Previously on “The Secret History of Vermont”

Introduction
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9

Chapter 9: The Origin of Native Vermonters

Radiocarbon dating is a way cool technique for figuring out how old stuff is. It works by measuring the amount of radioactive carbon-14 in a sample of something that was once alive. All living things have a small but constant amount of carbon-14 in them. When they die the carbon-14 slowly decays. By measuring the amount of carbon-14 left in a sample you can tell when it died.

Archaeologists invented radiocarbon dating and now there are labs that’ll do it for a fee. You send them a sample of something you’ve dug up and they’ll tell you how old it is. Unless you’re from Vermont. Radiocarbon dating labs don’t accept samples from Vermont any more.

The problem is homework. Every year freshman archaeological students are given the following summer project: Find the oldest sample you can and send it in to a radiocarbon dating lab to be dated. So every summer hundreds of students visit their grandmothers, duck down into the deepest darkest corner of the basement, and scrape into a sample bag the oldest driest sliver of wood they can find.

Hundreds of sample bags are mailed to various labs (probably all owned by the Archaeology Professors) and shortly after the results are mailed back: 15 years, 67 years, 3 months (nice rec room), 110 years, 29 years, 30,000 years, etc. It’s results like that last one that caused the problem for invariably the student would raise a stink and demand his or her money back. It didn’t take long for the radiocarbon dating labs to figure out that all such anomalous results came from Vermont and to blacklist the entire State.

It’s not that Vermont isn’t full of jokers. (Drive a car with out-of-state plates and ask directions from someone in Vermont sometime. Please!) It’s just that the conclusion that every single Vermont archaeology student independently decides to pull exactly the same prank is one that only an Archaeology Professor or Radiocarbon Lab Owner would come to.

The other conclusion, that the canning jar racks in grandma’s basement are 30,000 years old, is one of those things that’s so completely and totally obvious that the maintainers of the Secret History don’t have the slightest worry of it ever being discovered.

Not all Vermont archaeology students send out 30,000 year old samples to be dated, just those who attend out-of-state schools and who are therefore disqualified from being taught the Secret History. Anyone in the know, of course, wouldn’t be so stupid.

30,000 years ago a race of mysterious people now known as the Picts occupied most of the island now known as England. The Picts had an extremely high level of civilization and were practically worshiped as gods by the other races who were in awe of the Picts’ knowledge of farming, technology, medicine, and commerce. Only the Picts knew the secret of distilling sugar from trees. The Picts built mostly with wood which is why there’s hardly any trace of them left, but occasionally they built with stone and the remains of some of those structures survive to this day. The Picts’ unit of government was the homestead and anyone who felt the need could go out to the frontier, clear some land, and build a homestead of his or her own. The Picts abruptly disappeared from England leaving little evidence of their existence.

As always happens to civilizations that last any length of time, the climate changed. The poles got colder, water started freezing into ice, and the sea level dropped to the point where a land bridge between England and Europe reappeared. The Picts remembered this bridge as the one upon which they traveled to England thousands of years prior. This time is was barbarians from Europe who crossed the bridge and the Picts could see the handwriting on the wall. Pretty soon there would be a Legislature, Zoning, Taxes, debates about Universal Coverage, and why hang around for that? Particularly since the frontier hereabouts is getting a little sparse anyway and we all know that there’s an entirely empty continent just a few thousand miles west.

So the Picts built a huge fleet of ships, loaded everything that could be moved onto them, and sailed to the new world. They landed off of what is now known as the coast of Maine but decided to venture further west until they were completely satisfied. A few hundred miles later they came across the perfect combination of mountains, rivers, and valleys, and made it their new home which they named “Vermont.”

The word “Vermont” derives from Olde Neanderthale but modern day scholars are divided as to its precise meaning. Some say that it comes from “ver mont” which in Olde Neanderthale means “Heaven on Earth” but others insist that it really comes from “verm ont” which means “Any place that if you stay there during the winter you must have rocks in your head.” Olde Neanderthale is a very pithy language.

The emigration of the Picts to North America completely devastated the English economy of the time and created the English legend of a rich, all-knowing, and all-powerful race of magical elves who live on an unobtainable island somewhere “in the west.”

It was a few thousand years later that the same shift in climate that re-revealed the Europe-to-England land bridge revealed the Siberia-to-Alaska land bridge and people from Asia crossed to Northern North America and slowly began to expand south. When the Native Vermonters finally encountered the newcomers they were welcomed and the two races exchanged what bits of culture and technology they could, which wasn’t much since both were already completely independent and self-sufficient.

By that time the Native Vermonters had an old, established, and stable system of homesteads, roads, and Towns. There was plenty of extra space on which the newcomers, the menfolk of whom were admired by the Native Vermont men because they didn’t have to shave, occupied seasonally as was their custom.

This situation lasted for another few thousand of years until Columbus discovered America and all hell broke loose. The barbarians from England and Europe emigrated seemingly all at once. The Native Vermonters were racially close enough to the barbarians to be mistaken for “settlers who got there first” but the “Indians” were massacred nearly to the point of extinction.

The barbarians brought their system of government with them and, to prevent the new government from gaining the power of tens of thousands of years of civilization, the true History of Vermont was made Secret as previously described.

The relationship between the Native Vermonters and the “Indians” suffered grievously. The “Indians” blamed the Native Vermonters for not assisting them while they were being attacked, but the Native Vermonters didn’t want to get involved in the barbarians’ politics (English vs. French) while the “Indians” seemed to have all allied with one side or another. As a result the “Indians” lumped all “non-Indians”, Native Vermonters and barbarians, into a single category: oppressors.

But note that the State of Vermont still does not recognize any “Indian” tribe of being native to Vermont.

Postscript:

This chapter was written in 2004. In 2011 and 2012 the Montpelier Legislature granted recognition to four Abenaki Native American tribes. In 2022 a recognized Abenaki tribe in Quebec questioned the legitimacy of Vermont’s tribes. A formal declaration of war has yet to be announced.