Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
The Indians tried to dissuade him, saying he would never return
alive, but he pressed on, attended by two seashore Indians, passing
through cloud-banks and storms, reaching the highest peak, whence he
saw, as he related, "the sea by Saco, the Gulf of Canada, and the
great lake Canada River came out of;" and he found many crystals that
he thought were diamonds, from which the range long bore the name of
the "Chrystal Hills." Towards the close of the eighteenth century
colonists began moving into the outlying glens; in 1792 Abel Crawford
lived on the Giant's Grave, now Fabyan's; in 1803 a small inn was
built there; and in 1820 a party of seven ascended and slept on the
summit of Mount Washington, giving the principal peaks the names they
now have.
From the Connecticut River the chief route of entrance to the White
Mountain region is by railway up the Ammonoosuc River alongside its
swift-flowing amber waters, and through the villages of North Lisbon
and Littleton, then coming to Bethlehem Junction, whence a short
narrow-gauge railroad leads steeply up the hill-slope westward to
Maplewood and Bethlehem. This is one of the most populous resorts of
the district--Bethlehem Street--a well-kept highway, stretching two
miles along a plateau upon the northern hill-slope at an elevation of
almost three hundred feet above the river. When old President Dwight,
in his early wanderings over New England, first saw this place, it was
known as the "Lord's Hill," and he recorded it as remote and sterile,
having "only log huts, recent, few, poor and planted on a soil
singularly rough and rocky," but he saw "a magnificent prospect of
the White Mountains and a splendid collection of other mountains in
this neighborhood." It is now an aggregation of fine hotels and summer
boarding-houses, the whole "Street" having a grand view of the
imposing Presidential range, seen nearly twenty miles to the eastward
over the Ammonoosuc Valley, while other mountain ranges are to the
north and west, so that Bethlehem is in a vast amphitheatre,
presenting, when the clouds permit, an environment of unsurpassed
magnificence. To the southward, the visitors climb Mount Agassiz,
rising twenty-four hundred feet, formerly known as the Peaked Hill,
and get an unrivalled view of mountains all around the horizon, the
Green Mountains of Vermont being plainly visible beyond the
Connecticut River to the westward. The southern flanks of Mount
Agassiz are drained by the pretty little Gale River, flowing through a
deep glen westward to the Ammonoosuc at North Lisbon. Down in this
glen, to the southwest of Bethlehem, is the village of Franconia, with
numerous hotels and boarding-houses, while to the southwest of the
glen rises Sugar Hill, another popular resort, with its great hotels
set high on the hilltop, and having superb views of the Franconia and
White Mountains to the eastward, and far away westward over the
Connecticut Valley where the horizon is enclosed by the long line of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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