(upbeat music) (projector clicking) - Have you ever wondered where the television signal you're watching is coming from?

♪ I love to go a wanderin' (projector clicking) ♪ along the mountain track - Welcome to True North.

(upbeat music) (mysterious music) - Good evening and welcome to Mainewatch (upbeat music) (projector clicking) Welcome to From the Vault, a celebration of 60 years of Maine Public Television.

With Independence Day upon us, we will look at Maine's role in the early settlement of the country with two history programs.

Both are 1999 episodes of the history series "Home The Story of Maine".

We will look at the native population and their struggles with the early explorers, as well as Maine's importance in fishing, farming, shipbuilding and manufacturing.

A reminder that you can watch episodes anytime on our From the Wall playlist at YouTube.com/maine Public.

Now let's take a look at Maine's role in the early years of our country, as we go back to 1999 for Home The Story of Maine - [Announcer] The following program is a production of the Maine Public Broadcasting Network.

- [Narrator] Join us for "Home, the Story of Maine" where you'll discover the stories of a state whose history is intricately linked to the creation of an American identity.

This ongoing series offers insight into contemporary Maine through a collection of narratives from the state's rich past - [Announcer 2] Production of "Home, the Story of Maine" is made possible in part through a television demonstration grant from Rural Development, part of the USDA.

(uplifting ballad music) (seabirds squawking) (surf wafting) - [Richard] There's an old legend in Old Orchard Beach that says that on St. John the Baptist Day, the waters, the ocean waters off of the beach itself, take on this special purifying qualities.

And this was the attraction for local people.

And it became the thing that drew metropolitan New Englanders and northeasterners to Old Orchard Beach.

(calm music) (surf crashing) Really, the tourist industry began in Maine as early as 1837, I believe, when Evan Staples in Old Orchard Beach, was a farmer in that area, began adding to his own farmstead, his own homestead, houses to accommodate people who would come then to visit.

For the first time in 1837, we have a house that is specifically there as a destination for recreational purposes.

- [Narrator] Maine's image as an idyllic destination began long before the start of tourism.

The story behind the image of Maine has its beginnings in the 1500s when the first European explorers came to the area looking for a route through to the wealth of the far east.

The motive of trade and economic gain was powerful, and it pushed Europeans up every river that looked like a possible way through.

When no passage was found, these early explorers turned their attention to what surrounded them, and the unexpected bounty of Maine's thick forest and deep rich waterways did not go unnoticed.

- One thing they got, they didn't expect was the weather.

If you go across the Atlantic Ocean, from Maine you hit Spain.

They expected to have, since they knew about our latitude, they knew how far south they were from the north pole.

They expected a much more temperate climate.

- [Narrator] The climate of northern New England is the result of the arctic current that runs along the coast and the polar air masses that glide across the Canadian Shield, something early explorers knew nothing about.

(water babbling) The first explorers and colonists arrived in the middle of what's known as the Little Ice Age, a period from about 1300 to 1700 when the climate of the northern hemisphere was several degrees colder than it is today.

Temperatures of 40 below weren't uncommon on the coast, and southern Maine's Casco Bay, which became valued as the closest open port to England during the 1800s would actually freeze.

- Some of the earliest explorations were done exclusively in the summertime.

Maine's a great place in the summer, but, you know, to hang out through the entire winter was another proposition.

And it was touch and go.

Maine's colonies, Maine's early colonial endeavors were very, very marginal.

That is you see people build something here, and it disappears, and they build something down here, it disappears.

And there's a lot of fluctuation in the population along the Maine coast for the first couple of generations.

- [Narrator] One of the world's first glimpses of the region was the voyage of Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524.

- [Richard] That's a very important voyage.

He had very wonderful experience, actually someplace in Rhode Island, which he wrote up in his letter to the king of France.

And it was this description of an idyllic world, a world where the natives were civilized and where the fields were rolling and where food was easy to gather and so forth, ultimately became the story that was associated with a land called Norumbega.

- [Narrator] This image of a land of plenty was further reinforced by Estaban Gomez, who sailed up the Penobscot River in 1525 in search of the elusive Northwest passage.

His description of the wealth of the region got laid over the story told by Verrazzano, and soon the area we now know as New England appeared on maps as the fanciful region of Norumbega - It's usually cartographers that determine when a name's gonna stick.

And then they put it on a map, and people read it on a map.

And Norumbega appears on numerous maps of the area.

And it had certain mythological qualities about it.

There were often a fusion of impressions that came from the explorers who wrote reports.

And also they're getting outta the local bars and talk about things.

Everyone imagined there was gold over here.

And it was really rooted in the fact there was an awful lot of gold down in the Spanish empire, which got there earlier.

So it really wasn't a myth.

It was like a dry well.

- England began to use this concept of Norumbega in the 1580s as a kind of advertising supplement to get people to be interested in buying up properties out of the patents that had been formed.

- What they did is they came over and summered and then set up drying places and then took the fish back.

Some may have stayed over in winter.

- [Richard] And, really, only at the very beginning of the 17th century, do the English and the French start to make serious efforts to both examine the coast of Maine and begin to think about colonizing.

- [Narrator] Early European trading posts and fishing stations, like those on Monhegan, made way for permanent settlements throughout the 1600s.

And by 1622, Damariscove Island was home to the first successful permanent European settlement.

Most of the new settlers were engaged in agriculture, but others cut timber, fished, trapped, hunted, and traded furs.

The traditional skills and craftsmanship we associate with Maine today had begun.

And by the mid 1800s, Maine was well-positioned to meet the needs of a young and growing nation.

- We were engaged in ship building and doing very well in the 1840s.

We were also the nation's premier fishing state.

And at the same time, the nation's largest shipper of lumber products.

So there was a lot going on in which Maine was right on the cutting edge of American industrial development.

This was also what historians have called the wooden age.

The age of wood when virtually everything that we used to eat out of, to drink out of, to carry things in, to build structures.

Everything was made out of wood.

Since then, we've developed plastics and cement and structural steel and things like that, that replace this.

But in the 19th century, if you wanted to build a city, at least in the first half of the 19th century, you built it outta wood.

Maine lacks certain resources for the types of industrial development that you see in the late 19th century.

We don't have coal deposits.

We don't have steel deposits.

Geographically, were very isolated from the main streams of American demographic movement, which moved from east to west, of course.

We tend to think of Maine as an isolated, particularly the upland sections of Maine, as being relatively isolated.

But in fact, railroads moved in, in the 1840s and 1850s, able to carry a lot of materials into the inland sections where they were manufactured, brought together with some of our own natural resources and sent back out via the railroads, via the shipping lanes into the world.

- [Narrator] Railroads also brought the world to Maine.

By the end of the 19th century, tourism had become an important part of the state's economy.

Rail and steamboat lines promoted Maine as an ideal destination.

And once again, Maine's resources presented seemingly endless potential for economic growth.

Elegant hotels, sporting camps, and boarding houses were filled with rusticaters in sports who craved Maine's signature combination of opulence and rugged beauty.

- The obsession with the outdoors as a place to explore rather than to conquer really began in England as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution in England in the late 18th century and brought weeks and weekends.

That demarcation when people were just on the farm or working in a non-industrial society, there wasn't that combination of having to spend time in and kind of the idealization of wanting to get out.

And like the Industrial Revolution, it reached New England in the 1820s.

And it also coincided here with a couple of things.

One was passion to establish our identity as a real place, as a country.

And so there was a celebration of the American landscape and to get out into it.

You had Thomas Cole's essay on nature in the 1830s, and artists celebrating the woods and the mountains and putting those in front of people in the shape of big paintings and just thousands of sketches that people just ate up.

This was their country.

This was America.

New England was kind of the first finished corner.

And we were into being finished, you know, into being a place.

- Health was a very important component of this early tourist industry.

That is the reason people got out of the city is because they were looking for healthy places to stay.

This is a period, the 1830s, 1840s, when American cities were growing at a phenomenal rate of rural to urban migration, of the immigration from Europe coming into our east coast cities.

And they're growing fantastically during this time.

Things like sanitary engineering, technologies for sewers and public health are still four, five decades away.

- [Narrator] During the summer months, epidemics like yellow fever, typhus and cholera would sweep through American cities.

If you are wealthy enough, you packed up your family and left for the season.

And what you were looking for was someplace with a reputation for health.

Sea breezes, mineral springs, healthy mountains, and clean rural environments attracted wealthy urbanites to Maine.

- [Richard] We've always played down our urban character because what was really wanted out there by the world which was tired of its urban environment was a natural, pristine kind of world.

And so those who are packaging Maine give it to them.

- Well, I've always been fond of the phrase "captains of industry."

Captain's not a good term, obviously.

A lot of the transfer from a maritime to an industrial society, which on coastal New England, was a natural one because people who were captains of ships become small industrialists in their own way.

They quickly became the entrepreneurs.

- [Christina] In a few places, you had Boston developers.

It was a Boston company that developed Kennebunkport, complete with hotel and all the houses.

But in general, these were local entrepreneurs.

And frequently they were the wives of sea captains.

- [Narrator] Elsie Jane-Weare opened the Cliff House, a grand hotel in Ogunquit in 1872.

And by the 1880s, Ogunquit was on the map of summer resort destinations.

Farther up the coast in Bar Harbor, tourism had been popular since the 1850s.

And by the time Ogunquit was establishing itself, many of the grand hotel patrons in the area had already built their own mansion-sized cottages.

Interior Maine boasted many grand hotels, including the Ricker family's famous Poland Spring House and others in the Moosehead and Rangeley Lake regions.

Upper and middle class tourism boomed all along the train and steamboat lines.

In western Maine the Bethel Inn was for the well-to-do.

And middle class visitors found respite from city life by boarding at farm houses.

(ball clacks) Today, only a handful of the original grand hotels remain.

The Claremont in Southwest Harbor, And the Oakland House in Brooksville are both examples of grand rustic resorts that have been preserved with a sure touch.

- It's something that I love.

I grew up in it.

Fourth generation, that's almost in my genes.

It's long hours, but you don't mind that if you love it like I do.

- Oh, that was my biggest terror when I married Jim, of course.

Professionally, my past life, I'm a designer.

And I worked in theme parks, in museums, and environments.

And when people found out that I had done that, they just, it was like, "You are going to ruin this place."

It was really hard for me.

- [Wayne] I think many guests live in fear that things would be changed.

They're always telling us not to change anything.

It's just the way they want it.

- The sporting camp is one of the few resort options in Maine that hasn't changed in a 100 and even 130 years.

These were built as very simple resorts.

They're resorts because there's a difference between a sporting camp and just a camp.

The sporting camp has a central eating and gathering place and offers boats and guides.

And the whole focus is on the outdoors.

- And I guess history tells you that years and years ago, from working at Mount Kineo and from reading the ledgers here, they'd come with their family and their big trunks and get off the trains and unload, and they'd stay the whole summer long.

- I think it must have been very charming to see the women in their long dresses.

And the guides at one time, supposedly, there was how many guides hired?

- [Wayne] 40 plus guides.

- 40 guides that just worked outta Wilson's.

- I think the railroad is what really spurred the whole sporting camp business.

When the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad came in, they pushed Aroostook.

It was called not necessarily Aroostook county, it was called a Aroostook country.

And everybody, even in Moosehead used that phrase, Aroostook country, 'cause it was very famous for the fish and game that they had up here.

Even though he still advertise wilderness, it isn't a true wilderness like when mom had it.

- Libbys first came in to operating, they used to have to meet the people in Masardis with the buck board to bring them to the hotel in Oxbow in a two-day trip to camp.

So it was quite a chore to get back there, but they all enjoyed it.

And they would come and stay a month at least.

And of course back then, the cows were brought into camp.

You had fresh milk, butter, cream that was right there.

The sportsmen liked that, something unusual different they'd had at home.

Maybe we should get back to doing that, Matt.

(Matt chuckles) - My father always run sportin' camps.

I started guiding when I was 17.

That straightened the depression.

They'd come up, poor families and just lay around, hike and read and fish and watch nature, relax.

It was clear up into the 40s when they still came by train, a lot of them just before the Second World War.

Then the automobile started coming, and they started putting roads in.

It started then that they'd come for weekends or maybe three or four days.

And then they'd go home again.

And a different type of person would come, more or less the working man.

- [Narrator] This change actually started after World War One when more and more Americans began to own their own cars.

And by the late 1940s, travel was no longer only for the upper class.

The average person could afford to come and did.

The wealthy summer people who settled in for the season at private cottages, hotels or sporting camps were joined by an increasing throng of middle class tourists who stayed overnight at newly developed motor courts.

- [Christina] You almost have to mention L.L.

Bean and his effect on rural Maine because his boot and the whole ethos of where you could wear it and what you could do with it.

- [Howard] 90% of the people I guided stopped there and bought equipment.

I think was good for the state, L.L.

Bean, very good.

He put a lot of it on the map.

- That difference between what's out there and what's here has always worked to our advantage.

An important author in the 30s was Gladys Hasty Carroll, whose book "As the Earth Turns" was a national best seller.

It's a novel that recognizes the encroaching modern world and modernity, in general, but also, at the same time, is trying to find kind of the core value of what it means to be a person connected to the land.

And one of the reasons it was such a big hit at that time, of course, that was the depression, was people really wanted to hear that message again.

That if you didn't have skyscrapers, and you didn't have subways, and you didn't have all the accoutrements of modern life, you still had something of value.

- And good literature never goes out of fashion, I think.

You can still read a book by Gladys Hasty Carroll or "The Country of the Pointed Firs" or Kenneth Roberts and still get enjoyment out of it.

They printed a bumper sticker that says "I read Ruth Moore," and I've given away a couple hundred of them.

Every now and then traveling around the state I see someone go by me in a car that says, "I Read Ruth Moore" in the back.

And I think, you know, yeah.

She had mass appeal in the 40s and 50s and 60s.

"Spoonhandle" sold a million copies in the late 40s.

Her books made the New York Times Best Seller list.

They were condensed by Reader's Digest.

They were published in foreign languages, which I'm still curious about readers in other countries reading these stories about the Maine coast and wondering what it was going on.

I live in Elizabeth Coatsworth's house, in the house that she and her husband, Henry Beston, lived in and now belongs to their daughter, Kate Barnes, who's the state's poet laureate.

And I'm sort of haunted by Elizabeth and Henry.

All their books are around me.

All their furniture, they're buried there at the farm.

And Elizabeth in her lifetime wrote 125 books which were published.

And most of her books, again like Ruth's, are out of print.

And, to me, that's almost tragic because I like her work so much.

- Another interesting novel was Sinclair Lewis' "Babbitt."

The idea of a Maine vacation plays out significantly in that novel.

Babbitt is a kind of a booster go, go guy in a Midwest city.

And his answer in his own mind to the spiritual crisis of being a modern businessman is to get to Maine as soon as possible.

So who are we to argue with that kind of thing.

I go to a lake every summer, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

A lake in Maine, I wouldn't go any place else.

- We are still very remote, very wild, compared to what people have in New York or Portland or wherever.

And I guess in that sense, relatively speaking, we haven't changed from the turn of the century till now.

We're still a lot more remote than they are.

And probably the same difference that they were at the turn of the century.

- The meaning of sport is changing, In the 1830s, 40s, 50s, 60s and on around the turn of the century, it meant somebody who was a hunter, a fisherman and wanted to get out in to the wilderness and prove his manhood and commune with nature but didn't know how.

And so they needed a guide.

- Well, I'd say a sport is a man that, he doesn't catch more than his limit of fish, he obeys the law, and when you're guiding him, he helps you out if he can.

Where some sports don't.

- [Christina] Today, sports still exist in that way.

You still have people who come to sporting camps and want to hire a guide and, obviously, a boat.

But you have a new brand of sport.

And that's the person who comes wanting to experience the wilderness.

Maine has that special sense of escape.

And if you want to hike the wilderness, if you want to sail the sea, if you want to get to islands it has a sense of fulfillment that there's stuff out there for you.

You know that there are all those mountains and lakes.

I think the promise of this immensity, and the world is it becomes more and more confined and defined, I think it survives.

- [Wayne] And it's hard for Shan and I, 'cause we live it every day, to realize how special it is to some of these other people and how they work all year long for just those two weeks, or however long it is, that they're gonna spend with us at Wilson's.

- [Matt] You actually change some people, give them hope, I think.

- [Announcer 2] Production of "Home, the Story of Maine" is made possible in part through a television demonstration grant from Rural Development, part of the USDA.

- [Narrator] How does Maine rely on its image as a place apart for tourism today?

Find out more on "Home"'s website, www.mpbc.org.

(upbeat ballad music) (gentle music) - [Announcer] The following program is a production of the Maine Public Broadcasting Network.

- [Narrator] Join us for "Home: The Story of Maine" where you'll discover the stories of a state whose history is intricately linked to the creation of an American identity.

This ongoing series offers insight into contemporary Maine through a collection of narratives from the state's rich past.

- [Announcer] Production of "Home: The Story of Maine" is made possible in part through a television demonstration grant from Rural Development, part of the USDA.

(bright music) - We occupy a minute of time in a long sweep of time.

There are an enormous number of footsteps that have traveled in the very same places that we walk today.

I think that we are in essence stewards for everything that has ever happened in the place where we live.

And the more that we know about it the more that we can appreciate the place that we live and be better stewards, be better people that occupy one little spot on a continuing story of a place - [Narrator] The history of Maine is really nothing more than the story of its people.

And it's a story that began 12,000 years ago with the state's oldest inhabitants the Paleo-Indians who were the first human beings to call north America home.

- We have a tendency to think that our history begins with the discovery of America by the European, which in reality, it doesn't.

- European history is totally different from the Native history.

How can you discover something when there's people already present?

I always look at history that way.

It's in the context where you're looking it from.

At Passamaquoddy we feel our roots run deep in this land and that we were from here originally.

But other people will say there were different groups that came before you but it was our technology changed.

Our main emphasis of life changed during certain periods of our history - [Narrator] The study of prehistoric peoples, those whose culture predates the written record, is the domain of archeology.

While historians work mostly with written documentation archeologists interpret clues found in the material remains of vanished cultures.

The material remains don't contain the complete record of a culture because not everything remains.

Lightweight materials such as fabric break down over time leaving only the more resilient items behind to work with.

- [Deb Wilson] I think that's really the challenge.

You can dig a site.

You can find all kinds of artifacts and it's what you make of that information that's really the crux of archeology.

And we all come at it differently.

- I think every culture has an interest in the past.

In fact, I can think of no culture that with or without archeology, doesn't have a story about the past.

We tend to be so divorced from our environment today, living in central heated buildings, driving on highways.

I think to understand pre-history, let you understand how humans really depend on the environment, how they have interacted with the environment, how they've gotten along with what seems to us to be a very harsh environment how they seem to do it with some grace and some prosperity.

- [Narrator] Maine has long been recognized by archeologists as a key to understanding early human settlement in North America.

The bounty of the sea supported the needs of Native people and allowed them to thrive leaving a rich archeological record behind.

And since contemporary Maine is not heavily populated the disturbance of archeological sites has been less intense than in other places.

As a result, the Main State Museum is home to one of the country's largest collections of Native American artifacts.

- [Bruce Bourque] So we've been able to put together a pretty clear chronology of the occupation of Maine.

- [Narrator] Paleo-Indian simply means old Indians.

And these first inhabitants of Maine probably hunted caribou and musk ox which thrived in the Tundra environment of the time.

Once the ice age ended and gave way to a newly forested environment, the caribou herd could no longer survive.

Many archeologists surmised that it was this change in game that led to the demise of Maine's Paleo-Indian culture.

Whatever their diet, the climate that emerged after the ice age had profound effects upon their culture and they disappeared.

Following the Paleo-Indians, the two groups that produced the greatest number in variety of physical remains were both coastal cultures.

The Red Paint People, named for the color of the ochre used extensively in their grave sites.

And one of the groups that replaced them the people from the Susquehanna Tradition named for their presumed migration from the great valley of the Southeast.

Unlike the Red Paint People, they didn't venture far from where they lived near the shore.

- [Bruce Bourque] The Red Paint People so-called, are of course, are these swordfish hunters who developed these contacts with people far away, regularly hunted these dangerous creatures of the sea, engaged in all kinds of fancy ritual activities, made just stunning artifacts out of stone and bone.

You can tell from the tools that they're making large rugged boats and you need a fairly large rugged boat to hunt a swordfish.

And these are not the kind of swordfish we see staked out in stores.

These were big fish, 15, 1,600 pounds.

And they attack when they're harpooned, very, very frequently.

- [Narrator] Although we have much to learn about Maine's prehistoric peoples, it's clear that they lived within the same parameters of landscape and climate as the early European settlers did thousands of years later.

- [Donald Soctomah] The tribe had villages set up for different times of the season to coincide with the migration of animals.

And when the Europeans came, they thought it was as a migratory people and nomads.

Nomads of people that don't have a place to go but we had places to go.

There were different villages.

- You know, I think they probably moved around for a number of reasons.

One would certainly, and a very logical one would be for resources, whether those be sweet grass for basket making when sweet grass became available, going for codfish, that sort of thing.

But they may have also moved around for social reasons.

There may have been big gatherings and likely were big gatherings.

- The tribes of Maine had a special relationship with the animals of the forest.

So special that families formed clans that respected an animal, and that animal became their helper.

And during medicine ceremonies, that would be their animal that that helped them through troubled times.

The Europeans, on the other hand, didn't understand that, the closeness what we had with the animals, In their mind, it was just to shoot the animal.

It was food and it was in the way of progress.

As more Europeans moved into the area, they started exploited in the beaver and other fur bearers.

And it wasn't like the way the Natives tribes of Maine captured the fur bearers.

You'd always leave something behind.

You try not to take the young or you leave a few behind.

But as the settlers continued on, areas of, we'll say beaver, disappeared because they were over trapped.

And there was no thinking ahead.

And the tribes saw this happen and their livelihood disappearing.

- [Narrator] As English and French explorers began coming to the region in the 1500s, misunderstandings and conflict oftentimes stemmed from a lack of respect for the Native people.

One example of this is a memorable encounter during Giovanni da Verrazano's voyage of 1524.

- When he got to Maine, he ran into some Natives that were really fairly standoffish.

And one of the reasons they were probably standoffish is because Verrazano and his people had gotten off, walked inland several miles, and quote unquote, visited their homes.

In other words, he went tramping through their wigwams without their permission and just generally made a real pest out of himself.

And his statement when they finally traded with these people is they handed the stuff down in baskets to 'em off the rocks and he'd put in what he thought they might want.

And they'd take it out and take out what they want put some furs in and send it back down to him.

And as they were pulling away with their little boat he was already feeling that these people were not treating him with the respect that he deserved.

So as they were pulling away with a little boat he looked back and they were all up on the rocks, mooning him.

And this was the first mooning in Maine, as far as we know.

And he left the place in a real huff at that point and and nicknamed it, the land of the bad people.

So it was always a very edgy relationship.

They could get along, but there were always reasons on both sides felt they had reasons not to trust the other which ultimately did evolve into full scale warfare by the middle of the colonial period.

- Well, the Europeans didn't understand that the tribe held all the land in common.

Europeans had to put a fence around something, claim ownership to it.

The tribe said this land is everybody's.

We need to share, but not destroy.

- The Native Americans saw at first a people that they probably had wanted to get to know.

When the St. Croix colony started in 1604 the Europeans wouldn't have made it through the winter without the help of the Natives.

The Natives provided them food and provided them, showed them how to protect themselves against the elements and things like that.

- [Narrator] Even with help, this colony did not last.

Winter came early and it proved to be severe.

The French colonists quickly consumed most of the wood on the island and ice churning in the tides kept them from crossing for more on the mainland.

As the winter deepened, the harsh conditions took a fierce toll and the colony was abandoned.

Three years later, when the English settled Popham colony the Native people were more leery than before.

By this time they'd heard about Natives being captured and taken back to England.

And in fact, the Popham colonists arrived with two captives who had been taken from Maine.

Understandably, they received a cool reception from the captives kin.

- So when Popham came and set up his colony in 1607, the Natives are going, "Whoa!

You know, let's kind of hang back here and see," and the colony didn't make it.

- [Narrator] There were many reasons the Popham colony failed.

The fact that the Natives were suspicious and reluctant to trade was coupled with internal feuding, a shortage of supplies, and the untimely deaths of both the colonies leader and financial backer.

After this, Europeans came to the region mostly on a seasonal basis.

And it was some time before serious attempts were made again at settlement.

- Let's say by 1610 we begin to see a few full scale fishing voyages sent over.

And by the time you get to the twenties and thirties there's a large number of fishing vessels coming over.

And about the twenties, they start putting up year round fishing stations, and then it wasn't long after that, by the thirties, that you actually have people coming and settling.

When we look at that period, we have to understand that it was a different world in the sense that there were very defined female, male roles in the economic structure of how it operated.

And if someone died, a man or a woman, almost immediately, they would be remarried to somebody else because you had to keep both sides of the system operating.

Until the women showed up, you just don't get communities.

I mean, you have fishing stations or you have trading post.

You don't have towns.

- We learned, we furnished to the early settlers and they learned it from us, the growing of corn, the trapping, the life in the woods, the canoeing.

And they learned all that.

And to not share that aspect of it would be wrong.

- Europeans operating the fur trade had to use canoes.

Europeans moving about in the winter had to use snowshoes.

In terms of technology, the Europeans were amazed at the things the Indians made.

The Europeans were manufacturing goods.

That means they were anticipating that people out there would have use for certain categories of objects.

So they could make them in large volumes.

Natives made articles for their own use or for the use of a small group of usually relatives.

So for example, a hunter would have his own equipment, his own bow, his own spear, his own snow shoes, make his own arrows.

A family or a small group of people would make a canoe that would be used by the kin group.

Birch bark canoes were European's favorites.

Everybody either asked for or stole a Birch bark canoe to take back home.

- European contact very quickly had, I guess, a devastating effect.

And probably the first aspect of that would be the diseases that just were rampant especially between 1615 and 1617.

- The devastation along the Native peoples was fairly astonishing, even to the Europeans, because of course no one had a very clear idea of what caused the diseases in the first place.

We had no germ theory of disease in 1600 when the voyages began to become regular to this part of the world.

- [Narrator] The Native people had no immunity to European diseases.

And the most populated regions were devastated.

Some tribes lost as much as 75% of their people as the new settlers moved in.

- Many of 'em were coming as families.

They were trying to set up, they were leaving England.

Land was a real draw.

They were also looking at lumber, possibilities for the lumber trade.

So that's what was bringing your settlers.

Obviously you have the entrepreneurs who are in the fur trade or into fishing who are sending vessels over just for those things.

But the settlers were coming, I think, looking for a better life in a sense.

But you had in Maine early on development of what they call ribbon settlements.

So these are little settlements that literally hug the coast and hug the shores of the rivers and really didn't have much of a nucleus.

And which of course made it really tough when you get into the normal public problems that you have for example, transportation.

How do you move a bunch of grain from one end of the town to the other end of the town when the town is seven miles long and one house deep and you have no roads?

We have the image, the old mythological image, that most of your early people and even settlers here were either fishermen or lumber or fur trader.

Well, in point of fact, probably 80 to 90% of your early settlers in Maine, in the 1600s and since, well through the colonial period, were farmers.

I think then what happens though is people are gradually trying to make a living.

They've invested themselves in the land that they've cleared and the houses they've built and it's probably the only place they have to go.

So they stay and try to make the best of it.

I would suspect quite a number of them ended up in the woods in the wintertime doing a variety.

I think some of 'em probably went lumbering.

Some of 'em may have gone trapping.

They may have had other small industries that they carried on.

There's a series of maps in the 1794, 95 period when Massachusetts told every town to make a map of itself, which they all did.

And those maps, almost every one of every community, you'll find, you know, three, four, half a dozen sawmills on little streams.

And also when you study the history of these places you find that many of the local people have acquired large tracks of land, interior tracks of land, but essentially so they could go up and lumber them off.

And so they were facing these trees that were like three to four feet across and having to cut those babies down.

And that was a lot of work.

And what's really kind of funny about this is for the Native Americans at that time, this was a good deal because what they had been doing fairly extensively in this area is periodically would burn the land, because after it's burned you have this dramatic lush undergrowth come up of saplings and shrubs and so on which deer, and other game loved.

And so it would bring the game into the area.

Well, now you have some European come up here and this guy is offering to cut all this stuff out, would leave all of the twigs, the branches and all of that stuff behind.

And not only that, he was paying their Native to do it.

And now I don't care who you are, that's a good deal.

And I'm sure they went back and thought the Europeans were pretty dumb people because they really were getting what they wanted out of it.

Unfortunately, what happens of course, is as you move into the 18th century and you have speculators picking up these deeds they come back in with the idea of developing this.

And, of course, getting the Natives out of there.

I think there was a systematic effort to tame the land much more than had been going on prior within Native Americans to give it bounds, to give it dimensions and to find ways to move through it and to bring it under control.

And I think that's really probably the major change that went on was that type of thing.

- [Narrator] Lumber quickly became the most valuable of Maine's resource based products.

And Maine contributed substantially to the formation of American logging techniques and folklore.

The forest economy enjoyed an important advantage in the even distribution of Maine's 5,000 or so rivers and streams.

Rivers offered a cheap means of moving logs to tide water, and also served as arteries for carrying supplies north into the remote logging camps.

Bangor, settled in 1769, thrived on the lumber trade and quickly became the world's most productive lumber port.

♪ As a lad I worked at lumber camps ♪ ♪ All over the state of Maine ♪ Don't try to tell me now, my friend ♪ ♪ That woodsman are all the same ♪ ♪ I've seen them good ♪ I've seen them bad ♪ And many in between ♪ Listen, my boy and I'll tell you of this corky I have seen ♪ - There are these men who as career woodsman, you might say, they'd work in the woods in the winter time.

Then they'd come down to Bangor and then they'd go back up into the woods for the river drive, come down on the river drive, and probably be back down here by early July.

Well, they could get job on a farm, you know, haying, whatever it might be.

They could get job in a lumber mill.

They could work on the boom where the logs sorted.

There were jobs, and they could keep that up until it came time to go back up into the woods in the fall.

There were many men who followed this pattern let's say.

Now you've got to remember that these men in the lumber camp were in there from September and October, right through until March.

On the Penobscot, they generally didn't even come out for Christmas.

They'd stay there right straight through.

Now you get a bunch of men in a situation like this and they're going to have to have some entertainment.

They're developed a very strong tradition of lumber camp singing.

♪ Oh on the old farm ♪ Where the baked potatoes grow ♪ - One man described to me how a fella would go around, walk around the room to each man say, "Okay, fella what are you gonna do?

What are you gonna do?"

And you'd have to sing a song, step dance, play the fiddle, whatever you had to do, you'd have to do something to entertain 'em.

And he said, "If you didn't, they'd ding you."

And I said, "Ding you?

What do you mean, ding you?"

"Oh," he said, then he laughed.

He said, "Oh, they'd lay ya down on the floor and take an old one of these old dried cod fish.

And just wail you with that or toss you in a blanket, something like that."

They would get their entertainment out of you one way or the other.

- [Narrator] Lumber, agriculture and Maine's other key export industries of granite, ice and lime enjoyed spectacular growth throughout the first half of the 19th century.

During this time Maine out produced almost every other state in each of these industries.

But what was a golden era for the new settlers was an era of continued displacement for Native Americans.

As lumber production increased, Native people entered into agreements in which they lost much of their traditional homelands and were settled on reservations.

Indian Township, a Passamaquoddy reservation in Eastern Maine was reserved to the tribe by a Massachusetts treaty in 1794.

By 1965, some 6,000 acres of Passamaquoddy land had been sold off, much of it by the state of Maine acting as trustee for the tribe without actually consulting the Passamaquoddys.

This sale sparked what eventually became known as the Indian Land Claim Settlement.

- [Donald Soctomah] Major changes came in the 1980s when the Maine Land Claims was settled.

People wanted to get the land back to the tribe because one thing we were missing was that interaction with the forest.

And this was one way for us to get back in touch with the forest.

The tribes now have that interaction.

The healing process has started.

People are learning, that knowledge is coming back.

We're getting back in touch with the forest.

We're learning our roots, but we're also learning business development while learning economics.

We're continually changing, just like we have from day one.

If you don't change, but respect your roots, you fail to exist as a people.

And the Passamaquoddy have always changed based on the environment that we live in.

- [Announcer] Production of "Home: The Story of Maine" is made possible in part through a television demonstration grant from Rural Development, part of the USDA.

- [Narrator] How are Native people continuing their way of life in Maine today?

Find out more by visiting our website, www.mpbc.org.

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