Illustrated history of Kennebec County, Maine; 1625-1892, Part 8

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

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The settling of the Pejepscot lands was fatally checked by these Indian forays. The Scotch-Irish immigrants, brought by hundreds in the ships of Robert Temple, and located on the shores of Merrymeet- ing bay, took flight to New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, and save

THE INDIANS OF THE KENNEBEC.

the forts at Richmond and Brunswick, the region was again a soli- tude. Father Rale was conceived by the English to be the powerful genius whose malign influence had brought all the disaster and ruin. The government finally announced a special reward of two hundred pounds ($1,000) for his body dead or alive. Permission had been given by the legislature for such an expenditure of money two years before. The act was in harmony with the stern policy shown in extravagant rewards for Indian scalps. With the allurements before them of money and glory, 120 men, led by Captain Harmon, undertook the enterprise of removing Father Rale in the winter of 1723. The party started from Fort George (Brunswick) for Nanrantsouak, on the 6th of February, equipped with arms, rations and snow-shoes-taking as a measure of secrecy the unfrequented route via the Androscoggin and Sandy rivers. After accomplishing about half of the journey, the party was stopped by a thaw that softened the snow and flushed the rivers, and made further advance impossible. The expedition was a complete failure. The following summer the authorities invited a delegation of Mohawks to Boston, and tempted them with bribes ($500 a scalp) to fall upon the Indians of Maine, and hunt them down as in former times; but now the Iroquiois were at peace with their old ene- mies and concluded as a tribe not to take up the white man's quarrel, but allowed their young men to sell their services if they so wished. Only a few entered into public service. Two were assigned to Fort Richmond, and soon after arriving there were sent by Captain Heath on a scout with three soldiers under an ensign named Colby. The party had gone less than a league, when the Mohawks said they smelt fire, and refused to expose themselves further unless reinforced; a messenger was hastily sent back to the fort, who returned with thir- teen men; the whole party presently meeting thirty Indians killed two and drove the others to their canoes in so much haste that they left their packs; Colby was slain and two of his men wounded. * This skirmish must have occurred in the vicinity of the place that is now South Gardiner. The two Mohawks were by their first experience sickened of war, and returned ingloriously to Boston.

The government, worried by the distresses of the people, used every expedient to annihilate the stealthy and capricious enemy. A month's seige of Fort St. George (on St. George's river), begun Decem- ber 5, 1723, provoked the authorities to make another attempt to take Father Rale. Accordingly a special party was equipped to march to Nanrantsouak; it was led by Captain Moulton, in mid-winter, on snow- shoes, up the Kennebec. On reaching the village the soldiers found the huts empty and the snow untracked. The missionary, aware that a price had been offered from the public treasury for his head, had

* Williamson's History of Maine, Vol. II, p. 123.

HISTORY OF KENNEBEC COUNTY.

gone with his people for the winter to a safer place. His hut was again ransacked for trophies, which consisted of a few books and papers and another letter from the Canadian governor, exhorting him " to push on the Indians with all zeal against the English." No in- jury was done to the chapel or dwellings, in the hope that the for- bearance might be imitated by the owners when making similar in- cursions.

VIII. FOURTH INDIAN WAR IN MAINE (CONCLUDED).

Indian Assassinations .- Massacre on the St. George .- Fourth Expedition to Nanrantsouak .- Bomaseen and Family surprised .- Daughter and Father killed .- The Indian Village surprised .- Massacre of the Inhabitants .- Father Rale killed at the Mission-cross .- His Burial .- Monument over his Grave .- Dispersion of his Flock to Canada .- Treaty of Falmouth .- Father DeSirenne at Nanrantsouak .- The French Monarch's Gift .- Final Extinguishment of the Mission.

IN the spring of 1724 the Indians resumed their warfare with increased virulence. On the 17th of April they shot William Mitchell at Scarboro', and led his two boys captives to Nanrantsouak; John Felt, William Wormwell and Ebenezer Lewis were killed while at work in a saw mill on the Kennebec. On the 24th of April Captain Josiah Winslow and seventeen men fell into an Indian ambush on St. George river, a few miles below their fort, and all except four were killed. Captain Winslow's death was lamented throughout New Eng- land. He was a great-grandson of Edward Winslow, who came in the Mayflower, and the great-grandnephew of John Winslow, whom the patient reader of these pages has seen as the friend of Father Druillettes at the Cushnoc trading house; his distinguished lineage, character and acquirements gave great prominence to the tragedy in which he bravely perished. This massacre was the burning memory that nerved the hearts and steeled the sensibilities of men for the aveng- ing blow that was soon to follow, and which the savages themselves could not have given with less mercy.

Three expeditions had been sent forth expressly to capture or slay Father Rale. The errand was still unperformed; it had always been attempted in the winter, when the snow might show the tracks of lurking enemies, and the leafless forest could less securely hide the dreaded ambuscade. It was determined to make a fourth attempt in the summer time, and brave all increased perils. Thirty persons had been killed or captured in Maine since early spring; the exigency was great and popular vengeance could be appeased only by the blood of Father Rale. Captain Moulton, who had once been to Nanrantsouak and knew its topography, was selected to go again; his associate was

THE INDIANS OF THE KENNEBEC.

Captain Harmon, whom we saw one night at Somerset point, and later on a futile march up the Androscoggin; there were two other captains -Bourne and Beane-and a total force of 208 men. Two or three decorated Mohawks were welcomed by the company with their free- lances. Appropriately enough, Fort Richmond, in whose erection Father Rale had presaged the doom of his flock, was the rendezvous of the companies on their way to the fated village. The troops em- barked at the fort landing in seventeen whaleboats, on the 19th of August, and pulled lustily for Teconnet, 36 miles, where they arrived the next day; there the boats were tethered and forty men detailed to guard them and the surplus stores.

On the 21st, the main force in light marching order, struck into the forest by the Indian trail for Nanrantsouak, twenty miles distant. Before night the advance surprised a solitary family of three persons, living in fancied security near the site of the present village of South Norridgewock. There was a crash of musketry in the thicket and an Indian maiden fell writhing in death agonies on the reddened moss. The frantic mother fell an easy captive by the side of her dying child. The father, lithe and fleet-footed, started to carry warning to the dis- tant village; the soldiers pursued him desperately, for the success of the expedition now depended on his fall. He finally rushed into the river at a fording place to cross to the other side, a league below Nan- rantsouak; he had reached an island-ledge in the channel, when in the twilight the keen-eyed marksmen on the shore behind him riddled his panting body through and through with bullets .* So died Boma- seen, the noted chief, while trying to escape to his village with the tidings that would have saved it. By fate he was a savage, unblessed with the endowments which his Maker gives so freely to inen of another race, but he bravely yielded his humble life for his lowly sub- jects in their defense of ancestral soil-a cause which enlightened christendom always applauds among its own people. The place where he was killed now bears the name of Bomaseen rips. The widowed squaw, terrorized by her captors, told them of the condition of Nan- rantsouak, and of a route by which the village could be reached with the utmost secrecy.

So little was recorded that related to the details of this expedition, that it is not known to a certainty where the soldiers crossed the river, or from what direction they approached the village. It is passing

* Such was the manner of Bomaseen's death according to local tradition. There does not seem to be any other authority worth following. Penhallow, in his history of the Indian wars, makes a geographical jumble; he says nonsensi- cally that after the troops " landed at Ticonic they met with Bomaseen at Bruns- wick, whom they shot in the river," p. 102. That author was living at the time and could easily have been more accurate in his statement of fact in spite of his conventional animosity.

HISTORY OF KENNEBEC COUNTY.

strange that no personal diary or adequate narrative of a participant was ever given to the world. The accounts which we have are slight and vague and even contradictory in some particulars. It is probable the troops forded the river in the shallow water at the place where the chief was shot; then leaving the intervale and moving stealthily west- ward on the high land, a mile or two from the river, they reached a spot a little after noon on the 22d where they could overlook the vil- lage of huts that curved like a crescent, conforming to the bending river, on the plain below. The forces were then prepared for action. Captain Harmon led off a company in the direction of an imaginary camp, whose smoke it was fancied could be seen rising in the hazy distance. Captain Moulton moved his force of one hundred men directly toward the village; when near it he stationed two detach- ments in ambush and pushed forward another as a storming party. As the latter issued from the thickets on the double-quick into the vil- lage clearing, they saw their first Indian, who, raising the death yell, sprang for his weapons.

The village, thus startled from its sluggish siesta of a summer day, was at once in a state of panic; the people rushed out of their huts in terror and dismay; the warriors seized their guns and fired them wildly. The soldiers advanced in determined ranks, and when close upon the bark-walled wigwams and distracted people poured into them volley after volley indiscriminately. The helpless survivors scattered for the shelter of the woods, and in their flight encountered the murderous ambuscades that had been placed to anticipate them. At the first onset, Father Rale, aroused by the tumult, ran forth from his dwelling to the place of the village cross, perhaps in the hope that his efforts might tend to allay the conflict or mitigate its cruelties. A few terror stricken followers had gathered about him, as if to shield and to be miraculously shielded by his beloved person, when the. soldiers, catching sight of his priestly dress, and recognizing him as the person on whom the hate of all New England was concentrated, raised a hue and cry for his destruction; and selecting his breast as a target, sent forth a shower of bullets that laid him lifeless by the mis- sion cross which his own hands had raised .* Seven of his neophytes

* There is another version of the story of the killing of Father Rale. It is to the effect that a son-in-law of Captain Harmon, named Richard Jacques, discov- ered the missionary firing from a wigwam on the soldiers, whereupon he broke down the door and shot him dead. If this be true we must conclude that the Father was not very efficient with a musket, for we are not told that any soldier was seriously disabled; and we must also conclude that his mutilated body was considerately dragged out of doors to save cremation when the village was burned. The truth of the wigwam story was denied at the time. Charlevoix, History of New France, pp. 120,122; Williamson's History of Maine, pp. 129-132; Life of Sebastian Rale, by Convers Francis, D.D., pp. 311-322 (in Sparks' Ameri- .can Biography, Vol. VII). As to the scalping of the body, see Penhallow's Indian

THE INDIANS OF THE KENNEBEC.

fell beside him; all the others fled from the village and the slaughter- tempest was over. Thirty Indian men, women and children lay dead, and half as many more were hobbling into the thickets with wounds. Not an Englishman had been hurt; one of the Mohawks was killed, but it may be an open question whether his dusky hue did not make him the accidental victim of some excited soldier.

The purpose of the expedition had been accomplished; it only re- mained for the victors to enjoy their triumph and prepare to return home. Captain Harmon and his men returned before evening from their barren reconnoissance, and the reassembled companies passed the night in the village. The next morning, loading themselves with all the articles of worth (including Father Rale's gray and blood- stained scalp, which had a high commercial value in Boston, and the scalps of the other dead), the soldiers started on their return to Fort Richmond, leaving devastated Nanrantsouak rising in smoke and crackling flames behind them. They took with them the two Mitchell boys, who had been captured at Scarboro', and one other rescued pris- oner. The retirement of the soldiers was noted by the fugitives hid- ing in the surrounding forest, who soon returned to the ruins to look for their massacred friends. We are told by Charlevoix that they first sought the body of their missionary, and prepared it for sepulture with pathetic tears and kisses, and that they buried it where the church altar had stood. The cassock which he had worn was too frayed and bedraggled for the soldiers to care for; they threw it away, and it was saved by the Indians and carried to Quebec as a precious relic. The chapel bell was taken from the ashes by an Indian boy and hid; he never would reveal the place of its concealment, saying, "May be Indian want it some time;" and the secret died with him. Many years after it was accidentally discovered by a woodman in the hollow of an ancient pine tree .*

The grave of Father Rale was never forgotten-but was always

Wars, p. 103; see Early Settlements at Sagadahoc, by John McKeen, in Me. Hist. Soc. Coll., Vol. III, p. 313; Abbot's History of Maine, pp. 313-316; Drake's Book of the Indians, book III, p. 119; History of Norridgewock, by William Allen. Rev. Jonathan Greenleaf, a Congregational minister of Wells, writing in 1821 (nearly a century after the death of Father Rale) says of him: " The fact of his having devoted his superior talents to the instruction of the rude children of the wilder- ness; consenting to spend his days in the depths of the forest, in unrepining con- formity to savage customs, and modes of life; enduring such privations, hard- ships, and fatigues as he did by night and day in the discharge of his mission, proves him to have been a very superior man, and well entitled to the admira- tion of all."-Ecclesiastical Sketches, Maine, 1821, pp. 233-4.

* This bell, together with the "strong box" taken by Westbrook in 1721, and a crucifix found in the soil within a few years by a lad, and preserved by the Hon. A. R. Bixby of Skowhegan, are now in the rooms of the Maine Histori- cal Society, Portland.

HISTORY OF KENNEBEC COUNTY.

kept green-so long as any of the tribe haunted the river. It was first marked by a wooden cross-perhaps by the one made by Father Rale himself. When Arnold's army followed in 1775 the old Indian route to Quebec, his soldiers saw " a priest's grave " among the vestiges of the Indian village of Nanrantsouak." In 1833, under the patronage of Bishop Fenwick of Boston (an ex-member of the Society of Jesus), the site of Father Rale's church was purchased of the white man, and a granite monument erected with great ceremony over his grave. Some of the descendants of Rale's parishioners were present from Canada. The shaft was raised just 109 years after the burning of the church. Even that period of time had not been long enough for all animosity against the missionary to disappear, and the monument was maliciously overturned two years later, and again in 1851. It was replaced each time by the good people of the town of Norridgewock, and still stands in its harmlessness a mute reminder to the passing generations of a life of sublime toil, devotion and martyrdom on the banks of the Kennebec.+

The offense of Father Rale was his constancy to his vows and loyalty to his people. Had his efforts been less he would not have been true to his view of pastoral duty. He sought sympathy and help for his flock where only it could be obtained, not questioning in his zeal the propriety of the Canadian government's hearty encour- agement, for which he was denounced as a traitor. After a bounty had been offered for his head he was urged by Father de la Chasse to look after his own safety, but he replied, "God has committed this flock to my care, and I will share its lot, only too happy if I am allowed to lay down my life for it." He believed the disputed lands had been taken from the Indians by deception and force (and who does not?) and in the visionary cause of his tribe to recover them he serenely met

* Journal of Return J. Meigs, Sept. 9, 1775, to Jan. 1, 1776. Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll. (1814), Vol. I, second series, p. 231.

+ This monument is a granite structure of appropriate simplicity. The base is composed of irregularly shaped ashlar blocks, on which stands a graduated quadrilateral shaft that towers eighteen feet from the ground, and which is sur- mounted by an iron cross two feet high. On the southern face of.one of the blocks is the inscription in Latin, which may be translated as follows: " Rev. Sebastian Rale, a native of France, a missionary of the Society of Jesus, at first preaching for awhile to the Illinois and Hurons, afterwards for thirty-four years to the Abenakis, in faith and charity a true apostle of Christ; undaunted by the danger of arms, often testifying that he was ready to die for his people; at length this best of pastors fell amidst arms at the destruction of the village of Nor- ridgewock and the ruins of his own church, on this spot, on the twenty-third day of August, A.D. 1724." "Benedict Fenwick, Bishop of Boston, has erected this monument, and dedicated it to him and his deceased children in Christ, on the 23d of August, A.D. 1833, to the greater glory of God."

THE INDIANS OF THE KENNEBEC.

his death .* There were about two hundred persons affiliated with his mission at the time of its overthrow; three-fourths of them moved immediately to St. Francis, into which the Abenaki mission, near the mouth of the Chaudière had been merged (in the year 1700); the rest clung to the northern lakes and streams, far inland. Though the war continued to rage for a year longer, the Nanrantsouaks took no further part in it, and were not repre- sented at the peace parleys of 1725-6; but in July, 1727, forty Kennebecs and fifteen Wawenocs, under the sachem Wiwurna, whom we last saw in a pa- triotic passion at Arrowsic, met the authorities at Falmouth and ratified a peace-after having pleaded in vain as of yore, for the English to retire their boundaries from Richmond fort to Ar- rowsic, and from St. George fort to Pemaquid. Thus closed the fourth Indian war in Maine(sometimes called Lovewell's war, from a scalp hunter's exploit and death at Lake Peqwaket, May 8, 1725) - another hemorrhage from the old French conflict, and which was not FATHER RALE MONUMENT. even yet ended.

Six years after the death of Father Rale, the mission cross was re- erected over the ashes of Nanrantsouak, by Father James de Sirenne.+ The King of France had taken notice of the sorrows of the survivors of the massacre, and ordered Father de la Chasse to cover the body of

* Father Rale was born in 1658, in France; he came to America in 1689, ar- riving at Quebec October 13th. He studied the Indian languages at Sillery, and was affiliated for two or three years with the Abenakis on the Chaudière. In 1693 he went to Illinois, but returned to Quebec in 1694 or '95, to be sent to his life work on the Kennebec.

t The Catholic Church in Colonial Days, by John G. Shea (New York, 1886), p. 604. History of the Cath. Miss. Among the Ind. Tribes of the U. S., by John G. Shea. p. 152.

HISTORY OF KENNEBEC COUNTY.

Father Rale, which in Indian parlance is to condole with them on their loss. Eight years later (1738) the French monarch gave an out- fit of plate, vestments and furniture for the mission chapel; perhaps it was this gracious deed that excited a general movement among the exiled Kennebecs to return to their old home; but the Canadian government, to prevent the exodus and to have the fighting men near at hand in case of need, had Father de Sirenne recalled, and Nanrant- souak as a mission place was forever abandoned.

IX. THE FIFTH AND SIXTH INDIAN WARS IN MAINE.

England and France again at War .- The Indians join the French .- The Kenne- bec a Route for War Parties .- English Scalp Hunters scout the Cobbosseecon- tee and Messalonskee Lakes .- Treaty of Aix la Chapelle .- Fatal Affray at Wiscasset .- War Party from St. Francis .- Fort Richmond and Georgetown attacked .- Advent of the Plymouth Land Company .- Protest of Ongewas- gone .- Forts Shirley, Western and Halifax .- Bounties for St. Francis In- dians or their Scalps .- Last Skirmish on the Kennebec .- Capture of Quebec, and Extinguishment of French Power in America .- Natanis wounded under Arnold .- Sabatis .- Peerpole carries his Dead Child to Canada for Burial.

THE ambitions of European monarchs were to precipitate again the horrors of war in New England and New France. So sensitive were the rival colonies to the prevailing politics of their home coun- tries a thousand leagues distant, that a declaration of war by France against England in 1744-generated by a British-Spanish war then in progress-was presently felt in America, and the next year it de- veloped into what has been called the fifth Indian war, so far as it related to Maine. The French and English colonies vied sharply for the support of the Indians. The French were successful as usual. It was a wanton and fruitless war, prompted by no loftier impulse on either side than gratification of national, religious or race antipathy. It was made notable, however, by the capture, by New England valor, of the French fortress of Louisbourg (June 17, 1745). The few resi- dent Kennebec Indians were not early to engage in it, but their river was the thoroughfare for brigand parties from Canada, and however innocent, they came under the ban of the government (August 12, 1745), which offered prizes for their scalps ranging from one hundred to four hundred pounds ($500 to $2,000) apiece. By an odd discrim- ination the scalps of French leaders and accomplices were rated at only thirty-eight pounds ($190) apiece. Fort Richmond and Fort George (at Brunswick) were kept in order; a few hundred men were employed as scouts in Maine. Parties roamed the forests for scalps as huntsmen do for furs; there is record of one such party on the Kennebec.

THE INDIANS OF THE KENNEBEC.

On the 7th of March, 1747, some men under Captain John Gatchell started from the Brunswick fort to hunt for Indians; they reached Richmond fort the first day; the next day they tramped northwesterly toward the lakes that feed the Cobbosseecontee, where they hoped to surprise some camps; not finding any tracks at the small ponds (in Litchfield), they followed the stream up to Great Cobbosseecontee, where they were also disappointed. With great persistency they plodded a dozen miles northward to the waters of the Messalonskee; this lake they scouted in vain. There was not an Indian in all the region. The dispirited rangers now faced homeward, and emerging from the forest into the light of the river opening about eight miles above Cushnoc, they marched on the ice in a blinding snow storm down to the rapids where Augusta has since been built. There they went ashore and bivouacked for the night among the great trees; the next day (March 17) they reached Richmond fort, with neither scalps nor other laurels to recompense them for their toilsome outing." The vigor and alertness of the government kept the Indians in awe, and restricted their mischiefs in Maine to a few assassinations and cases of kidnapping. The treaty of Aix la Chapelle was signed October 7, 1748, by England and France, which restored peace again to their American colonies. A year later (October 16, 1749), eight Kennebec Indians with a few others went to Falmouth and renewed their hum- ble submission to the authorities. +

But so demoralized and fragmentary had the tribes now become, that this treaty affected few Indians except those who were parties to it. Irresponsible tramps from St. Francis and Becancourt, with old scores to settle, continued to infest the Kennebec. In a quarrel with some white men at Wiscasset December 2, 1749, an Indian was wickedly killed; the guilty parties were arrested but not otherwise punished. The victim's Indian friends became greatly excited; thir- teen went to Boston to see the governor, who gave them stately court- esy and condoning presents. The next spring a party of eighty war- riors came from St. Francis to settle the affair in the Indian fashion; they asked the Penobscots to join them, and the people of Maine began to shudder in dread of some act of savage retaliation. It finally came in an attack on Fort Richmond (September 11, 1750), when the Indians killed one man and wounded another and led away fifteen inhabitants as captives. Two weeks later (September 25), they appeared on Parker's island in Georgetown; shunning the garrison, they attacked where the danger was less. In one case they battered down with their tomahawks the door of a house which the owner-a Mr. Rose-

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Illustrated history of Kennebec County, Maine; 1625-1892, Part 8

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