Between Stockbridge and the St. Lawrence lay a sea of forest broken only by Fort Massachusetts and a few farms at Pittsfield and Lanesboro'; these and the one settler at Lenox were called into Stockbridge by mounted messengers when the tocsin was sounded at Dutch Hoosac on its destruction by 500 Canada Indians. Terror seized the upper Housatonic and Connecticut River settlers, the equal of which the veteran commander of the Indian fighting militia, Colonel Israel Williams of Hatfield, said he had never seen. Jonathan Edwards dipped his philosophical quill to ask aid from the province and to keep Sir William Pepperrell at Kittery advised of western perils, (amazingly far west was Stockbridge-her first newspaper being entitled The Western Star), and of the crucial moment to engage the friendship of the Six Nations.

To light signal fires of danger on these western mountains, spread out " as thick as hasty puddin'" along 'New York's border, gallant Ephraim Williams, Jr., [1] rode in hot haste from Newton, and was placed in command of a line of frontier posts established by the Province beyond Connecticut River, from above Northfield to Hoosac. In the Old French War Major Williams successfully defended Fort Massachusetts, the Night Watch of that menacing gap in our nor'west corner, at present Williamstown, threaded by the old Mohawk trail; their Eastern war-path crawled like a deadly rattlesnake within thirty miles of Stockbridge, -out from the scenes of crafty moonlit war-dances on the Mohawk; forded the Hudson, and stole onward toward Deerfield River by the " Dugway " at Pownal, and along Hoosac Plain east of Florida Mountain; the finish being in rocky passes on Hoosac Mountain where a moccasin leaves no scent; regard how the trail always sheers off from the Hoosac River bank, because the Indians disliked wet ground.

Over this fateful Indian path through Williamstown Valley, Mohawks stealthily hurried eastward to attack the Deerfield River tribe in 1662. Haughty Greylock, king of Saddle-back Mountain and monarch of Massachusetts, towers two thousand and eight feet above the trail and appears to quarrel with Vermont's hoary Green Hills for standing room. Up this same "Hoosac Road" (as Chaplain Norton calls the Mohawk path) merciless French and Indians carried their captives northwestward to thraldom in Canada, after the siege of Fort Massachusetts, the most notable in the war except Louisburg.

The traveller need not search the north bank of Hoosac River for the site of Fort Massachusetts; as he rides between North Adams and Williamstown, he will perceive a lofty elm planted by men of Williams College as an appreciation of the fort's commander and their benefactor-Ephraim Williams;. all fellows still pledge loyalty to the hero:

"oh, here's to the health of Eph Williams,
Who founded a school in Bill-ville. "
"And here's to old Fort Massachusetts,
And here's to the old Mohawk trail,
And here's to historical Pe-ri [2]
Who grinds out his sorrowful tale. "