Chapter 10

Where the Penobscot River reaches the sea, and for forty miles east, the sinking continental shore has deeply indented the coast line with a network of broad, twisting bays, enclosing many islands. The largest and finest of these is Mount Desert Island, for many years celebrated for its romantic beauty. Upon its northeast shore, facing Frenchman's Bay, is the resort town of Bar Harbor; other resorts dot its shores on every side. The island has a large summer population drawn from all parts of the country. Besides its hotels, there are many fine summer homes.

The feature which especially distinguishes Mount Desert Island from other islands, in fact from the entire Atlantic coast, is a group of granitic mountains which rise abruptly from the sea. They were once towering monsters, perhaps only one, unquestionably the loftiest for many miles around. They are the sole remainders upon the present coast line of a great former range. They are composed almost wholly of granite, worn down by the ages, but massive enough still to resist the agencies which wiped away their comrades. They rise a thousand feet or more, grim, rounded, cleft with winding valleys and deep passes, divided in places by estuaries of the sea, holding in their hollows many charming lakes.

Their abrupt flanks gnawed by the beating sea, their valleys grown with splendid forests and brightened by wild flowers, their slopes and domes sprinkled with conifers which struggle for foothold in the cracks which the elements are widening and deepening in their granite surface, for years they have been the resort of thousands of climbers, students of nature and seekers of the beautiful; the views of sea, estuary, island, plain, lake, and mountain from the heights have no counterpart elsewhere.

All this mountain wilderness, free as it was to the public, was in private ownership. Some of it was held by persons who had not seen it for years. Some of it was locked up in estates. The time came when owners began to plan fine summer homes high on the mountain slopes. A few, however, believed that the region should belong to the whole people, and out of this belief grew the movement, led by George B. Dorr and Charles W. Eliot, to acquire title and present it to the nation which would not buy it. They organized a holding association, to which they gave their own properties; for years afterward Mr. Dorr devoted most of his time to persuading others to contribute their holdings, and to raising subscriptions for the purchase of plots which were tied up in estates. In 1916 the association presented five thousand acres to the Government, and President Wilson created it by proclamation the Sieur de Monts National Monument. The gift has been greatly increased since. In 1918 Congress made appropriations for its upkeep and development. In February, 1919, Congress changed its name and status; it then became the Lafayette National Park.

The impulse to name the new national park after the French general who came to our aid in time of need arose, of course, out of the war-time warmth of feeling for our ally, France. The region had been identified with early French exploration; the original monument had been named in commemoration of this historical association. The first European settlement in America north of the latitude of the Gulf of Mexico was here. Henry of Navarre had sent two famous adventurers to the new world, de Monts and Champlain. The first colony established by de Monts was at the mouth of the St. Croix River, which forms the eastern boundary of Maine, and the first land within the present United States which was reached by Champlain was Mount Desert Island. This was in 1604. It was Champlain who gave the island its present name, after the mountains which rise so prominently from its rock-bound shore. To him, however, the name had a different significance than it first suggests to us. L'Isle des Monts Deserts meant to him the Island of the Lonely Mountains, and lonely indeed they must have seemed above the flat shore line. Thus named, the place became a landmark for future voyagers; among others Winthrop records seeing the mountains on his way to the Massachusetts colony in 1630. He anchored opposite and fished for two hours, catching "sixty-seven great cod," one of which was "a yard around."

"By a curious train of circumstances," writes George B. Dorr, "the titles by which these mountains to the eastward of Somes Sound are held go back to the early ownership of Mount Desert Island by the Crown of France. For it was granted by Louis XIV, grandson of Henry IV, to Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, an officer of noble family from southwestern France, then serving in Acadia, who afterward became successively the founder of Detroit and Governor of Louisiana--the Mississippi Valley. Cadillac lost it later, through English occupation of the region, ownership passing, first to the Province, then to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. But presently the Commonwealth gave back to his granddaughter--Madame de Gregoire--and her husband, French refugees, the Island's eastern half, moved thereto by the part that France had taken in the recent War of Independence and by letters they had brought from Lafayette. And they came down and lived there."

And so it naturally followed that, under stress of war enthusiasm, this reservation with its French associations should commemorate not only the old Province of Acadia, which the French yielded to England only after half a century of war, and England later on to us after another war, but the great war also in which France, England, and the United States all joined as allies in the cause of the world's freedom. In accord with this idea, the highest mountain looking upon the sea has been named the Flying Squadron, in honor of the service of the air, born of an American invention, and carried to perfection by the three allies in common.

The park may be entered from any of the surrounding resorts, but the main gateway is Bar Harbor, which is reached by train, automobile, and steamboat. No resort may be reached more comfortably, and hotel accommodations are ample.

The mountains rise within a mile of the town. They extend westward for twelve miles, lying in two groups, separated by a fine salt-water fiord known as Somes Sound. The park's boundary is exceedingly irregular, with deep indentations of private property. It is enclosed, along the shore, by an excellent automobile road; roads also cross it on both sides of Somes Sound.

There are ten mountains in the eastern group; the three fronting Bar Harbor have been renamed, for historic reasons, Cadillac Mountain, the Flying Squadron, and Champlain Mountain. For the same reason mountains upon Somes Sound have been renamed Acadia Mountain, St. Sauveur Mountain, and Norumbega Mountain, the last an Indian name; similar changes commemorating the early English occupation also have been made in the nomenclature of the western group. Tablets and memorials are also projected in emphasis of the historical associations of the place.

Both mountain groups are dotted with lakes; those of the western group are the largest of the island.

The pleasures, then, of the Lafayette National Park cover a wide range of human desire. Sea bathing, boating, yachting, salt-water and fresh-water fishing, tramping, exploring the wilderness, hunting the view spots--these are the summer occupations of many visitors, the diversions of many others. The more thoughtful will find its historical associations fascinating, its geological record one of the richest in the continent, its forests well equipped schools for tree study, their branches a museum of bird life.

To climb these low mountains, wandering by the hour in their hollows and upon their sea-horizoned shoulders, is, for one interested in nature, to get very close indeed to the secrets of her wonderful east. One may stand upon Cadillac's rounded summit and let imagination realize for him the day when this was a glaciered peak in a mighty range which forged southward from the far north, shoulder upon shoulder, peak upon peak, pushing ever higher as it approached the sea, and extending far beyond the present ocean horizon; for these mountains of Mount Desert are by no means the terminal of the original mighty range; the slow subsidence of the coast has wholly submerged several, perhaps many, that once rose south of them. The valley which now carries the St. Croix River drained this once towering range's eastern slopes; the valley of the Penobscot drained its western slopes.

The rocks beneath his feet disclose not only this vision of the geologic past; besides that, in their slow decay, in the chiselling of the trickling waters, in the cleavage of masses by winter's ice, in the peeling of the surface by alternate freezing and melting, in the dissolution and disintegration everywhere by the chemicals imprisoned in air and water, all of which he sees beneath his feet, they disclose to him the processes by which Nature has wrought this splendid ruin. And if, captivated by this vision, he studies intimately the page of history written in these rocks, he will find it full of fascinating detail.

The region also offers an absorbing introduction to the study of our eastern flora. The exposed bogs and headlands support several hundred species of plants typical of the arctic, sub-arctic, and Hudsonian zones, together with practically all of the common plants of the Canadian zone, and many of the southern coasts. So with the trees. Essentially coastal, it is the land of conifers, the southern limit of some which are common in the great regions of the north, yet exhibiting in nearly full variety the species for many miles south; yet it is also, in its sheltered valleys, remarkably representative of the deciduous growths of the entire Appalachian region.

The bird life is full and varied. The food supply attracts migratory birds, and aquatic birds find here the conditions which make for increase. Deer are returning in some numbers from the mainland.

In brief, the Lafayette National Park, small though it is, is one of the most important members of the national parks system. For the pleasure seeker no other provides so wide and varied an opportunity. To the student, no other offers a more readable or more distinctive volume; it is the only national museum of the fascinating geology of the east, and I can think of no other place in the east where classes can find so varied and so significant an exhibit. To the artist, the poet, and the dreamer it presents vistas of ocean, inlet, fiord, shore, wave-lashed promontory, bog, meadow, forest, and mountain--an answer to every mood.

If this nation, as now appears, must long lack national parks representative of the range of its splendid east, let us be thankful that this one small park is so complete and so distinguished.

THE VOLCANIC NATIONAL PARKS

ON THE VOLCANO IN SCENERY

The volcanic national parks are Lassen Volcanic, Crater Lake, Mount Rainier, Yellowstone, and Hawaii. Though several of them exhibit extremely high mountains, their scenic ensemble differs in almost all respects from that of the granite parks. The landscape tends to broad elevated surfaces and rolling hills, from which rise sharp towering cones or massive mountains whose irregular bulging knobs were formed by outbreaks of lava upon the sides of original central vents.

The Cascade Mountains in Washington, Oregon, and northern California are one of the best examples of such a landscape; from its low swelling summits rise at intervals the powerful master cones of Shasta, Rainier, Adams, Hood, Baker, and others. Fujiyama, the celebrated mountain of Japan, may be cited as a familiar example of the basic mountain form, the single-cone volcanic peak. Vesuvius is a familiar example of simple complication, the double-cone volcano, while Mauna Loa in Hawaii, including Kilauea of the pit of fire, a neighbor volcano which it has almost engulfed in its swollen bulk, well illustrates the volcano built up by outpourings of lava from vents broken through its sides. Flat and rolling Yellowstone with its geyser fields, is one of the best possible examples of a dead and much eroded volcanic region.

The scenic detail of the volcanic landscape is interesting and different from any other. Centuries and the elements create from lava a soil of great fertility. No forests and wild flowers excel those growing on the lavas of the Cascades, and the fertility of the Hawaiian Islands, which are entirely volcanic, is world-famous. Streams cut deep and often highly colored canyons in these broad lava lands, and wind and rain, while eroding valleys, often leave ornately modelled edifices of harder rock, and tall thin needles pointing to the zenith.

In the near neighborhood of the volcanoes, as well as on their sloping sides, are found lava formations of many strange and wonderful kinds. Hot springs and bubbling paint pots abound; and in the Yellowstone National Park, geysers. Fields of fantastic, twisted shapes, masses suggesting heaps of tumbled ropes, upstanding spatter cones, caves arched with lava roofs, are a very few of the very many phenomena which the climber of a volcano encounters on his way. And at the top, broad, bowl-shaped craters, whose walls are sometimes many hundred feet deep, enclose, if the crater has long been dormant, sandy floors, from which, perhaps, small cinder cones arise. If the crater still is active, the adventurer's experiences are limited only by his daring.

The entire region, in short, strikingly differs from any other of scenic kind.

Of the several processes of world-making, all of which are progressing to-day at normal speed, none is so thrilling as volcanism, because no other concentrates action into terms of human grasp. Lassen Peak's eruption of a thousand cubic yards of lava in a few hours thrills us more than the Mississippi's erosion of an average foot of her vast valley in a hundred thousand years; yet the latter is enormously the greater. The explosion of Mount Katmai, the rise and fall of Kilauea's boiling lava, the playing of Yellowstone's monster geysers, the spectacle of Mazama's lake-filled crater, the steaming of the Cascade's myriad bubbling springs, all make strong appeal to the imagination. They carry home the realization of mysterious, overwhelming power.

Lava is molten rock of excessively high temperature, which suddenly becomes released from the fearful pressures of earth's interior. Hurled from volcanic vents, or gushing from cracks in the earth's skin, it spreads rapidly over large neighborhoods, filling valleys and raising bulky rounded masses.

Often it is soft and frothy, like pumice. Even in its frequent glass forms, obsidian, for example, it easily disintegrates. There are as many kinds of lava as there are kinds of rock from which it is formed.

Volcanic scenery is by no means confined to what we call the volcanic national parks. Volcanoes were frequent in many parts of the continent. We meet their remnants unexpectedly among the granites of the Rockies and the Sierra, and the sedimentary rocks of the west and the southwest. Several of our national parks besides those prevailingly volcanic, and several of our most distinguished national monuments, exhibit interesting volcanic interludes.

VII

LASSEN PEAK AND MOUNT KATMAI

THE ONE A NATIONAL PARK IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA, THE OTHER A NATIONAL MONUMENT IN ALASKA

Because most of the conspicuous volcanic eruptions of our day have occurred in warmer climes nearer the equator, we usually think of volcanoes as tropical, or semi-tropical, phenomena. Vesuvius is in the Mediterranean, Pelee in the Caribbean, Mauna Loa and Kilauea on the Hawaiian Islands. Of course there is Lassen Peak in California--the exception, as we say, which proves the rule.

As a fact, many of the world's greatest volcanoes are very far indeed from the tropics. Volcanoes result from the movement of earth masses seeking equilibrium underneath earth's crust, but near enough to the surface to enable molten rock under terrific pressure to work upward from isolated pockets and break through. Volcanoes occur in all latitudes. Even Iceland has its great volcano. It is true that the volcano map shows them congregating thickly in a broad band, of which the equator is the centre, but it also shows them bordering the Pacific Coast from Patagonia to Alaska, crossing the ocean through the Aleutian Islands, and extending far down the Asian coast. It also shows many inland volcanoes, isolated and in series. The distribution is exceedingly wide.

Volcanoes usually occur in belts which may or may not coincide with lines of weakening in the earth's crust below. Hence the series of flaming torches of prehistoric days which, their fires now extinguished and their sides swathed in ice, have become in our day the row of spectacular peaks extending from northern California to Puget Sound. Hence also the long range of threatening summits which skirts Alaska's southern shore, to-day the world's most active volcanic belt. Here it was that Katmai's summit was lost in the mighty explosion of June, 1912, one of enormous violence, which followed tremendous eruptions elsewhere along the same coast, and is expected to be followed by others, perhaps of even greater immensity and power.

These two volcanic belts contain each an active volcano which Congress has made the centre of a national reservation. Lassen Peak, some wise men believe, is the last exhibit of activity in the dying volcanism of the Cascade Mountains. Mount Katmai is the latest and greatest exhibit in a volcanic belt which is believed to be young and growing.

THE BUILDING OF THE CASCADES

Millions of years ago, in the period which geologists call Tertiary, the pressure under that part of the crust of the earth which now is Washington, Oregon, and northern California, became too powerful for solid rock to withstand. Long lines of hills appeared parallel to the sea, and gradually rose hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of feet. These cracked, and from the long summit-fissures issued hot lava, which spread over enormous areas and, cooling, laid the foundations for the coming Cascade Mountains.

When the gaping fissures eased the pressure from beneath, they filled with ash and lava except at certain vent holes, around which grew the volcanoes which, when their usefulness as chimneys passed, became those cones of ice and snow which now are the glory of our northwest.

There may have been at one time many hundreds of these volcanoes, big and little. Most of them doubtless quickly perished under the growing slopes of their larger neighbors, and, as they became choked with ash, the lava which had been finding vent through them sought other doors of escape, and found them in the larger volcanoes. Thus, by natural selection, there survived at last that knightly company of monsters now uniformed in ice, which includes, from north to south, such celebrities as Mount Baker, Mount Rainier, Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, Mount Hood, vanished Mount Mazama, Mount Shasta, and living Lassen Peak.

Whether or not several of these vast beacons lit Pacific's nights at one time can never be known with certainty, but probability makes the claim. Whether or not in their decline the canoes of prehistoric men found harbor by guidance of their pillars of fire by night, and their pillars of smoke by day is less probable but possible. One at least of the giant band, Lassen Peak, is semi-active to-day. At least two others, Mount Rainier and Mount Baker, offer evidences of internal heat beneath their mail of ice. And early settlers in the northwest report Indian traditions of the awful cataclysm in which Mount Rainier lost two thousand feet of cone.

LASSEN PEAK NATIONAL PARK

Lassen Peak, the last of the Cascades in active eruption, rises between the northern end of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, of which it is locally but wrongly considered a part, and the Klamath Mountains, a spur of the Cascades. Actually it is the southern terminus of the Cascades.

* * * * *

Though quiet for more than two hundred years, the region long has enjoyed scientific and popular interest because it possesses hot springs, mud volcanoes and other minor volcanic phenomena, and particularly because its cones, which are easily climbed and studied, have remained very nearly perfect. Besides Lassen Peak, whose altitude is 10,437 feet, there are others of large size and great interest close by. Prospect Peak attains the altitude of 9,200 feet; Harkness Peak 9,000 feet; and Cinder Cone, a specimen of unusual beauty, 6,907 feet.

Because it seemed desirable to conserve the best two of these examples of recent volcanism, President Taft in 1906 created the Lassen Peak and the Cinder Cone National Monuments. Doubtless there would have been no change in the status of these reservations had not Lassen Peak broken its long sleep in the spring of 1914 with a series of eruptions covering a period of nineteen months. This centred attention upon the region, and in August, 1916, Congress created the Lassen Volcanic National Park, a reservation of a hundred and twenty-four square miles, which included both national monuments, other notable cones of the neighborhood, and practically all the hot springs and other lesser phenomena. Four months after the creation of the national park Lassen Peak ceased activity with its two hundred and twelfth eruption. It is not expected to resume. For some years, however, scientists will continue to class it as semi-active.

These eruptions, none of which produced any considerable lava flow, are regarded as probably the dying gasps of the volcanic energy of the Cascades. They began in May, 1914, with sharp explosions of steam and smoke from the summit crater. The news aroused wide-spread interest throughout the United States; it was the first volcanic eruption within the national boundaries. During the following summer there were thirty-eight slight similar eruptions, some of which scattered ashes in the neighborhood. The spectacle was one of magnificence because of the heavy columns of smoke. Eruptions increased in frequency with winter, fifty-six occurring during the balance of the year.

About the end of March, 1915, according to Doctor J.S. Diller of the United States Geological Survey, new lava had filled the crater and overflowed the west slope a thousand feet. On May 22 following occurred the greatest eruption of the series. A mushroom-shaped cloud of smoke burst four miles upward in air. The spectacle, one of grandeur, was plainly visible even from the Sacramento Valley. "At night," writes Doctor Diller, "flashes of light from the mountain summit, flying rocket-like bodies and cloud-glows over the crater reflecting the light from incandescent lavas below, were seen by many observers from various points of view, and appear to indicate that much of the material erupted was sufficiently hot to be luminous."