Finding the Almouchiquois: Native American Families, Territories, and Land Sales in Southern Maine

Abstract

A close reading of Native American land transactions aids in the identification of the inhabitants of southern Maine in the seventeenth century, a region that traditionally has been an ethnohistorical no-man's-land. Organized at the village level, Native peoples answered to no supreme sachem but had strong ties across the area through alliance and intermarriage. The residents of coastal Maine remained culturally and politically tied to their neighbors in southern New Hampshire and northeastern Massachusetts throughout the seventeenth century. Essentially, all of the people from the Androscoggin River in Maine southward to the north shore of Massachusetts made up the group Champlain called the“Almouchiquois.”