Northland_A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border

by Porter Fox

  An hour later, after a quick stop to buy shear pins, I followed a one-lane road past a chain-link fence and the Vanceboro border crossing. A patrol agent followed me in a green-and-white SUV and drove a loop around the town boat launch after I pulled in. He parked and watched while I took the canoe off the roof and launched it into the flat water where the Saint Croix meets Spednic Lake. He was expressionless. Military buzz cut, aviator glasses. A faded Canadian flag flapped on the opposite shore, beside an exact duplicate of the American boat ramp.

  The agent drove away, and I loaded the canoe and pushed off. The river was flat calm and, beyond the narrow eastern neck, opened into the lake. A wide, blue sheet of basins, coves, passages, and channels branched off in every direction. Spednic Lake Provincial Park spans the entire Canadian shore. The American side is a mix of private and state-owned land, nearly all of which has been conserved. The lake is seventeen miles long and covers seventeen thousand acres, roughly in the shape of a boomerang. Dozens of tiny islands, many with houses, crowd the borderline. On a summer day with bass fisherman and canoeists tooling across it, Spednic is a postcard of northern Maine. It is also famously shallow and can see ocean-sized waves in a big wind.

  I followed the border through Horse and Mollie Coves. A fire on a rocky headland a mile west could have been an Indian encampment a thousand years ago. Donald had told me about an old Passamaquoddy rendezvous on Diggity Stream. It was in Canada, so I would have to slip across the border to camp there. I thought about skipping it after the agent circled me at the boat landing, but looking north, it seemed like an easy jump across the line.

  Ten minutes after I zipped over the border, a small boat carrying two men dressed in black crossed my wake. They were a half mile behind me. The driver stood up. The passenger looked straight ahead. They were headed for Vanceboro. I shut off the engine, crouched down, and hoped that, from a distance, the canoe looked like one of the many rocks in Spednic. The boat slowed and stopped. My canoe drifted toward a small island. The men took off again, and I headed for Diggity.

  You can’t see Diggity Stream from the lake. Rocks, beaches, and forest blend into what looks like unbroken shoreline. I was a hundred feet away from it, on my third approach, when I finally spotted the outflow. The stream is framed by sand and alder. Golden light reflected off pondweed and pipewort growing at the mouth. The stream runs to First Lake, then Eagle Lake, which connects to Third Lake, Maudsley Lake, and ten more lakes before reaching a portage that connects to the Saint John River. The Passamaquoddy portaged the entire chain in the spring and fall when traveling between winter and summer camps. Diggity was the halfway point and had been a tribal haven for thousands of years.

  Donald had shown me where the campsite was on a map. When disease tore through the northland in the 1600s, killing most of the tribe, he’d told me, they retreated to Diggity to heal. The epidemic came from Jamestown, Quebec, Plymouth, and Fort Orange. It followed European trade lines on rivers across the northland, spreading measles, chickenpox, smallpox, diphtheria, and influenza. Half of a village typically died within days or weeks of initial contact. Shamans attempted traditional remedies, and warriors shoved arrows down their throats and burned themselves alive to exorcise the plague. They believed it was caused by the gods. Europeans did as well, albeit a different god. Governor Bradford of the Plymouth Colony said the “hand of God” was responsible and that His purpose was to clear room for the newcomers. Cotton Mather performed an exorcism in the Massachusett language to see whether Indian magic, and sickness, affected white people. He reported, happily, that it did not.

  The epidemic worsened, and New England tribes waged mourning wars. Warriors attacked neighboring tribes to avenge the dead and repopulate their clan, mostly with women and children. Men were often tortured and killed. Animal trapping grounds and pelts were essential to trade for European weapons, with which tribes could kill more Indian neighbors in what became a vicious cycle. The Iroquois eradicated entire populations from upstate New York to the Ohio Valley as they gained more trapping territory. From 1616 to 1619, disease killed 75–90 percent of coastal Indians living in the Northeast. About two million Indians lived east of the Mississippi when Champlain arrived on Saint Croix Island in 1604. By 1750, that number was 250,000. “Our people went deep into the woods, to this place, for protection,” Donald said. “We’ve been going there for three thousand years.”

  A stone monument at the Diggity campsite commemorates the place as a historic stopover. The plaque, placed by Canadian officials, does not mention the Passamaquoddy by name. Donald had spent much of his life fighting to protect that name, he said. Eradicating Passamaquoddy history was another way that governments on both sides of the border avoided land claims and other obligations. Archaeologists in the early 1900s helped their case, theorizing that ancient ancestors of some of Maine’s tribes were a different tribe altogether. They dubbed the first people to occupy the state “Red Paint People.” The Paleo-Indians, they said, were Eastern Woodlands Indians who called the Maine Coast “The Dawnland,” for the first rays of light to hit the continent every morning. They buried their dead with offerings of tools, animal bones, carved animal effigies, and small quartz pebbles painted with red ochre. Tool kits recovered by archaeologists contained woodworking implements for building dwellings and watercraft; finely wrought bone and ivory fishhooks, harpoons, and bone foreshafts; and long, narrow, slate lances for hunting whale and swordfish.

  For half a century, history books explained how the Red Paint People walked off the glaciers, then vanished—making way for the Passamaquoddy and other tribes to move in. Donald and his peers pointed out that the language and culture of Maine’s Wabanaki Confederacy—Micmac, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki, and Penobscot—were very similar to those of the Red Paint People. Academics and state officials told them they were wrong. Similar to the Passamaquoddy situation in Canada, if tribes are not officially linked to an ancient culture, they can’t claim burial sites, land rights, or any of the thousands of exhumed corpses lying in Smithsonian Institution warehouses.

  Recent linguistic and archaeological evidence revealed a new time line in the prehistoric northland. A dig site thirty miles from the Passamaquoddy reservation dated relics connected to the tribe at 12,500 years old. A similar site with Passamaquoddy artifacts had been excavated once before by archaeologists who supported the Red Paint People theory. Looking at spearheads and stone tools a few weeks later with one of the archaeologists who had been on the new dig, I asked how they had made the find. “We dug deeper,” he said.

  Every year, Donald leads a canoe trip down the Saint Croix from Spednic Lake to Calais. The first time he did it, he said, he didn’t know where he was going. The group ended up at one of the hydro dams. They lowered their canoes around the massive structure, then scrambled down and continued paddling. “It’s a lot more fun if you’re going downstream,” he said.

  That night, I pitched my tent in a small clearing in the trees and watched the sunset from the beach. Foliage on the lakeshore reflected every color in the spectrum. Islands in Spednic looked like a Winslow Homer painting—bristling tall pines, rocky shores. It was a forest of water. It was the Dawnland that Donald’s ancestors had called home, and the next day I would try to cross it all.

  4

  THE WIND STARTED AT TWO IN THE MORNING. BRANCHES AND leaves ricocheted off the tent, and the trees around Diggity Stream groaned. I barely slept, listening to gusts of wind burst off the lake. When I finally got up it was 5:30 a.m.

  Fog flowed from the mountains into Spednic. The eastern sky was an arc of amber light. I heard wind roaring up the lake and smelled the dank scent of lake water turning over. It had been cold all night under clear skies and a swirl of stars. The Milky Way ran exactly over the middle of the campsite, perpendicular to the stream. Every constellation I knew was visible. The last thing I saw before falling asleep was a shooting star that split the sky in two.

  This was the life that Champlain and most e
arly explorers lived in the northland: cold, wet, slightly lost. They relied on Indians to survive, find their way, and export resources. Tribes taught the Europeans how to fish, hunt, navigate, and stay warm at night. They showed them which plants were medicinal and which were poisonous. They demonstrated how to paddle a birchbark canoe, a vastly more efficient vessel than what explorers brought with them. They told their European friends oral histories of the continent: the end of the Ice Age, the migration of tribes, Indian cities in the West, floods, plagues.

  I could have used some guidance. Spednic’s main channel runs west–east for ten miles, and a northwesterly wind shooting through the gap had built up a wall of waves overnight. I saw whitecaps forming near Lindsay Island two miles away. The temperature was twenty-five degrees, and my hands were numb after breaking down the tent. The crossing would be nearly twenty miles. The odds of someone seeing me in the middle of the channel if something went wrong were slim. I doubted that even the border patrol would notice.

  It was Columbus Day, not the best time to illegally squat a sacred Indian retreat. If I were a better seaman, I would have waited for the wind to calm down. But I was anxious to get going and get out of Canada. I warmed my hands over the fire and made a mug of hot tea. Then I pushed off and motored toward a line of waves that looked like they had rolled in from the ocean.

  The wind blew twenty miles per hour through Diggity Cove and Green Bay. The swells were about two feet, and the canoe handled them well. The flat bottom and chine were incredibly stable and surfed down the backs of the swells. The waves died down in the lee of the Narrows but picked up again in Sandy Bay. Halfway across, I could barely see through the spray blowing over the bow. In a lapse of judgment, I took my hand off the tiller for a half second and reached forward for my raincoat. A blast of wind knocked the canoe sideways and the engine whipped to the side. A wave hit the boat at the same instant, tipping it violently. Freezing water poured into the canoe, and I jumped to the opposite gunwale to counterbalance.

  Another wave hit. Three inches of water sloshed in the bottom of the hull. I shifted from one side to the other, trying to keep the canoe from flipping. The waves were so tall that I couldn’t see over them from the trough. Whitecaps broke along the crests, and wind blew spray into my face. I managed to balance the canoe by holding on to both gunwales, but I couldn’t turn the bow into the waves without crawling back to the motor.

  I was exactly in the middle of Sandy Bay. A mariner’s rule I learned growing up is that you have a 50 percent chance of swimming 50 yards in 50-degree water. My best chance was to get back to the engine. During a moment between waves, I scrambled to the stern and grabbed the tiller. The wind blew the bow around again, and the canoe lurched to the side. Another wave hit, and I twisted the throttle. The boat spun around and rode up and over the next swell.

  The waves built for another hour. I was soaking wet and couldn’t feel my hands. The lee of Birch Island looked calm, and I aimed for it. A half hour later, I pulled up on a sandy point, dragged the canoe ashore and lay down on a flat boulder.

  The sun was warm, and it was a relief to be out of the waves for a moment. I peeled off my wet clothes and put on a shirt and sweater from the dry bag. I was somewhere between terrified and elated that I was halfway across the lake. The rest of the way was mostly in the lee of the mainland and looked like it would be calmer. I thought about Champlain’s many hairy moments in a canoe and finished off a half bottle of merlot in honor of him. The deep-blue water off the western tip of Birch Island was etched by frothy whitecaps. There were no houses on either shore, no boats or roads or radio towers. Clouds moved through the sky at what looked like a hundred miles per hour. For the moment, the lake was as it had always been, wild and untouched.

  I launched the canoe again and angled for the American shore. I couldn’t steer broadside to the waves, so I had to cross in and out of Canada a dozen times over the next hour. I wasn’t worried about border patrol anymore. Donald had convinced me that the line was not a real thing. I also hadn’t seen a patroller since Vanceboro.

  I ran the Canadian side of the border in the lee of Norway and Hinkley Points, then headed up the final stretch of Spednic. The wind finally died there, and I looked for the Forest City boat landing. The water was flat, and the nightmare of that morning eased away as I pointed the canoe toward a gravel boat ramp emerging from the woods.

  THE ASSASSINATION OF HENRI IV in 1610 shifted the balance of power in the northland. Champlain’s longtime supporter was gone, and Henri’s wife, Marie de Médicis, had little interest in New France. Champlain spent years in Paris trying to appease investors and influence the royal court. He married the twelve-year-old daughter of a court secretary to gain access to Marie’s inner circle, and he lobbied noblemen to rally behind his creation. Back in Quebec, Champlain paddled the Ottawa River, Lake Nipissing, and the French River; crossed the rocky Canadian Shield; and saw the vast expanse of Lake Huron. He met Otaguottouemin, High Hair, Petite, Putun, and Madawaska Indians, among many others, and kept a promise to his Indian allies in 1615 by attacking a central Onondaga village in Iroquoia—near present-day Syracuse, New York.

  The battle did not go as well as the first. Champlain was wounded by two arrows in his leg and had to retreat. He convalesced with the Huron Indians over the winter and wrote extensively about their walled cities and elaborate farming complexes. When he could walk again, he hunted deer with the tribe and explored the surrounding territory. In the spring he paddled back to Quebec and sailed for home, again, to save New France from squabbling aristocrats.

  While the French argued about the value of a North American colony, the English moved quickly to control the coast and, ultimately, cross the line that Champlain had drawn. In the end, the difference wasn’t ships, weapons, or Indian alliances. It was people.

  The “peopling” of British America began a year after Jamestown was founded and became one of the largest migrations in human history. Emigrating from England to the New World was not always a voluntary act. The lord mayor of London, who was an investor in the Virginia Company, rounded up hundreds of orphans from the streets and hospitals to be sent as “apprentices” to Jamestown. Most of them died, and constables were told to ship more urchins to the English port of Bridewell to be transported across the Atlantic. Churchwardens visited the poor and urged them to send family members overseas. One of the Virginia Company’s founders, Sir Edwin Sandys, introduced a law to Parliament to force every parish in England to send its destitute to his colony, at the parish’s expense. (It didn’t pass.) By 1624, more than four thousand outcasts had been shipped across the Atlantic.

  The Plymouth Colony and fishing ships along the coast of New England spread the English population north into Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. In the 1630s and ’40s, twenty thousand Puritans, either displaced by or dissatisfied with the tyranny of England’s Charles I, arrived on the shores of New England. They, too, spread to islands and coastal fishing villages in the northland, overlapping French settlers who had ranged south from New France’s easternmost colony, Acadia. By 1650, the population of New England was fifty thousand. Settlers in New France numbered seven hundred.

  Champlain saw the coming conflict and had his men dig ditches and erect fortifications around Quebec. It was not enough. Captain Samuel Argall, former governor of Virginia, sacked the French Jesuit colony of Saint-Sauveur on Mount Desert Island in 1613, then burned the structures that Champlain had built on Saint Croix Island. English and Scottish traders during the Thirty Years’ War forced Champlain to surrender Quebec in 1629. England returned it after the 1632 Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and Champlain sailed for the city he had built for the last time that spring.

  New France’s founder rarely left Quebec in his final years. He suffered a stroke in October 1635 that paralyzed him from the waist down. His condition worsened over the next month, and he lost feeling in his arms as well. He continued with official business from his bed and spent his last mo
nths conferring with and confessing to a Jesuit priest. Champlain’s spirituality had carried him across the ocean into the deepest wilds of North America, and he did not question it in his final days. He recounted his successes and failures to the priest and a small coterie of noblemen from his deathbed. His last day in this world was Christmas 1635.

  Within six years, New France was consumed by the Beaver Wars, a series of battles with the Iroquois over trapping territory. Thirty years later, the first of six bloody conflicts, collectively known as the French and Indian Wars, devastated communities on both sides of the New France–New England border. The wars raged for almost a century and destroyed nearly every town along the Maine coast. When peace was finally made in 1763, France ceded all of its territory east of the Mississippi to the British, and for a moment the line disappeared.

  The fall of New France gave rise to the world’s first global empire. The British were not charitable with their newfound hegemony. They had been trying to erase the French presence from North America since the 1600s, and in 1730 they forced residents of Acadia living between Maine and Nova Scotia to sign a declaration of loyalty. Twenty-five years later, they deported them instead, no matter their allegiance.

  The Grand Dérangement (Great Upheaval) deported 11,500 of the 14,000 Acadians living in New France. Most were shipped to the British colonies or England. Many later resettled in Louisiana, creating the Acadian culture that still exists there. Thousands died in transit, and only a few hundred escaped. Some of the escapees headed to Maine’s Upper Saint John Valley, out of reach of British ships. Two hundred years later, the valley still holds a thriving Acadian community.