148 Rhodora. [JUNE 
number of eastern men now annually visit Pike’s peak than penetrate 
to the Maine mountain, and a hundred Bostonians have been among 
the Alps for one who has climbed Ktaadn." 
But though few, it was yet a distinguished company that we fol- 
lowed! ‘To do more than refer to some who preceded us would un- 
duly lengthen our report and repeat unnecessarily what they have 
themselves written, as well as Mr. Hamlin’s account of them already 
referred to. 
In the beginning was Charles Turner, Jr. of Boston, “the original 
describer of Ktaadn," who with guides and seven comrades made the 
ascent as early as 1804. His account is preserved in the collections 
of the Mass. Hist. Society. In 1836 came the excursion of Prof. J. 
W. Bailey, the father of our genial associate and botanist W. W. 
Bailey, of Providence. Two other distinguished geologists, Dr. 
Charles T. Jackson in 1837, and C. H. Hitchcock in 1861, made 
official visits. The enthusiastic eulogy of the mountain by Theodore 
Winthrop, scholar and soldier, was published after his death in 
1861 under the title “ Life in the Open Air." Dr. Edward Everett 
Hale with his friend Mr. Channing, made a partial ascent in 1845, 
an account of which was printed in the Boston Daily Advertiser. 
Then came Thoreau, in 1846, and the Rev. Joseph Blake, who, in 
1856 discovered near the summit Saxifraga stellaris, var. comosa. 
And Dr. Goodale's visit, in 1861, was rewarded by the discovery of 
another Katahdin plant, Carex rarz/fora, which, however, in some 
way escaped detection by our party. 
The morning of July 3, 1900, saw two of our delegation safely 
landed at Stacyville, a little country village on the Bangor and Aroos- 
took R. R. We had had several introductory views of Katahdin from 
the car windows, but it was at the end of the little straggling road 
that leads from the station to the Post Office, where we stopped a 
few moments at the brow of the hill, that we first saw the mountain in 
his grandeur. Here truly was a picture for an artist. At our feet 
the hill sloped steeply to the West. On the horizon, twenty miles 
distant, was the great pile stretching along from North to South, 
crowned with its two peaks or summits and easily distinguished al- 
most to the base from the lower ranges of hills that lay between. 
Below us stretching away to the mountain and the western horizon 
was the wilderness, almost unbroken save by the camps and trails of 
the hunters and logging men. This was the broad flat valley of the 
