Mount Chocorua

Mount Chocorua is named for a Native chief who, if he existed, cursed white settlers from the summit in 1720. Cattle in the valley died for decades after.

Chocorua raised his arms to the sky and shouted a curse. 'May the Great Spirit curse ye when he speaks in the clouds, and his words are fire. Lightning blast your crops. Wind and fire destroy your dwellings. The Evil Spirit breathe death upon your cattle.' Then, wounded by Cornelius Campbell's rifle, he leapt from the summit of the mountain that now bears his name.

That is the version Lydia Maria Child published in 1829, and it is the version almost every hiker in the Whites can half-remember. The trouble is, historians are not convinced any of it happened.

The legend places the event around 1720, when Chocorua was said to be on friendly terms with the Campbell family of Tamworth. He left his young son with them and came back to find the boy dead. The child had swallowed poison that Mr. Campbell mixed to kill foxes. Chocorua pledged revenge. Shortly afterward, Campbell returned from the fields to find his wife and children slain. He tracked Chocorua up the mountain, shot him on the cliff, and heard the curse before the chief went over the edge.

Anthropologist Mary Ellen Lepionka went looking for the real Chocorua and couldn't find him. 'His name is not recorded either in Abenaki oral tradition or early colonial primary sources,' she wrote. She calls him a likely 'composite persona' invented by settlers. Historian Lawrence Shaw Mayo agrees, arguing the story is 'more likely a product of colonial fiction than Abenaki history,' particularly after Child 'embroidered it to her heart's content.'

Lepionka also points out that the suicide leap doesn't track culturally. Suicide wasn't the Algonquian way. An Abenaki warrior cornered on a summit would have died fighting. Her best guess is that the kernel of truth involves an unnamed Abenaki man killed by colonial bounty hunters near Chocorua Lake, and the rest is 19th-century embroidery built around a name the mountain already had.

So why does the curse stick? Part of the answer sits in the valley below. In the decades after Chocorua's supposed death, settlers in Burton, now called Albany, kept losing cattle to a mysterious wasting illness known as the Burton Ail. Livestock sickened and died for no reason anyone could pin down. The timing was perfect. The curse had named cattle specifically, and here was the land making good on it.

Modern readers can call that a mineral deficiency in the soil or lime-poor water. The settlers called it the Chocorua curse, and it gave the legend the one thing pure fiction couldn't: a body count you could go out and count.

Today the peak is one of the most photographed mountains in New England. Hikers climb it in summer for the bald granite summit and the 360-degree view of the Sandwich Range. On clear days it looks harmless. On foggy ones, with the wind funneling through the notches and the clouds pressing down on the open rock, the curse feels less like folklore and more like something you'd rather not test.

The historical marker at the base tells the Child version without flagging it as fiction. The Chocorua Lake Conservancy tells a more careful version, crediting Child and noting the doubts. Both agree on the basic shape: a father, a dead son, a mountain, and a curse that settlers absolutely believed was working on them.

Whether Chocorua was a real man, a composite, or a name a novelist pulled out of the air, the cattle in Albany kept dying.