USA > New Hampshire > Coos County > Lancaster > History of Lancaster, New Hampshire > Part 34
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Red-bellied nuthatch; Canada nuthatch (Sitta Canadensis), 728-(59).
Chickadee; black-capped chickadee (Parus atricapillus), 735- (44).
Hudsonian chickadee (Parus Hudsonicus), 740-(49.)
Family Sylviidae (Old World warblers, kinglets and gnatcatchers) :
Golden-crowned kinglet; golden crowned wren (Regulus sa- trapa), 748-(34).
Ruby-crowned kinglet ( Regulus calendula), 749-(33).
Blue-gray gnatcatcher ( Polioptila caerulea), 751-(36).
Family Turdidae (thrushes, bluebirds, and robins) :
Wood thrush; song thrush ( Turdus mustelinus), 755-(6).
Wilson's thrush; tawney thrush; veery ( Turdus fuscescens), 756-(7).
Gray-cheeked thrush ( Turdus aliciae), 757-(12).
Bicknell's thrush ( Turdus aliciae Bicknelli), 757a-(12 part).
Olive-backed thrush; Swainson's thrush; swamp robin ( Turdus ustulatus Swainsonii), 758a-(13).
Hermit thrush ; cathedral bird ; swamp angel ( Turdus aona- laschkae pallasii), 759a-(10).
American robin; robin (Merula migratoria), (I).
Bluebird ( Sialia sialis), 766-(27).
The annual address before the New Hampshire game and fish league, at Manchester, N. H., April 7, 1885, by Hon. Henry O. Kent, is of such local interest and so applicable to Lancaster's fish and game, that we insert it here in part:
Invited to address the fish and game league of the state, an organization whose . labors have been of recognized usefulness to its people wherever known and understood, and to whose originators and founders they owe a debt of remem- brance and appreciation, as yet quite likely underrated and not understood, I hesi- tated to accept the pleasant assignment ; not from disinclination to contribute my mite of information or experience relative to the interesting and important topics involved, but because for many years I have not had leisure to indulge in the exhilarating and restful experiences incident to wooing the woods and the waters of our state, and therefore have no claim as a sportsman, even as an amateur, to address this assemblage.
Among the incidents of my youth,-along with measles, spelling schools, and schoolboy loves,-was the not uncommon attack of cacoethes scribendi, peculiar to imaginative and callow years ; and the result, an intermittent eruption of metrical composition. At a later period, when, I trusted, this frivolity was forgotten, an appreciative friend of those earlier days solicited a " poem " to mark the anniver- sary of some local society ; in obedience to which request, and after several jerky attempts, the machine ground out its farewell to poesy in manner following :
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THE NATURAL HISTORY OF LANCASTER.
Long years have passed since last its crank Moved round at Poesy's decree. The flowers that then bespread each bank And blossomed o'er life's dewey lea In memory's gardens blossom still ; But the dull cares of daily life
Have banished far my rhyming mill As little useful in the strife.
And so, as there remained the memory, only, of sports once pleasantly familiar, I hesitated to exhibit my inexperience and unfamiliarity with the affairs of the present, and address this league of sportsmen.
But your president is a gentleman fertile in expedient and fatal in plausi- bility, comprehensive in mental scope, and one on whose genial brow authority sits enthroned ; and so it came that when, in reply to my plea of long disuse and inexperience, he suggested that I might properly present for your delectation the resources, the attractions, and the capacities (for business, pleasure, and sylvan sport) of my county of Coos, like the typical coon that I think must have given the memorable and historic response to Colonel Clarke instead of Captain Scott, I " came down," both from my tree of supposed vantage and from the highlands of Coos, to meet and address the sportsmen of the state by the Falls of Namos- keag, and to discuss, if not the Utopian desires of the epicures of ancient Derry- field as to the wants of this present world " and the world to come," the capaci- ties and attractions of Coos, the importance of the revenues derived through the advent of pilgrims for health and exercise thereto to the revenues and prosperity of the state, and the magnitude of results involved in the propagation and pro- tection of fish and game within our limits.
Let us glance at the earlier history of our northern section, its traditions and peoples.
When Col. John Goffe, of Bedford (for whom, I assume, was also named Goffe's Falls, on the Merrimack), raised, in 1763, under authority of Benning Wentworth, royal governor of the province of New Hampshire, his regiment, forming a part of the force intended, say the old commissions, " for the conquest of Canada," under command of General Amherst, his corps was filled by hardy pioneers and adventurers, ready to seek new homes on the borders of the receding wilderness. At the expiration of service in Canada, four of his officers, with a portion of his command, sought their homes on the Merrimack by the Indian trail from Cham- plain to the Connecticut and across the highlands of New Hampshire to their own river. Returning thus, they struck the Connecticut at the broad meadows now in Haverhill and Newbury,-then known in Indian legends as the Cohos, and returned there to aid in founding the towns referred to. As settlements extended up the stream, and broad meadows were found and occupied on the present site of Lan- caster, that region was called the " Upper Cohos ;" and later, when quaint Philip Carrigain, the genial Irish secretary of state, whose map is even now the most desirable authority on New Hampshire as it was, visited the more recent settle- ments under the shadow of the lesser Monadnock at Colebrook, forty miles north of Lancaster, he bestowed upon that section the title of " the Cohos above the upper Cohos," the territory designated thus, being the old home of the Coo-ash- auke Indians and now nearly all included in the limits of Coos county.
The name " Coos " is derived from the Indian word "Cohos," of the dialect of the Abernaquis, a confederacy of tribes once inhabiting New Hampshire, western Maine, and northerly to the St. Lawrence river. The word is further derived from " Coo-ash," signifying pines. It is known that the Indian inhabitants of a section were generally entitled by some name descriptive thereof, and the tribe occupy- ing this region was known as the " Coo-ash-aukes," or Dwellers in the Pine Tree Country, from Coo-ash, pines, and auke, place. This title applied especially to
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HISTORY OF LANCASTER.
the locality and inhabitants north of the mountains and along the Connecticut valley above Moosilauke.
The outlet of Massabesic lake is still known by its Indian name " Cohos brook," and the country around was once a dense forest of pines-Coo-ash. It seems probable that this name-Cooash-was carried north by Indian exiles from the lower Merrimack, when driven from their old abodes by the advance of the whites-to seek, as says the chronicler, a new home, "around the head waters of the Connecticut," and we learn, in corroboration of Indian occupancy of this section at this period-that after the massacre at Cocheco (Dover) in 1689, instigated by Kan-ca-ma-gus, he and his followers fled north " and joined the bands at the sources of the Saco, Amariscoggin, and Connecticut "-the Coo- ash region. The streams in this section abounding in trout-their native food- all the way from the lower to the upper Cohos, the territory became known as their Namaos-coo-auke, or pine-tree fishing-place-a nomenclature transformed and perpetuated in the modern name " Ammonoosuc," still held by three streams within this ancient domain.
The wild and picturesque river, rushing down from the slopes of Waumbek Methna through the rich meadows of Lancaster to join the Connecticut, is said to have borne the Indian name Sin-gra-wae; but as this word is unknown in deriva- tion it is probable that the name Si-woog-an-auke, itself a corruption of Sawa-coo- nauke, signifying " burnt pine place," is nearer, if not the exact name, thus defined and corrected. It is easy to believe that away back in the dusk of tradi- tion, the country had been despoiled by fire of its growth of pines, the legend only remaining to supply the name.
The Canadian home or head village of the Cooash-aukes was at Abenaquis, or St. Francis, as their settlement is still called, on the St. Lawrence. After the defeat of the Pequakets by Lovewell, in 1725, the broken remnant of that tribe retired to St. Francis ; and the bands, invading or occupying our present terri- tory, were more frequently known as the "St. Francis Indians " than by their original designation as Abenaquis or Coo-ash-aukes.
Descendants of these broken tribes still live in the village of St. Francis. Among those who returned to their old hunting-grounds in New Hampshire were two families of distinction, of which the chiefs were known as " Captain Joe " and " Captain John." They were active in pre-Revolutionary days, and both took part with the colonists in that struggle. "Old Joe" died at Newbury, in the " Lower Cohos," in 1819, and is buried in the original cemetery of the town at the Ox Bow. Captain John led a small party of Indians, enlisted from Cohos and vicinity, and received a captain's commission. He died a violent death after peace had been restored, and was also buried at the Lower Cohos. He was known among the Indians as Soosup or Sussup, and left one son called " Pial Sussup," -" Pial " being the Indian for Philip. There is some reason for the belief that this " Pial," son and heir of Captain John, an original Coo-ash-auke chief, who went from the Upper Cohos to St. Francis or Abenaquis, and who returned to aid the patriots, with a small band of Cohos Indians, was the " Philip, Indian chief, resident in Upper Cohos and chief thereof," who gave to Thomas Eames of. Northumberland the now famous deed of June 8, 1796, conveying to him and his associates the present county of Coos, together with a portion of the county of Oxford in Maine, then a part of Massachusetts; being the instrument known as the " King Philip Deed."
While it is a source of regret that the descriptive and euphonious nomenclature of the aborigines, has largely disappeared from the hills and streams of their hunting-grounds, it is a source of pleasure that it is occasionally retained, Whit- tier, in his "Bridal of Penacook," having embalmed in imperishable verse several of the ancient designations, two of which pertain to the country of the Coo- ash-aukes. He says :
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THE NATURAL HISTORY OF LANCASTER.
" They came from Sunapee's shores of rock- From the snowy source of Si-woo-ga-nock,
From rough Coös, whose wild woods shake Their pine cones in Umbagog Lake."
That the white settlers, of modern Coos were of English origin is evident from the nomenclature of the towns, which, indeed, granted by an English governor- general, would naturally be of English derivation. Hence the name of the ducal and royal house of Lancaster applied to the earlier and principal settlement, Northumberland, Percy, Dartmouth, and Cockburne; while the name of the family manor of the Wentworths at Bretton, in the county of York (the ancient seat being " Bretton Hall ") is duplicated in " Bretton Woods," now Carroll, where, there is reason to believe, it was the original intent to erect an American barony.
Before bidding farewell to the aboriginal inhabitants of Coos, the earliest hunters, when fish and game did so abound; shall I weary your patience and demonstrate anew my peculiarities as orator of this occasion if I give to you the story of Metallak as it was told to me in boyhood in the woods-Metallak, the last of the Abenaquis in Cohos, the final hunter of the Coo-ash-aukes over the territory of his fathers?
Sportsmen who voyage up the Magalloway, to or through Parmachene, or over those delightful bodies of water prosaically known as the " Rangely Lakes," hear frequent mention of the word "Metallak." It is preserved in the name of the point once running out into Mollychunkamunk, now submerged by the accumu- lated waters of the " Improvement Company ; " in a brook running into the Magal- loway, and in an island in lower Umbagog.
It is true that Captain Farrar, with rare denseness of appreciation, has bestowed the name "Metallic" in his guide-books, alike upon chief and localities, as though the one were really a specimen of native copper, and the other the loca- tion of mineral deposits. Yet there are those who knew these woods and waters before the invasion of the vandals or the days of guide-books; and to them the old nomenclature is dear, to be perpetuated when the days of the iconoclasts are ended. And so, despite guide-books and modern "discoverers," we retain the memory and the name of " Metallak," and tell his story here.
Metallak was the son of a chief, and from his earliest youth was taught the use of weapons and the craft of the woods. He grew up tall, lithe, and active, the pride of his tribe; and, after its custom, took to his wigwam the fairest among its maidens. He built his lodge in the old home of his tribe, the Coo-ash- · aukes, on the waters of the Amariscoggin; and for her ransacked the woods for the softest furs and the choicest game. Two children, a son and daughter, came to them, and gave to the parents' hearts the joy that is born of offspring. Years sped ; the old chief by the St. Lawrence died, and Metallak was the head of his tribe. The frown of the Great Spirit was dark upon his people. One by one its warriors in the woods sickened and passed away. Metallak, in his lodge on the point in the lake, watched and mourned the downfall of his race; and swift runners told him how the stately tree of his tribe was stripped of its branches ; but his mate and his children were left to him, and he vowed to the Great Spirit to remain on the hunting-grounds of his tribe until he should be called to the happy hunting-grounds of his fathers. Gradually, as fall the leaves of the forest when the winds of autumn are abroad, fell the once mighty Abenaquis, until Metallak and his family were alone. The son, not sharing the stern feeling of the sire, as he grew older sighed for the society of the pale faces, and left the lodge in the forest to find a home with the new companions of his choice. The daughter had visited at St. Francis, and had joined her fate with a young warrior of the tribe, before the great sickness that decimated them; and he, with the
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HISTORY OF LANCASTER.
English goods, easy of attainment, had robed his dusky bride in garments that a white woman might envy. She is represented as strikingly beautiful, and when she visited her father in the wilderness he was almost awed by her charms and her queenly attire.
About this time, while closing a moccasin, Metallak had the misfortune to lose an eye. Time sped. The bride of his youth sickened and died, -a sad blow for the desolate chief. She who entered his lodge when youth was high and his tribe had a place in the land, who had, with him, endured long years of adversity, was called, and he was alone.
Mournfully he laid the body in his canoe, together with the trinkets which in life had been dear to her, and gliding out from the sheltered shore took his way across the narrow strait and down its course to the broad reach of Mollychunk- amunk, past the whispering pines and sunny beaches, guided by the roar of Amariscoggin, where he shoots his crested waters toward the more quiet expanse of Umbagog. Entering the rapids he sat erect in the stern of his canoe-his beloved and lost companion in repose before him-and with skilful hand guided the frail bark with its precious burden through the seething waters, past danger- ous rock and whirling eddy, until it shot out upon the sunlit expanse of the lower lake ; still down, past where the river debouches on its way to the sea, to where, in the broad expanse, rises the green island that now bears his name. Here he dug her grave and buried her, after the fashion of his people; and without a tear seated himself upon the mound. Night came, but he moved not ; the wolf howled from the mainland, the song of the night-wind was on the air; but he heeded not ; morning came and passed ; night again and morning ; and still he sat upon the grave. It was not until the morning of the third day that he left the sacred spot. He built him a hut near it, leaving it only to procure necessary sustenance. Years went by, during which he was occasionally seen by the hunters and trap- pers who visited the region, but his eye had lost its fire, and his step was less firm than of old. In the year 1846 two hunters came across him in the woods. It was in November, and a very rainy time. He had fallen down, and upon a stub, thus extinguishing his remaining eye. He was without fire or food, and upon the point of starvation. They built a fire, collected wood, gave him provi- sions, and left him for assistance. With this they returned, and carried him to Stewartstown, on the Connecticut, where he lingered a few years, a public charge on the county of Coos. He now rests apart from the wife he loved so well; but his name and memory linger in the haunts of his manhood; and reference to the modern hunting-grounds of Coös would be incomplete without the story of Metal- lak,-the last of his race within our present boundaries, the last hunter of the ancient Coo-ash-aukes.
To the story of Metallak let me append the story and the tragedy of two white hunters on the same grounds ;- the story of Robbins, the murderer, and his vic- tim, Hines.
Where the Diamond glances down from the forests of College Grant, entering the Magalloway under the shadow of Mount Dustin, is a farm originally cleared by a hunter named Robbins. He was a stern, vindictive man, and wild stories were early abroad concerning his deeds. In the fall of 1826, in company with several companions-Hines, Cloutman, and Hayes,-all hunters by profession, he went upon the Androscoggin waters to trap sable. The party continued their hunt successfully until the first snows fell, when, leaving Robbins in care of the property, his comrades started on a last visit to the traps, extending over a line of twenty miles. On their return the camp was found burned and Robbins and the furs gone. They were without provisions and sixty miles from inhabitants ; but with great privation and suffering they were able to work their way into the settlements. On their return they instituted a suit in the courts of Coos county against Robbins, which was carried to a successful conclusion and execution was
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THE NATURAL HISTORY OF LANCASTER.
issued. Spring again came around, when Robbins proposed to Hines to hunt once more, promising to turn his share of the proceeds towards the extinguish- ment of the adjudged debt. Hines consented, and taking with him his son of fifteen years, proceeded to the hunting-grounds around Parmachene lake. Again they were successful, when one day, as Hines was returning to camp, he was met by Robbins and shot. The boy was killed by a blow from a hatchet and Rob- bins was left with the bloody spoil. The bodies were found and a search insti- tuted. Robbins was arrested in the woods by Lewis Loomis and Hezekiah Par- sons of Colebrook, after a desperate resistance, and lodged in Lancaster jail. Having some confederate, he obtained tools and commenced preparations for his escape. Working diligently at the window of his room, in the old Elm Tree jail, he succeeded in loosening the gratings, each day concealing his work by hang- ing over it his blanket, under the pretext that the room was cold, and the window admitted air. When all was in readiness, he made his exit, and the night before his trial was to have commenced he was missing, nor was any search successful. Public opinion was strongly against the jailer, as being in league with the prisoner, and was near manifesting itself in a rude manner. Strange rumors were afloat for years concerning his whereabouts and career, but nothing definite was known by the public of his subsequent life or final decease.
FISH AND GAME.
I well remember, as a boy, that a fine string of trout could always be easily taken from the bridge on Main street across Isreals river in Lancaster, and that a local character, one Tinker Wade, was accustomed frequently to secure a peck or more of these luscious fish by the clumsy process of mixing powdered cocculus indicus with bran, making pellets, which thrown at random upon the water from this bridge would be speedily devoured by the jumping trout to intox- icate them, when they would leap out of the water or float upon its surface, an easy spoil to the hand or the stick of the tinker.
The entire Cohos country, at the time of its settlement by the whites, abounded in fish and game, and, indeed, was among the most prolific of the hunting- grounds of the aborigines. For many years after settlers had opened up the forest all over this extent of territory, and, indeed, after considerable towns had sprung up therein, the game of the woods and the fish of the streams existed in profusion, but the advance of clearings, the lumber operations, and the century of hunting and fishing that has followed has materially diminished the supply and exterminated some species. Of the larger game, it is rare to find a moose or caribou, a wolf or a beaver. Salmon have entirely disappeared, and trout, in many once prolific localities, seem to be vanishing as did the salmon and shad. It is only in the secluded ponds and the small streams above the mills in the forests that trout are now taken.
When settlers from the lower Cohos penetrated the wilderness covering the present county of Coös, they found in abundance the moose, caribou, deer, the wolf, the bear, the lynx, the otter, the beaver, the red and cross fox, the marten or sable, the mink, the muskrat, the hedgehog, the woodchuck. Of birds, the partridge, or ruffed grouse, and pigeon; and of fish, the salmon, and perhaps the shad, and trout. So common were the moose, that it was not unusual for scores to be slain by a single hunter in a season. The greatest destruction of this ani- mal occurred annually in March, when the snow was deep and had stiffened after a thaw. They were then destroyed by professional hunters, who took only the skin, tallow, and nose, which last named part, together with a beaver's tail, were favorite tid-bits to the epicures of the forest. One season, a hunter named Nathan Caswell killed ninety-nine moose in the vicinity of Lancaster, most of them wantonly, not even saving the tallow or skins. This wasteful outrage so
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HISTORY OF LANCASTER.
brought him into disrepute with the settlers that they refused him their houses, and finally drove him from the region.
Later, moose were plenty around the head waters of the Connecticut, but being hunted with dogs and on the crust, they were soon practically exterminated. It is told that one of the Hilliards destroyed eighty in one season, after which wholesale massacre, they practically disappeared. South of Lancaster village, and in the town limits, rise three conical peaks, Mounts Orne, Pleasant, and Prospect, known as the " Martin Meadow Hills," and south of Mounts Pleasant and Orne is a sheet of water of about four hundred acres, known as " Martin Meadow Pond." This was a favorite resort for moose and deer, and an unfailing rendez- vous for the settier, when " the family was out of meat." This pond was in the low pine territory extending through parts of Dalton, Carroll, Whitefield, and Jefferson, in which last named town is "Pondicherry," or Cherry pond, at the northern base of Cherry Mountain, the entire region, in the early days, being a favorite resort of the moose. To illustrate their abundance, I quote from an old manuscript in my possession, written by the late Hon. John W. Weeks.
" An early settler, by the name of Dennis Stanley, a lieutenant in the Conti- nental army, and a man of strong mind and perfect veracity, informed the writer that being ' out of meat and wanting a moose skin to buy a certain luxury, then much used, and too often at the present day (New England rum), went alone to Cherry pond for a supply, carrying his old gun, which had been so much used that by turning powder into the barrel, it would prime itself. He had scarcely struck fire in his camp when he heard several moose, wading from the shallow side of the pond toward deep water. He then uncorked his powder-horn, put several bullets in his mouth and waited until the moose in front was nearly immersed in water. He then waded in, where the water was about one foot in depth, and took his position, not in the rear of the moose, lest they should swim over the pond ; but at a right angle with their track and at easy musket shot from it. On his appearance, the moose-four in number-as he had anticipated, chose rather to wade back than to swim over, and commenced their retreat in the same order in which they had entered the pond; that was, one behind the other, at some distance apart. In a moment, the moose that had been in the rear was now in front in the retreat, and coming within reach, he was shot at; the powder- horn was then applied to the muzzle of the gun, a bullet followed from his mouth with the celerity which hunters only know ; the second moose was fired at; the third and fourth in rapid succession, when Lieutenant Stanley found time to give a fifth discharge at the moose in the rear. Three fell at the water's edge, the other staggered to the top of the bank, where he fell dead."
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