Ethan Allen Crawford

Spaulding recounts some “relics” of a White Mountains hero:

Ethan Allen Crawford

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SOURCE: Spaulding (1855) p.18-19

This “stand firm” concept comes from a rhetorical passage Spaulding uses to build up his character of the “Giant Mountaineer:”

Yet he cheerfully performed the duties of life with an iron resolution, that stood misfortune’s shocks as firmly as his own mountains stand storms and the changes of time. (p.19)

This is an excellent example of brevity & simplification in a secondary source.  We get a more complete & intimate view of the Crawfords’ family life through accounts like that of Ethan’s sister, Lucy Crawford (1845).  Indeed, Spaulding was probably drawing from (& reducing & romantically embellishing) Lucy’s stories to weave his own heroic tapestry… Consider especially the precise eye-witness details recounted by Lucy Crawford (p.34), writing in Ethan’s voice of the house fire:

Beds all on fire — cheeses all around — hogs in the midst of them — all hurly burly; while the female party had much to do to keep safe what they had taken from the house… the bed on which Lucy lay caught fire three times, which she extinguished by smothering it with her hands. … (p.36)