traffic in captives during Queen Anne's War in the early 1700s between France and England. French and First Nations allies, including the Abenaki, would bring captives back to Kahnawake from New England settlements, often to be ransomed. Younger English children and women were sometimes adopted by Mohawk families and assimilated into the tribe. Due to exhaustion of land at Kahnawake and problems with traders' rum at the village, in the mid-1750s about 30 families migrated upriver about 20 leagues to set up a new community. Among the leaders were brothers and chiefs John and Zachariah Tarbell. Father Pierre-Robert-Jean-Baptiste Billiard accompanied the migrants as their priest. French officials supported the move, paying for a sawmill at the new mission. With tensions rising prior to the Seven Years' War (also known in North America as the French and Indian War), the French wanted to keep the Mohawk as allies, and away from English influence. The Tarbell brothers were born to English colonists in Groton, Massachusetts. They had been taken captive as children in 1707 along with their older sister Sarah, then 14, during Queen Anne's War. John and Zachariah were 12 and 8, respectively. The three children were taken by the French and Abenaki raiders some 300 miles to Montreal. They all became Catholic and were renamed. Sarah/Marguerite was redeemed by a French couple and entered the Congregation of Notre Dame, a teaching order founded in Montreal by French women in 1653. Adopted by Mohawk families in Kahnawake, the two boys became thoroughly assimilated: learning the language and ways, and being given Mohawk names. They later each married daughters of chiefs and reared their children as Mohawk. They each became chiefs, and some of their sons also became chiefs. They were examples of the multi-cultural community of the Mohawk, who absorbed numerous captives into their tribe. Starting in 1755, French-Canadian Jesuit priests founded the St. Regis Mission at Akwesasne. The Tarbell brothers were listed among the founding chiefs, representing numerous clans as of 1759, in papers of Loran Kanonsase Pyke, the patriarch of Akwesasne's Pyke family. The Jesuits first built a log and bark church at the mission, then a more formal log church. In 1795 the Mohawk completed construction of a stone church, which still stands. Named after the French priest St. Jean-François Regis, the mission was the source of the French name of the adjacent Saint Regis River, an island