Mount Grey Lock and Herrmann Melville

After growing bored of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the American literati of the industrial period of the 19th Century shifted their focus upon Mount Grey Lock in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts.  The Transcendentalists, Romantics, and Neo-Gothic writers like Emerson, Hathorne, and Herrmann Melville.  Melville wrote his great prose work, Moby Dick, at Arrowhead House on Holmes Avenue in Pittsfield in full view of Grey Lock and now the enormous industrial cathedral of the GE Plastics Plant.  These writers found peace in the shadow of the mountain knowing nothing of the violence of its namesake.

In August of 1723, a refugee from the Woronoke tribe, Grey Lock launched a series of stunning raids into the heart of European settlements from Abenaki villages in the Mississquoi and Otter Creek deltas.  Over the next four years, Grey Lock took hundreds of war captives and shed a tremendous amount of blood in New England, despite the efforts of the English and the Iroquois to find and kill him. He was never defeated on the field of battle and lived out his days shrouded in mystery to become one of the greatest legends in American Indian history.  As a result of the havoc and fear that Grey Lock created the scalp bounty rose to 100 pounds.  Grey Lock killed a lot of white people and with any luck would have taken out Herrmann Melville.

You may ask why do I hate Melville so much and why do I insist on misspelling his first name?  He knows why.  Herrmann Melville has always stood in my way.  Since 11th grade English when I scored zeros on Moby Dick quizzes and later having to read his entire published works for doctoral comphrensive exams, it has been a personal vendetta.  He is my white whale.