Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [85]
One incident—of many—captures the English attitude toward the native peoples. In the summer of 1675, a group of Indians traveled down the Saco River to the seacoast—their regular summer trip. They would swim, fish, dig clams and enjoy the cool sea breezes. Near the mouth of the river, they encountered English fishermen. A few of the Englishmen, on seeing the Indians in their canoes, began to speculate on the veracity of a belief among many of the European colonists that an Indian baby could not be made to sink. They laughed and argued about this and decided to make a test. There was an Indian woman in a canoe nearby with her child. Three Englishmen tipped the canoe. The baby sank and died. Now, it happened that this particular baby was the son of the tribe’s sachem, Squando. When he learned of his child’s death, and its cause, his grief and anger transformed into a rage that was unleashed on English homes and settlers up and down the Maine coast. And so it went. Squando’s rage, classical in its proportions and worthy of a treatment by Sophocles, merged with the more general Indian resistance to English encroachment along the Atlantic coast as far south as Rhode Island in a series of deadly clashes called King Philip’s War.
By 1690, the Massachusetts General Court was offering a bounty on dead natives. The bounty was collected by bringing scalps to Boston, and Indians who were captured were enslaved, kept by the English colonists or sent to the Caribbean for sale.
Indian genocide by our religious forebears proceeded relentlessly through the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Within biking distance of the cabin was a trace of this most shameful aspect of the nation’s history. In 1725, a group of Massachusetts men, led by a roughneck named John Lovell, traveled to Pequawket to kill Indians and collect scalps. They ambushed a group—men, women and children—and a battle ensued that ended pretty much in a draw. Lovell and some of his comrades (including a Harvard divinity student) were killed, but most of them escaped back to Boston, where they were regarded as heroes. In time, these men and their relatives were granted ownership of a big tract of land just north of Pequawket in recognition of their horrible deeds. That tract of land is now the town of Lovell, Maine. I buy my wine there at the Center Lovell Market. The site of what was once Pequawket is the grounds of an annual agriculture fair in the town of Fryeburg, and adjacent to the fairgrounds is Fryeburg Academy, which received a grant of land from the Massachusetts General Court in 1796 in appreciation of the early men of the region who cleaned out the “savage nation.”
By the middle of the 1700s, prior to the American Revolution, the Wabanaki were cleansed from the countryside. Nearly all of those who had survived retreated to St. Francis, Quebec, on the St. Lawrence River, where another bully by the name of Robert Rodgers took a group of English colonists and burned the village and slaughtered its inhabitants in 1749. These men were also rewarded with big tracts of land around Pequawket. All this is terribly ironical now. Beset as we now are by problems of pollution, global warming, diminishing natural resources and alienation from our environment, we can see that the native peoples offered a lesson in sustainable living and a reverence for God’s creation—one that would serve us well today. Theirs is a history worth recovering and celebrating.
But to bring this back to my siding and the white pine I was buying at Lovell Lumber: the native people not only were farmers, hunters and fishermen; they were also foresters. Their tool was fire, and they used it prodigiously. They burned the underbrush regularly to make travel and hunting easier and to encourage the growth of trees that they favored, especially nut-bearing trees. The