Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land E-Book

Charles M. Skinner

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 783

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

It is unthinkingly said and often, that America is not old enough to have developed a legendary era, for such an era grows backward as a nation grows forward. No little of the charm of European travel is ascribed to the glamour that history and fable have flung around old churches, castles, and the favored haunts of tourists, and the Rhine and Hudson are frequently compared, to the prejudice of the latter, not because its scenery lacks in loveliness or grandeur, but that its beauty has not been humanized by love of chivalry or faerie, as that of the older stream has been. Yet the record of our country's progress is of deep import, and as time goes on the figures seen against the morning twilight of our history will rise to more commanding stature, and the mists of legend will invest them with a softness or glory that shall make reverence for them spontaneous and deep. Washington hurling the stone across the Potomac may live as the Siegfried of some Western saga, and Franklin invoking the lightnings may be the Loki of our mythology. The bibliography of American legends is slight, and these tales have been gathered from sources the most diverse: records, histories, newspapers, magazines, oral narrative-in every case reconstructed. The pursuit of them has been so long that a claim may be set forth for some measure of completeness. This edition contains several hundred myths and legends from all parts of the country. Excerpt from Contents: Rip Van Winkle Catskill Gnomes The Catskill Witch The Revenge Of Shandaken Condemned To The Noose Big Indian The Baker's Dozen The Devil's Dance-Chamber.

Leseprobe

Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land

Charles M. Skinner

Contents:

Preface

An Introduction To American Mythology

The Hudson And Its Hills

Rip Van Winkle

Catskill Gnomes

The Catskill Witch

The Revenge Of Shandaken

Condemned To The Noose

Big Indian

The Baker's Dozen

The Devil's Dance-Chamber.

The Culprit Fay

Pokepsie

Dunderberg

Anthony's Nose

Moodua Creek

A Trapper's Ghastly Vengeance

The Vanderdecken Of Tappan Zee

The Galloping Hessian

Storm Ship Of The Hudson

Why Spuyten Duyvil Is So Named

The Ramapo Salamander

Chief Croton

The Retreat From Mahopac

Niagara

The Deformed Of Zoar

Horseheads

Kayuta And Waneta

The Drop Star

The Prophet Of Palmyra

A Villain's Cremation

The Monster Mosquitoe

The Green Picture

The Nuns Of Carthage

The Skull In The Wall

The Haunted Mill

Old Indian Face

The Division Of The Saranacs

An Event In Indian Park

The Indian Plume

Birth Of The Water-Lily

Rogers's Slide

The Falls At Cohoes

Francis Woolcott's Night-Riders

Polly's Lover

Crosby, The Patriot Spy

The Lost Grave Of Paine

The Rising Of Gouverneur Morris

The Isle Of Manhattoes And Nearby

Dolph Heyliger

The Knell At The Wedding

Roistering Dirck Van Dara

The Party From Gibbet Island

Miss Britton's Poker

The Devil's Stepping-Stones

The Springs Of Blood And Water

The Crumbling Silver

The Cortelyou Elopement

Van Wempel's Goose

The Weary Watcher

The Rival Fiddlers

Wyandank

Mark Of The Spirit Hand

The First Liberal Church

On And Near The Delaware

The Phantom Dragoon

Delaware Water Gap

The Phantom Drummer

The Missing Soldier Of Valley Forge

The Last Shot At Germantown

A Blow In The Dark

The Tory's Conversion

Lord Percy's Dream

Saved By The Bible

Parricide Of The Wissahickon

The Blacksmith At Brandywine

Father And Son

The Envy Of Manitou

The Last Revel In Printz Hall

The Two Rings

Flame Scalps Of The Chartiers

The Consecration Of Washington

Tales Of Puritan Land

Evangaline

The Snoring Of Swunksus

The Lewiston Hermit

The Dead Ship Of Harpswell

The Schoolmaster Had Not Reached Orrington.

Jack Welch's Death Light

The Lady Ursula

Father Moody's Black Veil

The Home Of Thunder

The Partridge Witch

The Marriage Of Mount Katahdin

The Moose Of Mount Kineo

The Owl Tree

A Chestnut Log

The Watcher On White Island

Chocorua

Passaconaway's Ride To Heaven

The Ball Game By The Saco

The White Mountains

The Vision On Mount Adams

The Great Carbuncle

Skinner's Cave

Yet They Call It Lover's Leap

Salem And Other Witchcraft

The Gloucester Leaguers

Satan And His Burial-Place

Peter Rugg, The Missing Man

The Loss Of Weetamoo

The Fatal Forget-Me-Not

The Old Mill At Somerville

Edward Randolph's Portrait

Lady Eleanore's Mantle

Howe's Masquerade

Old Esther Dudley

The Loss Of Jacob Hurd

The Hobomak

Berkshire Tories

The Revenge Of Josiah Breeze

The May-Pole Of Merrymount

The Devil And Tom Walker

The Gray Champion

The Forest Smithy

Wahconah Falls

Knocking At The Tomb

The White Deer Of Onota

Wizard's Glen

Balanced Rock

Shonkeek-Moonkeek

The Salem Alchemist

Eliza Wharton

Sale Of The Southwicks

The Courtship Of Myles Standish

Mother Crewe

Aunt Rachel's Curse

Nix's Mate

The Wild Man Of Cape Cod

Newbury's Old Elm

Samuel Sewall's Prophecy

The Shrieking Woman

Agnes Surriage

Skipper Ireson's Ride

Heartbreak Hill

Harry Main: The Treasure And The Cats

The Wessaguscus Hanging

The Unknown Champion

Goody Cole

General Moulton And The Devil

The Skeleton In Armor

Martha's Vineyard And Nantucket

Love And Treason

The Headless Skeleton Of Swamptown

The Crow And Cat Of Hopkinshill

The Old Stone Mill

Origin Of A Name

Micah Rood Apples

A Dinner And Its Consequences

The New Haven Storm Ship

The Windam Frogs

The Lamb Of Sacrifice

Moodus Noises

Haddam Enchantments

Block Island And The Palatine

The Buccaneer

Robert Lockwood's Fate

Love And Rum

Lights And Shadows Of The South

The Swim At Indian Head

The Moaning Sisters

A Ride For A Bride

Spooks Of The Hiawassee

Lake Of The Dismal Swamp

The Barge Of Defeat

Natural Bridge

The Silence Broken

Siren Of The French Broad

The Hunter Of Calawassee

Revenge Of The Accabee

Toccoa Falls

Two Lives For One

A Ghostly Avenger

The Wraith Ringer Of Atlanta

The Swallowing Earthquake

Last Stand Of The Biloxi

The Sacred Fire Of Nachez

Pass Christian

The Under Land

The Central States And The Great Lakes

An Averted Peril

The Obstinacy Of Saint Clair

The Hundredth Skull

The Crime Of Black Swamp

The House Accursed

Michel De Coucy's Troubles

Wallen's Ridge

The Sky Walker Of Huron

The Coffin Of Snakes

Mackinack

Lake Superior Water Gods

The Witch Of Pictured Rocks

The Origin Of White-Fish

The Spirit Of Cloudy

The Sun Fire At Sault Sainte Marie

The Snake God Of Belle Isle

Were-Wolves Of Detroit

The Escape Of Francois Navarre

The Old Lodger

The Nain Rouge

Two Revenges

Hiawatha

The Indian Messiah

The Vision Of Rescue

Devil's Lake

The Keusca Elopement

Pipestone

The Virgins' Feast

Falls Of St. Anthony

Flying Shadow And Track Maker

Saved By A Lightning-Stroke

The Killing Of Cloudy Sky

Providence Hole

The Scare Cure

Twelfth Night At Cahokia

The Spell Of Creve Ciur Lake

How The Crime Was Revealed

Banshee Of The Bad Lands

Standing Rock

The Salt Witch

Along The Rocky Range

Over The Divide

The Phantom Train Of Marshall Pass

The River Of Lost Souls

Riders Of The Desert

The Division Of Two Tribes

Besieged By Starvation

A Yellowstone Tragedy

The Broad House

The Death Waltz

The Flood At Santa Fe

Goddess Of Salt

The Coming Of The Navajos

The Ark On Superstition Mountains

The Pale Faced Lightning

The Weird Sentinel At Squaw Peak

Sacrifice Of The Toltecs

Ta-Vwots Conquers The Sun

The Comanche Rider

Horned Toad And Giants

The Spider Tower

The Lost Trail

A Battle In The Air

On The Pacific Coast

The Voyager Of Whulge

Tamanous Of Tacoma

The Devil And The Dalles

Cascades Of The Columbia

The Death Of Umatilla

Hunger Valley

The Wrath Of Manitou

The Spook Of Misery Hill

The Queen Of Death Valley

Bridal Veil Fall

The Governor's Right Eye

The Prisoner In American Shaft

As To Buried Riches

Kidd's Treasure

Other Buried Wealth

Storied Waters, Cliffs And Mountains

Monsters And Sea-Serpents

Stone-Throwing Devils

Storied Springs

Lovers' Leaps

God On The Mountains

Myths and Legends of our own land, Charles M. Skinner

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Germany

ISBN: 9783849619886

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

PREFACE

It is unthinkingly said and often, that America is not old enough to have developed a legendary era, for such an era grows backward as a nation grows forward. No little of the charm of European travel is ascribed to the glamour that history and fable have flung around old churches, castles, and the favored haunts of tourists, and the Rhine and Hudson are frequently compared, to the prejudice of the latter, not because its scenery lacks in loveliness or grandeur, but that its beauty has not been humanized by love of chivalry or faerie, as that of the older stream has been. Yet the record of our country's progress is of deep import, and as time goes on the figures seen against the morning twilight of our history will rise to more commanding stature, and the mists of legend will invest them with a softness or glory that shall make reverence for them spontaneous and deep. Washington hurling the stone across the Potomac may live as the Siegfried of some Western saga, and Franklin invoking the lightnings may be the Loki of our mythology. The bibliography of American legends is slight, and these tales have been gathered from sources the most diverse: records, histories, newspapers, magazines, oral narrative—in every case reconstructed. The pursuit of them has been so long that a claim may be set forth for some measure of completeness.

AN INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

IF the term be understood as signifying a systematic and conscious arrangement of mythic characters and events, it is certainly a misnomer to speak of the stories of the North American Indians as "mythology." To be sure, certain tribes and groups (as the Iroquois, the Pawnee, the Zuni, the Bella Coola, to mention widely separate examples) have attained to something like consistency and uniformity in their mythic beliefs (and It is significant that in just these groups the process of anthropomorphization has gone farthest) ; but nowhere on the continent can we find anything like the sense for system which in the Old World is in part evidenced and in part Introduced by the epic literatures — Aryan, Babylonian, Greek, Norse.

Mythology in the classic acceptation, therefore, can scarcely be said to exist in North America; but in quite another sense — belief in more or less clearly personified nature-powers and the possession of stories narrating the deeds and adventures of these persons — the Indians own, not one, but many mythologies; for every tribe, and often, within the tribe, each clan and society, has its Individual mythic lore. Here again the statement needs qualifying. Beliefs vary from tribe to tribe, even from clan to clan, and yet throughout, if one's attention be broadly directed, there are fundamental similarities and uniformities that afford a basis for a kind of critical reconstruction of a North American Indian mythology. No single tribe and no group of tribes has completely expressed this mythology — much less has any realized its form; but the student of Indian lore can scarcely fail to become conscious of a coherent system of myths, of which the Indians themselves might have become aware in course of time, if the intervention of Old World ideas had not confused them.

A number of distinctions are the necessary introduction to any study of Indian myth. In the first place, in America, no more than in the Old World, are we to identify religion with mythology. The two are intimately related; every mythology is in some degree an effort to define a religion; and yet there is no profound parallelism between god and hero, no immutable relation between religious ceremony and mythic tale, even when the tale be told to explain the ceremony. No illustration could be better than is afforded by the fact that the greatest of Indian mythic heroes, the Trickster-Transformer, now Hare, now Coyote, now Raven, is nowhere important in ritual; while the powers which evoke the Indian's deepest veneration, Father Sky and Mother Earth, are of rare appearance in the tales.

The Indian's religion must be studied in his rites rather than in his myths; and it may be worth while here to designate the most significant and general of these rites. Foremost is the calumet ceremony, in which smoke-offering is made to the sky, the earth, and the rulers of earth's quarters, constituting a kind of ritualistic definition of the Indian's cosmos. Hardly second to this is the rite of the sweat-bath, which is not merely a means of healing disease, but a prayer for strength and purification addressed to the elements — earth, lire, water, air, in which resides the life-giving power of the universe. Third in order are ceremonies, such as fasting and vigil, for the purpose of inducing visions that shall direct the way of life; for among the Indian's deepest convictions is his belief that the whole environment of physical life is one of strength-imbuing powers only thinly veiled from sight and touch. Shamanistic or mediumistic rites, resting upon belief in the power of unseen beings to possess and inspire the mortal body, form a fourth group of ceremonies. A fifth is composed of the great communal ceremonies, commonly called "dances" by white men.

These are almost invariably in the form of dramatic prayers — combinations of sacrifice, song, and symbolic personation — addressed to the great nature-powers, to sun and earth, to the rain-bringers, and to the givers of food and game. A final group is formed of rites in honour of the dead or of ancestral tutelaries, ceremonies usually annual and varying in purpose from solicitude for the welfare of the departed to desire for their assistance and propitiation of their possible ill will.

In these rituals are defined the essential beings of the Indian's pagan religion. There is the Great Spirit, represented by Father Sky or by the sky's great incarnation, the Sun Father. There are Mother Earth and her daughter, the Corn Mother. There are the intermediaries between the powers below and those above, including the birds and the great mythic Thunderbird, the winds and the clouds and the celestial bodies. There are the Elders, or Guardians, of the animal kinds, who replenish the earth with game and come as helpers to the huntsmen; and there is the vast congeries of things potent, belonging both to the seen and to the unseen world, whose help may be won in the form of "medicine" by the man who knows the usages of Nature.

Inevitably these powers find a fluctuating representation in the varying imagery of myth. Consistency is not demanded, for the Indian's mode of thought is too deeply symbolic for him to regard his own stories as literal: they are neither allegory nor history; they are myth, with a truth midway between/ that of allegory and that of history. Myth can properly bd defined only with reference to its sources and motives. Now the motives of Indian stories are in general not difficult to determine. The vast majority are obviously told for entertainment; they represent an art, the art of fiction; and they fall into the classes of fiction, satire and humour, romance, adventure. Again, not a few are moral allegories, or they are fables with obvious lessons, such as often appear in the story of the theft of fire when it details the kinds of wood from which fire can best be kindled. A third motive is our universally human curiosity: we desire to know the causes of things, whether they be the forces that underlie recurrent phenomena or the seeming purposes that mark the beginnings and govern the course of history. Myths that detail causes are science in infancy, and they are perhaps the only stories that may properly be called myths. They may be simply fanciful explanations of the origin of animal traits — telling why the dog's nose is cold or why the robin's breast is red; and then we have the beast fable. They may be no less fanciful accounts of the institution of some rite or custom whose sanction is deeper than reason; and we have the so-called aetiological myth. They may be semi-historical reminiscences of the inauguration of new ways of life, of the conquest of fire or the introduction of maize by mythical wise men; or they may portray recoverable tribal histories through the distorted perspective of legend. In the most significant group of all, they seek to conceptualize the beginnings of all things in those cosmogonic allegories of which the nebular hypothesis is only the most recently outgrown example.

Stories which satisfy curiosity about causes are true myths. With this criterion it should perhaps seem an easy task for the student to separate mythology from fiction, and to select or reject from his materials. But the thing is not so simple. Human motives, in whatever grade of society, are seldom unmixed; it is much easier to analyze them in kind than to distinguish them in example. Take such a theme as the well-nigh universally North American account of the origin of death. On the face of it, it is a causal explanation; but in very many examples it is a moral tale, while in not a few instances both the scientific and the moral interest disappear before the aesthetic. In a Wikeno story death came into the world by the will of a little bird, — "How should I nest me in your warm graves if ye men live forever?" — and however grim the fancy, it is difficult to see anything but art in its motive; but in the version known to the Arctic Highlanders, where the poignant choice is put, "Win ye have eternal darkness and eternal life, or light and death?" — art and morality and philosophy are all Intermingled.

To perfect our criterion we must add to the analysis of motive the study of the sources of mythic conceptions. In a broad way, these are the suggestions of environing nature, the analogies of human nature both psychical and physiological, imagination, and borrowings. Probably the first of these is the most Important, though the "nature-myth" is far from being the simple and Inevitable thing an elder generation of students would make of it. Men's Ideas necessarily reflect the world that they know, and even where the mythic incidents are the same the timbre of the tale will vary, say from the Yukon to the Mississippi, in the eastern forest, or on the western desert. There are physiographical boundaries within the continent which form a natural chart of the divisions in the complexion of aboriginal thought; and while there are numberless overlappings, outcroppings, and Intrusions, none the less striking are the general conformities of the character of the several regions with the character of the mythic lore developed in them. The forests of the East, the Great Plains, the arid South-West, secluded California, the North-Western archipelago, each has its own traits of thought as It has its own traits of nature, and it is inevitable that we suppose the former to be in some degree a reflection of the latter. Beyond all this there are certain constancies of nature, the succession of darkness and light, the circle of the seasons, the motions of sun, moon, and stars, of rivers and winds, that affect men everywhere and everywhere colour their fancies; and It is not the least Interesting feature of the study of a widespread mythic theme or Incident to see the variety of natural phenomena for which it may, first and last, serve to account, since the myth-maker does not find his story In nature, but writes it there with her colouring.

The second great source of myth material is found in the analogies of human nature. Primarily these are psychical: the desires and purposes of men are assumed, quite unconsciously, to animate and to inspire the whole drama of nature's growth and change, and thus the universe becomes peopled with personalities, ranging in definition from the senselessly voracious appetites incarnated as monsters, to the self-possessed purpose and, not infrequently, the "sweet reasonableness" of man-beings and gods. Besides the psychical, however, there are the physical analogies of humankind. The most elementary are the physiological, which lead to a symbolism now gruesome, now poetic. The heart, the hair, and the breath are the most significant to the Indian, and their inner meaning could scarcely be better indicated than in the words of a Pawnee priest from whom Alice Fletcher obtained her report of the Hako. One act of this ceremony is the placing of a bit of white down in the hair of a consecrated child, and in explaining this rite the priest said: "The down is taken from under the wings of the white eagle. The down grew close to the heart of the eagle and moved as the eagle breathed. It represents the breath and life of the white eagle, the father of the child." Further, since the eagle is intermediary between man and Father Heaven, "the white, downy feather, which is ever moving as if it were breathing, represents Tirawa-atius, who dwells beyond the blue sky, which is above the soft, white clouds"; and it is placed in the child's hair "on the spot where a baby's skull is open, and you can see it breathe." This is the poetic side of the symbolism; the gruesome is represented by scalping, by the tearing out of the heart, and sometimes by the devouring of it for the sake of obtaining the strength of the slain. Another phase of physiological symbolism has to do with the barbarian's never-paling curiosity about matters of sex; there is little trace of phallic worship in North America, but the Indian's myths abound in incidents which are as unconsciously as they are unblushingly indecent. A strange and recurrent feature of Indian myth is the personification of members of the body, especially the genital and excretory organs, usually in connexion with divination. The final step in the use of the human body as a symbol is anthropomorphism — that complete anthropomorphism wherein mythic powers are given bodies, not part human and part animal, but wholly human; it marks the first clear sense of the dignity of man, and of the superiority of his wisdom to that of the brutes. Not many Indian groups have gone far in this direction, but among the more advanced it is a step clearly undertaken.

Imagination plays a part in the development of myth which is best realized by the aesthetic effect created by a body of tales or by a set of pictorial symbols. The total impression of Indian mythic emblems is undoubtedly one of grotesquerie, but it is difficult to point to any pagan religious art except the Greek that has outgrown the grotesque; and the Indian has a quality of its own. There is a wide difference, however, in the several regions, and indeed as between tribes of the same region. The art of the North-West and of the South-West are both highly developed, but even in such analogous objects as masks they represent distinct types of genius. The Navaho and the Apache are neighbours and relatives, but they are poles apart in their aesthetic expression. Some tribes, as the Pawnee, show great originality; others, as the northern Athapascans and most of the Salish, are colourless borrowers.

Borrowing is, indeed, the most difficult of problems to solve. In the abstract, it is easy to suppose that, with the main similarities of environment in North America and the general evenness of a civilization everywhere neolithic, the like conditions of a like human nature would give rise to like ideas and fancies. It is equally easy to suppose that in a territory permeable nearly everywhere, among tribes in constant intercourse, borrowing must be extensive. Both factors are significant, though in general the obvious borrowing is likely to seem the more impressive. Nevertheless, universal borrowing is a difficult hypothesis, for Innumerable Instances show an identity of Old-World and New-World Ideas, where communication within thinkable time is Incredible. Even in the New World there are wide separations for identical notions that seem to Imply distinct origins. Thus the Arctic Highlanders, who have only recently learned that there are other peoples in the world, possess Ideas Identical with those of the Indians of the far South. When such an Idea is simply that there is a cavernous underworld which is an abode of spirits, there is no need to assume communication, for the notion is world-wide; but when the two regions agree in asserting that there are four underworld caverns — an Idea which is In no sense a natural Inference — then the suspicion of communication becomes Inevitable. Again, constellation-myths which see In Corona Borealls a circle of chieftains, in the Pleiades a group of dancers, in Ursa Major a quadruped pursued by three hunters, might have many independent origins; but when we encounter so curious a story as that of the Incestuous relations of the Sun and the Moon told by Eskimo In the north and Cherokee In the south, communication is again suggested; and this suggestion becomes almost certainty when we find, further, that a special incident of this myth — the daubing of the secret lover with paint or ashes by which he is later identified — appears In another tale found In nearly every part of the continent, the story of the girl who bore children to a dog.

In the story just mentioned the children of the girl and the dog sometimes become stars, sometimes the ancestors of a tribe or clan of men; and this is a fair illustration of the manner In which incidents having all the character of fiction are made to serve as explanatory myths by their various users. The fundamental material of myth is rather a collection of Incidents fitted into the scheme of things suggested by perception and habit than the stark invention of nature; and while the incidents must have an Invention somewhere, the greater portion of them seem to be given by art and adopted by nature, — borrowing and adaptation being, for the savage as for the civilized man, more facile than new thinking.

In every considerable collection of Indian stories there are many adaptations of common ideas and incidents. In different regions this basic material comes to characteristic forms of expression. Finally, in the continent as a whole, viewed as one great region, there is a generally definable scheme, within which the mythic conceptions of the North American fall into place. It is in this sense, and with reference to this scheme, that we may speak of a North American Indian mythological system.

On the side of cosmology, the scheme has already been indicated. There is a world above, the home of the Sky Father and of the celestial powers; there is a world below, the embodiment of the Earth Mother and the abode of the dead; there is the central plane of the earth, and there are the genii of its Quarters. But cosmology serves only to define the theatre; it does not give the action. Cosmogony is the essential drama. In the Indian scheme the beginning is seldom absolute. A few tribes recognize a creator who makes or a procreator who generates the world and its inhabitants; but the usual conception is either of a pre-existent sky-world, peopled with the images of the beings of an earth-world yet to come into being, or else of a kind of cosmic womb from which the First People were to have their origin. In the former type of legend, the action begins with the descent of a heaven-born Titaness; in the latter, the first act portrays the ascent of the ancestral beings from the place of generation. Uniformly, the next act of the world drama details the deeds of a hero or of twin heroes who are the shapers and lawgivers of the habitable earth. They conquer the primitive monsters and set in order the furniture of creation; quite generally, one of them is slain, and passes to the underworld to become its Plutonian lord. The theft of fire, the origin of death, the liberation of the animals, the giving of the arts, the institution of rites are all themes that recur, once and again, and in forms that show surprisingly small variation. Universal, too, is the cataclysmic destruction of the earth by flood, or fire and flood, leaving a few survivors to repopulate the restored land. Usually this event marks the close of a First, or Antediluvian Age, in which the people were either animal in form or only abortively human. After the flood the animals are transformed once for all into the beings they now are, while the new race of men is created. It is not a little curious to find in many tribes tales of a confusion of tongues and dispersion of nations bringing to a close the cosmogonic period and leading into that of legendary history.

Such, in broad outline, is the chart of the Indian's cosmic perspective. It is with a view to its fuller illustration that the myths studied in the ensuing chapters have been chosen from the great body of American Indian lore.

THE HUDSON AND ITS HILLS

RIP VAN WINKLE

The story of Rip Van Winkle, told by Irving, dramatized by Boucicault, acted by Jefferson, pictured by Darley, set to music by Bristow, is the best known of American legends. Rip was a real personage, and the Van Winkles are a considerable family at this day. An idle, good-natured, happy-go-lucky fellow, he lived, presumably, in the village of Catskill, and began his long sleep in 1769. His wife was a shrew, and to escape her abuse Rip often took his dog and gun and roamed away to the Catskills, nine miles westward, where he lounged or hunted, as the humor seized him. It was on a September evening, during a jaunt on South Mountain, that he met a stubby, silent man, of goodly girth, his round head topped with a steeple hat, the skirts of his belted coat and flaps of his petticoat trousers meeting at the tops of heavy boots, and the face—ugh!—green and ghastly, with unmoving eyes that glimmered in the twilight like phosphorus. The dwarf carried a keg, and on receiving an intimation, in a sign, that he would like Rip to relieve him of it, that cheerful vagabond shouldered it and marched on up the mountain.

At nightfall they emerged on a little plateau where a score of men in the garb of long ago, with faces like that of Rip's guide, and equally still and speechless, were playing bowls with great solemnity, the balls sometimes rolling over the plateau's edge and rumbling down the rocks with a boom like thunder. A cloaked and snowy-bearded figure, watching aloof, turned like the others, and gazed uncomfortably at the visitor who now came blundering in among them. Rip was at first for making off, but the sinister glare in the circle of eyes took the run out of his legs, and he was not displeased when they signed to him to tap the keg and join in a draught of the ripest schnapps that ever he had tasted,—and he knew the flavor of every brand in Catskill. While these strange men grew no more genial with passing of the flagons, Rip was pervaded by a satisfying glow; then, overcome by sleepiness and resting his head on a stone, he stretched his tired legs out and fell to dreaming.

Morning. Sunlight and leaf shadow were dappled over the earth when he awoke, and rising stiffly from his bed, with compunctions in his bones, he reached for his gun. The already venerable implement was so far gone with rot and rust that it fell to pieces in his hand, and looking down at the fragments of it, he saw that his clothes were dropping from his body in rags and mould, while a white beard flowed over his breast. Puzzled and alarmed, shaking his head ruefully as he recalled the carouse of the silent, he hobbled down the mountain as fast as he might for the grip of the rheumatism on his knees and elbows, and entered his native village. What! Was this Catskill? Was this the place that he left yesterday? Had all these houses sprung up overnight, and these streets been pushed across the meadows in a day? The people, too: where were his friends? The children who had romped with him, the rotund topers whom he had left cooling their hot noses in pewter pots at the tavern door, the dogs that used to bark a welcome, recognizing in him a kindred spirit of vagrancy: where were they?

And his wife, whose athletic arm and agile tongue had half disposed him to linger in the mountains how happened it that she was not awaiting him at the gate? But gate there was none in the familiar place: an unfenced yard of weeds and ruined foundation wall were there. Rip's home was gone. The idlers jeered at his bent, lean form, his snarl of beard and hair, his disreputable dress, his look of grieved astonishment. He stopped, instinctively, at the tavern, for he knew that place in spite of its new sign: an officer in blue regimentals and a cocked hat replacing the crimson George III. of his recollection, and labelled "General Washington." There was a quick gathering of ne'er-do-weels, of tavern-haunters and gaping 'prentices, about him, and though their faces were strange and their manners rude, he made bold to ask if they knew such and such of his friends.

"Nick Vedder? He's dead and gone these eighteen years." "Brom Dutcher? He joined the army and was killed at Stony Point." "Van Brummel? He, too, went to the war, and is in Congress now."

"And Rip Van Winkle?"

"Yes, he's here. That's him yonder."

And to Rip's utter confusion he saw before him a counterpart of himself, as young, lazy, ragged, and easy-natured as he remembered himself to be, yesterday—or, was it yesterday?

"That's young Rip," continued his informer. "His father was Rip Van Winkle, too, but he went to the mountains twenty years ago and never came back. He probably fell over a cliff, or was carried off by Indians, or eaten by bears."

Twenty years ago! Truly, it was so. Rip had slept for twenty years without awaking. He had left a peaceful colonial village; he returned to a bustling republican town. How he eventually found, among the oldest inhabitants, some who admitted that they knew him; how he found a comfortable home with his married daughter and the son who took after him so kindly; how he recovered from the effect of the tidings that his wife had died of apoplexy, in a quarrel; how he resumed his seat at the tavern tap and smoked long pipes and told long yarns for the rest of his days, were matters of record up to the beginning of this century.

And a strange story Rip had to tell, for he had served as cup-bearer to the dead crew of the Half Moon. He had quaffed a cup of Hollands with no other than Henry Hudson himself. Some say that Hudson's spirit has made its home amid these hills, that it may look into the lovely valley that he discovered; but others hold that every twenty years he and his men assemble for a revel in the mountains that so charmed them when first seen swelling against the western heavens, and the liquor they drink on this night has the bane of throwing any mortal who lips it into a slumber whence nothing can arouse him until the day dawns when the crew shall meet again. As you climb the east front of the mountains by the old carriage road, you pass, half-way up the height, the stone that Rip Van Winkle slept on, and may see that it is slightly hollowed by his form. The ghostly revellers are due in the Catskills in 1909, and let all tourists who are among the mountains in September of that year beware of accepting liquor from strangers.

CATSKILL GNOMES

Behind the New Grand Hotel, in the Catskills, is an amphitheatre of mountain that is held to be the place of which the Mohicans spoke when they told of people there who worked in metals, and had bushy beards and eyes like pigs. From the smoke of their forges, in autumn, came the haze of Indian summer; and when the moon was full, it was their custom to assemble on the edge of a precipice above the hollow and dance and caper until the night was nigh worn away. They brewed a liquor that had the effect of shortening the bodies and swelling the heads of all who drank it, and when Hudson and his crew visited the mountains, the pygmies held a carouse in his honor and invited him to drink their liquor. The crew went away, shrunken and distorted by the magic distillation, and thus it was that Rip Van Winkle found them on the eve of his famous sleep.

THE CATSKILL WITCH

When the Dutch gave the name of Katzbergs to the mountains west of the Hudson, by reason of the wild-cats and panthers that ranged there, they obliterated the beautiful Indian Ontiora, "mountains of the sky." In one tradition of the red men these hills were bones of a monster that fed on human beings until the Great Spirit turned it into stone as it was floundering toward the ocean to bathe. The two lakes near the summit were its eyes. These peaks were the home of an Indian witch, who adjusted the weather for the Hudson Valley with the certainty of a signal service bureau. It was she who let out the day and night in blessed alternation, holding back the one when the other was at large, for fear of conflict. Old moons she cut into stars as soon as she had hung new ones in the sky, and she was often seen perched on Round Top and North Mountain, spinning clouds and flinging them to the winds. Woe betide the valley residents if they showed irreverence, for then the clouds were black and heavy, and through them she poured floods of rain and launched the lightnings, causing disastrous freshets in the streams and blasting the wigwams of the mockers. In a frolic humor she would take the form of a bear or deer and lead the Indian hunters anything but a merry dance, exposing them to tire and peril, and vanishing or assuming some terrible shape when they had overtaken her. Sometimes she would lead them to the cloves and would leap into the air with a mocking "Ho, ho!" just as they stopped with a shudder at the brink of an abyss. Garden Rock was a spot where she was often found, and at its foot a lake once spread. This was held in such awe that an Indian would never wittingly pursue his quarry there; but once a hunter lost his way and emerged from the forest at the edge of the pond. Seeing a number of gourds in crotches of the trees he took one, but fearing the spirit he turned to leave so quickly that he stumbled and it fell. As it broke, a spring welled from it in such volume that the unhappy man was gulfed in its waters, swept to the edge of Kaaterskill clove and dashed on the rocks two hundred and sixty feet below. Nor did the water ever cease to run, and in these times the stream born of the witch's revenge is known as Catskill Creek.

THE REVENGE OF SHANDAKEN

On the rock platform where the Catskill Mountain House now stands, commanding one of the fairest views in the world, old chief Shandaken set his wigwam,—for it is a mistake to suppose that barbarians are indifferent to beauty,—and there his daughter, Lotowana, was sought in marriage by his braves. She, however, kept faith to an early vow exchanged with a young chief of the Mohawks. A suitor who was particularly troublesome was Norsereddin, proud, morose, dark-featured, a stranger to the red man, a descendant, so he claimed, from Egyptian kings, and who lived by himself on Kaaterskill Creek, appearing among white settlements but rarely.

On one of his visits to Catskill, a tavern-lounging Dutchman wagered him a thousand golden crowns that he could not win Lotowana, and, stung by avarice as well as inflamed by passion, Norsereddin laid new siege to her heart. Still the girl refused to listen, and Shandaken counselled him to be content with the smiles of others, thereby so angering the Egyptian that he assailed the chief and was driven from the camp with blows; but on the day of Lotowana's wedding with the Mohawk he returned, and in a honeyed speech asked leave to give a jewel to the bride to show that he had stifled jealousy and ill will. The girl took the handsome box he gave her and drew the cover, when a spring flew forward, driving into her hand the poisoned tooth of a snake that had been affixed to it. The venom was strong, and in a few minutes Lotowana lay dead at her husband's feet.

Though the Egyptian had disappeared into the forest directly on the acceptance of his treacherous gift, twenty braves set off in pursuit, and overtaking him on the Kalkberg, they dragged him back to the rock where father and husband were bewailing the maid's untimely fate. A pile of fagots was heaped within a few feet of the precipice edge, and tying their captive on them, they applied the torch, dancing about with cries of exultation as the shrieks of the wretch echoed from the cliffs. The dead girl was buried by the mourning tribe, while the ashes of Norsereddin were left to be blown abroad. On the day of his revenge Shandaken left his ancient dwelling-place, and his camp-fires never glimmered afterward on the front of Ontiora.

CONDEMNED TO THE NOOSE

Ralph Sutherland, who, early in the last century, occupied a stone house a mile from Leeds, in the Catskills, was a man of morose and violent disposition, whose servant, a Scotch girl, was virtually a slave, inasmuch as she was bound to work for him without pay until she had refunded to him her passage-money to this country. Becoming weary of bondage and of the tempers of her master, the girl ran away. The man set off in a raging chase, and she had not gone far before Sutherland overtook her, tied her by the wrists to his horse's tail, and began the homeward journey. Afterward, he swore that the girl stumbled against the horse's legs, so frightening the animal that it rushed off madly, pitching him out of the saddle and dashing the servant to death on rocks and trees; yet, knowing how ugly-tempered he could be, his neighbors were better inclined to believe that he had driven the horse into a gallop, intending to drag the girl for a short distance, as a punishment, and to rein up before he had done serious mischief. On this supposition he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to die on the scaffold.

The tricks of circumstantial evidence, together with pleas advanced by influential relatives of the prisoner, induced the court to delay sentence until the culprit should be ninety-nine years old, but it was ordered that, while released on his own recognizance, in the interim, he should keep a hangman's noose about his neck and show himself before the judges in Catskill once every year, to prove that he wore his badge of infamy and kept his crime in mind. This sentence he obeyed, and there were people living recently who claimed to remember him as he went about with a silken cord knotted at his throat. He was always alone, he seldom spoke, his rough, imperious manner had departed. Only when children asked him what the rope was for were his lips seen to quiver, and then he would hurry away. After dark his house was avoided, for gossips said that a shrieking woman passed it nightly, tied at the tail of a giant horse with fiery eyes and smoking nostrils; that a skeleton in a winding sheet had been found there; that a curious thing, somewhat like a woman, had been known to sit on his garden wall, with lights shining from her finger-tips, uttering unearthly laughter; and that domestic animals reproached the man by groaning and howling beneath his windows.

These beliefs he knew, yet he neither grieved, nor scorned, nor answered when he was told of them. Years sped on. Every year deepened his reserve and loneliness, and some began to whisper that he would take his own way out of the world, though others answered that men who were born to be hanged would never be drowned; but a new republic was created; new laws were made; new judges sat to minister them; so, on Ralph Sutherland's ninety-ninth birthday anniversary, there were none who would accuse him or execute sentence. He lived yet another year, dying in 1801. But was it from habit, or was it in self-punishment and remorse, that he never took off the cord? for, when he drew his last breath, though it was in his own house, his throat was still encircled by the hangman's rope.

BIG INDIAN

Intermarriages between white people and red ones in this country were not uncommon in the days when our ancestors led as rude a life as the natives, and several places in the Catskills commemorate this fact. Mount Utsayantha, for example, is named for an Indian woman whose life, with that of her baby and her white husband, was lost there. For the white men early found friends among these mountains. As far back as 1663 they spared Catherine Dubois and her three children, after some rash spirits had abducted them and carried them to a place on the upper Walkill, to do them to death; for the captives raised a Huguenot hymn and the hearts of their captors were softened.

In Esopus Valley lived Winnisook, whose height was seven feet, and who was known among the white settlers as "the big Indian." He loved a white girl of the neighborhood, one Gertrude Molyneux, and had asked for her hand; but while she was willing, the objections of her family were too strong to be overcome, and she was teased into marriage with Joseph Bundy, of her own race, instead. She liked the Indian all the better after that, however, because Bundy proved to be a bad fellow, and believing that she could be happier among barbarians than among a people that approved such marriages, she eloped with Winnisook. For a long time all trace of the runaway couple was lost, but one day the man having gone down to the plain to steal cattle, it was alleged, was discovered by some farmers who knew him, and who gave hot chase, coming up with him at the place now called Big Indian.

Foremost in the chase was Bundy. As he came near to the enemy of his peace he exclaimed, "I think the best way to civilize that yellow serpent is to let daylight into his heart," and, drawing his rifle to his shoulder, he fired. Mortally wounded, yet instinctively seeking refuge, the giant staggered into the hollow of a pine-tree, where the farmers lost sight of him. There, however, he was found by Gertrude, bolt upright, yet dead. The unwedded widow brought her dusky children to the place and spent the remainder of her days near his grave. Until a few years ago the tree was still pointed out, but a railroad company has now covered it with an embankment.

THE BAKER'S DOZEN

Baas [Boss] Volckert Jan Pietersen Van Amsterdam kept a bake-shop in Albany, and lives in history as the man who invented New Year cakes and made gingerbread babies in the likeness of his own fat offspring. Good churchman though he was, the bane of his life was a fear of being bewitched, and perhaps it was to keep out evil spirits, who might make one last effort to gain the mastery over him, ere he turned the customary leaf with the incoming year, that he had primed himself with an extra glass of spirits on the last night of 1654. His sales had been brisk, and as he sat in his little shop, meditating comfortably on the gains he would make when his harmless rivals—the knikkerbakkers (bakers of marbles)—sent for their usual supply of olie-koeks and mince-pies on the morrow, he was startled by a sharp rap, and an ugly old woman entered. "Give me a dozen New Year's cookies!" she cried, in a shrill voice.

"Vell, den, you needn' sbeak so loud. I aind teaf, den."

"A dozen!" she screamed. "Give me a dozen. Here are only twelve."

"Vell, den, dwalf is a dozen."

"One more! I want a dozen."

"Vell, den, if you vant anodder, go to de duyvil and ged it."

Did the hag take him at his word? She left the shop, and from that time it seemed as if poor Volckert was bewitched, indeed, for his cakes were stolen; his bread was so light that it went up the chimney, when it was not so heavy that it fell through the oven; invisible hands plucked bricks from that same oven and pelted him until he was blue; his wife became deaf, his children went unkempt, and his trade went elsewhere. Thrice the old woman reappeared, and each time was sent anew to the devil; but at last, in despair, the baker called on Saint Nicolaus to come and advise him. His call was answered with startling quickness, for, almost while he was making it, the venerable patron of Dutch feasts stood before him. The good soul advised the trembling man to be more generous in his dealings with his fellows, and after a lecture on charity he vanished, when, lo! the old woman was there in his place.

She repeated her demand for one more cake, and Volckert Jan Pietersen, etc., gave it, whereupon she exclaimed, "The spell is broken, and from this time a dozen is thirteen!" Taking from the counter a gingerbread effigy of Saint Nicolaus, she made the astonished Dutchman lay his hand upon it and swear to give more liberal measure in the future. So, until thirteen new States arose from the ruins of the colonies,—when the shrewd Yankees restored the original measure,—thirteen made a baker's dozen.

THE DEVIL'S DANCE-CHAMBER.

Most storied of our New World rivers is the Hudson. Historic scenes have been enacted on its shores, and Indian, Dutchman, Briton, and American have invested it with romance. It had its source, in the red man's fancy, in a spring of eternal youth; giants and spirits dwelt in its woods and hills, and before the river-Shatemuc, king of streams, the red men called it—had broken through the highlands, those mountains were a pent for spirits who had rebelled against the Manitou. After the waters had forced a passage to the sea these evil ones sought shelter in the glens and valleys that open to right and left along its course, but in time of tempest, when they hear Manitou riding down the ravine on wings of storm, dashing thunderbolts against the cliffs, it is the fear that he will recapture them and force them into lightless caverns to expiate their revolt, that sends them huddling among the rocks and makes the hills resound with roars and howls.

At the Devil's Dance-Chamber, a slight plateau on the west bank, between Newburg and Crom Elbow, the red men performed semi-religious rites as a preface to their hunting and fishing trips or ventures on the war-path. They built a fire, painted themselves, and in that frenzy into which savages are so readily lashed, and that is so like to the action of mobs in trousers, they tumbled, leaped, danced, yelled, sang, grimaced, and gesticulated until the Manitou disclosed himself, either as a harmless animal or a beast of prey. If he came in the former shape the augury was favorable, but if he showed himself as a bear or panther, it was a warning of evil that they seldom dared to disregard.

The crew of Hudson's ship, the Half Moon, having chanced on one of these orgies, were so impressed by the fantastic spectacle that they gave the name Duyvels Dans-Kamer to the spot. Years afterwards, when Stuyvesant ascended the river, his doughty retainers were horrified, on landing below the Dans-Kamer, to discover hundreds of painted figures frisking there in the fire-light. A few surmised that they were but a new generation of savages holding a powwow, but most of the sailors fancied that the assemblage was demoniac, and that the figures were spirits of bad Indians repeating a scalp-dance and revelling in the mysterious fire-water that they had brought down from the river source in jars and skins. The spot was at least once profaned with blood, for a young Dutchman and his wife, of Albany, were captured here by an angry Indian, and although the young man succeeded in stabbing his captor to death, he was burned alive on the rock by the friends of the Indian whose wrath he had provoked. The wife, after being kept in captivity for a time, was ransomed.

THE CULPRIT FAY

The wood-tick's drum convokes the elves at the noon of night on Cro' Nest top, and, clambering out of their flower-cup beds and hammocks of cobweb, they fly to the meeting, not to freak about the grass or banquet at the mushroom table, but to hear sentence passed on the fay who, forgetting his vestal vow, has loved an earthly maid. From his throne under a canopy of tulip petals, borne on pillars of shell, the king commands silence, and with severe eye but softened voice he tells the culprit that while he has scorned the royal decree he has saved himself from the extreme penalty, of imprisonment in walnut shells and cobweb dungeons, by loving a maid who is gentle and pure. So it shall be enough if he will go down to the Hudson and seize a drop from the bow of mist that a sturgeon leaves when he makes his leap; and after, to kindle his darkened flame-wood lamp at a meteor spark. The fairy bows, and without a word slowly descends the rocky steep, for his wing is soiled and has lost its power; but once at the river, he tugs amain at a mussel shell till he has it afloat; then, leaping in, he paddles out with a strong grass blade till he comes to the spot where the sturgeon swims, though the watersprites plague him and toss his boat, and the fish and the leeches bunt and drag; but, suddenly, the sturgeon shoots from the water, and ere the arch of mist that he tracks through the air has vanished, the sprite has caught a drop of the spray in a tiny blossom, and in this he washes clean his wings.

The water-goblins torment him no longer. They push his boat to the shore, where, alighting, he kisses his hand, then, even as a bubble, he flies back to the mountain top, dons his acorn helmet, his corselet of bee-hide, his shield of lady-bug shell, and grasping his lance, tipped with wasp sting, he bestrides his fire-fly steed and off he goes like a flash. The world spreads out and then grows small, but he flies straight on. The ice-ghosts leer from the topmost clouds, and the mists surge round, but he shakes his lance and pipes his call, and at last he comes to the Milky Way, where the sky-sylphs lead him to their queen, who lies couched in a palace ceiled with stars, its dome held up by northern lights and the curtains made of the morning's flush. Her mantle is twilight purple, tied with threads of gold from the eastern dawn, and her face is as fair as the silver moon.

She begs the fay to stay with her and taste forever the joys of heaven, but the knightly elf keeps down the beating of his heart, for he remembers a face on earth that is fairer than hers, and he begs to go. With a sigh she fits him a car of cloud, with the fire-fly steed chained on behind, and he hurries away to the northern sky whence the meteor comes, with roar and whirl, and as it passes it bursts to flame. He lights his lamp at a glowing spark, then wheels away to the fairy-land. His king and his brothers hail him stoutly, with song and shout, and feast and dance, and the revel is kept till the eastern sky has a ruddy streak. Then the cock crows shrill and the fays are gone.

POKEPSIE

The name of this town has forty-two spellings in old records, and with singular pertinacity in ill-doing, the inhabitants have fastened on it the longest and clumsiest of all. It comes from the Mohegan words Apo-keep-sink, meaning a safe, pleasant harbor. Harbor it might be for canoes, but for nothing bigger, for it was only the little cove that was so called between Call Rock and Adder Cliff,—the former indicating where settlers awaiting passage hailed the masters of vessels from its top, and the latter taking its name from the snakes that abounded there.

Hither came a band of Delawares with Pequot captives, among them a young chief to whom had been offered not only life but leadership if he would renounce his tribe, receive the mark of the turtle on his breast, and become a Delaware. On his refusal, he was bound to a tree, and was about to undergo the torture, when a girl among the listeners sprang to his side. She, too, was a Pequot, but the turtle totem was on her bosom, and when she begged his life, because they had been betrothed, the captors paused to talk of it. She had chosen well the time to interfere, for a band of Hurons was approaching, and even as the talk went on their yell was heard in the wood. Instant measures for defence were taken, and in the fight that followed both chief and maiden were forgotten; but though she cut the cords that bound him, they were separated in the confusion, he disappearing, she falling captive to the Hurons, who, sated with blood, retired from the field. In the fantastic disguise of a wizard the young Pequot entered their camp soon after, and on being asked to try his enchantments for the cure of a young woman, he entered her tent, showing no surprise at finding her to be the maiden of his choice, who was suffering from nothing worse than nerves, due to the excitement of the battle. Left alone with his patient, he disclosed his identity, and planned a way of escape that proved effective on that very night, for, though pursued by the angry Hurons, the couple reached "safe harbor," thence making a way to their own country in the east, where they were married.

DUNDERBERG