Maine History Online

Before contact, about 20,000 Indians lived in Maine. As the "People of the Dawn," they shared language, culture, and ancestry with the larger Wabanaki confederation across New England and eastern Canada. In southern Maine, the Abenaki economy included corn, beans, and squash along with fish, shellfish, and game. Men hunted, trapped, and traveled on diplomatic and military excursions, while women farmed, foraged, made clothing and baskets, fished, and cared for the home and the children.

During winter, families dispersed into small interior camps to hunt, and in summer they traveled frequently to the coast. Since the Abenaki had no large domesticated animals, no fertilizer, and no plows, they farmed only as long as the natural fertility of the soil held out, then moved to a new location. Their semi-permanent villages included up to 160 bark-covered houses built on frames of saplings bent into a dome. The larger villages could hold a thousand individuals or more.

The fur trade brought some economic stability to the English settlements and initially benefited the Indians as they gained copper kettles, metal hatchets, knives and arrow points, colorful cloth and beads, and firearms for traditional stone, bone, or ceramic tools that made their lives easier.

By the third decade of the 17th century, however, the fur trade had profoundly changed the Indian economy as it disrupted their hunting and fishing routines, altered gender relations, and changed traditional hunting territories. It also introduced new forms of status based on European goods.

In the mid 1600s, English settlers depended more on their farms and became less interested in trading for furs, leaving the Indians without a source for the English goods on which they came to depend, particularly muskets. Because of cultural differences, Indians were unable to distinguish dishonest from honest traders and were vulnerable to abuse.

Fur trading continued farther west and in Canada, however.

Besides issues related to fur trading, Indians experienced other disastrous events in the first half of the 17th century. Between 1616 and 1619, virulent diseases transmitted by Europeans swept through the Abenaki villages killing 75 to 90 percent of the inhabitants. The plagues interrupted the transmission of traditional skills, political practices and wisdom passed down by elders, leaving survivors more dependent on European technology.

By the mid 1600s English communities from Kittery to Sagadahoc were growing rapidly. This demographic growth, combined with the competition among fur-traders, put the Abenaki in the middle of a competitive war for land titles. Like the fur trade, these transactions had little effect on the Indian way of life at first, but there were subtle changes.

When populations were sparse and game abundant, the Abenaki had no need for exclusive rights outside relatively small horticulture regions, and thus they considered these sales simply a means of granting access to the land. While Abenaki continued to reside on the lands they "sold" to settlers and trading companies, the hasty transactions laid the groundwork for later tensions.

As settlers flooded into the Kennebec Valley in the second half of the century, the Abenaki lost access to hunting territories, coastal foraging areas, communal gathering spots, and transportation corridors, and they began complaining of "hard dealing" in land transactions. This breakdown in communication led ultimately to tension and war.

The fur trade was one among many causes of tension between the English and Abenaki in Maine. Beginning in 1675, a series of five wars, most of them extensions of conflict between France and England in Europe, tore through the fabric of English, French, and Indian society.

These wars posed a dilemma for the Abenaki, who were tied strategically and spiritually to the French in eastern Maine and Quebec. Caught between two belligerent European nations, and facing constant English encroachments on their territory, the Abenaki response was not uniform.

Some favored accommodation; others, a military alliance with the French; and a third group counseled withdrawal to the French settlements along the St. Lawrence. Survival depended on holding a middle ground between two colonial powers, a nightmarish path with no discernable end in sight.