19 May

Mounted settlers from surrounding towns attack the natives at Peskeompskut; language poet Susan Howe scrambles the history

1676 The Indians had gathered at Peskeompskut, at the falls on the Connecticut River, near present-day Montague, Massachusetts, to fish, trade and plan raids against the surrounding English settlements. At dawn on 19 May Captain William Turner led 160 English soldiers to attack the camp, killing over 200 natives (mainly women and children, though earlier histories omit this fact) and setting fire to their wigwams.

But when a native band from a nearby camp got to hear of the massacre, they moved in on the English to cut off their escape route, killing 37 soldiers and wounding others. Eventually the rest got back to safety, apart from the Reverend Hope Atherton and seven or eight others. These men got lost, holding out for three or four days in the woods until hunger forced them to surrender to the Indians. But the natives tied straw around them, set it alight and made them run until consumed by fire. Only Atherton was spared, because (as a contemporary report put it) when ‘a little man with a black coat and without a hat came toward [the natives] they were afraid and ran away, thinking it was the Englishman’s God’.

This is the ‘background’, much of it provided by Susan Howe herself, to her postmodern treatment of the events in ‘Hope Atherton’s Wanderings’, in her Singularities (1990). Here is how the ‘poem’ goes in part:

Prest try to set after grandmother

Revived by and laid down left by …

Clog nutmeg abt noon

Scraping cano muzzell

Foot path sand and so

Gravel rubbish vandal

Horse flesh ryal table

Sand enemys flood sun

Danielle Warnare Servt

Turner Dalls Fight us

Next wearer April One

In fact many of these words – though not in this order – are taken from a 19th-century history of the frontier settlement of Deerfield by George Sheldon, and describe the flight of another fugitive from the Falls Fight, one Jonathan Wells. Here is part of it with the relevant words italicised:

J.W. was glad to leave him, lest he shd be a clog or hindrance to him. Mr W. grew faint, & once when ye Indians prest him, he was near fainting away, but by eating a nutmeg (which his grandmother gave him on going out) he was revived.

Wounded in the leg, he crosses a stream using his musket as a crutch, but for fear of wetting the lock, puts the muzzell end into the water instead, which, filled with so much gravel and sand, renders the gun useless when the natives come at him across the river in a cano. And so on.

So Howe offers one ‘background’ narrative to contextualise her poem, but actually raids another, hidden source that she doesn’t want her readers to know about – unlike Pound or Williams, for example (see 19 February, 4 and 13 July), who wanted their fragments like these to tease the reader into looking up their sources. But Howe’s sources have none of that exemplary status. They are not ‘a shrine and a monument’ but time-bound, patriarchal texts resting on the assumption that it was the ‘manifest destiny’ of white Europeans to bring order to the wilderness. They cry out for deconstruction. Howe goes one better by dismantling them as well, concentrating on the sounds and rhythms of the words while preventing them from forming any coherent narrative at all.

They named the falls after Captain Turner, who led the murderous, incompetent raid in the first place.