The Fabyan House, in front of Mount Washington, stands upon the location of the "Giant's Grave," which was an elongated mound of sand and gravel formed by the waves of an ancient lake, reacting from the adjacent mountain slopes, and rising about fifty feet. Being high, long and wide, it was just the place for a house. The tradition is that once a fierce-looking Indian stood upon this mound at night, waving a flaming torch and shouting "No paleface shall take root here; this the Great Spirit whispered in my ear." The successive burnings of hotels on this site would seem to indicate this as prophetic, and in fact no hotel did stand there any length of time until the projectors of the present large building, after the last one was burnt, as if to avoid fate, had the mound making the "Giant's Grave" levelled and obliterated. Here was built the earliest inn of the White Mountains in 1803 by a sawmill owner on the Ammonoosuc River, named Crawford. His grandson, Ethan Allen Crawford, the famous "White Mountain Giant," was the noted guide who made the first path to ascend Mount Washington and built the first house on its summit. Now, the mountain is ascended from this western side by an inclined-plane railway, reached by an ordinary railway extending from Fabyan's five miles across to the base of the mountain. The railway to the summit is about three miles long, with an average gradient of thirteen hundred feet to the mile, the maximum being thirteen and one-half inches in the yard. It is worked by a cog-wheel locomotive acting upon a central cogged rail, and the ascent is accomplished in about ninety minutes. It is an exhilarating ride up the slope, for, as the car is elevated, the horizon of view widens decidedly to the west and northwest, while the trees of the forest get smaller and smaller, and their character changes. The sugar-maples, yellow birches and mossy-trunked beeches, with an occasional aspen or mountain ash, are gradually left behind in the valley, being replaced on the higher slope by white pine and hemlock, white birch, and dark spruces and firs hung with gray moss. These gradually becoming smaller, soon the only trees left are a sort of dwarf fir intertangled with moss. Then, rising above the limit of trees, there is only a stunted arctic vegetation, and this permits a grand and unobstructed view all around the western horizon.