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These federations comprise the tribes with which the
earliest colonists were brought directly in contact, and, consequently
in the pursuit of the subject in which we are particularly interested,
further mention of the Indians of New England will be limited for the
most part to them. In passing, however, a glance at some of the other
tribes whom Gookin groups as Abenakis or Tarrateens, will not be out of place.
Other writers apply the term Abenaki to a much narrower limit, confining
it to the
Micmacs of Nova Scotia, called Souriquois by the French, the
Abenaki, now called the St. Francis, in Canada, and the
Passamaquoddies
and
Penobscots of Maine, which four tribes or federations are said to have
called themselves not Abenaki, that being the name of one of them, but "Wabanaki,"
an Algonquin word meaning white or light, and believed to refer to the
fact that they were the first upon whom the light of the sun rested as he
started in his daily journey across the heavens.
The Micmacs, Passamaquoddies and Penobscots appear to have been extremely
rich in folklore, myth and legend, an
interesting collection of which was made by Charles G. Leland in 1884
under the title of "Algonquin Legends of New England." As one of the
sources of his authority for these legends and traditions, Leland tells us
that the Wampum Records of the Passamaquoddies were read for him by "Sapiel
Selmo, the only living Indian who had the key to them."
Whatever subdivisions may have existed among them, or
whatever federations made up of various closely related tribes; whatever
potency there may have been in their totemic bonds; whatever civil wars
may have rent them asunder, this fact we know, that from the time of our
earliest knowledge of this part of the world after the Saga of Thorvald,
until their practical extermination, all of New England was peopled by
tribes of this great Algonquin family. To attempt an enumeration of them
would be useless; their name is legion; and most of them are long since
forgotten, except as they have left their names indelibly stamped upon the
places they once inhabited, the mountains from whose summits their watch
fires burned as they surveyed from the lofty heights the country round,
and the streams upon whose silvery bosoms they paddled their light canoes.
A few of the more powerful tribes, or, in some cases,
federations, have made such an impress upon the life of the colonists,
with whom the history of America, as it is today, begins, that their names
and exploits have been handed down to us by the writers of that history;
and a remnant of what was once a proud and powerful people in some few cases
remains to remind their conquerors how futile were a he efforts of the
children of nature to withstand the onward sweep of a higher civilization
than they had ;attained. Among the latter are the Passamaquoddies, some
five or six hundred of whom still occupy a small portion of their ancient
hunting grounds in eastern Maine; the Penobscots, who in the early hart of
the seventeenth century occupied the beautiful valley of the river and the
shores of the bay from which time has not been able to efface their name,
and in which river two islands still furnish a home for the five or six
hundred remaining members of the tribe; and the Gay Heads, the descendants
of the tribe that under the Sachem Epenow, in the Pilgrims' time occupied
Capawack or Nope, now Martha's Vineyard, together with a few scattering
members of other tribes distributed throughout Massachusetts; to say
nothing of the few hundred descendants of the Mohicans who fought under
Uncas, and a like number in whose veins flows the blood of the warriors
who followed the three great Narragansett Chiefs, Canonicus, Miantonomo
and Canonchet.
Many of these have by intermarriage almost lost their
identity, and even those who still cling to the lands allotted to them by
the governments, are for the most part so crossed with other races that
they would not, in most instances, be recognized as the descendants of the
men our fathers found here three hundred years ago.
The Passamaquoddies and Penobscots are as much French
as Indian, and nearly all the natives of Massachusetts have mingled the
blood of the Indian with that of the African, Schoolcraft saying in 1850
that there were not more than seven or eight full blooded Indians among
the eight hundred and forty-seven in the state. Occasionally one meets a
family who would never be suspected of being anything but the purest
whites, but who boast the blood of the children of the forest.
Among the tribes that have left their names indelibly
stamped upon the localities in which they lived, but were not so closely
connected with the earliest settlements as to have been active
participants in the scenes enacted there, and consequently have not
received the particular attention of historians, and have left no
sufficient surviving remnant of their former strength to perpetuate their
memory through their posterity, one notes with interest the Kennebecs,
whose lordly river still flows down to the sea through their ancient
hunting grounds with the same calm and peaceful movement in the seasons of
low water, and the same torrential rush when the sun in his northward
travels unfetters its thousand feeding brooks and springs, as in the days
when the children of the forest dipped their dusky bodies in its cooling
waters; the Norridgewocks, who dwelt farther back towards the headwaters
of the same river, and whose name will not be forgotten as long as the
people of Norridgewock, Maine, tell their children that their town derives
its name from the Indians whose children listened to the folklore and
songs of their people at their mothers' knees on this same spot three centuries ago;
the Androscoggins who dipped their paddles noiselessly into the waters of
the noble river that now turns the wheels of hundreds of mills, but will
not allow the name of its first navigators to be sunk in oblivion; the
Piscataquas who dwelt about the place where now a government navy yard
gives shelter to men of war beside which the frail bark canoes of the
natives are as the fingerlings of the shore beside the leviathans of the
deep, and who have left their name upon the river that "widens to meet the
sea" at Portsmouth; and the Pemaquids, who little dreamed when they heaped
the shells of clams and other edible mollusks in huge piles along the
shore, that they were erecting a monument to themselves, to be gazed at in
wonder by generations of their destroyers; and whose name still clings to
the places they once roamed at will.
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Massasoit of the Wampanoags
Massasoit of the Wampanoags
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