However they arrived, those Paleolithic immigrants eventually forged a kaleidoscope of Native societies, from immensely complex urban cultures that built monumental earthen mounds, to coastal farmers raising maize and squash, to northern hunters stalking moose and caribou. As many as a million people may have lived on the eastern seaboard at the dawn of the sixteenth century. They settled so thickly along the coasts and river valleys that some of the first European explorers wondered whether there was room for anyone else.
At first the Indians welcomed the European visitors, who brought new technologies and goods, sparking trade, intermarriage, a cross-pollination of ideas, and cooperation. Europeans also brought suspicion and discord, rapacity and ruthlessness, as well as one of the worst mass epidemics the world has ever seen. When Europeans as varied as the Swedes, Dutch, Spanish, French, and English established their first beachheads in North America, they encountered a suddenly empty land.
Part II, “Let Us Not Live to Bee Enslaved,” examines the colonial explosion of the seventeenth century, especially around Chesapeake Bay, where some of the earliest tensions between Indians and settlers (and between competing colonies) arose, and in New England, where relations began with a long period of peace and mutual cooperation but soon soured, leading to two of the bloodiest clashes ever between Natives and colonists, the Pequot War and King Philip’s War—the latter the first regional, pan-Indian uprising against the invaders.
This part also explores the experiences of captives, both white and Native, including an usually quick-witted ten-year-old named John Gyles, who survived blizzards, near starvation, and years of slavery among the Maliseet and French, and Mary Rowlandson, whose seventeenth-century narrative became America’s first bestseller. Both her release from captivity and the subsequent publication of her story owed a largely unacknowledged debt to a Harvard-educated Nipmuc, who was himself a victim of war.
Part II ends with an account of the Carolina deerskin and slave trade, which led to the largest Indian revolt in the colonial period. Almost forgotten today, this war changed the face of the South and gave birth to the antebellum plantation system.
Part III, “We That Came out of This Ground,” explores the Pennsylvania backcountry, a place where exiles from around the world, and from throughout the battered Indian nations, went in the mid-eighteenth century to start new lives. It follows the intertwined fortunes of a Scots-Irish trader, a German-born frontier diplomat, a French-Iroquois interpreter, and several Native leaders—some war chiefs, some peacemakers—all trying to navigate the increasingly dangerous clash of imperial powers, provincial expansion, and pent-up Indian fury that ignited the Seven Years’ War—the first truly world war.
In the end, the story of the frontier is the story of people—not stereotypes, but complex individuals and societies, all trying to make sense of a new kind of world with which none of them had any experience. No one had a monopoly on heroism or unprincipled behavior, which makes the story of the First Frontier at once rich, exhilarating, and heartbreaking.
Language and sources can be minefields for any writer dealing with frontier history. The thorniest issue is what to call the Native people. With hundreds of languages and dialects, they obviously did not have a single term for themselves. Most used phrases that translate to some variant of “real people”—which meant, essentially, “us, not everyone else.”
“Indian,” “Native American,” “Amerindian,” “aboriginals,” “First Nations” (in Canada), and other terms have been used through the years. None is ideal. For example, none of the Shawnee, Lenape, Miami, or Mingo (Iroquois) who lived in the upper Ohio Valley in the mid-1700s were native to that region; all were refugees, emigrants, or exiles from homelands hundreds of miles away. Though aware of the limitations of these words, I use many of them interchangeably. Despite questions about the political correctness of “Indian,” I have not shied away from it, given its universality in the historical record, as well as its continuing acceptance among many contemporary Natives.
Interestingly, “white” is a word the colonists rarely used to describe themselves during the first two centuries of exploration and settlement. They saw their differences with the Indians primarily in religious, rather than racial, terms—as Christian versus pagan—and viewed national, religious, and ethnic divisions among their fellow Europeans as almost more profound and intractable.
“Tribe” is another problematic word, since it implies a rigid ethnic and political division, which was rarely the case in Indian society. Drawing a bright line between, say, the Iroquoian Mohawk and the Algonquian Abenaki to their east is fairly simple, but what about the Pequot and Mohegan of southern New England? Deeply connected by language, intermarriage, tributary status, and disputes over hereditary sachemships, their internal “tribal” politics helped spark the devastating Pequot War of 1637. Historians often sidestep the issue by using the exceedingly broad (and literarily ugly) word “polity” for any social structure, from the clan level to paramount chiefdoms. I use “tribe” sparingly, recognizing that, as William Burton and Richard Lowenthal once said, it is “a convenient, if belabored, category meaning [a] named ethnic unit.”
Because Europe was a literate society, while Native America depended on oral traditions, the sources on which we can draw are pitifully lopsided. For every speech in Boston or Philadelphia, for every panicked letter from a worried settler or gut-wrenching recollection by a survivor of captivity, there was a Native echo at the council fires in Onondaga or Logstown, an anguished story in an Abenaki wigwam or the yihakin of Tsenacommacah, unrecorded but no less important.
Furthermore, transcribing names from an oral language into a written form creates its own confusion. I spell the name of one eighteenth-century Seneca leader Tanaghrisson, but it appears in historical records as Tanighrisson, Tanacharison, Deanaghrison, Johonerissa, Tanahisson, and Thanayieson, among other renderings, all of which give a sense of how the man actually pronounced his name. Further muddying the waters, many American Indians used multiple names, appropriate for different stages of their lives, and often were given (or asked for) additional names in European languages. For the sake of clarity, I usually refer to an individual by the same name throughout, even though his or her public name may have changed over time.
Place names are similarly confusing. Although choosing to describe a location using its English, French, or Spanish name is, essentially, choosing sides, in many cases we have no record of what that place’s original name was. Even when the name is known, using it would not help modern readers identify the location. Even seemingly innocent terms such as “New World” and “Old World” are freighted with the European perspective, but they are often the best terms we have.
The frontier is not gone in the East, but it can be difficult to find. The other day, I drove across the Kittatinny Ridge and turned onto Bloody Spring Road, named for another backwoods attack in 1757. When I turned off onto an unpaved lane, a cloud of dust followed me along the base of the mountain. I got out of the car and listened to the spring birdsong in the woods; this was the site of Fort Northkill, the hapless installation that did nothing to prevent French and Indian attacks on local settlements. The trees are smaller now than I imagine they were in the 1750s, but the chorus of wood thrushes and tanagers was the same that the poorly led, poorly equipped militia would have heard.
From there I drove a few miles south to what had been the Hochstetler farm, to which Jacob—after three years of captivity and privation and a harrowing solo escape through the wilderness of New France and the Ohio country—finally returned. I coasted to a stop near the state historical marker, which proclaims this the site of the first Amish settlement in the United States.
Although an interstate now cuts through part of the fields, and forest has closed in around the homestead itself (where at least one of the original eighteenth-century buildings still stands), most of the land remains a working farm, tilled each spring and harvested each autumn. Squinting a lit
tle and looking north, blocking out the rumble of the highway and focusing on the crumpled line of the Kittatinny, I could almost see the valley as it looked on that September day in 1757.
Almost. Alongside the interstate, occupying what had been part of the Hochstetler farm, is a kitschy tourist attraction. Dominating the parking lot, and directly in my line of sight, is an enormous, twelve-foot-tall Amish couple made of fiberglass, happily waving at the highway. A family was posing for a photograph just below the fake farmer’s pitchfork. What old Jacob would have made of them, I cannot even begin to imagine.
In other places, though, the frontier seems as close and vivid as if it were still unfolding. One such place is a cluster of islands on the New England coast, whose seaward shores foam with waves breaking white out of the deep blue-black water, the air empty of all but the cries of gulls. Whether one knew it as the dawn-touched edge of the coastal world of wôbanakik, at the beginning of the Grubbing Hoe Moon, or as the unexplored “maine land” shore, on June 4 in the year of the Lord 1605, the story that played out there began on a day when everything changed forever.
PART I
“SO MANY NATIONS, PEOPLE, AND TONGUES”
Chapter 1
Mawooshen
Somewhere over the edge of the world, the sun had long since risen out of sobagwa, the great sea, but along the margins of wôbanakik, nothing was visible in the thick fog, except the ghostly silhouettes of narrow spruces along the shore of the low island and the pale band of gray, barnacle-encrusted rock where the falling tide surged and sucked.
Two long, high-prowed bark wigwaol moved along the island’s lee, three men in each digging their slender paddles deep to move the sleek canoes forward. As they rounded the island, the sun suffused the fog with a pale golden light, but the paddlers had no time to admire the change, for now the rollers were coming in from the open ocean. The men had to time their strokes to the lifting swells, keeping the canoes angled into the waves so they would not broach. Nevertheless, the lively seas sometimes broke shockingly cold over the bows.
These boats were not the big, seagoing woleskaolakw—giant dugouts carved from the trunks of great pines, canoes built to carry fifteen people. Though nearly twenty feet long, these bark canoes were small craft in big waters, and while the men were skilled, they knew disaster lay just a careless moment or unexpected wave away. But a loon called, distant in the fog, and another answered it unseen—long, unearthly wails quavering over the water—and the men smiled at one another. The mata-we-leh were the messengers of Kəlóskαpe, the One Who Made Himself, and perhaps they were asking him to watch over their canoes on this auspicious and frightening day.
For a long time, they moved in a world of mist, their own breath white with the morning chill, seeing nothing beyond the bows of their boats. In the stern of the first canoe sat a sὰkəmα (leader) named Ktə̀hαnəto. Wielding a long steering paddle, he navigated carefully but not blindly, keeping his bearings by the direction of the swells and by listening for the crash of waves on the receding shore behind them.
The fog made the men in the canoes feel as though they remained motionless no matter how hard they paddled, but Ktə̀hαnəto never wavered, never appeared to be lost. To one of the men, barely out of his teens, this ability seemed almost supernatural—Ktə̀hαnəto’s name, after all, meant “doer of great magic”—but it was simply the product of a lifetime spent along the wôbanakik coast. Knowing how the currents flowed among these islands on a rising tide, and taking into account the freshening breeze that now twisted the fog into wraiths, Ktə̀hαnəto set the course.
Then, with stunning speed, the mist began to split and lift, stripped away by the rising wind and brilliant sun; what was moments before a world cloistered in gray took on the bright edges and sharp shadows of morning.
All around them lay the complexity of rock-hemmed shores, spruce islands, long peninsulas, and deep bays that formed the beautiful edge of wôbanakik. Extending before Ktə̀hαnəto and his companions, still hazy in the dissipating fog, was a series of steppingstone islands, humped with low hills and black with forest.
They paddled for an hour, passing rocky ledges on which dozens of askigw were hauled out, their smooth, mottled pelts shining in the sun. The smaller seals had faces like dogs, but the much larger, grayer ones had long muzzles like those of the big, antlered moz of the forest. In autumn, when the askigw were fat, they provided meat and oil, and even now, at the beginning of summer, they were good eating. But the men, who had no harpoons and had other things on their minds this morning, didn’t stir when a gray askigw surfaced near their canoes.
The strengthening sun warmed Ktə̀hαnəto’s face, glinting off the white bone ornaments in his long black hair. This was the time of day that spoke most directly to how he and his kin saw themselves as a people, how they defined themselves in the world they knew. Because no other nation lived as close to the rising of the sun, all those who lived along this rocky coast called themselves wαpánahki, “the people of the east.” Their beautiful home was wôbanakik, “land of the dawn.”
The Wapánahki were not a unified people. The tongues spoken by those living far away were similar but subtly different from those of Ktə̀hαnəto and his relatives. Their nearest neighbors to the northeast, along the great bay, were the pαnáwαhpskek, “the people who live where the river spreads out,” and farther still the pestαmokάdiak, “the people who live where the pollock are speared.” These three peoples were closely bound by ties of blood and marriage, as they were with the w’olastiqiyik, “the people of the shining river,” whose homes lay north and east of the great mountain k’ta’dən.
Ktə̀hαnəto and his kin called themselves walina’kiak, “the cove people,” because the bay on which they lived was unusually rich in small coves and harbors, even by the bountiful measure of wôbanakik. They knew that they inhabited the most beautiful part of the world and felt slightly superior to all other people, especially the mi’k’makik, who lived farther north and with whom they sometimes traded, sometimes warred.
Like his companions and his brother Amóret in the bow, Ktə̀hαnəto wore heavy, waterproof moccasins and leggings made from askigw skins and a lighter buckskin loincloth, all decorated with open, curving geometric patterns stitched with dyed porcupine quills and bone beads. Copper bangles hung from his belt and wrists. His heavy mantle of tanned moz hide, supple and smelling of smoke, which he normally wore tied over one shoulder and belted at the waist, was too heavy and awkward for paddling in summer weather. It, along with its detachable beaver-skin sleeves, was rolled up and stowed carefully in the boat, for use against the nighttime chill. For now, Ktə̀hαnəto and the others were almost naked, enjoying some of the first truly warm days of the year.
It was the Grubbing Hoe Moon, when the women back in the village would begin in earnest to work the moist ground of their small gardens, using arakehigan made by hafting the shoulder blades of deer to long, smooth handles. Except for the insects, the little biting tsé’sẅak, this was a relatively easy time of the year for the Wapánahki. A week earlier, on the full moon, the tides had risen and fallen at their monthly extremes, allowing the villagers to wade into the frigid water and gather the first lobsters coming into the shallows, to pry purple-blue mussels and green urchins from the rocks, and to lift the mats of rockweed and find succulent crabs hiding beneath.
The shoreline echoed with the shrieks of children nipped by the crabs, and there was easy laughter among the adults. The laughter was good, because it had been a hungry winter, as winters often were. Ktə̀hαnəto’s band, along with several others, had chosen a traditional encampment well inland, hiding among the hills that offered some protection from the worst of the great winter storms that blew in from the northeast, but the moz were scarce this year, and while there were plenty of the white hares, máhtəkwehsəwak, to snare, their lean meat filled the belly but didn’t stop the hunger.
By the time of the Ice Crusting the Snow Moon, there had been
little to eat except old strips of autumn-killed moz, hung from the smoke hole, so hard and leathery, it was a morning’s work to chew just a few pieces. The people washed them down with a weak tea made from dried sumac and blueberries. “Woodeénit atók-hagen Kəlóskαpe (This is a story of Kəlóskαpe),” a grandfather would say around the fire at night as the children nestled into their furs. But even the old stories—of how Kəlóskαpe caught up all the animals in the world in a magic bag of his Grandmother Woodchuck’s belly hairs, or how the snowshoe hare lost its tail—couldn’t keep the children’s minds off the gnawing hunger in their guts or strike the worry from their parents’ minds.
Still, Ktə̀hαnəto thought, it had not been as grim as the past several winters, a time of true starvation, when to many it seemed as though the endless cold of the North, where the giant giwakwa cannibals lived, was once again stalking the land, never to let summer return. And as if to reinforce that fear, the summers that did finally arrive had been poor, miserly seasons, with frosts that lingered and returned again too soon.
But wôbanakik provided. The hunters had eventually found a few small herds of caribou, and one party that trekked to the coast for askigw had instead ambushed a great tusked walrus on the beach. It was the first anyone in the band had seen, and its blubbery meat, dragged back to camp on toboggans, had both fed everyone to satiation and provided proof that they were not forgotten.
Wôbanakik provided, as it always did in the fullness of the seasons. In spring, the newly ice-free rivers swarmed with fish: the run of the sjamej (Atlantic salmon), fresh and powerful from the sea; the slab-sided shad and sinuous eels that could be corralled in weirs; and the huge karparseh, sturgeon, plated monsters the length of two men, that were harpooned at night by the light of birch-bark torches.
The First Frontier Page 2
