Lake Umbagog.
1907
August 8
  On reaching the Back Street place we found Mr. West
lying in bed in one of the lower rooms were he has been kept
a close prisoner for several weeks by a broken leg. Yet he
was very cheerful and evidently glad to see me. I cannot
remember ever meeting him before although he has spent his
entire life in Upton where he was born on East B Hill, in 1832.
Hence he is now eighty-five years of age yet his light brown
hair and beard are only slightly stroked with grey. He is
of medium size and rather sparely built but large-boned
and sinewy. An intelligent man, blessed with an excellent and
as yet unimpaired memory, he was not less able than willing
to tell me many things that I wanted to know for his
interests have been broader and his powers of observations keener,
than those of his wife, however superior she may be to him in
practical efficiency. Although a farmer rather than a hunter
he has used the gun and the steel trap since boyhood and
hence is not unfamiliar with the northern forests and their
animal life: In his youth Umbagog was much less
extensive in summer than it is at present. It was then
bordered in many places by natural meadows where the
farmers cut large quantities of coarse hay which they took
off with horses and wagons, for the ground was quite dry
and firm except in early spring, when it was flooded for
a few weeks. The forest trees growing at high water mark
and for some distance back of this, wherever the land was
low and flat, were chiefly white pines. They fringed the
banks of the Cambridge, the Androscoggin and the Megalloway
Rivers and sometimes occurred on high ground remote from
water but not very generally or numerously. Most of those
near the water were cut and rafted off by the lumbermen
between 1840 and 1850 - very little clear white pine
Jonathan P. West