To the eastward of the Connecticut River, which we have explored from
its mouth to the source, lies one of the most attractive regions in
America, the White Mountain district. It covers about thirteen hundred
square miles, stretching forty-five miles eastward from the
Connecticut to the Maine boundary, and being thirty miles wide from
the Ammonoosuc and Androscoggin on the north to the base of the
Sandwich range on the south. There are some two hundred of these
mountains rising from a plateau elevated generally sixteen hundred
feet above the sea. They cluster mainly in two groups, separated by a
broad table-land ten to twenty miles wide, the western group being the
Franconia Mountains and the eastern group the Presidential range, or
White Mountains proper. Their great mass is of granite, overlaid by
mica slate; their scenery is varied and beautiful; and the country has
nowhere a more popular resort than these mountains in the summer. They
send out from their glens and notches various rivers, westward to the
Connecticut, eastward to the Androscoggin and Saco, and southward to
the Merrimack. The Indians called the White Mountains Agiochook,
meaning "the Mountains of the Snowy Forehead and Home of the Great
Spirit," and held them in the utmost reverence and awe. They rarely
ascended the peaks, as it was believed no intruder upon these sacred
heights was ever known to return. The legend was that the Great Spirit
once bore a blameless chief and his squaw in a mighty whirlwind to the
summit, while the world below was overspread by a flood destroying all
the people. It was said that the great Passaconaway, the wizard-king
at Pennacook, was wont to commune with celestial messengers on the
summit of Agiochook, whence he was finally borne to heaven. The first
white man who visited these mountains was Darby Field, who came up
from Portsmouth on the seacoast in June, 1642, by the valley of the
Saco. The Indians tried to dissuade him, saying he would never return
alive, but he pressed on, attended by two seashore Indians, passing
through cloud-banks and storms, reaching the highest peak, whence he
saw, as he related, "the sea by Saco, the Gulf of Canada, and the
great lake Canada River came out of;" and he found many crystals that
he thought were diamonds, from which the range long bore the name of
the "Chrystal Hills." Towards the close of the eighteenth century
colonists began moving into the outlying glens; in 1792 Abel Crawford
lived on the Giant's Grave, now Fabyan's; in 1803 a small inn was
built there; and in 1820 a party of seven ascended and slept on the
summit of Mount Washington, giving the principal peaks the names they
now have.
From the Connecticut River the chief route of entrance to the White
Mountain region is by railway up the Ammonoosuc River alongside its
swift-flowing amber waters, and through the villages of North Lisbon
and Littleton, then coming to Bethlehem Junction, whence a short
narrow-gauge railroad leads steeply up the hill-slope westward to
Maplewood and Bethlehem. This is one of the most populous resorts of
the district--Bethlehem Street--a well-kept highway, stretching two
miles along a plateau upon the northern hill-slope at an elevation of
almost three hundred feet above the river. When old President Dwight,
in his early wanderings over New England, first saw this place, it was
known as the "Lord's Hill," and he recorded it as remote and sterile,
having "only log huts, recent, few, poor and planted on a soil
singularly rough and rocky," but he saw "a magnificent prospect of
the White Mountains and a splendid collection of other mountains in
this neighborhood." It is now an aggregation of fine hotels and summer
boarding-houses, the whole "Street" having a grand view of the
imposing Presidential range, seen nearly twenty miles to the eastward
over the Ammonoosuc Valley, while other mountain ranges are to the
north and west, so that Bethlehem is in a vast amphitheatre,
presenting, when the clouds permit, an environment of unsurpassed
magnificence. To the southward, the visitors climb Mount Agassiz,
rising twenty-four hundred feet, formerly known as the Peaked Hill,
and get an unrivalled view of mountains all around the horizon, the
Green Mountains of Vermont being plainly visible beyond the
Connecticut River to the westward. The southern flanks of Mount
Agassiz are drained by the pretty little Gale River, flowing through a
deep glen westward to the Ammonoosuc at North Lisbon. Down in this
glen, to the southwest of Bethlehem, is the village of Franconia, with
numerous hotels and boarding-houses, while to the southwest of the
glen rises Sugar Hill, another popular resort, with its great hotels
set high on the hilltop, and having superb views of the Franconia and
White Mountains to the eastward, and far away westward over the
Connecticut Valley where the horizon is enclosed by the long line of
the Green Mountains. It is a breezy and health-giving place.