on the side of the mountain opposite from where we started."
"So that you conclude--?"
"We are lost."
This was, of course, mere guesswork; but we had no compass, and might
be travelling in the wrong direction, after all. A moment's reflection,
however, reassured me. "Is that your opinion, too, George?" I asked.
George had taken off his boot, and was chafing his swollen ankle. He
looked up.
"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]
"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.
PAGE
I. _LEGENDS OF THE CRYSTAL HILLS_ 113
II. _JACKSON AND THE ELLIS VALLEY_ 122
III. _THE CARTER NOTCH_ 132
IV. _THE PINKHAM NOTCH_ 144
V. _A SCRAMBLE IN TUCKERMAN'S_ 155
VI. _IN AND ABOUT GORHAM_ 165
VII. _ASCENT BY THE CARRIAGE-ROAD_ 178
VIII._MOUNT WASHINGTON_ 189
[Illustration: WHITE MOUNTAINS
(CENTRAL AND NORTHERN SECTION.)
FROM
WALLING'S MAP OF
NEW HAMPSHIRE,
With corrections by
Members of the
APPALACHIAN CLUB.
1881.
]
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]
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] 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] 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] above Saco."