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28 chapters
Allegheny Episodes
Allegheny Episodes
“The country east of the Mississippi was inhabited by a very powerful nation. * * * Those people called themselves Alligewi. * * * The Allegheny River and Mountains have been named after them. * * * The Lenni-Lenape still call the river Alligewi Sipu, the river of the Alligewi, but it is generally known by its Iroquois name–Ohe-Yu–which the French had literally translated into La Belle Riviere, The Beautiful River, though a branch of it retains the ancient name Allegheny.”...
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Foreword
Foreword
The author tells me that I was his discoverer, and that without a discoverer we cannot do anything. Very true; one American author had to write till he was forty-eight, and then be discovered in Japan. Henry W. Shoemaker was discovered nearer home, and by a humbler scholar. In my last foreword I emphasized the value of folk-lore. Its significance grows upon me with age. I have now come to regard it as a kind of appendix to Scripture. Outside of mere magic, an abuse of correspondences, as Swedenb
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Introduction
Introduction
It is a good thing to make resolves, but a better thing, once having made them, to keep them. On two previous occasions the compiler of the present volume has stated his resolve in prefaces to issue no no more books of the kind, but has gone ahead and prepared more. Probably the motive that brought into existence the first volume can be urged in extenuation for the eleventh, namely, the desire to preserve the folk-lore of the Pennsylvania Mountains. The contents of the present volume, like its p
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I Tulliallan
I Tulliallan
“Why, yes, you may accompany your Uncle Thomas and myself to select the plate which we plan to present to the battleship of the line, ‘The Admiral Penn,’ which the First Lord, His Grace, Duke of Bedford, has graciously named in honor of your distinguished grandsire,” said Richard Penn, pompously, answering a query addressed to him by his young son, John. The youth, who was about eighteen years of age and small and slight, seemed delighted, and waited impatiently with his father for Uncle Thomas’
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II At His Bedside
II At His Bedside
When old Jacob Loy passed away at the age of eighty years, he left a pot of gold to be divided equally among his eight children. It was a pot of such goodly proportions that there was a nice round sum for all, and the pity of it was after the long years of privation which had collected it, that some of the heirs wasted it quickly on organs, fast horses, cheap finery and stock speculations, for it was before the days of player-pianos, victrolas and automobiles. Yolande, his youngest daughter, was
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III. The Prostrate Juniper
III. The Prostrate Juniper
Weguarran was a young warrior of the Wyandots, who lived on the shores of Lake Michigan. In the early spring of 1754 he was appointed to the body-guard of old Mozzetuk, a leader of the tribe, on an embassy to Bethlehem, in Pennsylvania, to prevail on the holy men there, as many Indians termed the Moravians, to send a band of Missionaries to the Wyandot Country, with a view of Christianizing the tribe, and acting as advisors and emissaries between between the Wyandots and allied nations with the
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IV. Out of the Ashes
IV. Out of the Ashes
Last Autumn we were crossing Rea’s Hill one afternoon of alternate sunshine and shadow, and as we neared the summit, glanced through several openings in the trees at the wide expanse of Fulton County valleys and coves behind us, on to the interminable range upon range of dark mountains northward. In the valleys here and there were dotted square stone houses, built of reddish sandstone, with high roofs and chimneys, giving a foreign or Scottish air to the scene. Some of these isolated structures
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V Wayside Destiny
V Wayside Destiny
Like many natives of the Pennsylvania Mountains, Ammon Tatnall was a believer in dreams and ghosts. Even in his less prosperous days, when life was considerable of a struggle, he had time to ponder over the limitless possibilities of the unseen world. Probably his faith in the so-called supernatural was founded on a dream he had while clerking in a hotel at Port Allegheny, during the active days of the lumber business in that part of the Black Forest. It seemed that his mother was lying at the p
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VI The Holly Tree
VI The Holly Tree
It was while on a mountain climbing trip in the French Alps, when stormstayed at a small inn at Grenoble, that a chance acquaintance showed The Viscount Adare a copy of “The Travels of Thomas Ashe,” a book which had recently appeared in London and created a sensation in the tourist world. The Viscount had already perused “Travels Beyond the Alleghenies,” by the younger Michaux, but the volume by Ashe, so full of human interest, more than sharpened his old desire to travel in the United States, n
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VII The Second Run of the Sap
VII The Second Run of the Sap
The selective draft, according to Dr. Jacobs, a very intelligent Seneca Indian, residing on the Cornplanter Reservation in Warren County, was practiced by Pennsylvania Indians in some of their earlier conflicts, notably in the bloody warfare in the Cherokee country. In the war against the Cherokees, there was a popular apathy at home, as it was not undertaken to repel an unjust invasion, but for the purpose of aggression, after the murder of a number of Cherokees by the Lenape, and as such did n
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VIII Black Chief’s Daughter
VIII Black Chief’s Daughter
It was the occasion of the annual Strawberry Dance at the Seneca Reservation, a lovely evening in June, when, after a warm rain, there had been a clear sunset, and the air was sweet with the odor of the grass, and the narrow roads were deep with soft, brown mud and many puddles of water. In the long, grey frame Council House all was animation and excitement. The grim old Chief, Twenty Canoes, decked out in his headdress of feathers, followed by the musicians with wolf-skin drums filled with pebb
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IX The Gorilla
IX The Gorilla
If Sir Rider Haggard was a Pennsylvanian he would doubtless lay the scenes of his wonderful mystery stories in Snyder County. It is in that ruggedly picturesque mountainous county where romance has taken its last stand, where the old touches the new, and hosts, goblins and witches and memories of panthers, wolves and Indians linger in cycle after cycle of imaginative reminiscences. Every now and then, even in this dull, unsympathetic age, when the world, as Artist Shearer puts it, “is aesthetica
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X The Indian’s Twilight
X The Indian’s Twilight
According to Daniel Mark, born in 1835, (died 1922), when the aged Seneca Indian, Isaac Steel, stood beside the moss-grown stump of the giant “Grandfather Pine” in Sugar Valley, in the early Autumn of 1892, he was silent for a long while, then placing his hands over his eyes, uttered these words: “This is the Indians’ Twilight; it explains many things; I had heard from from Billy Dowdy, when he returned to the reservation in 1879, that the tree had been cut by Pardee, but as he had not seen the
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XI Hugh Gibson’s Captivity
XI Hugh Gibson’s Captivity
After the brutal massacre, by the Indians, of the Woolcomber family, came fresh rumors of fresh atrocities in contemplation, consequently it was considered advisable to gather the women and children of the surrounding country within the stockade of Fort Robinson, under a strong guard, while the bulk of the able-bodied men went out in companies to reap the harvest. Some of the harvesters were on guard part of the time, consequently all the men of the frontier community performed a share of the gu
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XII Girty’s Notch
XII Girty’s Notch
The career of Simon Girty, otherwise spelled Girtee and Gerdes, has become of sufficient interest to cause the only authoritative biography to sell at a prohibitive figure, and outlaw or renegade as he is called, there are postoffices postoffices , hotels, streams, caves and rocks which perpetuate his name throughout Pennsylvania. Simon Gerdes was born in the Cumberland Valley on Yellow Breeches Creek, the son of a Swiss-German father and an Irish mother. This origin guaranteed him no high socia
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XIII Poplar George
XIII Poplar George
“I have been reading your legends of the old days in the ‘North American,’” American,’” said the delegate to the Grange Convention, stroking his long silky mustache, “and they remind me of many stories that my mother used to tell me when I was a little shaver, while we were living on the Pucketa, in Westmoreland County. There was one story that I used to like best of all. It was not the one about old Pucketa the Indian warrior for whom the run was named, but about a less notable Indian, but more
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XIV Black Alice Dunbar
XIV Black Alice Dunbar
Down in the wilds of the Fourth Gap, latterly used as an artery of travel between Sugar Valley and White Deer Hole Valley, commonly known as “White Deer Valley,” a forest ranger’s cabin stands on the site of an ancient Indian encampment, the only clearing in the now dreary drive from the “Dutch End” to the famous Stone Church. Until a dozen years ago much of the primeval forest remained, clumps of huge, original white pines stood here and there, in the hollows were hemlock and rhododendron jungl
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XV Abram Antoine, Bad Indian
XV Abram Antoine, Bad Indian
Abram Antoine, a Cacique of the Stockbridge Tribe of Oneida Indians, had never before while in Pennsylvania been off the watershed of the Ohe-yu, or “The Beautiful River,” called by the white men “Allegheny,” until he accepted the position of interpreter to a group of chiefs from the New York and Pennsylvania Indians, to visit “The Great White Father,” General Washington, at Mount Vernon. While the General had not been President for several years, and was living in retirement at his Virginia hom
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XVI Do You Believe in Ghosts?
XVI Do You Believe in Ghosts?
A. D. Karstetter, painstaking local historian, tells us that there was no more noteworthy spot in the annals of mountainous Pennsylvania than the old Washington Inn at Logansville. Built after the fashion of an ancient English hostelry, with its inn-yard surrounded by sheds and horse stables, it presented a most picturesque appearance to discerning travelers. The passage of time had obliterated obliterated it, long before the great fire on June 24, 1918, swept the town, removing even the landmar
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XVII A Stone’s Throw
XVII A Stone’s Throw
When land warrants were allotted to Jacob Marshall and Jacob Mintges, of the Hebrew colony at Schaefferstown, there were elaborate preparations made by these two lifelong friends to migrate to the new country of the Christunn. That the warrants were laid side by side made the situation doubly pleasant, a compensation in a measure for any regrets at leaving the banks of the beautiful Milbach. The country was becoming too closely settled, opportunities were circumscribed, and the liberality of the
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XVIII The Turning of the Belt
XVIII The Turning of the Belt
There are not many memories of Ole Bull in the vicinity of the ruins of his castle today. Fifteen years ago, before the timber was all gone, there were quite a few old people who were living in the Black Forest at the time of his colonization venture, who remembered him well, also a couple of his original colonists, Andriesen and Oleson, but these are no more. One has to go to Renovo or to Austin or Germania to find any reminiscences now, and those have suffered through passing from “hand to mou
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XIX Riding His Pony
XIX Riding His Pony
When Rev. James Martin visited the celebrated Penn’s Cave, in the Spring of 1795, it was related that he found a small group of Indians encamped there. That evening, around the campfire, one of the redskins related a legend of one of the curiosities of the watery cave, the flambuoyant “Indian Riding Pony” mural-piece which decorates one of the walls. Spirited as a Remington, it bursts upon the view, creates a lasting impression, then vanishes as the power skiff, the “Nita-nee,” draws nearer. Acc
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XX The Little Postmistress
XX The Little Postmistress
It was long past dark when Mifflin Sargeant, of the Snow Shoe Land Company, came within sight of the welcoming lights of Stover’s. For fourteen miles, through the foothills on the Narrows, he had not seen a sign of human habitation, except one deserted hunter’s cabin at Yankee Gap. There was an air of cheerfulness and life about the building he had arrived at. Several doors opened simultaneously at the signal of his approach, given by a faithful watchdog, throwing the rich glow of the fat-lamps
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XXI The Silent Friend
XXI The Silent Friend
Every one who has hunted in the “Seven Brothers’”, as the Seven Mountains are called in Central Pennsylvania, has heard of Daniel Karstetter, the famous Nimrod. The Seven Mountains comprise the Path Valley, Short Bald, Thick Head, Sand, Shade and Tussey Mountains. Though three-quarters of a century has passed since he was in his hey-day as a slayer of big game, his fame is undiminished. Anecdotes of his prowess are related in every hunting camp; by one and all he has been acclaimed the greatest
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XXII The Fountain of Youth
XXII The Fountain of Youth
Old Chief Wisamek, of the Kittochtinny Indians, had lost his spouse. He was close to sixty years of age, which was old for a redman, especially one who had led the hard life of a warrior, exposed to all kinds of weather, fasts and forced marches. Though he felt terribly lonely and depressed in his state of widowerhood, the thought of discarding the fidelity of the eagle, which, if bereaved, never takes a second mate, and was the noble bird he worshipped, seemed repugnant to him until he happened
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XXIII Compensations
XXIII Compensations
It seemed that Andrew McMeans and Oscar Wellendorf were born to be engaged in rivalry rivalry , although judging by their antecedents, the former was in a class beyond, McMeans being well-born, of old Scotch-Irish stock, a valuable asset on the Allegheny. Wellendorf, of Pennsylvania Dutch origin, of people coming from one of the eastern counties, was consequently rated much lower socially, had much more to overcome in the way of life’s obstacles. The boys were almost of school age; Wellendorf, i
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XXIV A Misunderstanding
XXIV A Misunderstanding
It was the night before Christmas in the little mountain church near Wolfe’s Store. The small, low-roofed, raftered chapel was illumined as brightly as coal oil lamps in the early stage of their development could do it; a hemlock tree, decked out with candles and tinsel stood to one side of the altar, an almost red-hot ten-plate stove on the other, while the chancel and rafters were twined and garlanded with ground pine and ilex, or winter berries. In one of the rear pews sat a very good looking
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XXV A Haunted House
XXV A Haunted House
When Billy Cloyd prospered in the lumber and milling business, he determined to erect a mansion overlooking the arrowy waters of the Sinnemahoning that would reflect not only his success, but the social status of his family as well. Accordingly Williamsport architects who made a specialty of erecting houses for the wealthy lumbermen of that community were commissioned to prepare plans for what was to be the grandest private dwelling on the outposts of civilization, a structure which would outdo
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