Drake Samuel Adams
The Heart of the White Mountains, Their Legend and Scenery
VIII.
THROUGH THE NOTCH
Around his waist are forests braced,
The avalanche in his hand. – Byron.
THE valley, which had continually contracted since leaving Bartlett, now appeared fast shut between these two mountains; but on turning the tremendous support which Mount Willey flings down, we were in presence of the amazing defile cloven through the midst, and giving entrance to the heart of the White Hills.
These gigantic mountains divided to the right and left, like the Red Sea before the Israelites. Through the immense trough, over which their crests hung suspended in mid-air, the highway creeps and the river steals away. The road is only seen at intervals through the forest; a low murmur, like the hum of bees, announces the river.
I have no conception of the man who can approach this stupendous chasm without a sensation of fear. The idea of imminent annihilation is everywhere overwhelming. The mind refuses to reason, or rather to fix itself, except on a single point. What if the same power that commanded these awful mountains to remove should hurl them back to ever-during fixedness? Should, do I say? The gulf seemed contracting under our very eyes – the great mountains toppling to their fall. With an eagerness excited by high expectation, we had pressed forward; but now we hesitated.
This emotion, which many of my readers have doubtless partaken, was our tribute to the dumb but eloquent expression of power too vast for our feeble intellects to measure. It was the triumph of matter over mind; of the finite over the infinite.
Below, it was all admiration and surprise; here, all amazement and fear. The more the mountains exalted themselves, the more we were abased. Trusting, nevertheless, in our insignificance, we moved on, looking with all our eyes, absorbed, silent, and almost worshipping.
The wide split of the Notch, which we had now entered, had on one side Mount Willey, drawn up to his full height; and on the other Mount Webster, striped with dull red on clingy yellow, like an old tiger’s skin. Willey is the highest; Webster the most remarkable. Willey has a conical spire; Webster a long, irregular battlement. Willey is a mountain; Webster a huge block of granite.
For two miles the gorge winds between these mountains to where it is apparently sealed up by a sheer mass of purple precipices lodged full in its throat. This is Mount Willard. The vast chasm glowed with the gorgeous colors of the foliage, even when a passing cloud obscured the sun. These general observations made, we cast our eyes down into the vale reposing at our feet. We had chosen for our point of view that to which Abel Crawford conducted Sir Charles Lyell in 1845. The scientist has made the avalanche bear witness to the glacier, precisely as one criminal is made to convict another under our laws.
Five hundred feet below us was a little clearing, containing a hamlet of two or three houses. From this hamlet to the storm-crushed crags glistening on the summit of Mount Willey the track of an old avalanche was still distinguishable, though the birches and alders rooted among the débris threatened to obliterate it at no distant day.
We descended by this still plain path to the houses at the foot of the mountain. One and the other are associated with the most tragic event connected with the history of the great Notch.
We found two houses, a larger and smaller, fronting the road, neither of which merits a description; although evidence that it was visited by multitudes of curious pilgrims abounded on the walls of the unoccupied building.
Since quite early in the century, this house was kept as an inn; and for a long time it was the only stopping-place between Abel Crawford’s below and Captain Rosebrook’s above – a distance of thirteen miles. Its situation, at the entrance of the great Notch, was advantageous to the public and to the landlord, but attended with a danger which seems not to have been sufficiently regarded, if indeed it caused successive inmates particular concern. This fatal security had a lamentable sequel.
In 1826 this house was occupied by Samuel Willey, his wife, five children, and two hired men. During the summer a drought of unusual severity dried the streams, and parched the thin soil of the neighboring mountains. On the evening of the 26th of June, the family heard a heavy, rumbling noise, apparently proceeding from the mountain behind them. In terror and amazement they ran out of the house. They saw the mountain in motion. They saw an immense mass of earth and rock detach itself and move toward the valley, at first slowly, then with gathered and irresistible momentum. Rocks, trees, earth, were swooping down upon them from the heights in three destroying streams. The spectators stood rooted to the spot. Before they could recover their presence of mind the avalanche was upon them. One torrent crossed the road only ten rods from the house; another a little distance beyond; while the third and largest portion took a different direction. With great labor a way was made over the mass of rubbish for the road. The avalanche had shivered the largest trees, and borne rocks weighing many tons almost to the door of the lonely habitation.
This awful warning passed unheeded. On the 28th of August, at dusk, a storm burst upon the mountains, and raged with indescribable fury throughout the night. The rain fell in sheets. Innumerable torrents suddenly broke forth on all sides, deluging the narrow valley, and bearing with them forests that had covered the mountains for ages. The swollen and turbid Saco rose over its banks, flooding the Intervales, and spreading destruction in its course.
Two days afterward a traveller succeeded in forcing his way through the Notch. He found the Willey House standing uninjured in the midst of woful desolation. A second avalanche, descended from Mount Willey during the storm, had buried the little vale beneath its ruins. The traveller, affrighted by the scene around him, pushed open the door. As he did so, a half-famished dog, sole inmate of the house, disputed his entrance with a mournful howl. He entered. The interior was silent and deserted. A candle burnt to the socket, the clothing of the inmates lying by their bedsides, testified to the haste with which this devoted family had fled. The death-like hush pervading the lonely cabin – these evidences of the horrible and untimely fate of the family – the appalling scene of wreck all around, froze the solitary intruder’s blood. In terror he, too, fled from the doomed dwelling.
On arriving at Bartlett, the traveller reported what he had seen. Assistance was despatched to the scene of disaster. The rescuers came too late to render aid to the living, but they found, and buried on the spot, the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Willey, and the two hired men. The remaining children were never found.
It was easily conjectured that the terrified family, alive at last to the appalling danger that menaced them, and feeling the solid earth tremble in the throes of the mountain, sought safety in flight. They only rushed to their doom. The discovery of the bodies showed but too plainly the manner of their death. They had been instantly swallowed up by the avalanche, which, in the inexplicable order of things visible in great calamities, divided behind the house, leaving the frail structure unharmed, while its inmates were hurried into eternity.8
For some time after the disaster a curse seemed to rest upon the old Notch House. No one would occupy it. Travellers shunned it. It remained untenanted, though open to all who might be driven to seek its inhospitable shelter, until the deep impression of horror which the fate of the Willey family inspired had, in a measure, effaced itself.
The effects of the cataclysm were everywhere. For twenty-one miles, almost its entire length, the turnpike was demolished. Twenty-one of the twenty-three bridges were swept away. In some places the meadows were buried to the depth of several feet beneath sand, earth, and rocks; in others, heaps of great trees, which the torrent had torn up by the roots, barricaded the route. The mountains presented a ghastly spectacle. One single night sufficed to obliterate the work of centuries, to strip their summits bare of verdure, and to leave them with shreds of forest and patches of shrubbery hanging to their stark and naked sides. Thus their whole aspect was altered to an extent hardly to be realized to-day, though remarked with mingled wonder and dread long after the period of the convulsion.
From the house our eyes naturally wandered to the mountain, where quarrymen were pecking at its side like yellow-hammers at a dead sycamore. All at once a tremendous explosion was heard, and a stream of loosened earth and bowlders came rattling down the mountain. So unexpected was the sound, so startling its multiplied echo, it seemed as if the mountain had uttered a roar of rage and pain, which was taken up and repeated by the other mountains until the uproar became deafening. When the reverberation died away in the distance, we again heard the metallic click of the miners’ hammers chipping away at the gaunt ribs of Mount Willey.
How does it happen that this catastrophe is still able to awaken the liveliest interest for the fate of the Willey family? Why is it that the oft-repeated tale seems ever new in the ears of sympathetic listeners? Our age is crowded with horrors, to which this seems trifling indeed. May we not attribute it to the influence which the actual scene exerts on the imagination? One must stand on the spot to comprehend; must feel the mysterious terror to which all who come within the influence of the gorge submit. Here the annihilation of a family is but the legitimate expression of that feeling. It seems altogether natural to the place. The ravine might well be the sepulchre of a million human beings, instead of the grave of a single obscure family.
We reached the public-house, at the side of the Willey house, with appetites whetted by our long walk. The mercury had only risen to thirty-eight degrees by the thermometer nailed to the door-post. We went in.
In general, the mountain publicans are not only very obliging, but equal to even the most unexpected demands. The colonel, who never brags, had boasted for the last half-hour what he was going to do at this repast. In point of fact, we were famishing.
A man was standing with his back to the fire, his hands thrust underneath his coat-tails, and a pipe in his mouth. Either the pipe illuminated his nose, or his nose the pipe. He also had a nervous contraction of the muscles of his face, causing an involuntary twitching of the eyebrows, and at the same time of his ears, up and down. This habit, taken in connection with the perfect immobility of the figure, made on us the impression of a statue winking. We therefore hesitated to address it – I mean him– until a moment’s puzzled scrutiny satisfied us that it – I mean the strange object – was alive. He merely turned his head when we entered the room, wagged his ears playfully, winked furiously, and then resumed his first attitude. In all probability he was some stranger like ourselves.
I accosted him. “Sir,” said I, “can you tell us if it is possible to procure a dinner here?”
The man took the pipe from his mouth, shook out the ashes very deliberately, and, without looking at me, tranquilly observed,
“You would like dinner, then?”
“Would we like dinner? We breakfasted at Bartlett, and have passed six hours fasting.”
“And eleven miles. You see, a long way between meals,” interjected George, with decision.
“It’s after the regular dinner,” drawled the apathetic smoker, using his thumb for a stopper, and stooping for a brand with which to relight his pipe.
“In that case we are willing to pay for any additional trouble,” I hastened to say.
The man seemed reflecting. We were hungry; that was incontestable; but we were also shivering, and he maintained his position astride the hearth-stone, like the fabled Colossus of old.
“A cold day,” said the colonel, threshing himself.
“I did not notice it,” returned the stranger, indifferently.
“Only thirty-eight at the door,” said George, stamping his feet with unnecessary vehemence.
“Indeed!” observed our man, with more interest.
“Yes,” George asserted; “and if the fireplace were only larger, or the screen smaller.”
The man hastily stepped aside, knocking over, as he did so, a blazing brand, which he kicked viciously back into the fire.
Having carried the outworks, we approached the citadel. “Perhaps, sir,” I ventured, “you can inform us where the landlord may be found?”
“You wanted dinner, I believe?” The tone in which this question was put gave me goose-flesh. I could not speak, George dropped into a chair. The colonel propped himself against the chimney-piece. I shrugged my shoulders, and nodded expressively to my companions, who returned two glances of eloquent dismay. Evidently nothing was to be got out of this fellow.
“Dinner for one?” continued the eternal smoker.
“For three!” I exclaimed, out of all patience.
“For four; I shall eat double,” added the colonel.
“Six!” shouted George, seizing the dinner-bell on the mantel-piece.
“Stop,” said the man, betraying a little excitement; “don’t ring that bell.”
“Why not?” demanded George; “we want to see the landlord; and, by Jove,” brandishing the bell aloft, “see him we will!”
“He stands before you, gentlemen; and if you will have a little patience I will see what can be done.” So saying, he put his pipe on the chimney-piece, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and went out, muttering, as he did so. “The world was not made in a day.”
In three-quarters of an hour we sat down to a funereal repast, the bare recollection of which makes me ill, but which was enlivened by the following conversation:
“How many inhabitants are in your tract?” I asked of the man who waited on us.
“Do you mean inhabitants?”
“Certainly, I mean inhabitants.”
“Well, that’s not an easy one.”
“How so?”
“Because the same question not only puzzled the State Legislature, but made the attorney-general sick.”
We became attentive.
“Explain that, if you please,” said I.
“Why, just look at it: with only eight legal voters in the tract” (he called it track), “we cast five hundred ballots at the State election.”
“Five hundred ballots! then your voters must have sprung from the ground or from the rocks.”
“Pretty nearly so.”
“Actual men?”
“Actual men.”
“You are jesting.”
My man looked at me as if I had offered him an affront. The supposition was plainly inadmissible. He was completely innocent of the charge.
“You hear those men pounding away up the hill?” he demanded, jerking his thumb in the direction indicated.
“Yes.”
“Well, those are the five hundred voters. On election morning they came to the polling-place with a ballot in one hand, and a pick, a sledge, or a drill in the other. Our supervisor is a very honest, blunt sort of man: he refused their ballots on the spot.”
“Well?”
“Well, one of them had a can of nitro-glycerine and a coil of wire. He deposited his can in a corner, hitched on the wire, and was going out with his comrades, when the supervisor, feeling nervous, said,
“‘The polls are open, gentlemen.’”
“Ingenious,” remarked George.
The man looked astounded.
“He means dangerous,” said I; “but go on.”
“I will. When the votes were counted, at sundown, it was found that our precinct had elected two representatives to the General Court. But when the successful candidates presented their certificates at Concord, some meddlesome city fellow questioned the validity of the election. The upshot of it was that the two nitro-glycerites came back with a flea in each ear.”
“And the five hundred were disfranchised,” said George.
“Why, as to that, half were French Canadians, half Irish, and the devil knows what the rest were; I don’t.”
“Never mind the rest. You see,” said George, rising, “how, with the railway, the blessings of civilization penetrate into the dark corners of the earth.”
The colonel began his sacramental, “That beats – ” when he was interrupted by a second explosion, which shook the building. We paid our reckoning, George saying, as he threw his money on the table, “A heavy charge.”
“No more than the regular price,” said the landlord, stiffly.
“I referred, my dear sir, to the explosion,” replied George, with the sardonic grin habitual to him on certain occasions.
“Oh!” said the host, resuming his pipe and his fireplace.
We spent the remaining hours of this memorable afternoon sauntering through the Notch, which is dripping with cascades, and noisy with mountain torrents. The Saco, here nothing but a brook, crawls languidly along its bed of broken rock. From dizzy summit to where they meet the river, the old wasted mountains sit warming their scarred sides in the sun. Looking up at the passage of the railway around Mount Willey, it impressed us as a single fractured stone might have done on the Great Pyramid, or a pin’s scratch on the face of a giant. The locomotive, which groped its way along its broken shell, stopped, and stealthily moving again, seemed a mouse that the laboring mountain had brought forth. But when its infernal clamor broke the silence, what demoniacal yells shook the forests! Farewell to our dream of inviolable nature. The demon of progress had forced his way into the very sanctuary. There were no longer any White Mountains.
We passed by the beautiful brook Kedron, flung down from the utmost heights of Willey, between banks mottled with colors. Then, high up on our right, two airy water-falls seemed to hang suspended from the summit of Webster. These, called respectively the Silver Cascade, and the Flume withdrew the attention from every other object, until a sharp turn to the right brought the overhanging precipice of Mount Willard full upon us. This enormous mass of granite, rising seven hundred feet above the road, stands in the very jaws of the gorge, which it commands from end to end.
Here the railway seems fairly stopped; but with a graceful sweep it eludes the mountain, and glides around its massive shoulder, giving, as it does so, a hand to the high-road, which comes straggling up the sharp ascent. The river, now shrunken to a rivulet, is finally lost to view beneath heaped-up blocks of granite, which the infuriated old mountain has hurled down upon it. It is heard painfully gurgling under the ruins, like a victim crushed, and dying by inches.
Now and here we entered a close, dark defile hewn down between cliffs, ascending on the right in regular terraces, on the left in ruptured masses. These terraces were fringed at the top with tapering evergreens, and displayed gaudy tufts of maple and mountain-ash on their cool gray. Those on the right are furthermore decorated with natural sculptures, indicated by sign-boards, which the curious investigate profitably or unprofitably, according to their fertility of imagination.
For a few rods this narrow cleft continues; then, on a sudden, the rocks which lift themselves on either side shut together. An enormous mass has tumbled from its ancient location on the left side, and, taking a position within twenty feet of the opposite precipice, forms the natural gate of the Notch, through which a way was made for the common road with great labor, through which the river frays a passage, but where no one would imagine there was room for either. The railway has made a breach for itself through the solid rock, greatly diminishing the native grandeur of the place. All three emerge from the shadow and gloom of the pass into the cheerful sunshine of a little prairie, at the extremity of which are seen the white walls of a hotel.
IX.
CRAWFORD’S
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose.
Shakspeare.
ALL who have passed much time at the mountains have seen the elephant – near the gate of the Notch.
Though it is only from Nature’s chisel, the elephant is an honest one, and readily admitted into the category of things curious or marvellous constantly displayed for our inspection. Standing on the piazza of the hotel, the enormous forehead and trunk seem just emerging from the shaggy woods near the entrance to the pass. And the gray of the granite strengthens the illusion still more. From the Elephant’s Head, a title suggestive of the near vicinity of a public-house, there is a fine view down the Notch for those who cannot ascend Mount Willard.
The Crawford House, being built at the highest point of the pass, nearly two thousand feet above the sea, is not merely a hotel – it is a water-shed. The roof divides the rain falling upon it into two streams, flowing on one side into the Saco, on the other into the Ammonoosuc. Here the sun rises over the Willey range, and sets behind Mount Clinton. The north side of the piazza enables you to look over the forests into the valley of the Ammonoosuc, where the view is closed by the chain dividing this basin from that of Israel’s River. But we are not yet ready to conduct the reader into this Promised Land.
My window overlooked a grassy plain of perhaps half a mile, the view being closed by the Gate of the Notch, now disfigured by snow-sheds built for the protection of the railway. The massive, full-rounded bulk of Webster rose above, the forests of Willard tumbled down into the ragged fissure. Half-way between the hotel and the Gate, over-borne by the big shadow of Mount Clinton, extends the pretty lakelet which is the fountain-head of the Saco. Beyond the lake, and at the left, is where the old Notch House stood. This lake was once a beaver-pond, and this plain a boggy meadow, through which a road of corduroy and sods conducted the early traveller. The highway and railway run amicably side by side, dividing the little vale in two.
This pass, which was certainly known to the Indians, was, in 1771, rediscovered by Timothy Nash, a hunter, who was persuaded by Benjamin Sawyer, another hunter, to admit him to an equal share in the discovery. In 1773 Nash and Sawyer received a grant of 2184 acres, skirting the mountains on the west, as a reward. With the prodigality characteristic of their class, the hunters squandered their large acquisition in a little time after it was granted. Both the Crawford and Fabyan hotels stand upon their tract.
Of many excursions which this secluded retreat offers, that to the summit of Mount Washington, by the bridle-path opened in 1840 by Thomas J. Crawford, and that to the top of Mount Willard, are the principal. The route to the first begins opposite to the hotel, at the left; the latter turns from the glen a quarter of a mile below, on the right. Supposing Mount Washington a cathedral set on an eminence, you are here on the summit of the eminence, with one foot on the immense staircase of the cathedral.
Our resolve to ascend by the bridle-path was already formed, and we regarded the climb up Mount Willard as indispensable. As for the cascades, which lulled us to sleep, who shall describe them? We could not lift our eyes to the heights above without seeing one or more fluttering in the play of the breeze, and making rainbows in pure diversion. President Dwight, in his “Travels,” has no more eloquent passage than that describing the Flume Cascade. How many since have thrown down pen or pencil in sheer despair of reproducing, by words or pigments, the aerial lightness, the joyous freedom; above all, the exuberant, unquenchable vitality that characterize mountain water-falls! Down the Notch is a masterpiece, hidden from the eye of the passer-by, called Ripley Falls, which fairly revels in its charming seclusion. Only a short walk from the hotel, by a woodland path, there is another, Beecher’s Cascade, whose capricious leaps and playful somersaults, all the while volubly chattering to itself, like a child alone with its playthings, fascinates us, as sky, water, and fire charm the eyes of an infant. It is always tumbling down, and as often leaping to its feet to resume its frolicsome gambols, with no loss of sprightliness or sign of weariness that we can detect. Only a lover may sing the praises of these mountain cascades falling from the skies:
“The torrent is the soul of the valley. Not only is it the Providence or the scourge, often both at once, but it gives to it a physiognomy; it gladdens or saddens it; it lends it a voice; it communicates life to it. A valley without its torrent is only a hole.”
They give the name of Idlewild to the romantic sylvan retreat, reached by a winding path, diverging near the hotel, on the left. I visited it in company with Mr. Atwater, whose taste and enthusiasm for the work have converted the natural disorder of the mountain side into a trysting-place fit for elves and fairies; but where one encounters ladies in elegant toilets, enjoying a quiet stroll among the fern-draped rocks. Some fine vistas of the valley mountains have been opened through the woods – beautiful little bits of blue, framed in illuminated foliage. One notes approvingly the revival of an olden taste in the cutting and shaping of trees into rustic chairs, stairways, and arbors.
After a day like ours, the great fires and admirable order of the hotel were grateful indeed. If it is true that the way to man’s heart lies through his stomach, the cherry-lipped waiter-girl, who whispered her seductive tale in my too-willing ear at supper, made a veritable conquest. My compliments to her, notwithstanding the penalty paid for lingering too long over the griddle-cakes.
The autumn nights being cool, it was something curious to see the parlor doors every now and then thrown wide open, to admit a man who came trundling in on a wheelbarrow a monster log fit for the celebration of Yule-tide. The city guest, accustomed to the economy of wood at home, because it is dear, looks on this prodigality first with consternation, and finally with admiration. When the big log is deposited on the blazing hearth amid fusees of sparks, the easy-chairs again close around the fireplace a charmed circle; and while the buzz of conversation goes on, and the faces are illuminated by the ruddy glow, the wood snaps, and hisses, and spits as if it had life and sense of feeling. The men talk in drowsy undertones; the ladies, watching the chimney-soot catch fire and redden, point out to each other the old grandame’s pictures of “folks coming home from meeting.” This scene is the counterpart of a warm summer evening on the piazza – both typical of unrestrained, luxurious indolence. How many pictures have appeared in that old fireplace! and what experiences its embers revived! Water shows us only our own faces in their proper mask – nothing more, nothing less; but fire, the element of the supernatural, is able, so at least we believe, to unfold the future as easily as it turns our eyes into the past. If only we could read!
When we arose in the morning, what was our astonishment to see the surrounding mountains white with snow. Like one smitten with sudden terror, they had grown gray in a night. Striking, indeed, was the transformation from yesterday’s pomp; beautiful the contrast between the dark green below and the dead white of the upper zones. Thickly incrusted with hoar-frost, the stiffened foliage of the pines and firs gave those trees the unwonted appearance of bursting into blossom. Over all a dull and brooding sky shed its cold, wan light upon the glen, forbidding all thought of attacking the high summits, at least for this day.
Dismissing this, therefore, as impracticable, we nevertheless determined on ascending Mount Willard – an easy thing to do, considering you have only to follow a good carriage-road for two miles and a half to reach the precipices overlooking the Saco Valley.
Startling, indeed, by its sublimity was the spectacle that rewarded our trouble a thousand-fold. Still, the sensations partook more of wonder than admiration – much more. The unpractised eye is so utterly confounded by the immensity of this awful chasm of the Notch, yawning in all its extent and all its grandeur far down beneath, that, powerless to grasp the fulness and the vastness thus suddenly encountered, it stupidly stares into those far-retreating depths. The scene really seems too tremendous for flesh and blood to comprehend. For an instant, while standing on the brink of the sheer precipice, which here suddenly drops seven or eight hundred feet, my head swam and my knees trembled.
First came the idea that I was looking down into the dry bed of some primeval cataract, whose mighty rush and roar the imagination summoned again from the tomb of ages, and whose echo was in the cascades, hung like two white arms on the black and hairy breast of the adjacent mountain. This idea carries us luck to the Deluge, of which science pretends to have found proofs in the basin of the Notch. What am I saying? to the Deluge! it transports us to the Beginning itself, when “Darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
You see the immense walls of Mount Willey on one side, and of Webster on the other, rushing downward thousands of feet, and meeting in one magnificently imposing sweep at their bases. This vast natural inverted archway has the heavens for a roof. The eye roves from the shaggy head of one mountain to the shattered cornices of the other. One is terrible, the other forbidding. The naked precipices of Willey, furrowed by avalanches, still show where the fatal slide of 1826 crushed its way down into the valley, traversing a mile in only a few moments. Far down in the distance you see the Willey hamlet and its bright clearing. You see the Saco’s silver.
Such, imperfectly, are the more salient features of this immense cavity of the Notch, three miles long, two thousand feet deep, rounded as if by art, and as full of suggestions as a ripe melon of seeds. I recall few natural wonders so difficult to get away from, or that haunt you so perpetually.
