VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO

Assistant Professor of English

Three hundred miles north of Hanover in the Indian town of Odanak on the St. Francis Reservation in Canada one may find today an Indian school which was founded by a Dartmouth Indian in the early years of the Nineteenth Century. His name was Peter Paul Osunkhirhine, as he registered it on formal

occasions, but he was known at Dartmouth and among English-speaking Indians as Peter Masta. This name, Masta, he passed along to his descendants, one of whom was graduated from the Dartmouth Medical School and an- other who is now teacher in the "Dartm outh" school on the St. Francis Reservation. Knowledge of the work of these early students at Dartmouth seemed to have been lost since 1850, and it was only recently through a letter from the present teacher, H. L. Masta, to Dean Craven Laycock that the existence of the school came to be known.

This school is one of the very few living links that connect the Dartmouth of today with the Dartmouth of old. What Eleazar Wheelock did for the Indian race is not so distinct in the minds of the immediate, oncoming generations who remembered mostly what he did for the white race, but the fact that an off- shoot of the Dartmouth of 1773 has existed until the present time is some evidence of the power that the Colonial school held among the Indians. It is also a tribute to the founder of Dartmouth, perhaps even a greater tribute than the actually existing Dartmouth College which is admittedly the work of many hands and hearts and brains, whereas the Indian School was almost a personal matter with Mr. Wheelock and progressed but little as an Indian school after his death.

The diary of Levi Frisbee, compiled in 1773, and published by Mr. Wheelock in the same year as part of the Wheelock Memoirs contains an account of the trip that he and three others took, into the "wilderness" in search of students for the new college in Hanover. That trip, made on horseback part of the way, and up the St. Lawrence in a boat for the latter part of the journey took the better part of a month. In Montreal Mr. Frisbee and his companions were told that there were Indian boys at St. Francis whose parents desired them to have educations, and accordingly the "party set out for St. Francis where were living some six hundred Indians, all that remained of the five or six tribes that once constituted the Abenaki or Wabenaki nation, now decimated by war, disease, famine, or removal to richer hunting-grounds. Four little boys were brought by Frisbee to Hanover. Fris- bee s diary is a very human document and registers here and there a bit of emotion, although he tried to st'ifle the expression of it as he notes in his conclusion, but he gives us a striking picture of Indian mothers standing by the banks of the river watching the strangers embark with their sons, and the scene must have touched the Puritanical Frisbee for his words betray a natural, emotional, '"weakness."

This then is the beginning of a real Dartmouth tradition that is alive today. For after these four boys brought by Prisbee and Dean, there came other Indians who traversed the three hundred miles of wild country on foot for the purpose of getting an education. There was some white blood in the Abenaki tribe, even at that time, for men had been taken prisoners in early wars and had taken wives among the Indians. One family, the Gill family, was a really noteworthy family. One record has it that the Gills were taken from Deerfield after the massacre early in the 18th Century, another, the record of Mrs. Emily Smith of Ames-bury, Mass., that the Gill family as captives came from the district of Newbury and the towns to the North. The descendants of this Gill family, many of whom are now living, have been persons of rather remarkable intellectual power. The four students who came to Dartmouth in 1773 were all of the Gill family.

The first Masta appears in 1809. This was Peter, who followed the St. Francis River to its source and then struck off. into the Connecticut valley. Arriving at Dartmouth he entered the Moor Charity School, ran errands and blacked boots as did the poorer boys of that time, and applied himself to his studies with such diligence that he mastered the English language well enough to translate portions of the English Bible into the Abenaki language. I am indebted to a correspondent in the Boston Transcript for the following list of his books: Booklet on Ten Commandments, Crocker & Brewster, 47 Washington Street, Boston, 1830 ; Perpetual Almanac, Spelling and Reading Book, published in the Indian dialect, by the same publishers in 1830; Prayers and Catechism; Gospel of St. Mark, printed by funds furnished by friends; a Primer, published in Boston about 1830, now in the possession of H. L. Masta, Odanak, Canada.

Peter Masta built a school on the reservation, a picture of which appears here. The building, although a school, was used also as a church, perhaps indeed the church was the main function of the building, but the school was the institution which owed its existence directly to Dartmouth College; the school flourished thereafter for more than a hundred years, and is today a rather in- spiring sight for any Dartmouth eye.

Peter Masta's school, and his own romantic history make a story in themselves, but this article is chiefly concerned with the relation of the school to Dartmouth College. The second teacher at the school was a certain Annance (whose house is one of the prettiest on the reservation) who also had his training at Dartmouth. He too walked over- land the three hundred miles and partook of the learning of the Moor Charity School. On the reservation in Canada there is a record .of this second teacher as Joseph Annance, but he was later known in this country as Louis Annance, "Old Louis" as the Maine accounts bear witness. According to a correspondent in the Transcript he was one of the four Indians that met Thoreau at Northwest Carry in 1857. He left a son and grandson near Greenville, Maine, —the grandson may be alive today.

Students carried on the work of the school after Annance, among them being a number of men who attended Dartmouth, until the present teacher Henry L. Masta took up the work. Mr. Masta has given his life to work on the reservation. He is now 73 years old and has been in his life the means of sending many Indians away from the reservation to attend school, to learn trades, or to enter business, and although he has been offered several pieces of work in the government Indian Bureaus, he has chosen to remain by his own people and work for them. He is a descendant of the Gill family, also of the branch of the Masta family to which the original Dartmouth Indian belonged.

With Professor Thomas G. Brown of the English Department I visited the Indian settlement early in the summer, the first time that members of the college teaching staff had been in St. Francis since 1773. We were entertained by Mr. Masta in the manner of strangers returning home after an hundred and fifty years of wandering. In his possession and in the possession of families on the reservations are records which we hope to obtain, records which are priceless in value for the history of our own college, in which are told something of the doings of the Dartmouth men of old days, of the pioneers who built the College. The reservation school will probably pass away in this our generation and in a few years there will be no mem- ory of the Dartmouth of old days*— there is a little graveyard on the reser- vation, overblown with sand and over- grown with rough coarse grass, and there buried one above the other with no sign -to mark the places sleep the proud men of the Abenaki race,—some of whom heard the voice crying in the wilderness and answered the call.

Henry L. Masta and Indian pupils

Home of Joseph Annance-Built in 1845

School opened by Peter Masta in 1830

Back of Hanover

AN EARLY LIKENESS OF WEBSTER An enlargement of a daguerreotype presented by H. S. Baketel '95 and H. S. Baketel, Jr. '20