THE INDIANS
When the Mayflower dropped anchor in Provincetown Harbor, and her weary
passengers at last had a chance to stand on a steady deck and look
about them, they saw a shore wooded to the water’s edge as far as the
eye could reach. So, as a matter of fact, was all the rest of the Cape:
a virgin wilderness, with mile on mile of continuous forest. But there
was more than vegetation to be found by one who was explorer enough to
pierce the veil; for the Pilgrims, instead of carving a republic from
a western wilderness, stumbled into an organized community. Behind the
screen of pine and oak were clearings dotted with Indian dwellings and
connected by well-worn paths with other groups of dwellings. These were
villages in the strictest sense: no chance camping grounds of nomadic
savages, but fixed abodes, inhabited by generation after generation of
natives. It was no joke to make a clearing big enough for a village in
such woods as used to cover the Cape; and natural clearings were few
and far between. Once they had hewn out such an area with their stone
axes, the Indians kept it, for they were not adventurous, and preferred
other forms of exercise to wood-chopping.
The trails that connected these villages were established routes
fixed after long and painful experience. That they were indeed paths
of least resistance is shown by the fact that many of the Cape roads
to-day follow these Indian trails. One of them led up the Cape from
Eastham to Yarmouth and was so much used by the settlers that it was
beaten into a dusty bridle-path and then into a wagon-road. To-day it
is substantially the route of the macadamized highway between these
two towns. At Yarmouth this trail was cut diagonally by a famous
thoroughfare that ran across the Cape from Hyannis. Another main artery
of Indian travel was the famous trail from Sandwich off the Cape to
Plymouth. No doubt, too, a path through the woods connected Yarmouth
and Sandwich. At all events, there was a much-used trail across the
Cape at Barnstable that has never ceased its usefulness; it is now
known as Mary Dunn’s Road. In short, the Pilgrims landed, not in a
wilderness, but in a region that had been settled for nobody knows how
many hundred years; a region that had its villages and its roads, its
organization and its traditions. So much is certain, although little
enough is known about its inhabitants.
All Cape Indians belonged nominally to the Wampanoags, but thanks to
the geographical isolation of the Cape, each little tribe--and there
were half a dozen or more of them--was free to go its own gait under
its own sachem. Massasoit had no control over them. King Philip tried
in vain to enlist them as allies. They were independent, peace-loving,
and non-progressive. At Falmouth were the Succonessitts. The tribe
that lived in and near Sandwich called themselves Manomets; those at
Barnstable and Yarmouth were Mattakees and Cummaquids; the Monomoyicks
occupied what is now Chatham; the Nausets controlled Eastham, and the
northernmost group, who lived in the neighborhood of Truro, were called
Pamets.
The notion that Indians lived only in wigwams receives a blow when one
begins to read what the early explorers have to say on the subject.
Wigwams existed, it is true, on the Cape as elsewhere, but the early
accounts say little about them and a good deal about a different sort
of structure, with a skeleton of sapling-poles bent into the shape of
horseshoes about seven feet high, with both ends stuck into the ground.
For greater stability a ridgepole was sometimes fastened along the top.
Over these ribs the builder stretched heavy mats, woven from the long
thatch that bordered every creek in the marshes. The door was another
mat hung over an opening so small that it was necessary to crawl to
get through it. These dwellings usually had an inner lining of mats of
finer texture, embroidered with colored grass and porcupine quills. The
floor consisted of mats spread on the ground.
All the houses were small, only big enough for a single family. In
the middle of the floor a circle of stones served as a fireplace, and
directly above, a hole in the roof let out the smoke. Beds were the
most conspicuous items of furniture, and consisted of three or four
thicknesses of mats. Sometimes these were raised a little off the
ground on stakes.
Such houses were almost never found isolated, for Indians were more
gregarious than whites. The remote New England farmhouse, standing a
mile or two from its nearest neighbor and ten miles from a town, had
no prototype among the Cape Cod Indians. Sometimes, to be sure, the
number of dwellings was small. Bradford and his band, for example,
came upon a group of only two, but probably these were what was left
of a larger number that had been moved away on the arrival of the
Mayflower. Champlain reports ‘large numbers of little houses’ seen on
an expedition inland from Chatham, and describes Nauset Harbor as ‘very
spacious, being perhaps three or four leagues in circuit, entirely
surrounded by little houses, around each one of which there was as much
land as the occupant needed for his support.’
The sites of these settlements could be pretty well determined to-day
by the shell deposits that accumulated beside them, even if we had no
contemporary historians to tell us where they were. Such shell heaps
are found in every town on the Cape from Truro to Buzzards Bay and on
both the north and south shores. For the most part they are close to
salt water, for the Indians, like their white successors, regarded
the inland of the Cape (except for hunting purposes) as merely a
distance to be covered in getting from one shore to the other. The few
settlements that they did make inland lay along the banks of great salt
creeks like Bass River, or beside ponds like the mill ponds behind
North Brewster. But the great permanent villages were alongshore.
Of the tools and weapons found on the sites of these villages little
need be said, for they hardly differ from those used by Indians
throughout the country. The isolation of the Cape, though it increased
the natives’ happiness, retarded their progress. Their implements,
therefore, were less elaborate than those made by Western Indians;
but the same sort of objects are found: stone arrow- and spear-heads;
knives; scrapers; the usual types of stone axes and grooved hammers;
occasionally a finely polished pendant, and more rarely still a
sacramental banner-stone showing fine workmanship. Once in a great
while a stone pipe turns up, but none so elaborate as the Western
specimens. Cape Indians had no need to make pipes out of stone: they
used wooden pipes and lobster claws, and no doubt corncobs. Stone
pestles are common enough, but mortars are very rare and of enormous
size, obviously village property placed at some central point to be
used by any member of the group, like our town pumps. They made pottery
out of a mixture of clay and broken shell, surprisingly thin and light,
and frequently decorated with criss-cross patterns and scalloped
rims. Many implements of all kinds were made of shell--needles, hoes,
arrow-heads, pendants, and the like, but these have nearly all vanished.
A significant fact about all these objects is that they are made almost
without exception from local material. As far as the raw stuff for
manufacture went, the Cape Indians were as self-sufficient as they were
in the matter of food and clothing. One may pick up, for example, a
thousand arrow-heads made from local stone, for one of copper. Gosnold,
to be sure, mentions seeing an Indian off Chatham adorned with a copper
pendant a foot long, but the copper for this, and for the arrow-heads
as well, is more likely to have come from a wrecked French fishing
vessel than from the utterly unknown and remote Michigan Indians.
One exception to this rule must be noted. Fragments of soapstone
pottery are frequently found on the Cape and one soapstone pipe was
picked up in Harwich Port. As no native soapstone exists anywhere
on Cape Cod, this must have been imported from Johnston, Rhode
Island, where quarries exist that are known to have been worked by
the Narragansetts. One clay pipe of an elaboration beyond the powers
of the local Indians has been found near Bourne. But with these two
exceptions, the Cape tribes made their implements from local materials.
Before the arrival of the whites, wampum seems to have been used merely
for ornament, never for money. For this reason there was not much of it
in evidence. The Plymouth men had no idea of its value until Rasière,
on a visit to them from New Amsterdam, explained that the Dutch were
using it in trading with the New York Indians; he sold the Plymouth
settlers a lot of it, but it took Bradford two years to get rid of
it to the Indians. After that, however, it went better. Two kinds of
wampum existed on the Cape--white and black. The white was made from
the stems of periwinkle shell; the black from the purplish part of the
inside of quahaug shells. This was worth twice as much as the white, or
about twopence a bead.
The natives of the Cape were in no proper sense of the word nomadic.
They found living easy where they were, and saw no reason to change.
They were led away by no wandering herds of buffalo--like the Western
tribes--and had no fixed seasons for hunting. Every creek was full
of eels; every flat thick-sown with clams; most harbors had oysters.
The marshes teemed with ducks and geese, snipe and plover. Deer were
abundant in the woods, and to make hunting easier they burned out
the underbrush whenever it grew too thick--a maneuver called ‘firing
the woods.’ They spread nets for fish, and set snares for wolves and
deer, so shrewdly concealed that young William Bradford was caught in
one at Provincetown on his first excursion ashore from the Mayflower.
Beans were sometimes planted in the same hill with corn--a sort of
embryonic succotash. If the ground was poor, they spread herring over
it for fertilizer and spaded it with sea-clam shells. They stored up
their surplus corn by the simple method of burying it in grass baskets
three or four feet deep in the sand, where it kept perfectly. By way
of luxuries they may have raised tobacco, but this is quite as likely
to have been a weed called poke. At all events they smoked poke, but
perhaps they had a little real tobacco too. What wonder that they were
content with their lot, and wisely concluded that their lines were
fallen unto them in pleasant places?
Champlain speaks of the neat appearance of the Nauset girls. It would
be pleasant to lend unqualified endorsement to this view, but sailors
are not always discriminating in matters of feminine beauty. It was a
long time since Champlain had seen any women, and he doubtless looked
on the Nauset maidens with a tolerant eye. The Indians wore no clothes
to speak of until cold weather forced them into a single lower garment
of deerskin that served for both trousers and stockings, with another
deerskin worn loosely over the upper part of the body. Champlain
mentions a short grass garment, open in front, that some of the Nausets
wore when they visited his ship. One woman, he says, had a red deerskin
tunic, the borders of which were ornamented with little shells. Both
sexes frequently painted their faces red, black, and yellow, in
whatever designs they fancied, and indulged at times in elaborate
hairdressing that involved feathers, foxtails, and similar adornments.
But these, like their clothes, appeared only on state occasions.
But we have already spent more time on his costume than ever an Indian
did! Let us turn to the baffling question of his character. Certain of
the traditional Indian traits are too well known to need more than the
briefest mention. Such qualities as stoicism in pain and remembrance
of injuries may be taken for granted. But quiet endurance of torture
seems to be about the only sort of restraint the Indians practiced;
in most respects they were like children, and restraint is not in the
nature of children or of primitive man. It is no surprise, therefore,
to learn that even the best of them were gluttons in the presence of
food. They ate as much as they could whenever they had it. No less
a dignitary than Massasoit himself--though just recovering from an
almost fatal attack of indigestion--was powerless before the savor of
a fat wild duck, and nearly killed himself by devouring it against
the excellent Puritanical advice of Winslow. An incident that further
illustrates their childishness occurred when some of Iyanough’s men had
stolen certain trinkets from Miles Standish on one of his excursions
from Plymouth to Yarmouth for food. The Captain, with characteristic
brusqueness, demanded their instant return. The Indians gathered round
with wide-eyed protestations of innocence, while the culprit slipped
down to the boat and placed the stolen articles on board. He then
returned with the glad tidings that they hadn’t been stolen after all,
but had been overlooked by the impetuous Standish.
A good deal of discussion has been indulged in, first and last, on
this question of Indian honesty, and wise men have raised their voices
on both sides. It would be foolish to try to show that the Cape Cod
Indians--or any other Indians--were not ready thieves. But if they
stole oftener than civilized men, so did they more often return the
stolen goods; and it is doubtful whether at any period of Cape Cod
history the permanent losses suffered by the whites at the hands of the
Indians have been more numerous than those suffered by the Indians at
the hands of the whites.
The Indians were frequently dishonorable. It may be, indeed, that they
cared nothing for honor. Thomas Dermer would have said so, for one.
It was his misfortune in 1619 to be captured by the Monomoyicks near
Chatham. They demanded a ransom from his crew. It was paid. ‘But,’ says
Dermer bitterly, ‘I was [then] as far from liberty as before.’ Such
perfidy would be shocking enough but for the cheering reflection that
Lord Bacon himself, at about this time, was profiting by the same sort
of ethics in the High Courts of Justice in England. It would be prudent
to preface all criticisms of aboriginal honor with Addison’s dictum,
‘None but men of fine parts deserve to be hanged.’
Of their utter savagery at times there can be no doubt. Not even the
graves of dead enemies were sacred. Champlain was horrified when the
natives dug up the bodies which he had buried and threw down the cross
he had erected over their graves. He had not the gift of prophecy and
could not foresee that when another century and a half had wheeled
round, purging the gentle weal as it revolved, a London sexton would
exhume from the graveyard the body of a child and leave it on the
parents’ doorstep because they were slow with the burial fee. Indian
atrocities were in fact no more than manifestations of the same cruelty
that has existed in all human beings, in all countries, in all ages.
A pleasanter characteristic of the Cape Cod Indians was their amazing
friendliness to the white men--at first to those fleeting voyagers to
the Cape shores, and afterwards to the permanent settlers there. This
friendliness is strongly marked among the Cape Indians. It singles them
out from among all the other tribes of the New World. It made enemies
for them among their own kind. Why they were friendly is a mystery.
Many considerations help to explain it; none of them--nor all of them
together--quite succeeds. But a few instances when their friendliness
appeared may furnish a hint of the answer.
In the spring of 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold anchored off the south
shore of the Cape somewhere between Eastham and Monomoy. The
apprehension which he felt when he saw his vessel surrounded by a
fleet of canoes full of Indians quickly vanished before their friendly
gestures, and he bore no malice for the loss of a few articles to which
they inconspicuously helped themselves. When he landed on one of the
Elizabeth Islands, he was cheered to find that there too the Indians
were on the whole friendly and helpful. His decision to abandon his
purpose of settlement was in no way attributable to their attitude.
The Indian who did more than any one else to keep his fellow tribesmen
amicable to the whites was Squanto (sometimes called Tisquantum).
He appeared at Plymouth very soon after the Mayflower, with the
great Massasoit, and acted as interpreter in drawing up a treaty of
peace which that chief made with the colonists. When Massasoit left
Plymouth, Squanto stayed behind, perhaps because Plymouth was his
native place; perhaps because he fared better with the whites than
with his own people; perhaps, as Bradford devoutly declared, ‘because
he was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their
expectation’; perhaps, as Winslow asserts, because he ‘wished to make
himself great in the eyes of his countrymen ... not caring who fell, so
he stood.’ At all events, he stayed with them, showed them how to plant
corn and catch fish, and took them ‘to unknown places for their profit.’
One of his first helpful exploits was in connection with a worthless
youngster named John Billington, who was always in trouble and who this
time got lost in the woods. Less rigorous consciences than the Plymouth
men’s would have ascribed this happy accident to God’s will and would
have persuaded them that they were well rid of the young pest. But the
stern daughter of the voice of God sent them off in search of him, and
ten men, with Squanto as their guide, set out by water for the Bay side
of Eastham. They spent the night in their boat, which had grounded
at low tide on the Yarmouth flats, and in the morning were cordially
greeted by some Indians who were lobstering alongshore, and who told
them that the boy was safe at Nauset. They accepted an invitation to
land and take breakfast with the savages, and were warmly received by
the young chief Iyanough, whose ‘cheare was plentiful and various.’
The white men were chagrined to find here an old woman who wept
and wailed at the sight of them--the first Englishmen she had ever
seen--because her three sons had been sold into slavery by the
unscrupulous Captain Hunt. Notwithstanding this untoward incident,
the visit passed off in friendly style, and Iyanough himself escorted
them in their shallop to Nauset, and on arriving, went off inland with
Squanto to tell Aspinet, the sachem, what they had come for. Here again
the sins of the settlers rose up to confound them, for they met the
owner of some corn they had helped themselves to when first they had
landed at Provincetown. They satisfied him, however, with promises of
payment, and this incident, too, was amicably closed.
Soon a great number of Indians arrived with Aspinet, bringing the lost
boy. They waded out to the shallop, carrying him in their arms lest
he wet his feet, and returned him bedecked with beads. The settlers
bestowed two knives on the Indians and sailed away. They stopped again
at Yarmouth on the way back, where Iyanough supplied them with fresh
water and a necklace, and then they squared away for Plymouth.
The friendliness of the Indians throughout this expedition is of
capital significance. If they had wished to wipe out the Plymouth
Colony, this was their chance, for by killing the ten men who comprised
the crew of the shallop, they would have reduced the number of
able-bodied settlers by more than half, thereby delivering what would
probably have been a fatal blow. But the Englishmen, instead of getting
arrows between their ribs or knives in the back, received food, water,
information, guidance, and presents. The next year the Monomoyicks
of Chatham supplied Bradford with eight hogsheads of corn and beans,
thereby pulling the Colony through a severe shortage of food.
In the winter of 1626, the Nausets had another chance to help the
settlers. An English vessel, probably the Sparrowhawk, bound for
Virginia with prospective colonists, came ashore near Eastham. She
was not much damaged, and could be made seaworthy again if materials
could be had. The shipwrecked men had hardly got ashore when they
were approached by a group of Indians who asked if they were Governor
Bradford’s men and offered to carry the news of the disaster to
Plymouth. This offer, as a matter of fact, was made out of friendship
to Bradford rather than from any special desire to help the new
arrivals, for the Indians on the Cape had agreed to notify the Governor
of any ‘roving ships upon the coast.’ However, the offer was eagerly
accepted, Indian runners were dispatched over the forest trails to
Plymouth, and in due time Bradford himself arrived, bringing spikes and
oakum. The vessel was repaired, but was again smashed by a storm before
she could set sail, this time beyond hope of repair. So with Indians
as guides, the newcomers betook themselves bag and baggage overland
to Plymouth, having received Bradford’s permission to sojourn there
temporarily.
Five years later, in the winter of 1631, occurred an instance of Indian
humanity worthy of the good Samaritan himself. Richard Garrett, a
Boston cobbler, set sail in January for Plymouth with his daughter and
a crew of four men. They were blown by a northerly gale across Cape Cod
Bay and came ashore somewhere near Barnstable. Two of the men started
out on foot for Plymouth and on the way met two Indians, one of whom
went along with them, while the other went back to help those who had
stayed with the boat. He found them almost frozen, built a shelter
over them and started a fire to thaw them out. Garrett died very soon,
whereupon the Indian with his tomahawk chopped a grave in the frozen
ground and laid him in it, covering the spot with a pile of brush to
protect it from wolves. Garrett’s daughter and one of the men survived.
The two who had started for Plymouth died--one at the Manomet trading
post, and the other on arriving at Plymouth.
It is true that two or three instances of hostility occurred between
the Cape tribes and various explorers who visited its shores from time
to time. At first glance, these skirmishes seem to contradict the
thesis of Indian friendliness, but a little consideration will show
that they were the result of panic, or else were acts of justified
retaliation for wanton aggressions of the whites.
The first of them was Champlain’s unpleasant experience with the
Nausets in 1605. The trouble started with a tactless performance on the
part of one of Champlain’s men. Some of his sailors had gone ashore for
water near Eastham, and a group of Indians had returned the compliment
by going aboard the vessel for a friendly visit. As one of the shore
party was filling a copper kettle from a brook, an Indian snatched it
from his hand and made off into the woods. The French, with all their
virtues, are an impulsive folk. One of them instantly pursued the
fugitive, while the rest shouted to the men on the vessel to shoot.
The Frenchmen fired muskets, and the Indians who were aboard, seeing
that something was amiss, dived over the side and headed for shore--all
but one, whom the sailors seized and bound. Panic is contagious. The
Indians who were ashore, hearing the shouts and seeing their comrades
take to the water, killed the Frenchman who had had the kettle. Some
more shots were fired from the ship, and a landing party went ashore
to bury the dead man. The whole affair was unfortunate and quite
unnecessary. If, instead of flying off the handle and beginning to
shout and shoot the minute the kettle was stolen, the French had kept
calm and demanded its return from the chief, the chances are they
would have got it with apologies. At worst they would have lost only a
kettle instead of a kettle and a man. A few hours later, a delegation
of Indians came to apologize. Champlain bore no malice and released the
prisoner that had been held on board.
His encounter with the Chatham Indians the next year was more serious,
and no amount of sentimentality can interpret it as friendly. One
thing, however, is clear. A fortnight’s association with the Frenchmen
turned the Indians from friends into enemies. If they had wished to
destroy the newcomers at the outset, they need only have stood on the
shore and watched the vessel pound her bottom out on the worst shoals
on the Atlantic Coast. Instead, they piloted her into the harbor. They
could even have piloted her wrong and led the explorers into certain
destruction. There was something, clearly, in the attitude of the
Frenchmen--in particular in the aspect of their excursions inland--that
offended or alarmed the Indians so seriously that they tried to kill
the same men whom two weeks before they had saved from the Monomoy
breakers. It is unfortunate that our only account of the affair is from
the French angle.
[Illustration: CHAMPLAIN’S DRAWING OF THE FIGHT WITH THE INDIANS AT
CHATHAM]
The Indians were slow to forget injuries. Fourteen years later,
the Nausets, remembering the experience that their neighbors, the
Monomoyicks, had had with Champlain, attacked the Pilgrims who landed
at Eastham in the course of the Third Discovery. Obviously the Indians
supposed that these white men were the same sort of people as the
French. But as soon as they learned their mistake, they changed their
attitude, and on more than one occasion saved these very men from
starvation.
[Illustration: CHAMPLAIN’S MAP OF NAUSET HARBOR]
[Illustration: CHAMPLAIN’S MAP OF CHATHAM, SHOWING INDIAN HOUSES AND
MONOMOY]
The rumor of one more war must be silenced before the road is clear
for pleasanter topics. In March, 1623--in the midst of genial passages
between the Cape Indians and their white neighbors at Plymouth--Winslow
refers to a proposed insurrection of the Massachusetts Indians against
Weston’s colony of demoralized Londoners at Wessagussett. It is no
wonder that they wanted to destroy these persons, whose actions filled
the Plymouth men with pious horror and the Indians with scorn. The
plot would not have come within the scope of this volume had not
these Massachusetts Indians induced their brothers on the Cape to
plan an attack on Plymouth at the same time. Such, at any rate, was
the story that Massasoit told to Hobbamock--a staunch friend of the
Plymouth settlers--with instructions that he should report it to
Winslow. Massasoit’s motive was gratitude to Winslow for having cured
him of indigestion. According to him, all the Cape tribes except the
Monomoyicks were involved in the conspiracy.
Here, then, is a fine state of affairs, coming as it does in the midst
of our protestations of Indian friendliness. But there is no reason
for becoming any more exercised about it than the settlers did. They
ordered Miles Standish to take as many men as he needed and march
off north to annihilate the Indians of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
By this procedure they deliberately deprived their town of its chief
military officer and an important fraction of its fighting men. To
be sure, Standish, always fond of the spectacular, took only eight
men with him, but eight men were a good many in the condition of the
Colony. Remember that two years before, ten men had comprised more
than half of its fighting force. Furthermore, the Governor and Council
were themselves surprised that the Captain took so few; they had been
ready to part with more.
This action when rightly interpreted, is significant. If the Plymouth
Colony had felt that there was real danger of an attack from the Cape
Indians from the south, they would hardly have sent off Standish and
his men to the north; for though blood is indeed thicker than water,
and the Pilgrims were ready to help Weston’s colony if they could, yet
the blood in our own veins is thicker than that in our neighbors’, and
not even the New England consciences of the Plymouth settlers would
have jeopardized their own hard-won existence for the sake of saving
profligate countrymen from a fate that they richly deserved. If, then,
the men most immediately threatened by this alleged conspiracy of
the Cape took such a cavalier attitude toward it, there is no reason
to regard it as more than a rumor. Furthermore, the event justified
their nonchalance. No attack materialized; the strength of their newly
completed fort was never put to the test; and though they were stern
believers in punishment where punishment was deserved, they never made
the slightest move to punish the Indians of Cape Cod. It looks very
much as if Winslow, through the alchemy of a close perspective, raised
a dense cloud of smoke from a very small spark.
So much for the question of Indian friendliness. For the next fifty
years all was quiet among them. Then came the formidable war declared
by King Philip--and what the Cape Indians did at that critical
period will appear in due time. These fifty years, however, formed
an important epoch in their history; for it brought them their first
lessons in the rudiments of civilized life. By 1644 the first four
permanent settlements on the Cape had been made--at Sandwich, Yarmouth,
Barnstable, and Eastham; and as time went on, the pious citizens
of these towns felt moved to spread the gospel among their heathen
neighbors and so were brought for the first time in contact with the
primitive but in some ways beautiful religion of the Cape Indians.
This is a tantalizing subject because our information is so meager.
Our ancestors felt small interest in what they regarded as the bizarre
paganism of the aborigines and were at small pains to leave exact
information about it. The following facts are taken from Winslow’s
somewhat sketchy observations among the Indians just off the Cape in
the neighborhood of Buzzards Bay.
Two major gods, it seems, presided over the Indian destinies. The
greater of these they called Kiehtan. He was their creator and the
creator of all else besides, earth and sea, sky and stars. The
naturalness of the Adam and Eve story as an explanation for man’s
existence on the earth is strikingly illustrated by the Indian idea
that Kiehtan had first created one man and one woman from whom they all
were descended. Kiehtan lived in heaven, and to him went the spirits
of all the dead; to be admitted if they had been good; otherwise to be
sentenced to a wretched and restless existence of aimless wandering
in a sort of Cimmerian fog. They prayed to Kiehtan for good crops and
good weather and offered him sacrifices if their prayers were answered.
Apparently they ran no risk of wasting a sacrifice before the event.
Kiehtan seems to have been a somewhat remote deity. That he was at
least partly analogous to the Christian God appears from a conversation
which Winslow had with an Indian named Combatant, who, observing that
he asked a blessing before meat and returned thanks after it, asked
what the significance of the ceremony was. Winslow explained as simply
as he could, and Combatant, nodding his comprehension, remarked that
the Indians held much the same belief, but called the god Kiehtan. It
is prudent to suggest, however, that this remark was probably born of
the childish desire of all primitive peoples not to be outdone.
The other great divinity of the Indians was Habbamock. He was less
powerful than Kiehtan, but more active, and held particular sway over
the realm of disease. He disclaimed all connection with fatal diseases,
however, ascribing them to Kiehtan and asserting that he himself dealt
only in curable ailments, and was always ready to cure them if properly
approached. This approach could be made by only two classes of Indians,
the _powahs_, or medicine-men, and the _pnieses_. Obviously Habbamock’s
reluctance to associate himself with fatal illness was a canny
invention of these medicine-men to cover their retreat when their cures
failed. He appeared to them, so they declared, sometimes as a man, but
more often in the form of a bird or other animal--usually a snake.
The powahs, in effecting their cures, worked themselves into a state
of frenzy with loud cries and wails and other antics of so strenuous a
nature that the sweat stood out on their bodies and foam on their lips.
Clearly an Indian sick-bed was not a couch of roses. Winslow remarks
that when he visited Massasoit in his illness, these medicine-men
were ‘in the midst of their charms, making such a hellish noise as
it distempered us that were well, and therefore unlike to ease him
that was sick.’ It need hardly be observed that the office of Powah
furnished a fine chance for hypocrisy and false practice.
The pnieses were quite different from the powahs, and were the finest
specimens, both mentally and physically, in the tribe--a combination
of priest and warrior and statesman. To become a pniese a man had to
undergo a rigorous and savage training that would have discouraged or
killed any but the sturdiest. They had little to do with religion, but
were constantly summoned to councils of state. They were the chosen
advisers of the sachem and the most powerful fighters in war. A sort of
divinity hedged them in battle, the prestige of which enabled them, we
are told, to put a hundred of the enemy to flight single-handed. There
is a Homeric quality about these pnieses that suggests the prowess of
Achilles and the wisdom of Nestor. But since their religious activities
received only a small part of their attention, no more need be said
about them here.
Religion among the Cape Indians was falling upon evil days as early
as 1623. They told the settlers--perhaps with more evasiveness than
truth--that the forms of their worship varied widely between village
and village, and they added gloomily that in the olden days their
ancestors had been more religious than they. Kiehtan, they asserted,
was no longer worshiped as he had been. Such doleful sentiments have a
familiar ring. Even the Indian, it would seem, sighed for the good old
days!
Their legends were to Indian religion what the story of Adam and Eve
or of Samson and Delilah is to our own. They would surely have found
a place in an Indian Old Testament. Most of them were invented to
account for the existence of natural objects, and show a pretty highly
developed imagination. Like all legends, they might serve as fanciful
answers to children’s questions.
A good example is the Yarmouth Indians’ explanation of fog. Long years
before, they said, a huge bird used to visit the shores of Yarmouth and
carry off the children in its talons, flying with them to the south out
over Vineyard Sound. Maushop, a benevolent giant of Yarmouth, at last
grew tired of this procedure and decided to pursue the bird and kill
it. So, on its next appearance, he followed it out across the Sound,
wading along as fast as he could, until finally, pretty well exhausted,
he reached an unknown island on the other side, where he found a huge
tree piled about with the bones of children. ‘It is time for a smoke,’
said Maushop to himself, and reached for his tobacco. But he had
forgotten to bring any with him and was obliged to use poke instead--a
plant which he found growing plentifully on the island. This poke he
puffed with such effect that the whole Sound and the shores on both
sides of it were enveloped with the smoke; and forever after when a fog
settled down over the south shore of the Cape, the Indians would nod
wisely and say, ‘There’s old Maushop smoking his pipe.’
The Indians on Nantucket made up a fine story to explain the existence
of their island. Like the Yarmouth legend, it involves a giant--a
monster who used the Cape for his bed, covering the whole length of it
with his huge body, and fitting himself comfortably into its curves.
One morning he awoke after a restless night, in the course of which
his thrashings and rollings had ploughed the sand into hollows and
dunes that have remained ever since, and struggled to his feet. To his
annoyance he found that his moccasins were full of sand; so he took
them off and threw the contents far into the sea, where they formed
Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.
The Cotuit Indians had a local legend to account for Santuit River and
a knoll near by. A great trout, that lived in the South Sea, wanted to
get into Santuit Pond to rest. So he ploughed his way overland, leaving
behind him a deep, crooked furrow that was promptly filled with salt
water. Finally he arrived at the pond, but was so exhausted that he
had not the strength for the return trip, and died there. His path
became Santuit River. The Indians covered his remains with a mound of
earth that still exists and is called Trout Grave by the inhabitants.
Each of these legends, it will be observed, has something to say about
fatigue, rest, or sleep. This may be chance, or it may be significant;
but it is idle to try to guess what the significance may be--if there
is any. It was with men who were thinking such thoughts and repeating
such tales as these that the early Cape preachers had to deal when they
turned missionaries in their spare time. Two or three of them, indeed,
finding the virgin soil of the savage mind more fruitful than the
stubborn clay of the enlightened Christian, gave their best efforts to
the Indians.
The pioneer among these was Richard Bourne, who was in fact not a
minister at all, but a layman of substance who moved to Sandwich early
and was established there by 1641. He soon became interested in the
Indians and determined to improve their condition. They could have had
no better advocate. Bourne was experienced in legislative matters,
having been representative to the General Court, and was a man of
sound judgment and common sense. His voice carried weight in high
places, and the energy of his nature made his theories work. He wisely
concluded that the first step in converting the Indians was to awaken
their self-respect by establishing them in a community on land of their
own, and then teaching them the rudiments of self-government. It took
him twenty years to accomplish this, but in 1665 the act was recorded
authorizing the Indians to hold their own courts, try criminals, and
pass judgments. Five years earlier they had received title to fifty
square miles of ideal territory at Mashpee--shore, woods, rivers, and
ponds--everything best suited to an Indian’s existence.
Naturally enough, their first experiments at governing themselves often
failed. The jump from a primitive tribal organization to the complex
machinery of civilized government was too great. Frequently the General
Court was obliged to step in and extricate them from legal tangles in
which they had become enmeshed. Yet Bourne’s scheme, with all its
failures, was a great help in increasing the natives’ self-respect; and
this was the cornerstone of Bourne’s structure.
Meanwhile, he kept preaching Christianity to them with considerable
success, for it would be a churlish Indian, indeed, that allowed
himself to be cured by Bourne’s medicine, accept Bourne’s land,
preside over a court which Bourne had given him, and then rejected
the religion that came hand in hand with these blessings. Bourne had
four Indian preachers as his assistants, and reports that the whole
population of Mashpee--numbering between four and five hundred--were
converted. Although this district was nearest his heart, Bourne assumed
responsibility for the spiritual welfare of all the Indians on the
Cape, and did what he could to convert the tribes as far away as Truro.
In 1670 he was regularly ordained as minister of the Mashpee church--a
mere official recognition of the work he had been doing there for
years. Here he continued to preach until his death in 1685.
During the last dozen years of his life, Bourne’s territory was reduced
to something like manageable dimensions, for in 1672 Samuel Treat, an
energetic young minister who graduated from Harvard in 1669, was called
to the parish of Eastham. He immediately relieved Bourne of all the
territory below Yarmouth, and divided his efforts about evenly between
the Indians and the whites. Treat had a genial and sociable nature with
a marked vein of humor not always found in our early preachers; but
there was nothing genial or humorous about his doctrine. It was the
most virulent form of undiluted Calvinism, and the detailed description
of the torments of hell-fire that he roared at the natives in a voice
which, in the language of Dr. Freeman, drowned out ‘even the winds that
howled over the plains of Nauset,’ were well calculated to rouse the
savage instinct of even the most phlegmatic Indian.
Treat, like Bourne, was a firm believer in self-government for the
natives, and was able, thanks to his proximity, to put into execution
schemes that Bourne had been trying to work out at arm’s length. The
result was very much what it had been at Mashpee. In 1693, Treat was
able to report that there were five hundred praying Indians in his
district, which included Eastham, Harwich, Chatham, Wellfleet, and
Truro. Twenty years earlier there had been only three hundred in all
the territory below Sandwich. This improvement shows what could be done
by an enthusiast like young Treat. Four native preachers operated under
his supervision, and four native schoolmasters taught the Indians to
read and write their own language. The difficulties of this tongue had
no terrors for Treat. He mastered it in a short time, translated the
Confession of Faith, and frequently wrote sermons in Indian for his
assistants to deliver.
The finest specimen of a praying Indian, however, lived neither in
Eastham nor in Mashpee, but in Yarmouth. His name was Elisha Nauhaught,
but he is better known as Nauhaught the Deacon, the man who stood his
ground when attacked by a large number of black snakes and let them
surround him. One climbed up his body and tried to put its head into
Nauhaught’s mouth. The Deacon opened his jaws and brought them together
on the snake’s neck with such vigor that the reptile was decapitated.
Alarmed by the blood that flowed down in streams, the rest of the
snakes fled, and Nauhaught strolled home. On another occasion he showed
an interesting combination of superstition and honesty. He had found a
purse full of money, but refused to open it except in the presence of
witnesses, ‘for if I did,’ said he, ‘all the trees in the woods would
see me and witness against me.’ This remarkable Indian died peacefully
at the age of eighty-nine, and viewed the approach of death without a
tremor--calm in the assurance of salvation, or, as he himself expressed
it to the Reverend Mr. Alden, who was at the bedside, ‘I have always
had a pretty good notion about death.’
Unfortunately not all the praying Indians were of Nauhaught’s caliber,
nor was Nauhaught himself exempt from an occasional fall. Sometimes
they found unorthodox uses for their newly acquired religion. There
is, for example, the yarn of Deacon Ryder and the stolen turkeys. The
language of the Reverend Timothy Alden, who tells the tale in his
‘Collection of American Epitaphs,’ cannot be improved upon:
The village [i.e., the Indian village near the mouth of Bass River]
contained many praying Indians as well as some of a different
character. Deacon Ryder, an old gentleman, had lost some turkeys on
a certain time, and not being well acquainted with the character of
his aboriginal neighbors, fixed his suspicions upon them. He rode
into the [Indian] village very early in the morning, fastened his
horse in the woods, and walked in silence to the door of one of the
wigwams, where he stopped for a moment and found that the Indian was
at prayer. He then, without disturbing the pious occupant in his
devotions, passed on to another wigwam. The head of the family was
solemnly engaged in the same manner. He felt ashamed of himself but
thought he would go to one wigwam more. He did so, and it happened
to be Nauhaught’s. To his astonishment he found him also offering
his morning sacrifice in the midst of his little family. What a
delightful scene! While the groves resounded with the melodious notes
of the feathered choir, the whole village seemed to echo with the
prayers and praises which rose from every quarter. Deacon Ryder was
extremely mortified that he should have suspected the poor Indians
of theft, when he found them before sunrise pouring forth their
petitions to Almighty God in such a commendable manner, while many of
his whiter brethren were sleeping like the sluggard and never called
upon that sacred name unless to profane and blaspheme it!
On the whole, however, Bourne and Treat ought to have been satisfied
with their results even in the ticklish realm of religious conversions;
and their temporal accomplishments may have saved Massachusetts,
for in 1675, fifteen years after Bourne secured Mashpee for the
Sandwich Indians, and three years after Treat had begun his work
among the Nausets, King Philip declared war on all the white settlers
in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The condition of the Cape during
this war, though actually a very happy one, was potentially critical.
As long as the Cape Indians refused to join Philip or listen to his
anti-white propaganda, the settlers there were in a far better position
than the other colonists. King Philip was not in their vicinity, and
it was unlikely that any fighting would take place on Cape soil.
Nevertheless, the Cape men had a very real cause for anxiety. They
had to furnish their quota for the colonial army, and every man who
departed weakened the town. In the midst of them lived some five
hundred braves who might at any moment leap up with a whoop and attack
them in their own houses.
The alarm was universal and led to the absurd measure of seizing some
of the squaws as hostages. But the settlers soon realized the folly
of this and then became doubly excited for fear the Indians would
attack them in retribution. The Reverend Mr. Walley, of Barnstable,
writes: ‘I am greatly afflicted in my spirit to see the danger we are
in and the confusion and sad disorder we are fallen into.... Some fear
we have paid dearly for former acts of severity; and how dear we may
yet pay, God knoweth.’ It seems that his apprehension had so far gained
ascendancy that he was living not in the present, but in a future of
his own imagining; for the Cape Indians stood firm. Some of them even
enlisted with the settlers and fought against their own people, thereby
helping the white cause by their activity as well as by their inaction.
The commanders of the colonial units soon discovered the wisdom of
following the advice of their dusky allies. ‘Set an Indian to catch
an Indian’ became the watchword of the wisest of them. Before long,
the Cape was inviting the citizens of less fortunate communities, like
Rehoboth, Bridgewater, and Taunton, to seek safety for their families
on its peaceful shores; and though the invitations were not accepted,
the incident shows strikingly what confidence Cape men put in their
Indian neighbors before the end of the war.
The reasons for the fidelity of the Cape tribes during these months
were many. In the first place, they were isolated from their warring
brethren and so did not catch the contagion of war. Furthermore, they
were of a peaceful--even a submissive--nature. But beyond a doubt a
large factor in their friendliness was gratitude for the work that
Bourne and Treat had done for them. Without these two men, a fire
might have broken out in the rear and consumed the Cape settlements.
Religious teaching alone would not have sufficed, for Christianity so
far has failed to prevent wars. It would be hard to point to a finer
instance of virtue receiving its reward than the staunchness which the
Cape Cod Indians maintained, in considerable measure out of gratitude
to Bourne and Treat.
But there was another reason why the tribes on the Cape held aloof
from Philip’s War. They no longer had the energy or the desire to
fight with any one. Their race was run; their pride and dignity were
little more than memories. Degeneration had begun as far back as 1616,
when a plague swept over the Massachusetts coast from Penobscot to
Provincetown and wiped out whole villages. This disease was apparently
a kind of malignant typhus caused by filthy living conditions. The Cape
suffered less than the rest of the State, perhaps because its sandy
soil provided perfect natural drainage. But a good many Indians died
even there, as is shown by the number of graves that Bradford found at
Truro and Eastham.
Treading the shadow of this disaster came the white men, whose arrival
was the beginning of a long uneasiness among the natives. In the modern
jargon, they began to suffer from an inferiority complex. What was the
meaning of this new race whose weapons belched fire and roared like the
thunder? Vague dread lay beneath the Indians’ acts of friendliness, and
dread is a poor companion for those who are trying to swing back into
stride after a pestilence. This surely is an important reason why the
Indians of Cape Cod were so friendly to the Englishmen. Their attitude
sprang from no unnatural desire to help foreign intruders, but rather
from an underlying apprehension that tinged their generosity with fear;
and the white man, though he, too, was afraid, was shrewd enough, as he
accepted their hogsheads of corn, to smile loftily at his benefactors--
‘... as one great lord of fate
Might smile upon another half as great.’
It is not hard to deceive children, and the Indians supposed that these
white strangers felt as fearless as they looked.
When, in 1639, the settlers came and built towns close beside them,
choosing the best places from Sandwich to Eastham, this vague
uneasiness began to crystallize into despair. The Indians saw that the
whites grew and prospered, while their own strength ebbed from year to
year. Their new neighbors assumed charge of all things in a masterful
way. ‘This land,’ they said, ‘we will buy from you for five axes; that
land you may keep.’ ‘We will tell you what God to worship, and will
show you how to govern yourselves.’ But the new God seemed remoter even
than Kiehtan, and the government that the white men gave them was an
unwieldy tool in their hands. They grew more discouraged than ever. Rum
found its way among them. What was the use of struggling? The whites
were invincible and knew everything. Blasted by such apprehensions,
their native virtues withered and died. This was the effect, on these
reduced and plague-ridden tribes, of the arrival of a superior race.
It is not a new story. It has been the result wherever civilization
has camped beside primitive man; only in the present case the end was
hastened by the epidemic.
The speed with which the Indians vanished was frightful. Before the
plague, there had been upwards of two thousand adult Indians on the
Cape. [See notes to Chapter III.] Eighty years or so later (in 1690)
there were probably not more than a thousand. A little before the
outbreak of the Revolution there were five hundred and fifteen. Town
after town saw its Indian population dwindle to a half-dozen wretched
families in an isolated cluster of huts. In 1764, only four Indians
remained in Eastham and eleven in Wellfleet. Five or six families of
Monomoyicks were left at Chatham. Harwich was better off with a total
of ninety-one. Nauhaught reported six wigwams in Yarmouth, near the
mouth of Bass River, as late as 1767, but ten years later smallpox
carried away most of their occupants, and their lands were sold soon
after the war. A few years later, all that remained of this village was
a single wigwam occupied by a Negro and a squaw.
Mashpee, meanwhile, was in a serious condition. Numerically, to be
sure, the district seemed to be holding its own much better than any
other Indian community. In 1802, for example, there were three hundred
and eighty inhabitants, including children, and in 1820 the number
was three hundred and twenty, a very slight shrinkage compared to the
death-rate elsewhere. But these figures are misleading; they do not
indicate either health or prosperity in the district, for the original
Mashpees were dying off as fast as any Indians on the Cape. What kept
the numbers up was not a healthy birth-rate, but the fact that Mashpee
was a Utopia where no inhabitant was taxed. This halcyon state of
affairs brought the scum of the Indian and Negro population from all
over the State drifting to Mashpee like weeds to the Sargasso Sea.
These worthless immigrants--many of whom had little or no Indian blood
in their veins--intermarried with the remains of the Mashpees, until,
as early as 1792, at least two thirds of the inhabitants were of mixed
blood. The fact that the population was kept up by these unwelcome
additions deceived some into believing that the district was a model
Indian community, happy and prosperous, under the wise, paternal
eye of intelligent overseers. A few industrious and self-respecting
families there were, no doubt, like the Pocknets and the Attaquins,
but on the whole the inhabitants were a lazy, improvident lot. Well
into the nineteenth century many of them still lived in sedge wigwams
that crawled with vermin; and the few houses that they did build were
‘dirty, unfinished huts.’
The State tried various schemes for improving their condition. Before
1763, the Governor had appointed two overseers and two guardians for
Mashpee, who should watch over the Indians’ affairs, and in particular
should see to it that the entailment on their real estate, a protection
which Richard Bourne’s son Shearsjushub had obtained for them, was
respected, and that no white man should be allowed to buy away their
land. Good men had been provided to preach the Gospel to them: after
Shearsjushub’s death, his son Joseph had been their minister; and after
him came the Reverend Gideon Hawley and John Freeman, the half-breed.
But the Mashpees remained degenerate and degraded. In 1763, the
authorities, thinking that perhaps a little more self-government might
increase their self-respect, answered the Indians’ constant petitions
for more liberty by making Mashpee a district, and allowing the
inhabitants to elect for themselves five overseers and various minor
officials. But all was in vain; no form of government, no amount of
preaching, could make the Indians religious, virtuous, or happy; so
after twenty-five years of prolonged discontent, the old order was
reëstablished, and in 1788, the Governor once more appointed Mashpee’s
overseers and guardians. As the various committees that labored for
the Indians’ welfare ‘could not give them temperance and industry, they
still remained poor, abject and discontented.’ The committees were
discouraged; in the words of James Freeman, ‘the melancholy reflection
that they have labored in vain obtrudes itself upon the mind.’ Again
he writes, ‘Last year (1801) their meeting house resembled a cage of
unclean birds. The situation of it proved that they could take no
delight in the worship of God, as the house which is dedicated to
him was more offensive to the senses than even their filthy huts....
The term “Praying Indian” cannot with propriety be applied to the
inhabitants of Mashpee.’
Twenty years later, the situation had not changed. Their missionary,
Mr. Fish, writing in 1820, says: ‘Their descent cannot be traced at
this day and they have altogether adopted the habits of civilized life.
They have forgotten their ancient names and languages, except a very
few who retain a slight knowledge of the old tongue and can converse in
it a little. The number of pure-blooded Indians is very small, perhaps
fifty or sixty, and is decreasing. There is more negro blood than
white in the mixture. About fifty profess religion, a few of whom are
eminently pious, considerable numbers decent in their lives, and not a
few shockingly profligate.’
Fifty years later, in 1869, we learn from the lips of a Mashpee Indian,
Mr. Pocknet, that the foreign strain in the Mashpee blood was still
more marked. Addressing the legislative committee on Indians that
visited the Mashpees in their meetinghouse to discuss once more the
question of removing the entailment on their real estate, he made this
striking statement: ‘There are some Indians here two-thirds blooded,
and some nigher.’ The next year, 1870, the district was incorporated as
the Town of Mashpee.
About this time a new ingredient was added to the already miscellaneous
nationality of the Mashpees. Every returning New Bedford whaler
brought home a few _bravas_, or black Portuguese, among its crew.
These Cape Verde savages--a cross between exiled Portuguese criminals
and the aborigines of the Islands--began to drift into Mashpee and
marry into the hybrid of Indian and African Negro that they found
there. This vicious mixture caused what Mr. Pocknet called ‘a drift of
disgust against Mashpee,’ and has resulted in such a mixture of blood
that the Indian strain is to-day almost lost. Only now and then, as
one makes one’s way through the village, is the eye caught by some
leather-skinned veteran whose high cheekbones, thin lips, and straight
hair suggest that his ancestors once chipped arrow-heads from the
pebbles on the shores of the Cape and shot deer with them in the woods.