Radio Script #922

Little Talks on Common Things
February 27, 1972

Last week we talked about relations of French and English with the Maine Indians. Today let us have more to say about those Indians themselves.

They were of great historic importance to our state, though their significant contributions came before Maine achieved statehood in 1820. Even in 1972, the remaining Penobscot and Passamaquoddy Indians on reservations in our state are just beginning to receive anything like the consideration due them from the predominantly white population. We should do all we can to encourage these people to preserve their tribal traditions, their historic folklore, their dances and festal customs. Their right to be recognized as a definite ethic group, much older than any other on this continent, deserves our hearty acceptance.

But it is of the Maine Indians of long ago that I want to speak today.

First let us have a little about their behavior when they went to war. That it was often savage and brutal is certainly true, but so was warfare between whites. War has never been a pretty subject, except to heroizing romanticists. Everywhere, in every age, war has been a horrid business.

In my early boyhood, I became familiar with Elijah Kellogg’s book, Good Old Times, an account of the settlement and early development of Gorham, Maine. Since Gorham was my mother’s birthplace, she especially cherished that Kellogg book. In it Kellogg tells of the repeated Indian raids, the gathering of settlers inside the stockaded garrison on Fort Hill, where the Gorham branch of the University of Maine now stands. In gruesome detail Kellogg tells of the murder of six members of the Bryant family, who failed to heed the warning to seek refuge in the garrison. He tells of the cP’el march of captives taken to Quebec, where the Indians received a price from the French for every Englishman handed over.

But we ought also to remember that, with all the scalping and killing, all the terrible days of captivity, it was a minority of the raids that were initiated by the Indians themselves. Previous to 1675, the few raids that did occur were often caused by encroachment of white men on Indian lands. As the Indians became more experienced in trading their furs, they came to know when they were cheated. To make matters worse, though colonial authorities took steps to control the sale of to the Indians, enforcement was just as ineffective as was national prohibition in the 1920’s. Fired by alcohol, the red men committed depredations they would never have performed when sober.

Then in 1675 came King Philip’s War, an almost spontaneous uprising of the Indians, that began in Rhode Island and the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, and quickly spread into Maine. It was an attempt by the Narraganset Chief and his allies to end once for all the white men’s despoliation of their lands and the threatened elimination of their people.

In Maine at least, that was the last of the Indian-inspired raids. Thereafter the Maine Abnakis and their Canadian cousins were tools of the French against the English until the time of the American Revolution. During the hundred years after King Philip’s War, until 1775, the numerous raids on Maine settlements, with their bitter toll of death and captivity, though usually the work of Indians, were actually planned by the French, who paid the Indians liberally for English scalps.

Because the Maine Indians were pro-French, that meant they were anti-British. So, when the colonists proclaimed independence from Britain and the Revolutionary War began, quite naturally, the Maine Abnakis sided with the Americans. As early as the autumn of 1775 they helped guide Arnold’s expedition, and a considerable number of them fought with his army in its costly, unsuccessful attempt to capture Quebec. All through the Revolution, they rendered aid to the patriot cause.

The word Abnaki means dawn land. If we called them Dawnlands that would be nearly what they called themselves. Perhaps the nearest modern equivalent would be Downeasters. Those Abnaki tribes extended all the way from the upper reaches of the Connecticut River eastward to New Brunswick, where they met a quite different people, the Micmacs. While different names are usually given to the various sub-tribes of the Abnakis, their most usual labels from west to east are the Pennacooks of New Hampshire, the Sacos along the Saco River, the Androscoggins to Merrymeeting Bay, the Kennebecs, who themselves were divided into three different groups, the Carribos or Kennebecs proper, the Norridgewocks, and the Sheepscots; the Waweoocks of the present area of Knox and Lincoln counties; the Penobscots of Penobscot River Valley; the Pentagoets in the surroundings of Castine; the Passamaquoddies of the Machias and St. Croix rivers and the Indians along the St. John River. The Passamaquoddies and the St. John Indians were those closest to the Canadian Micmacs. When you encounter other names, such as the Tarratines, bear in mind that those are names given by the white men, not names the Indians called themselves. Bear in mind also that the Indians had no written language, and that accounts for a bewildering spelling of Indian place names, dependent on the way an Englishman or a Frenchman phoneticized what he heard or thought he heard from the mouth of an Indian. For instance the name of the falls of the Kennebec at Waterville have, in the early records of the English colonists half a dozen different spellings. So, when you see references to Taconet, Teconnet, Taconit and Ticonnet, they are all just different ways of denoting what we have today come to call Ticonic, as used in recent names like Ticonic Bank and Ticonic Bridge.

As for the language spoken by Maine Indians, those of New Hampshire and the Saco valley used a common dialect, now entirely extinct. The Androscoggins, Kennebecs and Penobscots spoke the same ancient Abnaki as the Indians of the Chaudiere and the St. Francis in Quebec. It is the language still preserved by the Penobscot Indians at Old Town. The Passamaquoddy and St. John people used a third dialect called Amalicite. The designation of the Penobscots as Tarratines was so persistent that today there is the well known Tarratine Club in Bangor, though I doubt if it has any Indian members. As near as we can now tell, the name originally meant simply traders and the Englishmen meant by it, the Indians with whom they traded on the Penobscot. The first mention of the name appears in the account of the short-lived Popham colony in 1607. The narrator wrote, “We took those people to be Tarratines.” In 1614 an Indian at Camden told Capt. John Smith, during his exploratory voyage from Virginia up along the New England coast, that east of Penobscot Bay were the Tarratines, the Pentagoet’s mortal enemies. Governor Bradford of the Plymouth Colony wrote of his Massachusetts Bay Indians: “They were much afraid of the Tarratines, a people to the eastward, who used to come at harvest time arid take away their corn and often kill their people.”

However, in the literally thousands of pages of treaties, deeds and official correspondence that dealt with the Indians, the name Tarratine has been found only once, and that was in a forged deed dated 1629. So the name Tarratine never had official status.

Historians agree that, if they had not been prompted by the French, as early as 1700 the Maine Indians would have sought and benefitted by English protection. The danger that threatened their extermination at that time came not from white men but from the war-like, rapidly conquering Mohawks, a tribe of the great Iroquois nation, no kin at all to the wide-spread Algonguin speaking people, of whom the Abnakis were the northeastern branch. Already they had become aware of the superiority of steel knives and needles, iron kettles, guns and powder to their stone knives, bone needles, birch bark kettles and bows and arrows. With their furs they could get those superior good so by 1700, the Penobscots were regularly taking their furs to the trading posts on Casco Bay, and not until 1705 did they get the nearer post at New Harbor.

When the Massachusetts State Constitution was ratified in 1786, the new state sought to bring order to its Indian affairs in Maine. It made a treaty with the Penobscots, and ten years later the lands which that treaty had granted to the tribe, Massachusetts began to purchase from the Penobscots, bit by bit, from 1796 to 1818. Maine continued the practice when it became a separate state in 1820. The terms of all those purchases assured every member of the tribe annual payments of corn, pork, molasses, broadcloth, powder, shot, blankets and tobacco. But note that not in any instance did the payments include rum. The last four complete townships belonging to the Penobscots by the Treaty of 1786 were sold in 1833, with annual income promised to the tribe in the form of interest on the capital purchase, held as a fund by the State of Maine on behalf of the Penobscots. The Indians retained ownership of Indian Island near Old Town and of all the other 146 islands in the river above that reservation – a total of 4500 acres.

The old records, however prejudiced, reveal why the Indians preferred French to English alliance. Naturally we Anglo-Saxon Americans have been most familiar with the English accounts and many of us never saw even a translation of the Jesuit Relations, to which I referred last week. Prejudiced as both the Jesuit accounts and the English records certainly are, their perusal will convince most readers that the British attitude toward the Indians was strikingly different from that of the French Jesuits. As early as 1605 Weymouth, at the mouth of the Kennebec, kidnapped five Indians and took them to England as curiosities. Though same of them later returned, the Indians at the mouth of the Kennebec never forgave Weymouth’s action. Weymouth’s successors, including both the Plymouth and the Boston colonists, had only mercenary interest in the Indians, to buy their furs cheap and sell them at a handsome profit. They regarded the red men as heathen savages and never to be trusted.

The French Jesuits behaved otherwise. They treated the Indians kindly and gained their confidence. Many Frenchmen, including Baron Castine, married Indian wives. It is said that by 1700 there were few Acadian families without some Indian blood. This was all the more accentuated by the difference in religion. The Indians, thoroughly converted to Catholicism, came to fear the Protestant English as determined to destroy their religion. So it came about that ties of friendly relations, of marriage and of religion bound the Maine Abnakis to a French alliance until the American Revolution.

But scattered through the old records are many instances of friendship, not only between individual Indians and individual Frenchmen, but just as strong ties between individual Indians and individual Englishmen. Elijah Kellogg’s Good Old Times tells how a friendly Indian warned the Gorham settlement of impending raid. Bradford’s relation tells how the Plymouth Indians taught the Pilgrims how to use fish for fertilizer in hills of corn, and Captain John Smith’s narrative tells of his friendly reception by Indians at Castine. What really happened, of course, was that the Indians, helpless before the sophisticated weapons of Europeans, found themselves the innocent victims of centuries of European conflict, jammed in the middle between French and British determination to control the American continent.

Year: 1972