Was Capt. Jabez of Native American Descent?

 

 

One of our subscribers sent me [COH] a letter this winter in which he suggested an alternate possible ancestry of Capt. Jabez. Without going into details, because there was no documentation, the reader suggested that Capt Jabez was a half or quarter blood Native American from Connecticut.

 

This is of course not an original suggestion; it is mentioned in the GOFA. It may have originated from the fact that Jabez, as a young man, participated in the “scout” from Deerfield to Lake Champlain, (see the last two issues) in which, as was customary in those days, no quarter was granted on either side. It was very bloody.

 

The GOFA, as mentioned elsewhere in this issue, says that a person of part Native American blood could not have married into the family of Thomas BARNES. Thomas was a very influential town official in Brookfield, one of the most landed men in town. Furthermore, his boyhood home in Marlborough was burnt to the ground in King Phillip’s War, and members of his family scalped and killed. It is doubtful that he have allowed his daughter to marry a person with Native American blood.

 

Capt. Jabez was granted a portion of land when he settled into Brookfield. He was the Town Constable. Brookfield itself was razed to the ground during King Phillip’s War, and the settlers killed, taken into captivity, or dispersed. The town fathers had a long memory.

 

The records state that Capt. Jabez received grants of land from the Great and General Court for his services in the earlier French and Indian Wars. To my knowledge, grants of land were not given to people of mixed blood.

 

Finally, the argument that a part Native American could not be a commissioned officer was justified. It was just not possible.

 

Note: Capt. Jabez’s lieutenant in the Tenth Company, Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, in the Louisbourg campaign, was one James FRY, whose cousin, John FRY, was set upon in Maine and was chased for miles by Native Americans. He only escaped by jumping off a one hundred foot high cliff (now known locally as Frye’s Leap) into Sebago Lake, and swimming to an island, now known as Frye Island (my summer home).