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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