Down the Meductic> Brunswick man recalls 125-mile journey with Maliseet companion

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In this age of superhighways, it’s hard for most to envision a simpler time when people traveled great distances by canoe. But not for Nicholas Smith, who has traveled on many of the old Indian canoe trails in Maine and New Brunswick during his 73 years. His crowning achievement was traversing the 125-mile Meductic (New Brunswick) to Old Town trail, once the main East-West artery for central Maine and New Brunswick, which also led to the St. John and St. Croix rivers.

That accomplishment is singular because he and his Maliseet companion Peter Paul became the first men in the 20th century to complete that trail after finishing their journey in May 1964. (Smith knows of only one other pair to traverse the trail, Maliseets Pat Polchies and Martin Paul in 1994.)

What led two modern men to canoe and portage through the wilds of Maine and New Brunswick? Simply put, they were chasing history.

The Brunswick resident has been studying Colonial and especially Indian history for the past 49 years. He got into the field on the suggestion of an adviser, two weeks before he graduated from the University of Maine. His career stops along the way include being curator of the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor for a few years.

Smith first heard of Paul while working as a volunteer at the Peabody Museum in Salem, Mass., then later at the Abbe.

“I figured I had to find this man and get to know him,” he recalled. “I went up and met him, and we got along well. I worked with him about 40 years, until his death in 1989.”

One of the reasons that Smith decided to tackle the Meductic trail was his research into the life of John Gyles.

Like Smith, Gyles ended up being immersed in Indian life. But unlike Smith, it wasn’t voluntarily.

Smith explained that, in 1689, French-Canadian missionaries in Old Town and Meductic, sympathetic to the local Indian populations, organized a raid of the fort at Pemaquid Point to strike back at an unpopular Massachusetts governor. They attacked just after noon, cutting off the field workers from the fort. They captured Judge Thomas Gyles, his wife, three sons and two daughters.

The elder Gyles was badly injured in the attack and couldn’t keep up with the raiding party returning north. The Indians took him aside and thumped him in the head, a mercy killing.

“They piled rocks over his grave, showing they had great respect for this man,” said Smith, a founding member of the Maine Archaeological Society.

John Gyles was taken up the canoe trail to Meductic by the Maliseets. What he saw and did was later recounted in the book “The Strange Adventures of John Gyles Captured by the Indians,” which went through 11 editions. (“Indian captivity stories were best sellers in the 1850s and 1860s,” Smith said.)

Later, after his ransom was paid, Gyles was hired by Massachusetts to be an Army interpreter. He went on to build Fort George in Brunswick, and for 15 years, he was the chief interpreter for every treaty between the Indians and Massachusetts.

So, even 300 years later, Smith and Paul hoped to find some of the sights that Gyles had experienced. They first started talking about doing the Meductic trail in the mid-’50s, and they had taken some of the old canoe trails along the border. But they ended up taking off on the Meductic near the end of May in 1964.

The pair started at Meductic, then had a five-mile portage to Benton, where they set into the Eel River and followed it to Eel Lake. Next was a portage to North Lake, near Fosterville. They paddled through The Thoroughfare to Grand Lake, which proved the first treacherous part of their trip.

“There were huge waves building up in that lake, with 6-foot swells,” Smith said. “On an average day, it was impossible to do much canoeing on that lake.”

They landed at that lake’s Butterfield Landing, then portaged to Baskahegan Stream. That dumped into the Mattawamkeag River, which they followed until Gordon’s Falls.

“It was better to portage around the falls than to try to make it through,” Smith said.

The Mattawamkeag led to the Penobscot at Mattawamkeag.

You would think the pair would be home free once hitting the Penobscot, but such was not the case.

“It began to get really cold,” Smith recalled. “It would be 90 in the daytime, then down to the 30s at night. Also, a terrific wind blew, which would set up big whitecaps on the Penobscot. I remember trucks stopping, and [the drivers] looking at us, wondering if we were in trouble.”

Smith also forgot the main warning to all travelers: Don’t drink the water.

“I had severe thirst,” he said. “The thermos with water had been used up, and I hadn’t put in anything else to drink. So I drank some of the water near Lincoln, and had some bad effects from it.”

While on the trek, Smith could relate to what Gyles had experienced.

“Three hundred years later, I’m the white man, Peter Paul is the Indian, and we’re trying to find places where different things had happened. We did find several of the places that John Gyles had described when he was prisoner.”

The portages were perhaps the most difficult part of the five-day journey.

“The portages held us up, much more than we anticipated,” he said. “We weren’t hep on doing it the old-fashioned way, carrying the canoe, if we could help it, so we lined up rides wherever we could.”

Smith and Paul took both black-and-white slides and 16 mm film on the trip. Unfortunately, they used mostly film on the second half of the trip, and that film was lost by the processing company. The remaining film from the trek now rests at Northeast Historic Film in Bucksport. Smith is hopeful that the film and photos could be turned into a documentary by a history-minded filmmaker.

The Meductic canoe trail continued to be popular until the time of the Aroostook War in 1807.

“The border was a very loose affair then, with neither side positive where it was,” Smith explained. “Loggers were cutting lumber back and forth on one side or the other. The Army had no trail to follow, so they had to cut a road up, so they could get in their wagons.”

Smith and Paul made several subsequent trips to parts of the trail, especially the picturesque Eel River.

“It was Peter’s favorite trip,” Smith said. “On our first expedition along this river, the beaver were almost extinct. But on his last trip, we saw signs of beaver houses along the river. It made Peter extremely happy to see the return of that animal that meant so much to the traditions of his people.”

Why is this trail still important today?

“This old trail has so much historic significance for Maine and Canada,” Smith said. “It’s a beautiful area, which unfortunately has been spoiled by mill dams, so that it’s almost been forgotten. But it’s something that schoolchildren should know about as part of their Maine history.”

Smith’s current project is compiling a bibliography of articles about Maritime Indian history, in hopes of fostering better understanding between the native population and those who have followed.

“Some of the racism that’s still going on is absolutely absurd in this day and age,” he said. [The Indians] have a lot of good things going for them, and, if given a chance, they can do a lot to bring up the whole economy of Maine. If they could be brought into the mainstream of life, their potential is enormous.”