Third Season
XIII — The Swamps and Hills of Mosholu and Lowerre, New York
Within the circuit of this plodding life,
There enter moments of an azure hue.
Thoreau, Excursions.
This season, on May 15th, I began my explorations in the hills and swamps of Mosholu and Lowerre. The most conspicuous flowers about these woods are trillium, spring beauties (Claytonia Virginica), bird’s-foot violets, yellow violets, jack-in-the-pulpits, and pink azaleas. The swamps and slopes east of the Mosholu station are bright with these blossoms, which peep from the sod and shrub in their turn. In several places, also columbine, Dutchman’s-breeches and dog’s-tooth lily are abundant. During May these flowers, with the trees of snowy dogwood blossoms, fill the rolling hills and quiet valleys with delicate perfume and unrivaled glory.
Along the higher ridges, the brilliant Rock Pinks (Phlox subulata) bloom abundantly. Their mossy-mats creep over the hills from Bronx Park to Yonkers. They belong especially to the extreme southern part of the State of New York, and southward to Virginia and westward to Michigan. In these woods of Mosholu and Lowerre they flower immediately after the Dutchman’s-breeches have faded. I had believed that these pinks must grow as far north as West Rock and the rocky heights of the Giant at Mount Carmel, as well as about the ridges bordering Lake Saltonstall, near New Haven, Connecticut. I was, however, disappointed to find that their territory extended no farther north than the wilder woods of New York City.
I discovered many beautiful plants of the Prickly Pear, or Indian Fig (Opuntia Opuntia) of the Cactus Family. It was named for a town in Greece where it grew. This strange relic of the primeval wood blooms in June, producing a sulphurous-yellow flower of great beauty. The large, spatulate-lobed, juicy leaves are sap-green in color, bearing many thorn-like spines. The new leaves, or lobes, appear as joints along the edges of the parent leaf. The fruit is edible. This species is often cultivated. It belongs natively to the rocky shores of Nantucket, Rhode Island, and to Manhattan Island. It is not abundant in Bronx Wood, however. Isolated colonies of the plant live in New York City, along the mutton-backed granite rocks in vacant lots, west of St. Nicholas Avenue, and along Washington Heights.
Wild Garlic, of the Lily Family, is ever present about the hills of Bronx Valley and Spuyten Duyvil Creek.
The Bird’s-Foot Violet (Viola pedata) and the Round-Leaved Violet (Viola rotundifolia) seem to run riot on the Mosholu Hills, but it is not always easy to distinguish the species. A variety of Bird’s-Foot Violet that grows here appears like a small pansy, and is designated as Viola bicolor, producing two delicate, velvety hues of blue-purple. The plant derived its common name from the shape of the leaves, which are divided into five to eleven pointed lobes.
The early Greek name for Violets and Pansies was Ion. According to Emperor Constantine, it arose from Io, a nymph loved of Jupiter, Nicander wrote that the name Ion was given to Violets because the Nymphs first presented Jupiter with these flowers in the fields of Ionia. They were known to Virgil as Vaccinium, and later in Latin as Vittulæ, Violæ, and to-day they are classified as Viola. Species of these plants were designated by the early Greek apothecaries as “Herbes Bolbonac.” In the sixteenth century plants of this family grew wild among the corn-field stubbles of England, according to Dodoens and Lyte. They were known as Viola, Iacea, Herbe Clauellata, Pances, Love-in-Idleness, and Heart’s-Ease.
The Downy Yellow Violet (Viola pubescens), although not so common as blue violets in Bronx Woods, is abundant in special corners among the damp hillsides. Here, too, the Sweet White Violet (Viola blanda) dwells near the borders of streams. It is delicately fragrant, although not so sweet-scented as the Canada Violet (Viola Canadensis) growing northward as well as southward along mountainside streams. The perfume of the Canada Violet is much like that of the Small Yellow Moccasin-Flower.
Jack-in-the-Pulpit preaches from many rocky hills and hollows in Mosholu and Lowerre, where grow the largest plants I ever saw. They spring from bulbous turnip or onion-like roots, and are sometimes called Indian Turnips. These plants were known by Pliny in Christ’s day as “Dragons,” on account of the stalks, which are speckled like an adder’s skin. The ancients believed that the leaves of Dragonworts, carried in the clothing, would prevent stings of vipers. Others believed that the leaves, wrapped around cheese, would keep it from mouldering.
Matthiolus thus described the Skunk-Cabbage of this group, to which was attributed mythical properties, since it grew sparingly in northern Asia: “Great large leaves, folded and lapped one within another, with an upright stalke, at the top a floure like to a spikie-eare.”
The Green Dragonwort and Jack-in-the-Pulpit were known, until recently, generically as Arum. Arisæma antedates Arum, referring to the red-blotched stalks of some species. Jack-in-the-Pulpit to-day is known in the science as Arisæma triphyllum. The origin of the name Jack-in-the-Pulpit is recent, and, like Indian Turnip, is purely of American origin. Clara Smith of Medford, Massachusetts, so christened these Dragonworts, in a poem which was sent to Whittier for revision. He published it in Child Life, about 1884, after amending and adding several lines. The poem became popular, and the flower was thereafter known as “Jack-in-the-Pulpit.”
Columbine was especially plentiful along the hillsides; and the hollows and crevices of rocks were filled with blade-like leaves, resembling Sweet Flag (Acorus Calamus). They proved, however, to be the leaves of the Blackberry Lily (Gemmingia Chinensis). This lily creeps from southern New York to Georgia. The seeds resemble blackberries. The plant produces several large blossoms in a terminal bracted cluster, of an orange color mottled with purple. This species was formerly known as Pardanthus, meaning a Leopard-Flower. The roots are of a golden color.
Returning from the Point of Rocks above Deer Park, I passed along lanes bordered with cedars and junipers, while violets, rosy-pinks and tufts of maiden-hair spleenwort clung to the ledges. On leaving the swamp below, I found a drowsy diamond snake in a stupor, from having recently swallowed a bird or frog. The diamond-shaped checks upon his skin betrayed his species. He is considered venomous, therefore I remained a safe distance from him.
On May 18th I again visited the Point of Rocks and McLean’s Woods, searching for Orchis spectabilis and for Cypripedium parviflorum. Leaving the car at Bedford Park, we struck westward, coming out near Poe Park, where still stands that quaint white cottage in which Poe wrote The Raven. We bore around the slopes, northward beyond the Racing Park, and entered a country lane, soon turning again to the left into the forest, where stood great pools of water. Along the sluggish stream grew many rare species of fern. Finally we entered Jerome Avenue, leading toward Yonkers.
We searched the borders of the roadside for that little two-leaved orchid, Twayblade (Leptorchis liliifolia), formerly known as Lily-leaved Liparis, which grows here in the moist woods. We were too early for it, however. We turned off into the deeper woods till we came to the tangled edges of McLean’s Swamp. Here, a little later, I collected pink azaleas and marsh marigolds, golden-ragwort,—known as the False Valerian (Senecio aureus),—white mustard, and water-cress,—also of the Mustard Family. Throughout these beautiful woods the Broad-Beech Fern (Phegopteris hexagonoptera) and the Oak Fern (Phegopteris Dryopteris) dwell. The Jack-in-the-Pulpit and Indian Cucumbers were here, towering above the False Lilies-of-the-Valley and Trillium; and among these vines the dainty golden-shoes of the Fragrant Cypripedium tripped forth like fairy’s foot-gear. The Indian Cucumber (Medeola Virginiana) is a strange plant belonging to the Lily-of-the-Valley Family. The root is tuberous, of a white, brittle substance, with a flavor like that of the garden cucumber. The leaves occur in two whorls along the slender stalk. About the middle of the stem there is a whorl of five to nine oblong-lanceolate leaves; above this another smaller whorl occurs, with three to five leaves; and still above this, all the small flowers nod toward the ground.
Medeola is an adaptation of Medea, the name of the daughter of King Æetes of Colchis, who aided Jason by her witchcraft, and was afterward deserted by him. This plant is supposed to possess magic properties as a medicine, and is thus used by the Indians and other superstitious folk.
Colonies of Brake and Clayton’s Fern grew in the hollows on the hill, and about the stagnant pools northward. We wandered up and down the slopes with eyes bent upon the ground, carefully pacing between the vines, searching for the Golden Moccasin-Flowers. Most of the buds still were folded within the sepals, although we found a few that were showing their golden tips and carmine lacing-petals. In the swamps beyond, we gathered a dozen Nodding Wake-Robins (Trillium cernuum). This species is not so gaudy as the Painted Trillium, being of a delicate rose-pink, and often pure white.
Later in the week, while exploring to the east beyond the lane toward Mount Vernon, I ran upon a select group of Cypripedium parviflorum, many stems of which bore two blossoms. This colony grew beneath pines, cedars, thorns, and dogwood trees. The soil was rich and dry, and the leaves, for the most part, were blown off the bare black soil. I counted a hundred plants—evidently seedlings—besides the ones in bloom. Some were at least three or four years old; others were of only one or two seasons’ growth. The smallest plants were but a few months old. I had never found so many natural seedlings of Cypripedium before.
We journeyed homeward through Putnam Valley to Mosholu, passing Van Courtlandt Mansion. Near Cold Spring, along the borders of the Golf Links, we found the handsome leaves of Bloodroot (Sanguinaria Canadensis), of the Poppy Family, which is one of the early flowers, and is pure white. The roots contain a reddish orange juice which looks like blood, whence the name is derived.
At the crossing of the Putnam Railroad, we passed over the bridge near Deer Park, east of Mosholu. Leaving the road abruptly, we turned to the right, following along the west shore of the Putnam Swamp, which is filled with the rank growth of skunk’s-cabbage, Indian poke, tangled grape-vines, mints, mustards, golden ragwort, violets, dog’s-tooth lilies, and unknown measures of wild ginger root, stick-tights, or “pitchforks,” and cockle-burrs.
The Yellow Cypripedium also, at one time, grew along the edges of the swamp, amid the Indian poke, violets, and lilies. Slowly we climbed the hill toward the northwest, along winding paths among white birch saplings, pines, and junipers, until we reached the Point of Rock near Lowerre, this pile of granite being the highest along the Putnam Division, in this vale. On the east of the rocks, we found a dozen or more plants of the Showy Orchis, scattered among the stones and vines. Their flowers, however, were faded, and fell as soon as touched. Among the low bushes and plants I found a colony of the leafless parasitic Cancer-Root (Thalesia uniflora), of the Broom-Rape Family.
Another plant lacking green leaves is the Indian Pipe or Corpse-Plant (Monotropa uniflora), frequently met among the Orange Mountains of New Jersey, and throughout the Hoosac Highlands. It grows among decayed brush-heaps in dark woods, during June and August. There are twelve species of Monotropaceæ. The flowers of a sister genus of Monotropa, found in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, are remarkable for their deep rose-carmine coloring. It is sometimes known as the Snow-Plant (Sarcodes sanguinea). The tall club-like, fleshy spikes are encircled with crimson pipe-shaped flowers, often sixty or even a hundred being found on one spike. A specimen plant, collected in Washoe Valley near Franktown, Nevada, was sent to me last season, on May 15th. The flowers grow there along the higher slopes of the mountains, at an elevation from six to nine thousand feet above sea level, amid brakes, pine, fir, cedar, golden-chestnut bushes, and the beautiful evergreen shrub, Manzanita (Arctostaphylos pungens).
Above the Point of Rocks, a rough canvas tent was pitched in a crevice of the ledge—probably the temporary abode of Italian green venders. Columbines, rock-pinks, violets, and Wood Betony (Pedicularis Canadensis) crept along our path. The plants of the Wood Betony produce yellowish-green as well as crimson-purple flowers. They are often called Lousewort. Children often mis-name them orchids, believing this term suitable to all odd-looking flowers.
The white Monumental Rock, east of Mosholu Swamp, is covered with glacial scratches. From its summit a dream of visual delight spreads toward the blue walls of the Palisades along the Hudson. The blossoming wood, waving with pink and white dogwood branches, the western slope of the rock itself, banked with rosy pinks, nodding lily-bells, and columbine, form a scene the impression of which never can fade from the mind.
Passing the station of Mosholu, we followed the path along the railroad southwardly near the marsh. Here, during July, three rare species of Habenaria will bloom. And in the meadows farther northward, the Ladies’ Tresses—genus Gyrostachys of the Orchid Family—and the Blue Fringed Gentians (Gentiana crinita) will unfold in September and October. Soon we came to the end of the swampy path, and entered the broad meadows of Van Courtlandt Farm. In the distance the antique Colonial Mansion of Revolutionary fame stood out among the ancient trees. Over these fields the first bobolinks of the season were carolling. I found one of their eggs among the grasses. It is a risky nesting-ground for birds. The parades of the militia form upon these fields, the regiments’ camp being located east of the mansion. The trees along the lanes hereabout are English species, planted years ago by the owner of the mansion. Many are crumbling and decaying as the mills to the left. Another half century will do away with such as these. To the right flows Spuyten Duyvil Creek,—a small, elusive stream; and as it glides into the swamp beyond, it covers much marsh-land, where sedges and cat-tails flourish and no one dares to wade.
XIV — The Swamp of Oracles — Hoosac Valley
Science is welcome to the deepest recesses of the forest, for there, too nature obeys the same old civil laws. The little red bug on the stump of a pine,—for it the wind shifts and the sun breaks through the clouds.—Thoreau, Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
On June 6th I departed from New York for the Hoosac Valley, to obtain photographs of my orchids and their haunts. Rosy-faces, golden-slippers, witches’-bells, and milky-white stars all arose from the earth at once in gay array, and disputed their line of order in posing for their pictures. I had sent no forewarning of my coming to the swamps. I fancied I should find more flowers in bloom if I took them by surprise.
The morning of the seventh, I hurried off at sunrise through the dewy meadows. I felt sure I was too late for the Showy Orchis and the Ram’s-Head Cypripedium, the former having faded in Bronx Valley as early as May 18th. The hills were glorious; the robins, orioles, and bobolinks were carolling joyously. The meadows, still heavy with dew, caused me to choose my path along the edges of the Bone Lot near the old Pond Hole. This I found fringed with pink azaleas,—the swamp-apple blossoms loved of the children hereabout. I entered the chestnut wood beyond, and sought the colony of the Large Yellow Moccasin-Flowers, only to find that the shoes had been broken from their stems, and that there were none remaining. Still, there were other groups in the Swamp of Oracles, and I proceeded to scout the slopes leading to the hollow below, winding about the knolls—or Sugar-loaves, as they are called here. These glacial hills are worthless barren pastures at best, seldom ploughed for rye or corn, for all attempted crops of grain here have proven thin and dwarfed, and when it rains gutters burrow in the hillsides.
As I descended through Patterson’s Meadows, the air was musical with humming bees and birds. Moths and butterflies sailed lazily about the pools below, hovering about the first blossoms of Fleur-de-lis. Over the rolling fields near, the tender leaves of Indian-corn rustled musically in the breeze, and crows were still lingering on the fence, not in the least frightened by the snares and scarecrows about the field. I found the meadow ablaze with late Columbine (Aquilegia Canadensis); I had never before seen fields so luxuriant with the blossoms of this plant. They danced among the daisies, and outnumbered the grasses in their patches. The generic name Aquilegia, or Aquileia, is said in our manuals to be derived from Aquila, an eagle, since the curves of the hollow spurs of these flowers resemble an eagle’s talons. But in this case, the name should read Pes Aquilegia. Among the ancient herbals, however, there is no record of this derivation. Originally, as Dodoens wrote in 1578, this plant was known as Aquileia. Aquileia was also the name of a town in the vicinity of ancient Troy. The town was celebrated in history for its desperate resistance to Attila, King of the Huns. Assuming that the origin of the name is vague, and observing the customs of the ancients in the naming of plants, it might be inferred that these flowers were first observed in the town of Aquileia, or were named in honor of a king or herbalist of the region. This was the case with the Pæonia, which took its title from that good old man, Dr. Pæon of Pæonia, in Macedonia. The origin of the common name Columbine, also, has occasioned of late much discussion in the popular plant journals.44 One author, claiming that the spurs of these flowers resembled a dove’s-foot, said that the name should read “Pes Columbinus”—pes meaning foot, and columbinus signifying dove. But “Pes Columbinum” was used by the ancients to designate an allied group of Aquilegia, a species of wild geranium, written of by Linnæus in 1753 as Geranium Columbinum. It is commonly known in English as Dove’s-foot Geranium, and in French as Pied de pigeon.
According to Gaza, species of Aquilegia were supposed to have been named originally by Theophrastus—centuries before Christ—Ponthos Theophrasti. Theophrastus is accepted as our first real botanist leaving extant records of plants. The name Columbine for these species appears to have originated in England, or in the Low Countries. Dodoens described them under that title as early as 1578; and as botany was not actually revived until 1530 and 1542, we may accept Dodoens as authoritative on the common names of that day. He writes of the Columbine: “The shape and proportion of the leaves of the floures do seem to represent the figure of a dove or culver,—these floures produce hollows with a long-crooked tayle like a Lark’s-claw (and bending somewhat toward the proportion of the necke of a Culver).”45 The honeyed-spurs of Columbine, therefore, suggested the curve of a dove’s-neck rather than the dove’s-foot or the eagle’s-talons. Another author is reminded of a “dove’s-cote,” as he looks into the open flower, which seems to him a fitting home for doves.
Columbine-flowers are often called “Honeysuckles” by children. The name Honeysuckle, however, applies to the Woodbines which Dodoens describes as growing with flowers “in tufts like nosegaies, of a pleasant color, and long and hollow almost like the little bags of Columbine.” The Columbine became confused with the Honeysuckles of the Woodbine Family, since Columbines produce “little bags of honey”—which the children sucked and christened. Furthermore there is a resemblance in the long hollow spurs of the Woodbine flowers to those of Columbine blossoms.
The Columbines belong to the Crowfoot Family (Ranunculaceæ), and are closely allied with sister genera, including Clematis, Anemone, Hepatica, Meadow Rue, False Bugbane, Buttercup, Marsh Marigold, Goldthread, Larkspur, Aconite, and Monkshood. These species produce plants with cut leaves, as it were, resembling feet, claws, or talons of various birds, animals, and fishes.
Continuing my journey, I crossed the edges of Rabbit Plain, observing the low blue huckleberry bushes, laden with green fruit, and the flaming flowers of the deep pink azaleas. Through the bushes peered the white schoolhouse of District Fourteen. I wandered along the border of the wood just out of sight of the curious gaze of the children. A cow-path led windingly along the shades for a quarter of a mile. Near the bars above the Swamp of Oracles, I found a spike of the Small Round-Leaved Orchis (Habenaria Hookeriana) in bud. I blazed a tree above it, marking the spot for another day when the flowers should be in blossom. Crossing the East Pownal road, I turned into a hollow to the west, following along over decaying logs and pine brush-heaps. The ground sent up a rich pitch-like perfume as the sun poured down upon the mossy sod. Wild lilies were abundant here, producing the largest leaves I ever saw. Solomon’s Seal, arbutus, and wintergreen leaves (Gaultheria) were creeping everywhere near the edges of the deeper wood. Within the denser shades, growing among pine logs and heaps of leaves, I found the Great Round-Leaved Orchis, so seldom found in the lower vales. It proved to be a seedling, too young to bloom. The leaves were like large saucers, and of a beautiful silvery green underneath. The plant is always suggestive of the luxuriant tropics. I marked the corner, and shielded it from any chance vandal eye with a broken branch of black birch.
The slopes leading to Cold Spring, in the hollow below, were abrupt, and I was forced to slide most of the distance, clinging to the bushes. I came out at the foot of the hill in the midst of a colony of Sweet Canada Violets (Viola Canadensis) in full bloom. They grew along the borders of a little brook flowing through a dense thicket of soft maple and black birches. I had never before found this species in flower here. It seemed to have flown down from the heights of the Dome, to grace this swamp. Belated purple birthroot and its sister, the painted trillium, were still nodding here. There were also a few pale-faced priests-in-the-pulpit, unlike the larger coarse purple ones found in Bronx Valley. These Indian Turnips are not abundant here as in the swamps and hills of Mosholu. The wild leek of genus Allium seeks the higher mountainsides.
I followed the Canadensis Brook to the edge of the Swamp of Oracles, crossing Ball Brook at the junction of these streams. I penetrated where the rarer orchids dwell, and where few children dare to travel. I was still too early for the Showy Queen Moccasin-Flower, but on time for the large and the small golden slippers, as well as the Pink Acaule—that humble two-leaved Cypripedium which, as a rule, only seeks the dryer edges of the swamps. The Large Yellow Moccasin-Flowers were beginning to fade and turn brown. The swamp was luxuriant in its growth of ferns and vines and foliage. Dogwood trees are very scarce here, but the azaleas, mountain laurel, or calico-bush, and the lambkill flowers make up for the missing snowy blossoms.
In the heart of the swamp I was attracted by an uprooted tree, about whose stump stagnant water had settled, now reflecting the shadows and sunshine as a miniature lake. Several baby deer-mice were in the pool. Many were dead, and the live ones were swimming about in desperation. I counted six or seven in all. I fished them out, and placed them on the sun-dried moss, which covered the roots of the turnover, forming little islands in the lake. But these white-faced, pink-eyed little creatures were no safer after my rescue than before; for soon, in their nervous fright, they crawled off the mossy islands, and were still swimming when—not wishing to witness the end—I went away. It was one of the many mid-forest tragedies which Nature seems to plan with so little philosophy, and which I knew I could not prevent. Had I removed them from the water again and placed them at a distance from the mud-hole over which they were born, certain starvation would have awaited them. In the topmost parts of the overturned stump, amid the roots and peat, a pile of forest leaves was rudely huddled, forming the deer-mouse mansion, hidden from the crawling turtles and creeping snakes, as well as from the hawks and owls in the trees above. There are many natural causes of destruction for such animals in the woods. Usually I have found the deer-mouse’s nest in low thorn-apple bushes, at least six feet above the ground, but always near the borders of streams. Such nests at first remind one of a last year’s bird-nest filled with drifted autumn leaves, until the little wildwood albinos are discovered.
With my vasculum packed full of perfect blossoms, I started homeward, following the Pownal Centre road westward, in order to have a look at the Ram’s-Head Cypripedium. On the edge of the marsh, as usual I found the two hundred unfolding buds of the Pink Moccasins (Cypripedium acaule).
Near the Amidon Meadows, I startled up two mother partridges and their broods—the Ruffled Grouse (Bonasa umbellus), so prolific in these woods. The old hens, fluttering and sputtering, limped away with their wings drooping, and continued to warn their chickens to hide. The little speckled fellows were soon lost sight of beneath the dead leaves at my feet. They ceased to peep, and being of the colors of the leaves, I hardly dared to advance for fear of stepping upon them. I sat down upon a stone by a tree, and waited for the return of the wild hens. Before long, I heard a rustling of leaves in the distance, and a clucking and calling as of a tame hen summoning her chickens to feed upon a worm. The little brown balls began—one, three, then a dozen, all at once to take their heads from under the leaves, and they ran like streaks of lightning. The mother partridge came so near, unawares, that I saw the color of her eyes. Finally, discovering me, she in terror signalled again, much as the tame hen does in real or fancied danger. The little grouse hid again, some of them putting their heads under leaves, while the body was wholly exposed.
On June 8th I visited Rattlesnake Swamp. Pink Moccasin-Flowers and late blossoms of Painted Trillium were abundant under the hemlocks along the slopes of the Domelet.
On June 10th I heard of a colony of albinos or white Cypripedium acaule reported on the Rabbit Plain north of the Swamp of Oracles. In searching unsuccessfully for it, I frightened up an old mother whippoorwill. She feigned broken wings, attempting to distract my attention from her two unprotected yellow eggs upon the leaves at my feet. Both partridges and whippoorwills remain on their nests until almost stepped upon, as a rule, believing that they are concealed because of their dead-leaf ground-coloring. The old whippoorwill perched on some distant pine logs, and moaned piteously while I looked at her eggs. Her great round, sad eyes distressed me, while she gave forth a sighing sound. I broke down a small tree over the nest and near the path as I left, hung my linen collar on a tree, marking the line of entrance for another day.
Four days later I returned, and found two little round balls of yellow down, just out of their shells which were lying near. Creeping up softly within touch of the mother, I had a chance of observing her carefully. She had no shelter or protection but a leaf of the False Lily-of-the-Valley (Unifolium Canadense) which covered her eyes and part of her head. She never stirred a feather nor blinked either of her round brown eyes. Close to the earth like the leaves themselves, pressed down with winter snows, it was difficult to distinguish her feathers from them. I finally frightened her from the spot. The poor little birds heard their mother’s cry of alarm, and, babes as they were, instinctively understood it all, opening their dreamy sad eyes, and trying to hide away. Nest they had none, and rolled about over the leaves. I visited these birdlings so often, in my eagerness to make observations, that the mother finally left her young. One cold night, finding them almost freezing and starving, I took them home. They did not live more than a week, however, on account of my ignorance as to what food to give them. During this time they became very tame and dependent upon my care, rejoicing strangely when I came near.
The Southern Chuck-Will’s-Widow, a species closely allied to our Whippoorwill, builds no nest, but is said to move her eggs and young, in her large mouth, from place to place, wherever she may choose to abide. It would be well if Nature had thus taught our Northern Whippoorwills.
I continued to visit the Bogs of Etchowog, collecting azalea, iris, and the other flowers in their turn. In circling the Pownal Pond one day, I ran upon a Water Thrush (Selurus noveboracensis) and her brood of five little foolish, half-grown thrushlings. The awkward birds ran peeping across my path, not in the least afraid. I caught them all, and placed three in my hat, leaving two for consolation to the mother, while I hurried home to obtain a photograph of my prizes. But I was not able to reconcile them to their new conditions and food so easily as I had domesticated my whippoorwills. As soon as I had secured a negative, I returned them, nearly famished, to the mother, who was running along the shore of the pond, tipping-up her tail like the wagtail. These birds are swift in flight, skimming near the water, whistling as it were, while they catch insects. Their nest is very difficult to find, being as a rule among the roots of trees along the shores of ponds or streams in damp woods. I frequently observe these birds walking in the stony brook flowing down from Cold Spring in Chalk Pond region, as well as about the shores of Aurora’s Lake in North Adams.
The hillside clearings in this region are the haunts of woodchucks (Arctomys monax). Many holes show where they have burrowed. Usually these ground-pigs seek for their habitations clover and bean fields, which furnish them provender. Exploring the dooryard of the woodchuck, I found several plants of the Small Round-Leaved Orchis maturing their seed-capsules. Not every wild pig’s garden bears this evidence of æstheticism.
The fertilization of these strange Round-Leaved Habenarias is unique. The anther is eager to give up its pollinia. The adhesive masses shot from their cells when I touched them, and fastened to the head of my hat-pin. When placed near the viscid surface of the stigma, they were drawn forcefully from it, thus impregnating the ovules in the ovary. These masses of pollinia, once glued upon the thigh of an insect, would remain there until deposited on the attractive stigma of their proper species.
On my next excursion to the Bogs of Etchowog, I found nothing new, save six spikes of the Small Purple-Fringed Orchis in bud. I was too early for Pogonias and Limodorums, which are fast disappearing from this swamp. The colony of Fragrant Yellow Moccasin-Flowers, in the Glen of Comus, was photographed one morning while the sunshine struggled in through the leaves, lighting up the flowers in this labyrinth of tropical foliage. They were fragrant in the highest degree—a true form of Cypripedium parviflorum, with a slight variegated effect of carmine coloring on the tips of the slippers. This is the first instance of such spots of crimson on the exterior observed by me. Near this group stands also a larger colony of Cypripedium hirsutum seedling plants. Several had bloomed this season. One slipper had been destroyed by what appeared to be a snail. Nothing of the flower remained but the column, with the adhering anthers and stigmatic lobes. The sepals and petals, including the labellum, were eaten away. The snail was still clinging to the column, and must have found some delicate food in the juices of such golden petals to cause him to tear the flower apart. He may, however, have fertilized the species in the act; yet the destruction of its parts would have weakened the possible chances of the seed-capsule maturing properly.
In the bend of Ball Brook, amid the ferns, the Tall Northern Green Orchis (Habenaria hyperborea) blooms, its seeds having floated down here from the seed-capsules ripening on plants bordering the stream above.
Wild Ginger-Root (Asarum Canadense) grows abundantly along the sphagnous edges of the Swamp of Oracles. This plant produces bell-shaped blossoms, which invariably turn downward, hiding in the soft soil beneath the leaves. Its creeping roots are of a spicy, ginger-like flavor. The leaves—kidney-shaped—appear as small burdocks at a distance. The generic name is very obscure, although the plant was known to the early Greeks, and later known in Latin as Asarum, Nardus rustica, and Perpensa. Macer called it Vulgago, while it was known in England and Germany in 1578 as Asarabacca, Folefoot, and Hazlewort. It was used by the ancients as an antidote for venomous serpent bites, sciatica, difficult respiration, and various other diseases.
On June 15th I made my farewell journey to Etchowog. Turning into the thicket, east of the Barber Mill, I followed a path as far as possible, and then waded through sphagnum into a meadow-like clearing of three acres or more, concealed in the deepest of solitude. It was closed in on all sides by low alders, willows, and beautiful green spires of tamarack-trees. The sphagnum was many feet deep, spangled with flowers; and rising above the swamp grasses were iris blades and buckbean leaves. It was a little world whose limitations were the infinite blues above, the depths of moss below, and the circling green-fringed forest trees. The sunshine knew the field, and poured in upon it. I was obliged to wade slowly over the quaking sphagnum, assisted by pine-slabs, strewn about as stepping blocks.
The oblong green leaves of the rare Buckbeans (Menyanthes trifoliata)—found also in the Cranberry Bogs, north of Pownal Pond—were here thickly entangled over the greater area of the meadow. A few spikes still were in blossom, although the greater portion were adorned with the bullet-like glossy, smooth seed-pods. Later in the season they would slowly ripen, and throw thousands of seeds broadcast over the sphagnous field. It is evident that this plant—so infrequent in its general distribution—is most productive of its own seeds in its chosen haunts. This species is a sister genus of the Blue-Fringed Gentians, abundant along the edges of these bogs during October. Gentians derived their generic name from King Gentius of Illyria, who first used them in medicine.
The Floating-Heart (Limnanthemum lacunosum), closely allied to the Buckbeans, grows also in our marshy pools, the leaves being heart-shaped, instead of oblong as those of Menyanthes.
In the middle of this swamp an island arose, over which grew willow bushes and tamarack spires, interspersed by grape-vines. I crawled through the bushes without finding a flower worthy of description. Surrounding the edges of this island, tall spikes of the Fragrant Northern Orchis (Habenaria dilatata) rose above the water-soaked sphagnum. I was able to reach a few of them, then sought the terra firma of the tangled swamp beyond. I ran great risk, since I was forced to wade the soaking bogs where the cat-tail flags were dense. I managed to jump from hummock to hummock, not waiting for the grass to grow beneath my feet. Beyond I struggled through the low tangled trees covered with the Wild Frost Grape-Vines or Possum-Grape (Vitis cordifolia), amid tamaracks, swamp-maples, poison-sumach and ivy-vines. I observed many enormous colonies of Pitcher Plants, still in bloom in the shades. Finally I reached the muddy bank of Ball Brook, ragged, dirty, and tired. I found the stream impassable because of the mud. Even old Major had sense enough not to go too near the stream. I was forced to make my way, as well as possible, back to the mill, among piles of old tinware that had been accumulating since the early Revolutionary days of 1777.
Once out of this place, it was a pleasure to enter the open Pitcher Plant Meadow, where I searched for Pogonias and Limodorums without success. I circled about the swamp and turned away from it at the north, climbing over the hill above the Washon Bridge, toward Cranberry Swamp. Blue jays were screaming loudly, and catbirds were mewing in the bushes near the pools. I found the path near the pond, which led through luxuriant ferns to the shades of pines beyond. Here the ground was carpeted with fragrant needles and cones. Bull-frogs croaked hoarsely in the swamp beneath the lily-pads, and over the hillside crept yards of the evergreens known as Ground-Pine (Lycopodium obscurum) and Club-Moss (Lycopodium Selago), known to the Greeks as Wolf’s-Claw. This moss takes hold of the earth with its small roots, like the claws of a wolf.
This corner of Etchowog was the home of the mosquito, and I was obliged to use a bough of sweet-fern to keep the pests from devouring me.
“Fair insect! that, with threadlike legs spread out,
And blood-extracting bill, and filmy wing,
Does murmur, as thou slowly sail’st about,
...
Thou’rt welcome to the town—but why come here?”46
XV — White Oaks and Gregor Rocks
I can recall to mind the stillest summer hours, in which the grasshopper sings over the mulleins, and there is a valor in that time the bare memory of which is armor that can laugh at any blow of fortune.—Thoreau, Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
I had been on the trail for white Moccasin-Flowers for years; and on June 16th a lad of White Oaks Valley promised to guide me to the Forks of Broad Brook, and show me a colony of absolutely White Lady’s Slippers. We arrived at the junction of the Field Brook—where it crosses the White Oaks Road near Richmond’s Farm—and turned our horse’s head through the fields eastward along the rude loggers’ path travelled in winter. We were obliged to cross fields of oats and potato vines in order to arrive on the summit of these rounded hills. Here, amid the white birches and sweet-fern bushes, we fastened our horse. Among these ferns and briars I discovered five enormous orange-yellow mushrooms, which, apparently, were of recent growth. They were gorgeous to behold, and smelled like new-made bread, yet they were extremely poisonous. They were, upon examination, found to spring from a socket, above which a ring encircled the stalk. This is characteristic of genus Amanita of this form of fungus. This poisonous species with some susceptible people produces serious results if only handled, or if its fragrance is inhaled. I collected three specimens, however, and put them in my vasculum.
We now descended the slopes eastward leading to the Wilsey Lot, where we found a road leading up through Broad Brook Valley to the Forks. The path was bordered with tall, luxuriant brakes at least four feet high. They were covered with dew, and brushing against them, we became wet through. My guide was an alert observer, and darting off here and there into the ravine, he brought forth gay blossoms of the Showy Queen of the Moccasin-Flowers. As we proceeded, we came to a bend of the brook and followed along high ledges of rock, where we crossed to the right over the boulder-filled stream. A quarter of a mile more brought us to another bend in the brook, and here we re-crossed, and at the left hand abruptly climbed the hillside in the sphagnous bed of a rivulet. Here, my guide said, were the Pure White Moccasin-Flowers. They proved to be pale pink blossoms of the Showy Reginæ, however, and not, as I had hoped, the rarer Cypripedium candidum, or even the albinos of Cypripedium reginæ.
It is said that in a swamp near the Forks both of the Yellow Moccasin-Flowers bloom. American Mountain Laurel, the beautiful Calico-bush, was in full bloom hereabout, so the day was not without some new treasure found.
The wildness of Broad Brook Valley is delightful. The stream rises in luxuriant swamps on the eastern summit of the Dome, between Stamford and Haystack Mountains. The Forks along the stream are formed by this one and others flowing down from Mount Hazen, which lies to the southeast of the Dome. The valley is comparatively wide, and the stream, as its name implies, is broad. The chasm bears scars of days when the heights to the northeast were capped with glaciers, towering thousands of feet above the present mutton-backed summits, which were formed into their dome-like shapes by the erosions of this ice sheet. The channel of the stream is full of tumbling boulders, and during April, when the snows are melting, a wilder brook is unknown in the Hoosac Valley. Three seasons it has become so rough and swollen that it has carried bridges and all else in its course before it, threatening the houses and little chapel, as it rushed downward to the Hoosac.
Bears inhabit these dark ravines, and wander close to the habitation of man in the Hollow. Not far from where we collected our flowers, a bear had been killed last season by two lads fishing in the stream. As I left the glen, and drove out over the moss-grown hills, and through the hollows, I found the ground red with wild strawberries. Needless to say, I paused until I had my fill of this luscious fruit, and I carried a birch-bark cornucopia of it away with me.
On June 18th I visited my great colony of Showy Reginæ in Rattlesnake Swamp. As they were not yet unfolded in their perfection of magenta coloring, I put up a warning on a tree near them not to rob the colony until photographed,—fearing some fisherman would behold and gather the blossoms. However, they were photographed successfully on the 20th.
The stumps and trees in this corner of the swamp are covered with dead boughs, laden with lichens and reindeer moss. A kind of moss known as Usnea hangs from the boughs of the trees above. The whole region is humid and luxuriant, and could almost deceive one into believing that he was in the jungles of the Southlands, instead of among the glooms of the Green Mountains. The beautiful Butterfly-fungus (Polypores) is especially interesting throughout this swamp, growing on dead trees and logs. Another pretty species, found on stumps and the earth, has scarlet-tinted cups, nestling in early spring amid the mosses. The trees and stones display both their gray and foliaceous lichens everywhere hereabout; and in the fields, the smoking puff-balls burst beneath the footsteps. Foxes Fire-Eyes is common in this region. It is decaying wood, green in color, said to be full of threads of phosphorescent fungi. During the night this wood gives out a soft, luminous light, which if it happens to come from a large stump, often frightens both travellers and horses along our woodland roads.
In the Swamp of Rattlesnake Brook may be found the Pitch or Torch-Pine (Pinus rigida), shad-bushes, white and black birches, chestnuts, high huckleberries, and small bushes of the Ague Tree (Sassafras), which seem rare here, but are abundant in southern New York. The odd spires of the double or black spruce are also found among the denizens of this region. From May until late November the swamp brings forth, in their season, arbutus, mountain snowberry vines, St. John’s wort, low huckleberry, the evergreen leaves of Gaultheria, prince’s pine, creeping evergreens, numerous rushes and sedges. Here, too, the goldthread entangles the roots of mosses and trilliums, while the Sundew (Drosera rotundifolia), creeps along the mossy sides of the wood road, and in the deeper sphagnum about the stream. The rare Large Whorled Pogonia (Pogonia verticillata), of the Orchid Family, has been collected in this swamp for three seasons. This orchid is rare in New England, save in Massachusetts and Connecticut. It was first found in Vermont near High Bridge and Colchester by Messrs. Robbins and Oakes, the pioneer botanists, who passed through the State in 1829. The delicate emerald green leaves of Clintonia, marsh marigolds, Solomon’s seal, Shin-Leaf (Pyrola rotundifolia), liverwort, wild briar-roses, lambkill, blue lobelias, Labrador tea, yellow loosestrife, blue-fringed gentians, innumerable ferns, the spikes of the Tall-Green Orchis, plants of the Round-Leaved Orchis, the Pink Moccasin-Flower, and rarely the beautiful orchid, Arethusa bulbosa—all of these conspire to make the region a wilderness of beauty.
On an excursion to Thompson’s Brook, June 19th, near Meyers’s Sugar-Bush, I collected ferns and iris. As I descended to the hemlocks, near the waterfalls, I stumbled upon the late plants of the Showy Orchis (Orchis spectabilis), in bloom—which were fully two weeks past the regular flowering date. They had faded in the hills of Mosholu on May 19th.
I had heard of Wash-Tub Brook for years, and on July 5th started off to explore the valley and the cliffs of Gregor Rocks above North Pownal. A lime-rock ridge runs from the base of Mount Anthony southeasterly to the Glebe in Witch Hollow region. The soil of the latter is principally black slate, with outcropping boulders of marble and lime-rock. In 1899, Mr. W. W. Eggleston of Rutland had visited this valley, and reported the rare Rue-Wall Spleenwort and the Purple-stemmed Cliff-Brakes growing abundantly on Gregor Rocks. I followed his path of cliff-climbing, as nearly as possible. Now that the orchid season was practically ended, I was giving my attention to hunting ferns, and I knew I should find them among the lime-rock cliffs. I had recently collected the Walking Fern in its native haunts. I proceeded up the valley of Wash-Tub Brook, passing the limestone mills northward, toward Mount Anthony and Peckham’s Hollow. Another stream, known as Hemlock Brook, flows down from the eastern slopes of Perkins’ Hill, and joins the Wash-Tub stream near the lime crushers. All the streams in this western corner of Pownal flow to the Hoosac River, while the streams from the northern summits of the Dome and Mount Œta flow northward to the Walloomsac.
For the greater part of the valley, Wash-Tub Brook flows through open pasture lands. The bed is broad and shallow, strewn with numerous small lime-rock boulders drifted down from the hills with the floods of spring. The larger boulders wear scars and dimpled erosions of the glacial period. I took time to explore the ledges above, where the depressions reveal the terraces of an ancient lake. The prevailing evergreen trees here appear to be hemlock and cedar—the American Arbor Vitæ—whose roots cling to the cliffs, their green spires lending a touch of coloring to the bare-faced walls.
I saw from the banks here the distant pot-hole formations in the brook, from which the stream had taken its name. As I approached these marble basins, I found three in succession—one above the other—following the course of the stream—a narrow passage eroded through crystalline marble and limestone. The first or lowermost one was like a small lakelet overflowing its brim. The second one was a typical pot-hole, revolving its stones in its whirling waters. The bowl was about six feet deep, of a circular—or rather elliptical form, about twenty-six feet in circumference. The stream entered through the middle of the northern rim, and had eroded a spout-like gutter, causing the water to flow in a rapid, seething manner as if poured into the basin below. Here the greenish water boiled and whirled, finally with an added force leaping forth through a deep spout over the lower rim of the pot, carrying with it small stones and marble dust—the lower rim thus being worn away. As the bowl becomes deeper, layers of rock will be cracked and broken, until finally the pot-hole formation will be destroyed. The upper or third basin is located in the harder portion of the lime and marble bed-rock, portions of the marble being highly polished. The marble brook-bed glittered in the noonday sunshine. Pot-holes are formed originally by a boulder, which—carried in the currents of a stream—lodges in a depression of the bed-rock. It bores gradually into its resting place, until, in the course of ages, it has worn the walls of its basin into a deep hollow, at the same time wearing itself away, at last being carried off as a pebble. It may be that these holes are sometimes formed in a slightly different way. Dimples and fissures often occur in rocks, and if the water and pebbles circle about these cracks they probably eat down through the soft layers of rock, and thus loosen a revolving stone from the bed-rock itself. It would then fit the pot-hole closely for ages, revolving as the currents become forceful in freshets. The pot-holes along the granite ridges in Bronx Park, New York City, as well as on the Canaan Hills—nearly one thousand feet above the Merrimac and Connecticut river-beds,—reveal the erstwhile revolving stones now motionless in their basins.
After remaining in the region of the Wash-Tubs an hour or more, I followed down the lateral moraine or wooded ridge along the stream, which became rocky in the heart of the hemlocks. Upon a broad table-like rock, I found a large mat of Walking Ferns. It appeared about four feet square, and contained the most luxuriant plants I have ever seen or expect to see. I placed several in my vasculum, and descended to the stream, hastening on toward the village. Here I met an old gray-haired man—the inn-keeper for the mill laborers. He recognized my botanizing outfit, and remarked that Mr. Eggleston had passed through the town in 1899. He directed me to the Gregor Rocks, above the village, and thus I found the path winding around the northern brow of these lime-rock cliffs.
Crossing the Pownal Centre road, I entered the pasture east of the village church, and wound up the cliffs above the limekiln quarry. Here, striking in among the cedar trees and ragged bluffs, I pulled myself up under the trees and rocks. Resting for a moment, I beheld a fern which proved to be the Purple-stemmed Cliff-Brake (Pellæa atropurpurea). Much elated by my discovery, I fell to wondering what the little Wall-Rue Spleenwort (Asplenium Ruta-muraria) could look like. I had studied the plates of these rare ferns, but had not known them face to face. I soon came to an enormous lime-rock boulder on the summit of Gregor Rocks, and here I found the rare ferns for which I searched. From the crevices both the tender green tufts of the Wall-Rue Spleenwort and the wiry purple stems of the Cliff-Brake grew luxuriantly, draping the fissured sides of the boulder. Climbing to the top of the boulder, I saw beyond my reach a tuft of Walking Fern. This proved to me that this plant throve on the dryest of lime-rocks in the full glare of the sun, as well as in damp sheltered places. None of these species look like the ferns that are ordinarily known, and unless one turns the leaves over and observes the sori or fruit dots, he would never guess to what family they belonged, so different are they in appearance from their brothers of the boglands and hillside pastures.
The rocks about were covered with tufts of the delicate Wall-Rue, and great tangles of the Cliff-Brake, growing from twelve to fifteen inches tall. The last year’s growth was still brown and rusty amid the fresh green fronds of this season. Hardy indeed were these ferns, growing in such a dry, exposed place.
Later in the month I made another trip to secure some ferns for photographing. It was Sunday, and the church bells were ringing at North Corners as I drove into the valley, and hitched my horse opposite the village inn. As I went my way toward the haunts of the ferns, I soon discovered that I was not making my ascent to the cliffs alone. A gray-haired woman, with basket on her arm, overtook me. She seemed to be gathering the bluebells along the ledges. We began to converse, and when we came to some ripe strawberries, we ate in a social way the fruits we found by the path. She told me she was gathering bluebells to decorate the chancel of the church, as it was Children’s Day.
On the brow of Gregor Rocks I asked my companion if the legend were true, of which Hawthorne writes, in 1838, during his stay in the valley at North Adams: “A mad girl leaped from the top of a tremendous precipice in Pownal, hundreds of feet high, and, if the tale be true, being buoyed up by her clothes, came safely to the bottom.”47 She told me the name of the girl who had made the leap. She was a half-witted creature who, descending the cliffs at twilight with a package of wool rolls, thought to save time by throwing her burden ahead of her and leaping from the rocks. Her homespun garments caught and held her in the cedars below, until the villagers heard her screams and rescued her. The rocks are called “Weeping Rocks”—for what reason it is not quite clear, unless through some exaggeration of this story.
I collected some perfect ferns, and told my companion their names. She glowed with interest, and told me she had never been to these cliffs since she was a child, until now. She said if she had her life to live again, she would have devoted more time to exploring these rugged hills and vales. Soon our baskets were filled, and with a warm handclasp we parted.
I proceeded up Wash-Tub Brook, and secured some fresh plants of the Walking Fern in Hemlock Glen; then I returned to my horse. I was laden with rare treasures from the roadsides before I reached Mount Œta, late in the afternoon.
Many of the present names of ferns, lichens, and mosses originated with the ancients. Dioscorides knew and designated two kinds of fern. They were thought to put forth no seed in those days, since they produced no flowers—except as Dodoens in 1578 wrote: “We shall take for seede the blacke spots growing on the backside of the leaves, the which some do gather thinking to worke wonders, but to say the truth, it is nothing else but trumperie and superstition.”48
The Osmunda, Polypody, Oak-Fern, Hart’s-Tongue, Spleenwort, Asplenium, Venus-Hair and Maiden-Hair, as well as the delicate Ruta-Muraria—the Wall-Rue found on Gregor Rocks—were described clearly by the earliest herbalists. These records are full of errors and confusion, since the natural affinity of these species was not then known.
The Lichens were known also as “Stone-Liverworts (Hepatica), found with wrinkled, crimpled leaves on the ground or moist sweating rocks, where the sun shines seldom,” according to Dodoens. Among the list of mosses described, I discover that our Round-Leaved Sundew, the little carnivorous plant, was anciently classed as a species of moss, in close relation with the Ground and Club mosses known as Lycopodium. But the Sundew, unlike the mosses, produces a stalk with white flowers. The plant was considered strange, because the stronger shone the sun upon the round, reddish leaves, the more moist with drops of dew became the plant; for this reason it was called in Latin, Ros Solis, which became in English Sundew, in 1578.
The Wall-Rue Fern was thought to resemble the Garden Rue, but is much smaller. Rue-of-the-Wall was common in Germany and England in 1578, and was found upon old moist cathedral walls where the sun did not shine. It was originally called, in apothecary shops, Capillus-Veneris, Adiantum; and in France Saluia vita and Ruta-Muraria. There were two varieties of this fern, designated in Europe as Venus-Haire or Lumbardie Maiden-Haire, in 1578. The larger species grew commonly about well-springs, in walls in Italy. It was known as Capillus-Veneris,—named by the ancients Adiantum. This fern has hairy foot-stalks, small, blackish leaves, snipped around. This species is, no doubt, our Venus-Hair Fern, known to-day as Adiantum Capillus-Veneris.
The Walking Fern was known to Linnæus by the name of Asplenium, species of this genus being used against diseases of the spleen and liver. It was unknown to Dodoens in 1578. The Purple-stemmed Cliff-Brake was originally known as a species of Pteris, a name suggested because these ferns resemble the wings of birds.
Our native species of Bluebells of New England are emigrants from Europe, and are closely allied with the Bellflowers of Europe. These flowers were likened to cathedral-bells, with a small white clapper hung in the middle. These were, according to Lyte, found in Coventry and Canterbury, England, 1578, opening after “Sunne-rising,” and closing toward “Sunne-set.” Theophrastus knew these flowers centuries before Christ, while Pliny designated them in Latin Iosione.
Our Bluebell (Campanula) derived its generic name from campana, the Italian for a bell. The species found on Gregor Rocks are known as Campanula rotundifolia, signifying round-leaved bells. The original Bluebells of Europe were known in 1578 as Campanula cœrulea, from whence the common name originated. That of the “Bluebells of New England” originated with Thomas Bailey Aldrich, in his poem on these flowers.49
Between the 15th and 19th of July I made journeys over the nearer hills. I visited Oak Hill above White Oaks Valley, where I found the bluebells abundant along the roadside walls, even growing in the dooryard fences of the dwellers thereabout. I had never visited this hill before, and was charmed with its “glen-like seclusion.” It was known as “Nigger Hill” before White Oaks Chapel was built in the vale below, because of the colored population of this place. It is situated in the shadow of the Dome and Mount Hazen, surrounded on the northern and eastern sides by wild, primeval forests. The broad, sloping meadows were among the first to be cleared in this region, and wear the scars that follow in the trail of the woodman. In the time of the Rebellion, many slaves sought the seclusion of this valley, and built their shanties snugly by the brooks. Until quite recently, the roads of the Hollow and the streets of Williamstown were frequented by one of these ancient slaves, known as “Old Abe-the-Bunter,” who used to sell huckleberries and arbutus, and who sawed wood for the students at Williams. His real name was Abraham Parsons. The title “Bunter” was affixed on account of a horny growth projecting from his forehead, which he used sometimes after the manner of a goat. At one time, many years ago, a number of students and White-Oakers made a wager with Uncle Abe, which he won by butting through the heavy oak head of a molasses hogshead. It is also reported that after this, some students, putting a grindstone into a sack, told Uncle Abe it was a tough cheese. The old negro gave it a terrific bunt and cracked the stone, but nearly killed himself by the operation. He is said later to have killed a horse with which he had become enraged, by one blow of this horny growth. Carroll Perry has published a college book in which Uncle Abe figures in one chapter. It is entitled Bill Pratt, the Saw-Horse Philosopher.
Civilization and the selling of the streams for the North Adams water-supply has caused the removal of all the shanties along the Hollow Road. Only the old George Adams cottage remains as an example of the original type.
The region of White Oaks formerly included all the rocky hills and swamps now known as Colesville and Riverside, and has received its name from the abundance of white oak timber in this locality, utilized by the colored people in making baskets which they peddle in town. Many years ago, three very large white-oak trees stood east of the house known as Old Stone Tavern, near Broad Brook bridge. This building still stands—in a deplorable condition—as a tenement house. It is over a century old, built in the Revolutionary days by Silas Stone, who kept tavern when stages ran between Pittsfield, Bennington, and Troy.
On July 18th I made a tour of the limestone ridge above the Gulf Road, known as the Glebe. It is the most desolate and unproductive soil in the whole town. In the early townships of the New Hampshire Grants, Governor Benning Wentworth required “One Share for a Glebe for the Church of England as by Law Established,” and another for schools. These lands, therefore, are to-day called “minister lots” and “school lots.” The occupants, instead of paying taxes, pay lease money for the use of the land, which is appropriated according to the vote of the town’s people for the support of ministers and schools.
Beginning northwest of the Swamp of Oracles, over the Amidon fields, one finds the limestone bed-rock cropping out everywhere. Little rounded hills appear to jut out of the deeper swamps leading toward Iris Swamp on Ball Farm, as one rides along the Pownal Centre Road. Great lime-rock boulders and piles of loosened rock lie strewn over the fields. One enormous boulder may be observed by the road north of Amidon’s house, and another near the Peleg Card house. I collected innumerable Walking Ferns scattered over these miniature hills and boulders. I proceeded northward to the Campbell horseshoeing shop, in the woods beyond, and turned to the left toward the ridges of the Glebe. Searching the rocks along the edges of the road, I found—perched high on a point of rocks—a beautiful colony of the rare Ebony Spleenwort (Asplenium platyneuron), not common hereabout. Over the mossy rocks below I again found numerous mats of Walking Fern. In finding these two ferns so closely associated, I searched for the rarer hybrid of these ferns, known as Scott’s Spleenwort (Asplenium ebenoides), but did not find it. It has been seen but once or twice in Vermont, to my knowledge, being more frequent in southern New England, Alabama, and Virginia, where it ascends fourteen hundred feet above the sea level.
The rich soil amid the hollows above was covered with the strange Grape-Fern, locally called Umbrella-Fern (Botrychium Virginianum). Maiden-Hair and numerous other common ferns and brakes filled the swamps below. Coming from the woods, I entered a hayfield where the mowers were at work. Beyond this, I entered a cow-pasture skirting the Glebe ridge. Here were deep hollows guttered out, leading northward to Pownal Centre. Pennyroyal grew over the parched, dry plains, and in the hot sun shed forth its aromatic perfume. Boulders and natural obelisks were lodged on the hills above. In character the latter are similar to rocking stones, that are so finely poised on the mutton-backed bed-rock, that with pressure they sway slightly. The obelisks are either pillar-like boulders moored in the mud and soil, or formed along cliffs by the heat, frost, and wind erosions, causing them to appear like columns or broken monuments, in the distance.
On the rocks of the Glebe hills, I again collected the Walking-Fern, and I am sure that if I were to penetrate the cliffs of the gulf along the western slopes of this ridge, I should find the Rue-of-the-Wall and Purple-stemmed Cliff-Brake.
Far away in the hollow, slept the little village of Pownal Centre. The church steeple towered among the trees, and the village green sloped between the church and the old Revolutionary road.
XVI — Alpine Blossoms of the Dome
Mountains seem to have been built for the human race, as at once their schools and cathedrals; full of treasures of illuminated manuscript for the scholar, kindly in simple lessons for the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, glorious in holiness for the worshipper.
—John Ruskin.
Of the swamps and domes of the Hoosac region, Henry Ward Beecher once said: “The most level portion of this region, if removed to Illinois, would be an eminent hill. The region is a valley only because the mountains on the east and west are so much higher than the hills in the intermediate space. The endless variety of such a country never ceases to astonish and please. At every ten steps the aspect changes; every variation of atmosphere, and therefore every hour of the day, produces new effects. It is everlasting company to you. It is, indeed, just like some choice companion of rich heart and genial imagination, never twice alike, in mood, in conversation, in radiant sobriety, or half-bright sadness, bold, tender, deep, various.”
On July 19th I drove beyond the Bogs of Etchowog, over a portion of the Hill Road toward Bennington. As I passed the Elijah Mason Farm, I turned my horse’s head through the cow-pastures to the east. In a swamp to the left of the grassy wood-road, I collected scattered Pogonias and Limodorums, although the season was late for them. Still farther eastward are impenetrable swamps, through which Ball Brook flows northward to the Walloomsac near Bennington. The road led around to another swamp farther eastward, toward which I drove. It was one of those wild regions, tangled with tamarack, balsam-firs, high-huckleberry trees, amid the peat and sphagnum. The green spires of tamarack and fir swayed in billowy waves as the wind breathed through these vales; and the sunshine drew forth the fragrance of pitch and balsamic resins from the blistered bark of these young trees.
I fastened my horse to a pine tree, and penetrated the depths of this swamp as far as I dared, along a moss-grown brook bed leading from a spring toward the interior. The heart of this region was impenetrable. The pioneers, settling along the valley of Ball Brook, chose in Revolutionary days this heavily timbered region, in preference to the lower swamps of the deeper vales of the Hoosac. It has proven to be the coldest, most desolate, and barren soil for corn and grains,—the most productive crops here being stumps and boulders! Shad-bushes and the high-huckleberry bushes were laden with berries. I stood upon a log and ate of them for some time, meanwhile listening to the choruses of locusts and numerous thrushes, screaming jays, young crows, and whistling hawks. Many distant sounds came whispering to me from out this wild solitude of Nature. The mystery of wild wood isolation, in the presence of the scars of ages, took possession of me, and filled me with a nameless fear. I gave vent to a wild howl in order to relieve the tensity and portentousness of the situation. It was a damp, mossy place, such as bears, lynxes, and wild cats choose in which to nap during the day, being located in their run from the Petersburgh Hills to the Dome of the Green Mountains eastward, above. As Thoreau described one of the Maine woods swamps: “It was ready to echo the growl of a bear, the howl of a wolf, or the scream of a panther; but when you get fairly into the middle of one of these grim forests, you are surprised to find that the larger inhabitants are not at home commonly, but have left only a puny red squirrel to bark at you. Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.”50
I ventured on farther east, until I came to the true spring of the swamp. Every swampy region reveals innumerable springs, and this swamp was no exception. Many were oozing through the carpets of moss. Around such fountains I searched for the familiar leaves of Moccasin-Flowers without success.
I returned to the open pastures, all fear of the wilderness having subsided. I looked about, and saw from the lay of the land that this had been the bed of a glacial lake. It is in such regions as these that fossil remains of the whale and mastodon have been found. A fossil whale was found in Charlotte, Vermont, sixty feet above the level of the lake and one hundred and fifty feet above sea level. In Swanton, in a ledge of rock blasted through for railroad purposes, a large deposit of fossil marine shells was found. Also fossil bones of the elephant were found in Brattleboro.
Beyond the Howling Swamp, an interesting glacial hill rises, dividing the swamp from the broader valley of Ball Brook beyond. The lower southern brow of this hill had been eroded by the currents formerly flowing over the ridge when a larger lake existed here. From the summit of this hill, one becomes conscious that not so long ago wide waters spread about. Two currents are evident,—one from the glaciated Dome, flowing westward, and one from the ice-capped heights of Mount Anthony, southeastward; the two currents mingling and rushing westward over the Glebe toward Pownal Centre and the natural dam at Gregor Rocks, toward the Hudson Valley and the sea. Slowly—as the dam in the valley broke away and let the ice-currents out—the mountain lakes were drained off, and left these bare, round hills and deep, swampy hollows, where as soon as the climates grew temperate, forests of evergreens sprang up and flowers bloomed. Northward, toward Bennington, as far as the eye can see, one discerns a chain of rounded wooded hills and intervening swamps.
On my way homeward, I stopped at the Swamp of Oracles, and decided to climb up the sides of the ravine for a look at the Large Round-Leaved Orchis, found here in June. I passed through Clintonia Hollow, beyond the woodchuck’s home, where I had observed the Small Round-Leaved Orchis in the little animal’s dooryard. There I struck out westward up the hillside. I frightened up the same mother whippoorwill that I had disturbed earlier in the season. The little birds of the second brood were now large, and commencing to feather. They were fluffy, and of a dead-leaf yellowish-brown color. Their large, round, brown eyes were like small shoe buttons. They began to run about at sight of me. The mother, meanwhile, feigned a broken wing and moaned piteously, with actual tears in her sad eyes. I lifted the downy balls in my hands. They snuggled without fear in my sleeve, and closed their sleepy eyes. Finally I put them on the leaves together, and promised the mother I would not again disturb her.
We have two species of the Goatsucker Family (Caprimulgidæ), including the Whippoorwill (Antrostomus vociferus), and the Southern Whippoorwill, or Chuck-will’s-widow (Antrostomus Carolinensis). The closely allied Night-Hawk, or Bull-Bat (Chordeiles Virginianus), is often mistaken for the Northern Whippoorwill. Its habits and flight are far different, however, although the homes of both are similarly adopted. The Night-Hawk deposits her two buff-green eggs on rocks, bare ground, or on flat roofs, either in country or village. All of these birds winter in the Southern lands, and all save the Chuck-will’s-widow arrive here about the third week in May, returning with their broods the latter part of September.
The Twilight-Hawk preys upon other birds and moths. I have observed him at twilight, on a cloudy day in autumn, circling and diving down among the weeds about a potato field, where sparrows were feeding in great numbers. The sparrows flew in fear toward the house, one driving so forcefully against the window-pane that he dropped to the ground with a broken neck. This Night-Hawk gives forth a peculiar moan or call,—“Peent,”—accompanied by a booming, buzzing sound in flight, as the wind passes through the quills of its feathers. It whizzes swiftly through the air, swooping down upon its prey about the fields or garden.
The leaves of the Pink Moccasins—sometimes called Whippoorwill’s-Shoes—were numerous about the place, the flowers serving, near the ever-changing nests, to attract the insects and moths upon which the birds feed.
I found another oven-bird’s thatched nest in Witch Hollow region, late in June, very near the colony of Ram’s-Head Cypripediums. On my return to secure a photograph of it, I found that some animal—perhaps a dog or skunk—had torn the nest to pieces and devoured the birdlings.
The Small Round-Leaved Orchis, which formerly I observed in Chalk Pond region, has developed into the varietal form of this species—producing oblong leaves—known as Habenaria oblongifolia. This often occurs when the flower is in company with the true Round-Leaved Orchis. This season I have instanced the fact in another colony of these orchids, in Rattlesnake Swamp.
The flowers found on the summit of the Dome, three thousand feet above sea level, are slightly modified in size and coloring. They are fully two or three weeks later in blooming than the same species flourishing in the Hoosac Lowlands.
On July 20th, with two other mountain climbers, I started from the brow of Mount Œta, and at nine o’clock descended to Rattlesnake Swamp and the secret haunts of Showy Reginæ. We crossed the stream over the log bridge, and followed up the old Joe Larabee path; passing around the southern ledge of the Domelet to the Dummy Road watering-trough. The path was densely overgrown with bushes, and impeded with heaps of tree-tops. However, we finally came out to the Exford Clearing and the White Oaks Road beyond. At the watering-trough, a road turns to the right hand through Rocky Hollow, leading to the Coal-Bed, or Chip-Bed, as it is known. We sauntered along the shady path of the Hollow until we came to the clearing, where loggers in winter haul and pile their spruce and hemlock logs for later milling. From this station, four roads branch in various directions. We took the northeast path, and were soon climbing steadily toward the clouds. On a previous occasion, during March, I had ridden on a logger’s sleigh to the summit. The snow, then about four feet deep, covered fallen trees, over which, during summer, it is almost impossible to walk. In winter, the hardened, encrusted snow spreads a clear, smooth surface for walking, far above impassable barriers and tangled brush. In its summer garb, the road was strangely confusing to me. It was rocky, and intersected by sun-dried brook beds, which the melting snows had guttered in spring.
Rocky Hollow Road is available for horse and carriage as far as Logger’s Depot, and northward to the Dummy Road. The trees along this vale are chestnuts, beech, yellow, white, and black birch, white oak, black oak, maples, and various flowering bushes, such as azalea, mountain laurel, and shad trees. As one ascends, the trees become dwarfed and gnarled, and many abnormal forms occur among the yellow birch. As we neared the summit, the yellow birch trunks assumed great size, while their tops were scraggy and dwarfed by the winds and storms. Higher up, we found little but spruce, hemlock, and balsam-fir; the trees and bushes became low-lying,—hugging the rocks for protection from the winds.
Frequently we paused by the path for breath, finding sweet Canada Violets (Viola Canadensis) ripening their seed-capsules. They were ready to burst and throw their seeds about for some feet. We collected several plants to transplant. The brakes and sphagnum indicated a swamp not far distant. We began to feel thirsty, and searched about without finding trace of a spring, although one is said to be near here, with a rusty tin cup hung to a tree. To the left of the path, we saw the ruins of a wood-chopper’s log cabin, which assured us that brook or spring must be near, else the spot never would have been chosen for man’s habitation. Above the hut, we came to a clearing. A level stretch led to the junction of two roads: one led directly ahead, terminating on the Ladd Lot, while the path to the right turned abruptly up the steeps to the summit of the Dome. The last few rods were the steepest portion of the whole journey, the rest of the climb having wound around about in gradual ascent.
At last we walked along the edges of a precipice above Bear Swamp. In the scorching heat of noon we made one last turn eastward, entering the clearing on the very brow of the desolate Dome, three thousand feet above the sea. Here were dense groups of beautiful spruces and balsam-firs. The forest floor was carpeted with luxuriant leaves of clintonia and dwarf dogwood,—sometimes wrongly called bear-berries. The latter, an Alpine species, was still in bloom, the flower sometimes having two whorls of rosy-tinted petals. The mountain snowberry, creeping wintergreen, trailing arbutus, and goldthread were clinging to the sphagnous hummocks over the summit, while Alpine species of huckleberries crept through the clearing and draped the white-faced rocks.
The great stillness of Nature’s solitude was broken only by the buzzing of insects, the notes of the chickadees, and the winds soughing through the boughs of spruce and firs. The brow of the Majestic Dome receives the force of the eight winds of heaven direct from the frozen North or from the fragrant Southlands. In March, 1894, a terrific tornado swept over this region from the northeast, mowing a path several rods wide over the Dome, and laying the spruce and firs in a twisted pile;—that portion of the summit is almost impassable to-day. During these great northeasters in the spring, the birds and beasts of the Dome seek the lower plains and hollows.
We wandered southward in the path of the tornado, a quarter mile or so, to a sphagnous swamp and the ledge of White Rock on the side of the Dome. The view from these rocks is variable, yet not picturesque nor pastoral as the one from Mount Œta. It is wild, fearful,—beyond all signs or sounds of civilization. Far to the southwest the blue Catskills blend with the sky; southward the grim, awkward, ragged shoulders of Greylock’s Brotherhood tower; from the eastern brow, Haystack and Stamford Mountains roll away, one after the other, like great land waves. The deep valley of Broad Brook sleeps below. The slopes of Stamford Mountains are dotted with evergreen trees for miles, as far as one can see.
Gathering a few fragrant balsam-fir boughs, we now rapidly began to descend the mountain, for while the luncheon we carried had satisfied our hunger, we were sadly in need of drinking water. We soon found ourselves at the Coal-Bed, gathering the Wildwood Tiger Lilies (Lilium Philadelphicum), which we had observed as we passed in the morning. We ate the late wild strawberries along the roadside, and took a long rest in the shade, pursuing our way later down the Rocky Hollow Road northward to Blackberry Clearing, on the Dummy Farm. Here we religiously searched the ravines for Deaf-Man’s Spring. Major, our dog, was the first to discover it. We found him taking a bath in the deepest pool. However, a higher basin was overflowing with fresh, clean water, from which we drank excessively. The reviving effect upon our spirits was immediate. Deaf-Man’s Fountain is in the ravine of Dry Brook, walled up like a little well. It is the only water in this immediate vale,—a natural and everlasting spring-head. Guide-boards should be erected at the four corners of country roads, directing travellers to the water-supply, the need of which is often so powerfully felt by pilgrims.
We rounded the Domelet, descended to Jepson Farm in Rattlesnake Valley, and proceeded to Lloyd Spring and the colony of Showy Reginæ. At this point in our travels, we had completed a great circle.
XVII — The Cascade and Bellows-Pipe, Notch Valley, Berkshire County
Come here where Greylock rolls
Itself toward heaven; in these deep silences
World-worn and fretted souls
Bathe and be clean! Cares drift like mists away.
Author Unknown.
Monday, July 22d, dawned fair, although there were some signs of a storm in the lowering gray cloud-folds at the horizon. However, we had decided to explore the Notch Valley and the Bellows-Pipe, between Greylock and the Ragged Mountains.
We journeyed from Mount Œta to North Adams, leaving State Street about ten o’clock, and ascended the path to Witt’s Ledge. Soon we rounded the Ragged Mountains, entering the woods near Crystal Spring, where we descended the Cascade ravine. Its rocky chasm is beautifully draped with the Common Polypody Ferns, and delicate tufts of Maiden-Hair Spleenwort, which clings in the fissured ledges. The bed-rock appears to be a flinty slate, similar to that of the Tunnel Mountain. It is not so favorable to the growth of the rarer ferns—such as the Rue-in-the-Wall—as the lime-rock formation of Gregor Rocks in Pownal. Large boulders lie in the heart of the brook bed, and the hillsides are clothed with primeval hemlocks. Just above the brow of the Cascade, I found a few Walking Ferns. The ravine is accessible to this point, but here I was forced back and climbed the southern bank to the path leading around to the waterfalls. High boots supplied with hob-nails are indispensable to safety in such climbing in the channels of streams.
From this point we retraced our steps to the Pent Road, leading up through Snuff Hollow to the City’s reservoir, at the junction of the South Adams Road. Here we trudged up the hill and entered the Notch highway at Walden’s farmhouse. Greylock Park Road turns off here through the pastures, around Mount Williams. We, however, continued straight ahead toward the source of The Notch Brook,—Hawthorne’s and Thoreau’s routes, long before roads to Greylock were available. It was steady climbing, until at last we reached the pasture-land where the streams from Greylock’s Brotherhood divide; there is a stream beyond the ridge, flowing southward to South Adams, while those on the north side flow down Notch Valley to the Hoosac River. Hawthorne often sought the seclusion of this valley, and in his American Notes, under date of September 9, 1838, describes these rugged slopes. He not only followed up the North Notch, but descended the South Notch in the rocky course of the stream homeward through South Adams. He speaks of inquiring at a cottage his way to South Village, which was “across lots,” into the road near the Quaker Meeting-house, surrounded by grave-stones. He also drank of the region’s spring water,—the “most delicious” he ever tasted,—“pure, fresh, almost sparkling, exhilarating,—such water as Adam and Eve drank.”51
The people of this region looked upon his journeys through their valley with curiosity in those early days. The houses were more numerous then than now in the extreme southern portion of the valley. This region has been purchased by the North Adams Water Company, which has removed all dwellings above the reservoir. The last house in The Notch to-day is on the Walden Farm, at Greylock Park Gate.
Hawthorne found, in the Highlands-of-the-Hoosac, the originals of many characters described in his works. “Eustace Bright,” of Wonder-Book, was a student of Williams; and the Tanglewood Tales have made the whole world familiar with “rough, broken, rugged, headlong Berkshire.” Here, in the seclusion of The Bellows-Pipe, “where it slopes upward to the skies,” Hawthorne loved best to come. There he could look southward over the vast fields of Berkshire’s valleys to the distant crags of Bryant’s “Monument Mountain,” immortalized as the “headless sphinx” of his own Wonder-Book. And from the northern Notch, he looked away to the blue Domes of the White Mountains, a distance of sixty miles or more.
The Limekilns along the Ashuilticook—the south branch of the Hoosac—still are smoking, as when Hawthorne and Mr. Leach visited them in 1838. The tale of Ethan Brand was suggested by the legend of an insane creature who threw himself in at the open gate of the burning kiln. Their open iron doors in the mountainside at night seem like yawning mouths of Tartarus. Hawthorne met here also his “Bertram,” who figures in the story; while “the boy Joe,” son of “Bertram, the lime-burner,” was a bar-room lad observed at the “Whig Tavern” in North Adams. Daniel Haines, then living in a desolate hut in “Willow Dell,” was formerly nicknamed in the village as “Black Hawk,” and is described in Ethan Brand as “Lawyer Giles,” the “elderly ragmuffin,” who—with the rest of the lazy regiment from the town tavern—came in response to the summons of “boy Joe” to see poor Brand returned from his long “search after the Unpardonable Sin.” The title of this story was the name of one of the prose master’s Salem acquaintances.
Among other characters which Hawthorne drew from this region, were the “seven doctors of the place.” In the “Whig Tavern boarder” Hawthorne saw and delineated himself. He describes the Saddleback Mountain and Greylock in all their different phases,—when enshrouded with dark masses of storm clouds and when: “Old Greylock was glorified with a golden cloud upon his head. Scattered likewise over the breasts of the surrounding mountains, there were heaps of hoary mist, in fantastic shapes, some of them far down into the valley, others high up toward the summits, and still others, of the same family of mist or cloud, hovering in the gold radiance of the upper atmosphere. Stepping from one to another of the clouds that rested on the hills, and thence to the loftier brotherhood that sailed in air, it seemed almost as if a mortal man might thus ascend into the heavenly regions. Earth was so mingled with sky, that it was a day dream to look at it. To supply that charm of the familiar and homely, which Nature so readily adopts into a scene like this, the stage-coach was rattling down the mountain-road, and the driver sounded his horn, while Echo caught up the notes, and intertwined them into a rich and varied and elaborate harmony, of which the original performer could lay claim to little share. The great hills played a concert among themselves, each contributing a strain of airy sweetness.”52
As we neared the head of The Bellows-Pipe, and passed the Wilbur and Eddy farms, where Thoreau was entertained, I tried to trace the paths which he had followed in his ascent to Greylock some years after Hawthorne sojourned here. He stopped that July afternoon in North Adams Village, purchased a tin cup, a little rice and sugar, and, placing them in his knapsack, started up The Bellows toward the mountains, followed closely by a thunderstorm. “The thunder had rumbled at my heels all the way,” he said, “but the shower passed off in another direction, though if it had not, I half believed that I should get above it.” He “reached the last house but one, where the path to the summit diverged to the right, while the summit itself rose directly in front.” But it seems he “determined to follow up the valley to its head,” and there find his “own route up the steep as the shorter and more adventurous way.” He believed this “occupied much less time than it would have taken to follow the path—for what’s the hurry? If a person lost would conclude that after all he is not lost,... but the places that have known him, they are lost,—how much anxiety and danger would vanish. I am not alone if I stand by myself.”53
We followed up the eastern sides of Notch Valley to the head of The Bellows where the Saw Mill had stood in Thoreau’s day. We regaled ourselves upon the red raspberries along the pasture, and found the Deadly Nightshade in bloom amid the bushes. These fields furnish pasturage for yearlings and calves. The sides of Greylock are clothed with a heavy forest—“all beshaggled,”—and adorned with “headlong precipices” and innumerable rivulets. Finally we crossed to the west side of the valley, in the shadow of the great hill, and entered a ravine which we christened Æolian Glen.
I have always believed that this Notch Valley was in Thoreau’s thoughts when he wrote “Rumors from an Æolian Harp.” The name “Bellows-Pipe” originated with the early settlers for the extreme portion of Notch Valley, on account of the subtle roaring of the southeast winds, breathing like a bellows through the narrow vale. The Indians recognized in the roar of winds the anger of the Great Spirit. The Hoosac Highlands near the “Forbidden Mountain” were their hunting grounds, to which they journeyed from their Indian village farther westward near Schaghticoke, not far from Troy-on-the-Hudson.
Thoreau says of this vale’s “glen-like seclusion overlooking the country at a great elevation between these two mountain walls,” that it reminded him of the homesteads of the Huguenots, on the interior hills of Staten Island.
As Thoreau passed the last house in The Bellows, on his ascent to Greylock, “Rice” called out and told him that it was still four or five miles to the summit by the path which he had left, though not more than two in a straight line from where he was, but that nobody ever went this way; there was no path and it would be found as “steep as the roof of a house.” But Thoreau took the short cut, notwithstanding Wilbur’s warning that he would not reach the summit of Greylock that night. Thoreau says, however: “I made my way steadily upward in a straight line, through a dense undergrowth of mountain laurel, until the trees began to have a scraggy and infernal look, as if contending with frost goblins, and at length I reached the summit, just as the sun was setting.” After taking “one fair view of the country before the sun went down,” Thoreau “set out directly to find water.” It proved to be labor, too. Following down the path for half a mile he came to a muddy place in the road “where the water stood in the tracks of the horses which had carried travellers up.” He drank these dry, one after the other, by lying flat on the earth. He was not able to fill his dipper, and in a place above dug a well about two feet deep, using his hands and sharp stones as spade and hoe. It soon filled with pure cold water, from which he filled his tin cup; and he says: “The birds, too, came and drank at it.” He then proceeded to the rude wooden observatory originally erected by Williams College, for the construction of which Platt—“a friend of mine,” writes Hawthorne in the Diary—hauled the material by ox-team. Platt, the stage-driver, boasted of the fact that he was the first man to drive a team to the summit of the then pathless Greylock, led by President Griffin of Williams on horseback, who directed the building of that first observatory. This tower is now replaced by a modern iron structure fifty feet high.
Thoreau collected some “dry sticks, and made a fire on some flat stones” placed on the floor of the observatory for the purpose, and cooked the rice which he had bought in the village, eating it with a wooden spoon whittled out for the occasion. He was up at daybreak the next morning, and he has left a glorious description of sunrise on Greylock, as seen from the tower in the mists.54
The nights are very chill on these summits, even in July. There are now several log-cabins erected on Greylock for travellers to occupy, with stables for horses and keepers in attendance. The Catskills can be seen to the southwestward from this height.
Thoreau set his compass for a lake in the valley to the southwest, and descended the mountain by his own route, on the opposite side to that of his ascent.
My companions and I had climbed the slippery glen to where Thoreau commenced his ascent, and a tiny rivulet slipped over the rocks, which had formerly been dimpled with miniature pot-holes. Along the moss-grown banks, above the brook-bed, grew the familiar leaves of the Wild Ginger, while at the very entrance I discovered the Wild Black Currants (Ribes floridum), similar in taste and appearance to the cultivated species. The fruit was covered with bristles, and produced a disagreeable odor like that of the Wild Red Currants on the Dome—reminding one of a skunk.
At the entrance of Æolian Glen, a long log-like slab of rock lay upon the ground, strangely suggesting a petrified tree. Slowly we descended the western side of the vale, counting no less than twenty-two flowing brooklets, and four sun-dried brook-beds between Æolian Brook, at the head of the Bellows, and Walden Farm below. As we approached the meadows where the Wilbur Farm buildings formerly stood, we found a half-dozen spikes of the Ragged Orchis (Habenaria lacera) amid the damp grasses. This species I collected also later in the pastures of Rattlesnake Swamp, and found the pure White-Fringed Orchis along the roadside of Ladd Brook Valley in Pownal.
We now arrived at Crystal Spring, where we freshened up before entering the City in the “hollow vale” three miles below.
The formation of the Notch Valley was brought about by one of the successive terminal moraines flowing from the glaciated slopes of the ice-mountains farther northwestward, in the Adirondack region; while later the glaciated shoulders of Greylock’s Brotherhood slowly melted, eroding the slopes with small ravines in which the numerous rivulets flow to-day. The continental ice rivers from the higher glaciers northward apparently culminated in tremendous and successive cascades above Notch Valley, eroding the deep-cut gorges between Greylock and Ragged Mountains. The general directions of these currents, below these waterfalls, were various, finally leading down to the ancient Hoosac Lake, and flowing with it through the natural dam, northwestwardly, to the Hudson Valley, and thence to the sea. According to Professor T. Nelson Dale, an ancient lake six hundred feet deep existed in the Hoosac Valley ten thousand years ago. Perhaps ten times ten thousand years ago, a greater glacial sea overflowed the Hoosac Tunnel Mountains, leaving the bald summit of Greylock alone towering above the waves. As the terminal moraines of the great ice-sheet slowly receded, the various cascades formed pot-hole erosions, in their descent on the Canaan Hills, above the Connecticut Valley. Deerfield Arch was similarly formed by the force and chemical action of the eroding ice rivers, which flowed from glaciers, and wore through the wall of rock spanning the Deerfield Valley. Hawthorne compared this arch to “the arched entrance of an ancient church, which it might be taken to be, though considerably dilapidated and weather-worn.... It was really like the archway of an enchanted palace, all of which has vanished except the entrance—now opens only into nothingness and empty space.... This curiosity occurs in a wild part of the river’s course, and in a solitude of mountains.”55 Dr. Wolfe says: “The summit of the arch and the water-worn pillars upon either side display ‘pot-holes’ and other evidences of erosion, and in the bed of the current lie fragments of similar attrite rocks which seem to indicate that at some period a series of arches spanned the entire space from mountain to mountain.”56
Other erosions known as the “Twin Cascades” are found on the eastern slopes of Hoosac Mountain, above the eastern portal of the Tunnel, formed ages before the Hoosac Lake rippled in the “hollow vale” at North Adams. The Natural Bridge of the Mayunsook Valley is one of the greatest natural formations in Berkshire Highlands, and was also caused by erosions of the ice-currents ages ago.
On August 16th, this season, a great landslide occurred on the southern brow of Greylock, caused by a cloudburst. It began within a few feet of the summit, widening as the loosened soil slipped off the bed-rock of the mountain. It swept down with velocity, becoming several rods wide as it reached the valley. It covered Gould Farm with earth, rocks, and logs gathered in its descent to South Adams, and the machinery in the mills in the village, three miles away, was crippled by the sand and water pouring in about the engines; the streets became canals, and boats were necessary to move about in. However, no lives were lost. The formation rock, from the base of Greylock, is laid bare in the path of this landslide. Six to ten terraced ridges, like stone stairs, are revealed in the ascent for some distance, indicating many ages in geological history. Here is evidence of those slowly receding seas and lakes as they drained from the summits down, stair by stair to the winding Ashuilticook River of to-day.
XVIII — The Natural Bridge of Mayunsook Valley, Northern Berkshire
There’s no music like a little river’s. It plays the same tune (and that’s the favorite) over and over again, and yet does not weary of it like men fiddlers.—Robert Louis Stevenson, Prince Otto.
A narrow vale winds away northeastward from the city of North Adams to Stamford, Vermont. A short walk from the terminus of the car line in The Beaver leads to the junction of Hudson Brook with the Mayunsook River. The Mayunsook is often called the Little Deerfield. It is the North Branch of the Hoosac, rising near Stamford Ponds, and draining the southern and western slopes above Stamford Hollow. The Greater Deerfield River rises also near these lakes, and drains the same mountains from their northern and eastern slopes, flowing around through Readsboro to Zoar, where travellers meet it as they pass out of the eastern portal of the Hoosac Tunnel into the Deerfield Valley. Thus, from their mysterious sources our turbulent rivers and mountain streams bring restful, cooling news from out the higher lands, where scarce the foot of man has been.
On August 7th I explored about Natural Bridge on Hudson Brook. I wore hob-nailed boots, and made a long day’s excursion. Hawthorne knew and loved this wonderful natural feature of northern Berkshire, and here gathered many fancies, which he has woven into his tales. The chasm of Hudson Brook is described as the “Cave” in his Notes. His description of the ravine is the finest ever written.
Hudson Brook, tradition tells us, took its name from the hunter Hudson, who, one twilight, dragging homeward a deer he had killed, lost it in this chasm. He narrowly escaped following it himself.
The region is entered either by walking up the bed of the stream itself, or following around the road above Marble Quarry, just east of the chasm. The former is the more direct, but the latter a longer and safer way. In this instance, I followed the travelled highway. I proceeded up the stream where the erosions begin, and readily descended the ravine, following its course downward until I came to a beautiful marble basin or pot-hole formation, which very few see, since it is hidden under the wooden foot-bridge above the natural bridge of rock. Logs and immense rocks barred my way, and I was forced through dark fissures in my ascent to the sunlight.
The pot-hole was evidently the same pool of which Hawthorne wrote: “As the deepest pool occurs in the most uneven part of the chasm, where the hollows in the sides of the crag are deepest, so that each hollow is almost a cave by itself, I determined to wade through it... there was an accumulation of soft stuff on the bottom, so that the water did not look more than knee-deep; but, finding that my feet sunk in it, I took off my trousers and waded through.”57 He visited this stream often: “The cave makes a fresh impression upon me every time I visit it,—so deep, so irregular, so gloomy, so stern,—part of its walls the pure white of marble,—others covered with a gray decomposition and with spots of moss, and with brake growing where there is a handful of earth.”58
Hawthorne believed firmly that “a complete arch of marble, forming a natural bridge over the top of the cave,” must have covered the whole chasm of the stream at an unknown period. The pot-hole, I am most certain, has been forded by few lads, and it is hardly probable that any other poet or prose master ever disrobed and bathed in its waters as Hawthorne did in 1838. The basin is from six to eight feet deep, with a beautifully rounded, highly polished brim. I christened this bowl “Hawthorne’s Bath-Tub,” and, unable to wade it, climbed out of the “Cave” to the light above. I, however, descended again to see the northern portal of the arch below the Bath-Tub. I was interested in the names painted high and low upon the marble rocks. Some visitors had evidently tried to place their initials as high as possible, while others more modest sought to write theirs as low, and in more obscure places. I regretted that I had not brought a pot of red paint and a brush to daub my own title there, with the ambitious crowd.
The stream, as it approaches the arch of the Bridge, is deep and of a dark green color. The chasm, from the top of the ledge, is about sixty feet deep, and the ravine three hundred feet in length. Geologists say that the ravine was formerly spanned by two ledges of rock, one of which is now in ruins. The piles of rocks in the chasm south of the southern portal of the arch are dazzling white, seen in the noonday sunshine. The fall of water, in its descent through the ravine, is about forty feet to the three hundred feet, so that the eddies play and whirl rapidly through the irregular bed. A wooden tile, or raceway, was hung high over the chasm, across a leaning crag of the original ledge,—conveying water power thereby to mills below. This old structure leaked, and as I descended the banks below, I saw some of the most gorgeous miniature rainbows spanning the depths, as the sunshine fell upon the mist near the arch.
A lad once made a wager with his comrades that he could cross over the ravine upon this wooden tile. The old weather-worn log was slippery with mould and mosses. In making his daring and perilous trip, the youth lost his footing, and fell headlong into the heart of the chasm. Following the fall, a terrific thunderstorm passed through the Hoosac, and night closed over the chasm. The next morning the boy’s lifeless body was recovered. The wooden structure is now replaced with an iron tiling.
I passed on down the path on the west bank, until I reached an immense marble boulder, which was draped with dainty ferns and mosses. Little rivulets flowed from its sides, and climbing around to its southern brow, I was delighted to find many luxuriant plants of Walking Ferns—this making the fifth excursion in succession in which I had found this rare plant.
I entered the ravine below the boulder, and picked my way up the chasm to the southern portal of the arch, where I became wet through from the mist above, as I ventured to look through the cave. Returning, I found a path up the east bank leading to Marble Quarry and the mill below, where grave-stones, door-stones, and various ornaments are manufactured. The most useful piece of work ever turned out here was, in my mind, the Williams College sun-dial tablet, which Hawthorne observed in 1838 as being as large as the top of a hogshead.59 I have later discovered that this dial was placed near that old Astronomical Observatory on Consumption Hill, near the present College Library,—the first building of its kind erected in the United States, for the study of the worlds above, by Professor Albert Hopkins, in 1838. The bronze sun-dial was supported upon the marble table which Hawthorne saw at the quarry. Around it was carved in the soft marble the now dim inscription:
“HOW IS IT THAT YE DO NOT DISCERN THIS TIME.”
This dial is now among the relics in the College Museum.
The overhanging crag, near the southern side of the arch, will in another half-century or more tumble also into the ravine. One large pine tree and many bushes, growing on this leaning tower, are plying their roots deeply in the marble fissures, and are slowly splitting the rock asunder. I have designated this pile Captain Skipper’s Monument, in memory of him who recorded the last evidences of the Beaver Dam across this stream. Tradition says that the beavers labored centuries before the white man arrived in the Mayunsook Valley, building better than they realized, since they erected a dam which stopped the rippling flow of Hudson Brook. Originally, this stream flowed nearer the surface of the Natural Bridge. It is believed by some that the dam clogged the driftwood from the domes, and thus set the waters back. The force of the eddies, combined with the chemical action of the waters whirling among the logs and rocks, eroded dimples in the soft marble, until they wore the present archway through.
I followed down the bed of the stream, stepping from rock to rock easily, until I reached the path far below the Marble Quarry, and entered The Beaver, a little village where every one works like the small animals for which it is named. I was now near the junction of Hudson Brook and the Mayunsook; and not wishing to return to the City until sunset, I scrambled up the slippery sides of the hemlock hills above the little river. With the echo of the cavern’s tumultuous roar still in my ears, I now heard, in pleasant contrast, the distant gentle murmur of that flowing stream. When I departed from the vales of these talking streams, I carried with me back to the busy world the remembrance of the voicing fantasies of their songs of wilderness and solitude.
XIX — Orange Mountains, and Salt Meadows, New Jersey
The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and the lance, but the bush-whack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard fought field.—Thoreau, Excursions.
August 12th I started for the Orange Mountains, in search of Cardinal Flowers, and various other blossoms, which I hoped to find about Eagle Rock. Arriving at those ragged cliffs, overhanging the brow of the mountains above West Orange, I climbed up the winding stone stairs and entered the park. The woods were strewn with small yellow flowers and ferns.
The view from the Rock is vast, as the eye sweeps off over the Great Salt Meadows beyond Newark, to Brooklyn Heights. On a clear day, the tall buildings of New York and the piers of Brooklyn Bridge are discernible. The Goddess of Liberty in the Bay also stands out clearly, and the slow-moving sails and funnels of outgoing steamers are visible. Most people seek Eagle Rock for this view alone.
Farther back in the woods, in May and June, the Pinxter-Flower, False Solomon’s Seal, yellow and blue violets, bluets, and anemone everywhere decorate the rocky soil. Numerous tall weeds towered coarsely along the mountainsides, to-day flaunting their disagreeable perfume ever before me.
I followed southwesterly, along the summit for a mile or more, to Crystal Lake, passing the park called “Wildmont,” to the right of which stands Cobblestone Cottage. The building appears very ancient.
All the vast solitudes of the parks of Orange Mountains are locked within gates, and the entrance labelled, “No Trespassing, Under Penalty of the Law.” Law is a specific designation for a certain kind of a broad-headed, bow-legged quadruped—a thoroughbred species not mentioned in the scientific annals of the Hoosac Highlands. After passing the lake, I followed up the swamp toward the distant walls of Wildmont, very desirous of trespassing and seeing the Wild Law in his cage. Soon I found a place where the stones were tumbled out, and where, by lifting a barbed wire, I could crawl through. So happily and leisurely I began to trespass about the woods. I found luxuriant colonies of the Maiden-Hair Fern, tall spirit-like spikes of feathery flowers, and club-like spikes of fringed-purple weeds not seen in the Hoosac Valley. They were so common that I did not gather any, so I never determined their title. In the deeper pools grew a few plants of the Skunk Cabbage. The low bushes and plants were overgrown and coarse in the extreme, amid the dense shades of chestnut and elm trees. The forest, apparently, was still in its primeval state.
As I approached the cottage of Wildmont, I ran upon an old cellar hole, where a building had once stood. The ruins were now prettily covered with myrtle and ivy. From this site, between the parting boughs, I caught glints of a sea of blues in the valley of the Oranges, which was overflowing with glistening house-tops and church-spires. Here I turned about and found a great colony of Indian Pipes.
As I turned from the shades of Wildmont, I walked toward Crystal Lake, along a dry brook bed. Here, indeed, I found a Cardinal show; over a hundred spikes of that brilliant flower danced before my eyes and lighted up the glooms. I had never before seen such flowers as these. The Cardinal-Flower (Lobelia cardinalis) is not frequent in Hoosac Valley—at least I have never collected it there. John Burroughs writes of it: “It is not so much something colored as it is color itself.”60 I gathered many spikes of this flaring colored flower, and passed out to the shore of the lake; children, with their sailboats, ran teasingly after me, until I escaped to a quiet retreat where ice-cream was served. The waiter and the children alike were strangely unfamiliar with this flower, growing so close to their homes.
I passed out over the rocky slopes northward, where I ate huckleberries to my heart’s content. The ghost-like Feathery Plumes, and common Purple Clubs of this region towered everywhere among the woods; and low beautiful plants of the Yellow Gerardia were in full bloom. As I rounded the slope, below the Rock, I collected a fine specimen of the gorgeously colored Orange Butterfly-Weed, or Pleurisy-Root (Asclepias tuberosa), of the Milkweed Family. In the swamp farther south on the Orange Mountains, I have formerly collected the Swamp Milkweed flowers, which are similar to Butterfly-Weed, save that they are of a delicate rose-purple color. Our common species northward is the Purple-Flowered Silkweed. It grows along our roadside walls and river banks, and its tender leaves are used as greens, proving very delicious food.
I sat some time on the hillside under Eagle Rock, recalling the various flowers collected along the Northfield Road the year past. Llewellyn and Hutton Parks, along these summits, are always fragrant with blossoms in May and June. I once spent a holiday in Pleasant Valley beyond St. Cloud, in May and June, collecting among other flowers the beautiful Tulip-Tree blossoms (Liriodendron Tulipifera), which some lads graciously gathered for me.
The swamps and woods about this vale produce about the same species of flowers and trees as the hills of Mosholu and Lowerre above New York City—marsh marigolds, violets, anemones, dogwoods, and glowing apple orchards that one does not soon forget. One rare flower, however, graces the Orlando Williams Swamp in Pleasant Valley that I find nowhere else. It is the Painted-Cup (Castilleja coccinea) of the Figwort Family. It is very similar to the Scarlet Painted-Cup that Bryant wrote about as growing on the prairies.61
Frequently country folk call this flower Indian’s Paint-Brush; it somewhat resembles a clover tuft daubed with vermilion. The species found in New Jersey and Staten Island are the same. Thoreau found the scarlet tufts of the Painted-Cup “very common in the meadows” on Staten Island in 1843.62 The Alpine Painted-Cups of the White and Green Mountains are somewhat different from the species found southward and westward. A friend collected flowers of these strange plants near Woodmont in the vicinity of New Haven, and about Marbledale, Connecticut. These are typical little Figworts.
The lobelias, gerardias, milkweeds, butter-and-eggs, Leopard’s-Bane (Arnica acaulis), and field daisies are common in the pastures and woods of St. Cloud and Pleasant Valley. In the distant swamps the Sweet Bay Magnolia (Magnolia Virginiana) and the Tulip Tree are the only two common northern species of the Magnolia Family. A single tulip tree is found in the Hoosac Valley, at North Pownal. Tulip trees are abundant in New Haven, Connecticut, and in Bronx Park, and also on Orange Mountains. They thrive especially westward and southward, where they become beautiful flowering trees—often one hundred and forty feet high.
As I came down the Northfield Road from St. Cloud, in June, 1896, I found the pastures full of blooming briar-roses, and the meadows waving with white daisies and golden arnica. The latter flower is replaced in the meadows of the Hoosac Highlands by great patches of the Devil’s Paint-Brush or Orange Hawkweed (Hieracium aurantiacum), an emigrant weed from Europe, which is very pretty and fragrant. The Purple Gerardia (Gerardia purpurea), the Blue Lobelias (Lobelia syphilitica), and Lobelia spicata grow abundantly in Pownal-on-the-Hoosac in June.
As I passed homeward through the Salt Meadows, beyond Newark, on the new Plank Road to Desbrosses Ferry, I began to observe the large pink-purple blossoms of the Swamp Rose-Mallow (Hibiscus Moscheutos) and the Marsh-Mallow (Althæa officinalis), whose roots contain a mucilaginous substance, and which are closely allied to our cultivated hollyhocks. I soon neared an open ditch by the road, filled with blossoming Arrow-Head (Sagittaria latifolia) and Pickerel-Weed (Pontederia cordata). The former produces beautiful waxen white flowers, and the latter, blue spikes of ragged blossoms. Not far from this mud-hole on the dry, sandy roadside, I gathered the rank-scented Jimson-Weed or Thorn-Apple (Datura Stramonium), a poisonous emigrant weed from Asia, whose Arabic name was Tatorah. It is common everywhere about these regions in waste ground, as well as along Kingsbridge Road and Old East Chester near the City. I have also observed it near the poor-house in New Haven, but never in the Hoosac Valley region.
The Salt Meadows of New Jersey, during August and September, are rolling swales of tall sedges and cat-tail grasses. Later in the season, when the golden-rod and purple asters are frozen and brown, and thrown in heaps upon the ground by the autumn winds, one may see great flocks of geese, and the comical purple grackle—the crow blackbird—flying southward over these desolate lands. A deep, weird solitude surrounds these unfathomable swamps. The foot of man and his bog-hoe as yet have never penetrated their regions, although within hearing of Old Trinity’s chimes.
In the Hoosac Valley autumn is a season of glory. Late August produces the gorgeous colored tiger lilies. The swampy meadows in September are brightened with the delicate greenish-white stars of the Grass-of Parnassus (Parnassia Caroliniana), first found on that ancient Mount Parnassus in Greece, and described and named by Dioscorides in Christ’s day. Innumerable asters and golden-rod brighten the roadside hedges. In the open clearings of bushy pastures grows the Woolly Moonshine—the “everlasting” of which Thoreau wrote. It is sometimes called Cud-Weed, or Balsam-Weed (Gnaphalium decurrens). The Pearly-Everlasting or None-so-Pretty (Anaphalis margaritacea) is peculiarly fragrant and beautiful, banked in among the late golden-rods, and the crimson and chrome-colored autumn leaves of sumach and blackberry briars against the dark green pines. I have found these flowers unfolding amid the snows as late as December. Late spikes of Orchids, the Ladies’ Tresses of genus Gyrostachys, the Bitter-Buttons or Tansy-Weed (Tanacetum vulgare), numerous thistles (Carduus), the velvety leaves of St. Peter’s Mullen (Verbascum Thapsus), Wormwood (Artemisia Absinthium) grow along the roadsides over Mount Œta, while Thimble-Berry blossoms and the Bluebells-of-New-England fill in the waste places of fences and dug-away ledges.
When the cooler days of October come, we may look for that blue flower of heaven, the Fringed Gentian (Gentiana crinita), along the roadsides near the swamps of Etchowog, modestly and patiently waiting for the autumnal skies of blue:
Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye
Look through its fringes to the sky,
Blue—blue—as if that sky let fall
A flower from its cerulean well.63
So come and fade alike the rarest flowers and the commonest weeds among the Highlands of the Hoosac, the valley of peaceful waters.
It is in the deepest and most secluded swamps that the shy orchid blooms, far beyond the realm of lawn or garden. Few indeed realize what a world of beauty and order lies sleeping unsought and unseen in the mossy recesses of our mountains,—a wonderland of discovery to any one who persistently, though reverently, seeks to lure from Nature the secrets of her deep retreats.