In the Devil's Snare (11 page)
CHAPTER THREE
Pannick at the Eastward
SEPTEMBER 1675–JANUARY 1691½
THURSDAY, JUNE 27, 1689; Cocheco (Dover), New Hampshire. The seventy-four-year-old Major Richard Waldron, a magistrate and militia officer, had dealt with native peoples for almost five decades, and so he surely felt little alarm when about thirty members of the Pennacook and Saco bands of the Wabanaki people arrived unexpectedly at his trading post during the last week of June 1689. Scattered outbreaks of violence between Indians and settlers had marred the preceding nine months, but the “Company of young men” led by the sachem Kankamagus (also called Hawkins) informed the major that “a great number of Indians were not far from them with considerable quantities of beaver, who would trade with him the next day.” Waldron undoubtedly welcomed that news, for he had a reputation as a sharp dealer, perhaps even a cheat, in his commerce with the Indians.
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Others, though, already knew that he should be on the alert for trouble. Five days earlier, two Pennacooks had appeared at the home of a militia major in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, warning him that “damage will undoubtedly be done within a few days at puscataqua & that Major Walden in particular is Threatned.” The officer forwarded the information through proper channels, sending a messenger to Thomas Danforth, president of the province of Maine. On the morning of June 27, Danforth passed on the warning, urging that Waldron be given “speedy” notice of the threat. But by the time his message arrived at its destination, it was too late.
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That same day at Cocheco the visiting Pennacooks and Sacos were treated cordially; therefore, when some of the women, complaining of the “dull weather,” sought shelter for the night in the settlement’s garrisoned houses, they were allowed to sleep by the fires. After midnight, the women rose and opened the doors to the men outside, informing them of how many people lay in each chamber, and the men divided appropriately. Major Waldron, sleeping in an inside room, jumped out of bed when the men entered and— one of the attackers later recalled—“drove them out with his sword through two or three doors.” But a raider stunned Waldron by hitting him on the head with a hatchet. They then “hauled him out, and set [him] up upon a long table in his hall and bid him judge Indians again.” After they stabbed him numerous times, they “bid him order his book of accounts to be brought and cross out all the Indian debts.” The Wabanakis tortured Waldron until he died, burning his garrison and several other Cocheco houses as a final gesture of contempt and defiance. Twenty-three residents of the settlement died that day; twenty-nine were captured.
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THE FIRST INDIAN WAR
The Wabanakis targeted Major Richard Waldron in 1689 not only because of his notoriously duplicitous trading practices, but also because he had twice betrayed them during what everyone in the region called “the First Indian War”—that is, the conflict today most commonly referred to as King Philip’s War (1675–1678). Indeed, more than a decade after the 1689 Cocheco raid, the Wabanakis still kept alive the memory of Waldron’s perfidy in the mid-1670s. The Reverend John Williams, captured in 1704 at Deerfield, Massachusetts, recorded that some Jesuits he encountered in New France “justified the Indians in what they did against us, rehearsing some things done by Major Walden above thirty years ago, and how justly God retaliated them in the last war.”
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King Philip’s War, which began in Rhode Island and Plymouth Colony in June 1675, ended in southern New England soon after Philip’s death on August 12, 1676, but continued in the north until spring 1678. Historians generally agree that in the south the war’s origins lay in conflicts over land and Christian missionizing, as Nipmucks and Narragansetts joined King Philip’s (Metacom’s) Wampanoags in a prolonged struggle to maintain their cultural autonomy in the face of increasing Anglo-American encroachment.
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In northern New England, though, the sources of conflict in the mid-1670s are more obscure.
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In the sparsely settled region located beyond the Merrimack River—roughly the northern boundary of Massachusetts— Anglo-American villages lived in uneasy juxtaposition with similarly sized (even somewhat larger) villages of Wabanaki peoples. From Pemaquid in the north to the Piscataqua River in the south, English settlers had established fur-trading posts and fishing stations, along with farming communities of varying sizes. Most of the coastal English settlements lay between Casco Bay and Kittery, which was located on the northeastern shore of the Piscataqua, but one large trading and farming community had grown up further north, near the mouth of the Kennebec River. Dotting the coastline southward from Falmouth, on Casco Bay, to the Piscataqua were the towns of Black Point (Scarborough), Saco, Wells, and York. On the Piscataqua’s south shore in New Hampshire lay Portsmouth (or Strawberry Bank), the major northern port. Inland, up the river, were such communities as Cocheco, Oyster River (now Durham, New Hampshire), and Salmon Falls (now Berwick, Maine), the sites of large numbers of sawmills.
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Although the region was inhabited only by about 3,600 English people, its scattered settlements flourished before the mid-1670s. Exports of peltry, fish, and timber from the “eastward”—that is, Maine and New Hampshire— fueled the Massachusetts economy, providing the colony’s major source of income. In 1675, about 440 fishing boats operated off the coast between Boston and the Kennebec, employing perhaps a thousand men, and at least fifty sawmills each produced up to a thousand feet a day of white pine boards. The timber industry also supplied shipbuilders in the colonies and the home country with valuable masts and spars. One Bostonian pronounced “the Eastwards . . . the best Land in New England,” with “Good harbours” well-situated for fishing, and predicted that the settlers there “may Soone outdoe this people.” In large part because of such profitable potential, Massachusetts fought first to seize control of the region (originally governed by other proprietors) and then, after the mid-1660s, to maintain its dominance there. Northeasterners, many of whom were not Puritans, chafed at the authority of “the Bostoners” but simultaneously recognized the value of the protection that subordination to the Bay Colony afforded them.
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The Wabanakis in the region were most commonly identified by the name of the river valleys in which their villages were located: Sacos, Androscoggins, Kennebecs, Penobscots, and so forth. Such villages consisted of multiple groups of family bands organized around older men and their wives, children, and other relatives. The villages were simultaneously intertwined and autonomous; no single Wabanaki chief sachem ruled the whole, but sachems of the different villages were related to one another by blood or marriage, and they often cooperated in both peace and war. By the final quarter of the seventeenth century, the Wabanakis had become heavily reliant on the manufactured items they obtained by trading furs to the Europeans, French as well as English, who had moved into their territory. Vital as that commerce was to both peoples—for the settlers in the region needed the income they earned by selling furs in Europe as much as the Indians needed guns and knives—the fur trade nevertheless was a source of constant friction, for each side regularly suspected the other of cheating.
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The presence of French settlers and Catholic priests in the region northeast of Penobscot Bay complicated such commercial relationships, for English and French traders competed for the same pelts and moose hides. From the mid-1620s on, l’Acadie (as the French called the area) or Nova Scotia (as the English referred to it) changed hands repeatedly as the two nations struggled for preeminence along the northeast coast. After the 1650s Acadians—by the 1670s a mixed group of French, Scots, and Wabanakis— traded primarily with “les Bastonnais,” despite the fact that under the Treaty of Breda in 1667 France had once again regained control of the region. From the New Englanders’ perspective, the greatest threat to their well-being was posed by Jean Vincent d’Abbadie, Baron de Castine, whose headquarters at Pentagoet on Penobscot Bay (now Castine) was located dangerously close to their northernmost outpost at Pemaquid. Castine married the daughter of Madockawando, chief sachem of the Penobscots, and was an adopted Wabanaki, which made him all the more dangerous.
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Yet in all likelihood war would not have erupted in the region had it not been for the armed struggle between Indians and Anglo-Americans in southern New England. The Wabanakis, who would have preferred to remain neutral in King Philip’s War, found themselves pulled inexorably into the conflict by the demands of the opposing forces. On the one hand, the English distrusted their Wabanaki neighbors, making peaceful relationships nearly impossible to sustain during the southern war; on the other, the Wampanoags, Nipmucks, and Narragansetts sought assistance and shelter from their fellow Algonquians in the north, especially after the death of King Philip. In consequence, fighting began in the vicinity of Casco Bay in September 1675, lasting until what one contemporary termed a “patched up” peace was negotiated in the same place in April 1678.
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Trouble had actually started during the summer of 1675, when some sailors abused the wife of Squando, a Saco sachem, leading to the drowning of her young child. In July, Sylvanus Davis, one of the Kennebec traders, learning of the outbreak of war to the south, asked nearby Wabanakis to surrender their weapons to prove their commitment to peace. Some complied, but others resisted, on the grounds that they needed their guns for hunting. Both incidents angered the Indians. On September 9, a small band of Wabanakis attacked a farm outside of Falmouth. The next day Lieutenant George Ingersoll (Mary Walcott’s great-uncle) investigated the “great smoke” he had seen from the town, thereafter reporting to Andrew Alger that he and his men had found a house in ruins, with six people killed and three missing. The elderly Thomas Wakely and his wife were dead, “neer halfe burnt,” lying “halfe in, & halfe out of the house.” Their adult son had been shot and “his head dashed in peices”; their daughter-in-law, “bigg with Child,” had been scalped; and two of their grandchildren had “their heads dashed in peices, & laid by one another with their bellys to the ground, & an Oake plank laid upon their backs.”
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New Englanders were well acquainted with death, but not this sort of death. Women dying in or shortly after childbirth, babies failing to survive the first year of life, adults falling victim to fatal accidents or mysterious illnesses: all were familiar (if not always easily explicable) occurrences. Yet Ingersoll’s vivid description revealed that he and his small militia contingent had found the carnage at the Wakely farmstead truly horrifying. English settlers in northern New England had never experienced the like before. For their part, southern New Englanders would not have seen any similar sights for nearly four decades prior to 1675—not since 1637, when the Pequot War ended. Scenes resembling those Ingersoll depicted in such graphic detail would become all too common in the months and years that followed, but familiarity did not foster indifference. As later observations quoted throughout this book will demonstrate, New Englanders like George Ingersoll never grew accustomed to the violent death that seemed to emerge without warning from the forests, then to disappear quickly and unobtrusively whence it had come.
Lieutenant Ingersoll responded to the Wakelys’ deaths by requesting reinforcements, fearing that “a company of Indians” was still in the area. And his suspicions proved all too correct. In subsequent weeks, small bands of Wabanakis raided garrison houses and farms in Saco, Black Point, Salmon Falls, and elsewhere. (Andrew Alger and one of Ingersoll’s own sons were both among the more than fifty settlers killed.) By late October, a militia officer reported that “it is hardly imaginable the pannick fear that is upon our upland plantations & [people in] scattered places [are] deserting their habitations.” Not all the English settlers thought the Indians’ aggression unprovoked. Thomas Gardner, who ran the trading post at Pemaquid, told John Leverett, the governor of Massachusetts, that he attributed the assaults in part to “our owne Acttings.” Because “these Indianes Amongst us live most by Hunting,” he reminded Leverett, they needed their guns for subsistence. How then could the English legitimately have asked them to surrender their firearms? To clinch his point, Gardner observed that “these Indianes in these parts did never Apeare dissatisfied untill their Armes wear Taken Away,” warning that the Wabanakis would now probably turn to the French for aid.
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The autumn hit-and-run raids and the colonists’ attempts to retaliate ended with the early onset of especially heavy snowfalls that year. Over the next few months, the Massachusetts government dispatched to Maine companies of “country soldiers” to augment the inadequate regional militia forces. The troops, however, proved a mixed blessing to local residents and stimulated great controversy, especially in Black Point. There taxpayers later complained bitterly that they had not asked for the soldiers and had derived little benefit from their presence, yet they had nevertheless been required to pay the soldiers’ expenses. Even more galling, they explained, was the fact that the local commander, Joshua Scottow, who had moved to Maine from Boston a few years earlier, had used the men for his own personal gain, employing them to pave his yard, move his barn, and build a palisade for his property.
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Perhaps the soldiers stationed in Maine did serve to deter attacks, for the Wabanakis did not resume their campaign when good weather returned. (Or possibly they merely needed to tend their own crops and complete their usual spring fishing.) Governor Leverett reported in mid-June 1676 that “the Eastern parts have been & are quiet,” with Indians “coming in, professing they desire to bee at peace.” Even some “that have been active & had taken prisoners are come in, brought in theire captives & delivered them up freely,” he revealed, expressing his hope that such actions represented “reall” sentiments. Even so, he added, the authorities would “keepe a strict eye upon them.”
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Leverett’s caution appeared more than justified when the Wabanakis dashed expectations of renewed peaceful relations by launching a major assault on Falmouth on August 11. As was seen in chapter 2, thirty-four residents of the town, including many of Mercy Lewis’s relatives, either died or were captured that day. Although initially the survivors assumed that they would soon be able to return to their homes, later fighting in the region rendered that impossible, and Falmouth was abandoned for five years. Falmouth’s minister George Burroughs did not return until 1683, after a four-year stay in Salisbury and a difficult two years as pastor of the contentious parish at Salem Village.
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A few days after the assault on Falmouth, other Wabanakis raided the trading post at the mouth of the Kennebec. Frightened settlers abandoned settlements all along the coast north of Black Point. Thomas Gardner and other residents of Pemaquid, for instance, sought to escape from “the barborous heathen” by fleeing to Monhegan Island, whence they wrote to Boston to request a ship to carry away their many “distresed ffamilies.” Gardner, well acquainted with the Wabanakis, listed three sources for the renewed conflict. The “cheefest” was the influence of hostile natives “from the westwards” (by which he meant the southern Algonquians), but also important had been the Wabanakis’ lack of gunpowder the previous winter, which had caused many deaths, they “haveing nothing to kill food.” A final contributing factor was “the perfidious & unjust dealing of som English . . . who have Stollen Eight or Nine persones from the Indianes.” Gardner was referring to an incident in November 1675, when a Boston vessel under the command of William Waldron (a son of the major, armed with a formal commission from his father) had sailed to Acadia, nominally to trade but “principaly to take Indians.” Through subterfuge and force they had captured several groups of Wabanaki people, including a “Sagamore & his squaw,” then sailed to the Azores to sell them into slavery. Even though some of the perpetrators were subsequently arrested and tried in Boston, irrevocable damage was thereby done to Indian relations in the northeast.
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