WHITE MOUNTAINS
The traveler who comes to the White Mountains should not fail to see Chocorua. "Chocorua," how rich and sonorous is that word. It has in it something expressing the wildness and loneliness of these lovely hills. Its rhythm suggests the sigh of the wind among mountain pines or the continuous and far-heard melody of distant waterfalls. This famous peak is everything that a New Hampshire mountain should be. It bears the name of an Indian chief. It is invested with traditional and poetic interest. In form it is massive and symmetrical. The forests of its lower slopes are crowned with rock that is sculptured into a peak with lines full of haughty energy in whose gorges huge shadows are entrapped and whose cliffs blaze with morning gold, and it has the fortune to be set in connection with lovely water scenery, with squam and Winnepesaukee, and the little lake directly at its base.
"On one side of its jagged peak a charming lowland prospect stretches east and south of the Sandwich range, indented by the emerald shores of Winnepesaukee, which lies in queenly beauty upon the soft, far-stretching landscape. Pass around a huge rock to the other side of the steep pyramid, and you have turned to another chapter in the book of nature. Nothing but mountains running in long parallels, or bending ridge behind ridge, visible, here blazing in sunlight, there gloomy with shadow, and all related to the towering mass of the imperial Washington.
"And Chocorua is the only mountain here whose summit is honored with a legend. 'In the valley where the lovely forest-clad mountains tower above the blue lakes dwelt Chocorua, the last chief of his tribe. Here too lived a settler by the name of Cornelius Campbell.
"Chocorua had a son, nine or ten years old, to whom Caroline Campbell had occasionally made such gaudy present as were likely to attract his savage fancy. This won the child's affections, so that he became a familiar visitant, almost an inmate of their dwelling, and, being unrestrained by the courtesies of civilized life, he would inspect everything which came in his way. Some poison, prepared for a mischievous fox which had long troubled the little settlement, was discovered and drunk by the Indian boy, and he went home to his father to sicken and die. When Chocorua had buried his wife by the side of a brook, all that was left to him was his little son. After the death of the boy, jealousy and hatred took possession of Chocorua's soul. He never told his suspicions, but he brooded over them in secret, to nourish the deadly revenge he contemplated against Cornelius Campbell.
"The story of Indian animosity is always the same. Campbell left his but for the fields early one bright, balmy morning in June. Still a lover, though ten years a husband, his last look was towards his wife, answering her parting smile; his last action a kiss for each of his children. When he returned to dinner, they were dead—all dead—and their disfigured bodies too cruelly showed that an Indian's hand had done the work.
"In such a mind, grief, like all other emotions, was tempestuous. Home had been to him the only verdant spot in the desert of life. In his wife and children he had centered all affection, and now they were torn from him. The remembrance of their love clung to him like the death grapple of a drowning man, sinking him down into darkness and death. This was followed by a calm a thousand times more terrible, the creeping agony of despair, that brings with it no power of resistance.
"It was as if the dead could feel
The icy worm around him steal."
Such for many days was the state of Cornelius Campbell. Those who knew and reverenced him feared that the spark of reason was forever extinguished. But it rekindled, and with it came a wild, demoniac spirit of revenge. The death groan of Chocorua would make him smile in his dreams, and when he waked, death seemed too pitiful a vengeance for the anguish that was eating into his very soul.
Chocorua's brethren were absent on a hunting expedition at the time he committed the murder, and those who watched his movements observed that he frequently climbed the high precipice, which afterwards took his name. He was probably looking for indications of their return. Here Campbell resolved to carry out his deadly plan. A party was formed, under his guidance, to cut off all chance of retreat, and the dark-minded prophet was to be hunted like a wild beast to his lair.