This report has emphasized the Presumpscot people of the 1730s-1750s, and the latest-known sakamo of the Sebagoland area: Polin. I have suggested their affiliation both with the inland Pigwacket band (HQ at now-Fryeburg ME) of the Abenaki-Pennacook peoples, and with the much-further-inland St Francis / Odanak people of the French mission village on the St Francis / Arosaguntacook River in southern Quebec. These affiliations may have resulted from, but certainly were increased by, continual English colonial expansion inland from the coast, from the late 1720s onward, and also(of course) by French influences. But what of the century before?

In SPAP Report No.I-5, I discussed the earliest-known sakamo of the lower Presumpscot River: Skedraguscett / Skitterygusset, who (in 1623-24) "hath a house" at Presumpscot First Falls (now Smelt Hill Dam in Falmouth ME). He again is mentioned as still concerned thereabouts in a 1657 primary document, thus giving him at least a 34-year tenure in the area. In Report I-5, I stated that, under the spelling Squidrayset, this sakamo well may have been also a chief of today's Lynn MA area, through intermarriage between Pennacook bands*. Indeed, research now being done by two ethnohistorians (David Stewart-Smith on the Pennacook peoples, and Emerson W. Baker on land-deeds in southwestern Maine) reveals the close ties of marriage & kinship among many of the Native leaders in the large area between Boston, MA and Bath, ME on the coast, and inland between the Mystic River and the Androscoggin River, in the 1600s, and through Pennacook connections especially.

Any continuity in Sebagoland over time, specifically between the 1620s and the 1750s, also may have been the result of Pennacook leadership-bridging. For example, the Pigwacket main village had been abandoned after the famous stalement battle there (now Fryeburg ME) in 1725, between invading English scalp-bounty-hunters under Capt John Lovewell and resident Pigwacket warriors under Paugus (who apparently was a borrowed war-chief). The leaders of both sides were killed in that battle. However, Pigwacket village was reoccupied relatively soon thereafter - quite possibly by, among others, Chief Polin (who may have been a borrowed sakamo, too).

So, then, consider the strong likelihood that an at-least-residual (if not direct) Pennacook thread tied together the Lakes Region of Maine & the Presumpscot River, through time, just as the Pennacook (a.k.a. Central Abenaki) in their heyday especially had held together the Lakes Region of New Hampshire & the Merrimac River. That would make quite a large combined Pennacook legacy, from a Native American confederation which supposedly became extinct (per se) right after King Philip's War (i.e., by 1680), but which sent its still-proud refugees not only in all directions but into the future as well.

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