Lawrence watershed and east of the Alleghanies, though they were
probably the first of white men to see those peaks rising in the north of
what is now New England, known as the White Mountains.
Standing on the summit of one of the White Mountains a few summers ago, I
was shown a dim little indentation of the sky at the northwest which I was
told was Mont Real. And since seeing that I have imagined Jacques Cartier
in 1535 looking off to the southeast, when his disappointed vision of the
west had tired his eyes, and catching first sight of these dim
indentations of his sky, the White Mountains, which the colonists from
England did not see until a century later and then only from their ocean
side.
But whether the master pilot from the white-bastioned St. Malo saw them or
not, we have record that Champlain in his exploration of the Atlantic
coast did discern their peaks upon his horizon; and so we may think of the
French as the discoverers not merely of the northern and western valleys,
of the Adirondacks, in whose shadows Champlain and Brule and Father Jogues
fought with the Iroquois and suffered torture, and of the snow-capped
Rockies at whose feet Chevalier de la Verendrye was obliged to turn back,
but also of the tops of the white hills near the Atlantic coast, which I
have often seen lighted at sunrise while the lower slopes and valleys were
in darkness or shadow--hills touched by the French, as by that rising sun,
only at their tops and by the trails of their eyes.
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