Thread: Barndoor Island
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Old 06-18-2009, 09:41 AM   #8
Rattlesnake Gal
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Talking Barndoor Island Whopper

Excerpt from the politically incorrect with odd grammar, Winnipesaukee Whoppers by Elizabeth Crawford Wilkin, Illustrated by Lloyde Coe:



Big and Little Barn Door Islands lie southeast of Wolfeboro, and the real natives of the town will tell you that they are so-called because when approaching them from a certain angle (just which angle is rather a vague point) one can see - if it's not too dark or too misty, and not too sparklly or too glary - a huge barn door which actually is on the mainland beyond, but appears to hold the two islands together by it's great hinges.

This is undoubtedly perfectly correct, but here is another version which dates back more than a hundred years.

One morning when the oak leaves were about the size of a weasel's ear, an all but-but-naked Injin ran in great haste and excitement down the one street of the village of Smith's Bridge, which is now called Wolfeboro.

From a leather thong tied about his middle clattered pompion shells an and an assortment of gourds, while in one hand he balanced a canoe paddle, and with the other he swung a useful-looking tomahawk.

He was shouting something sort of guttural-like as he galloped down the rough street, but no one paid a great deal of attention to what he was saying. It sounded like "Barn Door" to the few who did hear, but what would an Injin (who wouldn’t have anything to put inside a barn anyhow) want with a barn door? All that the village folk wanted was to get out of his way; they weren’t accustomed to Injins, and certainly not an Injin swinging a tomahawk.



By the time he reached then end of the street every house was closed, and there was only one man in sight.

This man was “Ez” Hopkins, and he was sitting on a stool slivering with a jackknife on an Indian birch splintbroom. He wasn’t as young as he’d one been, nor as thin. The neighbors said of him that “he was fatter’n a settled minister.” He has a beard as big as the broom he was slivering, and he used to say that all he had to do was to stay behind that beard and he was “as safe as in God’s pocket.”

Anyhow he never even looked up when he heard this Injin yelling, so maybe he didn’t know that the stranger had a tomahawk.

The Injin stopped short when he saw Ez and squatted down beside him as though they were old friends, but still went on shouting about his barn door. Finally EX looked down at him, and saw that the Red Man was really in distress, and was trying to tell him something in a language he couldn’t understand, and which he didn’t think was any Injin talk either. He wondered if it might be French. Lots of Injins from the north, he’d heard tell, spoke a smatter’n of French, along with a few English words, mixed up with their own talk.

After a while Ez put aside his birch broom and, puffing from his great weight, led the Injin up the rise which is now Wolfeboro Falls. The day before eZ had seen a half-Yankee half-Frenchie traveling trader with his tin trunk go up that way. He knew that the trader figgered about a half a day to a farmhouse with a meal, and sometimes a bed, thrown in, so he couldn’t be far off. Maybe the Injin was garbling some kind of French that this trader could make out.

They found him with his pins and ribbons and furbelows strewn over the kitchen floor of a farmhouse with all the women in the place gathered around him, but he was a good-natured fellow, and seemed even to welcome the interruption.

He made out with some diffuclty that the Injin was a Mohawk, and was trying to get back to his own people. He had been taken north by the French, and it was while with them that he had learned what French he knew. When he had escaped from them, according to his story, he had been “loaned” a canoe, some food, and a bar of gold to aid him on his long journey south.

He had been many moons on the way, and had been forced to discard a number of canoes, and to “accept the loan” of others owning to the long carries. However he had managed to keep with him his bar of gold and some food until early that morning when, in a sudden squall, the canoe had been sunk between the two islands off Smith’s Bridge.

After swimming ashore the Red Man had run down the village street to warm up, and to try to find someone who would lend him a canoe (as he couldn’t see one around to “lend” to himself). He wanted to get back his Barre d’or (Bar of Gold), but everyone except Monsieur La Barbe had run from him when he tried to tell them about it.

Ez sort of like the idea of being called Monsieur The Bearded One, and so he decided to take the Injin in his rowboat to find this Barre d’or.

That day and every day for months afterward they rowed up and down the channel between the two islands, and the Injin dived time and again at the place he’d marked while EZ rested and puffed. Every day, no matter what the weather, they could be seen from Smith’s Bridge until finally the Injin died of lung fever, and old Ez of exhaustion, but the Barre d’or was never found.

However as long as Yankees live on the shores of Lake Winnipiseogee the two little islands southeast of Wolfeboro will always be known as The Barn Door Islands, and some place in the narrow channel between them, deep down amongst the rocks and sand and waving lake weed, lies a bar of gold big enough to make a poor man rich.

Maybe if you squared up with that barn door and its great hinges on the mainland…with the shores of the two little islands…on just the right day…
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