It was one o’clock in the morning when we came along the Neck and into the town of Falmouth, now called Portland for some mysterious reason. Despite the lateness we were well content, having done thirty miles, in the dark, heavily burdened with muskets and packs, in something over seven hours.
I have done it more quickly since, but I had less on my shoulders and was older. Now that I look back on it, I was as small and wet, then, as a newly born bear cub. I wonder I did it at all until I remember my determination to come up with Mary and take her back to Arundel with me.
My father led me down Queen Street, past Love Lane and Meeting House Lane to Fiddle Lane and thence into Turkey Lane which leads off Fiddle Lane and runs into King Street; and while I gawked at the houses, he pounded on the door at the sign of the Red Cow until Jane Woodbury, its owner, poked her angular face out of the window above our heads, calling, “Who’s there at such an hour?”
“Steven Nason of Arundel,” my father said.
“Law! Why couldn’t you say so?” protested Mistress Woodbury, leaving us to feel we had been at fault in permitting her to ask.
Five minutes later we were tucked into a warm bed and I was listening in drowsy wonderment to the noises of a great town—the cry of the watch, the kicking of a horse against the side of his stall, the footsteps of two people passing on unknown business, the mournful wails of argumentative cats: a tumult that would have kept me long awake in Arundel.
We were up at dawn, and so, too, was Mistress Woodbury, not only to see us fed but to learn our business; for she was a gossip with a reputation to sustain. When my father told her of the killing of Mallinson and the theft of Mary, she made with her tongue a sound like a dog walking rapidly through sticky mud.
“How’ll you find this Frenchman,” she asked, “when you know nothing about him?”
“I think we’ll find him,” my father said grimly.
Mistress Woodbury placed her hands on her fat knees and rolled her eyes upward, as if to find assistance on her eyebrows.
“There came here last night,” she said, “a trader, Britt, just down from the Plymouth Company lands. His speech was full of petrified giant moose, and salmons as big as poplar logs, and sea serpents, and God knows what other Abenaki tales, so I paid mighty little attention to him, knowing he’d spoken to nobody for months except squaws. You know what that does to ’em when they come out to a big town like this!” With her tongue she briefly walked a dog through the mud. “Seems to me, though,” she added, “he had something to say about a Frenchman who struck the Kennebec yesterday with some Northern Abenakis. Maybe I’d better get him down here.”
She sailed upstairs, and her knocks and cries filled the house. She brought back a gangling, sheepish-looking man with a bristly mustache which, when he was in thought, he constantly forced down with his forefinger, caught lightly and almost voluptuously with his outthrust lower teeth, and immediately released, so that it snapped back into place. He pulled up a chair, cut the flaky crust of the apple pie that Mistress Woodbury placed before him, and plunged into his tale.
“You could have knocked me over with a feather,” he said, sucking at his mustache. “I come down from Merrymeeting Bay over the trail last night with two Assagunticooks. There was a moon, and me thinking of nothing, only some good Christian food when I got into Falmouth instead of bear fat and hominy, when a young feller stepped out of the brush into the middle of the trail, not three feet away.”
He looked quickly over his shoulder at the fly-specked wall. Mistress Woodbury walked her dog through the mud. Britt laughed sheepishly, catching his mustache with his lower teeth and releasing it slowly.
“Give me a start!” he said. “Thinks I, it’s Pamola, the evil one that comes in the night, or Pulowech, or one of those men that pop out of rocks, like the Abenakis always talk about.” He bit ferociously at his apple pie.
“Did he have eyes like coals of fire?” my father yawned.
“Hell,” Britt said, flicking pie crumbs from his mustache, “he had something better’n that. He had a watch with diamond initials on it.”
“What were they?” my father demanded.
“Couldn’t see ’em, only the last one. There was two letters; then ‘de S.’ This Pamola the Abenakis talk about: he never carried a watch.”
“No, it probably wasn’t Pamola.”
“Probly not,” Britt agreed. “He was a thin young feller with a pale face and his chin in the air, and kind of a mean way of talking. Had some Abenakis with him. They spoke to my Assagunticooks. French Indians. St. Francis. They had a white girl with ’em. You could have knocked me over with a pine needle!”
“That’s the man,” said my father. “What did he want?”
“News. Nothing but news. He wanted news of a man who’d went up the Kennebec ahead of him.”
“What man?”
Britt didn’t know, and my father couldn’t guess what could lead a Frenchman to appear from nowhere, pursuing a man up the river, toward Wolfe, instead of down the river, away from Wolfe.
“Well,” my father said at length, “it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he’s on the Kennebec. We’ll have news of him at Swan Island or Norridgewock. If we don’t get a crack at him after all this, I’m a Frenchman!”
He began to strap on his pack, as did I. Britt said: “If you ain’t following a trail, you’d best take a whaleboat express from Preble’s Wharf at seven o’clock this morning. One goes across Casco Bay into Maquoit Bay in two hours if the wind’s right. You walk up to Brunswick over the Twelve Rod Road in an hour.”
Grateful for this information, which would save us a day’s tramp over the evil trails northward from Falmouth, we bade farewell to Mistress Woodbury, who waved aside my father’s demand for a reckoning, declaring she would seek payment in kind at our inn when she traveled to Boston for fripperies.
I was bemazed by the size and activity of Falmouth, and by the wealth of the place. Men went freely about the streets, wearing embroidered waistcoats, lace cuffs, silver shoe buckles. From the stores on King Street came odors of all sorts of foods and drinks and merchandise; and the street itself was five rods wide. So great was the traffic that the whole road was churned into mud or dust and scarce a blade of grass grew anywhere.
There were houses of three stories, meeting houses, public buildings, all built of boards, with no logs showing, some painted red, though mostly unpainted. I wondered how the people of Falmouth could spend their days amid such noise and excitement without losing their minds; and I resolved then, nor have I ever changed, that I would hold to the peace of the country and leave the tumult of cities to folk of stronger nerves.
Never had I seen such hustling and bustling as surrounded the wharves of Fore Street—wharves so large that the largest whaleboats seemed small beside them; and even brigs of a hundred tons burthen, that would have crowded the eels and pollocks out of our Arundel River, were nothing to waste time over.
The whaleboats lay at the pier-end, one loading supplies and parcels for the Brunswick fort, and the other taking on goods for forts and settlers along the Kennebec. There were four men to row, two on each side, and a helmsman with a musket beside him, and a boat captain in the bow with a musket and a fish spear, prepared for any sort of encounter.
At seven, after a deal of shouting and swearing, the tarpaulins were stretched over the packages, and our boat pushed out, her passengers besides ourselves being a trader and a young militiaman from the Brunswick fort, who had been home to visit his parents. For the first time since the afternoon of the preceding day my gloom fell from me at the thought we were about to enter the wild Indian country, and that somewhere within it—anywhere within it—we might find Mary and snatch her from her captors and carry her back to Arundel to be my love forever.
My father, too, I thought, seemed better pleased than I had seen him in some time; and he looked approvingly at the green islands in the bay and the high Yarmouth shore on our left as the whaleboat edged out int
o deeper water and pointed her bow a little to the north of east.
“To-night,” he said, “we’ll sleep with friends on Swan Island, if we can find two Assagunticooks to carry us into the Norridgewock country.” With that he asked the young militiaman where in Brunswick the Assagunticooks could be found.
“God’s truth,” the boy said helplessly, “I know none of these red devils by name. They all look alike! If left to me, I’d have ’em wiped out, so to stop ’em yowling how we stole their lands, and put an end to their thieving and rum-guzzling!”
And this, indeed, is the manner in which the great Abenaki people are regarded by those who have had no means of knowing them, as well as by many who have had opportunities to know them but cannot, through bigotry or prejudice, see beyond the ends of their noses. Since I must frequently speak of my dealings with Abenakis during the course of this tale, it is fitting I should write down the facts that I and my father before me gathered from them and concerning them.
Little enough is known of them now, God knows, and most of that erroneous; and I fear that in another hundred years the only memory of them will be the names they gave to ten thousand hills and headlands and bays throughout our eastern country.
The Abenaki nation is a confederation of tribes living in the river valleys of our beautiful province of Maine, moving up the rivers in the autumn to hunt and gather furs, and down the rivers in the spring to fish and be cool. Between times they plant and harvest their crops on fertile spots along the rivers. The Micmacs of Acadia belong to the Abenaki Confederation as well. They are a coarser breed than our true Abenakis because of mixing their blood with slant-eyed, round-faced Indians from the cold countries. The same is true, to a less degree, of Abenakis living in the eastward of our province—the Penobscots and Passamaquoddies. They, too, are inclined to be ruder and rougher than the rest of the Abenakis, as a man from the deep woods is ruder than one from the settlements. I think it’s because they’re adventuresome, and have traveled among the wild tribes in the north, intermarrying with them.
However that may be, there is a relationship between all Abenakis. The land of our province belongs to all of them in common, so that a Passamaquoddy may hunt in the valley of the Kennebec if it pleases him, and a Kennebec may hunt on the Penobscot if so inclined. There’s a similarity in their speech, so that an Abenaki from the valley of the Saco can understand an Abenaki from the valley of the Penobscot, though he may have difficulty. Thus, a Kennebec Abenaki calls a salmon cobbossee, whereas the Penobscot word for salmon is karparseh. The words are the same: yet they are a little different.
Our chief rivers, going from Boston toward the easternmost end of our province, are the Merrimac in Massachusetts; then the Saco; then the Androscoggin and the Kennebec together, the Androscoggin flowing into the Kennebec at the pleasant inland tidal lake known as Merrymeeting Bay; and finally the beautiful Penobscot.
In the Merrimac Valley were the Pennacooks, who went early to Canada to live on the St. Francis River because of the manner in which white men crowded them. In the valley of the Saco live the Sokokis, the Abenakis who come to Arundel for the summer fishing. In the Androscoggin Valley are the Assagunticooks, and in the Kennebec Valley dwell the Kennebecs, sometimes called the Norridgewocks, because the largest of their towns is at Norridgewock on the Kennebec. To my mind the Sokokis, the Assagunticooks, and the Kennebecs are the finest of all Abenakis, just as the Abenakis are the finest of all Indians.
Farther to the eastward, in the Penobscot Valley and on the shores of Mt. Desert, which places have no equal for beauty in any of our provinces, live the Penobscots. Beyond them, along our wildest and foggiest shores, are the wigwams of the Passamaquoddies. All of them together, with the Micmacs of Acadia, which is also called Nova Scotia, form the Abenaki Confederation.
It has been one of the peculiarities of our colonists that they have never kept faith with Indians. They have either stolen their lands outright, or made the Indians drunk and persuaded them to sell vast stretches of territory for a few beads and a little rum and a musket or two; and they have made treaty after treaty with them—treaties which have always favored the white men; and never has there been a treaty that the white men haven’t broken.
Everywhere throughout New England the colonists lied to them, cheated them, robbed them—an easy matter, since the Abenakis are brought up from childhood to think that all their possessions are safe; that no locks or bars are necessary to guard them. In trade they are fair and honest. Nothing causes them greater astonishment and perplexity than crimes white men commit in order to accumulate property.
For an Abenaki to tell an untruth to a friend, except in jest or in the making of medicine, is accounted a crime. When an injury is done to one of them, all his friends make common cause against the guilty person. In friendship they are faithful and ardent, and grateful for favors, which never vanish from their memories; and if these be not returned in kind, then the Abenakis become contemptuous, revengeful, dangerous.
Because of these traits the English might easily have gained and held their friendship and had their assistance against the French. Instead of that, by insults, cruelties and constant frauds they early aroused the enmity of many of them and drove them over to the French; and the French, by flattery and fair dealing, made them into faithful friends.
This, then, accounts for still another body of Abenakis known as a tribe, but actually composed of fragments of tribes. Even before my father was born there were Abenakis south of us—the Pennacooks, of whom I have spoken as living in the valley of the Merrimac. When many of these were massacred without reason by the white settlers, the remnants departed to Canada, where the governor, knowing they would be valuable in warfare, welcomed them and made a treaty with them—a treaty that has ever since been kept. They were given lands on the St. Francis River and at Beçancour, near Three Rivers. After the attack on Father Rale and the Norridgewocks in 1724, the most bitter Norridgewocks departed for St. Francis and Beçancour; and many of the Sokokis joined them after Lovewell’s raid on Pequawket in the following year. Still later many Assagunticooks removed to St. Francis.
These Indians became known to us as the St. Francis Indians or the Northern Indians; and while they were Abenakis, like our own Abenakis, they were led by French officers and longed for revenge on those who had abused them. Yet they spoke the same musical language; read the same wampum rolls in the same way; told the same pleasing tales of the good hero-giant Glooskap and his pet loon, the evil wolf-giant Malsum, the mischief-making Indian devil Lox, the great sorcerer Pulowech, the partridge, and Pamola, the evil one.
From all this it may be seen how a white man might be led astray in his estimate of the Indians; how, if he knew only the Sokokis, he might fall a victim to roving bands from St. Francis; how, if he knew only those from St. Francis, he might be at constant odds with friendly Assagunticooks and Penobscots.
My father knew them all except the braves from St. Francis. Even to them he was known by reputation; and since he had dealt honestly with them, giving fair measure and true weight, never watering his rum or sanding his powder, trusting them, helping them when they were in need, scrupulously keeping his promises to them, holding them to be honorable men in all his relations with them, they in turn dealt amiably and honestly with him.
Not only had the Norridgewocks and other tribes given wampum belts to my father, but they had erected private monuments of stone outside our stockade wall at Arundel; and so long as these monuments were not pulled down, my father’s family was at peace with the tribes who raised them.
As the morning wore on, a breeze sprang up from the west. We stepped a mast with a small sail that hurried us past all the islands and into the end of narrow Maquoit Bay, where we disembarked and set off for Brunswick over a path so clear that in an hour we had reached the banks of the Androscoggin and presented ourselves before the captain at the fort.
He had seen, he said, no trace of St. Francis Indians, or of a French man such
as my father described, or of Mary; nor, he added, would he be likely to do so, since they would be sure to move around the fort in the concealment of the forest. Yet he offered us supplies, and summoned Warriksos and Wheyossawando, tall Assagunticooks in buckskin leggins without shirts, who readily agreed to carry us toward Fort Richmond on service of benefit to the colonies.
We embarked under the warm mid-morning sun, and slipped down stream through trees touched here and there with frost. In less than an hour we met the salty odor of the rising tide: then entered the broad reaches of Merrymeeting Bay, with its red blaze of maples close down along its edges. Instead of pressing against us, the tide swung to the northward and carried us into the Kennebec.
Flocks of teal and black ducks skittered from the water to scale off into guzzles and marshes on either side. The banks and headlands drew closer. The river split into two channels, leaving between the channels a marsh shaped like an arrowhead. The base of the marsh lay snug against the high curved headland of an island—an oak-and birch-clad island—as an arrowhead rests against a flexed bow.
“Swan Island,” my father said, and I thought the sight of it made him happy.
There were guzzles through the marsh; and my father told Warriksos to leave the river and follow one of them to the headland. When we were close to the point we saw Abenakis behind the trees, watching. As we neared the beach a tall girl hurried down the bank and into the water toward us. Men, unarmed, splashed in behind her, laughing and shouting, “Steven! Brother Steven!”
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