Radio Script #955

Little Talks on Common Things
January 7, 1973

Let us begin the New Year with a talk again about Abnaki Indians of Maine. One authority tells us that, along the Androscoggin, the Kennebec and the Penobscot, wherever the salmon and the shad abounded and where wild game was plentiful, especially near falls and intersections of streams, could be found the summer wigwams of the Abnaki. The first mention of these people is in the Jesuit Relations, the reports of missionaries like Father Druillettes to their superior in France. Then, early in the 17th century, came the accounts of sale of Abnaki lands to the English settlers.

In 1648 James Smith bought of a chief whom he called Robinhood, a name that became familiar in the Pemaquid area, land extending down the Kennebec from Merrymeeting Bay to what became known as the Long Reach below Bath, with the privilege of hunting and fishing on that land. We now know what Smith and other buyers from the Indians could not comprehend, namely, that the Indians had no idea they were selling the land, but rather only the rights for the white man to hunt and fish on it. The Abnaki Indians had no conception of private ownership of land. That belonged only to nature or the nature gods, not to inhabitants. What they did hold in their possession was the right to hunt, fish, build their wigwams, and plant corn on pieces of Mother Nature’s land. That was what they believed they were selling to the white men.

The English paid for Indian lands in various commodities cherished by the red men – glass beads and trinkets, pots and pans, axes and knives, and, though it was soon forbidden by frontier law, guns and powder. Sometimes the cost was fantastically low, as was the case in Smith’s deal with Robinhood. The latter was to receive in payment for that huge tract along both sides of the Kennebec River from the big bay to below Bath one peck of corn on every first day of November for ten years.

In that same year of 1648 William Bradford, representing the Plymouth Colony, bought land on both sides of the Kennebec from Cushnoc to Wesserunsett that included the land around Ticonic Falls where are now Winslow and Waterville, which another chief than the one from whom Bradford bought claimed as his own. In the next year Chief Calibas sold to Christopher Lawson part of the identical land that Bradford thought he had bought. That is one example of how confusing the old Indian deeds could be when conflicting claims of heirs arose in later years.

Concerning the Jesuit missionaries, there is an interesting account in Macauley’s History of England. He wrote: “Before the Jesuit order had existed for a hundred years, it had filled the whole world with memorials of things done. No religious order had ever extended its operations over so wide a space. There was no region of the globe, no walk of life in which Jesuits were not to be found. They guided the counsels of kings. They deciphered Latin inscriptions. They were competent astronomers. They published whole libraries. Throughout Catholic Europe, the secrets of every government were in their keeping. The unknown wilderness of North America was opened by them. Amid the snows of Hudson’s Bay, all along the St. Lawrence, down the mighty Mississippi from its source, on the vast prairies, and in the canebrakes of Louisiana, Jesuits were found.”

It was in 1610 that the Queen Mother of France, mother of the infant King Louis XIII, sent two Jesuit priests to Quebec. One of them went to the Kennebec but did not stay. The first Jesuit to stay any time with the Kennebec Abnakis was Father Druillettes who came to the Indian Settlement on Old Point in Norridgewock in 1646. His chapel of fir trees was the first house of worship erected on the Kennebec.

We have plenty of evidence that the Abnakis were originally friendly to all white men, both French and English. Only when France and England were at war did the French win them over. It was payment for British scalps that turned those otherwise peaceable Indians against the English. Allen says in his History of Norridgewock, “There is no historical evidence that the Kennebec Indians were ever the first to turn to violence against the white men.” When they saw English raiding parties destroy their crops, burn their wigwams, and carry off captives, they naturally sought revenge. Settlers along the Kennebec, doing their best to deprive the Indians of guns and ammunition, used these superior weapons successfully against the bows and arrows of the red men. They drove the Indians from the lands where they raised their corn and left them to wander and sometimes starve. So, when King Philip’s War broke out in Massachusetts in 1675, many Eastern Indians, including the Abnakis, were ready to fight against the English.

Because the Indians were later so completely overwhelmed, there has long prevailed the belief that King Philip’s War, ending in the death of that chief, was a great English victory. At the time when the war ended in 1690 that was not the case at all. It was the Indians who dictated the terms of peace. All prisoners were to be released, and the English held more prisoners than did the Indians. All inhabitants, both red and white, were to enjoy their possessions unmolested. Furthermore, the English had to agree to pay a peck of corn annually to the Indians for each English family settled on the lands.

The Abnakis whose chief settlement was at Old Point on the Kennebec were known as the Norridgewocks, and peaceable as they naturally were, they committed repeated raids on English settlements during the half-century between 1675 and 1725.

I have often told on this program the story of Father Rasle, killed when Captain Moulton destroyed the Indian Village at Old Point in 1724. In his diary, or rather collectjon of notes, preserved at the Maine Historical Society in Portland, one can read – that is, if one can read 17th Century French – many interesting items. For instance, Father Rasle tells how he made candles for his chapel by having his Indians get some 24 pounds of wax from bayberry and mix it with 24 pounds of deer and moose tallow. Out of that mixture Rasle made 100 candles.

Rasle’s greatest achievement was his Abnaki dictionary, the manuscript of which is now in the Harvard Library. On the flyleaf is written in French a sentence that is translated: “In the year when I came among the savages, I began to make a dictionary of their words that I could understand.” Before he died, Rasle had listed more than 500 Abnaki words, with their definitions in French.

Father Rasle won the confidence and affection of the Norridgewock Indians. Within half a dozen years he had the tribe completely obedient to his wishes. As Allen puts it, “Father Rasle could successfully command his Indians, in the spirit of the church militant, either to say mass for the souls of departed saints or an alien race, or stay living and obstinate heretics.”

Linguistic students who came in contact with the few remaining Abnakis in the early 19th century tell us that the Abnaki dialect was one of the most harmonious of all Indian tongues. It was a kind of language known as agglutinative, that is, it could form self-explaining compounds. A good example of this kind of speech in the modern world is German, and our original English, Anglo-Saxon, had the same characteristic. For instance, take the modern German word “spatherbstnachmittag”, which takes four modern English words to translate for it means afternoon in late autumn. Now note how it is put together, back to front. The last syllable is tag, day. Mittag is midday or noon. Nach is the preposition after, so nachmittag is afternoon. Herbst is the middle autumn, so herbstnachmittag is autumn afternoon. But in front of it all is spat meaning late. So we have altogether spatherbstnachmittag – late autumn afternoon. And it means late autumn, not late afternoon, for German is precise in the order of its word syllables. If it meant a late afternoon in autumn, the compound word would be herbstspatnachmittag.

Now, if you lasted through that lesson in German, let’s get back to our Kennebec Indians. A long compound Abnaki word, phoneticized by 14 English letters meant, “I break it with the hand.” A fairly short word means “I sing,” but a much longer compound meant “I sing the death son.”

After repeated conflicts, a treaty was made by the English settlements on the lower Kennebec with the Indians on the river. That treaty granted the English rights to settle on purchased lands, and the Indians the right to hunt and fish wherever they chose.

Father Rasle persistently argued that Indians were being cheated and exploited by the English, and he particularly resented attempts to place Protestant ministers among them. There actually arose a division among the Indians at Old Point, a war party and a peace party. Father Rasle led the war party, seeing only disaster if the English peace terms were accepted. But some of the Indians had had enough of English bullets. A substantial number from Old Point joined a delegation of other Kennebec Indians and some Penobscots to go down the river for a consultation with English at Georgetown. The meeting was indecisive. That was in 1722, and two years later the Indian Village at Norridgewock was destroyed.

Before there were any white settlements above Merrymeeting Bay, the Indian Village at Norridgewock was a long distance from any white man except the wandering hunters and traders. It was five days journey from Quebec and two days from any white settlement down the river.

Williamson’s History of Maine quotes an aged Indian as pointing out the difference between his people’s treatment by French and by English in these words: “Frenchmen never take away our lands. Their kind missionaries come and tell us how to pray and how to worship the Great Spirit. In trade with them we get good articles, full weight and full measure. The English have returned us evil for good. They took every advantage of us to their gain and our loss. They made our beaver cheap and paid us with trifles and watered rum. They have made us many promises, and have kept none of them.”

That is without doubt too harsh indictment. Neither the French nor the English treatment of the Abnaki Indians was filled with undiluted Christian virtue. The Maine Indian was in fact a hopeless victim of the ancient enmity between England and France that spilled over onto the American continent with no Indian having the slightest idea what the quarrel was about.

And with that we must say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1973