May 21, 1910.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
811 
very lame Indian appeared. He had heard my 
gun and had come to see who it was. 1 was not 
sure whether he was Penobscot or St. Francis, 
so after the usual “Queh!” (How do you do?), 
I said: » 
“Penobscot?” 
“Ya-se.” 
“Name?” 
“Brassua.” 
“Captain?” * 
“Ya-se.” 
“Do you know me?” 
After a long searching look, he said, “Y a- 
a-se! Why debble you don’t staid home ’long 
old Jonat’an?” 
My father’s name was Jonathan, so I had no 
doubt but he knew me, though how he did so 
was a puzzle, for he had not seen me since I 
was a small boy. I think, however, that he had 
heard at Chesuncook that I was at Caucomgo- 
moc, and my speaking Indian to him told him 
which of the two I was. 
I asked who was with him. 
His answer was, “Boy.” 
“How large boy?” 
“Some boy.” 
He led the way to a little shed camp of 
spruce bark, which we had occupied when there 
before. Here I found John Brassua, or France¬ 
way, a man weighing over two hundred, a good 
hunter and one of the best boatmen on the 
river. 
John at once welcomed me, and then I found 
who I was up against. Instead of the old man 
being “Captain” Brassua (the term Captain be¬ 
ing about equivalent for chief), whom I had 
known when I was a boy, this was old Brassua 
(or Franceway—i. e., Franqois) Peneas, the 
father of John Franceway, as in those days 
among the Indians the son always took for his 
last name the first name of his father. Old 
Brassua Peneas (called Franceway by the 
whites) was the very worst man in the Penob¬ 
scot tribe, and I knew nearly every hunting 
man in it. Old Peol Pole (i. e., Peter Paul) 
was a close second, but after that there was 
no one who could begin with him for rascality. 
I could fill quite a book with his devices to 
cheat. In those days beaver skins were always 
sold by the pound. It was rulable to leave in 
the middle of the skin what was known as the 
“saddle.” This was a piece of flesh as large 
over as one’s hand, lying between the skin and 
the true body meat; it usually comes off with 
the skin and is afterward fleshed off; it is per¬ 
haps an eighth of an inch thick and would add 
an ounce or two to the weight of the skin. 
Old Brassua used to cut a piece of thick sheet 
lead a little smaller than the so-called “saddle,” 
and with a long knife, loosening one side of the 
saddle from the skin under it, would detach it 
except at the edges and slip in his plate of lead, 
closing down the saddle over it. When the skin 
was dry the lead would bend with it, and there 
was no possible way of detecting the fraud but 
by cutting through the saddle. 
But this did not satisfy old Brassua. He 
would lay his beaver skins with the fur side up, 
and with a bottle of oil in one hand and a 
sheath-knife in the other, he would plough 
furrows through the fur with the knife and 
dribble in oil, following it with sand sifted in. 
The oil would stick the sand close to the pelt 
and the fur would close over it, so that it was 
very hard to detect. My father, who used to 
buy nearly all of the furs brought in by the In¬ 
dians, detected this, although I rather think that 
he had at first a hint from the other Indians. 
If old Brassua had only lived later and been a 
New York broker, he would have taught them 
ways of watering stock which they never 
dreamed of. A photograph of old Geronimo 
as he looked in 1886 when he held the council 
with General Crook at Funnel Canon (Canon de 
los Embudos) would be as good a picture of 
Brassua Peneas as if he himself had sat for it. 
He was a drinking man and the most profane 
man in the tribe, while John was temperate, did 
not swear, and was a good, clean man. 
At first old Brassua began to swear at me 
for being on his hunting ground. He had 
IN GLACIER NATIONAL PARK. 
Looking Down Swift Current River. 
hunted that ground before I was born, “had 
only left it a few years to grow up”; there 
would be trouble if we did not leave. 
After he had finished, I told him that if he 
had hunted here so long he ought to be satis¬ 
fied; that if he had left the ground for several 
years, he had no claim on it, and that we had 
come to stay. 
Then he changed his tactics. He would set 
his traps between ours and he “would plague us 
a great deal.” I told him to go ahead. 
John talked to him low in Indian, and then 
he said, “S’pose you lose urn something, you 
said, ‘D-d Indian, he stole him.’ You got 
um plan?” 
I got Philbrook’s plan, and we sat down 
cross-legged to look at it. I found that, al¬ 
though he could not read, he not only knew 
every pond and stream, but could tell the town¬ 
ship and range in most cases, as he had been 
guide for white timber explorers. I showed 
him where our trap lines were. Seeing that the 
one on Baker Lake Carry crossed the brooks 
above Francis Lake, he said: 
“You found beaver there?” 
“Yes.” 
“Now s’pose you give me that line. Leave 
beaver alone. We tlade (trade). 
I told him that we had eaten one of those 
beaver, and that another was probably then in 
our trap. * 
“Beaver poison,” he said; “you eat, mebbe 
you die.” 
Before this he had showed me where he had 
cut his knee and it had suppurated and made 
him lame. I said: “You old man, be’n eat 
great many beaver, poison blood, that make 
you knee sore, by’m-by you die.” 
He looked at me sharply, and said: “Ugh! 
Ebber you see anybody he don’t die?” 
This conversation seemed to please him and 
he dropped the subject of our giving up our 
line to him. Then he began again: “We got 
it bloke tlap. You swap good tlap our bloke 
tlap; we tlade.” 
On my refusing to do this, he said: ‘You 
got um file?” 
“Yes.” 
“ S’pose you lend um file, maybe can mend.” 
Our camp was so hidden that it wornd be 
only by chance any one could find it, but I had 
anchored a small spruce spar out opposite it as 
a mark, and had been carrying out all the camp 
waste and dumping it there to toll fish, so that 
we could catch them for bait. I told John, who 
I knew had been trying to keep the peace, to 
go up the west shore till he saw the spar and 
then land and find our camp. I told him where 
he could find the key to our chest hidden in the 
moss chinking; that in the chest were two files 
and they could have one of them; that we 
should be gone two days and they could stay 
in our camp and live on our provisions, while 
they carried on the Baker Lake Carry.. They 
could have got on good ground by going up 
the Sis and across to Allegash Lake by much 
shorter carries; but they preferred the nine- 
mile carry to Baker Lake, and we agreed not 
to extend our line any farther. So we said, 
“Adieu!” and parted good friends. My telling 
them where the camp was, proved, as we after¬ 
ward learned, to be the means of saving the 
lives of both of them, when they must have 
frozen to death but for the knowledge of this 
refuge near them. 
•I really felt badly for them to be obliged to 
make the nine-mile carry, but by all the un¬ 
written laws of the woods, both of whites and 
Indians, we owned the ground we had occupied. 
If we had found any new “spots” on any beaver 
dam and the name of any hunter or the totem 
mark of any Indian on such a spot, we should 
have respected their ownership as any one would 
a marked bee-tree; but the country was fairly 
ours, and it was our right to hold it. As Rufus 
was not acquainted with Indians, he worried be¬ 
cause they were going to our camp, but I felt 
sure, although one of them was the greatest 
rascal in the tribe, that they would use our things 
well, for I would much rather trust two strange 
Indians than two strange white men. I had 
been among Indians all my life, and in winter 
we often, in my boyhood, had a great many 
more Indians than whites for neighbors, yet I 
had never known an Indian, when sober, to steal 
anything. An Indian might lie to you and cheat 
you as badly as a white man, but he would 
. never steal from you. 
