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The Maine Woods

by Henry David Thoreau · English · Gutenberg #42500 · 615,688 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Maine Woods

Author: Henry David Thoreau


        
Release date: April 9, 2013 [eBook #42500]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAINE WOODS ***

The Writings of Henry David Thoreau

In Twenty Volumes

VOLUME III

Manuscript Edition
Limited to Six Hundred Copies
Number ----


  [Illustration: _Snowberry_ (_page 227_)]

  [Illustration: _Moosehead Lake, from Mount Kineo_]


The Writings of Henry David Thoreau

THE MAINE WOODS







Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin and Company
MDCCCCVI

Copyright 1864 by Ticknor and Fields
Copyright 1892, 1893, and 1906 by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

All rights reserved




CONTENTS


     INTRODUCTORY NOTE

     KTAADN

     CHESUNCOOK

     THE ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH

     APPENDIX

       I. TREES

      II. FLOWERS AND SHRUBS

     III. LIST OF PLANTS

      IV. LIST OF BIRDS

       V. QUADRUPEDS

      VI. OUTFIT FOR AN EXCURSION

     VII. A LIST OF INDIAN WORDS

     INDEX




ILLUSTRATIONS


     SNOWBERRY, _Carbon photograph_

     MOOSEHEAD LAKE, FROM MOUNT KINEO,

     MAINE WILDERNESS

     PINE TREE, BOAR MOUNTAIN

     SQUAW MOUNTAIN, MOOSEHEAD LAKE

     MOOSEHEAD LAKE, FROM MOUNT KINEO

     MOUNT KINEO CLIFF




INTRODUCTORY NOTE


The Maine Woods was the second volume collected from his writings
after Thoreau’s death. Of the material which composed it, the first
two divisions were already in print. “Ktaadn and the Maine Woods” was
the title of a paper printed in 1848 in _The Union Magazine_, and
“Chesuncook” was published in _The Atlantic Monthly_ in 1858. The book
was edited by his friend William Ellery Channing.

It was during his second summer at Walden that Thoreau made his first
visit to the Maine woods. It was probably in response to a request
from Horace Greeley that he wrote out the narrative from his journal,
for Mr. Greeley had shown himself eager to help Thoreau in putting his
wares on the market. In a letter to Emerson, January 12, 1848, Thoreau
writes: “I read a part of the story of my excursion to Ktaadn to quite
a large audience of men and boys, the other night, whom it interested.
It contains many facts and some poetry.” He offered the paper to
Greeley at the end of March, and on the 17th of April Greeley
responded: “I inclose you $25 for your article on Maine scenery, as
promised. I know it is worth more, though I have not yet found time to
read it; but I have tried once to sell it without success. It is
rather long for my columns, and too fine for the million; but I
consider it a cheap bargain, and shall print it myself if I do not
dispose of it to better advantage. You will not, of course, consider
yourself under any sort of obligation to me, for my offer was in the
way of business, and I have got more than the worth of my money.” But
this generous, high-minded friend was thinking of Thoreau’s business,
not his own, for in October of the same year he writes, “I break a
silence of some duration to inform you that I hope on Monday to
receive payment for your glorious account of ‘Ktaadn and the Maine
Woods,’ which I bought of you at a Jew’s bargain and sold to _The
Union Magazine_. I am to get $75 for it, and as I don’t choose to
_exploiter_ you at such a rate, I shall insist on inclosing you $25
more in this letter, which will still leave me $25 to pay various
charges and labors I have incurred in selling your articles and
getting paid for them,--the latter by far the most difficult portion
of the business.”

The third of Thoreau’s excursions in the Maine woods was made very
largely for the purpose of studying Indian life and character in the
person of his guide. He had all his life been interested in the
Indians, and Mr. Sanborn tells us--what is also evident from his
journal--that it was his purpose to expand his studies into a separate
work on the subject, for which he had collected a considerable amount
of material from books as well as from his own observations. After his
return from the Allegash and East Branch he wrote as follows to Mr.
Blake under date of August 18, 1857: “I have now returned, and think I
have had a quite profitable journey, chiefly from associating with an
intelligent Indian.... Having returned, I flatter myself that the
world appears in some respects a little larger, and not as usual
smaller and shallower for having extended my range. I have made a
short excursion into the new world which the Indian dwells in, or is.
He begins where we leave off. It is worth the while to detect new
faculties in man, he is so much the more divine; and anything that
fairly excites our admiration expands us. The Indian who can find his
way so wonderfully in the woods possesses so much intelligence which
the white man does not, and it increases my own capacity as well as
faith to observe it. I rejoice to find that intelligence flows in
other channels than I knew. It redeems for me portions of what seemed
brutish before. It is a great satisfaction to find that your oldest
convictions are permanent. With regard to essentials I have never had
occasion to change my mind. The aspect of the world varies from year
to year as the landscape is differently clothed, but I find that the
_truth_ is still _true_, and I never regret any emphasis which it may
have inspired. Ktaadn is there still, but much more surely my old
conviction is there, resting with more than mountain breadth and
weight on the world, the source still of fertilizing streams, and
affording glorious views from its summit if I can get up to it again.”




THE MAINE WOODS




KTAADN


On the 31st of August, 1846, I left Concord in Massachusetts for
Bangor and the backwoods of Maine, by way of the railroad and
steamboat, intending to accompany a relative of mine, engaged in the
lumber trade in Bangor, as far as a dam on the West Branch of the
Penobscot, in which property he was interested. From this place, which
is about one hundred miles by the river above Bangor, thirty miles
from the Houlton military road, and five miles beyond the last log
hut, I proposed to make excursions to Mount Ktaadn, the second highest
mountain in New England, about thirty miles distant, and to some of
the lakes of the Penobscot, either alone or with such company as I
might pick up there. It is unusual to find a camp so far in the woods
at that season, when lumbering operations have ceased, and I was glad
to avail myself of the circumstance of a gang of men being employed
there at that time in repairing the injuries caused by the great
freshet in the spring. The mountain may be approached more easily and
directly on horseback and on foot from the northeast side, by the
Aroostook road, and the Wassataquoik River; but in that case you see
much less of the wilderness, none of the glorious river and lake
scenery, and have no experience of the batteau and the boatman’s life.
I was fortunate also in the season of the year, for in the summer
myriads of black flies, mosquitoes, and midges, or, as the Indians
call them, “no-see-ems,” make traveling in the woods almost
impossible; but now their reign was nearly over.

Ktaadn, whose name is an Indian word signifying highest land, was
first ascended by white men in 1804. It was visited by Professor J. W.
Bailey of West Point in 1836; by Dr. Charles T. Jackson, the State
Geologist, in 1837; and by two young men from Boston in 1845. All
these have given accounts of their expeditions. Since I was there, two
or three other parties have made the excursion, and told their
stories. Besides these, very few, even among backwoodsmen and hunters,
have ever climbed it, and it will be a long time before the tide of
fashionable travel sets that way. The mountainous region of the State
of Maine stretches from near the White Mountains, northeasterly one
hundred and sixty miles, to the head of the Aroostook River, and is
about sixty miles wide. The wild or unsettled portion is far more
extensive. So that some hours only of travel in this direction will
carry the curious to the verge of a primitive forest, more
interesting, perhaps, on all accounts, than they would reach by going
a thousand miles westward.

The next forenoon, Tuesday, September 1, I started with my companion
in a buggy from Bangor for “up river,” expecting to be overtaken the
next day night at Mattawamkeag Point, some sixty miles off, by two
more Bangoreans, who had decided to join us in a trip to the mountain.
We had each a knapsack or bag filled with such clothing and articles
as were indispensable, and my companion carried his gun.

Within a dozen miles of Bangor we passed through the villages of
Stillwater and Oldtown, built at the falls of the Penobscot, which
furnish the principal power by which the Maine woods are converted
into lumber. The mills are built directly over and across the river.
Here is a close jam, a hard rub, at all seasons; and then the once
green tree, long since white, I need not say as the driven snow, but
as a driven log, becomes lumber merely. Here your inch, your two and
your three inch stuff begin to be, and Mr. Sawyer marks off those
spaces which decide the destiny of so many prostrate forests. Through
this steel riddle, more or less coarse, is the arrowy Maine forest,
from Ktaadn and Chesuncook, and the head-waters of the St. John,
relentlessly sifted, till it comes out boards, clapboards, laths, and
shingles such as the wind can take, still, perchance, to be slit and
slit again, till men get a size that will suit. Think how stood the
white pine tree on the shore of Chesuncook, its branches soughing with
the four winds, and every individual needle trembling in the
sunlight,--think how it stands with it now,--sold, perchance, to the
New England Friction-Match Company! There were in 1837, as I read, two
hundred and fifty sawmills on the Penobscot and its tributaries above
Bangor, the greater part of them in this immediate neighborhood, and
they sawed two hundred millions of feet of boards annually. To this is
to be added the lumber of the Kennebec, Androscoggin, Saco,
Passamaquoddy, and other streams. No wonder that we hear so often of
vessels which are becalmed off our coast being surrounded a week at a
time by floating lumber from the Maine woods. The mission of men there
seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of
the country, from every solitary beaver swamp and mountain-side, as
soon as possible.

At Oldtown, we walked into a batteau-manufactory. The making of
batteaux is quite a business here for the supply of the Penobscot
River. We examined some on the stocks. They are light and shapely
vessels, calculated for rapid and rocky streams, and to be carried
over long portages on men’s shoulders, from twenty to thirty feet
long, and only four or four and a half wide, sharp at both ends like a
canoe, though broadest forward on the bottom, and reaching seven or
eight feet over the water, in order that they may slip over rocks as
gently as possible. They are made very slight, only two boards to a
side, commonly secured to a few light maple or other hard-wood knees,
but inward are of the clearest and widest white pine stuff, of which
there is a great waste on account of their form, for the bottom is
left perfectly flat, not only from side to side, but from end to end.
Sometimes they become “hogging” even, after long use, and the boatmen
then turn them over and straighten them by a weight at each end. They
told us that one wore out in two years, or often in a single trip, on
the rocks, and sold for from fourteen to sixteen dollars. There was
something refreshing and wildly musical to my ears in the very name of
the white man’s canoe, reminding me of Charlevoix and Canadian
Voyageurs. The batteau is a sort of mongrel between the canoe and the
boat, a fur-trader’s boat.

The ferry here took us past the Indian island. As we left the shore, I
observed a short, shabby, washerwoman-looking Indian,--they commonly
have the woebegone look of the girl that cried for spilt milk,--just
from “up river,” land on the Oldtown side near a grocery, and, drawing
up his canoe, take out a bundle of skins in one hand, and an empty keg
or half-barrel in the other, and scramble up the bank with them. This
picture will do to put before the Indian’s history, that is, the
history of his extinction. In 1837 there were three hundred and
sixty-two souls left of this tribe. The island seemed deserted to-day,
yet I observed some new houses among the weather-stained ones, as if
the tribe had still a design upon life; but generally they have a very
shabby, forlorn, and cheerless look, being all back side and woodshed,
not homesteads, even Indian homesteads, but instead of home or
abroad-steads, for their life is _domi aut militiæ_, at home or at
war, or now rather _venatus_, that is, a hunting, and most of the
latter. The church is the only trim-looking building, but that is not
Abenaki, that was Rome’s doings. Good Canadian it may be, but it is
poor Indian. These were once a powerful tribe. Politics are all the
rage with them now. I even thought that a row of wigwams, with a dance
of powwows, and a prisoner tortured at the stake, would be more
respectable than this.

We landed in Milford, and rode along on the east side of the
Penobscot, having a more or less constant view of the river, and the
Indian islands in it, for they retain all the islands as far up as
Nicketow, at the mouth of the East Branch. They are generally
well-timbered, and are said to be better soil than the neighboring
shores. The river seemed shallow and rocky, and interrupted by rapids,
rippling and gleaming in the sun. We paused a moment to see a fish
hawk dive for a fish down straight as an arrow, from a great height,
but he missed his prey this time. It was the Houlton road on which we
were now traveling, over which some troops were marched once towards
Mars’ Hill, though not to Mars’ _field_, as it proved. It is the main,
almost the only, road in these parts, as straight and well made, and
kept in as good repair as almost any you will find anywhere.
Everywhere we saw signs of the great freshet,--this house standing
awry, and that where it was not founded, but where it was found, at
any rate, the next day; and that other with a waterlogged look, as if
it were still airing and drying its basement, and logs with
everybody’s marks upon them, and sometimes the marks of their having
served as bridges, strewn along the road. We crossed the Sunkhaze, a
summery Indian name, the Olemmon, Passadumkeag, and other streams,
which make a greater show on the map than they now did on the road. At
Passadumkeag we found anything but what the name implies,--earnest
politicians, to wit,--white ones, I mean,--on the alert to know how
the election was likely to go; men who talked rapidly, with subdued
voice, and a sort of factitious earnestness you could not help
believing, hardly waiting for an introduction, one on each side of
your buggy, endeavoring to say much in little, for they see you hold
the whip impatiently, but always saying little in much. Caucuses they
have had, it seems, and caucuses they are to have again,--victory and
defeat. Somebody may be elected, somebody may not. One man, a total
stranger, who stood by our carriage in the dusk, actually frightened
the horse with his asseverations, growing more solemnly positive as
there was less in him to be positive about. So Passadumkeag did not
look on the map. At sundown, leaving the river road awhile for
shortness, we went by way of Enfield, where we stopped for the night.
This, like most of the localities bearing names on this road, was a
place to name which, in the midst of the unnamed and unincorporated
wilderness, was to make a distinction without a difference, it seemed
to me. Here, however, I noticed quite an orchard of healthy and
well-grown apple trees, in a bearing state, it being the oldest
settler’s house in this region, but all natural fruit and
comparatively worthless for want of a grafter. And so it is generally,
lower down the river. It would be a good speculation, as well as a
favor conferred on the settlers, for a Massachusetts boy to go down
there with a trunk full of choice scions, and his grafting apparatus,
in the spring.

The next morning we drove along through a high and hilly country, in
view of Cold-Stream Pond, a beautiful lake four or five miles long,
and came into the Houlton road again, here called the military road,
at Lincoln, forty-five miles from Bangor, where there is quite a
village for this country,--the principal one above Oldtown. Learning
that there were several wigwams here, on one of the Indian islands, we
left our horse and wagon and walked through the forest half a mile to
the river, to procure a guide to the mountain. It was not till after
considerable search that we discovered their habitations,--small huts,
in a retired place, where the scenery was unusually soft and
beautiful, and the shore skirted with pleasant meadows and graceful
elms. We paddled ourselves across to the island side in a canoe,
which we found on the shore. Near where we landed sat an Indian girl,
ten or twelve years old, on a rock in the water, in the sun, washing,
and humming or moaning a song meanwhile. It was an aboriginal strain.
A salmon-spear, made wholly of wood, lay on the shore, such as they
might have used before white men came. It had an elastic piece of wood
fastened to one side of its point, which slipped over and closed upon
the fish, somewhat like the contrivance for holding a bucket at the
end of a well-pole. As we walked up to the nearest house, we were met
by a sally of a dozen wolfish-looking dogs, which may have been lineal
descendants from the ancient Indian dogs, which the first voyageurs
describe as “their wolves.” I suppose they were. The occupant soon
appeared, with a long pole in his hand, with which he beat off the
dogs, while he parleyed with us,--a stalwart, but dull and
greasy-looking fellow, who told us, in his sluggish way, in answer to
our questions, as if it were the first serious business he had to do
that day, that there _were_ Indians going “up river”--he and one
other--to-day, before noon. And who was the other? Louis Neptune, who
lives in the next house. Well, let us go over and see Louis together.
The same doggish reception, and Louis Neptune makes his appearance,--a
small, wiry man, with puckered and wrinkled face, yet he seemed the
chief man of the two; the same, as I remembered, who had accompanied
Jackson to the mountain in ’37. The same questions were put to Louis,
and the same information obtained, while the other Indian stood by. It
appeared that they were going to start by noon, with two canoes, to
go up to Chesuncook to hunt moose,--to be gone a month. “Well, Louis,
suppose you get to the Point (to the Five Islands, just below
Mattawamkeag) to camp, we walk on up the West Branch tomorrow,--four
of us,--and wait for you at the dam, or this side. You overtake us
to-morrow or next day, and take us into your canoes. We stop for you,
you stop for us. We pay you for your trouble.” “Ye’,” replied Louis,
“may be you carry some provision for all,--some pork,--some
bread,--and so pay.” He said, “Me sure get some moose;” and when I
asked if he thought Pomola would let us go up, he answered that we
must plant one bottle of rum on the top; he had planted good many; and
when he looked again, the rum was all gone. He had been up two or
three times; he had planted letter,--English, German, French, etc.
These men were slightly clad in shirt and pantaloons, like laborers
with us in warm weather. They did not invite us into their houses, but
met us outside. So we left the Indians, thinking ourselves lucky to
have secured such guides and companions.

There were very few houses along the road, yet they did not altogether
fail, as if the law by which men are dispersed over the globe were a
very stringent one, and not to be resisted with impunity or for slight
reasons. There were even the germs of one or two villages just
beginning to expand. The beauty of the road itself was remarkable. The
various evergreens, many of which are rare with us,--delicate and
beautiful specimens of the larch, arbor-vitæ, ball-spruce, and
fir-balsam, from a few inches to many feet in height,--lined its
sides, in some places like a long front yard, springing up from the
smooth grass-plots which uninterruptedly border it, and are made
fertile by its wash; while it was but a step on either hand to the
grim, untrodden wilderness, whose tangled labyrinth of living, fallen,
and decaying trees only the deer and moose, the bear and wolf can
easily penetrate. More perfect specimens than any front-yard plot can
show grew there to grace the passage of the Houlton teams.

About noon we reached the Mattawamkeag, fifty-six miles from Bangor by
the way we had come, and put up at a frequented house still on the
Houlton road, where the Houlton stage stops. Here was a substantial
covered bridge over the Mattawamkeag, built, I think they said, some
seventeen years before. We had dinner,--where, by the way, and even at
breakfast, as well as supper, at the public-houses on this road, the
front rank is composed of various kinds of “sweet cakes,” in a
continuous line from one end of the table to the other. I think I may
safely say that there was a row of ten or a dozen plates of this kind
set before us two here. To account for which, they say that, when the
lumberers come out of the woods, they have a craving for cakes and
pies, and such sweet things, which there are almost unknown, and this
is the _supply_ to satisfy that _demand_. The supply is always equal
to the demand, and these hungry men think a good deal of getting their
money’s worth. No doubt the balance of victuals is restored by the
time they reach Bangor,--Mattawamkeag takes off the raw edge. Well,
over this front rank, I say, you, coming from the “sweet cake” side,
with a cheap philosophic indifference though it may be, have to
assault what there is behind, which I do not by any means mean to
insinuate is insufficient in quantity or quality to supply that other
demand, of men, not from the woods but from the towns, for venison and
strong country fare. After dinner we strolled down to the “Point,”
formed by the junction of the two rivers, which is said to be the
scene of an ancient battle between the Eastern Indians and the
Mohawks, and searched there carefully for relics, though the men at
the bar-room had never heard of such things; but we found only some
flakes of arrowhead stone, some points of arrowheads, one small leaden
bullet, and some colored beads, the last to be referred, perhaps, to
early fur-trader days. The Mattawamkeag, though wide, was a mere
river’s bed, full of rocks and shallows at this time, so that you
could cross it almost dry-shod in boots; and I could hardly believe my
companion, when he told me that he had been fifty or sixty miles up it
in a batteau, through distant and still uncut forests. A batteau could
hardly find a harbor now at its mouth. Deer and caribou, or reindeer,
are taken here in the winter, in sight of the house.

Before our companions arrived, we rode on up the Houlton road seven
miles to Molunkus, where the Aroostook road comes into it, and where
there is a spacious public house in the woods, called the “Molunkus
House,” kept by one Libbey, which looked as if it had its hall for
dancing and for military drills. There was no other evidence of man
but this huge shingle palace in this part of the world; but sometimes
even this is filled with travelers. I looked off the piazza round the
corner of the house up the Aroostook road, on which there was no
clearing in sight. There was a man just adventuring upon it this
evening in a rude, original, what you may call Aroostook wagon,--a
mere seat, with a wagon swung under it, a few bags on it, and a dog
asleep to watch them. He offered to carry a message for us to anybody
in that country, cheerfully. I suspect that, if you should go to the
end of the world, you would find somebody there going farther, as if
just starting for home at sundown, and having a last word before he
drove off. Here, too, _was_ a small trader, whom I did not see at
first, who kept a store,--but no great store, certainly,--in a small
box over the way, behind the Molunkus sign-post. It looked like the
balance-box of a patent hay-scales. As for his house, we could only
conjecture where that was; he may have been a boarder in the Molunkus
House. I saw him standing in his shop door,--his shop was so small,
that, if a traveler should make demonstrations of entering in, _he_
would have to go out by the back way, and confer with his customer
through a window, about his goods in the cellar, or, more probably,
bespoken, and yet on the way. I should have gone in, for I felt a real
impulse to trade, if I had not stopped to consider what would become
of him. The day before, we had walked into a shop, over against an inn
where we stopped, the puny beginning of trade, which would grow at
last into a firm copartnership in the future town or city,--indeed, it
was already “Somebody & Co.,” I forget who. The woman came forward
from the penetralia of the attached house, for “Somebody & Co.” was in
the burning, and she sold us percussion-caps, canalés and smooth, and
knew their prices and qualities, and which the hunters preferred. Here
was a little of everything in a small compass to satisfy the wants and
the ambition of the woods,--a stock selected with what pains and care,
and brought home in the wagon-box, or a corner of the Houlton team;
but there seemed to me, as usual, a preponderance of children’s
toys,--dogs to bark, and cats to mew, and trumpets to blow, where
natives there hardly are yet. As if a child born into the Maine woods,
among the pine cones and cedar berries, could not do without such a
sugar-man or skipping-jack as the young Rothschild has.

I think that there was not more than one house on the road to
Molunkus, or for seven miles. At that place we got over the fence into
a new field, planted with potatoes, where the logs were still burning
between the hills; and, pulling up the vines, found good-sized
potatoes, nearly ripe, growing like weeds, and turnips mixed with
them. The mode of clearing and planting is to fell the trees, and burn
once what will burn, then cut them up into suitable lengths, roll into
heaps, and burn again; then, with a hoe, plant potatoes where you can
come at the ground between the stumps and charred logs; for a first
crop the ashes sufficing for manure, and no hoeing being necessary the
first year. In the fall, cut, roll, and burn again, and so on, till
the land is cleared; and soon it is ready for grain, and to be laid
down. Let those talk of poverty and hard times who will in the towns
and cities; cannot the emigrant who can pay his fare to New York or
Boston pay five dollars more to get here,--I paid three, all told,
for my passage from Boston to Bangor, two hundred and fifty
miles,--and be as rich as he pleases, where land virtually costs
nothing, and houses only the labor of building, and he may begin life
as Adam did? If he will still remember the distinction of poor and
rich, let him bespeak him a narrower house forthwith.

When we returned to the Mattawamkeag, the Houlton stage had already
put up there; and a Province man was betraying his greenness to the
Yankees by his questions. Why Province money won’t pass here at par,
when States’ money is good at Fredericton,--though this, perhaps, was
sensible enough. From what I saw then, it appears that the Province
man was now the only real Jonathan, or raw country bumpkin, left so
far behind by his enterprising neighbors that he didn’t know enough to
put a question to them. No people can long continue provincial in
character who have the propensity for politics and whittling, and
rapid traveling, which the Yankees have, and who are leaving the
mother country behind in the variety of their notions and inventions.
The possession and exercise of practical talent merely are a sure and
rapid means of intellectual culture and independence.

The last edition of Greenleaf’s Map of Maine hung on the wall here,
and, as we had no pocket-map, we resolved to trace a map of the lake
country. So, dipping a wad of tow into the lamp, we oiled a sheet of
paper on the oiled table-cloth, and, in good faith, traced what we
afterwards ascertained to be a labyrinth of errors, carefully
following the outlines of the imaginary lakes which the map contains.
The Map of the Public Lands of Maine and Massachusetts is the only one
I have seen that at all deserves the name. It was while we were
engaged in this operation that our companions arrived. They had seen
the Indians’ fire on the Five Islands, and so we concluded that all
was right.

Early the next morning we had mounted our packs, and prepared for a
tramp up the West Branch, my companion having turned his horse out to
pasture for a week or ten days, thinking that a bite of fresh grass
and a taste of running water would do him as much good as backwoods
fare and new country influences his master. Leaping over a fence, we
began to follow an obscure trail up the northern bank of the
Penobscot. There was now no road further, the river being the only
highway, and but half a dozen log huts, confined to its banks, to be
met with for thirty miles. On either hand, and beyond, was a wholly
uninhabited wilderness, stretching to Canada. Neither horse nor cow,
nor vehicle of any kind, had ever passed over this ground; the cattle,
and the few bulky articles which the loggers use, being got up in the
winter on the ice, and down again before it breaks up. The evergreen
woods had a decidedly sweet and bracing fragrance; the air was a sort
of diet-drink, and we walked on buoyantly in Indian file, stretching
our legs. Occasionally there was a small opening on the bank, made for
the purpose of log-rolling, where we got a sight of the river,--always
a rocky and rippling stream. The roar of the rapids, the note of a
whistler duck on the river, of the jay and chickadee around us, and of
the pigeon woodpecker in the openings, were the sounds that we heard.
This was what you might call a bran-new country; the only roads were
of Nature’s making, and the few houses were camps. Here, then, one
could no longer accuse institutions and society, but must front the
true source of evil.

There are three classes of inhabitants who either frequent or inhabit
the country which we had now entered: first, the loggers, who, for a
part of the year, the winter and spring, are far the most numerous,
but in the summer, except a few explorers for timber, completely
desert it; second, the few settlers I have named, the only permanent
inhabitants, who live on the verge of it, and help raise supplies for
the former; third, the hunters, mostly Indians, who range over it in
their season.

At the end of three miles we came to the Mattaseunk stream and mill,
where there was even a rude wooden railroad running down to the
Penobscot, the last railroad we were to see. We crossed one tract, on
the bank of the river, of more than a hundred acres of heavy timber,
which had just been felled and burnt over, and was still smoking. Our
trail lay through the midst of it, and was well-nigh blotted out. The
trees lay at full length, four or five feet deep, and crossing each
other in all directions, all black as charcoal, but perfectly sound
within, still good for fuel or for timber; soon they would be cut into
lengths and burnt again. Here were thousands of cords, enough to keep
the poor of Boston and New York amply warm for a winter, which only
cumbered the ground and were in the settler’s way. And the whole of
that solid and interminable forest is doomed to be gradually devoured
thus by fire, like shavings, and no man be warmed by it. At Crocker’s
log-hut, at the mouth of Salmon River, seven miles from the Point, one
of the party commenced distributing a store of small, cent
picture-books among the children, to teach them to read, and also
newspapers, more or less recent, among the parents, than which nothing
can be more acceptable to a backwoods people. It was really an
important item in our outfit, and, at times, the only currency that
would circulate. I walked through Salmon River with my shoes on, it
being low water, but not without wetting my feet. A few miles farther
we came to “Marm Howard’s,” at the end of an extensive clearing, where
there were two or three log huts in sight at once, one on the opposite
side of the river, and a few graves even, surrounded by a wooden
paling, where already the rude forefathers of a hamlet lie, and a
thousand years hence, perchance, some poet will write his “Elegy in a
Country Churchyard.” The “Village Hampdens,” the “mute, inglorious
Miltons,” and Cromwells, “guiltless of” their “country’s blood,” were
yet unborn.

     “Perchance in this _wild_ spot _there will be_ laid
       Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
     Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed,
       Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.”

The next house was Fisk’s, ten miles from the Point at the mouth of
the East Branch, opposite to the island Nicketow, or the Forks, the
last of the Indian islands. I am particular to give the names of the
settlers and the distances, since every log hut in these woods is a
public house, and such information is of no little consequence to
those who may have occasion to travel this way. Our course here
crossed the Penobscot, and followed the southern bank. One of the
party, who entered the house in search of some one to set us over,
reported a very neat dwelling, with plenty of books, and a new wife,
just imported from Boston, wholly new to the woods. We found the East
Branch a large and rapid stream at its mouth and much deeper than it
appeared. Having with some difficulty discovered the trail again, we
kept up the south side of the West Branch, or main river, passing by
some rapids called Rock-Ebeeme, the roar of which we heard through the
woods, and, shortly after, in the thickest of the wood, some empty
loggers’ camps, still new, which were occupied the previous winter.
Though we saw a few more afterwards, I will make one account serve for
all. These were such houses as the lumberers of Maine spend the winter
in, in the wilderness. There were the camps and the hovels for the
cattle, hardly distinguishable, except that the latter had no chimney.
These camps were about twenty feet long by fifteen wide, built of
logs,--hemlock, cedar, spruce or yellow birch,--one kind alone, or all
together, with the bark on; two or three large ones first, one
directly above another, and notched together at the ends, to the
height of three or four feet, then of smaller logs resting upon
transverse ones at the ends, each of the last successively shorter
than the other, to form the roof. The chimney was an oblong square
hole in the middle, three or four feet in diameter, with a fence of
logs as high as the ridge. The interstices were filled with moss, and
the roof was shingled with long and handsome splints of cedar, or
spruce, or pine, rifted with a sledge and cleaver. The fireplace, the
most important place of all, was in shape and size like the chimney,
and directly under it, defined by a log fence or fender on the ground,
and a heap of ashes, a foot or two deep within, with solid benches of
split logs running round it. Here the fire usually melts the snow, and
dries the rain before it can descend to quench it. The faded beds of
arbor-vitæ leaves extended under the eaves on either hand. There was
the place for the water-pail, pork-barrel, and wash-basin, and
generally a dingy pack of cards left on a log. Usually a good deal of
whittling was expended on the latch, which was made of wood, in the
form of an iron one. These houses are made comfortable by the huge
fires, which can be afforded night and day. Usually the scenery about
them is drear and savage enough; and the loggers’ camp is as
completely in the woods as a fungus at the foot of a pine in a swamp;
no outlook but to the sky overhead; no more clearing than is made by
cutting down the trees of which it is built, and those which are
necessary for fuel. If only it be well sheltered and convenient to his
work, and near a spring, he wastes no thought on the prospect. They
are very proper forest houses, the stems of the trees collected
together and piled up around a man to keep out wind and rain,--made of
living green logs, hanging with moss and lichen, and with the curls
and fringes of the yellow birch bark, and dripping with resin, fresh
and moist, and redolent of swampy odors, with that sort of vigor and
perennialness even about them that toadstools suggest.[1] The
logger’s fare consists of tea, molasses, flour, pork (sometimes beef),
and beans. A great proportion of the beans raised in Massachusetts
find their market here. On expeditions it is only hard bread and pork,
often raw, slice upon slice, with tea or water, as the case may be.

The primitive wood is always and everywhere damp and mossy, so that I
traveled constantly with the impression that I was in a swamp; and
only when it was remarked that this or that tract, judging from the
quality of the timber on it, would make a profitable clearing, was I
reminded, that if the sun were let in it would make a dry field, like
the few I had seen, at once. The best shod for the most part travel
with wet feet. If the ground was so wet and spongy at this, the dryest
part of a dry season, what must it be in the spring? The woods
hereabouts abounded in beech and yellow birch, of which last there
were some very large specimens; also spruce, cedar, fir, and hemlock;
but we saw only the stumps of the white pine here, some of them of
great size, these having been already culled out, being the only tree
much sought after, even as low down as this. Only a little spruce and
hemlock beside had been logged here. The Eastern wood which is sold
for fuel in Massachusetts all comes from below Bangor. It was the
pine alone, chiefly the white pine, that had tempted any but the
hunter to precede us on this route.

Waite’s farm, thirteen miles from the Point, is an extensive and
elevated clearing, from which we got a fine view of the river,
rippling and gleaming far beneath us. My companions had formerly had a
good view of Ktaadn and the other mountains here, but to-day it was so
smoky that we could see nothing of them. We could overlook an immense
country of uninterrupted forest, stretching away up the East Branch
toward Canada on the north and northwest, and toward the Aroostook
valley on the northeast; and imagine what wild life was stirring in
its midst. Here was quite a field of corn for this region, whose
peculiar dry scent we perceived a third of a mile off, before we saw
it.

Eighteen miles from the Point brought us in sight of McCauslin’s, or
“Uncle George’s,” as he was familiarly called by my companions, to
whom he was well known, where we intended to break our long fast. His
house was in the midst of an extensive clearing or intervale, at the
mouth of the Little Schoodic River, on the opposite or north bank of
the Penobscot. So we collected on a point of the shore, that we might
be seen, and fired our gun as a signal, which brought out his dogs
forthwith, and thereafter their master, who in due time took us across
in his batteau. This clearing was bounded abruptly, on all sides but
the river, by the naked stems of the forest, as if you were to cut
only a few feet square in the midst of a thousand acres of mowing, and
set down a thimble therein. He had a whole heaven and horizon to
himself, and the sun seemed to be journeying over his clearing only
the livelong day. Here we concluded to spend the night, and wait for
the Indians, as there was no stopping-place so convenient above. He
had seen no Indians pass, and this did not often happen without his
knowledge. He thought that his dogs sometimes gave notice of the
approach of Indians half an hour before they arrived.

McCauslin was a Kennebec man, of Scotch descent, who had been a
waterman twenty-two years, and had driven on the lakes and headwaters
of the Penobscot five or six springs in succession, but was now
settled here to raise supplies for the lumberers and for himself. He
entertained us a day or two with true Scotch hospitality, and would
accept no recompense for it. A man of a dry wit and shrewdness, and a
general intelligence which I had not looked for in the back woods. In
fact, the deeper you penetrate into the woods, the more intelligent,
and, in one sense, less countrified do you find the inhabitants; for
always the pioneer has been a traveler, and, to some extent, a man of
the world; and, as the distances with which he is familiar are
greater, so is his information more general and far reaching than the
villager’s. If I were to look for a narrow, uninformed, and
countrified mind, as opposed to the intelligence and refinement which
are thought to emanate from cities, it would be among the rusty
inhabitants of an old-settled country, on farms all run out and gone
to seed with life-everlasting, in the towns about Boston, even on the
high-road in Concord, and not in the back woods of Maine.

Supper was got before our eyes in the ample kitchen, by a fire which
would have roasted an ox; many whole logs, four feet long, were
consumed to boil our tea-kettle,--birch, or beech, or maple, the same
summer and winter; and the dishes were soon smoking on the table, late
the arm-chair, against the wall, from which one of the party was
expelled. The arms of the chair formed the frame on which the table
rested; and, when the round top was turned up against the wall, it
formed the back of the chair, and was no more in the way than the wall
itself. This, we noticed, was the prevailing fashion in these log
houses, in order to economize in room. There were piping-hot wheaten
cakes, the flour having been brought up the river in batteaux,--no
Indian bread, for the upper part of Maine, it will be remembered, is a
wheat country,--and ham, eggs, and potatoes, and milk and cheese, the
produce of the farm; and also shad and salmon, tea sweetened with
molasses, and sweet cakes, in contradistinction to the hot cakes not
sweetened, the one white, the other yellow, to wind up with. Such we
found was the prevailing fare, ordinary and extraordinary, along this
river. Mountain cranberries (_Vaccinium Vitis-Idæa_), stewed and
sweetened, were the common dessert. Everything here was in profusion,
and the best of its kind. Butter was in such plenty that it was
commonly used, before it was salted, to grease boots with.

In the night we were entertained by the sound of rain-drops on the
cedar splints which covered the roof, and awaked the next morning with
a drop or two in our eyes. It had set in for a storm, and we made up
our minds not to forsake such comfortable quarters with this prospect,
but wait for Indians and fair weather. It rained and drizzled and
gleamed by turns, the livelong day. What we did there, how we killed
the time would perhaps be idle to tell; how many times we buttered our
boots, and how often a drowsy one was seen to sidle off to the
bedroom. When it held up, I strolled up and down the bank, and
gathered the harebell and cedar berries, which grew there; or else we
tried by turns the long-handled axe on the logs before the door. The
axe-helves here were made to chop standing on the log,--a primitive
log of course,--and were, therefore, nearly a foot longer than with
us. One while we walked over the farm and visited his well-filled
barns with McCauslin. There were one other man and two women only
here. He kept horses, cows, oxen, and sheep. I think he said that he
was the first to bring a plow and a cow so far; and he might have
added the last, with only two exceptions. The potato-rot had found him
out here, too, the previous year, and got half or two thirds of his
crop, though the seed was of his own raising. Oats, grass, and
potatoes were his staples; but he raised, also, a few carrots and
turnips, and “a little corn for the hens,” for this was all that he
dared risk, for fear that it would not ripen. Melons, squashes, sweet
corn, beans, tomatoes, and many other vegetables, could not be ripened
there.

The very few settlers along this stream were obviously tempted by the
cheapness of the land mainly. When I asked McCauslin why more settlers
did not come in, he answered, that one reason was, they could not buy
the land, it belonged to individuals or companies who were afraid that
their wild lands would be settled, and so incorporated into towns, and
they be taxed for them; but to settling on the State’s land there was
no such hindrance. For his own part, he wanted no neighbors,--he
didn’t wish to see any road by his house. Neighbors, even the best,
were a trouble and expense, especially on the score of cattle and
fences. They might live across the river, perhaps, but not on the same
side.

The chickens here were protected by the dogs. As McCauslin said, “The
old one took it up first, and she taught the pup, and now they had got
it into their heads that it wouldn’t do to have anything of the bird
kind on the premises.” A hawk hovering over was not allowed to alight,
but barked off by the dogs circling underneath; and a pigeon, or a
“yellow-hammer,” as they called the pigeon woodpecker, on a dead limb
or stump, was instantly expelled. It was the main business of their
day, and kept them constantly coming and going. One would rush out of
the house on the least alarm given by the other.

When it rained hardest, we returned to the house, and took down a
tract from the shelf. There was the “Wandering Jew,” cheap edition,
and fine print, the “Criminal Calendar,” and “Parish’s Geography,” and
flash novels two or three. Under the pressure of circumstances, we
read a little in these. With such aid, the press is not so feeble an
engine, after all. This house, which was a fair specimen of those on
this river, was built of huge logs, which peeped out everywhere, and
were chinked with clay and moss. It contained four or five rooms.
There were no sawed boards, or shingles, or clapboards, about it; and
scarcely any tool but the axe had been used in its construction. The
partitions were made of long clapboard-like splints, of spruce or
cedar, turned to a delicate salmon-color by the smoke. The roof and
sides were covered with the same, instead of shingles and clapboards,
and some of a much thicker and larger size were used for the floor.
These were all so straight and smooth, that they answered the purpose
admirably, and a careless observer would not have suspected that they
were not sawed and planed. The chimney and hearth were of vast size,
and made of stone. The broom was a few twigs of arbor-vitæ tied to a
stick; and a pole was suspended over the hearth, close to the ceiling,
to dry stockings and clothes on. I noticed that the floor was full of
small, dingy holes, as if made with a gimlet, but which were, in fact,
made by the spikes, nearly an inch long, which the lumberers wear in
their boots to prevent their slipping on wet logs. Just above
McCauslin’s, there is a rocky rapid, where logs jam in the spring; and
many “drivers” are there collected, who frequent his house for
supplies; these were their tracks which I saw.

At sundown McCauslin pointed away over the forest, across the river,
to signs of fair weather amid the clouds,--some evening redness there.
For even there the points of compass held; and there was a quarter of
the heavens appropriated to sunrise and another to sunset.

The next morning, the weather proving fair enough for our purpose, we
prepared to start, and, the Indians having failed us, persuaded
McCauslin, who was not unwilling to revisit the scenes of his driving,
to accompany us in their stead, intending to engage one other boatman
on the way. A strip of cotton cloth for a tent, a couple of blankets,
which would suffice for the whole party, fifteen pounds of hard bread,
ten pounds of “clear” pork, and a little tea, made up “Uncle George’s”
pack. The last three articles were calculated to be provision enough
for six men for a week, with what we might pick up. A tea-kettle, a
frying-pan, and an axe, to be obtained at the last house, would
complete our outfit.

We were soon out of McCauslin’s clearing, and in the evergreen woods
again. The obscure trail made by the two settlers above, which even
the woodman is sometimes puzzled to discern, ere long crossed a
narrow, open strip in the woods overrun with weeds, called the Burnt
Land, where a fire had raged formerly, stretching northward nine or
ten miles, to Millinocket Lake. At the end of three miles, we reached
Shad Pond, or Noliseemack, an expansion of the river. Hodge, the
Assistant State Geologist, who passed through this on the 25th of
June, 1837, says, “We pushed our boat through an acre or more of
buck-beans, which had taken root at the bottom, and bloomed above the
surface in the greatest profusion and beauty.” Thomas Fowler’s house
is four miles from McCauslin’s, on the shore of the pond, at the mouth
of the Millinocket River, and eight miles from the lake of the same
name, on the latter stream. This lake affords a more direct course to
Ktaadn, but we preferred to follow the Penobscot and the Pamadumcook
lakes. Fowler was just completing a new log hut, and was sawing out a
window through the logs, nearly two feet thick, when we arrived. He
had begun to paper his house with spruce bark, turned inside out,
which had a good effect, and was in keeping with the circumstances.
Instead of water we got here a draught of beer, which, it was allowed,
would be better; clear and thin, but strong and stringent as the cedar
sap. It was as if we sucked at the very teats of Nature’s pine-clad
bosom in these parts,--the sap of all Millinocket botany
commingled,--the topmost, most fantastic, and spiciest sprays of the
primitive wood, and whatever invigorating and stringent gum or essence
it afforded steeped and dissolved in it,--a lumberer’s drink, which
would acclimate and naturalize a man at once,--which would make him
see green, and, if he slept, dream that he heard the wind sough among
the pines. Here was a fife, praying to be played on, through which we
breathed a few tuneful strains,--brought hither to tame wild beasts.
As we stood upon the pile of chips by the door, fish hawks were
sailing overhead; and here, over Shad Pond, might daily be witnessed
the tyranny of the bald eagle over that bird. Tom pointed away over
the lake to a bald eagle’s nest, which was plainly visible more than a
mile off, on a pine, high above the surrounding forest, and was
frequented from year to year by the same pair, and held sacred by him.
There were these two houses only there, his low hut and the eagles’
airy cart-load of fagots. Thomas Fowler, too, was persuaded to join
us, for two men were necessary to manage the batteau, which was soon
to be our carriage, and these men needed to be cool and skillful for
the navigation of the Penobscot. Tom’s pack was soon made, for he had
not far to look for his waterman’s boots, and a red flannel shirt.
This is the favorite color with lumbermen; and red flannel is reputed
to possess some mysterious virtues, to be most healthful and
convenient in respect to perspiration. In every gang there will be a
large proportion of red birds. We took here a poor and leaky batteau,
and began to pole up the Millinocket two miles, to the elder Fowler’s,
in order to avoid the Grand Falls of the Penobscot, intending to
exchange our batteau there for a better. The Millinocket is a small,
shallow, and sandy stream, full of what I took to be lamprey-eels’ or
suckers’ nests, and lined with musquash-cabins, but free from rapids,
according to Fowler, excepting at its outlet from the lake. He was at
this time engaged in cutting the native grass--rush-grass and
meadow-clover, as he called it--on the meadows and small, low islands
of this stream. We noticed flattened places in the grass on either
side, where, he said, a moose had laid down the night before, adding,
that there were thousands in these meadows.

Old Fowler’s, on the Millinocket, six miles from McCauslin’s, and
twenty-four from the Point, is the last house. Gibson’s, on the
Sowadnehunk, is the only clearing above, but that had proved a
failure, and was long since deserted. Fowler is the oldest inhabitant
of these woods. He formerly lived a few miles from here, on the south
side of the West Branch, where he built his house sixteen years ago,
the first house built above the Five Islands. Here our new batteau was
to be carried over the first portage of two miles, round the Grand
Falls of the Penobscot, on a horse-sled made of saplings, to jump the
numerous rocks in the way; but we had to wait a couple of hours for
them to catch the horses, which were pastured at a distance, amid the
stumps, and had wandered still farther off. The last of the salmon for
this season had just been caught, and were still fresh in pickle, from
which enough was extracted to fill our empty kettle, and so graduate
our introduction to simpler forest fare. The week before they had lost
nine sheep here out of their first flock, by the wolves. The surviving
sheep came round the house, and seemed frightened, which induced them
to go and look for the rest, when they found seven dead and lacerated,
and two still alive. These last they carried to the house, and, as
Mrs. Fowler said, they were merely scratched in the throat, and had no
more visible wound than would be produced by the prick of a pin. She
sheared off the wool from their throats, and washed them, and put on
some salve, and turned them out, but in a few moments they were
missing, and had not been found since. In fact, they were all
poisoned, and those that were found swelled up at once, so that they
saved neither skin nor wool. This realized the old fables of the
wolves and the sheep, and convinced me that that ancient hostility
still existed. Verily, the shepherd-boy did not need to sound a false
alarm this time. There were steel traps by the door, of various sizes,
for wolves, otter, and bears, with large claws instead of teeth, to
catch in their sinews. Wolves are frequently killed with poisoned
bait.

At length, after we had dined here on the usual backwoods fare, the
horses arrived, and we hauled our batteau out of the water, and lashed
it to its wicker carriage, and, throwing in our packs, walked on
before, leaving the boatmen and driver, who was Tom’s brother, to
manage the concern. The route, which led through the wild pasture
where the sheep were killed, was in some places the roughest ever
traveled by horses, over rocky hills, where the sled bounced and slid
along, like a vessel pitching in a storm; and one man was as necessary
to stand at the stern, to prevent the boat from being wrecked, as a
helmsman in the roughest sea. The philosophy of our progress was
something like this: when the runners struck a rock three or four feet
high, the sled bounced back and upwards at the same time; but, as the
horses never ceased pulling, it came down on the top of the rock, and
so we got over. This portage probably followed the trail of an ancient
Indian carry round these falls. By two o’clock we, who had walked on
before, reached the river above the falls, not far from the outlet of
Quakish Lake, and waited for the batteau to come up. We had been here
but a short time, when a thunder-shower was seen coming up from the
west, over the still invisible lakes, and that pleasant wilderness
which we were so eager to become acquainted with; and soon the heavy
drops began to patter on the leaves around us. I had just selected the
prostrate trunk of a huge pine, five or six feet in diameter, and was
crawling under it, when, luckily, the boat arrived. It would have
amused a sheltered man to witness the manner in which it was unlashed,
and whirled over, while the first waterspout burst upon us. It was no
sooner in the hands of the eager company than it was abandoned to the
first revolutionary impulse, and to gravity, to adjust it; and they
might have been seen all stooping to its shelter, and wriggling under
like so many eels, before it was fairly deposited on the ground. When
all were under, we propped up the lee side, and busied ourselves there
whittling thole-pins for rowing, when we should reach the lakes; and
made the woods ring, between the claps of thunder, with such
boat-songs as we could remember. The horses stood sleek and shining
with the rain, all drooping and crestfallen, while deluge after deluge
washed over us; but the bottom of a boat may be relied on for a tight
roof. At length, after two hours’ delay at this place, a streak of
fair weather appeared in the northwest, whither our course now lay,
promising a serene evening for our voyage; and the driver returned
with his horses, while we made haste to launch our boat, and commence
our voyage in good earnest.

There were six of us, including the two boatmen. With our packs heaped
up near the bows, and ourselves disposed as baggage to trim the boat,
with instructions not to move in case we should strike a rock, more
than so many barrels of pork, we pushed out into the first rapid, a
slight specimen of the stream we had to navigate. With Uncle George in
the stern, and Tom in the bows, each using a spruce pole about twelve
feet long, pointed with iron,[2] and poling on the same side, we shot
up the rapids like a salmon, the water rushing and roaring around, so
that only a practiced eye could distinguish a safe course, or tell
what was deep water and what rocks, frequently grazing the latter on
one or both sides, with a hundred as narrow escapes as ever the Argo
had in passing through the Symplegades. I, who had had some experience
in boating, had never experienced any half so exhilarating before. We
were lucky to have exchanged our Indians, whom we did not know, for
these men, who, together with Tom’s brother, were reputed the best
boatmen on the river, and were at once indispensable pilots and
pleasant companions. The canoe is smaller, more easily upset, and
sooner worn out; and the Indian is said not to be so skillful in the
management of the batteau. He is, for the most part, less to be relied
on, and more disposed to sulks and whims. The utmost familiarity with
dead streams, or with the ocean, would not prepare a man for this
peculiar navigation; and the most skillful boatman anywhere else would
here be obliged to take out his boat and carry round a hundred times,
still with great risk, as well as delay, where the practiced
batteau-man poles up with comparative ease and safety. The hardy
“voyageur” pushes with incredible perseverance and success quite up to
the foot of the falls, and then only carries round some perpendicular
ledge, and launches again in

     “The torrent’s smoothness, ere it dash below,”

to struggle with the boiling rapids above. The Indians say that the
river once ran both ways, one half up and the other down, but that,
since the white man came, it all runs down, and now they must
laboriously pole their canoes against the stream, and carry them over
numerous portages. In the summer, all stores--the grindstone and the
plow of the pioneer, flour, pork, and utensils for the explorer--must
be conveyed up the river in batteaux; and many a cargo and many a
boatman is lost in these waters. In the winter, however, which is very
equable and long, the ice is the great highway, and the loggers’ team
penetrates to Chesuncook Lake, and still higher up, even two hundred
miles above Bangor. Imagine the solitary sled-track running far up
into the snowy and evergreen wilderness, hemmed in closely for a
hundred miles by the forest, and again stretching straight across the
broad surfaces of concealed lakes!

We were soon in the smooth water of the Quakish Lake, and took our
turns at rowing and paddling across it. It is a small, irregular, but
handsome lake, shut in on all sides by the forest, and showing no
traces of man but some low boom in a distant cove, reserved for spring
use. The spruce and cedar on its shores, hung with gray lichens,
looked at a distance like the ghosts of trees. Ducks were sailing here
and there on its surface, and a solitary loon, like a more living
wave,--a vital spot on the lake’s surface,--laughed and frolicked, and
showed its straight leg, for our amusement. Joe Merry Mountain
appeared in the northwest, as if it were looking down on this lake
especially; and we had our first, but a partial view of Ktaadn, its
summit veiled in clouds, like a dark isthmus in that quarter,
connecting the heavens with the earth. After two miles of smooth
rowing across this lake, we found ourselves in the river again, which
was a continuous rapid for one mile, to the dam, requiring all the
strength and skill of our boatmen to pole up it.

This dam is a quite important and expensive work for this country,
whither cattle and horses cannot penetrate in the summer, raising the
whole river ten feet, and flooding, as they said, some sixty square
miles by means of the innumerable lakes with which the river connects.
It is a lofty and solid structure, with sloping piers, some distance
above, made of frames of logs filled with stones, to break the ice.[3]
Here every log pays toll as it passes through the sluices.

We filed into the rude loggers’ camp at this place, such as I have
described, without ceremony, and the cook, at that moment the sole
occupant, at once set about preparing tea for his visitors. His
fireplace, which the rain had converted into a mud-puddle, was soon
blazing again, and we sat down on the log benches around it to dry us.
On the well-flattened and somewhat faded beds of arbor-vitæ leaves,
which stretched on either hand under the eaves behind us, lay an odd
leaf of the Bible, some genealogical chapter out of the Old Testament;
and, half buried by the leaves, we found Emerson’s Address on West
India Emancipation, which had been left here formerly by one of our
company, and _had made two converts to the Liberty party_ here, as I
was told; also, an odd number of the _Westminster Review_, for 1834,
and a pamphlet entitled “History of the Erection of the Monument on
the Grave of Myron Holly.” This was the readable or reading matter in
a lumberer’s camp in the Maine woods, thirty miles from a road, which
would be given up to the bears in a fortnight. These things were well
thumbed and soiled. This gang was headed by one John Morrison, a good
specimen of a Yankee; and was necessarily composed of men not bred to
the business of dam-building, but who were jacks-at-all-trades, handy
with the axe, and other simple implements, and well skilled in wood
and water craft. We had hot cakes for our supper even here, white as
snowballs, but without butter, and the never-failing sweet cakes, with
which we filled our pockets, foreseeing that we should not soon meet
with the like again. Such delicate puffballs seemed a singular diet
for backwoodsmen. There was also tea without milk, sweetened with
molasses. And so, exchanging a word with John Morrison and his gang
when we had returned to the shore, and also exchanging our batteau for
a better still, we made haste to improve the little daylight that
remained. This camp, exactly twenty-nine miles from Mattawamkeag Point
by the way we had come, and about one hundred from Bangor by the
river, was the last human habitation of any kind in this direction.
Beyond, there was no trail, and the river and lakes, by batteaux and
canoes, was considered the only practicable route. We were about
thirty miles by the river from the summit of Ktaadn, which was in
sight, though not more than twenty, perhaps, in a straight line.

It being about the full of the moon, and a warm and pleasant evening,
we decided to row five miles by moonlight to the head of the North
Twin Lake, lest the wind should rise on the morrow. After one mile of
river, or what the boatmen call “thoroughfare,”--for the river becomes
at length only the connecting link between the lakes,--and some slight
rapid which had been mostly made smooth water by the dam, we entered
the North Twin Lake just after sundown, and steered across for the
river “thoroughfare,” four miles distant. This is a noble sheet of
water, where one may get the impression which a new country and a
“lake of the woods” are fitted to create. There was the smoke of no
log hut nor camp of any kind to greet us, still less was any lover of
nature or musing traveler watching our batteau from the distant hills;
not even the Indian hunter was there, for he rarely climbs them, but
hugs the river like ourselves. No face welcomed us but the fine
fantastic sprays of free and happy evergreen trees, waving one above
another in their ancient home. At first the red clouds hung over the
western shore as gorgeously as if over a city, and the lake lay open
to the light with even a civilized aspect, as if expecting trade and
commerce, and towns and villas. We could distinguish the inlet to the
South Twin, which is said to be the larger, where the shore was misty
and blue, and it was worth the while to look thus through a narrow
opening across the entire expanse of a concealed lake to its own yet
more dim and distant shore. The shores rose gently to ranges of low
hills covered with forests; and though, in fact, the most valuable
white-pine timber, even about this lake, had been culled out, this
would never have been suspected by the voyager. The impression, which
indeed corresponded with the fact, was, as if we were upon a high
table-land between the States and Canada, the northern side of which
is drained by the St. John and Chaudière, the southern by the
Penobscot and Kennebec. There was no bold, mountainous shore, as we
might have expected, but only isolated hills and mountains rising here
and there from the plateau. The country is an archipelago of
lakes,--the lake-country of New England. Their levels vary but a few
feet, and the boatmen, by short portages, or by none at all, pass
easily from one to another. They say that at very high water the
Penobscot and the Kennebec flow into each other, or at any rate, that
you may lie with your face in the one and your toes in the other. Even
the Penobscot and St. John have been connected by a canal, so that the
lumber of the Allegash, instead of going down the St. John, comes down
the Penobscot; and the Indian’s tradition, that the Penobscot once ran
both ways for his convenience, is, in one sense, partially realized
to-day.

None of our party but McCauslin had been above this lake, so we
trusted to him to pilot us, and we could not but confess the
importance of a pilot on these waters. While it is river, you will not
easily forget which way is up-stream; but when you enter a lake, the
river is completely lost, and you scan the distant shores in vain to
find where it comes in. A stranger is, for the time at least, lost,
and must set about a voyage of discovery first of all to find the
river. To follow the windings of the shore when the lake is ten miles,
or even more, in length, and of an irregularity which will not soon
be mapped, is a wearisome voyage, and will spend his time and his
provisions. They tell a story of a gang of experienced woodmen sent to
a location on this stream, who were thus lost in the wilderness of
lakes. They cut their way through thickets, and carried their baggage
and their boats over from lake to lake, sometimes several miles. They
carried into Millinocket Lake, which is on another stream, and is ten
miles square, and contains a hundred islands. They explored its shores
thoroughly, and then carried into another, and another, and it was a
week of toil and anxiety before they found the Penobscot River again,
and then their provisions were exhausted, and they were obliged to
return.

While Uncle George steered for a small island near the head of the
lake, now just visible, like a speck on the water, we rowed by turns
swiftly over its surface, singing such boat songs as we could
remember. The shores seemed at an indefinite distance in the
moonlight. Occasionally we paused in our singing and rested on our
oars, while we listened to hear if the wolves howled, for this is a
common serenade, and my companions affirmed that it was the most
dismal and unearthly of sounds; but we heard none this time. If we did
not _hear_, however, we did _listen_, not without a reasonable
expectation; that at least I have to tell,--only some utterly
uncivilized, big-throated owl hooted loud and dismally in the drear
and boughy wilderness, plainly not nervous about his solitary life,
nor afraid to hear the echoes of his voice there. We remembered also
that possibly moose were silently watching us from the distant coves,
or some surly bear or timid caribou had been startled by our singing.
It was with new emphasis that we sang there the Canadian boat song,--

     “Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,
     The rapids are near and the daylight’s past!”

which describes precisely our own adventure, and was inspired by the
experience of a similar kind of life,--for the rapids were ever near,
and the daylight long past; the woods on shore looked dim, and many an
Utawas’ tide here emptied into the lake.

     “Why should we yet our sail unfurl?
     There is not a breath the blue wave to curl!
     But, when the wind blows off the shore,
     Oh, sweetly we’ll rest our weary oar.”

     “Utawas’ tide! this trembling moon
     Shall see us float o’er thy surges soon.”

At last we glided past the “green isle,” which had been our landmark,
all joining in the chorus; as if by the watery links of rivers and of
lakes we were about to float over unmeasured zones of earth, bound on
unimaginable adventures,--

     “Saint of this green isle! hear our prayers,
     Oh, grant us cool heavens and favoring airs!”

About nine o’clock we reached the river, and ran our boat into a
natural haven between some rocks, and drew her out on the sand. This
camping-ground McCauslin had been familiar with in his lumbering days,
and he now struck it unerringly in the moonlight, and we heard the
sound of the rill which would supply us with cool water emptying into
the lake. The first business was to make a fire, an operation which
was a little delayed by the wetness of the fuel and the ground, owing
to the heavy showers of the afternoon. The fire is the main comfort of
the camp, whether in summer or winter, and is about as ample at one
season as at another. It is as well for cheerfulness as for warmth and
dryness. It forms one side of the camp; one bright side at any rate.
Some were dispersed to fetch in dead trees and boughs, while Uncle
George felled the birches and beeches which stood convenient, and soon
we had a fire some ten feet long by three or four high, which rapidly
dried the sand before it. This was calculated to burn all night. We
next proceeded to pitch our tent; which operation was performed by
sticking our two spike-poles into the ground in a slanting direction,
about ten feet apart, for rafters, and then drawing our cotton cloth
over them, and tying it down at the ends, leaving it open in front,
shed-fashion. But this evening the wind carried the sparks on to the
tent and burned it. So we hastily drew up the batteau just within the
edge of the woods before the fire, and propping up one side three or
four feet high, spread the tent on the ground to lie on; and with the
corner of a blanket, or what more or less we could get to put over us,
lay down with our heads and bodies under the boat, and our feet and
legs on the sand toward the fire. At first we lay awake, talking of
our course, and finding ourselves in so convenient a posture for
studying the heavens, with the moon and stars shining in our faces,
our conversation naturally turned upon astronomy, and we recounted by
turns the most interesting discoveries in that science. But at length
we composed ourselves seriously to sleep. It was interesting, when
awakened at midnight, to watch the grotesque and fiend-like forms and
motions of some one of the party, who, not being able to sleep, had
got up silently to arouse the fire, and add fresh fuel, for a change;
now stealthily lugging a dead tree from out the dark, and heaving it
on, now stirring up the embers with his fork, or tiptoeing about to
observe the stars, watched, perchance, by half the prostrate party in
breathless silence; so much the more intense because they were awake,
while each supposed his neighbor sound asleep. Thus aroused, I, too,
brought fresh fuel to the fire, and then rambled along the sandy shore
in the moonlight, hoping to meet a moose come down to drink, or else a
wolf. The little rill tinkled the louder, and peopled all the
wilderness for me; and the glassy smoothness of the sleeping lake,
laving the shores of a new world, with the dark, fantastic rocks
rising here and there from its surface, made a scene not easily
described. It has left such an impression of stern, yet gentle,
wildness on my memory as will not soon be effaced. Not far from
midnight we were one after another awakened by rain falling on our
extremities; and as each was made aware of the fact by cold or wet, he
drew a long sigh and then drew up his legs, until gradually we had all
sidled round from lying at right angles with the boat, till our bodies
formed an acute angle with it, and were wholly protected. When next we
awoke, the moon and stars were shining again, and there were signs of
dawn in the east. I have been thus particular in order to convey some
idea of a night in the woods.

We had soon launched and loaded our boat, and, leaving our fire
blazing, were off again before breakfast. The lumberers rarely trouble
themselves to put out their fires, such is the dampness of the
primitive forest; and this is one cause, no doubt, of the frequent
fires in Maine, of which we hear so much on smoky days in
Massachusetts. The forests are held cheap after the white pine has
been culled out; and the explorers and hunters pray for rain only to
clear the atmosphere of smoke. The woods were so wet to-day, however,
that there was no danger of our fire spreading. After poling up half a
mile of river, or thoroughfare, we rowed a mile across the foot of
Pamadumcook Lake, which is the name given on the map to this whole
chain of lakes, as if there was but one, though they are, in each
instance, distinctly separated by a reach of the river, with its
narrow and rocky channel and its rapids. This lake, which is one of
the largest, stretched northwest ten miles, to hills and mountains in
the distance. McCauslin pointed to some distant, and as yet
inaccessible, forests of white pine, on the sides of a mountain in
that direction. The Joe Merry Lakes, which lay between us and
Moosehead, on the west, were recently, if they are not still,
“surrounded by some of the best timbered land in the State.” By
another thoroughfare we passed into Deep Cove, a part of the same
lake, which makes up two miles, toward the northeast, and rowing two
miles across this, by another short thoroughfare, entered Ambejijis
Lake.

At the entrance to a lake we sometimes observed what is technically
called “fencing-stuff,” or the unhewn timbers of which booms are
formed, either secured together in the water, or laid up on the rocks
and lashed to trees, for spring use. But it was always startling to
discover so plain a trail of civilized man there. I remember that I
was strangely affected, when we were returning, by the sight of a
ring-bolt well drilled into a rock, and fastened with lead, at the
head of this solitary Ambejijis Lake.

It was easy to see that driving logs must be an exciting as well as
arduous and dangerous business. All winter long the logger goes on
piling up the trees which he has trimmed and hauled in some dry ravine
at the head of a stream, and then in the spring he stands on the bank
and whistles for Rain and Thaw, ready to wring the perspiration out of
his shirt to swell the tide, till suddenly, with a whoop and halloo
from him, shutting his eyes, as if to bid farewell to the existing
state of things, a fair proportion of his winter’s work goes
scrambling down the country, followed by his faithful dogs, Thaw and
Rain and Freshet and Wind, the whole pack in full cry, toward the
Orono Mills. Every log is marked with the owner’s name, cut in the
sapwood with an axe or bored with an auger, so deep as not to be worn
off in the driving, and yet not so as to injure the timber; and it
requires considerable ingenuity to invent new and simple marks where
there are so many owners. They have quite an alphabet of their own,
which only the practiced can read. One of my companions read off from
his memorandum book some marks of his own logs, among which there were
crosses, belts, crow’s feet, girdles, etc., as, “Y--girdle--crowfoot,”
and various other devices. When the logs have run the gauntlet of
innumerable rapids and falls, each on its own account, with more or
less jamming and bruising, those bearing various owners’ marks being
mixed up together,--since all must take advantage of the same
freshet,--they are collected together at the heads of the lakes, and
surrounded by a boom fence of floating logs, to prevent their being
dispersed by the wind, and are thus towed all together, like a flock
of sheep, across the lake, where there is no current, by a windlass,
or boom-head, such as we sometimes saw standing on an island or
headland, and, if circumstances permit, with the aid of sails and
oars. Sometimes, notwithstanding, the logs are dispersed over many
miles of lake surface in a few hours by winds and freshets, and thrown
up on distant shores, where the driver can pick up only one or two at
a time, and return with them to the thoroughfare; and before he gets
his flock well through Ambejijis or Pamadumcook, he makes many a wet
and uncomfortable camp on the shore. He must be able to navigate a log
as if it were a canoe, and be as indifferent to cold and wet as a
muskrat. He uses a few efficient tools,--a lever commonly of rock
maple, six or seven feet long, with a stout spike in it, strongly
ferruled on, and a long spike-pole, with a screw at the end of the
spike to make it hold. The boys along shore learn to walk on floating
logs as city boys on sidewalks. Sometimes the logs are thrown up on
rocks in such positions as to be irrecoverable but by another freshet
as high, or they jam together at rapids and falls, and accumulate in
vast piles, which the driver must start at the risk of his life. Such
is the lumber business, which depends on many accidents, as the early
freezing of the rivers, that the teams may get up in season, a
sufficient freshet in the spring, to fetch the logs down, and many
others.[4] I quote Michaux on Lumbering on the Kennebec, then the
source of the best white pine lumber carried to England. “The persons
engaged in this branch of industry are generally emigrants from New
Hampshire.... In the summer they unite in small companies, and
traverse these vast solitudes in every direction, to ascertain the
places in which the pines abound. After cutting the grass and
converting it into hay for the nourishment of the cattle to be
employed in their labor, they return home. In the beginning of the
winter they enter the forests again, establish themselves in huts
covered with the bark of the canoe-birch, or the arbor-vitæ; and,
though the cold is so intense that the mercury sometimes remains for
several weeks from 40° to 50° [Fahr.] below the point of congelation,
they persevere, with unabated courage, in their work.” According to
Springer, the company consists of choppers, swampers,--who make
roads,--barker and loader, teamster, and cook. “When the trees are
felled, they cut them into logs from fourteen to eighteen feet long,
and, by means of their cattle, which they employ with great dexterity,
drag them to the river, and, after stamping on them a mark of
property, roll them on its frozen bosom. At the breaking of the ice,
in the spring, they float down with the current.... The logs that are
not drawn the first year,” adds Michaux, “are attacked by large worms,
which form holes about two lines in diameter, in every direction; but,
if stripped of their bark, they will remain uninjured for thirty
years.”

Ambejijis, this quiet Sunday morning, struck me as the most beautiful
lake we had seen. It is said to be one of the deepest. We had the
fairest view of Joe Merry, Double Top, and Ktaadn, from its surface.
The summit of the latter had a singularly flat, table-land appearance,
like a short highway, where a demigod might be let down to take a turn
or two in an afternoon, to settle his dinner. We rowed a mile and a
half to near the head of the lake, and, pushing through a field of
lily-pads, landed, to cook our breakfast, by the side of a large rock,
known to McCauslin. Our breakfast consisted of tea, with hard-bread
and pork, and fried salmon, which we ate with forks neatly whittled
from alder twigs, which grew there, off strips of birch-bark for
plates. The tea was black tea, without milk to color or sugar to
sweeten it, and two tin dippers were our tea cups. This beverage is as
indispensable to the loggers as to any gossiping old women in the
land, and they, no doubt, derive great comfort from it. Here was the
site of an old logger’s camp, remembered by McCauslin, now overgrown
with weeds and bushes. In the midst of a dense underwood we noticed a
whole brick, on a rock, in a small run, clean and red and square as in
a brick-yard, which had been brought thus far formerly for tamping.
Some of us afterward regretted that we had not carried this on with us
to the top of the mountain, to be left there for our mark. It would
certainly have been a simple evidence of civilized man. McCauslin said
that large wooden crosses, made of oak, still sound, were sometimes
found standing in this wilderness, which were set up by the first
Catholic missionaries who came through to the Kennebec.

In the next nine miles, which were the extent of our voyage, and which
it took us the rest of the day to get over, we rowed across several
small lakes, poled up numerous rapids and thoroughfares, and carried
over four portages. I will give the names and distances, for the
benefit of future tourists. First, after leaving Ambejijis Lake, we
had a quarter of a mile of rapids to the portage, or carry of ninety
rods around Ambejijis Falls; then a mile and a half through Passamagamet
Lake, which is narrow and river-like, to the falls of the same
name,--Ambejijis stream coming in on the right; then two miles through
Katepskonegan Lake to the portage of ninety rods around Katepskonegan
Falls, which name signifies “carrying-place,”--Passamagamet stream
coming in on the left; then three miles through Pockwockomus Lake, a
slight expansion of the river, to the portage of forty rods around the
falls of the same name,--Katepskonegan stream coming in on the left;
then three quarters of a mile through Aboljacarmegus Lake, similar to
the last, to the portage of forty rods around the falls of the same
name; then half a mile of rapid water to the Sowadnehunk deadwater,
and the Aboljacknagesic stream.

This is generally the order of names as you ascend the river: First,
the lake, or, if there is no expansion, the deadwater; then the falls;
then the stream emptying into the lake, or river above, all of the
same name. First we came to Passamagamet Lake, then to Passamagamet
Falls, then to Passamagamet Stream, emptying in. This order and
identity of names, it will be perceived, is quite philosophical, since
the deadwater or lake is always at least partially produced by the
stream emptying in above; and the first fall below, which is the
outlet of that lake, and where that tributary water makes its first
plunge, also naturally bears the same name.

At the portage around Ambejijis Falls I observed a pork-barrel on the
shore, with a hole eight or nine inches square cut in one side, which
was set against an upright rock; but the bears, without turning or
upsetting the barrel, had gnawed a hole in the opposite side, which
looked exactly like an enormous rat-hole, big enough to put their
heads in; and at the bottom of the barrel were still left a few
mangled and slabbered slices of pork. It is usual for the lumberers to
leave such supplies as they cannot conveniently carry along with them
at carries or camps, to which the next comers do not scruple to help
themselves, they being the property, commonly, not of an individual,
but a company, who can afford to deal liberally.

I will describe particularly how we got over some of these portages
and rapids, in order that the reader may get an idea of the boatman’s
life. At Ambejijis Falls, for instance, there was the roughest path
imaginable cut through the woods; at first up hill, at an angle of
nearly forty-five degrees, over rocks and logs without end. This was
the manner of the portage. We first carried over our baggage, and
deposited it on the shore at the other end; then, returning to the
batteau, we dragged it up the hill by the painter, and onward, with
frequent pauses, over half the portage. But this was a bungling way,
and would soon have worn out the boat. Commonly, three men walk over
with a batteau weighing from three to five or six hundred pounds on
their heads and shoulders, the tallest standing under the middle of
the boat, which is turned over, and one at each end, or else there are
two at the bows. More cannot well take hold at once. But this requires
some practice, as well as strength, and is in any case extremely
laborious, and wearing to the constitution, to follow. We were, on the
whole, rather an invalid party, and could render our boatmen but
little assistance. Our two men at length took the batteau upon their
shoulders, and, while two of us steadied it, to prevent it from
rocking and wearing into their shoulders, on which they placed their
hats folded, walked bravely over the remaining distance, with two or
three pauses. In the same manner they accomplished the other portages.
With this crushing weight they must climb and stumble along over
fallen trees and slippery rocks of all sizes, where those who walked
by the sides were continually brushed off, such was the narrowness of
the path. But we were fortunate not to have to cut our path in the
first place. Before we launched our boat, we scraped the bottom smooth
again, with our knives, where it had rubbed on the rocks, to save
friction.

To avoid the difficulties of the portage, our men determined to “warp
up” the Passamagamet Falls; so while the rest walked over the portage
with the baggage, I remained in the batteau, to assist in warping up.
We were soon in the midst of the rapids, which were more swift and
tumultuous than any we had poled up, and had turned to the side of the
stream for the purpose of warping, when the boatmen, who felt some
pride in their skill, and were ambitious to do something more than
usual, for my benefit, as I surmised, took one more view of the
rapids, or rather the falls; and, in answer to our question, whether
we couldn’t get up there, the other answered that he guessed he’d try
it. So we pushed again into the midst of the stream, and began to
struggle with the current. I sat in the middle of the boat to trim it,
moving slightly to the right or left as it grazed a rock. With an
uncertain and wavering motion we wound and bolted our way up, until
the bow was actually raised two feet above the stern at the steepest
pitch; and then, when everything depended upon his exertions, the
bowman’s pole snapped in two; but before he had time to take the spare
one, which I reached him, he had saved himself with the fragment upon
a rock; and so we got up by a hair’s breadth; and Uncle George
exclaimed that that was never done before, and he had not tried it if
he had not known whom he had got in the bow, nor he in the bow, if he
had not known him in the stern. At this place there was a regular
portage cut through the woods, and our boatmen had never known a
batteau to ascend the falls. As near as I can remember, there was a
perpendicular fall here, at the worst place of the whole Penobscot
River, two or three feet at least. I could not sufficiently admire the
skill and coolness with which they performed this feat, never speaking
to each other. The bowman, not looking behind, but knowing exactly
what the other is about, works as if he worked alone. Now sounding in
vain for a bottom in fifteen feet of water, while the boat falls back
several rods, held straight only with the greatest skill and exertion;
or, while the sternman obstinately holds his ground, like a turtle,
the bowman springs from side to side with wonderful suppleness and
dexterity, scanning the rapids and the rocks with a thousand eyes; and
now, having got a bite at last, with a lusty shove, which makes his
pole bend and quiver, and the whole boat tremble, he gains a few feet
upon the river. To add to the danger, the poles are liable at any time
to be caught between the rocks, and wrenched out of their hands,
leaving them at the mercy of the rapids,--the rocks, as it were, lying
in wait, like so many alligators, to catch them in their teeth, and
jerk them from your hands, before you have stolen an effectual shove
against their palates. The pole is set close to the boat, and the prow
is made to overshoot, and just turn the corners of the rocks, in the
very teeth of the rapids. Nothing but the length and lightness, and
the slight draught of the batteau, enables them to make any headway.
The bowman must quickly choose his course; there is no time to
deliberate. Frequently the boat is shoved between rocks where both
sides touch, and the waters on either hand are a perfect maelstrom.

Half a mile above this two of us tried our hands at poling up a slight
rapid; and we were just surmounting the last difficulty, when an
unlucky rock confounded our calculations; and while the batteau was
sweeping round irrecoverably amid the whirlpool, we were obliged to
resign the poles to more skillful hands.

Katepskonegan is one of the shallowest and weediest of the lakes, and
looked as if it might abound in pickerel. The falls of the same name,
where we stopped to dine, are considerable and quite picturesque. Here
Uncle George had seen trout caught by the barrelful; but they would
not rise to our bait at this hour. Halfway over this carry, thus far
in the Maine wilderness on its way to the Provinces, we noticed a
large, flaming, Oak Hall handbill, about two feet long, wrapped round
the trunk of a pine, from which the bark had been stripped, and to
which it was fast glued by the pitch. This should be recorded among
the advantages of this mode of advertising, that so, possibly, even
the bears and wolves, moose, deer, otter, and beaver, not to mention
the Indian, may learn where they can fit themselves according to the
latest fashion, or, at least, recover some of their own lost garments.
We christened this the Oak Hall carry.

The forenoon was as serene and placid on this wild stream in the
woods, as we are apt to imagine that Sunday in summer usually is in
Massachusetts. We were occasionally startled by the scream of a bald
eagle, sailing over the stream in front of our batteau; or of the fish
hawks on whom he levies his contributions. There were, at intervals,
small meadows of a few acres on the sides of the stream, waving with
uncut grass, which attracted the attention of our boatmen, who
regretted that they were not nearer to their clearings, and calculated
how many stacks they might cut. Two or three men sometimes spend the
summer by themselves, cutting the grass in these meadows, to sell to
the loggers in the winter, since it will fetch a higher price on the
spot than in any market in the State. On a small isle, covered with
this kind of rush, or cut-grass, on which we landed to consult about
our further course, we noticed the recent track of a moose, a large,
roundish hole in the soft, wet ground, evincing the great size and
weight of the animal that made it. They are fond of the water, and
visit all these island meadows, swimming as easily from island to
island as they make their way through the thickets on land. Now and
then we passed what McCauslin called a pokelogan, an Indian term for
what the drivers might have reason to call a poke-logs-in, an inlet
that leads nowhere. If you get in, you have got to get out again the
same way. These, and the frequent “runrounds” which come into the
river again, would embarrass an inexperienced voyager not a little.

The carry around Pockwockomus Falls was exceedingly rough and rocky,
the batteau having to be lifted directly from the water up four or
five feet on to a rock, and launched again down a similar bank. The
rocks on this portage were covered with the _dents_ made by the spikes
in the lumberers’ boots while staggering over under the weight of
their batteaux; and you could see where the surface of some large
rocks on which they had rested their batteaux was worn quite smooth
with use. As it was, we had carried over but half the usual portage at
this place for this stage of the water, and launched our boat in the
smooth wave just curving to the fall, prepared to struggle with the
most violent rapid we had to encounter. The rest of the party walked
over the remainder of the portage, while I remained with the boatmen
to assist in warping up. One had to hold the boat while the others got
in to prevent it from going over the falls. When we had pushed up the
rapids as far as possible, keeping close to the shore, Tom seized the
painter and leaped out upon a rock just visible in the water, but he
lost his footing, notwithstanding his spiked boots, and was instantly
amid the rapids; but recovering himself by good luck, and reaching
another rock, he passed the painter to me, who had followed him, and
took his place again in the bows. Leaping from rock to rock in the
shoal water, close to the shore, and now and then getting a bite with
the rope round an upright one, I held the boat while one reset his
pole, and then all three forced it upward against any rapid. This was
“warping up.” When a part of us walked round at such a place, we
generally took the precaution to take out the most valuable part of
the baggage for fear of being swamped.

As we poled up a swift rapid for half a mile above Aboljacarmegus
Falls, some of the party read their own marks on the huge logs which
lay piled up high and dry on the rocks on either hand, the relics
probably of a jam which had taken place here in the Great Freshet in
the spring. Many of these would have to wait for another great
freshet, perchance, if they lasted so long, before they could be got
off. It was singular enough to meet with property of theirs which they
had never seen, and where they had never been before, thus detained by
freshets and rocks when on its way to them. Methinks that must be
where all my property lies, cast up on the rocks on some distant and
unexplored stream, and waiting for an unheard-of freshet to fetch it
down. O make haste, ye gods, with your winds and rains, and start the
jam before it rots!

The last half mile carried us to the Sowadnehunk Deadwater, so called
from the stream of the same name, signifying “running between
mountains,” an important tributary which comes in a mile above. Here
we decided to camp, about twenty miles from the Dam, at the mouth of
Murch Brook and the Aboljacknagesic, mountain streams, broad off from
Ktaadn, and about a dozen miles from its summit, having made fifteen
miles this day.

We had been told by McCauslin that we should here find trout enough;
so, while some prepared the camp, the rest fell to fishing. Seizing
the birch poles which some party of Indians, or white hunters, had
left on the shore, and baiting our hooks with pork, and with trout,
as soon as they were caught, we cast our lines into the mouth of the
Aboljacknagesic, a clear, swift, shallow stream, which came in from
Ktaadn. Instantly a shoal of white chivin (_Leuciscus pulchellus_),
silvery roaches, cousin-trout, or what not, large and small, prowling
thereabouts, fell upon our bait, and one after another were landed
amidst the bushes. Anon their cousins, the true trout, took their
turn, and alternately the speckled trout, and the silvery roaches,
swallowed the bait as fast as we could throw in; and the finest
specimens of both that I have ever seen, the largest one weighing
three pounds, were heaved upon the shore, though at first in vain, to
wriggle down into the water again, for we stood in the boat; but soon
we learned to remedy this evil; for one, who had lost his hook, stood
on shore to catch them as they fell in a perfect shower around
him,--sometimes, wet and slippery, full in his face and bosom, as his
arms were outstretched to receive them. While yet alive, before their
tints had faded, they glistened like the fairest flowers, the product
of primitive rivers; and he could hardly trust his senses, as he stood
over them, that these jewels should have swam away in that
Aboljacknagesic water for so long, so many dark ages;--these bright
fluviatile flowers, seen of Indians only, made beautiful, the Lord
only knows why, to swim there! I could understand better for this, the
truth of mythology, the fables of Proteus, and all those beautiful
sea-monsters,--how all history, indeed, put to a terrestrial use, is
mere history; but put to a celestial, is mythology always.

But there is the rough voice of Uncle George, who commands at the
frying-pan, to send over what you’ve got, and then you may stay till
morning. The pork sizzles and cries for fish. Luckily for the foolish
race, and this particularly foolish generation of trout, the night
shut down at last, not a little deepened by the dark side of Ktaadn,
which, like a permanent shadow, reared itself from the eastern bank.
Lescarbot, writing in 1609, tells us that the Sieur Champdoré, who,
with one of the people of the Sieur de Monts, ascended some fifty
leagues up the St. John in 1608, found the fish so plenty, “qu’en
mettant la chaudière sur le feu ils en avoient pris suffisamment pour
eux disner avant que l’eau fust chaude.” Their descendants here are no
less numerous. So we accompanied Tom into the woods to cut cedar twigs
for our bed. While he went ahead with the axe and lopped off the
smallest twigs of the flat-leaved cedar, the arbor-vitæ of the
gardens, we gathered them up, and returned with them to the boat,
until it was loaded. Our bed was made with as much care and skill as a
roof is shingled; beginning at the foot, and laying the twig end of
the cedar upward, we advanced to the head, a course at a time, thus
successively covering the stub-ends, and producing a soft and level
bed. For us six it was about ten feet long by six in breadth. This
time we lay under our tent, having pitched it more prudently with
reference to the wind and the flame, and the usual huge fire blazed in
front. Supper was eaten off a large log, which some freshet had thrown
up. This night we had a dish of arbor-vitæ or cedar tea, which the
lumberer sometimes uses when other herbs fail,--

     “A quart of arbor-vitæ,
     To make him strong and mighty,”--

but I had no wish to repeat the experiment. It had too medicinal a
taste for my palate. There was the skeleton of a moose here, whose
bones some Indian hunters had picked on this very spot.

In the night I dreamed of trout-fishing; and, when at length I awoke,
it seemed a fable that this painted fish swam there so near my couch,
and rose to our hooks the last evening, and I doubted if I had not
dreamed it all. So I arose before dawn to test its truth, while my
companions were still sleeping. There stood Ktaadn with distinct and
cloudless outline in the moonlight; and the rippling of the rapids was
the only sound to break the stillness. Standing on the shore, I once
more cast my line into the stream, and found the dream to be real and
the fable true. The speckled trout and silvery roach, like
flying-fish, sped swiftly through the moonlight air, describing bright
arcs on the dark side of Ktaadn, until moonlight, now fading into
daylight, brought satiety to my mind, and the minds of my companions,
who had joined me.

By six o’clock, having mounted our packs and a good blanketful of
trout, ready dressed, and swung up such baggage and provision as we
wished to leave behind upon the tops of saplings, to be out of the
reach of bears, we started for the summit of the mountain, distant, as
Uncle George said the boatmen called it, about four miles, but as I
judged, and as it proved, nearer fourteen. He had never been any
nearer the mountain than this, and there was not the slightest trace
of man to guide us farther in this direction. At first, pushing a few
rods up the Aboljacknagesic, or “open-land stream,” we fastened our
batteau to a tree, and traveled up the north side, through burnt
lands, now partially overgrown with young aspens and other shrubbery;
but soon, recrossing this stream, where it was about fifty or sixty
feet wide, upon a jam of logs and rocks,--and you could cross it by
this means almost anywhere,--we struck at once for the highest peak,
over a mile or more of comparatively open land, still very gradually
ascending the while. Here it fell to my lot, as the oldest
mountain-climber, to take the lead. So, scanning the woody side of the
mountain, which lay still at an indefinite distance, stretched out
some seven or eight miles in length before us, we determined to steer
directly for the base of the highest peak, leaving a large slide, by
which, as I have since learned, some of our predecessors ascended, on
our left. This course would lead us parallel to a dark seam in the
forest, which marked the bed of a torrent, and over a slight spur,
which extended southward from the main mountain, from whose bare
summit we could get an outlook over the country, and climb directly up
the peak, which would then be close at hand. Seen from this point, a
bare ridge at the extremity of the open land, Ktaadn presented a
different aspect from any mountain I have seen, there being a greater
proportion of naked rock rising abruptly from the forest; and we
looked up at this blue barrier as if it were some fragment of a wall
which anciently bounded the earth in that direction. Setting the
compass for a northeast course, which was the bearing of the southern
base of the highest peak, we were soon buried in the woods.

We soon began to meet with traces of bears and moose, and those of
rabbits were everywhere visible. The tracks of moose, more or less
recent, to speak literally, covered every square rod on the sides of
the mountain; and these animals are probably more numerous there now
than ever before, being driven into this wilderness, from all sides,
by the settlements. The track of a full-grown moose is like that of a
cow, or larger, and of the young, like that of a calf. Sometimes we
found ourselves traveling in faint paths, which they had made, like
cow-paths in the woods, only far more indistinct, being rather
openings, affording imperfect vistas through the dense underwood, than
trodden paths; and everywhere the twigs had been browsed by them,
clipped as smoothly as if by a knife. The bark of trees was stripped
up by them to the height of eight or nine feet, in long, narrow
strips, an inch wide, still showing the distinct marks of their teeth.
We expected nothing less than to meet a herd of them every moment, and
our Nimrod held his shooting-iron in readiness; but we did not go out
of our way to look for them, and, though numerous, they are so wary
that the unskillful hunter might range the forest a long time before
he could get sight of one. They are sometimes dangerous to encounter,
and will not turn out for the hunter, but furiously rush upon him and
trample him to death, unless he is lucky enough to avoid them by dodging
round a tree. The largest are nearly as large as a horse, and weigh
sometimes one thousand pounds; and it is said that they can step over a
five-foot gate in their ordinary walk. They are described as exceedingly
awkward-looking animals, with their long legs and short bodies, making
a ludicrous figure when in full run, but making great headway,
nevertheless. It seemed a mystery to us how they could thread these
woods, which it required all our suppleness to accomplish,--climbing,
stooping, and winding, alternately. They are said to drop their long
and branching horns, which usually spread five or six feet, on their
backs, and make their way easily by the weight of their bodies. Our
boatmen said, but I know not with how much truth, that their horns are
apt to be gnawed away by vermin while they sleep. Their flesh, which
is more like beef than venison, is common in Bangor market.

We had proceeded on thus seven or eight miles, till about noon, with
frequent pauses to refresh the weary ones, crossing a considerable
mountain stream, which we conjectured to be Murch Brook, at whose
mouth we had camped, all the time in woods, without having once seen
the summit, and rising very gradually, when the boatmen beginning to
despair a little, and fearing that we were leaving the mountain on one
side of us, for they had not entire faith in the compass, McCauslin
climbed a tree, from the top of which he could see the peak, when it
appeared that we had not swerved from a right line, the compass down
below still ranging with his arm, which pointed to the summit. By the
side of a cool mountain rill, amid the woods, where the water began to
partake of the purity and transparency of the air, we stopped to cook
some of our fishes, which we had brought thus far in order to save
our hard-bread and pork, in the use of which we had put ourselves on
short allowance. We soon had a fire blazing, and stood around it,
under the damp and sombre forest of firs and birches, each with a
sharpened stick, three or four feet in length, upon which he had
spitted his trout, or roach, previously well gashed and salted, our
sticks radiating like the spokes of a wheel from one centre, and each
crowding his particular fish into the most desirable exposure, not
with the truest regard always to his neighbor’s rights. Thus we
regaled ourselves, drinking meanwhile at the spring, till one man’s
pack, at least, was considerably lightened, when we again took up our
line of march.

At length we reached an elevation sufficiently bare to afford a view
of the summit, still distant and blue, almost as if retreating from
us. A torrent, which proved to be the same we had crossed, was seen
tumbling down in front, literally from out of the clouds. But this
glimpse at our whereabouts was soon lost, and we were buried in the
woods again. The wood was chiefly yellow birch, spruce, fir,
mountain-ash, or round-wood, as the Maine people call it, and
moose-wood. It was the worst kind of traveling; sometimes like the
densest scrub oak patches with us. The cornel, or bunch-berries, were
very abundant, as well as Solomon’s-seal and moose-berries.
Blueberries were distributed along our whole route; and in one place
the bushes were drooping with the weight of the fruit, still as fresh
as ever. It was the 7th of September. Such patches afforded a grateful
repast, and served to bait the tired party forward. When any lagged
behind, the cry of “blueberries” was most effectual to bring them up.
Even at this elevation we passed through a moose-yard, formed by a
large flat rock, four or five rods square, where they tread down the
snow in winter. At length, fearing that if we held the direct course
to the summit, we should not find any water near our camping-ground,
we gradually swerved to the west, till, at four o’clock, we struck
again the torrent which I have mentioned, and here, in view of the
summit, the weary party decided to camp that night.

While my companions were seeking a suitable spot for this purpose, I
improved the little daylight that was left in climbing the mountain
alone. We were in a deep and narrow ravine, sloping up to the clouds,
at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, and hemmed in by walls of
rock, which were at first covered with low trees, then with
impenetrable thickets of scraggy birches and spruce trees, and with
moss, but at last bare of all vegetation but lichens, and almost
continually draped in clouds. Following up the course of the torrent
which occupied this,--and I mean to lay some emphasis on this word
_up_,--pulling myself up by the side of perpendicular falls of twenty
or thirty feet, by the roots of firs and birches, and then, perhaps,
walking a level rod or two in the thin stream, for it took up the
whole road, ascending by huge steps, as it were, a giant’s stairway,
down which a river flowed, I had soon cleared the trees, and paused on
the successive shelves, to look back over the country. The torrent was
from fifteen to thirty feet wide, without a tributary, and seemingly
not diminishing in breadth as I advanced; but still it came rushing
and roaring down, with a copious tide, over and amidst masses of bare
rock, from the very clouds, as though a waterspout had just burst over
the mountain. Leaving this at last, I began to work my way, scarcely
less arduous than Satan’s anciently through Chaos, up the nearest
though not the highest peak. At first scrambling on all fours over the
tops of ancient black spruce trees (_Abies nigra_), old as the flood,
from two to ten or twelve feet in height, their tops flat and
spreading, and their foliage blue, and nipped with cold, as if for
centuries they had ceased growing upward against the bleak sky, the
solid cold. I walked some good rods erect upon the tops of these
trees, which were overgrown with moss and mountain cranberries. It
seemed that in the course of time they had filled up the intervals
between the huge rocks, and the cold wind had uniformly leveled all
over. Here the principle of vegetation was hard put to it. There was
apparently a belt of this kind running quite round the mountain,
though, perhaps, nowhere so remarkable as here. Once, slumping
through, I looked down ten feet, into a dark and cavernous region, and
saw the stem of a spruce, on whose top I stood, as on a mass of coarse
basket-work, fully nine inches in diameter at the ground. These holes
were bears’ dens, and the bears were even then at home. This was the
sort of garden I made my way _over_, for an eighth of a mile, at the
risk, it is true, of treading on some of the plants, not seeing any
path _through_ it,--certainly the most treacherous and porous country
I ever traveled.

                     “Nigh foundered on he fares,
     Treading the crude consistence, half on foot,
     Half flying,”

But nothing could exceed the toughness of the twigs,--not one snapped
under my weight, for they had slowly grown. Having slumped, scrambled,
rolled, bounced, and walked, by turns, over this scraggy country, I
arrived upon a side-hill, or rather side-mountain, where rocks, gray,
silent rocks, were the flocks and herds that pastured, chewing a rocky
cud at sunset. They looked at me with hard gray eyes, without a bleat
or a low. This brought me to the skirt of a cloud, and bounded my walk
that night. But I had already seen that Maine country when I turned
about, waving, flowing, rippling, down below.

When I returned to my companions, they had selected a camping-ground
on the torrent’s edge, and were resting on the ground; one was on the
sick list, rolled in a blanket, on a damp shelf of rock. It was a
savage and dreary scenery enough, so wildly rough, that they looked
long to find a level and open space for the tent. We could not well
camp higher, for want of fuel; and the trees here seemed so evergreen
and sappy, that we almost doubted if they would acknowledge the
influence of fire; but fire prevailed at last, and blazed here, too,
like a good citizen of the world. Even at this height we met with
frequent traces of moose, as well as of bears. As here was no cedar,
we made our bed of coarser feathered spruce; but at any rate the
feathers were plucked from the live tree. It was, perhaps, even a more
grand and desolate place for a night’s lodging than the summit would
have been, being in the neighborhood of those wild trees, and of the
torrent. Some more aërial and finer-spirited winds rushed and roared
through the ravine all night, from time to time arousing our fire, and
dispersing the embers about. It was as if we lay in the very nest of a
young whirlwind. At midnight, one of my bed-fellows, being startled in
his dreams by the sudden blazing up to its top of a fir tree, whose
green boughs were dried by the heat, sprang up, with a cry, from his
bed, thinking the world on fire, and drew the whole camp after him.

In the morning, after whetting our appetite on some raw pork, a wafer
of hard-bread, and a dipper of condensed cloud or waterspout, we all
together began to make our way up the falls, which I have described;
this time choosing the right hand, or highest peak, which was not the
one I had approached before. But soon my companions were lost to my
sight behind the mountain ridge in my rear, which still seemed ever
retreating before me, and I climbed alone over huge rocks, loosely
poised, a mile or more, still edging toward the clouds; for though the
day was clear elsewhere, the summit was concealed by mist. The
mountain seemed a vast aggregation of loose rocks, as if some time it
had rained rocks, and they lay as they fell on the mountain sides,
nowhere fairly at rest, but leaning on each other, all rocking stones,
with cavities between, but scarcely any soil or smoother shelf. They
were the raw materials of a planet dropped from an unseen quarry,
which the vast chemistry of nature would anon work up, or work down,
into the smiling and verdant plains and valleys of earth. This was an
undone extremity of the globe; as in lignite we see coal in the
process of formation.

At length I entered within the skirts of the cloud which seemed
forever drifting over the summit, and yet would never be gone, but was
generated out of that pure air as fast as it flowed away; and when, a
quarter of a mile farther, I reached the summit of the ridge, which
those who have seen in clearer weather say is about five miles long,
and contains a thousand acres of table-land, I was deep within the
hostile ranks of clouds, and all objects were obscured by them. Now
the wind would blow me out a yard of clear sunlight, wherein I stood;
then a gray, dawning light was all it could accomplish, the cloud-line
ever rising and falling with the wind’s intensity. Sometimes it seemed
as if the summit would be cleared in a few moments, and smile in
sunshine; but what was gained on one side was lost on another. It was
like sitting in a chimney and waiting for the smoke to blow away. It
was, in fact, a cloud-factory,--these were the cloud-works, and the
wind turned them off done from the cool, bare rocks. Occasionally,
when the windy columns broke in to me, I caught sight of a dark, damp
crag to the right or left; the mist driving ceaselessly between it and
me. It reminded me of the creations of the old epic and dramatic
poets, of Atlas, Vulcan, the Cyclops, and Prometheus. Such was
Caucasus and the rock where Prometheus was bound. Æschylus had no
doubt visited such scenery as this. It was vast, Titanic, and such as
man never inhabits. Some part of the beholder, even some vital part,
seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends.
He is more lone than you can imagine. There is less of substantial
thought and fair understanding in him than in the plains where men
inhabit. His reason is dispersed and shadowy, more thin and subtile,
like the air. Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at
disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine
faculty. She does not smile on him as in the plains. She seems to say
sternly, Why came ye here before your time. This ground is not
prepared for you. Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys? I have
never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these
rocks for thy neighbors. I cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but
forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where I _am_ kind. Why seek
me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me
but a stepmother? Shouldst thou freeze or starve, or shudder thy life
away, here is no shrine, nor altar, nor any access to my ear.

     “Chaos and ancient Night, I come no spy
     With purpose to explore or to disturb
     The secrets of your realm, but ...
     .    .    .    .    .    .    as my way
     Lies through your spacious empire up to light.”

The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe,
whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their
secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and
insolent men, perchance, go there. Simple races, as savages, do not
climb mountains,--their tops are sacred and mysterious tracts never
visited by them. Pomola is always angry with those who climb to the
summit of Ktaadn.

According to Jackson, who, in his capacity of geological surveyor of
the State, has accurately measured it, the altitude of Ktaadn is 5300
feet, or a little more than one mile above the level of the sea, and
he adds, “It is then evidently the highest point in the State of
Maine, and is the most abrupt granite mountain in New England.” The
peculiarities of that spacious table-land on which I was standing, as
well as the remarkable semicircular precipice or basin on the eastern
side, were all concealed by the mist. I had brought my whole pack to
the top, not knowing but I should have to make my descent to the
river, and possibly to the settled portion of the State alone, and by
some other route, and wishing to have a complete outfit with me. But
at length fearing that my companions would be anxious to reach the
river before night, and knowing that the clouds might rest on the
mountain for days, I was compelled to descend. Occasionally, as I came
down, the wind would blow me a vista open, through which I could see
the country eastward, boundless forests, and lakes, and streams,
gleaming in the sun, some of them emptying into the East Branch. There
were also new mountains in sight in that direction. Now and then some
small bird of the sparrow family would flit away before me, unable to
command its course, like a fragment of the gray rock blown off by the
wind.

I found my companions where I had left them, on the side of the peak,
gathering the mountain cranberries, which filled every crevice between
the rocks, together with blueberries, which had a spicier flavor the
higher up they grew, but were not the less agreeable to our palates.
When the country is settled, and roads are made, these cranberries
will perhaps become an article of commerce. From this elevation, just
on the skirts of the clouds, we could overlook the country, west and
south, for a hundred miles. There it was, the State of Maine, which we
had seen on the map, but not much like that,--immeasurable forest for
the sun to shine on, that eastern _stuff_ we hear of in Massachusetts.
No clearing, no house. It did not look as if a solitary traveler had
cut so much as a walking-stick there. Countless lakes,--Moosehead in
the southwest, forty miles long by ten wide, like a gleaming silver
platter at the end of the table; Chesuncook, eighteen long by three
wide, without an island; Millinocket, on the south, with its hundred
islands; and a hundred others without a name; and mountains, also,
whose names, for the most part, are known only to the Indians. The
forest looked like a firm grass sward, and the effect of these lakes
in its midst has been well compared, by one who has since visited this
same spot, to that of a “mirror broken into a thousand fragments, and
wildly scattered over the grass, reflecting the full blaze of the
sun.” It was a large farm for somebody, when cleared. According to the
Gazetteer, which was printed before the boundary question was settled,
this single Penobscot County, in which we were, was larger than the
whole State of Vermont, with its fourteen counties; and this was only
a part of the wild lands of Maine. We are concerned now, however,
about natural, not political limits. We were about eighty miles, as
the bird flies, from Bangor, or one hundred and fifteen, as we had
ridden, and walked, and paddled. We had to console ourselves with the
reflection that this view was probably as good as that from the peak,
as far as it went; and what were a mountain without its attendant
clouds and mists? Like ourselves, neither Bailey nor Jackson had
obtained a clear view from the summit.

Setting out on our return to the river, still at an early hour in the
day, we decided to follow the course of the torrent, which we supposed
to be Murch Brook, as long as it would not lead us too far out of our
way. We thus traveled about four miles in the very torrent itself,
continually crossing and recrossing it, leaping from rock to rock, and
jumping with the stream down falls of seven or eight feet, or
sometimes sliding down on our backs in a thin sheet of water. This
ravine had been the scene of an extraordinary freshet in the spring,
apparently accompanied by a slide from the mountain. It must have been
filled with a stream of stones and water, at least twenty feet above
the present level of the torrent. For a rod or two, on either side of
its channel, the trees were barked and splintered up to their tops,
the birches bent over, twisted, and sometimes finely split, like a
stable-broom; some, a foot in diameter, snapped off, and whole clumps
of trees bent over with the weight of rocks piled on them. In one
place we noticed a rock, two or three feet in diameter, lodged nearly
twenty feet high in the crotch of a tree. For the whole four miles we
saw but one rill emptying in, and the volume of water did not seem to
be increased from the first. We traveled thus very rapidly with a
downward impetus, and grew remarkably expert at leaping from rock to
rock, for leap we must, and leap we did, whether there was any rock at
the right distance or not. It was a pleasant picture when the foremost
turned about and looked up the winding ravine, walled in with rocks
and the green forest, to see, at intervals of a rod or two, a
red-shirted or green-jacketed mountaineer against the white torrent,
leaping down the channel with his pack on his back, or pausing upon a
convenient rock in the midst of the torrent to mend a rent in his
clothes, or unstrap the dipper at his belt to take a draught of the
water. At one place we were startled by seeing, on a little sandy
shelf by the side of the stream, the fresh print of a man’s foot, and
for a moment realized how Robinson Crusoe felt in a similar case; but
at last we remembered that we had struck this stream on our way up,
though we could not have told where, and one had descended into the
ravine for a drink. The cool air above and the continual bathing of
our bodies in mountain water, alternate foot, sitz, douche, and plunge
baths, made this walk exceedingly refreshing, and we had traveled only
a mile or two, after leaving the torrent, before every thread of our
clothes was as dry as usual, owing perhaps to a peculiar quality in
the atmosphere.

After leaving the torrent, being in doubt about our course, Tom threw
down his pack at the foot of the loftiest spruce tree at hand, and
shinned up the bare trunk some twenty feet, and then climbed through
the green tower, lost to our sight, until he held the topmost spray
in his hand.[5] McCauslin, in his younger days, had marched through
the wilderness with a body of troops, under General Somebody, and with
one other man did all the scouting and spying service. The General’s
word was, “Throw down the top of that tree,” and there was no tree in
the Maine woods so high that it did not lose its top in such a case. I
have heard a story of two men being lost once in these woods, nearer
to the settlements than this, who climbed the loftiest pine they could
find, some six feet in diameter at the ground, from whose top they
discovered a solitary clearing and its smoke. When at this height,
some two hundred feet from the ground, one of them became dizzy, and
fainted in his companion’s arms, and the latter had to accomplish the
descent with him, alternately fainting and reviving, as best he could.
To Tom we cried, “Where away does the summit bear? where the burnt
lands?” The last he could only conjecture; he descried, however, a
little meadow and pond, lying probably in our course, which we
concluded to steer for. On reaching this secluded meadow, we found
fresh tracks of moose on the shore of the pond, and the water was
still unsettled as if they had fled before us. A little farther, in a
dense thicket, we seemed to be still on their trail. It was a small
meadow, of a few acres, on the mountain-side, concealed by the forest,
and perhaps never seen by a white man before, where one would think
that the moose might browse and bathe, and rest in peace. Pursuing
this course, we soon reached the open land, which went sloping down
some miles toward the Penobscot.

Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and
forever untamable _Nature_, or whatever else men call it, while coming
down this part of the mountain. We were passing over “Burnt Lands,”
burnt by lightning, perchance, though they showed no recent marks of
fire, hardly so much as a charred stump, but looked rather like a
natural pasture for the moose and deer, exceedingly wild and desolate,
with occasional strips of timber crossing them, and low poplars
springing up, and patches of blueberries here and there. I found
myself traversing them familiarly, like some pasture run to waste, or
partially reclaimed by man; but when I reflected what man, what
brother or sister or kinsman of our race made it and claimed it, I
expected the proprietor to rise up and dispute my passage. It is
difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We habitually
presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not
seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and
inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something
savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I
trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion
and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have
heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but
the unhandseled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor
woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land. It was the fresh and
natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and
ever,--to be the dwelling of man, we say,--so Nature made it, and man
may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was
Matter, vast, terrific,--not his Mother Earth that we have heard of,
not for him to tread on, or be buried in,--no, it were being too
familiar even to let his bones lie there,--the home, this, of
Necessity and Fate. There was clearly felt the presence of a force not
bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and
superstitious rites,--to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the
rocks and to wild animals than we. We walked over it with a certain
awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew
there, and had a smart and spicy taste. Perchance where _our_ wild
pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor, in Concord, there
were once reapers, and husbandmen planted grain; but here not even the
surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw
fit to make this world. What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see
a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star’s
surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this
matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not
spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,--_that_ my body might,--but I
fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has
possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in
nature,--daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,--rocks,
trees, wind on our cheeks! the _solid_ earth! the _actual_ world! the
_common sense!_ _Contact!_ _Contact!_ _Who_ are we? _where_ are we?

Erelong we recognized some rocks and other features in the landscape
which we had purposely impressed on our memories, and, quickening our
pace, by two o’clock we reached the batteau.[6] Here we had expected
to dine on trout, but in this glaring sunlight they were slow to take
the bait, so we were compelled to make the most of the crumbs of our
hard-bread and our pork, which were both nearly exhausted. Meanwhile
we deliberated whether we should go up the river a mile farther, to
Gibson’s clearing, on the Sowadnehunk, where there was a deserted log
hut, in order to get a half-inch auger, to mend one of our spike-poles
with. There were young spruce trees enough around us, and we had a
spare spike, but nothing to make a hole with. But as it was uncertain
whether we should find any tools left there, we patched up the broken
pole, as well as we could, for the downward voyage, in which there
would be but little use for it. Moreover, we were unwilling to lose
any time in this expedition, lest the wind should rise before we
reached the larger lakes, and detain us; for a moderate wind produces
quite a sea on these waters, in which a batteau will not live for a
moment; and on one occasion McCauslin had been delayed a week at the
head of the North Twin, which is only four miles across. We were
nearly out of provisions, and ill prepared in this respect for what
might possibly prove a week’s journey round by the shore, fording
innumerable streams, and threading a trackless forest, should any
accident happen to our boat.

It was with regret that we turned our backs on Chesuncook, which
McCauslin had formerly logged on, and the Allegash lakes. There were
still longer rapids and portages above; among the last the Ripogenus
Portage, which he described as the most difficult on the river, and
three miles long. The whole length of the Penobscot is two hundred and
seventy-five miles, and we are still nearly one hundred miles from its
source. Hodge, the Assistant State Geologist, passed up this river in
1837, and by a portage of only one mile and three quarters crossed
over into the Allegash, and so went down that into the St. John, and
up the Madawaska to the Grand Portage across to the St. Lawrence. His
is the only account that I know of an expedition through to Canada in
this direction. He thus describes his first sight of the latter river,
which, to compare small things with great, is like Balboa’s first
sight of the Pacific from the mountains of the Isthmus of Darien.
“When we first came in sight of the St. Lawrence,” he says, “from the
top of a high hill, the view was most striking, and much more
interesting to me from having been shut up in the woods for the two
previous months. Directly before us lay the broad river, extending
across nine or ten miles, its surface broken by a few islands and
reefs, and two ships riding at anchor near the shore. Beyond, extended
ranges of uncultivated hills, parallel with the river. The sun was
just going down behind them, and gilding the whole scene with its
parting rays.”

About four o’clock, the same afternoon, we commenced our return
voyage, which would require but little if any poling. In shooting
rapids the boatmen use large and broad paddles, instead of poles, to
guide the boat with. Though we glided so swiftly, and often smoothly,
down, where it had cost us no slight effort to get up, our present
voyage was attended with far more danger; for if we once fairly struck
one of the thousand rocks by which we were surrounded, the boat would
be swamped in an instant. When a boat is swamped under these
circumstances, the boatmen commonly find no difficulty in keeping
afloat at first, for the current keeps both them and their cargo up
for a long way down the stream; and if they can swim, they have only
to work their way gradually to the shore. The greatest danger is of
being caught in an eddy behind some larger rock, where the water
rushes up stream faster than elsewhere it does down, and being carried
round and round under the surface till they are drowned. McCauslin
pointed out some rocks which had been the scene of a fatal accident of
this kind. Sometimes the body is not thrown out for several hours. He
himself had performed such a circuit once, only his legs being visible
to his companions; but he was fortunately thrown out in season to
recover his breath.[7] In shooting the rapids, the boatman has this
problem to solve: to choose a circuitous and safe course amid a
thousand sunken rocks, scattered over a quarter or half a mile, at the
same time that he is moving steadily on at the rate of fifteen miles
an hour. Stop he cannot; the only question is, where will he go? The
bowman chooses the course with all his eyes about him, striking broad
off with his paddle, and drawing the boat by main force into her
course. The sternman faithfully follows the bow.

We were soon at the Aboljacarmegus Falls. Anxious to avoid the delay,
as well as the labor, of the portage here, our boatmen went forward
first to reconnoitre, and concluded to let the batteau down the falls,
carrying the baggage only over the portage. Jumping from rock to rock
until nearly in the middle of the stream, we were ready to receive the
boat and let her down over the first fall, some six or seven feet
perpendicular. The boatmen stand upon the edge of a shelf of rock,
where the fall is perhaps nine or ten feet perpendicular, in from one
to two feet of rapid water, one on each side of the boat, and let it
slide gently over, till the bow is run out ten or twelve feet in the
air; then, letting it drop squarely, while one holds the painter, the
other leaps in, and his companion following, they are whirled down
the rapids to a new fall or to smooth water. In a very few minutes
they had accomplished a passage in safety, which would be as foolhardy
for the unskillful to attempt as the descent of Niagara itself. It
seemed as if it needed only a little familiarity, and a little more
skill, to navigate down such falls as Niagara itself with safety. At
any rate, I should not despair of such men in the rapids above Table
Rock, until I saw them actually go over the falls, so cool, so
collected, so fertile in resources are they. One might have thought
that these were falls, and that falls were not to be waded through
with impunity, like a mud-puddle. There was really danger of their
losing their sublimity in losing their power to harm us. Familiarity
breeds contempt. The boatman pauses, perchance, on some shelf beneath
a table-rock under the fall, standing in some cove of backwater two
feet deep, and you hear his rough voice come up through the spray,
coolly giving directions how to launch the boat this time.

Having carried round Pockwockomus Falls, our oars soon brought us to
the Katepskonegan, or Oak Hall carry, where we decided to camp
half-way over, leaving our batteau to be carried over in the morning
on fresh shoulders. One shoulder of each of the boatmen showed a red
spot as large as one’s hand, worn by the batteau on this expedition;
and this shoulder, as it did all the work, was perceptibly lower than
its fellow, from long service. Such toil soon wears out the strongest
constitution. The drivers are accustomed to work in the cold water in
the spring, rarely ever dry; and if one falls in all over he rarely
changes his clothes till night, if then, even. One who takes this
precaution is called by a particular nickname, or is turned off. None
can lead this life who are not almost amphibious. McCauslin said
soberly, what is at any rate a good story to tell, that he had seen
where six men were wholly under water at once, at a jam, with their
shoulders to handspikes. If the log did not start, then they had to
put out their heads to breathe. The driver works as long as he can
see, from dark to dark, and at night has not time to eat his supper
and dry his clothes fairly, before he is asleep on his cedar bed. We
lay that night on the very bed made by such a party, stretching our
tent over the poles which were still standing, but re-shingling the
damp and faded bed with fresh leaves.

In the morning we carried our boat over and launched it, making haste
lest the wind should rise. The boatmen ran down Passamagamet, and soon
after Ambejijis Falls, while we walked round with the baggage. We made
a hasty breakfast at the head of Ambejijis Lake on the remainder of
our pork, and were soon rowing across its smooth surface again, under
a pleasant sky, the mountain being now clear of clouds in the
northeast. Taking turns at the oars, we shot rapidly across Deep Cove,
the foot of Pamadumcook, and the North Twin, at the rate of six miles
an hour, the wind not being high enough to disturb us, and reached the
Dam at noon. The boatmen went through one of the log sluices in the
batteau, where the fall was ten feet at the bottom, and took us in
below. Here was the longest rapid in our voyage, and perhaps the
running this was as dangerous and arduous a task as any. Shooting down
sometimes at the rate, as we judged, of fifteen miles an hour, if we
struck a rock we were split from end to end in an instant. Now like a
bait bobbing for some river monster, amid the eddies, now darting to
this side of the stream, now to that, gliding swift and smooth near to
our destruction, or striking broad off with the paddle and drawing the
boat to right or left with all our might, in order to avoid a rock. I
suppose that it was like running the rapids of the Sault Sainte Marie,
at the outlet of Lake Superior, and our boatmen probably displayed no
less dexterity than the Indians there do. We soon ran through this
mile, and floated in Quakish Lake.

After such a voyage, the troubled and angry waters, which once had
seemed terrible and not to be trifled with, appeared tamed and
subdued; they had been bearded and worried in their channels, pricked
and whipped into submission with the spike-pole and paddle, gone
through and through with impunity, and all their spirit and their
danger taken out of them, and the most swollen and impetuous rivers
seemed but playthings henceforth. I began, at length, to understand
the boatman’s familiarity with, and contempt for, the rapids. “Those
Fowler boys,” said Mrs. McCauslin, “are perfect ducks for the water.”
They had run down to Lincoln, according to her, thirty or forty miles,
in a batteau, in the night, for a doctor, when it was so dark that
they could not see a rod before them, and the river was swollen so as
to be almost a continuous rapid, so that the doctor _cried_, when they
brought him up by daylight, “Why, Tom, how did you see to steer?” “We
didn’t steer much,--only kept her straight.” And yet they met with no
accident. It is true, the more difficult rapids are higher up than
this.

When we reached the Millinocket opposite to Tom’s house, and were
waiting for his folks to set us over,--for we had left our batteau
above the Grand Falls,--we discovered two canoes, with two men in
each, turning up this stream from Shad Pond, one keeping the opposite
side of a small island before us, while the other approached the side
where we were standing, examining the banks carefully for muskrats as
they came along. The last proved to be Louis Neptune and his
companion, now, at last, on their way up to Chesuncook after moose,
but they were so disguised that we hardly knew them. At a little
distance they might have been taken for Quakers, with their
broad-brimmed hats and overcoats with broad capes, the spoils of
Bangor, seeking a settlement in this Sylvania,--or, nearer at hand,
for fashionable gentlemen the morning after a spree. Met face to face,
these Indians in their native woods looked like the sinister and
slouching fellows whom you meet picking up strings and paper in the
streets of a city. There is, in fact, a remarkable and unexpected
resemblance between the degraded savage and the lowest classes in a
great city. The one is no more a child of nature than the other. In
the progress of degradation the distinction of races is soon lost.
Neptune at first was only anxious to know what we “kill,” seeing some
partridges in the hands of one of the party, but we had assumed too
much anger to permit of a reply. We thought Indians had some honor
before. But--“Me been sick. Oh, me unwell now. You make bargain, then
me go.” They had in fact been delayed so long by a drunken frolic at
the Five Islands, and they had not yet recovered from its effects.
They had some young musquash in their canoes, which they dug out of
the banks with a hoe, for food, not for their skins, for musquash are
their principal food on these expeditions. So they went on up the
Millinocket, and we kept down the bank of the Penobscot, after
recruiting ourselves with a draught of Tom’s beer, leaving Tom at his
home.

Thus a man shall lead his life away here on the edge of the
wilderness, on Indian Millinocket Stream, in a new world, far in the
dark of a continent, and have a flute to play at evening here, while
his strains echo to the stars, amid the howling of wolves; shall live,
as it were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive man. Yet he
shall spend a sunny day, and in this century be my contemporary;
perchance shall read some scattered leaves of literature, and
sometimes talk with me. Why read history, then, if the ages and the
generations are now? He lives three thousand years deep into time, an
age not yet described by poets. Can you well go further back in
history than this? Ay! ay!--for there turns up but now into the mouth
of Millinocket Stream a still more ancient and primitive man, whose
history is not brought down even to the former. In a bark vessel sewn
with the roots of the spruce, with horn-beam paddles, he dips his way
along. He is but dim and misty to me, obscured by the æons that lie
between the bark canoe and the batteau. He builds no house of logs,
but a wigwam of skins. He eats no hot bread and sweet cake, but
musquash and moose meat and the fat of bears. He glides up the
Millinocket and is lost to my sight, as a more distant and misty cloud
is seen flitting by behind a nearer, and is lost in space. So he goes
about his destiny, the red face of man.

After having passed the night, and buttered our boots for the last
time, at Uncle George’s, whose dogs almost devoured him for joy at his
return, we kept on down the river the next day, about eight miles on
foot, and then took a batteau, with a man to pole it, to Mattawamkeag,
ten more. At the middle of that very night, to make a swift conclusion
to a long story, we dropped our buggy over the half-finished bridge at
Oldtown, where we heard the confused din and clink of a hundred saws,
which never rest, and at six o’clock the next morning one of the party
was steaming his way to Massachusetts.

       *       *       *       *       *

  [Illustration: _Maine Wilderness_]

What is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the continuousness of
the forest, with fewer open intervals or glades than you had imagined.
Except the few burnt lands, the narrow intervals on the rivers, the
bare tops of the high mountains, and the lakes and streams, the forest
is uninterrupted. It is even more grim and wild than you had
anticipated, a damp and intricate wilderness, in the spring everywhere
wet and miry. The aspect of the country, indeed, is universally stern
and savage, excepting the distant views of the forest from hills, and
the lake prospects, which are mild and civilizing in a degree. The
lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so
high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine
fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like
amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water,--so
anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on
their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever
be. These are not the artificial forests of an English king,--a royal
preserve merely. Here prevail no forest laws but those of nature. The
aborigines have never been dispossessed, nor nature disforested.

It is a country full of evergreen trees, of mossy silver birches and
watery maples, the ground dotted with insipid small, red berries, and
strewn with damp and moss-grown rocks,--a country diversified with
innumerable lakes and rapid streams, peopled with trout and various
species of _leucisci_, with salmon, shad, and pickerel, and other
fishes; the forest resounding at rare intervals with the note of the
chickadee, the blue jay, and the woodpecker, the scream of the fish
hawk and the eagle, the laugh of the loon, and the whistle of ducks
along the solitary streams; at night, with the hooting of owls and
howling of wolves; in summer, swarming with myriads of black flies and
mosquitoes, more formidable than wolves to the white man. Such is the
home of the moose, the bear, the caribou, the wolf, the beaver, and
the Indian. Who shall describe the inexpressible tenderness and
immortal life of the grim forest, where Nature, though it be
midwinter, is ever in her spring, where the moss-grown and decaying
trees are not old, but seem to enjoy a perpetual youth; and blissful,
innocent Nature, like a serene infant, is too happy to make a noise,
except by a few tinkling, lisping birds and trickling rills?

What a place to live, what a place to die and be buried in! There
certainly men would live forever, and laugh at death and the grave.
There they could have no such thoughts as are associated with the
village graveyard,--that make a grave out of one of those moist
evergreen hummocks!

     Die and be buried who will,
       I mean to live here still;
     My nature grows ever more young
       The primitive pines among.

I am reminded by my journey how exceedingly new this country still is.
You have only to travel for a few days into the interior and back
parts even of many of the old States, to come to that very America
which the Northmen, and Cabot, and Gosnold, and Smith, and Raleigh
visited. If Columbus was the first to discover the islands, Americus
Vespucius and Cabot, and the Puritans, and we their descendants, have
discovered only the shores of America. While the Republic has already
acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and
unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the
shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come
from which float our navy. The very timber and boards and shingles of
which our houses are made grew but yesterday in a wilderness where the
Indian still hunts and the moose runs wild. New York has her
wilderness within her own borders; and though the sailors of Europe
are familiar with the soundings of her Hudson, and Fulton long since
invented the steamboat on its waters, an Indian is still necessary to
guide her scientific men to its headwaters in the Adirondack country.

Have we even so much as discovered and settled the shores? Let a man
travel on foot along the coast, from the Passamaquoddy to the Sabine,
or to the Rio Bravo, or to wherever the end is now, if he is swift
enough to overtake it, faithfully following the windings of every
inlet and of every cape, and stepping to the music of the surf,--with
a desolate fishing town once a week, and a city’s port once a month to
cheer him, and putting up at the lighthouses, when there are any,--and
tell me if it looks like a discovered and settled country, and not
rather, for the most part, like a desolate island, and No-Man’s Land.

We have advanced by leaps to the Pacific, and left many a lesser
Oregon and California unexplored behind us. Though the railroad and
the telegraph have been established on the shores of Maine, the Indian
still looks out from her interior mountains over all these to the sea.
There stands the city of Bangor, fifty miles up the Penobscot, at the
head of navigation for vessels of the largest class, the principal
lumber depot on this continent, with a population of twelve thousand,
like a star on the edge of night, still hewing at the forests of which
it is built, already overflowing with the luxuries and refinement of
Europe, and sending its vessels to Spain, to England, and to the West
Indies for its groceries,--and yet only a few axemen have gone “up
river,” into the howling wilderness which feeds it. The bear and deer
are still found within its limits; and the moose, as he swims the
Penobscot, is entangled amid its shipping, and taken by foreign
sailors in its harbor. Twelve miles in the rear, twelve miles of
railroad, are Orono and the Indian Island, the home of the Penobscot
tribe, and then commence the batteau and the canoe, and the military
road; and sixty miles above, the country is virtually unmapped and
unexplored, and there still waves the virgin forest of the New World.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] Springer, in his _Forest Life_ (1851), says that they first remove
the leaves and turf from the spot where they intend to build a camp,
for fear of fire; also, that “the spruce-tree is generally selected
for camp-building, it being light, straight, and quite free from sap;”
that “the roof is finally covered with the boughs of the fir, spruce,
and hemlock, so that when the snow falls upon the whole, the warmth of
the camp is preserved in the coldest weather;” and that they make the
log seat before the fire, called the “Deacon’s Seat,” of a spruce or
fir split in halves, with three or four stout limbs left on one side
for legs, which are not likely to get loose.

[2] The Canadians call it _picquer de fond_.

[3] Even the Jesuit missionaries, accustomed to the St. Lawrence and
other rivers of Canada, in their first expeditions to the
Abenaquinois, speak of rivers _ferrées de rochers_, shod with rocks.
See also No. 10 _Relations_, for 1647, p. 185.

[4] “A steady current or pitch of water is preferable to one either
rising or diminishing; as, when rising rapidly, the water at the
middle of the river is considerably higher than at the shores,--so
much so as to be distinctly perceived by the eye of a spectator on the
banks, presenting an appearance like a turnpike road. The lumber,
therefore, is always sure to incline from the centre of the channel
toward either shore.”--Springer.

[5] “The spruce tree,” says Springer in ’51, “is generally selected,
principally for the superior facilities which its numerous limbs
afford the climber. To gain the first limbs of this tree, which are
from twenty to forty feet from the ground, a smaller tree is undercut
and lodged against it, clambering up which the top of the spruce is
reached. In some cases, when a very elevated position is desired, the
spruce tree is lodged against the trunk of some lofty pine, up which
we ascend to a height twice that of the surrounding forest.”

To indicate the direction of pines, one throws down a branch, and a
man on the ground takes the bearing.

[6] The bears had not touched things on our possessions. They
sometimes tear a batteau to pieces for the sake of the tar with which
it is besmeared.

[7] I cut this from a newspaper: “On the 11th (instant?) [May, ’49],
on Rappogenes Falls, Mr. John Delantee, of Orono, Me., was drowned
while running logs. He was a citizen of Orono, and was twenty-six
years of age. His companions found his body, enclosed it in bark, and
buried it in the solemn woods.”




CHESUNCOOK


At five P. M., September 13, 1853, I left Boston, in the steamer, for
Bangor, by the outside course. It was a warm and still night,--warmer,
probably, on the water than on the land,--and the sea was as smooth as
a small lake in summer, merely rippled. The passengers went singing on
the deck, as in a parlor, till ten o’clock. We passed a vessel on her
beam-ends on a rock just outside the islands, and some of us thought
that she was the “rapt ship” which ran

                    “on her side so low
     That she drank water, and her keel ploughed air,”

not considering that there was no wind, and that she was under bare
poles. Now we have left the islands behind and are off Nahant. We
behold those features which the discoverers saw, apparently unchanged.
Now we see the Cape Ann lights, and now pass near a small village-like
fleet of mackerel fishers at anchor, probably off Gloucester. They
salute us with a shout from their low decks; but I understand their
“Good-evening” to mean, “Don’t run against me, sir.” From the wonders
of the deep we go below to yet deeper sleep. And then the absurdity of
being waked up in the night by a man who wants the job of blacking
your boots! It is more inevitable than seasickness, and may have
something to do with it. It is like the ducking you get on crossing
the line the first time. I trusted that these old customs were
abolished. They might with the same propriety insist on blacking your
face. I heard of one man who complained that somebody had stolen his
boots in the night; and when he found them, he wanted to know what
they had done to them,--they had spoiled them,--he never put that
stuff on them; and the bootblack narrowly escaped paying damages.

Anxious to get out of the whale’s belly, I rose early, and joined some
old salts, who were smoking by a dim light on a sheltered part of the
deck. We were just getting into the river. They knew all about it, of
course. I was proud to find that I had stood the voyage so well, and
was not in the least digested. We brushed up and watched the first
signs of dawn through an open port; but the day seemed to hang fire.
We inquired the time; none of my companions had a chronometer. At
length an African prince rushed by, observing, “Twelve o’clock,
gentlemen!” and blew out the light. It was moonrise. So I slunk down
into the monster’s bowels again.

The first land we make is Monhegan Island, before dawn, and next St.
George’s Islands, seeing two or three lights. Whitehead, with its bare
rocks and funereal bell, is interesting. Next I remember that the
Camden Hills attracted my eyes, and afterward the hills about
Frankfort. We reached Bangor about noon.

When I arrived, my companion that was to be had gone up river, and
engaged an Indian, Joe Aitteon, a son of the Governor, to go with us
to Chesuncook Lake. Joe had conducted two white men a-moose-hunting in
the same direction the year before. He arrived by cars at Bangor that
evening, with his canoe and a companion, Sabattis Solomon, who was
going to leave Bangor the following Monday with Joe’s father, by way
of the Penobscot, and join Joe in moose-hunting at Chesuncook when we
had done with him. They took supper at my friend’s house and lodged in
his barn, saying that they should fare worse than that in the woods.
They only made Watch bark a little, when they came to the door in the
night for water, for he does not like Indians.

The next morning Joe and his canoe were put on board the stage for
Moosehead Lake, sixty and odd miles distant, an hour before we started
in an open wagon. We carried hard-bread, pork, smoked beef, tea,
sugar, etc., seemingly enough for a regiment; the sight of which
brought together reminded me by what ignoble means we had maintained
our ground hitherto. We went by the Avenue Road, which is quite
straight and very good, northwestward toward Moosehead Lake, through
more than a dozen flourishing towns, with almost every one its
academy,--not one of which, however, is on my General Atlas,
published, alas! in 1824; so much are they before the age, or I behind
it! The earth must have been considerably lighter to the shoulders of
General Atlas then.

It rained all this day and till the middle of the next forenoon,
concealing the landscape almost entirely; but we had hardly got out of
the streets of Bangor before I began to be exhilarated by the sight of
the wild fir and spruce tops, and those of other primitive evergreens,
peering through the mist in the horizon. It was like the sight and
odor of cake to a schoolboy. He who rides and keeps the beaten track
studies the fences chiefly. Near Bangor, the fence-posts, on account
of the frost’s heaving them in the clayey soil, were not planted in
the ground, but were mortised into a transverse horizontal beam lying
on the surface. Afterwards, the prevailing fences were log ones, with
sometimes a Virginia fence, or else rails slanted over crossed stakes;
and these zigzagged or played leap-frog all the way to the lake,
keeping just ahead of us. After getting out of the Penobscot valley,
the country was unexpectedly level, or consisted of very even and
equal swells, for twenty or thirty miles, never rising above the
general level, but affording, it is said, a very good prospect in
clear weather, with frequent views of Ktaadn,--straight roads and long
hills. The houses were far apart, commonly small and of one story, but
framed. There was very little land under cultivation, yet the forest
did not often border the road. The stumps were frequently as high as
one’s head, showing the depth of the snows. The white hay-caps, drawn
over small stacks of beans or corn in the fields on account of the
rain, were a novel sight to me. We saw large flocks of pigeons, and
several times came within a rod or two of partridges in the road. My
companion said that in one journey out of Bangor he and his son had
shot sixty partridges from his buggy. The mountain-ash was now very
handsome, as also the wayfarer’s-tree or hobble-bush, with its ripe
purple berries mixed with red. The Canada thistle, an introduced
plant, was the prevailing weed all the way to the lake, the roadside
in many places, and fields not long cleared, being densely filled with
it as with a crop, to the exclusion of everything else. There were
also whole fields full of ferns, now rusty and withering, which in
older countries are commonly confined to wet ground. There were very
few flowers, even allowing for the lateness of the season. It chanced
that I saw no asters in bloom along the road for fifty miles, though
they were so abundant then in Massachusetts,--except in one place one
or two of the _Aster acuminatus_,--and no golden-rods till within
twenty miles of Monson, where I saw a three-ribbed one. There were
many late buttercups, however, and the two fire-weeds, erechthites and
epilobium, commonly where there had been a burning, and at last the
pearly everlasting. I noticed occasionally very long troughs which
supplied the road with water, and my companion said that three dollars
annually were granted by the State to one man in each school-district,
who provided and maintained a suitable water-trough by the roadside,
for the use of travelers,--a piece of intelligence as refreshing to me
as the water itself. That legislature did not sit in vain. It was an
Oriental act, which made me wish that I was still farther down
East,--another Maine law, which I hope we may get in Massachusetts.
That State is banishing bar-rooms from its highways, and conducting
the mountain springs thither.

The country was first decidedly mountainous in Garland, Sangerville,
and onwards, twenty-five or thirty miles from Bangor. At Sangerville,
where we stopped at mid-afternoon to warm and dry ourselves, the
landlord told us that he had found a wilderness where we found him. At
a fork in the road between Abbot and Monson, about twenty miles from
Moosehead Lake, I saw a guide-post surmounted by a pair of moose
horns, spreading four or five feet, with the word “Monson” painted on
one blade, and the name of some other town on the other. They are
sometimes used for ornamental hat-trees, together with deer’s horns,
in front entries; but, after the experience which I shall relate, I
trust that I shall have a better excuse for killing a moose than that
I may hang my hat on his horns. We reached Monson, fifty miles from
Bangor, and thirteen from the lake, after dark.

At four o’clock the next morning, in the dark, and still in the rain,
we pursued our journey. Close to the academy in this town they have
erected a sort of gallows for the pupils to practice on. I thought
that they might as well hang at once all who need to go through such
exercises in so new a country, where there is nothing to hinder their
living an outdoor life. Better omit Blair, and take the air. The
country about the south end of the lake is quite mountainous, and the
road began to feel the effects of it. There is one hill which, it is
calculated, it takes twenty-five minutes to ascend. In many places the
road was in that condition called _repaired_, having just been
whittled into the required semicylindrical form with the shovel and
scraper, with all the softest inequalities in the middle, like a hog’s
back with the bristles up, and Jehu was expected to keep astride of
the spine. As you looked off each side of the bare sphere into the
horizon, the ditches were awful to behold,--a vast hollowness, like
that between Saturn and his ring. At a tavern hereabouts the hostler
greeted our horse as an old acquaintance, though he did not remember
the driver. He said that he had taken care of that little mare for a
short time, a year or two before, at the Mount Kineo House, and
thought she was not in as good condition as then. Every man to his
trade. I am not acquainted with a single horse in the world, not even
the one that kicked me.

Already we had thought that we saw Moosehead Lake from a hilltop,
where an extensive fog filled the distant lowlands, but we were
mistaken. It was not till we were within a mile or two of its south
end that we got our first view of it,--a suitably wild-looking sheet
of water, sprinkled with small, low islands, which were covered with
shaggy spruce and other wild wood,--seen over the infant port of
Greenville with mountains on each side and far in the north, and a
steamer’s smoke-pipe rising above a roof. A pair of moose-horns
ornamented a corner of the public house where we left our horse, and a
few rods distant lay the small steamer Moosehead, Captain King. There
was no village, and no summer road any farther in this direction, but
a winter road, that is, one passable only when deep snow covers its
inequalities, from Greenville up the east side of the lake to Lily
Bay, about twelve miles.

I was here first introduced to Joe. He had ridden all the way on the
outside of the stage, the day before, in the rain, giving way to
ladies, and was well wetted. As it still rained, he asked if we were
going to “put it through.” He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four
years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad
face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more
turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description
of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt,
woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the
lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.
When, afterward, he had occasion to take off his shoes and stockings,
I was struck with the smallness of his feet. He had worked a good deal
as a lumberman, and appeared to identify himself with that class. He
was the only one of the party who possessed an india-rubber jacket.
The top strip or edge of his canoe was worn nearly through by friction
on the stage.

At eight o’clock the steamer, with her bell and whistle, scaring the
moose, summoned us on board. She was a well-appointed little boat,
commanded by a gentlemanly captain, with patent life-seats and
metallic life-boat, and dinner on board, if you wish. She is chiefly
used by lumberers for the transportation of themselves, their boats,
and supplies, but also by hunters and tourists. There was another
steamer, named Amphitrite, laid up close by; but, apparently, her name
was not more trite than her hull. There were also two or three large
sailboats in port. These beginnings of commerce on a lake in the
wilderness are very interesting,--these larger white birds that come
to keep company with the gulls. There were but few passengers, and not
one female among them: a St. Francis Indian, with his canoe and
moose-hides; two explorers for lumber; three men who landed at Sandbar
Island, and a gentleman who lives on Deer Island, eleven miles up the
lake, and owns also Sugar Island, between which and the former the
steamer runs; these, I think, were all beside ourselves. In the saloon
was some kind of musical instrument--cherubim or seraphim--to soothe
the angry waves; and there, very properly, was tacked up the map of
the public lands of Maine and Massachusetts, a copy of which I had in
my pocket.

The heavy rain confining us to the saloon awhile, I discoursed with
the proprietor of Sugar Island on the condition of the world in Old
Testament times. But at length, leaving this subject as fresh as we
found it, he told me that he had lived about this lake twenty or
thirty years, and yet had not been to the head of it for twenty-one
years. He faces the other way. The explorers had a fine new birch on
board, larger than ours, in which they had come up the Piscataquis
from Howland, and they had had several messes of trout already. They
were going to the neighborhood of Eagle and Chamberlain lakes, or the
head-waters of the St. John, and offered to keep us company as far as
we went. The lake to-day was rougher than I found the ocean, either
going or returning, and Joe remarked that it would swamp his birch.
Off Lily Bay it is a dozen miles wide, but it is much broken by
islands. The scenery is not merely wild, but varied and interesting;
mountains were seen, farther or nearer, on all sides but the
northwest, their summits now lost in the clouds; but Mount Kineo is
the principal feature of the lake, and more exclusively belongs to it.
After leaving Greenville, at the foot, which is the nucleus of a town
some eight or ten years old, you see but three or four houses for the
whole length of the lake, or about forty miles, three of them the
public houses at which the steamer is advertised to stop, and the
shore is an unbroken wilderness. The prevailing wood seemed to be
spruce, fir, birch, and rock maple. You could easily distinguish the
hard wood from the soft, or “black growth,” as it is called, at a
great distance, the former being smooth, round-topped, and light
green, with a bowery and cultivated look.

Mount Kineo, at which the boat touched, is a peninsula with a narrow
neck, about midway the lake on the east side. The celebrated precipice
is on the east or land side of this, and is so high and perpendicular
that you can jump from the top, many hundred feet, into the water,
which makes up behind the point. A man on board told us that an anchor
had been sunk ninety fathoms at its base before reaching bottom!
Probably it will be discovered ere long that some Indian maiden jumped
off it for love once, for true love never could have found a path more
to its mind. We passed quite close to the rock here, since it is a
very bold shore, and I observed marks of a rise of four or five feet
on it. The St. Francis Indian expected to take in his boy here, but he
was not at the landing. The father’s sharp eyes, however, detected a
canoe with his boy in it far away under the mountain, though no one
else could see it. “Where is the canoe?” asked the captain, “I don’t
see it;” but he held on, nevertheless, and by and by it hove in sight.

We reached the head of the lake about noon. The weather had, in the
meanwhile, cleared up, though the mountains were still capped with
clouds. Seen from this point, Mount Kineo, and two other allied
mountains ranging with it northeasterly, presented a very strong
family likeness, as if all cast in one mould. The steamer here
approached a long pier projecting from the northern wilderness, and
built of some of its logs, and whistled, where not a cabin nor a
mortal was to be seen. The shore was quite low, with flat rocks on it,
overhung with black ash, arbor-vitæ, etc., which at first looked as if
they did not care a whistle for us. There was not a single cabman to
cry “Coach!” or inveigle us to the United States Hotel. At length a
Mr. Hinckley, who has a camp at the other end of the “carry,” appeared
with a truck drawn by an ox and a horse over a rude log-railway
through the woods. The next thing was to get our canoe and effects
over the carry from this lake, one of the heads of the Kennebec, into
the Penobscot River. This railway from the lake to the river occupied
the middle of a clearing two or three rods wide and perfectly straight
through the forest. We walked across while our baggage was drawn
behind. My companion went ahead to be ready for partridges, while I
followed, looking at the plants.

This was an interesting botanical locality for one coming from the
south to commence with; for many plants which are rather rare, and one
or two which are not found at all, in the eastern part of
Massachusetts, grew abundantly between the rails,--as Labrador-tea,
_Kalmia glauca_, Canada blueberry (which was still in fruit, and a
second time in bloom), _Clintonia_ and _Linnæa borealis_, which last a
lumberer called _moxon_, creeping snowberry, painted trillium,
large-flowered bellwort, etc. I fancied that the _Aster Radula_,
_Diplopappus umbellatus_, _Solidago lanceolata_, red trumpet-weed, and
many others which were conspicuously in bloom on the shore of the lake
and on the carry, had a peculiarly wild and primitive look there. The
spruce and fir trees crowded to the track on each side to welcome us,
the arbor-vitæ, with its changing leaves, prompted us to make haste,
and the sight of the canoe birch gave us spirits to do so. Sometimes
an evergreen just fallen lay across the track with its rich burden of
cones, looking, still, fuller of life than our trees in the most
favorable positions. You did not expect to find such _spruce_ trees in
the wild woods, but they evidently attend to their toilets each
morning even there. Through such a front yard did we enter that
wilderness.

There was a very slight rise above the lake,--the country appearing
like, and perhaps being partly a swamp,--and at length a gradual
descent to the Penobscot, which I was surprised to find here a large
stream, from twelve to fifteen rods wide, flowing from west to east,
or at right angles with the lake, and not more than two and a half
miles from it. The distance is nearly twice too great on the Map of
the Public Lands, and on Colton’s Map of Maine, and Russell Stream is
placed too far down. Jackson makes Moosehead Lake to be nine hundred
and sixty feet above high water in Portland harbor. It is higher than
Chesuncook, for the lumberers consider the Penobscot, where we struck
it, twenty-five feet lower than Moosehead, though eight miles above it
is said to be the highest, so that the water can be made to flow
either way, and the river falls a good deal between here and
Chesuncook. The carry-man called this about one hundred and forty
miles above Bangor by the river, or two hundred from the ocean, and
fifty-five miles below Hilton’s, on the Canada road, the first
clearing above, which is four and a half miles from the source of the
Penobscot.

At the north end of the carry, in the midst of a clearing of sixty
acres or more, there was a log camp of the usual construction, with
something more like a house adjoining, for the accommodation of the
carry-man’s family and passing lumberers. The bed of withered fir
twigs smelled very sweet, though really very dirty. There was also a
store-house on the bank of the river, containing pork, flour, iron,
batteaux, and birches, locked up.

We now proceeded to get our dinner, which always turned out to be tea,
and to pitch canoes, for which purpose a large iron pot lay
permanently on the bank. This we did in company with the explorers.
Both Indians and whites use a mixture of rosin and grease for this
purpose, that is, for the pitching, not the dinner. Joe took a small
brand from the fire and blew the heat and flame against the pitch on
his birch, and so melted and spread it. Sometimes he put his mouth
over the suspected spot and sucked, to see if it admitted air; and at
one place, where we stopped, he set his canoe high on crossed stakes,
and poured water into it. I narrowly watched his motions, and listened
attentively to his observations, for we had employed an Indian mainly
that I might have an opportunity to study his ways. I heard him swear
once, mildly, during this operation, about his knife being as dull as
a hoe,--an accomplishment which he owed to his intercourse with the
whites; and he remarked, “We ought to have some tea before we start;
we shall be hungry before we kill that moose.”

At mid-afternoon we embarked on the Penobscot. Our birch was nineteen
and a half feet long by two and a half at the widest part, and
fourteen inches deep within, both ends alike, and painted green, which
Joe thought affected the pitch and made it leak. This, I think, was a
middling-sized one. That of the explorers was much larger, though
probably not much longer. This carried us three with our baggage,
weighing in all between five hundred and fifty and six hundred pounds.
We had two heavy, though slender, rock-maple paddles, one of them of
bird’s-eye maple. Joe placed birch-bark on the bottom for us to sit
on, and slanted cedar splints against the cross-bars to protect our
backs, while he himself sat upon a cross-bar in the stern. The baggage
occupied the middle or widest part of the canoe. We also paddled by
turns in the bows, now sitting with our legs extended, now sitting
upon our legs, and now rising upon our knees; but I found none of
these positions endurable, and was reminded of the complaints of the
old Jesuit missionaries of the torture they endured from long
confinement in constrained positions in canoes, in their long voyages
from Quebec to the Huron country; but afterwards I sat on the
cross-bars, or stood up, and experienced no inconvenience.

It was deadwater for a couple of miles. The river had been raised
about two feet by the rain, and lumberers were hoping for a flood
sufficient to bring down the logs that were left in the spring. Its
banks were seven or eight feet high, and densely covered with white
and black spruce,--which, I think, must be the commonest trees
thereabouts,--fir, arbor-vitæ, canoe, yellow and black birch, rock,
mountain, and a few red maples, beech, black and mountain ash, the
large-toothed aspen, many civil-looking elms, now imbrowned, along the
stream, and at first a few hemlocks also. We had not gone far before I
was startled by seeing what I thought was an Indian encampment,
covered with a red flag, on the bank, and exclaimed, “Camp!” to my
comrades. I was slow to discover that it was a red maple changed by
the frost. The immediate shores were also densely covered with the
speckled alder, red osier, shrubby willows or sallows, and the like.
There were a few yellow lily pads still left, half-drowned, along the
sides, and sometimes a white one. Many fresh tracks of moose were
visible where the water was shallow, and on the shore, the lily stems
were freshly bitten off by them.

After paddling about two miles, we parted company with the explorers,
and turned up Lobster Stream, which comes in on the right, from the
southeast. This was six or eight rods wide, and appeared to run nearly
parallel with the Penobscot. Joe said that it was so called from small
fresh-water lobsters found in it. It is the Matahumkeag of the maps.
My companion wished to look for moose signs, and intended, if it
proved worth the while, to camp up that way, since the Indian advised
it. On account of the rise of the Penobscot, the water ran up this
stream to the pond of the same name, one or two miles. The Spencer
Mountains, east of the north end of Moosehead Lake, were now in plain
sight in front of us. The kingfisher flew before us, the pigeon
woodpecker was seen and heard, and nuthatches and chickadees close at
hand. Joe said that they called the chickadee _kecunnilessu_ in his
language. I will not vouch for the spelling of what possibly was never
spelt before, but I pronounced after him till he said it would do. We
passed close to a woodcock, which stood perfectly still on the shore,
with feathers puffed up, as if sick. This Joe said they called
_nipsquecohossus_. The kingfisher was _skuscumonsuck_; bear was
_wassus_; Indian devil, _lunxus_; the mountain-ash, _upahsis_. This
was very abundant and beautiful. Moose tracks were not so fresh along
this stream, except in a small creek about a mile up it, where a large
log had lodged in the spring, marked “W-cross-girdle-crow-foot.” We
saw a pair of moose-horns on the shore, and I asked Joe if a moose had
shed them; but he said there was a head attached to them, and I knew
that they did not shed their heads more than once in their lives.

After ascending about a mile and a half, to within a short distance of
Lobster Lake, we returned to the Penobscot. Just below the mouth of
the Lobster we found quick water, and the river expanded to twenty or
thirty rods in width. The moose-tracks were quite numerous and fresh
here. We noticed in a great many places narrow and well-trodden paths
by which they had come down to the river, and where they had slid on
the steep and clayey bank. Their tracks were either close to the edge
of the stream, those of the calves distinguishable from the others, or
in shallow water; the holes made by their feet in the soft bottom
being visible for a long time. They were particularly numerous where
there was a small bay, or pokelogan, as it is called, bordered by a
strip of meadow, or separated from the river by a low peninsula
covered with coarse grass, wool-grass, etc., wherein they had waded
back and forth and eaten the pads. We detected the remains of one in
such a spot. At one place, where we landed to pick up a summer duck,
which my companion had shot, Joe peeled a canoe birch for bark for his
hunting-horn. He then asked if we were not going to get the other
duck, for his sharp eyes had seen another fall in the bushes a little
farther along, and my companion obtained it. I now began to notice the
bright red berries of the tree-cranberry, which grows eight or ten
feet high, mingled with the alders and cornel along the shore. There
was less hard wood than at first.

After proceeding a mile and three quarters below the mouth of the
Lobster, we reached, about sundown, a small island at the head of what
Joe called the Moosehorn Deadwater (the Moosehorn, in which he was
going to hunt that night, coming in about three miles below), and on
the upper end of this we decided to camp. On a point at the lower end
lay the carcass of a moose killed a month or more before. We concluded
merely to prepare our camp, and leave our baggage here, that all might
be ready when we returned from moose-hunting. Though I had not come
a-hunting, and felt some compunctions about accompanying the hunters,
I wished to see a moose near at hand, and was not sorry to learn how
the Indian managed to kill one. I went as reporter or chaplain to the
hunters,--and the chaplain has been known to carry a gun himself.
After clearing a small space amid the dense spruce and fir trees, we
covered the damp ground with a shingling of fir twigs, and, while Joe
was preparing his birch horn and pitching his canoe,--for this had to
be done whenever we stopped long enough to build a fire, and was the
principal labor which he took upon himself at such times,--we
collected fuel for the night, large, wet, and rotting logs, which had
lodged at the head of the island, for our hatchet was too small for
effective chopping; but we did not kindle a fire, lest the moose
should smell it. Joe set up a couple of forked stakes, and prepared
half a dozen poles, ready to cast one of our blankets over in case it
rained in the night, which precaution, however, was omitted the next
night. We also plucked the ducks which had been killed for breakfast.

While we were thus engaged in the twilight, we heard faintly, from far
down the stream, what sounded like two strokes of a woodchopper’s axe,
echoing dully through the grim solitude. We are wont to liken many
sounds, heard at a distance in the forest, to the stroke of an axe,
because they resemble each other under those circumstances, and that
is the one we commonly hear there. When we told Joe of this, he
exclaimed, “By George, I’ll bet that was a moose! They make a noise
like that.” These sounds affected us strangely, and by their very
resemblance to a familiar one, where they probably had so different
an origin, enhanced the impression of solitude and wildness.

At starlight we dropped down the stream, which was a deadwater for
three miles, or as far as the Moosehorn; Joe telling us that we must
be very silent, and he himself making no noise with his paddle, while
he urged the canoe along with effective impulses. It was a still
night, and suitable for this purpose,--for if there is wind, the moose
will smell you,--and Joe was very confident that he should get some.
The Harvest Moon had just risen, and its level rays began to light up
the forest on our right, while we glided downward in the shade on the
same side, against the little breeze that was stirring. The lofty,
spiring tops of the spruce and fir were very black against the sky,
and more distinct than by day, close bordering this broad avenue on
each side; and the beauty of the scene, as the moon rose above the
forest, it would not be easy to describe. A bat flew over our heads,
and we heard a few faint notes of birds from time to time, perhaps the
myrtle-bird for one, or the sudden plunge of a musquash, or saw one
crossing the stream before us, or heard the sound of a rill emptying
in, swollen by the recent rain. About a mile below the island, when
the solitude seemed to be growing more complete every moment, we
suddenly saw the light and heard the crackling of a fire on the bank,
and discovered the camp of the two explorers; they standing before it
in their red shirts, and talking aloud of the adventures and profits
of the day. They were just then speaking of a bargain, in which, as I
understood, somebody had cleared twenty-five dollars. We glided by
without speaking, close under the bank, within a couple of rods of
them; and Joe, taking his horn, imitated the call of the moose, till
we suggested that they might fire on us. This was the last we saw of
them, and we never knew whether they detected or suspected us.

I have often wished since that I was with them. They search for timber
over a given section, climbing hills and often high trees to look off;
explore the streams by which it is to be driven, and the like; spend
five or six weeks in the woods, they two alone, a hundred miles or
more from any town, roaming about, and sleeping on the ground where
night overtakes them, depending chiefly on the provisions they carry
with them, though they do not decline what game they come across; and
then in the fall they return and make report to their employers,
determining the number of teams that will be required the following
winter. Experienced men get three or four dollars a day for this work.
It is a solitary and adventurous life, and comes nearest to that of
the trapper of the West, perhaps. They work ever with a gun as well as
an axe, let their beards grow, and live without neighbors, not on an
open plain, but far within a wilderness.

This discovery accounted for the sounds which we had heard, and destroyed
the prospect of seeing moose yet awhile. At length, when we had left
the explorers far behind, Joe laid down his paddle, drew forth his
birch horn,--a straight one, about fifteen inches long and three or
four wide at the mouth, tied round with strips of the same bark,--and,
standing up, imitated the call of the moose,--_ugh-ugh-ugh_, or
_oo-oo-oo-oo_, and then a prolonged _oo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o_, and listened
attentively for several minutes. We asked him what kind of noise he
expected to hear. He said that if a moose heard it, he guessed we
should find out; we should hear him coming half a mile off; he would
come close to, perhaps into, the water, and my companion must wait
till he got fair sight, and then aim just behind the shoulder.

The moose venture out to the riverside to feed and drink at night.
Earlier in the season the hunters do not use a horn to call them out,
but steal upon them as they are feeding along the sides of the stream,
and often the first notice they have of one is the sound of the water
dropping from its muzzle. An Indian whom I heard imitate the voice of
the moose, and also that of the caribou and the deer, using a much
longer horn than Joe’s, told me that the first could be heard eight or
ten miles, sometimes; it was a loud sort of bellowing sound, clearer
and more sonorous than the lowing of cattle, the caribou’s a sort of
snort, and the small deer’s like that of a lamb.

At length we turned up the Moosehorn, where the Indians at the carry
had told us that they killed a moose the night before. This is a very
meandering stream, only a rod or two in width, but comparatively deep,
coming in on the right, fitly enough named Moosehorn, whether from its
windings or its inhabitants. It was bordered here and there by narrow
meadows between the stream and the endless forest, affording favorable
places for the moose to feed, and to call them out on. We proceeded
half a mile up this as through a narrow, winding canal, where the
tall, dark spruce and firs and arbor-vitæ towered on both sides in the
moonlight, forming a perpendicular forest-edge of great height, like
the spires of a Venice in the forest. In two places stood a small
stack of hay on the bank, ready for the lumberer’s use in the winter,
looking strange enough there. We thought of the day when this might be
a brook winding through smooth-shaven meadows on some gentleman’s
grounds; and seen by moonlight then, excepting the forest that now
hems it in, how little changed it would appear!

Again and again Joe called the moose, placing the canoe close by some
favorable point of meadow for them to come out on, but listened in
vain to hear one come rushing through the woods, and concluded that
they had been hunted too much thereabouts. We saw, many times, what to
our imaginations looked like a gigantic moose, with his horns peering
from out the forest edge; but we saw the forest only, and not its
inhabitants, that night. So at last we turned about. There was now a
little fog on the water, though it was a fine, clear night above.
There were very few sounds to break the stillness of the forest.
Several times we heard the hooting of a great horned owl, as at home,
and told Joe that he would call out the moose for him, for he made a
sound considerably like the horn; but Joe answered, that the moose had
heard that sound a thousand times, and knew better; and oftener still
we were startled by the plunge of a musquash. Once, when Joe had
called again, and we were listening for moose, we heard, come faintly
echoing, or creeping from far through the moss-clad aisles, a dull,
dry, rushing sound with a solid core to it, yet as if half smothered
under the grasp of the luxuriant and fungus-like forest, like the
shutting of a door in some distant entry of the damp and shaggy
wilderness. If we had not been there, no mortal had heard it. When we
asked Joe in a whisper what it was, he answered, “Tree fall.” There is
something singularly grand and impressive in the sound of a tree
falling in a perfectly calm night like this, as if the agencies which
overthrow it did not need to be excited, but worked with a subtle,
deliberate, and conscious force, like a boa-constrictor, and more
effectively then than even in a windy day. If there is any such
difference, perhaps it is because trees with the dews of the night on
them are heavier than by day.

Having reached the camp, about ten o’clock, we kindled our fire and
went to bed. Each of us had a blanket, in which he lay on the fir
twigs, with his extremities toward the fire, but nothing over his
head. It was worth the while to lie down in a country where you could
afford such great fires; that was one whole side, and the bright side,
of our world. We had first rolled up a large log some eighteen inches
through and ten feet long, for a backlog, to last all night, and then
piled on the trees to the height of three or four feet, no matter how
green or damp. In fact, we burned as much wood that night as would,
with economy and an air-tight stove, last a poor family in one of our
cities all winter. It was very agreeable, as well as independent, thus
lying in the open air, and the fire kept our uncovered extremities
warm enough. The Jesuit missionaries used to say, that, in their
journeys with the Indians in Canada, they lay on a bed which had never
been shaken up since the creation, unless by earthquakes. It is
surprising with what impunity and comfort one who has always lain in a
warm bed in a close apartment, and studiously avoided drafts of air,
can lie down on the ground without a shelter, roll himself in a
blanket, and sleep before a fire, in a frosty autumn night, just after
a long rain-storm, and even come soon to enjoy and value the fresh
air.

I lay awake awhile, watching the ascent of the sparks through the
firs, and sometimes their descent in half-extinguished cinders on my
blanket. They were as interesting as fireworks, going up in endless,
successive crowds, each after an explosion, in an eager, serpentine
course, some to five or six rods above the tree-tops before they went
out. We do not suspect how much our chimneys have concealed; and now
air-tight stoves have come to conceal all the rest. In the course of
the night, I got up once or twice and put fresh logs on the fire,
making my companions curl up their legs.

When we awoke in the morning (Saturday, September 17), there was
considerable frost whitening the leaves. We heard the sound of the
chickadee, and a few faintly lisping birds, and also of ducks in the
water about the island. I took a botanical account of stock of our
domains before the dew was off, and found that the ground-hemlock, or
American yew, was the prevailing undershrub. We breakfasted on tea,
hard-bread, and ducks.

Before the fog had fairly cleared away we paddled down the stream
again, and were soon past the mouth of the Moosehorn. These twenty
miles of the Penobscot, between Moosehead and Chesuncook lakes, are
comparatively smooth, and a great part deadwater; but from time to
time it is shallow and rapid, with rocks or gravel beds, where you can
wade across. There is no expanse of water, and no break in the forest,
and the meadow is a mere edging here and there. There are no hills
near the river nor within sight, except one or two distant mountains
seen in a few places. The banks are from six to ten feet high, but
once or twice rise gently to higher ground. In many places the forest
on the bank was but a thin strip, letting the light through from some
alder swamp or meadow behind. The conspicuous berry-bearing bushes and
trees along the shore were the red osier, with its whitish fruit,
hobble-bush, mountain-ash, tree-cranberry, choke-cherry, now ripe,
alternate cornel, and naked viburnum. Following Joe’s example, I ate
the fruit of the last, and also of the hobble-bush, but found them
rather insipid and seedy. I looked very narrowly at the vegetation, as
we glided along close to the shore, and frequently made Joe turn aside
for me to pluck a plant, that I might see by comparison what was
primitive about my native river. Horehound, horse-mint, and the
sensitive fern grew close to the edge, under the willows and alders,
and wool-grass on the islands, as along the Assabet River in Concord.
It was too late for flowers, except a few asters, goldenrods, etc. In
several places we noticed the slight frame of a camp, such as we had
prepared to set up, amid the forest by the riverside, where some
lumberers or hunters had passed a night, and sometimes steps cut in
the muddy or clayey bank in front of it.

We stopped to fish for trout at the mouth of a small stream called
Ragmuff, which came in from the west, about two miles below the
Moosehorn. Here were the ruins of an old lumbering-camp, and a small
space, which had formerly been cleared and burned over, was now
densely overgrown with the red cherry and raspberries. While we were
trying for trout, Joe, Indian-like, wandered off up the Ragmuff on his
own errands, and when we were ready to start was far beyond call. So
we were compelled to make a fire and get our dinner here, not to lose
time. Some dark reddish birds, with grayer females (perhaps purple
finches), and myrtle-birds in their summer dress, hopped within six or
eight feet of us and our smoke. Perhaps they smelled the frying pork.
The latter bird, or both, made the lisping notes which I had heard in
the forest. They suggested that the few small birds found in the
wilderness are on more familiar terms with the lumberman and hunter
than those of the orchard and clearing with the farmer. I have since
found the Canada jay, and partridges, both the black and the common,
equally tame there, as if they had not yet learned to mistrust man
entirely. The chickadee, which is at home alike in the primitive woods
and in our wood-lots, still retains its confidence in the towns to a
remarkable degree.

Joe at length returned, after an hour and a half, and said that he
had been two miles up the stream exploring, and had seen a moose, but,
not having the gun, he did not get him. We made no complaint, but
concluded to look out for Joe the next time. However, this may have
been a mere mistake, for we had no reason to complain of him
afterwards. As we continued down the stream, I was surprised to hear
him whistling “O Susanna” and several other such airs, while his
paddle urged us along. Once he said, “Yes, sir-ee.” His common word
was “Sartain.” He paddled, as usual, on one side only, giving the
birch an impulse by using the side as a fulcrum. I asked him how the
ribs were fastened to the side rails. He answered, “I don’t know, I
never noticed.” Talking with him about subsisting wholly on what the
woods yielded,--game, fish, berries, etc.,--I suggested that his
ancestors did so; but he answered that he had been brought up in such
a way that he could not do it. “Yes,” said he, “that’s the way they
got a living, like wild fellows, wild as bears. By George! I shan’t go
into the woods without provision,--hard-bread, pork, etc.” He had
brought on a barrel of hard-bread and stored it at the carry for his
hunting. However, though he was a Governor’s son, he had not learned
to read.

At one place below this, on the east side, where the bank was higher
and drier than usual, rising gently from the shore to a slight
elevation, some one had felled the trees over twenty or thirty acres,
and left them drying in order to burn. This was the only preparation
for a house between the Moosehead Carry and Chesuncook, but there was
no hut nor inhabitants there yet. The pioneer thus selects a site for
his house, which will, perhaps, prove the germ of a town.

My eyes were all the while on the trees, distinguishing between the
black and white spruce and the fir. You paddle along in a narrow canal
through an endless forest, and the vision I have in my mind’s eye,
still, is of the small, dark, and sharp tops of tall fir and spruce
trees, and pagoda-like arbor-vitæs, crowded together on each side,
with various hard woods intermixed. Some of the arbor-vitæs were at
least sixty feet high. The hard woods, occasionally occurring
exclusively, were less wild to my eye. I fancied them ornamental
grounds, with farmhouses in the rear. The canoe and yellow birch,
beech, maple, and elm are Saxon and Norman, but the spruce and fir,
and pines generally, are Indian. The soft engravings which adorn the
annuals give no idea of a stream in such a wilderness as this. The
rough sketches in Jackson’s Reports on the Geology of Maine answer
much better. At one place we saw a small grove of slender sapling
white pines, the only collection of pines that I saw on this voyage.
Here and there, however, was a full-grown, tall, and slender, but
defective one, what lumbermen call a _konchus_ tree, which they
ascertain with their axes, or by the knots. I did not learn whether
this word was Indian or English. It reminded me of the Greek κόγχη, 
a conch or shell, and I amused myself with fancying that it
might signify the dead sound which the trees yield when struck. All
the rest of the pines had been driven off.

How far men go for the material of their houses! The inhabitants of
the most civilized cities, in all ages, send into far, primitive
forests, beyond the bounds of their civilization, where the moose and
bear and savage dwell, for their pine boards for ordinary use. And, on
the other hand, the savage soon receives from cities iron
arrow-points, hatchets, and guns, to point his savageness with.

The solid and well-defined fir-tops, like sharp and regular
spearheads, black against the sky, gave a peculiar, dark, and sombre
look to the forest. The spruce-tops have a similar but more ragged
outline, their shafts also merely feathered below. The firs were
somewhat oftener regular and dense pyramids. I was struck by this
universal spiring upward of the forest evergreens. The tendency is to
slender, spiring tops, while they are narrower below. Not only the
spruce and fir, but even the arbor-vitæ and white pine, unlike the
soft, spreading second-growth, of which I saw none, all spire upwards,
lifting a dense spearhead of cones to the light and air, at any rate,
while their branches straggle after as they may; as Indians lift the
ball over the heads of the crowd in their desperate game. In this they
resemble grasses, as also palms somewhat. The hemlock is commonly a
tent-like pyramid from the ground to its summit.

After passing through some long rips, and by a large island, we
reached an interesting part of the river called the Pine Stream
Deadwater, about six miles below Ragmuff, where the river expanded to
thirty rods in width and had many islands in it, with elms and
canoe-birches, now yellowing, along the shore, and we got our first
sight of Ktaadn.

Here, about two o’clock, we turned up a small branch three or four
rods wide, which comes in on the right from the south, called Pine
Stream, to look for moose signs. We had gone but a few rods before we
saw very recent signs along the water’s edge, the mud lifted up by
their feet being quite fresh, and Joe declared that they had gone
along there but a short time before. We soon reached a small meadow on
the east side, at an angle in the stream, which was, for the m

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