House of "The Pearl of Orr's Island," Casco Bay, Me.
THE ANDROSCOGGIN.
Maine has more than fifteen hundred lakes, scattered everywhere through its extensive forests. Seventeen miles northwest of Portland is Sebago Lake, one of the most attractive, an islet-dotted expanse, fourteen miles long and ten miles wide, its Indian name meaning "the stretch of water." Into it flows the rapid and devious Songo River, discharging Long Lake, a little over two miles distant, but the boat journey on the river to that lake is for six miles and around twenty-seven bends. Thirty-eight miles northwest of Portland is Poland Springs, the chief inland watering-place of Maine, with pure air, the finest waters and large hotels. To the northward the Androscoggin River, flowing from the flanks of the White Mountains, sweeps eastwardly across the State, and then turns southward to unite its current with the Kennebec in Merry Meeting Bay. Not far from the New Hampshire boundary it pours down the Rumford Falls, one of the finest of cataracts, the river making three or four leaps over ragged, granite ledges, aggregating one hundred and sixty feet descent, the final fall being nearly seventy feet, making a great roaring, heard for a long distance. Here is a town of textile and paper-mills, with three thousand people. Having turned to the southward, the river comes to the Livermore Falls, another manufacturing village on the Indian domain of Rockomeka, or the "great corn land." Here were born the famous brothers Israel, Elihu B. and Cadwalader C. Washburne, who were so long in the public service, representing Maine, Illinois and Wisconsin. A handsome Gothic public library built of granite has been erected as their memorial. Farther along is Leeds, the birthplace of General Oliver O. Howard, and then some distance below the river plunges down the Lewiston Falls of fifty-two feet at the second city in Maine, the towns of Auburn and Lewiston having twenty-five thousand population, chiefly employed in the manufacture of textiles, there being large numbers of French Canadians in the mills. Bates College, with two hundred students, is one of the chief buildings of Lewiston.
Eastward from Casco Bay to the Androscoggin is a rough wooded country becoming, however, rather more level as the river is approached. The Androscoggin having come down from the north, sweeps around to the northeast to enter Merry Meeting Bay, and at the bend, about thirty miles from Portland, is Brunswick, at the head of tidewater, with over six thousand population, largely employed in its mills. The river falls forty-one feet here in three separate cataracts, giving an enormous water-power. This was the Indian Pejepscot, where the English built Fort George in 1715, known as "the key of Western Maine." The city is chiefly noted now as the seat of Bowdoin College, the chief educational institution of Maine, incorporated in 1794, and opened in 1802 with an endowment by the State. It has nearly four hundred students and attractive buildings, the most conspicuous one being surmounted by twin spires, which are seen from afar in approaching the town, rising above the trees with a thick growth of pines behind them. This college had President Franklin Pierce, Hawthorne, Longfellow and Chief Justice Fuller among its graduates, and Longfellow was its professor of modern languages until 1835, when he was called to Harvard. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin in Brunswick in 1851-2, when her husband was in the Bowdoin College faculty. Pierre Baudouin, a Huguenot refugee from La Rochelle, came to Portland in 1687; and his grandson, who was Governor of Massachusetts in 1785-6, had his name given the college, the great-grandson, James Bowdoin 2nd, the noted diplomatist, having been most liberal in his gifts to it. Beyond Brunswick the Androscoggin broadens into Merry Meeting Bay, which is finally absorbed by the Kennebec.
THE KENNEBEC.
The Kennebec River, the Indian "large water place," is one of the greatest streams of Maine, having its source in its largest lake, Moosehead, surrounded by forests. This lake is at an elevation of over a thousand feet, is thirty-five miles long, and has a surface of two hundred and twenty square miles. The shores are generally monotonous, excepting where the long peninsula of Mount Kineo is projected from the eastern side so far into the lake as to narrow it to little more than a mile width. Mount Kineo is nine hundred feet high, rising abruptly on the south and east, but sloping gradually to the water on the other sides. To the northeast, Spencer Mountain is seen rising four thousand feet, with Katahdin, the Indian "greatest mountain," in the distance. This magnificent summit, the highest in Maine, rises nearly fifty-four hundred feet. All about Moosehead Lake and far to the northward over the Canadian border is a vast forest wilderness, full of lakes and streams, visited chiefly by the timber-cutters and sportsmen, and one of the favorite hunting and angling regions of the country. From the southwestern extremity of the lake the Kennebec River flows out towards the sea, and in a winding course of a hundred miles descends a thousand feet of rapids and cataracts, until it reaches the tidal level at Augusta. It narrows at Solon to only forty feet as it goes over the Carrituck Falls of twenty feet. Then it passes Old Point and comes to Norridgewock, where several ancient elms of enormous size border the street along the river bank. This is the scene of Whittier's poem of Mogg Megone, and along here lived the ancient Norridgewocks. At Old Point was their chief town, and as early as 1610 French missionary priests sent out from Quebec settled among them, the famous Jesuit, Sebastian Rale, coming about 1670 and living there over forty years, being not only the spiritual but finally the political head of the tribe. He was a man of high culture, and had been professor of Greek at the College of Nismes, in France. The tribe belonged to the Canabis branch of the Abenaquis nation, and he prepared a complete dictionary of their language (now preserved in Harvard University), which he described as "a powerful and flexible language—the Greek of America."
In the early eighteenth century wars broke out between these Indians under the French flag and the Puritans of New England. It is said that Father Rale had a superb consecrated banner floating before his church, emblazoned with the cross, and a bow and sheaf of arrows. This was often borne as a crusading flag against the Puritan border villages. Norridgewock was destroyed by a sudden raid in 1705, and peace following, an envoy was sent to Boston to demand an indemnity, and also that workmen be sent to rebuild the church. Both were promised on condition that they would accept a Puritan pastor, but this was declined. The Indians rebuilt their village, and it was again destroyed by a plundering raid in 1722, and in revenge they then made a fearful ravaging expedition in which the Maine coast towns paid dearly. The English seacoast colonists consequently decided that for protection Norridgewock must be taken and the tribe driven away, a price being set upon Rale's head. In August, 1724, a strong party of New England rangers marched secretly and swiftly, and, before their presence was known, had surrounded the village and began firing through the wigwams. A few Indians escaped, but nearly the whole tribe—men, women and children—were massacred. Charlevoix writes of it that "the noise and tumult gave Père Rale notice of the danger his converts were in, and he fearlessly showed himself to the enemy, hoping to draw all their attention to himself, and to secure the safety of his flock at the peril of his life. He was not disappointed. As soon as he appeared the English set up a great shout, which was followed by a shower of shot, when he fell dead near to the cross which he had erected in the midst of the village. Seven chiefs, who sheltered his body with their own, fell around him." His mutilated body was afterwards found at the foot of the cross and buried there. The place lay desolate for a half-century, when English settlers came in 1773, and in 1833 a granite memorial obelisk was erected on the site of the ancient church. Thus Whittier describes the tragedy:
"Fearfully over the Jesuit's face,
Of a thousand thoughts, trace after trace,
Like swift cloud shadows, each other chase.