Cold Case/2

My Nephew, Ryan, was graduating from Amherst, with a degree in history and a passion for prehistoric New England. We had spent a brief time in the Pratt Museum on campus and he had shown me a collection of artifacts found along the Connecticut River, collected over a two hundred mile stretch from New Haven, Connecticut to Maidstone, Vermont.

Ryan described what he called the Path of Life, a spiritual migration of the Abnakis that encompassed what is now the Long Trail, running the crest of the Green Mountains, from Killington to Mt Mansfield to Jay Peak and into Canada. He explained that the return trip went the length of Lake Memphremagog, down the Nulhegan river, and eventually followed the Connecticut River back to the ocean.

It was an interesting story, made moreso by its passing within miles of my home just two miles north of the Clyde River, a certain part of the trail. It was a story that sounded romantic, and belied the tragedy that I would later learn -- the conflict of a spiritual Path of Life going south along the river, and a migration of white families going north along the same route into Vermont.

Although I had read the gravestone of John Stanton, I did not put these stories together. Nor would I for some time come to learn that the fate of my family was intricately tied to the Path of Life and the conflict that erupted between the Hamonassetts and the Europeans.