In the Devil's Snare (12 page)

Whether Kankamagus and his June 1689 retinue knew of Richard Waldron’s indirect involvement in these kidnappings fourteen years earlier is unknown, but he and his people were very well aware of the direct role the old trader had played in other reprehensible acts during the mid-1670s.

The first occurred in September 1676. Throughout the summer, as Governor Leverett remarked in June, Wabanakis and other Algonquians had gathered at Cocheco and other posts to demonstrate their peaceful intentions. The Pennacooks, who lived in the Piscataqua region, remained neutral during the first year of the war, and in early July 1676 Waldron confirmed that neutrality by negotiating a treaty not only with them but also with the Sacos and other Wabanaki villagers living as far north as Casco Bay. In the treaty, both sides promised to keep the peace; the Indians agreed not to assist or shelter combatants from the southern war. Major Waldron and his associates later admitted that they could not “Charge those that had made the Pease with any breach of Articles Save only that of entertaining our Southern Enemies.”
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Nevertheless, in early September Waldron hastened to comply with orders he received from Boston to capture all the Indians at his trading post, an unknown number of whom had trickled in from the south, both before and after King Philip’s death. The recent arrival of 130 soldiers from Massachusetts under the leadership of Captain William Hathorne (younger brother of the later Salem magistrate) allowed him to accomplish that feat by pretending to enlist the able-bodied men in the colonial forces. On September 6, as he informed his superiors,

I drew up the Indians at Cocheco upon the open Ground before my house under the Notion of takeing them out into the Service, such of them as I saw meet, upon assembled I made them eate & Drink, & then surrounded them with the Army & calling the chiefe Sagamores into the Center I told them what must bee don, only that the Innocent should not be damnified, they surrendered their Armes 20 in Number. we have taken 80 fighting Men & 20 old men, & 250 women & children[,] 350 in all.

When he dispatched the prisoners to Boston by ship, as the authorities had directed, Waldron advised the colony’s leaders to make distinctions among the captives, who included some Indians who “before the Pease had been very Active Against us but since have lived quietly & Attended Order.” According to the Reverend William Hubbard, a contemporary chronicler of the war, seven or eight of the captives were executed in Boston and another two hundred or so sold into slavery elsewhere. The rest, including the Pennacook sachem Wannalancet, were eventually freed to return home—and to remember how Richard Waldron had betrayed them and their families, for most of those sold, like most of those captured, must have been women and children.
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Frontier dwellers accurately predicted the consequences of Waldron’s deceit, anticipating “Suddain Spoyle” that would leave them “in a More danger[ous] Condision” than before. That was precisely what happened. While Captain Hathorne and his men sought (largely futilely) to engage the Indians in battle elsewhere, the Wabanakis attacked Wells, then the small settlement at Cape Neddick, and finally, in October, the Black Point fort itself. Joshua Scottow had gone to Boston to defend himself against charges of misappropriating the soldiers’ labor the preceding winter. In his absence, the inhabitants of the fort mounted only a feeble defense before slipping away by sea while their resident magistrate, Henry Jocelyn, negotiated with besieging Indians in the forest outside the fort. When Jocelyn returned to find the post deserted except for his own family, he had no choice but to capitulate. Brian Pendleton, the magistrate in Saco, reported that after soldiers stationed there learned of the loss of Black Point, “thay weare as mad to make away as ever I saw any men.” The fishermen, too, hurried to leave, “supposinge it noe boote to stay here against such a multitude of enemyes.” All the towns northeast of York and Wells then disintegrated, their residents dispersing primarily into various locations in Essex County. A lack of detailed records makes it impossible to trace the specific destinations of most of the refugees. Most likely, they relocated to towns where they already had friends or relatives.
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In the wake of these disasters, a November attempt to negotiate another treaty and arrange for the return of captives failed, and so in February 1676/7 Richard Waldron sailed northeast along the coast with militiamen from Maine and Salem (the latter under the command of Lieutenant Thomas Fiske) to attack the Wabanaki homeland and rescue captives by force or, failing that, to try once more to reach an agreement to end the fighting. After a series of frustrating meetings in different locations, Waldron managed to ransom three settlers. But fearing that the Indians intended to ambush him during one of their negotiating sessions, he again acted treacherously and struck first—under a flag of truce. One of the Wabanaki sachems was killed in the fighting; another, a “Notorious Rogue,” Waldron executed the next day. In the melee the colonists also captured Madockawando’s sister.
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Some months later, in early July 1677, a group of Wabanaki sachems excoriated Waldron’s perfidious actions in a message to the “governor of Boston” carried by a released female captive. “This is to let you to understand how major walldin served us,” they declared; “is that your fashing to com & m[a]ke pese & then kill us we are afraid you will do so agen Major Waldin do ly we were not minded to kill no body. . . . Major Waldin have bin the cause of killing all that have bin kiled this sommer.”
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The year 1677, indeed, lacked the long hiatus in fighting that had marked 1676. In mid-April, for example, Waldron recounted to his superiors recent losses on both shores of the Piscataqua. In the space of six days, two men had been killed at Wells and seven adults and children at Kittery, along with two men in New Hampshire. Seven captives had been taken but some were rescued or freed almost immediately. The Indians, he declared, “run Sculking about in Small parties like Wolves”; “wee have had parties of men after them . . . can’t Certainly say they have kil’d any of them.” Attempting to reestablish a presence on the coast, Massachusetts reoccupied the Black Point fort and sent a small company to the mouth of the Kennebec. The Indians then again attacked Black Point twice. In May, they were repulsed and their leader killed, but during another clash in June they inflicted heavy casualties on colonial forces.
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After the second Black Point battle, Governor Edmund Andros of New York decided to intervene by dispatching soldiers to Pemaquid. Bay Colony leaders distrusted Andros’s motives (in part because they suspected that Albany merchants had been supplying the Wabanakis with guns and ammunition) but could hardly object openly to his assistance, which was desperately needed. Resources were stretched so thin that “the Eastern Deputies” in the General Court asked their colleagues in June to order all refugees to return to Maine, and requested that “those that remaine may be comanded not to depart without licence from authoritie upon their perrill.” Furthermore, they urged that “those young men that are out of Imployment & not capeable of provideing for themselves may be Impressed into the service of the country.” Rumors that Castine had promised to aid the Indian alliance increased the anxieties of colonial officials.
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The war entered a unique phase when in June and July the Wabanakis targeted fishing craft as well as farms and trading posts. The Indians managed to take more than twenty ships, most of them from Salem, but in mid-July members of one crew overpowered their captors and sailed their ship into Marblehead harbor, where their arrival precipitated one of the most brutal episodes of the war. Filled with the families of captive fishermen and bulging with refugees, Marblehead gave the Indians an “angry” and “clamorous” greeting. A crowd at the docks asked the sailors “why we kept them alive and why we had not killed them.” Although informed that the fishermen hoped to receive some payment for the captives to offset their losses of gear and clothing, the Marbleheaders remained dissatisfied. Surrounding the men and their prisoners, a group of women “drove us by force from them,” James Roules later attested, and laid violent hands upon the captives, some stoning us in the meantime, because we would protect them, others seizing them by the hair, got full possession of them, nor was there any way left by which we could rescue them. Then with stones, billets of wood, and what else they might, they made an end of these Indians. We were kept at such distance that we could not see them till they were dead, and then we found them with their heads off and gone, and their flesh in a manner pulled from their bones.

He had recognized none of the women, Roules declared. But members of the mob had complained that if the Indians had been turned over to authorities in Boston, they would have been freed. The female rioters insisted that “if there had been forty of the best Indians in the country here, they would have killed them all, though they should be hanged for it.” No one could stop the murderers, Roules indicated, “until they had finished their bloody purpose.”
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Roules’s claim that he did not know any of the rioters is striking. The Marblehead fisherman might have lied to protect longtime acquaintances, or perhaps (as he said) the “tumultation these women made” had so confused him that he could not identify any individuals. But it is also possible, even likely, that James Roules really did
not
know them, and that instead of being local residents the turbulent women were among the many refugees who had flocked into Essex County from Maine the previous year. Under those circumstances—if they were indeed widows and bereaved mothers from the frontier—their vicious treatment of the Wabanakis exemplified their fury at the destruction of their homes and families.
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Both sides, then, felt enraged in July 1677. Superficially, there appeared little hope of reconciliation. Yet that month a group of Kennebec sachems took the first tentative steps toward ending the bloodshed. Insisting that “we are owners of the country & it is wide and full of engons & we can drive you out,” they nevertheless indicated that “our desire is to be quiet.” Although they complained to Bay Colony authorities that the Kennebecs had been “all way for peace” while “you allways broke the peace,” they asked to resume normal relations, proposed a prisoner exchange, and declared, “we can fight as well as others but we are willing to live pesabel.” We would like to trade with you, they said, “as we have done for many years we pray you send us such things as we name powder cloth tobacko liker corn bread.”
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Massachusetts responded positively to the overture, as did Andros’s men at Pemaquid. On July 17, Anthony Brockholst, the commander there, reached agreement with the Kennebec sagamores, including Moxis. Both sides concurred in ceasing all hostile acts and releasing all captives. The Wabanakis agreed to return the fishing vessels they had taken and to subject themselves to English law. If people on either side caused injury to those on the other in the future, the combatants decided that aggrieved parties should apply for relief to the appropriate authorities (settlers to the sachems, Indians to the magistrates) instead of seeking revenge directly. In August, first Squando (who initially rejected the treaty) and then Madockawando accepted the same terms in further negotiations conducted at Pemaquid in the presence of Joshua Scottow. Yet despite the evidently successful agreement, sporadic violence continued for months, in part because Massachusetts officially refused to acknowledge the validity of a treaty signed by Andros’s representative, and in part because Wabanaki sachems disagreed among themselves over the benefits or drawbacks of a peace accord. A final treaty, with broader provisions than the first, was eventually signed at Casco in April 1678.
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THE SECOND INDIAN WAR BEGINS

Hostilities between the Anglo-Americans and the Wabanakis erupted again just ten and a half years later. In the interim, former residents returned to Maine’s frontier and new settlers flocked in. By 1688, not only was the region between Wells and Falmouth fully resettled, but new towns were also being established to the northeast of Casco Bay. As the size of the population and the area of settlement expanded, the colonists increasingly ignored elements of the Casco accord the Indians regarded as vital: a requirement that settlers pay a “yearly Tribute of Corn,” that they respect the Wabanakis’ fishing rights on the Saco River, and that they not open new lands to settlement unless those lands had first been properly purchased. If the underlying friction that helped to instigate the First Indian War stemmed from the fur trade, that which underlay the second came rather from conflicts over growing numbers of land grants issued by Bay Colony authorities without regard to Indian claims to the soil.
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Although rumors of possible Indian plots against resettled frontier communities emerged in early 1682 and again two years later, reports of “surly” Indians actually threatening the residents of Maine appeared only in January 1687/8 and thereafter. On August 6, 1688, several Sacos fired on settlers’ cattle ravaging their cornfields, initiating a confrontation that ended with “verey threatning words to the English of Shooting them.” The first deaths of settlers, though, occurred in western Massachusetts, when in mid-August Indian raiders from French Canada slew some members of English families living in the upper Connecticut Valley.
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Taken together, the two evidently unconnected and widely separated incidents in August 1688 set off a panic in Massachusetts and on the Maine frontier. Wild rumors about 200—or 700, or 2,000—local Indians gathering at Pennacook with French officers and French Indians to “consult about a war with the English” flashed through the countryside. Gossipers were assured that “all the Youngmen were for fighting against the English, but the Elder men did oppose them,” that “they have erected A Fort of four Acres of Ground,” even that “credible persons” had intimated that “some of our owne Gentlemen” had a “hand in this evil designe” because “it is not for the Kings Interest” that New Englanders control the colony. That last insinuation would bubble to the surface again and again during the next nine months, for Bay Colony residents deeply resented the fact that their original charter had been abrogated in 1684 and their colony subsequently incorporated into the larger Dominion of New England. In particular, they intensely distrusted Sir Edmund Andros, the autocratic former governor of New York named to head the dominion by King James II.
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Andros, who had had considerable experience in dealing with Native Americans in New York and who had intervened in Maine affairs in 1677, was absent as fear increasingly gripped northern New England. He and some of the members of the Dominion’s governing council had gone to New York at the end of July; other councilors were away from Boston. In their absence, the remaining council members—evidently Joseph Dudley, William Stoughton, John Usher, and Samuel Shrimpton
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—ordered military supplies sent to the frontier and directed local militia commanders “to take and destroy all [Indians engaging] in acts of hostility and to seize all suspected persons,” even those who offered no resistance. Captain Benjamin Blackman of Saco responded by ordering the arrest of twenty Wabanakis. Although the group included Hope Hood (an Androscoggin leader) and “the Donys” (father and son sachems of the Kennebunks), most of the captives were women and children.
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What happened next might best be termed a tragedy of errors. Having seized the Indians, Maine’s military and political leaders did not know what to do with them. First the small group of prisoners was shipped north to Falmouth. There Edward Tyng, the local magistrate, decided that the captives should instead be transported south to Boston. In early September, small groups of Wabanakis, mystified by these moves, inquired at several different houses in Maine “why Capt Blackman tooke the Indians att Saco & sent them away”; at one, asking if Governor Andros had issued the order for the arrest, they were told perceptively that since Andros was in New York, the whole affair was likely “onely Blackmans folly.” No matter: fearing for the safety of their kinfolk, the Wabanakis captured sixteen English settlers from scattered locations along the coast to hold as hostages for the return of their people. Faced with a quickly escalating crisis, the councilors in Boston decided to dispatch the captive Indians north to Falmouth once more, authorizing their associate William Stoughton to negotiate a general prisoner exchange. For reasons that remain obscure, Stoughton failed to make contact with the Wabanakis, and on September 19 he sailed back to Boston, leaving the captives in Falmouth under Tyng’s control and still on shipboard. That very day the first blood was shed. On an isolated point of land in Casco Bay a small party of Indians holding some of the English prisoners encountered an equally small group of settlers. They skirmished, and in the aftermath of the fight “the youngmen” among the Wabanakis killed four of their captives. “Egeremett the Sachem Seemed to be troubled att” that action, one of the surviving English prisoners later observed. Edgeremet, a Kennebec sagamore, had good reason to be concerned. A war that would last until 1699, and which would devastate both Indian and Anglo-American communities of Maine and New Hampshire, had begun.
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When Sir Edmund Andros at last returned to Boston from New York in mid-October, he found “a Pannick feare” prevailing throughout northern New England. By then, two troops of militia had been raised to serve under Edward Tyng’s command in Falmouth; the Casco Bay village of North Yarmouth had been attacked and temporarily abandoned; more settlers and militiamen had been killed; and Tyng had shipped all but one of the Indian captives back to Boston yet again.
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Andros, who had visited the eastern settlements in the late spring, had plundered Castine’s outpost at Pentagoet, and had left that region “in great Peace” in May, was astonished and infuriated by the chaos precipitated in his absence. He reported acidly to London that he had made the councilors “Sencible of the Unadvised Seizeing of Indians & their Raiseing & Sending fforces without Authority.” After criticizing his subordinates’ actions in no uncertain terms, he set about trying to repair the damage he believed they had caused.
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As a first step, the governor ordered the much-traveled prisoners freed, they “being Charged with noe particuler Cryme.” Expecting—or at least hoping for—reciprocity on the part of the Wabanakis, he issued a proclamation calling on them “to Release all Christian Captives” and requesting that the Casco Bay settlers’ murderers be turned over to Massachusetts authorities. He also ordered the outfitting of several vessels that could be used to protect Maine’s valuable fishing outposts.
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Andros’s efforts came to naught, as the Wabanakis responded to the proclamation by attacking additional settlements northeast of Casco Bay. The governor then led a 600-man army in a winter campaign against the enemy, and, although he never encountered the Wabanakis directly, he subsequently boasted that his efforts had “reduced [them] to great Extremityes” by destroying their food supplies. But Andros’s opponents later offered a very different interpretation of his actions. His winter campaign had been overly costly and “ineffectuall.” What precipitated the war was not Blackman’s seizure of the Wabanakis but instead Andros’s raid on Pentagoet, which had invited retaliation by the Indian allies of the French. Andros had then compounded the problem by not hurrying back to Boston when informed of the outbreak of hostilities. His opponents “particularly Objected” to the release of the Indian prisoners, “some of them knowne Enemies to the English, . . . without any Exchange of our English Captives then in the Enemies hands.”
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Many New Englanders, indeed, expressed outrage at the governor’s order freeing the Wabanakis captured at Saco. Sylvanus Davis, who had relocated from the Kennebec to Falmouth when Maine was resettled, complained that the men had been “Cruell mordrous Rogs in the first Indian war”; it was, he emphasized,
“very straing that a govnor shoold bee soe Carless of his majestys
subjects & Intrest.”
He and others hinted darkly that Sir Edmund Andros, from the Isle of Jersey and “of a French extract, so in the French interests,” had had “Sinister designs . . . as to our Troubles with the Indians”; perhaps, Davis wrote, Andros had planned his winter campaign “to impovrish this country.”
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Throughout the winter of 1688–1689, after the Wabanakis’ release, New Englanders told each other tales of Andros’s supposed complicity with their enemies in the war. Most of these stories were reputed to have originated with individual natives: “Solomon thomas Indian . . . [said that] when the fight shoold bee att East ward the governor woold sit in his Wigwam and say o brave Indians”; “John James Indian of his owne volontary mind say[d] that the govornor was a Rouge and had hired indians to kill the English”; another Wabanaki declared that “the Governor had more love for them the Indians, then for his Majesties Subjects the English.”
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The anti-Andros tales did not end with such rumors; two former soldiers, for example, deposed that during the winter at his Pemaquid fort Andros had given powder and shot to the sister of Madockawando and the wife of Moxis. One added that the men in the fort afterwards “did very much Question among themselves wheither Sr Edm: Andros did not Intend the Destruction of the English Armie, and brought them theither to be a sacrifice to their heathen Adversaries.”
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Were the two soldiers telling the truth? Probably. Andros could have been making a friendly gesture toward the sachems he still hoped to conciliate. As events early in King Philip’s War had shown, northern Indians now depended on guns for hunting, and without gunpowder and bullets they could not kill the game that provided much of their food during the winter. As a result of Andros’s destruction of their stores, the Penobscots found themselves in dire straits for lack of food by late in the season. A timely gift of bullets and gunpowder, Andros could well have concluded, might work to his long-term advantage by easing tensions and paving the way for renewed negotiations. In practical terms, it might also prevent the Wabanakis from raiding English settlements in search of food.
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Were the rumors of Andros’s treachery true? Surely not—but that New Englanders found them compelling, and that they were so pervasive, is revealing. The gossip disclosed an exceptional level of distrust of the colony’s leadership. In the spring, such fears contributed significantly to the movement that turned Andros out of office during the Massachusetts phase of the Glorious Revolution. Boston’s merchants and political leaders acted against Andros on April 18, 1689, even before they received definite word that James II, Andros’s patron, had been replaced on the throne by William of Orange and his wife Mary (James’s Protestant daughter). A traveler from the West Indies had recently brought fragmentary information implying that such a change had occurred, but the Bostonians would not have official notice of the alteration in the English monarchy until late May. Yet they nonetheless ousted Governor Andros a month after his return from Maine. According to one of the governor’s partisans, his overthrow resulted from “many foolish and nonsensicall storys” that he was “confederated with” the French and Indians, and that “the Indian war was but a sham, for hee design’d noe evil to the Indians, but the destruction of the Country.” Those tales had “miserably distracted” New Englanders, he wrote, making them believe that Sir Edmund was their “great Enemy.”
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The uprising against Andros by prominent Bostonians had disastrous consequences for Maine residents.
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As news that the governor had been deposed and arrested spread to the northern posts, the militiamen pressed to serve in Andros’s forts and garrisons deserted in droves. Not that they needed to: as one of its first acts, the new “Council for Safety of the People and Conservation of the Peace” ordered Edward Tyng and the other Maine magistrates to reduce the size of frontier garrisons immediately and to dismiss the officers in charge, who, along with Andros, were suspected of communicating with “the french & eastern Indians in order to the destruction of New England.”
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Chaos ensued. One beleaguered commander still at his post reported that the Wabanakis were saying that the Massachusetts authorities “doe intend to Slight and Disowne these Esterne parts.” If true, he observed, that news would cause people to “leave theire habitations and Stocks and Desartt the Country.” Frontier communities that had previously complained of the cost of supporting Andros’s garrisons—and of the constant militia service to which they were subjected—now wondered how they would be defended if the Indians chose to act. The residents of Saco did not have long to wait for an answer. Just three days after the toppling of Andros’s regime, eight or ten Wabanakis, “sundry of them well known” in the town, launched a surprise attack. They burned two houses and wounded five or six people. The next day they moved on to nearby Cape Porpoise, burning a house and killing one man. On April 25 the leaders of Wells informed “the Superior Power now in being in Boston” that inhabitants of the two communities had been forced to flee to a garrisoned island, “where they remaine in a deplorable case, and are subject to starving, or murder, or both if speedy succor be not afforded.”
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That “Superior Power” consisted initially of such Dominion councilors as Wait Winthrop and Bartholomew Gedney, and the man they quickly designated as governor: the elderly Simon Bradstreet, the last elected to the post before the charter was abrogated in 1684. Eventually, the councilors reasserted the validity of the old charter, held elections under it in the spring of 1690, and operated the government on an ad hoc basis (with Bradstreet continuing as governor) until the new charter issued by William and Mary was implemented in May 1692. Bradstreet and the council, in other words, had to confront the war on the Maine–New Hampshire frontier at the same time they were attempting to consolidate their authority over the Bay Colony itself.
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