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“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.”
–John Heckewelder.
ALTOONA, PENNSYLVANIA
Published by the Altoona Tribune Company
1922
Copyright: All Rights Reserved.
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_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 Swedenborg calls it, there is in folk-lore a digest
of the spiritual insight of the plain people. It also contains actual
facts boiled to rags. For instance, in 1919 the dying Horace Traubel saw
in vision his life-long idol, Walt Whitman, and the apparition was also
seen by Colonel Cosgrave, who felt a shock when it touched him.
The flimsy modern paper whereon the scientific account of this is
printed will soon perish, and then there will be nothing left but loose
literary references and memories to witness that it happened. Any
skeptic can challenge these, and the apparition will become folk-lore.
As it is in its scientific setting in the Journal of the American
Society for Psychical Research for 1921, it is a side light on the
Transfiguration. For if Whitman appeared to Traubel in 1919, and
Swedenborg appeared to Andrew Jackson Davis in 1844, why should not the
great predecessors of Christ appear also to him?
Such is the value of folk-lore, and for this reason the Armenian Church
did well to attach an appendix of apocrypha to the Holy Gospel. In such
a document as the uncanonical Gospel of “Peter” (this was not one of the
Armenian selections, but it ought to have been, in spite of the fact
that the Mother Church of Syria had suppressed it) the life of Christ is
seen in a dissolving view, blending with the folk-lore of the time; and
let us hope that some day this valuable piece of ancient thought will be
printed with the New Testament instead of some of the unimportant matter
that too often accompanies it.
ALBERT J. EDMUNDS.
THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA,
Philadelphia, March 1, 1921.
_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 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 predecessors, were gathered
orally from old people and others, and written down as closely as
possible to the verbal accounts. In order to escape ill feeling, as in
the case with the earlier volumes, some names of persons and places, and
dates have been changed. This has been done with the greatest
reluctance, and only where absolutely necessary. The characters are real
persons, and most of them appear under their rightful names. Many of the
legends or incidents run counter to the accepted course of history, but
tradition is preserved for what it is worth, and the reader can draw his
own conclusions. While some of these tales end unhappily, the proportion
is not greater than in life as we know it, and the general ascendency of
right over wrong shines through the gloomiest passages. Life could not
exist, or the world go on, unless the majority of events ended
fortuitously; it is that happy preponderance which makes “hope spring
eternal,” and is so often rewarded by a realization of the heart’s
desire.
The various phases of the supernatural in the ensuing pages depicts
probably a more normal condition of our relationship with the unseen
world than the crude and clumsy mediumship found in the big cities, and
may present a rational explanation of life “behind the dark curtain.”
There is certainly a spiritual life, and a purely spiritual God, and all
the events of the soul are regulated by divine laws, which have only too
frequently been confused with the physical life so subject to chance and
reversion back to chaos.
The origins of Pennsylvania folk-lore seem to the writer like a happy
blending of Indian and European elements which would have gradually, had
backwoods conditions continued, developed into a definitely
Pennsylvanian mythology. The fact that the writer had so many more
legends in form of notes, which otherwise would have been mislaid and
come to nothing, prompted him to break his resolve and prepare the
present volume. And, for good or ill, he has many more, dealing with
other parts of the State. What shall be their fate? Are they worthy of
perpetuation as folk-lore? Apart from the general idea of preserving
legendary matter for future generations, there is the added reason that
the heroic lines of some of the characters appealed to him, and, to save
them from the oblivion of the “forgotten millions,” their careers have
been herein recorded.
Probably one-half of the stories were told to the compiler by one
lady–Mrs. W. J. Phillips, of Clinton County--who spent some of her
girlhood days, many years ago, on the Indian Reservations in
Pennsylvania and southwestern New York.
Professor J. S. Illick, Chief of the Bureau of Research of the
Pennsylvania Department of Forestry, is due thanks for securing many of
the illustrations. Four of the chapters–Nos. IX, XV, XXI, XXII–are
reprinted from the compiler’s historical brochure, “Penn’s Grandest
Cavern,” and the first chapter, “Tulliallan,” was published in the
“Sunbury Daily”; otherwise none of the chapters of this book have
hitherto appeared in print.
Persons interested in more intimate details concerning the origins and
characters of the various tales will be cheerfully accommodated “for
private circulation only.” Like James Macpherson of “Ossian,” it can be
said “the sources of information are open to all.”
The compiler hopes that through this book a more general interest in the
Pennsylvania folk-lore can be created; its predecessors have missed
achieving this, but there is always that hope springing afresh to
“Godspeed” the newest volume. No pretense at style of literary
workmanship is claimed, and the stories should be read, not as romances
or short stories, but as a by-product of history–the folk-lore, the
heart of the Pennsylvania mountain people. With this constantly borne in
mind, a better understanding and appreciation of the meanings of the
book may be arrived at.
The kindly reception accorded to the previous volumes, and also to
“North Pennsylvania Minstrelsy” by the press and by a small circle of
interested readers, if equalled by the present volume will satisfy the
compiler, if his ambitions for a wider field of usefulness are not to be
realized.
To those of press and public who have read and commented on the earlier
volumes go the compiler’s gratitude, and to them he commends this book,
the tales of which have had their origins mostly along the main chain of
the Allegheny Mountains and on the western watershed. Sincere thanks are
due to Miss Mary E. Morrow, whose intelligence and patience in
transcribing the manuscripts of this and the majority of the earlier
volumes of the series has had much to do with whatever recognition they
may have achieved, and a pleasant memory to the author, as well.