<\/p>\n
In our discussion of the old French missions established by the Jesuits in Maine we closed last week’s broadcast with the story of the destruction of the Indian village of Norridgewock and the death of Father Sebastian Rasle in 1724.<\/p>\n
At that time there were about 300 persons residing at the mission village, although many of the men were away on a hunt. Three fourths of them, about the number that escaped on that August afternoon or were not there at the time, fled to Canada and joined the Abnaki mission on the St. Francis, which about 20 years earlier had been merged with the older mission on the Chaudiere. A very few of the survivors stayed near the lakes and streams in Maine’s northern wilderness.<\/p>\n
Twenty years after the destruction of Norridgewock came what is known in Maine history as the Fifth Indian War, precipitated by renewal of hostilities between France and England on the European continent. The few Indians left in the Moosehead and Kennebec regions were slow to engage in that war, but the river was the thoroughfare for the repeated raids on Maine settlements made by Indians from the St. Francis mission.<\/p>\n
In the spring of 1750 a band of about 100 Indians from St. Francis swept down the river, burning and killing as they went along. The white settlers were terrified, many abandoning their wilderness homes and taking refuge behind the pa11isade at Fort Richmond. Finally the raiding party attacked the fort itself, killed several men and took fifteen captives to Canada.<\/p>\n
By 1754 indignation against the St. Francis mission as the seed bed of French and Indian raids on Maine settlements became so intense that Governor Shirley of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was persuaded to order the erection of two fortified and garrisoned defenses, Fort Western at Augusta and Fort Halifax at Winslow. But it was not until 1759 that the well known general of the French and Indian wars, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, decided the time had come to wipe out the hornets’ nest at St. Francis.<\/p>\n
The result was the famous march and raid of Rogers’ Rangers, which Kenneth Roberts has recounted so vividly in his novel “Northwest Passage”. After a fatiguing march of 21 days through the forest from Lake Champlain to the St. Francis river, Rogers came within sight of the Indian village. Halting his men about three miles from the place, he waited until darkness. Then, in the early evening, he entered the village in disguise, accompanied only by two of his officers. Just before daylight he ordered a general assault while the Indians were sound asleep.<\/p>\n
They made little resistance, even those who were able to awake and grab up guns before the English were upon them. Twenty of the Indians were taken prisoner, and five English captives whom the Indians had taken some months earlier were released. Rogers retreated up the St. Francis river before alerted French troops could catch him. He ordered his men to scatter and rendezvous later on the Connecticut river. But the rendezvous never occurred.<\/p>\n
Rogers was vigorously pursued by French soldiers and lost seven of his men. For about ten days his party of 30 men managed to keep together, then they too scattered, every man for himself. Some died in the woods, and all the others suffered great privation from hunger and fatigue before the few survivors reached the outlying Vermont settlements.<\/p>\n
Rogers’ destruction of St. Francis in 1759 did not end either the Indian settlement there nor its Jesuit mission. In 1764 the Governor of Massachusetts informed the General Court that the Indians in their large settlement at St. Francis kept in constant touch with their tribal brothers scattered along the Kennebec and the Penobscot. Thus we know that, within five years after Rogers’ raid, the St. Francis settlement was going strong again. In fact, though now on a slightly different site, the descendants of those 18th century Abnakis still inhabit two hundred years after Rogers raid, an Indian village on the St. Francis river, about four miles from its junction with the St. Lawrence.<\/p>\n
In the 1880’s there lived in Waterville an interesting, humorous and caustic writer who might well be described as the John Gould of 80 years ago. for a number of years he was publisher and editor of a weekly paper in Waterville called the “Kennebec Democrat”, and decidedly Democratic in politics it was. The publisher was Benjamin Bunker whose editorials blazoned the vitriolic language common in the politics of that time. In 1889, when his newspaper was enjoying the height of its prosperity, despite the Democratic national set-back in the defeat of Cleveland and the election of Harrison as President in 1888, Bunker was having a gay time with his persistent jabs at Maine Republicans. It was then that he published a small, paper-covered book with the title “Bunker’s Textbook of Political Deviltry.<\/p>\n
A Record of Maine’s Small Bore Politicians and Political Bosses”. Last summer I was so fortunate as to obtain a copy of that old book. In its introduction Bunker wrote: “In 1884 the Democratic party was again trusted with power. This was due chiefly to the general cussedness, corruption and dishonesty of the Republican politicians, who had plundered the treasury, voted away the public domain to the railroad barons, systematically plundered the people, and filled the land with millionaires and tramps.”<\/p>\n
Then Bunker turned his attention to the Plumed Knight of Maine, James G. Blaine, who had narrowly lost the Presidency to Cleveland in 1884.”When elected to Congress for his first term, Blaine was a poor man. The country was then torn by civil war. Blaine saw his opportunity to accumulate wealth and obtain huge profits in contracts for munitions, clothing and quartermaster supplies. The arming and equipping of Maine regiments gave Blaine a grand opportunity to enrich himself and his friends. From a poor Congressman on a salary of $5,000 a year, he has been able to build a $60,000 palace in Washington, buy a $50,000 interest in Pennsylvania mines, a $200,000 interest in a Virginia railroad, and for years has been a heavy dealer- in Wall Street. Jim Blaine has done mighty well for himself.”<\/p>\n
Bunker was scathing in his denunciation of what he called the “Temperance Party” in Maine. Bunker asserted that in the good old days of such Republicans as Anson Morrill, Isaac Washburn, William Pitt Fessenden and Neal Dow, the Republican leaders were not hypocrites, but declared open war on rum sellers and would make no deals with them. But how different was the situation in 1889. According to Bunker, Republican sheriffs and even officers higher in the state hierarchy now made constant deals with rum sellers. As for the avowed Prohibitionists, Bunker said of them: “From the beginning of the crusade against liquor dealers, the temperance cause has suffered from the antics of cranks and from professional temperance hypocrites. From the time when Deputy Marshall Weaver of Bangor transported whiskey in coffins, down to more recent days when state constables roam from town to town, seizing elderberry wine from old widows, the Temperance Party has graduated some bad specimens of humanity. They are found in Bangor, where the clergymen pound the Holy Bible on Sunday evening and call down the curse of the Almighty on the rum seller’s head, then on Monday go to the polls side by side with a well known saloon keeper, and with eyes raised to heaven, drop a ballot in the box for a candidate who is just outside the polling place filling up a voter with rum. They can be found in Augusta where a candidate for President and an alleged temperance man refused to vote for a constitutional amendment prohibiting the sale of liquor. while his tools and dupes are seizing liquor from Democratic saloon keepers to hand it over to Republicans. and where the chairman of the GOP pays court to the temperance men, and is himself carted home stupidly drunk.”<\/p>\n
Bunker was especially bitter in his denunciation of what he called the Republican ring. “For the last 15 years the Republican party has been controlled by machine politicians. Nominations for Senators and Representatives to Congress have been parceled out to members of the ring since 1872. while state and county offices have been likewise managed by dickers between the ring and local politicians.”<\/p>\n
Then Bunker called attention to the Maine man who was to James G. Blaine what seventy years later Sherman Adams would be to Dwight Eisenhower. “To reach Mr. Blainen, wrote Bunker, “one must consult J. H. Manley. If Manley says no, that ends the matter. No Republican can be nominated if Mr. Manley objects, and every legislative bill must be approved by Manley before it can be passed. So complete is the hold of the machine that not a single Republican, high or low, black or white. dares openly denounce its rule.”<\/p>\n
Then Bunker thought he had better call attention to the political situation right at home in Kennebec County. He wrote: “Machine rule has transformed Kennebec County into a paradise of boodle politicians whose ingenuity is taxed for excuses to explain their raids on the county treasury. Even the fat is fried out of the officials at the Insane Hospital, and that roost. of party favorites is made to pay tribute to keep the machine well greased.”<\/p>\n
A condition of which many of us older people have almost forgotten the existence was labeled by Ben Bunker as the tramp racket. Let’s have it in Ben’s own words: “To reward a lazy set of drones in the shape of county and town officials, the Legislature of 1880 passed the tramp law, which gave officers authority to arrest all persons going about the state asking for food and shelter. To do so was a State Prison offense, and the sentence was supposed to be a year or more in Thomaston. Kennebec County officials at once saw a way to feather their own nests. Instead of complaining of the tramp as a vagrant, they arraigned him before municipal courts as being drunk and disturbing the peace. By this~shapp practice those~aching voids, the pockets of deputy sheriffs and town constables, are filled with fees which the taxpayers have to furnish. The office of county sheriff, always a rather soft snap, has now become a wonderful bed of roses, thanks to the tramp racket as worked by the county boodlers. The chronic tramp soon learned that he could get a warm home for the winter, without work, come out for the summer, then go back in again. The more times he was arrested, the more fees for the boodler. The Kennebec County jail has become notorious as the Tramp’s Paradise, where the same tramp may be hauled up half a dozen times a year, induced to plead guilty to drunkenness, then enjoy himself at the county’s expense. From a position of paying barely $1,200 a year, the office of sheriff of Kennebec County has been raised to one paying over $8,000, three-fourths of which comes to the sheriff as fees for committal and board of tramps.”<\/p>\n
A whole chapter in Bunker’s book is devoted to local politics in Waterville. Bunker said: “Several years ago a Democrat, General Franklin Smith, was elected to the Legislature from Waterville. He was a life-long temperance man and in the Legislature voted consistently for improvement and enforcement of the Maine prohibitory law. The next year, when Smith was renominated, the Republicans were determined to beat him. They put up as their candidate a druggist, who sold juice of the maize called split. Then the clergymen, the college professors and the temperance reformers banded together to defeat the wicked temperate Democrat and elect the holy Republican rum seller.”<\/p>\n
Bunker went on, in even more bitter language. “The partisanship of Waterville Republicans has always bordered on insanity. The Baptist brethren and the college faculty have long dominated the politics of the town. To swell Republican majorities, students were allowed to vote.<\/p>\n
“When the town grew and the Deomcrats increased in number, what did the ruling politicians do? They at once secured a city charter and proceeded to divide the town into such sections that the Democrats could never carry more than one ward.”<\/p>\n
Well, that was old Ben Bunker for you. I wonder what he would say if he were here today to know that eighty years later the old ward lines of which he complained still remain, and that it has become very easy indeed to elect Democrats from more than one ward.<\/p>\n
Year: 1959<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #413, Broadcast on March 22, 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\/7952"}],"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=7952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7952\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}