Bars Fight

"Bars Fight" is a ballad poem written by Lucy Terry about an attack upon two white families by Native Americans on August 21, 1746. The incident occurred in an area of Deerfield, Massachusetts, called "The Bars," which was a colonial term for a meadow. The poem was preserved orally and not published until the November 20, 1854, issue of The Springfield Daily Republican, as an excerpt from the book History of Western Massachusetts published the following year (1855) by Republican associate editor Josiah Gilbert Holland.