The significance of honoring Maliseet Chief Ambrose Bear

Henry John Bear, Maliseet Tribal Representative, Special to The County
10 years ago

There is no doubt in my mind, in a review of all historical and legal evidence, that the U.S. was fully aware it had entered into a binding treaty with the St. John River Indians, that were based beyond America’s borders or, at best, straddled its borders. At the time, none of present-day Aroostook County was located within either the United States of America, Massachusetts or what would become present-day State of Maine in 1820.

What is even more striking, like the history of Maliseet Chief Ambrose Bear, is the history and role the St. John River Indians, our modern-day Maliseet Tribe, played in protecting the coastal district of Maine and the newly formed American federation from being swallowed up by the world’s largest navy and world’s largest armies of the British Crown.
Reading Colonel John Allan’s own memoir plus Kidder and others, the war that played out in northern Maine and Nova Scotia, fought by the Maliseet and the other tribes with Colonel Allan, is akin to the Russians weighing down the Nazi Germans in World War II until the Americans and the Allies could put together the D-Day invasion to liberate Europe.
Colonel Allan and the Maliseet weighed down the British in two major battles in the north and in many minor sea skirmishes against the British, which gave General George Washington some desperately needed room to breathe by forcing the British to maintain extra troops, ships and supplies in the north to defend Nova Scotia and its territory east of the St. John River from Allan and the Tribes, and to also protect it from within from the disgruntled locals in Nova Scotia who wanted to be part of the new United States and who were actively working with Colonel Allan and the Tribes.
Without the Treaty of Watertown of 19 July, 1776, which was concluded between James Bowdoin on behalf of Massachusetts and all the other United States of America on the one part and Maliseet Chief Ambrose Bear and all the Eastern Indians on the other part, the Machias settlements would have been obliterated and blown to smithereens in August of 1777 for their part in taking the British armed schooner “Margaretta” two years earlier in 1775.
Those British troops, after destroying Machias, could have then been freed up to either go south and engage and encircle General Washington near Boston and New York, or they could stay north and add substantially to the British forces in Canada by pushing the few settlers in Maine all the way back to Boston as there was no Yankee Doodle defense between Maine and Boston other than the Maliseet Indians in present-day Aroostook County, which at the time was on the Canadian side of United States interests and legal jurisdiction.
Either way, without the Canadian-based Maliseet tribe in what is now Aroostook County in northern Maine, the States’ war for independence would have been a much more difficult war to fight and probably impossible to win, especially if the British had not trespassed on Maliseet lands in the St. John River watershed and Maliseets had kept to their previous Treaty of 1760 with the British.
In fact, it was because the Maliseet homeland, which includes the entire Wulustuq Region or St. John River watershed, was completely occupied by the Maliseet Tribe and no one else and that the Maliseets were both Allies and friends of the United States of America, that the British quickly acknowledged after the war ended that they no longer could make any pretensions to that part of the St. John River watershed, if they ever had.
There exists sufficient historical and legal evidence to prove the British never considered any part of the St. John River watershed above the mouth of the St. John River on the Bay of Fundy as being legally possessed by the British. The Treaty of February 1760, itself, is proof positive that the British Crown agreed not to trespass upon Maliseet lands anywhere within the St. John River watershed.
However, unable to fully control trespasses by individual British subjects on Maliseet lands after 1765, even following complaints to the British authorities in Halifax by Chief Ambrose Bear himself about these trespasses and subsequent British inaction in dealing with the trespasses would eventually lead Chief Bear to rescind the 1760 Treaty with the British 16 years later, and to accept an invitation by General Washington to go to Massachusetts to enter into a Treaty in 1776 with America as Allies and friends in their dispute against Great Britain, which he then did. Chief Bear did this because the United States agreed to respect Maliseet lands and jurisdiction as separate and apart from the United States of America. The specific clauses in the treaty of 1776 clearly state these facts.
It is what happened next that is particularly significant. After concluding the Treaty, Chief Bear then returned to his homeland in the Wulustuq (Aroostook) Region and, after ratifying the Treaty with all of the Maliseet Chiefs and People, he formally declared war on Great Britain in writing while simultaneously declaring his support for the United States of America in that same writing.
Chief Bear then led the Tribes in the attack on the British Army at Nova Scotia’s Fort Cumberland, near Halifax, in October of 1776. He then led the Tribes, including more than 400 Maliseets in more than 100 canoes, as a Captain in Washington’s Continental Army in the successful defense of Machias in August of 1777. As the historical records indicate, Machias was apparently only defended by 10 or so local militia and less than 50 Continental soldiers at the time. The British lost the battle and the war, and the rest is history, which, as regards Maliseet Chief Ambrose Bear was, until now, essentially forgotten.
Editor’s note: Rep. Bear has submitted legislation to rename Houlton’s B Stream as Captain Ambrose Bear Stream as long overdue recognition of the role one of his ancestors played in the American Revolution.