Maine (Volume 1); A History (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE INDIANS OF MAINE By Fannie Hardy Eckstrom. [This chapter aims to give the general reader the information about the tribes, language, traditions, government and customs of the Maine Indians not easily accessible to him in books. It does not rehearse the details of border warfare and treaties, which may be found in all standard works.] When their resemblances are emphasized, rather than their differences, it is easy to understand the ethnological place of the New England Indians. Within historic times they have all been of the great Algonquin stock, whose nations, broken only by the great "islands" of the Sioux and the Iroquois, extended from the Blackfeet of the Rockies to the Boethuks of Newfoundland, from Hudson Bay to the Carolinas. All spoke languages essentially similar. Many of the words in Longfellow's "Hiawatha" are used by Maine Indians today, and Maqua, the word by which Cooper's Mohicans always called the Iroquois, is the word the Penobscot still uses when speaking of his once dreaded foe. Of the seven principal tribes in New England, three were crushed in open conflict with the English,?the Pequots, the Narragansetts and the Wampanoags (including the Pokanokets of Cape Cod), and three others,? the Massachusetts Bay Indians, the Quinnipiaks of New Haven and the Mohegans of the Sound,?either drifted westward or wore away insensibly. King Philip's War, in 1675, ended all acute dangers from the Indians of southern New England. But with the seventh division, the Eastern Indians, or Abenakis, it was only the beginning of almost a century of the bloodiest warfare in Indian history. From Deerfield to Haverhill, from Dunstable to Dover, from Berwick to the Penobscot was the frontier of all frontiers, held only by incomparable English steadfastness. ...