THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE

PEQUAKETS.

ITS CAUSES AND ITS RESULTS.

Read before the Maine Historical Society, May 21, 1890.

BY JAMES PHINNEY BAXTER.

It has been persistently asserted, and will be often re-asserted, that the frequent wars waged by the Indians upon the Maine colonists, were caused by cruel treatment on the part of the latter, and by their constant encroachments upon the huntinggrounds of the Indians, which threatened their subsistence; and sentimentalists, who imagine that impartiality requires them to admit the most questionable evidence against their own race, have carefully sought for wrongs against a people, whose very misfortunes tend to blind the sympathetic inquirer to their faults.

Doubtless individual acts of injustice were perpetrated, and doubtless more or less jealousy was cherished by the Indians on account of invasions by an alien people, of territory partly occupied by them; but these were insufficient to cause the extensive and protracted wars, which were waged against the colonists. during the close of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century.

It is a fact, that at this period encroachment upon their territory was too inconsiderable to cause the Indians great apprehension. Nearly all the continent outside of a portion of Massachusetts, north, east and west, was a vast wilderness, and though the English increased with considerable rapidity in a few localities, so vast was the territory-to the Indian mind illimitable — that this increase could have caused but little apprehension, though encroachment upon their land was one of their pretexts for war.

A more active cause of war, which had germinated in religious and race antagonisms, and which had been transplanted from the soil of the Old World, where it had long flourished, to the more stimulating soil of the New, may be more profitably studied.

There can be no doubt that the cruel wars which raged in Maine from an early period, especially during the two decades from 1688 to 1698 and from 1705 to 1713, and at various other times until 1759, and which inflicted terrible sufferings upon the colonists, were the result of French machinations.

Through the influence of the Jesuit missions, the eastern Indians had become close allies of the French, whose hostility to their English neighbors was ever active. At Pentagoet was the adventurous Castine, who exercised unlimited sway over his savage associates, and whose settlement so near them was regarded by the English as a constant menace to their peace.

1

After two years of warfare, a partial peace with the Indians was secured by the capture, in 1690, of Port Royal by Phipps,1 but this was only of short duration, and with the advent of Villebon to the governorship of Acadia, hostilities recommenced; indeed, Villebon was instructed by the French government to make it his principal object to wage war without ceasing, against the English, and to apply himself to the congenial task of animating the Indians "de chercher fairè du proffit sur les ennemis, and to make them feel that war against the English was more profitable than hunting.

Villebon, apparently delighted with his instructions, supplied the savages, who were eager for blood, with suitable weapons, and dispatched them against the infant settlements of Maine. One hundred and fifty Penobscot Indians, converts of Thury, the Jesuit priest, set out on this expedition, and were joined by a body of Indians from the Kennebec. Traveling on snow-shoes, the expedition reached York, which, in the early dawn, they attacked and destroyed; Dummer, the venerable minister of York, was shot dead at his door, and his wife subjected to the hardships of a captivity which she did not survive. One of the savages it is said arrayed himself in the clerical garb of the dead minister, and delivered a mock sermon to his howling associates.

1 Vide Collection De Documents, relatifs a l'Histoire de la Nouvelle France. Quebec, 1884. Vol. II. pp. 6-8, #Ibid, p. 83.

On their return from this expedition, the Indians were received by the French authorities with feasting and merry-making, and incited by stirring harangues to continue their warfare. Pentagoet, the headquarters of Castine, was made the base of another attack upon the English settlements, and here in the early summer the French leaders with the principal Abnaki chiefs and their followers assembled. Encouraged by former success in ravaging the scattered hamlets of the English, which Frontenac admits was "impossible of description," they set forward with savage glee to attack Wells.

But Wells, fortunately, had in Converse a hero, and though he had but thirty men with him, he defeated the most formidable force which had yet been sent over the French border. Villebon, as cruel as his savage allies, to raise their despondent spirits and stimulate their thirst for blood, gave them one of his English prisoners to burn, and does not seem to have been shocked at the inhuman tortures inflicted upon him. Aroused by their danger, it was resolved by the English to rebuild the ruined fort at Pemaquid, and under Phipps a structure of stone of considerable strength was erected, which served to check the ardor of the savages, who were always easily disheartened, and whose bravery was most conspicuous, when safe in ambush and against an unprotected foe.

A partial peace resulted, which Villebon, aided by Thury, strove zealously to rupture. Some of their chiefs, to impress them with the splendor and power of France were sent to the French court, where they were flattered, feasted and gaily apparelled, and were returned with pomp to their people to relate the wonders which they had beheld. The efforts of Villebon and Thury succeded in renewing the war, and under the leadership of Villebon another expedition against the English was organized. The savages were to strike a blow at the heart of New England and were instructed to give the English no quarter. Reaching the outskirts of Oyster River, now Durham, New Hampshire, they made an attack upon it before daybreak, and slaughtered men, women and children, as they endeavored to escape halfnaked from their beds.

After the massacre, the savages bearing their bloody trophies, were assembled by Thury to celebrate mass, after which the chief

1

Taxous set out on another raid "to knock people in the head by surprise," says Villebon, "which cannot fail to have a good effect;" indeed, says this writer, "even infants in the cradle were not spared." In this cruelty, the Jesuit Thury, we must believe was particeps criminis. In a letter to the Bishop of Quebec, the French minister, Ponchartrain, extolled his services in inciting the savages to war upon the English, and he urges, as a reward for his zeal, the bestowal upon him of a portion of the money which the government contributed to the support of the Acadian clergy: "une plus forte part sur les 1500 l. de gratification que sa Majesté accorde pour les ecclésiastiques de l'Acadie." 2

But the English were not to be swept from the earth as their enemies desired. With a courage nerved by necessity, they met the murderous bands sent against them by their fanatical neighbors, and drove them back defeated and disheartened.

There was a lull in the storm of war, but soon after the arrival of the English colonial Governor, Dudley, the French again began to incite the Indians to attack the English settlements. To prevent another war with its concomitant horrors, Dudley succeeded in assembling at Casco on the 20th of June, 1703, the principal Abnaki chiefs for the purpose of concluding a treaty with them. The Indians, however, instigated by the French, prepared a plot to surprise the governor and his assistants. In order to avoid suspicion they thought best not to appear at the council in too large numbers, but it was arranged that the chief of the Pequakets should arrive at the proper time with a large force, and at a given signal aid in consummating the plot. This treacherous design was frustrated by the non arrival of the Pequakets at the expected time, and by an occurrence, but for which it might, however, have been successful. It was the custom for the Indians and the English to join in a salute at the conclusion of certain ceremonies, and during the progress of negotiations, several salutes had accordingly been fired. The conclusion of the treaty was to be celebrated by a feu de joie, and at the proper moment, the English, by arrangement fired first. When the Indians fired it was discovered that their guns were loaded with balls, and it afterward transpired, that they had intended to turn upon the English and slaughter them, but that

1 Ibid. p. 158.

2 Ibid. p. 179.

owing to some misunderstanding many of their principal chiefs were mingled with the English, and their lives would have been jeoparded had this part of the plot been carried out.

Dudley and his associates returned home in safety, but the Pequaket chief soon arrived with two hundred Indians and Frenchmen, and without regard to the treaty, which had just been concluded, they fell upon the scattered settlements and destroyed young and old without mercy.

1

Thus began a war which raged with terrible fury for ten years, and which depopulated a large portion of Maine and filled New England with mourning. In the early part of the war, through the energy of Governor Dudley, who began an aggressive warfare upon the Indians, the success of the English appeared marked, and in the flush of enthusiasm, the governor wrote home, on April 23, 1706, "I am in a very good posture with my French and Indian neighbors by continual marches in the mighty Deserts. I have not left an Indian Habitation, nor a Planting Field undestroyed, so that the Indians are fled over to the French, and I have no damage; but am at great Cost to keep the field and Frontiers, but the assembly are very easy at the Charge: and perfectly satisfied at the expence of their money." He found ere long, however, that marches in the "mighty Deserts," and the destruction of Indian wigwams did not avail in bringing the war to a termination, and two years later he wrote in a different tone in which he said, speaking of the Indians: "Their Priests and Jesuits have gotten the command of all the Inland Indians and have Debauched the Indians of the Province of Mayn and by their late Trade and Discovery of the Messasseppi River have, in a manner made a Circle round all the English Colonys, from New England to Virginia, and do every year give the Governm'ts of New England very great Trouble." This was dated November 10, 1708. It had been preceded on the 20th of October by a memorial to the Queen, from the people, who were in great distress on account of the prolongation of the war, in which they advised the employment of the Mohawk Indians, as the only practical method of reaching their prowling enemy, and inflicting upon him a telling blow. "It's nothing," says this memorial, "Short of Twenty Years That your Majesties good subjects of this Prov

2

1 Vide Dudley's Letters in the office of the Public Records, London.

2 Ibid.