Radio Script #432

Little Talks on Common Things

November 1, 1959

You often see the expression “the Indian Wars” when you read the early history of Maine. Why the plural? Was there more than one Indian war? Wasn’t there a prolonged conflict with the tribes for a hundred years? I thought we might spend a little time tonight explaining just what were Maine’s Indian wars.

At Phippsburg near the mouth of the Kennebec the settlers had made peace with Chief Robin Hend and his Indians soon after the middle of the 17th century. Under that treaty the Indians on the lower Kennebec and those on the Sheepscot gave up their arms.

In Kennebec Yesterdays I have told the story of the prank played by a group of white sailors on the wife and child of Chief Squando of the Saco Indians. In wrath Squando aroused the neighboring tribes and started the first Indian war in 1675. It began with the massacre of the Wakeley family at Falmouth, and before the war ended in 1678, more than 70 settlers had been killed between Casco Bay and the Piscataqua.

The leader of the settlement at Pemaquid, Abraham Shurte,determined that the war should not spread to the tribes on the Kennebec, called the famous Council at Ticonic (now Waterville). The Indians demanded the return of their arms in order that they might hunt the forest animals. Since their introduction to firearms, a whole generation of Indians had grown up that did not know the expert use of bow and arrow. When the whites, despite Shurte’s attempts at further conciliation, refused to return the Indian muskets, the tribes were hit by great deprivation and were threatened with famine. They made a sudden and murderous raid on the lower Kennebec settlements, killing the whole Hammond family of nine persons at Woolwich, and slaughtering 35 persons at Arrowsic.

For three years the raids continued until at last the chiefs along the three rivers — Saco, Androscoggin and Kennebec — met the English commissioners at Casco and signed a treaty of peace on April 12, 1678. During those three dreadful years six Maine settlements had been completely destroyed: Scarborough, Casco, Arrowsic, Pemaquid, Cape Neddick and Saco.

The Second Indian War was short but bloody. It lasted only a few months in 1688. The towns of Sheepscot, Berwick, Falmouth and Dover, New Hampshire were completely destroyed. That is the war when every home in Falmouth, now the City of Portland, was burned, and for several years the whole peninsula where now is Maine’s largest city had not a single white inhabitant. It was in that second Indian War that the practice was begun of selling captives in Canada.

In the first war in 1675 the French had not been involved. But in 1688 France and England were again at war on the continent, and the French were glad to pay well for prisoners brought to Quebec by their Indian allies. It was at the start of this second war that Governor William Phips built Fort William Henry at Pemaquid and a similar stronghold was built at Saco.

After fifteen years of peace England and France were again in conflict in what was popularly called Queen Anne’s War. It lasted for ten years and its repercussions in the colonies created what our history calls the Third Indian War. There were attacks on Wells, Saco, Scarborough and Falmouth, all of which were repulsed, but with bloody sacrifice. The year 1707 was especially trying for the people remaining in Maine. They could not go a hundred feet from their cabins without hazard to their lives, and no cabin was safe unless it was near a fortified garrison. The lumber trade and the fisheries were completely abandoned.

Settlers could till lands only when the acres were close to the sentry boxes. The means of livelihood was extremely slender, and more and more settlers were forced to give up their claims and seek protection in the coast towns of Massachusetts. In ten years Maine lost more than a fourth of her white population. Besides those who moved to Massachusetts, some families were entirely wiped out by Indian tomahawks; others were carried into captivity. The habitations of the survivors decayed and became miserable hovels, and their laboriously cleared fields grew up to bushes.

After a treaty was signed at Portsmouth in 1713, peace lasted for only nine years. Then in 1722 the Fourth Indian War broke out with an attack on the fort at St. Georges, near Waldoboro. Although the fort was not captured and burned, several of its defenders lost their lives, and all the members of two outlying families, who were taken by surprise in the raid, were massacred.

It was in this fourth war that there occurred the burning of Brunswick, then the largest settlement between Falmouth and Pemaquid. Here on the Kennebec we mark that fourth war as the time when Father Rasle was killed at Norridgewock. It was also the conflict that saw the famous battle of Lovewell’s Pond in Fryeburg — a momentous victory for the British colonists. Before peace was again agreed upon in 1725, more than 200 Maine settlers had been killed or carried into captivity. The war cost the provincial government of Massachusetts 170,000 pounds, and a disproportionate amount of that cost was borne by the people of Maine. Costly and bloody as was the Fourth Indian War, it was the colonists’ decisive victory over the tribes. The dispersal of Father Rasle’s Indians at Norridgewock and the complete rout of the Sacos and neighboring tribes at the Battle of Lovewell’s Pond had caused the majority of Maine Indians between the Piscataqua and the Penobscot to retreat to Canada. It was from their stronghold on the St. Francis River that, after 1725. repeated raids were made on the Maine settlements until the Treaty of Paris in 1763 finally ended the strife between England and France on the American continent.

Aroused by French agitators, the St. Francis Indians started bold raids in 1745, continuing for five years what was called the Fifth Indian War. The forts at St. Georges and Pemaquid were repeatedly attacked. In 1746 occurred the bloody attack on Gorham, where seven members of the Bryant family were massacred — a story thrillingly told by Elijah Kellogg in his book “Good Old Times”. The French and English settled their part of the dispute in 1748, rather ignominiously for the English. How frustrated and heartsick must have been those Maine men who, under Sir William Pepperell. had captured Louisburg, the Gibraltar of America on Cape Breton Island, only to see the whole island handed back to the French by the Treaty of Aux-la-Chappelle in 1748. In Maine the Indian attacks continued for another year until a treaty with the Indians was signed at Falmouth in October, 1749.

Strangely enough, the sixth and last Indian War, popularly known as the French and Indian War, did not touch the middle Kennebec. The raids made by Indian allies of the French, sallying forth from St. Francis, hit Gorham, North Yarmouth, Windham, Gray and Brunswick, and the coast towns of Georgetown and St. George, but not the settlements on the Kennebec above Merrymeeting Bay. By that time there were sizable settlements at Bowdoinham, Pownalborough, Gardiner, Hallowell, Augusta, Vassalboro and Winslow. In 1754 forts had been built at Augusta and Winslow, and the settlers, aware of the activities of the French and Indians all the way from Lake Champlain to western Pennsylvania, expected momentary attack. It never came, and even before the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the Kennebec Valley was on the way to prosperity.

The story of Maine’s six Indian wars gives clear and convincing answer to an often asked question. Since we know that the Pilgrims established a trading post at Augusta as early as 1627, and since there were sizable settlements from Kittery to Pemaquid, all along the coast before 1650, why did it take so long to settle inland Maine? The answer is that no settlement was safe anywhere in the whole District of Maine between 1675 and 1760. Permanent settlement was held up for 85 years by a succession of Indian wars. The worst of it is that, except for the first of those wars in 1675. they were not really conflicts between settlers and Indians. but fighting in which the Indians were the paid tools of the French. In other parts of the colonies, the English used the same method, and paid Indians to bring in French scalps. The more one studies Maine history, the more one is forced to conclude that for those bloody Indian massacres the white man was chiefly to blame.

Now let us leave the Indian wars for another kind of trouble — robbery.

In August, 1860 the Portland Advertiser reported as follows about an incident up in Franklin County: “Last Sunday night Michael Larkin’s store at Livermore Falls was robbed of goods worth $2,000. A cart was stolen in the neighborhood to carry off the plunder. A portion of the stolen goods was left with one Bucknam at East Dixmont and the cart was sold in Cherryfield. Soon afterward six oxen were stolen in Washington County and were driven off to Augusta and there butchered by one Shorey of Monmouth, who was arrested when he offered the meat for sale. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to state prison for four years.

“A brother-in-law of Shorey, Andrew Tozier, was implicated, but having committed no offense in Kennebec County, he was discharged. But he was re-arrested, tried in Waldo County, and acquitted. Meanwhile Shorey had implicated Tozier in the earlier robbery at Livermore Falls. Tozier was finally brought to trial at Auburn. He was identified as the man who sold the stolen cart in Cherryfield. So he too got five years in state prison. It took many months to finish this case, and Storekeeper Larkin never recovered a cart’s worth of the stolen goods.”

Almost exactly a hundred years ago there died in Hallowell one of the most famous men of the 19th century on the Kennebec. He was Rufus Page who had many records to his credit. He was at one time the largest shipowner in Maine, his vessels in number and tonnage even exceeding those of the Sewalls at Bath. He owned the first line of steamers ever to ply between the Kennebec and Boston. In 1842 he s~nt from Portland to the Mediterranean the steamer Bangor, the first American steamship to pass through the Straits of Gibraltar. Page was also the first to open up the Kennebec to the ice trade, and his icehouse near Hallowell was the first built on the river. He held many public offices and was the first mayor of Hallowell.

Sixty years ago it was the custom to publish time tables for transportation services in the newspapers. In the Maine Woods for May 8, 1903 there were seven such time tables. At that time the several narrow gauge railroads in Franklin County, which were later merged into the Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes, operated as separate lines. So the newspaper gave three separate time tables — one for the Sandy River Railroad, another for the Franklin and Megantic, and a third for the Phillips and Rangeley. Each road ran three trains a day in both directions, during the summer months. The Sandy River ran between Farmington and Phillips, where it connected with the Phillips and Rangeley for Dead River and Rangeley Village. At Strong the Sandy River had a junction with the Franklin and Megantic to Kingfield.

A fourth time table in that 1903 paper shows three trains a day, both ways, on the broad gauge Portland and Rumford Falls Railway. A fifth gives the thrice daily trip of the Rangeley Lakes Steamboat Company between Rangeley and Rangeley Outlet, with stops at Rangeley Lake House, South Rangeley and Mountain View. The remaining two timetables were for steamship lines out of Portland — one to Boston, the other to New York. Round trip fare from Portland to New York on one of the two steamers of the Maine Steamship Company was only $5.00.

In 1900 the Maine fish and game laws were somewhat complicated. Maine Woods warned fishermen that on any brook in the towns of Freeman, Strong and Salem, it was legal to fish on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday only.

Year: 1959