The Night the Snowmen Stood Guard

In the small hours of February 8, 1690, a force of 114 French soldiers and militiamen, joined by 96 Mohawk and Algonquin allies, marched down from Canada and hit Schenectady, a fur trading outpost on the Mohawk River a short ride from Albany. Word had reached the settlement that a war party was coming, but the men guarding the north gate reportedly slipped off to the Douwe Aukes tavern anyway, leaving two snowmen to hold the post. The raiders walked straight through the open gate two hours before dawn. By morning more than sixty buildings were burning and sixty residents lay dead, eleven of them enslaved Black New Yorkers who had no say in the imperial war that killed them. Twenty seven more people, including five enslaved Africans, were dragged north as captives. The attack was retaliation for a Mohawk raid on the French settlement of Lachine the year before, one more bloody exchange in the fight between France and England, and their Native allies, for control of the fur trade and the continent.