Penobscot River

“ Some were thrown into the water. One man (Butler) had his ribs broken. All were more or less injured. The capstan went overboard. The old boom swung on and on, and, passing Spencer's bay, broke and went to pieces on the shore. The logs were with great difficulty regathered, but were finally brought to the outlet of the lake July 4th, the last raft of the season.
After river driving in the spring of 1835, I went to the Penobscot river and found employment at twenty dollars a month at East Great Works, building a dam. John Mills, our superintendent, was a good man. ”

“ The little town of Castine, on the Penobscot River, Maine, is a favorite resort for summer visitors, who are attracted by its fine air, its abundance of sea food, and its accessibility to the interior of the country. These same considerations together with the fine strategic location of Castine Peninsula at the head of Penobscot Bay, guarding the entrance to the Penobscot River, influenced the French adventurers of three hundred and more years ago to plant their settlement of Pentagoet and to build a fort in this very vicinity. ”

“ At length a Mr. Hinckley, who has a camp at the other end of the "carry," appeared with a truck drawn by an ox and a horse over a rude log-railway through the woods. The next thing was to get our canoe and effects over the carry from this lake, one of the heads of the Kennebec, into the Penobscot River. This railway from the lake to the river occupied the middle of a clearing two or three rods wide and perfectly straight through the forest. We walked across while our baggage was drawn behind. My companion went ahead to be ready for partridges, while I followed, looking at the plants. ”

“ It is higher than Chesuncook, for the lumberers consider the Penobscot, where we struck it, twenty-five feet lower than Moosehead,—though eight miles above it is said to be the highest, so that the water can be made to flow either way, and the river falls a good deal between here and Chesuncook. The carryman called this about one hundred and forty miles above Bangor by the river, or two hundred from the ocean, and fifty-five miles below Hilton's, on the Canada road, the first clearing above, which is four and a half miles from the source of the Penobscot. ”

“ We landed in Milford, and rode along on the east side of the Penobscot, having a more or less constant view of the river, and the Indian islands in it, for they retain all the islands as far up as Nickatow, at the mouth of the East Branch. They are generally well-timbered, and are said to be better soil than the neighboring shores. The river seemed shallow and rocky, and interrupted by rapids, rippling and gleaming in the sun. We paused a moment to see a fish-hawk dive for a fish down straight as an arrow, from a great height, but he missed his prey this time. ”

“ Those who have never been on such a journey would be surprised at the dexterity of the Penobscot boatmen as they drive their frail bateau through the rapids and among dangerous rocks. The slightest failure on their part, on passing the numerous water-falls, would place the lives of those on board in imminent peril, and the traveler has good reason to be thankful if the boat by their care is saved from being overturned or sunk in the river. ”

“ We despatched our camp-building and bed-making with speed, for we had a purpose. The Penobscot was a very beautiful river, and the Ayboljockameegus a very pretty stream; and if there is one place in the world where trout, at certain seasons, are likely to be found, it is in a beautiful river at the mouth of a pretty stream. Now we wanted trout; it was in the programme that something more delicate than salt-pork should grace our banquets before Katahdin. Cancut sustained our a priori, that trout were waiting for us over by the Aybol. ”

“ The reader is referred to what is already narrated of Norumbega for the earliest knowledge of the Penobscot by white men. The first vessel that ascended the river was probably the bark of Du Guast, Sieur de Monts, in the year 1604. De Poutrincourt was there in the year 1606. [33]
No establishment appears to have been begun on the Bagaduce peninsula until our colonists of New Plymouth fixed upon it for the site of a trading-post, about 1629. [34] Here they erected a house, defended, probably, after the fashion of the time, with palisades, loop-holed for musketry. ”

“ They proceeded up the river as far as the mouth of an affluent now known as the Kenduskeag, [37] which was then called, or rather the place where it made a junction with the Penobscot was called by the natives, Kadesquit, situated at the head of tide-water, near the present site of the city of Bangor. The falls above the city intercepted their further progress. The river-banks about the harbor were fringed with a luxurious growth of forest trees. On one side, lofty pines reared their gray trunks, forming a natural palisade along the shore. ”

“ Extension of salmon-hatching operations on the Penobscot.
The establishment of branch hatcheries has been suggested in order to utilize the spawning salmon in the region which lies above commercial fishing, and thus increase by artificial means the production of young fish. It is well known that even under the best conditions now prevailing in our streams the eggs of anadromous fishes like the salmon and shad are liable to numerous destructive agencies ”

“ It is to the work of Allefonsce that we probably owe another confusion of this northern cartography in the sixteenth century. What we now know as Penobscot Bay and River was called by him the River of Norumbega, and he seems to have given some ground for believing that this river connected the waters of the Atlantic with the great river of Canada, just as we find it later shown upon Gastaldi's map in Ramusio, by Ruscelli in 1561, by Martines in 1578, by Lok in 1582, and by Jacques de Vaulx in 1584.
[Pg 617]
Greenland connects Europe and America. ”

“ Lawrence and the Gulf of Maine is much too narrow. The Penobscot is made almost to unite with the more northern river; and this error is perpetuated in the Dutch maps published by Blaeu, and Covens and Mortier [384] many years later. The placing of Lake Champlain within a short distance of Casco Bay was another error that the later Dutch cartographers adopted in one form or another. Lake Ontario is not greatly misshapen; but Erie is stretched into a strait, while beyond a distorted Huron a “grand lac” is so placed as to leave a doubt if Superior or Michigan was intended. ”

“ Opposite the Sunkhaze is the main boom of the Penobscot, where the logs from far up the river are collected and assorted.
As we drew near to Oldtown I asked Polis if he was not glad to get home again; but there was no relenting to his wildness, and he said, "It makes no difference to me where I am." Such is the Indian's pretence always.
We approached the Indian Island through the narrow strait called "Cook." He said, "I 'xpect we take in some water there, river so high,—never see it so high at this season. Very rough water there, but short; swamp steamboat once. ”

“ The soil of this region, generally speaking, is good, but remains in its original wildness. Its stationary inhabitants are few and far between; but it gives employment to about three thousand lumbermen. They spend the winter wielding the axe in the forests, and the spring and summer in driving down the stream logs which they have prepared for the saw-mills, which are mostly located on the lower part of the Penobscot. Nine months in the year they labor without ceasing, but usually appropriate to themselves a play spell of three months, which is the entire autumn. ”

“ But water, the feminine element, is so mobile and impressible that it must protect itself by much that seems caprice and fickleness. We might be sure that the Penobscot would not always flow so gently, nor all the way from forests to the sea conduct our bark without one shiver of panic, where rapids broke noisy and foaming over rocks that showed their grinding teeth at us. ”

“ The country is an archipelago of lakes,—the lake-country of New England. Their levels vary but a few feet, and the boatmen, by short portages, or by none at all, pass easily from one to another. They say that at very high water the Penobscot and the Kennebec flow into each other, or at any rate, that you may lie with your face in the one and your toes in the other. Even the Penobscot and St. John have been connected by a canal, so that the lumber of the Allegash, instead of going down the St. John, comes down the Penobscot ”

“ Jos. Laurent, New Familiar Abenakis and English Dialogues, Quebec, 1884, p. 216, and Maurault, op. cit. p. IV.) Gov. Newell Lyon, of the Penobscot tribe, added that this is probably the upper end of Islesboro (formerly Long Island) in Penobscot Bay. This still has the name We·ni·α̨ŋgánik “Has a head” in the Malecite language, probably having been named by some Malecite. At Castine Head, where the lighthouse is now, is a place called Madə ́ŋgαmαs, “Old homely snowshoe.” The Indians claim that this is where Pukdjinskwessu gave up her chase, the same story occurring in the Penobscot. ”

“ So the schooner vanishes into the mist behind. We get up our steam, and soon enter the harbor, meeting vessels of every rig; and the fog, clearing away, shows a cloudy sky. Aboard, an old one-eyed sailor, who had lost one of his feet, and had walked on the stump from Eastport to Bangor, thereby making a shocking ulcer.
Penobscot Bay is full of islands, close to which the steamboat is continually passing. Some are large, with portions of forest and portions of cleared land; some are mere rocks, with a little green or none, and inhabited by sea-birds, which fly and flap about hoarsely. ”

“ The Penobscot is not so likely to be affected by destructive freshets as are most large rivers; for instance, the Kennebeck, whose accumulating waters rush through its deeply-cut channel with tremendous power, carrying all before it; and for this reason the former runs through immense tracts of low intervale lands, which, in time of abundant rains, act as vast reservoirs, receiving and scattering the surplus water over thousands of acres. Nothing is likely to produce disastrous freshets, except such as arise from unusual causes ”

“ It is curious to observe how the embouchure of the Penobscot is on either shore guarded by two such solitary ranges of mountains as the Camden and Mount Desert groups. They embrace about the same number of individual peaks, and approximate nearly enough in altitude. From Camden we may skirt the shores for a hundred and fifty miles to the west and south before meeting with another eminence; and then it is an isolated hill standing almost upon the line of division between Maine and New Hampshire that is encountered. ”

“ We started early before breakfast, the Indian being considerably better, and soon glided by Lincoln, and stopped to breakfast two or three miles below this town.
We frequently passed Indian islands with their small houses on them. The Penobscot Indians seem to be more social even than the whites. Ever and anon in the deepest wilderness of Maine you come to the log hut of a Yankee or Canada settler, but a Penobscot never takes up his residence in such a solitude. ”

“ The highlands separating rivers that empty into the Atlantic Ocean, are by no means identical with the highlands separating the rivers that empty into the Sea. The Americans have urged that the northern range divides the rivers of the St. Lawrence from the Atlantic rivers, but it certainly does not separate the Penobscot branches north and east which flow into the Atlantic from the southern range ”

“ The Penobscot glimmered winningly. Our birch looked wistful for its own element. Why not marry shallop to stream? Why not yield to the enticement of this current, fleet and clear, and gain a few beautiful miles before nightfall? All the world was before us where to choose our bivouac. We dismounted our birch from the truck, and laid its lightness upon the stream. Then we became stevedores, stowing cargo. Sheets of birch-bark served for dunnage. Cancut, in flamboyant shirt, ballasted the after-part of the craft. ”

“ The actual height and breadth of a mountain or a waterfall are always ridiculously small; they are the imagined only that content us. Nature is not made after such a fashion as we would have her. We piously exaggerate her wonders, as the scenery around our home.
Such was the heaviness of the dews along this river that we were generally obliged to leave our tent spread over the bows of the boat till the sun had dried it, to avoid mildew. We passed the mouth of Penichook Brook, a wild salmon-stream, in the fog, without seeing it. ”

“ The ear, however, could hear the roaring of the waters and the crash of buildings, bridges, and lumber, and the eye could trace the mammoth ice-jam of four miles long, which passed on majestically, but with lightning rapidity, bearing the contents of both rivers on its bosom, The noble covered bridge of the Penobscot, two bridges of the Kenduskeag, and the two long ranges of saw-mills, besides other mills, houses, shops, logs, and lumber enough to build up a considerable village. ”

“ The pilot of the steamer which ran from Oldtown up the Penobscot in 1854 told me that she drew only fourteen inches, and would run easily in two feet of water, though they did not like to. It is said that some Western steamers can run on a heavy dew, whence we can imagine what a canoe may do. Montresor, who was sent from Quebec by the English about 1760 to explore the route to the Kennebec, over which Arnold afterward passed, supplied the Penobscot near its source with water by opening the beaver-dams, and he says, "This is often done." ”