Maine's Dirty Little Culture War

The Allagash River became the new battleground for Maine’s culture war with the establishment of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway (AWW) in 1966.

Southern Maine and New England environmental groups, acting like self-anointed Crusaders riding the white horses of moral virtue, charged north to Augusta.

Like every other holy war, this one was never about moral virtue.

It was about power.   

Today, in collaboration with the Allagash Wilderness Waterway Foundation (AWWF), Governor Janet Mills’ administration abuses the power to revise and demean Scots-Irish and Acadien-Québécois Allagash River history.

In a blatant disregard for ethical, moral, and legal obligations, both groups warped into a bizarre alternate reality of my Acadien-Québécois family’s 115-year history (1870 to 1986) farming, logging, trapping, guiding, and building a fishing and hunting lodge along the Allagash River, despite landowner threats to burn down our properties.  

In Allagash Wilderness Waterway: History, Video 5 of 9, financed by the state’s taxpayers, and in AWWF’s Storied Lands and Waters document, the segments about our family are so out of touch with reality they rival four men claiming aliens abducted them from their Allagash River campsite.

By ignoring their responsibility to conduct fundamental research, interviews, and fact-checking, these two groups unjustly stripped my family of our dignity, wiped out the extraordinary tale of a wilderness family, and purged our heroes. In short, they utterly denied my family’s right to our historical narrative.  

The state’s “history” video marches even further beyond acceptable limits. In fact, it may potentially breach state and federal anti-discrimination laws, besides violating regulations governing the inappropriate allocation of taxpayer funds.

The narrator, Jim Marquis, a retired Fort Kent High School principal demeans a mythic figure who rose to legend as the Old Guide by reducing him to an ethnic punchline: a stereotypical dimwitted Canuck struggling for two-to-three days thirty miles upriver from Allagash Village to Round Pond by canoe and outboard motor.

Contrary to Mr. Marquis’ absurd allegation, the Old Guide rose to legend for the ease of traveling by canoe and outboard motor from Allagash Village thirty miles upriver to Round Pond in a few hours.

Additional exploits include

Flying up a plowed tote road alongside his boyhood brothers in a sleigh harnessed to a galloping bull moose.

Standing on a sixty-foot black spruce log to run the Long Lake Dam sluiceway, a fourteen-foot drop, without losing the hat he waved to river drivers eating lunch on the shore.

Killing two bears with an ax.

Hiring sixty men to run 23 million board feet of timber for the Québécois lumber baron Édouard “King” LaCroix.

Sitting in the bow of my father’s canoe when the Old Guide led by no more than a paddle length between his stern and our bow, I watched him and my father accomplish an art of unimaginable grace and confidence.

When they throttled outboard motors wide open, the bow lifted me off the water, spray fanned from the gunnels like wings, and we flew upriver along a channel the Old Guide learned from age five aboard his uncle Jean-Baptiste Jalbert’s horse-drawn towboat.

During low flows, when the river was strewn with so many boulders it looked impassable, they banked the canoes around boulders and skimmed over gravel bars. Five hours during spring high water. Seven or eight hours during mid-summer low flows. The Old Guide, my father Robert “Bob” Jalbert, uncle Willard Jalbert, and I ran the channel even at night, by the faint light of a quarter moon, without hitting a single rock.

By ignoring an entire generation, including thirty years of farming in a frontier settlement three miles above Allagash Falls, beginning with my great-grandparents, Joseph and Helen Russell Jalbert, Mr. Marquis sweeps from history among the couples’ many triumphs and tragedies, my stoic great-grandmother, Helen, who gave birth to fourteen children.

The first son named after her father, Samuel Russell, was just four when he died of scarlet fever. A daughter died during childbirth. A few hours later, those complications took Helen’s life, May 3, 1892, six weeks before her thirty-ninth birthday. My grandfather was five when he and his brothers and sisters stood at her bedside as she bid them goodbye. 

Mr. Marquis’ callous indifference and arrogant injustice also include purging my father and uncle from family, cultural, and regional history by claiming three anonymous individuals helped my grandfather build our fishing and hunting lodge, Jalberts’ Allagash Camps, on Round Pond, Burntland Brook, and Whitaker Brook.  

According to oral history, supported Uncle Willard and the Old Guide’s statements in a published interview, shortly after the Army discharged the brothers in the summer of 1946, they and the Old Guide reasserted their rightful claim to Windy Point.

Since the 1920s, the Old Guide had used abandoned logging camps and tent sites for his guiding operations. In the early 1940s, Great Northern Paper Company drove him and his tent operation off Windy Point’s public campsite.

During a German U-boat attack on their convoy, the brothers vowed to re-claim Windy Point and build their father comfortable accommodations as he and his valued guests approached their sixties--if they survived the war. 

The Old Guide used a chainsaw to cut down more than fifty spruce and fir trees. Cradling the butts of five-hundred-pound logs in cantdogs (like peaveys) between them, Bob and Willard dragged the logs across the felling waste, down the ridge, through puckerbrush to the lakeshore.

Within just a few days and nights by kerosene lanterns, they logged the kitchen camp and the Big Camp, a guest camp with two bedrooms and a large gathering area.  

By the time a bush pilot flew a Great Northern Paper Company representative into Round Pond, puckerbrush had shredded the brothers’ pants and shirts. Spruce pitch had knotted coal-black beards and hair. My father and uncle must have looked like twin beasts freshly risen from the black muck of a cedar swamp.  

“We’ll burn you out,” the representative threatened as the brothers backed him into a clothesline. It caught the back of his neck like a snare.  

“You’ll never put out the fire,” the brothers warned him, referring to the far hills and standing timber valued in the millions burned to the ground.  

A lease appeared in my grandmother’s Fort Kent mailbox three days later. 

Only three men had that bold vision. Only three men had the physical prowess and river mastery to accomplish that dream.

Bob, Willard, and the Old Guide ferried by twenty-foot canoes and outboard motors lumber, tarpaper, roofing, doors, windows, beds, mattresses, bureaus, wood stoves, wood-burning kitchen stoves, propane refrigerators, and more ten miles to Allagash Falls, where they portaged the dunnage and canoes a quarter mile to the upper landing.

They flew another twenty miles to Round Pond.

The expedition shortened to seventeen miles when logging companies swamped a road around the falls to Michaud Farm, but Double-S Bar, Bogan Brook Bar, Sidehill Bar, and Round Pond Rips, a three-mile stretch of whitewater dangerously rocking overloaded canoes.  

In an early version of the AWWF’s website, board member and L.L. Bean Senior Product Developer for Equipment Scot Balantine claimed he didn’t know the Allagash River flowed north. Now, people as clueless as Mr. Balantine about our 115-year relationship with the river assume the power to decide whose story to tell, whose to manufacture, and whose to forget.

It’s pretty easy to forgive Mr. Balantine for a common assumption that all rivers flow south, like ice cream melting down a beach ball. Ignoring Mr. Balantine and board members like Richard Barringer and Peter Sirois, who knew my father, becomes impossible.

They ignored the evidence I emailed the Board and denied my requests to revise Storied Land and Waters’ problematic allegations. The truth no longer matters to these folks. Their denial of reality is absurd.

Their attempted gaslighting of a family patriarch has been the most bizarre, other-worldly life experience.

I appealed to both organizations to rectify their heartless representations of our family history and align them with the facts. About the state’s video, those appeals went to Melford Pelletier, the cultural representative on the Allagash Wilderness Water Way Advisory Council at the time. As my high school algebra teacher, Mr. Pelletier knew me as someone with unimpeachable honesty and integrity. I trusted him to stand up for my family.

Along with oral history handed down to me by the Old Guide, my father, Uncle Willard, Uncle James Jalbert, second-cousin Ray Jalbert, who spent winters with his father, Sam Jalbert trapping beaver from the age of twelve, and second-cousin Clarence Jalbert, who cut timber and ran log drives alongside Uncle Willard and the Old Guide, along with veteran river men like guides Fred Hafford, Dennis Pelletier, and Harley Kelly, resources include more than a dozen feature articles in local, state, regional, and national publications. More than two hundred pages of interviews with the Old Guide. More than 100 photographs from the 1920s. More than five hours of digitized 8mm movies from the 1950s. There are numerous birth and death certificates, copies of deeds, and census data from the 1870s.

I asked Mr. Pelletier to mediate these issues during a March 16, 2018, Allagash Wilderness Waterway Advisory Council meeting in Augusta. Preventing a transparent discussion and decision, while suggesting a backroom decision had been made before the meeting, possibly with Governor Mills and the Attorney General, Bureau of Public Lands Director Tom Desjardin claimed, according to meeting minutes, “…BPL does not have funds to have the video edited or redone. Rather, BPL will accept the tape as recollections provided by the narrator.”  

Even though I shared a substantial amount of information with Mr. Pelletier, including a feature article I wrote for Yankee Magazine titled “In the Kingdom of the Jalberts,” now part of a collection of essays by prominent American authors, and had lengthy phone conversations with Mr. Pelletier, the meeting minutes do not indicate he stood up in support of my family’s integrity. Many people in both organizations seem clumsily tripping over their bootlaces following a spinning moral compass.

It seems odd to me, as well as somewhat ridiculous, that, having earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Maine, as well as having written extensively about the Civil War based on extensive research according to bibliographies, Mr. Desjardin chose Mr. Marquis as an authority over me, who lived my family’s legacy. By choosing Mr. Marquis without qualifying his legitimacy as a "family historian," Mr. Desjardin illustrates the double standard leading to the ongoing marginalization and dehumanization of our ethnic history and the extermination of our cultural Odyssey.  

Considering Willard Jalbert and Bob Jalbert’s catastrophic deaths, Mr. Marquis, Mr. Pelletier, Mr. Desjardin, and the AWWF Board of Directors raised callous indifference to heartless cruelty by erasing them entirely from history.

Late on the night of February 15, 1976, as Uncle Willard and Cousin Billy drove from Bangor back to Fort Kent, Billy fell asleep at the wheel and drove the car head-on into a tractor-trailer, killing both instantly. On May 21, 1980, during violently gusting winds, a pilot flying my father from a northern Maine lake to Round Pond lost control of the bush plane. It nosedived into timber and exploded on impact. 

Governor Mills’ administration and the AWWF Board of Directors’ brazen refusal to revise the segments about my family exposes Maine’s normalized ethnic prejudice, including the ongoing efforts to exterminate the Acadien-Québécois racial Odyssey by circulating information that is false or profoundly incomplete. 

After several years of asking Governor Mills’ administration and AWWF’s Board of Directors to edit their segments for historical accuracy, I realized they were more than stubbornly committed to a bizarre alternate reality produced by people too lazy and incompetent to conduct research, interviews, and fact-checking.

Like bullies incapable of embracing our common humanity and immigrant struggle, they created a laughable alternate reality.

Except it’s not funny.

Reducing minorities to objects is the first step towards assuming racial superiority and the freedom to act unconstrained from empathy, guilt, shame, remorse, and laws guiding moral conduct.

Milan Kundera, the Czech-born writer who lived through the Soviet Union’s crushing August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, eloquently summarized the process of authoritarian conquest, leading to cultural genocide in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being:  

The first step in liquidating a person is to erase their memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long, the Nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster. 

The attack on my family’s heritage and community’s history resurrects Anglo-Protestant oppressive and repressive racist assaults on our Acadien-Québécois community as an “alien race,” a popular racist reference in Maine’s nativist, white supremacist, and Ku Klux Klan publications from the 1850s to 1930s.  

Here is what one editor wrote about my Québécois migrant ancestors, who fled racial injustice and a nationwide financial collapse, and my Acadien refugee ancestors, who evaded New England militia and British military hunting them like animals, who survived famine in Mi’kmaq and Québécois refugee camps until they finally found sanctuary along the St. John River above Grand Falls:  

They are generally ignorant and unambitious, each generation contenting themselves with simply existing. They subsist chiefly on pea soup and other vegetable food raised on their patches of land. A gentleman who visited them a few years since counted fifteen houses near each other, averaging twelve children to each house. They make large quantities of maple sugar but, in general, content themselves with the simple fare of their fathers. The State has made several attempts to educate and civilize them and, in some instances, with good results. They are, however, peculiar people, distinct in tastes, habits, and aspirations from the Anglo-Saxon race. 

Edward H. Elwell, Aroostook: With some account of the Excursions Thither of the Editors of Maine in the years 1858 and 1878, and of the Colony of Swedes, settled in the town of New Sweden (Portland: Transcript Printing Co., 1878), pp.25-26, 37.  

These alternate realities dismiss us as ghosts, les Invisibles, swept into a grave-dark chasm without possibly climbing back into the spotlight of the nation’s history. Condemned to cultural genocide, forgotten and nameless, les noms-sans-noms, free-falling into obscurity, a chasm the French Creoles call le Bas de l’Eau. 

Until just now.