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The Maine Indian Land Claim Settlement: A Personal Recollection, John M.R. Paterson
The Maine Indian Land Claim Settlement: A Personal Recollection, John M.R. Paterson
Maine History
From 1971 to 1980, the state of Maine grappled with one of the greatest legal challenges ever before it. That challenge had its origin in a suit brought by the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes against the U.S. Department of the Interior seeking the seemingly simple declaration that the department owed a fiduciary duty to the tribes based on a federal law adopted in 1790. That suit was eventually to lead to a suit by the U.S. Department of Justice against the state of Maine, and potentially 350,000 residents in the eastern two-thirds of the state, seeking return of land taken …
Hanging Ebenezer Ball, William L. Welch
Hanging Ebenezer Ball, William L. Welch
Maine History
Ebenezer Ball of Robbinston was the first man hanged for murder in Eastern Maine. A native of Massachusetts proper, he had drifted “downeast,” and become part of a lawless culture endemic to Maine’s borderlands in the early nineteenth century. Suspected of counterfeiting and confronted by authority ,he retreated to the woods, and a lawman died at his hands. Although he might have fled, he stayed, and was tried, convicted, and executed for murder in 1811. Ball’s case is seminal, since it gives us insight into the workings of the criminal justice system in Maine in the years prior to statehood. …