They lived a truer poetry than Homer or Virgil wrote.
The Patuckets, once a powerful native tribe, had their principal settlements around the falls at the time of the visit of the white men of Concord and Woburn in 1652.

Gookin, the Indian historian, states that this tribe was almost wholly destroyed by the great pestilence of 1612.

In 1674 they had but two hundred and fifty males in the whole tribe.

Their chief sachem lived opposite the falls; and it was in his wigwam that the historian, in company with John Eliot, the Indian missionary, held a "meeting for worshippe on ye 5th of May, 1676," where Mr.Eliot preached from "ye twenty-second of Matthew." The white visitants from Concord and Woburn, pleased with the appearance of the place and the prospect it afforded for planting and fishing, petitioned the General Court for a grant of the entire tract of land now embraced in the limits of Lowell and Chelmsford.

They made no account whatever of the rights of the poor Patuckets; but, considering it "a comfortable place to accommodate God's people upon," were doubtless prepared to deal with the heathen inhabitants as Joshua the son of Nun did with the Jebusites and Perizzites, the Hivites and the Hittites, of old.