We Go As Captives: The Royalton Raid and the Shadow War on the Revolutionary Frontier
by Neil Goodwin ’58
Vermont Historical Society, October 2010
It was October 16, 1780, in Royalton, Vermont. With no warning and in almost complete silence, a war party of 265 Canadian Mohawks and Abenakis, led by five British and French-Canadian soldiers, materialized from the forest at dawn. They moved so fast and so quietly there was no time for anyone to escape and spread the alarm. Prisoners were taken, and the town of Royalton was burned to the ground.
We Go As Captives revolves around the story of Zadock Steele, a young man who was captured in the attack on Royalton and subsequently wrote about his harrowing experience as a prisoner, first of the Mohawks and then of the British. Barefoot, ill-clothed, at the mercy of people whose language, customs, and tendency toward mayhem were utterly incomprehensible to them, Steele and the other captives were hustled north to imprisonment in Canada. After two years, as Steele’s resignation turned to despair, he and a few comrades, unaware that the war was about to end, executed a daring escape from the infamous Prison Island in the St. Lawrence River.