The First Frontier

Synopsis

Before America had a West, it had Maine.

In 1675, three drunken sailors threw a Native baby into the Saco River to see if it was true that Indian babies naturally float. Then they brutally assaulted his mother. The baby died. He was Squando’s son. No one was punished, so Squando went to war, and Maine burned for fifty years.

It was a war without rules. Babies were killed in front of their mothers. Children were marched north through the snow and never came home. Governments paid cash for human scalps: man, woman or child.

The terror followed the survivors south. Orphaned girls who had watched their families butchered turned up in Salem, screaming that invisible spirits were tearing at them. Because of their testimony, Massachusetts hanged a minister from Maine as a witch.

In 1692, four-year-old Jeremiah Moulton hid under a bed while his parents were murdered in front of him. Thirty-two years later, he was one of the commanders of a Massachusetts death squad, sent north to kill the Catholic priest he had spent his life blaming.

The boy under the bed had become the man coming through the woods. And he was looking for vengeance.

The First Frontier is the true story of the war America forgot. And it still matters.