The Merrimack River: its source and its tributaries. Embracing a history of manufactures, and of the towns along its course; their geography, topography, and products, with a description of the magnificent natural scenery about its upper waters./ By J. W. Meader.

THE MERRIMACK RIVER;
worthy of emulation, the doom of his people was even then foreshadowed; indeed, the "beginning of the end" was apparent. After a
sickly existence of a few years, meeting with unexpected cruelty and
ill-treatment from those whose superior enlightenment and Christian
pretensions he had been taught by the Apostle Eliot to respect and
confide in, and being broken and decimated in numbers and spirit,
Wonnalancet retired with the remnant of his tribes to the St. Francis, were merged with that people, and there ended his days.
Wonnalancet" means literally " breat1tiiiy pleasantly, wonne
or wunne (pleasant) and nangshonat (to breathe), and was the
name given him after he had come to manhood, when his character
was considered as formed, -a name peculiarly appropriate as well
as beautiful, as his great wisdom and Christian virtues "breathed
pleasantly" on all with whom he camne in contact, and over all by
whom he was surrounded.
The subjugation of the Indians generally signified not only their
reduction to submission, but banishment from the soil, and when this
was not the result, some worthless or out-of-the-way portion of their
own lands was kindly set off for their occupation and exclusive use.
The densely populated part of the present city of Lowell was thus
set off as an Indian reservation. Its boundary on one side was the
Merrimack River, and on the other a ditch extending from a point
some distance above the Pawtucket Falls to the foot of Hlunt's
Falls.
When Chelmsford was first incorporated, this reservation was in
the eastern portion of the town, and after the departure of the Indians this territory was "squatted" upon by adventurous whites, who
were disfranchised and refused representation in the General Court.
Whereupon they retorted by politely but firmly refusing to pay
any taxes, which brought the matter to a solution by annexation to
Chelmsford by act of the Legislature.
It appears that the early settlers and their officials, misled by the
course pursued by the Merrimack for thirty or forty miles before
reaching the ocean, had adopted the erroneous conclusion that its
course was east and west; at least this is the natural inference deduced from documents of the time, official and unofficial. The claim
of Iassachusetts was to a point three miles north of the most extreme
northerly point of the Merrimack River, and, to establish perma
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