day, we decided to follow the course of the torrent, which we supposed
to be Murch Brook, as long as it would not lead us too far out of our
way. We thus traveled about four miles in the very torrent itself,
continually crossing and recrossing it, leaping from rock to rock, and
jumping with the stream down falls of seven or eight feet, or
sometimes sliding down on our backs in a thin sheet of water. This
ravine had been the scene of an extraordinary freshet in the spring,
apparently accompanied by a slide from the mountain. It must have been
filled with a stream of stones and water, at least twenty feet above
the present level of the torrent. For a rod or two, on either side of
its channel, the trees were barked and splintered up to their tops,
the birches bent over, twisted, and sometimes finely split, like a
stable-broom; some, a foot in diameter, snapped off, and whole clumps
of trees bent over with the weight of rocks piled on them. In one
place we noticed a rock, two or three feet in diameter, lodged nearly
twenty feet high in the crotch of a tree. For the whole four miles we
saw but one rill emptying in, and the volume of water did not seem to
be increased from the first. We traveled thus very rapidly with a
downward impetus, and grew remarkably expert at leaping from rock to
rock, for leap we must, and leap we did, whether there was any rock at
the right distance or not. It was a pleasant picture when the foremost
turned about and looked up the winding ravine, walled in with rocks
and the green forest, to see, at intervals of a rod or two, a
red-shirted or green-jacketed mountaineer against the white torrent,
leaping down the channel with his pack on his back, or pausing upon a
convenient rock in the midst of the torrent to mend a rent in his
clothes, or unstrap the dipper at his belt to take a draught of the
water. At one place we were startled by seeing, on a little sandy
shelf by the side of the stream, the fresh print of a man’s foot, and
for a moment realized how Robinson Crusoe felt in a similar case; but
at last we remembered that we had struck this stream on our way up,
though we could not have told where, and one had descended into the
ravine for a drink. The cool air above and the continual bathing of
our bodies in mountain water, alternate foot, sitz, douche, and plunge
baths, made this walk exceedingly refreshing, and we had traveled only
a mile or two, after leaving the torrent, before every thread of our
clothes was as dry as usual, owing perhaps to a peculiar quality in
the atmosphere.
After leaving the torrent, being in doubt about our course, Tom threw
down his pack at the foot of the loftiest spruce tree at hand, and
shinned up the bare trunk some twenty feet, and then climbed through
the green tower, lost to our sight, until he held the topmost spray
in his hand.[5] McCauslin, in his younger days, had marched through
the wilderness with a body of troops, under General Somebody, and with
one other man did all the scouting and spying service. The General’s
word was, “Throw down the top of that tree,” and there was no tree in
the Maine woods so high that it did not lose its top in such a case. I
have heard a story of two men being lost once in these woods, nearer
to the settlements than this, who climbed the loftiest pine they could
find, some six feet in diameter at the ground, from whose top they
discovered a solitary clearing and its smoke. When at this height,
some two hundred feet from the ground, one of them became dizzy, and
fainted in his companion’s arms, and the latter had to accomplish the
descent with him, alternately fainting and reviving, as best he could.
To Tom we cried, “Where away does the summit bear? where the burnt
lands?” The last he could only conjecture; he descried, however, a
little meadow and pond, lying probably in our course, which we
concluded to steer for. On reaching this secluded meadow, we found
fresh tracks of moose on the shore of the pond, and the water was
still unsettled as if they had fled before us. A little farther, in a
dense thicket, we seemed to be still on their trail. It was a small
meadow, of a few acres, on the mountain-side, concealed by the forest,
and perhaps never seen by a white man before, where one would think
that the moose might browse and bathe, and rest in peace. Pursuing
this course, we soon reached the open land, which went sloping down
some miles toward the Penobscot.
Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and
forever untamable _Nature_, or whatever else men call it, while coming
down this part of the mountain. We were passing over “Burnt Lands,”
burnt by lightning, perchance, though they showed no recent marks of
fire, hardly so much as a charred stump, but looked rather like a
natural pasture for the moose and deer, exceedingly wild and desolate,
with occasional strips of timber crossing them, and low poplars
springing up, and patches of blueberries here and there. I found
myself traversing them familiarly, like some pasture run to waste, or
partially reclaimed by man; but when I reflected what man, what
brother or sister or kinsman of our race made it and claimed it, I
expected the proprietor to rise up and dispute my passage. It is
difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We habitually
presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not
seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and
inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something
savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I
trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion
and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have
heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but
the unhandseled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor
woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land. It was the fresh and
natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and
ever,--to be the dwelling of man, we say,--so Nature made it, and man
may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was
Matter, vast, terrific,--not his Mother Earth that we have heard of,
not for him to tread on, or be buried in,--no, it were being too
familiar even to let his bones lie there,--the home, this, of
Necessity and Fate. There was clearly felt the presence of a force not
bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and
superstitious rites,--to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the
rocks and to wild animals than we. We walked over it with a certain
awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew
there, and had a smart and spicy taste. Perchance where _our_ wild
pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor, in Concord, there
were once reapers, and husbandmen planted grain; but here not even the
surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw
fit to make this world. What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see
a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star’s
surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this
matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not
spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,--_that_ my body might,--but I
fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has
possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in
nature,--daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,--rocks,
trees, wind on our cheeks! the _solid_ earth! the _actual_ world! the
_common sense!_ _Contact!_ _Contact!_ _Who_ are we? _where_ are we?
Erelong we recognized some rocks and other features in the landscape
which we had purposely impressed on our memories, and, quickening our
pace, by two o’clock we reached the batteau.[6] Here we had expected
to dine on trout, but in this glaring sunlight they were slow to take
the bait, so we were compelled to make the most of the crumbs of our
hard-bread and our pork, which were both nearly exhausted. Meanwhile
we deliberated whether we should go up the river a mile farther, to
Gibson’s clearing, on the Sowadnehunk, where there was a deserted log
hut, in order to get a half-inch auger, to mend one of our spike-poles
with. There were young spruce trees enough around us, and we had a
spare spike, but nothing to make a hole with. But as it was uncertain
whether we should find any tools left there, we patched up the broken
pole, as well as we could, for the downward voyage, in which there
would be but little use for it. Moreover, we were unwilling to lose
any time in this expedition, lest the wind should rise before we
reached the larger lakes, and detain us; for a moderate wind produces
quite a sea on these waters, in which a batteau will not live for a
moment; and on one occasion McCauslin had been delayed a week at the
head of the North Twin, which is only four miles across. We were
nearly out of provisions, and ill prepared in this respect for what
might possibly prove a week’s journey round by the shore, fording
innumerable streams, and threading a trackless forest, should any
accident happen to our boat.
It was with regret that we turned our backs on Chesuncook, which
McCauslin had formerly logged on, and the Allegash lakes. There were
still longer rapids and portages above; among the last the Ripogenus
Portage, which he described as the most difficult on the river, and
three miles long. The whole length of the Penobscot is two hundred and
seventy-five miles, and we are still nearly one hundred miles from its
source. Hodge, the Assistant State Geologist, passed up this river in
1837, and by a portage of only one mile and three quarters crossed
over into the Allegash, and so went down that into the St. John, and
up the Madawaska to the Grand Portage across to the St. Lawrence. His
is the only account that I know of an expedition through to Canada in
this direction. He thus describes his first sight of the latter river,
which, to compare small things with great, is like Balboa’s first
sight of the Pacific from the mountains of the Isthmus of Darien.
“When we first came in sight of the St. Lawrence,” he says, “from the
top of a high hill, the view was most striking, and much more
interesting to me from having been shut up in the woods for the two
previous months. Directly before us lay the broad river, extending
across nine or ten miles, its surface broken by a few islands and
reefs, and two ships riding at anchor near the shore. Beyond, extended
ranges of uncultivated hills, parallel with the river. The sun was
just going down behind them, and gilding the whole scene with its
parting rays.”
About four o’clock, the same afternoon, we commenced our return
voyage, which would require but little if any poling. In shooting
rapids the boatmen use large and broad paddles, instead of poles, to
guide the boat with. Though we glided so swiftly, and often smoothly,
down, where it had cost us no slight effort to get up, our present
voyage was attended with far more danger; for if we once fairly struck
one of the thousand rocks by which we were surrounded, the boat would
be swamped in an instant. When a boat is swamped under these
circumstances, the boatmen commonly find no difficulty in keeping
afloat at first, for the current keeps both them and their cargo up
for a long way down the stream; and if they can swim, they have only
to work their way gradually to the shore. The greatest danger is of
being caught in an eddy behind some larger rock, where the water
rushes up stream faster than elsewhere it does down, and being carried
round and round under the surface till they are drowned. McCauslin
pointed out some rocks which had been the scene of a fatal accident of
this kind. Sometimes the body is not thrown out for several hours. He
himself had performed such a circuit once, only his legs being visible
to his companions; but he was fortunately thrown out in season to
recover his breath.[7] In shooting the rapids, the boatman has this
problem to solve: to choose a circuitous and safe course amid a
thousand sunken rocks, scattered over a quarter or half a mile, at the
same time that he is moving steadily on at the rate of fifteen miles
an hour. Stop he cannot; the only question is, where will he go? The
bowman chooses the course with all his eyes about him, striking broad
off with his paddle, and drawing the boat by main force into her
course. The sternman faithfully follows the bow.
We were soon at the Aboljacarmegus Falls. Anxious to avoid the delay,
as well as the labor, of the portage here, our boatmen went forward
first to reconnoitre, and concluded to let the batteau down the falls,
carrying the baggage only over the portage. Jumping from rock to rock
until nearly in the middle of the stream, we were ready to receive the
boat and let her down over the first fall, some six or seven feet
perpendicular. The boatmen stand upon the edge of a shelf of rock,
where the fall is perhaps nine or ten feet perpendicular, in from one
to two feet of rapid water, one on each side of the boat, and let it
slide gently over, till the bow is run out ten or twelve feet in the
air; then, letting it drop squarely, while one holds the painter, the
other leaps in, and his companion following, they are whirled down
the rapids to a new fall or to smooth water. In a very few minutes
they had accomplished a passage in safety, which would be as foolhardy
for the unskillful to attempt as the descent of Niagara itself. It
seemed as if it needed only a little familiarity, and a little more
skill, to navigate down such falls as Niagara itself with safety. At
any rate, I should not despair of such men in the rapids above Table
Rock, until I saw them actually go over the falls, so cool, so
collected, so fertile in resources are they. One might have thought
that these were falls, and that falls were not to be waded through
with impunity, like a mud-puddle. There was really danger of their
losing their sublimity in losing their power to harm us. Familiarity
breeds contempt. The boatman pauses, perchance, on some shelf beneath
a table-rock under the fall, standing in some cove of backwater two
feet deep, and you hear his rough voice come up through the spray,
coolly giving directions how to launch the boat this time.
Having carried round Pockwockomus Falls, our oars soon brought us to
the Katepskonegan, or Oak Hall carry, where we decided to camp
half-way over, leaving our batteau to be carried over in the morning
on fresh shoulders. One shoulder of each of the boatmen showed a red
spot as large as one’s hand, worn by the batteau on this expedition;
and this shoulder, as it did all the work, was perceptibly lower than
its fellow, from long service. Such toil soon wears out the strongest
constitution. The drivers are accustomed to work in the cold water in
the spring, rarely ever dry; and if one falls in all over he rarely
changes his clothes till night, if then, even. One who takes this
precaution is called by a particular nickname, or is turned off. None
can lead this life who are not almost amphibious. McCauslin said
soberly, what is at any rate a good story to tell, that he had seen
where six men were wholly under water at once, at a jam, with their
shoulders to handspikes. If the log did not start, then they had to
put out their heads to breathe. The driver works as long as he can
see, from dark to dark, and at night has not time to eat his supper
and dry his clothes fairly, before he is asleep on his cedar bed. We
lay that night on the very bed made by such a party, stretching our
tent over the poles which were still standing, but re-shingling the
damp and faded bed with fresh leaves.
In the morning we carried our boat over and launched it, making haste
lest the wind should rise. The boatmen ran down Passamagamet, and soon
after Ambejijis Falls, while we walked round with the baggage. We made
a hasty breakfast at the head of Ambejijis Lake on the remainder of
our pork, and were soon rowing across its smooth surface again, under
a pleasant sky, the mountain being now clear of clouds in the
northeast. Taking turns at the oars, we shot rapidly across Deep Cove,
the foot of Pamadumcook, and the North Twin, at the rate of six miles
an hour, the wind not being high enough to disturb us, and reached the
Dam at noon. The boatmen went through one of the log sluices in the
batteau, where the fall was ten feet at the bottom, and took us in
below. Here was the longest rapid in our voyage, and perhaps the
running this was as dangerous and arduous a task as any. Shooting down
sometimes at the rate, as we judged, of fifteen miles an hour, if we
struck a rock we were split from end to end in an instant. Now like a
bait bobbing for some river monster, amid the eddies, now darting to
this side of the stream, now to that, gliding swift and smooth near to
our destruction, or striking broad off with the paddle and drawing the
boat to right or left with all our might, in order to avoid a rock. I
suppose that it was like running the rapids of the Sault Sainte Marie,
at the outlet of Lake Superior, and our boatmen probably displayed no
less dexterity than the Indians there do. We soon ran through this
mile, and floated in Quakish Lake.
After such a voyage, the troubled and angry waters, which once had
seemed terrible and not to be trifled with, appeared tamed and
subdued; they had been bearded and worried in their channels, pricked
and whipped into submission with the spike-pole and paddle, gone
through and through with impunity, and all their spirit and their
danger taken out of them, and the most swollen and impetuous rivers
seemed but playthings henceforth. I began, at length, to understand
the boatman’s familiarity with, and contempt for, the rapids. “Those
Fowler boys,” said Mrs. McCauslin, “are perfect ducks for the water.”
They had run down to Lincoln, according to her, thirty or forty miles,
in a batteau, in the night, for a doctor, when it was so dark that
they could not see a rod before them, and the river was swollen so as
to be almost a continuous rapid, so that the doctor _cried_, when they
brought him up by daylight, “Why, Tom, how did you see to steer?” “We
didn’t steer much,--only kept her straight.” And yet they met with no
accident. It is true, the more difficult rapids are higher up than
this.
When we reached the Millinocket opposite to Tom’s house, and were
waiting for his folks to set us over,--for we had left our batteau
above the Grand Falls,--we discovered two canoes, with two men in
each, turning up this stream from Shad Pond, one keeping the opposite
side of a small island before us, while the other approached the side
where we were standing, examining the banks carefully for muskrats as
they came along. The last proved to be Louis Neptune and his
companion, now, at last, on their way up to Chesuncook after moose,
but they were so disguised that we hardly knew them. At a little
distance they might have been taken for Quakers, with their
broad-brimmed hats and overcoats with broad capes, the spoils of
Bangor, seeking a settlement in this Sylvania,--or, nearer at hand,
for fashionable gentlemen the morning after a spree. Met face to face,
these Indians in their native woods looked like the sinister and
slouching fellows whom you meet picking up strings and paper in the
streets of a city. There is, in fact, a remarkable and unexpected
resemblance between the degraded savage and the lowest classes in a
great city. The one is no more a child of nature than the other. In
the progress of degradation the distinction of races is soon lost.
Neptune at first was only anxious to know what we “kill,” seeing some
partridges in the hands of one of the party, but we had assumed too
much anger to permit of a reply. We thought Indians had some honor
before. But--“Me been sick. Oh, me unwell now. You make bargain, then
me go.” They had in fact been delayed so long by a drunken frolic at
the Five Islands, and they had not yet recovered from its effects.
They had some young musquash in their canoes, which they dug out of
the banks with a hoe, for food, not for their skins, for musquash are
their principal food on these expeditions. So they went on up the
Millinocket, and we kept down the bank of the Penobscot, after
recruiting ourselves with a draught of Tom’s beer, leaving Tom at his
home.
Thus a man shall lead his life away here on the edge of the
wilderness, on Indian Millinocket Stream, in a new world, far in the
dark of a continent, and have a flute to play at evening here, while
his strains echo to the stars, amid the howling of wolves; shall live,
as it were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive man. Yet he
shall spend a sunny day, and in this century be my contemporary;
perchance shall read some scattered leaves of literature, and
sometimes talk with me. Why read history, then, if the ages and the
generations are now? He lives three thousand years deep into time, an
age not yet described by poets. Can you well go further back in
history than this? Ay! ay!--for there turns up but now into the mouth
of Millinocket Stream a still more ancient and primitive man, whose
history is not brought down even to the former. In a bark vessel sewn
with the roots of the spruce, with horn-beam paddles, he dips his way
along. He is but dim and misty to me, obscured by the æons that lie
between the bark canoe and the batteau. He builds no house of logs,
but a wigwam of skins. He eats no hot bread and sweet cake, but
musquash and moose meat and the fat of bears. He glides up the
Millinocket and is lost to my sight, as a more distant and misty cloud
is seen flitting by behind a nearer, and is lost in space. So he goes
about his destiny, the red face of man.
After having passed the night, and buttered our boots for the last
time, at Uncle George’s, whose dogs almost devoured him for joy at his
return, we kept on down the river the next day, about eight miles on
foot, and then took a batteau, with a man to pole it, to Mattawamkeag,
ten more. At the middle of that very night, to make a swift conclusion
to a long story, we dropped our buggy over the half-finished bridge at
Oldtown, where we heard the confused din and clink of a hundred saws,
which never rest, and at six o’clock the next morning one of the party
was steaming his way to Massachusetts.
* * * * *
[Illustration: _Maine Wilderness_]
What is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the continuousness of
the forest, with fewer open intervals or glades than you had imagined.
Except the few burnt lands, the narrow intervals on the rivers, the
bare tops of the high mountains, and the lakes and streams, the forest
is uninterrupted. It is even more grim and wild than you had
anticipated, a damp and intricate wilderness, in the spring everywhere
wet and miry. The aspect of the country, indeed, is universally stern
and savage, excepting the distant views of the forest from hills, and
the lake prospects, which are mild and civilizing in a degree. The
lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so
high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine
fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like
amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water,--so
anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on
their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever
be. These are not the artificial forests of an English king,--a royal
preserve merely. Here prevail no forest laws but those of nature. The
aborigines have never been dispossessed, nor nature disforested.
It is a country full of evergreen trees, of mossy silver birches and
watery maples, the ground dotted with insipid small, red berries, and
strewn with damp and moss-grown rocks,--a country diversified with
innumerable lakes and rapid streams, peopled with trout and various
species of _leucisci_, with salmon, shad, and pickerel, and other
fishes; the forest resounding at rare intervals with the note of the
chickadee, the blue jay, and the woodpecker, the scream of the fish
hawk and the eagle, the laugh of the loon, and the whistle of ducks
along the solitary streams; at night, with the hooting of owls and
howling of wolves; in summer, swarming with myriads of black flies and
mosquitoes, more formidable than wolves to the white man. Such is the
home of the moose, the bear, the caribou, the wolf, the beaver, and
the Indian. Who shall describe the inexpressible tenderness and
immortal life of the grim forest, where Nature, though it be
midwinter, is ever in her spring, where the moss-grown and decaying
trees are not old, but seem to enjoy a perpetual youth; and blissful,
innocent Nature, like a serene infant, is too happy to make a noise,
except by a few tinkling, lisping birds and trickling rills?
What a place to live, what a place to die and be buried in! There
certainly men would live forever, and laugh at death and the grave.
There they could have no such thoughts as are associated with the
village graveyard,--that make a grave out of one of those moist
evergreen hummocks!
Die and be buried who will,
I mean to live here still;
My nature grows ever more young
The primitive pines among.