"A Scratch with a Bear's Paw": Anglo-Indian Land Deeds in Early Maine

Abstract

Seventeenth-century deeds from Maine serve as a case study for the ethnohistorical potential of research. These transactions provide insights into native land tenure and tribal boundaries, two aspects of Maine Indians rarely noted by seventeenth-century observers. Deeds also shed light on Anglo-Indian relations. Maine Indians were not cheated of their lands in a fraudulent deed game. Instead, land sales were predominantly legitimate transactions between parties who generally understood the terms and implications of the sale. In I688 Joseph Lynde, owner of large tracts of land in the Sagadahoc region of Maine, presented his deeds to Sir Edmund Andros, governor of the Dominion of New England. Lynde later recalled that after showing him an Indian for land, he said that their hand was no more worth than a scratch with a bear's paw, undervaluing all my titles, though everyway legal under our former charter government.' Andros refused to validate the deeds from Indians because he planned to give the holdings of Lynde and other Maine proprietors to his own friends and cronies as choice political plums. Although one hundred years of courtroom debate resulted from the questionable legal validity of Maine lands held under such conveyances, there is no dispute that deeds granted by Indians to English settlers in Maine are worth far more to the ethnohistorian than a scratch with a bear's paw. Not only do deeds shed light on native land tenure and IndianEuropean encounters, but they can also provide important specific information on the native populations. This is particularly true for Maine, where there are few other documents that describe the Indians during the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Europeans frequently noticed the natives of Maine before 1630 but made fewer references to them between I630 and the outbreak of King Philip's War in 1675. Deeds from Ethnohistory 36:3 (Summer I989). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc ooI4-I80i/89/$i.50. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.137 on Fri, 27 May 2016 05:56:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms