Believe if thou wilt that mountains change their places, but believe not that men change their dispositions.—Oriental Proverb.
ALTHOUGH one may make the journey from the Profile House to Bethlehem with greater ease and rapidity by the railway recently constructed along the side of the Franconia range, preference will unquestionably be given to the old way by all who would not lose some of the most striking views the neighborhood affords. Beginning near the hotel, the railway skirts the shore of Echo Lake, and then plunges into a forest it was the first to invade. By a descent of one hundred feet to the mile, for nine and a half miles, it reaches the Ammonoosuc at Bethlehem station. I have nothing to say against the locomotive, but then I should not like to go through the gallery of the Louvre behind one.
FRANCONIA IRON WORKS AND NOTCH.
FRANCONIA IRON WORKS AND NOTCH.
From Echo Lake the high-road to Franconia, Littleton, and Bethlehem winds down the steep mountain side into the valley of Gale River. To the left, in the middle distance, appear the little church-tower and white buildings constituting the village of Franconia Iron Works. This village is charmingly placed for effectively commanding a survey of the amphitheatre of mountains which isolates it from the neighboring towns and settlements.
As we come down the three-mile descent, from the summit of the pass to the level of the deep valley, and to the northern base of the notch-mountains, an eminence rises to the left. Half-way up, occupying a well-chosen site, there is a hotel, and on the high ridge another commands not only this valley, but also those lying to the west of it. On the opposite side to us rise the green heights of Bethlehem, Mount Agassiz being conspicuous by the observatory on its summit. Those farm-houses dotting the hill-side show how the road crooks and turns to get to the top. Following these heights westward, a deep rift indicates the course of the stream dividing the valley, and of the highway to Littleton. Between these walls the long ellipse of fertile land beckons us to descend.
I am always most partial to those grassy lanes and by-ways going no one knows where, especially if they have well-sweeps and elm-trees in them; but here also is the old red farm-house, with its antiquated sweep, its colony of arching elms, its wild-rose clustering above the porch, its embodiment of those magical words, “Home, sweet home.” It fits the rugged landscape as no other habitation can. It fits it to a T, as we say in New England. More than this, it unites us with another and different generation. What a story of toil, privation, endurance these old walls could tell! How genuine the surprise with which they look down upon the more modern houses of the village! Here, too, is the Virginia fence, on which the king of the barn-yard defiantly perches. There is the field behind it, and the men scattering seed in the fallow earth. Yonder, in the mowing-ground, a laborer is sharpening his scythe, the steel ringing musically under the quick strokes of his “rifle.”
Over there, to the left, is the rustic bridge, and hard by a clump of peeled birches throw their grateful shade over the hot road. Many stop here, for the white-columned trunks are carved with initials, some freshly cut, some mere scars. But why mutilate the tree? What signify those letters, that every idler should gratify his little vanity by giving it a stab? Do you know that the birch does not renew its bark, and that the tree thus stripped of its natural protection is doomed? Cease, then, I pray you, this senseless mutilation; nor call down the just malediction of the future traveller for destroying his shade. Unable to escape its fate, the poor tree, like a victim at the stake, stoically receives your barbarous strokes and gashes. Refrain, then, traveller, for pity’s sake! Have a little mercy! Know that the ancients believed the tree possessed of a soul. Remember the touching story of Adonis, barbarously wounded, surviving in a pine, where he weeps eternally. Consider how often is the figure of “The Tree” used in the Scriptures as emblematic of the life eternal! Who would wish to inhabit a treeless heaven?
The stream—which does not allow us to forget that it is here—is a vociferous mountain brook. Hardly less forward is the roadside fountain gushing into a water-trough its refreshing abundance for the tired and dusty wayfarer. It makes no difference in the world whether he goes on two legs or on four. “Drink and be filled” is the invitation thus generously held out to all alike. With what a sigh of pleasure your steaming beast lifts his reluctant and dripping muzzle from the cool wave, and after satisfying again and again his thirst, luxuriously immersing his nose for the third and fourth time, still pretends to drink! How deliciously light and limpid and sparkling is the water, and how sweet! How it cools the hot blood! You quaff nectar. You sip it as you would champagne. It tastes far better, you think, pouring from this half-decayed, moss-crusted spout than from iron, or bronze, or marble. Come, fellow-traveller, a bumper! Fill high! God bless the man who first invented the roadside fountain! He was a true benefactor of his fellow-man.
Turn once more to the house. A little girl tosses corn, kernel by kernel, to her pet chickens. There go a flight of pigeons: they curvet and wheel, and settle on the ridge-pole, where they begin to flirt, and strut, and coo. The men in the field look up at the top of the mountain, to see if it is not yet noon. And now a woman, with plump bare arms, coming briskly to the open door, puts the dinner-horn to her lips with one hand while placing the other lightly upon her hip. She does not know that act and attitude are alike inviting. How should she?
Let us follow the pretty stream that is our guide. Franconia has the reputation of being the hottest in summer and in winter the coldest of the mountain villages. It is hot. The houses are strung along the road for a mile. People may or may not live in them: you see nobody. One modest church-tower catches the eye for a moment, and then, as we enter the heart of the village, a square barrack of a building, just across the stream, is pointed out as the old furnace, which in times past gave importance to this out-of-the-way corner. But the old furnace is now deserted except by cows from the neighboring pastures, who come and go through its open doors in search of shade. At present the river, which brings its music and its freshness to the very doors of the villagers, is the only busy thing in the place.
During the Rebellion the furnace was kept busy night and day, turning out iron to be cast into cannon. The very hills were melted down for the defence of the imperilled Union. In the adjoining town of Lisbon the discovery of gold-bearing quartz turned the heads of the usually steady-going population. The precious deposits were first found on the Bailey farm, in 1865, and similar specimens were soon detected on the farms adjoining. It is said the old people could scarcely be made to credit these reports until they had seen and handled the precious metal; for the country had been settled nearly a century, and the presence of any but the baser ores was wholly unsuspected and disbelieved.
There is one peculiarity, common to all these mountain villages, to which I must allude. A stranger is not known by any personal peculiarity, but by his horse. If you ask for such or such a person, the chances are ten to one you will immediately be asked in return if he drove a bay horse, or a black colt, or a brown mare with one white ear; so quick are these lazy-looking men, that loll on the door-steps or spread themselves out over the shop-counters, to observe what interests them most. The girls here know the points of a horse better than most men, and are far more reckless drivers than men. To a man who, like myself, has lived in a horse-stealing country, it does look queerly to see the barn-doors standing open at night. But then every country has its own customs.
One seeks in vain for any scraps of history or tradition that might shed even a momentary lustre upon this village out of the past. Yet its situation invites the belief that it is full of both. Disappointed in this, we at least have an inexhaustible theme in the dark and tranquil mountains bending over us.
Mount Lafayette presents toward Franconia two enormous green billows, rolled apart, the deep hollow between being the great ravine dividing the mountain from base to summit. Over this deep incision, which, from the irregularity of one of its ridges, looks widest at the top, presides, with matchless dignity, the bared and craggy peak whose dusky brown gradually mingles with the scant verdure checked hundreds of feet down. With what hauteur it seems to regard this effort of Nature to place a garland on its bronzed and knotted forehead! One can never get over his admiration for the savage grace with which the mountain, which at first sight seems literally thrown together, develops a beauty, a harmony, and an intelligence giving such absolute superiority to works of Nature over those of man.
The side of Mount Cannon turned toward the village now elevates two almost regular triangular masses, one rising behind the other, and both surmounted by the rounded summit, which, except in its mass, has little resemblance to a mountain. It is seen that on two-thirds of these elevations a new forest has replaced the original growth. Twenty-five years ago a destructive fire raged on this mountain, destroying all the vegetation, as well as the thin soil down to the hard rock. Even that was cracked and peeled like old parchment. This burning mountain was a scene of startling magnificence during several nights, when the village was as light as day, the sky overspread an angry glow, and the river ran blood-red. The hump-backed ridges, connecting Cannon with Kinsman, present nearly the same appearance from this as from the other side of the Notch—or as remarked when approaching from Campton.
The superb picture seen from the upper end of the valley, combining, as it does, the two great chains in a single glance of the eye, is extended and improved by going a mile out of the village to the school-house on the Sugar Hill road. It is a peerless landscape. I have gazed at it for hours with that ineffable delight which baffles all power of expression. It will have no partakers. One must go there alone and see the setting sun paint those vast shapes with colors the heavens alone are capable of producing.
Distinguished by the beautiful groves of maple that adorn its crest, Sugar Hill is destined to grow more and more in the popular esteem. No traveller should pass it by. It is so admirably placed as to command in one magnificent sweep of the eye all the highest mountains; it is also lifted into sun and air by an elevation sufficiently high to reach the cooler upper currents. The days are not so breathless or so stifling as they are down in the valley. You look deep into the Franconia Notch, and watch the evening shadows creep up the great east wall. Extending beyond these nearer mountains, the scarcely inferior Twin summits pose themselves like gigantic athletes. Passing to the other side of the valley, we see as far as the pale peaks of Vermont, and those rising above the valley of Israel’s River. But better than all, grander than all, is that kingly coronet of great mountains set on the lustrous green cushion of the valley. Nowhere, I venture to affirm, will the felicity of the title, “Crown of New England,”[32] receive more unanimous acceptance than from this favored spot. Especially when a canopy of clouds overspreading permits the pointed peaks to reflect the illuminated fires of sunset does the crown seem blazing with jewels and precious stones. All the great summits are visible here, and all the ravines, except those in Madison, are as clearly distinguished as if not more than ten instead of twenty miles separated us.
The high crest of Sugar Hill unfolds an unrivalled panorama. This is but faint praise. Yet I find myself instinctively preferring the landscape from Goodenow’s; for those great horizons, uncovered all at once, like a magnificent banquet, are too much for one pair of eyes, however good, or however unwearied with continued sight-seeing. As we cannot look at all the pictures of a gallery at once, we naturally single out the masterpieces. The effort to digest too much natural scenery is a species of intellectual gluttony the overtaxed brain will be quick to revenge, by an attack of indigestion or a loss of appetite.
I was very fond of walking, in the cool of the evening, either in this direction or to the upper end of the village, on the Bethlehem road. There is one point on this road, before it begins in earnest its ascent of the heights, that became a favorite haunt of mine. Emerging from the concealment of thick woods upon a sandy plain, covered here with a thick carpet of verdure, and skirted by a regiment of pines seemingly awaiting only the word of command to advance into the valley, a landscape second to none that I have seen is before you. At the same time he would be an audacious mortal who attempted to transfer it to page or canvas. Nothing disturbs the exquisite harmony of the scene. To the left of you are all the White Mountains, from Adams to Pleasant; in front, the Franconia range, from Kinsman to the Great Haystack. Here is the deep rent of the Notch from which we have but lately descended. Here, too, overtopped and subjugated by the superb spire of Lafayette, the long and curiously-distorted outline of Eagle Cliff pitches headlong down into the half-open aperture of the pass. Nothing but an earthquake could have made such a breach. How that tremendous, earth-swooping ridge seems battered down by the blows of a huge mace! Unspeakably wild and stern, the fractured mountains are to the valley what a raging tempest is to the serenest of skies: one part of the heavens convulsed by the storm, another all peace and calm. Thus from behind his impregnable outworks Lafayette, stern and defiant, keeps eternal watch and ward over the valley cowering at his feet.
From this spot, too, sacred as yet from all intrusion, the profound ravine, descending nearly from the summit of Lafayette, is fully exposed. It is a thing of cracks, crevices, and rents; of upward curves in brilliant light; of black, mysterious hollows, which the eye investigates inch by inch, to where the gorge is swallowed up by the thick forests underneath. The whole side of the principal peak seems torn away. Up there, among the snows, is the source of a flashing stream which comes roaring down through the gorge. Storms swell it into an ungovernable and raging torrent. Thus under the folds of his mantle the lordly peak carries peace or war for the vale.
After the half-stifled feeling experienced among the great mountains, it is indeed a rare pleasure to once more come forth into full breathing-space, and to inspect at leisure from some friendly shade the grandeur magnified by distance, yet divested of excitements that set the brain whirling by the rapidity of their succession. If the wayfarer chances to see, as I did, the whole noble array of high summits presenting a long, snowy line of unsullied brilliance against a background of pale azure, he will account it one of the crowning enjoyments of his journey.
The Bridal Veil Falls, lying on the northern slope of Mount Kinsman, will, when a good path shall enable tourists to visit them, prove one of the most attractive features of Franconia. Truth compels me to say that I did not once hear them spoken of during the fortnight passed in the village, although fishermen were continually bringing in trout from the Copper-mine Brook, on which these falls are situated. The height of the fall is given at seventy-six feet, and its surroundings are said to be of the most romantic and picturesque character. Its marvellous transparency, which permits the ledges to be seen through the gauze-like sheet falling over them, has given to it its name.
From Franconia I took the daily stage to Littleton, which lies on both banks of the Ammonoosuc, and, turning my back upon the high mountains, ran down the rail to Wells River, having the intention of cultivating a more intimate acquaintance with that most noble and interesting entrance formed by the meeting of the Ammonoosuc with the Connecticut.
THE Connecticut is justly named “the beautiful river,” and its valley “the garden of New England.” Issuing from the heart of the northern wilderness, it spreads boundless fertility throughout its stately march to the sea. It is not a rapid river, but flows with an even and majestic tide through its long avenue of mountains. Radiant envoy of the skies, its mission is peace on earth and good-will toward men. As it advances the confluent streams flock to it from their mountain homes. On one side the Green Mountains of Vermont send their hundred tributaries to swell its flood; on the other side the White Hills of New Hampshire pour their impetuous torrents into its broad and placid bosom. Two States thus vie with each other in contributing the wealth it lavishes with absolutely impartial hand along the shores of each.
Unlike the storied Rhine, no crumbling ruins crown the lofty heights of this beautiful river. Its verdant hill-sides everywhere display the evidences of thrift and happiness; its only fortresses are the watchful and everlasting peaks that catch the earliest beams of the New England sun and flash the welcome signal from tower to tower. From time to time the mountains, which seem crowding its banks to see it pass, draw back, as if to give the noble river room. It rewards this benevolence with a garden-spot. Sometimes the mountains press too closely upon it, and the offended stream repays this temerity with a barrenness equal to the beneficence it has just bestowed. Where it is permitted to expand the amphitheatres thus created are the highest types of decorative nature. Graciously touching first one shore and then the other, making the loveliest windings imaginable, the river actually seems on the point of retracing its steps; but, yielding to destiny, it again resumes its slow march, loitering meanwhile in the cool shadows of the mountains, or indolently stretching itself at full length upon the green carpet of the level meadows. Every traveller who has passed here has seen the Happy Valley of Rasselas.[33]
Such is the renowned Ox-Bow of Lower Coös. Tell me, you who have seen it, if the sight has not caused a ripple of pleasurable excitement?
Here the Connecticut receives the waters of the Ammonoosuc, flowing from the very summit of the White Hills, and, in its turn, made to guide the railway to its own birthplace among the snows of Mount Washington. Here the valley, graven in long lines by the ploughshare, heaped with fruitful orchards and groves, extends for many miles up and down its checkered and variegated floor. But it is most beautiful between the villages of Newbury and Haverhill, or at the Great and Little Ox-Bow, where the fat and fecund meadows, extending for two miles from side to side of the valley, resemble an Eden upon earth, and the villages, prettily arranged on terraces above them, half-hid in a thick fringe of foliage, the mantel-ornaments of their own best rooms. Only moderate elevations rise on the Vermont side; but the New Hampshire shore is upheaved into the finely accentuated Benton peaks, behind which, like a citadel within its outworks, is uplifted the gigantic bulk of Moosehillock—the greatest mountain of all this valley, and its natural landmark—keeping strict watch over it as far as the Canadian frontiers.
The traveller approaching by the Connecticut Valley holds this exquisite landscape in view from the Vermont side of the river. The tourist who approaches by the valley of the Merrimac enjoys it from the New Hampshire shore.
The large village of Newbury, usually known as the “Street,” is built along a plateau, rising well above the intervale, and joined to the foothills of the Green Mountains. The Passumpsic Railway coasts the intervale, just touching the northern skirt of the village. The village of Haverhill is similarly situated with respect to the skirt of the White Mountains; but its surface is much more uneven, and it is elevated higher above the valley than its opposite neighbor. The Boston, Concord, and Montreal Railway, having crossed the divide between the waters of the Merrimac and the Connecticut, now follows the high level, after a swift descent from Warren Summit. These plateaus, or terraces, forming broken shelves, first upon one side of the valley, then upon the other, strongly resemble the remains of the ancient bed of a river of tenfold the magnitude of the stream as we see it to-day. They give rise at once to all those interesting conjectures, or theories, which are considered the special field of the geologist, but are also equally attractive to every intelligent observer of Nature and her wondrous works.
Of these two villages, which are really subdivided into half a dozen, and which so beautifully decorate the mountain walls of this valley, it is no treason to the Granite State to say that Newbury enjoys a preference few will be found to dispute. It has the grandest mountain landscape. Moosehillock is lifted high above the Benton range, which occupies the foreground. The whole background is filled with high summits—Lafayette feeling his way up among the clouds, Moosehillock roughly pushing his out of the throng. Meadows of emerald, river of burnished steel, hill-sides in green and buff, and etched with glittering hamlets, gray mountains, bending darkly over, cloud-detaining peaks, vanishing in the far east—surely fairer landscape never brought a glow of pleasure to the cheek, or kindled the eye of a traveller, already sated with a panorama reaching from these mountains to the Sound.
We are now, I imagine, sufficiently instructed in the general characteristics of the famed Ox-Bow to pass from its picturesque and topographical features into the domain of history, and to summon from the past the details of a tragedy in war, which, had it occurred in the days of Homer, would have been embalmed in an epic. Our history begins at a period before any white settlement existed in the region immediately about us. No wonder the red man relinquished it only at the point of the bayonet. It was a country worth fighting for to the bitter end.
“L’histoire à sa vérité; la legende a la sienne.”
IN the month of September, 1759, the army of Sir Jeffrey Amherst was in cantonments at Crown Point. A picked corps of American rangers, commanded by Robert Rogers, was attached to this army. One day an aide-de-camp brought Rogers an order to repair forthwith to head-quarters, and in a few moments the ranger entered the general’s marquee.
“At your orders, general,” said the ranger, making his salute.
“About that accursed hornet’s-nest of St. Francis?” said the general, frowning.
“When I was a lad, your excellency, we used to burn a hornet’s-nest, if it became troublesome,” observed Rogers, significantly.
“And how many do you imagine, major, this one has stung to death in the last six years?” inquired General Amherst, fumbling among his papers.
“I don’t know; a great many, your excellency.”
“Six hundred men, women, and children.”
The two men looked at each other a moment without speaking.
“At this rate,” continued the general, “his Majesty’s New England provinces will soon be depopulated.”
“For God’s sake, general, put a stop to this butchery!” ejaculated the exasperated ranger.
“That’s exactly what I have sent for you to do. Here are your orders. You are commanded, and I expect you to destroy that nest of vipers, root and branch. Remember the atrocities committed by these Indian scoundrels, and take your revenge; but remember, also, that I forbid the killing of women and children. Exterminate the fighting-men, but spare the non-combatants. That is war. Now make an end of St. Francis once and for all.”
ROBERT ROGERS.
ROBERT ROGERS.
Nearly a hundred leagues separated the Abenaqui village from the English; and we should add that once there, in the heart of the enemy’s country, all idea of help from the army must be abandoned, and the rangers, depending wholly upon themselves, be deprived of every resource except to cut their way through all obstacles. But this was exactly the kind of service for which this distinctive body of American soldiers was formed.
Sir Jeffrey Amherst had said to Rogers, “Go and wipe out St. Francis for me,” precisely as he would have said to his orderly, “Go and saddle my horse.”
But this illustrates the high degree of confidence which the army reposed in the chief of the rangers. The general knew that this expedition demanded, at every stage, the highest qualities in a leader. Rogers had already proved himself possessed of these qualities in a hundred perilous encounters.
That night, without noise or display, the two hundred men detailed for the expedition left their encampment, which was habitually in the van of the army. On the evening of the twenty-second day since leaving Crown Point a halt was ordered. The rangers were near their destination. From the top of a tree the doomed village was discovered three miles distant. Not the least sign that the presence of an enemy was suspected could be seen or heard. The village wore its ordinary aspect of profound security. Rogers therefore commanded his men to rest, and prepare themselves for the work in hand.
At eight in the evening, having first disguised himself, Rogers took Lieutenant Turner and Ensign Avery, and with them reconnoitred the Indian town. He found it the scene of high festivity, and for an hour watched unseen the unsuspecting inhabitants celebrating with dancing and barbaric music the nuptials of one of the tribe. All this marvellously favored his plans. Not dreaming of an enemy, the savages abandoned themselves to unrestrained enjoyment and hilarity. The fête was protracted until a late hour under the very eyes of the spies, who, finding themselves unnoticed, crept boldly into the village, where they examined the ground and concerted the plan of attack.
At length all was hushed. The last notes of revelry faded on the still night air. One by one the drowsy merry-makers retired to their lodges, and soon the village was wrapped in profound slumber—the slumber of death. This was the moment so anxiously awaited by Rogers. Time was precious. He quickly made his way back to the spot where the rangers were lying on their arms. One by one the men were aroused and fell into their places. It was two in the morning when he left the village. At three the whole body moved stealthily up to within five hundred yards of the village, where the men halted, threw off their packs, and were formed for the assault in three divisions. The village continued silent as the grave.
St. Francis was a village of about forty or fifty wigwams, thrown together in a disorderly clump. In the midst was a chapel, to which the inhabitants were daily summoned by matin and vesper bell to hear the holy father, whose spiritual charge they were, celebrate the mass. The place was enriched with the spoil torn from the English and the ransom of many miserable captives. We have said that these Indians had slain and taken, in six years, six hundred English: that is equivalent to one hundred every year.
The knowledge of numberless atrocities nerved the arms and steeled the hearts of the avengers. When the sun began to brighten the east the three bands of rangers, waiting eagerly for the signal, rushed upon the village.
A deplorable and sickening scene of carnage ensued. The surprise was complete. The first and only warning the amazed savages had were the volleys that mowed them down by scores and fifties. Eyes heavy with the carousal of the previous night opened to encounter an appalling carnival of butchery and horror. Two of the stoutest of the rangers—Farrington and Bradley—led one of the attacking columns to the door where the wedding had taken place. Finding it barred, they threw themselves so violently against it that the fastenings gave way, precipitating Bradley headlong among the Indians who were asleep on their mats. All these were slain before they could make the least resistance.
On all sides the axe and the rifle were soon reaping their deadly harvest. Those panic-stricken, half-dazed wretches who rushed pell-mell into the streets either ran stupidly upon the uplifted weapons of the rangers or were shot down by squads advantageously posted to receive them. A few who ran this terrible gauntlet plunged into the river flowing before the village, and struck boldly out for the opposite shore; but the avengers had closed every avenue of escape, and the fugitives were picked off from the banks. The same fate overtook those who tumbled into their canoes and pushed out into the stream. The frail barks were riddled with shot, leaving their occupants an easy target for a score of rifles. The incessant flashes, the explosions of musketry, the shouts of the assailants, and the yells of their victims were all mingled in one horrible uproar. For two hours this massacre continued. Combat it cannot be called. Rendered furious by the sight of hundreds of scalps waving mournfully in the night-wind in front of the lodges, the pitiless assailants hunted the doomed savages down like blood-hounds. Every shot was followed by a death-whoop, every stroke by a howl of agony. For two horrible hours the village shook with explosions and echoed with frantic outcries. It was then given up to pillage, and then to the torch, and all those who from fear had hid themselves perished miserably in the flames. At seven o’clock in the morning all was over. Silence once more enveloped the hideous scene of conflagration and slaughter. The village of St. Francis was the funeral pyre of two hundred warriors. Rogers had indeed taken the fullest revenge enjoined by Sir Jeffrey Amherst’s orders.
From this point our true history passes into the legendary.
While the sack of St. Francis was going on a number of the Abenaquis took refuge in the little chapel. Their retreat was discovered. A few of their assailants having collected in the neighborhood precipitated themselves toward it, with loud cries. Others ran up. Two or three blows with the butt of a musket forced open the door, when the building was instantly filled with armed men.
An unforeseen reception awaited them. Lighted candles burnt on the high altar, shedding a mild radiance throughout the interior, and casting a dull glow upon the holy vessels of gold and silver upon the altar. At the altar’s foot, clad in the sacred vestments of his office, stood the missionary, a middle-aged, vigorous-looking man, his arms crossed upon his breast, his face lighted up with the exaltation of a martyr. Face and figure denoted the high resolve to meet fate half-way. Behind him crouched the knot of half-crazed savages, who had fled to the sanctuary for its protection, and who, on seeing their mortal enemies, instinctively took a posture of defence. The priest, at two or three paces in advance of them, seemed to offer his body as their rampart. The scene was worthy the pencil of a Rembrandt.
At this sight the intruders halted, the foremost even falling back a step, but the vessels of gold and silver inflamed their cupidity to the highest pitch; while the hostile attitude of the warriors was a menace men already steeped in bloodshed regarded a moment in still more threatening silence, and then by a common impulse recognized by covering the forlorn group with their rifles.
Believing the critical moment come, the priest threw up his hands in an attitude of supplication, arresting the fatal volley as much by the dignity of the gesture itself, as by the resonant voice which exclaimed, in French, “Madmen, for pity’s sake, for the sake of Him on the Cross, stay your hands! This violence! What is your will? What seek ye in the house of God?”
A gunshot outside, followed by a mournful howl, was his sole response.
The priest shuddered, and his crisped lips murmured an ave. He comprehended that another soul had been sent, unshriven, to its final account.
“Hear him!” said a ranger, in a mocking undertone; “his gabble minds me of a flock of wild geese.”
A burst of derisive laughter followed this coarse sally.
In fact, they had not too much respect for the Church of Rome, these wild woodsmen, but were filled with ineradicable hatred for its missionaries, domesticated among their enemies, in whom they believed they saw the real heads of the tribes, and the legitimate objects, therefore, of their vengeance.
“Yield, Papist! Come, you shall have good quarter; on the word of a ranger you shall,” cried an authoritative voice, the speaker at the same time advancing a step, and dropping his rifle the length of his sinewy arms.
“Never!” answered the ecclesiastic, crossing himself.
A suppressed voice from behind hurriedly murmured in his ear, “Écoutez: rendez-vous, mon père: je vous en supplie!”
“Jamais! mieux vaut la mort que la miséricorde de brigands et meurtriers!” ejaculated the missionary, rejecting the counsel also, with a vehement shake of the head.
“Grand Dieu! tout, donc, est fini,” sighed the voice, despairingly.
The rangers understood the gesture better than the words. An officer, the same who had just spoken, again impatiently demanded, this time in a higher and more threatening key,
“A last time! Do you yield or no? Answer, friar!”
The priest turned quickly, took the consecrated Host from the altar, elevated it above his head, and, in a voice that was long remembered by those who heard it, exclaimed,
“To your knees, monsters! to your knees!”
What the ranger understood of this pantomime and this command was that they conveyed a scornful and a final refusal. Muttering under his breath, “Your blood be upon your own head, then,” he levelled his gun and pulled the trigger. A general discharge from both sides shook the building, filling it with thick and stifling smoke, and instantly extinguishing the lights. The few dim rays penetrating the windows, and which seemed recoiling from the frightful spectacle within, enabled the combatants vaguely to distinguish each other in the obscurity. Not a cry was heard; nothing but quick reports or blows signaled the progress of this lugubrious combat.
This butchery continued ten minutes, at the end of which the rangers, with the exception of one of their number killed outright, issued from the chapel, after having first stripped the altar, despoiled the shrine of its silver image of the Virgin, and flung the Host upon the ground. While this profanation was enacting a voice rose from the heap of dead at the altar’s foot, which made the boldest heart among the rangers stop beating. It said,
“The Great Spirit of the Abenaquis will scatter darkness in the path of the accursed Pale-faces! Hunger walks before and Death strikes their trail! Their wives weep for the warriors that do not return! Manitou is angry when the dead speak. The dead have spoken!”
The torch was then applied to the chapel, and, like the rest of the village, it was fast being reduced to a heap of cinders. But now something singular transpired. As the rangers filed out from the shambles the bell of the little chapel began to toll. In wonder and dread they listened to its slow and measured strokes until, the flames having mounted to the belfry, it fell with a loud clang among the ruins. The rangers hastened onward. This unexpected sound already filled them with gloomy forebodings.
After the stern necessities of their situation rendered a separation the sole hope of successful retreat, the party which carried along with it the silver image was so hard pressed by the Indians, and by a still more relentless enemy, famine, that it reached the banks of the Connecticut reduced to four half-starved, emaciated men. More than once had they been on the point of flinging their burden into some one of the torrents every hour obstructing their way; but as one after another fell exhausted or lifeless, the unlucky image passed from hand to hand, and was thus preserved up to the moment so eagerly and so confidently looked for, during that long and dreadful march, to end all their privations.
But the chastisement of heaven, prefigured in the words of the expiring Abenaqui, had already overtaken them. Half-crazed by their sufferings, they mistook the place of rendezvous appointed by their chief, and, having no tidings of their comrades, believed themselves to be the sole survivors of all that gallant but ill-fated band. In this conviction, to which a mournful destiny conducted, they took the fatal determination to cross the mountains under the guidance of one of their number who had, or professed, a knowledge of the way through the Great Notch of the White Hills.
For four days they dragged themselves onward through thickets, through deep snows and swollen streams, without sustenance of any kind, when three of them, in consequence of their complicated miseries, aggravated by finding no way through the wall of mountains, lost their senses. What leather covered their cartouch-boxes they had already scorched to a cinder and greedily devoured. At length, on the last days of October, as they were crossing a small river dammed by logs, they discovered some human bodies, not only scalped, but horribly mangled, which were supposed to be some of their own band. But this was no time for distinctions. On them they accordingly fell like cannibals, their impatience being too great to await the kindling of a fire to dress their horrid food by. When they had thus abated somewhat the excruciating pangs they before endured, the fragments were carefully collected for a future store.
My pen refuses to record the dreadful extremities to which starvation reduced these miserable wretches. At length, after some days of fruitless wandering up and down, finding the mountains inexorably closing in upon them, even this last dreadful resource failed, and, crawling under some rocks, they perished miserably in the delirium produced by hunger and despair, blaspheming, and hurling horrible imprecations at the silver image, to which, in their insanity, they attributed all their sufferings. One of them, seizing the statue, tottered to the edge of a precipice, and, exerting all his remaining strength, dashed it down into the gulf at his feet.
Tradition affirms that the first settlers who ascended Israel’s River found relics of the lost detachment near the foot of the mountains; but, notwithstanding the most diligent search, the silver image has thus far eluded every effort made for its recovery.
MOOSEHILLOCK, or Moosilauke,[34] is one of four or five summits from which the best idea of the whole area of the White Mountains may be obtained. It is not so remarkable for its form as for its mass. It is an immense mountain.
Lifted in solitary grandeur upon the extreme borders of the army of peaks to which it belongs, and which it seems defending, haughtily over-bearing those lesser summits of the Green Mountains confronting it from the opposite shores of the Connecticut, which here separates the two grand systems, like two hostile armies, the one from the other, Moosehillock resembles a crouching lion, magnificent in repose, but terrible in its awakening.
This immense strength, paralyzed and helpless though it seems, is nevertheless capable of arousing in us a sentiment of respectful fear—respect for the creative power, fear for the suspended life we believe is there. The mountain really seems lying extended under the sky listening for the awful command, “Arise and walk!”
This mountain received a name before Mount Washington, and is in some respects, as I hope to point out, the most interesting of the whole group. In the first place, it commands a hundred miles of the Connecticut Valley, including, of course, all the great peaks of the Green Mountain and Adirondack chains. Again, its position confers decided advantages for studying the configuration of the Franconia group, to which, in a certain sense, it is allied, and of the ranges enclosing the Pemigewasset Valley, which it overlooks. Moosehillock stands in the broad angle formed by the meeting waters of the Connecticut and the Ammonoosuc. In a word, it is an advanced bastion of the whole cluster of castellated summits, constituting the White Mountains in a larger meaning.
Therefore no summit better repays a visit than Moosehillock; yet it is astonishing, considering the ease of access, how few make the ascent. The traveller can hardly do better than begin here his experiences of mountain adventure, should chance conduct him this way; or, if making his exit from the mountain region by the Connecticut Valley, he may, taking it in his way out, make this the appropriate pendant of his tours, romantic and picturesque.
Having been so long known to and frequented by the Indian as well as white hunters, the mountain is naturally the subject of considerable legend,[35] which the historian of Warren has scrupulously gathered together. One of these tales, founded on the disaster of Rogers, recounts the sufferings of two of his men, hopelessly snared in the great Jobildunk ravine. But that tale of horror needs no embellishment from romance. This enormous rent, equally hideous in fact as in name, cut into the vitals of the mountain so deeply that a dark stream gushes from the gaping wound, conceals within its mazes several fine cascades. Owing to long-continued drought, the streams were so puny and so languid when I visited the mountain that I explored only the upper portion of the gorge, which bristles with an untamed forest, levelling its myriad spears at the breast of the climber.
The greater part of the mountain lies in the town of Benton, or, perhaps, it would be nearer the truth to say that fully half the township is appropriated by its prodigious earthwork. But, to reach it without undergoing the fatigues of a long march through the woods, it is necessary to proceed to the village of Warren, which is twenty miles north of Plymouth, and about fourteen south of Haverhill. Behind the village rises Mount Carr. Still farther to the north the summits of Mounts Kineo, Cushman, and Waternomee, continuing this range now separating us from the Pemigewasset Valley, form also the eastern wall of the valley of Baker’s River, which has its principal source in the ravines of Moosehillock. There is a bridle-path opening communication with the mountain from the Benton side, on the north; and so with Lisbon and Franconia. A carriage-road is also contemplated on that side, which will render access still more feasible for a large summer population; while a bridle-path, lately opened between two peaks of the Carr range, facilitates ingress from the Pemigewasset side.
I set out from the village of Warren on one of the hottest afternoons of an intensely hot and dry summer. The five miles between the village and the base of the mountain need not detain the sight-seer. At the crossing of Baker’s River I remarked again the granite-bed honey-combed with those curious pot-holes sunk by whirling stones, first set in motion and then spun around by the stream, which here, breaking up into several wild pitches, pours through a rocky gorge. But how gratefully cool and refreshing was even the sound of rushing water in that still, stifling atmosphere, coming, one would think, from a furnace! Then for two miles more the horse crept along the road, constantly ascending the side of the valley, until the last house was reached. Here we passed a turnpike-gate, rolled over the crisped turf of a stony pasture through a second gate, and were at the foot of Moosehillock.
In a trice we exchanged the sultriness, the dryness, the dust, parching or suffocating us, of a shadeless road, for the cool, moist air of the mountain-forest and the delectable sound of running water. A brook shot past; then another; then the horse, who stopped when he liked, and as often as he liked, like a man forced to undertake a task which he is determined shall cost his task-masters dearly, began a languid progress up the increasing declivity before us. His sighs and groans, as he plodded wearily along, were enough to melt a heart of stone. I therefore dismounted and walked on, leaving the driver to follow as he could. The question was, not how the horse should get us up the mountain, but how we should get the horse up.
They call it four and a half miles from the bottom to the top. The distances indicated by the sign-boards, nailed to trees, did not appear to me exact. They are not exact; and the reason why they are not is sufficiently original to merit a word of explanation. Having long observed the effect of imagination, especially in computing distances, the builder of the road, as he himself informed me, adopted a truly ingenious method of his own. He lengthened or shortened his miles according as the travelling was good or bad. For example: the first mile, being an easy one, was stretched to a mile and a quarter. The last mile is also very good travelling. That, too, he lengthened to a mile and a half. In this way he reduced the intervening two and a half miles of the worst road to one and three-fourth miles. This absolutely harmless piece of deception, he averred, considerably shortened the most difficult part of the journey. No one complained that the good miles were too long, while the bad ones were now passed over with far less grumbling than before they were abbreviated by this simple expedient, which very few, I am convinced, would have thought of. In fact, the sum of the whole distance being scrupulously adhered to, it is the most civil piece of engineering of which I have any knowledge.
The road up is rough, tedious, and, until the ridge at the foot of the south peak is reached, uninteresting. It crooks and turns with absolute lawlessness while climbing the flanks of the southern peak, skirting also the side of the profound ravine eating its way into the mountain from the south. Nearing this summit we obtained through an opening a glimpse of Mount Washington, veiled in the clouds. The trees now visibly dwindled. Just before reaching the ridge, where it joins this peak, a fine spring, deliciously cold, gushed from the mountain side. A few rods more of ascent brought us quite out upon the long, narrow, curving backbone of the mountain, uplifting its sharp edge between two profound gorges, connecting the peaks set at its two extremes, between which Nature has decreed a perpetual divorce. The sun was just setting as we emerged upon this natural way conducting from peak to peak along the airy crest of the mountain.
Although this, it will be remembered, is one of the longest miles, according to the scale of computation in vogue here, the unexpected speed which the horse now put forth, the sight of the squat, little Tip-Top House, clinging to the summit beyond, the upper and nether worlds floating or fading in splendor, while the night-breezes sweeping over cooled our foreheads, and rudely jostled the withered trees, drawn a little apart to the right and left to let us pass, quickly replaced that weariness of mind and body which the mountain exacts of all who pass over it on a sultry midsummer’s day.
At the extremity of the ridge, which is only wide enough for the road, a gradual ascent led to the high summit and to a level plateau of a few acres at its top. This was treeless, but covered with something like soil, smooth, and, being singularly free from the large stones found everywhere else, affords good walking in any direction. The house is built of rough stone, and, though of primitive construction, is comfortable, and even inviting. Furthermore, its materials being collected on the spot, one accepts it as still constituting a part of the mountain, which, indeed, at a little distance it really seems to be. In the evening I went out, to find the mountain blindfolded with clouds. Soon rain began to drive against the window-panes in volleys. At a late hour we heard wheels grinding on the rocks outside, and then a party of tourists drove up to the door, dripping and crestfallen at having undertaken the ascent with a storm staring them in the face. But they had only this one day, they said, and were “bound” to go up the mountain. So up they toiled through pitch darkness, through rain and cloud, passed the night in a building said to be on the summit, and returned down the mountain in the morning, to catch their train, through as dense a fog as ever exasperated a hurried tourist. But they had been to the top! Are there anywhere else in the world people who travel two hundred miles for a single day’s recreation?
It is very curious, this being domesticated on the top of a mountain. We go to bed wondering if the scene will not all vanish in our dreams. It was very odd, too, to see the tourists silently mount their buck-board in the morning, and disappear, within a stone’s throw, in clouds. Detaching themselves to all intents from earth, they began a flight in air. Walking a short distance, perhaps a gunshot, from the house, I groped my way back with difficulty. The case seemed desperate.
But grandest scene of all was the breaking up of the storm. Shortly after noon the high sun began to exert a sensible influence upon the clouds. A perceptible warmth, replacing the chill and clammy mists, began to pervade the mountain-top. Presently a dim sun-ray shot through. Then, as if a noiseless explosion had suddenly rent them, the whole mass of clouds was torn in ten thousand tatters flying through space. All nature seemed seized with sudden frenzy. Here a summit and there a peak was seen, struggling fiercely in the grasp of the storm. Coming up with rushing noise, the west wind charged home the routed storm-clouds with fresh squadrons. What indescribable yet noiseless tumult raged in the heavens! Even the mountains seemed scarcely able to stem the tide of fugitives. A panic seized them. Fear gave them wings. They rushed pell-mell into the ravines and clung to the tree-tops; they dashed themselves blindly against the adamant of Lafayette, only to fall back broken into the deep fosse beneath. Bolts of dazzling sunshine continually tore through them. The gorges themselves seemed heaped with the wounded and the dying. But the rushing wind, trampling the fugitives down, dispersed and cut them mercilessly to pieces. One was irresistibly carried away by this rage of battle. In ten minutes I looked around upon a clear sky. One cloud, impaled on the gleaming spear of Lafayette, hung limp and lifeless; another floated like a scarf from the polished casque of Chocorua; a third, taken prisoner en route, humbly held the train of Washington. All the rest of the phantom host, using its power to render itself invisible, vanished from sight as if the mountains had swallowed it up.
The landscape being now fully uncovered, I enjoyed all its rare perfection. It is a superb and fascinating one, invested with a powerful individuality, surrounded by a charm of its own. You wish to see the two great chains? There they are, the greater rising over the lesser, in the order fixed by Nature. That sunny space in the softened coloring of old tapestry, more to the right, is the Pemigewasset Valley, and the spot from where not long ago we looked up at this mountain looming large in the distance. We raise our eyes to glance up the East Branch upon Mount Hancock and the peaks of Carrigain peeping over. We touch with magic wand the faint cone of Kearsarge, so dim that it seems as if it must rise and float away; then, continuing to call the roll of mountains, Moat, Tripyramid, Chocorua, and all our earlier acquaintances rise or nod among the Sandwich peaks. Some draw their cloud-draperies over their bare shoulders, some sun their naked and hairy breasts in savage luxury. We alight like a bird upon the glassy bosom of Winnepiseogee the incomparable, and, like the bird, again rise, refreshed, for flights still more remote. We sweep over the Uncanoonucs into Massachusetts, steadying the eye upon far Wachusett as we pass from the Merrimac Valley. Now come thronging in upon us the mountains of the Connecticut Valley. We rest awhile upon the transcendently beautiful expanse of the Ox-Bow, and its playthings of villages, strung along the glittering necklace of the river. Across this valley, lifting our eyes, we wander among the loftiest peaks of the Green Mountains—those colossal verd-antiques—exchanging frozen glances across the placid expanse of Champlain with the haughtiest summits of the Adirondacks. We grow tired of this. One last look, this time up the valley, reveals to us the wide and curious gap between two distant mountains, and far beyond Memphremagog, where these mountains rise, we scan all the route travelled by Rogers, the perils of which are fresh in our memory. We pass on unchallenged into the dominions of Victoria.
Is not this a landscape worth coming ten miles out of one’s way to see? And yet the half is not told. I have merely indicated its dimensions. Now let the reader, drawing an imaginary line from peak to peak, go over at leisure all that lies between. I merely prick the chart for him. Moosehillock, not quite five thousand feet high, overlooks all New Hampshire, pushes investigation into Maine and Massachusetts, is familiar with Vermont, distant with New York, and has an eye upon Canada. It is said the ocean has been seen, but I did not see it.
Circumstances compelled me to drive the old horse, who has made more ascensions of the mountain than any living thing, back to Warren. No other was to be had for love or money. Had there been time I would have preferred walking, but there was not. This horse measured sixteen hands. His thin body and long legs resembled a horse upon stilts. He looked dejected, but resigned. I argued that he would be able to get down the mountain somehow; and, once out of the woods, I could count on his eagerness to get home, to some extent, perhaps. I was not deceived in either expectation.
The road, as I have said, is for most of the way a rough, steep, and stony one. In order to check the havoc made by sudden showers, and to hold the thin soil in place, hemlock-boughs were spread over it, artfully concealing those protruding stones which the scanty soil refused to cover. He who intrusted himself to it did not find it a bed of roses. The buck-board was the longest, clumsiest, and most ill-favored it has ever been my lot to see. This vehicle, being peculiar to the mountains, demands, at least, a word. It is a very primitive and ingenious affair, and cheaply constructed. Naturally, therefore, it originated where the farmers were poor and the roads bad. But what is the buck-board? Every one has seen the spring-board of a gymnasium or of a circus. A smooth plank, ten feet long, resting upon trestles placed at either end, assists the acrobat to vault high in the air. Each time he falls the rebound sends him up again. This is the principle of the buck-board. Remove the trestles, put a pair of wheels in the place of each, and you have the vehicle itself, minus shafts or pole, according as one or two horses are to draw it. Increased weight bends the board or the spring more and more until it is in danger of touching the ground. The passengers sit in the hollow of this spring, the natural tendency of which is to shoot them into the air.
THE BUCK-BOARD WAGON.
THE BUCK-BOARD WAGON.
I am justified in speaking thus of the road and the vehicle. But who shall describe the horse? That animal was possessed of a devil, and, like the swine of the miracle, ran violently all the way down the mountain, without stopping for water or breath. Fortunate indeed for me was it that the sea was not at the bottom. In three-quarters of an hour, half of which was spent in the air, I was at the foot of the mountain which had required two tedious hours to ascend. How the quadruped managed to avoid falling headlong fifty times over the concealed stones I have no idea. How I contrived to alight, when a wheel, coming violently against one of these stones, put the spring-board in play—how I contrived to alight, I remark, during this game of battledoor and shuttlecock, never twice in the same place, is to this day an enigma.
The houses of ancient Rome frequently bore the inscription for the benefit of strangers, “Cave canem.” This could be advantageously replaced here, upon the first turnpike-gate, at the mountain’s foot, with the warning, “Beware of the horse!”