Illustrated history of Kennebec County, Maine; 1625-1892, Part 6

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

USA > Maine > Kennebec County > Illustrated history of Kennebec County, Maine; 1625-1892 > Part 6

Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).

THE INDIANS OF THE KENNEBEC.

on his errand, probably sailing in his own boat from Pemaquid along the coast and into the Kennebec. At Sagadahoc he took council with the committee of safety, who selected Captain Sylvanus Davis to accompany him. The two ascended the river to Teconnet (now spelled Ticonic) where they found a large number of Indians awaiting them. Five chiefs were there: Assiminasqua and Wahowa (alias Hopegood) of the Kennebecs; Madockawando and Mugg of the Penobscots, and Tarumkin of the Androscoggins; but Squando of the Sacos was ominously absent.

The commissioners were welcomed by a salute of musketry, and conducted into the great wigwam where the chiefs were seated, each attended by his people. Assiminasqua opened the proceedings, say- ing: " Brothers, keep your arms, they are a badge of honor. Be at ease. It is not our custom like the Mohawks to seize the messengers coming unto us; nay, we never do as your people once did with four- teen of our Indians, sent to treat with you; taking away their arms and setting a guard over their heads. We now must tell you, we have been in deep waters; you told us to come down and give up our arms and powder or you would kill us, so to keep peace we were forced to part with our hunting-guns, or to leave both our fort and our corn. What we did was a great loss; we feel its weight." To this Mr. Shurte replied: "Our men who have done you wrong are greatly blamed; if they could be reached by the arm of our rulers they would be punished. All the Indians know how kindly they have been treated at Pemaquid. We come now to confirm the peace, especially to treat with the Anasagunticooks [Androscoggins]. We wish to see Squando and to hear Tarumkin speak." Tarumkin responded: " I have been westward, where I found three sagamores wishing for peace; many Indians are unwilling. I love the clear streams of friendship that meet and unite. Certainly, I myself, choose the shades of peace. My heart is true, and I give you my hand in pledge of the truth." Seven Androscoggins echoed the sentiments of their chief, while Hopegood and Mugg, representing two other tribes, likewise declared for peace. But the absence of the childless chief of the Sacos was fatal; no gen- eral treaty could be made without him. The commissioners were dis- appointed and anxious, and even suspicious of the fidelity of the tribes present. The Indians had parted with their guns and knives; they were unable in their life as hunters to gain their subsistence without them; no substitute by which they could obtain food was given in recompense; they were now pinched with hunger and threat- ened with starvation; some they declared had thus died already. They now asked for their weapons that they might legitimately follow the game of the forest. The commissioners could not conceal their mis- trust that the implements might be misused. Madockawando then

HISTORY OF KENNEBEC COUNTY.

speaking abruptly, said: "Do we not meet here on equal ground? Where shall we buy powder and shot for our winter's hunting. when we have eaten up all our corn? Shall we leave Englishmen and turn to the French? or let our Indians die? We have waited long to hear you tell us, and now we want Yes, or No." The commissioners could no longer hide in diplomatic words the unhappy condition of affairs; they said: " You may have ammunition for necessary use; but you say yourselves, there are many western Indians [the Sacos] who do not choose peace. Should you let them have the powder we sell you, what do we better than cut our own throats? This is the best answer we are allowed to return you, though you wait ten years."* The chiefs would neither hear more nor talk longer; they rose abruptly and ended the parley, their flashing eyes announcing to the assembly the hopeless answer of the English. The commissioners, discomfited, withdrew to their boat and embarked for home with painful appre- hensions.

The condition of the Indians was pitiable. In their destitution and wretchedness they had vainly asked for the restoration of their hunting outfits. The alternative of starvation or war was now be- fore them. If the forests could not be made to furnish them food should not the plenty of the white man's settlements? Emissaries and refugees from Philip's shattered band-each one an incendiary, and murderer of Englishmen-were deploying eastward and mixing with the tribes. They recounted by many a lodge fire the deeds of Philip's warriors and awakened in the hearts of their excited listeners the wild thoughts of English extermination. The time had come when the Kennebecs could sit peacefully on their mats no longer. The pangs of hunger and impending famine made them desperate, and impelled them to the war path for self-preservation.

A few weeks after the parley at Teconnet some Kennebecs in alli- ance with some Androscoggins formed their first war party. On the 13th of August (1675) they went forth in cruelty against the trading fort of Richard Hammond, that stood at the head of Long Reach, just below the chops or outlet of Merrymeeting bay + (in the present town of Woolwich). Hammond had aforetime kept a temporary trading post at Teconnet; the Indians said he had made them drunk and then cheated them. They ruthlessly killed him and two of his men- Samuel Smith and John Grant-and took sixteen persons captive, among them Francis Card and his family. A brave young woman escaped from the bloody scene and fleeing in the darkness of night. across the country to Sheepscot, alarmed that settlement and saved it

* Williamson's History of Maine, Vol. I, pp. 532, 533.

+ Problem of Hammond's Fort. By Rev. H. O. Thayer, in Collections of the Maine Historical Society. Quarterly series No. 3, 1890.

THE INDIANS OF THE KENNEBEC.

from surprise. After supplying themselves with food and plunder, and burning the buildings, some of the Indians returned up river with their captives, while others in the night stole down to Clark & Lake's trading place on Arrowsic island; they adroitly entered the fort through the gate behind the sleepy sentinels as they were retir- ing from their posts at daybreak. The consternation of the inmates of the garrison, thus aroused from slumber in the early morning, was indescribable. In their helplessness they could make no resistance to the fearful onslaught; a few ran out of the fort and escaped. Thirty- five persons were either killed or captured. Among the slain was Captain Lake, a member of the committee of safety, and one of the wealthy proprietors of the establishment. Among the wounded was Captain Davis, one of the recent peace messengers to Teconnet, who barely escaped capture and death by hiding in the clefts of the rocks by the water's edge until the savages had departed. The destruction of these forts, which was only a small part of the general devastation that presently marked the entire coast from Piscataqua to Pemaquid, drove all the English settlers from the Kennebec.

Of the Indians concerned in the sacking of the Nequasset and Arrowsic forts, there is reason to believe that the Kennebecs were less fierce and brutal than their fellows; indeed, there is no evidence that the Kennebecs, like some of their allies, ever tortured a white captive. This omission of a diabolical superstitious requirement is traceable to the teaching of Father Druillettes, and the softening in- fluence of the missionaries with whom the tribe had contact by its intercourse with Quebec. Many of the unhappy captives who were led away from the ruins of Sagadahoc, never returned, and their sad fate can only be conjectured. But in June of the next year (1677) the Kennebecs sent back a company of twenty, as is shown by a letter from the chiefs "to the governor of Boston," borne by Mrs. Ham- mond, the widow of the trader. This unique document, illiterately written by some captive sitting abjectly among the chiefs who dic- tated it, is a valuable souvenir of the comparative humanity of the tribe. The chiefs say they have been careful of the prisoners; that Mrs. Hammond and the rest " will tell that we have drove away all the Androscoggin Indians from us, for they will fight and we are not willing of their company. . . We have not done as the Androscog- gin Indians who killed all their prisoners. . . We can fight as well as others, but we are willing to live peaceable; we will not fight with- out they [the settlers] fight with us first; . . We are willing to trade with you, as we have done for many years; we pray you send us such things as we name: powder, cloth, tobacco, liquor, corn, bread- and send the captives you took at Pemaquid. . . Squando is minded to cheat you, . . and make you believe that it is Kennebec men

HISTORY OF KENNEBEC COUNTY.

that have done all this spoil." The names of eleven Indians are appended: William Woum Wood, HenNwedloked, Winakeermit, Moxus, Essomonosko, Deogenes, Pebemowoveit, Tasset, John, Shyrot, Mr. Thomas .* These are some of the actors in the Sagadahoc trage- dies, who were anxious to make it appear that their tribe had not for- feited all claim to English reconciliation. As a chief had said at Teconnet, they loved " the clear streams of friendship that meet and unite;" they had tasted of war and were now anxious for peace; early in the strife they had mostly withdrawn into the distant forest, and left their allies to murder and pillage alone. They tardily and reluct- antly broke with the English, and they were the first to suggest a return to peace.

A full account of the first Indian war in Maine, covering a period of about three years, belongs to the general history of the state, and cannot here be given. It makes a dreadful chapter of surprisals, mas- sacres and conflagrations, in which nearly three hundred English people were killed or died in captivity. The region was made deso- late. The losses and sufferings of the tribes can never be told. Finally, after a mutual cessation of hostilities for a few months, the Kennebec sagamores gladly joined with those of the Androscoggin, Saco and Penobscot, in meeting English commissioners at Casco, to make a treaty of peace (April 12, 1678). All surviving captives were restored. It was a day of rejoicing. The settlements that had been destroyed soon began to revive, and returning prosperity gradually cheered again the coast of Maine. But the tribes were broken and their condition changed. The Mohawks had long been the scourge of the Kennebecs and other tribes, the English had ever refused pro- tection against them; in the late war they had been employed to kill and torture by the side of the English; they continued their warfare in vagrant bands after the treaty of peace. The crippled tribes asso- ciated these raids with English perfidy. The terror from these Mohawk parties was finally allayed by the governor of New York (Edmund Andros) forbidding his friends and allies up the Hudson from further molesting the conquered subjects of his master's eastern dukedom of Pemaquid. A second treaty was made at Portsmouth in 1685 (and signed on behalf of the Kennebecs by Hopegood), wherein for the first time the English agreed to protect the tribes of Maine so long as they were peaceable, from their Mohawk enemies. Notwith- standing all outward promises of peace, the Indians' nature, their mode of life, and the bitter memories of the past, made the treaties little else than temporary truces. The two races were mutually repellant.

*Rev. H. O. Thayer in article on Hammond's fort, quoting Mass. Archives, Vol. XXX; 241, 242.

THE INDIANS OF THE KENNEBEC.

VI .- THE SECOND AND THIRD INDIAN WARS IN MAINE.

Indian Refugees in Canada .- New Mission established for them .- Fathers Jacques and Vincent Bigot on the Kennebec and Penobscot .- Castine inspires the Tribes to avenge his Wrong .- King William's War begun .- French Intrigue with the Indians .- Father Rale sent to the Kennebec .- Bomaseen Imprisoned .- Treaties of Ryswick and Mare-point .- Third Indian War .- Parley at Casco .- Bounties for Scalps .- Arruawikwabemt Slain .- Rebekah Taylor rescued by Bomaseen .- Acadia ceded to England .- Treaties of Utrecht and Portsmouth.

IN a few years following the war, the Kennebec refugees, mixing with the Canada Indians, so overcrowded the Sillery mission, that in 1685 it was removed to the opposite side of the St. Lawrence, a few miles up the Chaudière. The new village, composed mostly of fugitives from the Kennebec, was named the Mission of St. Francis de Sales, and given to the care of two brothers and Jesuit fathers named Jacques and Vincent Bigot. The instruction given by Druil- lettes on the Kennebec a generation before had nearly if not quite faded out, and the new missionaries, like their predecessor, had to begin their labors by teaching the mere rudiments of their faith. But they found their flock of five or six hundred souls altogether attentive and docile to priestly influence; they endeavored to Christ- ianize anew the whole tribe; they visited the head-waters of the Chaudière and the Kennebec, where many Kennebecs and other Maine Indians had permanently collected for fishing and hunting, in their northward hegira from their English neighbors. The two Fathers extended at different times their wandering labors down the Kennebec to Nanrantsouak (Indian Old Point), and even as far as Pentagoet (Castine), where, under the patronage of the half Indianized French- man, Castine, Father Jacques laid the foundation of a church in 1687. The two brothers toiled among the Maine Indians for more than twenty years, principally in the villages of the refugees on the St. Lawrence .* Their visits to the Kennebec were few and comparatively brief. It appears that a chapel was built by them at Old Point; they revived the mission that had been closed for thirty years, and pre- pared the way for a permanent successor to Father Druillettes, who finally came in the remarkable person of Father Sebastian Rale.

The first war in Maine had been wholly between the natives and the English; no boundary line of Acadia was involved. The French were inactive spectators, harmlessly sympathizing, for national reasons, with the Indians. But ere a decade had passed, events were leading to a war in which all of the natives of Maine were to be the helpers of France in a national struggle. The first provocation for trouble

* Relation of Father Jacques Bigot.

HISTORY OF KENNEBEC COUNTY.

was given as usual by the English. It was the rifling by Governor Andros of the house of Baron St. Castine at Pentagoet (in the spring of 1688), under the pretext that the Penobscot was in the king's province, and that Acadia did not extend westward of the St. Croix. The haughty governor cared as little for human rights as his royal master (James II), whom he fancied he was pleasing by the outrage. The deed brought bitter retribution. Castine was a naturalized tribes- man, and a personage of unsurpassed eminence among the Penob- scots .* He easily aroused his followers to war, and in a few months he led them remorselessly against the English settlements. But Castine's personal quarrel soon became lost in the greater one between his king and William III of England. James II had been driven from his throne (1688); fleeing to France in his distress he received the aid of Louis XIV. The war that immediately opened extended to the French and English possessions in America. In Maine history it has been called King William's or the second Indian war. It was a series of dreadful massacres and reprisals-largely predatory on the part of the Indians, who marshalled by French officers, issued in bands from Canada to rob, murder or capture the English. Every settlement had to be provided with a fortress or defensible place into which the inhabitants could quickly gather. Such an one was at Pemaquid, garrisoned by Captain Weems and fifteen men; it was sur- prised and captured in August, 1689, and the place made desolate; another at Berwick was attacked on the 28th of March following, when thirty-four persons were slain and many more than that num- ber captured; another (Fort Loyal) was at Falmouth (now Portland, on the site of the Grand Trunk railroad station); the place was attacked May 26, 1690, by a force of five hundred French and Indians; after four days the inhabitants were forced to surrender only to be toma- hawked, and their mutilated bodies left unburied as prey for the wild beasts. These are only instances of the sufferings that were inflicted upon the English during a period of ten years. Warriors from all the tribes participated.

It was the policy of the French, when they saw their ancient Acadia passing into the possession of the English, to seek to draw into Canada through the missionaries the discontented natives of Maine. The Kennebecs had been attracted to St. Francis de Sales. The Sacos emigrated nearly en masse within one or two years after Philip's war, and assembled in Canada near the mouth of the St. Francis river, down which from their deserted Saco they had reached the St. Law- rence. They were soon gathered into the parish of St. Francis. Their warriors, like those of the Kennebecs in the Chaudière village, were utilized by the French to fight both the troublesome Iroquiois and the

* History of Acadia, by James Hannay, pp. 215-216.

THE INDIANS OF THE KENNEBEC.

hated English. It was for this purpose rather than from a sentiment of philanthropy, that French statesmen and Canadian governors had sought through the machinery of the church to manipulate the tribes of Maine. But many families still clung to the Androscoggin and Kennebec. With the design of collecting these fragments and mak- ing them useful against the English, the Canadian rulers had encour- aged the sending of the Fathers Bigot to the Kennebec to reconnoiter for a new mission.

Thus it was amid the throes of war and for reasons more political than religious, that Father Rale was sent to the Kennebec to re- occupy the old mission-field of Druillettes. He came in 1693, by the well traveled route that had been followed by his predecessor in 1646; he lingered on the way among the wigwams at Lake Megantic (from Namesokantik-place where there are many fishes), and the neighboring waters; in 1695 we find him at Nanrantsouak, which he chose for the center of his field of labors. Already schooled in the arts of savage living, he here drew by the persuasives of a trained and cultured enthusiast, the remaining families of the shattered tribes west of the Penobscot. The history of his mission is the remaining history of the Indians on the Kennebec-who from the location of the village which he founded, thenceforward bore the Anglicised name of Norridgewocks. The Kennebec was again a Canadian parish, and a semi-military outpost of New France. Of the three or four Indian routes of travel between the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic coast, none was more direct or easy than the one up the Chaudière and down the Kennebec; the portage between the waters of the two rivers was sometimes made from an upper tributary of the Chaudière to one of the Penobscot and from thence to Moosehead lake, but usually from Lake Megantic to the nearest stream that runs into Dead river. It was by this thoroughfare that the little Catholic village of Nanrant- souak maintained its communication with the diocese of Quebec. In war it was often the route of the French captains with their trains of scarcely more savage and cruel allies. Nanrantsouak was a village site of great excellence; the circling river, foam-laden from the wild falls above, almost surrounds it; it is in the midst of hundreds of acres of mellow land suitable for corn raising; it was secluded from the English, while the Sandy river made it accessible from the Andros- coggin.

The tribal distinctions of the natives of Maine began to dis- appear during the common cause against the English; soon after the coming of Father Rale the shreds of the tribes that had lingered on the Saco and Androscoggin, united with the Kennebecs as the Wawenocs had done before. The Penobscots, under the lead of the elder and younger Castine, maintained themselves as a tribe and so

HISTORY OF KENNEBEC COUNTY.

remain to this day. We do not know the nature or extent of Father Rale's influence over his people in reference to the war in which he found them involved. If he exerted any'it may have been in the direction of peace; for on the 11th of August, 1693 (the year of his earliest intercourse with the Abenakis), thirteen sagamores appeared at Pemaquid and offered the submission of their tribes to the English government; among them were Wassabomet, Ketteramogis, Wenob- son. and Bomaseen from the Kennebec. The resident Indians were ready for peace, but the French, on whom the war pressed less sorely, were not; they ignored the treaty which their allies had made; and as a part of their endeavor to repossess themselves of Acadia, which had been taken from them by Governor Phipps in 1690, they sent a party against the New England settlements in 1694; as Cotton Mather says: " What was talked at Quebec in the month of May, must be done at Oyster river [in New Hampshire] in the month of July." Several dreadful massacres were committed, and all the settlements were again filled with horror and fear.

That Bomaseen, the Kennebec chief, was an accomplice in those deeds was never known; but the public exasperation was so great, and the possibility of other butcheries so imminent, that the authorities felt justified in seizing and imprisoning every prominent or doubtful Indian it could lay hands upon. Bomaseen was seized November 19, 1694, at Pemaquid garrison, whither he had gone with a flag of truce in apparent confidence that his professions of regret at the recent tragedies would relieve both himself and tribe from blame. He pro- tested his innocence, and showed that he felt his arrest to be an act of perfidy. Cotton Mather says, " he discovered a more than ordi- nary disturbance of mind; his passions foamed and boiled like the very waters of the fall of Niagara." The sagamore was immediately transported to Boston and there put in prison. The injustice of his treatment-hardly ever questioned by dispassionate Englishmen- turned his followers back to their French alliance and to a renewal of the war from which the treaty at Pemaquid a year before had freed them. The Norridgewock warriors returned to the war path, and two years later (1696) helped the French to overawe and capture even the proud Fort William Henry of Pemaquid, whose walls had been the prison of Bomaseen. The French participation in the war closed with the treaty of Ryswick in 1697, but the Indians, cherishing new as well as old resentments, remained in hostility two years longer. The last to desist from their attacks and acquiesce in a treaty with the English, were the Kennebecs, whose kidnapped sagamore was fretting behind prison bars in Boston. But finally, on the 7th of January, 1799, at Mare point (in Brunswick) Moxus and his lieuten- ants of the Kennebec, united with the sachems of the other tribes in

THE INDIANS OF THE KENNEBEC.

humble submission to King William III. Bomaseen was then and there restored to his people, and the latter returned as many of their English captives as were able to make the terrible journey in the cold and snow of winter from Nanrantsouak to Casco bay. Little had been accomplished between France and England, for Acadia reverted by treaty to the former, while the Indians were left in reduced num- bers and more forlorn and miserable than before.

The treaty of Mare point was a truce, that lasted only until another war broke out between England and France. So subtle were the re- lations of France with its allies in the new world that a royal wish expressed in the Tuilleries could reach the low-browed savages at their camp fires, and excite them into the frenzy of the war dance. The exiled James II died September 16, 1701, leaving a son-nicknamed the Pretender-to be placed by the power of France if possible on the throne. William III died March 8. 1702; Anne, the Protestant daugh- ter of James, was given the English crown; she immediately declared war against France, and asserted sovereignty over Acadia to the St. Croix. The inevitable result of another war in America followed. The Indians on the Kennebec were again the supple instruments of France. Father Rale had lived in companionship with them for ten years-ministering to their ailments of sickness and wounds, attach- ing them to his person and faith, and trying ever to better their earthly condition and save their souls. His influence over them was great; he followed and yet he led them-sometimes yielding to their inconstant humors, yet always holding them loyal to France and con- formable to the wishes of the Canadian governors.

The warlike premonitions that followed the crowning of Queen Anne, led the governor (Joseph Dudley) of Massachusetts to solicit a personal conference with the Maine tribes, to renew the last treaty (of Mare point). The Indians responded with alacrity, and assembled in large numbers at Casco (now Portland), June 20, 1703, to meet the governor and his suite. It was agreed with great ceremony that peace should continue (in the language of Bomaseen) " so long as the sun and moon shall endure." Moxus and a new chief named Captain Sam, with Bomaseen, were of the delegation from Nanrantsouak. Father Rale was present, but stayed in the background until his identity was accidentally discovered by the governor, who then showed signs of annoyance that the Indians should have in their interest a diplomat as watchful and suspicious as himself. But the treaty, though it was celebrated with more pomp than any similar one ever made in Maine, could not long be kept. The pressure of French poli- tics was too strong for the morally weak Indian to resist. In less than two months after the treaty was made, the dogs of war were let loose from Canada, and stealing through Maine with increasing numbers,

Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.

Illustrated history of Kennebec County, Maine; 1625-1892, Part 6

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