“Devils…Among Us”: The Portrayal of Native Americans in White Folklore.

by Robert A. Geake

From the beginnings of the settlement of New England, an uneasy and sometimes disquieting shared existence occurred, often determined by the personalities of leaders involved in both white settlements and Native encampments. Cotton Mather wrote in his Magnalia Christi Americana, that the colony of Hartford was by 1698,  “improved with many wealthy husbandmen, and is become no small part of the best granary for all New England. And the same good Providence has all along so preserved them from annoyance by the Indians, that although at their first setting down there were few towns but what wisely perswaded a body of Indians to dwell near them: whereby such kindnesses passed between them that they always dwelt peaceably together; nevertheless there are few of those towns but what have seen their body of Indians utterly expirtated by nothing but mortality wasting them”.

Of course, mortality had long come to the Native Americans by way of disease, poverty, and English weapons by the time of Mather’s writing, and these bodies of Indians living near white settlements were but remnants of once thriving tribes who were now mostly reduced to trading or working with the Europeans for a livelihood, once the natural resources of land and game were diminished.

Early white historians after Mather, largely portrayed the Native Americans as “noble savages” often highlighting their deep respect for man and nature, a tenderness toward their wives and children, and a moral code in life and tribal governance that was to promote the same ideals in white leaders, though they rarely acknowledged the influence.

These ideals were bolstered by the popularity of Indian treaties published in Great Britain and America, and often sold in coffeehouses. The novelty of these treaties, showcasing for the first time, the eloquence of Native American leaders were to have a tremendous impact on some of the men who would later become known among the founders of the United States. But in the years that followed, as the long brokered treaties broke down, and the tribes involved were defeated, removed, and reduced to a small number of survivors on reservations, a shift became perceptible in the writing of both scholarly and popular historians.

By the middle of the 19^th century, as local state and municipal histories began to be written of the American republic,  this vision of Native Americans was clarified both in academic and popular histories, with the long defeated indigenous leaders eulogized as heroic defenders of their land, and the descendants of their people who remained vilified for their ongoing struggle with the white borne disease of alcoholism,  poverty and poor education, and most of all for their dependency, as many now saw it,  upon white society.

As early as 1859, Henry David Thoreau wrote in a passage that recalled his Father’s and other settlers relations with Native Americans, that

“Some have spoken slightingly of the Indians, as a race possessing so little skill and wit, so low in the scale of humanity, and so brutish that they hardly deserve to be remembered,-using only the terms “miserable”, “wretched”, “pitiful” and the like. In writing their histories of this country they have so hastily disposed of  this refuse of humanity (as they might have called it) which littered and defiled the shore and the interior….If wild men, so much more like ourselves than they are unlike, have inhabited these shores before us, we wish to know particularly what manner of men they were, how they lived here, their relation to nature, their arts and their customs, their fancies and superstitions. They paddled over these waters, they wandered in these woods, they had their fancies or beliefs connected with the sea and the forest…..It frequently happens that the historian, though he professes more humanity than the trapper, mountain man or gold digger, who shoots one as a wild beast, really exhibits and practices a similar inhumanity to him, wielding a pen instead of a rifle.”[1]

In the popular histories of New England especially, which seemed to be published amidst waves of nostalgic Americana that washed through every second or third generation, these “Indian tales” collected from various communities and all seeming to hold an underlying moral invective, reflected the vices and shiftiness now associated with Native Americans and underscore the prejudice that white Americans displayed towards their race. These tales of wandering Indians, itinerant and lazy, sure to be drunk at any given time of day- reflected the stature that white citizens placed on Native Americans Those who attempted integration were viewed with suspicion, and so given the basest tasks of manual labor and the lowest of wages. The Native American then, is almost always portrayed in these tales as a hapless, overindulgent, and essentially lost individual; a comic figure of what had once been a proud race.

One of the earliest stories from Rhode Island is a compelling example. The tale involves the ghost of an indigent Indian who haunted a room of the old Black Horse Tavern in North Scituate. The tavern had been in operation on the turnpike road to Providence for several generations by the time that Rueben Jencks owned the place and the haunting began. It seems that guests who slept in the room would be awakened by a fearfully dressed Indian, who grabbed hold of their hair and lifted their heads from the pillow while wielding a tomahawk, as though to scalp his terrified victim. This occurred so often that eventually, no one would sleep in what was now called the “Indian chamber”, even when Jenks lowered the rate.

Neighbors told him that the Indian ghost was one who had frequented the Pine Tree tavern just up the road, and was doubtless determined to scare off his customers. But when Mrs. Jenks took the room for her own, the haunting took a decidedly different turn. With the first visitation, the Indian had grabbed her hair, but then led her outside and pointed repeatedly to the base of a large cedar by the front gate, “muttering in broken English of his need to avenge some insult to his race”.

When Mrs. Jenks told her husband of her experience, he determined that the Indian was pointing to what must undoubtably be treasure buried on the property, and promptly dug furiously around the roots of the tree. The Indian continued his visits, taking Mrs Jenks outside to other trees, including their precious orchard, which Mr. Jenks nearly destroyed in hunting for treasure before he gave up, and determined like his friends, that the Indian was merely bent on ruining his livelihood.

One night the Indian visited the Jenks eleven year old daughter and led her outside to the old carriage house, now packed with decades of discarded furniture, tools and trunks left moldering for longer than anyone remembered. The Indian pointed to one such trunk in the loft, and left the girl to tell the others. Though Mr. Jenks now had reputedly little interest in following the ghost’s signs and directions, his wife was determined to resolve the cause of the haunting. She unpacked the loft and brought the box out with the help of some frightened household help, and they opened the lid to find an ancient wig-makers kit and mannequin. It seems that Jenks grandfather had manufactured wigs on the side to sell to his guests and that the humiliation spoken of by the Indian had occurred during this time, when he was supposed to have attempted to scalp one of these guests and walked away with a bloodless wig in his hand.

This oft –told tale was repeated with some variation in Edward Field’s “Colonial Taverns” and more fully in Alice Morse Earle’s “Stage Coach and Tavern Days”, both published at the end of the 19^th century. Ms. Earle reveals that the source for her version came from the pen of one Parson Pillsbury, who had been present during Reuben Jenks hunt for treasure, and recorded the “Indian speak” as the daughter told it to him. One can presume then that the pious minister would want the tale, however the incidents at its roots occurred, to have a moral, much like the biblical fables he drew from for his sermons.

But the Parson was not alone in this respect. Tales from travelers and old settlers often reflected those fears they faced,  the temptations of wealth and licentiousness, the alcohol that brought ruin to both natives and newcomers. There were many tales about greed and the ills brought on by the pursuit of riches. The Native American, to Mrs. Earle,  “simply belonged to a class of ghosts…that…have a passion for pointing out places and saying treasure or skeletons are buried therein; whereas it always proves that nothing of the sort is ever found.”

Indeed, tales of this sort were abundant in white folklore. The spirits deceiving gullible  people like Jenks, were not tethered to this earth of their own free will, and so were often associated with the Devil.  Sometimes the places of Native American history became the havens of these spirits.

In Charlestown, Rhode Island, the Coronation Rock of the Narragansett people where the Sachems were once received, became a lonely and desolate place with the tribe’s reduced numbers, and the state and town taking their lands. In this period, the place became woven into New England folklore with the story of one Tom Rogers, most recently retold by Edward R. Snow.

Rogers was originally from Nantucket, and perhaps that upheaval, with the wilderness suddenly just outside his door, gave him the certainty that the region he lived in was haunted, that there were spirits in those unfamiliar woods, and that they gathered about the Coronation Rock. One night after drinking a good quantity of spirits to fortify his own, he set off to walk right past the site of the Rock on his way home. And sure enough,

“ as he approached  the rock he saw a glow through the trees and heard the sound of a fiddle playing like mad, and when he reached the rock he saw that a wild dance was in progress. Finding a mischievous looking maid alone on a mossy hummock, Tom quickly took her by the waist and took her to the clearing –as they danced, he had the sensation of soaring above the clearing and noticed that the crowd were now seated watching them dance. As they separated and came back again, Tom noticed his partner’s features were changing from the rosy-cheeked girl he first noticed to that of a lank and withered hag whose eyes now glowed green with evil, and whose sharp teeth now projected from the once delicate mouth.  He flung off his coat and hat, vest, and then fled for his life, tumbling once in the woods and hearing growling, hissing, and a strange language about him. He had the sensation of a hideous form hovering over him.”

When Rogers woke in the woods the next morning he noticed that his jackknife bore two portrait of the witch he’d met the night before. When he reached home he fell ill for a time but recovered, and thereafter eschewed alcohol, got married, became a member of the church and eventually, a deacon in good standing.

The lesson in Christian morality is abundantly clear in this tale, and likely originated with the backlash against alcohol and the frivolity that had become prevalent in the taverns by the turn of the 18^th century. These religion-based morals however, were also placed within those  “Indian tales”  of Native Americans.

Another Indian place of memory, which entered into the canon of White folklore is the “Devil’s Rock” in North Kingston, which before the European arrivals, had long been a gathering place of the Narragansett tribe.

By 1671, the rock had become a boundary marker for the initial “Fones purchase”, and thus out of Narragansett hands. Situated just north of Wickford, in the town of North Kingston, The Devil’s Rock is part of a long, granite ledge that had once been hidden deep in the woods, and then exposed, as a railway, and then a road were built in the twentieth century. The Rock is the site of a legend borne from Colonial times into the present and the world of technology aided exploration of the paranormal and haunted places.

The tale has a few variations, but by and large has remained intact into modern folklore.  The legend of Devil’s Rock is an intermingling of Native American and White belief, an acknowledgement of a shared uncertainty about the afterlife, which takes the form of each culture’s entity.  The story’s first appearance in print seems to be a version published in 1850, but by then, the tale was generations old:

An Indian woman had murdered a white man (either in Boston, or Wickford, (depending upon the version). She had made her way to the ledge and there knelt and prayed to Hobomoken, the Native god who was both a benevolent and cruel deity, often called upon when a Native American faced an insurmountable uncertainty over an event or the fate of a loved one. [2]

As she prayed, a stern faced Englishman appeared beside her. Believing herself to be discovered by the white authorities, she attempted briefly to escape, but was seized by the arm. The Indian woman called out again to Hobomoken to save her. The black frocked Englishman told her “I’m Hobbomoken”, and grabbing her by the waist, stomped his feet on the rock and took her in flight to Purgatory Chasm from which he threw her to the turbulent waters below.[3]

In his version, Edward R. Fields concludes the tale by telling readers that

“to this day may be seen near Wickford the footprints of Satan on surface of the ledge near the road. One has the form of a cloven hoof, and the other has the shape and size of a human foot, even to the mark of the great toe.”

In other versions of the story, the last mark of the devil can be found on a ledge on Block Island, said to be where Satan landed before diving into Block Island Sound. Other tales from the East Coast concern similar impressions that have been interpreted in folklore as “the Devil’s footprints”.  In Monteville, Connecticut, an impression on the rocky ledges of Shelter Island is the stepping off point for the legend that

“when the Evil Spirit left the Island he took three long strides, the first on Shelter Island, the second on Orient Point, and the third on Montauk, whence he plunged into the sea.”[4]

The Rhode Island tale however, is more firmly rooted in a moral tradition, as is the Narragansett fable. In the popular version that appeared in white folklore, the Indian woman, fleeing from her crime, is brought to justice by the Devil, the very god she prayed to for mercy.

The Native American interpretation of the stern Englishman as the “devil’s disguise” has precedent in earlier Native evocations of Hobomoken, also called Cheepie in other Algonkian tribes. The missionary Daniel Gookin in his Two Voyages to New England (1673), recounts the experience of being woken by two Natives and told that they had fled from a vision of Hobomoken:

“Two Indians and an Indess came running into our house, crying they should all die. Cheepie was gone over the field gliding in the air with a long rope hanging from one of his legs: we asked what he was like, and they said all wone Englishman, clothed with a hat and coat, shoos and stockings…”[5]

        Another site of Native American memory that became integrated into White folklore is that of Bish-Bash Falls- a natural formation whose flow of water assumes from its heights the form of a standing female figure. Native American oral history recounts the story of the Mohican woman named Bish-Bash who despite her protestations of innocence, was found guilty of adultery by the tribal council, and condemned to death. Her sentence was to be carried out, as the story goes, by strapping Bish-Bash with leather thongs to a canoe secured upstream from the falls. As Mary Bolte writes in her modern retelling:

“Bish-Bash was to be bound to the vessel, which was then to be released and drawn by the current over the fateful cataract.”

      On the appointed day of execution, the Indians gathered on the ledge above the waterfall. Included in the group was Bish-Bash’s infant daughter, White Swan, an innocent bystander to the punishment about to be inflicted on her Mother. As the sentence neared, a fine mist enveloped the people, and at the same time a ring of butterflies materialized and circled around the condemned woman’s head. At the last moment, Bish-Bash managed to break away, and quickly flung herself over the falls, a trail of butterflies following her to the basin below.

Her people were saddened by the whole affair but most felt that Bish-Bash’s avoidance of her punishment proved that she must be in league with evil spirits, and that she might also have been a witch.

Her daughter was brought up, as is tribal tradition, within the various families among the Mohican, and grew to be as lovely as her Mother was said to have been. She married the son of a Chief, but then when she could not bear him children, he found another, which filled White Swan with remorse.

In her dreams she began to hear Bish-Bash beckoning her to the pool at the bottom of the Falls. In time she went and sat forlornly on a crag overlooking the waterfall. One day as her husband came from the woods with the gift of a white butterfly, White Swan suddenly leapt up and plunged from the rock to the water cascading below. Her husband’s hands opened in horror, releasing the butterfly, which he could only watch follow his wife’s descent. He too, dove after to save her somehow, but all that remained of his effort was his broken body, found by the tribe’s people who came searching for the couple. White Swan’s body, like her Mother’s for whom the Falls are named, was never found.

Mary Bolte, in her retelling, evokes the mysterious spirit of this place:

“… the cascading water sometimes assumes the unmistaken form of a woman and on moonlit nights a smiling female face can be seen beneath the surface of the pool below.”

White folklore adapted this Native American mythology behind a place name to evoke another moral fable into the lexicon. Bish-Bash’s reckless behavior not only in the commitment of adultery, but avoidance of the proscribed punishment was a grievance so great that the shadow of her sin passed with sorrow to White Swan, whose only release was to join her Mother in death.

Within these moral tales, Native American women occupied a fearsome and forceful personality in folklore. Cast as witches, wenches, or simply willful figures in a narrative, the long tradition of the natural beauty, woodland wiles, and dedicated labor of a native wife were cast by the wayside for portraits of loathsome or pitiful creatures.

One such caricature that has evolved into the folklore of modern times is the portrait of Tuggie  Bannocks, who according to Alice Morse Earle in her books “Old Narragansett “ and “Stage Coach and Tavern Days”, “was as much negroe as Indian” and known to be a witch. As well as her “dusky” complexion, Tuggie bore a “full set of double teeth” . Her very appearance was witchlike, for she was “tall and gaunt, with long bony arms and skinny claws of hands, with a wrinkled, malicious, yet half frightened countenance, surrounded by little pigtails of gray wool that stuck out from under her scarlet turban.”

It was said by townspeople, that she never sat on a chair, sofa, or stool, but would perch on a table, pull out a drawer from a high chest and recline on its edge, squat on the floor if need be, or perch on a churn. In her own tumble down house that had once been a tavern, she was believed to hang from her heels on the oaken chair rail that circled the old taproom. Tuggie told townspeople that could “raise every one who had ever stopped at that house as a guest, and often did so for company.”

Her reputation as a witch helped her eek out an existence in Narragansett. She told the occasional fortune, and concocted mostly ineffective spells for the hopeful who came and laid out a few coins on her table. Tuggie Bannocks cast spells of her own volition as well, when her venomous temper got the better of her judgment.

She once cast a spell on a sheep farmer and his wife when she felt they had insulted her and her powers. For some time, every roast that was cooked for dinner burned, no matter how careful it was watched. Cakes too, suffered the same end. The chimney spewed soot into the house, and the couple told neighbors that on stormy nights, they could hear Tuggie dancing on the roof, and hollering into the chimney as the wind rattled the window panes of their house.[6]

A tale retold in M.E. Reilly-McGreen’s recent “Witches, Wenches, & Wild Women of Rhode Island” is that of Tuggies vengeance on a local tinker by the name of Bosum Sidet. The tinker had broken her favorite copper teakettle, and Tuggie determined to conjure a charm that would exact revenge. This was no simple matter, but required weeks of gathering and preparation. Included in the ingredients of her “noxious brew”, were twigs from the victim’s bushes, a few hairs from his cow’s tale, a scrap of red flannel, the tail of a smoked herring, a few rusty nails, and  a handful of “grave dirt” that she had taken from one of the Narragansett graveyards, and “last of all, that chief ingredient in all charms, a rabbits foot…were thrown into a pot of water that was hung upon the crane over a roaring fire.”

Her plans were foiled however, when she was suddenly felled by an unseen force. Believing that she had accidentally invoked a moonack, or evil spirit, Tuggie knew she would die if she glanced at the creature, and so closed her eyes fiercely, and vowed to mend her ways if she survived.

She heard the creature scrape over her floor and drag itself to her door, and shuddered in relief when the moment had passed, never noticing the boys scampering up the hill in the snow from her tumble down house, with the bobsled that had knocked her to the floor.

Such comic endings are typical to the Tuggie Bannocks’ stories, as they are to others of the genre-if the “witch” does not end up dead with a glint of silver in her forehead.  The latest chronicler feels that Tuggie Bannocks might be in fact, a fictional character entirely, though a recent academic work mentions her with others in another light.

Women like Tuggie Bannocks were not uncommon in Colonial New England. In the soul-shifting, uncertainty of life in the wilderness, religious and secular beliefs were often intermingled so that prayer, home remedies and even witchcraft were all employed in time of crisis. Almost every town in early New England held a “healer”, usually a woman of Native American or African descent who knew the plants to gather and the potions to procure for ailments and other common afflictions. As a matter of choice, these women usually lived on the outskirts of a village or in the woods, thus enhancing the mystery of their activities away from villagers eyes, and the suspicions that were raised when potions failed, or misfortune befell some person or the whole community.

Other Native American women, if not portrayed as witches were certainly cast as willful and often miscreant matrons. One such person was Sarah Boston, described by Alice Morse Earle as “ a most Godless old heathen” despite being brought up in one of the first “praying villages” of Native Americans in Massachusetts. Sarah lived on Keith’s Hill in Grafton, Massachusetts in a house described as

“low and little, black and old and faced Kittville. The East door above at the end of front.In the middle of the room on the opposite side as one entered was the big chimney with all the things around it, no cupboard, cooking utensils, stools, no chairs. Small loft accessible by ladder. Indians just slept around. Set the table in the middle. Windows faced out toward the valley and were little. When the door was shut it was quite dark.”[7]

Sarah Boston was said to weigh over three hundred pounds and was renowned for her strength. Earle writes that she “ dressed in short skirts, a mans boots and hat, a heavy spencer,…and like a true Indian always wore a blanket over her shoulders in winter. She was mahogany-red of color, with coarse black hair, high cheek bones, and all the characteristic features of her race.”

Sarah peddled the Indian baskets she made, and told the occasional fortune, but it was her “great strength and endurance that made her the most desired farm-hand in the township to be employed in haying time, in wall-building, or any heavy farm work. Her fill of cider was often her only pay for some powerful feat of strength, such as stone lifting or stump-pulling.”

Sarah’s consumption of cider, was in fact, also of legendary proportions. She often “freely entered every home, and sat smoking and glowering for hours in the chimney corner of the tavern.”

One tale of Sarah’s in white folklore is of a gang of “young blades” who after drinking at the tavern, stop by the wooden gate to the cemetery and call out to the silent graves: “arise ye dead, the judgment day is come” only to be struck by the looming form of Sarah Boston who called back to their horror “yes Lord, I am coming”.[8]

As with the tales of Native American men, those of women were often associated with liquor, and thus the recklessness and ruin it brought. A tale recounted by Samuel Drake in his “Indians of North America” from an early history of Connecticut, concerns a legendary stretch of the Connecticut River about two hundred miles from Long Island, where the passage narrows to about five yards, “formed by two shelving mountains of solid rock…a frightful passage of about 400 yards in length…No boat, or living creature, was ever known to pass through this narrow, except an Indian woman.”

This unnamed Native American woman had attempted to cross the river above the passage, but her canoe had been caught in the current and swept downstream. While carried on her way to certain destruction she seized her bottle of rum and did not let it fall from her mouth until every drop was quaffed. When she was found, several miles below the channel, and quite drunk in her canoe, she was asked “how she dared to drink so much rum with certain death before her, she answers that she knew it was too much for one time, but she was unwilling that any of it should be lost”.

Drake also recounts the tale of an Indian widow’s brief bereavement, also associated with the ruinous behavior of drinking:

“A young widow, whose husband had been dead about eight days, was hastening to finish her grief, in order that she might be married to a young warrior: she was determined therefore, to grieve much in a short time; to this end she tore her hair, drank spirits, and beat her breast to make the tears flow abundantly, by which means, on the evening of the eighth day, she was ready again to marry, having grieved sufficiently.”[9]

In New England folklore, Native American women also appear as forlorn spirits, much like Bish-Bash’s daughter – at the edge of ponds, or brook side, even on the roads that wind through Narragansett country and other regions along the shore. In Rhode Island, these sightings are most often associated with the area now known as “Crying Rocks”, a traditional Narragansett place of euthanizing babies who were born sickly or deformed[10]. This site was first recorded by the minister Ezra Stiles, who wandered through New England in the 1760’s, transcribing legends and customs of the remnants of the tribes he encountered. A Narragansett named John Paul told Stiles that long before the white man came, Narragansett women had retired to the woods to give birth to illegitimate children, and pointed out the site “where they killed so many infants, & their bones lay about so thick that they go by the name of Bastard Rocks to this day”

In modern retellings, both the cries of women and their babies can be heard throughout the woods of the surrounding area at night. The sad tale of Crying Rocks was most recently placed in a modern fictional setting by the author Janet Taylor Lisle, whose story of a pair of teenagers discovering the site and learning a little of the tribal history, is also one of a young girl searching for her own troubled origins.

Another similar tale is that of the “Ghost of Crying Bog” in Narragansett. The story is of an Indian woman who lived near the bog and was, depending on the version read, is deceived by a white man whom she had borne two children, or driven mad by her Native American husband. The story tells of her taking her two small children into the bog and murdering them, leaving their bodies forever hidden in the underbrush of the swamp. The act so bereaved her, that she refused to leave the site, and was often seen pacing the area frantically, and weeping  area for many years after. As written in Thomas R. Hazard’s “Recollection of Olden Times”, the troubled woman found no peace even after death. For years after, people traveling the road past the bog witnessed “an old Indian squaw sitting on the ground…rocking herself backward and forward, and moaning and weeping most dolefully.” The woman would often disappear as people came near, but that horses would often stand firm and refused to pass the place by the roadside. Hazard writes that

“It was said that after passing most of the night in woeful lamentations the ghost of the wretched murderess used to leave towards morning in the direction of a little wooded island that stands in the south-western part of Kit’s Pond, apparently keeping her rapid course close to the surface of the water, and screaming as she went until the horrifying sounds reached the island, when all was again still.”

Other versions of the story tell that the old squaw was finally driven mad by the cries of her children and fled to the ocean where the pounding of the waves drowned out the calls for their mother. This version was also written into a poem by Caroline Hazard and published in the Century Magazine in 1889,  a portion of which reads:

“On, on she speeds, oe’r bog and field

with giant bowlders thickly set,

She slips and falls, but will not yield,

She hastens on, in fog and wet;

The baby’s cry is in her ears,

It fills her with a thousand fears.

At last she wins the ocean’s shore-

A great expanse of dusky gray

In motion with a moaning roar

And dashing on the rocks its spray.

Oh ! welcome sound, its sobbing moan

Drowns out the baby’s piercing tone.”

Many of these tales survive in print and on web sites today as anecdotal expressions of another age that pre-date our own urban legends and paranormal explorations taped for cable television. It is ultimately, our own ongoing fascination with folklore that continues to bring these tales into print, and though as noted, we read them now as charming, often amusing stories from a nearly forgotten era; we should not forget the influence such tales had upon generations of readers-citizens whose view of local Native Americans were clouded by a national conception portrayed in the published popular histories and folktales.

With the advent of research by social anthropologist Frank Speck in the 1920’s, the brief, but treasure trove of stories published in “Narragansett Dawn” in the 1930’s by the Narragansett Indian tribe, and most recently, in the renewed interest, like that of Thoreau “to know what manner of men they were…their fancies and superstitions…” that has led scholarly researchers, as William Simmons, to learn the lore of the local tribes, and record those oral histories given to them.

Oct.-Nov. 2011