This February 29th is the 300th anniversary of the Indian raid on Deerfield, Mass. A relatively minor event in the 200-year war native Indians fought to keep their land. More a symbol than a significant event, it has been popularized by a 1930’s movie about the raid and the development of a colonial architecture museum there in the 1950’s. The raid was similar to many battles in the region except that in this case there were 200 French soldiers/
advisors overseeing the attack from the edge of the woods.
    A dozen years earlier, a more successful Indian war in Maine contributed to one of the country’s best known bad memories. In late February of 1692 the Salem witch hangings flared out of control and 17 months later 24 women and men were dead. Of the more than 144 accused, 38 were men. Some of those accused died in prison. The mania spread from Salem Village, 10 miles northwest of the port of Salem Town, to many other villages, most in Essex County. A variety of interpretations of what happened continues to develop, but it so parallels similar “enemy within” incidents before and since, that human nature may have to bare the responsibility.
    Like a social perfect storm, swirling developments on the Maine frontier collided with volatile developments in Salem Village setting off a psycho fission that left most involved stunned when it just as suddenly ended.
    Armed conflict between early European settlers and Native American Indians is well known. There were several forces driving the two groups toward conflict. Some of the problems were those that are inevitable when different people live near each other. Someone’s dog kills someone else’s chickens, someone’s cows get out and mow someone else’s cornfield, someone’s paranoid and another feels slighted.
    The conditions and events in the first major conflict 1675-77 varied, but it was affected by the fur trade, Indian debt, missionizing and the collapse of the pelt supply in southern New England. This war, “King Phillip’s War”, began in southeastern Massachusetts, then spread through a lot of southern New England and south coastal Maine. Phillip was the English speaking second son of Chief Massasoit of eastern Massachusetts. To be considered on the same level as the settler’s highest authority he called himself “king” when he became chief.
    Harvard and Yale colleges were established in the 1630’s to train preachers. These were the epicenters of the religious spin on Indian affairs and settlement life in general. Further out on the frontier, the church and its informal partner the state, had less influence. One of the ways the ministers measured progress in Indian affairs was in the number of Indians they converted. The converted were known as “praying Indians”. They were considered safe and some lived among the settlers in southern New England villages.
    In Maine, this war was fought more over English settlement pressure and it’s effect on land rights. Settlers moved in and in Maine this often meant close to natives, near the best farmland and fishing grounds. They held up title in vague documents and strange language. The settlers brought their own rules of the road, for the most part, disregarding Indian rules. Maine tribes might not have entered the war had not southern Indians fled, seeking refuge in the north. Unlike southern New England, most of the settlers in Maine were driven out of the province in this war. it was in Maine where the Abanakies came as close as any American Indians in driving the Eurpeans from Indian land. Nearly all these settlements at the time were west of Casco Bay, some extended nearly to the French settlement and fort at Castine.
    In the 1600’s, when a representative (explorer) of a European king came ashore here or practically anywhere outside of northern Europe, they claimed that land for the king. The king’s cronies set up a company, Hudson Bay Company, Massachusetts Bay Company, East India Company, etc., and Europeans borrowed from those companies for passage (as did the “pilgrims”) to the “new” country. The debt was paid with fur and timber.
    Settlers arrived with the belief that the land was theirs and this was all part of a business deal sanctioned by the king who took his orders from God. Standing on the beach with their suitcases in hand, settlers soon discovered the people already living here needed to be categorized in order to fit into their equation.
    In the Second Indian War, 1688-99, “King William’s War” (named after a new English King), attacks on Maine settlements at York, Wells, Falmouth and others ultimately drove Europeans from Maine again. Many went to Salem, Massachusetts where their experiences in Indian attacks and what today would be termed ‘post traumatic stress syndrome”, played into the psycho/religious politics of Salem.
    The French and English had struggled for decades over control of the northeast frontier of Arcadia, an area today we know as Maine. In the second Indian War the French allied themselves with the Indians. The Indians were by then seriously at odds with the Europeans, and the French used them to advance French interests. This was generally true in New England. The arrival of the Europeans in the homeland of the Indians was as close as it gets to the arrival of beings from another planet. The differences between the two peoples can’t easily be exaggerated. The Indians had not the slightest notion of the tidal wave of European settlers and developers that was about to break over them in the coming decades. Somewhat naively the natives allowed the settlers in. Early European promises of cooperation soon gave way to loose cattle gorging themselves on Indian cornfields, commercial fishing operations set up at traditional Indian fishing positions and deceptive fur traders swindling Indians.
    The Indians had had no real commercial enterprises, they fished and hunted pretty much what they needed, since anything more more would go unused. There was a limited trade among regional tribes for some things, but the English fur traders brought the voracious demand of the European pelt market.
    The settlers were very much governed by contract and ownership. The Indians had no concept whatsoever of the former and a very different take on the latter. Account books were the unknown paper trail of the unseen, implied contract in trade relations with the English. Some of the account books have survived and detail the smallest transactions with Indian customers.
    Fur traders brought premade clothes and metal cooking pots and knives to the Indians, who until that time made these things themselves. The indians self reliance and skills were honed over centuries. With instant goods, the traders were Walmart to the Indians. Instant goods for not much in exchange, so it seemed. Accounting was so alien to Indian culture, extending them credit was like giving credit cards to six year olds. Indians very quickly became dependent on these goods, in particular, the guns which were so effective in the hands of knowledgeable hunters and skilled stalkers.
    When the beaver and other fur-bearing animals began to be over trapped, some trappers went west. But as stocks declined, the indebtedness of many Indians did not.
    Some Indian chiefs fell into debt to accountant traders and began turning over land to pay down debt. The chiefs didn’t really have rights to ownership as defined by the English, with registered deeds, etc., a fact that didn’t bother the English. When war broke out and word of attacks on the Maine frontier spread, the state of Massachusetts recruited settler soldiers by offering them whatever booty they could take and half the value of captured Indians sold into slavery. The other half went to the state to finance the war. They were also paid “8 pounds” for each Indian scalp.
    The Piscataquis River was the site of a lot of very early industry and trade. Upstream at Dover, N.H., magistrate and militia officer Richard Waldron had dealt with the native Indians for 50 years by 1689. Known as a sharp dealer in furs to some of his peers, he was a notorious cheat to others and the Indians. So well rememberedwere his deeds, Indians reenacted his thieving ways for captives brought to Quebec from the raid on Deerfield, in 1704. Waldron was known to make excursions up the Maine coast to capture Indians to sell into slavery. As a militia officer, he was asked to move about 300 displaced Abenakies. Instead he sold 200 of them into slavery, most women and children. He made it easy for his enemies to remember him.
    Waldron may have been among the worst, but he was not the only businessman exploiting their position. Pennacooks and Sacos attacked the Waldron garrison in June of 1689. In one version of the story, they laid him out on a long table where they stabbed and sliced pieces of him reciting the repayment of debt. They ordered his book of accounts to be brought in and all the Indian debts crossed out.
    In Salem, Massachusetts, the oldest permanent settlement in America (Established in 1636), the threat of Indian attack was just beyond the edge of the woods. When survivors of the attacks in Maine arrived in Salem with their war trauma, they walked into another traumatized population. The town had also sent sons to fight in the Indian War, some never returned and some returned deeply wounded. Along with this religious politics were raising havoc of another order in Salem.
    Salem Town had been home to several ministers in the previous decade who had left in frustration. Farmers from Salem Village, 10 miles to the northwest, had been objecting to the long weekly trip to Sunday services in Salem Town and wanted their own meeting-house. But this would have threatened the revenue that members were required to pay to the meeting-house in town. It would have also challenged the authority and income of Salem Town’s minister Samuel Parris. Both communites were known to be contentious for decades. Bickering and squabbling seemed the norm at church meetings and in the homes of many.
    New England Puritans were living in a pre-scientific world where what we cure with antibiotics today was beleived caused by the grimace of a hard-of-hearing elderly person or the peculiar glance of a farm animal. This in the midst of an Indian war they were individually helpless in effecting, while living in a land they had to know belonged to others. According to their religious beliefs, they were guilty of not being up to snuff in God’s eye and therefore were being punished with these Indian attacks.
    This was the audience for claims coming from their minister’s house. Parris’ 9-year old daughter began having fits which culminated in accusations. She claimed to have been afflicted or bewitched by their house keeper, Tibata. She just happened to a “Spanish Indian”, as African Americans from Florida and coastal Georgia were then known.
    This set off a wildfire of accusations in a community brought to the kindling point by paranoia, ignorance and guilt. Most of the accusers were young women, some domestic workers, who as women, then were low on the social totem pole. But now they were intently listened to, a fact which had great consequences.
    These satanic claims if acted on, it was believed, may drive the feared demon’s “plague” from their door. The refugees from Maine had ample tales to tell of the horrors of the attacks in Maine. Some of these refugees joined the ranks of the accusers and the accused in the following 17 months. Some of the accused were hanged, others imprisoned and all victimized. The ministers and justices were the leaders of of these towns.
    George Burroughs was a refugee and a minister. He was driven out of Falmouth when it was burned in the first Indian War in 1675. He went to Salem where he became their minister until he was driven out by the squabbling. Burroughs went back to Falmouth to minister until the Second Indian War in 1688, fled to Wells which was soon burned and finally back to Salem. Along the way he had three wives, a gaggle of kids, earned a reputation as drunk, a wife-beater and a rambler at the podium. He generated a lot of gossip that was easily molded into supporting evidence for the accusation that hanged him.
    “The enemy within” is an old story, each has a similar script and same short memory for the next group of participants. Ironically, our more recent famous witch-hunt included two major players, the accuser and the accused, hanging out in Essex County. During Joe Macarthy’s rein as communist-hunter in the 1950’s, Whitaker Chambers the accuser and Alger Hiss the accused spent time in Beverly Farms, a town that borders Salem Village (now Danvers, Massachusetts).