What follows are provisional thoughts about what the Pemi has meant to the history of ideas about the White Mountains. Please feel free to comment, criticize, refine, refute. I haven’t decided whether I’m being too hard on J. E. Henry, demonizing him excessively. After all, we walk on some trails in the Pemi courtesy of his EB&L logging railroad. I have not had a chance to look at either the 1964 federal wilderness act or the 1984 NH wilderness act and to think about how they figure into this. That’s probably next.
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The Pemi gained a reputation—and a name—as a wilderness, the very “heart” of the White Mountains, just after the mid nineteenth century. Drawing upon Charles Huntington’s accounts of explorations of the Pemi, in 1876 Moses Sweetser observed that the “term Pemigewasset has been applied to the great wilderness which surrounds the East Branch and its tributaries.” Ignoring any possibility of Native American habitation, the numerous fishing trails, and other human influence, Sweetser argued that the region was “still in a condition of primeval wildness and has not been invaded by clearings, roads, or trails . . . its stately trees yet undeveloped into sashes and blinds.”
The idea of the Pemi as a primeval wilderness devoid of any human interference developed in the larger context of the perception of the White Mountains according to ideals of nineteenth century European Romanticism. Thomas Starr King and other early guide book writers saw the White Hills through the lens of the old world; for them the White Mountains were the “Switzerland of America.” The White Mountain school of artists had earlier visualized exaggerated craggy peaks in our local landscape fit to compete with the most awe inspiring mountains that Europe had to offer. Part and parcel of the creation of the White Mountains as a remote and majestic range capable of thrilling and even terrifying the viewer was the notion of the wild and impenetrable region that lay at its center, its untrammeled, mysterious, even desolate core. If the Pemi had not existed, early guide book writers would have had to invent it as the canvas on which to project their ideas of what Nature meant to humans. Perhaps for that reason, the perception of the Pemi as a “wilderness” untouched by humans persisted long after lumber baron J. E. Henry had begun to systematically strip the region of any vestige of wildness.
By 1882, the groundwork for the actual assault on the Pemi’s relatively undeveloped state was being laid: rail lines were extended as far north as North Woodstock, providing a direct commercial link as well as tourist route from the White Mountains to Concord NH and then to southern New England. Ten years later, 1892, Henry’s logging company moved into Lincoln.
Henry’s previous depredation of the Zealand Valley was well known, and the alarm was raised about his threat to the Pemi. In an 1893 New York Times article, “Devastating the White Mountains,” the unidentified writer warns that the destruction of the forest around Fabyan’s and Zealand is “about to be introduced into the very heart of the White Mountain wilderness,” “the choicest part of the wilderness section of the White Mountains”:
“It is this region that is now doomed to the kind of destruction that the locusts brought on Egypt when they ate up everything that was before them. The forest along the river is to be cut off clean. . . . . By the contracts already made, the Pemigewasset wilderness will be destroyed during the coming winter. . . .”
It took Henry’s “swarm of locusts” longer than the winter of 1893-1894 to destroy the Pemi, but by the first decade of the twentieth century, his logging crews had stripped the west side of the Bonds and a few years later completed massive clear cutting on Carrigain and Hancock. Their depredation continued until 1940. In 1936, the Forest Service was obliged to close a major portion of Pemi because the slash left over from such unrestrained logging posed immense fire hazard.
Six successive editions of the AMC hiking guide from 1917 to 1931 appear to acknowledge that Henry had reduced the heart of the White Mountains to something less than the fabled primeval forest so integral to nineteenth century views of the meaning of this region. The area about the headwaters of the East Branch, they note, is “formerly known as the Pemigewasset Wilderness,” an apparent allusion to the effect of Henry’s wood butchery on the untrammeled forest. But, as one reads on in these six guide books, there is no mention of the devastation of vast areas of the Pemi, the despoiling of the Pemi’s pristine state, the difficulty of finding and following trails. Instead, the rubric “Pemigewasset Wilderness Trails” soon crops up in these editions and informs trampers to use the convenient route that the logging railroad offers into the “wilderness.”
In fact, “formerly” does not actually cede the Pemi’s wilderness status in the face of the reality of Henry’s brutal domestication of this region. It is almost certainly a typographical error. The 1916 edition of the WMG, the first to include the East Branch drainage, had noted that the region is “familiarly known as the Pemigewasset Wilderness.” In the subsequent 1917 edition, “familiarly” morphed into “formerly” and stood uncorrected for the next fifteen years through five more editions. It was a Freudian slip, revealing the actual state of the Pemi, with its miles of rails, mountains of slash, tons of trash, and burned over hillsides, but the idealized White Mountains continued to require a wilderness at its center to accompany its lofty peaks.
Proofreaders at the WMG woke up in 1934 and corrected the typo. From the 1934 to 1955 editions, the East Branch drainage was introduced as the “so-called Pemigewasset Wilderness,” an acknowledgement of the ineptness of the term in the face of Henry’s destructiveness, but, at the same time, a retention of the term. The 1960 edition dropped “so-called” and the Pemi was once more termed a wilderness, unqualified. Ironically, the year before saw the completion of a highway, the Kanc, through this wilderness. By then, however, conceiving of the Pemi as a wilderness in the face of reality—railroads or auto roads--had become tradition.
From 1969 to 1983, the WMG reverted to its ambivalent stance about the wild Pemi, placing the word “Wilderness” in the rubric “Pemigewasset Wilderness” in quotation marks. But the older romantic view prevailed again in 1987; the quotation marks were removed. The Pemi was once more imaged as an unqualified wilderness. The editors explained their change on the grounds that “a recent act of Congress has once again officially entitled it to the name of Wilderness.” An act of Congress, and, I would argue, a longstanding tradition that wants, even requires, a wild area untouched by human hands at the heart of the White Mountains regardless of obvious evidence to the contrary.
