Review: "The First Frontier," by Scott Weidensaul

By Paul Carrier

Long before there was a wild, wild west, there was another untamed American frontier, one that stretched from the Atlantic seaboard to the Appalachian Mountains.

You might call it the even wilder east.

As Scott Weidensaul notes in The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America, the physical evidence of this colonial cauldron, where settlers and natives alternated between cooperation and warfare, is largely lost to us now. But this tumultuous, forgotten world was all-too-real for centuries, spanning a vast expanse of territory in what is now the eastern United States and Canada.

Weidensaul describes this long-lost land as one in which “Europeans and Native Americans were creating a new society, and a new landscape, along the tidewater and among the forests and mountains — one by turns peaceful and violent, linked by trade, intermarriage, religion, suspicion, disease, mutual dependence, and acts of both unimaginable barbarism and extraordinary tolerance and charity.”

The First Frontier explores the dim past, as Weidensaul examines conflicting theories on when and how Native Americans arrived on these shores, as well as their early encounters with Norsemen, Basque fishermen and other Europeans. But the central focus is on later contacts between Indians and ever-growing numbers of colonists, beginning in the late 1500s and intensifying over the course of the next two centuries.

It’s an unsettling picture, but a fascinating one as well. European explorers, land speculators, backwoods farmers, feuding politicians, warring empires, captives, and myriad woodland tribes and nations fill this tale, which overflows with trickery, brutality, epidemics and greed, while also offering occasional glimpses of steadfast loyalty, upright dealings and simple human decency.

Even by the start of the 17th century, Weidensaul notes, there was “a long tradition” of kidnapping Indians and hauling them back to Europe as curiosities, slaves, or proof of an explorer’s claims. The Pequot war of 1636-38 witnessed the deaths of men, women and children, and so badly decimated that Connecticut tribe that the English victors outlawed the very use of its name. Only a few decades later, King Philip’s War proved to be the bloodiest war ever fought on American soil, in proportion to the population. A series of conflicts followed, some of them regional. Others, such as the French and Indian War of the 18th century, were much larger in scope.

Weidensaul has an imagination vivid enough to visualize memorable moments in the history of the first frontier, as well as the skill to portray such scenes in writing. Consider this snippet from an encounter in 1605, as Wabanaki Indians paddle their canoes toward the ship of English explorer George Waymouth, anchored off the coast of Maine.

“The strange vessel was clearly visible, sitting quietly in a natural harbor among several islands, its trees bare of skins, the figures of men silhouetted against the sky . . . . As the canoes drifted closer, one of the strangers on the big wigwaol shouted in a harsh language that sounded like screeching gulls, making signs that those in the canoes should come aboard.”

As that passage shows, Weidensaul has a refreshing fondness for using Indian terms to describe various people and objects, thereby breathing vitality into their culture. The Atlantic is sobagwa in one tribal language. Seals are askigw, the tribal homeland is webanakik, lobsters are shoggah, an ax is a tomaheegon, and so on.

In fact, Weidensaul is careful to provide a balanced view of each side’s motives and norms. He notes that while a late 17th-century Englishman might view the Maliseet Indians as shiftless nomads traveling between summer and winter grounds, to the Maliseets “crossing the ocean to live in a new place was incomprehensible, even pathological.”

Weidensaul’s captivating and thorough account includes some startling insights.

For example, just as the early colonists found it difficult to differentiate among tribes because all Indians looked and sounded alike to them, so too Europeans of different nationalities “were indistinguishable to many Indians,” sometimes with fatal consequences.

Weidensaul rejects out of hand what he describes as the popular misconception that Europeans introduced scalping to America, and explains the cultural significance of the practice to native people. He writes that Europeans dubbed Native Americans “red Indians” not because of their skin color but because the Beothuk people of Newfoundland painted themselves with red ocher and animal fat, and the name that was applied to them “tagged an entire continent’s population.”

The First Frontier contends that the earliest colonists did not find a wilderness when they arrived in North America, as commonly assumed. In Weidensaul's account, the eastern woodlands were dotted with parklike stands of trees free of undergrowth, as well as grasslands and savannas, all deliberately created by Indians using fire to dramatically reshape their environment.

Historical figures familiar to students of colonial history find a place on Wiedensaul’s stage, including Hannah Duston of Massachusetts, who killed her Indian kidnappers in 1697 with help from two other captives, escaped, and then returned to scalp her victims; George Washington, who “ignited” the French and Indian War in 1754; Puritan minister Cotton Mather; and Wampanoag sachem Massasoit.

But Weidensaul also introduces compelling characters whose names and stories are little-known to us now, such as Andrew Montour, an 18th-century interpreter and negotiator of Indian and French ancestry; Robert Stobo, who made a detailed map of New France’s Fort Duquesne in Pennsylvania while a prisoner there in 1754 and smuggled it out to the British; John Gyles, who was captured by Maliseets at Pemaquid, Maine, in 1689 and went on to have so many adventures that he published a memoir in 1736; and Miantonomi, a prominent 17th-century chief of the Narragansett Indians. If their names are unfamiliar to us, it's our loss.