“... tongues of fire
On dusty tribes and twilight centuries sit.”
Mrs. Spofford in a delightful sketch of the poet tells how in the
stirring events of the early days of the seventeenth century, in the
midst of the bitter strife between the red man and the white, the
Whittiers lived in the calm and safety of their own peaceful Quaker
faith. They were as was William Penn to the red man. Indian attacks,
Indian massacres, white women and children fleeing to the fort for
their lives, white men with the rifles mowing down red savages--as the
red savages whenever they could find or make opportunity tomahawked
and scalped in hate the white intruders--the Whittier household had
no part in these horrors; these were crimes they neither perpetrated
nor suffered from. Their door was always on the latch; no gun was
ever behind it, or in the hands of its men. The Indians entered and
departed at will, always to meet with kindness and never to return this
by injury, quick to distinguish between friend and foe, and ready to
return kindness with confidence. For that household there were no wild
terrors, no midnight massacres.
This fact, while it gives to the character the courage and faith in God
and man shown by the Whittier ancestry as Friends, also, it should be
remembered, speaks significantly for the appreciation of these traits
by the “noble red man.” Many times the Indian has shown that he was
capable of response to confidence in him and the appeal to his sense of
honor.
* * * * *
At one time the poet was applied to for a fitting name for a house
recently built in the region of Kenoza Lake on the outskirts of
Haverhill. He answered the friends who forwarded the request:
“I have looked over Roger Williams’ ‘Key to the Indian Language,’ and
find nothing that seems quite to answer Mr. S----’s purpose.
‘Yokomish--I lodge here.
Nowekin--I dwell here.
Wotomuck--At Home.
Washowanan--Hawk or Hawk’s Place.
Wussokat--Walnut Trees.’
Most of the names are very long and hard to pronounce. How would the
name of the great Sachem, or Chief, on the Merrimac River and whose
father owned the whole valley, do for the place? It is a pleasant,
well-sounding name and wouldn’t be inappropriate; for the Sachem who
bore it doubtless had wandered through the woods and fished in the
lakes between which the house stands--Wolanset. He was the son of
Passaconaway, the mightiest Indian chief in the Northern section of New
England and who always made his home on the banks of the Merrimac. Both
were friends of the whites and all the associations of their names are
pleasant.”