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Gc 974.402 L95cow 1786350
M. L.
REYNOLES HISTORICAL GENEALOGY COLLECTION
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01094 5886
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MEMORIES
OF THE
INDIANS AND PIONEERS
OF THE
REGION OF LOWELL.
1 BY CHARLES COWLEY.
Let not ambition mock their useful toil, ' Their homely joys and destiny obscure, Nor grandeur hear, with a disdainful smile, The short and simple annals of the poor. -Gray's Elegy.
LOWELL: STONE & HUSE, BOOK PRINTERS, 21 CENTRAL STREET. 1862.
HALOMIM
1786350
F 84445 .203
Cowley, Charles, 1832-1908.
Memories of the Indians and pioneers of the region of Lowell (Mass.] By Charles Cowley ... Lowell, Stone & Huse, printers, 1862.
24 p. 24cm.
"The substance of an address delivered ... before different local societies in Lowell." .
CHELE CARD
1. Pennacook Indians. 2. Lowell, Mass .- HIst.
-35450 Library of Congress E02.P4CB
- Copy 2.
F74.LOCS2 ma32b11
TA88320
THE following pages contain the substance of an address delivered several times by Mr. Cowley, before different local societies in Lowell, and now published in compliance with the request of those who heard it, and in the belief that the history of the Indians and l'ioneers of Lowell can never be barren of interest to those who tread the dust in which " The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep."
INDIAN AND PIONEER MEMORIES.
WHEN the Merrimack River was dis- their season by canoe-loads. Next to the covered by the Sieur de Champlain,* in Falls of Amoskeag, the Falls of Pawtucket the year 1605, the spot where Lowell now were the most noted for fishing facilities on stands, was a principal rendezvous of the the Merrimack River. The centrality and Pawtucket or Pennacook Indians. This accessibility of its geographical position tribe, or confederation of tribes, was among also added much to the importance of the the foremost in New England, and num- place. The upper Merrimack and the bered several thousand souls. The terri- Musketaquid or Concord, communicated tory of this confederacy stretched almost with a vast region of the interior; while from the Penobscot to the Connecticut, em- the lower Merrimack afforded a safe and bracing the whole of New Hampshire, a convenient channel to the seaboard. Here, part of Massachusetts, and a part of Maine. then, were Indian councils held ; here were The tribes, or sub-tribes, composing this the wise wont to counsel, and the eloquent confederacy, lived, when at home, in sepa- to persuade; and such decorum was ob. rate villages, under their several local served by these braves and sages as would chiefs. Every good fishing-ground was the do honor to the British or the American site of one of these villages, the population Senate. " Here was the war-whoop sound- of which ranged from fifty to three hun- ed, and the death-song sung ; and when dred souls. This place, however, attracted the tiger strife was over, here curled the a more numerous population. It was no smoke of peace."
unusual spectacle to see thousands of the
It would be foreign to my purpose to dusky sons and daughters of the forest en- consider whether the Pawtuckets. and camped here in the season of spring, catch- their cognate tribes descended from the ing, with rude stratagem, their winter's Scandinavians, the Egyptians, the Phoni- store of fish. Aside from this periodical cians, the Hindoos, the Seythians, the confluence of Indians, this region contained Chinese, the Japanese, the Islanders of the two or more villages of more permanent Pacific, the tribes dispersed after the inhabitants-one at Pawtucket Falls, and building of Babel, or the ten lost tribes of another at Massick or Wamesit Falls.
LOWELL IN INDIAN TIMES.
This territory, indeed, offered as many attractions to the lords of the forest as Lowell now presents to the lords of the loom. Its alluvial soil possessed sufficient fertility to yield excellent crops of Indian corn. The hunting-grounds round about it abounded with game. The rivers swarmed with many varieties of fish. Sturgeon, salmon, shad and alewives were caught in
Israel. It would be equally foreign to my purpose to trace the relationship between the Indians of the Merrimack Valley and the builders of the mounds of the West. the architects of the temples of Mexico, the carvers of the hieroglyphs of Peru, and the founders of the buried cities of Yuca- tan. Nor would it accord with my present plan to describe their wigwams, their canoes, their utensils of wood, bark, stone and clay ; their curious implements, carved out of turtle-shells, clam-shells and bones ; their primitive modes of cooking, hunting, fowling, fishing and farming ; their be Its of
+ Les Voyages du Sieur de Champlain en la Nou- velle France Occidentale, edition of 1632, p. 80.
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wampum-money ; their gewgaw-ornaments, marry till they had attained adult years. ingeniously formed from the bones and The men employed themselves in fighting, shells of fishes, the claws and horns of hunting, fowling and fishing. The women beasts, and the feathers of birds. But a performed all menial services, which were few words upon their social usages, their deemed dishonorable by the men. Even government, their polygamy and their polytheism, will not be out of place.
when they travelled, the men went empty- handed, while the women toiled along
Though destitute of many of those noble with bundles of baggage and basketsfull relationships which soften the heart and of babies at their backs. Yet all agree sweeten the intercourse of life, the Indians that these Indian women were affectionate held all the social and private virtues in wives and most devoted mothers.
equal esteem with us .. Their hospitality
Polytheists in religion, they paid their was unbounded. It was the custom of the devotions to the sun, the moon, Arcturus, Indians in the interior to visit their sea- Orion, Sirius, the Pleiades, and those far- board allies every summer ; and on these off stars that seemed to weep in pity over occasions, as Hubbard relates, " they used the lowly lot of the red man. Intimations like good fellows to make all common ;" of one Infinite Power they also had, in the the hospitalities thus received being duly holy scriptures of Nature-in the constant reciprocated on other occasions when the march of the seasons-in the tender forth- seaboard Indians visited their interior puttings of spring-in the ripening heats friends. Firm alike in their attachments of summer-in the falling leaves of autumn and resentments, they never forgot a friend and never forgave & foe ; yet Gookin com- -- in the thunder, the artillery of heaven, that boomed over the lonely waste-in plains, that, like the Cretians of Scripture, the lightning, God's pyrotechnics, whose they were incorrigible liars. They were flashes changed night to day-in the wild, fond of gambling, and sometimes hazarded requiem wail of wintry winds like spirit and lost all that they had. They were voices whispering in the tree-tops their also fond of violent dancing and boister- weird and pensive melody-in the deep ous revels, which were sometimes pro- moaning of the river's waves rolling down- tracted for a week at a time.
ward toward the melancholy main. Some Their government was a despotism : but in its administration it was popular and paternal; for as the old despotism of France was "tempered by epigrams," dim conception they also formed, of a ma- terialistic Paradise, like the Paradise fore- shadowed in the Koran. The location of this Indian Heaven was in the far South- and that of Russia by assassination, so west. They had a general belief in the was this Indian despotism mitigated and immortality of the soul, and in the resur- mellowed by the recognition of the right rection. not of mankind only, but of all in every citizen to expatriate himself at animated nature. With the bodies of their his pleasure. But rarely indeed did an dead they buried bows, arrows, war-clubs, Indian desert his natal tribe. To their tomabawks, scalping-knives, spears, and other weapons and implements, of supposed utility in the world to come. honor be it recorded, that in countless instances, in the most desperate emergen- cies, these Indian braves proved as con-
From the number of human bones ex- etont to their chief as the Old Guard of humed within the last twenty years in Napoleon, the Continentals of Washington, the territory embraced within the Lowell the honsides of Cromwell, or the Tenth Legion of Cæsar.
Cemetery, it is evident that that spot was a favorite burial-place of the Indians long
Like other tribes, the Pawtuckets were before the waters of the Merrimack had addicted to polygamy; and their matri- murmured in the white man's ear. In morial connections were dissoluble at the 1858, when the bill which once overlooked option of either party ; but none could the Concord was pared down, a large hu-
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man skeleton was found, which was sup- Smith's visit, a regular traffic was opened posed to be that of an Indian chief, being carefully embedded in a substance resemb- ling charcoal. It was apparently buried
The Pawtuckets had no priest-hood ; but every village had its powwow. These the visionary's dream. Occasional visits powwows answered to the description were received from these fishermen by the which the author of the Anatomy of Melan- natives along the shore.
choly gives of Pythagoras, being " part PESTILENCE AND WAR. philosopher, part magician, and part About the year 1614, the Pawtuckets witch." They exerted an almost para- became embroiled in a most sanguinary mount influence in their tribe, as men of war with a tribe in Maine, called the intellect always do ; and frequently attain- Tarrantines. This war raged with great ed the rank of chiefs. They are believed to fury during three years, and greatly re- have possessed some secrets of the healing duced the numbers of all the belligerent art, of which the sons of Exculapius must tribes. The process of depopulation was still confess their ignorance; and it is cer- vastly accelerated by an epidemic disease, tain they used with great efficacy, many which followed close on the heels of the plants, roots and barks which to the phar- war, and continued its ravages for two macopia of medical science are still un- years. What this pestilence was it is im- known. They were also familiar with the possible to determine and fanciful to con- modern doctrine of the Water Cure .*
Such were the people who inhabited this regim when the De Monts, the Cham- plains, the Cabots, the Gosnolds, and other leaders in American discovery, first landed on these shores. The first Englishman to whom the existence of the Merrimack be- came known, was Captain John Smith, whose exploits in both hemispheres have made his name famous wherever the English language is spoken ; who, in 1614, in an open boat, explored and manped the whole coast of New England, from the Penobscot to Cape Cod, and learned of the existence of the Merrimack from the In- dians.t Within a few years after Captain
jecture. Some writers call it small pox ; Dr. Noah Webster asserts it to be the common American plague or yellow fever, while the Puritans deemed it the agent of Providence to prepare the way for the chosen people. There remain some records of this plague, which tell us that the vic- tims " died in heaps," and that "the living were in no wise able to bury the dead." The appearance of the great comet of 1618, by arousing the superstition of the victims, added greatly to the terrors of the plague. Thousands of corpses were left to putrify in the wigwams ; hundreds, without burial or shelter, were devoured as carrion by beasts and birds of prey ; and their bones were bleached in the wind and sun. But beyond this the old chroni- eles are silent. The plague which deso- lated Athens has been vividly delineated by the masterly pen of Thucidides ; that of Florence, by Boccacio; that of London, by the incomparable author of R. binson Crusoe. But imagination only can des- cribe how this Indian pestilence came ; how it spread like fire on a prairie from
" For the general history, condition, moners and cust ms of the Indians, consult schonicrait's Algic Researches ; Hubbard's, and Pabrey's, History of New england: Hotchinson's, and Barry's, of Mes-a- chusetts; Belkuapi's. of New Hampshire; Drake's Book of the indians; Wool's New England's Prospect Part 2, chapters 1-20; Morton's New English Ca- man, Book I, chapters 1-20; Gookin, in I Massachu- F. tts Historie di Collections, pp. 1+1-226 ; Roger Wil- Jimne. in S Mass. Hist. Coll., pp. 203-23>; Potter's Httatory of Manchester, N. H .. chap. 4; Y ung's Comonebs of Plymouth and Massachusetts bay ; Forer's Historic Tracts, etc.
t Seo Smith's Generall Historie, vol. ii, p. 184.
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with the Indians; blankets, hatchets, ket- tles and trinkets being bartered for fish, fowls, berries, baskets, poultry and furs. in a sitting posture, facing the rising sun. Thousands of English, French, Spanish, The skull bore indications of fracture with & tomahawk. Near it was found the skele- ton of a woman, perhaps the chief's squaw.
Flemish and Portuguese fishermen cruised annually on the banks of Newfoundland and on the fishing-grounds of Cape Cod, while as yet no settlement existed, save in
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wigwam to wigwam, and from village to in summer and into fire in winter ; that he village, until nineteen-twentieths of all could clothe the dried leaves of autumn the Indians between the Penobscot and with the tints of spring, and bring dead Narragansett Bay had succumbed to its serpents to life ; that he could metamor- mysterious power ; how the babe of a day phose himself into a shining flame, and and the patriarch of a century fell together career through space like a Connecticut beneath its stroke ; witch on a broomstick ; and perform many other impossible feats.
" How wolves came with fierce gallop, And crows on eager wings, To tear the flesh of captains, And pluck the eyes of kings."*
It is remarkable that Richard Vines and other Europeans, whom Sir Fernando Gorges had left to settle on the adjacent coast, who lodged in wigwams with the Indians during the whole period of this plague, did not experience " so much as a headache" all the time. When the pio- neers of civilization penetrated the country in after years, they found skeletons of the victims by hundreds. Thomas Morton says, the country seemed to him " a new- found Golgotha."i
The first Merrimack River Indian, of whom history has preserved any account, was a chief, famous in his day, who bore the name of Passaconaway, or Papassacon- away, which means "the child of the bear." He was regarded by all who knew him as a man of decided capacity, and had the sagacity to perceive that to contend with the English would be suicide. Hle first became famous among his tribe as a powwow; in other words, he was a prestidigitateur, conjurer and magician, " parson, fiddler and physician." If the reports which William Wood received from the Indians can be relied on, Passa- conaway's feats of prestidigitation surpass- ed even those of our celebrated contempo- rary, Monsieur Hermann. It is said he could make the rocks move and the trees dance ; that he could turn water into ice -
At what time Passaconaway became the chief of the Pawtucket confederacy, we are not informed ; but he probably attained that dignity before or soon after the land- ing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth ; for in 1623, Captain Christopher Leavitt visited the neighboring coast, and saw a chief whom he calls Conway, who was probably none other than Passaconaway. Within a few years after Captain Leavitt's visit, we find numerous references to this chief in Morton, Wood, Dudley, and other writers of the early colonial age.
On the seventeenth of May, 1629, Pas- saconaway conveyed to John Wheelwright all the land lying between the Piscataqua and the Merrimack, by a deed which is still preserved in the office of the Secre- tary of State. The deed bears, beside the mark of Passaconaway, the marks of several local chiefs, who acknowledged allegiance to him ; and among these was Runnawit, who, as is supposed, was at that time the . local chief of what is now Lowell. Passaconaway had other places of rendezvous besides Pawtucket : one at Amoskeag Falls, now Manchester ; aboth- er at Pennacock Island, now Sewall's Is- land, in Concord ; and still others on dif- ferent islands in the Merrimack River.
A good understanding seems to have ex- isted between Passaconaway and the white settlers from the first. In 1632, two years after the settlement of the Colony of Mas- sachusetts Bay, this chief captured and delivered to Governor Winthrop for pun- ishment, an Indian who had killed an Eng- lish trader. Ten years after this, in bep- tember, 1642, the colonial authorities, alarmed by the report of an Indian con- spiracy in Connecticut, for the massacre of the white settlers, sent forty armed men
Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome.
t For further information touching this pestilence, ror ault Dermer, Morton, Higginson, Johnson, Goo- Mir., Increase Mather, and Hutchinson, quoted in i ung's Chronicles of Plymouth, pp. 183-185 ; and " Noah Webster's History of Epidemic and Pesti- Dal Diseases, vol 2
This plague bore a striking resemblance to that klich, in the . eventh century, depopulated Britain a. Ireland .- Lingard's history of England. vol. 1. 1 101.
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to disarm Passaconaway and his tribe .- to be gouerned aud protected by them, accord- They failed to find . Passaconaway ; but ing to their Just Lawes and orders so farre as we shall be made capable of understanding them. And we doe promise for orselues & all or subiects & all or posteritie to be true & faith- full to the said Gourmt & ayding to the main- tenance thereof to or best abilitie, And from tyme to tyme to giue speedy notice of any con- spiracie attempt or evill intention of any wch. we shall know or heare of against the same & we doe pmise to be willing from tyme to tyme to be instructed in the knowledge & worship of God. In witnes whereof wee haue heerevnto put or hands the day & yeare aboue written .* found and arrested his son Wannalancet, together with his squaw and child. Wan- nalancet contrived to escape ; but his squaw and child were hurried off to Bos- ton as prisoners. An outrage like this could not fail to arouse the resentment of any man of spirit ; but such was the mod- eration of Passaconaway, he accepted an apology for these proceedings, which the colonial authorities declared were unau- thorized; and soon afterward, when the prisoners had been returned to him, he sent his son and delivered up all his guns to the colonial governor.
In the first years of the history of the colonies, the Indians were treated, in some measure, as independent nations ; but in 1644, the settlers proceeded by diplomacy to reduce the various chiefs to the rank of petty local magistrates under colonial authority. The year before this project was attempted, the Colony was divided in- to counties. At that time, namely, in 1643, Middlesex County contained eight towns, viz : - Charlestown, Cambridge, Watertown, Sudbury, Concord, Woburn, Medford and Reading. Among the first that submitted to this arrangement was the chief of the Pawtuckets. The instru- ment of submission bearing Passacona- way's mark, and also the mark of his son, Nahnanacommock, the local chief of the Wauchusetts, is still preserved among the archives in the office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, though two centuries have rolled by since all who assisted at its execution passed to the Silent Land. As this is the oldest document in existence relating to the region of Lowell, it is proper to introduce it here, in full.
INDIAN TREATY.
At a generall Court held at Boston the 12 day of the ffourth moneth [June] 1644. Papassaconaway, Nahnancommock, did vol- untarilie cubmitt themselves to ns. as appear- eth by their Couchant subscribed by their owne hands heere following & other articles to wch they consented. We haue & doe by theise prsents voluntarily & wthout any constraint or psusaion, but of or owne free motion put or- selues, or subiects Lands & estates vnder thie Gouermt and Jurisdiction of the Massachusetts
On the part of the Indians every stipu- lation in this instrument was faithfully kept and performed. Would that the same praise could be awarded to the whites. History must weep to zelate that, within twenty years from the day of this treaty of submission, Passaconaway was reduced to the condition of a pauper, a stranger in the land of his fathers, dependent for his subsistence on the cold charity of those who had dispossessed him of his native soil.
Before the close of the year 1644, a number of other chiefs submitted to the colonial jurisdiction, and consented to re- ceive missionaries among them to teach their children. On the thirteenth of No- vember of that year, an order was passed by the General Court, instructing the County Courts to provide " that the Indians residing in the several shires should be civilized and instructed in the knowledge and worship of God." Though this first step toward the Christianization of the Indians was not taken until a quarter of a century after the landing at Plymouth, the object aimed at had been kept more or less steadily in view from the first. As early as 1625, we find the Rev. William Morrell re- returning to England and invoking the King, and all the " Holy Aarons" of the British hierarchy, to engage in the propa- gation of Christianity among the red men. But the missionary operations of the settlers were necessarily postponed until they had felled the forests, broke up the fallow ground, built houses and barns, enclosed corn-fields, fortified themselves against famine, established churches and schools,
"Sco Massachusetts Archives, vol. 30, pago 3; Win- throp's Journal, (Savages' Edition,) vol. 2, pp. 166 214.
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instituted a government of laws, informed in full in works to which access is easy, it themselves respecting the country, and pro- is unnecessary to relate them here .* The vided for their own safety and subsistence. pages which record the labors of this great To do all this in a quarter of a century Apostle of the Indians, are, indeed, the was doing well. And before this had been brightest pages in our colonial history. In done, came the Antinomian controversy of its ordinary features, the Puritanism of Anne Hutchinson, and the Pequot War, that day was sour, austere, uncouth, rugged which occasioned a further adjournment and grim; but the softening radiance of of missionary enterprise.
Various preliminary notes were sounded on the Gospel trumpet, but nothing of moment was accomplished till 1646, when the General Court passed an order request- ing the elders of the several churches to consider what. should be done for the dif- fusion of Christianity among the Indians. This order met with a prompt response. Eliot, Cotton, Thatcher, and the two May- hews, girded themselves to the work with that apostolic heroism and that holy ardor which have made their names blessed only with Eliot that we are concerned .*
JOIIN ELIOT.
John Eliot-whom Edward Everett so justly eulogises as one of the noblest spirits that he could make himself tolerably well that have walked the earth since the days understood without the aid of an inter- preter. Not satisfied with what he was accomplishing among the Indians whom he gathered at Nonantum, he soon extended of the Apostle Paul-was born in Essex- shire, England, in 1604. He was educated ut Cambridge, and was for some time usher to Hooker, the author of the celebrated his ministrations to other places more re- work on Ecclesiastical Polity, at his gram- mote until the whole colony from Cape mar-school near Chelmsford -- the town Cod to the Connecticut had been conse- from which our neighboring town of crated by his labors of love-his zeal being Chelmsford took its name. In 1613, be continually quickened by his belief that he came to Massachusetts, and settled at West saw, in the dusky faces that shone under Roxbury, where he became pastor of the his preaching, the descendants of the ten lost tribes of ancient Israel.
Fame church of which he had been pastor in England. Notwithstanding his accumu- On the twenty-sixth of May, 1647, the Inted labors as an author and a missionary, General Court established monthly courts Le retained his pastoral charge at West in those villages which were visited by El- H. xbury until his death, which occurred iot or the other Indian missionaries ; and on the twentieth of May, 1690.
the chiefs were constituted judges, for the nal ; their powers being substantially the same as those of justices of the peace .- An Indian constabulary was also establishı-
The events of Eliot's life being narrated trial of petty causes, both civil and crimi-
& For an account of the efforts for the conversion of " In bans, between 1647 and 1675, consult the tracts 21 Moss. Hirt. Collections; Gookin, in 1 Mass.
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