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Penobscot

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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The 1911 Heat Wave Was So Deadly It Drove People Insane

A July 1911 heat wave killed thousands of New Englanders and sent many over the brink of madness.

Two men in a park during the 1911 heat wave in New York City. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

During 11 hellish days, horses dropped in the street and babies didn’t wake up from their naps. Boats in Providence Harbor oozed pitch and began to take on water. Tar in the streets bubbled like hot syrup. Trees shed their leaves, grass turned to dust and cows’ milk started to dry up.

In every major northeastern city, the sweltering heat drove people to suicide.

On July 4, temperatures hit 103 in Portland, 104 in Boston (a record that still stands), 105 in Vernon, Vt., and 106 in Nashua, N.H., and Bangor, Maine. At least 200 died from drowning, trying to cool off in rivers, lakes, ponds and the ocean – anything wet. Still more died from heat stroke. The 1911 heat wave was possibly the worst weather disaster in New England’s history, with estimates of the death toll as high as 2,000.

Trying to cool off in Hartford. Photo courtesy Hartford Courant.

Trying to cool off in Hartford during the 1911 heat wave. Photo courtesy Hartford Courant.

The 1911 Heat Wave

June weather had been normal that year, but in July hot, dry air from the southern plains flowed into Canada and then swept south and toward the coast. The hot wind suppressed cool ocean breezes, and the temperature rose 11 degrees in a half hour in Providence.

In Hartford, crowds gathered around the Thermograph near City Hall to watch as the temperature fluctuated between 110 and 112 degrees in the shade. At Colwell’s store in Cumberland, R.I., the thermometer hit 130. A farmer in Woodbury left his field when the temperature reached 140 degrees in the sun.

Ice and electric fans were luxuries, air conditioning unknown. Pedestrians fainted from the stifling heat. At night, the streets filled with exhausted mothers walking up and down, trying to comfort their crying babies. They feared leaving them in their beds, lest they fail to wake up. One police officer described the night during the 1911 heat wave as a ‘giant wail.’

The City of Hartford flushed fire hydrants and ferries and trolleys allowed people to ride free. Some rode all day. Others went round and round on carousel horses for the slight breeze. The Heublein family donated water barrels to the parks, and the Trout Brook Ice Co. refilled them.

Throughout the region, factories closed and mail delivery was suspended.

Parks and beaches were opened for sleeping. In tenement slums, the sidewalks were lined with blankets and mattresses. Sleeping outside had its dangers, as thieves commonly stole hats, coats and wallets.

Sleeping in the park in New York during the 1911 heat wave. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

5,000 Sleep on Boston Common

Boston Common was described as the ‘biggest boardinghouse in New England.’ Five thousand men, women and children slept there on the ground at night during the 1911 heat wave.

Some people slept on roofs. John Merlo, a 28-year-old Italian immigrant, rolled over in his sleep on the tin roof of his boardinghouse in Hartford’s slum. He crashed through a 10-inch guard and fell to his death on the concrete below.

It became a daily ritual to read the morning newspaper to see how many died. Workers died digging holes. Women fell over picking blueberries. A teamster fainted and fell off his wagon, only to be trampled to death by the horses pulling it. A woman sitting up in bed talking suddenly keeled over, dead.

A week after it started, a line of thunderstorms broke the 1911 heat wave. But the next day the temperature shot up to 95 degrees. People started to go mad. In Hartford, a crazed man tried to climb a utility pole. Two police officers and three bystanders subdued him and wrestled him into a straitjacket. In Springfield, a man suddenly threw off his coat and ran through a pharmacy. In New York, a crazed drunk ran after a police officer with a meat cleaver.

The New London Day reported Jacob Seegar, an aged resident of Roxbury, Mass., was so crazed by the extreme heat he killed himself with a revolver.

Boys licking ice in New York City. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Train Wreck

The 1911 heat wave bent rail lines, causing derailments. But it was probably excessive speed that caused the wreck of the Federal Express train carrying passengers from Washington to Boston.

At 3:30 a.m. on July 11, the train derailed as it approached the station in Bridgeport, Conn.

The engine and six cars fell 20 feet to the street below, killing 14 and injuring 47.

The St. Louis Cardinals were sleeping in a Pullman car at the back of the train that remained on the tracks. They were on their way to Boston to play the Braves. Hall of Fame catcher-manager Roger Bresnahan directed the team’s rescue efforts, credited with saving many lives before ambulances reached the wreck.

Bangor

Bangor, Maine, had already suffered from one inferno two months earlier: the worst fire in its history. But in July, the city suffered from temperatures above 100 degrees.

A 69-year-old African-American woman, Mrs. Myra Hudlin, had been burned out in the fire and lived in a room with a bed, six chairs and a stove. She collapsed in the heat after washing clothes all one morning and died the next day.

The New York Tribune's estimates of the death toll from the heat, undoubtedly understated.

The New York Tribune’s estimates of the heat wave’s death toll, undoubtedly understated.

Bangorians seeking relief slept on porches and roofs. Most men walked around town without wearing a coat. Moviegoers showed up at the un-air-conditioned theaters at night in various states of undress.

On July 6, a terrific thunderstorm interrupted the heat and killed carpenter Harry Mower by toppling a barn on top of him. The storm damaged property throughout the city, felling the charred walls of buildings that still stood after the fire.

From morning to night, people hoping to catch a breeze jammed into the open cars of the Bangor Railway and Electric Company’s open trolley cars. Six thousand people besieged Riverside Park at the end of the trolley line in Hamden so they could cool off in the Penobscot River.

Even swimmers couldn’t escape the heat. David Kerr, a waiter on the steamer Belfast, was overcome by heat while swimming near the ferry terminal. He appeared too dazed to grab on to a line thrown to him.

After 11 days of searing heat, another severe thunderstorm brought the temperature down to bearable levels — and killed five more people. But the 1911 heat wave finally ended.

A deadly heat wave 15 years earlier launched a U.S. president. Read about it here. This story about the 1911 heat wave was updated in 2023.

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How July 4th Partying Cost the Life of Thoreau’s Maine Guide

Joe Attien was a Maine guide, logger and Penobscot chief who died in a logging accident. It probably wouldn’t have happened if his skilled crew hadn’t been off partying on the Fourth of July.

Joe Attien

Logging season usually ended around Independence Day, and loggers on the Penobscot River usually spent their wages raising hell in the Devil’s Half Acre in Bangor, Maine.

But in 1870, the logging season ran long, and Attien got stuck with an inexperienced skeleton crew to drive the last of the logs down the Penobscot.

Maine Guide, Logger, Chief

Henry David Thoreau made several trips to Maine. On his second trip in 1853, he hired Joe Attien as his Maine guide. They met at Moosehead Lake, and Thoreau described him:

He was a good looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his under clothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian..

Joe Attien was more than a stereotypical Indian, though. He was the last hereditary chief, or governor, of the Penobscot Nation and the first to be elected. Born on Christmas Day, 1829, he grew up when the tribe had illegally ceded most of its land to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the State of Maine. Like many of the Penobscot men, he earned seasonal wages working as a Maine guide and a logger.

Log drive on the Kennebec River, 1922. Courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

On July 4, 1870, Joe Attien was leading a team of log drivers down the Penobscot River in a bateau. Some of the experienced loggers were in Bangor, celebrating Independence Day. Attien and his crew had to drive the last of the logs down the river.

Attien’s bowman was inexperienced and unskilled. They shoved off on the West Branch of the Penobscot, and the bowman ccouldn’t get the bateau in position to run the rapids. They struck a rock sideways and the boat began to break apart. Some swam for the shore while others clung to the boat. Attien stayed behind to rescue the men who clung to it. He was desperately trying to save their lives when the bateau plunged over Grand Pitch Falls.

Folklorist Fanny Hardy Eckstorm had known Joe Attien since she was an infant, and she wrote about his death in a collection of stories called Penobscot Man.

He was not only brave but good, an open-hearted, patient, forbearing sort of a man, renowned for his courage and skill in handling a boat, but loved for his mild justness.

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Bartholomew Gosnold, the Founding Grandfather of the 13 Colonies (and Namer of Cape Cod)

When Bartholomew Gosnold and his small crew came to anchor on the Maine coast in 1602, an Indian wearing imported European shoes and pants greeted them.

‘Gosnold at Cuttyhunk, 1602’ by Albert Bierstadt, 1858

The Indian in European garb shouldn’t have surprised the British explorers. Many European visitors preceded them to the northeast coast of North America. Basque, French, Spanish, Portuguese and English fishermen and fur traders had made hundreds, if not thousands, of voyages to Maine and the Canadian Maritimes.

In 1517, 50 European ships were counted along the coast of Newfoundland. French explorer Jacques Cartier estimated he saw 1,000 Basque fishing boats off the Gaspe Peninsula in 1534. The Isles of Shoals were established as seasonal fishing and trading posts at the turn of the 17^th century, with hundreds of summer residents.

Gosnold was no unlettered workingman come to spend the warm weather months fishing or fur trading. He was an English lawyer who managed to get backing to found a year-round colony in North America. He would try and fail on Cape Cod in 1602, but his voyage had an impact still felt today.

Some historians argue that Bartholomew Gosnold prevented Spain from settling Atlantic coast, allowing the British to establish colonies instead. Dana Huntley in British Heritage argues Bartholomew Gosnold perhaps more than any other single individual is responsible for the establishment of British North America.

His history, “ought to have recognized in one sense as at least the Founding Grandfather of these fair colonies,” wrote Huntley.

Bartholomew Gosnold

Gosnold was to the manor born in 1571 in Suffolk, England. He graduated from the University of Cambridge and studied law in London. But instead of following the law, he grew fascinated by the sea and by stories of New World exploration.

John and Sebastian Cabot made landfall in Maine or the Canadian Maritimes in 1497. Giovanni Verrazzano sailed the Maine coast in 1524. Estevan Gomez became the first European tourist in Bangor in 1525.

In 1597, Bartholomew Gosnold joined the Earl of Essex’s expedition to the Azores. For about a year they privateered against the Spanish, and Gosnold made a small fortune.

In March 1602, he set sail from England in a leaky 39-foot bark, The Concord, with 32 men on board. Sailing due west from the Azores, he reached the Maine coast in May. Exactly where he landed isn’t clear, but the Indian’s clothing certainly indicated others had preceded him across the Atlantic.

An English gentleman aboard the Concord, John Brereton, kept a diary of the trip. Brereton observed the Indians they met in Mane – possibly on Cape Elizabeth or at the mouth of the Penobscot River. They had a Basque shallop with an iron grapple and an iron kettle. The Indian with the imported shoes also wore black serge breeches and a European waistcoat. Clearly the Indians had traded with European fishermen.

Gosnold aimed to be the first to explore Cape Cod, though some European fishermen may have already ventured there.

Cape Cod

The Concord skirted the Maine coastline for a few days, anchored in York Harbor, Maine, and then sailed into Provincetown Harbor. He called it Shoal Hope.

Wrote Gosnold, “Near this cape we came to fathom anchor in fifteen fathoms, where we took great store of codfish, for which we altered the name, and called it Cape Cod. Here we saw sculls of herring, mackerel, and other small fish, in great abundance.”

Bartholomew Gosnold sailed around Provincetown, and after a week reached an island he named Martha’s Vineyard, after his daughter who died in infancy. There they spent two days sampling strawberries. The Wampanoags brought them cooked fish, deerskins and tobacco, but Gosnold decided to press on.

Gosnold Monument on Cuttyhunk Island.

They sailed to Gay Head, spent the night in Vineyard Sound and continued to Buzzard’s Bay. They landed on Cuttyhunk, where they found abundant trees, herbs, fruit and, of course, fish. Most intriguing was the sassafras, then commanding a high price because it supposedly cured syphilis.

The men began building a fort, harvesting sassafras and trading with the Indians.

Bartholomew Gosnold left eight men on the island and sailed away for 72 hours – we may never know why. But three days of living off the land and a brief skirmish with Indians dissuaded them from spending the year on Cuttyhunk. Some wanted to return to England; some wanted to stay. They took a vote, and those who favored returning won.

A Short Stay

Breretron, who probably voted to stay, believed they decided to leave because of greed.

“After our bark had taken in so much sassafras, cedar, furs, skins and other commodities as were thought convenient, some of our company that had promised Captain Gosnold to stay, having nothing but a [profitable] voyage in their minds, made our company of inhabitants (which was small enough before) much smaller,” wrote Brereton.

After six weeks on Cuttyhunk, they set sail for England. A regretful Brereton wrote, ‘leaving this island (which he called Elizabeths Island) with as many true sorrowful eyes as were before desirous to see it.’

Legacy

Nonetheless, Bartholomew Gosnold’s voyage to Cape Cod left a greater legacy than people often realize.

He showed a quicker way to reach New England along his sailing route due west of the Azores. The Mayflower followed his chart 18 years later. And Brereton’s journal, published in 1602, popularized the idea of colonizing the Northeastern United States.

Back in England, Bartholomew Gosnold went to work finding backing and recruiting colonists, including John Smith, for a permanent settlement in Virginia. In 1607 he sailed to the colony called Jamestown. But then he died a few months after arriving on August 22, 1607. The colonists buried him inside the fort.

Cross marking what is believed to be Bartholomew Gosnold’s grave.

John Smith acknowledged Bartholomew Gosnold as the founder of Jamestown. He wrote that Gosnold had ‘small assistance’ and worked for many years on the venture.

King James at the time wanted to placate the Spanish, who also wished to exploit the New World. He might have let them colonize North America had Bartholomew Gosnold not prevailed. And you might be reading this in Spanish.

With thanks to The Enduring Shore: A History of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, by Paul Schneider. This story about Bartholomew Gosnold was updated in 2022.

Images: Gosnold’s grave By Ser Amantio di Nicolao at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26639505. Bartholomew Gosnold monument By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11123218.

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Fan Jones, The Madame Who Reigned Over the Devil’s Half Acre in Bangor

When Penobscot logging was at its peak, lumbermen flocked to the bordello run by Fan Jones near the Devil’s Half Acre in Bangor, Maine. Rivermen in red shirts and tasseled sashes swaggered into town looking for the Sky Blue House of Pleasure, their pay burning a hole in their pockets.

A saloon in the Devil’s Half Acre

According to legend, Fan Jones was handsome, gracious, slender and shrewd, the proverbial madam with a heart of gold. She was well-kept and so was her house. Folk songs dreamed up by her satisfied customers, mostly sailors and lumberjacks, spread her fame:

Fan Jones, She ran a cathouse
Way down on Harlow Street
If you’re a woodsman
Head straight there
And your friends you’ll surely meet.

Wild and Boisterous Play

Fan Jones was known as a good businesswoman who took full advantage of the opportunities presented by the booming little city on the frontier. At its height in 1860, Bangor shipped 250 million board feet of lumber, and more than 3,000 ships moored in its harbor. You could walk across the river on their decks from Bangor to Brewer, people said.

The ships came from around the world: China, Europe, Australia, but especially the West Indies. Timber was traded for molasses and rum, which the loggers imbibed with enthusiasm.

Bangor’s homage to the lumberjack, Paul Bunyan.

Though Maine had gone dry in 1851, Bangor stayed resolutely wet. In 1890 the city had 142 saloons, many of them in the Devil’s Half Acre. Under ‘the Bangor Plan’ (described as ritualized bribery of politicians and policemen), the city flouted Maine’s Prohibition law.

Robert Pike described the appeal of the saloons and whore-houses that lined the plank sidewalks of the Devil’s Half Acre in his classic book Tall Trees, Tough Men:

Reveling in work that permitted him to display his splendid strength and skill, the riverman also liked to throw himself into wild and boisterous play. … The songs he roared out as he strode boldly from one Haymarket Square dive to another, or as he approached Fan Jones’ noted Skyblue House of pleasure on Harlow Street, were not of the Sunday School type…

Voluptuous Experience

And, noted Pike, entrepreneurs like Fan Jones could count on repeat customers, especially around the Fourth of July. River drives were usually over by Independence Day, when the men went into Bangor and celebrated with a vengeance.

The logger came into Bangor for a good time, and he had it. True, he often woke up in jail with a splitting headache and bruises on his noggin, but after he had paid or worked off his fine he put a final bottle or two of the squirrel into his turkey and headed back up the river. There the passage of months and frequent re-telling to his colleagues made his Bangor adventures take on the aura of a wonderful time, and by the time spring had rolled around again he was ready and anxious to repeat the voluptuous experience.

A log drive on the Penobscot near Bangor

Fan Jones

Fan Jones was born in Brooksville, Maine, sometime in 1830, to Eliza and Benjamin Jones. She worked as a seamstress and possibly a servant for a wealthy family.

It isn’t clear how or why, but she became a prostitute in Bangor by 1850. In 1858 police arrested her for operating a house of ill-repute. She moved to another house at 233 Harlow St., a short walk from the riverfront and the Devil’s Half Acre. Shrewd with money, she bought the building around 1867. It earned the nickname the ‘Sky Blue House of Pleasure,’ supposedly because she had the chimney painted that color though no evidence exists that she did.

It was the most successful, longest running brothel in Bangor.

Fan Jones usually had eight seasoned women working for her; unlike many of Bangor’s brothels, she didn’t employ young girls. The house had as many as 12 bedrooms that could be used for commercial purposes.

233 Harlow Street today. Image courtesy Google maps.

The State Fair

She not only survived, but she did well enough to help others along the way. She adopted 16-year-old Caddie Graffam.

Fan Jones was fined a few times for running a disorderly house and for serving liquor. She served a few months in the Bangor House of Corrections in 1861. In 1870 a grand jury indicted her, and she tried to get out of town on the Maine Central Railroad. Marshals intercepted her in Fairfield and brought her back.

“[Imagine] Fan’s feelings at such disregard of women’s rights as would not let her choose her own direction to travel in,” commented the Whig & Courier.

Once a year she dressed her employees in lavish gowns from Paris and seated them in an open coach-and-six. They then rode in it in the parade that opened the Bangor State Fair. She set up a large tent near the fair for a week where her girls could ply their trade.

By the mid- or late 1860s, an ex-con named John Thomas moved into the Sky Blue House of Pleasure, and Fan jones started to go by the name ‘Mrs. Thomas.’ John Thomas may have been her real or common-law husband.

Bangor’s Mount Hope Cemetery.

The Sky Blue House of Pleasure survived the Great Bangor Fire of 1911, but Fan Jones, then 81, had probably retired by then. She died of tuberculosis, like many in Bangor, in 1917 and was laid to rest in Mount Hope Cemetery.

With thanks to Rogues, Rascals, and Other Villainous Mainers by Trudy Irene Scee and Tall Trees, Tough Men by Robert Pike. This story was updated in 2023.

Images: Bangor, Bangor, Maine. Penobscot River Bangor Maine, 1800. [s] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2020637508/. Paul Bunyan By Dennis Jarvis – https://www.flickr.com/photos/archer10/4447762402/sizes/o/in/photostream/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22033451/

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Molly Spotted Elk, a Penobscot Scholar Who Also Danced on Stage

In the fall of 1931, 27-year-old Molly Spotted Elk was far from home and unsure about marrying her French journalist lover. She didn’t know if two people from such different worlds could work it out.

Molly Spotted Elk

Molly Spotted Elk was the stage name for Mary Alice Nelson, a Penobscot Indian who won acclaim for her dancing in Paris. Shortly after she arrived in France, she met Jean Archambaud, a reporter for Paris Soir newspaper. Soon he was writing passionate love letters to her.

She decided to say ‘yes’ after she remembered the true story of a 17^th century French nobleman who came to Acadia, married an Indian princess and became a leader of her tribe.

Throughout her life, Molly Spotted Elk felt ambivalent about her role in the dominant culture. She acted out the stereotype of the sexy savage to meet the racist expectations of white people. At the same time she strove for their acclaim as an entertainer, as a writer and as an anthropologist.

Molly Dellis

Mary Alice (Molly Dellis in Penobscot) Nelson was born Nov. 17, 1903 on Indian Island in Old Town, Maine. Her father, Horace Nelson, was the first Penobscot to attend Dartmouth College. He studied there for a year and became a governor of the tribe. Her mother, Philomena, made some of the best sweetgrass baskets in Maine.

Molly was the oldest of eight children. The family lived in a tiny white house with two windows. The children helped the family survive by selling Philomene’s baskets from tents in tourist towns. Molly learned traditional Penobscot dances and danced for tourists who stayed at the big hotels.

She took jobs cleaning houses to pay for ballet lessons in Bangor, even as she badgered tribal elders about Penobscot legends.

At 13, Molly Dellis Nelson graduated from Old Town Junior High School and went to live with the family of Frank Speck, a University of Pennsylvania anthropologist. She attended Swarthmore Preparatory School and for two years audited classes at Penn. Molly Spotted Elk contributed to Speck’s classic study of her tribe, Penobscot Man.

She needed money, though, and left school to dance on the vaudeville circuit and in Wild West shows.

No More Baskets

In 1926, Molly moved to New York seeking fame and fortune. “Once I become famous, Mama will not have to make any more Indian baskets,” she told a newspaper reporter back home.

In New York, she described herself as ‘alone, friendless, a hungry innocent Injun girl.’ Her first job was as a nude model for Greenwich Village artists. She tried to save money for school, gave dance lessons, modeled footwear, sent money home for her mother and wrote and read: Flaubert, H.G. Wells, Proust and Joyce.

She won a role in the chorus line of the Foster Girls, who, like the Rockettes, shared a stage with a motion picture. The Foster Girls traveled to San Antonio for an eight-month performance at the Aztec, which screened the Westerns of the era.

Out west, Molly earned cameo spots as ‘Princess Spotted Elk’ and pursued a writing career when she wasn’t dancing. She carried her typewriter into dressing rooms and between shows wrote poetry and adventure stories, literary fiction and traditional Penobscot tales.

When the engagement at the Aztec ended, she returned to New York and found work with Lucy Nicolar, a Penobscot entertainer 20 years her senior. Lucy, known as Princess Watawaso, led an all-Indian troupe that performed on the Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit.

Eventually, Molly Spotted Elk went off on her own performing Indian dances along with the Charleston and the Black Bottom. In one New York cabaret, she appeared in a floor-length Indian headdress and little else. She described her show business life as a ‘heartbreaking one full of promises, trouble, glamor and rush.’

In 1930, she appeared in the film documentary The Silent Enemy, playing the lead role as Neewa. Though it wasn’t a success, it has been restored as a classic.

Molly Spotted Elk in Paris

Molly Spotted Elk left for Paris in 1931 in the ballet corps of the International Colonial Exposition. When the troupe returned to the United States, she stayed behind. She found European audiences appreciated her authentic Native American dances, unlike the Americans who preferred racist Indian stereotypes. She also worked with anthropologists and attended lectures at the Sorbonne.

Journalist Jean Archambaud asked her for an interview for Paris Soir, the city’s biggest daily newspaper. They met at a sidewalk café. He asked how she liked Paris. She said, “It is too loud, I prefer the woods.”

He was charmed. Jean liked the woods too. He also liked art, literature, history and nature – as did she. He was fascinated by her stories of her tribal culture. Within a month he wrote her a love letter:

You are the guide, a delicious guide for my clumsy footsteps.

He wanted to marry her, but she was reluctant. Then she recalled the story of Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie de Saint-Castin. He was a French military officer who came to New France around 1765 at the age of 13. He learned about the Penobscot Indians and married the daughter of tribal chief Madockawando. Her nickname was also Molly. He was adopted into the tribe and became its leader.

Married Life

They married, and for a while life seemed good. They had a daughter, Jean Alice, and Molly achieved modest success dancing.

By 1933 the Depression crushed France. Molly had few opportunities to dance and Jean was fired from the newspaper. He freelanced, she took menial jobs.

Molly returned to the United States in 1934, where she danced and found bit parts in movies. She was pregnant, and gave birth to their daughter Jean Alice. In 1938, they went back to Paris to be reunited with Jean Archambaud. She worked on a book of Penobscot stories and found a publisher willing to bring it out.

Then the Nazis invaded. Molly and her daughter were separated from Jean. They never saw him again.

Mother and daughter fled Paris on foot over the Pyrenees Mountains into Portugal as German fighter planes whined overhead. Sometimes they hitched a ride on a horse-drawn cart, an ambulance or a relief truck. Molly claimed they once got a ride from journalist Howard K. Smith.

Old Moccasins

Back in the United States, Molly floated between Indian Island and New York, where she took increasingly menial jobs.

Indian Island

She finally returned for good to Indian Island. It was, wrote her biographer Bunny NcBride,

…like an old pair of moccasins that one dreamed of during years of high-heeled city life—only to find, upon slipping into them, that they felt less comfortable than remembered because the shape of one’s feet had changed.

Molly Spotted Elk deteriorated mentally, pounding away at her typewriter until late at night and spending some time in a mental institution. She wrote children’s stories and made traditional dolls, two of which are in the Smithsonian collection.

She died on Indian Island on Feb. 21, 1977 at the age of 73.

In 1986, Molly Spotted Elk became a charter member of the Native American Hall of Honor in Page, Ariz. Her real legacy, though, is a book of traditional Penobscot stories in English and a dictionary of the Penobscot language:

Katahdin: Wigwam’s Tales of the Abnaki Tribe and a Dictionary of Penobscot and Passamaquoddy Words with French and English Translations.

With thanks to Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot Indian in Paris by Bunny McBride. This story about Molly Spotted Elk was updated in 2023.

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