CHAPTER I. PRIMEVAL AGAWAM. THE long, simple, uneventful ages of the wilderness period that ended when the white man came, must ever remain too dim, shadowy and ghost-like to be subjected to the historian's rigid method. But a fine sense of justice to the unnumbered generations of Indian men and women, that preceded our own ancestors in ownership, as truly men and women as ourselves, however rude or cruel, compels us not to ignore their unrecorded history, but to construct it as best we can. In many localities they have left enduring memorials of their presence and the manner of their life. On the sandy tract sheltered by forest, bordering the way to Pine Swamp, where arrow heads innumerable have been found, and the ground is still strewed with chips struck off by their cunning hands, we can believe they made their winter home, and spent many an hour in fashioning their implements for the chase and for agriculture, their arrows and spears, axes and hoes. That level field by the Lower Falls, now included in the County House grounds, must have been occupied for generations and centuries as a compact village of bark-covered wigwams. Here and there upon Eagle Hill and Jeffrey's Neck, and all the fields skirting the river on either bank and near the beaches, the abundant shell heaps, rich in débris of early ages, attest their presence. How vivid the ancient village life becomes as we burrow into these simple cairns! Here are the very stones, blackened and chipped, and the charcoal of the camp fire. Near by, the black, grimy wigwam stood. Hither the warriors brought the bear, deer or beaver, their skill in arms had given them. Soon with their stone knives they have skinned and dismembered it roughly, and a feast is prepared, to which we are not drawn, for their cookery (1) was of the simplest, fingers and teeth were not used daintily, and cleanliness was not a virtue. Anon, we see them at their toil. The skins are smoothed and cured and reserved for robes, or divested of hair, softened and shred into strips for bow-strings and strong cords for fishing or domestic use; or cut and shaped and sewed skilfully to make them garments, squaw work, we presume, carried on most industriously, with sleek little pappooses slung up in the bushes near by, and naked children playing their rude games. Here are the very smooth stones, and bone awls and needles which they lost or left behind long years Here, too, are the fragments of the clay dishes and bowls used in their housekeeping, skilfully fashioned and ornamented. Their stone pestles, gouges, axes and hoes, tell of rude agriculture in the fields adjoining, toilsome carpentry and deadly fights with other tribes. ago. Now and then, one of these cairns tells a more thrilling tale. On the seaward side of Treadwell's Island a large and deep deposit of shells, patiently examined, has yielded abundant returns. No less than four feet of shells of the clam, oyster and mussel indicate a prolonged occupation of this site as a village. Mingled with these are bones, large enough to belong to the largest game, teeth of the beaver and the bear, vertebrae of large fish, the coals of the fires, and circles of stones. But the gruesome remains are the human bones, not laid in order as for burial, but broken and scattered and mixed with shells, and the bones of the head crushed and jumbled together in a little heap as though they had been cooked in some primitive kettle and thrown out in a mass-traces of a horrid feast on human flesh, we think though no other suggestion of such appetite has before been discovered. It is the body of some dreaded foe, perhaps, slain at last and now ignominiously consumed; or can it be, that some living man was tortured here, while the wilderness round rang with the shouts of the torturers, though he scorned to give one dying groan before his bones were torn asunder? Some rods back from the highway at the Village, on the farm of John W. Nourse, a few years ago, the ploughshare disclosed a cache of finely fashioned stone spearheads, some forty or more, the buried treasure, perchance, of an Indian brave, or some armorer of the centuries past. |