While in Portland with portland, Casco and Miss Foo-foo-foolonsie, I found what I hoped would be a set of local Down East essays complementary to the excellent and previously reviewed Living North Country on the life of upstate New York. I found The Maine Reader: The Down East Experience from 1614 to the Present.
Unlike Living North Country and its writings on contemporary issues, The Maine Reader is a selection of writings through time about the State from early encounters with aboringinal peoples and the early failures of colonization before Plymouth, to writings by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow right on to contemporary poets, essayists and photographers.
Things you learn: in 1819, someone wanted to call the place "Ligonia". Yikes. What would he have called the bear in Hotel New Hampshire?
Another thing that strikes you about the US from these books is the private civic nature of the colonization. Canada was essentially kept alive as a military fact with the string of fortresses from the western great lakes to Halifax establishing the French and then the British presence against each other and the Algonkians, then as a line to the north focusing US destiny elsewhere. Halifax and Kingston did not get local government until the late 1830's. The north-eastern US, by comparison, was colonized by poor saps gathered from Europeans streets by adventurers given private and often overlapping grants to exploit whoever and whatever they could find there. The early, thinly spread out inhabitants regularly sent unheeded requests for protection to their bosses, not the redcoats. Neither seem to have been around much except at gathering time. Other than the autumn, those at the frontier were making do on their own focusing on trade and town rather than the supply and protection of a garrison. The tale of John Gyles, taken as a slave during an Abinaki raid in the 1690's and worked as such through very familiar countryside of Maine and New Brunswick at a time when only four towns in what would become the state survived complete destruction, is simply amazing and now perhaps only plausible in a film if set in Central or South America. Nasty lives these groundbreakers lived. I wonder how this difference, private versus public first settlement, colours still.
