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Indian Names Of Boston/ Eben Horsford 1885 [BS/BSN = (Bostonian Society/Bostonian Society Notes): "Kennebec" and Quinnebequi" differ only dialectically. Both mean long, still water. "If an Indian of the Massachusetts tribe standing on the bank of any river against a stretch of dead water were asked what he called the stream he would reply "Quinne= long," and "bequi= still" water. Massachusetts/ Blue Hills according to Roger Williams.` 1822 Samuel Deane of Scituate = Shawmut, a fountain of living waters = Mishawumut, he translated as great spring The only authority for Shawmut is Blaxton. It differs from the name of Charlestown in that it lacks the prefix Mi or Mis....mis we know = Mistick, Missouri etc. = Great -ut? Mishaum + mishaumut ....on title page of books printed for Indians = Boston-ut... Eel = Neek-sha Sha = is parallel-sided Sha-um was the Neck, upon or near which was the first Indian settlement, between the cove formerly coming in from the northwest to beyond the eastern limit of Haymarket Square, and the bay extending from the east to points west of Dock Square, as shown on Winsor's map. In sum.. BSN: When in 1811 the Bostonians cut off a considerable slice of Beacon Hill to use in filling in the Mill Pond they found hundreds of skeletons. These they dumped in the pond along with the dirt and stones. Later when the cellar holes of the North Station and surrounding buildings were dug many of these bones were again disturbed. This time they had a ride to Needham where they helped fill a marsh in that town." BSN : Shawmut depending on who translates it: BS F60 But the white men kept coming and coming like snowflakes until the Indians were either exterminated or driven away from the haunts of civilization. And matters went on in this unsettled condition, Indians and white men being killed indiscriminately, because there were lawless men in those days, as in the present, until there came the great Pequot War in CT." BIBL: Wampanoag Weinstein-Farson July 1988 Chelsea House Publications BS T 5 Three Indian paths led to Boston...that from Taunton not wholly unlike the present railroad in general direction. The path from Boston to Salem and Gloucester, again along the lines of the railway, was used in the fishing season, and became the first highway of the white man in MA...Another path known to Winthrop as the Nashaway (Lancaster) path was substantially along the Boston and Maine toward Northampton. From Springfield toward the Iroquois country the Indian trail lay quite near the tracks of the Albany and NY Central. This was the trail that brought so much misery to the Indians of NE. To the white pioneers the most misery came along the much disputed path from Quebec up the Chaudiere and down the Connecticut" Algonquin of NE: Algonquin, Iroquois and Appalachian, east of the Mississippi River, three of seven families. Algonquin fear of Iroquois Federation. The Peacemaker and his lieutenant, Hiawatha confederacy of five tribes in western New York, including Mohawks, fifty years before Columbus. Emissaries collected tributes as far as Nipmucks of Central MA, Pennacooks of NH, Indians of Maine. Five Nations, later six including Mohawks, Oneidas, Ondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, all known simply as Mohawks by the Algonquins "a pestilential thorn in the side of the Algonquins" Iroquois line of descent thought the female line i.e. a chief's brother, sister or sister's children Hudson Bay to the Carolinas and Atlantic to the Mississippi and Lake Winnepeg Leni Lenapee = Delawares = call themselves the parent stock of the Algonquin = "the original men" Pequots = ?true Mohicans. Wars between Sassacus the Pequot and Uncas = family rows for the sovereignty of the federation First half of 17th century, the Algonquin race had spread over a territory nearly half as large as Europe.
Massachusett inhabited the Blue Hills and tributaries around Massachusetts Bay / People of the Blue Hill Around Boston Bay, between time of the plague 1616-17 and arrival of the Puritans natural re-afforestation had gone far with forest returning to cleared fields. In 1614, Smith had reported in Boston Bay, many isles all planted with corn. Bradford and Wilson a decade later also commented that most of the islands had been inhabited, some cleared from end to end. Yet Wood in 1634 has these islands abounding in woods and deer. Massachusett and Nipmuc, primarily John Smith: "The Paradise of All These Parts" /40 thriving coastal villages. Cape Cod Penobscot Bay. Squaw Sachem of Mystic Indians, north of Boston, who signed deed to English of Mystic River valley BIBL Encounters Alden Vaughan (AV)
Loosely connected band of small villages. Seldom more than 150, but sites changed with seasons or as area became polluted by habitation.
Sachem was holder for the tribe of all lakes and streams in his territory. Of sometimes greater importance powwows or medicine men Sachem sagamore (subordinate): chieftainship was hereditary, descending through the mother (Wood) Hereditary royal line = also female e.g. "Weetamoo as potent as any prince round about her" Family groups Mohegan = Wolf, Turtle, Turkey A casual encroachment on a deer park was grounds for hostility. Their wealth is in proportion to their dogs" Nicholas Common to all families of the tribe were the carefully protected groves of nut trees, berry fields, deer pasture, wooded and marshy sources of firewood and materials for canoes, housing, baskets and tools. Religion: "He sang the songs which raise the dead and scare the devils." Manitoo = spirits e.g. Cantantowwit was great spirit who first made man and woman. Native spirits: "good-natured Bear," "wise Moose," " Fox, the Mischief maker"
Acknowledged the existence of supernatural qualities = Manitou = in a wide range of animate objects. "It is a God!" (Man, woman, bird, fish etc.) Also inanimate e.g. English ships, buildings. "Monnitowock! They are Gods"
Powwows mediating with the spirits. Powwow or shaman....priest healers (NB term medicine indicating power and medicine man = absent from writings about the Indians before the 19th century.) Animal helpers of which each shaman was likely to claim one or two. Gookin : "They are partly wizards and witches holding familiarity with Satan; and partly are physicians and make use at least in show of herbs and roots for curing the sick and diseased." Tobacco (ceremonial), the sacred plant for toothache and to revive and refresh. 450 plant remedies/50 drugs Punishment: Roger Williams says " with his own hand, beat, whip or put to death" Wood: They hold the band of brotherhood so dear, that when one had committed a murder and fled, they executed his brother X contrast with European state monopoly on justice and misunderstood. Burglary unknown
Hostilities:
NB: This war coincides with the reported plague. In general, spared women and children.
Inter-tribal fights rare but not impossible e.g. Mohegan vs. Pequots In summer, inland Nipmucs migrated to coast for shell fish, lived freely among the coastal inhabitants Labor:
Many colonial commentaries charged men with being lazy and virtually enslaving wives. " Their wives and their slaves, do all their work. The men do nothing but kill beasts, fish etc." The English classed hunting as a recreation, the Indians as work. Often exhausting, backbreaking and tedious tasks undertaken in deadly earnest. To run down a deer or moose, a feat of a day or more. Notion that in early times woods were full of deer and birds is a myth. "Women fell to work with great cheerfulness; sometimes one of their orators cheers them with humorous old tales and agreeable wild tunes." Compare not with modern women but farm women of the 16th century in England. Both woman and maize = mother". Women, first mother,"...the one who plants, and maize with its milk, the second mother" Corn hills x rows x fish fertilizer Humans, mostly women, moved all the burdens. A band clasped about head or shoulders eased the bearing of the load. Fields prepared with a stone axe and fire. Forest returned rapidly if the cleared land was abandoned. Everything harvest, food, clothing, canoes etc. by hand tools ... "but it was skilled hands which held tools, and intelligence that directed the labor." Father Paul le Jeune in Canada suggested that laborers be sent from France to work for the Indians. Food:
Salt, the early New England tribes never used. They mixed sassafras and other herbs with bear oil for drying and smoking fish. But Morton saw them beginning to use salt. Later they would beg for it. On the hunt dehydrated corn meal "no cake" which made a nourishing meal when moistened with water. NOKEHICK = No Cake "Clams baked in piles over heated rocks covered and interlaced with seaweed, with succulent ears or green corn and slices of fish added to the steaming pile" Trees: white oak, beechnut, chestnut, butternut, hickory and others. Thirty varieties of oak. Clearings and cultivations widespread
Whether planted in corn, whether kept open and green for berries and as deer pasture to furnish meat for the tribes, whether orchard like, it was studded with ancient oaks, hickories and chestnuts to yield acorns for bread and nuts for oil, or whether it bore cherry trees for fruit or white birch for canoes, "almost every variety of land, the growth on it, and the animal life within it formed a useful place in the indigenous economy." Seasons: Planting corn and beans: both tender plants ruined by a hard frost, began only when the budding leaves of the white oak reached the size of a moose's ear or a red squirrel's foot or whom the shadbush leaf became as large as a squirrel ear. Planting around Moon of Leaves (June? Knee-high by Fourth of July.") Clam shell hoes/herring in each corn hill to fertilize plants/Set beans next to them, natural trellis. Two weeks until the fish rotted. Watch-houses in fields. Children. Trained hawks. Fields guarded against dogs and wolves who would dig up and eat fish at night. Feast of the Green Corn /August. First potful as an offering to the spirits. No one tasted a single kernel until the offering had been made and sacred ears burned to black coals.
Rhythmic hub-hub-hub" = hubbub. Dry pit corn storage. 3-5 feet across x 5 feet deep or 10-15 feet wide for large size = modern pit or root culture.
Wampanoag grist mill (Warren) a natural flat table rock into which grooves have been cut or worn by use, where women of tribe ground corn by rolling round stoned over its surface these movable stones being operated by rolling them like a wheel about a shaft thrust through a hole drilled in the center. Hunting:
Dogs: On a great occasion, a favorite dog might be sacrificed as a singular honor to a guest. Deer pasture: drive. After deer brought down, the squaws were expected to carry them to a temporary camp for butchering. Deer: brain went to process hides, rawhide went to make bindings or glue. Tanned hide became clothing pouches and containers of all sorts. Antlers were worked into points for weapons, into knapping tools, decorations, fishhooks, needles. Bones became scrapers, musical instruments, gaming pieces. Hooves made rattles and glue. All this after the meat had been cut away, muscle by muscle, dried, smoked, ground, mixed with fat, berries or nuts. Or eaten boiled, broiled or raw, sometimes several pounds at a sitting. A native deer would dress out at 100 pounds, a moose at 800. Lip of a moose was a special delicacy; beaver's tail a luxury. Bones of a beaver not thrown carelessly to the dogs but returned to the animal's native stream. "To New England Indians, all nature, however its various parts might at times appear in conflict, was a single whole, formed all of it, by the Creator and thus to a certain degree, sacred Different from Genesis to subdue the earth and have dominion over it" (Francis Jennings) Every part of Nature, man, beast, fruit, flower, soil, sun or shower had its role and special value as an intrinsic part of creation. Each deserved regard and, if made use of, man's appreciation. The wealth of nature's resources was to be used judiciously, not squandered. Tremendous flights of wild pigeons during brief spring and fall migrations. So many that they were said to shut out the sun as they flew. When at night they roosted on the branches of trees, it was easy to knock them off with sticks. Morning and evenings were time for geese and ducks. Following well-known flyways birds settled at night in river meadows and salt marshes or rested at ease on smooth water (Back Bay). The hunters would drift in quietly in canoes, light torches to case sudden confusion among the birds, and knock them down with paddles or clubs. Then a specially trained canoe dog would jump in and retrieve game. Turkey: hunters get close by imitating bird's call. Fish: Great runs of herring or shad, abundant salmon and occasional sturgeon migrated up rivers and brooks in Spring. Herring easy to dip out at weirs by the basketful. Whale hunt (Cape Vancouver, Ozette canoes to hunt whales 40 foot long with 8 men.) Hospitality, food and protection, Canoe: Crowning achievement in handicraft. Red paint from central Maine Trade:
Wide distribution of shell beads known as wampum. Black had twice the value of white. 1) Wampum 2) Copper 3) Tobacco pipes An Indian runner could cover 100 miles a day and on the second day afterward returned in the same time. Hulbert has counted these paths the greatest asset bequeathed by the red man to the first Europeans." Beside the path, some boulder with a hollowed out depression where the traveling squaw could ground corn or nuts."
Cascades on the Connecticut and Merrimac were meccas for the Indians. Neutral zones, where they gathered by the thousands when the salmon were running. Games:
Wood: "It might take as much as two days of struggle town against town to make a goal. In such contests men paint faces and distort them to minimize the chance for personal animosity. Each town's goal hung with strings of wampum, beaver and otter and other furs. Private bets among the players would include clothing, skins, valuables, even to the extent that a losing player and wife would have to travel home naked, save for a breech cover. Even loser appears as merry as though he had won and everyone remains friends.The boys pipe and the women dance and sing...All done in good spirits and when the clams were dried and smoked, everyone joined in a feast before setting out for home with the supplies for winter Winter: ice-fishing/squirrels The children played with dogs and listened carefully while their elders filled their memory with the legends of their people and the lore of the woods, winds and weather..." Children:
Child was not babied. Following mother's recovery, after two or three days, the little papoose travels about with his bare-footed mother in the Icie clammbankes." Orphans provided for. Lifespan: 60,80,100 even Soul of the departed thought to journey to the South-West, there to share the fields of the great Kanta (or Tanto or Cantantowwit/Kautauowit) where abundance rains and ancestors are welcome after feasting. Buried with cherished possessions, together with practical items likely to be needed in the country of souls. Indians described:
Wood: upon cheeks of the superior males there were certain portraitures of beares, deeres, mooses, wolves, eagles, hawks incised permanently in unchangeable ink, together with round impressions on their arms and breasts." Gosnold: dark olive complexion. bronze" or tawny" Josselyn: Very comely with good features, many pretty brownnettes and spider-fingered lasses, slender, limbs cleanly, straight, generally plump as a partridge and saving now and then, one of a modest deportment." Black eyes, very white teeth which the natives account the most necessary and best parts of man." Williams: as free as emperors with their hospitality" Cotton Mather: "wretches and bloodthirsty savages...the most devoted vassals of the devil" Ability to remember for years benefits conferred and injuries suffered at others hands is well attested, each native was an individual with a deep sense of personal and tribal worth. Rev. Robert Cushman of Plymouth: The Indians are said to be the most cruel and treacherous people in all these parts, even like lions, but to us they have been like lambs, so kind, so submissive and trusty, as a man might truly say, many Christians are not so Marriage:
Violation/rape unknown. Plague: Bubonic Plague (in London, 1604/5 1624-25 and 1637-38) 1614 or 1615 "A French trader spent six weeks in Boston harbor trading with natives until nothing left to barter. A year or two later there is a passing record of another vessel and while she lay at anchor off Peddock's Island, the savages attacked, killing or capturing all and plundering and burning the ship. There were traditions of shipwrecked Frenchmen who led a miserable existence as captives of the Indians, through one or two were rescued from there."
Five French distributed among five sachems of adjoining territories. Made them fetch wood and water etc. Tortured. One Frenchman said God would be angry and destroy them. Natives said that they were too many and God could not destroy them. Nausets: Champlain and Smith both in skirmishes with them. Morton: "But contrarywise the hand of God fell heavily on them with such a mortal stroke that they died in heapes, as they lay in their houses and the living that were able to shift for themselves would run away and let them die...the living not being able to bury the dead, they were left for crowes, kites and vermin to prey on.
And by this means there is yet but a small number of savages in NE to that which hath been in former time, and the place is made so much the more fit, for the English nation to inhabit in, and erect in it Temples to the glory of God." Squanto told the sachem that what the English had hid underground was the plague. If he should give offense to the English, they would let out the plague to destroy all, which kept him in great awe. Squanto later came to ask English to let out the plague to destroy his enemies. Which indicated that Indians believed the plague to be imported? Deaths in such numbers that they dare not raise a mound to mark the spot for feat that their weakness be discovered. "Wisdom and love of God to sweep away the savages in heaps" Many Massachusetts began to believe that their own gods had abandoned them and a new and angry god came to inflict punishment...Many survivors of epidemics became engaged in a search for order...I see in the praying people not victims or villains, not historical props or pawns, but human beings caught up in a historical struggle for survival and a search for a new and viable order." BIBL: Robert Cushman - On the State of the Colony, 1621 ... a great mortality that fell among them three years since, which together with their own civil dissension and wars, hath so wasted them, as I think the twentieth person is scarce left alive , and those that are left have their courage much abated, and their countenance is dejected, and they seem as a people affrighted...We found the place where we live empty, the people being all dead and gone away, and none living nearby eight or ten miles.... We are compassed about with a helpless and idle people, which cannot in any comely way help themselves, much less us." IMAGINING BOSTON | BRAZIL | BRAZIL
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