University of Virginia Library

DOVER.

A dozen miles above Portsmouth lies the old
town of Dover, on the route to the White
Mountains, which hills, as it has been said, were
first explored by a party from the place, and
always previously believed (both by the Indians
and many of the settlers) to be haunted by
powerful and splendid spirits. Dover is the oldest
town in the State, and though Portsmouth
may have the first church-organ, Dover has the
honor of having possessed the first church-edifice,
strongly palisaded in the days of primitive
worship there. This town is the Cocheco
of the early settlers, and is situated upon a
stream of that name, a branch of the Piscataqua,
which by its cascades—one of more than
thirty-two feet—offered good opportunity of
mill-sites to the first fellers of the forest, allowing
them to clear their ground and manufacture
their lumber at once. Of these opportunities
later generations have not been slow to take
advantage, and the flow of water now turns the
ponderous machinery of multitudes of looms,
the yards of whose manufacture are numbered
only by millions, while an enormous backwater
exists in the reserve of the neighboring town of
Strafford, sufficient at any time to drown out a
drouth.

Of all the manufacturing towns of New England,
Dover is one of the most picturesque, and,
from some of the loftier points within its
limits, meadow, lake, river and phantom
mountain-ranges combine to make a varied
view of pastoral beauty. But there are other
views to the full as interesting for the lover of
humanity, when at night all the mill-windows
blaze out and are repeated in the river, or
when at noon the thousands of operatives pour
forth from the factory-gates, and busy Peace
seems half disguised. Still it is Peace, and
Prosperity beside her; and much it would
amaze some ghost of the dead and gone could
he, without losing his thin and impalpable
essence altogether, obtain a noonday glimpse
of the scene of his old troubles. For the place
has not been in the past a haunt of Peace—from
the time, during the last war with England,
when the ships, kept from going to sea by the
American powers, were drawn up the river to
Dover lest they should be destroyed at the
wharves of Portsmouth by the British powers,
to the time, a hundred and seventy-five years
before, when the followers of Mrs. Ann Hutchinson,
with their Antinomian heresies, stirred
up sedition among a people for whose preservation
from English tyranny on the one hand,
and Indian cruelty on the other, perfect unanimity
of heart and mind was necessary—with
all the troubles in the meantime occasioned
by Mason, who made claim, by royal grant, to
the land the settlers had purchased of the
Aborigines and all the troubles with the Aborigines
themselves.

Dover is more peculiarly the scene of the old
Indian outrages than any other New England
town can be considered, inasmuch as it was not
only there that the famous Waldron Massacre
occurred, but the place was also the stage of
most of the events that, during a dozen years,
led up to that terrific night's work, and that
constitute a bit of interesting history never
faithfully written out, and which now probably
never will be, several of the links being lost,
and remaining only to be conjectured from
their probabilities.

In 1640 there were four distinct settlements
on the Piscataqua and its confluent streams;
but each having an individual and voluntary
management, and all of them being too much
divided in opinion to establish a government
of mutual concessions among themselves, and
hope of any protection from the King, then in
sorry plight himself, being out of the question,
the four settlements agreed in one thing, and
unanimously requested permission to come
under the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts
Colony — a request very gladly granted, as,
while reserving rights of property to the
owners, it afforded that Colony better opportunity
to establish the boundaries, three miles
north of the Merrimack and any branch thereof,
which she had always claimed; and in return
for this opportunity she allowed deputies who
were not Church-members to sit in the General
Court — a privilege she had not given her own
people, but which was perhaps necessary where
but few, as in New Hampshire, were of the
Puritan persuasion. Under this arrangement,
Richard Waldron was for more than twenty
years a deputy, and several years Speaker of
the Assembly; he was also a Justice, and the
Sergeant-Major of the Militia in that part of
the country; and when the connection with

Massachusetts had been severed, he was, for a
time, the Chief Magistrate of the Province.
He had married in England; and, being a
person of some wealth, on his arrival here he
had bought large tracts of land, received large
grants for improvement, had built the first
saw-mill on the Cocheco, followed it with
others, and established a trading-post with the
Indians. He was evidently a man of remarkable
character, respected by his neighbors
for his uprightness, and everywhere for his
ability.

Whatever he did was done with a will; as a
magistrate he persecuted the Quakers to the
extent of the law, though he was known to
shed tears when passing sentence of death
upon an offender; as a landlord he fought the
claims of Mason and his minions persistently,
being thrice suspended from the Council, and
twice sentenced to fines which he paid only
after an arrest of his body; while as a soldier
he was no less zealous in behalf of the public
interest than in private capacity he had proved
himself in behalf of his own. He appears to
have exercised a certain fascination on the
Indians of the locality, being able for many
years to do with them as he would, and Cocheco
having long been spared by them when the
war-whoop resounded over almost every other
settlement in the land—a circumstance aptly
illustrating the adage that things are what you
make them, since, so long as the Indians were
treated like brothers, they fulfilled the law of
love, in rude but faithful manner; but once
trapped like wild beasts, and wild beasts they
became.

These Indians were chiefly the Pennacooks,
a tribe belonging to the region of the Merrimack
and its tributaries, who traded their
pelts at Waldron's post for ammunition, blankets,
fineries, and such articles as they were
allowed to have, and who on more than one
occasion showed their capability for gratitude
just as strongly as they subsequently showed it
for revenge. They sometimes took advantage
of Waldron's absence to procure from his partner
the liquor which he would not sell to
them; but in the main they seemed to have a
wholesome fear of him, not unmixed with
affection and trust in his honor. This tribe
had been almost annihilated by the Mohawks,
or Men-eaters, of whom they entertained a
deadly terror, and by an ensuing pestilence;
and being once accused of unfriendly intentions,
by messengers sent from the settlements,
they did not scruple to disarm suspicion by betraying
their own weakness, and averring that
they consisted of only twenty-four warriors,
with their squaws and pappooses; while their
wise old sachem, Passaconaway, whose people
believed that he could make water burn, raise
a green leaf from the ashes of a dry one, and
metamorphose himself into a living flame, had
early seen the futility of attempts upon the
English, had always advised his subjects to
peace, and had imbued his son, Wonnelancet,
so strongly with his opinions, that the latter
never varied his rule from that which his
father's had been. When the war with King
Philip of the Wampanoags broke out, a body
of soldiery was sent to the Pennacooks to ascertain
the part they intended to play; but
seeing so large a company approaching, the
Indians, who had had no idea of joining the
war, concealed themselves; upon which, in
mere wantonness, the soldiery burned their
wigwams and provisions. Instead of revenging
this injury, they only withdrew further
away, to the headwaters of the Connecticut,
and passed a quiet winter in their usual pursuits.
In the meanwhile, however, the other
tribes—Tarratines, Ossipees, and Pequawkets—
became restless, and presently commenced hostilities
upon the outlying points; and Falmouth,
Saco, Scarborough, Wells, Woolwich,
Kittery, Durham, Salmon Falls, and other spots,
were red with slaughters, and in three months
eighty men were killed between the Piscataqua
and the Kennebec. With the winter there
came a tremendous fall of snow, and that, together
with the severity of the season and the
famine that distressed them, occasioned these
Indians to sue for peace; and, coming to
Major Waldron, they expressed sorrow for
their conduct, and made repeated promises of
better behavior for the future. But, this being
done, the survivors among King Philip's men,
who, at his death, fearing total extirpation
had fled from their own forests and disseminated
themselves among the northern tribes,
inflamed them anew with memory of wrong
and outrage, endured doubtless, as well as committed,
and the hostilities began again by a demonstration
at Falmouth, and were continued,
the savages burning the homesteads as the
dwellers abandoned them, till between Casco
Bay and the Penobscot not a single English
settlement was left. At this time, the Pennacooks,
who had not been concerned in the
butcheries at all, seem to have been used by
Major Waldron to secure a peace which he
almost despaired of obtaining in any other
way; and it was through their agency, it may
be supposed, that some four hundred of the
Eastern Indians, of all tribes, with their women
and children, assembled in Cocheco, on the
6th of September, 1676, to sign a full treaty
of peace with Major Waldron, whom, the historian
Belknap says, they looked upon as a
friend and father.

At this instant a body of soldiery, that had
been dispatched to the northward, with orders
to report to Major Waldron, the various settlements
on their way being directed to reinforce
them as they might be able, arrived at Cocheco;
and, obediently to the instructions which they
brought, Major Waldron had no choice but to
surround and seize the whole four hundred of
the confiding Indians.

To Major Waldron this must have been an
exceedingly trying moment: his plighted word,
his honor, his friendship for this poor people
whom he knew so well, all his sentiments as a
man and a Christian, must have drawn him one
way, while his duty as a soldier compelled him
the other. To resign his command in the face
of the enemy and under such instructions
would doubtless have involved him in most
serious difficulties; to disobey these instructions
imposed upon him a too fearful responsibility
in case of future depredations by those
whom he should have spared against his orders;
he was a soldier, and his first duty was
obedience; and, for the rest, the young captains
of the force sent by the Governor were
on fire with eagerness, and it was with difficulty
he could restrain their martial spirit
while he took counsel with himself. In this
strait the Major unfortunately thought of a
strait that might be used, and having, it is

said, assured the Indians, who had been a little
alarmed by the arrival of the soldiery, that they
had nothing to apprehend, he proposed to them
a sham fight with powder, but without balls,
and on the signal of the discharge of their guns
—making that a pretext for considering that
the Indians had violated the understanding—
the soldiery surrounded them, by an artful military
movement, and with one or two exceptions
made prisoners of the whole body. One of
these exceptions was a young Indian who,
escaping, sought and found refuge with Mrs.
Elizabeth Heard, and in his thankfulness promised
her a recompense of future safety, and
one day redeemed the pledge.

Although the Pennacooks were immediately
separated from the other prisoners and discharged,
upon which Major Waldron had perhaps
relied for his own exculpation with them,
and only half of the whole number were sent
to Boston, where some six or eight, being convicted
of old murders, were hanged, and the
rest sold into foreign slavery, yet they, together
with all other Indians both far and near, regarded
it as a treachery upon Major Waldron's
part that absolved them from all ties and demanded
a bitter reparation. It is said that
there is no sufficient evidence of their having
been invited to treat for more definite peace,
and that they had no guarantee of protection in
their assemblage at Cocheco; but the mere fact
of their quiet presence in that number, an unusual
if not unprecedented thing with them,
Implies that the occasion was a special one,
and that they must have had Major Waldron's
verbal promise of safety at least, while, if it had
been otherwise, it would have been absurd and
impossible for them to regard the affair as so
signal and abominable a treachery of his,
worthy to be remembered with such undying
hatred and expiated in his own person with
such torture. This view of the facts is fortified,
moreover, by the subsequent action of the
Pennacooks. That they should have fancied
themselves so peculiarly aggrieved as they did,
should so long in all their wanderings have
cherished their rancor, and should at last have
executed vengeance through their own tribe,
in itself testifies sufficiently that they had been
used by Major Waldron to allure the other Indians
into the treaty under promises of protection,
and felt the course which they pursued to
be a necessary vindication of their honor as
well as a gratification of their passions.

They were not, however, in any situation to
pay their debt at once, and on being set at
liberty they withdrew to their hunting-grounds,
and as season after season rolled away had
apparently forgotten all about it. A grandson
of old Passaconaway at last ruled them — Kancamagus,
sometimes called John Hagkins. He
was a chief of different spirit from the previous
sachems, and the injuries his people had received
from the English rankled in his remembrance;
his thinned and suffering tribe, his
stolen lands, his old wrongs, were perpetual
stings; and when finally the English, dispatching
emissaries to the Mohawks, engaged their
co-operation against the Eastern Indians, nothing
but impotence restrained his wrath. It
is possible that even then, by reason of his distresses,
he might have been appeased, if the
English could ever have been brought to consider
that the Indian's nature was human
nature, and to treat him with anything but
violence when he was strong and contempt
when he was weak. Several letters which
Kancamagus sent to the Governor of New
Hampshire, and which are curiosities, are adduced
to prove his amenable disposition at this
time:

This letter was written for Kancamagus by an
Indian teacher, who signed it, together with
King Hary, Old Robin, Mr. Jorge Rodunnonukgus,
and some dozen others, by making their
respective marks. The next letter is a much
more complicated affair in style; it is dated on
the same day.

These letters winning no notice from the
contemptuous official, on the same day were
followed by another:

None of these letters having produced any
effect, the sachem abandoned the one-sided correspondence,
and on the next morning indited
another epistle to Mr. Mason, the claimant of
the Province.

There was something touching in these letters,
to any but an early settler; but apparently
they were quite disregarded, and Kancamagus
had every right to feel ill-used by
the neglect which his petition for protection
from the Mohawks met, and it is probable that
this waiting at rich men's gates only deepened
the old grudge. At the close of the summer
various affronts were put upon the settlers at
Saco, and their dogs were killed; after which
the Indians gathered their own corn and removed
their families to some unknown place.
This resembling a warlike menace, messengers
were sent, to discover its meaning, who were
informed that the Pennacooks had received
threats from the Mohawks, and had withdrawn
from the settlements that the English might
not suffer on their account—far too plausible a
reply and too magnanimous action for the
truth. But an agreement of friendship was
then made, and was signed, among the rest,
by Kancamagus and another chief named
Mesandouit.

Kancamagus had no intention of making this
anything but a brief truce, and he improved
the time to gather around himself the little
band of the sullen Pennacooks, and to strike
hands with the Pequawkets, and the remnant
of the more northerly tribes, while several
of the Strange Indians, who were among the
four hundred prisoners of that 6th of September,
escaped from their slavery, returned
to New England, found their way to the haunts
of the Pennacooks and Ossipees, and with the
recital of their sufferings assisted him in fanning
the steadily smoldering fires of hate to a
fury against their betrayer on that unforgotten
day.

Nor had Major Waldron endeavored at all to
pacify the Indians, in the meantime. His
prominent position alone would have kept his
great misdeed fresh in their remembrance,
even without his accustomed hot-headed energy
of action. No little act of his that could
embitter one savage remained untold by another;
they fancied deceit in all his dealings
now, and used to tell that in buying their peltry
he would say his own hand weighed a pound,
and would lay it on the other scale. He had
been in command, too, on a frontier expedition,
where, a conference being held with arms laid
aside. Waldron, suspecting foul play, seized
the point of a lance which he espied hid beneath
a board, and, drawing it forth, advanced
brandishing it toward the other party, who
had probably concealed it there to be used
only in case of a second act of treachery on
his own part, and the conference broke up in
a skirmish, in which several of the Indians,
including a powerful chieftain, were killed, a
canoe-full drowned, and five were captured,
together with a thousand pounds of dried beef
—and another mark was made on the great
score which at some time the Indians meant to
cross out.

Sir Edmund Andros was the Governor of
New England now, and in the spring of 1688,
fired with ambitious projects or with cupidity,
he sailed down the coast in a man-of-war, and
failing to achieve any other doughty action,
plundered, in the absence of its master, the
house of the Baron de St. Castine, a French
officer, who had married the daughter of the
great Tarratine chief, Modokawando. Castine,
burning with indignation, immediately used all
his influence, and it was great, to excite the
Indians to avenge the injury and insult; and
from unheeded complaints that their fisheries
were obstructed, their corn devoured by cattle,
their lands patented without consent, and their
trading accounts tampered with, they proceeded
to reprisal, and the old difficulties
broke out afresh. They were all at an end,
however, before the next summer. The crops
were in, the Indians went peaceably to and fro
through the settlements, their wrongs seemed
to be righted, their wounds to be healed; thirteen
years had elapsed since the capture of
the four hundred, the settlers no longer remembered
it, the Indians themselves never
made allusion to it; Waldron, now nearly
eighty years old, but full of vigor, relied
securely on his power over the savages, his
acquaintance with their character, and his
long-acknowledged superiority; the village,
with its five garrison-houses, into which the
neighboring families withdrew at night, but
kept no watch, feeling safe behind the bolted
gates of the great timber walls, reposed in an
atmosphere of tranquillity and contentment,
and no one suspected any guile.

It was while affairs were in this comfortable
condition that, on the 27th of June, 1689,
the Indians were observed rambling through
the town, on one errand and another, in
far more frequent numbers than usual or than
seemed necessary for trade. Many strange
faces were among them: and it was noticed
that their sidelong glances scrutinized the defenses
very closely. To more than one housewife
a kindly squaw muttered hints of mischief,
but so darkly as to give only a vague sense of
danger. As night drew near, one or two of
the people, a little alarmed, whispered to
Major Waldron a fear that evil was in the air.
Waldron laughed at them, told them to go and
plant their pumpkins, and he would let them
know when the Indians were going to break
out; and being warned again at a later hour
by a young man, who assured him there was
great uneasiness in the settlement, he said he
knew the Indians perfectly, and there was not
the least occasion for concern. That night
the sachem, Mesandouit, was hospitably entertained
at Waldron's table. “Brother Waldron,”
said he, “what would you do if the Strange
Indians were to come now?” and Waldron
carelessly answered that he could assemble a
hundred men by the lifting of his finger. It is
not said whether Mesandouit remained in the
garrison-house or not; but on the same evening
a couple of squaws requested a night's
lodging on the hearth, telling the Major that
a company of Indians were encamped a few
miles off, who were coming to trade their
beaver on the next day. Several of the household
objected to the society of the squaws that
night, but it being dull weather, Waldron compassionately
said, “Let the poor creatures
lodge by the fire;” and by-and-by, in total unsuspicion,
setting no watch, and thinking no
harm, the family retired to bed, while at three
of the remaining garrison-houses other squaws
had obtained entrance and shelter on a similar
pretense.

Five days before, Major Hinchman, of Chelmsford,
having heard from two friendly Indians
a strange story of hostile intentions against
Cocheco, had dispatched an urgent letter to
the Governor acquainting him with the rumor.

[ILLUSTRATION]

THE INDIANS STOLE OFF IN THE MORNING AND LEFT THE LITTLE GRANDDAUGHTER OF MAJOR WALDRON COVERED BY THE SNOW, ALONE IN THE WOODS WITH THE WILD BEASTS AND HUNGER."

[Description: 693EAF. Page 033. In-line image. A little girl lays asleep in the snow leaning up against a tree. Snow covers both the ground and some of the branches of the tree. She is barefoot.] At the same time, he wrote to Mr. Danforth of
the Council, and Mr. Danforth instantly forwarded
the letter, and begged the Governor to
lose no time, but to send to Cocheco “on purpose
rather than not at all;” yet for some
unexplained reason—whether the Governor regarded
the rumor as idle, or could do nothing
till his Council could be gathered — although
Major Hinchman's letter was dated on the 22d
of June — it was not till the 27th that any
attempt was made to apprise Waldron of his
danger.

“To Major Richard Waldron and Mr. Peter
Coffin, or either of them, at Cocheco; these
with all possible speed.”

The speed, however, came too late. When
Mr. Weare, the bearer of this agitated and ill-written
letter, on the night of its date reached
Newbury, a freshet had swollen the stream so
that it was impassable; and while he was riding
up and down the bank the squaws had been
admitted into the garrison-houses and had
stretched themselves before the fires. These
squaws had asked in an incidental way to be
told how to go out if they should wish to leave
the place after the others were asleep, and had
willingly been shown the way; and accordingly
in the dead of the night, noiselessly as the coming
of darkness itself, the bolts were withdrawn
by them, and a low whistle crept out into the
thickets and the ambush of the river-banks,
and sounding their dreadful war-whoop in reply,
the Indians leaped within the gates. The
squaws, who had faithfully informed themselves,
hurriedly signified the number of people in each
apartment, and the invaders divided in every
direction, and missed none of those they sought.
Waldron himself lodged in an inner room, and,
wakened by the noise, he leaped out of bed
crying, “What now! what now!” and, seizing
only his sword, met the Indians, and, old as he
was, with his white wrath blazing loftily over
the fierce devils, he drove them before him
from door to door till he had passed the third.
As he sprung back then for other weapons, the
Indians rushed up behind him and stunned him
with their hatchets, felled him, and dragged
him to the hall, where they seated him in an
armchair placed on the top of a table, and,
tauntingly asking him, “Who shall judge Indians
now?” left him to recover his senses
while they compelled such of the family as they
had spared to prepare them some food. Their
hunger being appeased, they returned to Major
Waldron, had his books, in which their trade
had been registered, brought forth, and as each
Indian's turn came, he stepped up, crying, “I
cross out my account!” and with his knife drew
a deep gash across the breast of the old hero.
Tradition adds that, cutting off the hand whose
weight they had so often felt, they tossed it into
the scales to discover for themselves if indeed
it weighed a pound, and were struck with consternation
on finding that it did. It is not recorded
that Waldron uttered a cry of pain or
an entreaty for their mercy. “Oh, Lord!” he
said, “oh, Lord!” and, spent with anguish and
loss of blood from the shocking mutilation to
which he was further subjected, he fell forward
on his sword, which one of the tormentors held
ready to receive him, and the vengeance that
had brooded and waited thirteen years was satisfied.

That night Mrs. Elizabeth Heard, coming up
the river with her sons, from Strawberry Bank,
was alarmed by the turmoil and the light, and
sought protection at Waldron's garrison; but,
discovering the terrible state of things there,
Mrs Heard was so prostrated that she had no
power to fly, and her children were obliged to
leave her— though it would seem as if the three
sons might, at least, have dragged her into the
shelter of the bushes, where afterward she
contrived to crawl. With the daylight an Indian
got a glimpse of her, and hastened to part
the bushes, pistol in hand, but, looking at her
an instant, turned about and left her; he had
taken only a stride away when, as if a doubt
crossed his mind, he came back, gave her another
glance, and with a yell departed. It was
probably the Indian whom she had protected
on the day of which this day was the result.
Mrs. Heard's own garrison had been saved by
the barking of a dog, which wakening William
Wentworth—the ancestor of all the Wentworths
in this country—he pushed the door to;
and, throwing himself on his back, held it with
his feet till assistance came, various bullets
piercing the oak meanwhile, but missing its
valiant and determined old defender. But in
two other garrisons the Indians had worked
their bloody will; and, having been refused entrance
into that of Mr. Coffin's son, they
brought out the father, captured at an earlier
hour, and threatened the old man's murder
before the son's eyes, upon which he also surrendered;
but while the house was being
plundered, all the Coffins escaped together.
After this, setting fire to the mills and houses,
the Indians, having killed twenty-two persons
and made prisoners of twenty-nine, retreated
by the light of the blaze, so rapidly as to be beyond
danger before any of the other settlers
were aroused to a sense of what had been
done.

But in their flight the Indians inaugurated a
system that for years continued to plague the
settlers—alleviate, though it did, the previous
horrors of Indian warfare—and, sparing the
lives of their prisoners, they sold them to the
French. Among the captives of that night was
a little granddaughter of Major Waldron's,
who, having been sent by the Indians, while at
their dark work in the garrison-house, to bid
forth those hiding in another room, had crept
into a bed and drawn the clothes about her;
she had been found again, though, and had
been forced to undertake the march with them,
half-clad and on her little bare feet. She was
only seven years old, and her trials were
bitter.

At one time her master made her stand
against a tree while he charged his gun and
took aim at her; again, an Indian girl pushed
her off a precipice into the river, and, having
clambered out, she dared not tell, when questioned,
the reason of her being so wet; once
the Indians stole off in the morning and left
her, covered by the snow, alone in the woods
with the wild beasts and hunger, and, tracing
them by their foot-prints, the poor little thing
went crying after them through the wilderness;
and at another time, building a great fire,
they told her she was to be roasted whereupon
bursting into tears she ran and threw her arms
round her master's neck, begging him to save
her, which, on the condition that she would
behave well, he promised her to do. Another
capture of more subsequent importance was
the wife of Richard Otis, the ancestress of Hon.
John Wentworth, of Illinois, and of Mr. Charles
Tuttle, late of the Cambridge Observatory.
The unhappy Mrs. Otis had seen her husband
killed as he rose in bed, a son share his father's
fate, a daughter's brains beaten out against the
stairs, and with her little daughter Judith, who
was subsequently rescued, and her baby of
three months old, she was led up through the
White Mountain Notch to Canada. This infant
of three months became a personage of great
interest in her day. Baptized by the French
priests and given the name of Christiné, and
intended by them for conventual life, on reaching
maturity she declined taking the vail,
and was married to a Frenchman by the

name of Le Beau. Upon her husband's death
an inextinguishable desire to see her native
land took control of her, and not being permitted
to carry her children with her, she left them in
the hands of friends upon the liberation of
prisoners, and at the loss of all her estate,
which was not inconsiderable, as she herself
says, journeyed back to Dover. A few years
afterward she returned to Canada, where she
appears to have been greatly valued, made an
unsuccessful effort to recover her children, and
again underwent the hardships of the perilous
pilgrimage home. She must have been a woman
of rather remarkable nature to prefer the
New England wilds with their discomforts to
the comparatively sumptuous life of the French
in Canada; but she was still young, and whether
from pure preference, or because she formed
another attachment there at an early date, she
remained in New England and married the adventurous
Captain Thomas Baker, who had
himself been a captive of the Indians some
years previously, and who had accompanied
her on the voyage home; and, abjuring the religion
of her baptism, she embraced the Protestant
faith. Her apostasy appeared greatly
to distress the priest whose especial charge she
had been, and more than a dozen years after
her return led to quite a controversial tilt between
representatives of the two forms of belief—Father
Seguenot addressing her a long
and affectionate letter, in which he made her
and her husband handsome promises if they
would go to Montreal, wrought upon her feelings
in describing the death of her daughter,
set forth quite ably the distinctive doctrines
of his Church and besought her to return
to it:

“Let us add, dear Christiné,” said he, “that
the strange land in which you are does not afford
you the Paschal Lamb, the true and
heavenly manna, the bread of angels; I mean
Jesus Christ contained really within the holy
Eucharist, which is only to be found in the
Catholic Church; so that you are in that place,
like the prodigal son, reduced to feed on improper
and insipid food, which cannot give you
life, after having fed here on the most exquisite,
most savory, and most delicious food of
Heaven—I mean the adorable body and precious
blood of Jesus Christ at the holy sacrament of the
altar.” By this letter, written in a crabbed and
almost illegible hand, but in the language of
her childhood and of countless dear associations,
Christiné seems to have been unshaken,
and Governor Burnett made a learned and
masterly reply to it, among other things declaring,
in reference to the passage quoted,
that the upholders of this interpretation of the
Eucharist did, in St. Paul's words, “crucify to
themselves the Son of God afresh and put him
to an open thame.” These letters attracted
much attention throughout the Colonies, and
rendered Christiné a person of importance during
all her life of nearly ninety years, and she
received many favors and several grants of
land, one of five hundred acres under the
guardianship of Colonel William Pepperrell.

But though the greater part of that long
term of life was passed in Dover, it was untroubled
by any foray of the Indians who once
had desolated her friends' and father's dwellings.
For, having glutted their vengeance, the
Pennacooks were content to pay the penalty
to fly from their old hunting-grounds, to abandon
their territory and their name, to find refuge
in Canada and lose themselves among
the Indians of the St. Francis, and, except
when some solitary wanderer roamed alone by
the graves of his fathers, the Pennacooks never
again were seen on the pleasant bank of the
“winding water”. And no one who surveys
the busy, bustling town of Dover to-day, would
think that less than two hundred years ago it
was the scene of such a tragedy as Waldron's
Massacre.