Chapter 11 - The Wolves Came Down from the Mountains
When fate determined that Hubbardton was the place to have a battle, the first intimation its nine resident families had that their lives were going to be turned inside out was the sudden appearance on July 6 of a troop of loyalists and Indians. Swarming through the settlement, they made off with much loot and three captives-Uriah Hickok and two young men named Keeler and Kellogg-before moving on to Castle Town to see what damage they could do there. The man in charge of these raiders was Captain Alexander Fraser, the brigadier's nephew and fellow Scot, whose deputy, Captain Justus Sherwood, was an American loyalist fighting just as tenaciously for his beliefs as any American rebel. Sherwood was a real asset to Fraser, since he knew the territory, having farmed for a time in New Haven, about thirty miles north, before moving to Shaftsbury in the southwest corner of the Grants. In both places he had tried to make a home but ran into no end of trouble over his land claims and his politics. Sherwood was a twenty-five-year-old, well-educated "man of culture," according to a British officer who knew him, and as a dedicated loyalist he elected to stand up for king and country. He was jailed by a local Committee of Safety for refusing to take an oath supporting the rebel cause and later was sentenced to life imprisonment in the mines of Simsbury, Connecticut. Somehow he succeeded in making a getaway and fled to the mountains, where some forty other loyalists joined him and followed him to Canada to sign up with the Queen's Loyal Rangers under John Peters. Like Peters, Sherwood had old scores to settle: both had it in for the rebels in the worst way, and chances were they viewed them with more unadulterated hatred than did any regular soldier in Burgoyne 's command. There is no telling exactly what Captain Fraser's instructions were when his raiders came storming down the road from Crown Point on that hot July morning, but since he had a number of Indians as well as Tories with him it is probable that he had a license to raise as much hell as possible along his route, giving the savages a free hand to loot and burn while picking up all the horses and beef animals he could find. Between Fraser's raid and the subsequent clash of the two little armies here, the community that was only beginning to take root after three years of incessant hardship and toil was decimated. Life was no different here from any other American frontier, after all-hard, infinitely demanding, a battle by men, women, and children against everything nature could throw at them, plus the constant threat of Indians, disease, and death. Yet they had persevered and survived, and though they knew the British were attacking Ticonderoga it probably did not occur to them that they would be in the path of the marauders who swept through their community and threatened to destroy in a few hours what they had struggled for years to build. The soldiers who fought at Hubbardton were by no means the only victims, in other words: civilians paid a heavy price, as witness what happened to the Churchill household. Theirs was an instance of how a family unlucky enough to be caught in the middle of the venomous civil war between rebel and loyalist could be shattered. Samuel Churchill, his wife, and their children lived far enough from everyone else in Hubbardton that on the morning of the battle Seth Warner was concerned for their safety, should Fraser's guerrillas return. To get them to a secure area he dispatched about two hundred men-enough, he guessed, to handle Fraser's force-but no sooner had his troops reached the Churchill house than they heard firing down near Sucker Brook. (They could not know it, but their absence on this errand of mercy was responsible for Warner's delayed departure to join St. Clair, the resulting surprise of his rear guard, and the battle that followed.) The detachment turned around at once and marched on the double toward the sound of the guns, accompanied by two Churchill boys, John and Silas, who wanted to join the fight. If the young men thought their military experience would be brief and eventful, they were right: Silas was taken prisoner but John escaped, returning home just in time to be captured by Captain Fraser's command, which came back after being roughed up and scattered by St. Clair's army in Castle Town, where some of them were taken prisoner. That experience had done nothing to improve Fraser's or Sherwood's disposition, and their irregulars now surrounded the Churchill house, seized the remaining young males, looted the place, and were about to burn it when one of the Churchill daughters is said to have screamed, "You have taken away our men and provisions-how can you be so cruel as to burn our house?" At which she fell into a faint, and Fraser relented, sparing their home. Even so, he was certain that Samuel Churchill had a supply of flour hidden somewhere, and he ordered the Indians to take him into the woods and make him talk. The method chosen was to truss him up and prepare to burn him alive unless he revealed where the flour was concealed, but before that could happen Churchill's repeated denials were so convincing that Fraser had him untied. Then Churchill and his sons Silas and John, plus Uriah Hickok, Keeler, and Kellogg, were packed off under guard to Ticonderoga. Young William Churchill, who was lame, was left behind with his mother, three other women, and four small children, and with neither spare clothing nor food to take with them they somehow made their way across the Connecticut River to No.4, on to Springfield, Massachusetts, and finally to Sheffield, Connecticut**, which had been their home before they migrated to Hubbardton in 1775. Several weeks later, when Samuel Churchill and Uriah Hickok escaped from Ticonderoga and returned to a deserted, desolate Hubbardton, they stopped long enough to look with horror inside Hickok's house, which held the putrefying carcasses of a number of American soldiers, with fragments of weapons and clothing; then they shut the door behind them and moved along in search of their families. Hickok was lucky: his wife and children had gone no farther than Castle Town. Churchill had to make the long journey to Sheffield before he found his people. **Sheffield = Sheffield, MA