The Curse of Chocorua

Now don't roll past this one too fast — because there is a mountain at the far end of this road with a curse on it, and I'd not feel right sending you toward it without the tale. They call me Ranger Boone.

The mountain is Chocorua, and you'll see it near the end of the drive: a bare rock peak, sharp as a tooth, standing off by itself. It is one of the most painted, most photographed mountains in America. And it is named for a Pemigewasset man who died on top of it.

Here's the true bones of it. This was Pemigewasset and Abenaki country. By the early seventeen hundreds the English were pushing into these valleys, and most of the native families had gone north to Canada — but a few stayed on, and there were friendships across that line. The story fastens on one of them: a man named Chocorua, and a settler family named Campbell. Chocorua had a young son. And when Chocorua went north on a journey, he left the boy with the Campbells.

And the boy died. That's the hinge of the whole thing. The tellings differ on how — the commonest is that he got into poison the family kept out for foxes and drank it. An accident. A terrible, ordinary accident.

But Chocorua came back to find his son dead in a white family's house, and grief does what grief does. What followed was blood on both sides, and it ended with settlers chasing Chocorua up that bare peak, to the very top, where there was nowhere left to go.

And there — this is the part that has been told around New Hampshire firesides for two hundred years — the story goes that before they shot him, Chocorua stood on that summit and laid a curse on them. Not a shouted one. A cold one. He cursed the white men who took his son and his country: that their corn would wither, that their cattle would sicken and die, that lightning would find their homes, and that the wind on this mountain would carry his voice as long as there were people below to hear it.

And here's the thing that kept the tale alive. For generations afterward, the cattle in that valley DID sicken — dying of a wasting illness nobody could explain, right there under the mountain. Farmers left. It went on so long that people took it as proof. Now, a chemist eventually turned up and found the real answer: the water in that particular valley runs through rock with too much muriate of lime in it, and it was poisoning the stock. Bad geology, not a dying man's words.

But you tell me which explanation the people living under that peak believed. When you catch sight of Chocorua near the end of this drive — and you will, it stands alone and you can't mistake it — look up at that bare stone top and remember there was a man standing on it, at the end of everything, with nothing left to give the world but words. Some folks say if you're up there when the wind comes hard out of the northwest, you can still hear him working on it.