Old Cape Cod

by Mary Rogers Bangs

III

In these years of the early settlements the Indians had given little trouble, and they had been willing enough to sell their lands for considerations that were valuable to them and not ruinous to the whites. The matter of the natives’ claim to the soil was reasoned out in certain “General Considerations for the Plantation in New England.” “The whole earth is the Lord’s garden and he hath given it to the sons of Adam to be tilled and improved,” ran the ingenuous document. “But what warrant have we to take that land which is, and hath of long time been possessed by others of the sons of Adam? That which is common to all is proper to none,” is the answer thereto. “This savage people ruleth over many lands without title or property.... And why may not Christians have liberty to go and dwell amongst them in their waste lands and woods (leaving them such places as they have manured for their corn) as lawfully as Abraham did among the Sodomites?” Fortified by such doctrine, the settlers took up the waste lands, paid for the corn, and went on, when need arose, to pay for the cleared land; though later Andros, characteristically, was to declare that these Indian deeds were no better than “the scratch of a bear’s paw.” Prices were easy of adjustment. “A great brass kettle of seven spans in wideness round about and one broad” fell to one Paupunmuck, of Barnstable, who, however, reserved “the right freely to hunt in the lands sold, provided his traps did no harm to the cattle.” And of Monohoo, the Reverend Mr. Walley, lover of justice and peace, bought some threescore acres for “ten yards of trucking cloth, ten shillings in money, one iron kettle, two knives, and a bass-hook.” And so were matters arranged to the satisfaction of all concerned: to the settler his farmland; to the Indian a brass pot and bass-hook, and often a small plot was reserved to him for tillage. But his right to hunt or fish was inevitably encroached upon as the settlements absorbed more and more of the wild lands, and before 1660 Richard Bourne, of Sandwich, perceived that some special reservation should be made for the fast dwindling tribes.

The settlers had lived comfortably enough with their pagan neighbors; and so busy were they about their own affairs, temporal and spiritual, that they were not annoyingly zealous in proselyting. But when John Eliot, apostle to the Indians, came down from Boston to arbitrate the parochial troubles of Sandwich, he improved the occasion to forward the work nearest his heart. An Indian of the Six Nations shrewdly observed to a Frenchman that “while we had beaver and furs, the missionaries prayed with us; but when our merchandise failed they thought they could do us no further good.” No such charge could be brought against Eliot. “We may guess that probably the devil decoyed these miserable salvages hither,” set forth the “Magnalia,” “in hopes that the gospel should never come here to destroy or disturb his absolute empire over them. But our Eliot was on such ill terms with the devil as to alarm him with sounding the silver trumpets of heaven in his territories and make some noble and zealous attempts ... to rescue as many as he could from the old usurping landlord of America.” The silver trumpets sounded in vain at Sandwich. Eliot was baffled by the difficulties of the local dialect, by the too pliant acquiescence of one sagamore, and by the ironic compliance of a huge sachem known as Jehu who stalked into meeting, stood silent at the door, and, silent still, went forth again never to reappear there. Eliot returned to Boston, but it is probable that his hope was the inspiration of much good that followed.

Richard Bourne took hold of the matter by the right handle: he was “a man of that discernment that he conceived it was in vain to propagate Christian knowledge among any people without a territory where they might remain in peace.” And he proceeded to obtain for his wards a tract of over ten thousand acres on the “South Sea,” where in time, as birds to the safety of some southern island, flocked Indians from far and near; and where still, though of deteriorated breed, may be found a few Mashpee Indians. “There is no place I ever saw so adapted to an Indian town as this,” wrote the Reverend Gideon Hawley in 1757. “It is situated on the Sound, in sight of Martha’s Vineyard; is cut into necks of land, and has two inlets by the sea; being well watered by three fresh rivers and three large fresh ponds lying in the centre of the plantation. In the two salt water bays are a great plenty of fish of every description; and in the rivers are trout, herring &c. In the woods, until lately, has been a great variety of wild game consisting of deer &c., and adjacent to the rivers and ponds otters, minks, and other amphibious animals whose skins have been sought for and made a valuable remittance to Europe ever since my knowledge of these Indians.” The description of the land on the thickly settled south shore of to-day is clearly recognizable; there are trout in the brooks, and fish in the sea, though the Indian and the “amphibious animals” be rarer denizens.

Mr. Hawley had been deflected by the French wars from work among the Iroquois, in contrast to whom the Mashpees “appeared abject,” he thought. “A half naked savage were less disagreeable than Indians who had lost their independence.” But he might better have been thankful for that civilization which his predecessors had made possible: for the less trouble was his, and his Indian parishioners gave him, moreover, valid title to two hundred acres of their best land. He lived among them for fifty years, and is said to have “possessed great dignity of manner and authority of voice, which had much influence.” And his Indians, though “abject,” did him credit. In 1760 one Reuben Cognehew presented himself at the Georgian court with a protest against the colonial governor, and returned with orders to treat the Indians better; and in the Revolution, Hawley said, more than seventy of the Mashpee women were made widows. In his old age he wrote a letter full of a humorous philosophy that must have stood him in good stead through his long ministry: “Retired as I am, and at my time of life I need amusement. I read, but my eyes soon become weary. I converse, but it is with those who have my threadbare stories by rote. In such case what can I do? I walk, but soon become weary. I cannot doze away my time upon the bed of sloth, nor nod in my elbow chair.” He contemplates his fowl and observing “how great an underling one of the cocks was made by Cockran and others of the flock I pitied his fate, and concluded to take an active part in his favor.” Whereupon Master Cockerel “gathered courage with his strength, sung his notes, and enjoyed his amours in consequence of my action. But alas! to the terror and amazement of the whole company he in his turn became an intolerant tyrant. The Archon had better understanding than I and I have determined not to meddle in the government of hens in future, nor overturn establishments. Cocks will be cocks. As the sage Indian said, ‘Tucks will be tucks, though old hen he hatch ’em!’” As for other animals, though “Milton, full of his notions, supposes that a change in consequence of Adam’s fall passed upon them,” Mr. Hawley notes them much of the “same nature that they had before the Revolution in this country, and that important one now regenerating the Old World, as it is called; and under every form of government and dispensation, men will be men.”

But to return to Bourne: having obtained for the Indians their land, in 1665 he furthered their “desire of living in some orderly way of government, for the better preventing and redressing of things amiss among them by just means,” and a court was set up consisting of six Indians, under his guidance, reserving, however, that “what homage accustomed legally due to any superior sachem be not infringed.” In 1670 Bourne was ordained by Eliot as their pastor. And his son, following the father’s example, procured an act of the Court guarding the tenure of their land, which might not be “bought by or sold to any white person or persons without the consent of all the Indians.” And in the ministry Bourne was succeeded by men, sometimes Indians, sometimes whites, who had due regard for their charges, “the Praying Indians,” they were called.

At Eastham, the Reverend Samuel Treat was at pains to learn the language of his Indian neighbors, and translated the Confession of Faith into the Nauset dialect. Mr. Treat was an old-school Calvinist, whose chief means to grace was the threat of eternal damnation. “God himself shall be the principal agent in thy misery,” he could thunder out in the little meeting-house with a voice that carried far beyond its walls. “His is that consuming fire; his breath is the bellows which blows up the flame of hell forever; he is the damning fire—the everlasting burning; and if he punish thee, if he meet thee in his fury, he will not meet thee as a man, he will give thee an omnipotent blow.” Whether Mr. Treat dealt out such red-hot doctrine to his Indians, we cannot know; perhaps they were warmed by the fervor rather than alarmed by the tenor of his words. At any rate, they loved him; and when he died during the Great Snow of 1716, they tunnelled a way to the grave and bore him to his rest.

There were old ordinances forbidding the whites to give or sell firearms, ammunition, canoes, or horses to Indians. There was also a provision that “whoever shall shoot off a gun on any unnecessary occasion, or at any game except at an Indian, or a wolf, shall forfeit five shillings for every shot.” Evidently all was not love and trust between the races. The Indians steadily dwindled in numbers until at Eastham in 1763 there were but five Indians, and at Truro in 1792 only one family, although an old lady then remembered that there used to be as many Indian children at school as whites, and “sometimes the little Injuns tried to crow over ’em.” Early in the nineteenth century the pure-breed Mashpees were extinct; but in 1830 William Apes, an “Indian” preacher, succeeded in enlarging their religious liberties; in 1842 their common lands were apportioned in sixty-acre lots; in 1870 Mashpee became a town with full self-government, though still with some special grants of state aid for schools and highways.

“Rum” here, as elsewhere, played its important part in undermining the stamina of the natives; and its evil, as in any age, exhorters to virtue were prone only too vividly to depict. “Mr. Stone one very good preacher,” commented a Mashpee, “but he preach too much about rum. When he no preach about rum, Injun think nothing ’bout it; but when he tells how Injun love rum, and how much they drunk, then I think how good rum is and think no more ’bout sermon, my mouth waters so much for rum.” And when asked whether he preferred Mr. Stone or “Blind Joe,” a Baptist, he said: “Mr. Stone he make best sermons, but Blind Joe he make best Christians.” And as in other and later times the whites made their profit in selling drink to the Indians. As early as 1685 Governor Hinckley writes of the Indians: “They have their courts and judges; but a great obstruction to bringing them to more civility and Christianity is the great appetite of the young generation for strong liquors, and the covetous ill-humor of sundry of our English in furnishing them therewith notwithstanding all the court orders and means used to prohibit the same.”

The Indians were inveterate gamblers, and although they could sit solemnly enough through a church service, they were as likely to go forth to game away all they had even to their precious knives and kettles. And the whites, as in the early days before they had made good Christians of the “salvages,” were ready to suspect them of petty thievery: for which, however, the savages were not without examples to imitate. An Indian, reproved for taking a knife from an Englishman’s house, retorted: “Barlow steals from the Quakers. Why can’t I steal?” At Yarmouth, late in the seventeen hundreds, near the mouth of Bass River, was a little cluster of wigwams; and whether for reason or not, an irate deacon, suspecting some of the community of robbing his henroost, visited them in the early morning, only to be abashed by finding them at prayer. He stole away without further inquiry about his hens. And the Indian deacon, one Naughaught, nettled, perhaps, by such suspicions, upon finding a purse of money one day, would not open it save in the presence of witnesses at the tavern. “If I were to do so,” he told them, “all the trees of the forest would see and testify against me.” And this same Naughaught had a marvellous adventure that must have made a fine story for drinkers at the tavern. Walking one day far from the habitations of man, went the tale, he was set upon by a great number of black snakes—a common and harmless reptile in the Cape Cod meadows to-day, but going about their business there in smaller companies. Unarmed, Naughaught saw that his defence lay only in a steadfast spirit. He quailed not when the snakes writhed up his body, even to the neck; and when one, bolder than the rest, faced him eye to eye, he opened his mouth and straight snapped off its head. Whereupon its companions withdrew and left Naughaught master of the field.