Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620–1984

343 Pages·1986·6.268 MB·English

by  William S. Simmons

Spirit of the New England Tribes

Spirit of the New England Tribes
INDIAN HISTORY AND FOLKLORE,
1620-1984
William S. Simmons
University Press of New England
Hanover and London, 1986
To Cheryl and Riva
University Press of New England
Brandeis University
Brown University
Clark University
University of Connecticut
Dartmouth College
University of New Hampshire
University of Rhode Island
Tufts University
University of Vermont
© 1986 by University Press of New England
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotation in critical articles or reviews,
this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without
permission in writing from the publisher. For further information contact
University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755.
Printed in the United States of America
This publication has been supported by the National Endowment for the
Humanities, a federal agency which supports the study of such fields as
history, philosophy, literature, and languages.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Simmons, William Scranton, 1938-
Spirit of the New England tribes.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Indians of North America—New England—Folklore.
2. Indians of North America—New England—Legends.
3. Legends—New England. 4. Indians of North America—
New England—History. 5. New England—History, Local.
I. Title.
E78.N5S54 1986 398.2*08997074 85-40936
ISBN 0—87451—370—7
ISBN 0—87451—372—3 (pbk.)
Contents
PREFACE Vil
1 Introduction 3
2 From the Past to the Present io
3 Worldview 37
4 The First Europeans 65
5 Christianity 73
6 Shamans and Witches 91
7 Ghosts and the Devil ns
8 Treasures 162
9 Giants: Maushop and Squant 172
10 Little People 235
11 Windows to the Past: Dreams and Shrines 247
12 Conclusion: “There is a Stream That Issues
Forth” 257
APPENDIX 271
NOTES 287
BIBLIOGRAPHY 301
INDEX OF FOLKLORE MOTIFS 319
GENERAL INDEX 325

Preface
I present in this volume examples of southern New England In­
dian folklore from the earliest European contact to the present day.
Two conversations shaped this folklore—one between the living and
the dead and the other between the living and the changing world
into which they were born. Each generation inherited a body of leg­
ends, symbols, and meanings from their predecessors and revised
this heritage in recognition of their own experiences. Over the last
four centuries the southern New England tribes merged more and
more with the larger Euro-American society, and the tribes’ oral tra­
ditions show strong influences from American folklore in general.
Despite this movement away from their past, ancestral voices con­
tinue to speak to the living through oral narratives, and the living in
turn attribute new and borrowed customs to ancestral sources. In a
world where the New England tribes have little in common with
their early predecessors and much in common with non-Indian
neighbors, folklore is an important link with and source for their
Indian identity. I hope to identify the symbols through which they
expressed this identity over time and observe how the succession of
historic events affected these symbols. I draw mainly upon three
kinds of data. The first is the folklore texts themselves and what can
be said about their authenticity, content, and changes. Second is the
local and large-scale historical circumstances that acted upon the
Indian communities. Third is the Yankee, English, Afro-American,
and other folklore traditions from which the southern New England
Indians borrowed in rebuilding their own narratives. My overall aim
is to represent the symbolism, worldview, we might say spirit, of the
New England tribes in the context of their material and historic ex­
istence. The folklore texts are divided into chapters on witches,
ghosts, giants, treasures, and so on, and each text is presented in
chronological order from the seventeenth century to the present. Not
a history per se, this book is a commentary upon the folklore narra­
tives in terms of which the southern New England Indians registered
their past.
vii
viii Preface
In quoted passages obvious slips of the pen have been corrected
without comment. Superscript letters have been lowered to the line
of the text, and the thorn has been expanded. Editor’s omissions are
noted by three ellipsis points if the omission entails only part of a
sentence, and four ellipsis points if it comes between sentences or if
it entails more than a sentence but less than a paragraph. A row of
ellipsis points is used if the omission includes a paragraph or more.
Words added to clarify texts are placed within brackets. The dates
given above the individual texts reflect the approximate recording
date, or the earliest publication date.
The design elements facing the title page and on chapter openings
are taken from historic period southern New England Indian
painted baskets. The design element on the Preface opening is ta­
ken from the end of Roger Williams’s A Key into the Language of
America.
I drew the folklore texts together from published and manuscript
sources and from interviews with contemporary New England Indi­
ans. I first visited Gay Head, for four days, in March 1981; in July
1981 I spent several days in Mashpee on Cape Cod. I was more suc­
cessful at Gay Head than at Mashpee even though several friends
and colleagues (principally the Reverend Harold Mars, James Deetz,
and Anne Yentsch) had given me good contacts in the latter com­
munity. This was perhaps due to the fact that the Mashpee Wampa-
noag Tribal Council, Incorporated, had recently lost a major court
case in which they attempted to gain federal recognition as an In­
dian tribe, which would have enabled them to file suit to reclaim
thousands of acres of land they had held jointly as a proprietorship
until the late nineteenth century. Nonetheless, a number of Mashpee
residents, including the tribal historian Amelia Bingham and a
young woman who identified herself as Nosapocket, were very hos­
pitable. Carol Bennett of the Vineyard Gazette and Gale Huntington
of the Dukes County Historical Society provided contacts for me
with several Gay Head people, including Wenonah Silva, Leonard
Vanderhoop, and Eloise Page, who were generous with their knowl­
edge of Gay Head legends. Donald Widdiss of the Wampanoag Tribal
Council of Gay Head, Incorporated, was drafting a petition for fed­
eral recognition for Gay Head and saw that my research on oral tra­
ditions would strengthen their case. Widdiss introduced me to his
mother, Gladys Widdiss, and uncle, Donald Melanson, who spoke to
me at some length about Gay Head landmarks, folklore, and history.
Again, I visited Mashpee and Gay Head for several days each in
Preface ix
April 1983 but obtained no new interviews at Mashpee. At Gay
Head, Silva, Page, Vanderhoop, and Melanson furnished new mate­
rials, and Silva introduced me to her aunt, Ada Manning, whom I
also interviewed. In April and again in June 1983 I taped a number
of ghost stories and other legends with old Narragansett friends, the
Reverend Harold Mars and his wife, Laura Mars of Charlestown,
Rhode Island. On several occasions in spring and summer 1983 and
summer 1984 I visited Gladys Tantaquidgeon and Courtland E. Fow­
ler of the Mohegan TYibal Office in Uncasville, Connecticut. Both
were very interested in the folklore research and talked at some
length about Mohegan history and traditions. Tantaquidgeon had
done extensive folklore research in Mashpee and Gay Head about
fifty-five years earlier; she still had her extensive unpublished field
notes as well as the outline for an unfinished manuscript on New
England Indian culture heroes, which she generously offered for use
in this study. Like an archaelogist who leaves part of the site in the
ground, I copied the legends and folktales from Tantaquidgeon’s
notes but did not transcribe her information on plant lore and med­
icine. She also conducted me through the collections of Mohegan
and Niantic material culture in the unique Tantaquidgeon Indian
Museum that she and her brother, Harold Tantaquidgeon, have run
for many years. Fowler, who looks like his eighteenth-century ances­
tor, Samson Occom, gave me the typed text of a ghost story involving
the anthropologist Frank Speck and also showed me his personal
collection of bowls, baskets, carvings, papers, and other heirlooms
that he had inherited from his Mohegan forebears. In spring 1984 I
interviewed Eric Thomas, a Narragansett who is currently an under­
graduate at the University of California, Berkeley, who had worked
for several years to prepare the Narragansett petition for federal rec­
ognition. In 1984 I interviewed another old friend, Ella Seketau, of
the Narragansett TYibe, Incorporated, in the Narragansett Longhouse
in Charlestown, who told me several legends I had not heard before.
I am extremely grateful to all of these New England Indian people
for their openness, kindness, patience, and generosity, and for en­
abling me to connect the historical record with living tradition. I
also should like to acknowledge Earl Mills and Selena and Kenneth
Coombs of Mashpee, June MacDonald and Tony Pollard of Plimoth
Plantation, Jane Waters of North Dartmouth, Helen Attaquin and
Clinton and Daisy Haynes of Middleboro, John Brown of Narragan­
sett, and Dorothy Scoville of Gay Head for some important discus­
sions.
Many colleagues in anthropology, folklore, and history contrib­
X Preface
uted to this effort. Alan Dundes of the Berkeley anthropology de­
partment introduced me to the basics of contemporary folklore
scholarship and offered many ideas and suggestions over the last
several years. Folklore was an unknown territory to me when I began
this research, and I am fortunate to have had the most important
living folklorist in my own department. Stanley Brandes and the late
William Bascom, also of the Berkeley anthropology department,
freely listened and offered their expertise on several occasions, as
did Michael Bell, the state folklorist for Rhode Island. Several Berke­
ley graduate students, particularly Lee Davis, Marcelle Williams,
Phyllis Passariello, Peter Nabokov, and Constance Crosby, helped
with ideas and references that improved the final outcome. For eth­
nographic and anthropological questions I turned most often to Ives
Goddard and Kathleen Bragdon of the Smithsonian Institution, Gor­
don Day of the Canadian Ethnology Service, Anne Yentsch, then of
Plimoth Plantation, Dena Dincauze of the University of Massachu­
setts at Amherst, Elizabeth Little of the Nantucket Historical Asso­
ciation, and Ethel Boissevain, now retired from Herbert H. Lehman
College. For linguistic questions I consulted Ives Goddard, George
Aubin of Assumption College, William Cowan of Carleton Univer­
sity, and David Pentland of Winnipeg. William Sturtevant and Wil-
comb Washburn of the Smithsonian Institution, Neal Salisbury of
Smith College, Karen Kupperman of the University of Connecticut,
and James Axtell of the College of William and Mary have had an
important influence on my ethnohistorical research over the years.
Special thanks are due to Kathleen Bragdon and Neal Salisbury for
reading and commenting upon the completed manuscript. I partic­
ularly wish to thank Gladys Tantaquidgeon for the many unique
texts that she contributed to this study.1
I visited many libraries in the course of this project, including the
John D. Rockefeller and John Carter Brown libraries at Brown Uni­
versity. Duane Davies of the Rockefeller Library was particularly
helpful during my sabbatical there in 1982-83. Glenn W. LaFantasie
of the Rhode Island Historical Society and Thomas Norton of the
Dukes County Historical Society assisted on several occasions, as
did Kenneth Cramer of Dartmouth College Library, Dorothy King of
the East Hampton Free Library, and Dorothy Koenig of the Berkeley
Anthropology Library.
My wife, Cheryl Leif Simmons, read and commented insightfully
upon many chapters, despite her own heavy schedule. My nephew,
Robert M. Simmons, Jr., of Middleboro, traveled to New Bedford to
photocopy the Mary C. Vanderhoop texts from old issues of the New
Bedford Evening Standard, and my daughter, Riva C. Simmons, as­