The 1691 Battle of La Prairie and the 1704 Raid on Deerfield are not just vaguely related—they are two bookends of the exact same bloody cycle of asymmetric warfare, geopolitics, and cross-border retaliation.
When we look at these two events through the lens of our family’s blog archives, a spectacular, cinematic narrative emerges. Our ancestors didn't just witness these wars; their physical bodies were the literal friction points where New England Puritanism and French-Canadian Habitant culture collided, shattered, and eventually, beautifully healed.
Here is the historical analysis connecting the two events, followed by a wrap-around narrative that stitches our ancestors directly into the story.
The Historical Connection: A Cycle of Bloody Retaliation
These events were connected as part of the French and Indian Wars. Specifically, La Prairie took place during King William’s War (1688–1697) and Deerfield took place during Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713).
To the people living through them, however, these weren't two separate wars with different names—they were one continuous, exhausting, 25-year struggle for control of the North American fur trade, driven by the imperial rivalry between the British and French crowns.
The connection between 1691 and 1704 is a direct line of tit-for-tat frontier raiding:
- The Strategy of the Raid: Neither the French nor the English had the numbers to march massive European-style armies through hundreds of miles of untamed, snowbound wilderness. Instead, both sides adopted the Indigenous style of warfare: fast, devastating, hit-and-run strikes designed to terrorize the enemy's frontier outposts, destroy their food supplies, and capture hostages for leverage or ransom.
- La Prairie (1691) as the Provocation: Major Pieter Schuyler took an Anglo-Iroquois force north from Albany right into the heart of New France, striking the farming settlement of La Prairie to destabilize Montreal. They caught the French off guard before being bloodied by Captain de Valrennes on the road to Chambly.
- Deerfield (1704) as the Answer: The French never forgot incursions into their territory. Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville’s raid on Deerfield in 1704 was part of a grand retaliatory strategy. By striking deep into Massachusetts, the French forced English settlers to abandon the frontier, secured their own borders, and took captives to exchange for French prisoners held by the English.
The Ancestral Narrative: From the Ashes of the Frontier to
Act I: The Vulnerable Outpost (1675–1677)
Long before the official intercolonial wars broke out, the stage was set in the beautiful, isolated meadows of the Connecticut River Valley. The English frontier pushed hard against Indigenous homelands, heavily backed by French trade networks. Our family was on the razor's edge of this expansion.
In 1675, our ancestor John Allen stood his ground at Deerfield, only to be cut down at the infamous Battle of Bloody Brook during King Philip’s War. Two years later, in September 1677, Sergeant John Plimpton—"Old Sergeant Plympton"—was working to rebuild that very same shattered village when a Native raiding party swept in.
Plimpton was dragged 300 miles north into the wilderness of New France. He was marched along the Richelieu River, past the small farming settlement of La Prairie, to the stockade at Chambly. There, he was burned at the stake. The Plimpton family was left with 13 children and a foundational trauma deeply rooted in the Canadian borderlands.
Act II: The Strike at the Heart (1691)
Fourteen years after Sergeant Plimpton’s death, the English wanted revenge, and they wanted to choke out the French fur trade. Major Pieter Schuyler marched north from Albany, navigating the waterways right toward the patch of soil where Plimpton had perished.
Just before dawn on August 11, 1691, through a driving rainstorm, Schuyler’s Anglo-Iroquois force slammed into Fort Laprairie. They caught the French regulars and local habitants asleep, unleashing a brutal firefight. Though Schuyler was eventually forced to retreat after a desperate, hand-to-hand ambush by Captain de Valrennes on the road back to Chambly, the message was clear to the French: Your homes are not safe. The English will come to your door.
Act III: The Great Retaliation (1704)
The French answer came in the freezing, dead-of-winter darkness of February 29, 1704. Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville led a combined force of French soldiers and Native warriors 300 miles south. Their target? The rebuilt, palisaded walls of Deerfield—the exact ground where John Allen and John Plimpton had fought decades earlier.
When the enemy breached the snow-drifted stockade, your Catlin ancestors did not run. They fought with the fierce autonomy hardwired into their bloodline. John Catlin III was killed inside the burning fort, desperately defending the garrison houses. Simultaneously, out in the freezing, blood-soaked snow of the nearby meadows, his brother Joseph Catlin fell during a desperate counterattack.
As the fires died down, 47 colonists lay dead. The raiders turned back toward Canada, dragging 112 terrified captives into the winter wilderness. Among them was eight-year-old Elizabeth Corse (our 1st cousin, 8x removed), who watched her mother, Elizabeth Catlin, collapse and die of exposure along the merciless trail.
Act IV: The Circle Closes at La Prairie (1705–1712)
This is where our family’s history elevates from a standard tale of frontier warfare into a breathtaking epic of human grace.
The orphaned, traumatized Elizabeth Corse finally reached the end of her 300-mile march. She was brought to the muddy, riverside settlement of La Prairie—the very place the English had raided and bloodied in 1691.
But instead of finding vengeance or cruelty from the French habitants who remembered Schuyler's raid, Elizabeth found an open door. Pierre Roy and Catherine Ducharme—who are also our direct ancestors on our grandmother's side—already had eighteen children of their own, yet they took the shivering, Puritan girl into their home.
They fed her, loved her, and protected her. In 1705, Catherine Ducharme stood as her godmother inside Montreal's Notre-Dame Cathedral as she was baptized Élisabeth Casse. She grew up a Frenchwoman, marrying Jean Dumontet in La Prairie's church. In an even wilder twist of fate, Pierre and Catherine’s son, Jacques Roy, grew up to marry another Deerfield captive, Marthe (Marguerite) French.
The Living Legacy
Through a spectacular convergence of DNA and genealogy, our tree contains both the victims of the Deerfield Raid and the French-Canadian protectors who healed them at La Prairie. Our family represents both sides of the Fur Wars.
This profound, multi-generational trauma and its ultimate resolution didn't fade away. Decades later, our cousin George Catlin was raised on these exact stories of the Deerfield Raid and the frontier. Instead of channeling that legacy into further violence, he picked up a paintbrush. He dedicated his life to documenting and preserving the dignity of the Indigenous nations of the West—a lifetime poetic attempt to replace the historical cycle of frontier warfare with mutual understanding.
For a deeper dive into the exact cultural cross-currents and personal stories that defined this event, the video on the 1704 Deerfield Raid Perspectives breaks down the complex motivations of the French, English, and Native participants who converged on that fateful winter night.
Thank you Gemini AI for your wisdom and research assistance. -- Drifting Cowboy
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