The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  Robert Stobo, a suicide, could not be buried in a churchyard. “Having committed an act that was considered both immoral and illegal,” his biographer concludes, “he presumably was buried according to custom in an unmarked grave.” George Croghan’s pauper’s grave is likewise forgotten. Tanaghrisson, Scarouady, Teedyuscung, and Shingas and his brothers all lie anonymously and, if the bulldozers have missed them, one hopes quietly, someplace where the birds sing.

  They sing over Conrad Weiser. Twenty-six neatly manicured acres of his Tulpehocken Valley farm are now a state historic site, including the small stone house he built in 1729. Visitors find a monument, erected in 1909, to “Conrad Weiser: Pioneer, Soldier, Diplomat, Magistrate” and a 1930s-era statue of Shikellamy, who with his upraised hand, long braids, and peace pipe looks as if he just stepped out of an old movie. At night in the autumn, you can see the lights of a high school football field two miles to the east, where the Conrad Weiser Scouts play.

  Weiser’s simple gray tombstone, its epitaph in German, stands on a little knoll near the farmhouse, beside the grave of his wife, Ann Eva. Around them are a number of small, plain slabs poking out of the grass. According to family tradition, they mark the resting places of Indian friends and acquaintances. Even in death, it seems, Tarachiawagon keeps a foot in both worlds.

  Notes

  Introduction

  [>] keekachtanemin: Sassoonan (September 7, 1732), in Pennsylvania Archives, 1st ser., 1:345.

  tülpewihacki: Per Heckewelder and Du Ponceau 1834.

  “back parts”: By the 1720s, the terms “back parts” and “back settlements” were in common use to describe the Pennsylvania frontier; see Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, 3:103 and 3:282, for examples of early appearances.

  [>] “a fleshy woman”: Harvey Hostetler and William Franklin Hochstetler, Descendants of Jacob Hochstetler, the Immigrant of 1736 (Elgin, IL: Brethren Publishing, 1912), 30. My account of the attack and the Hochstetlers’ captivity is drawn largely from this source, which is in turn based primarily on family tradition. The Hostetler/Hochstetler family website, www.hostetler.jacobhochstetler.com, was also an important source of information, including boundaries of the original farm.

  [>] “not between strangers”: Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 8.

  [>] “a convenient, if belabored”: William Burton and Richard Lowenthal, “The First of the Mohegans,” American Ethnologist 1 (November 1974): 592.

  Chapter 1: Mawooshen

  [>] along the margins: No one is sure exactly what ethnic group lived along Muscongus Bay in Maine in the early seventeenth century, much less what dialect they spoke. They certainly used a form of what is now called eastern Abenaki, one branch of the immense Algic language family, of which Algonquian is a major part. Anthropologists assume that they belonged to the wider cultural group that included the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, and Maliseet (and that, with the western Abenaki and Mi’kmaq, formed the Wapánahki confederacy). There is a contrarian view, however, that cultural affiliations were originally much different from those recorded by Europeans just after the devastating epidemics of the early 1600s and that seventeenth-century records should be viewed with skepticism. The Native words recorded by Rosier in 1605, according to linguist Frank T. Siebert, indicated that Indians of several related groups were involved in interactions with the English.

  Although this reconstruction of the events of June 4, 1605, assumes that the Indians involved were a distinct Wapánahki subgroup known as Wawenock, whose home was described by early settlers as the mouth of the St. George River, the Algonquian transliterations used here are primarily Penobscot, based on Speck 1940. In fact, no one knows who or what the Wawenock were, and most modern historians dismiss “Wawenock” as one of many confusing labels applied to the same coastal people by Europeans of several nationalities and languages. For a discussion of this issue, see Bourque 1989 and, arguing for the Wawenock as a distinct group, Brack 2008.

  [>] As several specialists have pointed out, trying to draw direct and unaltered connections between pre-contact groups and modern Indian cultures along the Northeast coast overlooks the tectonic changes forced by disease, warfare, and immigration/emigration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “Instead, the modern Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, and Maliseet tribes are better understood as products of ethnic realignments, shifts in residence, territorial loss, and the Indian policies of New England and New France” (Bourque 1989, 274) The language of the Wapánahki, like all native languages along the eastern frontier, was originally oral. French missionaries and, to a lesser extent, English colonists tried to represent it in the Latin alphabet, but with limited success, and later western Abenakis such as Joseph Laurent and his son Stephen from Quebec, as well as recent scholars of eastern Abenaki, such as Siebert, codified the languages. The orthography of eastern Abenaki uses a variety of consonants not found in English, such as kw, pronounced “kww,” while written western Abenaki was filtered through French, which lacks the English w. That consonant is represented as 8 in western Abenaki, while ô is pronounced as a nasal “ohn.” In Penobscot, one dialect of eastern Abenaki that has survived (barely) to the present, the symbol α is used for an “uh” sound, like the e in “flower.”

  Two long, high-prowed: Although the coastal Wapánahki used large dugouts for ocean travel, the account by Rosier is quite specific that the canoes were “of the bark of a Birch tree, strengthened within with ribs and hoops of wood.” Although I have used the modern western Abenaki word for birch-bark canoe, wigwaol, James Rosier recorded a different name, saying the Wapánahki called the English ship as “they call their owne boats, a Quiden” (James Rosier [1605], A true relation of the most prosperous voyage made this present yeere 1605, by Captaine George Waymouth, in the Discovery of the land of Virginia, in Quinn and Quinn 1983, 288).

  woleskaolakw: Western Abenaki, per Wiseman 2001.

  [>] mata-we-leh: Penobscot, per Nicholar 2007, 165.

  “doer of great magic”: Penobscot, per Dana et al. 1989.

  [>] wαpánahki, “the people of the east”: Most Native groups referred to themselves with terms that are usually translated as something like “the people” or “the real or original people,” which in practice probably meant the most fundamental form of “us.” These are almost never the names by which they became known to Europeans, however, and thus to modern history. Arriving in a new cultural territory, the French, English, or Spanish explorers would, in effect, ask their Native guides—who were usually from a previously contacted group—“Who are these people?” Not surprisingly, the names given in response were often scatological or derogatory. Maliseet, for example, is probably a Mi’kmaq term meaning “broken talker” or “doesn’t speak like us.”

  heavy, waterproof moccasins: The description of the clothing worn by Ktə̀hαnəto and his companions, given by Rosier, corresponds with other eyewitness accounts of contact-period Wapánahki dress.

  [>] A week earlier: May 22, 1605.

  “Woodeénit atók-hagen Kəlóskαpe”: Adapted from Leland 1884, 28.

  it had not been as grim: Geophysicists have linked the eruption of the Peruvian volcano Huaynaputina in 1600 with profound cooling across much of the globe, including Europe, Asia, and South America. The effects likely would have been severe in North America as well, at least through 1603.

  giwakwa cannibals: Most accounts of Algonquian legends, such as Leland 1884, use the Mi’kmaq term chenoo, but this is western Abenaki, per Day 1994.

  [>] mardarmeskunteag: The modern Damariscotta River; the Penobscot name is from Nicholar 2007. The Whaleback shell midden, though largely removed in the nineteenth century, was one of the largest shell heaps along the Atlantic coast. Thirty feet deep in places, it was more than a thousand years in the making.

  [>] k’chi-wump-toqueh: In modern Penobscot usage, this term refers to a Canada goose, but this may be a linguistic evolution. The nineteenth-cent
ury Penobscot historian Joseph Nicholar used it to refer to a swan (Nicholar 2007, 166n), and oral traditions of first contact often refer to European ships under sail as looking like swans.

  pαnáwαhpskek: The origin of “Penobscot,” meaning “where the rocks widen, open out, spread apart.” The first English record of the name refers to a village near the modern town of Orland, at the head of Penobscot Bay.

  Bashabes: Historians have wrangled for centuries over whether “Bashabes” is a name or a title. Snow 1976 argues that Samuel de Champlain and other early explorers referred to every other Indian sagamore they encountered by name rather than rank, making it unlikely that Bashabes was an exception. Pierre Biard, a Jesuit who traveled to Penobscot Bay in 1611, wrote that “the most prominent Sagamore was called Betsabés, a man of great discretion and prudence” (Thwaites 1896, 2:49). Rosier, however, specifically notes that the Indians they met applied the term to Captain George Waymouth, “whom they called our Bashabes” (Rosier, A true relation, 276). John Smith, in his account of his 1614 visit to Maine, indicates that Bashabes and the man he called “Dohannida” (Ktə̀hαnəto) were brothers; this is the only reference to a blood tie (John Smith, A Description of New England (1616; repr., Boston: William Veazie, 1865).

  wenooch: Derived from the word meaning “Who is that?” (Prins 1994, 114).

  the first time anyone: Samuel de Champlain, meeting the Bashabes in 1604, said that he was told it was “the first time they ever had beheld Christians” (Bourque and Whitehead 1994, 135).

  square-rigged sailing bark: The exact design of the Archangell is unknown, but it was likely similar to Bartholomew Gosnold’s Godspeed and other ships of the day—a squat, two-masted square-rigger that would have been beastly cramped with a full complement of about thirty men aboard.

  [>] “the most fortunate”: Rosier, A true relation, 259.

  “above thirty great Cods”: Ibid., 260.

  “we [arrived] there”: Ibid., 262.

  [>] pinnace: Rosier actually refers to the smaller craft as both a pinnace and a shallop, both small, one- or two-masted vessels that could be sailed or rowed.

  “thirty very good”: Rosier, A true relation, 264.

  “but the crust”: Ibid.

  “fourteen shot and pikes”: Ibid.

  “very great egge shelles”: Ibid., 262. These were most likely the eggs of great auks, a flightless, goose-size relative of the puffin, which was hunted to extinction in the North Atlantic by 1844, and whose remains have been found on other islands in Muscongus Bay.

  the mouth of a river: Although there is no doubt that the Archangell’s anchorage lay among the Georges Islands at the mouth of Muscongus Bay, in a natural harbor framed by Allen, Burnt, Benner, and Davis Islands, exactly which river Waymouth explored has been the subject of considerable historical discussion. Waymouth took precise soundings and mapped the area in detail, but this information (since lost) was left out of Rosier’s published account, doubtless to throw off competitors. It has had the same effect on historians and geographers.

  Two rivers debouch into the sea near the Archangell’s anchorage—the St. George River, immediately to the north, and the very much larger Penobscot River, to the northeast. I find myself persuaded by the arguments of Morey 2005 and others that although the St. George lies closer to the presumed anchorage, it would have been harder to detect. The Penobscot, opening to its immense bay, is the more likely candidate and better fits Rosier’s descriptions. A modern replica of the Waymouth light horseman, equipped with a sail and manned by enthusiastic if inexpert rowers, made it from Allen Island to the Penobscot and back in less than twenty-four hours, suggesting the trip was well within the capabilities of Waymouth and his trained seamen.

  [>] “canoas”: Rosier, A true relation, 267.

  “the maine land”: Ibid., 260.

  “But when we shewed”: Ibid., 267–68.

  “We found them then”: Ibid., 269.

  “in this small time”: Ibid., 271.

  “knives, glasses, combes”: Ibid., 273.

  [>] “whereat they much marvelled”: Ibid., 274.

  shoggah: Rosier compiled a list of four hundred to five hundred Wapánahki words, but he did not publish it in his 1605 booklet A true relation. A truncated list of about one hundred words, possibly with transcription errors, was published by Samuel Purchas in his Pilgrimes in 1625 (Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes [Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1906], 18:358–59) and is all that survives. An annotated version appears in “James Rosier’s List of Indian (Eastern Abenaki) Words, Recorded in Samuel Purchas, Pilgrimes (1625): A Preliminary Analysis by Philip L. Barbour,” in Quinn and Quinn 1983, 481–93.

  mawooshen: This word has been the subject of much scholarly debate and little resolution. It does not appear in Rosier’s published list of Indian words, but The Description of the Countrey of Mawooshen, Discovered by the English, in the Yeere 1602 (in Quinn and Quinn 1983, 470–76), published at the behest (and possibly by the authorship) of Ferdinando Gorges shortly after the voyage, makes it clear that the English, at least, believed this was the name given by the Indians to this stretch of coastal Maine, roughly from the Piscataqua River to Mount Desert Island. “Although we may always remain in the dark about the precise meaning of mawooshen, it probably refers not to a stretch of land but to the confederacy of allied villages under a regional grand chief known as the Bashabes” (Prins 1994, 100–11).

  “behaved themselves”: Prins 1994, 275.

  Owen Griffin: Griffin is described by Rosier (Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 18:344) as “one of them we were to leave in the Countrey, by their agreement with my Lord the Right Honorable Count Arundell (if it be thought needfull or convenient),” suggesting that Arundell and the other backers had considered the possibility of leaving some of the crew to overwinter. Quinn and Quinn 1983 (p. 277) suggest that Griffin, a Welshman, may have been chosen because of the contemporary belief that Indian languages were a form of Welsh.

  “the men all together”: Rosier, A true relation, 278.

  “their Bashebas”: Ibid., 280.

  “their excellent Tabacco”: Ibid.

  [>] “utterly refused”: Ibid., 282.

  chipping his name: The inscription, “1605 Tho. King,” remains today on the bedrock just above the tide line at Davis Point in Knox County, Maine.

  “every one his bowe”: Rosier, A true relation, 282.

  “very trecherous”: Ibid., 283.

  “Wherefore . . . we determined”: Ibid.

  [>] ania for brother and adesquide for friend: Trade pidgin, from the Basque anaia and adeskide, per Bakker, “The Language of the Coast Tribes,” 1989.

  [>] tomhikon: Besides “tomahawk,” the Algonquian family of languages bequeathed dozens of other words to English, filtered by unschooled ears and altered by awkward tongues: asquutasquash would become “squash”; opasson (from op, “white,” and assom, “dog”) would become “opossum”; and aroughcun would become “raccoon.” Cau’cau’as’u, an adviser or counselor, would become the verb “caucus.” Toboggan, chipmunk, moose, hickory, hominy, persimmon, papoose, quahog, skunk, succotash, terrapin, powwow, wigwam, wampum, and many more Algonquian words would find a place in the language of their invaders.

  [>] When Ktə̀hαnəto was a boy: In 1579, the Portuguese mariner Simão Fernandes sailed along the coast of Maine, and in 1580 an Englishman named John Walker raided a camp, probably along the Penobscot, stealing three hundred dried hides.

  a great canoe: In September 1604, Samuel de Champlain visited the “Bessabez,” as he spelled the sagamore’s name or title.

  [>] skrælings: Though usually translated as “wretches,” the word may have a less pejorative meaning. Icelandic scholar Nancy Marie Brown notes that “skræ- seems to derive from skrá, ‘dried skin,’ particularly the kind of well-scraped and stretched dried skins on which books were written. This kind of skin is not so dissimilar to the leather used by Native Americans for clothing, making a Skraeling a
person dressed in leather clothes, as opposed to the Vikings, who wore woven wool and linen” (Brown 2007, 190).

  [>] By the summer of 1578: Turgeon 1998 notes that such eyewitness accounts would have overlooked ships out on the Grand Banks and inshore boats fishing along thousands of miles of coastline, suggesting that the true number could have been considerably higher.

  [>] “a Baske-shallop”: John Brereton, A Briefe and True Relation of the Discoverie of the North Part of Virginia, ed. Luther S. Livingston (1602; facs. ed., New York: Dodd, Mead, 1903), 4.

  “They spoke divers”: Gabriel Archer, The Relation of Captain Gosnold’s Voyage to the North Part of Virginia, 1602, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser. (Boston: Charles C. Little & James Brown, 1838), 7:73.

  Mathieu Da Costa: His name is also spelled Mathieu De Coste in French and Matheus de Cost in Dutch. He’s referred to as “een Swart genamd Matheu” (a black named Matheu) in one source (A. J. B. Johnston, Mathieu Da Costa and Early Canada: Possibilities and Probabilities [Halifax, NS: Parks Canada, 2009], www.canadachannel.ca/HCO/index.php/Mathieu_Da_Costa_and_Early_Canada,_by_A._J._B._Johnston). Da Costa wasn’t the only black interpreter along the Atlantic coast during this period; the Dutch also employed Jan Rodriguez in New Amsterdam along the lower Hudson in 1613–14.

  “the language of the coast”: Marc Lescarbot, quoted in Bakker, “The Language of the Coast Tribes,” 1989, 124. Bakker notes, however, that none of the Native words recorded by Rosier are of Basque origin, suggesting that the Wapánahkis Waymouth’s crew encountered were not themselves fluent in trade pidgin, which was more common to the north.