I finally got a good start on reading "Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield," (Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney, University of Massachusetts Press, 2003)
This is turning out to be an excellent book, much more exciting than the widely acclaimed web site on the subject,
http://www.1704.deerfield.history.museum/.
Deerfield was intentionally designed as a throwback to a medieval-style village, with residences lining a single street and privately owned fields surrounded by fences common to all. Decisions as to when to harvest and when to turn cattle loose to graze on the fields were made communally, by the town government.
It was in a sense a town on the edge of the part of Massachusetts that had been settled by whites. But "edge" isn't quite the right word. It was also a crossroads, near where the Deerfield River flowed into the Connecticut. It was along a major route that native peoples used to travel between the Hudson River valley and modern Maine.
One example touches on some of the variety of relationships that connected the people in the story. In 1690 a native man, Chepasson, and two others, came to Deerfield to trade. They claimed to have been from Schaghticoke, near modern Schenectady. One of the English residents dunned him for a previous debt, which gave the visit an unpleasant turn. Chepasson, who with the others could speak English, said, "they were all boys and would not fight when the Frenchmen came but would cry as the Dutchmen did." Chepasson had possibly been involved in a raid on Schenectady earlier that year. He threatened to cut off one man's head and tried to get a gun or knife to kill another. This got him confined under guard, where he tried to talk the African-American slave who was guarding him into letting him go and got into a tussle with him but his guard managed to hang onto his gun and knife. The next day he tried to bribe the young Englishman who was guarding him, and then was shot and killed in an attempt to overpower him.
The point is, in the time leading up to the raid, the relationships among the people ranged from peaceful to violent, from trading to warfare, and even that barely begins to touch on the complexity of the human interactions that the authors tell us about.
It's a book written more as as scholarly than a popular history, but unlike many scholary histories, it's a great narrative. I'm excited to find out what will happen next, even though I know the general outline of what happens next.