Maine History Online

The Wabanaki made alliances with the French through the fur trade, and here the French had a decided advantage over the English. Fur trading relationships were based on mutual respect nurtured carefully over years. In their 1604-1605 voyage to the Gulf of Maine, Sieur de Monts and Samuel Champlain mastered the tricky diplomatic exchanges that involved ritual gift exchanges, speeches, banquets, dances, and songs, and tribal alliances, and by the early 1600s French adventurers had the upper hand in relationships with Wabanaki north and east of the Kennebec.

Since no New England river offered the trading advantages of the St. Lawrence, and since southern New England Indians grew crops more than they hunted, English colonists were less interested in the fur trade. For the French, Indians were the essence of empire; for the English they were obstacles to an agricultural empire fashioned after the English countryside.

French missionaries also were more successful than their English counterparts. They lived in the Indians' villages, knew their spiritual needs, and benefited from the cultural disruptions brought on by war and plague.

By the middle of the 17th century the Abenaki were living in a nightmarish landscape shaped by conflict, disease, and alcohol, and they turned to the missionaries for help and reassurance. Catholicism was something of a compromise with traditional religion, just as European trade was a compromise with native material culture. English missionaries were less interested in compromise and generally lacked the ability to use religion to cement military alliances.

Despite the inadequacies of English diplomacy, Indians became increasingly dependent on their trade goods. The epidemics disrupted oral communication and accelerated the loss of traditional hunting, fishing, and gathering skills.

As Indians narrowed their economic focus, their involvement in the fur-trade took on a desperate tone. Tensions increased in the mid-1640s when truck houses began selling hard liquor. As beaver populations declined, Abenaki interjected themselves as intermediaries in the trade with tribes further west, resulting in a series of violent clashes known as the "Beaver Wars."

These conflicts, involving tribes from Cape Breton Island to the Chesapeake and as far west as the Great Lakes, eventually yielded new alliances that turned the Abenaki against the English.

King Philip's War

By 1670 Indian frustration with trade abuses, land encroachments, rum dealing, and free-roaming English livestock in their cornfields was mounting. Sensing these tensions, in fall 1674 English officials banned trade of shot and powder to Indians. The Abenaki suffered severe food shortages during the following winter, and some fled to Canada seeking French aid.

In summer 1675 war broke out in southern New England between Pilgrims and Wampanoags led by King Philip, or Metacomet, and the war strained relations all through New England. Relations between French "Papists" and Indian "heathens" fueled English fears that all Indians were conspirators of King Philip, and with war raging to the south, the General Court sent commissioners to Maine trading posts to enforce the ban on arms. English scalp hunters, given a bounty to hunt Indians south of the Piscataqua, no doubt crossed the river into Maine as well.

Madockawando, the chief sagamore on the Maine coast, withdrew to the Penobscot, where French traders at Pentagoet and Port Royal provided muskets and shot.

In July magistrates met with local Indians to encourage neutrality, but later that summer British sailors accosted the wife and child of Squando, a sagamore among the Saco River Abenaki, and overset their canoe to test the theory that Indian babies could swim from birth. The baby died, and as native law required, Squando sought revenge on white settlers.

In September a party of 20 Indians robbed a trading house belonging to Thomas Purchase at Brunswick. Purchase's neighbors pursued the raiders up the New Meadows River, surprising and killing one, and the resulting skirmish was the first battle of King Philips War in Maine.

In Falmouth members of the Wakely family were tomahawked and two children carried away as captives, and throughout the fall Indian bands continued raiding English settlements from Saco to Casco Bay. With no knowledge of the interior, militia and settlers alike were forced to "huddle together, in danger of being shot down," until winter snows and lack of ammunition restricted Indian military movement.