The Last of the Bird People

In 1928, Massachusetts water authorities began land takings for the largest public works project in the United States at the time, the construction of the Quabbin Reservoir, in the Swift River Valley. What the authorities did not realize was that, living in the more remote, forested tracts of the valley, there was a secretive band of mixed-race hunter-gatherers who had been subsisting, undiscovered there for more than ten generations. This book, taken from a legal deposition found at Harvard's Peabody Museum, is the story of the fate of these retiring, peaceable people and the young anthropologist who first contacted them.