The most famous Indian in Maine at the turn of the last century was Frank Loring, better known as Chief Big Thunder. At 6-foot-4 and 225 pounds, Loring was also called Big Frank.

When he died at Indian Island a century ago at age 79, he was the oldest person on the island. The old man left a baffling legacy. He had spun a web of colorful intrigue around himself that is still being sorted out to this day. Was he a vaunted medicine man and keeper of ancient relics and legends or a fraud?

Popular with his people as an orator, Loring was elected lieutenant governor toward the end of his life, but he was never a chief, let alone a “famous wartime chief” as the Bangor Daily News claimed in a headline marking his death on April 9, 1906. In fact, Loring was a vaudeville star who most likely took his sobriquet off a circus program back when Indians were regularly featured in traveling shows.

Unequaled as a storyteller and orator, Loring was popular with newspaper reporters as well. “Big Thunder has been written up, has been photographed, and sketched more times than can be ascertained,” said the BDN. “Not a newspaper man reached Old Town but a visit to the island resulted in a published interview with the foremost red man of the island reservation.”

Reporters always left with some heart-pounding stories “reeking with bloodshed and indiscriminate gore” often about the scalping of Mohawk Indians, the Penobscots’ fabled enemies. Loring claimed to have participated in some of these ancient battles, and he produced a big “scalping knife” to prove it, among the other “relics” he guarded. He claimed he was “about 90,” said the newspapers, but even if that were true, he had been born long after the violent troubles with the Mohawks.

After he died the newspapers soon forgot about Big Thunder. The old chief’s reputation went downhill quickly in the hands of experts such as Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, who dismissed him as “an untruthful and untrustworthy old rascal.” Frank Speck, author of the famous book “Penobscot Man,” said, “He was a most unreserved liar and no secret was made of it among the Penobscot.” Another expert, Frank Siebert, claimed incorrectly Loring was a pureblooded white man and “a mendacious circus entertainer and showman who spent a lifetime in travel and exploitation of his pseudo-aboriginal knowledge.”

I scanned the indexes of several recent books on Maine Indians and found no mention of Loring at all. Then I checked the index for “Maine History,” a scholarly journal published by the Maine Historical Society. An essay titled “Chief Big Thunder (1827-1906): The Life History of a Penobscot Trickster” by Harald E.L. Prins gives Loring’s life a whole new slant. After reading Prins’ article, it’s clear to me that Chief Big Thunder deserves better from historians.

Loring was one of the most memorable Indian showmen in 19th century New England, according to Prins, a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University whose research helped gain federal recognition for Indian groups in Aroostook County. Big Frank’s father was of mixed Wampanoag Indian-Portuguese heritage and his mother was a Penobscot, “a doctress of the tribe who practiced medicine in Boston and Portland.” After his parents died, Frank, the youngest of eight children, helped his sisters make baskets for a living. When he got older, he roamed throughout New England, marrying twice and fathering at least nine children.

As a teenager, Loring joined the circus working for P.T. Barnum and others. By 1848 he was a recruiting scout for a vaudeville company that staged plays and exhibitions with Indian themes in the Northeast. By the 1880s, he lived on Olamon Island, in the Penobscot River north of Old Town, visiting Bar Harbor in the summer to sell crafts. He was skilled at making baskets, moccasins and snowshoes. In the fall he guided wealthy hunters. He continued to perform.

In 1889 he moved to Indian Island and opened a small “museum” with a cloth sign announcing “Big Thunder, Indian relics and Indian traditions told” that covered the front of his small house. Among his treasures were a “war bow,” a wampum collar, stone peace pipe, iron tomahawk and other items. Their authenticity can only be imagined. This is evidently the period when for a generous tip sightseers were regaled with stories and given some of these “curios.”

Was Loring a fraud? That may be the wrong question today. Of course he stretched the truth. But rather than dismissing him as a liar, one could do better to accept him as a “trickster,” or player of practical jokes, in the tradition of Gluskap, the legendary figure in Abenaki myth, “one who exaggerates, lies habitually and tells tall tales.” His role in Indian history came at a time when the United States had nearly succeeded in destroying American Indians physically and was pressuring the remnants in Maine to become farmers or work in sawmills. Many resisted and became transient artisans, peddling baskets and other crafts and medicines. Show business was a survival route for some such as Big Frank.

“Frank Loring deserves re-evaluation as a cultural survivalist,” wrote Prins. “He understood the importance of his ‘Indian’ identity, refused to walk the assimilation path, took a critical stance toward the dominant culture, was not above creatively fooling the affluent white folk visiting his humble abode and milking them for all they were worth.” Watching the traditional culture bleed from his community, he became Big Thunder, the trickster, engaged in a “subversive strategy of creative resistance in the form of theatrics,” Prins tells us.

In other words, Loring was a new kind of warrior in an era when scalping knives and war bows no longer had any practical significance. Tribal survival had become showbiz.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.