A HANDFUL of flint spears, crescent-shaped beads, knives, and arrowheads—these are the few remnants of a culture that flourished on the coast of Maine more than 5,000 years ago. Who produced these artifacts? We know almost nothing about these so-called “Red Paint People” except that the red iron oxide found in their burials has been traced to a single source on the slopes of Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest mountain.
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More recently relatively speaking, when Nero was Emperor of Rome, “Oyster Shell Man” roamed up and down the coast of Maine. These people were creatures of habit and lovers of feasting. Year after year, they returned to the same locations for their outdoor feasts, and the evidence is still here—enormous heaps of oyster shells, sometimes rising 25 feet high, lining the banks of rivers such as the Damariscotta. Do you suppose our own civilization will leave traces as joyful and innocent?
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The earliest European explorers of the coast encountered the “People of the Dawn,” the Abenaki Indians. The exploits of the Abenakis, as well as those of the French and English who struggled to maintain a toehold here, are chronicled in myriad volumes of Maine’s long history. Twentieth-century historical novelist Kenneth Roberts offered a paean to the Abenakis in his Arundel:
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“Little enough is known of them now, God knows, and most of that is erroneous; and I fear that in another hundred years the only memory of them will be the names they gave to ten thousand hills and headlands and bays throughout our eastern country.”
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By way of background and explanation, Roberts provided the following:
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“The Abenaki nation is a confederation of tribes living in the river valleys of our beautiful province of Maine, moving up the rivers in the autumn to hunt and gather furs, and down the rivers in the spring to fish and be cool. Between times they plant and harvest their crops on fertile spots along the rivers…
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“In the Merrimac Valley were the Pennacooks, who went early to Canada to live on the St. Francis River because of the manner in which white men crowded them. In the valley of the Saco live the Sokokis, the Abenakis who came to Arundel for the summer fishing. In the Androscoggin Valley are the Assagunticooks, and in the Kennebec Valley dwell the Kennebecs, sometimes called the Norridgewocks, because the largest of their towns is at Norridgewock on the Kennebec. To my mind the Sokokis, the Assagunticooks, and the Kennebecs are the finest of all Abenakis, just as the Abenakis are the finest of all Indians.
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“Farther to the eastward, in the Penobscot Valley and on the shores of Mt. Desert, which places have no equal for beauty in any of our provinces, live the Penobscots. Beyond them, along our wildest and foggiest shores, are the wigwams of the Passamaquoddies. All of these together, with the Micmacs of Acadia, which is also called Nova Scotia, form the Abenaki Confederation.
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“It has been one of the peculiarities of our colonists that they have never kept faith with Indians. They have either stolen their lands outright, or made the Indians drink and persuaded them to sell vast stretches of territory for a few beads and a little rum and a musket or two, and they have made treaty after treaty with them—treaties which have always favored the white men; and never has there been a treaty that white men haven’t broken.
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“Everywhere throughout New England the colonists lied to them, cheated them, robbed them—an easy matter, since the Abenakis are brought up from childhood to think that all their possessions are safe, that no locks or bars are necessary to guard them. In trade they are fair and honest. Nothing causes them greater astonishment than crimes white men commit in order to accumulate property.
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“For an Abenaki to tell an untruth to a friend except in jest or in the making of medicine, is accounted a crime. When an injury is done to one of them, all his friends make common cause against the guilty person. In friendship they are faithful and ardent, and grateful for favors, which never vanish from their memories; and if these be not returned in kind, then the Abenakis become contemptuous, revengeful, dangerous.
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“Because of these traits the English might easily have gained and held their friendship and had their assistance against the French. Instead of that, by insults, cruelties and constant frauds they early aroused the enmity of many of them and drove them over to the French; and the French, by flattery and fair dealing, made them into faithful friends…
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“It may be I shall be damned for saying so; but unless I have misread my Bible, I have found more Christianity and human kindness in…my Indian friends than in the venerated and violent Cotton Mather of Boston, who has declared in his writings that all red men are Scythians, and that the practicing of cruelties on them and the breaking of treaties with them are justified in God’s sight.”
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