With the dawn of American history, the Penacooks, a tribe of Indians, were known to have occupied the site of Lowell as their favorite rendezvous. Here the salmon and shad were caught in great abundance by the dusky warriors. Passaconaway was their first great chief known to the white man, and he was acknowledged as leader by many neighboring tribes. He was a friend to the English. Before the coming of the Pilgrims a great plague had swept over New England, making desolate the Indian villages. Added to the terrors of the pestilence, which was resistless as fate to the children of the forest, was the fear and dread of their implacable enemies, the fierce Mohawks of the west. The spirit of the Indian was broken. In 1644, Passaconaway renounced his authority as an independent chief, and placed himself and his tribe of several thousand souls under the protection of the colonial magistrates. The Indian villages at Pawtucket Falls, on the Merrimack, and Wamesit Falls, on the Concord, the Musketaquid of the aborigines, were first visited in 1647 by the Reverend John Eliot, the Apostle to the Indians. In 1652, Captain Simon Willard and Captain Edward Johnson made their tour up the Merrimack Paver to Lake Winnipiseogee, and marked a stone near the Weirs as the northern boundary of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The following year the work of settlement swept onward, crowding in upon the cornfields of the red men; and Eliot, caring for his charges, procured the passage of an act by the General Court reserving a good part of the land on which Lowell now stands to the exclusive use of the Indians.
The towns of Chelmsford and Billerica were incorporated May 29, 1655.
In 1656, Major-General Daniel Gookin was appointed superintendent of all the Indians under the jurisdiction of the Colony. By his fair dealing he won their entire confidence. They had good friends in Judge Gookin and the Apostle Eliot, who were ever ready to protect them from encroachments of their neighbors.
In 1660, Passaconaway relinquished all authority over his tribe, retiring at a ripe old age, and turning over his office of sachem to his son Wannalancet, whose headquarters were at Penacook. Numphow, who was married to one of Passaconaway's daughters, was the chief for some years of the village of Pawtucket. In 1669, Wannalancet, in dread of the Mohawks, came down the river with his whole tribe, and located at Wamesit, and built a fortification on Fort Hill in Belvidere, which was surrounded with palisades. The white settlers of the vicinity, catching the alarm, took refuge in garrison-houses.
