A BEOTHUK DEATH
Grandfather Rubin and the attack of the Indians
WARNING: Somebody gets killed in a gory manner with a gun in this story so stop reading if you are faint of heart. I guarantee you – you cant un-know some things.
HOW RUBIN ADAMS FITS IN OUR FAMILY TREE:
Rubin was born (DATE) and lived in (Place) and married (Name/Date) in (Date) and had five children. Rubin died in (Date) of some blood disease. Several other family members (Including my aunt recently) died of similar ailments and as a result we think that was probably a hereditary blood disease.
His wife (Name) is now a widow with five young children. A sort time later (Name) was visiting (Place) and agreed to marry (Widows name) and brought her and her five children to live in ship cove where he had a job as caretaker of the French properties at (Place). They had three more children.
One of her (Name) children (Name) was nine years old when she (Name) married (Name).
This daughter (Name) later married Henry Bowfies Who is my 3x Great grandfather half french/ half Beothuk who was born in the wilderness in Northern Newfoundland around March 1849 . They had (How many children), one of whom was (Name) who was the father of my Great Grandfather born in 1898.
Rubin Adams would be my 4x great grandfather.
This story was told to my mother by my great grandfather fifty or more years ago. She dont remember it being told as a family story just a story that he knew (My great grandfather was always telling stories and was a great story teller). There was not a lot of interaction between ship cove and central Newfoundland so this story originally would certainly have come from his great grandmother Mary Keefe (Who died when he was seven) or his grandmother (Whom he never got to met) so could have been a story that his parents or grandparents told second hand to him – possibly why he didn’t realize that it was a direct family story.
Decades later my mother was visiting Fogo and was doing research on Mary Keefe (My great grandfathers great Grandmother – The widow whose daughter married my half blood Beothuk 3x great Grandfather) and interviewed Rubin Adams great grandson – a very old man by then. He was very familiar with this story as it was a big part of his family history. He also gave a few other tidbits of information. Rubin Adams supposedly died of a brain hemmerage while doing something with seals. In the years before he died he had bizarre medical symptoms including bleeding through his eyes and mouth.
This is still just a story and not a connection to our family tree but a study of church records puts Rubin Adams as my direct ancestor (4x Great Grandfather – see above). Also several other family members have died of a rare blood disease (Including one of my aunts just a couple years ago) so we would logically assume that Rubin died of a rare hereditary blood disorder that runs in the family.
The interaction with the Beothuks would have happened in the mid 1840s which is after the official last known Beothuk died so we were wondering if the story was actually about Rubins Father or grandfather. However we know that Beothuks were around after the well known red Indian lake Beothuks died out (think Santu Toney and the Northern Peninsula Beothuks) so its not a stretch to think that a small band of Beothuks (Who lived in small groups of 30 to 35 if Wikipedia info is correct) survived off the radar in remote Newfoundland for a couple decades afterwards. So this likely happened in the mid 1840s.
Rubin Adams was born in (When) and lived in (Where). In the mid 1840s he was around 10 or 11 years old – still a young person but old enough that he was expected to help contribute to the well being of the family. This included taking a gun an going hunting for birds. He had a musket to shoot birds. This was similar to guns used in the American civil war (And other wars at the time). To use this gun you carried around a powder horn filled with gunpowder, a bag of lead shot and a piece of flint to ignite the whole thing. For wartime use or to shoot a large animal you would use a larger musket ball instead of small shot. In the American civil war there would be four lines of soldiers three of whom was kneeling down being as small a target as possible while the other line stood up to fire. Then the line that recently fired knelled down to reload and some seconds later another line would stand up and fire. A trained able bodied soldier took a couple minutes to load the gun. To a ten year old boy who might have only done it a couple times and only shown once or twice it could well have taken him a half hour. So using the gun was not a simple matter – especially to a ten year old.
Rubin is off in a boat with his gun hunting ducks (Or I presume any other bird that happened to be around). His boat is described as a canoe. So it was a small non seaworthy boat that you might use in lakes or the sea shore that a small boy could row by himself. He shoots some ducks and reloads his gun and goes to pick up his ducks. As he goes to pick them, up two Bothuks runs out of the woods with weapons coming after him. Rubin panics, drops his gun and runs to his boat and pushes off the shore. The two Indians stop and pick up the gun and start inspecting it. One of them looks strait down the barrow as part of the inspection. At that time one of them pulls the trigger and the gun goes off – and there is now one less (Now headless) Beothuk around. The other Indian (Presumably now scared) drops the gun and runs back into the wilderness.
Rubin rows back to shore and retrieves his gun and Ducks. That night we assume that mom makes a Duck jigs dinner.