What an adventure that Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone has taken me on.
For those being introduced for the first time to this mysterious artifact on display at the New Hampshire Historical Society Museum and Library in Concord, N.H., we’re talking about an exquisitely carved, egg-shaped stone of unknown origins. Northfield’s Joe Graveline turned me on to this intriguing curiosity, which has twice since been featured in this space accompanied by photo illustrations.
While the jury’s still out on Graveline’s identification of it as a Native American birthing stone that became a grave offering for the burial of some royal Algonquian man or woman whose birth was aided by it, many twists and turns have transported me up the Merrimack Valley and back down to Harvard University, then around the land to Texas, California and back to Boston and New York City. Yes, it’s been a wild ride indeed, spurred by this peculiar stone discovered in 1872, a mysterious author named Charles Edward Beals Jr. and an even more fascinating, long dead and forgotten child prodigy, a genius the likes of whom may never be seen again.
First, the 117-mile-long Merrimack River and its valley, which rises at the confluence of the Pemigewasset and Winnipesaukee rivers in Franklin, N.H., extending an additional 30 or so miles north to the headwaters at Lake Winnipesaukee in the east and at Profile Lake, located in Franconia Notch below Cannon Mountain. In this watershed lived the Penacook tribe (often spelled Pennacook, but I’ll go with one ‘n’ as in the modern village’s spelling) and an extraordinary contact-period sachem/powwow named Passaconaway.
If this peculiar Mystery Stone was indeed of a Native American origin (doubtful) and was a grave offering for someone very important from the Penacook confederacy, then a great place to start probing would be in the Passaconaway gene pool, which included best-known sons Nanamocomuck and Wonalancet, legendary daughter Wenunchus, and grandson Kancamagus, son of Nanamocomuck. Perhaps this Mystery Stone was buried with one of these iconic tribal figures, including the daughter, who’s often confused with Weetamoo, the “Squaw Sachem” of King Philip’s War fame, widow of Alexander, King Philip’s older brother. This confusion arises out of John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “Bridal of Pennacock,” which misnames Wenunchus as Weetamoo and has her dying a tragic drowning in the Merrimack River at Amoskeag Falls in Manchester, N.H., while returning in a canoe from her father’s village to her Montowampate’s village in Saugus. Colonials knew her husband as Sagamore James.
To bone up on the regal Passaconaway genealogy, I went looking for accurate sources and found one that seemed to be the superior: a 1916 publication titled “Passaconaway in the White Mountains” by Beals. It wasn’t cheap, but there was good reason for the lofty price tag. The research was astonishing for its day, perhaps the best I have encountered during a long journey through many similar sources on New England Native American tribes long ago displaced to faraway places.
After receiving the book in the mail, reading it and discussing it with my friend Peter Thomas, the contact-period scholar shared an obscure, 444-page, unpublished 1998 doctoral dissertation by the late David Stewart-Smith of Webster, N.H. His “The Pennacook Indians and the New England Frontier, Circa 1604-1733” was another extraordinary piece of research that only expanded upon Beals’ scholarship, which is to be expected 82 years and several archaeological excavations later.
The Beals book led to another interesting little adventure, one instigated by bookseller Mat Glover, from whom I purchased it. Owner of “The Book Moose” in Lincoln, N.H., Glover, in his online description of the book, suggested that it was the pseudonymous work of eccentric child prodigy William James Sidis, born on April Fools Day in 1898. If you haven’t heard of this incredible early 20th-century genius, well, he was said to be speaking at 6 months, reading the New York Times at 18 months, fluent in at least seven languages at age 6, ready for Harvard at age 9, accepted at 11, and graduated at 16. Google Sidis to see for yourself. It’s an amazing tale. And although it apparently hasn’t been proven, a Sidis website does indeed identify “Passaconaway” as his first of many pseudonymous titles under various names he used before his July 17, 1944 death. Not that this isn’t disputed. In an online chat site, someone from the White Mountains comes forward to say they knew Beals’ daughter and that he, not Sidis, wrote the book. But it appears that the jury’s still out. Could it be possible that Sidis wrote only the first three chapters about Passaconaway and family?
Intrigued by Sidis, I bought Amy Wallace’s 1986 book “The Prodigy: A Biography of William James Sidis, America’s Greatest Child Prodigy,” which is fascinating in its own right. The problem with it is that Wallace is from faraway Berkeley, Calif. Thus, she likely knew little or nothing about New England Native Americans, one of Sidis’ fascinations. Although Wallace sheds no light on the “Passaconaway” issue, she does identify several Sidis pseudonyms (not including Beals) and notes that Sidis was an expert on early New England history and prehistory, with a deep understanding of coastal New England tribes and some reaching inland, especially the Penacook of the Merrimack watershed.
Late in life, during private lectures delivered to a tight circle of friends and political allies in Boston, Sidis was known to cite groundbreaking facts about artifacts discovered in layers of Boston clay and other previously unknown facts about New England Native Americans. Although no one will ever know from what sources he pulled these obscure claims, remember, this was a man with a photographic memory and an IQ estimated to exceed Albert Einstein’s by 50 to 100 points. Plus, he would have had access to Harvard’s Tozzer Library, the best anthropological library in the world today.
Despite a voluminous Sidis archive recovered and preserved from his tiny Boston apartment at the time of his death, there was almost certainly much more that will never be found. The man was secretive and private to a fault, and on the reclusive side, resulting from a young life under intense public scrutiny as a freak of nature. Still, there’s a chance that some careful scholar immersed in the Sidis mystery and focused exclusively on his pseudonymous works will someday unravel the “Passaconaway” riddle.
I guess I’m at an impasse. Think of what I’ve learned on this month-long journey. Not only do I know much more about Passaconaway and his Penacook people, but I also discovered a fascinating, peculiar Harvard math prodigy worth finding. His story really hit home for me personally, having myself known a local math prodigy. My boyhood neighbor and sister’s godfather was a man named A. Phillips Bill. From a regal New England pedigree, this eccentric genius graduated from Dartmouth College and was teaching at Deerfield Academy at age 17. Later, still teaching in Deerfield, he “moonlighted” as the human computer for Gordon E. Ainsworth & Associates land surveyors. So, let’s just say I had a little insight into math prodigies, which made the Sidis tale all the more captivating.