Who was Indian Joe?

A Journey into Local Lore

by Joy Leland Michelson
Adapted from a talk delivered on June 20, 2010
Clan of the Hawk Spiritual Weekend
Orleans, Vermont

Growing up in Newbury, Vermont, I developed a deep appreciation for local history

blessed by passionate teachers and a hometown rich with legends of great men and
women, their hardships, and sacrifice. In the Oxbow Cemetery in Newbury village, my
grandparents and two siblings lay in rest just yards from Jacob Bayley, Thomas Johnson,
and the marker remembering Old Joe the Friendly Indian Guide. I have always felt a
kinship to these people of lore, and delighted in imagining our common footsteps in the
meadows and hillsides of the town.
In 1998 I was invited by the Oxbow Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution,
based in Newbury, to give a talk on Indian Joe at the celebration of the chapters 100 th
anniversary. Their members had seen an article I had written for the Journal Opinion,
where I had investigated the question of whether Indian Joe was actually buried in the
Oxbow Cemetery. To prepare for that article, and my DAR talk, I did my best to collect a
variety of resources on which to base a description of the man whose rifle is displayed in
its Chapter House in the village. I consulted things like a 1976 booklet published by the
West Danville Methodist Church, an article in Vermont Life magazine, the town histories
of Newbury and Walden, Vermont, and even the Cracker Barrel Cookbook of the Newbury
Womens Fellowship of the Congregational Church. What emerged from those sources
was a sketch of a sympathetic Indianclaimed as a resident by several different towns
who aided the English and Scottish settlers as a lookout and guide, on the banks of the
Connecticut River and along the route we call the Bayley-Hazen Road.
I went on to join the Oxbow Chapter a few years after that talk, and became better
acquainted with the rifle attributed to Indian Joe, and a dugout canoe dragged out of a
local pond that is also housed there. Tales of Indian Joes legendary cave, dug into the
bank overlooking the great ox-bow, had tantalized me since youth, as did the mysterious
Indian corn mill on the Haverhill side of the village. So much awaited examination, and
I made this local history the focus of my graduate studies at Dartmouth College, where I
was disciplined as an examiner of history to look deeper, and to distrust simple
explanations for complex cultural phenomena like Native American history. In my thesis
manuscript, entitled Jacob Bayley, Indians, and the Remembered Past: Reflections of
History in a Small Vermont Town, I sought to shed light on the complex relationship
between Newburys founder, Brigadier General Jacob Bayley, and the Indian people like
Joe, who served as scouts for Bayley during the Revolutionary War. By digging deeper
in my research, I came to understand that the history I had relied upon for my sense of
place as a child was not a complete view, and I came to understand Indian Joe in a very
different way.
Stories of a time and a place are multi-dimensional and told by many, many different
people. They are passed down, written down, and shared. Some are even quite obviously
fictional, but have become a collective truth. While that might sound more like the oral

history tradition of a native culture, its also true of the European settler culture from
which I was born. I discovered, for example, that Indian Joes cavea source of
fascination and exploration for generations of Newbury nativeswas an invention of
author Frances Parkinson Keyes for her novel of historical fiction, The Safe Bridge, written
in 1934. The novels heroine, Elizabeth (Beth) Burr, arrives from Scotland to settle in
Ryegate, Vermont, and along the way meets Joe the Indian along the road approaching
Newbury.
When Joe offers to guide Beths party to the village, she asks,
But, Joe, youre not going out of your way, are you? You said your cave was
in Newbury.
And he answers,
Near. North. Near Oxbow, Colonel Thomas Johnsons place.
Thus a legend the legend of Indian Joes cave was formed, and from it others. Virginian
Downs, in her Vermont Life article of 1960, even cited The Safe Bridge a work of fiction
for her biography of Indian Joe, and many a local writer has undoubtedly built
pamphlet and cookbook biographies of Indian Joe or Injun Joe, using that Vermont Life
article as historical reference. My beloved grade school teachers told the story of Joe and
Mollys cave to generations of Newbury children as though it was unquestionable truth.
Surely they had been told the same tale by the ones who had come before them.
Based on primary documents such as war rolls, official correspondence between Jacob
Bayley, Timothy Bedel, and General George Washington, as well as journals of various
New England legislatures, I learned that the stories in our town histories about Indian
Joe serving as a guide to local settlers could in fact be attributable to half a dozen
different men. Included here are a few such men, whose identities documented at the
time held characteristics shared by Indian Joe:

Lewis Vincent, a Huron from Caughnewaga and a Dartmouth graduate who served
as interpreter and scout for Jacob Bayley, and according to Washingtons
presidential papers dined with him in Philadelphia.

Colonel Lewis, referred to as Chief of the Caughnewaga accompanied Jacob

Bayley to Cambridge, Massachusetts in the winter of 1776 to meet with George
Washington, to share intelligence from Canada. A Colonel Lewis was also reported
to have been interviewed by the Massachusetts General Court in 1775.

Joseph Lewis, about whom Jacob Bayley wrote to Captain Timothy Bedel in 1778,
was a guide and interpreter, and also an ambassador and recruiter of northern
Indians to the American cause. Later in the same letter, Bayley refers to him
simply as Louis.

Pierre Joseph Louis, possibly the son of a Louis Wawanolet, who was known around
Troy, VT in 1800 as Louis the Indian. Pierre Joseph Louis may have been a
grandson of Chief Gray Lock. Gordon Day could not substantiate the precise
identity, but found reference to him being called Captain Susup, with whose
band the medicine woman Molly Occut was associated.

Pial-Susup, or Pierre Joseph, son of Captain John Vincent. Captain John is noted to
have been present at the battle known as Braddocks Defeat in 1755, and he
claimed to have taken aim at George Washington with a rifle.

There are others . . .

In the end, for me, understanding the precise identity of Indian Joe is not as important as
understanding what his identity meant to the people of Coos in the early 19 th century,
and to the people of the 19th and 20th centuries who created our written local histories.
Indian Joe was the Native American that my white ancestors wanted to believe
represented all Indianssomeone who saw the settlers as righteous defenders of
freedom and independence, rather than foreign invaders who would totally displace the
indigenous people and wear away their culture by degrees. My ancestors wanted to
reconcile a belief in their own goodness with the harsh reality of cultural domination,
through a romantic tale of the last noble Indiana composite character, perhapsmade
up of all the best parts of the many, many native people who shared the Coos country for
generations.
To be fair, one particular Indian Joe most certainly did own the rifle in the DAR Chapter
Housethe same Joe who died in Newbury on February 19, 1819 in the care of the
Bayley family. Its possible that this same Joe camped with a woman named Molly at the
ponds bearing their names (where the towns of Danville, Peacham, Cabot and Walden
meet). It is less likely that this same Joe hewed the dugout canoe in the Oxbow Chapter
House, or that he ground corn in the rocky depression known as the Indian Corn Mill, or
that he ever called a cave his home. For me, history demands a less tidy story of the
native people who clearly occupied this ground before us, and whose names were not all
Joe and Molly.