by Peter Stark
Soon after his return, civil wars erupted again in France and the queen summoned Poutrincourt to retake a town near his former feudal holdings in Champagne. Leading a confused charge against a town that apparently had already surrendered, hoping to regain his lost glory, he took a cannon shot straight to the chest, dying on the spot at age fifty-eight.
His death left the two young men, Charles Biencourt, with Charles de La Tour as his right-hand man, in charge of whatever remained of the Acadian enterprise—now consisting of the two of them, the ruins of the manor house at Port-Royal, and a handful of Frenchmen.
They would receive almost no support from France for nearly two decades. Biencourt and La Tour abandoned Poutrincourt’s dream of an agricultural settlement—a kind of Eden in the New World—and fashioned their own life in the woods. Using the dilapidated remains of Port-Royal as their base, they mostly lived and traveled with the Micmac, trapping and trading for furs, to supply European aristocrats’ taste for beaver-skin hats and soft, luxurious coats of marten and otter.31 Each year a single ship delivered Biencourt and La Tour supplies from France—mainly wine, gunpowder, flour, and trade goods for the Indians—and sailed back across the Atlantic to the Old World laden with some 25,000 of the valuable pelts.
“With great toil,” La Tour later wrote, they learned the region’s Indian languages. They lived, he said, as “people of the country.”
Unlike the Indians to the south, where the British had started to settle, the Micmac were nomadic hunters and fishers and did not clear land around villages to cultivate corn, beans, and squash. They moved frequently to follow seasonal migrations of game and fish. The young Frenchmen learned32 how to move constantly, too, honoring the nomadic life. They learned how to fashion raquets—snowshoes—of bent wood and animal-gut strings to navigate the deep forest snows of winter, and how to bend ribs of cedar and stitch together sheets of birch bark with root fibers to make a canoe, sealing the seams with fir pitch. The Micmac traveled in these strong, lightweight canoes with everything they possessed—“wives, children, dogs, kettles, hatchets, matachias,33 bows, arrows, quivers, skins, and the [skin] coverings of their houses,” wrote Lescarbot.
The young French wore capes made of beaver or otter, leggings of moose or bearskin in winter, and shod their feet with moccasins of tough moose hide, which grips easily on ice and snow. When traveling, they learned to subsist on the rich Micmac food known as cacamo—or “moose butter”—marrow extracted from boiled moose bones. The Micmac taught them, when they were tired and thirsty in the woods without water at hand, how they could suck the sap of the sugar maple for refreshment. They learned to paddle the streams and rivers through the forests, and how to portage their canoes on their backs over the low divides separating one drainage from the next, thus able to traverse broad swaths of forest by moving from river to river. They didn’t think anything about traveling one hundred or two hundred miles alone through the woods like the Micmac, who, Lescarbot marveled, went these vast distances without “path or inn” such as you’d find in France. Instead, they carried only tinderbox, tobacco, a bow in their hand, and a quiver on their backs.
“And we in France,” Lescarbot writes, “are much troubled when we have lost our way ever so little in some great forest.”
Perhaps the “Indian wisdom” absorbed by Biencourt and La Tour even extended to the Micmac belief in the spirits of nature. All things in their world were made by a creator in which every creature, every object, had a spirit and the supreme spirit was Manitou.34 Medicine men communicated with these spirits and could foretell the future and heal the sick. The Europeans who came later—the Jesuit priests, the Puritans down in New England—would call it “devil worship.” But Charles de La Tour was known to be tolerant of the Micmac beliefs, and perhaps even accepted them himself. Samuel de Champlain, then trying to establish his own colony on the St. Lawrence River, reported how his men came to believe, like the Indians, in giant cannibals who made “strange hissings.”35
And there was more to keep a young French male engaged in the Indian way of life. Young unmarried Micmac women were free to have sexual relations with men at their choosing, which included the young French, although they learned the hard way that forcing themselves on the Micmac women would result in death.
“…[V]igorous and tough,”36 wrote a later French colonial administrator of this little culture of transplanted Frenchmen in the New World, “well built and firmly planted on their legs, accustomed to live on little, robust and vigorous, very self-willed and inclined to dissoluteness; but they are witty and vivacious…they imitate the Indians, whom, with reason, they hold in high regard…strive to hold their regard and please them.”
So this small band of Frenchmen living isolated from Europe learned the Micmac way—learned, as Thoreau would say, “Indian wisdom.” What a profound difference in attitude toward the native peoples and the North American wilds when one compares these fur-hunting young Frenchmen in Acadia to the crop-raising British down in Jamestown and the Puritans at Plymouth. From the outset—that first winter of celebration in 1606–07 and l’Ordre de Bon Temps—the French forged a bond with the Micmac. Down in Jamestown and Plymouth, the soon-to-arrive British colonists, in contrast, kept themselves separate from the native populations. While the French in Acadia embraced the wilds of North America, the British framed their lot in the New World as an epic struggle against a wilderness of vast, biblical proportions, and one infested with deviltry. Both the wilderness and the satanic heathens who lived there had to be eradicated to bring forth the light of Christianity and civilization.
FROM THE MOMENT he set foot on Cape Cod in autumn of 1620, William Bradford, the leader of the religiously inspired “Pilgrims” aboard the Mayflower anchored offshore, cast the colony’s fate in opposition to the American wilds:
“[W]hat could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men…”
The early New England preacher and poet Michael Wigglesworth wrote of the same evil desolation:
[A] waste and howling wilderness,37
Where none inhabited
But hellish fiends, and brutish men
That Devils worshiped.
To the Puritans it was a simple fact that Satan had long ago seized the New World wilderness and its Indian inhabitants for his own purposes, and it was their God-given role to counter him. While to the French Acadians, the Indian chiefs, or sagamores, like Membertou were held in high respect for their wisdom, generosity, and knowledge of the woods, to the New England Puritans the greater the sagamore, the greater his evil. The “chief Sagamores” of the Indians, wrote the preacher Cotton Mather, are “horrid Sorcerers, and hellish Conjurers and such as Conversed with Daemons.”
By the time of Thoreau’s birth, in 1817, that old Puritan New England fear of wilderness and its deviltry still resonated. The wilderness and its Indian inhabitants were still something to be eradicated, although both now lay far from his placid Concord, where the Indians long ago had been run off or killed and the forests mostly cultivated into farms. When Thoreau went to live on Walden Pond and then headed to the Maine Woods in search of “Indian wisdom,” he attempted a radical leap from the New England past—away from two centuries of that old Puritan fear of the evil and desolate wilderness, and toward the embrace of it as once absorbed by young Charles Biencourt and Charles de La Tour and the other French who had lived with the Micmac in Acadia.
I WONDERED HOW OFTEN Charles Biencourt or Charles de La Tour encountered other humans while paddling the Upper St. John—Micmac or Maliseet Indians in birch-bark canoes, most likely, or perhaps their own French colleagues. We saw no one, until the fourth night. Again it had poured all day, causing the river to rise noticeably. During the day’s paddling, it had broadened to one hundred yards, swishing fast between dark, forested banks—undulating walls of green. The forest looked impenetrable. I sensed why it might have repelled the Puritans, and why Biencourt and La Tour, taught by the Micmac, tr
aveled by canoe along the open streams instead of through the tangled, dark woods.
In late afternoon, a grassy opening with a campsite appeared on the left bank, at a place known as Nine-Mile Bridge. Once serving an old logging road, the bridge itself was long gone, washed out in a decades-ago ice jam. Now only a cable stretched over the river with a pulley system to haul supplies across.
From our campsite, through a gap in the woods, we could see a cabin a few hundred yards off. On the map a spot was marked “Warden Camp.” A shiny white pickup truck parked next to the cabin glowed eerily in the gloomy woods, like a bit of pearly shell on a black sand beach. We didn’t approach it.
After dinner, we were sprawled on our bags, reading aloud to one another as dusk and steady rain fell outside, when there was a sudden, startling voice.
“I have two yellow Labs, but don’t be afraid of them,” it said, just outside the tent.
I pulled on my pants and rain jacket and climbed out.
A gray-bearded man stood there, the droplets streaming off his baseball cap and past his glasses. He looked like he’d been in the woods a long time. His khakis were soaked, and he had left his heavy flannel shirt unbuttoned, over a T-shirt. Red, angry splotches of blackfly welts banded his neck and wrists. He carried a large, insulated coffee mug, from which he sipped. It made me feel itchy just to look at him.
“I saw the children down here, and I didn’t want them to be afraid of the dogs,” he said.
“Are you the warden?” I asked.
“No, no,” he replied. “The warden camp hasn’t been here for years and years.”
He said people called him “Nine-Mile Mike.” A professor from upstate New York, where he was married and lived most of the year, Nine-Mile Mike had long ago bought the cabin as a vacation spot. He’d come up here for a few weeks to make repairs. Nine-Mile Mike was very eager to talk. In fact, it seemed as if he hadn’t talked for days, and hungered for it.
“Do you know anything about the local history?” I asked.
The words came pouring out of Nine-Mile Mike, in the dusky rain, as I stood and nodded and dripped water from my hair and he dashed from subject to subject and the cascade of words rushed over me, and the children and Amy remained hunkered in the tent.
“Have you heard of Seven Islands?” he asked.
I knew it only as a group of islands on the map a short way downstream. I knew Nine-Mile Bridge was so named because it lay nine miles above these Seven Islands.
Nothing there now, Mike said, it’s all overgrown, but it was a booming logging camp in its day. It had a hotel, a school. There were farms along the river, too, to supply the camps. There was a camp here, too, at Nine-Mile. You can still see the old cellar holes out in the forest.
I’d seen them earlier, while searching for dry firewood—dank, mossy depressions in thick groves of fir, with an old corroded iron bedstead poking out from the moss, and ancient scatterings of rusted buckets and cans.
“Do you know who Helen Hamlin is?” he asked.
I didn’t.
“She lived here in the thirties with her husband, who was a warden. She wrote a book called Nine Mile Bridge.”
It struck me as odd that out here—in the middle of what I called a “blank spot”—some seventy years before had lived a woman who wrote a book about this very place where I expected to find a kind of historical nothingness. But, later, as I thought about it, I realized that it was my concept of “historical nothingness” that didn’t really exist.
So much had happened here, along the St. John, over the centuries—to use one conventional marker of time—or over the millennia, or over the geologic ages since the Appalachian Mountains uplifted and eroded and Ice Age glaciers scraped and sculpted the rock and melted, and the St. John River took its current form. Through the great cycles of time and geology animals lived and died in forests along its banks, fish swam and spawned in its waters, and, starting perhaps 12,000 to 14,000 years ago, humans traveled along this river—on foot and in canoes. They loved and they warred, they married and they died, they hunted and they fished, they built alliances and they chose leaders, they danced and they feasted, they worshipped spirits and they healed the ill, they told stories and they had dreams, they cradled children in their arms and sang them to sleep.
It existed, all of this, along the St. John. Our notion of “blankness” reflects whether an unbroken chain of people has passed down the events—either in stories told or accounts written. Big gaps yawned. In my own mind, these wild, uppermost reaches of the St. John had largely remained a “blank spot” from the early 1600s, when Marc Lescarbot recorded stories of the first Acadians, until today. Rather, it remained a blank spot to me until Nine-Mile Mike, dripping wet and blackfly-bitten, popped out of the rainy woods that fourth evening and told me about Helen Hamlin.
HELEN HAMLIN’S BOOK, Nine Mile Bridge: Three Years in the Maine Woods, had, in fact, been a bestseller in its day.
Helen Leidy was the eldest of six children38 growing up in the 1920s and 1930s in Fort Kent, Maine, a bilingual town along the middle reaches of the St. John River, where it forms the Canadian border. With both English and French at her command, she attended teacher’s college in nearby Madawaska. The principal at the school told her riveting stories about his adventures in the Upper St. John area hunting and fishing, and about the life in the lumber camps. Leidy was not entirely new to the woods—her grandfather and uncle were game wardens, and she had spent her summers canoeing Maine’s rivers and lakes. Upon graduating from Madawaska, she jumped at the chance to take a teacher’s post at a remote lumber camp at Churchill Lake. Surrounded by French-Canadian lumberjacks and teaching children in the small log school, she met a young game warden named “Curly” Hamlin—“a tall, broad-shouldered woodsman, with a square jaw and clear blue eyes.” They soon married, and, after the winter of 1938–39 together in a warden’s camp on Umsaskis Lake, they transferred to the “Warden’s Camp”—as it was marked on my map—at Nine-Mile Bridge.
They spent two years here in the isolation of Nine-Mile Bridge on the Upper St. John, where Helen learned to drive a dog team, hunt for deer, snowshoe, and live snowbound for months, eagerly awaiting winter to lift and the river to thaw.
On April 27, Helen and Curly were sitting lazily on the front porch of their cabin as the snow dripped from the roof in the warm spring sun when they heard a sound like a distant but large motor that brought them to their feet. In her book, she describes the scene as it unfolded.
“It’s the river!” she shouted to Curly.
Curly started for the bridge. “The ice is going out!”39
I raced after him…soon the faint roar became thunderous and angry. A ten-foot wall of tumbling, crackling, fast-moving ice rolled around the upper bend of the river, sweeping everything before it, gathering momentum and throwing two-ton ice floes on the high banks. It uprooted trees and crumbled the fettered ice sheet in its path. The dammed water behind pushed relentlessly, increasing in force and power and coming closer and closer…We stepped off the bridge just as the ice struck. The iron girders quivered and the ground around us was shaken. From the knoll I stopped to look back, thinking it had surely carried away the bridge. But with a muffled rumbling it ground its way slowly between the piers…had it gone out, so would the camp.
Hamlin captured the old way of logging just as it was ending, with the big lumber camps, the French Canadians with their axes, the horse-drawn sleds hauling the logs over the frozen roads, and the spring river drives to send the logs downstream to the mills. With the end of the river drives, motor-powered logging arrived, and logging roads and large trucks began to crisscross the Maine Woods.
Hamlin left the woods with the birth of their daughter and Curly’s illness, and wrote Nine Mile Bridge, which fascinated readers with the exploits of a woman in the wilderness. After the book spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 1945, Helen used the proceeds from its publisher, W. W. Norton, to help buy an outfitter
’s camp on a Maine lake, soon divorced Curly, and married a young graduate student in ichthyology who worked for a summer at a timber company in the Maine Woods. Curly died two years later at age forty. Thus began a second life for Helen Hamlin—and three more children—far from the Nine-Mile Bridge as she accompanied her husband, Robert Lennon, in his work as a fisheries researcher in various posts throughout the United States and the world, as if she were making up for the isolation of her early life.
When Lennon worked in the Midwest, she returned to school, now at the University of Wisconsin, to reaccredit herself as a teacher of French. She taught on and off throughout the rest of her life, at both high school and college level. When Lennon’s job took them to West Africa for six years on a UN mission to prevent river blindness, Helen worked as a French translator for the State Department. Through the years, she also developed a love of painting, and took commissions to paint portraits. While she took her children on regular visits to northern Maine to make sure they understood their heritage, Helen and Robert Lennon finally retired to Minnesota.
Now the Nine-Mile Bridge, where she had once lived, was no more—not even pilings in the river. The ice had taken it all away. Helen had died in Minnesota in 2004. In the course of two years, she had managed to preserve an entire bookful of stories that happened right here—in this spot in northern Maine I called “blank.” How many thousands of other stories had occurred here that I would never know?
HENRY DAVID THOREAU ILLUMINATED another corner of this blank spot. If Thoreau hadn’t tried to climb Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest peak, in 1846 and described his attempt in intimate psychic detail, we might think of wilderness in an entirely different way today. Our idea of “wilderness” might include people, for it was on that climb up Mount Katahdin that Thoreau tossed out humans from his vision of “wild.”