Kinneo—Women on Mountains and Authorship (Rachael DeWitt)

In 1845 Elizabeth Oakes Smith journeyed to Maine’s Moosehead Lake and Mount Kinneo. We don’t know the details of the voyage, but we do know she continued to reflect on the experience in later years. We get some snippets of the journey in her 1851 piece in Godey’s Lady’s Book, “Kinneo: the Legend of Moosehead Lake”. What the piece lacks in detail, it more than makes up for in meta-commentary about her status as a woman writer in a man’s world.

The commentary below is excerpted from a presentation I gave at ALA 2025 that teases out the different modes of authorship that Oakes Smith juggles in the preface to her Kinneo tale.

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 The cheeky and winding preface touches on different visions of female authorship and includes a six-stanza verse poem about the beauty of the lake. In this autobiographical preface, She situates herself as three different kinds of writers—the poet of the poem “to Moosehead Lake” that appears halfway through the opening paragraphs, the collaborative author of a cairn at the top of Kinneo, and the writer of the ensuing tale. And she keeps femininity front and center as she rearranges its conditions in striking ways across these instances of authorship.

First she brags and then apologizes: “We visited the top of Kinneo, the first white women (Heaven save the mark) that ever touched the summit. Reader, your pardon; we have a mind to tell a fact in connection with this journey.” Then she tries to win over her reader by making the female author more desirable after so bold an entry: “Women who write now are not a few slatternly, odd, withered-looking bugbears; they make a little array of nice, dashing, elegant feminines, who are capable of anything that arrests their attention; from the darning of a pair of hose to the writing of an ode, the tending of the baby, compounding of a pudding, writing an epic, or breaking a heart, each and all they do with perfect facility, address, and comfort, both to themselves and others.” Note how the writing of ode and epic are soothing reproductive labors alongside darning and childrearing, rather than something done in a bid for fame. She seems to be explicitly curtailing her own authority.

She goes on, though, to couch her own moves within a community of women writers who are in fact strategic in how they write for a given audience: “Each lady writer understands the power of her sister author, and so far from disparaging her or it, and being eaten up with envy, as the uninitiated suppose, she is joyous and appreciating, and foresees great good to her kind from the accumulating power of womanhood; but she does see that the chances for her own selfish individual distinction are lessened by the numbers in the field.” This woman writer appears torn, but rather than settling the matter, the beauty of the landscape intervenes. She breaks into a poetic voice that here again seems merely to channel the authority of the lake: “in her primal loveliness, wild, heroic, and most beautiful; queen-like did she sit amid the hills, unsung and unvisited, and then we ventured a stop to her praise.”

But the poem is just the one of several kinds of texts this woman mountaineer generates in response to the place. With little indication she shifts from poem to cairn, which she co-authors with her women hiking companions. And though the rocky material makes the cairn an unconventional inscription, and the collaborative authorship would seem to further attenuate her authority, here she evinces only boldness:  tricking the “stout lumberman” who adds to the cairn as their unknowing reader and follower. She claims this creation with full authority: “The monument was raised in honor of ourself. We are willing to leave to others the marble monument and noisy plaudit, while our cairn is built upon Kinneo.”

What began with the idealization of the humble, virtuous female writer, builds into a celebration of the bombastic credit-claiming woman author. She effectively thematizes the problem of women authorship and moves confidently around it as she paints her journey through the wilderness.