The Other Schaghticoke Indian Massacre: Part Two
In the last column, I quoted from a Gothic novel, written by Eliza Bleecker, a resident of Schaghticoke at the time of the American Revolution. She vividly described an Indian massacre and kidnapping in the Kittle family in Schaghticoke, setting the action in 1746. The actual massacre occurred much earlier, in 1711, so Mrs. Bleecker has confused historians ever since. She was an educated woman living in isolation on the frontier. How did she come to write this novel?
When the Revolutionary War began, Schaghticoke became a very dangerous place to live, especially during the summer of 1777, as Burgoyne’s army advanced down the Hudson Valley towards Saratoga. During that summer, many residents evacuated the area, and Eliza’s husband, John Bleecker, went to Albany to arrange for a place for his family to move. Ann Eliza heard that the British and their Indian allies were within two miles of the village, “burning and murdering all before them.” This was not the truth, but she did not know that. It is true that in July, Major Dirck VanVeghten of the local militia went home to Schaghticoke to check on his property. He was killed and scalped by a marauding band of Tories and Indians. Certainly Eliza would have known of that. At some point during the summer, with her husband still away, she fled on foot and by wagon to Lansingburgh, where her husband rescued her and took her on down the Hudson River to Red Hook. Enroute her infant daughter was taken ill and died. Eliza and her surviving daughter joined her mother in Red Hook, but her mother soon died, as did her sister.
The Bleeckers returned to Schaghticoke after the battle of Saratoga, but surely rumors of British and Indian activity continued. In 1781, Mr. Bleecker was kidnapped while working in his fields either by a Loyalist raiding party or by some rebellious Vermonters. He was quickly released in Bennington, but Eliza, pregnant, went into labor, delivering a premature baby, which died. She never recovered, mentally or physically, from this and the earlier episodes, including the deaths of so many relatives. She died in Schaghticoke in 1783.
Mrs. Bleecker put all of her emotions and fears into writing. The History of Maria Kittle is full of melodrama, horror, and graphic and gruesome violence. She also wrote an account of an ax murder that occurred in the Yates family in Schaghticoke in 1781. It is interesting to me that Mrs. Bleecker knew in such detail of the Indian attack some 60 years earlier, but she lived very close to where it happened, and a number of the same families still lived there as in 1711. It certainly was a memorable event, maybe a story recalled and retold in the light of the new dangers brought by the British invasion.
The History of Maria Kittle is important both as a very early American novel, and as the first gothic novel by a woman. There were quite a few true accounts of similar Indian kidnapping episodes, but Mrs. Bleecker really novelized hers, describing for the first time in literature both the stereotypes of the “noble savage”- typified by the Indians who helped the Kittles, and the “vicious savage”- of course typified by the attacking Indians who gruesomely murdered members of the Kittle family. Ann Eliza Bleecker and Schaghticoke play an important part in the history of literature in the United States.
Bibliography:
Bleecker, Ann Eliza, Posthumous Works, reprinted 1970.
Broderick, Warren, “Fiction based on ‘Well-Authenticated Facts’ “, Hudson Valley
Regional Review , 1987.
Giffen, Allison, “Ann Eliza Bleecker”, American Women Prose Writers to 1820