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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