The first volume of Elizabeth Oakes Smith: Selected Writings (2023) considers Oakes Smith’s emergence as a public figure and her rise to fame, first in New York, and soon as a name widely recognized in the national media. The volume ends, however, with a countertext—Oakes Smith’s narrative account of her journey back to the middle of Maine, where she and her childhood friend Nancy Mosman became the first two white women to summit Mt. Katahdin. The trip for Oakes Smith was not only a break from the demands of editors and publishers cashing in on her name—it also seems to mark Oakes Smith’s decision to concentrate her energies on something more fulfilling and significant, though her correspondence admits she did not know just what that would entail.
It’s very important to remember that Oakes Smith was not the only woman on this excursion. Who, finally, was Oakes Smith’s woman partner on the journey, Nancy Crockett Mosman? In two fairly recent essays, “The Mount Katahdin Peaks: the First Twelve Women Climbers, 1849-1855 (2016) and The First Women on Katahdin: Was It a Race or Merely an Exciting Phase? (2018) William Geller documents the stories of Oakes Smith, Mosman, and ten other women who made the climb up Maine’s highest peak. In both essays, he mentions how little we know about most of these women (some seem to be treated by men like Keep as exotic baggage to carry), but he does supply more information about Mosman than anyone has to date:
Since 1989 Mosman’s name has appeared in two articles, with no other information about her. Nancy Crockett Mosman, born in 1822 and 16 years younger than Elizabeth Oakes Smith, grew up in Portland, Maine. In 1842 she married David Mosman, a successful Bangor hardware merchant, and they resided in Bangor. They raised two children, Mary and Fitz Howard, both born in Bangor before the ascent. Nancy was a supporter of and a contributor to the Female Medical Education Society and the New England Female Medical College in 1853. How Mosman and Smith knew each other remains unknown, but they both lived in Portland until 1838, and their families may have attended the same church. (Geller, 2018, 1)
We need to pursue Geller’s questions if we can, and already I think he’s concluded correctly that Mosman’s future as a female physician allows us to make some better sense of her relationship to Oakes Smith beyond their mutual origin in Portland. Higher education and the medical profession were goals of some of the most radical women of the day, and her pursuit of these may indicate the journey was in fact as much a political statement as it was a vacation of sorts.
But it’s quite a different thing to postulate abstractly about this journey than it is to put oneself in these women’s shoes and see what it actually entailed. Stan Tag is the only writer about this moment (that I know of) who has summited Katahdin via the Keep Path, but unfortunately, though he mentions the Oakes Smith/Mosman excursion, he focuses (like Geller) more on their writing of a (pretty sassy) note to Marcus Keep, original blazer of that trail, than he does on the physical experience. (see his “Forest Life and Forest Trees: Thoreau and John S. Springer in the Maine Woods”)
Cuz women were writers, right?
Maybe. In this instance, maybe not. True, Oakes Smith wrote about this experience, it seems, automatically; she turned everything she could into fodder for what would support herself and her family. But this was also her trip moving away from writing—at least of the kind she’d been doing, and maybe, in her mind—away from writing at all. Perhaps she envied her young friend Nancy, and the way her work had more tangible and immediate results than the cash one could make from writing.
* * *
When I traveled to Katahdin this past summer (2022), I had been to the mountain several times already, and I had traced Oakes Smith’s path with veteran guide Susan Adams from Hunt’s Farm, (more or less where any road into the region ends) through the woods, to Katahdin Lake. On another day, we traipsed the three easy miles from the lake to Avalanche Brook, where Keep decided it would be easier for those making the summit to get into the water, where they wouldn’t have to struggle through thick underbrush. I left the rest of the journey—those three more miles up the rocky stream, to the scree scramble up the Avalanche that tore off the side of the mountain in the 1820s, to Pamola peak—yeah, I left all that for another time. Sure, there had been a lot of misquitoes (how folks without DEET survived them I don’t know), but the hiking I’d done to that point?—well it was walking.
That is, what I had done so far wasn’t much of an adventure. In fact it was as close to an adventure “in the abstract” as it could be—something women of the nineteenth century might write about, as if it were more, I had to think. While Oakes Smith’s detailed narrative invited her readers to make comparisons to classical antiquity or mythology, our concerns were historical and theoretical (what if the path was through here and not there? Were these the kinds of ferns Oakes Smith describes in her narrative? Oh look! Pitcher plants—just like she wrote about!). To this point (and in following EOS to this point in her account), I been working on ideas, which means I had no idea what these women had done.
On this trip in 2022, I would find out what it was like to do.
In order to follow the old Keep Path completely off the established trails, I needed more permissions than ever, and it was required by the park that I take with me not one but two guides (one to stay with a person who had been injured, and the other to go for help). Fittingly, mine were two women, Jesika Lucarelli and Tallie Martin, from Great Mountain Guide Service, both closer to Mosman’s age in 1849 than Oakes Smith’s. They informed me that we needed to mark our trail with neon plastic ties in ways that ensured we would know our way out again. They forced me to carry more food than this non-climber can imagine for a day-long hike (and we ate pretty much all of it). The weather had been sweltering until the day appointed for our hike up the Brook, but that morning (as if a historical switch had been thrown) the rain came down steadily, with a temperature ranging in the high fifties—making our weather much more like that in which Oakes Smith and Mosman had made this journey. Like them, we were glad the rain drove away the mosquitoes.
Packing a Go Pro, my smartphone and some changes of socks and extra layers in my backpack, along with a couple thousand calories of food, I waded into the cold stream, now on the rise, and plunged ahead. In less than five minutes we were all soaked through, wherever we weren’t covered in gortex of some kind, and those areas wouldn’t be dry for long. For some hours, adrenaline kept us going at a steady pace, picking our way over boulders in the stream at times, losing our footing on slippery stones and plunging up to the hip in deeper pools, and scrambling on the bank whenever a moose trail had cleared some of the thick foliage. Tallie carried a Garmin to determine our position on a crude map of the terrain, but when the stream began to divide into forks in the direction of the mountain, it was difficult, without having done the hike previously, to know the right fork to pursue. Somewhere, Stan Tag was shaking his head.
Of course, this was our undoing. Having traveled what we believed to be the right distance before heading north to the avalanche, we took one of the stream’s forks and began to climb. By this time, every pause for water or food brought on a chill, so we kept moving, and for a while it seemed we would soon find the opening made by the avalanche. But the stream we were following began turning in what was clearly the wrong direction finally disappearing into completely impassable underbrush. When we could push no farther into the thicket, Tallie’s Garmin placed us only a few hundred yards from an established trail well short of Avalanche Field. Dispirited, wet through, and now concerned with signs of any onset of hypothermia, we turned around for a three hour descent downstream.
The only comfort, I suppose, was knowing Thoreau didn’t make it either.
We can read about Elizabeth Oakes Smith and Nancy Mosman and the other women (and men) who, without any of our sartorial or directional technology, managed to reach Katahdin’s summit the way Marcus Keep had designed. But I would argue that we can’t know that much about these predecessors until we make the experiment ourselves. Even allowing that the men on their trip did the carrying, the women who climbed Katahdin in the early years possessed a physical endurance and determination our reading and writing can hardly suggest. If we don’t see much in the historical record to let us know who Nancy Mosman was, this was a way to get to know her—and Oakes Smith—just a bit better.
On my way back to Chicago, I stopped in Bangor to see if the local historical society knew of Mosman, whose husband, as Geller tells us, ran a hardware and dry goods store at the time. No luck, though curator Michael Bishop did let me know about the first licensed outdoor guide in the State of Maine, Flyrod Crosby. At the public library, Betsy Paradise helped me find a directory that verified Mosman’s residence there in the year 1849, and reminded me (with Geller) that Mosman was buried in Reading, Massachusetts. Later, searching her family on Ancestry.com, my graduate assistant Sylwia Jurkowski located some of her living descendants in Houston, Texas, and I left a note for them on that site, knowing many users do not visit often. Tracking down their address in Houston, I put my MS from the chapter from The Selected Writings on the Katahdin climb in the mail and hoped I might get some response.
Months later, I received a return message on Ancestry.com. The family had received my envelope, but I’d used soluable ink on my return address, so they could only respond this way. Miraculously, in fact they did have an image of their great great great (great?) grandmother Nancy, and one of her father, Nathaniel Crockett, both oil paintings executed around the time of the women’s adventure or a bit afterwards. Finally, my contact, Karen Dean, extracted the paintings from a storage facility and sent me a quick image from her smartphone.
Only having attempted to match her feat in 1849 do i feel I can read the smile on her face.
Section of an oil painting of Nancy Mosman
(as yet unidentified artist)
courtesy of the Dean Family