The Heart of the White Mountains, Their Legend and Scenery

II.

JACKSON AND THE ELLIS VALLEY

Once more, O mountains of the North, unveil
Your brows, and lay your cloudy mantles by! – WHITTIER.

IT is Petrarch who says, “A journey on foot hath most pleasant commodities; a man may go at his pleasure; none shall stay him, none shall carry him beyond his wish, none shall trouble him; he hath but one labor, the labor of nature, to go.” Every true pedestrian ought to render full faith to the poet’s assertion; and should he chance to have his Laura, he will see her somewhere, or, rather, everywhere, I promise him. But that is his affair.

There are two ways of reaching Jackson from North Conway. One route leaves the travelled highway a short distance beyond the East Branch of the Saco, and ascends Thorn Hill; another diverges from it near Glen Station, in Bartlett. The Thorn Hill way is the longer; but, as the views are unsurpassed, I unhesitatingly chose it in preference to the easier and shorter road.

The walk from the Intervale over Thorn Hill gives ravishing backward glimpses, opening to a full and broad panorama of the Saco meadows and of the surrounding mountains. Needless to call them by name. One might forget names, but the image never. Then, advancing to the summit, full upon the charmed eye comes that glorious vision of the great mountains, elevated to an immense height, and seeming, in their benevolence, to say, “Approach, mortals!” Underneath is the village.

We have left the grand vestibule of the Saco to enter an amphitheatre. Washington, in his snowy toga, occupies the place of high honor. Adams flaunts his dainty spire over the Pinkham Notch, at the monarch’s left hand. Then comes an embattled wall, pierced through its centre by the immense hollow of the Carter Notch.

Jackson is the ideal mountain village. From Thorn Hill it looked a little elysium, with its handful of white houses huddled around its one little church spire, like a congregation sitting at the feet of their pastor. You perceive neither entrance nor exit, so completely is the deep vale shut in by mountains. The streams, that make two veins of silver in the green floor, seem vainly seeking a way out. One would think Nature had locked the door and thrown away the key. The first stream is the Wildcat, coming from the Carter Notch; the second, the Ellis, from the Pinkham Notch. They unite just below the village, and, like a forlorn-hope, together cut their way out of the mountains.

Getting down into the village, the high mountains now sink out of sight, and I saw only the nearer and less elevated ones immediately surrounding – on the north, Eagle and Wildcat; on the east, Tin and Thorn; on the west, Iron Mountain. The latter has fine, bold cliffs. Over its smooth slope I again saw the two great steps of the Giant’s Stairs, mounting the long ridge which conducts to the great plateau of Mount Washington.

The village has a bright, pleasant look, but is not otherwise remarkable in itself. Three hotels, the church, and a score or so of houses, constitute the central portion. But if the village is small, the township is large; and what is the visitor’s astonishment, on opening his eyes some fine morning, to see farms and farm-houses scattered along the very summit of Thorn Mountain, whence they appear to regard the little world below with a lofty disdain. How came they there? is the question one feels inclined to ask; for in this enchanted air he loses the desire, almost the faculty, of thinking for himself. The inhabitants of this little colony seem to prize their seclusion, and only descend to earth at the call of necessity. Their neighbors are the eagles. Surely this is Ultima Thule. Alas! no; the tax-gatherer mounts even here.

The people of Jackson are above all anxious for the development of the mineral resources of the place. They have iron and tin, and claim also the existence of copper and even of gold ores. Yet it is probable that the vein most profitable for them, the one most likely to yield satisfactory returns, is that on which the summer hotels have been located and opened. So far, the mountains refuse to give up the wealth they hoard.

The Wildcat cuts the village in two. It is a perfect highwayman of a stream. The very air is tremulous with its rush and roar. I halted awhile on the little bridge that spans it, from which, looking down the long pathway it makes, I enjoyed a fine retrospect of the Moats, and, looking up, saw the torrent come bounding toward me. Here it makes a swift descent over granite ledges, clean and fresh from constant scrubbing, as the face of a country urchin, and as freckled. See how hard every rod of its course is beset by huge hump-backed bowlders! A river in fetters!

Just above the bridge the stream plunges, two white streaks of water, twenty to thirty feet obliquely down. Now it is dark, now light; sometimes tinged a pale emerald, sometimes a rich amber, where it falls down in thin sheets. For half a mile the ledges look as if an earthquake had ripped them up to make a channel for this tempest of water. It is from these ledges, looking down the course of the stream, that Moat Mountain is so incomparably fine. It stretches itself luxuriously along the rich meadows, like a Sybarite upon his couch of velvet, lifting its head high enough to embrace the landscape, of which itself is the most attractive feature. And the tall pines rise above the framework of forest, as if to look at the beautiful mountain, clothed with the light of the morning, and reclining with such infinite grace.

Sprays of trembling foliage droop or stretch themselves out over the stream in search of the fine dew it sends up. They seem endeavoring to hide the broad scar made through the forest. The clear sun illuminates their green leaves, and makes the cool rocks emit a sensible warmth. It also illuminates the little fountains of water. Ferns and young willows shoot from crevices, delicate mosses attach themselves to the grim bowlders. I found the perfect print of a human foot sunk in the hardest rock; also cavities as cleverly rounded as if pebbles had been taken from the granite. On the banks, under the thick shade of the pines, I gathered a handful of the showy pappoose flower, the green leaves of which are edible. Little mauve butterflies fluttered at our knees like violets blown about by the wind.

The crest of the fall is split, and broken up in huge fragments. The main stream gains an outlet by a deep channel it has cut in the rock; then turns a mill; then shoots down the face of the ledge. Above the high ledge the bed of the river widens to about two hundred feet. Higher up, where it is broken in long regular steps over which fifty cascades tumble, I thought it most beautiful.

Besides Jackson Falls, so called, there is a fine cataract on the Ellis, known as Goodrich Falls. This is a mile and a half out of the village, where the Conway road passes the Ellis by a bridge; and, being directly upon the high-road, is one of the best known. The river here suddenly pours its whole volume over a precipice eighty feet high, making the earth tremble with the shock. I made my way down the steep bank to the bed of the river below the fall, from which I saw, first, the curling wave, large, regular, and glassy, of the dam, then three wild and foaming pitches of broken water, with detached cascades gushing out from the rocks at the right – all falling heavily into the eddying pool below. Where the water was not white, or filliped into fine spray, it was the color of pale sherry, and opaque, gradually changing to amber gold as the light penetrated it and the descending sheet of the fall grew thinner. The full tide of the river showed the fall to the best possible advantage. But spring is the season of cascades – the only season when one is sure of seeing them at all.

One gets strongly attached to such a stream as the Ellis. If it has been his only comrade for weeks, as it has been mine, the liking grows stronger every day – the sense of companionship is full and complete: the river is so voluble, so vivacious, so full of noisy chatter. If you are dull, it rouses and lifts you out of yourself; if gay, it is as gay as you. Besides, there is the paradox that, notwithstanding you may be going in different directions, it never leaves you for a single moment. One talks as it runs, one listens as he walks. A secret, an indefinable sympathy springs up. You are no longer alone.

Among other stories that the river told me was the following:

Once, while on their way to Canada through these mountains, a war-party of Indians, fresh from a successful forray on the sea-coast, halted with their prisoners on the banks of a stream whose waters stopped their way. For weeks these miserable captives had toiled through trackless forests, through swollen and angry torrents, sometimes climbing mountains on their hands and knees – they were so steep – and at night stretching their aching limbs on the cold ground, with no other roof than the heavens.[16 - Captivity of Elizabeth Hanson, taken at Dover, New Hampshire, 1724.]

The captives were a mother, with her new-born babe, scarcely fourteen days old, her boy of six, her two daughters of fourteen and sixteen years, and her maid. Two of her little flock were missing. One little prattler was playing at her knee, and another in the orchard, when thirteen red devils burst in the door of their happy home. Two cruel strokes of the axe stretched them lifeless in their blood before her frenzied eyes. One was killed to intimidate, the other was despatched because he was afraid, and cried out to his mother. There was no time for tears – none even for a parting kiss. Think of that, mothers of the nineteenth century! The tragedy finished, the hapless survivors were hurried from the house into the woods. There was no resistance. The blow fell like a stroke of lightning from a clear sky.

This mother, whose eyes never left the embroidered belt of the chief, where the reeking scalps of her murdered babes hung; this mother, who had tasted the agony of death from hour to hour, and whose incomparable courage not only supported her own weak frame, but had so far miraculously preserved the lives of her little ones, now stood shivering on the shores of the swollen torrent with her babe in her arms, and holding her little boy by the hand. In rags, bleeding, and almost famished, her misery should have melted a heart of stone. But she well knew the mercy of her masters. When fainting, they had goaded her on with blows, or, making a gesture as if to snatch her little one from her arms, significantly grasped their tomahawks. Hope was gone; but the mother’s instinct was not yet extinguished in that heroic breast.

But at this moment of sorrow and despair, what was her amazement to hear the Indians accost her daughter Sarah, and command her to sing them a song. What mysterious chord had the wild, flowing river touched in those savage breasts? The girl prepared to obey, and the Indians to listen. In the heart of these vast solitudes, which never before echoed to a human voice, the heroic English maiden chanted to the plaintive refrain of the river the sublime words of the Psalmist:

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

“We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

“For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth.”

As she sung, the poor girl’s voice trembled and her eyes filled, but she never once looked toward her mother.

When the last notes of the singer’s voice died away, the bloodiest devil, he who murdered the children, took the babe gently from the mother, without a word; another lifted her burden to his own shoulder; another, the little boy; when the whole company entered the river.

Gentlemen, metaphysicians, explain that scene, if you please: it is no romance.

As this tale plunged me in a train of sombre reflection, the river recounted one of those marvellous legends which contain more poetry than superstition, and which here seem so appropriate.

According to the legend, a family living at the foot of a lofty peak had a daughter more beautiful than any maiden of the tribe, possessing a mind elevated far above the common order, and as accomplished as beautiful. When she reached a proper age, her parents looked around them for a suitable match, but in vain. None of the young men of the tribe were worthy of so peerless a creature. Suddenly this lovely wildflower of the mountains disappeared. Diligent was the search, and loud the lamentations when no trace of her light moccasin could be found in forest or glade. The tribe mourned her as lost. But one day some hunters, who had penetrated into the fastnesses of the mountain, discovered the lost maiden disporting herself in the limpid waters of a stream with a beautiful youth, whose hair, like her own, flowed down below his waist. On the approach of the intruders, the youthful bathers vanished from sight. The relatives of the maiden recognized her companion as one of the kind spirits of the mountain, and henceforth looked upon him as their son. They called upon him for moose, bear, or whatever creature they desired, and had only to go to the water-side and signify their desire, when, behold! the animal came swimming toward them. This legend strongly reminded me of one of those marvellous fables of the Hartz, in which a princess of exceeding beauty, destroyed by the arts of a wicked fairy, was often seen bathing in the river Ilse. If she met a traveller, she conducted him into the interior of the mountain and loaded him with riches. Each legend dimly conveys its idea of the wealth believed to reside in the mountain itself.

The Ellis continues to guide us farther and farther into the mountains. If we turn in the direction of the Glen House, a mile out of the village the Giant’s Stairs come finely into view, and are held for some distance. Then bewitching vistas of Mount Washington, with snow decorating his huge sides, rise and sink, appear and disappear, until we reach an open vale, where the stream is spanned by a rude bridge. The route offers nothing more striking in its way than the view of the Pinkham Notch, which lies open at this point.

One of my walks extending as far as the last house on this road, permitted me to gratify a strong desire to see something of the in-door life of the poorer class of farmers. That desire was fully satisfied. There was nothing remarkable about the house itself; but the room in which I rested would have furnished Meyer von Bremen a capital subject for one of his characteristic interiors – it carried me back a century at least. In one corner a woman upward of seventy, I should say, sat at a spinning-wheel. She rose, got my bread-and-milk, and then resumed her spinning. A young mother, with a babe in her lap and two tow-headed urchins at her knee, occupied a high-backed rocking-chair. To judge from appearances, the river which flowed by the door was completely forgotten. Her efforts to hush the babe being interrupted by the peevish whining of one of the brats, she dealt him a sound box on the ear, upon which the whole pack howled in unison, while the mother, very red with the effect of her own anger, dragged the culprit from the room. There was still another occupant, a young girl, so silently plying her needle that I did not at first notice her. The floor was bare. A rickety chair or two and a cradle finished the meagre inventory of the apartment. The general appearance of things was untidy and unthrifty, rather than squalid; but I could not help recalling Sir William Davenant’s remark, “that those tenants never get much furniture who begin with a cradle.”

In such rambles, romantic and picturesque, in such dreams, the time runs away. The weeks are long days, the days moments. Every one asks himself why he finds Jackson so enticing, but no one is able to answer the question. Cui bono? When I am happy, shall I make myself miserable searching for the reason? Not if I know it.

Like bees to the sweetest flowers, the artists alight on the choicest bits of scenery by instinct. One runs across their umbrellas almost everywhere, spread like gigantic mushrooms; but some of them seem only to live and have their true artistic being here. In general, they are gentle, unobtrusive, and rather subdued in the presence of their beloved mountains. Some among them, however, develop actual rapacity in the search for new subjects, as, with a pencil between their teeth, they creep in ambush to surprise and carry off some mountain beauty which you or I are to ransom. Does a traveller contemplate some arduous exploration in an unvisited region? the artist knocks him over by quietly remarking, “I camped there several days last year.”

In France they maintain that high mountains cannot be painted. Consequently, the modern French landscape is almost always a dead level; an illimitable plain, through which a placid stream quietly meanders, with a thick wood of aged trees at the left, a snug hamlet in the middle distance, some shrubbery on the right, and a clumsy ox-cart with peasants, in the foreground. All these details are sufficiently commonplace; but they appeal strongly to our human yearning for a life of perfect peace – a sanctuary the world cannot enter. Turner knew that he must paint a mountain with its head in the clouds, and its feet plunged in unfathomable abysses. Imagination would do the rest, and imagination governs the universe.

Photography cannot reproduce the true relation of distant mountains to the landscape. The highest summits look like hills. For want of color, too, it is always twilight. Even running water has a frozen look, and rocks emit a dead, sepulchral glare. But for details – every leaf of the tree, or shadow of the leaf – it is faultless; it is the thing itself. True, under the magnifying-glass the foliage looks crisped, as is noticed after a first frost. In short, the photograph of mountain scenery is like that of a friend taken in his coffin. We say with a shiver that is he, but, alas, how changed! A body without a soul. Again, photography cannot suggest movement. Perfect immobility is a condition indispensable to a successful picture. A successful picture! A petrified landscape!

“In the morning to the mountain,” says the proverb, as emblematic of high hopes. For two stations embodying the best features the vicinity of Jackson can offer, the crest of Thorn Mountain and the ledges above Fernald’s Farm are strongly commended to every sojourner. Both are easily reached. On the first, you are a child lifted above the crowd on the shoulders of a giant; the mountains have come to you. On the second, you have taken the best possible position to study the form and structure of Mount Washington. You see all the ravines, and can count all the gigantic feelers the immense mountain throws down into the gorge of the Ellis. In this way, step by step, we continue to master the topography of the region visited as we take our chocolate, one sip at a time.

I prepared to continue my journey to the Glen House by the valley of the Wildcat and the Carter Notch, which is a sort of side entrance to the Peabody Valley. Two passes thus lie on alternate sides of the same mountain chain. Before doing so, however, two words are necessary.

III.

THE CARTER NOTCH

Stranger, if thou hast learned a truth which needs
No school of long experience, that the world
Is full of guilt and misery, and hast seen
Enough of all its sorrows, crimes, and cares,
To tire thee of it, enter this wild wood
And view the haunts of nature. – Bryant.

WHAT traveller can pass beyond the crest of Thorn Hill without paying his tribute of silent admiration to the splendid pageant of mountains visible from this charmed spot! Before him the great rampart, bristling with its countless towers, is breached as cleanly as if a cannon-ball had just crashed through it. It is an immense hole; it is the cavity from which, apparently, one of those great iron teeth has just been extracted. Only it does not disfigure the landscape. Far from it. It really exalts the surrounding peaks. They are enormously aggrandized by it. You look around for a mountain of proper size and shape to fill it. That gives the true idea. It is a mountainous hole.

The little river, tumbling step by step down its broken ledges into Jackson, comes direct from the Notch, and its stream is the thread which conducts through the labyrinth of thick woods. I dearly love the companionship of these mountain streams. They are the voices of the wilderness, singing high or low, softly humming a melodious refrain to your thoughts, or, joining innumerable cascades in one grand chorus, they salute the ear with a gush of sound that strips the forest of its loneliness and awe. This same madcap Wildcat runs shouting and hallooing through the woods like a stream possessed.

By half-past seven of a bright and crisp morning I was climbing the steep hill-side over which Jackson Falls pour down. Here was a genuine surprise. On arriving at the top, instead of entering a difficult and confined gorge, I found a charming and tolerably wide vale, dotted with farms, extending far up into the midst of the mountains. You hardly realize that the stream flowing so demurely along the bottom of the valley is the same making its entry into the village with such noise and tumult. Half a mile above the falls the snowy cupola of Washington showed itself over Eagle Mountain for a few moments. Then, farther on, Adams was seen, also white with snow. For five miles the road skirts the western slopes of the valley, which grows continually deeper, narrower, and higher. Spruce Mountain is now on our left, the broad flanks of Black Mountain occupy the right side of the valley. Beyond Black Mountain Carter Dome lifts its ponderous mass, and between them the dip of the Perkins Notch, dividing the two ranges, gives admittance to the Wild River Valley, and to the Androscoggin, in Shelburne. Before me the grand, downward curves of Carter Notch opened wider and wider.

I picked up, en route, the guide of this locality, who lives on the side of the mountain near where the road is left for the woods. Our business was transacted in two words. While he was strapping on his knapsack I had leisure to observe the manner of man he was.

The guide, whose Christian name is Jonathan, is known in all the country round as “Jock” Davis. He was a medium-sized, muscular man, whiskered to his eyes, with a pair of bare arms the color of unglazed earthen-ware, and a step like a panther. As he strode silently on before, with his dog at his heels, I was reminded of the Jibenainosay and his inseparable Little Peter. He was steady as a clock, careful, and a capital forester, but a trifle taciturn. From time to time, as he drew my attention to the things noticeable or interesting by the way, his face grew animated, and his eyes sparkled. By the same token I believed I detected that dormant perception of beauty and grandeur which is inborn, and which travellers are in general too much disposed to deny any existence among the natives of these mountains. It is true, one cannot express his feelings with the vivacity of the other; but if there is such a thing as speech in silence, the honest guide’s looks spoke volumes.

He told me that he was accustomed to get his own living in the woods, like an old bear. He had trapped and gummed all through the region we were in; the slopes of the great range, and the Wild River wilderness, which he declared, with a shake of the head, to be “a horrid hole.” Now and then, without halting, he took a step to the right or left to look into his fox and sable traps, set near the foot-path. When he spoke of “gumming” on Wildcat Mountain, I was near making an awkward mistake; I understood him to say “gunning.” So I very innocently asked what he had bagged. He opened his eyes widely and replied, “Gum.”[17 - No Yankee girl need be told for what purpose spruce gum is procured; but it will doubtless be news to many that the best quality is worth a dollar the pound. Davis told me he had gathered enough in a single season to fetch ninety dollars.]