Hamilton Stark by Russell Banks Read Free Book Online

white Englishmen. One studies the response of the Abenooki to this particular stimulus, hoping to learn from it, and one more or less successfully draws several generalizations from that response. The difficulty is in knowing what those generalizations should be applied to. To Hamilton Stark? His family, friends, neighbors?
    Perhaps, perhaps—but if so, one must also remember that there is more to explaining a single human being than the ancient history of his region allows.
    Ergo:
Some observations less anthropological, less geographic, less distant from the true object of our study than the foregoing; by the same token, however, observations, now following, which are as wholly from outside the conscious life of the true object of our study as have been all foregoing observations.
2
    Moving northward now, from the third, fourth, and fifth generations of families of Europeans who had settled in Boston, Newburyport, Salem, Gloucester, Charlestown, Cambridge, Belmont, Concord, and on and on—the small, yet crowded, cities and villages clustered close to the coast, bays and estuaries—all those seventeenth-century business communities with theological interests and connections, whose interests and connections, of a business as well as of a theological nature, had begun to jam harshly against one another by the end of the century. Second sons often went unemployed, and third sons came up landless, too. And thereseemed to be an excess of ministers and schoolmasters. What to do? What to do? One of the nicest things about being an American in that century (or in the two centuries that followed, for that matter) was the liberal plenitude of land not yet populated by white people. This, of course, is an old story, well known. The second sons and their younger brothers pack up wife, ax, gun and bag of seed, and they head out for the back country, the far outback, the territory, the hinterland, the boonies.
    Lemuel Stark, aet. twenty-four, out of Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1703, with his wife, Eliza, and son, Josiah, in a company of thirteen men and twelve women and seventeen children of various ages, went forth from Newburyport on 22 April to clear and establish residence upon certain lands near the headwaters of the Suncook River which had been properly surveyed and marked the previous year by a party of engineers sent out for the Newburyport Northern Regional Development Association.
    There they met the resident Abenookis, who, innocently, the previous summer had traded forty freshly speared salmon and twelve maple-cured cougar skins for a knife and hand mirror offered by members of the surveying party. The leader of the Indians in 1703 was a tall (for an Abenooki), muscular man named Horse. His name had been given him by a wandering Cree from the far northwest, a man who enjoyed the luxury of having actually seen horses and so knew what they looked like, which of course the Abenooki did not. It was rumored among the Abenooki that sometimes the white people stood upon and even had sex with enormous, long-tailed, big-nosed beasts, but the Abenooki word for the animal was Kiyoosee-hi-yi-ho-yo (“enormous, long-tailed, big-nosed beast that gets screwed by the white man”). When the wanderingCree had told them, first, that the animal was called by his people a “horse,” and second, that the white people were in many ways dependent upon the “horse’s” good nature and great strength, and third, that the tall (for an Abenooki), muscular, big-nosed boy before him looked something like a horse, the boy’s family immediately changed his name from Water Lily to Horse. When later, after having passed many trials of strength and courage, he became the leader of the Abenookis residing in the Valley of the Suncook, Horse was very proud of his name, for among the Abenooki, while there were many who were named Water Lily, there was but one named Horse.
    Horse, as noted above, was a physically gifted man, but he was also known to be