Moose River

The area’s scenic value derives from the relative lack of development. The mountains support a healthy, diverse cover of many coniferous and deciduous tree species. The shoreline area has seen very little human alteration. Rustic cabins, on several of the islands and a few stretches of the river, represent the only visible signs of residential development. These simple wooden structures blend into the natural setting. The most prominent landscape features are the surrounding hills, mountains, and shoreline.

VEGETATION AND WILDLIFE

Maine’s northernmost region is made up of boreal forest, consisting primarily of balsam fir, white spruce, and paper birch. Most of the southern half of the state is northern hardwood forest, composed of maple, beech aspen, ash, and white and red pine. Maine’s state tree, the white pine, has the largest cones of all the New England pines, with needles that grow in bunches of five. In the 1700’s, the British Royal Navy valued the white pine’s straight, tall trunk for making ship’s masts.

Lying between the boreal and northern hardwood forests is an ecotone or transition zone. The ecotone was important to early hunters since caribou and other herd animals would cross back and forth depending on plant availability, the rise and fall of insect pests, and the need for protection from severe weather. Hunting camps were positioned strategically to intercept herds during these seasonal migrations.

In these forests are smaller mammals, such as rabbits, foxes, fishers, and squirrels. There are magnificent hoofed beasts like moose, elk, and deer. Several large predators roam these woods as well: lynx, wolves, and mountain lions.

HISTORY

Made up partly of Precambrian rock, Maine was once a land of volcanoes. Maine’s rocky coastline portray evidence of glacial activity. During the four recent ice ages, the northeast coast was covered by glaciers estimated between 1-2 miles thick (a single acre of ice one mile thick weighs almost seven million tons). Glacial erratics, granite boulders “dropped” by melting glaciers, stand prominently among columnar basalt cliffs. Maine’s ridges and hills are moraines which are large deposits of gravel left behind retreating glaciers. Between the ridges and the hills, lakes and bogs formed. Shoreline bogs also formed between the high and low water marks. As time progressed, soil built up, allowing the land to blossom into forests and making Maine the “pine state.”

As forest life crept back into the north, nomadic bands of Paleolithic people followed in the tree’s wake. They were skilled hunters creating from stone and bones the special spear tips needed to kill their prey. Their descendants, who lived in Maine about seven- thousand years ago, are popularly known as the Red Paint People because of the red ochre they liberally used in religious rites. They settled along the ocean shore and hunted sea mammals and swordfish.

After the Red Paint People, other hunter gathers arrived who also did some primitive farming. They eventually became the Abenaki, the “People of the Dawn.” The Abenaki comprised several Indian groups, including the tribes that still exist today in northern New England: Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, Micmac, and Penobscot. The Abenaki lived most of the year along rivers in wigwams made of bark. In summer many of the tribes migrated to the coast, where the insects were less prevalent and the warm season lasted longer. At the time of the arrival of Europeans, Native Americans were cultivating small gardens of corn, squash, beans, and melons. Additionally, they were fishing and gathering mussels, clams, and other shellfish.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French and English battled for the land. To the European mind, the mere use of a bountiful land was insufficient; complete possession of the land was the only acceptable outcome. Nowhere was the conflict more savage than in Maine. So vicious was this endless warring, that the state’s first nickname was not “The Pine Tree State” but “Bloody Maine.” By the early 1800’s, the coast of Maine was settled from York to Machias and inland to Augusta. Logging operations began to push up the inland rivers to the big forest in the north. Dams were built on almost every river, stream, and lake to control the level and flow of the water. It was water that powered the mills that turned trees into lumber.