<\/p>\n
One of the great historians about colonial days in America was Francis Parkman. He wrote more than a dozen books and some of them refer to our part of the country.<\/p>\n
On several broadcasts during the past year, I have referred to our Maine Indians,and I want today to tell you what that renowned, professorial historian had to say about them in a book he published in the middle of the 19th century. The book
\nis called HALF A CENTURY OF CONFLICT, and the title refers to the long struggle between England and France for control of this part of North America.<\/p>\n
In one passage Parkman wrote: “The light and life of the grim solitude of the Maine wilderness were its countless streams and lakes. In 1700, Maine was still filled with wolves, bears, and wildcats. Tribes and subtribes of the Abnakis had villages on the Saco, the Kennebec, and the Penobscot. Most of them had been converted to Christianity by the Jesuits, and some had been persuaded to move to Canada. Those who remained, under the direction of missionaries, could be used by the French to keep the English settlements in check.”<\/p>\n
Parkman then tells about attempts to bring peace between the English settlers and their Indian neighbors. King Philip’s War had itself long ended, but Indian raids had continued when, in 1703, Gov. Dudley of Massachusetts Bay called a conference of Indians to meet with his representatives at Casco – not the modern village of Casco, but at what is now Portland. Responding were chiefs of the Norridgewock, the Penobscots, the Androscoggins, the Penacooks and the Pequawkets. Chief Bomazeen of the Canibas on Swan Island told Gov. Dudley that several French missionaries had lately come among his people and were inciting them against the English, but the chief assured the governor that his Indians would remain the Englishman’s firm friends.<\/p>\n
Bomazeen may have been sincere, but he certainly did not speak for his braves. It was later discovered that some of them carried loaded muskets, ready to kill Gov. Dudley if they could do so without endangering the life of their own chief. But Dudley was suspicious enough to keep Bomazeen close to himself during the whole conference.<\/p>\n
At any rate, there at Casco in 1703 was concluded a treaty between Massachusetts and the Maine Indians.<\/p>\n
Chief agitator of the tribes, spurring them to raids on the English settlements, was the French Governor of Quebec, Vandreuil. No sooner had the Treaty of Casco been accepted than he spread abroad the claim that several Abnakis had recently been murdered by Englishmen. That rumor so aroused the tribes that soon nearly every unprotected house in English-settled Maine was ablaze.<\/p>\n
In 1703 Maine settlements were few and far apart. They extended along the coast from Kittery to Casco Bay. There were none at all up the great rivers, but only at their mouths. What is now the town of Wells, with its extensive beach and its many summer visitors, was in 1703 a scattered settlement of 50 families, living mostly in log cabins, along the west side of the King’s Highway running parallel to the Sea. Behind the cabins were crude, half-cleared fields, and behind those was the primeval forest.<\/p>\n
On August 10, 1703, several parties of Indians attacked different cabins at about the same time – a carefully planned and truly concerted raid. The result was massacre. No fewer than 40 persons were killed or carried off captive to Canada. And that was only one of numerous Indian raids in the same year between Kittery and Casco Bay.<\/p>\n
Now let us again pick up the story in Parkman’s own words: “The Kennebec was generally admitted by the French as the dividing line between their possessions and New England. Its headwaters approached those of the Chaudiere, the mouth of which is near Quebec. By ascending the Kennebec and crossing the headwaters of the Chaudiere through an intricacy of forests, hills, ponds and marshes, a small body of hardy men, unencumbered by cannon, could reach Quebec. Hence the French considered it imperative to close that route. The Norridgewock Indians at Old Point served that purpose as a sort of advance guard to the French colony on the St. Lawrence. Missionaries were stationed at Old Point to keep the Indians true to the Catholic Church and the French king. That station, so important to the French, was in charge of Father Sebastian Rasle who had come to Old Point as a Jesuit missionary, in 1694.”<\/p>\n
Parkman then explains that in the middle of the 17th century, nearly 50 years before Fr. Rasle arrived at Norridgewock, a decided change had taken place in the Jesuit missions in North America. And now again we quote Parkman. “Nothing is more admirable than the devoted apostleship of the earlier period; the Protestant Reformation in Europe had produced changes in the ancient church itself. In the presence of Protestant opposition, the Church of Rome became determined to beat back the invading heresies by the armed forces of princely and imperial allies. In New France, as Canada was then called, the civil and military forces grew stronger and the church no longer held undivided rule.<\/p>\n
“As times changed, men changed with them. By 1700 the Canadian Jesuits had become as much political as religious, but their devotion to the heads of their order in Paris was as strong as before. The Jesuit missionaries, always in contact with the civil authorities of New France, tried to make themselves useful to those authorities, and in large measure succeeded. No one else was so able to keep the tribes loyal to France.”<\/p>\n
Not only Parkman, but also most other historians agree that the binding tie that kept the Indians on the French side was religion. The Jesuits did not try to civilize the Indians in any secular sense. There was no attempt to change their dress, their mode of life, their basic customs. At all the villages where there were Jesuit priests the Indians remained savages still. The priests taught them only to repeat the catechism, which they could not understand, and practice the rites of the church. To Indian eyes the crucifix was a fetish of great power and the mass was potent medicine. In short, the Jesuits adapted the rites of the church to beliefs the Indians already held.”<\/p>\n
A party under Col. Hilton from Casco had attacked the Indian Village at Norridgewock in 1705. Parkman described the place in 1716, as it had arisen from the ashes of Hilton’s raid. “Near where the Town of Norridgewock now stands, the Kennebec curves around a tongue of meadow land. On ground a few feet above the general level, there stood in 1716 the rebuiit Indian village, faced with a nine-foot log stockade. It was a square enclosure, 160 feet on each side, with a gate on each of the four sides. From the gates ran two streets or lanes, which crossed each other in the middle of the village. There were 26 Indian huts inside the stockade. Outside it was the church, about 20 yards from the east gate.”<\/p>\n
Parkman adds the interesting point that the church had actually been built, not by the Indians under the direction of Fr. Rasle but by English workmen, sent there by the Massachusetts Governor in recompense for the destruction wrought by Hilton’s raid, and as a move to keep the Norridgewock Indians peaceful.<\/p>\n
When the next raid on Norridgewock was led by Col. Westbrook in 1722, he found this message in French tacked on the church door. Translated, the message said: “This church is ill built because the English don’t work well. It is not finished, although five or six Englishmen have wrought her for four years, and the contractor, who is a great cheat, was paid in advance to finish it.”<\/p>\n
Parkman made some amazing comments about our Kennebec Indians. “The wild Indian is as unstable as water. At the Arrowsic conference the Norridgewocks were all for peace. When they returned to Old Point, they at once began to kill cattle of the English down the river, burn their haystacks, and otherwise annoy them.”<\/p>\n
Then Parkman says the English decided that Fr. Rasle must be the source of all their trouble, but, says Parkman, “Afraid as were the Indians of another war, not even Rasle could have stirred them to violence except for indignities put upon the Indians by border ruffians, not the English settlers, but roving bands of scalp-hunters who had neither homes nor families. These ruffians were persistent sellers of rum to the Indians, despite strenuous attempts of the Boston magistrates to stop that pernicious traffic. The practice of the scoundrels was to get an Indian drunk, then rob him of his furs.”<\/p>\n
Another cause of Indian grievance was that, at the Arrowsic conference, Abraham Glint, the prominent trader at Pemaquid, had promised the Indians to set up a trading post at Norridgewock at last, then promptly forgot his promise.<\/p>\n
Parkman makes this emphatic statement: “The Norridgewock Indians were divided, not all united behind Fr. Rasle. Not only did they dread war; they had also received presents from the English in considerable amount, and often legitimate trading parties from Boston, not the roving traders, had paid the Old Point Indians more for their furs than they were offered by the French voyageurs from Canada.”<\/p>\n
Hence Fr. Rasle encountered in his village a sizable group cf pro-English Indians. That feeling was so strong that at one point they promised the Massachusetts authorities 200 beaver skins as damages for destruction caused by Indian raids.<\/p>\n
After a long description of the attack on the Old Point Village, during which Fr. Rasle\u00b7 was killed, Parkman made this comment on the Jesuit priest: “While Rasle was considered a devil by the English, in Canada he was regarded as a martyred saint. Actually he was neither, but a man with human qualities and faults – fearless, resolute, enduring; boastful, sarcastic, irritating, a vehement partisan, apt to see things not as they were but as he wanted them to be; given to inaccuracy and exaggeration; yet sincere in opinion and generous in zeal. He hated the English more than he loved the Indians. Calling himself their friend, he used the Indians as instruments of worldly policy to their danger and final ruin. He did not die because he was an apostle of the faith, but because he was an acting agent of New France.”<\/p>\n
Thus controversy about Fr. Rasle has raged two and a half centuries. Parkman’s verdict may have been too severe, but he was our most widely read 19th century historian.<\/p>\n
Year: 1975<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #1052, Broadcast on May 18, 1975<\/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":[42942,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9557"}],"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=9557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9557\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}