Radio Script #1241

Little Talks on Common Things
May 4, 1980

At this time when Indian claims to Maine land have attracted so much attention, it is well to point out, occasionally on this program, a few things that the European colonists learned about those earlier inhabitants of Maine.

When the Pilgrims first became acquainted with the Cape Cod tribe, they were struck by the fact that they never saw a fat Indian. Governor Bradford wrote, “They are tall and slender; only some of the squaws show any fat. Perhaps it is because they are/always on the move, getting plenty of exercise that makes the men so slender and so muscular.”

The Pilgrims also found it remarkable that the Indians had no beards, and they seldom saw one whose hair was not black and glossy. Why were there no greyhaired Indians? Perhaps they just didn’t live long enough.

Why did the colonists call the Indians red men? It was not because their tawny bronze faces were actually red, but because they painted their faces with red ochre. In the early 18th century it was well known that Maine Indians got their paint from the red ochre entrapped in rock near Mount Katahdin.

One of the trails that fishermen and huntsmen find today in the Maine forests is the profusion of insects – flies, mosquitos, gnats and minges. Didn’t those bugs plague the Indians? Indeed they did. To ward them off, the Indians coated their whole bodies with bear grease that smelled so vile it was said to be able to ward off the devil himself. When the Indian warrior used a mixture of colors – black, yellow and red – on his face, he did it to scare his enemies by making himself look especially fierce. We think of tattooing as applying chiefly to sailors. The Indians knew the art and used it. The skin was pierced with a sharp stone, and a black dye was worked into the deeper layers. It was used not so often on arms or chest, as the sailors had it done, but on the Indians cheeks.

Another question the Pilgrims asked was why didn’t the Indian men get bald like John Alden and many other white men whom Plymouth settlers had known in England and Holland? The Indians themselves were proud of their glossy black hair. They used soot mixed with bear grease to darken the natural black, and often carefully braided the hair down to their shoulders, though a single knot at the back of the head was more common.

What became known as wampum was originally a string of beads used as an ornament to be worn around the neck. Since loose beads were used as money by some of the tribes, the English caused the name wampum to mean Indian money. Because the red men were especially fond of beads, the colonists found them a ready means for buying Indian furs. Cheap shell beads were easy to obtain, as they had long been made in England, and many a trader found his profits were much larger when he could get beaver, otter, and other skins for cheap beads rather than for more expensive knives, hatchets, guns and powder.

The Indians used the beads not only in strings, but fastened to other material in a great variety of designs. King Philip was said to wear a dazzling display. He had belts from his neck to his ankles, some of them, I understand, all studded with beads. When he visited Boston in 1671, the minister who greeted him noted that one belt must have been at least 20 pounds worth of beads of numerous sizes. He had on his head a star with 500 beads.

It was not long before the colonists found that very cheap glass beads pleased the Indians quite as much as did the shell beads, and they were easier to color, which made the Indians who wore them appear even more gaudy. Getting a beaver fur for a dozen glass beads was for the English trader very profitable business.

Far worse than the cheating done with beads was another commodity used to buy Indian furs. That was liquor, the New England rum that the colonists soon learned to distill from the sugar and molasses they got in the West Indies. Well before the end of the 17th century, Boston ships were plying regularly between that port and the Caribbean islands.

For some reason not clear, either to medical science or to anthropologists, the American Indians were peculiarly prone to alcoholism. They were never moderate drinkers, and they never seemed to get enough rum. Their drinking orgies often ended in injuries and deaths.

It is true that early in the 18th century, several colonial governments tried to restrict the giving of either liquor or guns to the Indians, but bootlegging in both commodities was prevalent. The business was too profitable for the few province authorities to stop it or even curb it effectively.

The result is well known to historians. Liquor decimated the tribes far more than did the wars they waged with the white men or even with tribe against tribe. Just before the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, a devastating plague had swept through the New England Indian communities, killing perhaps a third of the whole population. Yet by 1725, all authorities on Indian life agree that liquor had done far more damage than had that terrible plague. In fact, the whites may have been to blame for the plague itself, although there was before 1620 no permanent settlement in all New England. It seems highly probable that the Indians caught the disease from white sailors who manned the fishing fleets that came to New England shores every summer, year after year well before 1620. Those fishermen had become immune to the more violent features of the disease, but the Indians had no such immunity, and they died in hordes.

Every community of Indians was small. with seldom more than 200 persons. No family names were necessary. Boys were often named for phenomena of nature, as Little Thunder, Big Cloud, Rain in the Face; or for animals or birds, as Standing Bear and Great Eagle. Girls were named for earth features as Woman of Green Valley, Woman of the Rock.

Indian chiefs seldom executed arbitrary power. In most tribes government was managed and justice was dispensed by a council of the elders. In most cases decisions were made not by vote but by a sort of consensus, as in a Quaker meeting. After full discussion in which every elder present had his say, the chief would announce the consensus, and the matter was settled.

It is not known when the Maine Indians first developed agriculture. Undoubtedly in an earlier time, probably more than a century before the Pilgrims came, all the Abnaki tribes, from the Narragansetts to the Passamaquoddies, were hunters and fishermen, having no settled village at all, but constantly on the move, even in winter. It was agriculture that settled them into communities, such as the Norridgewocks at Old Point near the present town of Madison, and on Swan Island in the Kennebec near Richmond. There they cultivated corn and pumpkins, and by 1620 a variety of bean. It was the women who did the planting and the hoeing, for the chief occupation of the men was still hunting and fishing. Even when whole families left the village to fish for salmon and shad at such places as Ticonic Falls, the village was never wholly deserted. Many, especially women, stayed behind to tend the crops.

Unlike the Indians of the west, the Maine Indians, all through colonial times, never became well acquainted with the horse. Those whooping raids of wild riding Indians, so common in the movies, never described the Maine tribes. Horses were too scarce even among the New England colonists for the Indians to use them.

Nor did they turn to the colonist’s more common beast ‘of labor, the ox. Until the abandonment of the Old Point village in 1724, the Indian corn fields there were cultivated entirely by hand. So much for a few facts about our Indians in colonial times.

Now let us turn to a subject that concerns Maine today, as we find ourselves in the last quarter of the 20th century.

It is a surprising fact that Maine ranks second among the 50 states in the proportion of millionaires in its population. Maine has eight millionaires in every 10,000 of its people. Only Idaho, of all the states, had a higher proportion. That fact is astonishing when we consider that Maine is known to be a very poor state, with its per capita wealth placing it far down in the lowest quarter of all the states. Maine did produce few millionaires many years ago. What is surprising is that several came from small towns. It is true that the larger places saw a few like two Waterville citizens: Nathaniel Gilman, merchant and trader, and Timothy Boutelle, the land speculator and lawyer.

But let us note one nationally known millionaire who came from a small Maine town. In 1854 there was born in Mercer a boy whose father was the operator of a small sawmill and gristmill and who later set up a tannery. With only the education given in the one-room school, the boy, in 1876, started a general store in Mercer. His name was Frank Munsey. Buying goods for his store in Augusta. Munsey became acquainted with the operator of a telegraph instrument for that town, and just as a hobby he learned telegraphy. When his teacher moved to Boston, Munsey got his job, and sold his Mercer store. Four years later he was manager of the Western Union Telegraph office in Augusta. In 1882 he moved on to New York City, where the young man who had never even attended a Maine academy, decided he would publish a magazine. He started one for children called the Golden Argosy. Never pretending that he could write articles and stories himself, or even edit them, Frank Munsey had real genius in selecting others to do that sort of work, while he exercised his brilliant financial talent to make the magazine profitable.

After a few years Munsey saw that competition with the more popular St. Nicholas was going to be tough and he changed his publication to an adult magazine called simply, the Argosy. It became popular and enjoyed a wide circulation well into the 20th century. By 1890 Munsey had another magazine on the newsstands, this one carrying his own name, Munsey’s Magazine. It was the first Armerican monthly to sell for ten cents a copy. Popular and prosperous as was that magazine, Frank Munsey was not content with it and the Argosy alone. He began to buy up other magazines, and by 1906 he owned All Story Weekly, the Railroad Man’s Magazine, and half a dozen other specialized publications. Then Munsey began to gain control of newspapers: The New York Sun, the Baltimore News, the New York Star, and finally the prestigious New York Herald. When Frank Munsey died in 1925, that man from Mercer, seemingly so poorly educated for the life work he undertook, left an estate of $40 million, of which he gave $20 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

About Frank Munsey from Mercer, there was written a fascinating book entitled “Forty years – Forty Millions.” And with that we must say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1980