On the impressive natural site through which multiple American stories can
be traced.
Near the top of Monument
Mountain, an open space reservation in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, is
a summit known as Squaw Peak. The nickname implies what poet Lydia Sigourney
makes explicit in her “Indian
Names” (1838): the ways in which Native Americans remain part of our
national landscape and language, even when we have often otherwise worked to
elide them from our histories. And indeed William Cullen
Bryant, Sigourney’s peer and one of the first American professional poets,
penned an early poem entitled “Monument Mountain”
(1815) in which he narrates the legend of a local “Indian maid” who threw
herself from the summit (suffering from an unrequited love, as all such tragic
poetic ladies seem to be). Bryant’s poem concludes with his own recognition of
the continued presence of such native identities and stories on our landscapes,
both real and literary: “Indians from the distant West, who come / to visit
where fathers’ bones are laid, / Yet tell the sorrowful tale, and to this day /
The mountain where the hapless maiden died / Is called the Mountain of the
Monument.”
A few decades later, Monument Mountain would be the site and source of a
very different kind of literary inspiration. On August 5th, 1850, Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Herman Melville met for the first time during a group
excursion to the mountain; both men were staying at family homes in the
Berkshires at the time, and while they knew each other by reputation and
writing had not previously had the chance to meet. The group hike included not
only the two authors but many other literary figures of the period, including Evert Duyckinck and James T. Fields,
and this collection of creative voices helped produce what became a truly
mythic version of the excursion: one in which a sudden thunderstorm forced the
group to take refuge, during which time Hawthorne and Melville connected so immediately
and deeply that some of the starting points for Moby Dick (which Melville would
dedicate to Hawthorne) arose out of the conversation. I don’t mean to imply
that the excursion did not include these events—it may well have—but rather
that this mythic Monument Mountain moment also captures ideas of artistic genius
and inspiration that embody much of what defined American literary narratives
in this American Renaissance
era.
Over the next century, Monument Mountain would be influenced by two
distinct and competing national histories. On the one hand, the ongoing Industrial
Revolution would threaten its continued existence as a natural space: for
example, logging in support of iron foundaries
in places like nearby Lenox heavily deforested the area. Yet at the same
time, the burgeoning conservation movement pushed back on such trends: in 1899 the
reservation was acquired by the Trustees
of Reservations, a non-profit conservationist organization that reforested
the area by planting red pines throughout the reservation in the 1930s.
Fortunately for those of us who want to make our own ascent to the top of Squaw
Peak, perhaps to find the kinds of inspiration there that could lead to the
next literary classics (or at least blog posts), the conservationist efforts
have won the day, and Monument Mountain reservation remains a vital part of the
Berkshires’ natural beauty and power.
Next Berkshire story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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