Cape Cod's Figure in Black

by Bill Russo

  “I have fifty braves left, with fifty bows and one thousand arrows. You have probably 400 soldiers, all with fire-sticks. Do you know what this means, Captain Franklin?”

  “Tell me old man, what do you think it means?” sneered the Captain as his horse began fidgeting as if in anticipation of a battle charge.

  “It means that you will kill all of my people - but not before we kill at least fifty of yours! And I promise you,” said the ancient chief in the powerful voice of a much younger warrior, “That you will be the first to die! I spit on your offer. I spit on you.”

  With amazing speed for one so time worn, Chief Mashantampaine wheeled around and returned to his tribesmen, who were amazed at the fighting words of their brave leader.

  “I’ll give you 15 minutes to think about this and accept my offer,” shouted Franklin as the Chief reached the warm embraces offered by his son Sagem and the elders of the tribe.

  The Chief and his closest advisors calmly strolled to a glade behind a stand of scrub pines. Mashantampaine produced a ceremonial pipe. He filled it and lit it from the coals of a fire that he had built there earlier in the day.

  “Be seated around the fire my sons and brothers and we shall pass the pipe. Perhaps in the clouds of the smoke we shall see whether we should back my boast and die today, or take the slow road to our meeting with the Great Spirit.”

  “The old buzzard is lounging around with his councilmen and smoking a pipe!” reported Sgt. Thomas who had been dispatched to observe the ‘savages’ actions.

  “I don’t like it Sergeant. I expected they would simply fall in line and give in right away. Didn’t they see the bloody head of their friend on the pike?”

  “I think they’ll give in Captain. They’re just making a little show of it.”

  “But we can’t be sure Sergeant. We’re in a bad position here. There’s no cover. We’re in the open. Muskets are far more deadly than their stringed weapons, but bows are faster to use, even if they are not as deadly. I have no doubt that the old monster can make good on his threat. They can take out at least fifty of us before we eliminate them. I don’t want that kind of a blood bath today.”

  “Right Captain, especially if it’s you and probably me too that’s going to get killed first.”

  The warm breeze coming from the big water swirled the pipe smoke around the heads of the Chief’s council members.

  “We are not going to die today,” said the Chief. “I pushed back at them to make space for bargaining room. We cannot win in a fight with them. We must then forge the best deal we can make.”

  “I disagree. We should not die like a wounded rabbit hiding in a hole. We should strike now while they are in the open. We may kill a hundred of them before we fall. And we’ll die as heroic warriors,” shouted Sagem.

  “It’s a brave and good idea that you have my son,” agreed the old chief. “But what of our women and children back at our village? We have more than 20 wig-wams filled with squaws and young ones. Think of what will happen to them if we perish on the battle field this afternoon. Our children will probably be killed instantly. The women will wish they were murdered right away, for their lot will be rape for the pretty ones, torture for the old and the ugly, and then slavery, for any that survive.”

  “You are wise and right, Father. My tongue spoke before my brain had a chance to stop it. I vote with you. We should try to get them to increase the gold offer and also attempt to bargain for more land.”

  There was no slaughter of the Nobscussets that day; but as predicted they died a slow, lingering death over the next few decades.

  Chapter Twelve:

  The Nobscusset Miracles

  Mashantampaine, in standing up to the European murderers was able to force a few concessions. Captain Franklin increased his offer of gold by twelve more ounces and added another 300 acres to the ‘gift’ of land.

  Franklin departed for Boston but left a score of heavily armed troops to enforce the boundaries of the reservation. He erected a solid wall of fear around it that no man dared to cross, because of what happened to the first Nobscusset brave who tried it.

  Less than six months after the tribe was shoved into its tiny enclave, Luke Rainwater, one of the strongest men of the village, sneaked out of the reservation in the darkest hour of early morning. He was on a desperate search to find food for his family.

  The whole tribe was suffering, for in that short space of half a dozen ‘moons’, there was little game left to hunt, the tiny spring that was the only water source was nearly dry, there were few fish left in the spring, and the sparse crops that had been harvested were nearly gone. The gold that they had received in mock payment for their own land, had been spent on the most basic items needed to stay alive - flour, beans, rice, and such.

  Under the shield of an especially murky night Luke crept through the hemlocks and spruces that provided shelter from high winds but little else that would aid the people. He reached the wide road, now called the King’s Highway, and made straight for the ‘big water’.

  In the twilight of dawn he arrived at the edge of the beach. The wet sand at the shoreline where it was kissed by gentle waves seemed to be alive. It was moving slowly from the water towards him.

  A ray of sun illuminated a slice of the moving sand, revealing a pair of black, protruding eyes with no pupils, and a long dark brown antenna next to each eye.

  “Pig food,” he scoffed to himself. “Lobsters! Hundreds of them. It’s not much, but I can fill my sacks quickly. Even these creatures are better food than the bark of trees.”

  Lobsters were anything but a delicacy to the people of Cape Cod in colonial days. They were more common than ants at a picnic and almost as unwelcome. The Europeans fed lobsters to their prison population, but the King in a rare display of kindness had ruled that people in jail could be fed lobsters no more than three times a week.

  Slowly and carefully Luke Rainwater approached the largest one near him, close to 10 pounds it was, and in possession of more than enough strength in its claw to break a careless man’s arm.

  Whipping the sack through the air like a hatchet, he drew it down over the claws and head of the crusty brown monster, and bagged it. Working quickly he harvested as many of the creatures as he could carry and headed back towards home.

  Though it was still early morning, the King’s highway was crowded with Europeans both on horseback and on foot. Some were on their way to work, while others were out for a day of recreation. Unluckily for the Nobscusset brave with the sacks of lobsters, there was a third group; six mounted soldiers belonging to the hated Captain Franklin.

  They saw Luke and gave chase. He had a head-start and might have made it to safety except that he wouldn’t drop the lobsters. They caught him just a hundred yards from the reservation.

  Being civilized and following the law, the soldiers gave Luke a trial. It lasted one minute, after which he was pronounced guilty and killed on the spot. His head was cut off and put on a pole at the entrance to the reservation.

  Worse still, they had drawn and quartered his body and hung the pieces in trees. If you do not know what it means to draw and quarter a person, I’ll not sicken you in this narrative by describing it.

  The horror did not stop with the desecration of the body. The ruthless soldiers entered the reservation and demanded to see the leader of the ‘savages’.

  “We have something for you Chief,” said Sgt. Rathbone of Franklin’s militia. He handed a small parcel to a brave who brought it to the Chief.

  The chief pulled open the wrapping, which was a red scarf, and his heart sank to his toenails when he saw what was inside - the severed right hand of Luke Rainwater.

  “Let this be a lesson to you all,” boomed the barbaric Sgt. Rathbone, “The next time one of you savages tries to stray from your pen, I’ll kill not only the offender but also all of his family.”

  With tears flowing from her eyes, Pr
incess Scargo told John Deer that no further attempts were made to escape their confinement in an area just big enough to allow them to slowly starve to extinction.

  Her father Sagem, who became Chief after Mashantampaine’s death, devised a masterful plan that he hoped would save the people and bring new prosperity.

  “Our only water source is drying up and we are dying. Our fresh water spring becomes shallower each day. The depth is so low the fish have to splash themselves with their fins to keep wet. I saw my daughter Scargo sitting by the tiny water hole with great tears running down her beautiful face.

  “As one large drop from her eyes hit the water, three fish struggled to the ripples. They began happily splashing and jumping high into the air as if given new life from Scargo’s salty tears.

  “I had a vision of a 100 acre pond filled with clear water. It was brim full of fresh water to drink and to give us new life. Fresh water, but fresh water inspired by a salty tear from our Princess.

  “Today, our strongest bowman, White Wolf, will shoot an arrow to the west. It will mark the beginning of a lake near the place the invaders call “Yarmouth”. Then our warrior will take his bow and aim it to the east. He will shoot his arrow in the opposite direction as far as he can. Where it lands will be the eastern shore of our new lake that we shall call, Scargo’s Lake.”

  From a mound of discarded clamshells from the big water, piled high in the days before the tribe was confined, each man and woman selected the largest and sharpest shell available. They followed the chief to the place in the middle of the two arrow-shoots.

  “We will dig here. We will keep digging until we have made a long, narrow hole between the arrow-shoots. My vision tells me this hole will fill with pure water that will come from beneath the earth. It will swell up and fill the hole in three days – but only if we can dig it in an equal amount of time.”

  So it was that Sagem tasked his small group with the impossible job of digging a one hundred acre lake in just three days, with no tools but clam shells. The scientists of the day would have said the job was impossible, and yet it was done.

  In truth, the endeavor was difficult, but made much easier due to the fact that Cape Cod soil is mostly sand. The dirt quickly turns to sand when pierced to a depth of little more than a foot.

  The people found that shortly after they penetrated the thin layer of topsoil, the sand became saturated and nearly pushed itself out of the way with very little effort required. With this assistance, which Sagem said was the work of the Great Spirit, the project was completed in the allotted time and the lake swelled rapidly with sparkling, cool water.

  From atop Scargo Hill, created from the sand that was extracted to make the pond, Sagem rested and looked down on the lake. A wide smile crossed his face and he said, “Scargo, your lake is complete and I as I wished it, is in the shape of a fish. It is my hope that now our tribe can be renewed and that you will lead us back to strength.”

  “No Father, you are our leader and you are the one who built the lake.”

  Scargo Lake, seen from the hill. Photo copyright, Bill Russo.

  “I built it Scargo, but you inspired it. My time is over. You are the new Chief of the people.”

  That night under a full moon that lit the Hemlocks as though it were twilight time, Sagem left the people to be with the Great Spirit. Scargo became the Chief of the Nobscussetts. She was destined to be the last of a line of nobility that reached back more than 2,000 years.

  In less than six months the fish in the pond grew fat and plentiful. The people, though not fat and not plentiful; didn’t have the gaunt, starved look they bore before Sagem had his vision of the arrow-shoots that set the bounds of Scargo Lake.

  The everyday life of the people was much more comfortable because of the prosperity brought by the pond, but Scargo knew that the tribe was doomed. The few women of child bearing age, including the princess herself, were having difficulty getting pregnant. Among those who were successful, the children either died at birth or shortly after.

  The best that the lovely Princess could hope for was to make the last years of the Nobscussetts as pleasant as possible. Under her leadership the top of newly created Scargo Hill was transformed. She directed the Braves to flatten the top of the rise and plant part of it with Hemlocks.

  Two rows of young Hemlock trees were set in the soil, eight to a row. In future they would grow tall and straight and resemble soldiers guarding the place where the tribe lived and died.

  In the middle of the flattened top of the hill, the braves placed all of the rocks that had been dug up during the building of the lake. The pile of boulders reached more than twenty five feet into the air and took the shape of an Egyptian pyramid. Just after the rock mound was completed, nature put a temporary halt to further work.

  History gives few details of the great storm that devastated Cape Cod in the late 1600s, but Princess Scargo, who witnessed the torment said this, “In the second year after my father Sagem went to the Great Spirit, the Medicine Man warned us that a ferocious storm was crossing the ocean that could do us even more harm than the Europeans had done.

  “The warning that we received allowed us to take precautions and we were safe from the tempest, but the Europeans were devastated. Many died, much livestock was destroyed, as were homes, farms, and businesses.

  “One thing only, happened to the people of the Nobscusset Tribe – it was a good thing. It was a gift from the Great Spirit.

  “During the height of the storm, the triangular mound of rocks that we had placed on the hill was transformed. Boulders were tossed, cracked, and reshaped by the fierce winds. When the storm was over, we walked to the hill and were amazed to see that the pile of boulders had been molded and pressed into the likeness of the Great Spirit Himself. The great stone face stood fifty feet high.

  The Great Stone Face was carved not by man, but by nature itself. The tribe believed that the figure was The Great Spirit himself. The Europeans feared that the face might be that of their hated enemy whom they called ‘King Phillip’

  Scargo had her braves dig a large hole directly next to the image of the Great Spirit. After their work was done, she told her people that the top of the hill, guarded by the stone face, was not for the living. It was to be a place for the dead.

  The living would spend the rest of their lives below, in quiet repose of the sandy shores of the pond. They would be warm from the sun in the summer and heated in the winter by the fires in their wig wams. Their destiny was still one of doom, but thanks to Scargo’s lake, food was plentiful from the fish that swam in it, and the thirsty game that patrolled the shores.

  As they died off one by one, the Princess had the bodies of her people put in the deep hole next to the Great Stone Face. Sadly, with each new death, the face made of rock began to sag – at first the change was barely noticeable; but after a few years, it mimicked the visages of the old ones. New lines and cracks appeared almost daily. The chin of the rock face drooped lower and lower toward the ground.

  Even the mighty pointed crest that aped the outline of a royal feather and headdress began to flatten, crack, and threaten to topple.

  Despite the oddity of the crumbling of the stone face, the years passed peacefully. Resigned to their own mortality and the extinction of the tribe, they lived each day as fully as possible. Twenty years after Sagem’s death, there were but twenty of the people left.

  Each month, old age took another until finally there were only two, Scargo and White Wolf. He was the once mighty young bowman whose long, arrow-shoots marked the boundaries of the lake that brought peace and a measure of contentment, if not rebirth, to Mashantampaine’s ‘Indians’.

  Princess Scargo and White Wolf made a solemn, mournful pact. At the moment of death, the lone survivor would climb into the burial hole. With the last of their strength, he or she would remove enough earth from the base of the stone face so that all fifty feet of its crumbling mass wou
ld topple down and seal off forever the tomb of the Nobscussetts.

  Sickness in the form of a virulent fever came for White Wolf at the end of summer. He crawled to the crumbling stone face and stood at the edge of the once deep hole - nearly full now, after receiving the remains of the last members of the vanishing tribe. The Great Stone Face was barely a face anymore. Whole sections had flopped downward and others had fallen. A thousand wrinkles in the form of fissures and cracks, had nearly destroyed the once striking image of a rugged, brave warrior.

  His last thought as he stepped off the edge and into his grave was that Scargo wasn’t going to have to move much earth to get the stone face to fall down and cover their tomb; because in its weakened state any stiff breeze might cause a complete collapse.

  During the last weeks of her life, Princess Scargo totally abandoned earthly cares and pleasures. She stopped eating food, subsisting solely by chewing bits of birch tree bark with occasional sips of water.

  She was ready to join White Wolf and the rest of her tribe in the rock covered hole that would lead them to the Great Spirit. She was fully willing to go, but couldn’t do so until she finished the project she had started – a written history of the Nobscussett people.

  As a young girl, before Captain Stanley had imprisoned the tribe, Scargo had been taught to read and write by a kindly parishioner of the Congregational Church of Orleans.

  In anger after the Europeans stole the tribe’s land, she had rejected the white man’s ‘talking paper’ and had not read so much as a newspaper in decades. Scargo was conflicted. Eager as she was to write the story of her people, she was equally anxious that no white man or woman should ever read it. She decided to write it. She also resolved that the legend of the Nobscussetts would be buried with her.