You have only to travel for a few days into the interior and back
parts even of many of the old States, to come to that very America
which the Northmen, and Cabot, and Gosnold, and Smith, and Raleigh
visited. If Columbus was the first to discover the islands, Americus
Vespucius and Cabot, and the Puritans, and we their descendants, have
discovered only the shores of America. While the Republic has already
acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and
unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the
shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come
from which float our navy. The very timber and boards and shingles of
which our houses are made grew but yesterday in a wilderness where the
Indian still hunts and the moose runs wild. New York has her
wilderness within her own borders; and though the sailors of Europe
are familiar with the soundings of her Hudson, and Fulton long since
invented the steamboat on its waters, an Indian is still necessary to
guide her scientific men to its headwaters in the Adirondack country.
Have we even so much as discovered and settled the shores? Let a man
travel on foot along the coast, from the Passamaquoddy to the Sabine,
or to the Rio Bravo, or to wherever the end is now, if he is swift
enough to overtake it, faithfully following the windings of every
inlet and of every cape, and stepping to the music of the surf,--with
a desolate fishing town once a week, and a city’s port once a month to
cheer him, and putting up at the lighthouses, when there are any,--and
tell me if it looks like a discovered and settled country, and not
rather, for the most part, like a desolate island, and No-Man’s Land.
We have advanced by leaps to the Pacific, and left many a lesser
Oregon and California unexplored behind us. Though the railroad and
the telegraph have been established on the shores of Maine, the Indian
still looks out from her interior mountains over all these to the sea.
There stands the city of Bangor, fifty miles up the Penobscot, at the
head of navigation for vessels of the largest class, the principal
lumber depot on this continent, with a population of twelve thousand,
like a star on the edge of night, still hewing at the forests of which
it is built, already overflowing with the luxuries and refinement of
Europe, and sending its vessels to Spain, to England, and to the West
Indies for its groceries,--and yet only a few axemen have gone “up
river,” into the howling wilderness which feeds it. The bear and deer
are still found within its limits; and the moose, as he swims the
Penobscot, is entangled amid its shipping, and taken by foreign
sailors in its harbor. Twelve miles in the rear, twelve miles of
railroad, are Orono and the Indian Island, the home of the Penobscot
tribe, and then commence the batteau and the canoe, and the military
road; and sixty miles above, the country is virtually unmapped and
unexplored, and there still waves the virgin forest of the New World.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Springer, in his _Forest Life_ (1851), says that they first remove
the leaves and turf from the spot where they intend to build a camp,
for fear of fire; also, that “the spruce-tree is generally selected
for camp-building, it being light, straight, and quite free from sap;”
that “the roof is finally covered with the boughs of the fir, spruce,
and hemlock, so that when the snow falls upon the whole, the warmth of
the camp is preserved in the coldest weather;” and that they make the
log seat before the fire, called the “Deacon’s Seat,” of a spruce or
fir split in halves, with three or four stout limbs left on one side
for legs, which are not likely to get loose.
[2] The Canadians call it _picquer de fond_.
[3] Even the Jesuit missionaries, accustomed to the St. Lawrence and
other rivers of Canada, in their first expeditions to the
Abenaquinois, speak of rivers _ferrées de rochers_, shod with rocks.
See also No. 10 _Relations_, for 1647, p. 185.
[4] “A steady current or pitch of water is preferable to one either
rising or diminishing; as, when rising rapidly, the water at the
middle of the river is considerably higher than at the shores,--so
much so as to be distinctly perceived by the eye of a spectator on the
banks, presenting an appearance like a turnpike road. The lumber,
therefore, is always sure to incline from the centre of the channel
toward either shore.”--Springer.
[5] “The spruce tree,” says Springer in ’51, “is generally selected,
principally for the superior facilities which its numerous limbs
afford the climber. To gain the first limbs of this tree, which are
from twenty to forty feet from the ground, a smaller tree is undercut
and lodged against it, clambering up which the top of the spruce is
reached. In some cases, when a very elevated position is desired, the
spruce tree is lodged against the trunk of some lofty pine, up which
we ascend to a height twice that of the surrounding forest.”
To indicate the direction of pines, one throws down a branch, and a
man on the ground takes the bearing.
[6] The bears had not touched things on our possessions. They
sometimes tear a batteau to pieces for the sake of the tar with which
it is besmeared.
[7] I cut this from a newspaper: “On the 11th (instant?) [May, ’49],
on Rappogenes Falls, Mr. John Delantee, of Orono, Me., was drowned
while running logs. He was a citizen of Orono, and was twenty-six
years of age. His companions found his body, enclosed it in bark, and
buried it in the solemn woods.”
CHESUNCOOK
At five P. M., September 13, 1853, I left Boston, in the steamer, for
Bangor, by the outside course. It was a warm and still night,--warmer,
probably, on the water than on the land,--and the sea was as smooth as
a small lake in summer, merely rippled. The passengers went singing on
the deck, as in a parlor, till ten o’clock. We passed a vessel on her
beam-ends on a rock just outside the islands, and some of us thought
that she was the “rapt ship” which ran
“on her side so low
That she drank water, and her keel ploughed air,”
not considering that there was no wind, and that she was under bare
poles. Now we have left the islands behind and are off Nahant. We
behold those features which the discoverers saw, apparently unchanged.
Now we see the Cape Ann lights, and now pass near a small village-like
fleet of mackerel fishers at anchor, probably off Gloucester. They
salute us with a shout from their low decks; but I understand their
“Good-evening” to mean, “Don’t run against me, sir.” From the wonders
of the deep we go below to yet deeper sleep. And then the absurdity of
being waked up in the night by a man who wants the job of blacking
your boots! It is more inevitable than seasickness, and may have
something to do with it. It is like the ducking you get on crossing
the line the first time. I trusted that these old customs were
abolished. They might with the same propriety insist on blacking your
face. I heard of one man who complained that somebody had stolen his
boots in the night; and when he found them, he wanted to know what
they had done to them,--they had spoiled them,--he never put that
stuff on them; and the bootblack narrowly escaped paying damages.
Anxious to get out of the whale’s belly, I rose early, and joined some
old salts, who were smoking by a dim light on a sheltered part of the
deck. We were just getting into the river. They knew all about it, of
course. I was proud to find that I had stood the voyage so well, and
was not in the least digested. We brushed up and watched the first
signs of dawn through an open port; but the day seemed to hang fire.
We inquired the time; none of my companions had a chronometer. At
length an African prince rushed by, observing, “Twelve o’clock,
gentlemen!” and blew out the light. It was moonrise. So I slunk down
into the monster’s bowels again.
The first land we make is Monhegan Island, before dawn, and next St.
George’s Islands, seeing two or three lights. Whitehead, with its bare
rocks and funereal bell, is interesting. Next I remember that the
Camden Hills attracted my eyes, and afterward the hills about
Frankfort. We reached Bangor about noon.
When I arrived, my companion that was to be had gone up river, and
engaged an Indian, Joe Aitteon, a son of the Governor, to go with us
to Chesuncook Lake. Joe had conducted two white men a-moose-hunting in
the same direction the year before. He arrived by cars at Bangor that
evening, with his canoe and a companion, Sabattis Solomon, who was
going to leave Bangor the following Monday with Joe’s father, by way
of the Penobscot, and join Joe in moose-hunting at Chesuncook when we
had done with him. They took supper at my friend’s house and lodged in
his barn, saying that they should fare worse than that in the woods.
They only made Watch bark a little, when they came to the door in the
night for water, for he does not like Indians.
The next morning Joe and his canoe were put on board the stage for
Moosehead Lake, sixty and odd miles distant, an hour before we started
in an open wagon. We carried hard-bread, pork, smoked beef, tea,
sugar, etc., seemingly enough for a regiment; the sight of which
brought together reminded me by what ignoble means we had maintained
our ground hitherto. We went by the Avenue Road, which is quite
straight and very good, northwestward toward Moosehead Lake, through
more than a dozen flourishing towns, with almost every one its
academy,--not one of which, however, is on my General Atlas,
published, alas! in 1824; so much are they before the age, or I behind
it! The earth must have been considerably lighter to the shoulders of
General Atlas then.
It rained all this day and till the middle of the next forenoon,
concealing the landscape almost entirely; but we had hardly got out of
the streets of Bangor before I began to be exhilarated by the sight of
the wild fir and spruce tops, and those of other primitive evergreens,
peering through the mist in the horizon. It was like the sight and
odor of cake to a schoolboy. He who rides and keeps the beaten track
studies the fences chiefly. Near Bangor, the fence-posts, on account
of the frost’s heaving them in the clayey soil, were not planted in
the ground, but were mortised into a transverse horizontal beam lying
on the surface. Afterwards, the prevailing fences were log ones, with
sometimes a Virginia fence, or else rails slanted over crossed stakes;
and these zigzagged or played leap-frog all the way to the lake,
keeping just ahead of us. After getting out of the Penobscot valley,
the country was unexpectedly level, or consisted of very even and
equal swells, for twenty or thirty miles, never rising above the
general level, but affording, it is said, a very good prospect in
clear weather, with frequent views of Ktaadn,--straight roads and long
hills. The houses were far apart, commonly small and of one story, but
framed. There was very little land under cultivation, yet the forest
did not often border the road. The stumps were frequently as high as
one’s head, showing the depth of the snows. The white hay-caps, drawn
over small stacks of beans or corn in the fields on account of the
rain, were a novel sight to me. We saw large flocks of pigeons, and
several times came within a rod or two of partridges in the road. My
companion said that in one journey out of Bangor he and his son had
shot sixty partridges from his buggy. The mountain-ash was now very
handsome, as also the wayfarer’s-tree or hobble-bush, with its ripe
purple berries mixed with red. The Canada thistle, an introduced
plant, was the prevailing weed all the way to the lake, the roadside
in many places, and fields not long cleared, being densely filled with
it as with a crop, to the exclusion of everything else. There were
also whole fields full of ferns, now rusty and withering, which in
older countries are commonly confined to wet ground. There were very
few flowers, even allowing for the lateness of the season. It chanced
that I saw no asters in bloom along the road for fifty miles, though
they were so abundant then in Massachusetts,--except in one place one
or two of the _Aster acuminatus_,--and no golden-rods till within
twenty miles of Monson, where I saw a three-ribbed one. There were
many late buttercups, however, and the two fire-weeds, erechthites and
epilobium, commonly where there had been a burning, and at last the
pearly everlasting. I noticed occasionally very long troughs which
supplied the road with water, and my companion said that three dollars
annually were granted by the State to one man in each school-district,
who provided and maintained a suitable water-trough by the roadside,
for the use of travelers,--a piece of intelligence as refreshing to me
as the water itself. That legislature did not sit in vain. It was an
Oriental act, which made me wish that I was still farther down
East,--another Maine law, which I hope we may get in Massachusetts.
That State is banishing bar-rooms from its highways, and conducting
the mountain springs thither.
The country was first decidedly mountainous in Garland, Sangerville,
and onwards, twenty-five or thirty miles from Bangor. At Sangerville,
where we stopped at mid-afternoon to warm and dry ourselves, the
landlord told us that he had found a wilderness where we found him. At
a fork in the road between Abbot and Monson, about twenty miles from
Moosehead Lake, I saw a guide-post surmounted by a pair of moose
horns, spreading four or five feet, with the word “Monson” painted on
one blade, and the name of some other town on the other. They are
sometimes used for ornamental hat-trees, together with deer’s horns,
in front entries; but, after the experience which I shall relate, I
trust that I shall have a better excuse for killing a moose than that
I may hang my hat on his horns. We reached Monson, fifty miles from
Bangor, and thirteen from the lake, after dark.
At four o’clock the next morning, in the dark, and still in the rain,
we pursued our journey. Close to the academy in this town they have
erected a sort of gallows for the pupils to practice on. I thought
that they might as well hang at once all who need to go through such
exercises in so new a country, where there is nothing to hinder their
living an outdoor life. Better omit Blair, and take the air. The
country about the south end of the lake is quite mountainous, and the
road began to feel the effects of it. There is one hill which, it is
calculated, it takes twenty-five minutes to ascend. In many places the
road was in that condition called _repaired_, having just been
whittled into the required semicylindrical form with the shovel and
scraper, with all the softest inequalities in the middle, like a hog’s
back with the bristles up, and Jehu was expected to keep astride of
the spine. As you looked off each side of the bare sphere into the
horizon, the ditches were awful to behold,--a vast hollowness, like
that between Saturn and his ring. At a tavern hereabouts the hostler
greeted our horse as an old acquaintance, though he did not remember
the driver. He said that he had taken care of that little mare for a
short time, a year or two before, at the Mount Kineo House, and
thought she was not in as good condition as then. Every man to his
trade. I am not acquainted with a single horse in the world, not even
the one that kicked me.
Already we had thought that we saw Moosehead Lake from a hilltop,
where an extensive fog filled the distant lowlands, but we were
mistaken. It was not till we were within a mile or two of its south
end that we got our first view of it,--a suitably wild-looking sheet
of water, sprinkled with small, low islands, which were covered with
shaggy spruce and other wild wood,--seen over the infant port of
Greenville with mountains on each side and far in the north, and a
steamer’s smoke-pipe rising above a roof. A pair of moose-horns
ornamented a corner of the public house where we left our horse, and a
few rods distant lay the small steamer Moosehead, Captain King. There
was no village, and no summer road any farther in this direction, but
a winter road, that is, one passable only when deep snow covers its
inequalities, from Greenville up the east side of the lake to Lily
Bay, about twelve miles.
I was here first introduced to Joe. He had ridden all the way on the
outside of the stage, the day before, in the rain, giving way to
ladies, and was well wetted. As it still rained, he asked if we were
going to “put it through.” He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four
years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad
face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more
turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description
of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt,
woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the
lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.
When, afterward, he had occasion to take off his shoes and stockings,
I was struck with the smallness of his feet. He had worked a good deal
as a lumberman, and appeared to identify himself with that class. He
was the only one of the party who possessed an india-rubber jacket.
The top strip or edge of his canoe was worn nearly through by friction
on the stage.
At eight o’clock the steamer, with her bell and whistle, scaring the
moose, summoned us on board. She was a well-appointed little boat,
commanded by a gentlemanly captain, with patent life-seats and
metallic life-boat, and dinner on board, if you wish. She is chiefly
used by lumberers for the transportation of themselves, their boats,
and supplies, but also by hunters and tourists. There was another
steamer, named Amphitrite, laid up close by; but, apparently, her name
was not more trite than her hull. There were also two or three large
sailboats in port. These beginnings of commerce on a lake in the
wilderness are very interesting,--these larger white birds that come
to keep company with the gulls. There were but few passengers, and not
one female among them: a St. Francis Indian, with his canoe and
moose-hides; two explorers for lumber; three men who landed at Sandbar
Island, and a gentleman who lives on Deer Island, eleven miles up the
lake, and owns also Sugar Island, between which and the former the
steamer runs; these, I think, were all beside ourselves. In the saloon
was some kind of musical instrument--cherubim or seraphim--to soothe
the angry waves; and there, very properly, was tacked up the map of
the public lands of Maine and Massachusetts, a copy of which I had in
my pocket.
The heavy rain confining us to the saloon awhile, I discoursed with
the proprietor of Sugar Island on the condition of the world in Old
Testament times. But at length, leaving this subject as fresh as we
found it, he told me that he had lived about this lake twenty or
thirty years, and yet had not been to the head of it for twenty-one
years. He faces the other way. The explorers had a fine new birch on
board, larger than ours, in which they had come up the Piscataquis
from Howland, and they had had several messes of trout already. They
were going to the neighborhood of Eagle and Chamberlain lakes, or the
head-waters of the St. John, and offered to keep us company as far as
we went. The lake to-day was rougher than I found the ocean, either
going or returning, and Joe remarked that it would swamp his birch.
Off Lily Bay it is a dozen miles wide, but it is much broken by
islands. The scenery is not merely wild, but varied and interesting;
mountains were seen, farther or nearer, on all sides but the
northwest, their summits now lost in the clouds; but Mount Kineo is
the principal feature of the lake, and more exclusively belongs to it.
After leaving Greenville, at the foot, which is the nucleus of a town
some eight or ten years old, you see but three or four houses for the
whole length of the lake, or about forty miles, three of them the
public houses at which the steamer is advertised to stop, and the
shore is an unbroken wilderness. The prevailing wood seemed to be
spruce, fir, birch, and rock maple. You could easily distinguish the
hard wood from the soft, or “black growth,” as it is called, at a
great distance, the former being smooth, round-topped, and light
green, with a bowery and cultivated look.
Mount Kineo, at which the boat touched, is a peninsula with a narrow
neck, about midway the lake on the east side. The celebrated precipice
is on the east or land side of this, and is so high and perpendicular
that you can jump from the top, many hundred feet, into the water,
which makes up behind the point. A man on board told us that an anchor
had been sunk ninety fathoms at its base before reaching bottom!
Probably it will be discovered ere long that some Indian maiden jumped
off it for love once, for true love never could have found a path more
to its mind. We passed quite close to the rock here, since it is a
very bold shore, and I observed marks of a rise of four or five feet
on it. The St. Francis Indian expected to take in his boy here, but he
was not at the landing. The father’s sharp eyes, however, detected a
canoe with his boy in it far away under the mountain, though no one
else could see it. “Where is the canoe?” asked the captain, “I don’t
see it;” but he held on, nevertheless, and by and by it hove in sight.
We reached the head of the lake about noon. The weather had, in the
meanwhile, cleared up, though the mountains were still capped with
clouds. Seen from this point, Mount Kineo, and two other allied
mountains ranging with it northeasterly, presented a very strong
family likeness, as if all cast in one mould. The steamer here
approached a long pier projecting from the northern wilderness, and
built of some of its logs, and whistled, where not a cabin nor a
mortal was to be seen. The shore was quite low, with flat rocks on it,
overhung with black ash, arbor-vitæ, etc., which at first looked as if
they did not care a whistle for us. There was not a single cabman to
cry “Coach!” or inveigle us to the United States Hotel. At length a
Mr. Hinckley, who has a camp at the other end of the “carry,” appeared
with a truck drawn by an ox and a horse over a rude log-railway
through the woods. The next thing was to get our canoe and effects
over the carry from this lake, one of the heads of the Kennebec, into
the Penobscot River. This railway from the lake to the river occupied
the middle of a clearing two or three rods wide and perfectly straight
through the forest. We walked across while our baggage was drawn
behind. My companion went ahead to be ready for partridges, while I
followed, looking at the plants.
This was an interesting botanical locality for one coming from the
south to commence with; for many plants which are rather rare, and one
or two which are not found at all, in the eastern part of
Massachusetts, grew abundantly between the rails,--as Labrador-tea,
_Kalmia glauca_, Canada blueberry (which was still in fruit, and a
second time in bloom), _Clintonia_ and _Linnæa borealis_, which last a
lumberer called _moxon_, creeping snowberry, painted trillium,
large-flowered bellwort, etc. I fancied that the _Aster Radula_,
_Diplopappus umbellatus_, _Solidago lanceolata_, red trumpet-weed, and
many others which were conspicuously in bloom on the shore of the lake
and on the carry, had a peculiarly wild and primitive look there. The
spruce and fir trees crowded to the track on each side to welcome us,
the arbor-vitæ, with its changing leaves, prompted us to make haste,
and the sight of the canoe birch gave us spirits to do so. Sometimes
an evergreen just fallen lay across the track with its rich burden of
cones, looking, still, fuller of life than our trees in the most
favorable positions. You did not expect to find such _spruce_ trees in
the wild woods, but they evidently attend to their toilets each
morning even there. Through such a front yard did we enter that
wilderness.
There was a very slight rise above the lake,--the country appearing
like, and perhaps being partly a swamp,--and at length a gradual
descent to the Penobscot, which I was surprised to find here a large
stream, from twelve to fifteen rods wide, flowing from west to east,
or at right angles with the lake, and not more than two and a half
miles from it. The distance is nearly twice too great on the Map of
the Public Lands, and on Colton’s Map of Maine, and Russell Stream is
placed too far down. Jackson makes Moosehead Lake to be nine hundred
and sixty feet above high water in Portland harbor. It is higher than
Chesuncook, for the lumberers consider the Penobscot, where we struck
it, twenty-five feet lower than Moosehead, though eight miles above it
is said to be the highest, so that the water can be made to flow
either way, and the river falls a good deal between here and
Chesuncook. The carry-man called this about one hundred and forty
miles above Bangor by the river, or two hundred from the ocean, and
fifty-five miles below Hilton’s, on the Canada road, the first
clearing above, which is four and a half miles from the source of the
Penobscot.