WINOOSKI, Vt. (AP) – Almost 300 years ago, a group of 10 militiamen from western Massachusetts was marching up the Winooski River when they spotted a canoe with a handful of Mohawk Indians and an English captive.

The soldiers, headed home in May 1709 after a scouting trip to the northern reaches of Lake Champlain, attacked and tried to rescue the captive, later identified as William Moody of Exeter, N.H.

They later claimed to have killed two natives, wounded two others and were pulling Moody from the river when 19 other Mohawks, some of whom had been upstream and others down when Moody was first spotted, counterattacked.

The account of the incident and dozens of others like it in the colonial frontier are getting new attention from historians interested in better understanding the history of New England from perspectives other than the settlers’. But most accounts still come from the English settlers.

“Now we being under no advantage to defend ourselves we every one made (the) best of our way and shirked for ourselves,” said a report written after the incident by the group’s leader, Capt. Benjamin Wright of Northampton, Mass.

Two of Moody’s would-be rescuers were killed on the spot. The rest ran. One was never seen again.

“Hereupon Moody, unhappily resigned himself again into the Enemies hands; who most inhumanely tortured him, by fastening him unto a Stake, and roasting him alive,” said a 1726 history of New England’s Indian wars written by Samuel Penhallow.

By itself the incident was a footnote to a brutal period of early American history, a time when the English settlers of southern New England and the North American Indians of the region, frequently as allies of the French in Canada, were locked in an on-again, off-again, fight for survival.

It was a fight marked by what today would be considered heinous atrocities: The execution by the North American Indians of women and children and the wholesale kidnapping of men, women and children who would be taken to Canada and held for ransom.

On the other side, English residents were known to lure unsuspecting North American Indians into traps and then imprison or kill them. Colonial militiamen were offered large cash bounties for Indian scalps. The English goal was the eradication of the natives.

And the 1709 skirmish upstream from the Winooski River falls shows how decades before the first English settlers carved out homes for themselves along the Connecticut River in what is now Vermont, the area was an international highway between southern New England and Canada. There were at times sizable North American Indian communities in what is now Newbury and Swanton.

Now historians are re-examining history to include the perspective of previously overlooked groups like New England’s American Indians, said Emerson Baker, who specializes in early colonial New England history as chairman of the history department at Salem State College in Massachusetts.

“It is an important change, because it reflects the fact that history is really about all of us, just not the political and economic elite,” Baker said. “Not surprisingly, this has led to the examination of different sources, and the re-examination of old ones, and has produced a new history.”

Those re-examinations don’t try to gloss over the brutality of the wars, but it can put them into a more understandable context.

For example, there is no question the Indians inflicted what today would be considered horrible torture or deaths on some of their opponents or captives.

“Colonial and even 19th century observers simply saw this as an act of cruelty by a people they considered to be savages,”‘ Baker said.

“Today, historians who look at such incidents know that these native people put a great stress on the bravery of individual warriors and tribes,” Baker said.

“Captive warriors were sometimes given the honor’ of demonstrating their personal and tribal bravery by being slowly tortured to death,” Baker said. “Those who endured extreme torture without complaint died with the respect of their captors, and brought a degree of respect and honor to their people.”

And the natives would kill women and children captives who couldn’t keep up with the groups that were frequently headed back to Canada while being pursued by angry settlers trying to rescue their neighbors and relatives. The weaker and slower few would be sacrificed to protect the group.

At the other extreme, the native cultures sometimes adopted captives into their families. In some cases, English captives, most frequently females captured as young girls, refused to return to New England after being assimilated into native or French Canadian families.

The 1709 expedition led by Capt. Wright of Northampton, Mass., came during what was known as Queen Anne’s War, a 10-year conflict that mirrored the European war between England and France called the War of the Spanish Succession.

Probably the most famous battle of that war in New England was the 1704 raid on Deerfield, Mass., by hundreds of French and Indian combatants. Forty-seven Deerfield residents and allies were killed. Another 112 were taken captive.

It was in response to that attack that the settlers started sending “scouts,” small expeditions of irregular soldiers, to attack and harass the natives in what is now Vermont and other areas away from settled New England.

“Before the Deerfield raid the English never ranged more than 20 or 30 miles above Deerfield. Now they went as far as Cowass (Newbury), the shores of Lake Champlain and even the Richelieu River,” said the 2003 book “Captors and Captives, the 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield,” by Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney.

Wright set out in April 1709 with 16 men from Deerfield, leaving six at the mouth of the White River with their canoes and supplies. They walked up the banks of the White River and then down the Winooski, which at the time was called the French River. They stopped at the falls at Winooski to make canoes, said his report, reproduced in an 1895 “History of Deerfield” by George Sheldon.

They ventured out into Lake Champlain where they fought a skirmish with two canoes full of natives. The English were headed home when they abandoned their canoes at the falls and were walking east when they spotted Moody with his four captors.

Moody and three others had been captured near Exeter, N.H., on May 6. The four captives were part of a group of about two dozen natives traveling in five canoes when Wright and his men spotted Moody, apparently alone with his captives.

“And (militiaman) John Strong being upon the Bank heard (the) sticks Crack behind him & Looked round & cried out Indians and was immediately fired upon by them,” Wright’s report said.

A later French report of Wright’s attacks said two natives were killed on the lake and one on the river, with five English being killed.

Although Queen Anne’s War ended in 1713, the series of wars between the North American Indians, the French and the English didn’t end until 1763, after the French were evicted from North America following the English victory in the French and Indians War.

In the overall history of the time, the skirmish on the Winooski wasn’t a big deal, said Fred Wiseman, an Abenaki who is the tribal historian for the Abenaki Nation at Missisquoi and a professor of humanities at Johnson State College.

“There are all kinds of these little skirmishes all over,” Wiseman said. “The British were trying to protect the northern part of the Connecticut River Valley. That whole area was basically a big no man’s land where everyone was trying to jockey for position.”

But more attention is being paid now to the history of the area before permanent European settlement took place in the mid-1700s.

“It’s kind of a quasi-hot topic,” Wiseman said. “This wasn’t an empty wilderness. There were natives attempting to defend their land.”