Hey, I found this on YouTube

[PotatoChip]

7. Oh wow! This link is so interesting!

I'm only about 1/4 into it so far, but am already hooked! There is so much to absorb here... Amazing stuff that I would recommend to anyone who would like to know more about our state's history beyond what our euro-centric history books taught us.

This link is specifically about the Androscoggin River, and it's known historical origins. But that does not change the fact that other Maine rivers very likely have very similar histories.

Native Americans and the Amascongan

Native Americans lived alongside, and traveled on, the Androscoggin River centuries before the first Europeans explored the coast of Maine, an effort that may have begun as early as the 1490s. Moving up the Androscoggin valley after the glaciers retreated over 12,000 years ago, the ancestors of today’s Abenaki Indians—the “dawn land” people—survived by hunting large game, especially caribou. Termed the “Paleo-Indians” by some scholars, these inhabitants of the valley erected a stone structure for the storage of meat, dated to 11,120 years before the present (and now on display at the Maine State Museum), at the “Vail Site” on the old course of the Magalloway River—a northern tributary to the Androscoggin. Many other prehistoric Indian encampment sites along the Androscoggin, notably on points of land jutting into the river (for example, “Powwow Point” at Bethel) and on raised elevations not far from the water’s edge, have been identified and documented through archaeological investigations carried out by the Maine Historic Preservation Commission and Maine State Museum. Such investigations have aided in the reconstruction of the lifestyles of the original human inhabitants who occupied the Androscoggin watershed.

Cool link. Thanks for sharing, 2naSalit!