Snake, or God Snake, lived in the Gulf of Mexico. It slept in a cavern of
pure crystal at the bottom, and its head, being shaped from a solid
emerald, lighted the ocean for leagues when it arose near the surface.
Similar to this is the belief of the Cherokees in the kings of
rattlesnakes, "bright old inhabitants" of the mountains that grew to a
mighty size, and drew to themselves every creature that they looked upon.
Each wore a crown of carbuncle of dazzling brightness.
The Indians avoided Klamath Lake because it was haunted by a monster that
was half dragon, half hippopotamus.
Hutton Lake, Wyoming, is the home of a serpent queen, whose breathing may
be seen in the bubbles that well up in the centre. She is constantly
watching for her lover, but takes all men who come in her way to her
grotto beneath the water, when she finds that they are not the one she
has expected, and there they become her slaves. To lure victims into the
lake she sets there a decoy of a beautiful red swan, and should the
hunter kill this bird he will become possessed of divine power. Should he
see "the woman," as the serpent queen is called, he will never live to
tell of it, unless he has seen her from a hiding-place near the
shore--for so surely as he is noticed by this Diana of the depths, so
surely will her spies, the land snakes, sting him to death. In appearance
she is a lovely girl in all but her face, and that is shaped like the
head of a monster snake. Her name is never spoken by the Indians, for
fear that it will cost them their lives.
Michael Pauw, brave fisherman of Paterson, New Jersey, hero of the fight
with the biggest snapping-turtle in Dover Slank, wearer of a scar on his
seat of honor as memento of the conflict, member of the Kersey Reds--he
whose presence of mind was shown in holding out a chip of St. Nicholas's
staff when he met the nine witches of the rocks capering in the mists of
Passaic Falls--gave battle from a boat to a monster that had ascended to
the cataract. One of the Kersey Reds, leaning out too far, fell astride
of the horny beast, and was carried at express speed, roaring with
fright, until unhorsed by a projecting rock, up which he scrambled to
safety. Falling to work with bayonets and staves, the company despatched
the creature and dragged it to shore. One Dutchman--who was quite a
traveller, having been as far from home as Albany--said that the thing
was what the Van Rensselaers cut up for beef, and that he believed they
called it a sturgeon.
STONE-THROWING DEVILS
There is an odd recurrence among American legends of tales relating to
assaults of people or their houses by imps of darkness. The shadowy
leaguers of Gloucester, Massachusetts, kept the garrison of that place in
a state of fright until they were expelled from the neighborhood by a
silver bullet and a chaplain's prayers. Witchcraft was sometimes
manifested in Salem by the hurling of missiles from unseen hands. The
"stone-throwing devil" of Portsmouth is the subject of a tradition more
than two centuries of age, but, as the stone-thrower appears rather as an
avenger than as a gratuitously malignant spirit, he is ill treated in
having the name of devil applied to him. In this New Hampshire port lived
a widow who had a cabin and a bit of land of her own. George Walton, a
neighbor, wanted her land, for its situation pleased him, and as the old
woman had neither money nor influential friends he charged her with
witchcraft, and, whether by legal chicanery or mere force is not
recorded, he got his hands upon her property.
The charge of witchcraft was not pressed, because the man had obtained
what he wanted, but the poor, houseless creature laid a ban on the place
and told the thief that he would never have pleasure nor profit out of
it. Walton laughed at her, bade her go her way, and moved his family into
the widow's house. It was Sunday night, and the family had gone to bed,
when at ten o'clock there came a fierce shock of stones against the roof
and doors. All were awake in a moment. A first thought was that Indians
were making an assault, but when the occupants peered cautiously into the
moonlight the fields were seen to be deserted. Yet, even as they looked,
a gate was lifted from its hinges and thrown through the air.
Walton ventured out, but a volley of stones, seemingly from a hundred
hands, was delivered at his head, and he ran back to shelter. Doors and
windows were barred and shuttered, but it made no difference. Stones, too
hot to hold a hand upon, were hurled through glass and down the chimney,
objects in the rooms themselves were picked up and flung at Walton,
candles were blown out, a hand without a body tapped at the window, locks
and bars and keys were bent as if by hammer-blows, a cheese-press was
smashed against the wall and the cheese spoiled, hay-stacks in the field
were broken up and the hay tossed into branches of trees. For a long time
Walton could not go out at night without being assailed with stones.
Bell, book, candle, and witch-broth availed nothing, and it was many a
day before peace came to the Walton household.
In 1802 an epidemic of assault went through the Berkshire Hills. The
performance began in a tailor's shop in Salisbury, Connecticut, at eleven
of the clock on the night of November 2, when a stick and lumps of stone,
charcoal, and mortar were flung through a window. The moon was up, but
nothing could be seen, and the bombardment was continued until after
daylight. After doing some damage here the assailants went to the house
of Ezekiel Landon and rapped away there for a week. Persons were struck
by the missiles, and quantities of glass were destroyed. Nothing could be
seen coming toward the windows until the glass broke, and it was seldom
that anything passed far into a room. No matter how hard it was thrown,
it dropped softly and surely on the sill, inside, as if a hand had put it
there. Windows were broken on both sides of buildings at the same time,
and many sticks and stones came through the same holes in the panes, as
if aimed carefully by a gunner.
A hamlet that stood in Sage's ravine, on the east side of the Dome of the
Taconics, was assailed in the same way after nightfall. One house was
considerably injured. No causes for the performance were ever discovered,
and nobody in the place was known to have an enemy--at least, a malicious
one.
At Whitmire Hill, Georgia, the spot where two murders were committed
before the war, is a headless phantom that comes thundering down on the
wayfarer on the back of a giant horse and vanishes at the moment when the
heart of his prospective victim is bumping against his palate. At times,
however, this spook prefers to remain invisible, and then it is a little
worse, for it showers stones and sods on the pedestrian until his legs
have carried him well beyond the phantom's jurisdiction.
The legends of buried treasure, instanced in another place, frequently
include assaults by the ghosts of pirates and misers on the daring ones
who try to resurrect their wealth.
Forty-seven years ago, in the township of St. Mary's, Illinois, two lads
named Groves and a companion named Kirk were pelted with snowballs while
on their way home from a barn where they had been to care for the stock
for the night. The evening had shut in dark, and the accuracy of the
thrower's aim was the more remarkable because it was hardly possible to
see more than a rod away. The snowballs were packed so tightly that they
did not break on striking, though they were thrown with force, and Kirk
was considerably bruised by them. Mr. Groves went out with a lantern, but
its rays lit up a field of untrodden snow, and there was no sound except
that made by the wind as it whistled past the barn and fences. Toward
dawn another inspection was made, and in the dim light the snowballs were
seen rising from the middle of a field that had not a footprint on it,
and flying toward the spectators like bullets. They ran into the field
and laid about them with pitchforks, but nothing came of that, and not
until the sun arose was the pelting stopped. Young Kirk, who was badly
hurt, died within a year.
The men of Sharon, Connecticut, having wheedled their town-site from the
Indians in 1754, were plagued thereafter by whoops and whistlings and the
throwing of stones. Men were seen in the starlight and were fired upon,
but without effect, and the disturbances were not ended until the Indians
had received a sum of money.
Without presuming to doubt the veracity of tradition in these matters, an
incident from the writer's boyhood in New England may be instanced. The
house of an unpopular gentleman was assailed--not in the ostentatious
manner just described, yet in a way that gave him a good deal of trouble.
Dead cats appeared mysteriously in his neighborhood; weird noises arose
under his windows; he tried to pick up letters from his doorstep that
became mere chalk-marks at his touch, so that he took up only splinters
under his nails. One night, as a seance was about beginning in his yard,
he emerged from a clump of bushes, flew in the direction of the
disturbance, laid violent hands on the writer's collar, and bumped his
nose on a paving-stone. Then the manifestations were discontinued, for
several nights, for repairs.
STORIED SPRINGS
Like the Greeks, the red men endowed the woods and waters with tutelary
sprites, and many of the springs that are now resorted to as fountains of
healing were known long before the settlement of Europeans here, the
gains from drinking of them being ascribed to the beneficence of spirit
guardians. The earliest comers to these shores--or, rather, the earliest
of those who entertained such beliefs--fancied that the fabled fountain
of eternal youth would be found among the other blessings of the land. To
the Spaniards Florida was a land of promise and mystery. Somewhere in its
interior was fabled to stand a golden city ruled by a king whose robes
sparkled with precious dust, and this city was named for the
adventurer--El Dorado, or the Place of the Gilded One. Here, they said,
would be found the elixir of life. The beautiful Silver Spring, near the
head of the Ocklawaha, with its sandy bottom plainly visible at the depth
of eighty feet, was thought to be the source of the life-giving waters,
but, though Ponce de Leon heard of this, he never succeeded in fighting
his way to it through the jungle.
In Georgia, in the reputed land of Chicora, were a sacred stream that
made all young again who bathed there, and a spring so delectable that a
band of red men, chancing on it in a journey, could not leave it, and are
there forever.
In the island of "Bimini," one of the Lucayos (Bahamas), was another such
a fountain.
Between the Flint and Ocmulgee Rivers the Creeks declared was a spring of
life, on an island in a marsh, defended from approach by almost
impenetrable labyrinths,--a heaven where the women were fairer than any
other on earth.
The romantic and superstitious Spaniards believed these legends, and
spent years and treasure in searching for these springs. And, surely, if
the new and striking scenes of this Western world caused Columbus to
"boast that he had found the seat of paradise, it will not appear strange
that Ponce de Leon should dream of discovering the fountain of youth."
The Yuma Apaches had been warned by one of their oracles never to enter a
certain canon in Castle Dome range, Arizona, but a company of them forgot
this caution while in chase of deer, and found themselves between walls
of pink and white fluorite with a spring bubbling at the head of the
ravine. Tired and heated, they fell on their faces to drink, when they
found that the crumbling quartz that formed the basin of the spring was
filled with golden nuggets. Eagerly gathering up this precious substance,
for they knew what treasure of beads, knives, arrows, and blankets the
Mexicans would exchange for it, they attempted to make their way out of
the canon; but a cloudburst came, and on the swiftly rising tide all were
swept away but one, who survived to tell the story. White men have
frequently but vainly tried to find that spring.
In Southwestern Kansas, on a hill a quarter-mile from Solomon River, is
the Sacred Water, pooled in a basin thirty feet across. When many stand
about the brink it slowly rises. Here two Panis stopped on their return
from a buffalo hunt, and one of them unwittingly stepped on a turtle a
yard long. Instantly he felt his feet glued to the monster's back, for,
try as he might, he could not disengage himself, and the creature
lumbered away to the pool, where it sank with him. There the turtle god
remains, and beads, arrows, ear-rings, and pipes that are dropped in, it
swallows greedily. The Indians use the water to mix their paint with, but
never for drinking.
The mail rider, crossing the hot desert of Arizona, through the cacti and
over holes where scorpions hide, makes for Devil's Well, under El
Diablo--a dark pool surrounded with gaunt rocks. Here, coming when the
night is on, he lies down, and the wind swishing in the sage--brush puts
him to sleep. At dawn he wakens with the frightened whinny of his horse
in his ears and, all awake, looks about him. A stranger, wrapped in a
tattered blanket, is huddled in a recess of the stones, arrived there,
like himself, at night, perhaps. Poising his rifle on his knee, the rider
challenges him, but never a sign the other makes. Then, striding over to
him, he pulls away the blanket and sees a shrivelled corpse with a face
that he knows--his brother. Hardly is this meeting made when a hail of
arrows falls around. His horse is gone. The Apaches, who know no
gentleness and have no mercy, have manned every gap and sheltering rock.
With his rifle he picks them off, as they rise in sight with arrows at
the string, and sends them tumbling into the dust; but, when his last
bullet has sped into a red man's heart, they rise in a body and with
knives and hatchets hew him to death. And that is why the Devil's Well
still tastes of blood.
Among the Balsam Mountains of Western North Carolina is a large spring
that promises refreshment, but, directly that the wayfarer bends over the
water, a grinning face appears at the bottom and as he stoops it rises to
meet his. So hideous is this demon that few of the mountaineers have
courage to drink here, and they refuse to believe that the apparition is
caused by the shape of the basin, or aberrated reflection of their own
faces. They say it is the visage of a "haunt," for a Cherokee girl, who
had uncommon beauty, once lived hard by, and took delight in luring
lovers from less favored maidens. The braves were jealous of each other,
and the women were jealous of her, while she--the flirt!--rejoiced in the
trouble that she made. A day fell for a wedding--that of a hunter with a
damsel of his tribe, but at the hour appointed the man was missing.
Mortified and hurt, the bride stole away from the village and began a
search of the wood, and she carried bow and arrows in her hand. Presently
she came on the hunter, lying at the feet of the coquette, who was
listening to his words with encouraging smiles. Without warning the
deserted girl drew an arrow to the head and shot her lover through the
heart--then, beside his lifeless body, she begged Manitou to make her
rival's face so hideous that all would be frightened who looked at it. At
the words the beautiful creature felt her face convulse and shrivel, and,
rushing to the mirror of the spring, she looked in, only to start back in
loathing. When she realized that the frightful visage that glared up at
her was her own, she uttered a cry of despair and flung herself into the
water, where she drowned.
It is her face--so altered as to disclose the evil once hid behind
it--that peers up at the hardy one who passes there and knows it as the
Haunted Spring.
The medicinal properties of the mineral springs at Ballston and Saratoga
were familiar to the Indians, and High Rock Spring, to which Sir William
Johnson was carried by the Mohawks in 1767 to be cured of a wound, was
called "the medicine spring of the Great Spirit," for it was believed
that the leaping and bubbling of the water came from its agitation by
hands not human, and red men regarded it with reverence.
The springs at Manitou, Colorado (see "Division of Two Tribes"), were
always approached with gifts for the manitou that lived in them.
The lithia springs of Londonderry, New Hampshire, used to be visited by
Indians from the Merrimack region, who performed incantations and dances
to ingratiate themselves with the healing spirit that lived in the water.
Their stone implements and arrow-heads are often found in adjacent
fields.
The curative properties of Milford Springs, New Hampshire, were revealed
in the dream of a dying boy.
A miracle spring flowed in the old days near the statue of the Virgin at
White Marsh, Maryland.
Biddeford Pool, Maine, was a miracle pond once a year, for whoso bathed
there on the 26th of June would be restored to health if he were ill,
because that day was the joint festival of Saints Anthelm and Maxentius.
There was a wise and peaceable chief of the Ute tribe who always
counselled his people to refrain from war, but when he grew old the fiery
spirits deposed him and went down to the plains to give battle to the
Arapahoe. News came that they had been defeated in consequence of their
rashness. Then the old man's sorrow was so keen that his heart broke. But
even in death he was beneficent, for his spirit entered the earth and
forthwith came a gush of water that has never ceased to flow--the Hot
Sulphur Springs of Colorado. The Utes often used to go to those springs
to bathe--and be cured of rheumatism--before they were driven away.
Spring River, Arkansas, is nearly as large at its source as at its mouth,
for Mammoth Spring, in the Ozark Mountains, where it has its rise, has a
yield of ninety thousand gallons a minute, so that it is, perhaps, the
largest in the world. Here, three hundred years ago, the Indians
had gathered for a month's feast, for chief Wampahseesah's
daughter--Nitilita--was to wed a brave of many ponies, a hundred of which
he had given in earnest of his love. For weeks no rain had fallen, and,
while the revel was at its height, news came that all the rivers had gone
dry. Several young men set off with jars, to fill them at the
Mississippi, and, confident that relief would come, the song and dance
went on until the men and women faltered from exhaustion. At last,
Nitilita died, and, in the wildness of his grief, the husband smote his
head upon a rock and perished too. Next day the hunters came with water,
but, incensed by their delay, the chief ordered them to be slain in
sacrifice to the manes of the dead. A large grave was dug and the last
solemnities were begun when there was a roaring and a shaking in the
earth--it parted, and the corpses disappeared in the abyss. Then from the
pit arose a flood of water that went foaming down the valley. Crazed with
grief, remorse, and fear, Wampahseesah flung himself into the torrent and
was borne to his death. The red men built a dam there later, and often
used to sit before it in the twilight, watching, as they declared, the
faces of the dead peering at them through the foam.
During the rush for the California gold-fields in the '50's a party took
the route by Gila River, and set across the desert. The noon temperature
was 120, the way was strewn with skeletons of wagons, horses, and men,
and on the second night after crossing the Colorado the water had given
out. The party had gathered on the sands below Yuma, the men discussing
the advisability of returning, the women full of apprehension, the young
ones crying, the horses panting; but presently the talk fell low, for in
one of the wagons a child's voice was heard in prayer: "Oh, good heavenly
Father, I know I have been a naughty girl, but I am so thirsty, and mamma
and papa and baby all want a drink so much! Do, good God, give us water,
and I never will be naughty again." One of the men said, earnestly, "May
God grant it!" In a few moments the child cried, "Mother, get me water.
Get some for baby and me. I can hear it running." The horses and mules
nearly broke from the traces, for almost at their feet a spring had burst
from the sand-warm, but pure. Their sufferings were over. The water
continued to flow, running north for twenty miles, and at one point
spreading into a lake two miles wide and twenty feet deep. When
emigration was diverted, two years later, to the northern route and to
the isthmus, New River Spring dried up. Its mission was over.
LOVERS' LEAPS
So few States in this country--and so few countries, if it comes to
that--are without a lover's leap that the very name has come to be a
by-word. In most of these places the disappointed ones seem to have gone
to elaborate and unusual pains to commit suicide, neglecting many easy
and equally appropriate methods. But while in some cases the legend has
been made to fit the place, there is no doubt that in many instances the
story antedated the arrival of the white men. The best known lovers'
leaps are those on the upper Mississippi, on the French Broad, Jump
Mountain, in Virginia, Jenny Jump Mountain, New Jersey, Mackinac,
Michigan, Monument Mountain, Massachusetts, on the Wissahickon, near
Philadelphia, Muscatine, Iowa, and Lefferts Height. There are many other
declivities,--also, that are scenes of leaps and adventures, such as the
Fawn's Leap, in Kaaterskill Clove; Rogers's Rock, on Lake George; the
rocks in Long Narrows, on the Juniata, where the ghost of Captain Jack,
"the wild hunter" of colonial days, still ranges; Campbell's Ledge,
Pittston, Pennsylvania, where its name-giver jumped off to escape
Indians; and Peabody's leap, of thirty feet, on Lake Champlain, where Tim
Peabody, a scout, escaped after killing a number of savages.
At Jump Mountain, near Lexington, Virginia, an Indian couple sprang off
because there were insuperable bars to their marriage.
At the rock on the Wissahickon a girl sought death because her lover was
untrue to her.
At Muscatine the cause of a maid's demise and that of her lover was the
severity of her father, who forbade the match because there was no war in
which the young man could prove his courage.
At Lefferts Height a girl stopped her recreant lover as he was on his way
to see her rival, and urging his horse to the edge of the bluff she
leaped with him into the air.
Monument Mountain, a picturesque height in the Berkshires, is faced on
its western side by a tall precipice, from which a girl flung herself
because the laws of her tribe forbade her marriage with a cousin to whom
she had plighted troth. She was buried where her body was found, and each
Indian as he passed the spot laid a stone on her grave--thus, in time,
forming a monument.
"Purgatory," the chasm at Newport, Rhode Island, through which the sea
booms loudly after a storm, was a scene of self-sacrifice to a hopeless
love on the part of an Indian pair in a later century, though there is an
older tradition of the seizure of a guilty squaw, by no less a person
than the devil himself, who flung her from the cliff and dragged her soul
away as it left her body. His hoof-marks were formerly visible on the
rocks.
At Hot Springs, North Carolina, two conspicuous cliffs are pointed out on
the right bank of the French Broad River: Paint Rock--where the
aborigines used to get ochre to smear their faces, and which they
decorated with hieroglyphics--and Lover's Leap. It is claimed that the
latter is the first in this country known to bear this sentimental and
tragically suggestive title. There are two traditions concerning it, one
being that an Indian girl was discovered at its top by hostiles who drove
her into the gulf below, the other relating to the wish of an Indian to
marry a girl of a tribe with which his own had been immemorially at war.
The match was opposed on both sides, so, instead of doing as most Indians
and some white men would do nowadays--marry the girl and let
reconciliation come in time,--he scaled the rock in her company and
leaped with her into the stream. They awoke as man and wife in the happy
hunting-ground.