The Heart of the White Mountains, Their Legend and Scenery

VI.
IN AND ABOUT GORHAM

 
That lonely dwelling stood among the hills
By a gray mountain stream. – Southey.
 

AFTER the events described in the last chapter, I continued, like the navigator of unknown coasts, my tour of the great range. Half a mile below the Glen House, the Great Gulf discharges from its black throat the little river rising on the plateau at its head. The head of this stupendous abyss is a mountain, and mountains wall it in. Its depths remain unexplored except by an occasional angler or trapper.

Two and a half miles farther on a road diverges to the left, crosses the Peabody by a bridge, and stretches on over a depression of the range to Randolph, where it intersects the great route from Lancaster and Jefferson to Gorham. Over the river, snugly ensconced at the foot of Mount Madison, is the old Copp place. Commanding, as it does, a noble prospect up and down the valley, and of all the great peaks except Washington, its situation is most inviting; more than this, the picture of the weather-stained farm-house nestling among these sleeping giants revives in fullest vigor our preconceived idea of life in the mountains, already shaken by the balls, routs, and grand toilets of the hotels. The house, as we see by Mistress Dolly Copp’s register, has been known to many generations of tourists. The Copps have lived here about half a century.

Travellers going up or down, between the Glen House and Gorham, usually make a détour as far as Copp’s, in order to view the Imp to better advantage than can be done from the road. Among these travellers some have now and then knocked at the door and demanded to see the Imp. The hired girl invariably requests them to wait until she can call the mistress.

Directly opposite the farm-house the inclined ridge of Imp Mountain is broken down perpendicularly some two hundred feet, leaving a jagged cliff, resembling an immense step, facing up the valley. This is a mountain of the Carter chain, sloping gradually toward the Glen House. Upon this cliff, or this step, is the distorted human profile which gives the mountain its name. A strong, clear light behind it is necessary to bring out all the features, the mouth especially, in bold relief against the sky, when the expression is certainly almost diabolical. One imagines that some goblin, imprisoned for ages within the mountain, and suddenly liberated by an earthquake, exhibits its hideous countenance, still wearing the same look it wore at the moment it was entombed in its mask of granite. The forenoon is the best time, and the road, a few rods back from the house, the best point from which to see it. The coal-black face is then in shadow.

The Copp farm-house has a tale of its own, illustrating in a remarkable manner the amount of physical hardship that long training, and familiarity with rough out-of-door life, will occasionally enable men to endure. Seeing two men in the door-yard, I sat down on the chopping-block, and entered into conversation with them.

By the time I had taken out my note-book I had all the members of the household and all the inmates of the barn-yard around me. I might add that all were talking at once. The matron stood in the door-way, which her ample figure quite filled, trifling with the beads of a gold necklace. A younger face stared out over her shoulder; while an old man, whose countenance had hardened into a vacant smile, and one of forty or thereabouts, alternately passed my glass one to the other, with an astonishment similar to that displayed by Friday when he first looked through Crusoe’s telescope.

“Which of you is named Nathaniel Copp?” I asked, after they had satisfied their curiosity.

“That is my name,” the younger very deliberately responded. “Really,” thought I, “there is little enough of the conventional hero in that face;” therefore I again asked, “Are you the same Nathaniel Copp who was lost while hunting in the mountains, let me see, about twenty-five years ago?”

“Yes; but I wasn’t lost after I got down to Wild River,” he hastily rejoined, like a man who has a reputation to defend.

“Tell me about it, will you?”

I take from my note-book the following relation of the exploit of this mountain Nimrod, as I received it on the spot. But I had literally to draw it out of him, a syllable at a time.

On the last day of January, 1855, Nathaniel Copp, son of Hayes D. Copp, of Pinkham’s Grant, near the Glen House, set out from home on a deer hunt, and was out four successive days. On the fifth day he again left to look for a deer killed the previous day, about eight miles from home. Having found it, he dragged the carcass (weighing two hundred and thirty pounds) home through the snow, and at one o’clock P.M. started for another he had tracked near the place where the former was killed, which he followed until he lost the track, at dark. He then found that he had lost his own way, and should, in all probability, be obliged to spend the night in the woods, with the temperature ranging from 32° to 35° below zero.

Knowing that to remain quiet was certain death, and having nothing with which to light a fire, the hunter began walking for his life. The moon shone out bright and clear, making the cold seem even more intense. While revolving in his mind his unpleasant predicament he heard a deer bleat. He gave chase, and easily overtook it. The snow was too deep for the animal to escape from a hunter on snow-shoes. Copp leaped upon his back, and despatched him with his hunting-knife. He then dressed him, and, taking out the heart, put it in his pocket, not for a trophy, but, as he told me, to keep starvation at arm’s-length. The excitement of the chase made him forget cold until he perceived himself growing benumbed. Rousing himself, he again pushed on, whither he knew not, but spurred by the instinct of self-preservation. Daylight found him still striding on, with no clew to a way out of the thick woods, which imprisoned him on every side. At length, at ten in the morning, he came out at or near Wild River, in Gilead, forty miles from home, having walked twenty one consecutive hours without rest or food, the greater part of the time through a tangled growth of underbrush.

His friends at home becoming alarmed at his prolonged absence during such freezing weather, three of them, Hayes D. Copp, his father, John Goulding, and Thomas Culhane, started in search of him. They followed his track until it was lost in the darkness, and, by the aid of their dog, found the deer which young Copp had killed and dressed. They again started on the trail, but with the faintest hope of ever finding the lost man alive, and, after being out twenty-six hours in the extreme cold, found the object of their search.

No words can do justice to the heroic self-denial and fortitude with which these men continued an almost hopeless search, when every moment expecting to find the stiffened corpse of their friend. Goulding froze both feet; the others their ears.

When found, young Copp did not seem to realize in the least the great danger through which he had passed, and talked with perfect unconcern of hunts that he had planned for the next week. One of his feet was so badly frozen, from the effect of too tightly lacing his snow-shoe, that the toes had to be amputated.

Until reaching the bridge, within two miles of Gorham, I saw no one, heard nothing except the strokes of an axe, borne on the still air from some logging-camp, twittering birds, or chattering river. Ascending the hill above the bridge, I took my last look back at Mount Washington, over whose head rose-tinted clouds hung in graceful folds. The summit was beautifully distinct. The bases of all the mountains were floating in that delicious blue haze, enrapturing to the artist, exasperating to the climber. Turning to my route, I had before me the village of Gorham, with the long slopes of Mount Hayes meeting in a regular pyramid behind it. Against the dusky wall of the mountain one white spire stood out clean and sharp. At my right, along the river, was a cluster of saw-mills, sheds, and shanties; beyond, an irregular line of forest concealing the town – all except the steeple; beyond that the mountain. As I entered the village, the shrill scream of a locomotive pierced the still air, and, like the horn of Ernani, broke my dream of forgetfulness with its fatal blast. Adieu, dreams of delusion! we are once more manacled with the city.

I loitered along the river road, hoping, as the sky was clear, to see the sun go down on the great summits. Nor was I disappointed. As I walked on, Madison, the superb, gradually drew out of the Peabody Glen, and soon Washington came into line over the ridge of Moriah, whose highest precipices were kindled with a ruddy glow, while a wonderful white light rested, like a halo, on the brow of the monarch. Of a sudden, the crest of Moriah paled, then grew dark; night rose from the black glen, twilight descended from the dusky heavens. For an instant the humps of Clay reddened in the afterglow. Then the light went out, and I saw only the towering forms of the giant mountains dimly traced upon the sky. A star fell. At this signal the great dome sparkled with myriad lights. Night had ascended her mountain throne.

Gorham is situated on the Grand Trunk Railway, between Paris and Berlin, with Milan just beyond – names a trifle ambitious for villages with the bark on, but conferring distinction upon half a hundred otherwise obscure villages scattered from Maine to California.

Gorham is also situated in one of those natural parks, called intervales, in an amphitheatre of hills, through which the Androscoggin flows with a strong, steady tide. The left bank is appropriated by Mount Hayes, the right by the village – a suspension bridge giving access from one to the other. This mountain rises abruptly from the river to a broad summit-plateau, from which a wide and brilliant prospect rewards the climber. The central portion of Gorham is getting to be much too busy for that rest and quietude which is so greatly desired by a large class of travellers to the mountains, but, on the other hand, its position with respect to the highest summits is more advantageous than that of any other town lying on the skirts of the mountains, and accessible by railway. In one hour the tourist can be at the Glen House, in three on the summit of Mount Washington. Being at the very end of the great chain, in the angle where its last elevation abuts on the Androscoggin, the valley conducting around the northerly side of the great eminences, through the settlements of Randolph and Jefferson, furnishes another and a charming avenue of travel into the region watered by the Connecticut. As the great tide of travel flows in from the west and south, Gorham has profited little by the extension of railways furnishing more direct communication with the heart of the mountains.

Mount Hayes is the guardian of the village, erecting its rocky rampart over it, like the precipices of Cape Diamond over Quebec. The hill in front is called Pine Mountain, though it is only a mountain by brevet. The tip of the peak of Madison peers down into the village over this hill. I plainly saw the snow up there from my window. To the left, and over the low slope of Pine Mountain, rise the Carter summits, which here make a remarkably imposing background to the picture, and in conjunction with the great range form the basin of the Peabody. I saw this stream, making its final exit from the mountains, throw itself exhausted with its rapid course into the Androscoggin, half a mile below the hotel. North-west of the village street, drawn up in line across the valley, extend the Pilot peaks.

The Carter group is said to have been named after a hunter. According to Farmer, the Pilot Mountains were so called from a dog. Willard, a hunter, had been lost two or three days on these mountains, on the east side of which his camp was situated. Every day he observed that Pilot, his dog, regularly left him, as he supposed in search of game; but toward nightfall would as regularly return to his master. This at length excited the attention of the hunter, who, when nearly exhausted with fatigue and hunger, decided to commit himself to the guidance of Pilot, and in a short time was conducted by the intelligent animal in safety to his camp.

My first morning at Gorham was a beautiful one, and I prepared to improve it to the utmost by a walk around the northern base of Madison, neither knowing nor caring whither it might lead me. Spring was in her most enchanting mood. A few steps, and I was amid the marvels of a new creation, the tasselled birches, the downy willows, the oaks in gosling-gray. Even the gnarled and withered apple-trees gave promise of blossoming, and the young ferns, pushing aside the dead leaves, came forth with their tiny fists doubled for the battle of life. Why did not Nature so order it that mankind might rest like the trees, or shall we, like them, come forth at last strong, vigorous, beautiful, from that long refreshing slumber?

Leaving the village, at the end of a mile and a half I took the road turning to the left, where Moose River falls into the Androscoggin, at the point where the latter, making a remarkable bend, turns sharply away to the north. Moose River is a true mountain stream, clear and limpid, foaming along a bed of sand and pebbles.

From this spot the whole extent of the Pilot range was unrolled at my right, while at the left, majestic among the lower hills, Madison and Adams were massed in one grand pyramid. The snows glistening on the summits seemed trophies torn from winter.

About a mile from the turning, at Lary’s, I found the best station for viewing the statuesque proportions of Madison. The foreground a swift mountain stream, white as the snows where it takes its rise. Beyond, a strip of meadow land, covered with young birches and poplars, just showing their tender, trembling foliage. Among these are scattered large, dead trees, relics of the primeval forest; the middle ground a young forest, showing in its dainty wicker-work of branchlets that beady appearance which belongs to spring alone, and is so exquisitely beautiful. Above this ascends, mile upon mile, the enormous bulk of the mountain, ashen-gray at the summit, dusky olive-green below. Stark precipices, hedged about with blasted pines, and seamed with snow, capped the great pile. Over this a pale azure, deepening in intensity toward the zenith, unrolled its magnificent drapery.

After the ascent of Mount Hayes, which Mr. King has fittingly described as “the chair set by the Creator at the proper distance and angle to appreciate and enjoy” the kingly prominence of Mount Washington, the two things best worth seeing in the neighborhood are the falls of the Androscoggin at Berlin, and the beautiful view of the loftiest of the White Mountain peaks from what is called here the Lead Mine Bridge. To get to the falls you must ascend the river, and to obtain the view you must descend a few miles. I consecrated a day to this excursion.

With a head already filled with the noise of half a hundred mountain torrents, water-falls, or cascades, I set out after breakfast for Berlin Falls, feeling that the passage of a body of water such as the Androscoggin is at Gorham, through a narrow gorge, must be something different from the common.

A word about Berlin. Its situation is far more picturesque than that of Gorham. There is the same environment of mountains, and, in addition to the falls, a magnificent view of Madison, Adams, Jefferson, and of the Carter range. The precipices of Mount Forist, which overhang railway and village, are noticeable among a thousand. Here Dead River falls into the Androscoggin, and here the Grand Trunk Railway, taking leave of this river, turns to the north-west, crosses over to the Upper Ammonoosuc, twists and twines along: with it among the northern mountains, and at last emerges upon the level meadows of the Connecticut.

Berlin has another aspect. Lumber is its business; lumber its staple of conversation; people go to bed to dream of lumber. In a word, lumber is everywhere. The lumberman admires a tree in his way quite as much as you or I. No eye like his to estimate its height, its girth, its thickness. But as ships to Shylock, so trees to him are naught but boards – so many feet. So that there is something almost ferocious in the lumberman’s or mill-owner’s admiration for the forest; something almost startling in the idea that this out-of-the-way corner is devouring the forests at the rate of twenty car-loads a day. In plain language, this village cuts up a good-sized grove every day, and rejoices over it with a new house or a new barn.

At the risk of being classed with the sentimental and the unpractical, every one who is alive to the consequences of converting our forests into deserts, or worse than deserts, should raise a voice of warning against this wholesale destruction. The consequences may be remote, but they are certain. For the most part, the travelled routes have long since been stripped of their valuable timber trees. Now the mills are fast eating their way into the hitherto inaccessible regions, leaving a track of desolation behind wherever they go, like that of a destroying army. What cannot be carried away is burnt. Fires are seen blazing by the side of every saw-mill, in which all the waste material is carefully consumed. A trifle? Enough is consumed every year in this way to furnish the great city of New York with its fuel. I speak with moderation. Not a village but has its saw-mills; while at Whitefield, Bethlehem, Livermore, Low, and Burbank’s Grant, and many other localities, the havoc is frightful. Forest fires, originating chiefly in the logging-camps, annually desolate leagues of forest land. How long is this to continue?

The mountain labors incessantly to re-create, but what can it do against such fearful odds? and what shall we do when it can no longer furnish pine to build our homes, or wood to warm them? Delve deeper and deeper under the Alleghanies? In about two hundred and fifty years the noble forests, which set the early discoverers wild with enthusiasm, have been steadily driven farther and farther back into the interior, until “the forest primeval” exists not nearer than a hundred miles inland. Then the great northern wilderness began at the sea-coast. It is now in the vicinity of Lake Umbagog. Still the warfare goes on. I do not call occasional bunches of wood forests. All this means less and less moisture; consequently, more and more drought. The tree draws the cloud from heaven, and bestows it on the earth. The summer of 1880 was one of almost unexampled dryness. Large rivers dwindled to pitiful rivulets, brooks were dried up, and the beautiful cascades in many instances wholly disappeared. The State is powerless to interfere. Not so individuals, or combinations of individuals for the preservation of such tracts of woodland as the noble Cathedral woods of North Conway. In the West a man who plants a tree is a public benefactor; is he who saves the life of one in the East less so? America, says Berthold Auerbach, is no longer “the Promised Land for the Old World;” if she does not protect her woods, she will become “waste and dry,” like the Promised Land of the ancients – Palestine itself. Look on this picture of Michelet:

“On the shores of the Caspian, for three or four hundred leagues, one sees nothing, one encounters nothing, but midway an isolated and solitary tree. It is the love and worship of every passing wayfarer. Each one offers it something; and the very Tartar, in default of every other gift, will snatch a hair from his beard or his horse’s mane.”

The season when the great movement of lumber from the northern wilderness to the sea begins is one of great activity. The logs are floated down the Androscoggin from Lake Umbagog with the spring freshets, when those destined to go farther are “driven,” as the lumbermen’s phrase is, over the falls and through the rapids here, to be picked up below. It may well be believed that the passage of the falls by a “drive” is a sight worth witnessing. Sometimes the logs get so tightly jammed in the narrow gorge of the river that it seems impossible to extricate them; but the dam they form causes the river to rise behind it, when the accumulated and pent-up waters force their way through the obstruction, tossing huge logs in the air as if they were straws. A squad of lumbermen – tough, muscular, handy fellows they are – accompanies each drive, just as vaqueros do a Texan herd; and the herd of logs, like the herd of cattle, is branded with the owner’s mark. After making the drive of the falls, the men move down below them, where they find active and, so far as appearance goes, dangerous work in disentangling the snarls of logs caught among the rocks of the rapids. Against a current no ordinary boat could stem for a moment; they dart hither and thither in their light bateaux, as the herdsman does on his active little mustang. If a log grounds in the midst of the rapids, the bateaux dashes toward it. One river-driver jumps upon it, and holds the boat fast, while another grapples it with a powerful lever called a cant-dog. In a moment the log rolls off the rocks with a loud splash, and is hurried away by the rapid tide.

During the drive the lumberman is almost always wet to the skin, day in and day out. When a raft of logs is first started in the spring the men suffer from the exposure; but after a little time the work seems to toughen and harden them, so that they do not in the least mind the amphibious life they are forced to lead. Rain or shine, they get to their work at five in the morning, leaving it only when it is too dark to see longer. Each squad – for the whole force is divided into what may be called skirmishers, advanced-guards, main body, and rear-guard, each having its appointed work to perform – then repairs to its camp, which is generally a tent pitched near the river, where the cook is waiting for their arrival with a hot supper of fried doughnuts and baked beans – the lumberman’s diet of preference. They pass the evening playing euchre, telling stories, or relating the experiences of the day, and are as simple, hearty, happy-go-lucky fellows as can be found in the wide world.

To say that the Berlin Falls begin two miles below the village is no more than the truth, since at this distance the river was sheeted in foam from shore to shore. For these two miles its bed is so thickly sown with rocks that it is like a river stretched on the rack. The whole river, every drop of it, is hemmed in by enormous masses of granite, forming a long, narrow, and rocky gorge, down which it bursts in one mad plunge, tossing and roaring like the Maelstrom. What fury! What force! The solid earth shakes, and the very air trembles. It is a saturnalia. A whirlwind of passion, swift, uncontrollable, and terrible.

The best situation I could find was upon a jutting ledge below the little foot-bridge thrown from rock to rock. Several turns in the long course of the cataract prevent its whole extent being seen all at once; but it starts up hither and thither among the rocks, boiling with rage at being so continually hindered in its free course, until, at last, madness seizes it, and, flying straight at the throat of the gorge, it goes down in one long white wave, overwhelming everything in its way. It reaches the foot of the rocks in fleeces, darts wildly hither and thither, shakes off the grasp of concealed rocks, and, racing on, stretches itself on its wide and shallow bed, uttering a tremulous wail.

From the village at the falls, and from Berlin Mills, are elevations from which the great White Mountains are grandly conspicuous. The view is similar to that much extolled one from Milan, the town next to Berlin. Here the three great mountains, closed in mass, display a triple crown of peaks, Washington being thrown back to the left, and behind Madison, with Adams on his right. Best of all is the blended effect of early morning, or of the afterglow, when a few light clouds sail along the crimson sky, and their shadows play hide-and-seek on the mountain sides.

In the afternoon, while walking down the road to Shelburne, I met an apparently honest farmer, with whom I held some discourse. He was curious about the great city he had known half a century before, when it was in swaddling clothes; I about the mountains above and around us, that had never known change since the world began. An amiable contest ensued, in which each tried to lead the other to talk of the topic most interesting to himself. The husbandman grew eloquent upon his native State and its great man. “But what,” I insisted, “do you think of your greatest mountain there?” pointing to the splendid peak.

“Oh, drat the mountains! I never look at ‘em. Ask the old woman.”

Some enticing views may be had from the Shelburne intervales, embracing Madison on the right, and Washington on the left. It is, therefore, permitted to steal an occasional look back until we reach the Lead Mine Bridge, and stand over the middle of the flashing Androscoggin.

The dimpled river, broad here, and showing tufts of foliage on its satin surface, recedes between wooded banks to the middle distance, where it disappears. Swaying to and fro, without noise, the lithe and slender willows on the margin continually dipped their budding twigs in the stream, as if to show its clear transparency, while letting fall, drop by drop, its crystal globules. They gently nodded their green heads, keeping time to the low music of the river.

Beyond the river, over gently meeting slopes of the valley, two magnificent shapes, Washington and Madison, rose grandly. Those truly regal summits still wore their winter ermine. They were drawn so widely apart as to show the familiar peaks of Mount Clay protruding between them. It is hardly possible to imagine a more beautiful picture of mountain scenery. Noble river, hoary summits, blanched precipices, over whose haggard visages a little color was beginning to steal, eloquently appealed to every perception of the beautiful and the sublime. Much as the view from this point is extolled, it can hardly be over-praised. True, it exhibits the same objects that we see from Berlin and Milan; but the order of arrangement is not only reversed, but so altered as to render any comparison impossible. In this connection it may be remarked that a short removal usually changes the whole character of a mountain landscape. No two are precisely alike.

The annals of Shelburne, which originally included Gorham within its limits, are sufficiently meagre; but they furnish the same story of struggle with hardship – often with danger – common to the early settlements in this region. Shelburne was settled, just before the breaking out of the Revolution, by a handful of adventurous pioneers, who were attacked in 1781 by a prowling band of hostile Indians. This incursion is memorable as one of the last recorded in the long series going back into the first decade of the New England colonies. It was one of the boldest. The histories place the number of Indians at only six. After visiting Bethel, where they captured three white men, and Gilead, where they killed another, they entered Shelburne. Here they killed and scalped Peter Poor, and took a negro prisoner. Such was the terror inspired by this audacious onset, that the inhabitants, making no defence, fled, panic-struck, to Hark Hill, where they passed the night, leaving the savages to plunder the village at their leisure. The next day the refugees continued their flight, stopping only when they reached Fryeburg, fifty-nine miles from the scene of disaster.

Before taking leave of the Androscoggin Valley, which is an opulent picture-gallery, and where at every step one finds himself arrested before some masterpiece of Nature, the traveller is strongly advised to continue his journey to Bethel, the town next below Shelburne. Bethel is one of the loveliest and dreamiest of mountain nooks. Its expanses of rich verdure, its little steeple, emerging from groves of elm-trees, its rustic bridge spanning the tireless river, its air of lethargy and indolence, captivate eye and mind; and to eyes tired with the hardness and glare of near mountains, the distant peaks become points of welcome repose.