Illustrated history of Kennebec County, Maine; 1625-1892, Part 3

Author: Kingsbury, Henry D; Deyo, Simeon L., ed
Publication date: 1892
Publisher: New York, Blake
Number of Pages: 1790

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* Pioneers of France in the New World, by Francis Parkman, p. 292.

THE INDIANS OF THE KENNEBEC.

Biard says: " We thought we should hardly ever escape alive; in fact, in two places, some of our people cried out piteously that we were all lost; but praise to God, they cried out too soon."

Biencourt put on his military dress and visited Meteourmite, whom he found alone in his wigwam, which was surrounded by forty young braves, " each one having his shield, his bow and his arrows on the ground before him." The sachem having led the Frenchmen to visit him by promising to sell them corn, now confessed that his people did not have any to spare, but that they would barter some skins instead. Biencourt, with a mind for business, was ready to trade, and a truce for barter was agreed upon. When the time arrived, Biard says, "our ship's people, in order not to be surprised, had armed and barri- caded themselves. The savages rushed very eagerly and in a swarm into our boat, from curiosity (I think), because they did not often see such a spectacle; our people, seeing that notwithstanding their remon- strances and threats the savages did not cease entering the procession, and that there were already more than thirty upon the deck, they imagined that it was all a clever trick, and that they were intending to surprise them, and were already lying upon the ground prepared to shoot. M. Biencourt has often said that it was many times upon his lips to cry, ' Kill ! Kill !! ' Now the savages themselves, perceiving the just apprehensions which their people had given our French, took it upon themselves to retire hastily and brought order out of confusion." Father Biard says the reason why Biencourt did not order his men to shoot was because he (Father Biard) was at that hour upon the land (an island), accompanied by a boy, celebrating the holy mass; if any savage had been hurt, the priest would have been massacred. Father Biard says " this consideration was a kindness to him, and saved the whole party, for if we had begun the attack it is incredible that one could have escaped the fierce anger and furious pursuit of the savages along a river that has so many turns and wind- ings and is so often narrow and perilous." *

Father Biard appeared before the savages twice in the character of officiating priest. The rude altar improvised by him was the first one ever erected for the Catholic service on the Kennebec (or Sheep- scot, near which he seems to have been). He says he " prayed to God in their [the Indians'] presence, and showed them the images and tokens of our belief, which they kissed willingly, making the sign of the cross upon their children, whom they brought to him that he might bless them, and listening with great attention to all that he announced to them. The difficulty was that they had an entirely dif- ferent language, and it was necessary that a savage [one of the St. John captives] should act as interpreter, who, knowing very little of * Relation de la Nouvelle France, Vol. I, Chap. XVII, p. 36.

HISTORY OF KENNEBEC COUNTY.

the Christian religion, nevertheless acquitted himself with credit toward the other savages; and to see his face and hear his slow speech, he personated the Doctor [Biard] with dignity." The natives seem to have had great admiration for the Father, whose priestly at- tire and non-combative character made him conspicuous among his countrymen; speaking of one occasion, he says: " I received the larger share of the embraces; for as I was without weapons, the most distin- guished [Indians] forsaking the soldiers, seized on me with a thousand protestations of friendship; they led me into the largest of all the huts, which held at least eighty people; the seats filled, I threw my- self on my knees, and having made the sign of the cross, recited my Pater, Ave, Credo, and some prayers; then, at a pause, my hosts, as though they understood me well, applauded in their way, shouting, ' Ho, ho, ho!' I gave them some crosses and images, making them understand as much as I could." * It is not possible to identify pre- cisely the place where these interviews and proceedings occurred; it was in the vicinity of the mouth of the Sheepscot and not distant from the lower Hellgate, which the French at that time called one of the mouths of the Quinibequi (Kennebec). After sojourning about a week, Biencourt, finding out that the natives had little surplus food for themselves and none to sell, hoisted sail for Port Royal.

Two years later (1613) we see Father Biard, with Ennemond Masse and two other Jesuits, in the retinue of M. de LaSaussaye, on the island of Mount Desert, planting a mission colony by the name of St. Sauveur. The settlement was hardly established when Captain Argal, from the English colony in Virginia, sailed up to the little village and destroyed it, killing one of the missionaries and two other French- men. This was the beginning of bloodshed between the English and French on this continent. Brother Gilbert du Thet was the first Jesuit martyr. He was buried by his sorrowing black-robed brethren at the foot of the great cross that stood in the center of the ruined mission, where in the thin soil, by the surf-washed shore, his dust still reposes. Father Masse afterward labored in Canada, where he died and was buried in the mission church of Saint Michael at Sillery, in 1646. Father Biard, after many other adventures and perils, finally returned to France, where he died in 1622. He was the first to lift the cross before the aborigines of Maine.

The next well-identified visitor to the Kennebec was Captain John Smith, in 1614, eight years after his life was so gracefully saved, as he tells us, by Pocahontas. He cruised the coast for peltry, was agree- able to the Indians, and filled his ship with merchandise that brought riches in Europe. He found Nahanada (one of Weymouth's returned captives), " one of the greatest lords of the country." About this time

* Letter of Father Biard, 1611.

THE INDIANS OF THE KENNEBEC.

Samoset, afterward the benefactor of the Pilgrims, was taken from his tribe and carried to Europe. He appears to have been a Wawe- nock. The circumstances of his capture are unknown. His notable visit to the Plymouth colony was in March, 1621; two years later he seems to have been at home (as much as a wandering Indian can be) at Capemanwagan (Southport), whence Captain Christopher Leverett met him with his family; he showed his liking for Leverett by offer- ing his new-born son as a perpetual brother in mouchicke-legamatch (friendship) to the son of the Englishman. Leverett describes him as " a sagamore that hath been found very faithful to the English, and hath saved the lives of many of our nation, some from starving. others from killing."* The last glimpse we have of this ideal savage, whose character ennobles in a degree his humble and benighted race, is when he joined his fellow-sagamore Unongoit in deeding to John Brown of New Harbor (afterward of the Kennebec), a tract of land at Pemaquid, July 25, 1625. + He had been the first to welcome the Englishmen to his country, and he was the first to supplement the greeting by sharing with them his hunting grounds. The deed was acknowledged before Abraham Shurte, the worthy magistrate of Pemaquid, who fifty-one years afterward ascended the Kennebec to Teconnet (Winslow) as peacemaker to the then angry chiefs.

II. EARLY GLIMPSES OF THE ABENAKIS OR KENNEBEC TRIBE.

The English Names of the Maine Tribes .- The French Names of the same Tribes .- Origin of the Name of the Kennebec River .- The Indians' mode of Life .- Vestiges of their Villages .- Their Language and the Names derived from it .- Present Indian Names of Places on the River .- The Plymouth Trading Post at Cushnoc (Koussinok).

WHEN the aboriginal people of Maine first came into historic view, we find them grouped by the English into five tribes and occupying several principal river valleys. The Tarratines dwelt on the Penobscot; the Wawenocks from Pemaquid to Sagadahoc (Ken- nebec); the Sohokas (Sacos) from the Saco to the Piscataqua; the Androscoggins lived on the river that has taken their name; and the Canibas (Kennebecs) from Merrymeeting bay to Moosehead lake. In the beginning of Indian history a personage called the Bashaba

* Leverett's Voyage into New England. Me. Hist. Soc. Coll., Vol. II, pp. 87, 92.

+ Ancient Pemaquid, by J. Wingate Thornton. Me. Hist. Soc. Coll., Vol. V. pp. 188-193. Journal of the Pilgrims, by George B. Cheever, D.D., pp. 41-43. Bradford says Samoset " became a special instrument sent of God for their [the Pilgrims'] good beyond their expectation." See Popham Memorial, p. 297.

HISTORY OF KENNEBEC COUNTY.

presided on the Penobscot: Champlain (1605) met him there with Cabahis, a chief of less dignity; Manthoumermer ruled on the Sheepscot; Marchim on the Androscoggin, and Sasanoa on the Saga- dahoc. Champlain's guides, whom he took at the Penobscot, deserted his vessel at the St. George, " because the savages of the Quinibequy were their enemies." At Saco Champlain bartered a kidnapped Penobscot boy " for the products of the country." Three years after- ward (1608) he was founding Quebec .* The English names and grouping of the tribes differed from those of the French. The early French visitors used the name Armouchiquoys to designate the na- tives of Acadia westward of the St. Croix. They soon discarded it for the more comprehensive name of Abenaquiois (Abenakis)-meaning people of the east, easterners-which included all the natives between Nova Scotia and the Connecticut river. This great tribe was divided by the French into seven sub-tribes, three of which were in the terri- tory of Maine, namely-the Sokwakiahs or Sacos, the Pentagoets or Penobscots, and the Narhantsouaks or Norridgewocks (called also Canibas or Kennebecs). As the French influence declined in Acadia, the name Abenaquiois lost its wide application, and finally became limited to the Indians who lived on the Kennebec. It was a common French soubriquet for a century and a half before its use became familiar to the English. As gradually the tribes broke up, those sur- vivors who sought refuge on the Kennebec, and mixed with the Abenakis, came under the ancient name.

The name borne by the Kennebec river is another enduring trace of the Frenchman as well as of the Indians. Champlain was the first (1605) to receive from the Indians the word Quinibequi (or Kinibeki), which, it seems, they associated with the narrow and sinuous, though now much traveled, passage between Bath and Sheepscot bay. Then, as to-day, the water there boiled and eddied as the tides ebbed and flowed through the ledgy gates. It was a place of danger to the native navigators in their frail canoes; they had no understanding of the real causes of the manifestation; they knew nothing of natural laws, but believed all physical phenomena to be the work of genii or demons and the expression of their caprices and ever varying moods. In their mythology they peopled the water, forest and air with gross gods who ruled the world; their name for serpent or monster was Kinai-bik, an Algonquin word that has the same meaning among the kindred Chip- pewas to-day.+ Obviously as given to Champlain it referred to the mighty dragons that lay coiled in the mysterious depths about the

* Champlain's Exploration of the Coast of Maine in 1605, by Gen. J. Marshall Brown. Me. Hist. Soc. Coll., Vol. VII.

t Language of the Abanaquies, by C. E. Potter of New Hampshire. Me. Hist. Soc. Coll., Vol. IV, p. 190. H. R. Schoolcraft's American Indians, part 2, p. 465.

THE INDIANS OF THE KENNEBEC.

Hellgates; whose angry lashings or restless writhings made the waters whirl and foam in ceaseless maelstrom. The evil reputation of the locality yet survives in the word Hockomock (the Indian bad place), a name borne by a picturesque headland at the upper gate.

Champlain explored to Merrymeeting bay, where he ascertained that his Quinibequi came from the northward. Father Biard followed Champlain's chart, and in speaking of the Quinibequi, remarks that it has more than one mouth. The Indians had no geographical desig- nations, but named spots and places only; they had no name for any river as a whole, and it is a mistake to suppose that they did more in the naming of the Kennebec than to furnish from their mythological vocabulary the word which the French explorer caught from their lips and wrote upon his map." The English having named the river Sagadahoc (from Sunkerdahunk), called it by that name below Merry- meeting bay for more than a century. Above Merrymeeting Cham- plain's Quinibequi (with changes in orthography) was never dis- placed, but became permanent. After the successive wasting by the Indians of the settlements on the banks of the Sagadahoc, that vener- able name, as applied to any part of the river, faded out, and by un- conscious popular selection the one given by Champlain was restored to its place. Some writers have fancied that the river was named by Canibas, a chief, whose habitat was on Swan island, but long before that personage had entered upon his sachemship Quinibequi had been written indelibly on the French map of Acadia.

The memory of the Abenakis or Kennebec tribe of Indians will endure as long as the Kennebec shall continue to flow. We get our first glimpse of these savages in the visit of Captain Gilbert; the pic- ture is momentary and faint, yet real. Sebenoa and his warriors are dimly seen in the shadow of their native forest, among their people. Up to that moment their tribe has no history; it is not for us to know how long their ancestors had dwelt upon the river, nor to inquire whether they were of a race that was in the process of evolution from a lower state, or descending in reversion from a higher. We find them here, a little branch of the human family, in possession of the river valley. They gleaned their subsistence from forest and stream. The river was their highway and its banks their home. Their lives were spent in seeking the means of existence. They obeyed the mi- gratory impulse of the seasons like their not yet extinct contempo- raries, the moose, deer and caribou. In the winter they moved north- ward to hibernate with the game in the recesses of the upper Kenne- bec and Moosehead lake. There they kept the wolf from the door by snaring him in his lair, and chasing through the snows the flounder-

* Champlain wrote Quinibequy and Quinebeque; Lescarbot wrote Kinibeki; Jean de Laet wrote Quinibequin; on Dutch map of 1616 it is written Qui-mo- beguyn.

HISTORY OF KENNEBEC COUNTY.

ing moose and more helpless deer, and by catching through the ice of the lakes the gorgeous trout, whose descendants the sportsmen of to- day delight to capture. In the spring, when the lengthening days had melted the snow and cleared the rivers, and the nobler game that had sought the secluded valleys began to disperse to browse on the swell- ing buds and springing grasses, the Indians, too, would leave their winter haunts and migrate southward. Trimming with squaw and papooses their skin-laden canoes to even keel, they glided down the swollen river toward new supplies of food. They were accustomed in their migrations to tarry, according to mood or circumstance, for days or weeks at sundry places- at the mouths of tributary streams and at the falls where the migrating sea fishes congregated in great numbers during their passage to their native beds. These fishes- the salmon, shad and alewives-have, like the Indian, now disappeared from the river. These general migrations sometimes extended to the sea, but usually no further than Merrymeeting bay, where other tribes assembled, and all had merrymeeting.

The Indians were truly children of the wilderness; they lived close to nature; the chemistry of food and climate had brought them in complete rapport with their surroundings. The forest had assimilated them to itself; they were of its growth, like the pines and ferns. The harsh conditions of their existence sharpened their senses and intensi- fied their instincts. Their lives were of the utmost simplicity. Their weapons were stone-headed clubs and bows and arrows. Their work- ing tools were of stone, flint and bone; their clothing was the skins of beasts and plaited grasses and even boughs. As the bee makes its perfect cell at the first attempt, and the beaver is an accomplished engineer from its youth, so the Indian, without apprenticeship or master, fashioned with his flint knife and bone awl the ideal boat- the bark canoe (agwiden). It was adapted to his needs; without it he could not have lived his nomadic life-which, amid his environments, was the only mode of existence possible to him. The trackless forest on either side, like a hedge, kept him near the river's bank; he must needs roam for his food and raiment; this his canoe enabled him to do; it would glide over shallows and shoot rapids, and could be taken upon his shoulders and carried around dangerous cascades; in it he traversed lakes and rivers with ease and speed, and in it he made all of his long journeys, both of peace and war. The white man has copied its model for three centuries, but has not been able to improve it. In the winter his snow-shoes (angemak) were of an importance equal to that of the canoe in summer; they were the sole means by which the hunter conld pursue the game through the deep snows.

Their fishing and hunting encampments were the nearest approach to their villages; their dwellings, constructed of poles and bark, were only huts of shelter, and could not be called houses; they were aban-

THE INDIANS OF THE KENNEBEC.

doned when the builders removed to another spot, and soon tumbled in decay, leaving no trace save that of the fires. But the sites of many of their principal camps can be identified at the present day, both by the vestiges of their fires and the debris of their weapon and tool makers. Flint and stone chippings, with arrow-heads and other arti- cles in all stages of manufacture, are found mixed with the soil where their wigwams stood. Unlike the white man's metals, the material composing these relics defies the corroding power of time, and some of the articles are as bright and perfect as when centuries ago they left the hands of the dusky artisans. The prevailing substance is the silicious slate or hornstone of Mt. Kineo, from whose rugged cliffs it was quarried. Many spots where wigwam fires once glowed are yet marked by burned and crumbling stones and by fragments of the earthen vessels in which the feasts were cooked. These relic places abound all along the Kennebec, from Popham beach to Moosehead lake, but they are almost continuous on the alluvial banks between Augusta and Waterville, which seems to have been a favorite resort or metropolis of the tribe. The plow of civilization has been obliter- ating for five generations these vestiges of a vanished people.

We first see the Indian as the proprietor of all these lakes and rivers, and hills and meadows; his subjects were the beasts and birds and fishes; his scepter was the tomahawk, his chariot was the bark canoe; from Moosehead to the waters of the sea he exercised his sov- ereignty, and, monarch like, made progress through his forest realm, levying tribute according to his humble needs. His language had never been spelled into words and written in books; it was the artless tongue of the realm of nature. Philologists have written learnedly upon it, and exhibited specimens of it in dictionaries, but like the people who spoke it, it eludes domestication, and like them it has passed away. Many fragments, however, have been saved in the form of names attached to the rivers, lakes and mountains of our state; they were caught from the closing lips of a departing race; the nomencla- ture of the Kennebec valley is greatly enriched by them. In the ab- sence of geographical names, a river to the Indians was a series of places where food could be procured at certain moons or in a special manner; a range of mountains was divided by them into the abodes of different genii. A river was named only in places or in sections; we have seen that it fell to the white man to confer upon the Kenne- bec its name as an hydrographic unity. What our form of expression makes it convenient to call Indian names were not, in fact, originally names at all." They were laconic descriptions of the physical or

* That accomplished Abenakis scholar, Rev. C. M. O'Brien, says: "To understand Indian names it must always be borne in mind that they rarely, if ever, gave names to territories large or small, but only to spots."-Letter to Hon. James P. Baxter, quoted in Trelawney Papers, p. 225. Note (Me. Hist. Soc. Coll., 2d series, Vol. III).

HISTORY OF KENNEBEC COUNTY.

mystical characteristics of the places referred to, which the white man has softened and changed by his cultured tongue, and converted into permanent names as his reparation and memorial to the race which he has driven from the earth.

Among the earliest names derived from the Indian tongue on the Kennebec, we find Sagadahoc and Sabino; they were both associated with the mouth of the river; Sabino referred to the peninsula where the Popham colony located. Erascohegan was the present Georgetown; Arrowsic is the ancient name of the island adjoining; other familiar names in the same region are. Winnegance (Bath), Nequasset (Wool- wich) and Quabacook (Merrymeeting bay). The Indians invariably designated the mouths of rivers and tributary streams by mentioning some characteristic peculiar to cach. Thus, Nahumkeag (in Pittston) means the place where eels can be caught; Cobbosscecontee (Gardiner), sturgeon-place; Sebasticook (Winslow) is a comparatively modern Indian corruption of the French pronunciation of St. John the Bap- tist's place (or the place where an Indian lived who had been chris- tened St. John the Baptist). The original meanings of many, and in- deed of most of the Indian names, have been lost. The best students of the tongue seldom agree in their analyses and definitions, and usually confuse more than they explain. Names derived from the Indians have attached to all the considerable streams that feed the Kennebec. Beside those already mentioned there are the Worromon- togus (at Randolph); Kedumcook (Vaughan brook, Hallowell); Cushenoc (Bond brook, Augusta); Magorgoomagoosuck (Seven-mile brook, Vassal- boro); Messeclonskee (Emerson stream, Waterville); Wesserunsett (in Skowhegan); Norridgewock (Sandy river, at Old Point); Carrabassett (at North Anson). Mecseccontee applied to Farmington falls, on the Sandy river. The Kennebec, falling 1,050 feet between Moosehead and the tide at Augusta, is a remarkably swift river, full of rapids and falls, which the Indian canoeists well knew how to shoot or when to avoid. All of these places bore appropriate designations, such as Teconnet at Waterville, Skowhegan at the village of that name, and Carratunk at Solon. Above Carratunk only a few Indian names sur- vive. Moxa mountain was named for a modern Indian hunter. At Moosehead lake, where the shores are rich with relics of the Indians, Kineo is the only ancient name that remains. Ouguechonta was the name of Squaw mountain, when Montressor passed by its massive slope on his way from Quebec to Fort Halifax, about the year 1760. This dearth of Indian names in a region where once they must have been very numerous, is explained by the fact that the river was de- populated of natives and their local names on its upper waters forgot- ten, before the white men had pushed their settlements so far inland as to learn and preserve them.

THE INDIANS OF THE KENNEBEC.

The next recorded visit by white men to the Kennebec Indians after Captain Gilbert had erected a cross among them, was by Edward Winslow and a few others of the Plymouth colony, in the fall of 1625. During twenty-two years great events had taken place in New Eng- land-and among them was the landing of the Pilgrims, who, having founded a settlement, were now struggling for its continuance. At first they sought among the Indians only a market for their surplus corn in exchange for peltry, but they found the region so rich in the latter commodity that they presently applied for and obtained from their English patrons a patent or deed of about 450 square miles of territory in the center and best part of the Kennebec valley. They established (in 1628) a trading house at Cushnoc (now Augusta), and there trafficked with the natives for a period of thirty-four years. . Singularly enough during this era of intimate and friendly relation- ship with the Pilgrim fathers, when the means were excellent for pre- serving information, the Kennebec tribe is nearly destitute of any history. The names of its chiefs, the places of its villages, its rela- tions with neighboring tribes, its grand hunts and councils, and a thousand incidents illustrating the Indians' mode of life, were consid- ered too trivial for the white traders to record; perhaps as business men in the pursuit of gain, they preferred that the public should not know much about the affairs of the patent. They made no effort toward ameliorating the hard condition of their Indian wards; they gave them no teachers, either secular or religious, but looked upon them much as they did upon the other inhabitants of the wilderness. When trade ceased to be profitable they abandoned them.

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Illustrated history of Kennebec County, Maine; 1625-1892, Part 3

Author: Kingsbury, Henry D; Deyo, Simeon L., ed Publication date: 1892 Publisher: New York, Blake Number of Pages: 1790

Author: Kingsbury, Henry D; Deyo, Simeon L., ed
Publication date: 1892
Publisher: New York, Blake
Number of Pages: 1790