Note 31 — 1672 edition by Josselyn.

The earliest ascents of the White Mountains were those made by Field and others in 1642, of which we have some account in Winthrop’s Journal (by Savage, edit. 1, vol. ii. pp. 67, 89). Darby Field, “an Irishman living about Pascataquack,” has the honor of being the first European who set foot upon the summit of Mount Washington. He appears at Exeter in 1639, and was at Dover in 1645, and died there in 1649, leaving a widow, and, it is said, children (A. H. Quint, N. E. Geneal. Reg., vol. vi. p. 38). It seems likely, from his account, that Field, on reaching the Indian town in the Saco Valley, “at the foot of the hill” where the “two branches of Saco river met,” pursued his way up the valley either of Rocky Branch or of Ellis River, till he gradually attained to the region of dwarf firs, on what is known as Boott’s Spur, which is between the “valley” called Oakes’s Gulf, in which the “Mount Washington” branch of the Saco has its head, and the valley in which the Rocky Branch rises (see G. P. Bond’s Map of the White Mountains). There is no other way that shall fulfil the conditions of the narrative except that over Boott’s Spur; but of the three streams, that is, “the two branches of Saco River,” which come together at or near the probable site of the Indian town, the Rocky Branch is the shortest, and its valley the most ascending. Field repeated his visit, with some others, “about a month after;” and later, in the same year, the mountains were visited by the worshipful Thomas Gorges, Esq., Deputy-Governor, and Richard Vines, Esq., Councillor of the Province of Maine, of which Winthrop takes notice at p. 89. Whether Josselyn went up himself, or had his account from others, does not appear. But his calling the mountains “inaccessible but by the gullies,” leaves it at least supposable, that he, or the party from which he got his information (perhaps Gorges’s), instead of gradually ascending the long ridges, or spurs, penetrated into one of the gulfs (as they are there called), or ravines, of the eastern side; the walls of which are exceedingly steep, and literally inaccessible in many parts, except by the gullies. The “large level or plain of a day’s journey over, whereon grows nothing but moss,” is noticed in Winthrop’s account of Gorges’s ascent, but not in that of Field’s; and this plain—which doubtless includes what has since been called “Bigelow’s Lawn” (lying immediately under the south-eastern side of the summit of Mount Washington), but understood also, in Gorges’s account, to extend northward as far as the “Lake of the Clouds”—furnishes another ground for supposing that the last-mentioned explorer, or, at least, Josselyn, may have penetrated the mountain by one of its eastern ravines; several of which head in the great plain mentioned, while that is rather remote from what we have taken for Field’s “ridge.” Our author is the only authority for the “pond of clear water in the midst of” the top of Mount Washington; though a somewhat capacious spring, which was well known there before the putting-up of the house on the summit, may have been larger once; or he may rather have mistaken, or misremembered, the position of the Lake of the Clouds.