The Penobscot Indians. interpreted by Frank Loring, known as
- Big Thunder,' the Nestor of the tribe."
This ceremony was followed by social festiv ities, including the short-horn dance, snake dance and others. A gentleman whose youth was spent in the neighborhood of these Indians, writing for a religious journal in 1853, says: As we remember him [John Neptune] in our boyhood, he was one of the handsomest and statliest-looking red men we ever saw. With the weight of eighty-seven winters upon him, he is still noticeable for good person and dignified air. In middle life his understanding, intelligence and sagacity were equal to the performance of almost any service.
In 1817, the next year after Neptune's election to his office, he appeared in court at Castine, and addressed the judges of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in mitiga tion of the sentence of Peol Susup, an Indian of his tribe who had murdered a white man, William Knight, at Bangor. Though Nep tune was then young, it is recorded that his bearing was calm and dignified, and that all who were in the court-room listened with profound attention to his argument. "You know," said he, "your people do my Indians a great deal of wrong. They abuse them very much, — yes, they murder them; then they walk right off, — nobody touches them. This makes my heart bum." Peol Susup, the convicted murderer, ap pears not to have been of pure Indian blood. He was a person of firm mind and fierce passions. A year subsequent to his crime, some who had seen him in their youth looked upon him in his prison. The writer has heard from more than one of these, when they had become old people, a description of his appearance there. The face of the dark red man was " bleached almost to whiteness, his long black beard tangled and knotted, and his glaring eyes deeply sunken," — was the relation of one visitor. They noted, too, his hurried pacing across his cell, his coming
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to and retreating from the grate, " his moan, like a child, and his shout like a madman." At what date Susup died is unknown to me, but in 1852 his widow was the wife of the aged Neptune. A reminiscent native of the vicinity of these Indians (who was called by them with characteristic descriptiveness, " preachman's papoose ") says : We recall a time when drunken Indians were the terror of all the river towns; when children were chased in the road, or driven from home or the school-room. We have stood by our own mother, with the little flock clinging to her knees, — pale, motionless, horror-stricken, — when, with drawn knife, the red maniac yelled out, as he staggered to reach the little group, "Lum, lum! Me speak lum. You no stamina?" [Rum, rum! I call for rum. Don't you under stand?] More than once was our parental fire side invaded by a Penobscot in this wise; and by the inebriate, who, too helpless to attempt harm, fell dead drunk upon the floor: there coiling himself up as no one but an Indian can do, to sleep off his debauch'; while the mother and children, tearful and sleepless, watched the night through for manifestations of conscious ness, and of the terrible outbursts of ferocity which always marked the first hours of return ing sobriety.
Yet the drunken Indian is merely a little more crass and cruel than his superior, the white man, of similar habits. For half a century, however, such scenes have been in creasingly rare. First, the Washingtonian temperance movement reformed the drinking usages of the more thrifty and respectable people of the State; then the stringent liquor laws operated to establish abstinence as the usual habit among the lower class. Old people of the Penobscot and eastward regions will sometimes tell of the occasional breaks of the milder inebriates of a later period, but of few instances of violent or threatening behavior. One Indian governor is remembered who, when in his cups, some times perambulated the streets of Bangor, or of the villages, dressed in his military
