<\/p>\n
Did you know that the Pilgrim father, John Alden, was involved in a homicide that occurred in Maine, within twenty miles of the spot from which goes out this broadcast tonight? I am talking about the John Alden, the man to whom, according to Longfellow, Priscilla Mullins said, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?”<\/p>\n
Long before entering high school, every Maine boy and girl knows that the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, that their military leader was Miles Standish, that he sent young John Alden to plead his matrimonial cause with Priscilla Mullins, who turned down the older captain for the younger man. These school children know that the colonists suffered greatly through that first terrible winter, that they were deeply in debt to creditors in England, that they finally paid that debt, that the colony grew and prospered. But I have never seen any history text for grade school children that makes any mention of the Pilgrim’s relations with Maine.<\/p>\n
Plenty of books tell how, in the spring of 1621 the starving Plymouth settlers were greeted by an Indian who spoke English. You all know that story. Did it ever occur to you to wonder where that Indian learned English?<\/p>\n
We now know that he must have learned it from the Popham colony at the mouth of the Kennebec, established 15 years before the Pilgrims landed on Cape Cod. He was probably one of the six Indians who were taken to England in 1605 and was later returned to his native land. The general histories maintain the same silence about the Pilgrim fathers themselves in Maine and the part played by Maine in paying the Pilgrim debts. Maine’s great historian, Judge Williamson, in his two-volume history of our state, published in 1832, says: “By a little barter each year at Monhegan and Damariscove, the Plymouth colonists had become acquainted with the profit possible from fisheries and fur trade. In pursuit of the latter, in the autumn of 1626, after their harvest was in, they sent a shallop loaded with corn up the Kennebec River, and in exchange for the corn they received 700 pounds of beaver and other furs.”<\/p>\n
In his “History of Kennebec County”. Kingsbury tells us: “The Pilgrims established a trading house at Cushnoc (now Augusta) and there traded with the natives for 34 years.”<\/p>\n
It is Williamson who tells us about wampum. He says: “About 1628 the Plymouth colony opened trade in a new article called wampum. It consisted of white and blue beads, as long and as large as a kernel of corn, perforated and strung, and possessing a clearness and beauty which made them desirable ornaments. Those beads were known only to the natives in southern Massachusetts and around Long Island Sound, not at all to the Abenakis in Maine. The Pilgrims obtained the beads at very low prices, transported them to their eastern trading posts, and bartered them at high prices for the Indian furs.” Williamson then adds, “Within two years, by the spring of 1630, wampum was found to command a more ready market among the tribes than any other commodity.”<\/p>\n
It is now clear how the Pilgrims paid off their burdensome debt. Those cheaply secured Indian furs brought high prices in England, and by their sale the Plymouth Colony was saved from ruin.<\/p>\n
The old Plymouth trading post at Cushnoc stood where the remains of old Fort Western now stand, on the eastern bank of the Kennebec near the old highway bridge, although it is visible from the new toll bridge. Fort Western, of course. was built more than 90 years after the Pilgrim trading post was abandoned in 1662.<\/p>\n
So it came about that to what is now the City of Augusta, there came in the early 17th century such historically renowned Pilgrims as Miles Standish and Edward Winston, John Howland and William Bradford, Jr., and notably John Alden, which brings us to how John Alden got mixed up in a Maine homicide.<\/p>\n
In the spring of 1634 John sailed from Plymouth with supplies for the Kennebec trading post, where for a year John Howland of the Plymouth colony had been in charge. The value of that trade is shown by a statement in Bradford’s “Relation”, that in 1633 no less than 20 hogsheads of beaver skins, and quantities of other furs, were shipped to England. The Plymouth colony, by virtue of their royal grant claimed exclusive right to this lucrative trade on the Kennebec.<\/p>\n
In May, 1634 a man whom the old records variously call Hoskin, Haskin, and Hockings, arrived on the scene at Cushnoc. He had been sent by the settlement sponsored by Lords Say and Brooks on the Piscataqua, near modern Portsmouth, to dispute exclusive rights claimed by the Pilgrims and demand a share in the fur trade for the Piscataqua traders. John Howland, the Pilgrim in charge of the trading post, immediately ordered Hockings to depart. Hockings refused, and defiantly anchored his boat on the river a short distance above the trading post. With four men in boats, Howland put out into the stream to settle the matter, because it was obvious that Hockings intended to intercept the fur-laden Indian canoes as they came down the river and trade for the cargoes before they reached Augusta.<\/p>\n
Again Howland ordered Hockings to get out of the area. Again Hockings defiantly refused. So Howland ordered his men to cut the anchor cables of Hockings’ ship. As one of the men, Moses Talbot, cut a cable with a swift stroke of an axe, Hockings fired his gun, and Talbot fell back into the boat, instantly killed. One of Howland’s party at once retaliated, shooting Hockings through the head. Now John Alden, though apparently not a participant in this affair, was a witness of it, and at the time was a magistrate of the Plymouth Colony. Not unnaturally he was suspected of having at least egged on his fellow trader, Howland, to forceful action to eject the intruding Hockings.<\/p>\n
When news of the affair reached both Plymouth and the Piscataqua, intense excitement was aroused. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, long at odds with the older colony at Plymouth, at once came to the defense of the Piscataqua settlement. When John Alden, after his return from the Kennebec, went -to Boston on business, he was arrested and jailed. Captain Miles Standish rushed to Boston to try to get him out, but the Boston magistrates insisted on holding Alden until the whole case could be tried. They didn’t accuse him of personally killing Hockings, but they felt sure he must have been an accomplice.<\/p>\n
When full investigation was agreed upon and was held, the Piscataqua folk didn’t even bother to appear, but left their case wholly in the hands of their Boston friends. Bradford and Winslow appeared in behalf of Plymouth, while Governor Winthrop and Edward Dudley represented Massachusetts Bay.<\/p>\n
Finally the Boston complainers were compelled to agree that the Plymouth traders were on the Kennebec by virtue of a royal patent issued in 1627, granting them control over Kennebec trade, although its limits and its privileges were woefully indefinite. The Plymouth representatives also won in their contention that the killing of Hockings had been an act of self-defense after he had shot Talbot. So it all ended by the Boston authorities releasing John Alden as not guilty of any punishable offense.<\/p>\n
One of the amazing facts of our early Kennebec history is the friendly relations between the Pilgrim traders and French Jesuit missionaries. With the bitter feeling that existed between Protestants and Catholics in 16th century England, and the long-standing animosity between English and French, one would look for harsh treatment of these missionaries by the Plymouth traders. But exactly the opposite was true. The trading post at Cushnoc welcomed the Jesuit mission, allowed it to be stationed two miles up the river. Father Druillettes, the noted missionary, who preceded Father Rasle by nearly a century on the river, was a close friend of John Winslow. He and his fellow priests visited Plymouth, where they were cordially entertained. On at least one occasion Father Druillettes was permitted to celebrate Mass in a Puritan home, and was several times entertained by the Rev. John Eliot, apostle to the Indians.<\/p>\n
It is recorded that one Englishman who frequently came to Cushnoc, was known to worship at the little Frech mission chapel up the river. Who was that Englishman? Although no one knows for sure, a good guess is that he was none other than Captain Miles Standish, who was never a member of the church at Plymouth and considered himself their military defender but not actually one of them. What is not so well known is that Standish came from a Catholic family in England.<\/p>\n
At any rate the relations between the Pilgrim traders and the Jesuit missionaries is another instance of the evidence becoming increasingly available to the modern historian, that the bitter religious bigotry attributed alike to Plymouth Pilgrims and Boston Puritans, did not apply in the Province of Maine.<\/p>\n
When the well remembered Noyes-Gilman feud broke out here in Waterville in the 1860’s, it concerned dispute over the line between Lot 104 of the old McKechnie survey — the lot owned by the widow of Nathaniel Gilman -and the adjoining Lot 105, owned by the daughter of Timothy Boutelle. Knowing that Boutelle was not an original Waterville settler, but had come to the town about 1800, I have often wondered how he acquired possession of Lot 105, parts of which had already been sold to earlier settlers. Last summer, while going through some old papers at the Waterville Historical Society, I learned the answer. Boutelle purchased that lot, a bit at a time, over a period of two years. He bought the first piece from Dr. Moses Appleton on May 17, 1808. In consideration of $400, Appleton handed over to Boutelle all claim to what the deed d~scribed as “one undivided half of a tract of land, part of Lot 105, on the east side of the road leading from Waterville East Meeting House to Fairfield, being part of the lot granted to Isaac Temple by the Plymouth Company.<\/p>\n
We thus learn that Isaac Temple was the original purchaser, and he built his house near what is now the corner of Temple and Front Streets.<\/p>\n
The East Meeting House mentioned in the deed was to distinguish the old meeting house that later became the Armory from the west meeting house built in what is now Oakland. The following year, in May, 1809, Boutelle bought another part of Lot 105 from George Clarke,land described in the deed as beginning at the easterly line of the road leading from Ticonic Bay to Fairfield, at a stake and stone on the south line of Lot 105, granted by the Plymouth Company to Isaac Temple. Thein in the fall of 1809 Boutelle purchased another piece from Moses Appleton. So Timothy Boutelle finally got possession of the entire area of Lot 105 from the Kennebec to the Messalonskee, and it was that possession alongside Nathaniel Gilman’s Lot 104 that opened the way for the bitter boundary dispute many years later.<\/p>\n
What was the road, variously described as the road from Waterville East Meeting House to Fairfield and the road from Ticonic Bay to Fairfield? It was Waterville’s original road, extending from a point far down on the Plains to the Fairfield line, following the course of present Water Street, but instead of turning left up what is now Main Street, it swung slightly to the right, across what is now the Lockwood Common, and then followed the present line of Front Street and College Avenue to Fairfield. During the earliest years of settlement on this side of the Kennebec, following the earlier settlement on the east side, in the vicinity of Fort Halifax, that was the first street, though it was soon followed by Main, Silver and Mill Streets. Mill Street was the present Western Avenue. On low ground at the south side of that street, nearly opposite the end of present Marston Court, was Waterville’s first cemetery, where the surveyor William McKechnie, the pioneer James Stackpole, and other early settlers were buried.<\/p>\n
Year: 1959<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #403, Broadcast on January 11, 1959<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[800,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7925"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7925\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}