The Heart of the White Mountains, Their Legend and Scenery

“My opinion is that I don’t know anything about it; but as you got us into this scrape, you had better get us out of it, and be spry about it too, for the deuce take me if I can go much farther.”

“Why,” croaked the colonel, “I recollect hearing of a traveller who, like us, actually walked by the Summit House without seeing it, when he was hailed by a man who, by mere accident, chanced to be outside, and who imagined he saw something moving in the fog. In five minutes the stranger would inevitably have walked over a precipice with his eyes open.”

“And I remember seeing on the wall of the tavern where we stopped, at Bartlett, a placard offering a reward for a man who, like us, set out from Crawford’s, and was never heard of,” George put in.[10 - The remains of this ill-fated climber have since been found at the foot of the pinnacle. See chapter on Mount Washington.]

“And I read of one who, like us, almost reached the summit, but mistaking a lower peak for the pinnacle, losing his head, crawled, exhausted, under a rock to die there,” I finished, firing the last shot.

Without another word both my comrades grappled vigorously with the mountain, and for ten minutes nothing was heard but our labored breathing. On whatever side we might be, so long as we continued to ascend I had little fear of being in the wrong road. Our affair was to get to the top.

At the end of ten minutes we came suddenly upon a walled enclosure, which we conjectured to be the corral at the end of the bridle-path. We hailed it like an oasis in the midst of this desert. We entered, brushed the snow from a stone, and sat down.

Up to this time my umbrella had afforded a good deal of merriment to my companions, who could not understand why I encumbered myself with it on a day which began as this one did, perfectly clear and cloudless. Since the storm came on, the force of the wind would at any time have lifted off his feet the man who attempted to spread it, and even if it had not, as well might one have walked blindfolded in that treacherous road as with an open umbrella before him. Now it was my turn, or, rather, the turn of the abused umbrella. A few moments of rest were absolutely necessary; but the wind cut like a cimeter, and we felt ourselves freezing. I opened the umbrella, and, protected by it from the wind, we crouched under its friendly shelter, and lighted our cigars. Never before did I know the luxury of a smoke like that.

“Now,” said I, complacently glancing up at our tent, “ever since I read how an umbrella saved a man’s life, I determined never to go on a mountain without one.”

“An umbrella! How do you make that out?” demanded both my auditors.

“It is very simple. He was lost on this very mountain, under conditions similar to those we are now experiencing, except that his carrying an umbrella was an accident, and that he was alone. He passed two nights under it. But the story will keep.”

It may well be imagined that we had not the least disposition to be merry; yet for all that there was something irresistibly comical in three men sitting with their feet in the snow, and putting their heads together under a single umbrella. Various were the conjectures. We could hear nothing but the rushing wind, see nothing but driving sleet. George believed we were still half a mile from the summit; the colonel was not able to precisely fix his opinion, but thought us still a long way off. After diligent search, in which we all joined, I succeeded in finding something like a path turning to the right, and we again resumed our slow clambering over the rocks.

Perhaps ten minutes passed thus, when we again halted and peered anxiously into the whirling vapor – nothing, neither monument nor stone, to indicate where we were. A new danger confronted us; one I had hitherto repulsed because I dared not think of it. The light was failing, and darkness would soon be here. God help any that this night surprised on the mountain! While we eagerly sought on all sides some evidence that human feet had ever passed that way, a terrific blast, that seemed to concentrate the fury of the tempest in one mighty effort, dashed us helpless upon the rocks. For some seconds we were blinded, and could only crouch low until its violence subsided. But as the monstrous wave recoiled from the mountain, a piercing cry brought us quickly to our feet.

“Look!” shouted George, waving his hat like a madman – “look there!” he repeated.

Vaguely, through the tattered clouds, like a wreck driving miserably before the tempest, we distinguished a building propped up by timbers crusted with thick ice. The gale shook and beat upon it with demoniacal glee, but never did weary eyes rest on a more welcome object. For ten seconds, perhaps, we held it in view; then, in a twinkling, the clouds rolled over it, shut together, and it was gone – swallowed up in the vortex.

A moment of bewilderment succeeded, after which we made a simultaneous rush in the direction of the building. In five minutes more we were within the hotel, thawing our frozen clothing before a rousing fire.

It provokes a smile when I think of it. Here, in this frail structure, perched like another Noah’s Ark on its mountain, and which every gust threatened to scatter to the winds of heaven, a grand piano was going in the parlor, a telegraphic instrument clicked in a corner, and we sat down to a ménu that made the colonel forget the loss of his hat.

“By the bones of Daniel Boone! I can say as Napoleon did on the Great St. Bernard, ‘I have spoiled a hat among your mountains; well, I shall find a new one on the other side,’” observed the colonel, uncorking a second bottle of champagne.

SECOND JOURNEY

I.

LEGENDS OF THE CRYSTAL HILLS

My lord, I will hoist saile; and all the wind
My bark can beare shall hasten me to find
A great new world. – Sir W. Davenant.

WHEN Cabot, in the Mathew, of Bristol, was sailing by the New England coast, and the amazed savage beheld a pyramid of white sails rising, like a cloud, out of the sea, the navigator saw from the deck of his ship, rising out of the land, a cluster of lofty summits cut like a cameo on the northern sky.

The Indian left his tradition of the marvellous apparition, which he at first believed to be a mass of trees wrapped in faded foliage, drifting slowly at the caprice of the waves; but, as he gazed, fire streamed from the strange object, a cloud shut it from his view, and a peal like distant thunder was wafted on the breeze to his startled ears. That peal announced the doom of his race. He was looking at the first ship.

Succeeding navigators, Italians, Portuguese, French, English – a roll of famous names – sailed these seas, and, in their turn, hailed the distant summits. They became the great distinguishing landmarks of this corner of the New World. They are found on all the maps traced by the early geographers from the relations of the discoverers themselves. Having thus found form and substance, they also found a name – the Mountains of St. John.

Ships multiplied. Men of strange garb, speech, complexion, erected their habitations along the coast, the unresisting Indian never dreaming that the thin line which the sea had cast up would speedily rise to an inundation destined to sweep him from the face of the earth. Then began that steady advance, slow at first, gathering momentum with the years, before which he recoiled step by step, and finally disappeared forever. His destiny was accomplished. To-day only mountains and streams transmit to us the certainty that he ever did exist. They are his monument, his lament, his eternal accusation.

The White Mountains stood for the Indian not only as an image, but as the actual dwelling-place of Omnipotence. His dreaded Manitou, whose voice was the thunder, whose anger the lightning, and on whose face no mortal could look and live, was the counterpart of the terrible Thor, the Icelandic god, throned in a palace of ice among frozen and inaccessible mountain peaks, over which he could be heard urging his loud chariot amid the rage of the tempest. Frost and fire, plague and famine were the terrific natural agents common to the Indian and to the Norse mythology; and to his god of terrors the Indian conjurer addressed his prayers, his incantations, and his propitiatory offerings, when some calamity had befallen or threatened his tribe. But to cross the boundary which separated him from the abiding-place of the Manitou! plant his audacious foot within the region from which Nature shrunk back affrighted! Not all the wealth he believed the mountain hoarded would have tempted him to brave the swift and terrible vengeance of the justly offended, all-powerful Manitou. So far, then, as he was concerned, the mountain remained inviolate, inviolable, as a kind of hell, filled with the despairing shrieks of those who in an evil hour transgressed the limits sacred to immortals.[11 - This analogy of belief may be carried farther still, to the populations of Asia, which surround the great “Abode of Snow” – the Himalayas. It would be interesting to see in this similarity of religious worship a link between the Asiatic, the primitive man, and the American – the most recent, and the most unfortunate. Our province is simply to recount a fact to which the brothers Schlaginweit (“Exploration de la Haute Asie”) bear witness:“It is in spite of himself, under the enticement of a great reward, that the superstitious Hindoo decides to accompany the traveller into the mountains, which he dreads less for the unknown dangers of the ascent than for the sacrilege he believes he is committing in approaching the holy asylum, the inviolable sanctuary of the gods he reveres; his trouble becomes extreme when he sees in the peak to be climbed not the mountain, but the god whose name it bears. Henceforth it is by sacrifice and prayer alone that he may appease the profoundly offended deity.”]

As a pendant to this superstition, in which their deity is with simple grandeur throned on the highest mountain peak, it is curious to remember the Indian tradition of the Deluge; for, like so many peoples, they had their tradition, coming from a remote time, and having strong family resemblance with that of more enlightened nations. According to it, all the inhabitants of the earth were drowned, except one Powaw and his wife, who were preserved by climbing to the top of the White Mountains, and who were the progenitors of the subsequent races of man. The Powaw took with him a hare, which, upon the subsiding of the waters, he freed, as Noah did the dove, seeing in its prolonged absence the assurance that he and his companion might safely descend to earth. The likeness of this tradition with the story of Deucalion, and Pyrrha, his wife, as related by Ovid, is very striking. One does not easily consent to refer it to accident alone.

There is one thing more. When asked by the whites to point out the Indian’s heaven, the savage stretched his arm in the direction of the White Hills, and replied that heaven was just beyond. Such being his religion, and such the influence of the mountain upon this highly imaginative, poetic, natural man, one finds himself drawn legitimately in the train of those marvels which our ancestors considered the most credible things in the world, and which the sceptical cannot explain by a sneer.

According to the Indians, on the highest mountain, suspended from a crag overlooking a dismal lake, was an enormous carbuncle, which many declared they had seen blazing in the night like a live coal. Some even asserted that its ruddy glare lighted the livid rocks around like the fire of a midnight encampment, while by day it emitted rays, like the sun, dazzling to look upon. And this extraordinary sight they declared they had not only seen, but seen again and again.

It is true that the Indians did not hesitate to declare that no mortal hand could hope to grasp the great fire-stone. It was, said they, in the special guardianship of the genius of the mountain, who, on the approach of human footsteps, troubled the waters of the lake, causing a dark mist to rise, in which the venturesome mortal became bewildered, and then hopelessly lost. Several noted conjurers of the Pigwackets, rendered foolhardy by their success in exorcising evil spirits, so far conquered their fears as to ascend the mountain; but they never returned, and had, no doubt, expiated their folly by being transformed into stone, or flung headlong down some stark and terrible precipice.

This tale of the great carbuncle fired the imagination of the simple settlers to the highest pitch. We believe what we wish to believe, and, notwithstanding their religion refused to admit the existence of the Indian demon, its guardian, they seem to have had little difficulty in crediting the reality of the jewel itself. At any rate, the belief that the mountain shut up precious mines has come down to our own day; we are assured by a learned historian of fifty years ago that the story of the great carbuncle still found full credence in his.[12 - Sullivan: “History of Maine.”] We are now acquainted with the spirit of the time when the first attempt to scale the mountain, known to us, was rewarded with complete success. But the record is of exasperating brevity.

Among the earliest settlers of Exeter, New Hampshire, was a man by the name of Darby Field. The antecedents of this obscure personage are securely hidden behind the mists of more than two centuries.

A hundred and twenty-five years before the ascent of Mont Blanc by Jacques Balmat, Darby Field successfully ascended to the summit of the “White Hill,” to-day known as Mount Washington; but the exploit of the adventurous Irishman is far more remarkable in its way than that of the brave Swiss, since he had to make his way for eighty miles through a wilderness inhabited only by beasts of prey, or by human beings scarcely less savage, before he reached the foot of the great range; while Balmat lived under the very shadow of the monarch of the Alps, so that its spectre was forever crossing his path. Furthermore, the greater part of the ascent of Mont Blanc was already familiar ground to the guides and chamois-hunters of the Swiss Alps. On the contrary, according to every probability, Field was the first human being whose daring foot invaded the hitherto inviolable seclusion of the illustrious hermit of New England.

For such an adventure one instinctively seeks a motive. I did not long amuse myself with the idea that this explorer climbed merely for the sake of climbing; and I have little notion that he dreamed of posthumous renown. It is far more probable that the reports brought by the Indians of the fabulous treasures of the mountains led to Field’s long, arduous, and really perilous journey. It is certain that he was possessed of rare intrepidity, as well as the true craving for adventure. That goes without saying; still, the whole undertaking – its inception, its pursuit to the end in the face of extraordinary obstacles, which he had no means of measuring or anticipating – announces a very different sort of man from the ordinary, a purpose before which all dangers disappear.

In June, 1642, that is to say, only twelve years after the Puritan settlements in Massachusetts Bay, Field set out from the sea-coast for the White Hills.

So far as known, he prosecuted his journey to the Indian village of Pigwacket, the existence of which is thus established, without noteworthy accident or adventure. Here he was joined by some Indians, who conducted him within eight miles of the summit, when, declaring that to go farther would expose them to the wrath of their great Evil Spirit, they halted, and refused to proceed. The brave Irishman was equal to the emergency. To turn back, baffled, within sight of his goal was evidently not an admitted contingency. Leaving the Indians, therefore, squatted upon the rocks, and no doubt regarding him as a man rushing upon a fool’s fate, Field again resolutely faced the mountain, when, seeing him equally unmoved by their warnings as unshaken in his determination to reach the summit, two of the boldest warriors ran after him, while the others stoically made their preparations to await a return which they never expected to take place. They watched the retreating figures until lost among the rocks.

In the language of the original narration, the rest of the ascent was effected by “a ridge between two valleys filled with snow, out of which came two branches of the Saco River, which met at the foot of the hill, where was an Indian town of two hundred people.” … “By-the-way, among the rocks, there were two ponds, one a blackish water, and the other reddish.”… “Within twelve miles of the top was neither tree nor grass, but low savins, which they went upon the top of sometimes.”

The adventurous climber pushed on. Soon he was assailed by thick clouds, through which he and his companions resolutely toiled upward. This slow and labored progress through entangling mists continued until within four miles of the summit, when Field emerged above them into a region of intense cold. Surmounting the immense pile of shattered rocks which constitute the spire, he at last stood upon the unclouded summit, with its vast landscape outspread beneath him, and the air so clear that the sea seemed not more than twenty miles distant. No doubt the daring explorer experienced all the triumph natural to his successful achievement. It is not difficult to imagine the exultation with which he planted his audacious foot upon the topmost crag, for, like Columbus, Cabot, Balboa, he, too, was a real discoverer. The Indians must have regarded him, who thus scornfully braved the vengeance of their god of terrors, as something more than man. I have often pictured him standing there, proudly erect, while the wonder-struck savages crouched humbly at his feet. Both, in their way, felt the presence of their God; but the white man would confront his as an equal, while the savage adored with his face in the dust.

The three men, after their first emotion of ecstasy, amazement, or fear, looked about them. For the moment the great carbuncle was forgotten. Field had chosen the best month of the twelve for his attempt, and now saw a vast and unknown region stretching away on the north and east to the shores of what he took for seas, but what were really only seas of vapor, heaped against the farthest horizons. He fancied he saw a great water to the north, which he judged to be a hundred miles broad, for no land was beyond it. He thought he descried the great Gulf of Canada to the east, and in the west the great lake out of which the river of Canada came. All these illusions are sufficiently familiar to mountain explorers; and it must not be forgotten that in Field’s day geographical knowledge of the interior of the country was indeed limited. In fact, he must have brought back with him the first accurate knowledge respecting the sources of those rivers flowing from the eastern slopes of the mountains. The great gulf on the north side of Mount Washington is truly declared to be such a precipice that they could scarce discern to the bottom; the great northern wilderness as “daunting terrible,” and clothed with “infinite thick woods.” Such is its aspect to-day.

The day must have been so far spent that Field had but little time in which to prosecute his search. He, however, found “store of Muscovy glass” and some crystals, which, supposing them to be diamonds, he carefully secured and brought away. These glittering masses, congealed, according to popular belief, like ice on the frozen regions of the mountains, gave them the name of the Crystal Hills – a name the most poetic, the most suggestive, and the most fitting that has been applied to the highest summits since the day they were first discovered by Englishmen.

Descending the mountain, Field rejoined his Indians, who were doubtless much astonished to see him return to them safe and sound; for, while he had been making the ascent, a furious tempest, sent, as these savages believed, to destroy the rash pale-face and his equally reckless companions, burst upon the mountain. He found them drying themselves by a fire of pine-knots; and, after a short halt, the party took their way down the mountain to the Indian village.

Before a month elapsed, Field, with five or six companions, made a second ascent; but the gem of inestimable value, by whose light one might read at night, continued to elude his pursuit. The search was not, however, abandoned. Others continued it. The marvellous story, as firmly believed as ever by the credulous, survived, in all its purity, to our own century, to be finally transmitted to immortality by Hawthorne’s tale of “The Great Carbuncle.” It may be said here that great influence was formerly attributed to this stone, which the learned in alchemy believed prevailed against the dangers of infection, and was a sure talisman to preserve its owner from peril by sea or by land.

A tradition is ten times a tradition when it has a fixed locality. Without this it is a myth, a mere vagabond of a tradition. Knowing this, I searched diligently for the spot where the great carbuncle, like the eye of a Cyclop, shed its red lustre far down the valley of the Saco; and if the little mountain tarn to-day known as Hermit Lake, over which the gaunt crags rise in austere grandeur, be not the place, then I am persuaded that further seeking would be unavailing. I cannot go so far as to say that it never existed.

What seems passing strange is that the feat performed by Field,[13 - Field’s second ascension (July, 1642) was followed in the same year by that of Vines and Gorges, two magistrates of Sir F. Gorges’s province of Maine, within which the mountains were believed to lie. Their visit contributed little to the knowledge of the region, as they erroneously reported the high plateau of the great chain to be the source of the Kennebec, as well as of the Androscoggin and Connecticut rivers.] the fame of which spread throughout the colony, should have been nearly, if not wholly, forgotten before the lapse of a century. Robert Rogers, one of the most celebrated hunters of the White Mountains, subsequently a renowned partisan leader in the French and Indian wars, uses the following language concerning them:

“I cannot learn that any person was ever on the top of these mountains. I have been told by the Indians that they have often attempted it in vain, by reason of the change of air they met with, which I am inclined to believe, having ascended them myself ‘til the alteration of air was very perceptible; and even then I had not advanced half way up; the valleys below were then concealed from view by clouds.”

It is not precisely known when or how these granite peaks took the name of the White Mountains. We find them so designated in 1672 by Josselyn, who himself performed the feat of ascending the highest summit, of which a brief record is found in his “New England’s Rarities.” One cannot help saying of this book that either the author was a liar of the first magnitude, or else we have to regret the degeneracy of Nature, exhausted by her long travail; for this narrator gravely tells us of frogs which were as big as a child of a year old, and of poisonous serpents which the Indians caught with their bare hands, and ate alive with great gusto. These are rarities indeed.

The first mention I have met with of an Indian name for the White Mountains is in the narrative of John Gyles’s captivity, printed in Boston in 1736, saying:

“These White Hills, at the head of Penobscot River, are by the Indians said to be much higher than those called Agiockochook,[14 - It also occurs, reduced to Agiochook, in the ballad, of unknown origin, on the death of Captain Lovewell. One of these was, doubtless, the authority of Belknap. Touching the signification of Agiochook, it is the opinion of Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull that the word which Captain Gyles imperfectly translated from sound into English syllables is Algonquin for “at the mountains on that side,” or “over yonder.” “As to the generally received interpretations of Agiockochook, such as ‘the abode of the Great Spirit,’ ‘the place of the Spirit of the Great Forest,’ or, as one writer prefers, ‘the place of the Storm Spirit,’” says Dr. Trumbull, “it is enough to say that no element of any Algonkin word meaning ‘great,’ ‘spirit,’ ‘forest,’ ‘storm,’ or ‘abode,’ or combining the meaning of any two of these words, occurs in ‘Agiockochook.’ The only Indian name for the White Hills that bears internal evidence of genuineness is one given on the authority of President Alden, as used ‘by one of the eastern tribes,’ that is, Waumbekketmethna, which easily resolves itself into the Kennebec-Abnaki waubeghiket-amadinar, ‘white greatest mountain.’ It is very probable, however, that this synthesis is a mere translation, by an Indian, of the English ‘White Mountains.’ I have never, myself, succeeded in obtaining this name from the modern Abnakis.”] above Saco.”

The similitude between the names White Mountains and Mont Blanc suggests the same idea, that color, rather than character, makes the first and strongest impression upon the beholder. Thus we have White Mountains and Green Mountains, Red Mountains and Black Mountains, the world over. The eye seizes a color before the mind fixes upon a distinctive feature, or the imagination a resemblance. It is stated, on the authority of Schoolcraft, that the Algonquins called these summits “White Rocks.” Mariners, approaching from the open sea, descried what seemed a cloud-bank, rising from the landward horizon, when twenty leagues from the nearest coast, and before any other land was visible from the mast-head. Thirty leagues distant in a direct line, in a clear midsummer day, the distant summits appeared of a pearly whiteness; observed again from a church steeple on the sea-coast, with the sky partially overcast, they were whitish-gray, showing that the change from blue to white, or to cool tones approximating with white, is due to atmospheric conditions. The early writers succeed only imperfectly in accounting for this phenomenon, which for six months of the year at least has no connection whatever with the snows that cover the highest peaks only from the middle of October to the middle of April, a period during which few navigators of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries visited our shores, or, indeed, ventured to put to sea at all.[15 - Here is what Douglass says in his “Summary” (1748-’53): “The White Hills, or rather mountains, inland about seventy miles north from the mouth of Piscataqua Harbor, about seven miles west by north from the head of the Pigwoket branch of Saco River; they are called white not from their being continually covered with snow, but because they are bald atop, producing no trees or brush, and covered with a whitish stone or shingle: these hills may be observed at a great distance, and are a considerable guide or direction to the Indians in travelling that country.”And Robert Rogers (“Account of America,” London, 1765) remarks that the White Mountains were “so called from that appearance which is like snow, consisting, as is generally supposed, of a white flint, from which the reflection is very brilliant and dazzling.”]