Maine History

1668-1774 Settlement & Strife

By the middle of the 17th century, the Abenaki were living in a nightmarish
landscape shaped by conflict, disease, and alcohol, and they turned to the
missionaries for help and reassurance. After the cessation of hostilities in
Europe, the 1713 Treaty of Portsmouth quickly brought peace to the Maine
frontier. By this time, it was apparent that English population expansion
would engulf southern Maine and most Indians in the area withdrew to the St.
Lawrence settlements. The century before the American Revolution was
marked by a series of destructive wars between Natives and Europeans that
kept Maine – the frontier between New France, New England, and the Abenaki
homelands – in constant turmoil.

The tensions were local – disputes over control of land and resources – and
international. France, Spain and Great Britain engaged in numerous wars.
Most were economic in nature with the European powers seeking to control
both territory and resources to expand their economic power. Religion also
played a part in these struggles. The Europeans viewed control of North
America as crucial to their economic and political success and fought for
territory and colonies in the New World. Even the wars that were largely
centered in Europe often spilled-over into North America.

Tensions between the native population and Europeans began as early as the
first European arrivals. In 1525, Estevan Gomez raided Nova Scotia and
Maine and took some 58 surviving Indians back to Spain, and subsequent
explorers, whalers, fishers, and traders continued this practice into the 18th
century. Early fishing settlements and trading posts further poisoned the
relation between native and newcomer. Walter Bagnall was killed on
Richmond Island in 1631, for instance, for repeatedly cheating his clients,
and when John Winter arrived in 1632, he found the Indians so unfriendly he
abandoned hope of trade.
Indians, on the other hand, suspected that English colonials brought on the
terrible recurring epidemics, and they found it difficult, under their own
political system, to rein in those who wished vengeance for trading abuses,
land grabs, murders, and enslavements. Fluctuations in the price of furs left
the impression that all whites cheated them, and as the Wabanaki became
more dependent on European guns, ammunition, and commodities, fur-trading
– and its abuses – became an increasingly desperate matter. A heritage of
mutual suspicion soured relations between Indians and whites in Maine.

Effects of European Rivalries

Rivalries between France and England in the New World further strained
Indian-white relations. Most of the wars in colonial North America followed
upon conflicts in Europe, and although Maine's Wabanaki did their best to
remain aloof from these foreign quarrels, they were inevitably drawn into the
maelstrom. Still, they entered these wars for their own reasons, maintaining
a political independence that both French and English officials refused to
respect.

French or English alliances with various tribes exacerbated ancient feuds

and created new conflicts, and as the devastating plagues swept through the
villages, these alliances were again disrupted; those who survived regrouped
and exacted tribute from more debilitated or less powerful neighbors. Was
the outcome of these wars inevitable? European advantages included a
technology based on metal and gunpowder and expertise with capitalist
relations. While Indians clung to a culture disordered by plague and constant
demographic movement. Indians, however, enjoyed an advantage in logistics
and tactics.

Most of Maine's 6,000 English settlers were dispersed in "ribbon"

settlements strung out along the coast or lower rivers, almost impossible to
defend militarily. The English clung to what early historian William Hubbard
called the "sea-border," considering the unfamiliar woods behind them "a
great Chaos, the lair of wild beasts and wilder men." This, of course, was
familiar territory to the Abenaki who could traverse the woods and waters,
wait for an opportune moment, raid, and scatter. Indian tactics – sudden
attack and withdrawal – prevailed against a people with little wilderness
experience and a history of open-field combat.

However, these tactics were designed for short wars or raids to avenge
particular wrongs or insults. Given their subsistence regimes and their
limited capacity for storage, Indians simply did not have time to wage a
protracted war, and when English militia began destroying their corn fields
and blocking access to traditional hunting, fishing, and foraging grounds,
Indians were powerless to resist.

English victories also depended on alliances with other Indians; particularly

the Iroquois-Mohawk. While the Wabanaki's French allies were relatively
weak south of the St. Lawrence. By the 1670s, New England contained
about 50,000 inhabitants, and New France about 10,000, and there were
fewer than a thousand French inhabitants in Acadia. Most important were
England's pathogenic allies – the plagues that swept through the Indian
villages beginning in 1616 - killing more than 75 percent of the inhabitants
and leaving the rest weakened culturally, spiritually, economically, and
militarily.

The Wabanaki made alliances with the French through the fur trade, and here
the French had a decided advantage over the English. Fur trading
relationships were based on mutual respect nurtured carefully over years. In
their 1604-1605 voyage to the Gulf of Maine, Sieur de Monts and Samuel
Champlain mastered the tricky diplomatic exchanges that involved ritual gift
exchanges, speeches, banquets, dances, and songs, and tribal alliances, and
by the early 1600's, French adventurers had the upper hand in relationships
with Wabanaki north and east of the Kennebec.

Since no New England river offered the trading advantages of the St.
Lawrence, and since southern New England Indians grew crops more than
they hunted, English colonists were less interested in the fur trade. For the
French, Indians were the essence of empire. For the English, they were
obstacles to an agricultural empire fashioned after the English countryside.

French missionaries also were more successful than their English

counterparts. They lived in the Indians' villages, knew their spiritual needs,
and benefited from the cultural disruptions brought on by war and plague.
By the middle of the 17th century, the Abenaki were living in a nightmarish
landscape shaped by conflict, disease, and alcohol, and they turned to the
missionaries for help and reassurance. Catholicism was something of a
compromise with traditional religion; just as European trade was a
compromise with native material culture. English missionaries were less
interested in compromise and generally lacked the ability to use religion to
cement military alliances.
Despite the inadequacies of English diplomacy, Indians became increasingly
dependent on their trade goods. The epidemics disrupted oral
communication and accelerated the loss of traditional hunting, fishing, and
gathering skills. As Indians narrowed their economic focus, their
involvement in the fur-trade took on a desperate tone. Tensions increased in
the mid-1640s when truck houses began selling hard liquor. As beaver
populations declined, Abenaki interjected themselves as intermediaries in
the trade with tribes further west, resulting in a series of violent clashes
known as the "Beaver Wars." These conflicts, involving tribes from Cape
Breton Island to the Chesapeake and as far west as the Great Lakes,
eventually yielded new alliances that turned the Abenaki against the English.

King Philip's War

By 1670, Indian frustration with trade abuses, land encroachments, rum
dealing, and free-roaming English livestock in their cornfields was mounting.
Sensing these tensions, in fall 1674, English officials banned trade of shot
and powder to Indians. The Abenaki suffered severe food shortages during
the following winter, and some fled to Canada seeking French aid.

In summer 1675, war broke out in southern New England between Pilgrims
and Wampanoags led by King Philip, or Metacomet, and the war strained
relations all through New England. Relations between French "Papists" and
Indian "heathens" fueled English fears that all Indians were conspirators of
King Philip, and with war raging to the south, the General Court sent
commissioners to Maine trading posts to enforce the ban on arms. English
scalp hunters, given a bounty to hunt Indians south of the Piscataqua, no
doubt crossed the river into Maine as well.

Madockawando, the chief sagamore on the Maine coast, withdrew to the

Penobscot where French traders at Pentagoet and Port Royal provided
muskets and shot. In July, magistrates met with local Indians to encourage
neutrality, but later that summer British sailors accosted the wife and child
of Squando, a sagamore among the Saco River Abenaki, and overset their
canoe to test the theory that Indian babies could swim from birth. The baby
died, and as native law required, Squando sought revenge on white settlers.

In September, a party of 20 Indians robbed a trading house belonging to

Thomas Purchase at Brunswick. Purchase's neighbors pursued the raiders
up the New Meadows River surprising and killing one, and the resulting
skirmish was the first battle of King Philips War in Maine. In Falmouth,
members of the Wakely family were tomahawked and two children carried
away as captives, and throughout the fall, Indian bands continued raiding
English settlements from Saco to Casco Bay. With no knowledge of the
interior, militia and settlers alike were forced to "huddle together in danger
of being shot down," until winter snows and lack of ammunition restricted
Indian military movement.

At a conference in Pemaquid in 1676, English officials gained an uneasy

armistice that lasted until several Indians were kidnapped nearby and
carried off as slaves. Indians insisted on powder and shot, and English
negotiators refused demanding that the Abenaki admit blame for the war and
join in attacking other hostile tribes.

That summer, Abenaki and their allies, including Micmacs and remnants from
King Philips' troops, attacked settlements eastward to Cushnoc on the
Kennebec moving from cabin to cabin in swift raid-and-retreat maneuvers. In
August, the well-established trading post at Arrowsic fell in hand-to-hand
combat. The fort, mills, mansion house, and outbuildings were burned.
Later that fall, the Pemaquid settlement was destroyed as Indians cut off
access to the neck of land separating men in the fields and fishing boats
from women and children in the village. With no alternative but to return to
their homes, the men regained the fortress, but many were killed or taken
prisoner.

Settlers fled to the nearby islands and watched as the "whole circle of the
horizon landward was darkened and illuminated by the columns of smoke and
fire rising from the burning houses of the neighboring Main." After a month,
they sailed south. In the course of five weeks, 60 miles of coast east of
Casco Bay had been wiped clean of English settlements.

Hardships were equally severe on the Abenaki side. Families fled their
villages, leaving fields unharvested. Denied access to their guns,
ammunition and fishing grounds, many starved. Despite overtures for peace
on both sides, seafaring slavers continued to murder and kidnap along the
coast, and in September 1676, Major Richard Waldron invited 400 Indians to a
conference at Dover, New Hampshire, and used the occasion to enslave
around 200. In February, Waldron led an expedition eastward to ransom
English captives and capture Madockawando. Although he failed on both
accounts, he managed to kill eight peace-seeking Indians at Pemaquid.
In 1678, the provincial government of New York, which controlled Maine
between 1677 and 1686, signed the Treaty of Casco. According to its terms,
the Abenaki recognized English property rights but retained sovereignty over
Maine - symbolized by an annual land use tax for every English family. The
treaty also stipulated closer government regulation of the fur trade.

In 1686, Sir Edmund Andros, appointed governor of the Dominion of New

England, took charge of Indian relations. Although widely resented as a
representative of the Catholic King Charles, Andros acted decisively to
regulate the fur trade in a manner that would ensure fair prices and protect
native clients from abuses. Pemaquid was designated the sole trading post
between the Kennebec and Penobscot rivers, and ammunition was traded
only in amounts deemed necessary for hunting.

Despite fresh memories of a horrible conflict, settlers refused to abide by the

terms of the Treaty of Casco. Traders continued unfair practices. Settlers
placed nets across the Saco River preventing fish from migrating upriver to
the Wabanaki villages, and livestock ruined Indian corn. Negotiations and
further treaty attempts were not successful and confrontations continued.

King William's War

During King William's War (1689-1699), Comte de Frontenac, the aggressive
governor general of New France, launched a campaign to conquer all of
North America. A large force of French and Indians drove the English from
the settlements east of Falmouth. Baron de St. Castin, who lived with his
family in a village of 160 Etchemin Indians on the Bagadauce River near
present-day Castine, became a target for militia raids. He helped launch a
series of attacks on Maine settlements in the summer of 1689. The major
event of the war came in September 1689 when 200 Norridgewock,
Penobscot, and Canada Indians converged on Peaks Island In Casco Bay and,
on September 20, attacked the Back Cove settlements. Major Benjamin
Church arrived by sloop at sunrise at Fort Loyal, and after a "fierce fight"
drove the Indians from the area.

Exhausted by war and discouraged by French ambivalence, in 1693, the

Abenaki sued for peace, but the English refused to negotiate on realistic
terms. This brought another round of attacks on English settlements in 1694.
The English at Fort William Henry, built under the authority of Governor Sir
William Phips in 1692 at a huge cost, fell to a force of Canadian-based
Abenaki in August 1696. The English once again abandoned the lower
Kennebec. Massachusetts counterattacks against Port Royal and Quebec
were largely ineffectual - as were several raids up the Kennebec and
Penobscot rivers.

France and England concluded a peace in 1697, and in 1699 the Wabanaki
agreed to a treaty. In 1698 Father Sebastien Rasle (also spelled Rale or
Rasles) built a mission at the Indian village in Norridgewock on the upper
Kennebec River, and this became a center for French-Indian interaction. With
the coast east of Wells nearly devoid of English settlers, Rasle's mission
became the southern boundary of New France.

The Latter Wars

In the quarter century after King William's War, Falmouth, once the center of
a vigorous trade in fish, masts, spars, timber, and sawed lumber, slowly
revived. Sawmills, gristmills, and boatworks again dotted the rivers and
inlets between the Piscataqua and Kennebec, and farms sent hay, dairy
products, cattle, sheep, swine, cordwood, and fish to Massachusetts ports
for the local and coastwise trade. Returning settlers took up a quasi-military
life. Garrison houses, usually under a militia command, provided nuclei for
small settlements either just outside or within a stockade. During daylight,
men and women worked in their fields under protection of scouts and guards.
For most of the period, English Maine lived in a state of virtual siege. Only
the larger seaports – Boston, Salem, Portsmouth, Kittery – enjoyed sufficient
security to benefit from the military expenditures from Great Britain.

By 1701, France and England were engaged in what came to be known as

Queen Anne's War. When France proved less willing to supply arms, the
Penobscots ratified a series of neutrality agreements with Massachusetts.
But in August 1703, an expedition of about 500 French and Micmac Indians
from the St. Lawrence devastated the coastal towns and forts from Wells to
Falmouth, and Massachusetts declared war on all Maine Indians. Militia raids
in the upper Saco kept villagers from their fields and from critical foraging
areas.

After the cessation of hostilities in Europe, the 1713 Treaty of Portsmouth

quickly brought peace to the Maine frontier. By this time, it was apparent
that English population expansion would engulf southern Maine, and most
Indians in the area withdrew to the St. Lawrence settlements under the
command of Governor Vaudreuil.
Indian military successes were significant, and the upper Kennebec
remained a contested territory. With English settlers pushing upriver, the
Massachusetts militia rebuilt the fort at Brunswick, giving the English power
to prevent Indians from reaching the coast for foraging and fishing activities.
Indian security in central Maine was becoming more tenuous. Despite the
peace treaty, wars involving Indians and Europeans and between Europeans
were not over.

Dummer's War, in 1721-1727, began as a series of skirmishes in Maine and

Vermont in territory claimed by both French and English. By this time, the
Muscongus Company had pushed the English frontier eastward to the St.
Georges in Thomaston. Responding to Indian raids in March 1723, acting
Governor William Dummer sent militia under Colonel Thomas Westbrook into
the Kennebec region to burn Indian villages and fields, and in August 1724, a
combined force of English militia and Massachusetts and Mohawk Indians
destroyed the village at Norridgewock, killing as many as 100 Indians and
Father Rasle.

Another desperate encounter took place in April 1725 on the upper Saco
valley when a party of bounty hunters under John Lovewell encountered an
Indian troop near the Pigwacket village. Lovewell and 11 other English were
killed, along with an equal number of Indians. During this war, the French
offered only limited aid, leaving Massachusetts free to focus its attention on
the Wabanaki. With the destruction of Norridgewock, the Penobscots
emerged as leaders of a new intertribal alliance, and after consulting with
Vaudreuil, leaders ratified a treaty with Massachusetts in summer 1727.

Seventeen years of peace followed Dummer's War and during that time,
English resettled to the St. Georges River. Hostilities resumed in 1744 during
King George's War after a group of English scalp hunters killed or wounded
several Penobscot Indians. In 1745, Canadian Indians attacked Pemaquid
and Fort St. Georges, and despite minimal Penobscot and Kennebec
participation, Massachusetts again declared war on the Wabanaki in August
1745.
In this war, colonial forces, including those from Maine, prevailed against the
French stronghold at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, but inland Maine
military action was limited to occasional skirmishes. The war ended with the
Treaty of Falmouth in October 1749.
 The sixth and final Anglo-Abenaki war, known as the Seven Years, or French
and Indian war (1754-1760), was largely fought in the Ohio Valley. In Maine,
Governor William Shirley used rumors of French maneuvers on the Kennebec
to construct Fort Halifax above Norridgewock at Winslow. Many Penobscots
withdrew from the St. Georges area when both Massachusetts and the
French demanded that the Indians take-up arms against the other.

In 1759, English forces defeated the French at Quebec; ending the long
struggle for control of North America. During the next few years, Indian
family bands re-occupied tribal grounds on the upper Penobscot, Kennebec,
and Saco rivers. Governor Bernard banned white hunters and trappers from
the upper Penobscot and sent surveyor Joseph Chadwick to mark the limits
of English settlement at the falls above the Kenduskeag. But theft, murder,
poaching, land encroachment, and an explosion of white settlement up the
river valleys made a return to the old ways all but impossible.

Between the late 17th century and the early 19th century, Great Britain,
France, and others in Europe engaged in nearly constant warfare. The
battles for economic and political power spilled into North America -
catching the native populations in the middle. By the time a lasting peace
came between France and Britain, European descendants had permanent
settlements in North America and the native populations were relegated to
the fringes.

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