White Men Invented Saint Aspinquid

HISTORY MATTERS

A memorial can have meaning even if the person it honors never existed. But now is the ideal time to abandon the fictional "praying Indian" of Agamenticus, and replace him with a real hero. If it were not for the pacifist Passaconaway, there might be no New England at all (Detailed story below)

Converted Indian Leader or White Propaganda?

A tiny battle is brewing over whether to disturb a pile of rocks atop Mt Agamenticus in York, Maine. Town officials and land conservators want to move the rocks to enhance the landscaping. A few Native American descendants object. The rocks, they say, are a monument to an ancient Indian leader named St. Aspinquid and mark a sacred place. Aspinquid, some believe, is the Christian name of Passaconaway, the heroic 17^th century Pennacook (also "Penacook") Indian leader.

COULD WE BE WRONG? Read "York Legend Could be Real"

I find myself very uncomfortably at the heart of this controversy. Look up "St. Aspinquid" on Google and the first thing you may find is my essay. In it, I state emphatically, that St. Aspinquid is a white Christian fabrication – a pious, docile "Praying Indian" possibly invented as a literary device by Victorian writers. Although he shares characteristics with the heroic and historic "sagamon" Passaconaway, and may even come from the same rich stream of Native legend, St. Aspinquid appears to be imaginary.

I rarely take such a stand. But after years of poking into the local legend of St. Aspinquid, I read a 1924 essay by the esteemed Indian folklorist Fannie Hardy Eckstorm. After an exhaustive search for the "real" St. Aspinquid, she came to the same conclusion in 1924. Although early tourist booklets say St. Aspinquid was living in the York region during the first arrival of white settlers from Europe, Eckstorm was unable to track his story back further than 1833.

Nineteenth century South Berwick writer Sarah Orne Jewett, who dearly loved local history once said of St. Aspinquid: "I never could trace this legend beyond a story in one of the county newspapers, and I have never heard any tradition among the people that bear the least likeness to it."

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Native American history by European historian

Another account goes back further, but again, St. Aspinquid appears to have evolved from white storytellers, rather than Native Americans. In 1971, Canadian novelist Thomas Raddall was searching for the origin of St. Aspinquid Day, a celebration noted in a Canadian almanac at the time of the American Revolution. Raddall had worked with Portsmouth librarian Dorothy Vaughan while writing his novel "The Governor’s Lady", set partly in Portsmouth.

Raddall corresponded with Vaughan about St. Aspinquid. She suggested, based on local lore, that Aspinquid and Passaconaway were one in the same. Her evidence, in part, was a poem called "Saint Aspenquid" published in 1884 by Rev. John Albee, an amateur historian who summered in New Castle. Albee’s poem is about a converted Indian preacher who dies on Mount Agamenticus. It is a romantic Christian fantasy – not fact – written by a white minister in a guidebook for white tourists. Albee likely based his research on an 1833 book by Samuel Gardner Drake, an antiquarian bookseller from Boston. His son, Samuel Adams Drake, became a popular New England storyteller with a special fondness for tales of Indians, devils, witches and ghosts. This material, in turn, was incorporated into Edward Moody’s popular 1914 tour guide to York County that has been widely disseminated ever since.

Curiously, the Catholic-sounding St. Aspinquid Day shows up in Raddall’s Canadian almanac about the same time as Portsmouth-area Loyalists, including Gov. and Lady Wentworth, moved permanently to Nova Scotia to avoid being arrested as traitors to the American Revolution. Could the Aspinquid legend come from the Canadian Maritimes? Was it spread back to the York region by exiled Loyalists writing home to relatives? Could the story have actually come from the last of the local Pennacooks, who were driven from this region to Canada around 1677, then made its way back home? We just don’t know.

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Dueling legends

If you type "Passaconaway" into the Google search engine, you will also find an essay of mine there, It is bound to be flawed, since he is a complex figure. No one living, including Native descendants, knows the full story. But Passaconaway remains, for me, the greatest unsung hero of this region. If anyone deserves to be memorialized atop Mount Agamenticus, this is the man.

The historic Passaconaway, drawn from Native oral tradition and white colonial records, is eminently more interesting than St. Aspinquid. The great Sagamon, was by all accounts, at least six feet tall. Local Indians believed he could swim the width of the Merrimack River under water and shoot an arrow with such force that it could penetrate a deer and land yards away. An accomplished magician, he baffled audiences by making water burn, trees dance, ice appear in summer and green twigs rise out of burned leaves in winter. Whether the real Passaconaway truly converted to Christianity is unknown. The Protestant missionary John Eliot, who reportedly "saved" the famous "heathen" leader in 1631, certainly did not canonize him.

It was political and spiritual leader Passaconaway, according to colonial records, who gathered together more than a dozen Indian tribes under the Pennacook nation. As many as 90% of local Natives died from diseases brought by the first white settlers, reducing an estimated population of 12,000 Indians to a scattered few. Passaconnaway wove the disparate and depleted tribes together through marriages with his many children, through battles, rhetoric, showmanship and charisma.

Passaconaway continually asked his people to keep peace with European settlers despite endless slurs, mistreatment, exploitation, vilification and even murder by whites. It is due largely to Passaconaway, that colonial America was allowed to take root in this region during 50 initial years of peace. It was only after his death that the well-known "Indian massacres" began here.

Passaconaway himself often stayed in isolation, fearing his own capture. The "son of the bear" was no pacifist by nature. When called to war, the Pennacooks were able fighters. Passaconaway's tent, white reporters said, was hung with many enemy scalps. Yet any claim that Passaconaway was warlike is wholly unsupported, according to ethno-historian David Stewart Smith, an expert on the Pennacook Confederation. Passaconaway was a negotiator who used diplomacy first when holding his confederation together.

"Among Native Americans Passaconaway is thought of as a holy man with quite spectacular supernatural powers," Smith says. An authentic historical figure who rose to great importance during critical times, Smith compares the mythology surrounding Passaconaway to a New England version of King Arthur.

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Two very different deaths

Much is revealed by the death of these two figures. According to Drake, St. Aspinquid was born in 1588 and died in 1682. This is roughly the era of Passaconaway, who legend says, lived 100 years or more. Aspinquid, however, is said to have walked clear across the North American continent to the Pacific Ocean converting his fellow Natives, a story likely created in the early 1800s as the nation expanded westward.

White legend says that St. Aspinquid was buried, Christ-like, in a cave on Agamenticus that is covered in stones. This may be the founding myth of the contemporary pile of rocks, gathered in the 20^th century, and now in dispute.

The modern sign that marked the spot apparently came from the St. Aspinquid Lodge, a Masonic group in York. There is also an inn in Ogunquit named for the imaginary saint.

White historians record that between 3,000 and 15,000 wild animals were sacrificed by Natives in at St. Aspinquid’s funeral – a very unlikely prospect. One popular version places the number at exactly 6,723 and lists the numbers of every type of animal killed, some of which were never seen in this region in the 17^th century.

We know nothing about the historical death of Passaconaway. Rumor says his bones lie in a display case in a French museum, the ultimate indignity. Pennacook legend says Passaconaway rode a great sled pulled by two dozen wolves to the top of the tallest peak in the White Mountains, bursting into flames as he disappeared into the sky. Perhaps this explains the origin of the animal sacrifice story adapted in York lore.

Celebrating real Native America

Nobody doubts the powerful presence of Native Americans in this region for thousands of years prior to European occupation. That Mount Agamenticus, the highest point in the seacoast region, was sacred to Native Americans seems very likely. The historical Passconaway, however, is largely associated with the region near modern Concord or along the Amoskeag River in Manchester. He appears in local histories from the North Shore to Plymouth, MA, or living in isolation and safety among the White Mountains. He was spotted, some say, along the Maine and New Hampshire coast by an early white explorer. It only makes sense that a similar figure, re-engineered for white Christian audiences, was scaled down from Native lore in the White Mountains (that includes the 4,019-foot high Mt. Passaconaway) and relocated to the 692-foot Mount Agamenticus.

The danger of the Aspinquid story, however, is that it muddies the waters; it distracts from the already difficult search for the historic Indian leader Passaconaway without adding any useful details about Native Americans. St. Aspinquid is a white-man's Indian -- savagely romantic, culturally fascinating, potentially dangerous, even sexy -- but ultimately powerless, obedient and contrite. Like Longfellow's Hiawatha, Aspinquid may simply be Passaconaway, recast for polite Christian readers who enjoyed local "history" -- as long as it portrayed Indians as noble savages.

Eckstorm was right. She warned in 1924 that continually talking about Aspinquid (as I am doing now) dishonors the past. Even Native American descendants should be wary of attaching too much significance to this imagined figure. Instead, the Seacoast needs to honor authentic Native American heroes and traditions in every way possible, much as we are beginning to do for African Americans with memorials, walking trails, research and lectures. A memorial on Mt. Agamenticus, one that captures the authentic spirit of the "People of the Dawnland" and the real Passaconaway is an idea well worth consideration. Attending to St. Aspinquid as anything more than a romantic footnote is largely time wasted. His scattered stone memorial, however, still serves as a placeholder for a tribute yet to come.