Like the Shadows

"Like the shadows in the stream"
Local Historians, The Discourse of Disappearance and
Nipmuc Indians of Central Massachusetts

An abbreviated version of this paper was read at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass., May 20, 1999, as part of a evening public program titled, "Like Shadows in the Stream: Indian History and Historians," with Jean O'Brien of the University of Minnesota, moderated by Barry O'Connell of Amherst College. From a work in progress on New England Indian history, this paper was provided by Dr. Doughton to the Quinsigamond Band of Nipmucs and first made available through Nipmucnet, the Band's website. It is offered here with the permission of the author and cooperation of the Quinsigamond Band of Nipmucs, an association of Nipmuc Indians and friends based at Worcester, Massachusetts.

©1999, Thomas L. Doughton

        In one of the more widely read nineteenth-century texts on New England Native Americans, Samuel G. Drake's Book of Indians, the Nipmucs were labeled "long extinct." When first mentioned by English immigrants in the 1630s, Nipmucs were described as a powerful nation, the only Natives of the interior of Massachusetts. They occupied a series of homelands bounded by the New Hampshire border stretching from Sudbury to the Connecticut River, extending south towards Hartford along the river, incorporating northeastern Connecticut and northern Rhode Island, continuing through Mendon and Medway back to the Sudbury, Marlborough and Concord area. Here, near lakes, ponds and headwaters of Charles, Assabet, Chicopee, and Miller's, French and Blackstone rivers lived the "Nippiemook" or "Fresh Water People" in an extensive territory called "Nippienet" or "The Land of the Fresh Water People." Yet many historians of the nineteenth century—like Samuel Drake—, assured readers that the Nipmucs had "vanished," "disappeared," or "faded away," or in lines frequently quoted in histories, gone "Like the shadows in the stream/ Like the evanescent gleam/ Of the twilight's failing blaze/ Like the fleeting years and days."

In nineteenth-century New England, across works of history, fiction and reportage was created and solidified an obstinate discourse of disappearing Indians that claimed the region's aboriginal people had already vanished or were doomed to disappear. At times contradictory, if not duplicitous, this discourse is, on the one hand, an attitude of the dominant culture toward New England's past imagining that Indians had become "extinct." On the other hand, it is an ideology of vanishing Indians that refuses to "see" the continued presence, persistence and survival of the region's nineteenth-century Natives. In countless town chronicles, newspaper articles, fictional treatments and poetic works—all reinforced through a visual iconography, New England Indians take on the presence of an absence. Natives become "people without history," people without "a place," absent from the social landscape, their collective identity as Native, in both past and present, "erased."

Writing at the time of public controversy concerning "Removal," William Biglow, the first historian of Natick, found that "many of the vices both of the savage and civilized state" had led to a virtual disappearance of "the tribe of Aborigines which was first civilized and Christianized in North America …similar the fate of most, if not all the tribes in New England." He added that, "Whether a better destiny awaits the Red Men of the south and west, is known only to Him, who created them. The prayer of every Christian, of every philanthropist must be, Lord, have mercy on them, and protect them from their adversaries—Lord, have mercy on their persecutors, and touch their hearts with feelings of humanity, of pity and of justice." According to Charles Hudson, historian of Marlborough and Sudbury, in the "light of rational philosophy, or a pure and elevated religion," the "disappearance of the native tribes should fill us with rejoicing rather than with regret." If "sympathetic beings," affirmed Hudson, we "naturally" commiserate with the fate of Indians, but they are "destined to perish under Divine administration." Still in Hudson's opinion no "acts of injustice or cruelty" are justified since "an expiring nation, like an expiring individual is justly entitled to our sympathy and kind assistance." Similarly, the knowledge that they are destined to perish, furnishes "no more justification in accelerating their doom, than the belief that any of our friends were sick unto death, would justify us in adopting measures to hasten their departure." The aboriginal Nipmucs of the towns described by Hudson were "crude and uncivilized," and "in the Providence of God seem destined to fade away." Indeed, for others there might be "melancholy in the reflection that the natives of these hills and plains have all disappeared," in such a way that nineteenth-century residents "live and thrive on the ruins of the past." Natives were doomed to disappear, however, "such is the order of Providence." [Note 1]

Likewise, "a whole race of people has become nearly extinct," an "unfortunate people, whose fate it has been, like the morning dew, insensibly and mysteriously to disappear, before the lights of civilization and christianity," reported the North American Review in 1819. "That they should become extinct is inevitable," the journal explained but "this cannot excuse us for pressing upon them with indecent. If they must perish, let them die a natural, and not a violent death." [Note 2]

As many thinking Americans of the time agreed and William Tudor Jr. told Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa chapter in 1815, "in a short period they will exist no where else and even in the next century, the Indian warriour and hunter will perhaps only be found on the shores of the Pacific." Three years earlier an elderly John Adams had written to Thomas Jefferson of his "Interest in the Indians and a Commiseration for them from my childhood," recalling Natives as "frequent Visitors to my Fathers house," but added, "we scarcely see an Indian in a year." Reflecting comparable sentiments, in 1818 Niles Weekly reported "this people is rapidly passing away," however, the periodical informed its readership that " 'It will not tell well in history' that nothing was attempted, with strong arm to save them… That they are destined to disappear from vast tracts of rich country which they inhabit, seems manifest…but it is desirable that their descent to extermination should be easy—that they should have every comfort which their condition is susceptible of, —that a remnant should be saved as long as possible to stand as a monument of the national humanity." [Note 3]

Echoing comparable sentiments Judge Joseph Story inquired, "what can be more melancholy than their history?"At a commemoration of the town's founding in 1835, Story explained to Salem residents that "By a law of their nature, they seem destined to a slow, but sure extinction. Everywhere, at the approach of white man, they fade away. We hear the rustling of their footsteps, like that of the withered leaves of autumn, and they are gone for ever. They pass mournfully by us, and they return not." In these opinions, it could be argued that Story, likewise, reflects the general attitude of thinking New Englanders of his period. Judge Story (1779-1845) was a son of an early patriot, who was one of the Sons of Liberty participating at the Boston Tea Party and who served in the Continental Army. During his long career, the younger Story was a U.S. Supreme Court justice, legal scholar, congressman, and professor of law Harvard. According to historian Paul Finkelman, for example, "growing up in the aftermath of the Revolution, Joseph absorbed from both of his parents republican values, Unitarian theology, a heritage of Puritan idealism, a fierce sense of nationalism, and an unbending dedication to public service."

The year following his Salem oration Story wrote to his son that he was reading Irving's Life of Columbus, which "proves, and sadly proves (what I have ever believed) that the Europeans were always the aggressors of the natives in America, in all their contests, and that the sins of all the murders and desolations on these shores are attributable to their baseness and avarice and detestable passions," claiming "I never think on the subject without bitter regrets and undisguised indignation." The same letter contained the following sentiments:

The poor Indians! They will soon be exterminated in Florida, where the war is now waging. On their part it is now a desperate struggle for existence; and I have no doubt but they will all perish in the contest. In the course of a few years, not a relic will be found in all America of this heroic race. Their history will be lost in uncertain traditions. The white man will tell the story of their disappearance in his own way. [Note 4]

Where Story described a "rustling" like "withered leaves of autumn," other comparable images proliferate, employed in a variety of period texts to illustrate the disappearance of Indians. "They've vanished, they have fled," like "the shades when the dawn is red" or like "the evanescent flush of twilight on the lake" or "like snow-flakes in the stream" in the work of Isaac McLellan. [Note 5] For Charles Sprague, Indians "slowly and sadly …climb the distant mountains, and read their doom in the setting sun. They are shrinking before the mighty tide which is pressing them away; they must soon hear the roar of the last wave, which will settle over them forever." Natives were doomed "as the snow melts before the sunbeam" or "like a promontory of sand, exposed to the ceaseless encroachments of the ocean, they have been gradually wasting away before the current of the white population which set in upon them from every quarter." According to Tudor, Natives had "dwindled into insignificance and lingered among us, as the tide of civilization has flowed, mere floating deformities on its surface, poor, squalid and enervated with intoxicating liquors," so that they "diminish and waste before" civilization "like snow before the vernal influence." Similarly, as early as 1819, Henry Clay employed what he called a "figure" drawn from the "sublime eloquence" of Indians that "the poor children of the forest," had been "driven by a great wave…overwhelming in its terrible progress" from the Atlantic to the Rockies, leaving "remains of hundreds of tribes, now extinct." Even individual images of "brittle leaves" repeat, an 1847 novel of "forbidden" love between an Indian and Euroamerican woman in Boston of the 1670s claiming "One by one they perish, like the leaves of the forest that are swept away by the autumn winds; melancholy shrouds them; they die of sadness, and are effaced from the earth by an inexorable destiny."

        Characteristic of the period are also statements published in the U. S. Literary Gazette of 1825 describing Natives as "wretched remnants of nations," who are "the oppressed and desolate few…the scanty, forlorn, and powerless intruders, who are glad to hide their misery in any corner whither they may go, when we bid them crawl out of our way." The same writing claimed that Euroamericans "have allied ourselves with pestilence and famine, and that far fiercer foe to humanity than either, intemperance; and they are well nigh extirpated." Equally representative was a remark of Tudor in the North American Review of 1816 that "the present generation" in Massachusetts, "who cultivate their fields in peace and security…never see an Indian except it be in some itinerant group, whose appearance and occupation are not unlike the Gypsies of Europe." [Note 6]

For some New England commentators of the antebellum period the disappearance of Indians, although "sad" or "melancholy" was not only unquestionably accepted but at the same time considered desirable. As Jared Sparks, "the grandfather of American historians," expressed it in an 1824 review of James Buchanan's Sketches of the History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians:

We do not go to the length, however, to which some tender hearted persons allow themselves to be carried, in deploring the fatality by which the Indians have been made to resign a part of their ancient domain, and leave a portion of the soil for the foot of the white man in the new world. In our view, the sum of human happiness is quite as great, and the glory of the creation quite as much advanced, by the ten millions of white, civilised, [sic] enterprising people now spread over the United States, as they would be one tenth part of that number of semibarbarous red men, the wild and restless tenants of the wilderness, unimproved by the march of ages, and unsubdued by the discipline of time. Our smiling fields, our farm houses and villages, our crowded cities and thriving commerce, these and all the other testimonies of the ever active powers of social man, are fruits of what some have called the usurpation of foreign intruders…if the savage and the civilised man cannot live together, who will hesitate in deciding the question which shall retire before the other? [North American Review, 19 (October 1824) 464]

Similarly, an equally influential Edward Everett, asserted that while a "wave" of white population was "daily encroaching" upon Natives, it was becoming "common to speak of them as a much oppressed and wronged race, to deplore their extinction, and to form projects for their preservation and civilization." He asked: "Are they then a much injured and oppressed race, or rather is their gradual extinction and disappearance a great and crying injustice?" What he labels "barbarous tribes" have "but a partial and imperfect right in the soil; that they cannot allege a prior occupancy of the forests and plains, which they do not in any civilized sense occupy." Everett concluded, "If this be so, a civilized company of emigrants have a right to land and settle on a savage coast."

Settlers "possessing the arts of civilized life, enjoying the blessings of government, and backed by powerful countries beyond the sea," would be "likely to advance in population: while Natives would decline. Forests would disappear replaced by cornfield, which "feeds the white people, but starves the red people." Thus, in Everett's phrase, "the very first step to feed and support the new comers aims at the extinction of the savages."

Such notions of Euroamerican "entitlement" to Indian lands had long been accepted by New Englanders. For example, when a twenty-one year old schoolmaster at Worcester, John Adams could note in his diary:

Consider, for one minute, the Changes produced in this Country, within the Space of 200 years. Then, the whole Continent was one continued dismall Wilderness, the haunt of Wolves and Bears and more savage men. Now, the Forests are removed, the Land coverd with fields of Corn, orchards bending with fruit, and the magnificent Habitations of rational and civilized People. Then our Rivers flowed through gloomy deserts and offensive Swamps. Now the same Rivers glide smoothly on through rich Countries fraught with every delightful Object, and through Meadows painted with the most beautiful scenery of Nature, and of Art. The narrow Hutts of the Indians have been removed and in their room have arisen fair and lofty Edifices, large and well compacted Cities. [L.H. Butterfield, Leonard Faber & Wendell D. Garrett, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols., (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), I, 34]

Accordingly, Sparks, Everett and other authors merely rework what had become a cliché in New England writing. As Everett maintained in a review of Morse's 1820 Report to the Secretary of War on Indian Affairs, "the extinction of the Indians has taken place by the unavoidable operation of natural causes, and a natural consequence of the vicinity of white settlements." For Everett, none of the Indians were "aboriginals, in the literal sense of the term," since many Indians "at a very late period, and at no very remote period, had driven out some of a still "more oppressed and injured race.' " For these reasons, he concludes:

Let others then mourn over extinguished Pequods, and lament the vanished tribes of Naticks and Narragansetts;—for ourselves, while we would not insult the inferiority of their savage races, we rejoice in the memory of the pilgrims…Since then it was not possible that the savage races could be perpetuated and the civilized settlements flourish, we see neither matter of regret nor commiseration in the course which events have taken…in short we regard the disappearance of the natives in New England as full and final proof, that their preservation, within limits of a white population, is impracticable…Men have talked of the melancholy vanishing of the native tribes, as if but for the Europeans, the successive tribes would not have vanish; and forgetting that the hunting ground of fifty savage families would feed and does feed a large city of civilized christians…it is better that we be civilized than savage; and it is no just cause for melancholy reflection, that so much barbarity, heathenism, and moral degradation, have been succeeded by so much improvement and civilization. [Note 7 ]

        Certainly, numbers of Nipmucs and other Massachusetts Indians had decreased in the colonial period. Many scholars, for example, accept estimates that in the 130 year period from 1620 and 1750 thousands of Indians perished: 10,000 through warfare with Europeans, 2,500 killed outright, 795 from wounds in battle, and another 6,000 through capture, enslavement, hunger, exposure and displacement all related to defeat in various conflicts. By comparison, despite accepted notions of slaughters or massacres on both sides, between 1798 and 1898, Indians killed 7,000 white soldiers and civilians with an estimated 4,000 Natives dying in the same period. The decrease of New England Natives in the colonial period is, therefore, substantial yet the accepted "disappearance" of local aboriginal people is, for many reasons, curious and perplexing. The accepted "disappearance" of local aboriginal people is not really a "disappearance," since supposedly disappeared Nipmucs lived in regional towns. Many local residents, including several town historians were on familiar terms with them, and we encounter Nipmucs in a variety of nineteenth-century source materials.

        In 1819, the Uxbridge Selectmen, for example, petitioned the Worcester County Probate Court to appoint guardians for Samuel Johns, "an Indian …who by excessive drinking so spends and wastes his estate as to endanger and expose" the town to expense "for his maintenance;" while years earlier, he had appeared before the County justices of the peace for "swearing a profane oath" while inebriated. At Natick, Massachusetts, in 1821, Hannah Dexter, an Indian "doctoress," was burned to death. At Westborough in 1822, Polly Johns, "an Indian woman one of the Grafton tribe so-called…found sick, in a hut by the side of a swamp…wholly destitute of any necessaries of life—and unable to help herself," was cared for by a town resident until her death. Patience Job, who died at Barre, Massachusetts in 1834, according to her published obituary, "long been distinguished for her talents and general reading…by her industry and economy…had procured a sufficient quantity of money to purchase a large collection of well selected books, which she presented to the town," her body "at her request…given to the attending physician for dissection."[Note 8]

        "Remnants of a vanished race," these individuals are among regional Nipmuc Indians who allegedly had already "disappeared" or become "extinct." If not already "disappeared," other Indians were in the process of "disappearing" like Polly Pegan Nedson and husband Joseph Dorus who "spent most their time tramping" around the Brimfield, Sturbridge, and Monson area in the 1820s and 1830s, "turning up every few weeks begging for food and the privilege of sleeping in barns." During colder weather, with their children Esbon, Joe, Charles and Diantha, they would sleep on floors of kitchens in white households near fireplaces, while in the summer they would "camp out in the woods near some ponds for weeks at a time." Often "old blankets and quilts," were kept for them, since they never bought any clothes and "wore cast-off garments of the white people."

        To support themselves, the Dorus family "fished, snared partridges and rabbits…and raided the farmers' cornfields and potato patches." They also made "a few baskets which they traded mostly for rum." Considering themselves entitled to take trees for basket materials, the Dorus family "never hesitated to cut a tree for basket stuff when they saw one they wanted, no matter whose land it was on." Occasionally Joshua Buckingham, a Sturbridge Native and spouse of Polly Dorus's sister, Asenath Nedson, "travelled with them," and, together, they would "sit under a tree and send one of the boys to the house for food." A young Esbon Dorus, "once came in and asked for bread and cheese and pickles…after eating they all lay down and slept for several hours." Polly Dorus had "occasional fits," thought "caused by too much rum," while Joe Dorus was "witty and sarcastic, and very fond of cider." He called himself a "doctor," and carried "a bundle of dirty packages, which he called his medicines in an old leather bag."

        In the 1830s, Nedsons and several relatives lived on land remaining from the Nipmuc reservation at Woodstock, "swingling flax, chopping wood, weaving baskets and chairbottoms when not too full of liquor" until "one by one they succumbed to drink or disaster." James Nedson, for example, was "killed by a falling tree" while his "aged mother Meribah was thrown in the fire by a drunken savage."

        The Quan family —James and Sarah, four sons, and a daughter "had a shanty" near Alum Pond at Brimfield but "would sometimes be gone for months." Sarah made "cakes, did them up in walnut leaves and baked them in ashes," and was frequently "peeling birch brooms, making baskets." One of the Quan sons "in going into a barn to sleep, got among horses and was fatally kicked." Another son "was frozen to death by the roadside" while his wife later "was found frozen in a swamp where she had gone to cut basket stuff." Quan's widow, also known to Brimfield residents as Sarah or Polly Green was a celebrated cook "said she was a doctor and carried herbs in her basket." She was "jolly and fond of children," frequently giving white children "snake root and sweet ciceley out of her medicine bag." On foot she often traveled from Brookfield where a married daughter lived, stopping at Brimfield along the way to Holland, but supposedly Sarah was "fond of cider as other Indians were." [Note 9]

        Along with the Dorus family, the Quans were described in a newspaper article later in the century as "real Indians in their Native condition," neither noble nor brave, but "a dirty wandering set who did no good to anybody, and our only respect for them rests on their being the first occupants of the soil."

        In local town histories, nonetheless, are other abundant examples of allegedly vanished Indian individuals and families. Not always, but frequently, these are represented as doomed, dissolute, and degenerate. Some Nipmucs lived in towns, pursuing conventional occupations, living in stable households, their Indianness "unseen" by whites. Several Nipmucs portrayed in rich detail, for example, lived in the once extensive cedar swamps of Westborough in a squatters' community of Natives, African-Americans and whites who were "shiftless" or insane. In other town chronicles Nipmucs are represented as quaint, and colorful "characters," around whom grew persisting oral historical traditions. Often Natives are depicted as drunken, debased "remnants," with all of the vices of whites and none of the virtues. Frequently, however, local Indians are presented as the "last of …," the "last of…" almost a tribe unto itself, dozens of men and women supposedly the "last Nipmuc."

        Although collectively their message portrays the disappearance of Nipmucs, many local histories of the period thus confirm what Jean O'Brien has called the "paradox of Indian presence," and what I have labeled the discourse of disappearing Indians. We would, I suspect agree, that historical narratives argue erasure while at the same time providing a wealth of sometimes very detailed information confirming Indian presence and persistence.

        Well into the 1850s, few—whether advocates or opponents of aboriginal people— challenged the inevitably of Indian extinction, which anchored itself in the accepted "fact" that Indians of the East had already faded away. Indeed, much of the literature expresses Indian disappearance. The vanishing Indian appears repeatedly in fiction, poetry and drama. Travel texts, guidebooks and logs of exploration of newer parts of the continent claimed by Americans highlight the vanishing Indian. Essayists and critics accept Indian disappearance. The proliferation of reprinted eighteenth-century captivity narratives and chronicles of earlier Indian wars rely upon Indian extinction.

        Aboriginal disappearance was also re-enforced in the visual and plastic arts, whether in landscape paintings where Natives are invoked as if picturesque equivalents of European ruins or as if props in historical genre paintings glorifying the arrival of Europeans, foreshadowing Indian extinction. Similarly, some of the period's more celebrated works of sculpture by Horatio Greenough and Hiram Powers, for example, represent vanishing Indians as visual and plastic arts competed in portraying Indian disappearance.

        Local historical texts of the same period in proposing an American "creation story," correspondingly, employ the vanishing Indian as a stock character. Indeed, the disappearing Indian is omnipresent, justifying many of the most cherished beliefs of nineteenth-century Americans about who they were. Uniformly and employing the same idiom of extinction, they aimed to resolve the contradiction between championing a republic supposedly dedicated to democratic ideals and Eurocentric expansionism carving a transcontinental nation wrested from its aboriginal occupants. All of this is, in my work, labeled a discourse of disappearing Indians. It expresses a longing or a desire to provide an answer America's "Indian Question," but in the central New England region, as was true elsewhere, this desire to be free of Indians produced historical narratives that were patently counter-factual.

        On the one hand, Nipmucs remained present officially for the Commonwealth. Bay State Indians were not citizens but wards of the state until enfranchised in 1869. Considered "minors" at law, their affairs were administered by state-appointed guardians and local Indians were frequently visited by legislative committees: through the 1860s Nipmucs at Grafton, Worcester and Webster were described, their communities enumerated and in their names inscribed in official reports.[Note 10 ]

        Additionally, through a legislative Act of 1859, John Milton Earle, Worcester politician and newspaper publisher, was appointed to investigate the social condition of Massachusetts Indians and advance recommendations whether they should be placed on the same legal footing as other residents of the Commonwealth. Submitted to the General Court in 1861, Earle's report contained three sections: a 132-page narrative; a proposed act to enfranchise Bay State Indians; and an appendix of seventy-eight pages, listing Native families, a so-called "census." His labors are documented in the extensive John Milton Earle Papers at the American Antiquarian Society [AAS]. Statewide, Earle enumerated 1,126 individuals, in 291 families for whom the Commonwealth was guardian. Earle also tallied 322 individuals in eighty-seven families as "Miscellaneous Indians" whose heritage was not apparent to him. Aggregate totals in Earle's Report were 378 families comprising 1448 Indians, excluding 162 non-Indian spouses.

        Among them Earle also identified 181 men, women and children, connected to Nipmuc Indian families, including forty-eight persons at Worcester. [Note 29] Many of these Nipmucs Earle enumerated are part of families documented in other state records of the period. Between 1790 and 1813, for example, twenty-seven Nipmucs received cash payments from guardians of Indians at Grafton. Between 1786 and 1829, guardians at Grafton also sold twenty real estate holdings, on behalf of sixteen individuals, and in 1857 purchased property for a Nipmuc family desiring to move into Worcester. Additionally, in 1849 and 1859, the state provided the Worcester County Judge of Probate funds to be disbursed to meet some of their needs; who was assisted, when helped and how much they received is confirmed in the manuscripts of AAS-Member Judge Ira Barton at the Society. The manuscript records of the Grafton guardians, acquired in the late 1820s by Christopher Baldwin, are also in the AAS collection. Similarly, members of the "Dudley Tribe" living at the Nipmuc reservation at Webster received support from 1800 through 1869, according to very detailed extant guardians' accounts at the state Archives.

        Also during the 1860s, twenty-seven Nipmuc adults at Webster, Spencer, Worcester, Oxford, Gardner, New Bedford and Thompson, Connecticut received cash payments or other benefits from the Commonwealth, on the basis of their connection to Nipmucs at the Webster reservation. The manuscript notebook documenting these month by month disbursements for 1863 is part of the Webster, Mass. Manuscript Collection at AAS.

        On the other hand, however, the traditional sources searched by the historian reveal Nipmucs in vital, probate, real estate, military and other records generated by county and town clerks, Nipmuc individuals identified as Indian in these documents. And while early federal census returns had no category for Indians living away from reservations west of the Mississippi causing local Natives to be enumerated only as "black" or "mulatto," Massachusetts state census tallies, likewise, record local Natives as Indian.

        The "extinct" or "vanished" Nipmucs, clearly, generated a considerable amount of official documentation for a supposedly non-existent tribal community.

        The disappearance of the Nipmucs was, however, part of a much larger conceptual labor to make Natives extinct. According to the tidy scenario established at the beginning of the Euroamerican "errand" into the wilderness, Massachusetts Native people were nearly "wiped out" in the virgin soil epidemic of 1618-19, called a "wonderful plague" destroying them and leaving their lands free for occupation. As was very simply stated, the epidemic on the eve of English immigration to New England was the means chosen by Jehovah to make room for the new Jerusalem.

For comparison, AAS Vice-President William Paine told the Society's annual meeting in 1815, "The hand of God seems to have been most wonderfully displayed, in preparing the way for establishment of an European colony in this part of North America." According to Paine, "At the time our English ancestors arrived, the Indian tribes on the seacoast had been greatly thinned by a fatal epidemick, and the fierce spirit of the survivors seem to have been restrained by its pestilential influence…the settlement, no doubt, was facilitated in consequence of this destructive sickness." The aboriginal people subsequently vanished, Paine assuring the Membership, "they wasted, they have mouldered away. They have disappeared." The "ancestors," in this way, were beneficiaries of the "wonder which God did for their protection," in removing New England Natives, yet "we must commiserate the sufferings, and extinction almost, of the Indian nations through an immense extent of the country." Ironically, a grandfather of William Paine, Judge John Chandler II beginning in the 1730s had served for decades as one of the guardians of Indians at Grafton, Natives who had not "melted away" during Paine's lifetime. Additionally, Paine's father Judge Timothy Paine served as a guardian of the Grafton Nipmucs and William Paine grew up in a Worcester where several Indians were town residents or employed as servants in white households.

In outline, seventeenth-century writers inform: Massachusetts Natives did not enclose their land, therefore, their lands were not really their property; Indians had more land than they needed or knew how to use; they welcomed the coming of Europeans; and, epidemics and pandemics prior to 1620 and, again, in 1633-34, were proof Jehovah was clearing the "uncouth" and "heathen" wilderness to make way for his saints. Indians were, simply, doomed to disappear. Their disappearance is thus central to the vision of New England codified in the region's earliest narratives. Additionally, lop-sided Native casualties in the so-called King Phillip War of 1675-1676 allowed the dominant culture to imagine the surviving Native populations were killed off or vanished. [For discussion of selected period sources, See Note 11]

Around this "official version" cluster sub-themes, many repeated in the works of local historians, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century when was assumed the following: that European immigrants had geographical predestination to "possess" the continent; that "according to the intentions of the Creator" the soil was to be "subdued;" that European christianity was an advanced state of culture destined "to conquer" lower, decadent forms of human organization; and, that the vast reaches of the continent were under-utilized by transient, marauding, roaming, undeveloped Indians. Simply, Natives had to disappear. Their disappearance or extinction was ordained by the "Disposer of Human Events," the "Author of Nature," the "finger of God," the "Father of the Universe," the "Hand of Nature," or "Great Engineer of the Universe." How Natives were to be dealt with politically related to the acceptance of their fated erasure and extinction.

Works of local historians, accordingly, reflect aspects of the "Indian Question" that haunts the early Republic. In local writings the Question animates several discussions advanced at differing periods of the last century, concerning:

the "origin" of Indians, whether they were "Asiatic" people who migrated to the New World, or a lost tribe of Israelites, and whether there were connections between aboriginal peoples of North and South America;

"pre-history" of Natives or whether a supposedly racially distinct advanced and sophisticated people were conquered and displaced by less developed "savages" encountered by Europeans;
"present" or "nature" of the "savages" and "children of the forest" or whether Indians could be civilized, christianized and converted from "roving bands of barbaric nomads" to settled, sedentary farmers; and,
"future" of the Natives whether they were "fading" through operation of impersonal biological laws, to be "exterminated" to make room for Euro-Americans or to be "removed" to specifically designated Indian residence areas.
Some local writings simply allege aboriginal people never occupied towns they described. For example, Indians were never at Rutland according to an 1836 history, however, in describing the town's meadows its author states, "it is evident that some were partially cleared by Indians or beavers." The Hardwick history speculates that "there is no evidence…that the present township…was ever occupied by the Indians as a place of residence." Since many "stone arrow-heads were found so abundantly in the fields" this work concludes these artifacts are a result of "their frequent and long-continued visitation in pursuit of game." Natives never occupied the town, but the hills of Hardwick "furnished favorite hunting-grounds." The earliest Milford history invokes Natives as "savages" and "children of the forest," claiming "whether Indians ever occupied our territory, except as roving bands for hunting and fishing purposes is doubtful," yet describes a "burial-place" at the Milford-Holliston town borders, whence were taken "many arrow-heads, and perhaps a few rude implements of domestic use," adding "arrow-heads, either whole or in pieces, and other unimportant relics" were found "from time to time, in all parts of our vicinage." Examples abound confirming that a part of the local discourse of disappearing Indians is their allegation there were never Indians here.

        Other historical writings concede Natives had previously occupied the area. Ellen Larned, the historian of Windham County across the border in Connecticut, for example, represented aboriginal Nipmucs as "of little spirit or destructive character," their numbers "small," and much of the region "left vacant and desolate." Living in "poor" dwellings, their lives "were spent chiefly in hunting, fishing, idling and squabbling." At the end of the King Philip War, the Nipmucs of northern Connecticut were "almost annihilated…the few remaining…found a refuge with other distant tribes." The "aboriginal inhabitants of future Windham County were destroyed or scattered, and their territory opened to English settlement and occupation." Emory Washburn's Leicester history informed "the last vestige" of the Nipmucs inhabiting the own "has long ago disappeared…beyond its name nothing remains of them. Their story was that of most of the tribes in New England; they disappeared." A Westborough history maintains, "besides the names they have left and the legends they have suggested, there is very little by which we may trace the occupancy of the Indian proprietors." Similarly, in his 1837 history of Worcester, William Lincoln wrote of the Nipmuc Tribe that after the King Philip War "the whole nation perished," or "dispersed, seeking refuge in Canada…or migrating far westward," leaving the soil "almost without a relic of the aboriginal population." Again, examples abound confirming that a part of the local discourse of disappearing Indians is the allegation There were once Indians here but they vanished a long time ago.

        Notions that there were never Indians in the region and that Indians had long ago disappeared should, on one level, have represented a difficulty for local historians arguing Indian erasure. Numerous town histories claim Natives had disappeared, usually in portions of their texts describing the trials and tribulations of "our" ancestors in "carving" townships out of the alleged wilderness, yet these same works resolve the apparent contradiction of Natives who did not disappear by arguing that living Nipmucs were less than Indian. On the one hand, these nineteenth-century Natives are part of the "last of…Tribe," and, on the other hand, they were debased, often racially mixed remnants. By white definition, they had ceased being Indians. In the romantic imagination of the antebellum period, for example, aboriginal New England Natives were noble, heroic, handsome, long-suffering, virtuous, freedom-loving, eloquent, stout-hearted "children of the forest" while nineteenth-century Nipmucs are represented in local texts are ugly, filthy, lazy, immoral, degenerate, drunken, racially-mixed beggars rootlessly wandering through the area selling their baskets and brooms. Accordingly, they were, for regional historians, not really Indian. In their degraded state, they existed as living proof Nipmucs had ceased to exist.

        In the earlier decades of the last century, for example, local historians—authors of regional as well as national narratives, identified themselves with institutions, from where the disappearance of Nipmucs was furthered. One of these organizations was the American Antiquarian Society or AAS. Several historians were members or officers of AAS, or in other ways associated with the institution. In some instances they were bound by kinship, like AAS librarian and historian Christopher Baldwin and his cousin Leicester historian and AAS Member Emory Washburn. The discourse of disappearing Indians is furthered both in their own writings and in AAS pronouncements, addresses and publications. Indeed, any discussion of local historians, most particularly in the antebellum period, has to recognize a crucial role of AAS in supporting notions of vanishing New England Indians.

The American Antiquarian Society, in its formative years, clearly endorsed notions of Indian extinction, furthering the discourse of disappearance in arguing that nineteenth-century Indians were fading away and rendering Indians people without history by disconnecting them from an imagined earlier "race" conquered and overwhelmed by the Natives encountered by Europeans.

In the first publication of its Proceedings in 1813, the recently incorporated American Antiquarian Society announced that the "chief objects of the enquiries and researches of this society will be American Antiquities, natural, artificial and literary…," among articles to be retained by the Society, were "specimens with written accounts respecting them, of fossils, handicrafts of the Aborigines." ["An Account of the American Antiquarian Society Incorporated, October 24th, 1812," in American Antiquarian Society Proceedings, hereafter cited as AAS Proceedings, 1 (November 1813), 8-9].

Similarly, in an address at the first AAS annual meeting, at King's Chapel, Boston, in October 1813, by William Jenks the members were informed that "The ancient Indian nations of our continent demand our first attention. Here an extensive field of enquiry opens at once the present condition of the native Indian tribes indicates a deterioration in number, spirit and skill, if we survey them even by the light of those narratives which have been left us by our ancestors, and those, who were first acquainted with this extensive country.". For Reverend Jenks, a pastor at Bath, Maine and professor of Oriental [Middle-eastern] Languages at Bowdoin College, these concern should motivate AAS " to "collect complete vocabularies of the Indian tongues, to ascertain the boundaries of their ancient governments, and the progress they have made in the few arts, which are practiced among them; to obtain a knowledge of their numbers and circumstances at various epochs of their progress or declension, are objects of laudable curiosity." [See William Jenks, "An Address To the Members of the American Antiquarian Society Pronounced in King's Chapel, Boston on Their First Anniversary, Oct. 23, 1813," in AAS Proceedings, 2 (1813) 19-20, 23-24. 26]

Three years later, in 1816, Reverend Abiel Holmes of Boston, one of the Society's Corresponding Secretaries, told Members at the Annual Meeting, "It was the purpose of the CREATOR, who hath 'given the earth to the children of men,' to assign this immense continent, long inhabited by beasts of the wilderness, or thinly populated by men scarcely less ferocious than they, to become the habitation of myriads of human beings, cultivated by knowledge, improved in arts, and enlightened by the gospel of Jesus Christ." In his address of the purposes of AAS, Holmes maintained that Europeans were given, "these pleasant places, which we now occupy, this good land which we inherit." Holmes asked:

Who is not gratified in tracing our salutary institutions to their origin, and in discovering the causes of our rapid progress in population, wealth and refinement, of our freedom and independence? Who can behold the portraits of the first settlers of New England, without mingled delight and admiration? Who does not take a melancholy pleasure in reading the inscriptions on their monuments, or in treading the ground where they were content to lie without them? Who does not love to see any articles, either of utility or ornament, brought over to America by our ancestors when they first crossed the Atlantic, or choicely preserved in the private bureaus of their descendants? Who can step on that rock, on which the pilgrim fathers from Leyden first stepped, or even survey its fragments without grateful emotion?

For him, thus, not only was the study of antiquities bound up with utility and entertainment, throwing "great light" on a nation's past but also such emotions. And where is the Native American for Reverend Holmes? Part of the antiquarian's labor is "to hold long dialogues with Indians," and "to explore to the very bottom, any mounds of earth, that have a sepulchral, or military, or mystic appearance; to dig up subterranean walls, the design or occasion of which no man living can tell; to carry off, unmolested, any misshapen stone, which may haply prove to be some Indian relic…" ["Address by Rev. Abiel Holmes," AAS Proceedings 1812-1849, 58, 62-63]

Similarly, in an 1820 address Isaac Goodwin told the Society, "Generation has followed generation, and scare any efforts have been made to rescue from oblivion the comparatively recent antiquities of America…The race of men found in possession of our continent are passing into forgetfulness—are rapidly mingling their remains with their native soil—a soil doomed to pass into other hands. The wave of civilization, from the Atlantic, is pursuing them to the farthest West, to regions illumined by the setting sun; and overwhelming in indistinguishable ruin, alike the recent Indian tribes with those of the more civilized nations, who, many centuries since, preceded them on our continent. We tread their common graves without emotion. With unconcern we build our streets and erect our edifices upon their sacred inclosures." For Goodwin, "with sacrilegious hands we scatter to the winds alike the bones of the hero, and those of his faithful dog at his side. The land they once defended is ours. —The fields they trod, where they led their sons, where they inspired them with courage to repeal the invader of these hills, are all our own." He asked, "ought we not to return them the slight tribute of our recollection, the trifling compensation of preserving their memorials?" The Society should "preserve every thing American, every thing illustrative of the ancient history of this continent," and, in so doing, "redeem our country from any further imputation of ungrateful neglect." [AAS Proceedings, 1812-1849, 161]

In the same period drafting his "Dissertation on the First Peopling of America," Reverend Thaddeus Mason, an AAS Corresponding Secretary, endorsed the notion that America was "peopled at different periods, some of which must have been extremely remote, by emigrants from various nations, and who came by different routes." This was for Reverend Mason "apparent from the dissimilarity that exists in their features, language, custom, and religious opinions and ceremonies." Accordingly, when first encountered by Europeans, "there was a remarkable dissimilarity; and their condition varied from that of the most gross ignorance and barbarism to a wonderful degree of improvement in social and civil polity; and in many of these arts which we have been accustomed to consider as the arts of a civilized people." Still, Mason assured the AAS membership that "those who were found here by the first discoverers were descendants of such as had become possessors of the country, after having conquered and displaced a former race." [Thaddeus Mason Harris, "A Dissertation on the First Peopling of America, As Indicated By the Traditions, and Some Peculiar Customs of the Natives, AAS Proceedings 1812-1849, 180]

        With publication of its first Proceedings in 1813, the recently incorporated AAS announced that the "chief objects of the enquiries and researches of this society will be American Antiquities, natural, artificial and literary…" among articles to be retained by the Society, were "specimens with written accounts respecting them, of fossils, handicrafts of the Aborigines."For AAS this translated to gathering, collecting and preserving Indian "relics" and "remains," through study of Native languages and archeology.

        To its credit, The Society also gathered, collected and preserved Indian "relics" and "remains," as well as pursuing the study of Native languages and archeology. Many essential source materials required by contemporary history are found in the AAS collections. Often unpublished documents and records at AAS have been used by numerous scholars for works on Indian and Indian/ White history. In some instances, AAS materials are of crucial importance for Natives in documenting tribal history. For example, AAS received, valued and published in the last century a manuscript by Daniel Gookin, his The Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians 1675, 1676, 1677, a sympathetic and detailed narrative of Christian Indians, including many Nipmucs, in the King Philip War. No accurate history of the Nipmuc Indians, as another example, can be drafted today without utilizing AAS manuscripts, including the Grafton Indian guardians' records from 1730 through the Civil War. Similarly, the John Milton Earle Papers are necessary for equally essential information about Indians at Fall River, New Bedford, Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard as well as the aborigines of central Massachusetts.

        What mattered to AAS and the vision of America created at this institution in the antebellum period were objects from the Mississippi River Valley, which were imagined products of the earlier race of Aborigines, separate from and displaced by Natives encountered by Europeans. AAS was one of the premier collectors of such objects and in the first two volumes of Transactions published then significant research on Indian "relics" of the Mississippi River Valley.

        Identifying itself with national desires to constitute Indians as successors of an earlier, more sophisticated, culturally advanced aboriginal people conquered by savages who were, in turn, overcome by Europeans, AAS worked with determination to acquire "Western" or "Mississippian" objects. The Society's Archives confirm that in many instances AAS was competing at this time with Philadelphia's American Philosophical Society and other organizations in obtaining desired Indian objects.[Note 12]

        On the one hand, the Society sent out countless letters to residents of Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee and other regions soliciting objects.[Note 13] On the other hand, as part of acquisition efforts, AAS began electing residents in Ohio and the Mississippi Valley, locally based Receiving Officers charged with gathering, cataloguing and sending objects to Worcester.

In some instances individuals were specifically elected to the Membership in the hope of obtaining objects, descriptions of mounds, surveys of Indian earth works or leads to other individuals with collections of objects. Often the communications announcing election to the AAS membership with requests of materials produced results: Thomas Jefferson forwarded a lengthy manuscript on New England Indians and provincial governments. When elected in 1814, Jefferson acknowledged the honor, commending the Society's intentions but claiming, " I fear I shall be able to carry into their service little more than sincere dispositions to be useful to them whenever it shall be in my power." He offered AAS "a paper…long in my possession," compiling historical facts about Indians in several Northeastern states, but mostly Massachusetts. He had obtained the document fifty years earlier from William Burnet Brown, a descendant of colonial governor William Burnet. Much of the document relating to "the first century of our settlement, this being the department of our history in which materials are most defective," Jefferson wrote "it may perhaps offer something not elsewhere preserved."

        When elected an AAS Member in 1821, however, Jefferson wrote from Monticello giving thanks "for the honor done me some time since, in electing me a member of their useful and much respected society," and sending him the Diploma. Accepting membership as "a mark of their good will, and not with the hope of meriting it by any service I can render."He quoted Seneca's, "senex sum, et curis levissimus impar,' about being an old man unfit for the heaviest of burden, claiming "age and weakened health render me no longer equal to the labors of science."[Note 14]

        Other individuals when elected to AAS or charged as receiving secretaries sent reports, investigations and results of fact-finding journeys on behalf of the Society while still others sent to Worcester artifacts from their collections or committed to seeking out mound material for AAS [For sampled examples, See Note 15 ]

        In some instances the AAS archives confirm curious efforts towards these ends as in 1817 when one the Society's Tennessee receiving agents nominated for membership "several citizens of West Tennessee; gentlemen of respectability" to assist gathering and preserving Indian materials; the list was headed by Major General Andrew Jackson, [subsequently elected]. In making the suggestion, Oliver Fiske wrote to AAS, "I have a strong wish that some portion of his uncommon energy and influence might be engaged in favour of the American Antiquarian Society." Fiske also proposed for membership General John Coffee, in some circles of 1817 notorious for his military campaign in destroying Creek settlements during the war. "These gentlemen I introduce 'without regard to nation, sect or party.' If they would be elected and should weigh well the purpose of the Society," Fiske informed Isaiah Thomas, "their names, I trust, could be no dishonor" to the AAS roster^. [Note 16] By 1820, however, AAS named thirty-three Receiving Officers, nine in Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Indiana and Missouri.
        Just as individuals provided to the Society in its earlier years various important collections of printed materials and manuscripts, they also offered "relics" or "remains" of doubtful authenticity or questionable significance. [All descriptions from AAS Archives, Donation Books, Volume I] Representatives of " curiosities" given the Society in this period are:
Likewise, AAS received in this period other items including:
Some of items sent to Worcester occasionally arrived with almost comic descriptions of their significance. [For an example, see skeletal remains of a horse's head shipped to AAS, Note 17] Indian objects, both from the "West" and from New England, were finding their way into the AAS collection. In 1826, for example, William Lincoln,temporary AAS Librarian and cabinet keeper informed the Annual Meeting that, "The Cabinet has been increased in extent, variety and worth, by donations of relics of Indian arts and workmanship, bow, arrows, hatchets and utensils of culinary use as well as weapons of warfare."[Note 18]

        The AAS archives, accordingly, document that in the period from 1814 to 1830 objects of material culture unearthed in Worcester and surrounding towns became part of the AAS collections. Characteristic is a letter to the AAS Librarian, from Ephraim Roper of Templeton, Ephraim Roper to AAS Librarian, AAS Correspondence 1830-1839, Box 2]dated Aug. 14, 1837, explaining:

"The Indian Pestle here with sent was found in a Trout Brook---near its head in the westerly part of Templeton in the month of May last by some workmen employed building a mill dam it was covered with mud about a foot in depth. It is sent to you to be deposited in the hall of the Antiquarian Society if you deem it expedient. Very respectfully yours"

Similarly, other regional residents conveyed "Indian relics" found in the area to AAS. Received and described in manuscript donation books, these objects were, however, imagined products of "savages" that were "destitute of industry and providence." Later in the century, all of these "artifacts" were transferred by AAS to the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, where their specific local connections have been lost and they are "genericized" in current holdings of the Peabody Museum. [See Note 19 for some Nipmuc objects once at AAS] Between 1890 and 1910, AAS conveyed to Harvard's Peabody Museum no less than Indian 1838 objects from North and South America including "specimens."

        During the tenure of Christopher Baldwin as Cabinet-Keeper and later AAS Librarian in the 1830s, however, the Society's collection of Native materials significantly increased, but as he explained AAS had "no use" for "the trinkets of the modern Indian." Material culture of local Indians constituted "objects of much less interest than those which we connected with the mounds." Where "everything appertaining to those monuments of a forgotten race" was valued, "we do not care about collecting the articles wrought by modern Indians. Their dress. Their mode of living. Their implements of hunting and of war, are almost every where the same, and have been minutely and circumstantially described." [Note 20] In 1832 the AAS Librarian inquired of an Ohio resident "if you can get an entire mound/ and they are so thick upon the banks of every river in Ohio that even tho you should take the very largest of them it would not be missed/ it would give me no great pleasure to receive it: How will one look back of Antiquarian Hall?" His mission authorized by AAS in 1835, Baldwin died in a stagecoach accident at Zainesville, Ohio while investigating mounds with an eye to Society acquisition of objects being unearthed.

        Correspondingly, local historians in some instances provide detailed accounts of excavating Native settlement sites throughout the Nipmuc territories, historians themselves sometimes part of these efforts aimed at documenting the relative barbarism of regional Indians. Many items unearthed became part of the collections of local historians or entered cabinets of curiosity established in individual towns. Indeed, through their work can be established dozens of sites confirming Nipmuc presence, but in their narratives these locales are invoked to further a supposedly disappeared tribe.

With an amazing determination, local historians and regional antiquarians were involved in disinterring Nipmuc Indians. At innumerable sites, depicted in their histories, human remains were disturbed; sometimes skeletons or skulls became the property of historians, in other cases they were "badly handled and destroyed," in some instances simply "disappearing." In this, also, local historians were following the lead of AAS that, in the 1820s and 1830s, sought out physical remains of Indians. The earliest of its Indian human remains became part of AAS collections during the Society's first decade; AAS Donations Books confirm that sometime in 1814 the Society received a "lot" including "several ancient skulls from New Hampshire." Later on Oct. 25, 1820, Caleb Atwater sent from Ohio items including: "an under jaw-bone of a fossil skull of the ancient inhabitants, found in a tumulus" and "human bones taken from mounds in Ohio," [Vol. I: 3, 15, 16, 19]

Baldwin's interest in the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers is frequently mentioned in correspondence, years before his relationship to AAS. As early as 1825, for example, a friend who had not heard from him for a while wrote, "I was told some months ago that you had gone to state of Ohio to sell shingle-machines and to see the humans in the new settlements…and knew not whether you had returned from that perilous expedition or perished and left your bones to moulder without a hic jacet, in the western wilderness." [See David F. Cutler to Christopher C. Baldwin, May 8, 1835, Christopher Baldwin Papers, AAS, Box 1: Correspondence 1820-1829, folder 1: 1820-1826]

Once associated with AAS Baldwin pursued his interests in the Ohio region and also in Native skeletons, claiming in an 1832 letter that only his friend John Milton Earle was "even more clamorous for skulls than I am for antiquities." [Baldwin to Dr. William S. Emerson, Jan. 3, 1832, Letters of the Librarian. I, 171-173, Baldwin Papers, Octavo volume 5] In 1833 Baldwin submitted to examination by a Worcester phrenologist who found he had "the bump of Adhesiveness," which was "so prodigiously developed that he was much amazed by it." The "bump" supposedly indicated its possessor had a "very strong attachment to his friends." Subsequently, he visited a craniologist who asked Baldwin if it was true he liked his friends, "after fumbling and feeling of my head until it was soft and pliable as a Lemon that has been rolled by a Punch-Maker." [Baldwin to Joshua Coffin, May 27, 1833, Letters of the Librarian. I, 216-217, Baldwin Papers, Octavo volume 5] In the same year he expressed an eagerness to acquire Indian skeletal remains for AAS.

When Dr. William Emerson. a Harvard classmate, who had moved to Illinois responded in 1833 that he could send AAS "fossils and Indian curiosities without much difficulty," Baldwin began a letter, "Eh, Married! and children big enough to collect shells…" Accordingly, he told Emerson he was "in a begging mood," adding to the request for antiquities his desire for Indian remains:

I want some crania from your mounds--- The skulls of the mound Indian, you know, may be easily distinguished from the common Indian by the Palate bone (I have forgot you Doctor's word for it.) In the Mound skull it is a third larger than in the other---This is a curious fact. I should like an Indian skull too; one of the other kind, I must have. [Baldwin to Dr. William S. Emerson, June 12 1833, Letters of the Librarian. I, 233-236, Baldwin Papers, Octavo volume 5]

Similarly, when Reverend Aaron Bancroft, —AAS Council Member, father of historian George Bancroft and Baldwin's pastor at Worcester's First Unitarian Church—was at Cincinnati in August of 1833, the Librarian wrote:

The subject of the mounds in the valley of the Mississippi is among the most interesting connected with American history. We have in the Antiquarian Society many curious articles taken from them; but what I particularly want and am desirous of procuring is a collection of skulls. I want the skulls of that unknown and forgotten people who built the mounds and forts and inhabited the country before the present race of Indians. I should like also the skulls of the common Indians if they could be found…Specimens of either, could I presume, be easily procured and I should feel very sensibly the obligation if any one in Cincinnati would help me to them. I want as many as four of five, if they can be obtained. A less number, however, would answer. I should like to have them in a perfect form and unbroken and lower jaws, if practicable to obtain them in that state. I have written repeatedly to gentle men in the Western States, but have been as often disappointed. [Baldwin to Rev. Aaron Bancroft, Aug. 8, 1833, Letters of the Librarian. I, 262-264, Baldwin Papers, Octavo volume 5]

The elderly Bancroft was to have them "carefully packed in a strong Box" and sent to AAS in Worcester.

Likewise, in the following year, the Librarian discouraged a Tennessee collector from sending "specimens" from his "valuable cabinet," adding that:

Should you be able to send a cranium from one of the mounds, I should be greatly obliged to you. But I will not have you give yourself any trouble about the subject at present beyond merely informing me what difficulty there may be in procuring an entire skull. I have written several letters in the last year, and have found no sort of encouragement that one could be procured at any rate. I had supposed them so abundant that one could be easily detained. [Baldwin to Dr. J. G. M. Ramsey, Jan. 6, 1834, Letters of the Librarian. II, Baldwin Papers, Octavo volume 6]

Also, in 1834, Baldwin entered into correspondence with George T. Davis, publisher of Greenfield, Massachusetts Mercury, Davis writing in January that he made "several enquiries" about Indian skeletons, a subject "we were talking about when I saw you last." Davis claimed he "should have no difficulty" in getting Native skulls for AAS.

…I have got one of a female apparently, about twenty, found under ground near Turner's Falls, on a spot where bones are continually found, and which was probably a burial place…the skeleton was lying on its side, head to the east. I am going next week to hunt also another burial place in Deerfield.

The newspaper editor appeared incredulous, writing to confirm "whether I understood you to say that you had no Indian skull of the New England tribe in your possession." He claimed he had mentioned the situation to a George Hoyt who "not believe" the AAS collection lacked Indian skulls. Davis said, "I should make an article of it for my people, and have not doubt that by rousing people's attention I get you a 'wilderness of them.' " At Deerfield, according to Davis, were two cemeteries "from which many bones have been taken," while at Turner's Fall and Petty's Plain, "they are dug up almost every year," and "they have been so common here that he could not believe your museum could be deficient in specimens." Accordingly, he repeated, "Gratify me by writing me whether I understood you right."

Reassured, Davis responded, "I will stir my stump in return to get you an assortion of skulls in addition to the one I have already procured," since he was "in treaty" for a "whole skeleton in fine preservation with a noble head," also disinterred at Turner's Falls. Additionally, Davis reported that silver pieces and wampum had been discovered at the same location, but he'd not yet traced them.[George T. Davis to Christopher C. Baldwin, Jan. 6, 1834, Letters to the Librarian, II]

Baldwin's efforts were finally rewarded in June 1834 Davis offered AAS three Indian skulls recently disinterred. The Librarian responded:

Since I have been connected with the Society I have written many letters and asked many individuals to assist me in procuring for our cabinet perfect skulls of the different races of our Indians. But, thus far, I have been totally unsuccessful. I have not received even a fragment of one; and I cannot express to you, my dear Sir, the grateful sense I am certain of the obliging offer you make to render so acceptable a service. [Baldwin to George T. Davis, June 8, 1834, Letters of the Librarian. II, 14-15, Baldwin Papers, Octavo volume 6]

The first was found at Gill while digging a cellar, "others bones with it, but were not procured." It was disinterred a few hundred yards from Turner's Falls, "where a line of Indian huts is represented by tradition" to have stood until burnt in 1675 during the King Philip War. According to Davis, "skeletons are often dug up there." He added, "the plough continually turns up fragments of bone, arrow-heads, spearheads, ragged bullets, etc." A year earlier "a whole skeleton of a full-grown man" was removed from the site, and was owned by Dr. Lyons of Gill, regrettably for Davis since "the skull was of noble confirmation" than any of the three Davis sent to AAS.

The second and third skulls in the Davis packet also were disinterred near Turner's Falls, "many years ago," located about two feet below the surface. One had been sawed through for "ascertaining its age" before coming into Davis's possession. The other had found near the banks of the Connecticut River. He also mentioned others who owned Indian remains including Dr. [fill in] Williams of Deerfield, who had "an undoubted Indian's skull of an Indian killed at Mount Hoosac" around 1750 by one Chapin of Bernardston; it was saved when "Williams' ancestor went out & found the body, procured the head, and it has been kept in the family ever since," and the Museum of Amherst which housed "a skeleton supposed Indian dug up" at Deerfield "not long since." [George T. Davis to Christopher C. Baldwin, Aug. 11, 1834, Letters to the Librarian, II,]

The Greenfield skulls would arrive in July, according to AAS donation records, yet within days, the Librarian extended his search for skulls to South America. Thanking a New Englander based at Valparaiso [Chile] for "some interesting antiquities," Baldwin requested skulls and "vessels buried with them" which would be "most gratefully received." AAS wanted these human remains "to compare them with the skulls of North American Indians to ascertain thereby whether the original inhabitants of North and South America may not once have been the same people and descended from the same stock." [Baldwin to James L. Swett, June 12, 1834, Letters of the Librarian. II, 80, Baldwin Papers, Octavo volume 6]

The so-called "mummy" from Mammoth Cave was also one of the Society's more "curious" objects. These remains were transferred by AAS to the Smithsonian. The most famous of the early AAS acquisitions, according to Shipton, the so-called Mammoth Cave Mummy, was disinterred in 1816, a "subject of great curiosity" when taken to Lexington, Kentucky and poorly handled. By "being much exposed to the atmosphere, it gradually began to decay; its muscles to contract, and the teeth to drop out, and much of its hair was plucked from its head by wanton visitants." In this condition it was given to AAS, to be delivered by Nahum Ward, who "was to travel around the country with it and exhibit it for a fee." When the mummified woman—a.k.a. Fawn Hoof to AAS staff—arrived at Antiquarian Hall in Worcester, Isaiah Thomas concluded:

Very few persons attend to see the skeleton; as those who do, universally express their disgust at it. For myself, I cannot perceive how the cause of science, history or antiquarianism is to be benefited by the preservation of those dried up particles. I have seen a dead cat, which accidentally was inclosed in an oven, and found some months afterwards, in as good a state of mummy preservation as this skeleton. The best thing in my opinion which could be done would be to give it to some anatomical school or bury in the cemetery

The Society, however, continued to display these remains. In 1876 and in 1893, this Indian woman was exhibited in World's Fairs. [For all citations, see Shipton, "History of the Museum of the American Antiquarian Society," 10]

Accordingly, local historians who document excavation of countless individual burial sites and numerous burial grounds throughout the region are merely reflecting a general trend of antebellum Americans to take "possession" of everything Indian.

In narratives of the latter nineteenth century—after the "closing" of the frontier, after Wounded Knee, and after the end of armed resistance by Natives—Indians could become for local historians "exotic," their texts frequently expressing a nostalgia, often gathering together town oral historical traditions about the Nipmucs who supposedly once occupied the region. Again, these narratives, although providing confirmation that residents knew nineteenth-century Nipmucs, aimed to demonstrate they had "vanished." Sometimes this nostalgia produced monstrosities like the name Chaubunagungamaugamaugamaugmanchaugamaugamaug for Webster Lake, the original Nipmuc appellation Chaubunagungamaug ["Fish-Boundary Place"] extended, the larger designation nineteenth-century derision persisting to the present as if authentic.

Making "exotic" the Indian of course had also characterized some antebellum speculation. For example, prior to works of the Hudson River School painters and others, the "wilderness" of the American landscape was considered an obstacle or deficiency in intellectual assimilation of European aesthetic canons The continental doctrine of "association" was inimical to the American topography in that "association" defined the ideal landscape with ruins, relics, myths and legends assumed a uniformed "past" of humanity; simply, America lacked materials required by "association." In disagreement, Cole maintained in his "Essay on American Scenery" that "American scenes are not destitute of historical and legendary associations; the great struggle for freedom has sanctified many a spot, and many a mountain stream and rock has its legend, worthy of a poet's pen or painter's pencil." [For this frequently cited passage, see Thomas Cole, "Essay on American Scenery," American Monthly Magazine, 1 (January 1836) 2.] Similarly, much of the orientation of period painters was summarized in an 1858 article in The Crayon:

Soon the last red man will have faded from his native land, and those who come after us will trust to our scanty records for their knowledge of his habits and appearance…Setting aside all the Indian history of the West, how much there is that is romantic, peculiar, and picturesque in his struggles with civilization in our section of the country…As an accessory in the landscape the Indian many be used with great effect. He is at home in every scene of primitive country."

Washington Irving maintained that "Indians are like the shepherd of pastoral romance, a mere personification of mere attributes," [Washington Irving, A Tour of the Prairies, (New York: R. F. Fenno & Co., 1990) 27] yet as Ralph W. Emerson objected:

We in Massachusetts see the Indians only as a picturesque antiquity;—Massachusetts, Shawmut, Samoset, Squantum, Nantasket, Narragansett, Assabet, Museketaquid. But where are the men?

'Alas for them! their day is o'er'

Well, this feeling still honours the race. Hiawatha, Wyoming—we thank them for names. Indian relics, arrowheads. He is the oldest man. What real merits—knowledge as naturalist, skill to make bow, tent, sledge, canoe, to find his north, wise as a hound…" [Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson with Annotations,1845-1848, edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1914) 23]

However, one " must look on the Indian, not with the eye of sentiment and romance, but of truth and reality" announced Edward Everett , "seen as he really is, he stands low in the scale of humanity." As such, regional Natives were "orphans of Providence" or "benighted children of the forest," together experiencing "the melancholy fate of the New England Indians." Accordingly, as Everett claimed, "It could not be expected of them, to enter into the high counsels of heaven. It was not for them, dark and uninstructed even in the wisdom of men, — to comprehend the great design of Providence, of which their wilderness was the appointed theatre." Although America, "when discovered by the Europeans, was in the possession of the native tribes, it was obviously the purpose of Providence, that it should become the abode of civilization, the arts, and Christianity," as part of a two-pronged purpose, "to effect another great purpose connected with the relief and regeneration of mankind, namely, the establishment of a place of refuge for the children of persecution, and the opening of a new field of action, where principles of liberty and improvement could be developed." The Indian, in Everett's opinion, was an " uncivilized man, living from the chase, and requiring a wide range of forest for his hunting-ground, destitute of arts and letters, —belonging to a different variety of the species, speaking a different tongue, suffering all the disadvantages of social and intellectual inferiority." As an "untutored child of nature," the Native merited merely a "compassionate tear." [Edward Everett An Address Delivered at Bloody Brook in South Deerfield, September 39, 1835, In Commemoration of the Fall of the "Flower of Essex," At that Spot, in King Philip's War, September 18, (O.S.) 1675 (Boston: Russell, Shattuck & Williams, 1835) 7-8, 27, 28]

Similarly, another of the period's more noted orators, Rufus Choate, agreed that "It has been our lot in the appointments of Providence to be, innocently or criminally, instruments in sweeping from the earth one of the primitive families of man." As Choate amplified:

We build our houses upon their graves; our cattle feed upon the hills from which they cast their last look upon the land, pleasant to them as it is now pleasant to us, in which through an immemorial antiquity their generations had been dwelling. The least we can do for them, for science and letters, is to preserve their history. [Rufus Choate, "The Importance of Illustrating New-England History By A Series of Romances Like the Waverly Novels," delivered at Salem in 1833, in Addresses and Orations of Rufus Choate (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1878) pp. 1-28]

Countless local historians across New England took up this challenge "to preserve their history." In simple terms, historians of the interior of Massachusetts provide a conceptual framework for the extinction of Nipmuc Indians: Their narratives remove Natives from the past, at the same time denying the presence and persistence of the region's nineteenth-century communities. Actual Nipmucs supposedly "vanished," they became a fictionalized, trivialized, and romanticized symbol in historical texts. Objects of material culture and human remains were gathered as if trophies emblematic of their disappearance, items appropriated as if to confirm their disappearance. It can be argued that in historical texts produced between 1800 and 1920, Nipmuc Indians take on the presence of an absence: individuals and communities who only were to the extent that they had been. Even the Nipmuc objects collected —whether by AAS, local historians or town historical societies, —when de-contextualized and all information of where, how, at what level, or with what other materials discovered, obliterated, become genericized "Indian implements."

        Yet still in all this, local historians themselves admit inconsistencies much as a Marlborough history from 1862 claimed, "there is something melancholy in the reflection that the natives of these hills and plains have all disappeared, and that we live and thrive on the ruins of the past." Similarly, a Framingham history informs that when discovering objects in towns, older residents experienced a "sense of insecurity," so items were destroyed rather than preserved. At Westborough in the last century near the site of a Native burial ground, "the land around it has been ploughed and planted many times, but one little rectangular area has been kept sacredly free from the touch of ploughshare…guarded by the traditions that it contains the dust of the red men." In the territory of the Nipmuc, as was true elsewhere in nineteenth-century Massachusetts, the landscape was imagined haunted, occasional texts confirming that some areas were even avoided for fear of Indian ghosts.

        Nonetheless a collective intellectual labor sought to relegate Natives to the past, a past completely defined and regulated by the needs of the dominant culture of the nineteenth century. The AAS members' certificate contains the motto haec olim memnisse iuvabit, or "it will be helpful to remember these things," including the vanished aboriginal people of this region. In Aeneid, I, 203, the actual line forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit is one of the poem's many utterances about heartbreak, loss and continuing labors to be endured, animated by divine promise of a great nation to be created eventually in Italy. Interestingly, the motto used by AAS omits the words "forsan et" or " and perhaps," transforming the tentative nature of Vergil's line, a reflection of the uncertainty of divine promises in the Aeneid, to a more assertive and declarative statement it will be helpful to remember these things.[Note 21]

For nineteenth-century historians of central New England, ultimately, Indians were simply "disappeared" or "doomed to disappear" much as a supposed New England "Indian maiden" illustrated in Samuel Drake's Book of Indians offered the following lament:

I will go to my tent, and lie down in despair
I will paint me with black, and will sever my hair:
I will sit on the shore where the hurricane blows,
And reveal to the God of the tempest my woes;
I will weep for a reason, on bitterness fed,
For my kindred gone to the mounds of the dead;
But they died not by hunger, or wasting decay
The steel of the white man hath swept them away

Part 2: Notes Cited in Body of the Text

INDEX

Part 2: Notes Cited in Body of the Text