Down East Latch Strings/Chapter 14

by Ernest Ingersoll

Chapter XIV.

Umbagog and the Magalloway.

Rough Coös, whose thick woods shakeTheir pine-cones in Umbagog lake.

mbagog! No lake in the country had more excited my curiosity. When I was a boy, a lot of bright fellows in Cambridge used to come up here regularly on natural-history expeditions, and the treasures of ornithology they brought back excited both my imagination and envy. You can find now many a "list" and "paper," in the proceedings of scientific societies near Boston, upon this lake and its environs.

Then its scenery had been so often described to me! The beautiful way in which the sky painted its own hues upon the surface of the water, while the shores, many tinted, how abrupt, now low, forested here, cleared and tenanted there, or walled in with upright crags elsewhere, furnished a glorious frame for the picture. Then the mountains! How on every side they filled the background, towering greater with distance, as do the gigantic figures of ancient history! Eastward, were the rounded masses of the great hills at the head of the Cambridge, with the bald summits of Grafton at the right. Off to the westward, a contrast, in the peaked heights that bristle about Dixville notch. Northward, lone pyramids like Dustan, Aziscoos, and Observatory, dark with unscarred forests and overlooking a hundred lakes. Southward, massively superior to all the rest, Washington and his co-presidents.

All this delight was dented to our eyes; nor was it much consolation to recall that Major Winthrop encountered just such a day here thirty years ago.

"Whiffs of mist," he records, "lad met us at the outset. Presently we opened chaos, and chaos shut in upon us. There was no Umbagog to be seen; nothing but a few yards of gray water and a world of gray vapor. Therefore I cannot criticise, nor insult, nor compliment Umbagog. Let us deem it beautiful. The sun tried at the fog, to lift it with the leverage of his early level beams. Failing in this attempt to stir and heave away the mass, he climbed and began to use his beams as wedges, driving them down more perpendicularly. Whenever this industrious craftsman made a split, the fog gaped and we could see for a moment, indefinitely, an expanse of water hedged with gloomy forest, and owning for its dominant height, Aziscoos, or, briefer, Esquibos.…

"We enjoyed our damp voyage heartily, on that wide loneliness. Nor were our shouts and laughter the only sounds. Loons would sometimes wail to us, as they dived, black dots in the mist. Then we would wait for their bulbous reappearance and let fly the futile shot With its muffled report, missing, of course."

Through a similar fog the present writer and his companions steamed down the whole length of the lake. As the yacht plowed through the gauzy veil "little islands loomed trembling between sky and water, like hanging gardens. Gradually the filmy trees defined themselves, the aerial enchantment lost its potency, and we came up with common prose islands that had so late been magical and poetic."

Umbagog is a dozen miles long, and perhaps a mile and a half in average width. It lies north and south, sharing its waters between New Hampshire and Maine. Rapid river, the inlet from the upper lakes, enters near its northeastern end; and the outlet is only a short distance below, from the opposite (western) side, where the Androscoggin begins its course. The path of this river is as crooked as its name; and Winthrop thought the queer twist characteristic of colloquial pronunciation in that region appropriate to people who lived near a stream with so scraggy an appellation and tortuous a current.

Our morning’s voyage through the "gleaming fields of haze" terminated at the A. L. T. Co.'s excellent Lakeside House, on the lower extremity of the lake in Cambridge, N. H., which is half a mile west of the little settlement of Upton, Me., at the mouth of Cambridge river. The afternoon was spent by Baily and Prue in fishing, each having a guide and a boat, and exerting great rivalry, while I borrowed a gun and went after partridges, getting a fair bag before tea. The fog gradually thinned out and sailed away eastward, in detachments which encamped upon the rugged hilltops, leaving the air clear, the sky

  Of an azure hue,Untarnished fair as is the violetOr anemone, when the spring strews themBy some meandering rivulet,

and showing us in new relief the tall mountains northward with which we had become acquainted on the other lakes.

Next morning the steamer took us on its early trip up the lake to the Androscoggin, and down that river to Erroll Dam.

The water of this river, raised fifteen feet by the building of the dam many years ago, has invaded the forest on each side and killed a wide belt of trees, the stubs of which now stand in the water, rude cenetaphs of the departed sons of the forest, bereft of bark and branches, bleached and picturesque. Herons, kingfishers and eagles, fitly attitudinize upon these tough old relics, and the water they overlook is as still and smooth as a surface of polished bronze. Says Farrar: "Following the crooked channel of the river, which in the six miles between the lake and the dam makes about thirty distinct turns, you have, as the steamer twists about, views from all points of the compass. From about the middle of July to the first of October the sides of the river are carpeted with water lilies, that present a beautiful sight, and fill the air with their delightful odor. The captain of the steamer is accommodating, and often stops to gather them for the lady passengers, and thus thousands are carried away each year; but the next only sees them more abundant."

A well-known settlement and hotel exists at Errol Dam, connected by an ancient road with Colebrook, N. H., on the Connecticut river, twenty-one miles distant. This road passes through Dixville notch (half way) and forms one of the regular avenues of approach to the lake region, Colebrook being only thirteen miles by a delightful stage-road from North Stratford station on the Grand Trunk Railway.

Dixville notch is "a fine gorge between a crumbling conical crag and a scarped precipice, a pass easily defensible, except at the season when raspberries would distract sentinels." The cleft traversed by the road opens like a Titanic gateway to some region of mysterious desolation. "The pass," to quote Eastman's description, "is much narrower than either of the more famous ones in the White Mountains, and through its whole extent of a mile and quarter, has more the character of a notch.…So narrow is the ravine (it can hardly
In Dixville notch. be called a pass) that a rough and precarious roadway for a single carriage could only be constructed.…No description can impart an adequate conception of the mournful grandeur of the decaying cliffs of mica-slate which overhang the war. They shoot up in most singular and fantastic shapes and vary in height from 400 to 800 feet…but are rapidly crumbling away. Some have decayed to half their original height; and the side-walls of the notch are strewn with debris which the ice and storms have pried and gnawed from the decrepit cliffs." So says Eastman. The Rev. William C. Prime pronounces it one of the wildest and most imposing pieces of rock scenery on the Atlantic side of the country; and the drive from Colebrook through the notch to Bethel, the finest he has ever found in America.

It is possible to clamber up to Table rack, 800 feet above the road, and to other pinnacles, whence a view of the whole monument-strewn glen is given, and beyond it, over Umbagog, far down into the heart of the White Mountains, and westward and northward over to Vermont and Canada. Various minor features of interest, trout fishing, and the lovely pastoral region at the western foot of the range, invite a stay of several days in the neighborhood.

Errol Dam is best known, however, as a point of departure for the Magalloway river and Parmachenee lake, a distinction to which it has no better claim, however, than Lakeside. The Magalloway rises in a
White Mountains from Umbagog lake. group of ponds and springs among the hills on the boundary of the province of Quebec, in the same highlands that form the nursery of the Connecticut, the Chaudiere and the Cupsuptic. Ten miles southward it "bulges" into Parmachenee lake; and then, augmented by many brooks and pond-outlets, makes its way southward to empty into the Androscoggin two miles below Umbagog. From the time the ice goes out until the middle of October, it is navigated by a steamboat making daily trips from Errol Dam to the Berlin Mills House, sixteen miles up stream, except in low stages of water, when it is compelled to halt at a somewhat lower lauding. A short stage-trip then carries the traveller to another reach of steamer navigation; at the end of which he must take to his canoe and his feet in order to reach Parmachenee lake. The distance from Lakeside to Parmachenee, as travelled, is about sixty miles, the major part of which is accomplished by steamboat or stage; two days are required for the through trip, the night being spent at Aziscoos Falls. We did not undertake the whole journey, but did the first half of it. The enjoyment began when the pilot turned the steamer's prow right into the flooded woods along the Androscoggin, startling the herons and his passengers at the same time, for to our ignorant eyes
Aziscoos Falls—Magalloway river. no river-mouth could be seen. It opened before us, nevertheless, and presently we were cruising in the Magalloway, a river narrower than the Androscoggin, and hemmed in, not by dead trees, but by walls of living green. "It is not a rude wilderness; all the northern woods have of foliage, verdurous, slender, delicate, tremulous, overhung our shadowy path, dense as the vines that drape a tropic stream. Every giant tree, every one of the pinus oligarchy, had been lumbered away; refined sylvan beauty remained."

We thought the Androscoggin crooked enough, but this proved to be more so,—serpentine is a word that fits it most admirably. Its general width in the lower part is a hundred feet or more, but now and then the stream narrows until the trees bending outward almost touch each other overhead.

"Observe how black and glossy the water is in this deep place," I say to my companions. "It seems never disturbed, except when a trout throws himself, curving above the surface like the flash of a scimitar."

"Never expected to find swordfish up here in the woods!" Baily exclaims in an affectation of pleased surprise.

"Interruptions are impolite, and pointless jests are stupid!" I rejoin, with just severity, whereupon Prue retorts:—

"Oh, come now, that's too hard, Theo! What could be more pointed in a joke than a sword?"

I leave this frivolous pair to their own levity. I want to enjoy the river unmolested, and recall how well can be fitted to it Thoreau's masterful description of that other "crooked river," the Souhegan:—

The pines stand up with prideBy the Souhegan's side,And the hemlock and the larchWith their triumphant archAre waving o'er its march  To the sea.No wind stirs its waves,But the spirits of the braves  Hov'ring o'er,Whose antiquated gravesIts still water laves  On the shore.With an Indian's stealthy tread,It goes sleeping in its bed,Without joy or grief,Or the rustle of a leaf,Without the ripple or a billow,Or the sigh of a willow

"On your sail," says the author of Farrar's Ilustrated Guide to the Androscoggin Lakes, "you will see the brown and bald eagles,—the latter, the typical American bird,—spreading their huge wings in pursuit of some unlucky fish-hawk, who, having worked hard to procure a dinner, is now destined to lose it. The bald-headed eagles in this country are the largest I have ever seen, and they have been shot and measured nine feet from tip to tip of wing. There are many small ponds lying contiguous to the river on both sides and connected with it by short streams, that are often filled with ducks, with blue herons stalking near them. Deer, bear, caribou and moose are occasionally caught sight of along the river, as frightened by the steamer, they plunge into the leafy cover of the woods. The banks of the stream vary in height from two to eight feet according to the number of gates open at the dam, and a good camping-spot may be found readily.

"About four miles up the the Magalloway you pass some rocks on the left side, then make a sharp turn to the right. Looking back as you make this turn, you obtain the most romantic and picturesque view on the river. About half a mile of the stream can be seen, in some places the trees almost meeting overhead, and the silvery lane of water through this vista of living green presents a picture that you will not soon forget. The country people who go up and
Upper Magalloway. down this beautiful thoroughfare seem generally to care nothing about this scenery; but one day, when coming down the river, as we turned this bend, an old fellow on the boat who caught the view just at the right moment, was for an instant brought to a realizing sense of the beauties of nature, and. looking at me, said, 'I snum now, Mister, if that ain't the purtiest sight I ever saw.'"

Except some stony ledges, like that at Pulpit rock, the foliage and sedge that shut in the river is unbroken for ten miles, at the end of which humanity is recalled by a log cabin at the mouth of Bottle brook. A few moments later the lower landing is reached, among farms, and upon a wagon road along the right bank. Though it is only two miles by land to the Berlin Mills House, the distance is six by water.

This ride of six miles, heading to every point of the compass in
Diamond peaks. succession, is a delightful experience. "Mts. Dustan and Aziscoos are dodging around you continually now, first on one side and then on the other, while the peculiarly shaped Diamond peaks, some miles above, occasionally put in an appearance." All of these mountains, with intervening ridges, are lofty and savage heights on the western side of the river, and from the northernmost extension of the White Mountains. Dustan and Aziscoos are beautifully conspicuous from the Richardson lakes and Umbagog, while the Diamond peaks, now first well seen, resemble twin stumps of mountains (exact copies of one another) which have been truncated at a similar level by the plow of the continental glacier, or by some other evenly acting agency. They are reputed to get their name from the Diamond river which flows past them from distant sources in the Coos County forest; but, perhaps, on the contrary, the river takes its name from then, in reference to their odd angularity. At Berlin Mills we eat dinner and listen to animated stories of what capital shooting and fishing the vicinity affords, especially at Sturtevant pond. This is the proper point for the ascent of Aziscoos. A buckboard may be driven nearly to its summit, the prospect from which takes in the whole of northern Maine, as far as Katahdin, reaches westward to the heights about Lake Champlain, and southward far into the White Mountains. Nor need any fear of excessive difficulties deter
On Magalloway river. even ladies from availing themselves of this picture and experience, which certainly ought not to be missed.

This is the limit of navigation, because the river above is choked with logs, waiting to be driven out in the spring.

The afternoon was devoted to a ride of half a dozen miles through the woods, with occasional outlooks at mountains, etc., to Fred Flint's house, near Aziscoos falls, and the night we spent there was almost like camping-out in a very comfortable way. The falls are a series of cataracts, boiling over ledge after ledge for a long distance. It is the most dangerous place on the river in running logs, where more than one lumberman has lost his life. At high-water the tumult is very great and makes a picture of grand and perilous force, to which the wild surroundings lend grim emphasis. There is excellent trout-fishing at this place.

From a lauding above the falls (which act as a dam, holding back several miles of deep, smooth water), a stern-wheel steamboat runs about fifteen miles up the wriggling stream, which is now six or eight rods in width and strong of current. Camping-places are frequent, ducks and other game always to be had, and the fishing first-rate, especially at the Narrows, where the steamer has a hard pull to get through. Six miles above the Narrows, the Lower Mettaluk pond is reached, which at present forms the head of navigation. The river is to be improved, however, and the boat will then run as high up as the Grass Eddy, but a short distance below the forks of the Magalloway. A trail leads from this point to Lincoln pond, a considerable piece of water two miles eastward. It is said to be well-stocked with trout, disposed to be enticed with bait in May or June, and by a fly after that. Deer, moose, and caribou can often be shot there, in season, and the shore affords good camping ground. It is often reached by a trail from the Upper Mettaluk pond, where there is a cabin for fishermen.

Above the Mettaluk ponds the Magalloway winds for twelve miles through lush meadows beloved of deer and waterfowl. The current is swift through there, and above the meadows, decided rapids are met, where the Little Magalloway comes in from the northwest. This is the end of the canoe-trip, unless the traveller means to take his boat with him, in which case he drags it up the river almost to Parmachenee lake.

The lake is four miles distant by a good path which conducts on through a fine forest to the shore, where a bout will be found or can be signalled for. An island in the lake is occupied by Danforth's "Camp Caribou," a curiously irregular pile of woodland buildings, which has grown year by year from a "camp" to a "hotel." Everything about the place indicates the sportsman in both the proprietor and his guests, who come largely from New York City. The walls are adorned with heads of deer, tails of foxes, and other trophies of the chase, while gunning gear and fishing tackle, boats and camp-equipments, old clothes and friendly manners, characterize the settlement. Twenty or more fine boats will be found there, each of which had to be taken through the woods from Rangeley on the shoulders of men. The furniture of the house, like that structure itself, has been made on the spot, for the most part by the ingenious hands of the owner; but all the supplies of every kind must be paddled and carried up the Magalloway, or else "toted" in from Cupsuptic lake along a hilly footpath. The supplies are always abundant, and the equipment comfortable, however, so that ladies form a constant element in the summer colony at this thoroughly out-of-the-way resort.

Parmachenee is celebrated first of all as a fishing and hunting centre. We were told of eighteen trout caught there in one day, lately, none of which measured less than fifteen inches in length, while one reached twenty-three inches. Two gentlemen from New York are reported as taking 2,500 fish, of suitable size for cooking, in eight days, one day's score reaching 900. The scenery about the lake, which is shut in by hills, is utterly wild. Roads and trails or canoe
On Lake Parmacheenee. routes diverge to a large number of mountains, ponds, and streams, however; and in the autumn and winter the shooting in that region is incomparable, comprising all varieties of large game. Farrar's guide contains a circumstantial account of the best localities for both forms of sport.

It rained bard during our night at Flint's, and was lowery and cold when we left there on our return in the morning,—ah! what a memorable trout breakfast, we had!—but before we had reached The Berlin Mills House, and reëmbarked upon the lower Magalloway, all the clouds had disappeared, even from the crest of hoary Aziscoos, whose gray poll was almost white with the thinnest possible dusting of hail. Reversing the river pictures, and so finding novelty in them all, we ran quickly down to Errol Dam, and thence into Lake Umbagog. And now what a different scene presented itself, compared with our entrance three days' before! The canopy was unflecked, and the air calm and crystal-clear. The sky-answering water lay utterly still, smooth, and glistening, save where some flocks of ducks and a pair of loons floated upon the burnished surface.

On its margin the great forestStood reflected in the water,Every tree-top had its shadow,Motionless beneath the water.

Gliding from the Androscoggin, we swung around to the southward, and there, overtopping all the massive green ridges nearer by saw the whole Presidential range, peak after peak, towering into the blue sky as if carved from alabaster, for the storm had shed a heavy snow-fall upon them, and the White Mountains were white indeed with the first gifts of winter.

With the speed of thought another slide is shot before memory's lens. Again I am afloat in Hood's canal. Far away over the bronzed backs of my Indian paddlers, beating time to some savage crooning; past the long, gaudy, carven canoe-prow; beyond the shining levels and the clustered spires of Douglas fir upon the shore;—again I see the coruscant pinnacles of the Olympus piercing the blue Pacific sky. The Presidential is five, the Olympic range twelve, thousand feet above the watery foreground; but I avow that this rare picture, seen that early autumn morning from Umbagog, was as lovely in its composition, as brilliant in its color, as impressive in its grandeur and distance, as the other.

So we were glad not only that we had come to Umbagog, and had seen it both in the silvery fog and in the golden sunlight, but that it made for us the adieu of the lake region; for we thought if we had begun with this, the upper ponds could hardly have sustained the expectation of the first impression. We felt, that in coming down from Rangeley to Umbagog, we had steadily gone from good to better and had the best at the last. And, taking it all in all, we concluded that to him who seeks a vacation in the wilderness, near to nature's heart, the trip across Umbagog, and up the Magalloway to Parmachenee lake will yield more satisfaction with a better economy of time, money, strength and enjoyment, than any other route we know of in New England; but this, of course, omits almost all consideration of the social element, for which there is nowhere in the Rangeley region such au opportunity as goes with the out-door life at Moosehead lake.

In summer, there is traffic enough back and forth between the lakes and Bethel, Me., to support a daily stage each way. The trip takes about five hours. Climbing the big hill, in the rear of the Lakeside House, we take our last took at Umbagog and then fix our eyes upon the mountains in front, chiefly Saddleback and Speckled, between which we are to pass. We note the changes in them, with never-wearying eyes, until they gradually close about us, and we find ourselves between shaggy walls of forested and rocky heights where Cambridge river is a mere brook, and the road crosses and re-crosses its wrigglings upon bridges of rattling logs. Sometimes there
A glimpse of Saddleback. is scarcely room for the wheels to slip between masses of rock supporting the leafy mountain-sides, and the little stream is an incessant cascade. Then we find a tiny torrent rushing the other way which the driver tells us is Bear river, and by-and-by get out into the sunlight and can look off upon the world once more.

Such is the Grafton notch, and we heard of several curiosities of scenery in its neighborhood, such as the Screw-auger falls, where Bear river twists through a spiral channel in a series of sunken cascades; the Jail, a semi-circular abyss worn by some former vagary of the stream, and the Devil's Horseshoe,—an impression in the rocks of a cataract-bank, singularly true to the size and shape suggested, —and finally the profound chasm, or sink-hole into which legend says a wounded moose once plunged. "At the bottom flows a large and noisy stream, which, as if the gloom of the lofty walls which hem it in, and the sombre stillness of the surrounding forest did not sufficiently guard its privacy, plunges beneath a huge mass of super-incumbent rock…and disappears from sight."

Grafton notch left behind, the country becomes more open. The old Popple tavern and Newry corners are left in turn, and at the mouth of Bear river the broad intervales of the Androscoggin come in sight, with that crooked river meandering through them. Crossing Bear river we
Screw-auger falls, Grafton notch. turn up the main Androscoggin, amazed at the cultivation, serene beauty and warmth of the scene after the cold and almost forbidding sternness of the scenery to which we have long been accustomed; and so roll swiftly into the elm-embowered streets of Bethel.