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Reflecting on his 1832 visit to the Notch of the White Mountains in northern New Hampshire, Nathaniel Hawthorne describes the moment at which he entered the narrow “romantic defile” at the height of the Notch and was suddenly overtaken by a rapidly moving stagecoach. When he later spent the evening with the stage’s occupants at the Notch’s Crawford House, he was drawn to observe the variety of roles they played in the changing Northern Forest landscape: One was a mineralogist, a scientific, green-spectacled figure in black, bearing a heavy hammer, with which he did great damage to the precipices, and put the fragments in his pocket. Another was a well-dressed young man, who carried an opera glass set in gold, and seemed to be making a quotation from some of Byron’s rhapsodies on mountain scenery. There was also a trader, returning from Portland to the upper part of Vermont; and a fair young girl, with a very faint bloom like one of those pale and delicate flowers which sometimes occur among alpine cliffs. (Sketches 29) Hawthorne’s description of this encounter in the heart of the White Mountains offers not only a neat typology of nineteenth-century visitors to the region but also a map of their differing responses to the landscape through which they traveled. Through a number of physical and literary uses of the mountains, travelers like these represent a change in both the mountain landscape and its inhabitants in the early nineteenth century. The trader in Hawthorne’s sketch views the bleak environment of the Notch as a place to move through rather than visit. The traveling mineralogist’s focus on resource extraction illustrates early nineteenth-century expansionist ideology—his presence in the Notch of the White Mountains defining an early tourism of a particular sort, with which Hawthorne shows his unease. The clearly out-of-place young man shows the i n t r o d u c t i o n The White Mountains from Northern Frontier to Tourist Resort growing use of the mountains for an exploitation (and inhabitation) different from that of the mineralogist and trader. In his choice of Byron’s rhapsodies, the young man repositions the White Mountains in the context of an imported aesthetic rhetoric. Much like his literal framing of the mountain vista in his opera glass, by adopting such an aesthetic, the young man attempts to situate the northern New England landscape within the framework of a European iconology. Finally, the sketch’s young girl represents perhaps all that is in jeopardy in the mountain landscape at the hands of these three men; her ephemeral , “delicate” beauty gives her an immature, fragile, and as yet untrammeled wildness. After the first decades of the nineteenth century, the natural and cultural landscapes of the White Mountain region of New Hampshire were in the midst of a transformation built on the foundations of an expansionist national rhetoric , whose cornerstone had been laid in the last years of the eighteenth century. The imperialist agenda of the early eighteen hundreds was institutionalized in a 1785 congressional mandate to “improve” American public lands, a mandate that often associated discordant notions of ideology and place. Such rhetoric is apparent in northern New Hampshire as early as 1803, when Yale president and travel writer Timothy Dwight identified in Eleazer Rosebrook, grandfather of Ethan Allen Crawford and one of the area’s first entrepreneurs, a “spirit of enterprise and industry, and perseverance, which has surmounted obstacles, demanding more patience and firmness, than are in many instances required for the acquisition of empire” (Travels 96). This imperial ideology, also seen in the Jeffersonian attempt to standardize federal lands, serves as an appropriate starting point for an engagement of the dialogue between abstract political and ideological principles and the realities of specific places, what Lawrence Buell identifies as the blurred boundary between “map knowledge and place sense” (Imagination 278). These tensions between social and political constructions of landscape born in the forests of early nineteenth-century New Hampshire remain today implicit in the residents’ relationships to the particularities of a place. As a reading of nineteenth-century northern New Hampshire literatures suggests, the crossing of political, economic, cultural, and natural influences in the region helped define a landscape that is, even today, divided into a variety of townships, grants, purchases, and locations that often bear little connection with the topography of the landscape they circumscribe or the lives passed upon them. The image of...

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