Down East Latch Strings/Chapter 8
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arly next morning, as we went on board the ferry steamer,—certainly the handsomest boat, I, for one, ever saw in public service,—which would carry us eight miles across to the mainland (for we were now northward bound), Frenchman's bay lay softly blue and scarcely marred by a ripple. The Porcupine crags, rising sharply out of the shining plain of water, were dark almost to blackness, but the lazy islands along the Gouldsboro' shore gleamed bright in sunshine, where The train had several parlor cars which would go straight through to Boston, but we left them to the unfortunates who were homeward bound, for we were not going home,—oh, no! We were going to Moosehead lake!
With the exception of the large village of Ellsworth, and Reed's pond, much resorted to by fishing parties in search of land-locked salmon, there is little to entertain the railway passenger between the coast and Bangor. A ecologist, however, will be interested in observing the rounded and planed masses of granite exposed by the ravages of fires, in the crannies of which stunted trees can now hardly find nourishment. Prue seemed fascinated by this grim devastation; and Baily told us that it was just like that forlorn Keewaydin region between Lake Superior and Winnipeg. Here, too, are lodes bearing nearly all the precious minerals, and extensive mining for gold, silver, copper, and some other metals has been done.
Before this scenery grows tiresome, we escape it by emerging into the fields and orchards of old Brewer, and look down upon the river, wondering how long it has required for its current to erode so deep a path through the tough rock; then we cross through a covered bridge and roll into the city-like station of city-like Bangor.
Here the Pullman cars, which have just come in from New Brunswick (for this is the outlet of "the Provinces"), are attached to our train which will go on to Portland. But as for us three, we change to a train going the other way, and prepare our minds fora complete contrast to Mt. Desert. All are full of enthusiasm for the change. Even Baily, his countenance round and beaming, breaks into poetry, and, waving his hand impressively, he astonishes us with Wordsworth, most sonorously recited:—
Prue and I said nothing, but, looking solemn alarm at one another, stiffly agreed, for the sake of argument, that it was a joy. Baily's smile gradually faded away, and with some mutterings about "getting even," he marched out of the car. Then you should have heard how we let the seriously-minded farmers and farmers' wives: and the limp little dude beside his unbending dowager of a mother, who might easily have spared a good deal of starch for his benefit; and the boss-lumberman figuring in a worn pocket-book; and the group of factory girls going home to Dover for a vacation; and the brown-eyed little school-ma'm, who was all of a fluster for fear a Boston drummer, across the aisle, was going to try to flirt with her;—you should have heard, I say, how we let all these people know what whole-souled glee sounded like.
"Oh!" cries Prue. "what fun poor Mr. Baily has missed by not staying to hear himself laughed at?"
Meanwhile we had been travelling along the bank of the river, past enormous rafts of logs confined in booms next the shores, over which men in red shirts were skipping like grasshoppers, and now came to Oldtown,—a large, straggling village, where we leave the Maine Central and turn off upon the rails of the Bangor & Piscataquis line.
Here the booms were bigger and the mills more numerous. The falls of the Penobscot furnished the power, to a great extent. "Here," writes Henry D. Thoreau, whose inspiring volume, The Maine Woods, we had with us, "is a close jam, a hard rush, at all seasons; and then the once green tree, long since white, I need not say as the driven snow, but as the driven log becomes lumber merely.…Through this steel riddle, more or less coarse, is the arrowy Maine forest, from Katahdin to Chesuncook, and the headwaters of the St. John relentlessly sifted, till it comes out boards, clapboards, laths and shingles."
Just beyond Oldtown on an island in the river, a large cluster of small houses around a Roman Catholic church is the dwelling-place of the remnant of the Tarratine (Abnaki) Indians,—those who ravaged Pemaquid and were routed at Norridgewock. In the treaty of 1726 they were given possession of the islands in the river, and are paid by the state an annuity of $6,000 to $7,000 in exchange for lands relinquished years ago. Between four and five hundred persons, mostly half-breeds, have now included in their numbers, but the men scatter all over the slate, working in the mills and lumber driving, "guiding" hunters and camping-parties through the woods, or hunting and fishing for themselves, while the women at home make baskets or do rough household work in the town. The making of birch canoes is an important industry. Some of the Indians are partly educated and many own considerable property. Thoreau gives an interesting account of what he saw of them, and their characteristics, and their history has been written by their missionary, Vetromile.
At first the Piscataquis railroad runs northwestward, through dense scrub, but in the neighborhood of Lagrange a well-cultivated ridge appears on the right. A view of Katahdin can be had, in clear weather, from South Lagrange, but a far better one is obtained at Milo, a few miles farther on. Mt. Russell appears straight ahead, a round pile, bearing some naked rocks above the rusty woods, and farther away the low dome of Pleasant Pond mountain.
"Why, that’s the region, isn't it," Prue asks, "that John Burroughs visited and describes in his 'Taste of Maine Birch?' I remember that he says Pleasant pond was the only strictly silver lake he ever saw,—look, here it is, on this map, just at the western foot of the mountain,—and describes how he counted the boulders on its bottom in water thirty or forty feet deep."
"And I recall," adds Baily, "that he says of the trout that they were veritable bars of silver until you cut them open, and then they proved the reddest of gold. He thought they were a variety peculiar to that pond. And that was where he found loons that could dodge the bullet from the muzzle-loader every time, but wern't quick enough for his breech-loading rifle."
The next station is Milo, entering which we cross the Piscataquis.
"Strikes me that word, or others very similar, occur elsewhere on the map of the eastern states," some one remarks.
"It does, and naturally enough, since it simply means a big branch, or 'a fork', as we would say. The Abnaki mind regarded a stream from its mouth up, instead of from the source down, which would seem to indicate that they entered the country along the coast and explored it by ascending the rivers, rather than the reverse."
Frown Milo, a branch railroad, 19 miles long, goes northward to Brownville and the Bangor and Katahdin Iron Works. Brownville has quarries of peculiarly fine slate and is the point of departure for the Schoodic and Seboeis lakes, where there is good fishing. An old logging-road runs from Schoodic lake over to the West branch of the Penobscot, passing near the Ebeeme ponds and to Jo Merry lakes, all of which furnish shooting and fishing, amid attractive scenery. That is one route (and a short one) to Mt. Katahdin, by the way of South Twin lake and the West branch.
"Thoreau has much to say about that region," Prue reminds us, turning to page 35 of his Maine Woods, and reading to us his experiences in canoeing there thirty years ago.
From Brownville to Katahdin Iron Works the branch railroad runs through a dense forest, with glimpses of Pleasant river on the right. The iron works use the ore of an adjacent mountain to which the Indians had resorted for paint-stuff since time immemorial. The ore is brown hematite, extending from three to twenty feet thick, over many acres, and contains exquisite impressions of leaves, etc. It is manufactured by the charcoal process, especially for making into car-wheels, and the annual product amounts to some 4,060 tons.
Besides the small settlement of people about the furnaces, the Silver Lake House, on the Munolammonungun ("red-paint place") pond, is fast growing into popularity, not only among sportsmen-tourists, but with invalids, who find in the chalybeate springs near by, a tonic additional to the invigorating air and freedom of the woods. A glance at the map shows how many ponds are in the near vicinity, all of which furnish trout-fishing; and in the fall one can obtain excellent partridge shooting, besides having a chance at deer, caribou and the common black bear.
Ten miles up this, the West branch of the Pleasant river, is that exceedingly wild and precipitous "gulf" which comes nearer to a western canon than any other gorge in this part of Maine. Both Farrar's and Hubbard's Guides to Moosehead lake and vicinity (each of which contains a large scale map) give long accounts of it, but it is not yet accessible to the ordinary tourist. The river for several miles has cut its way irregularly into the slate, leaving banks over 100 feet high, which are so vertical and so near together that in one place deer often jump across the chasm. In the bottom is a roaring line of cascades, and above, an arch of dense forest, whence spring the long slopes of high mountains.
June or September are the best months for a camping-trip to this gulf, and the road is under improvement so that ladies may be taken. From that centre the ascent of White Cap (3,700 feet) and several other mountains is feasible; and it is only 15 miles to Moosehead lake. Two miles, by a good path from the foot of the gulf, is Long pond, "the main source of Sebee pond, and the home of the trout and land-locked salmon."
By the time we had discussed these facts we had run on past South Sebec, where stages for Sebec pond and its ancient settlements meet each train; the distance is five miles. There is a steamer on the lake, from whose further borders immense quantities of blueberries are sent to market. The spring fishing for salmon there, is renowned, but during the summer, pickerel and white perch must content the angler.
Then come Foxcroft and Dover,—very pretty towns, in a well-cultivated region. Here, nearly everybody, except the Moosehead tourist, leaves the cars, for this is on the edge of civilization; and the terror of that nervous little schoolma'm, when the Boston drummer also alighted here and politely helped her into the same hotel bus with himself, was as meat and drink to our amusement-searching eyes.
A little farther on is Monson Junction, where a narrow-gauge railway runs northward eight miles to the renowned Monson slate quarries, operated by a Lowell (Mass.) company, which proposes to extend the road northward to Greenville and southward to Skowhegan.
"If they do," says Baily, "they'll run it through, what one of the old stage drivers hereabout used to call, 'a pretty sassy country,' only made, in his opinion, 'to hold the world together.'"
The deep quarries, and the operations of cutting out the slate and splitting it into roof-pieces, are very interesting; and this industry has elevated what was formerly a little cluster of farms, into an energetic and populous community, making Monson a desirable centre for sport and camping. A score or so of ponds are in the near vicinity, most of them accessible by good roads, and several have rude, but comfortable inns on their shores. The local piscatores will give the stranger advice as to the kind of fish and proper season belonging to each body of water; and will cart him and his belongings about, or outfit him for camping, at a very moderate cost. This was the place for stopping over night on the old stage-journey from Bangor; and it was near here that Thoreau and Winthrop saw the moose-horns set on a guidepost at a fork of the read, with the name of each destination painted on their diverging prongs.
Again, I must beg you to remember, that, while I have taken this digression, we are rolling up the Piscataquis, now only an impatient brook. Then we pass Blanchard, and can look off to the left, beyond Mt. Russell, to the more distant hills where spring its fountains. Between Blanchard and Shirley are several high trestles, and a constant outlook far westward across forested ravines pinched between crowding hills. Mt. Russell hangs above us in the rear, and behind him Bald mountain, its smooth face ringed with woods like the crown of one of those friar's, who were the first white men to look upon these hills. Burroughs climbed it from Moxie pond, and found its top one enormous cap of naked granite, seamed, cracked and glacier-plowed,—much such a crest as that of the Mount Desert knobs, I fancy. His description of it is very striking. These hills, richly tinted and changeful, never lose their charm, till nearer and taller the Squaw rears her head, and the gleaming spaces of Moosehead lake, where she watches, break suddenly upon our view.