Now before we go a mile farther, you ought to know whose name is on this road — because it belongs to a real man, and his is a hard story. Name's Ranger Boone Merrick, and I'll be telling you the tales along the Kanc.
Kancamagus. In the old Penacook tongue it means, near as we can tell, 'the Fearless One.' He was the grandson of a great and famous sachem named Passaconaway — Boone's got HIS tale for you later — and in the sixteen eighties, Kancamagus became the last leader to try to hold the Penacook people together here in these mountains and river valleys. Understand the world he was born into: the English had come, thick and fast, and the sicknesses they brought had already swept through and killed the native people by the thousands. Kancamagus wanted peace. He tried for it, honestly and hard. He wrote to the governor asking only that his people be protected. He got nothing back but suspicion and insult.
And here's the turn that aches: the peace-seeker was pushed until he broke. Years before, a colonial major named Richard Waldron had seized some two hundred native people under a flag of truce and sold many of them into slavery. That wound never healed. And so in sixteen eighty-nine, Kancamagus led a raid in revenge on the town of Dover, down on the seacoast, where old Waldron lived — a bloody night the history books remember hard. As they cut the old major down, the story goes, a warrior drew a knife across his own chest and said, 'I cross out my account.' The debt was paid. And after it, knowing the English would hunt him to the end of the earth, Kancamagus gathered what was left of his people and led them away north, into Canada, and vanished from these valleys and from the history books for good. The Penacook confederacy his grandfather built was finished. So when you see his name on the green signs all up and down this road, don't think of it as just a pretty Indian word for a mountain pass. It's the name of a man who wanted peace, was denied it, and lost everything — his home, his people, these very mountains. The road remembers him. Now you do too.