History of Fitchburg by Rufus Torey: Part 4


February 10th, 1676 the Indians attacked Lancaster and after
destroying the settlement by burning the houses and
murdering many people, they marched with the prisoners
towards Canada.  Among these was Mrs. Rowlandson, wife of
the minister of the place.  After her return from captivity,
she published an account of her journeyings through the
wilderness, under the title of "Twenty Removes".  From this
quaint work and other data, attempts have been made to trace
her course.  But the country being then entirely wild, and
her accounts extremely vague in consequence her mind at the
same time being depressed by the hazards of her perilous
situation, and by recollections of the recent calamity which
had fallen so heavily upon her--nothing very satisfactory
has been elicited.  Her descriptions answer to three
distinct routes, the most northern of which would carry her
through Fitchburg.

From her account it appears that she spent the first hight
of her captivity on a small island in a river.  This is
supposed to be in Leominster.  There is an island there
answering very well to her description.  The second night
she passed upon a high hill -- the third night in
Narragansett, which is now Westminster--and on the eithth
day of her captivity she arrived at a place now in New
Braintree.

Even then it be assumed that she staid the first night in
Leominster and the third night in Narrhagansett, there is
every reqason to believe that -- independent of all
tradition and all circumstances related by her -- she passed
the second night somewhere in the limits of the present town
of Fitchburg.  Taking all things into consideration, there
is good foundation for the conjecture that she passed the
second night on Rollstone Hill.  If this conjecture be true,
what a scene must have been witnessed by her, on the summit
of that hill on the night of the 11th of February 1676.  The
merciless savages, exulting in their success were
celebrating the massacre which they had inflicted upon the
innocent people of Lancaster, and testifying by their
dreadful rites and hellish orgies their joy at shedding
humand blood.  In the midst of them sat the lone white woman
-- her spirit crushed to the earth by the weight of her
sudden and overwhelming calamities.  Torn from her husband,
sorrowing for the destruction of her kindred and friends
with no comforts to supply her necessities -- no shelter to
protect her from the wintry blasts - and with a dread of a
hopeless captivity in prospect, she was entirely dependent
upon the "tender mercies" of the savages the murderers of
her children.

I will now leave these matters of uncertain speculation and proceed with the
dull relations of history.  

(to be continued!)

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