ey were homes
of great and blessed spirits. Mount Washington was their Olympus and
Ararat in one, for there dwelt God, and there, when the earth was covered
with a flood, lived the chief and his wife, whom God had saved, sending
forth a hare, after the waters had subsided, to learn if it were safe to
descend. From them the whole country was peopled with red men. Yet woe
betide the intruder on this high and holy ground, for an angered deity
condemned him to wander for ages over the desolate peaks and through the
shadowy chasms rifted down their sides. The despairing cries of these
condemned ones, in winter storms, even frightened the early white
settlers in this region, and in 1784 the women of Conway petitioned three
clergymen "to lay the spirits."

Other ark and deluge legends relate to the Superstition Mountains, in
Arizona, Caddoes village, on Red River, Cerro Naztarny, on the Rio
Grande, the peak of Old Zuni, in Mexico, Colhuacan, on the Pacific coast,
Mount Apaola, in upper Mixteca, and Mount Neba, in Guaymi. The
Northwestern Indians tell of a flood in which all perished save one man,
who fled to Mount Tacoma. To prevent him from being swept away a spirit
turned him into stone. When the flood had fallen the deity took one of
his ribs and made a woman of it. Then he touched the stone man back to
life.

There were descendants of Manitou on the mountains, too, of North
Carolina, but the Cherokees believe that those heights are bare because
the devil strode over them on his way to the Devil's Court House
(Transylvania County, North Carolina), where he sat in judgment and
claimed his own. Monsters were found in the White Mountains. Devil's Den,
on the face of Mount Willard, was the lair of one of them--a strange,
winged creature that strewed the floor of its cave with brute and human
skeletons, after preying on their flesh.

The ideas of supernatural occurrences in these New Hampshire hills
obtained until a recent date, and Sunday Mountain is a monument to the
dire effects of Sabbath-breaking that was pointed out to several
generations of New Hampshire youth for their moral betterment. The story
goes that a man of the adjacent town of Oxford took a walk one Sunday,
when he should have taken himself to church; and, straying into the woods
here, he was delivered into the claws and maws of an assemblage of bears
that made an immediate and exemplary conclusion of him.

The grand portrait in rock in Profile Notch was reg