Agiochook: Autumn Ascent

Appalachia, December 2001

To the native inhabitants, the region was Agiochook: "Mountain of the Snowy Forehead and Home of the Great Spirit" (Spaulding, 5-6). The people who gave the region this name were the Abenaki, a branch of the Algonquian culture. For generations, they lived in small villages spread throughout the region; traces of Abenaki villages have been found near the modern towns of Bartlett and Conway, N.H., and Fryeburg, Maine (Daniell, 5-6). The Abenaki shared the Algonquian worldview, in which the natural world was suffused with spirits, and certain individuals—sagamores—had magical powers to manipulate natural phenomena by influencing the spirits that inhabited those phenomena (Daniell, 7). While this theme of a spiritual presence in the land appears in numerous myths and legends of North American native peoples, the Abenaki tales gain their power from their setting in the White Mountains. In their narratives, the land is dangerous and fickle, regularly assailing the human inhabitants with fierce winters, furious storms, devastating floods, killer avalanches.

Yet the narratives also reveal a special relationship between the Abenaki and their land, a relationship that is captured dramatically in one Abenaki creation legend. A solitary hunter wanders through the wilderness looking for game but unable to find any. Nearly frozen and desperately close to starvation, he falls to the snow, drifts into sleep, dreams. In the dream, he is transported to a beautiful valley that teems with life. Suddenly he is awakened by the Great Spirit, who hands him a lump of coal to kindle a fire and a spear to catch fish. The hunter places his coal on the ground, and it ignites into a fire that emits a cloud of smoke. From the smoke comes a great voice and a thunderous noise, and enormous rocks erupt from the earth to form mountains. Streams begin to flow down the sides of the mountains, clouds form at their crests. The great voice says to the hunter, "Here the Great Spirit will dwell, and watch over his favorite children" (Spaulding, 1-2).

In this legend the Abenaki are the chosen ones, and from the beginning they view the mountains with fear and awe. When the Englishman Darby Field visited the mountains in 1642, he reported what an Abenaki tribal elder told him: "The Great Spirit dwells there; he covers steps above the green leaves with the darkness of the fire tempest. No footmarks are seen returning from his home in the clouds" (Spaulding, 6). Field resolved to climb the highest peak—Mount Washington—and was accompanied by two native men who had traveled with him from Massachusetts and by a group of Abenaki. Eight miles from the summit, though, the Abenaki refused to go further, for they would not violate their bond with the Great Spirit by trespassing on the sacred land.