The increasing numbers of English settlers homesteading in the New England frontier region along the Kennebec River continued to worry the French in Canada. The French replied to the influx of English settlers by encouraging the Abenaki Indians to raid the new settlements.
The governor of the Massachusetts-Bay colony was William Dummer. The series of raids and battles that took place between the English and the French and their Indian allies during the year 1724 has become known as Dummer's War.
On 23 August 1724, Captain Jeremiah Moultan led a troop of eighty Massachusetts-Bay militia and some Mohawk Indians against an Abenaki village near the present-day town of Norridgewock, Maine, following a massacre of Maine settlers. Seven Abenaki chiefs and a Jesuit missionary, Sebastian Rasles, were killed as they attempted to flee across the Kennebec. The militia lost two men and one of their Mohawk allies.
Captain John Lovewell led an attack by New England militia against the Indians near Wakefield, New Hampshire on 20 February 1725. The attack was notorious as the first instance in which Euro-American settlers took scalps and sold them for bounty. The ten Indian scalps taken in the fight brought a bounty of £100 each.
