The wife of a minister in a small frontier town west of Boston, Mary Rowlandson was forced to leave her house in the late winter of 1676 after marauding Indians set the building on fire. "I had often before this said," she later wrote, "that if the Indians should come, I should chuse rather to be killed by them than taken alive but when it came to the tryal my mind changed; their glittering weapons so daunted my spirit, that I chose rather to go along ... than to end my days."