“Who was Indian Joe?” A Journey into Local Loreby Joy Leland Michelson

Adapted from a talk delivered on June 20, 2010 Clan of the Hawk Spiritual Weekend

Orleans, Vermont

Growing up in Newbury, Vermont, I developed a deep appreciation for local history—blessed by passionate teachers and a hometown rich with legends of great men and women, their hardships, and sacrifice. In the Oxbow Cemetery in Newbury village, my grandparents and two siblings lay in rest just yards from Jacob Bayley, Thomas Johnson, and the marker remembering “Old Joe” the “Friendly Indian Guide.” I have always felt a kinship to these people of lore, and delighted in imagining our common footsteps in the meadows and hillsides of the town.

In 1998 I was invited by the Oxbow Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, based in Newbury, to give a talk on Indian Joe at the celebration of the chapter’s 100th anniversary. Their members had seen an article I had written for the Journal Opinion, where I had investigated the question of whether Indian Joe was actually buried in the Oxbow Cemetery. To prepare for that article, and my DAR talk, I did my best to collect a variety of resources on which to base a description of the man whose rifle is displayed in its Chapter House in the village. I consulted things like a 1976 booklet published by the West Danville Methodist Church, an article in Vermont Life magazine, the town histories of Newbury and Walden, Vermont, and even the Cracker Barrel Cookbook of the Newbury Women’s Fellowship of the Congregational Church. What emerged from those sources was a sketch of a sympathetic Indian—claimed as a resident by several different towns—who aided the English and Scottish settlers as a lookout and guide, on the banks of the Connecticut River and along the route we call the Bayley-Hazen Road.

I went on to join the Oxbow Chapter a few years after that talk, and became better acquainted with the rifle attributed to Indian Joe, and a dugout canoe dragged out of a local pond that is also housed there. Tales of Indian Joe’s legendary cave, dug into the bank overlooking the great ox-bow, had tantalized me since youth, as did the mysterious “Indian corn mill” on the Haverhill side of the village. So much awaited examination, and I made this local history the focus of my graduate studies at Dartmouth College, where I was disciplined as an examiner of history to look deeper, and to distrust simple explanations for complex cultural phenomena like Native American history. In my thesis manuscript, entitled “Jacob Bayley, Indians, and the Remembered Past: Reflections of History in a Small Vermont Town,” I sought to shed light on the complex relationship between Newbury’s founder, Brigadier General Jacob Bayley, and the Indian people like “Joe,” who served as scouts for Bayley during the Revolutionary War. By digging deeper in my research, I came to understand that the history I had relied upon for my sense of place as a child was not a complete view, and I came to understand “Indian Joe” in a very different way.

Stories of a time and a place are multi-dimensional and told by many, many different people. They are passed down, written down, and shared. Some are even quite obviously fictional, but have become a collective “truth.” While that might sound more like the oral history tradition of a native culture, it’s also true of the European settler culture from which I was born. I discovered, for example, that Indian Joe’s cave—a source of fascination and exploration for generations of Newbury natives—was an invention of author Frances Parkinson Keyes for her novel of historical fiction, The Safe Bridge, written in 1934. The novel’s heroine, Elizabeth (Beth) Burr, arrives from Scotland to settle in Ryegate, Vermont, and along the way meets Joe the Indian along the road approaching Newbury.

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When Joe offers to guide Beth’s party to the village, she asks,

“But, Joe, you’re not going out of your way, are you? You said your cave was in Newbury.”

And he answers,

“Near. North. Near Oxbow, Colonel Thomas Johnson’s place.”

Thus a legend the legend of Indian Joe’s cave was formed, and from it others. Virginian Downs, in her Vermont Life article of 1960, even cited The Safe Bridge —a work of fiction—for her biography of “Indian Joe,” and many a local writer has undoubtedly built pamphlet and cookbook biographies of Indian Joe or “Injun Joe,” using that Vermont Life article as historical reference. My beloved grade school teachers told the story of Joe and Molly’s cave to generations of Newbury children as though it was unquestionable truth. Surely they had been told the same tale by the ones who had come before them.

Based on primary documents such as war rolls, official correspondence between Jacob Bayley, Timothy Bedel, and General George Washington, as well as journals of various New England legislatures, I learned that the stories in our town histories about “Indian Joe” serving as a guide to local settlers could in fact be attributable to half a dozen different men. Included here are a few such men, whose identities documented at the time held characteristics shared by Indian Joe:

Lewis Vincent, a Huron from Caughnewaga and a Dartmouth graduate who served as interpreter and scout for Jacob Bayley, and according to Washington’s presidential papers dined with him in Philadelphia.

Colonel Lewis, referred to as “Chief of the Caughnewaga” accompanied Jacob Bayley to Cambridge, Massachusetts in the winter of 1776 to meet with George Washington, to share intelligence from Canada. A Colonel Lewis was also reported to have been interviewed by the Massachusetts General Court in 1775.

Joseph Lewis, about whom Jacob Bayley wrote to Captain Timothy Bedel in 1778, was a guide and interpreter, and also an ambassador and “recruiter” of northern Indians to the American cause. Later in the same letter, Bayley refers to him simply as “Louis.”

Pierre Joseph Louis, possibly the son of a Louis Wawanolet, who was known around Troy, VT in 1800 as “Louis the Indian. ” Pierre Joseph Louis may have been a grandson of Chief Gray Lock. Gordon Day could not substantiate the precise identity, but found reference to him being called “Captain Susup,” with whose band the medicine woman Molly Occut was associated.

Pial-Susup, or Pierre Joseph, son of Captain John Vincent. Captain John is noted to have been present at the battle known as “Braddock’s Defeat” in 1755, and he claimed to have taken aim at George Washington with a rifle.

There are others . . .

In the end, for me, understanding the precise identity of Indian Joe is not as important as understanding what his identity meant to the people of Coos in the early 19th century, and to the people of the 19th and

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20th centuries who created our written local histories. “Indian Joe” was the Native American that my white ancestors wanted to believe represented all Indians—someone who saw the settlers as righteous defenders of freedom and independence, rather than foreign invaders who would totally displace the indigenous people and wear away their culture by degrees. My ancestors wanted to reconcile a belief in their own goodness with the harsh reality of cultural domination, through a romantic tale of the last noble Indian—a composite character, perhaps—made up of all the best parts of the many, many native people who shared the Coos country for generations.

To be fair, one particular Indian Joe most certainly did own the rifle in the DAR Chapter House—the same Joe who died in Newbury on February 19, 1819 in the care of the Bayley family. It’s possible that this same Joe camped with a woman named Molly at the ponds bearing their names (where the towns of Danville, Peacham, Cabot and Walden meet). It is less likely that this same Joe hewed the dugout canoe in the Oxbow Chapter House, or that he ground corn in the rocky depression known as the Indian Corn Mill, or that he ever called a cave his home. For me, history demands a less tidy story of the native people who clearly occupied this ground before us, and whose names were not all “Joe” and “Molly.”

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