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Penobscot Indians

Charles Shay, An Indian War Hero on Omaha Beach

Charles Shay, a 19-year-old Penobscot, landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day. Under heavy German fire, he bandaged the wounded and pulled drowning men from the blood-red tide.

The way Charles Shay looked at it, liberating Normandy continued a traditional alliance between the Penobscot Indians and the French people. His ancestor, Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie de Saint-Castin, served as a French military officer in Acadia, now Maine, during the late 17^th century. The town of Castine, Maine, is named after him. Castine married the daughter of another of Charles Shay’s ancestors, the chief Madockawando, and he fought with the Penobscot against the Dutch and the English.

There is now a plaque commemorating Indian soldiers in a little park on a bluff overlooking Omaha Beach. On June 5, 2015, the park got a new name: The Charles Shay Indian Memorial.

Charles Shay shakes hands with fellow D-Day veteran George Kline at the dedication ceremony for the Charles Shay Memorial in Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, France, June 5, 2017

Charles Shay

When the U.S. Army drafted Charles Shay, history repeated itself. His ancestor, Joseph Orono, helped the Continental Army during the American Revolution.

Shay was trained as a medic and shipped out with the 16th Infantry Regiment, part of the Big Red One. The Big Red One spearheaded the assault on Normandy, and suffered about 2,000 casualties on D-Day, mostly in the first hour.

Shay landed under heavy fire, carrying two satchels of medical supplies. He saw wounded men drowning in the sea, and he pulled them onto the sand. He bandaged the wounded and administered morphine, cradling the dying in his arms.

Assault troops on Utah Beach

Seven medics were killed and 24 wounded. Charles Shay escaped unhurt.

He then tended to wounded soldiers at the Battle of Aachen, the Battle of Hurtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge. Germans captured him after he crossed the Rhine on the bridge at Remagen. A month later, American troops liberated the POW camp.

Austria

Shay went home briefly, but couldn’t find work. He re-enlisted and returned to Europe as a medic for a military police battalion in Vienna. He met and married an Austrian woman, Lilli Bollarth.

Then the Korean War broke out, and Charles Shay went into battle once again as a combat medic. When the war ended, he returned to Vienna and worked for the United Nation’s Atomic Energy Commission. He and Lilli returned to the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation in Maine during the summers. While in Maine, he’d visit the University of Maine at Orono to talk German with the German language students.

His aunt, Lucy Nicolar, and her husband Bruce Poolaw had built a two-story wooden teepee from which they sold Indian novelties and Lucy’s baskets. When she died, Charles Shay inherited the teepee, so he remade it as a small family museum.

Penobscot Indian reservation, ca. 1940s

His grandfather, Joseph Nicolar, had written a book called, The Life and Traditions of the Red Man, in 1893. Shay had it republished, and he wrote his own autobiography. But he also worked on winning recognition for Indian warriors, persuading the state of Maine to recognize June 21 as Native American Veterans Day.

Awards

Charles Shay received the Bronze Star and the Silver Star from the United States, but the French awarded him an honor that perhaps surpassed those. In 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy, President of the French Republic, inducted him into the Legion of Honour as a Chevalier.

Charles Shay on Omaha Beach in 2018.

In 2015, Charles Shay presided at a ceremony on a bluff overlooking Omaha Beach. Dignitaries unveiled a granite statue of a turtle and a plaque dedicating the park to the 175 Indians who landed on the beach that day. The park got a new name that day: the Charles Shay Indian Memorial.

“There is now a plaque commemorating Indian soldiers who left Turtle Island to help liberate our ancient French allies,” he said. “We will not forget their sacrifices.”

Charles Shay Indian Memorial on Omaha Beach

Shay, 98 in 2022, has a website. You can visit it here. His book, Project Omaha Beach: The Life and Military Service of a Penobscot Indian Elder, is available from Bookshop.

This story was updated in 2022. Image of Shay in 2018 By Romain Bréget – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95721834. Image of Charles Shay Indian Memorial By Romain Bréget – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95721835.

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Joseph Orono, The Blue Eyed Indian Who Helped the Revolutionary Cause

The Penobscot sachem Joseph Orono died in 1801, too early to know about his consolation prize for losing his people’s land to white settlers.

He lived plenty long, though. He was said to have been born in 1688, which made him 113 when he died in 1801. If that’s true, Joseph Orono lived through every one of the French and Indian Wars as well as the American Revolution, in which he participated

A Penobscot chief

Five years after his death, Orono, Maine named itself after him. He probably would have preferred the land along the Penobscot River promised him, and then taken.

Joseph Orono

Historical accounts agree that Joseph Orono had reddish hair, blue eyes and a pale complexion. He spoke fluent French, English and Penobscot.

Accounts disagree about his lineage. Some say he had some relation to Baron de Castine, a French nobleman who married an Indian. (Castine also had a town named after him in Maine.) Perhaps Orono was Castine’s son-in-law, or grandson.

Joseph Orono himself said his father was French, and his mother half French, half Indian. A devout Catholic, he believed the Indians had suffered from war, and advocated peace. White people viewed him favorably, and described him as able, friendly and sagacious.

Revolution

In 1775, Joseph Orono and three other Penobscot chiefs went to air their grievances to the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, as Maine then belonged to that colony. The Indian delegation stopped in Falmouth, now Portland, where the people gave them money, horses and a carriage to help them on their journey.

Two days after the Battle of Bunker Hill, they arrived in Watertown, Mass., where the Provincial Congress then met. It included Sam Adams, John Hancock and Joseph Warren.

On June 21, 1775, Joseph Orono addressed the Provincial Congress on behalf of the whole Penobscot tribe. As he spoke, the men inside could hear the groans of the soldiers dying of their battle wounds.

Orono said that if the Congress took care of his people’s grievances, the Penobscots would aid the rebels with their whole force. Those grievances consisted chiefly of trespasses by the whites upon their timber lands and cheating them in trade.

The committee responded warmly, and said the Indians’ complaints would receive their attention as soon as they could take a breath from the Revolution. Eventually, Massachusetts signed a treaty giving six miles of land on each side of the Penobscot river to the Indians.

Frigates

In 1779, the British built a fort in what is now Castine. Joseph Orono communicated intelligence about their activities to the patriots. Massachusetts then sent the Penobscot Expedition to Castine, and the Penobscot Indians fought with them. Whether Joseph Orono actually fought is unclear; he would have been 91.

The British routed the Americans in the worst naval disaster until Pearl Harbor. But Joseph Orono continued to help the cause, communicating intelligence to patriots in Machias and Halifax.

In 1780, Joseph Orono earned his Indian nickname, K’tolaqu. It means ‘frigate.’

Orono went to Newport, R.I., where French forces had landed before marching to Yorktown. His mission: to request a Catholic priest from the French consul. But he was so amazed by the French frigates in the harbor that he couldn’t stop talking about them afterword.

Island Life

Joseph Orono had often stayed and hunted with a friend on Deer Isle, a white settler named Seth Webb. After he broke with other Penobscots in 1783, he moved a small group of his people to White Island, off Deer Isle.

Penobscot wigwams

They established a little village with a Franciscan missionary, a Catholic chapel and wigwams. But they couldn’t live in peace there, either. In 1786, Joseph Orono complained to Massachusetts Commissioner Benjamin Lincoln, once a member of the Provincial Congress. People were chopping down his trees and burning the wigwams, he said.

A decade later, Massachusetts reneged on its deal to deed the land along the Penobscot River to Orono’s people. All they had left was the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation.

Penobscot Indian reservation, ca. 1940s

Five years after Joseph Orono died, white settlers near the Indian reservation incorporated, naming the town Orono. Today, the University of Maine has its main campus there. An island in Penobscot Bay also bears his name.

In May 2018, the University of Maine and the Penobscot Nation were scheduled to signed an agreement ‘formalizing their collaborations in the past decade to help manage the tribe’s cultural heritage.’

With thanks to Canoe Indians of Down East Maine, by Bill Haviland. This story about the Penobscot chief Joseph Orono was updated in 2022.

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Exactly How New England’s Indian Population Was Decimated

Even before European colonists thinned the Indian population in New England, war and disease had already begun their dirty work.

A team of anthropologists, economists and paleopathologists studied the health of the Indian population in the Western Hemisphere over 7,000 years. Native American health had declined even before Columbus came to the New World, they concluded in a book published in August 2017, The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere.

The researchers found Indians’ health got worse because they came to depend on corn. They also began to live in denser communities, allowing infectious disease to spread quickly.

Still, the Indian population didn’t begin its demise until the Europeans arrived in the 16^th century.

Indians lament death by disease.

About 60,000 Indians lived in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut at the beginning of the 17^th century, according to Sherburne Cook. Maine had a robust population of Abenaki tribes. According to some estimates, Maine had more than 20,000 Penobscot, Micmac and Passamaquoddy Indians.

A century later, New England’s Indian population began to disappear. Some tribes were already extinct.

This is how the Europeans nearly wiped out the Indian population.

Indian Population Before the Pilgrims

The seeds of the Indians’ destruction were planted more than a century before the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock.

In what is now Canada and Maine, contact with Europeans began even before English and French explorers showed up at the turn of the 16^th century. In 1504, a French vessel was documented fishing the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. Portuguese fishermen arrived two years later.

Early map of the Grand Banks.

By 1519, a hundred European ships made round trips to the Grand Banks. The first tourist cruise to North America sailed from London in 1536, but food ran short and many died.

The European visitors brought with them diseases to which the Indians had no immunity, including smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, cholera and bubonic plague.

Maine’s Passamaquoddy Indians, among the first to make contact with Europeans, were devastated by a typhus epidemic in 1586. Other diseases brought the Passamaquoddy population to 4,000 from 20,000.

The 1616 Plague

In 1616, a terrible plague swept the Massachusetts coast, wreaking the most devastation north of Boston. It’s not clear what it was – perhaps smallpox, perhaps yellow fever, perhaps bubonic plague.

Whatever it was, it was terrifying. So much of the Indian population died there weren’t enough left to bury the dead. English colonist Thomas Morton described the heaps of dead Indians ‘a new found Golgotha.’

As many as 90 percent of the 4,500 Indians of the Massachusetts tribe perished. The disease cleared the Boston Harbor islands of inhabitants.

John Smith

English explorer John Smith had visited New England before the plague in 1614. He returned eight years later, and what he saw shocked him.

“God had laid this country open for us,” he wrote. “Where I had seen 100 or 200 people, there is scarce ten to be found.”

Disease persisted among the Massachusetts from 1620 to 1630. When smallpox struck in 1633, it left only about 750 and obliterated entire villages. The colonists herded the Massachusetts who survived into Christian villages of ‘praying Indians.’

Puritan minister Increase Mather wrote ‘about this time [1631] the Indians began to be quarrelsome touching the Bounds of the Land which they had sold to the English, but God ended the Controversy by sending the Smallpox amongst the Indians of Saugust, who were before that time exceeding numerous.’

Along the Merrimack River in New Hampshire, Mohawk raids had already weakened the Pennacook Indians when the 1616 plague arrived. It killed three out of four Pennacooks.

That same plague almost completely obliterated two other Pennacook tribes in Massachusetts, the Agawam in Ipswich and the Naumkeag in Salem.

Wampanoags

The plague of 1616-1618 cleared nearly all the Wampanoag along the coast from Plymouth to Boston, but was far less severe south of Plymouth.

King Philip

A year after the Pilgrims arrived, their Indian visitor Samoset told them, ‘about foure yeares agoe, all the Inhabitants dyed of an extraordinary plague, and there is neither man, woman, nor childe remaining, as indeed we haue found none, so as there is none to hinder our possession, or to lay claime unto it.’

“Thousands of them died,” wrote William Bradford, Plymouth’s governor. “They not being able to bury one another, their skulls and bones were found in many places lying still above the ground.”

Enough Wampanoag Indians survived to resist the colonists’ land grab during King Philip’s War in 1675.

But disease persisted among the tribe, weakening it further. By the war’s outbreak, the Wampanoag Indian population fell to 2,500 from as many as 5,500. Those who weren’t killed in the war were sold into slavery, moved to praying towns or migrated west. King Philip’s War virtually obliterated the Wampanoag.

Narragansett

Roger Williams with Narragansett Indians

The Narragansett were the biggest tribe in New England, with 7,800 members including 300 on Block Island. Protected by Narragansett Bay, they didn’t come into contact with the white invaders as early or as frequently as northern tribes. The great plague of 1616 didn’t affect them.

Because the Narragansetts were so much larger, Wampanoag leader Massasoit made peace with the Plymouth colonists to ally them against his Narragansett rivals.

The Narragansetts’ first epidemic was smallpox in 1633, which killed 700 of them. Chronic ailments further reduced their numbers to 5,000 by the outbreak of King Philip’s War. Wrote Roger Williams in 1643,

They commonly abound with children, and increase mightily; except the plague fall amongst them, or other lesser sicknesses, and then having no means of recovery, they perish wonderfully.

Infectious disease terrified the Narragansetts. “I have often seene a poore House left alone in the wild Woods, all being fled, the living not being able to bury the dead, so terrible is the apprehension of an infectious disease, that not only persons, but Houses and the whole Towne take flight,” wrote Williams.

The Narragansetts tried to stay out of King Philip’s War, but after English colonists massacred as many as 1,100 of them at the Great Swamp Fight in 1675, they had no choice but to fight. After King Philip’s War fewer than 500 Narragansetts remained. They were allowed to settle with the Eastern Niantic on a reservation at Charlestown, R.I., where they frequently intermarried with African-Americans and Indians from other tribes.

The Nauset

The Nauset, a tribe of about 8,000 on Cape Cod and the islands, were also apparently unaffected by the plague of 1616. But other diseases gradually reduced their numbers. The 2,100 Nausets on Cape Cod were down to 1,250 by 1700, and all had been converted to Christianity. By 1660, they had been driven into the Mashpee Reservation; the population of 2,100 Nausets fell to 1,250 by 1700.

Disease had also reduced the Indian population of 6,000 on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket by more than half, to 2,330.

Connecticut’s Indian Population

Before the English arrived, an Algonkian tribe that became the Pequots moved into Connecticut from the Connecticut River to the Rhode Island border, displacing the people who lived there. There were about 3,000 of them, and the population remained stable with little European contact and in the absence of war and severe epidemic disease.

War devastated the Pequot Indian population.

Then English colonists and Mohegan warriors attacked them in the Pequot War of 1637. Hundreds were killed or captured and hundreds more fled to southwestern Connecticut and Long Island. Only 200 were left by war’s end, and they were absorbed into the Mohegan tribe.

Shortly after the Pequot War in 1643, there were about 2,200 Pequot-Mohegans. Smallpox, flu, diphtheria and measles reduced their numbers to 750 by 1705. By then, the colonists had already herded them into Connecticut reservations at Ledyard and Groton.

One Connecticut tribe tried to protect itself by building a fort. A thousand Mattabesic Indians sealed their fate when they enclosed themselves in a palisade fort in Hartford County. By 1634, smallpox and plague killed all but 50 of them with terrifying swiftness.

Of the 3,000 other Connecticut Indians in the vicinity – Podunk, Mattabesic, Hammonasset and Wongunk – most who survived sold their land and moved away.

Reservations

During the 17^th century, life was short for the English colonists as well as the Indian population. By 1700, life expectancy in New England rose to 45-50 years, 15 years higher than in old England.

The Europeans had large families, and the colonist population grew 3 percent a year, doubling every 23 years. The land-hungry colonists pushed the remaining Indian population into warfare, and then into reservations and to parts west.

Before the Europeans arrived, about 10,000 Penobscot Indians lived in what is now Maine. The population collapsed from infectious diseases and fighting between the Iroquois over the fur trade. The Penobscot sided with the French during four Anglo-French wars, which the French ultimately lost.

The Indian Population Makes a Comeback

Both the Penobscot and the Passamaquoddy ceded their land to Massachusetts (which later became Maine). They had only a reservation on Indian Island in Old Town, Maine. By 1800, the Penobscot Indian population fell to 500.

Many Indians converted to Christianity and moved to one of 14 praying towns. Indians moved to reservations in Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard and Fall River in Massachusetts.

During the 20^th century, New England’s Indian population made a comeback. But that is a story for another day.

With thanks to The Indian Population of New England in the Seventeenth Century by S.F. Cook and to The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere, edited by Richard H. Steckel, Jerome C. Rose. This story about New England’s Indian population was updated in 2022.

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Six Historic Fourth of July Celebrations

The Fourth of July has been celebrated with feasting, fireworks and festivity since Boston shot off cannons on the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

The document wasn’t actually signed on the Fourth of July, as some of the signers weren’t even in Philadelphia that day. And John Adams thought the Second of July would be the day to remember, as that was when the Continental Congress voted for independence. The Fourth of July was the day the Congress adopted the document.

No matter. The first Fourth of July turned out to be cause for celebration year after year. Here are six of the oldest – and most historic – Fourth of July celebrations. If you know of another worth mentioning, please include it in the comments section below.

New Haven, Conn.

Yale College (left) and the State House.

In 1788, New Haven held a large and lavish Fourth of July celebration featuring a parade of working men grouped by their occupation. Cordwainers in a wagon made shoes as the parade wended its way from the long wharf to the Brick Meeting House. Blacksmiths made a hoe during the parade with anvil, hammer and bellows, while goldsmiths displayed a silver urn with 10 stars – one for each state that had adopted the Constitution.

According to a contemporary account, there were also sowers, reapers with sickles, thrashers with flails, butchers, barbers, distillers, bakers, tanners, curriers, leather dressers, stonecutters with chisels, cabinet makers, coppersmiths and braziers, watch and clock makers, coopers, painters, hatters with bows, weavers, tailors, boat builders, rope-makers wearing hempen girdles, shipwrights, a whaleboat with her crew, papermakers, printers, merchants, schoolmasters followed by their scholars, physicians, Yale College tutors, clergy, sheriffs, the common council, mayor, alderman, recorder, orator and high sheriff.

Roger Sherman, who signed the Declaration of Independence, attended the festivities. He heard Josiah Meigs, publisher of New Haven Gazette and Connecticut Magazine, read the Declaration of Independence and listened to a performance of a hymn composed by Barna Bidwell, a tutor at Yale College.

A feast was held at the Statehouse with at least one toast – to a model of the frigate USS Constitution. Patriotic toasts were probably drunk for George Washington and the veterans of the Revolution as well. After dinner came a ball. Outside, no doubt, there was plenty of noise. As a Yale student named Thomas Robbins wrote in his diary on July 4, 1796:

The students fired guns, etc., then came here and were very noisy, drinking toasts, etc.

New Haven over the years became the best place in the region to see fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Thomaston, Maine

Montpelier (Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views, New York Public Library).

Revolutionary War General Henry Knox led a Fourth of July celebration in 1795 that wasn’t the first in Maine, but it was certainly the grandest.

After the American Revolution, Knox relocated to Thomaston, Maine (then Massachusetts) where he built an estate and mansion, Montpelier.

Knox owned the better part of four counties in Maine, which he came by via his wife’s family. In 1795, with Montpelier finished, Knox came to Thomaston from Philadelphia. His mission was to develop the state. By 1795 he was busily building sawmills, kilns, quarries and brickyards to attract employees and tenants for his properties.

To promote the Maine endeavor, Knox opened Montpelier to any and all guests on the Fourth of July in 1795. The feast was legendary for its sheer size. Chicken, geese and an entire ox fed the crowds. More than 100 beds were made up for overnight guests. A delegation of Penobscot Indians, with whom Knox wanted peaceful relations, came and stayed more than a week. They finally left at Knox ‘s urging. He was annoyed by the length of their visit.

Knox would live barely 10 years after the celebration, and his plans for Maine met with limited success. Montpelier was torn down to make way for a railroad when the house fell into disrepair and no buyers could be found for it. Today no one will produce a feast for you, but you can visit a 1929 replica of Montpelier in Thomaston that operates as a museum.

Boston

The Old State House in Boston. The Declaration of Independence was read from the balcony.

Boston celebrated the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with joyful delirium.

The festivities began at dawn with a grand salute fired from cannon at Fort Independence and ships in the harbor. Gov. John Hancock proposed 13 toasts from the balcony of the Old State House, while cannons fired and Boston’s militia companies paraded, drilled and fired off their guns.

That day Boston established the tradition of Fourth of July oratory. It stemmed from the Boston Massacre speech delivered annually for 13 years commemorating that sad event. Rev. Dr. William Gordon of Roxbury preached a patriotic sermon to the General Court.

At night, a Col. Crafts illuminated the Boston Common. He ‘threw several shells, and exhibited a number of fireworks.’

Boston was the first municipality to officially designate the Fourth of July as a holiday, in 1783. And in 1929, Arthur Fiedler first took the podium to conduct the Boston Pops Orchestra’s performance of the 1812 Overture on the Esplanade. To this day, Boston celebrates with cannon, fireworks and church bells in one of the best attended Fourth of July celebrations in the country.

Portsmouth, N.H.

The Continental frigate Bonhomme Richard 9commanded by John Paul Jones) battling the HMS Serapis.

There is a legend about the first Fourth of July celebration in Portsmouth, N.H., that probably isn’t true.

The story has it that five young ladies of Portsmouth — Mary Langdon, Augusta Pierce, Caroline Chandler, Dorothy Hall and Helen Seavey — made an American flag from their best silk gowns, according to specification by John Paul Jones.

Jones supposedly sailed the USS Ranger from Boston to Portsmouth, where the Ranger had been built at what is now the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. The ladies presented him the flag. He then hoisted it on the Ranger. The record suggests, however, that John Paul Jones wasn’t in Portsmouth that day.

What did happen was that a Captain Thompson invited people to lunch on board a Continental frigate. Salutes were probably fired, church bells probably rung, and a toast to George Washington was probably drunk. In 1805, for example, Portsmouth gave Washington the following toast to ‘The memory of George Washington, Greater than Caesar–he would wear no crown, but that of the people’s love. ‘

Bristol, R.I.

The Bristol, R.I., parade.

Fourth of July observances have waxed and waned over the centuries, but not in Bristol, R.I. The town proudly claims to be the birthplace of the Fourth of July celebration.

The Bristol Fourth of July Celebration started in 1785 by the Rev. Henry Wight, newly hired by the First Congregational Church.

Wight had served as a soldier in the American Revolution, and he determined that Bristol should observe Patriotic Exercises on the Fourth of July. He led the ceremonies in 1785 with a speech calling for reflection on the veterans who won the war and celebration of the new nation’s freedoms.

For 40 years, Wight would continue leading these ceremonies. The Fourth of July has been celebrated every year in Bristol since.

Sometime in the early 1800s the now-2.5-mile Military, Civic and Firemen’s Parade began. In 1975, Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci started fighting with parade organizers. Under the rules, he wasn’t entitled to walk in the parade, but he did anyway.

Parade organizers sent him a letter in 1979 telling him not to show up in 1980, and the Bristol police chief vowed to arrest anyone who made a disturbance. Cianci showed up in a helicopter. So many parade-goers cheered him the police had to let him march.

In 1984, Cianci pleaded “no contest” to a charge of assault and skipped the parade. A clown dressed in a prison uniform, carrying a ball and chain, marched in his place. In 1989 he marched ahead of the marshal, prompting the parade chairman to say Cianci was rude and shouldn’t be invited back. In 1997 and 1998, he brought along an entourage of law enforcement officers squirting the crowd with water rifles, which got him dis-invited in 1999. He returned in 2009 after serving jail time for racketeering.

Today Bristol’s Fourth of July celebration officially starts on June 14th, Flag Day, and ends with the parade on July 4th. In between are concerts, fireworks, a drum corps show, a firefighters muster and a Fourth of July ball.

Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci marched in the Bristol, R.I., Fourth of July parade in 2009 after his conviction.

Bristol, Vt.

Coincidentally, the parade committee in Bristol, Vt., boasts that the Bristol Vermont Fourth of July parade is the oldest continuous parade in Vermont.

The parade committee is silent on when the parade first started, simply saying it has been going on for ‘decades.’ Bristol did host a parade for the nation’s Bicentennial in 1976. Today Bristol’s fireworks are said to rival Burlington’s, and the parade runs for an hour and a half.

In 1980, the Bristol parade featured the first annual Outhouse Race. Contestants participate in teams, with two runners and one rider who sits inside the outhouse frame. The outhouse frame must have a door for privacy. The race runs from St. Ambrose Catholic Church to the finish line at the traffic light, and there are usually three or four outhouses in each of the four heats.

For a youtube video of the outhouse race, click here.

Images: Old State House, Boston, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=221678; Bristol, R.I., parade: By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49912345; Buddy Cianci By Notyourbroom – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7211464; Bristol, RI, street scene By TwoSheds (talk) (Uploads) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12287639

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Jean-Louis Cheverus, the Catholic Priest Even the Puritans Liked

Boston, today that most Catholic of American cities, had no Catholic church within 300 miles when Father Jean-Louis Lefebvre Cheverus arrived in 1796.

Jean-Louis Lefebvre Cheverus

The 600 or so Catholics living in Massachusetts were mostly poor Irish and a few French. They were viewed as ‘an impure assemblage of idolators’ and priests were widely regarded as ‘vile imposters.’ Catholic teachings were ‘a hideous collection of impieties, absurdities and errors.’

Cheverus softened some of the anti-Catholicism that had possessed puritanical Massachusetts since the colony’s founding. The Puritans had fought Catholic influence in England for decades, and early colonists fought the Catholic French throughout the 16^th and 17^th centuries.

Cheverus spent 27 years in New England, during which time he impressed people with his learning, with his tact, with his sermons, with his simplicity and with his kindness toward the sick and the poor.

Cheverus left quite a mark on New England: in Cheverus High School in Portland, Maine; in Cheverus Hall, a dorm at Boston College, Cheverus Centennial School, in Malden, Mass., in the Archdiocese of Boston Cheverus Awards and in a book that rests on the shelves of the Boston Athenaeum, A memorial to Bishop Cheverus, with a catalogue of the books given by him to the Boston Athenaeum, by Walter Muir Whitehill.

Cheverus Arrives in New England

The priests who preceded Cheverus gave Puritan Boston good reason to look down on Catholics.

The first resident Catholic priest Boston was a disreputable French naval chaplain, l’abbe de la Poterie, who deserted when the French fleet left Boston Harbor at the end of the American Revolution. De la Poterie celebrated the first Catholic Mass in Boston in 1788. But he had been suspended from the priesthood in France, ran up debt in Boston and was relieved of his duties by Father John Carroll, who had begun to organize the Catholic church in America from Maryland.

The second resident Catholic priest in Boston was Father Rousselet, who had also been suspended from the priesthood in France. During Christmas Eve Mass in 1789, de la Poterie insisted on participating in the service, which sparked fisticuffs among the parishioners. The brawlers broke all the church’s furniture.

Then John Thayer arrived on his own accord. He was a wealthy Congregationalist minister who converted to Catholicism and was ordained a priest. He tried to take over from Rousselet. The Irish supported Thayer, the French supported Rousselet. As a result, only a few Catholics actually attended Sunday Mass.

Finally, the highly respected Father Francis Anthony Matignon arrived in Boston in 1792 and began to put things right. He wrote to his friend Father Cheverus and asked him to join him as a Catholic missionary.

Cheverus was 28 when he arrived in 1796. For four years he had been living in England, a refugee from the French Revolution.

Groaning in Spirit

Shortly after arriving in Boston, he began to travel New England to search out Catholics. In Massachusetts he went to Newburyport, Plymouth and Salem. In New Hampshire he traveled to Portsmouth, Claremont and Bedford.

He traveled by canoe and horseback to Maine, where he ‘groaned in spirit’ at the condition of the Catholics, according to his biographer, Andre Jean Marie Hamon. Cheverus dedicated the first Catholic church in Newcastle, and ministered to the Penobscot Indians in Old Town, who had been converted to Christianity but hadn’t seen a Catholic priest in 50 years. During his time in New England, Cheverus visited the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy Indians for three months every year.

Cheverus began to win over the Catholic haters. His delivered short, sweet and therefore popular sermons. He took care of the sick and buried the dead when yellow fever broke out in Boston.

Most Virtuous

Cheverus lived simply and read widely in English classic literature. He advised John Adams’ nephew, William Smith Shaw, on the founding of the Boston Athenaeum and donated some of his books to it.

After he’d been in Boston a year a Protestant came to him. “I did not believe that a minister of your religion could be a good man,” he said. “I declare to you, that I esteem and venerate you, as the most virtuous man that I have ever known.”

Protestant women of high social standing shared their troubles with him. He handled the financial affairs of widows, orphans, servants, the infirm and people naive about business. Cheverus invested their money judiciously and then brought them the interest.

John Adams

During a dinner in Boston honoring President John Adams, Cheverus sat next to him. “What most astonishes me, on this occasion, is, to see myself here, and to see you here,” Adams said.

When Cheverus started raising money for a church, John Adams made the first donation. In the fall of 1803, Baltimore Bishop John Carroll came to the dedication of Holy Cross, attended by both Catholics and Protestants.

Carroll named Cheverus the first Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Boston, and he was ordained on Nov. 1, 1810. There were three Catholic churches with priests in New England then: in Boston, in Damariscotta Mills, Maine, and in Pleasant Point, Maine.

Catholics revered him so much they named their children John after him. Even Protestants invited him to speak in their churches. In 1809, he went to New York City to dedicate St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Anti-Catholic Prejudice

Cheverus wasn’t beloved everywhere, nor were Catholics even liked. When he traveled to Northampton, Mass., he had a hard time finding a place to stay because of prejudice against Catholics.

Holy Cross Cathedral, designed by Charles Bulfinch and torn down in 1862.

He had gone to Northampton because two young Irish Catholic men were convicted of murder and condemned to death. They wrote to Cheverus, protesting their innocence and asked him to come give the funeral service for them. He ministered to them, and then stood in front of the mob that came to watch them hanged. He then scolded the horde.

Father Thayer, the Yankee priest, died in Ireland in 1810. He left his estate to Father Matignon, who told Cheverus to establish an Ursuline convent with the money. Cheverus brought 12 Ursuline nuns to Boston to educate Boston’s Catholic girls. In 1834, a mob of Know Nothings burned the convent to the ground.

Cheverus Returns to France

When John Carroll died in 1815, his successor asked Cheverus to come to Baltimore to serve as an auxiliary. He refused.

Then Father Matignon died three years later. By then Cheverus’ health was failing, and in 1823 Louis XVIII of France insisted he return to his native country. Though his parishioners protested, Cheverus decided to go back to France. He was named cardinal in 1836 but died shortly thereafter, aged 68.

William Ellery Channing, the foremost Unitarian minister of his age, held up Cheverus as an argument against anti-Catholicism.:

Who among our religious teachers would solicit a comparison between himself and the devoted Cheverus? . . . How can we shut our hearts against this proof of the Catholic religion to form good and great men? . . . It is time that greater justice were done to this ancient and widespread community.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Louis Sockalexis, The Indian Athlete With the Tragic Flaw

Louis Sockalexis broke a different color barrier in baseball 50 years before Jackie Robinson started for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

He was a red man. And unlike Jackie Robinson, he couldn’t handle the taunts and insults, the war whoops in the stands and the racial jeers.

Sockalexis had a sensational start to his Major League Baseball playing career, dubbed a ‘wonder’ and ‘the most talked about’ young player on his team.

But he would only play 97 games in the Major Leagues, spend time in jail and die young.

After his playing days ended, he was arrested for vagrancy in Holyoke, Mass. Unshaven, with toes protruding from his shoes, he explained his downfall:

They liked me on the baseball field, and I liked firewater.

Louis Sockalexis

On Oct. 24, 1871, Louis Francis Sockalexis was born a member of the Penobscot tribe in Old Town, Maine, where both money and jobs were scarce. He was the son of Francis Sockalexis, a logger who became governor, or chief, of the Penobscot tribe, and Frances Sockbeson Sockalexis. He grew to six feet tall and excelled at sports.

Sockalexis at Holy Cross

In the summer of 1894, Louis Sockalexis played outfield for a baseball team sponsored by the Poland Spring Resort. One of his teammates was Mike ‘Doc’ Powers, a summer visitor to Maine and captain of the baseball team at the College of the Holy Cross. He persuaded Louis, a Catholic, to enroll in the Jesuit school.

He tried out for Holy Cross’s baseball coach, Jesse Burkett, a future Hall of Famer who played for the Cleveland Spiders. Burkett offered the 24-year-old Sockalexis a full scholarship. He rewarded Burkett with outstanding play for two seasons, batting over .400. He once stole six bases in a game against Brown and is credited with setting a world’s record for the longest baseball throw – 138 yards.

Burkett moved to Notre Dame, and Louis Sockalexis followed him. In the spring of 1897, Burkett helped him get a contract with the Cleveland Spiders.

He made a splash.

Deerfoot of the Diamond

“I unhesitatingly pronounce him a wonder,” former New York Giants Manager John Ward told the Sporting Life.

His Indian heritage and outstanding play was catnip for sportswriters. They called him the ‘Deerfoot of the Diamond’ and ‘Chief of Sockem.’

When he hit a game-winning home run for the Spiders’ first victory of the season, a newspaper headline read, ‘Indians Hang One Little Scalp on Their Belts.’

The team went on a tear, led by Sockalexis’ hitting heroics. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported ‘a visibly larger percentage of women than usual’ came to the ballpark when he played. Fans also came to jeer at him with war whoops and war dances.

He cheerfully shrugged off their taunts — he claimed.

Wild Bird

Off the field, Sockalexis liked to drink and carouse at night. A teammate called him a ‘wild bird.’ In early July, a foot injury hampered his play. How he got it is unclear. According to some accounts, he jumped or fell from the second-story window of a brothel. According to others, he injured his foot while running the base paths.

His drinking caught up with him, his play clearly suffered and his boosters in the sporting press turned on him. Suddenly Louis Sockalexis fit all the stereotypes of the drunken Indian. When he made a fielding error, he was called ‘a wooden Indian.’ In late July, the Plain Dealer reported, management couldn’t control him anymore.

Sockalexis’ demeanor changed; he grew angry and sullen. He spent the end of the 1897 season on the bench.

And then he spent most of the 1898 season on the bench.

The 1899 Spiders, worst team ever in baseball. Sockalexis wasn’t good enough for them.

In 1899, most of the Spiders were sold to St. Louis, except Sockalexis. He stayed behind with the Spiders, who won only 20 games that year with a team made up of rejects, prospects and semipro players.

Early in the season, the Plain Dealer reported, ‘the big Indian seems to have come to his senses.’ But then his play quickly deteriorated. On May 13, he twice fell down drunk in the outfield.

The once promising star wasn’t even good enough to play for the worst team in baseball, and the Spiders released him.

Last Years of Sockalexis

Louis Sockalexis played minor league ball for a few months, then dropped out of the game. Over the next two years he was arrested and jailed for drunkenness, public disturbance and vagrancy. He returned to baseball in 1902, playing for a Lowell, Mass., team, and in 1903, playing for Bangor.

He returned to the reservation in Old Town, where he coached teams and piloted a ferryboat. In 1913, he joined a logging team. He died of a heart attack on Dec. 24, 1913, only 42 years old.

The Indians

The evolution of Chief Wahoo

Back then, baseball teams changed their names frequently. The leagues had merged, and Cleveland’s American League team was known as the Naps, after their best player, Nap Lajoie. But Lajoie had been traded, and the team needed a new name. In 1915, the team’s owner asked local sportswriters to come up with one.

They settled on the Indians. Perhaps they remembered that brief period of excitement when Louis Sockalexis made his major league debut nearly 20 years earlier. Perhaps they were thinking of Boston’s miracle Braves, who won the World Series the year before. At any rate, the Indians adopted the image of Chief Wahoo as their logo.

The grinning, dark red caricature has come under criticism recently, much like the name of the Washington Redskins. The team tried to deflect its critics by saying the team was named in honor of Louis Sockalexis.

Louis Sockalexis was voted into the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame in 2000. And in 2021, the Indians changed their name to the Guardians.

This story was updated in 2022.

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