All I've to add is—the bones in a grave
Were placed, and the cavern was called 'Skinner's Cave.'"
SOURCES OF THE CONNECTICUT.
The Connecticut River comes from the northeast to its confluence with the Passumpsic, a stream of reduced volume, flowing down rapids. There is only sparse population above, and in New Hampshire, some distance east of Colebrook, is the famous Dixville Notch. This is an attractive ravine about ten miles long, cut through the isolated Dixville Range. It is not a mountain pass in the usual sense, but a wonderful gorge among high hills, the cliffs being worn and broken down into strange forms of ruin and desolation. Theodore Winthrop describes the Dixville Notch as "briefly, picturesque—a fine gorge between a crumbling, conical crag and a scarped precipice—a place easily defensible, except at the season when raspberries would distract sentinels." Approached from Colebrook to the westward, the view is disappointing, as it is entered at a high level, but after an abrupt turn to the right, the tall columnar sides are seen frowning at each other across the narrow chasm; cliffs of decaying mica slate presenting a scene of shattered ruin that is mournful to behold. To the right of the Notch, Table Rock rises five hundred and sixty feet above the road, being elevated nearly twenty-five hundred feet above the sea, and is ascended by a rude stairway of stone blocks called Jacob's Ladder. Its summit is a narrow pinnacle only eight feet wide, with precipitous sides. It gives an extensive view over the Connecticut Valley northward to the Connecticut Lakes, and over the upper Androscoggin Valley to the southeastward. Its most impressive sight, however, is much nearer, the narrow dreary chasm immediately below, with its broken palisades that seem almost ready to fall. Beyond is the Ice Cave, a deep ravine where snow and ice remain throughout the summer. Washington's Monument and the Pinnacle, remarkable rock formations, rise high on the north side of the Notch. Beyond the Notch southeastward is the Androscoggin, which small steamboats ascend to Lake Umbagog on the Maine boundary. Still farther eastward and deep in the Maine forests are the noted fishery waters of the Rangeley Lakes, which have polysyllabic names, such as Mooselucmaguntic, Mollychunkamunk, and Welokenebacook. They are elevated fifteen hundred feet above the sea and cover eighty square miles of surface.
We have now ascended the picturesque Connecticut River to its mountain sources. It has become only a brook, and having followed it up to the Canadian boundary of Vermont, it is found to come out of Northern New Hampshire, flowing westward from the Connecticut Lakes. The main lake of this group is twenty-five miles northeast of Colebrook, covering about twelve square miles, a favorite haunt of anglers, and navigated by a small steamboat. The second lake, four miles farther northeast through the forest, has about five square miles of surface, and the third lake is to the northward, covering two hundred acres. The Canadian northern boundary of New Hampshire is a low mountain range, and on its southern slope is the fourth and highest lake, at twenty-five hundred feet elevation above the sea, a pond of about three acres, in which the great New England river has its head. These Connecticut Lakes are in an almost unbroken forest.
THE WHITE MOUNTAINS.
To the eastward of the Connecticut River, which we have explored from its mouth to the source, lies one of the most attractive regions in America, the White Mountain district. It covers about thirteen hundred square miles, stretching forty-five miles eastward from the Connecticut to the Maine boundary, and being thirty miles wide from the Ammonoosuc and Androscoggin on the north to the base of the Sandwich range on the south. There are some two hundred of these mountains rising from a plateau elevated generally sixteen hundred feet above the sea. They cluster mainly in two groups, separated by a broad table-land ten to twenty miles wide, the western group being the Franconia Mountains and the eastern group the Presidential range, or White Mountains proper. Their great mass is of granite, overlaid by mica slate; their scenery is varied and beautiful; and the country has nowhere a more popular resort than these mountains in the summer. They send out from their glens and notches various rivers, westward to the Connecticut, eastward to the Androscoggin and Saco, and southward to the Merrimack. The Indians called the White Mountains Agiochook, meaning "the Mountains of the Snowy Forehead and Home of the Great Spirit," and held them in the utmost reverence and awe. They rarely ascended the peaks, as it was believed no intruder upon these sacred heights was ever known to return. The legend was that the Great Spirit once bore a blameless chief and his squaw in a mighty whirlwind to the summit, while the world below was overspread by a flood destroying all the people. It was said that the great Passaconaway, the wizard-king at Pennacook, was wont to commune with celestial messengers on the summit of Agiochook, whence he was finally borne to heaven. The first white man who visited these mountains was Darby Field, who came up from Portsmouth on the seacoast in June, 1642, by the valley of the Saco. The Indians tried to dissuade him, saying he would never return alive, but he pressed on, attended by two seashore Indians, passing through cloud-banks and storms, reaching the highest peak, whence he saw, as he related, "the sea by Saco, the Gulf of Canada, and the great lake Canada River came out of;" and he found many crystals that he thought were diamonds, from which the range long bore the name of the "Chrystal Hills." Towards the close of the eighteenth century colonists began moving into the outlying glens; in 1792 Abel Crawford lived on the Giant's Grave, now Fabyan's; in 1803 a small inn was built there; and in 1820 a party of seven ascended and slept on the summit of Mount Washington, giving the principal peaks the names they now have.
From the Connecticut River the chief route of entrance to the White Mountain region is by railway up the Ammonoosuc River alongside its swift-flowing amber waters, and through the villages of North Lisbon and Littleton, then coming to Bethlehem Junction, whence a short narrow-gauge railroad leads steeply up the hill-slope westward to Maplewood and Bethlehem. This is one of the most populous resorts of the district—Bethlehem Street—a well-kept highway, stretching two miles along a plateau upon the northern hill-slope at an elevation of almost three hundred feet above the river. When old President Dwight, in his early wanderings over New England, first saw this place, it was known as the "Lord's Hill," and he recorded it as remote and sterile, having "only log huts, recent, few, poor and planted on a soil singularly rough and rocky," but he saw "a magnificent prospect of the White Mountains and a splendid collection of other mountains in this neighborhood." It is now an aggregation of fine hotels and summer boarding-houses, the whole "Street" having a grand view of the imposing Presidential range, seen nearly twenty miles to the eastward over the Ammonoosuc Valley, while other mountain ranges are to the north and west, so that Bethlehem is in a vast amphitheatre, presenting, when the clouds permit, an environment of unsurpassed magnificence. To the southward, the visitors climb Mount Agassiz, rising twenty-four hundred feet, formerly known as the Peaked Hill, and get an unrivalled view of mountains all around the horizon, the Green Mountains of Vermont being plainly visible beyond the Connecticut River to the westward. The southern flanks of Mount Agassiz are drained by the pretty little Gale River, flowing through a deep glen westward to the Ammonoosuc at North Lisbon. Down in this glen, to the southwest of Bethlehem, is the village of Franconia, with numerous hotels and boarding-houses, while to the southwest of the glen rises Sugar Hill, another popular resort, with its great hotels set high on the hilltop, and having superb views of the Franconia and White Mountains to the eastward, and far away westward over the Connecticut Valley where the horizon is enclosed by the long line of the Green Mountains. It is a breezy and health-giving place.
THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN.
To the southward of Bethlehem is the Franconia group, of which Mount Lafayette is the crowning peak, its pyramidal summit rising fifty-two hundred and seventy feet. A notch is cut down into the group, and through this, the Franconia or Profile Notch, another narrow-gauge railway going up-hill for ten miles in the forest, traverses the flanks of Lafayette and leads to the Echo Lake and Profile House, the most extensive hotel in the region. This is in Coös County, the mountain county of northern New Hampshire, getting its strangely pronounced name from the Indian word cooash, meaning the "pine woods," with which almost the whole country was then covered. Here lived the Abenaqui tribe, known as the "swift deer-hunting Coosucks." At the highest part of the Notch, where its floor broadens sufficiently for a few acres of smooth surface between the enormous enclosing mountains, is built the hotel and its attendant cottages, standing between two long, narrow lakes at the summit of the pass, the waters flowing out respectively north and south, from the one, Echo Lake to Gale River and the Ammonoosuc, and from the other, Profile Lake to the Pemigewasset, seeking the Merrimack. The Pemigewasset means "the place of the Crooked Pines," and Profile Lake used to be called the "Old Man's Washbowl." On its western side rises Mount Cannon, forty-one hundred feet high, on the southeastern face of which is the "Old Man of the Mountain," the noted Franconia Profile. The mountain rises abruptly from the edge of the lake, and twelve hundred feet above the water is this "Great Stone Face," about which Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote so famously. It is a remarkable semblance of the human countenance, and can be properly seen from only one position. Move but a short distance either north or south from this spot, and the profile becomes distorted and is soon obliterated. It is composed of three distinct ledges of granite projecting from the face of the mountain, one forming the forehead, another the nose and upper lip, and a third the chin. These three ledges are in different vertical lines, the actual length of the profile being forty feet, and they make an overhanging brow, a powerful and clearly-defined nose, and a sharp and massive projecting chin, the very mark of complete decision of character, so that the realism of the profile is almost startling. The Old Man's severe and somewhat melancholy gaze is directed towards the southeast over the lake, as if looking earnestly down the Notch.