8 Frank G. Speck and Maine Ethnohistory Alvin H. Morrison SUNY, Fredonia

Introduction Early in this century, a young anthropologist from Philadelphia symbolically staked a claim to the study of the Penobscot Indians of Maine, and, until his death at mid-century, no other anthropologist trespassed anywhere in Maine without his invitation. His name was Frank Gouldsmith Spech (1881-1950), and he did his basic Penobscot fieldwork intermittently between 1907 and 1918 (when a major informant froze to death in the woods). From the start, Speck simultaneously had under his scrutiny several other Indian peoples, in other areas of North America, and his attentions were divided accordingly. He published specialty articles on the Penobscot spasmodically, and a monograph on Penobscot Shamanism in 1919, but ("due to an unfortunate set of circumstances"1) his general ethnography—Penobscot Man—was not published until 1940. In my attempt to assess the strengths and weaknesses of what Frank Speck did with his Maine Indian monopoly, I depend upon the statements of those scholars who knew him personally. Where some of their assertions about him are contradictory, I decide for myself who is correct, based upon my own experiences with using his published works. Of one thing I have become very aware—namely, that the issues of concern to Speck were neither the same nor as complex as those of today. For that reason alone we must be relatively tolerant about some things that, to us, seem indeed to be shortcomings in his work. Speck was, after all, a pioneer ethnographer in a virgin territory, using limited analytical tools. The Boas Influence In order to better understand Speck's modus operandi, we should start with his university training under "Papa Franz" Boas, the sole proprietor of academic anthropology in North America in the earliest decades of this century. Although Frank Speck was awarded the Ph.D. degree from University of Pennsylvania in 1908, he was nonetheless still Boas' student, as he had been for his 1905 M.A. degree at Columbia. Boas founded what has been called the "American Historical- Distributional 'School,'" centered at Columbia but including most American anthropologists through the intimacy of small- group contact-networks. It was Boas' students who put his program into effect through their initial common training and direction, despite their later differences in interests (Eggan 1968:130, 133) . This Boasian program was purposefully reactionary against the armchair theorizing of the 19th-century Cultural descriptionEvolutionistshand fieldwors krathe. anIdt r oemphasizeftha publishinn theorizingd thg edetaile importanc. d culturae of doinl g first­ 9 Franz Boas "salvaged the evolutionist objective of historical laws, but substituted what he called the 'historical method' for the [then] discredited comparative method. His own investigations were turned ... to working out [what he considered to be] the actual history of peoples and cultures in limited geographical regions (Eggan 1968: 128-129)." Boas wrote extensively about the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest Coast. To Boas, "the definitive test of a good ethnography was wether or not it faithfully mirrored the world of the natives as the natives saw it (Harris 1968:316)." Today, we would call this the "emic" approach, emphasizing the insiders' perspectives and concepts of a culture; then, however, it was a brand new idea. "Boas may have been a good fieldworker, but he was good about the wrong things (Harris 1968:315)." Cross-cultural- studies pioneer George Peter Murdock simply was not able to wring enough relevant information from the "extravagantly overrated" Boas' material on the Kwakiutl culture to use it for his World Ethnographic Sample. He complained: "Despite Boas' 'five-foot shelf' of monographs on the Kwakiutl [including page after page of blueberry-pie recipes], this tribe falls into the quartile of those whose social structure and related practices are least adequately described among the 250 [societies] covered in this [cross-cultural] study (Murdock 1949:xiv)." "Historical" was Boas' own term for his interests, but one of his greatest students, Alfred Louis Kroeber, "went so far as to accuse his mentor of neglecting real history! According to Kroeber, the association of Boas with a position of historical particularism was nothing but an error which arose from Boas' attempt to refute the grandiose schemes of his [Cultural-Evolutionist] predecessors (Harris 1968:275)." Further, Kroeber goes on to make the flat accusation that Boas was not an historian. Although he observes all the methodological safeguards associated with an historical orientation—the need for context, stress on uniqueness in all phenomena, caution with respect to "generalizations savoring of the universal "--he still does not "do/1 history. "In brief, one may define the Boas position as basically that of the physical scientist . . . [Kroeber 1935:542]." A similar judgment was rendered by another of Boas' famous pupils, Paul Radin (1933:17) [Harris 1968:276]. If the historical results of Boas' type of studies were unsatisfactory to some ethnologists, they were even less attractive to most historians. Therefore, during the 1930s, there was a distinct increase of interest in archaeology and, more gradually, also in what came to be called ethnohistory. These were seen as being capable of providing a more realistigraphic can dan dethnologica accurate ltempora studiel s dimensio(Eggan n1968:130-147 for both ethno, passim)­ . 10 But, to conclude this section about Franz Boas' influence upon Frank Speck, suffice it to say that confusion over what is, and what is not, proper historical anthropology is an issue to which we shall return shortly, in earnest. Speck in the Field Intimate, empirical, field ethnography—what Speck himself called the "bedside ethnologist"3 approach—making possible a detailed description of a primitive culture: that is what Speck learned from Boas that an anthropologist must do. Collecting items of material culture for museums and teaching use became an integral part of Speck's fieldwork, also. Speck surrounded himself with both people and props. "And when Speck lived with an Indian family, he lived with them, he didn't merely observe them at close quarters. The association was emotionally rewarding to Speck and to the Indians. ..." So states one of Speck's last students, Anthony F.C. Wallace (1951:286). Another admirer, Carl F. Voegelin (in Wallace 1968:33), said "Speck was just like another Indian--you went to him because you liked him and maybe he knew more than some other Indians." On my own first visit to the Penobscots in 1965, I asked an Old Indian couple if they remembered an anthropologist named Frank Speck. The spontaneous delight that they displayed at hearing his name, and the almost reverential comments they made about him truly awed me. "His book is our Bible," added a younger woman, who probably was too young to have remembered Speck directly herself. Wallace (1951:287) tells us that Speck felt field ethnog­ raphy to be a highly romantic adventure: "Perhaps no more of this appeared in his writing because he lived out his romance in field trips — trips of scientific adventure and discovery." I believe there is no doubt whatever that Frank Speck simply delighted in "playing Indian," from his boyhood days until his death. There is even the strong possibility that occasionally he got too romantic about it, to the point of losing objective perspective and becoming gullible. Certainly the two scholars who knew the Penobscots as well as Speck did, but in different ways, in separately reviewing Speck's (1940) Penobscot Man, both clearly indicate that he was led astray. Romantic naivete seems to me the most likely cause. Linguist Frank T. Siebert (1941:280), without any comment, simple includes the following as a "corrigendum" in his review of the book: (pp. 113-114; 140; 144) Big Thunder or Frank Loring was a pure-blooded white man with a flare for folderol. It is he whose picture appears (p. 140) wearing the feather-duster turban. At Old Town he served as a conven­ ient target to which credulous white and guidnuncs could be directed, being a menda­ ociouspenf hist sacircu pseudo-aboriginalifetims entertainee in travelr lanknowledge dan dshowma exploitatio.n whMoso t n 11 Penobscot of the old school looked upon him as a sort of Baron Munchausen. The "war bow" (p. 144) needless to say is not authen­ tic, being one of Big Thunder's fabrications. Ethnohistorian and naturalist Fannie Hardy Eckstorm (1940: 743-744) flatly states that Speck was "... sometimes, we fear, being deliberately duped by his associates, one of whose great games was misinforming unsuspicious inquirers. There seems no other way to account for some of the statements in the book." Among other things that Eckstorm takes exception to are Speck's items about obtaining wool from moose-manes and a tree-trap for mink, neither of which, she claims, are naturally feasible. "So numerous are mistakes of this sort that it is clear the information was received from a poor hunter and never checked by a good one." Now, while Eckstorm's (1940) review leaves unstated who might have been the source of Speck's troubles, elsewhere Eckstorm (1945:40, 97) makes it clear that she has no confidence at all in one of Speck's principal informants, Newell Lyon.5 Speck (1947:286-287) vigorously defends Lyon in his review of Eckstorm's (1945) book, Old John Neptune and Other Maine Indian Shamans, but the doubt once raised may well linger uncomfortably in one's mind: How often was Speck misinformed? Speck and Historiography Earlier we considered Kroeber's indictment of Boas as a non-historian, regardless of what he called himself. Now we turn to the central issue of this paper, Frank G. Speck as historiographer, and find that he, too, is similarly paradoxical. On this issue the written opinions of highly respected scholars are in complete disagreement: Fred Eggan, A. Irving Hallowell, and John Witthoft consider Speck to have done and used historical research as part of his standard operating procedure; while Anthony F.C. Wallace, William N. Fenton, and Fannie Hardy Eckstorm think otherwise. So as not to distort their messages, I quote each opinion at some length, before analyzing any of them. Historical 1. Eggan (1967:118): "Northern Woodland Ethnology"—The utilization of historical sources and documentary data has long been an important research technique with regard to the Eastern Woodlands generally. John M. [sic] Swanton in the Southeast and Speck and his students in the East and Northeast have made masterly use of these materials to delineate aboriginal and early historic culture patterns. 2. Hallowell (1951:68): [Obituary of] "Frank Gouldsmith Speck, 1881-1950"—So . . . throughout his career Speck made considerable use of relevant documentary material in addition to the mass of information he was constantly collecting from Indian informants. Although the term "ethnohistory" appears in some of his later writings, he was always an ethno­ historian. His often expressed admiration for the work of orientationSwanton likewis. e documents this aspect of his general 12 3. Witthoft (in Wallace 1968:32): [Comments following] "The Value of the Speck Papers for Ethnohistory"—Actually Speck did a lot of library and manuscript research but he kept no notes on secondary sources. He always identified himself with the other side of the frontier; and he always regarded the frontier in the classic European sense as a march or boundary between peoples. Non-Historical 4. Wallace (1968:20): "The Value of the Speck Papers for Ethnohistory"—. . . I think it is fair to say that in the narrow sense of the word "ethnohistory" there is not a speck of ethnohistory in the Speck collection. There is, however, a body of material which is very relevant to some problems in ethnohistory, and the collection really creates issues for the collection of ethnohistory and, of course, the history of anthropology. 5. Fenton (in Wallace 1968:31, 34): [Comments following] "The Value of the Speck Papers for Ethnohistory"—[Speck] . . . had no interest in real history as such. I cannot imagine Speck ever sitting down in the library and working with the material of predecessors'—that just didn't interest him. He was interested in cultures in being in an ecological setting, and his primary orientation was that of a natural historian. [The] . . . cultures which he studied . . . were approached as phenomena of an ecological sort rather than as historical phenomena. To return to the point about his being an historian— this must have been at an earlier period. During the '40s, when I was editor of the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, I handled a number of Speck's papers which had things in them that just did not agree with facts in the Bureau of [American] Ethnology Library. When I brought these inconsistencies to Speck's attention, he was very impatient, and said, "You fix 'em; I'll not." 6. Eckstorm (1940:743): [Review of] "Penobscot Man: The Life History of a Forest Tribe in Maine. By Frank G. Speck"—Instead of datable facts, available in documentary sources, some of them very old, the author has contented himself with village gossip, which, in turn, was not checked. Even in quotation from printed sources, it [the book] is often incorrect. . . My analysis starts with those statements just presented which say that Frank Speck was not an historiographer. Anthony Wallace was referring specifically to the "about 35 boxes of material" that constitute the Speck Collection in the American Philosophical Society Library. However, since this includes materials which Speck published, as' well as much that he did not, Wallace's statement is virtually universal in scope. I suggest that Wallace has done enough ethnohistorical research himself to make a valid judgment about Speck's work therein.6 Fenton's comments are taken from the published transcript opresentatiof a conferencn aned atth eth ecomment APS Librarys of a. distinguisheThey follodw Wallace'audience s 13 They have both the candor of that informal discussion-setting and the basis of personal experiences to enhance them. Fenton had been with Speck in the field (among the Iroquois) and was very positively inclined. Conversely, Fenton had been negatively inclined, as an editor, about the library- work "inconsistencies" in Speck's papers. I suggest that the nub of the whole issue is summarized in Fenton's conclusion that Speck's work should be considered as "natural history" and not as "real history" (the latter meaning historiography). Eckstorm was the only ethnohistorian of Maine Indians during her lifetime (1865-1946), and her opinion cannot be brushed aside lightly. Even Speck himself (1947:284), in his review of Eckstorm's (1945) book Old John Neptune clearly implies a distinct difference between his work with the Penobscot and hers, which (latter) he calls "primarily a contribution to ethnohistory rather than to ethnology." I suggest that Speck was really interested only in live Indians, not in dead ones—to the point that the major map in Penobscot Man (1940:6) went to press with the names of the extinct neighboring groups reversed. As regards those statements claiming Speck to have been an historian, I find the only puzzler to be what Hallowell says about Speck admiring the work of John Swanton. The very titles of some of Swanton's publications seem incompatible with Speck's practiced interests: Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors (1922) ; Source Material on the History and Ethnology of the Caddo Indians (1942) ; The Wineland Voyages (1947). If Speck admired Swanton's work, he did so without imitating it. It should be added that Swanton seems not to have been quite so thoroughly influenced by Boasian training as Speck was, and therein may lie the basis for the difference between the two.7 When Eggan cites "Speck and his students" as having made "masterly use" of historical sources and documentary data, I am quite willing to accept the student part in the case of Anthony Wallace, but I myself have been too frustrated by Speck's lack of concern with the Maine Indians' ethnohistory to agree to praising Speck himself. If, as Witthoft says, "Speck did a lot of library and manuscript research," he has somehow failed to impress me with it. However, several years after both Eckstorm (1940) and Siebert (1941) had called to Speck's attention that he had misused the terms Etchemin and Tarratine, Speck does seem to have done, at last, enough documentary homework to agree with some of Eckstorm's findings. Specifically, in his review of Eckstorm's (1945) Old John Neptune, Speck (1947: 285) states: Carefully weighted reasoning . . . applied to the problems of identity of the people designated as "Etchemins" and "Tarratines" by early writers indicates that the former were resident about wherPenobscocontacPassamaquodde tthe tan yd ba noysubsequentl w atandweld thMalecitele undetimy erdrifte o,f thwhil efirs dname e teastwar thsEuropea eo f"Tarratines d nto " 14 were an intrusive Micmac group that temporarily occupied the lower coast of Maine, making inroads as far south as the Massachusetts coast. [Emphases added. ] That Speck finally took into account the ethnohistorical statements left by these "early writers" is particularly significant. It indicates that he had at last realized (however belatedly for his own work) the importance to the study of Maine Indians of these early-seventeenth-century reports. Nevertheless, Speck seems oblivious to the logical corollary of this acceptance—namely, that his elaborate schema of Penobscot family hunting territories (1940:6, 213-215, Chap. IV passim) thereby lost much of its heretofore-implied immemorial land tenure I Furthermore, in recent publications, Dean R. Snow (1976) and I (Morrison 1978) have taken opposite views on this very issue of who lived when in Penobscot country; and neither of us (until now) has counted Speck as ever having shared the Eckstorm (1945)-Hoffman (1955)-Morrison (1978) opinion that the modern "Penobscot" Indians are relative newcomers to "their" lower river. The Consequences Frank Speck's lack of interest in incorporating into his own work what we would call today the "ethnohistorical dimension" can be seen as having at least three consequences. First, if Speck had had more concern with documentary evidence, he might never have raised the claim of supposed pre-Columbian antiquity of family hunting territories among the Algonquian-speaking peoples. Or, at least he might not have insisted upon it so long and adamantly, even if he had suggested it.8 Second, Speck personified, even if he did not preach, an unreal, unnecessary, and counterproductive dichotomy between fieldwork and library-work, instead of promoting teamwork between these two means to the same end of balanced knowledge. Third, Maine ethnohistoriography begins in isolation, with the private research of Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, outside of the potentially beneficial forum of academia and wider publishing opportunities it commands. Little wonder, then, that those of us involved iNOTEn MainS e ethnohistory today still hav' Whate so thesefar t o"unfortunate go. circumstances" were we are not told by Hallowell (1951:72) in Speck's obituary. 2 Charles Hudson (1966) has described admirably for modern historiographic affairs the distinction between the "emic" insiders' perspective and the "etic" outsiders' perspective in his article "Folk History and Ethnohistory." A people's own emic folk history may be purely self-serving subjective 15 propaganda. Outsider-scholars should do unbiased scientifically-objective etic ethnohistory. Both potential perspectives ideally should be taken into conscious account in any well-balanced analysis of any people's past socio- cultural affairs. 3 Wallace (1951:286) describes Speck's "three kinds of ethnologists: the doorstep ethnologist, the kitchen-table ethnologist, and the bedside ethnologist." Today, the term "ethnographer" is used for the sociocultural anthropologist working at the purely observational and descriptive levels of scholarly endeavor, while the term "ethnologist" is reserved for the scholar working at the analytical-generalizing-explanatory levels. Usually the same person acts as both ethnographer and ethnologist, today. However, one of the major modern complaints against the Boasians is over their contentment at stopping with description, instead of attempting to push onward to what we consider to be the more worthy higher levels of investigation. Therefore, Speck's use here of the word "ethnologist" for someone doing initial observational field- work is appropriately symbolic of the Boasian non-concern with these higher levels. k Eckstorm's own book entitled The Penobscot Man (1904; second edition 1924), which is about log-drivers on the river, should not be confused with Speck's Penobscot Man: The Life History of a Forest Tribe in Maine (1940). Eckstorm's book about Indians is Old John Neptune and Other Maine Indian Shamans (1945). Each author reviewed the other's Indian book (Eckstorm 1940; Speck 1947). 5 It is ironic that Newell Lyon (also Lion) froze to death in the woods, in 1918. 6 Wallace's (1969) The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca is a good example of modern anthropological ethnohistory. 7 I am reminded by various knowledgeable persons of what my own suspicions suggested to me long ago—namely, that we are dealing with relative, not absolute, differences here. John Reed Swanton (1873-1958) may have had more, and better, ethnohistorical inclinations than Speck, but modern scholars studying the ethnohistory of the Indians of the Southeastern U.S. are not finding Swanton's work to be the last word. There is still plenty of work to do there—corrective and ground-breaking both. Consider, for example, the new monumental synthesis by Charles M. Hudson (1976) on The Southeastern Indians. Inherent in this idea is the more general rule-of-thumb that "the grass grows greener on the other side of the fence," whichever side one may be on, as a specialist. When one becomes steeped in the esoterica of any area, one sees, as a specialist, shortcomings that simply are not apparent to non-specialists of that area. Therefore, Eggan (1967: 118) is not the best judge of whether or not Speck made 16 "masterly" use of ethnohistorical materials in the Northeast, any more than I am in a position to judge Swanton's South- eastern work in absolute terms. I may (and do) say only that Iwanton's work was more ethnohistorically-onented than that of Speck. 6 Even to try here to outline Speck's deep concern with Algonquian family hunting territories is too complex a matter for this paper—and largely superfluous, because Eggan and Wallace have done it already. The academic debate over the antiquity of FHTs is summarized by Eggan|(1967: 109-112), and the political implications of Speck s position are discussed by Wallace (1968:22-26, 30) .

REFERENCES ECKSTORM, Fannie Hardy 1904 The Penobscot Man. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1940 [Review of] Penobscot Man: The Life History of a Forest Tribe in Maine. By Frank G. Speck. New England Quarterly, 13:742-747. 1945 Old John Neptune and Other Maine Indian Shamans. Portland, Maine: Southworth-Anthoensen Press. EGGAN, Fred 1967 Northern Woodland Ethnology. In The Philadelphia Anthropological Society: Papers Presented on its Golden Anniversary, 107-124. Jacob W. Gruber, (ed.). New York: Columbia University Press (for Temple University Publications). 1968 One Hundred Years of Ethnology and Social Anthropology. In One Hundred Years of Anthropology, 1I7T-149. J.O. Brew, (ed.). HALLOWELL, A. Irving 1951 [Obituary of] Frank Gouldsmith Speck, 1881- 1950. American Anthropologist, 53:67-87. HARRIS, Marvin 1968 The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co. HOFFMAN, Bernard G. 1955 Souriquois, Etechemin, and Kwedech: A Lost Chapter in American Ethnography. Ethnohistory, 2(1):65-87. HUDSON, Charles 1966 Folk History and Ethnohistory. Ethnohistory, 13(1-2):52-70. 17 HUDSON, Charles 1976 The Southeastern Indians. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. KROEBER, Alfred L. 1935 History and Science in Anthropology. American Anthropologist, 37:539-569. MORRISON, Alvin H. 19 7 8 Penobscot Country: Disagreement Over Who Lived There in the 17th Century Needs Resolving—If Possible. In Papers of the Ninth Algonquian Conference, 47-54. William Cowan, (ed.). Ottawa: Carleton University. MURDOCK, George P. 194 9 Social Structure. New York: Macmillan Co. RADIN, Paul 1933 The Method and Theory of Ethnology. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co. SIEBERT, Frank T. 1941 [Review of] Penobscot Man. Frank G. Speck. American Anthropologist, 43:278-280. SNOW, Dean R. 1976 The Ethnohistoric Baseline of the Eastern Abenaki. Ethnohistory, 23(3):291-306; and errata, 24(2): [191]. SPECK, Frank G. 1919 Penobscot Shamanism. Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association, VI(4). Washington: American Anthropological Association. 1940 Penobscot Man: The Life History of a Forest Tribe in Maine. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1947 [Review of] Old John Neptune and Other Maine Indian Shamans. Fannie Hardy Eckstorm. American Anthropologist, 49:284-287. SWANTON, John R. 1922 Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors. U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin No. 73. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. 1942 Source Material on the History and Ethnology of the Caddo Indians. U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin No. 132. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. 1947 The Wineland Voyages. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, 107(12). Washington: Smithsonian Institution. 18

WALLACE, Anthony F.C. 1951 The Frank G. Speck Collection. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 95(3) :286- 289. 1968 The Value of the Speck Papers for Ethnohistory. In The American Indian: A Conference in the American Philosophical Society Library, 20-34 . Library Publication No. 2. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. 1969 The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. New York: Vintage Books/Random House.