Raid on Dover

On June 27-28, 1689, violence erupted in Dover, New Hampshire, when Pennacook warriors under Chief Kancamagus struck the settlement in what became known as the Raid on Dover, or alternatively the Cochecho Massacre. This assault formed one episode within King William's War, itself the North American front of the broader Nine Years' War spanning 1688 to 1697, a conflict pitting England against France alongside each side's Native allies.

Background and Underlying Tension

When King Philip's War drew to a close between 1675 and 1678, several natives who had fought alongside King Philip sought to escape the Massachusetts Bay Colony, finding shelter among the Abenaki people settled in Dover. These refugees apparently did not realize that Massachusetts had governed New Hampshire since 1641, meaning they had never actually left the colony's jurisdiction. Upon learning of their presence, the Massachusetts Bay General Court dispatched two militia companies to the Dover region, instructing Major Richard Waldron to move against all the natives there and compel the Abenaki to hand over any combatants who had fled.

Waldron calculated that he could seize the escaping natives without triggering an open conflict with the Abenaki who lived locally. Acting on this plan, he lured roughly 400 natives, half of them local residents and half refugees, into a staged battle against his militia near Cochecho Falls on September 7, 1676. Once the natives had fired off their weapons, Waldron and Major Charles Frost seized them as captives. He then shipped the fleeing combatants along with locals who had angrily protested this betrayal off to Boston, where authorities convicted seven or eight of insurrection and put them to death. The remaining captives were sold into bondage, with most ending up in Barbados.

Though the local Indians were eventually set free, they never pardoned Waldron for his trickery, which broke codes of honor and hospitality that both sides held sacred. Jeremy Belknap's History of New Hampshire notes that Waldron himself sensed he had transgressed these same principles.

Officials in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts Bay praised this maneuver for sidestepping the direct combat the militia had anticipated. Seven years later, in 1683, Waldron received an appointment as Chief Justice for New Hampshire.

Revenge

For thirteen years, the colonial settlers assumed the whole affair had faded from memory, until warriors from the newly formed Wabanaki Confederacy showed up in Dover. Worried residents brought their fears to Waldron, but he brushed them aside, telling them simply to tend to their pumpkins while he handled matters with the Indians.

Then, on June 27, 1689, pairs of native women approached each of five garrison houses, requesting shelter by the fire for the night, a request nobody would have questioned in calmer days. Every house but one let them in. Before dawn broke the following morning, these women crept to the doors and undid the locks, letting in braves who had been hiding nearby. Waldron, elderly but armed with a sword, found himself slashed across the stomach with knives while each attacker declared, "I cross out my account."

The violence left five or six homes in ashes, along with the mills. In the end, fifty-two settlers, a quarter of the population there, were either killed or taken captive.

Aftermath

Among those seized was Sarah Gerrish, just seven years old and Waldron's grandchild, born to Elizabeth and John Gerrish. Their capture marked the first instance on record of English prisoners being carried off by natives and sold into Quebec.

Not every household fell that day. The Heard garrison stood, saved in part by William Wentworth, who at seventy-three years of age pressed his own body against the door to keep it shut. From this man descended the Wentworth family line of New Hampshire, a lineage that would later produce his great-grandson, Governor Benning Wentworth.

Pemaquid, Maine suffered a comparable fate the very next month. Among the captives taken there was John Gyles, who was brought to Dover afterward and later described encountering others who had been seized during the earlier assault on that town.

This assault opened a long chain of raids across the Seacoast Region, the stretch of fighting that made up New Hampshire's part in King William's War. Cotton Mather would come to call the era that followed the Mournful Decade, and its beginning traced back to this very moment.