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By Root 436 0

in stands that would remind us today of the California redwoods. There were other big trees, chestnuts and walnuts, but the most majestic of all were the white pines. A single giant pine would have provided enough wood to build three or four of my cabins. The forest then was a kind of primeval parkland—an Eden for the people who lived there. These people, the Algonquin nations to the south and the Abenaki to the north, were in part responsible for the character of the forest. The history of the forest and the New England landscape was tied up in the customs of the native peoples.

There had been an Abenaki settlement about twenty miles from my hillside until the early 1700s. It was called Pequawket, and it was the picture of small-town life in America for a thousand years before the swarm of Europeans. Of course, America was not yet America then: the people who lived there called it the Dawn Land. A few hundred people, of a group called the Wabanaki, lived at Pequawket in small permanent homes, made of woven sticks and covered with branches and bark. They were farmers as well as fishermen and hunters, and they lived peaceably among themselves, the community governed by consent of the village’s residents. They spent their summers, as extended families, at the seacoast. They valued relationships and grieved terribly when a child died, painting themselves black when a death occurred. They abjured wealth, which was a burden to them because it meant weight; and to be fleet was to be free. They liked to move lightly through the forest in their moose-hide moccasins. They had a reverential relationship with the land, believing it was inhabited by spirits. They lived on the land but did not think of themselves as owning the land. They passed a leisurely sort of life, as befit an Eden, which drew on the abundance around them: fish, game, corn, squash, beans, nuts, berries. A Jesuit priest who had observed the native peoples of the region, wrote: “Never had Solomon in his mansion been better regulated and provident with food . . .”

And so the native people lived until (by the European calendar) the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. At about this time, they began dying off in catastrophic numbers from horrific unknown (to them) diseases for which they had no resistance. Typhus, chicken pox, pneumonia, influenza, yellow fever, hepatitis, dysentery, plague, smallpox—the diseases took up to three-fourths of the entire native population. The only explanation the natives had for the deaths was spiritual. Somehow, they had transgressed. Close behind the deaths, like thunder following lightning, came the Europeans themselves, the source of the disease. In the case of the Pequawkets and other tribes of New England, they came as the English, who were building a religious and mercantile colony at Massachusetts Bay. These English people came first to the Indians as traders, seeking furs, especially beaver, which the people of Pequawket were adept at capturing. The commercial engagement with the English was fine with the Pequawkets and the others: they enjoyed the trade and exchanged their furs for tools, cloth, and ultimately guns and alcohol. But later, as the English colony began to outgrow its first perimeters, the English came as settlers, building homes and bringing with them their livestock. The English as permanent residents presented the native people with countless problems. They blocked the streams and their livestock were allowed to wander, playing further havoc with fish-filled waterways and sometimes getting caught in Indian deer traps or causing other mischief. Even the idea of keeping livestock was anathema to the native spiritual beliefs and practices, which bestowed a kind of equality on all forms of life.

Conflicts inevitably arose. The Indians pushed back on the English trespass, and the English returned the push—with force. The English believed they had a right, by God’s command, to the wild land. It was improvident to leave these places to the native peoples. It was the Puritan mission to bring civilization