Old John Neptune and Other Maine Indian Shamans

By Fannie Hardy Eckstorm

Maine author Fannie Hardy Eckstorm was a personal friend of the tribe, having worked with them with her fur trader father. John Neptune was the Governor and Hereditary Chief of the Penobscot Tribe, as well as shaman to his people. In this classic study, first published in 1945, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm traces Neptune’s life and his ancestors, discusses the history and politics of the Penobscot tribe, and describes their spiritual beliefs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Release date: May 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839744754

Fannie Hardy Eckstorm

Fannie Pearson Hardy Eckstorm (1865-1946) was an American writer, ornithologist and folklorist. Her extensive personal knowledge of her native state of Maine secured her place as one of the foremost authorities on the history, wildlife, cultures, and lore of the region. Born Fannie Pearson Hardy in Brewer, Maine, her father, Manly Hardy, was a fur trader, naturalist, and taxidermist. Her granduncle was painter Jeremiah Pearson Hardy. She attended Bangor High School, then was sent in the winter of 1883 to Abbot Academy, a college preparatory school in Andover, Massachusetts. She went on to Smith College and graduated in 1888, having founded the college chapter of the National Audubon Society. From 1889 to 1891, Hardy served as the superintendent of schools in Brewer, becoming the first woman to hold such a position in Maine. In 1891 she wrote a series of articles examining Maine game laws for Forest and Stream magazine. At the turn of the 20th Century, Eckstrom’s writing career began to gain momentum. She contributed to magazines such as Bird-Lore, the immediate predecessor of The Audubon Magazine, and the Auk, before publishing her first two books, The Bird Book and The Woodpeckers. Her next book, The Penobscot Man (1904) celebrates the lumbermen and river drivers that populated her childhood, and David Libbey: Penobscot Woodsman and River Driver (1907) creates an in-depth profile of one of those men. In 1908 Eckstorm founded Brewer’s public library while continuing to publish articles and critiques. She also contributed to Louis C. Hatch’s Maine, A History (1919), published Minstrelsy of Maine (1927) with Mary Winslow Smyth, and worked on British Ballads from Maine (1929) with Smyth and Phillips Barry. She also wrote prolifically on the language and culture of Maine’s Native Americans. Eckstorm was married to Reverend Jacob A. Eckstorm, and the couple had two children. She died on December 31, 1946 in Brewer, Maine.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

OLD JOHN NEPTUNE

AND OTHER MAINE INDIAN SHAMANS

BY

FANNIE HARDY ECKSTORM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 170

Dedication 171

Illustrations 172

Foreword 174

Our Fireside 176

John Neptune 179

Old Molly 179

Behind the Looking-glass 179

John Neptune’s Family and their M’teoulin 179

The Fight with the Wiwiliamecq’ 179

Interlude—The Background 179

Totems and Family Names 179

The Quoddy Chiefs 179

The Penobscot Neptunes 179

A. Passamaquoddy Branch of Neptunes 179

B. The Penobscot Branch of Neptunes 179

The Maine Tribes 179

The Name of Neptune 179

The Idea of the Wiwiliamecq’ 179

Maine Chiefs and Magic 179

The Rise of John Neptune 179

He Sows To The Wind 179

He Reaps the Whirlwind 179

Of his Voluntary Exile 179

Wanderer’s Return 179

The Break in the Tribe 179

Father Vetromile 179

Father Vetromile’s Account of the Political Quarrel 179

Enter Mr. Thoreau 179

The Old and the New Parties 179

Neptune the Shaman 179

Appendix 179

Our Illustrations 179

Later History of the Political Parties 179

The Sisters of Mercy 179

In the Present Century 179

Dedication

MARY CABOT WHEELWRIGHT

amica cara

Illustrations

Lt. Gov. John Neptune

Lt. Gov. John Neptune

Mary Balassee Nicola, known as Molly Molasses

Sarah Polasses (Mrs. Attean Lola)

Facsimile of one of Lewey Mitchell’s Letters

Penobscot Indian Woman in Winter Dress, 1820-1840

Clara Neptune, April 1919

Group of Penobscot Indians

Penobscot Indian Silver Brooch

Three Maine Indian Brooches

Foreword

MY friend, the reader, to err is human, and no other save God can call himself perfect, and even He, according to the Proverb, cannot satisfy everybody. Therefore, if you find anything in this book according not well with your opinion, or some fault of style, I beg of you in your wisdom to endure it all, and not to think me better than one of the authors who is put among the holy books."

So wrote Marc Lescarbot three hundred years ago in the Prologue to his History of New France. Like Lescarbot, I am undertaking to tell only what I know myself; and if I do not know everything there is to know about the Penobscot Indians, this which I do know would be lost to later students unless I saved it for them.

Instead of dealing with the whole large subject of shamanism, or magic among Indians, here is a simple narrative of a family group of Penobscot Indians, friends of my own family, who had the reputation of being medeoulinak, or wizards. I am telling you what these people were like; showing you their portraits; explaining the part they had in a political schism in the tribe; demonstrating how an able man, partly at least by virtue of his magic, could dominate others and save himself; trying to give some idea of the hold that shamanism had upon the Indians. John Neptune, hereditary chief of the Penobscot Indians, was a remarkable man; but he had powerful allies—his leman Old Molly, his "spiritual power," and the superstitious awe of his fellow tribesmen.

Those who knew my father, the late Manly Hardy, will wonder why he did not tell this story himself. In the first place, he did not know it. In the next place, he would not have believed it, if he had known it. Finally, such close-grained acquaintance as my family has had with Indians for generation after generation, carries with it certain obligations and implies certain reticences. My father could never be induced to write out what he knew about Indians. They were his friends—entitled to consideration; they had feelings—which must be respected; they told him tribal secrets—which must be guarded; they confided in him—and he was loyal. Whether it was he or they speaking, the phrase was "our folks and white folks"; they rated him as one of themselves. The obligation which he so respected I regarded as descending to myself so long as any of our old friends were living. The last one is gone now, and the seal of silence may be broken. As my friend Dr. George Bird Grinnell wrote me in 1924, "The modern Indian wears store clothes and knows far less about his own people and their traditions than you and I do."

Dr. Grinnell, however, was not boasting of his knowledge of Indians: "I am constantly impressed" he wrote in his preface to The Cheyennes, "by the number of things about Indians that I do not know." So is everybody who knows them at all intimately; so am I in this study of them; but the impression that I hope to leave permanently with those who shall read this book is—also in Dr. Grinnell’s own words—that "the Indians, when you know them, are real people just like the rest of us."

FANNIE HARDY ECKSTORM

Brewer, Maine

January, 1938

Our Fireside

A HUNDRED years ago there were more Indians than whites in the town of Brewer, so my father said. That was in 1835 when my grandparents moved here and my father was two and a half years old. From that time on for many years his associates were largely Indians. His father’s business was in part the buying of furs and articles made by the Indians and all day long they came and went, buying and selling, begging and borrowing; they came drunk and they came sober; they came on business or just for friendly conversation, to air their latest high-flown English expressions, to show off their best finery. It seems never to have occurred to my father that the Indians had not always been here.

In a way, they had been in Brewer immemorially. It was an ancient Indian resort. Very early French maps put the name of Niové or Nioué on the site, and in 1604, when Samuel Champlain came up the river no doubt he saw an Indian encampment on the east bank just across from his moorings at Kenduskeag Stream, his farthest north. Of this old Indian town we know nothing except that the first white settlers near the eastern end of the long bridge across the Penobscot found quantities of ancient stone implements upon their garden plots and the Indians, coming and going up and down the river, always liked to camp there. So much did they frequent the place that in its last treaty with the Indians, made June 29, 1818, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ceded to them in perpetuity two acres of land near the end of the bridge and the agreement was sacredly kept until August 17, 1820, when the new state of Maine by another treaty made other arrangements. After that the Indians at their pleasure occupied any unfenced site in the town that was suited to their manner of life and provided fresh water and firewood. Of seven Indian camping grounds which my father located for me, all but one were on the southern side of the old county road to the Ferry, now called Wilson street, upon which my family has now lived for a hundred and ten years.{1}

Most of this land was worthless to the white settlers. Much of it was low juniper, or hackmatack swamp, with outcropping rocky knolls covered with scrubby arborvitae. In it were stretches of tangled second-growth birch, with some open pasture, rough with cradle-knolls. It seemed a long way through this unkempt land to the Indian camps an eighth or at most a half mile away. There was no road to them; but the Indians had their own meandering footpaths several of which converged at a high board fence on the back side of Hardy’s lot, where a little board door, fastened with a wooden button, gave entrance to the garden of the first house occupied by Hardy. A few years later the family removed two houses down the street, to the present family homestead, and the Indians must still have come by the back way from Kaghskibinday and Pesutamesset, as they called two of their encampments, for there was no other way; but Governor John Neptune and his children and his children’s children and Molly Molasses and her descendants, who lived by the sparkling trout brook beyond Blake Street, trudged down the dusty road and came in by the front gate as gentry.

The brook is a trunk sewer now; its steep banks of clay are brick house walls in distant cities; the wild pigeons and the bark wigwams vanished long ago; but Hardy’s house is still occupied by his descendants and in it are the same fireframe, or modified Franklin stove, with the swinging crane and dangling trammels which were there when old Governor John and Molly used to sit before the open fire. The hearth is shorter now, the brick oven with the iron doors of oven and ash-pit is gone, the excessively high black mantel with its narrow shelf has been replaced by one more modern; but the open fire glows on the hearth, and if there is any place on earth to which the spirits of John and Molly could return and find something familiar, it would probably be that old fireside in my old home, where the long-nosed iron teakettle purred and the squat, round iron pot beside it bubbled as they hung above the blaze. Here my grandfather before the fire and Old Governor in the more desirable corner beside it, used to chat familiarly; for they were excellent friends. Here, too, came Molly Molasses, cross-grained and bitter, but always a faithful friend of Hardy. Here sometimes sat her handsome daughter Sarah, the great beauty of the tribe. How much of their history did my grandparents know? They knew that Molly, though several times a mother, had never had a husband; but did they know that her children were fathered by Old Governor? did they know that the handsome Sarah was his own daughter? did they know why the tribe was divided and half of it was living in Brewer while the other half lived in Old Town? If they knew this, no hint of it ever came down to me.

But granting them some knowledge of the situation, yet the real significance of the relationship between John and Molly, the real reason for the Indians being in Brewer, certainly never was comprehended. White men who enjoy the love and confidence of our Indians are often the very ones permitted to see least into their inner lives. Neither my father, nor his father, nor any of their forbears, who lived among Indians and knew them well, could have suspected the wealth of strange and lawless fancies behind their outwardly civilized and Christianized exteriors, a hinterland of untamed superstition in which their spirits wandered as they sat apparently apathetic and vacant. The genial Old Governor by our fireside was the great m’teoulino,{2} the wizard of the tribe, who could make his voice heard a hundred miles away, who could walk in hard ground sinking up to his knees at every step, who could find green corn in winter and tobacco in the forest where there was none, and who had fought and overcome that slimy, devouring monster, the dreadful Wiwiliamecq’.

This was the John Neptune my grandparents never knew, the Shaman John. And Old Molly, who was his consort, but not his wife, was another of like power with the unseen world, feared by all she frowned upon. And their children, even more than Neptune’s own legitimate offspring, were expected to inherit the wizardry of their parents—and did not.

Here were the two greatest shamans of their time, confident in their own superior powers, coming and going in my own home, sitting by our fireside, the familiar friends of my strictly orthodox and fastidiously moral grandparents, who would have had nothing to do with witchcraft, or magic, or supernatural powers, who did not believe in ghosts and were not afraid of demons, and to the Evil One himself would have cried, "A page Sathanas!" and sent him about his business. But Old John and Molly they made welcome to their own fireside. Which shows how little any of us knows about Indians.

John Neptune

MY father used to say that when he could first remember John Neptune he seemed to be about sixty years of age, weighed about two hundred and twenty-five pounds, was tall and well proportioned and had a Roman nose. Even among the whites he was noted as a man of great intellect. He had a wife and a large family of children, most of them already married, and some of the grandchildren were considerably older than my father, who remarked upon the singularity of so large a family group all living apart from the rest of the tribe in Oldtown, though the reason will appear when we discuss the split in the tribe.

That the Neptunes had Roman noses I have been told by others, and the other details of my father’s recollection are well confirmed, excepting Neptune’s age. A marble monument in the cemetery upon Indian Island is inscribed:

Lieutenant Governor

John Neptune

Born July 22, 1767,

Died May 8, 1865.

He held his commission as

Lt. Governor for fifty years.

The birth record, exact for day and month—which must have come from church records, probably in Quebec—makes his age at death ninety-seven years and ten months, lacking a few days. The newspapers said he was over a hundred years old, and Thoreau’s statement, taken from him personally in 1853{3}, checks up exactly with the printed notice of his last marriage to Mary Paul Susup, November 20, 1851, when his age is given as eighty-seven, Miss Susup’s as seventy-three; both make him three years older than his gravestone which we accept as authentic.{4}

The Old Governor, as he was called, kept his vigor and alertness remarkably. When Thoreau saw him he was very deaf, but he showed his characteristic cheerfulness and fondness for fun, playing with a puppy and planning to go moose-hunting in the fall. The thumb-nail sketch which Thoreau gives presents life on Indian Island as I myself remember it—the little two-room houses, the tiny stove with an elevated oven, beds in the corners, a Connecticut clock on the shelf, on the wall a sacred picture of the Bleeding Heart of Jesus, and all sorts of domestic occupations going on—a room apparently untidy, yet well swept and scrubbed, redolent of sweet grass and basket stuff, or making the eyes smart with the piercing acridity of moose hides smoked with cedar bark. Hung on a line across the room might be the dried bodies of several muskrat, with grinning skulls, the eyes still in them, and with bare, scythe-shaped tails.

In my day Indians lived in frame houses; in my father’s youth they dwelt most of the year in conical birch-bark camps, shaped like western tepees, with an open fire in the center or just outside the door and all the family belongings tucked away under the edges or hanging on the lodge-poles. In such a camp lived the Governor when he sojourned in Brewer. From it, for his fall hunt he went out with the scanty outfit of the Indian trapper—snowshoes, a gun, a hatchet, a blanket, some steel traps perhaps and his toboggan, with for food a few pounds of salt pork and a cotton bag of boiled and mashed potatoes, which could endure freezing, prepared for him by the woman on the last farm he passed. Extra clothing he carried none, unless moccasins. The Old Governor’s dress in those days, said my father, was only a long, black, buttonless frock coat, wrapped around him and belted in place, with a red silk handkerchief knotted at the throat; summer or winter he wore no other garments except his leggings and moccasins and the breech-cloth and gee-string, worn up to the eighteen-fifties by all the older men. Thoreau spoke of the Governor wearing a shirt, and he is shown in his portrait with one on, but this was not his ordinary dress. In winter most of the men covered their heads with a two-pointed cap, or hood, with a cape to keep snow out of their necks, and they muffled their shoulders in a blanket; but Old Governor wore no blanket and went bare-headed—his long-skirted frock coat his sole garment. Tough and hot-blooded must the man have been who, in our cold climate, could endure the exposure of a hunter’s life with such scanty clothing. More than twenty years after his death, Governor Sebattis Joe Mitchell said to me: Most ways old age he go so, crooking his forefinger, but Old Gov’ner always straight, jes’ like young man.

Governor Neptune was one of the most noted of all our Indian hunters. He was resolute, enterprising and skilled in trapping and still-hunting, and he brought back great catches of fur. Though the woods were roughly portioned out to different families, who went year after year to the same regions and could call a certain section their hunting grounds, I am not aware of any such minute subdivisions as are tabulated in Dr. Speck’s last book.{5} Neptune seems to have gone where he willed. Later will be given a detailed, contemporary account of his hunting in the Moxie region on Kennebec. He was for some years about Waldoboro, and no doubt hunted there. He hunted around Katahdin and the East Branch Penobscot and I have the story, taken down more than fifty years ago from my father, who heard it from Neptune himself, of his hunting north of the St. Lawrence.

The date of this northern hunt is not known; but Neptune, said he, headed a party of eight Penobscot Indians, among whom were John Lola and Louis Tomah. They stayed in the woods several months and had to live almost entirely upon meat, eaten without salt; they dared not go to any Hudson Bay Post for provisions and they could carry none so far. In the spring, when they had accumulated a large quantity of valuable furs, they came down to the St. Lawrence and crossed it at night at a point where it was thirty miles wide. Though they made the passage before daylight and hid their canoes, staying concealed so that the Hudson Bay men could not observe them by their telescopes, they had been discovered weeks before and had been closely watched. Before night fell a large number of the Company’s employees had crossed the river and surprised them. They were surrounded, taken prisoners, all their furs were seized and they were tied up and severely whipped. Then their guns, knives, hatchets, and a very little food were returned to them and they were bidden begone. But Neptune was made of sterner stuff. Once more he led his men across the St. Lawrence and made a successful spring hunt; and once more he recrossed the great river. Again he and his men were surrounded and told to surrender their furs. This time Neptune told his men to stand and fight, and so resolute was he that the attacking party would not take the risk with such determined men, but withdrew without seizing the furs.

The statement that Neptune was a guide for sportsmen, which is found in some accounts of his m’teoulin, is fictitious: in his prime there were no sportsmen in our woods, and in the later eighteen-forties, when visitors began to come, he was too old to act as a guide. He may have gone with early surveyors and timber explorers, but these were not sportsmen.

John Neptune was a man of keen mind, and, in spite of having to speak in English, of which he was not the master, he seldom failed to come back with a good retort. David Norton tells of his being called as a witness in the case of General Veazie against Wadleigh and Purington, tried in Wiscasset in 1832, when Daniel Webster was counsel.

Who brought you here? was asked.

Wadleigh, Purington, replied Neptune.

Did they tell you what to say?

Yes.

What did they tell you to say?

They told me to say what you know about it.{6}

In 1816 when Peol Susep was tried for the murder of one Knight, in Bangor, Neptune spoke for Susep and his speech is preserved by Judge Williamson, who, with Mellen, defended Susep. He spoke in broken English, yet every word was distinctly heard and easily understood. His questions were frequent and forcible; his manner solemn; and a breathless silence pervaded the whole assembly. Undoubtedly Judge Williamson’s transcript of the speech is accurate.{7} In 1820, after Maine had become a state, Neptune went to Governor King, in Portland, and in a speech still preserved{8} made complaint against the whites who were destroying the Indians’ hunting and fishing privileges. He asked for a new Indian Agent