Where the Rivers Flow North by Howard Frank Mosher

Author:Howard Frank Mosher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Vermont Press

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And it was fall, the late fall of 1759, when the first white man passed through the wilderness that would become Kingdom County. His name was Twilight Anderson and he was an advance scout for Robert Rogers’ Rangers, returning from a retaliatory raid on a Saint Francis Indian settlement in French Canada. It was a bleak time of year to travel through a bleak land, a morass of vast cedar bogs, white-water rivers, and thick coniferous forests avoided even by wolves and panthers because of the scarcity of smaller game for them to feed on. Some of Rogers’ party nearly starved. Some were killed or captured in an ambush on the northwest shore of Lake Memphremagog. Others went bush crazy, struck off into mountains to the southwest, and were not heard from again.

A hard, worldly first-generation Scotchman too ambitious to succumb to mere physical hardships, Twilight Anderson got through to the Connecticut River and civilization, though during the ordeal he froze his right foot and subsequently lost it. In a series of tracts written fifty years later Twilight explained that the loss of his foot was a divinely ordained affliction for his participation in the Saint Francis massacre. It was to atone for this crime that he returned to the northern wilderness, where his misfortune had occurred, married a Saint Francis woman, and established a homestead on a bluff over the Kingdom River.

During the first years after his return Twilight endured severe privations. Often he and his wife existed entirely on river water, porcupines, and stunted trout. At the same time, he was amassing a fortune by cutting and transporting the colossal white pines that abounded on the hills and mountains surrounding his cabin. By 1776 he had devised a closely reasoned religiosity that enabled him to sell pines for the masts of both His Majesty’s and the rebelling colonists’ warships. “Render unto Caesar,” he intoned to his squat, mute, uncomprehending wife. “When there be two Caesars, render one half of your trade unto each.”

Situated on the height of land between the Saint Lawrence and Connecticut River watersheds, the Kingdom land grant was ideally located for Twilight’s international marketing venture. Each spring during the war two small French and Indian crews conducted two simultaneous log drives under his direction, one north on the Lower Kingdom to Lake Memphremagog and on to Burgoyne’s fleet on the Saint Lawrence, the other south on the Nulhegan and Connecticut to Washington’s navy on the Atlantic. It was a lucrative enterprise, which his son, George, born in 1777 and named after both of Twilight’s benefactors, might have profitably revitalized in 1812 if he had not been engaged in more pressing concerns.

Soon after settling in the north country Twilight had consecrated one hundred white pines on the ridge at the head of the river to stand uncut forever as a memorial to his deliverance from the wilderness and his remorse over the mass murder of a village of women, children, and elderly persons. The sincerity of

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