NH’s short-lived Indian Stream Republic was an experiment in democracy
PITTSBURG – Richard Blanchard was a young dad still adjusting to his duties as a newly deputized sheriff in the Great North Woods when he awoke one crisp October morning in 1835 to a rap on his farmhouse door and a warrant for his arrest.
The men waiting outside had come from just across the Canadian border in the town of Hereford, an act of retaliation for Blanchard’s arrest late that summer of a Canadian man who’d owed debts to a nearby general store. While that same Canadian—who’d managed to escape following an ambush on Blanchard’s deputies—watched on, Blanchard finished his chores, bid his wife and children farewell, and took just enough time for word of his arrest to trickle out before heading off into the autumn woods with his captors.
Signs announcing Pittsburg as the site of the Indian Stream Republic are among the first things visitors see as they drive into town, and among the last remaining reminders of the tiny democracy. (Photo: David Lazar)
For Blanchard the events of the next 24 hours in the surrounding, unforgiving patchwork of lakes and tree-lined hills would make for the ride of his life. They would also mark the beginning of the end of one of New Hampshire’s and the nation’s more interesting historical footnotes—a shortlived experiment in democracy known as the Indian Stream Republic.
So-named for the Connecticut River tributary that formed its southeastern border, the Indian Stream Republic was a nation within a nation—an independent state that resulted from, of all things, a surveying slipup, as British and American negotiators in 1783 scrambled to draw up a truce to the Revolutionary War and draw firm borders dividing U.S. and British territories. The 1783 Treaty of Paris would define this particular section along the Canadian-U.S. border as coming at the “northwesternmost headwaters” of the Connecticut River. There was just one problem: those headwaters had any number of tributaries, from Indian Stream to Perry and Hall streams, making that northwesternmost point a debate among settlers and local leaders on both sides who sought to claim the land as their own.
(Photo: David Lazar)
The result was a nearly 300-square-mile patch of remote, rugged and pristine wilderness, an undefined area atop New Hampshire roughly the size of New York City’s five boroughs and whose population density even today (at 3.1 people per square mile) is dwarfed by the world’s least densely populated nation, Mongolia. For 40-plus years after the Treaty of Paris, the Indian Stream territory existed as a sort of legal no-man’s-land, a place where Canadian and U.S. authorities had little if any jurisdiction or taxing power and where new settlers—including a handful of debtors seeking escape from obligation—arrived each year with little more on their backs than an axe, a few sacks of provisions and the hope of finding new opportunity in the virgin forest.
“Like the Gold Rush where people left everything they had on the east coast for the chance at something better, people came here with nothing but the want and wish of better living,” says lifelong Pittsburg resident Roy Amey, a descendant of one of the Indian Stream Republic’s first leaders, John Haynes. “For a time, it was very hard. One summer, there was actually four or five feet of snow. There was no food, no grain, their animals starved. Overall, it was a pretty bleak outlook when these folks moved up here. I think when you look around today, though, we did all right.”
The Indian Stream Republic comprised a nearly 300-square mile patch of rugged, pristine wilderness, noted for its tree-lined hills and the Connecticut Lakes. (Photo: Raymond Mazalewski)
Indeed, to drive today through the lush and still largely raw forestland and lake country that make up modern day Pittsburg is to witness the handiwork of those early settlers—a hardscrabble lot who made a living clearing trees and building roads, cultivating farms and raising livestock, logging and burning wood for potash fertilizer (the chief industry—in fact, a large overturned iron potash kettle for a time served as the territory’s jail), and constructing schoolhouses and public buildings through volunteer labor. Now, as then, it remains a place of proud self-sufficiency; a place where life can be hard in the cold season, but where neighbors feel a sense of obligation to pitch in and do things themselves as a community rather than having it done for them.
In the decades following the Treaty of Paris, the Indian Stream territory quietly prospered, as more families moved in and settled. Crime was relatively rare and most of the necessities of life were produced at home, with bartering common, payment of debts a matter of honor, and methods of commercial and financial transactions little known. As the 1820s drew to a close, however, local officials both in Canada and New Hampshire—seeking to boost revenue and authority —began to test their limits in the territory. Both would impose taxes on Indian Stream inhabitants, with Canadians going so far as to charge duties on goods brought into the territory and to attempt conscripting residents into the Canadian army. For all of this, the residents—or Streamers as they were known —received little in return.
A surveying slipup by British and U.S. negotiators following the Revolutionary War would leave an area roughly the size of New York City’s five boroughs in limbo. Confusion came from where a small patch of the U.S.-Canadian border was to be. (Images courtesy of the NH Historical Society Library and Wikipedia Commons)
By 1832, with no sign of relief, the 60 or so families living in Indian Stream came to a decision. At a meeting held on July 9 of that year, dozens of Streamers—still in their work clothes—packed the Center School House, demanding change and ultimately approving a declaration of independence and constitution by a 56-3 vote for what was to become one of the world’s tiniest nations. The hope: that such a compact could last until the British and the Americans finally resolved their border dispute over the territory. The constitution for this new, tiny nation atop New Hampshire would look remarkably similar to that of the United States, guaranteeing Streamers the right to self-governance, religious freedom, life, property and happiness. Later amendments guaranteed the right to free speech, election and debate; a swift and fair trial; and protection from double jeopardy, cruel and unusual punishment, and unwarranted searches and seizures. From that meeting also sprung a simple three-branch government, consisting of: an elected five member executive council; a general assembly consisting of all males over 21 years of age with three months residence in the republic, which could overturn a council decision on a 2/3 vote; and a judiciary whose decisions could ultimately be appealed to the executive council.
“If you look at this from a historical standpoint, the people of this territory were working, perhaps subconsciously, within the bounds of precedent set by the American Revolution to declare their independence,” says Jere Daniell, a retired Dartmouth historian who helped author and edit perhaps the most definitive history of the Indian Stream Republic. “And for a while, it worked. It should be noted that this was never intended to be a permanent arrangement.” And it wasn’t. For a little more than three years, the Indian Stream Republic churned as a tiny engine of democracy. Elections for executive council were held regularly each March. By 1835, Indian Stream had 69 families and 414 inhabitants living in relative prosperity, with each head of family possessing 100 acres of land and more than 1,500 acres under cultivation.
Little, however, could stop the winds of unrest building along the Republic’s northern and southern borders, as Canadian and New Hampshire authorities began to tire of an independent nation living in their midst and made concerted attempts to establish jurisdiction within the territory. A fracture would develop within the Republic. Some Streamers—including one of its first councilors, Luther Parker—urged their government to align with New Hampshire and the protection and stability it offered. Others sided with Lower Canada, as chief magistrate from Hereford, Alexander Rea, appeared frequently to try and drum up local support for incorporation into Canada. It would be a series of cross-border raids and arrests in 1835, beginning with Parker’s apprehension for allegedly threatening a Canadian debtor in his general store, and culminating in Blanchard’s, that would spell the Indian Stream Republic’s unceremonious end.
Officers would bring Parker to Canada and then release him from custody almost immediately—the arrest, more than anything, a symbolic attempt by Rea to assert Canadian authority within the Republic’s borders. For Blanchard, the story would be different. For in the time it took him to say goodbye to his family and finish his chores on that crisp October morning, word would spread to friends and later allies in the neighboring NH towns of Colebrook and Stewartstown. A posse of more than a dozen men gathered, tracking Blanchard’s captors down that evening just beyond the Canadian border on horseback, ambushing them and securing the young deputy sheriff’s release. The following day, members of that same posse, fueled by rum and retribution, appeared at Magistrate Rea’s house in Hereford with their own arrest warrants for him and Blanchard’s captors. A street brawl ensued. One overzealous member would split Rea’s straw hat with his saber and another would fire a pistol in his direction, before the mob took the magistrate into custody and brought him back across the border to Canaan, VT.
As the group arrived in Canaan and the effects of the alcohol began to wear off, the men quickly realized the magnitude of what they’d done, having assaulted a magistrate in the exercise of his functions and carried him into captivity in a foreign country. Rea was immediately released back to Canada. A line, however, had been crossed. As word spread in the days following of an insurrection brewing in Indian Stream between pro-Canadian and pro-NH inhabitants and a possible incursion by Canadian forces, NH Governor William Badger decided to disregard ongoing U.S.-British border negotiations and dispatch the 24th regiment of the state’s militia into the Indian Stream Republic to restore order.
So fell the curtain on one of the world’s tiniest democracies, as Streamers, seeking the protection NH offered, ceded authority to the state. Five years later, Indian Stream would be incorporated as Pittsburg, today New England’s largest town in land area. In 1842, the British, seeking to rid themselves of any more headaches along the disputed border, would give up millions of acres of territory—including Pittsburg—to U.S. negotiators in the Ashburton Treaty.
How history judges the Indian Stream Republic rests in the eyes of each storyteller. For some, like bestselling author Jeffrey Lent, who used Indian Stream as the setting for his 2002 landmark novel Lost Nation, it is a fable of man’s imperfection. “I think it is ultimately a story of a people who are urged to change something and take authority into their own hands, in the hopes of achieving societal order,” says Lent, who recently moved with his family to Pittsburg to film the motion picture version of Lost Nation. “It is a story of great aspirations and potential. It is also a story of human failing. Not failure in a negative sense, but as with so much of human experience, a situation that, despite best intentions and efforts, was altered by uncontrollable events.”
Author Jeffrey Lent (left) and film producer Chris Alexander are now in production of Lent’s Indian Stream-based novel, Lost Nation. The pair hopes to use the film to launch an annual Coos Film Festival and movie studio in nearby Colebrook. (Photo: David Lazar)
As for Roy Amey, who has committed much of his life to preserving Pittsburg history, he just wants to make sure the story continues to be told. “I think it goes to show what people can accomplish when they are left alone because they know they have to do it themselves,” he says. “They didn’t need a big government. They got off the trail by the Connecticut and all they had were the woods. And for a time, they made it work. “The legacy question I can’t answer,” Amey continues. “But I do think everyone needs to know where Pittsburg came from. When Lost Nation came out, it opened the eyes of the whole town. People came from far and wide to learn more about it… Someone’s got to keep talking about it and reading it and making sure the younger people coming along know about it, too. Because this is a major part of who we are.”
Thanks to Lent and veteran film producer Chris Alexander, it is a story that will live on through the silver screen, and may indeed stretch far beyond, as the pair enters serious talks to launch an annual Coos Film Festival at the Balsams in nearby Dixville Notch and a movie studio in Colebrook. “We’re not just coming in to shoot a movie, we’re coming in to build a new template or model for industry in the North Country,” Alexander says. “We believe there’s an entire population up here of people with the interest, the knowledge, and the talent to make a contribution and really help to rebuild this region.” And, in the process, keep an important piece of history alive for future generations.
Special thanks to Jeffrey Lent, Chris Alexander, Roy Amey, Jere Daniell, the Balsams, the NH State Archives and the NH Historical Society Library for their generosity and assistance with this story.
