Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE FORERUNNERS F one were to search for the beginning of the Sokoki trail, to follow it down the unknown and unknowable span of years to its tragic blotting out along the sands of Lovewell's pond, one would go to the origin of the great Abenake family whose smokes for unnumbered centuries, uprising above the shag of wilderness woods of this nuova terra of Gomez, blew away one ill-starred day to seaward, to lightly kiss the dun sails of Cabot, perhaps, but surely those of Cortereal, Du Monts, Weymouth, and Capt. John Smith; for these latter met the aborigine, to whom these pale-faced adventurers and their white-winged ships were but forerunners of greater things. As to the origin of the Abenake, the original Indian family of northeastern North America, if one were todelve deeply enough into the history of races, crossing over the desert of conjecture into certainty, one might undoubtedly trace its ancestral beginnings over the northwestern ice floes of Behring Strait into the northern limits of Asia; but that were an impossibility, for the lack of even savage tradition. Only racial characteristics are left for the ethnologist. The Abenake, of which the Sokoki were a strong branch, are worthy of a moment's attention, for the reason that the reader is about to make a personally conducted tour through the country once the patriarchal domain of this Indian family, of whom the famous Paugus was the last and most notable chief. According to M. Ventromile, the Abenake comprised a large portion of the Indian race commorant to the country between Virginia and Nova Scotia. In fact they comprised it in its entirety. The Abenake, or to designate them correctly, the WdnbdnbdgM, or more literally still, Wdnbdnbdn (the people of the Aurora Borealis), were the original Indians, the or...