USA > New Hampshire > Carroll County > Tamworth > The Tamworth narrative (New Hampshire) > Part 2
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26
The first white man to see any part of our present Carroll County might well have been some unhappy factor like Ma-
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son's man, some explorer with a mission to report on resources to his superior in England. Can we at all put ourselves in this man's place, working his way up into the interior of the alien continent as far as where Tamworth is today? Without any Tamworth, the broad valley that spreads between the Sandwich Range and the Ossipees was as it is now. What did it look like when this first white man came? At the most, only some three hundred years have passed, a mere twitch in the movement of time, since he struggled slowly through the forest, pausing often to look this way and that, with axe and powder horn at belt, flint and steel in pocket, and carrying as his only defense a firelock of dubious capacity.
What was it like? If it were summer and this man climbed a tree, or got upon a bare hilltop, the landscape would have looked almost as it looks now when you fly above it, the entire field of view to all horizons one continuous green carpet lap- ping both valleys and mountains. This is broken into by small clearings but only rarely, because from the air most of the buildings we know at ground level are hidden by the trees around them. The over-all view gives the lie to our usual conception that we are town or village communities on hard roads, with woods on the outskirts of our lives. The fact is that since man has known this territory he has rolled back the forest carpet but very slightly. Though the actual amount of timber may be diminished to a fraction of its former volume, and the same with watercourses, this kind of change is not very evident from the air.
To that first explorer venturing into it, the forest was something that never again can be known except in imagi- nation. Dense woods, yes, pathless forest, "infinite thick woods," ruthless wilderness - none of the terms by which the adventurers tried to describe it to the uncomprehending officials at home conveys much meaning. Its unending extent alone was terrifying to men accustomed to the short distances of their green and pleasant isle. They were alarmed by its inhuman silence which caused any sound to startle, and con-
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stantly frustrated by its teeming growth which often meant perpetual use of the axe merely to advance a few more steps. For hurricanes are nothing modern. Blowdowns lay where they had fallen like jackstraws, decay upon decay, clogged thick with young growing softwood. No man could get through that, or through swamp areas set thick with alders. There are many witnesses to these things in the records. Add the win- ter's immovable weight of snows, and the mountain territory could become the "frightful polar horror" it was called in English by one of the first arrivals.
Even without snow, absence of roads or paths doubled all difficulties. Indians followed rivers; their spotted trails could be used when found. But there is little evidence that the Pequaket Indians of our region, who were centered on the Saco River, had permanent villages in our Sandwich valley or came through except to trap and hunt. They knew certain oak groves, and ground acorns apparently in holes they made in boulders for the purpose. The dugout fished up by Boy Scouts from Bearcamp Pond was probably stored for summer fishing visits. But mainly they crossed from east to west along that natural route the Bearcamp stream, when obliged to go to fight their enemies the Mohawks across the Great River.
Though the redskins may not have inhabited these woods, other terrors did roam it and take toll, such as black bear and lynx - that formidable wildcat later called loucivee - and especially the fearsome wolves, perpetually on the scent of blood. The sound of wolves howling for prey is a noise that none of us today has ever head. Would we have made a home where it was a feature of every nighttime? An early print shows a cabin in the moonlight in the middle of a circle of some fifty sitting wolves.
Another enemy that lay in wait, nor yet killed off today, was described by the early reporter Josselyn, he who first used the name The White Mountains. In 1684 he said, "There is a small black fly no bigger than a flea so numerous up in the country that they are not only a pesterment but a plague
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to the country." Another diarist is also "very much tormented by flies." "Thar came a scout of gnats" testifies another. We have no trouble in believing it.
Of the beauties that came with the wolves and midges we hear nothing. But the trailing arbutus after the ice and the lady's-slipper in June must have been abundant, and the purple fringed orchid fimbriata must have gleamed gloriously in the thickets. The songbirds came only with civilization, according to an early school history, and nobody would have thought them worth naming, but there were wild turkeys and passenger pigeons for food, multitudinous and tame, and all manner of small fry underfoot and in trees.
The forest must be thought of as dark. Trees towered then as they no longer can, untouched stands of them, in soil of a fertility and moisture now lost. The first settlers had incredible riches to mine from, and neither knowledge, ex- perience, nor tools to deal with the treasure rightly. They regarded all of it as hostile. Both Indians and forest were "foes to be felled." They destroyed as fast as they could, in their small piecemeal way. Conservation, or economical use of natural resources, was an idea that waited till the twentieth century to be born, after the amateur destruction had all been done, and most of the wealth gone down the rivers.
This pathless, impenetrable, dark, and silent forest, trimmed with hungry beasts and biting flies, as well as flowers and birds, in any case "daunting terrible" (another of Jos- selyn's expressions ), had surprising "intervals" - plains where grass grew - "grass man high unmowed uneaten and use- lessly withering.' Such lush meadows along the great bends of the Saco River were where the Pequakets made their base. But some few of these open intervals were over in our Tam- worth area and were seized upon first by the advance settlers. And there was Birch Intervale (Wonalancet) which, when Bradbury Jewell first looked down on it and called it his, was one enormous and solid stand of white birch. The lakes now in our township shone then as now, the ones we know as Cho-
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corua Lake and White Lake, as did our various ponds - Great Hill Pond, James Pond, Moore's Pond, and smaller ones. Seen from the air, all but Chocorua Lake are now going to green and yellow scum and must pass through a long cycle of nature before swamp alders give place to hardwood, to pine, and to clear water again.
The rivers have likewise changed - the Bearcamp River, the Chocorua River, the Swift River, and the brooks that feed them had an impetuous volume of flow unimagined today. Trees met over these tumultuous waters. In them and in the lakes and ponds, fish were in multitude. About the middle of the last century it was estimated that one hundred bushel of trout were taken out of Wonalancet Brook alone, in one season.
Though most of Chocorua Mountain and most of the Ossipees are not within Tamworth's actual borders, this valley is the only one where either range is seen to advantage and is most fully enjoyed, so that Tamworth possesses them not only as ramparts but as intimate landscape and part of life. Cho- corua Mountain, in particular, Tamworth residents have always appropriated with pride of ownership. Its pink granite peak composes into a unique and charming view from any one of some hundred or more homes that now command it. The cult of Chocorua Mountain with the lake at its foot is part of the tradition that permeates our small society. Every child is told how the Indians thought that the Great Spirits who lived on the mountaintop wished silence on the lake below, and that a word spoken aloud in a canoe would cause it to sink immediately.
The legend of the Indian sachem Chocorua meeting his death on the mountain heights is so deeply rooted that if not substantiated it ought to be. Here is the certain essential truth in ancient tradition, where scientific verification is out of place. That such a character as Chocorua lived seems to be fact, transmitted by Jonathan Gilman, husband of the famed first parson Hidden's daughter, who had often talked with an early
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settler who in turn had known Chief Chocorua well. Jona- than's account came to many Chocorua residents through Ezra Nickerson, now only lately dead. Sweetser's Guide to the White Mountains, a veritable Baedeker in careful state- ment, first printed in 1876 with a full description of "the stagelines in the Mountain-district," even in the 12th edition of 1892, speaking of Chocorua says, "The legend was thus nar- rated to the Editor by a venerable man of Tamworth, who had written it down forty years ago as he received it from his ancestors." Chocorua as an Indian chief can be allowed.
The details of his story vary in the printed accounts. In general it runs about like this: The earliest recorded white settler near Chocorua Lake was one Cornelius Campbell. His house is variously considered as located at the bend of the state road at Pequaket, or at the next cellar hole beyond Durrell's. In one story his name is Tobias Russell, again it turns up as something else. It is permissible to enhance the account by reporting the Campbells as descendants of Crom- wellian refugees forced into the American wilderness by the Restoration of the Stuarts. This is quite likely, as they are accounted different from other frontiersmen in having both manners and means. The man, anyhow, had made a friend of the Indian Chocorua who had remained behind with a few followers not to desert the graves of his ancestors after the battle of Lovewell's Pond, when most of the tribe had limped away to Canada. Chocorua's child played with the white children of the Campbells, and when the Indian went for a temporary visit to his kinsfolk at St. Francis, he left the boy in his friends' care.
Returning, the chieftain found his boy dead of fox poison drunk by mistake. The stricken father could not believe this accidental. He nursed his revenge until a day when Campbell in turn was away from home, when he fell upon the white man's family, massacred his wife and children, and set fire to the house. Campbell arriving home to this disaster called a neighbor or two and flung himself after the enemy. In
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battle with the enraged colonists, Chocorua and his few Indians were worsted. He escaped alone up the mountain. Campbell's men closed in and followed him to the top, isolated him on a precipice, and ordered him to jump and die. The spot used to be pointed out to climbers, by no means as forbid- ding a cliff as appears in the Hatch engraving of the Thomas Cole painting illustrated opposite page 22. It would seem difficult to die by jumping from the real one.
At this point the story divides into two versions: one, that before leaping, Chocorua lifted arms to heaven and uttered his famous imprecation upon white men and all their works. Though nobody was taking shorthand, posterity quotes: "A curse upon ye, white men! May the Great Spirit curse ye when he speaks in the clouds, and his words are fire! Chocorua had a son, and ye killed him when the sky was bright! Lightning blast your crops! Winds and fire destroy your dwellings! The Evil Spirit breathe death upon your cattle! Your graves lie in the warpath of the Indian! Pan- thers howl and wolves fatten over your bones! Chocorua goes to the Great Spirit - his curse stays with the white man!"
The other version is that failing to jump, the chief was shot by Campbell where he stood; falling, he partially raised himself and delivered his terrific curse while dying upon the rock. This is the attitude made immortal by Cole. The legend has never taken an effort to believe, and the romance of the mountain which has its deep personal appeal for all has been supported by the authority of Frederick W. Kilbourne sub- stantially as it appears in Sweetser's Guide. Let us fail to listen to the voice of reason which reminds us that an Indian, so much more a creature of the woods than they, could hardly be chased to a mountaintop by white men.
The curse had such weight with the settlers that when cattle did begin to die forthwith, they gave the region a wide berth for many years, and this is supposed to be why other areas were settled first. Ultimately it became understood that
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the cattle disease called Burton ail was due to muriate of lime in certain springs in the township of Burton next north.
Campbell had no land ownership that is recorded. One account has him become a hermit on the site of his tragedy. He must have fled the region, otherwise the chain of revenge in the Indian code would have obliged a bloody end for him in turn, and this is not in the record.
The Pequakets whose sachem and prophet was Cho- corua were a minor branch of the Sokokis (akin to the name Saco). The Ossipee Indians were another branch, and Pequot is a common designation. These were of the great Abenaki persuasion, and the Abenakis in turn were those tribes from the north and east within the Pennacook Confederacy, a unit of the Algonquins, centered where modern Concord is. There had been a great plague in 1617 that ran through all the eastern tribes like fire and killed them in such numbers that the living could not bury the dead. "By such singular means," pronounces the kindly Jeremy Belknap in his sober history in 1784 " did divine providence prepare the way for peaceable entrance of the European into this land"! By the time of the first English in the territory, only a remnant of the Penna- cooks survived, all of one language; they have been estimated all the way from 20,000 down to 250. The next nearest tribe were their hereditary enemies the Micmacs or Tarentines on the east, and the Mohawks over beyond Vermont, a family of the Six Nations (Iroquois) who covered New York and the Middle West. In 1650 Father Ragueneau of the Jesuits wrote, "My pen has no ink black enough to paint the fury of the Iroquois."
Over-all head of the Pennacooks, which practically meant all New Hampshire's Indians, was the great pacific figure of Passaconaway, "Bashaba," he who was greatest in height, greatest in war, greatest in magic and craftiness, and greatest in wisdom. Even the whites fell under his spell. As quoted by Sweetser, "It is a notorious fact that the English trespassed on his hunting-grounds and stole his lands. Yet he never stole
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anything from them. They killed his warriors,- yet he never killed a white man, woman, or child. They captured and imprisoned his sons and daughters, - yet he never led a captive into the wilderness. Once the proudest and most noble Bashaba of New England, he passed his extreme old age poor, forsaken, and robbed of all that was dear to him, by those to whom he had been a firm friend for nearly half a century."
This influential sachem had urged friendship with the white men, whose overwhelming numbers must otherwise obliterate his race. Upon retiring at the age of one hundred years he laid upon his followers in handsome Indian-type oratory the command that they must cease to fight this on- coming tide. Part of his legend is that he lived to be one hundred and twenty and died in a cave on the mountain afterward named for him, where there is an undecipherable inscription on a rock. According to the tribal tradition
"Gently they laid him in the waiting sledge. The gray wolf-team ran yelping up the ledge. Men, watching, saw them reach the summit, whirl, And vanish upward, in a fiery swirl."
-Paul Scott Mowrer
His one surviving son and successor Wonalancet obeyed his father and withdrew his people far away from the en- croaching paleface. Had the encroaching paleface been as temperate as they, there need never have been the unspeakable barbarities of the French and Indian wars. "Wars result from the crimes and ambitions of the few rather than of the masses." To those earliest English governors of the Province of New Hampshire whose eyes were solely on riches and lands, the way to handle the wild men was to swindle them freely, to kill them together with their cousins the wild animals, or to sell them as slaves in the West Indies. That they maddened the red men by their own careless arrogance and fraud did not change their methods. They paid for land with firewater or Sheffield knives, and then when drunken Indians went on scalping sprees, were free with what they called righteous re-
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venge. Was the forest not bad enough, they said, without prowling tomahawks and deadly ambushes? By this thinking, painted savages who could not even speak a civilized tongue did not deserve to live. Moreover, the savages did not fight by any known code. They made war as they hunted, patiently, with stalking, decoy, ambush, surprise, and then when the victim was thoroughly unprepared, with barbarous ferocity in the attack. The European system of declared war and pitched battles with opposing forces drawn up on a plain was to the Indian mind merely crackbrained.
In the long malevolent wars we have the spectacle of the French-Canadian government buying their Indian allies by a bounty on English scalps, to match Massachusetts which gave £100 apiece for Indian scalps. Later even this sum would be raised. In Maine it was £400, according to the town history of Thomaston. In inevitable reprisal, one outrage led to another in an unending cycle. Vengeance had to wait usually until winter, since crops and subsistence occupied all the attention of both Indians and whites for six months of the year. When the warpath was resumed, therefore, battles took place mostly on snow or in early spring. The final crucial fight was at Lovewell's Pond near Fryeburg, when both Cap- tain Lovewell and the enemy Paugus, father of Chocorua, were killed.
"Twas Paugus led the Pequatt tribe. As runs the fox would Paugus run. As howls the wild wolf would he howl. A large bear skin had Paugus on,"
recites the old ballad. He was so mighty a chieftain that his death was a great psychological defeat. After it the remain- ing Indians withdrew from New England altogether to their town of St. Francis up on the St. Lawrence River, and settlers no longer listened in terror for the blood-freezing warwhoop.
At Pequaket the tribe had been peaceable enough until roused by all the bloody excesses. Their settlements around the bends of the Saco, overlooking the fertile intervales called
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in general by their name, are to us the Conways and Frye- burg. Their main village of Auket would seem to have been on the long high peninsula by the river, a mile or so north of present Conway. There their assemblage of wickiups was within close reach of their plantations of corn, squash, tobacco, and beans, melons, and strawberries, and of the sugar bush where they tapped the rock maples. They trapped unlimited beaver whose fur was cash for trading. Seines fed them lake fish. Weirs in the Saco caught them salmon. Their squaws cured and tanned the game they brought, and curried the hides, made moccasins, and sewed wampum belts. The blue beads of wampum were their gold, and white their silver; they made these cleverly out of shells, drilled and strung and worked them. Pequaket crafts of this order are not practised in New England now, but as late as the early 1900's groups of rem- nant Indians used to come over from Old Town, Maine, selling their sweet-grass baskets at all the resorts, and doing well with them. Indians had no priests or worship, save to placate the Spirits who inhabited highest mountains. Their legends included a great deluge with one human pair surviv- ing, as in other ancient race lore. Their inherited code was to scorn fear, to speak truth, to endure, and to repay.
We have inherited from those Indians whom our fore- fathers despised and exterminated. It is a multiple legacy : Indian place names are scattered thick over our country; the campfire and trail lore of Boy and Girl Scouts have much to do with the code of Americans grown; the moccasin pattern is integral to all our shoe industry; the canoe, adopted speed- ily by the English immigrant, has been the basis ever since of more and more refinement of manufacture; snowshoes have never gone out of production, nor the toboggan, an Indian utility for dragging freight. And every American who cooks something on a long stick at his backyard barbecue is paying tribute to aboriginal influence. The pumpkin was the Indians' before it was ours; squash is also an Indian word, chowder likewise; clams were a staple to them. Maple syrup was an
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CHOCORUA'S CURSE
Engraving by George W. Hatch from the painting by Thomas Cole which brought $1,500 at a recent sale. Climbers suspect Cole of not having been up the mountain.
BUCKING STOVEWOOD AT THE BARN
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Indian discovery; so, of course, was tobacco which had reached England from America before any emigration to New Eng- land. Greater than any of these is corn. The maize first met with as the Indians pounded their meal in a stone mortar was soon to be our ancestors' main support, along with game. The words hominy, pone, samp, and succotash are all Indian in origin. Johnnycake is supposed to have been journey cake. From Indian pudding boiled in a bag, through popcorn (the marching ration of Indian warriors) down to corn liquor, maize has a place in every part of our diet today, and is pecu- liarly American.
There is an even more essential inheritance from the aboriginal American. Utterly displaced in our New Hamp- shire now, he still enters into the mental and moral fibre of the antagonist who supplants him, as conquerors have so often in history adopted the characteristics of the conquered. The Indian's strategy was learned in order to overcome him, by that so-called Christian newcomer whose guiding principle had been his strict Calvinistic religion. The two elements fused strangely. A Christian settler could listen to four hours of sermon on Sunday, hunt and take four scalps on Monday, and Tuesday ship the bloody mass to Boston to collect £1000, all seen as approved by the Lord. In "subduing the wilder- ness" the colonists were as resourceful and crafty as the frightened savages, and quite as cruel. To those of superior knowledge who had traded beads and liquor for hundreds of acres of timberland, trading became synonymous with playing to win. When, some generations afterward, descendants of this school became the unscrupulous tycoons of the 1870's and 1880's, business became license as never before. Our native New Hampshire farmers today come honestly by their talent and taste for tradin'. Trading amounts to the down-east Yankee's sport, and he is experienced and famous at it.
If the frontier experience has had a part in America's achievements, it is responsible for other things as well. The Indians honored guile - their venerated sachem Passacona-
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way was a great example. They never forgot an injury (nor a kindness, it was said), and they knew relatively little of courts or arbitration. Retaliation in kind was their law, a lesson we quickly learned and have not as quickly forgotten. We named it "getting even." Getting even has created a host of good anecdotes and some of our more famous local characters, but is not an element in the Christian code. Though sources may not be traced too assuredly, some racial marks can be recog- nized. It is enough to understand that in counting up our heritage the defeated Indians may not be overlooked.
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The Road In = John Dudley Begins Route 16
HAVING BEEN GRANTED "Laconia," Captain John Mason and after him his heirs could in turn grant some of the spoil to others. Surveying was primitive; mostly it did not exist and the courts of the time were helpless to create definitive titles. Grant had followed grant and sale followed sale in interlacing confusion for over a century. Claims could hardly have been more slippery and conflicting interests more complex.
Not to try to thread the swamps of litigation or find our way in grants that did not stick, we may skip the inter- vening generations to the year 1746 when New Hampshire, still a Crown province, saw most of the uncertainty swept away. In that year a syndicate of twelve men in Portsmouth brought from Lieutenant John Tufton Mason, for £1500, the claim of his great-great-great-grandfather Captain John. The Mason Patent then ceased to shift like a football from hand to hand. At last it was safe to go ahead and open the country. The "Purchasers of Mason's Claim," or the Proprietors, hence- forth became the official owners of New Hampshire's real estate.
By fair means or foul the Indian problem had been dis- posed of, and settlers began at once pushing up into the New Hampshire wilderness. They were mainly not emigrants from Europe, but from Massachusetts and Connecticut or farther south. Each man "pitched" on his lot or lots among the newly surveyed lands and applied to the Masonian Proprietors to have his choice assigned him so he could start clearing. The Masonian Proprietors, twelve in number though in effect only two or three, were relatives or hangers-on of Benning
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