Page:A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.djvu/266

260 told us that he was accustomed to go across the river into Goffstown for his water. But now, after nine years, as I have been told and indeed have witnessed, it contains sixteen thousand inhabitants. From a hill on the road between Goffstown and Hooksett, four miles distant, I have since seen a thunder shower pass over, and the sun break out and shine on a city there, where I had landed nine years before in the fields to get a draught of water; and there was waving the flag of its museum, where "the only perfect skeleton of a Greenland or river whale in the United States" was to be seen, and I also read in its directory of a "Manchester Athenæum and Gallery of the Fine Arts."

According to the gazetteer, the descent of Amoskeag Falls, which are the most considerable in the Merrimack, is fifty-four feet in half a mile. We locked ourselves through here with much ado, surmounting the successive watery steps of this river's stair-case in the midst of a crowd of villagers, jumping into the canal to their amusement, to save our boat from upsetting, and consuming much river water in our service. Amoskeag, or Namaskeak, is said to mean "great fishing place." It was hereabouts that the Sachem Wannalancet resided. Tradition says that his tribe, when at war with the Mohawks, concealed their provisions in the cavities of the rocks in the upper part of these falls. The Indians who hid their provisions in these holes, and affirmed "that God had cut them out for that purpose," understood their origin and use better than the Royal Society, who in their Transactions, in the last century, speaking of these very holes, declare that "they seem plainly to be artificial." Similar "pot-holes," may be seen at the Stone Flume on this river, on the Ottaway, at Bellows' Falls on the Connecticut, and