On Kingdom Mountain

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “Because I’m a showman,” Henry replied despite himself.

  No, said the granddaddy. You wear white because I did. Deny it if you can.

  “If you are who you say you are, tell me where you hid the treasure,” Henry said.

  To this the granddaddy’s voice said nothing.

  “I declare, Mr. Satterfield,” Miss Jane said from the porch. “You remind me of myself, standing out there talking to yourself a mile a minute. Whom are you conversing with?”

  “No one, Miss Jane,” Henry said. “Absolutely no one. What may I do to help you get ready for your big day in court? Are you really planning to represent yourself again?”

  “Come up out of the sun,” Miss Jane said. “I’ll tell you just exactly what I’m planning.”

  For the next forty-five minutes Miss Jane spoke to Henry nonstop, laying out her case point by point, exactly the way she would present it to the Vermont Supreme Court. When at last she finished, he thought for a time. Then he said, “Miss Jane, I wish to tell you something.”

  “Yes, Henry? Do you think my argument has holes in it? Don’t be afraid to speak up.”

  Although Henry was not at all sure that Miss Jane would be allowed to present her own case, or any part of it, he did not think her argument had holes in it, and had he thought so, he certainly knew better than to say so.

  “It has occurred to me that one day, many, many years from now, after you and, I venture to hope, I as well have ascended to the celestial canopy, Saint Peter may ask you to spell him at the gate from time to time. Regardless of what happens with the Supreme Court, that is how highly I regard you and your judgment.”

  “Why, thank you, Henry. But whom do you think I would admit to the celestial canopy?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Nay, nay, Mr. Satterfield. Surely not everyone.”

  “Yes, Miss Jane, surely everyone. Every applicant during your watch would receive the most severe and horrible tongue-lashing of their lives, so to speak. After which you would throw open the gates of heaven and, with open arms, welcome every last wretch to the canopy. It is the highest compliment I know to give and it came to me just now as you were telling me your plan.”

  “Well, it is a fine, original compliment, and I much appreciate it, and I agree with half of it, at least. That, of course, is the tongue-lashing part. I hope the second part would be true as well. But lord, Mr. S., can you imagine spending an eternity with Eben Kinneson Esquire and the town fathers? Not to mention such luminaries as Sneaking Saul and King James’s Jehovah?”

  “Not really, but when you stop to think of it, it might be more pleasant than the alternative.”

  “Well, that’s so, too,” Jane said. “When all’s said, however, I must say that I seem to get on better with my life when I dwell less on how I’m going to spend eternity and more on how I’m going to spend today. Come. Let’s go write that in the Kingdom Mountain Bible.”

  34

  “THE SUPREME COURT of the great Republic of Vermont, claiming statehood but not relinquishing independence as a Republic in the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and eighty-six, is now, on this eighteenth day of August in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and thirty, officially in session. Please rise.”

  Into the Vermont Supreme Court in Montpelier filed the five black-clad justices. Often in her girlhood Miss Jane had sat in this musty-smelling gallery, watching as her father, Chief Justice Morgan Kinneson, presided. Jane herself had briefly considered pursuing a legal career. Now, looking around the courtroom, she was glad that she had not and that, whatever the future might hold, she had devoted her life to teaching, carving her birds and dear people, and lending and even occasionally selling books to the people of kingdom County.

  The justices took their seats behind the dark, polished bench at the front of the courtroom. One by one their faces began to register reactions ranging from curiosity and surprise to consternation. As they looked out from their hallowed bailiwick, they saw, sitting or standing next to the dark-complected gentleman in the white suit and the attractive, light-haired woman in black, a row of figures with long, narrow heads and painted features, dressed in a variety of antiquated styles, all looking straight back at them with the same grave, wide-set gray eyes as the light-haired woman’s. A young man wearing a blue uniform held a two-headed snake staff in his hand. Beside him stood a boy dressed in homespun and carrying a rifle. One figure wore a great wooden ox yoke around his neck. A tall man with a wild halo of white hair held the hand of a black child, herself holding the hand of a black woman escorted by a black man. Next to them was a man dressed as plainly as a Quaker, carrying a woven basket containing an infant with a shock of coal black hair and black eyes.

  Otherwise the courtroom was a rather nondescript place, much smaller than Judge Allen’s in Kingdom Common, with no pictures on the walls and seating for no more than fifty spectators. At the plaintiff’s table sat Forrest Allen, just out of Yale Law School, wearing a broad, light-gray necktie and a dark gray double-breasted suit, waiting eagerly and perhaps with some apprehension, to make his first appearance before his home state’s highest court. Across the aisle at the defendant’s table sat Eben Kinneson Esquire. In the first row behind him were the town fathers of Kingdom Common, shooting glances at Miss Jane and her dear people. How had she gotten her wooden menagerie into the building, much less the courtroom? Four of the justices wondered the same thing. The court clerk looked significantly toward Chief Justice Hamilton Dewey, now a white-haired magistrate but once, as Miss Jane well remembered, her father’s law clerk. It was Justice Dewey who, earlier that morning, had instructed the clerk to allow Miss Jane’s people, whom she had transported to the state capital in the back of her Ford truck, to accompany her into the courtroom. If the daughter of his old mentor, Chief Justice Morgan Kinneson, wished to bring her wooden creations from the Kingdom to court with her, that was fine with him. This might be the state capital, but it was still Vermont, and Justice Dewey, at least, was determined not to forget it.

  The chief justice nodded at the clerk, who announced in a grave and sonorous voice, “To the Vermont Supreme Court come Jane Hubbell Kinneson and the selectmen of the township of Kingdom Common in the case of Jane Kinneson versus Kingdom Common. This case came on to be heard on the fourteenth of May in the Shiretown Court of Kingdom Common, in which the court chancellor did order and decree that the town highway known as the Connector stop on the south side of the Upper East Branch of the Kingdom River and not be continued across said river onto the property of Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson. The defendant in this case, the township of Kingdom Common, has filed a demurrer averring that the ruling of the chancellor is contrary to evidence, not supported by evidence, and contrary to law. Now comes counsel for the plaintiff, Mr. Forrest Allen, Esquire, duly admitted to, and in good standing with, the Vermont Bar, to present the case of the plaintiff, Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson.”

  Forrest Allen started to stand but, cutting him off, Jane herself stepped briskly to the podium in front of the bench, cardboard file folder in hand. “Good morning, gentlemen,” she said. “I am Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson of Kingdom Mountain.”

  “Where is your counsel, Miss Kinneson?” the chief justice inquired. “Is the gentleman at the plaintiff’s table your counsel?”

  “I’m my own counsel.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Kinneson. Only attorneys licensed by the Vermont Bar Association may argue cases in front of the Vermont Supreme Court.”

  “Vermont Supreme Court Decisions, volume XVII, 1892 to 1893, pages 824 to 912, page 825, Kittredge versus the Grand Trunk Railroad. I cite: ‘It is hereby ordered and decreed that any free-born Vermonter may argue his own case in any Vermont court.’ Mr. Kittredge argued his own case against the railroad, which was trying to appropriate part of his farm, and won. The decision was unanimous, and the court’s opinion was written by my father, Chief Justice Morgan Kinneson.”

  “Hasn’t that precedent been superseded by the ru
ling in the 1901 case of Vermont Electric, Inc., versus Rufus Hodgdon, who was not allowed to represent himself before the Supreme Court because he had not passed the bar examination?” another justice said.

  “It most certainly has not been so superseded,” Miss Jane said. “The Vermont Electric versus Rufus Hodgdon case, found in volume XXXVI of the Vermont Supreme Court Decisions, states on page 418, ‘Cases before the Supreme Court must be argued by licensed attorneys who have passed the Vermont Bar Exam and been duly admitted to the Vermont Bar, with the exception of land-claim cases brought by Memphremagog Abenaki property owners against town, state, or federal government, the presumption being that native landowners know their land best and can, therefore, speak best on behalf of that land’ Also authored by Chief Justice Morgan Kinneson. My father felt, gentlemen, and very rightly so, that no one but a Memphremagog could speak for the Memphremagogs. My mother was a full Memphremagog Abenaki. I’d like you to meet her.” Jane gestured at the carving of the infant Pharaoh’s Daughter, wrapped in the red Hudson’s Bay blanket, in the sweetgrass basket.

  In the meantime the clerk had checked the pertinent volume in the Supreme Court Decisions and confirmed Miss Jane’s statement. Chief Justice Dewey said, “Let’s get this show on the road and move ahead with the arguments. I’m satisfied that there’s good precedent for Miss Jane Kinneson, whose Memphremagog mother I remember very well, to speak on behalf of her own land.”

  Forrest Allen, shaking his head, started to rise.

  “Sit down, young man,” Jane told him. To the justices she said, “I am here as the last Memphremagog to dwell on Kingdom Mountain. Unfortunately, mountains are inclined to be silent. If it could, however, Kingdom Mountain would tell many powerful stories. It would tell how it was formed long before our puny Green Mountains. How, a mere ten thousand years ago, the great ice sheet deposited on its summit a massive glacial boulder inscribed with wondrous carvings. And how, for many millennia, it was the home of caribou, wolves, panthers, and a unique, now endangered species of fish known as the blue-backed char.”

  Chief Justice Hamilton Dewey leaned forward. “Taxonomically speaking, Miss Kinneson, is the blue-backed char officially designated as a separate species?”

  “She is.” Jane consulted her notes. “I cite Professor Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born naturalist, who in 1860 and again in 1861 journeyed to Vermont with his student, my uncle Pilgrim”—gesturing toward the young man with the snake staff—“to view the rare Arctic plants and glacial phenomena on Kingdom Mountain. In his monograph entitled Glaciation of Kingdom Mountain, besides identifying four new species of Arctic saxifrages and a pink and blue windflower previously unknown to science, Professor Agassiz wrote, ‘In the three tarns on the north side of the mountain, and in the upper reaches of the East Branch of the Kingdom River, there dwells a bluish fish of the Salmo genus, a species I have named borealis fontinalis Kinnesonian, found elsewhere only in a lake on Baffin Island.’ The Vermont Fish and Game Department lists the blue-backed brook trout as endangered. Benson’s authoritative North American Fresh Water Ichthyology classifies ‘the blue trout of a few cold-water ponds and brooks in remote northern Vermont and southern Quebec’ as a separate species.”

  The justices were taking notes. Henry Satterfield was beginning to feel excited. Whatever self-doubts she might have had when conversing with him or alone in On Kingdom Mountain with her dear people, Miss Jane’s public presence was magisterial.

  Chief Justice Dewey said, “Miss Kinneson, wouldn’t the Connector bring jobs and industry to rural northern Vermont?”

  “Certain local businessmen hope to purchase the mountain and turn it into a winter spa so that idle folks can slide down hill by day and roister by night. When it comes to roistering, people can always be counted on to be very industrious, you know.”

  “Miss Kinneson,” a younger justice said, “do you own all of Kingdom Mountain?”

  “Every square foot. In trust for the Memphremagog branch of the Abenaki nation.”

  “I don’t believe that the Memphremagogs or, for that matter, the Abenaki nation, have ever been officially granted tribal status by the state of Vermont.”

  “The Memphremagog nation is nearly extinct. In 1856 thirty-six men of the tribe fell to their deaths in the Saint Lawrence River while constructing the Victoria Bridge. I am their last descendant. If you doubt it, ask Memphre Magog.” Miss Jane gestured at her two-headed wooden sculpture of the Creator of Kingdom Mountain, standing erect and tall, drawn up to his full seven feet, and regarding the justices sternly with both his heads.

  “I understand that the international border, as designated by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, actually runs through your home, Miss Kinneson.”

  “The international border is an arbitrary line on a map, nothing more. But Kingdom Mountain, which is silent, or it would inform you of this fact itself, officially belongs to neither the U.S. nor Canada.” From her cardboard folder Miss Jane withdrew an ancient handwritten document. “Your Honors, behold. The first Webster-Ashburton Treaty, drafted by Daniel Webster and Lord Ashburton as a letter to my great-grandfather, Freethinker Kinneson. He’s the gentleman to my left who looks like John Brown. ‘As for the massive wild peak along the border known as Kingdom Mountain, lying between Vermont and Quebec, bisected by the 45th Parallel, and stretching from Lake Memphremagog on the west to the headwaters of the Upper East Branch of the Kingdom River in Pond Number Three of the Chain of Ponds on the east, and from the Grand Bayou du Nord or Great Northern Slang on the north to the Lower East Branch of the Kingdom River on the south, comprising approximately one hundred and fifty square miles of forests, lakes, and streams, this territory shall belong to neither the United States nor Great Britain but rather to Freethinker Kinneson and his heirs, to be held in trust for the Memphremagog branch of the Abenaki Nation, for as long as the summer sky over the mountain is blue, its waters flow north to the Saint Lawrence, and the grass on its slopes turns green in the spring.’”

  “Miss Kinneson, does this interesting provision appear in the ratified Webster-Ashburton Treaty?”

  “It does not. It was struck out by politicos in Washington and London at the last minute. But this document predates the final treaty by eight months and was signed by both Daniel Webster and Lord Ashburton.”

  “Where is its legal validity if it wasn’t incorporated into the final treaty?”

  “It was intended to be in the final treaty or it would have been invalidated in that treaty. Frankly, Kingdom Mountain was so remote and forbidding that originally neither the United States nor Great Britain wanted it. Now that it has some potential value, the town of Kingdom Common wishes to steal it from me.”

  “Miss Kinneson, can people—the public—visit your mountain and see these natural wonders you’ve told us about? Isn’t it all private land?”

  “Private, certainly. But open to anyone who wishes to fish, hunt, hike, look for birds. Not a square foot of kingdom Mountain is posted.”

  “Are you yourself an American or a Canadian citizen?”

  “Neither. I’m the last member of the Memphremagog tribe and the last of the Kingdom Mountain Kinnesons, speaking on behalf of the rights of kingdom Mountain.”

  “How can a mountain have rights? Does the United States Constitution stipulate such rights?”

  Once again Miss Jane dived into her cardboard case. “I now read from the Constitution of the Memphremagog Tribe of the Abenaki Nation, dictated by Chief Joseph Hubert, my Indian great-great-grandfather—whose name was subsequently anglicized to Hubbell—to my Kinneson great-great-grandfather, Seth.” Miss Jane gestured at the figure in the ox yoke. “’The domain of the Memphremagog, including the lake and mountain of that name, belong to Memphre Magog, our Creator, and to his Memphremagog children, in perpetuity.’ Since the domain in question belongs to another nation, not Canada or the U.S., neither the U.S. nor Canada can exercise eminent domain. Kingdom Mountain is an eminent domain. It belongs to itself. If it were not oblig
ed to keep its own counsel and remain silent, it would readily enough say so.”

  “This is all intriguing. But could you please clarify, Miss Kinneson, what the legal issue is here? Are you arguing that the town can’t exercise eminent domain on your mountain because of your ancestors’ aboriginal rights?”

  “Take care, sir, whom you call an aborigine. This case has nothing to do with aborigines, though in 1759 Robert Rogers and his so-called Rangers hunted down many of my ancestors and slaughtered them, even as the poor aborigines on the far side of the world were hunted down and slaughtered. I am arguing that the state has no right to appropriate property outside its own boundaries. Eminent domain, a term I have never much cared for, is, of course, the so-called right of a government to appropriate private property for public use, just compensation being given to the owner. But there can be no just compensation for destroying the last original wilderness in Vermont. And how, pray, do you compensate someone for taking away her history and traditions? How do you propose to compensate me for taking away and defiling the place that binds me to my family?”

  “I assume, Miss Kinneson, that you pay taxes to the state of Vermont? And to the federal government as well? And property taxes to the township of Kingdom Common?”

  “I pay taxes to no one. Kingdom Mountain is an unincorporated township. No Kinneson has ever paid a penny of taxes to any governmental entity—town, state, or federal. Seth Kinneson saw to that.”

  “Miss Kinneson, how do you propose that people travel by road from Kingdom County to Canada without the Connector?”

  “That’s not my lookout. They may go in a handbasket for all care.”

  Two or three of the justices smiled.

  “Doesn’t your mountain lie directly in the way?”

  “Let travelers go the long way round then. In the Kingdom people have always gone the long way round to get nearly anywhere. Look you, my friends. Do you see this young gentleman? This is Morgan Kinneson, my father, as a boy of seventeen, setting out to go south to find his brother, Pilgrim, missing in action in the Civil War. Morgan had no paved high road to follow. He went the long way round. So too did this worthy, Venturing Seth, who helped his ox pull the sled carrying his family through trackless wilderness to settle the mountain. This gentleman in gray is one of the Confederate raiders who carried away a fortune in gold from the bank in Kingdom Common. To return back to the South, he first traveled north. Here is Canada Jane Hubbell, my Memphremagog mother’s mother, a basket maker who traveled from the Saint Lawrence to the Atlantic and back each summer. She needed no high road to complete her annual migration. Let Kingdom Mountain remain as these good people all knew it. Let it remain itself, as Judge Ira Allen of Kingdom County has determined it should.”