These Catskill Mountains were purchased from the Indians on July 8,
1678, by a company of Dutch and English gentlemen, who took their
title at a solemn conclave held at the Stadt Huis in Albany, where the
Indian chief Mahak-Neminea attended with six representatives of his
tribe. The Indians seem to have soon disappeared, and the region for a
century or more remained mythical and almost unexplored, thus
contributing to the many fairy tales that have got mixed up with its
history. It was among these wonderful mountains that Washington Irving
was thus enabled to discover Rip Van Winkle. Down on the mountain
side, upon the margin of a deep dark glen leading up from Catskill
Village, stands Rip Van Winkle's ancient little cabin. It is within
the vast amphitheatre where Hendrick Hudson's ghostly crew held their
revels and beguiled him to drink from the flagon which put him into
his sleep of twenty years. It was a curious revel, for with the
gravest faces, and in mysterious silence, they rolled their nine-pin
balls, which echoed along the mountains like rumbling peals of
thunder. The huge cliffs overhanging the dark glen were evidently put
there for just such a ghostly scene, and even now the old denizens of
the Catskills are said to never hear a summer thunder-storm
reverberating among these mountains without concluding that the Dutch
ship's company from the "Half Moon" are again playing at their game of
nine-pins. There is still pointed out the slab of rock on which Rip
took his long sleep, and until recently there is said to have lived in
the old cabin an alleged "Van Winkle" who made a pretence to be a
descendant of the original Rip, and dispensed to the weary traveller
liquids fully as sulphurous as those in the flagon of the ghostly
crew. Among these mountains originated many of the quaint Dutch
legends that have got so interwoven into the early history of New York
that it is hard to separate the fact from the fiction.
It was not until 1823 that the first summer hotel was built in the
Catskills, a rude little structure standing where is now the Mountain
House, near the summit of the inclined plane railway. The highest peak
of the range is Slide Mountain, in the western Catskills, at the head
of the Big Indian Valley, rising forty-two hundred and five feet. A
large portion of this mountain, including the crest, is a New York
State reservation, and from its top six States are in view. These
Catskill peaks are built up of huge and jagged piles of crags and
broken stone, through which the torrents have carved the "Cloves." The
stratified rocks are easily split into layers, and they furnish the
towns along the Hudson with much of the flagging used for footwalks.
Enormous boulders, some as big as a house, are liberally strewn about,
where they were dropped by the great glacier. Among the grandest of
the gorges, which the torrents have cleft, is the Kaaterskill Clove,
its stream, after various windings, finally flowing eastward towards
the Hudson. As the name Kaatskill comes from the cat, so the
Kaaterskill is regarded as derived from an animal of most complete
feline development, the "gentleman cat." The steep borders of this
Kaaterskill Clove, a wonderful canyon, down in the bottom of which ice
and snow remain during the summer, furnish many points of remarkable
outlook, giving a startling realization of the vast scale of these
mountains. The stream bubbles far below, heard but not seen, and the
mountain peaks above are occasionally obscured by passing clouds.
Adjoining this canyon is an immense gorge carved out of the hills,
into which pours the majestic Kaaterskill Falls, plunging down an
abyss of two hundred and sixty feet in two leaps, respectively of one
hundred and eighty and eighty feet. The stream is dammed above the
cataract, so that in times of drouth the water may be retained and the
falls thus be exhibited at intervals by turning on the water, as is
the case with various cataracts in Switzerland. Few waterfalls have
had more praises sung than this ribbon of spray, which was a favorite
both of Cooper and Bryant. An inscription on the rock at the foot
preserves the memory of a faithful dog, who once jumped down to follow
a stone, because he thought it his master's bidding.
The unique description of the Kaaterskill Falls by Cooper's Leather
Stocking is interesting. He says, "The water comes crooking and
winding among the rocks, first so slow that a trout might swim in it,
and then starting and running just like any creature that wanted to
make a far spring, till it gets to where the mountain divides like the
cleft hoof of a deer, leaving a deep hollow for the brook to tumble
into. The first pitch is nigh two hundred feet, and the water looks
like flakes of driven snow afore it touches the bottom; and then the
stream gathers itself together again for a new start, and may be
flutters over fifty feet of flat rock before it falls for another
hundred, where it jumps about from shelf to shelf, first turning this
a-way, and then turning that a-way, striving to get out of the hollow,
till it finally comes to the plain. To my judgment, it's the best
piece of work I've met with in the woods, and none know how often the
hand of God is seen in the wilderness but them that rove it for a
man's life." William Cullen Bryant thus sings the praises of the
Kaaterskill Falls:
"'Midst greens and shades the Kaaterskill leaps
From cliffs where the wood-flower clings;
All summer he moistens his verdant steeps
With the sweet, light spray of the mountain springs;
And he shakes the woods on the mountain side,
When they drip with the rains of autumn tide.
"But when in the forest bare and old,
The blast of December calls,
He builds, in the star-light clear and cold,
A palace of ice where his torrent falls,
With turret, and arch, and fret-work fair,
And pillars blue as the summer air."
At the head of the Kaaterskill Clove are Haines's Falls in a
picturesque environment, the stream making two main leaps of one
hundred and fifty and eighty feet, and other plunges lower down,
descending in all four hundred and seventy-five feet, within the
distance of a quarter of a mile. The water here is also dammed to make
a better exhibition. A main railway route into the Catskills is from
Kingston up the valley of Esopus Creek, gradually ascending to its
sources in the southwestern part of the range. This leads past the
highest peak, Slide Mountain, past Shandaken or "the rapid water," and
up the Big Indian Valley, at the head of which the summit is crossed
between the waters of the Hudson and the Delaware. The "Big Indian"
whose memory is thus preserved was Winnisook, a savage seven feet
high. He fell in love with a white maiden of the lowlands, who,
however, married one Joe Bundy instead, but got along so unhappily
that she finally ran away to her dusky lover. Winnisook on one
occasion came down to the lowlands with his tribe on a cattle-stealing
expedition, and Joe Bundy shot and mortally wounded him, saying, "The
best way to civilize the yellow serpent is to let daylight into his
black heart." The Big Indian was afterwards found dead standing
upright in the hollow of a large pine tree. The inconsolable maiden,
overwhelmed with grief, is said to have spent the rest of her life
near Winnisook's grave, while the stump of the pine was preserved
until the railroad came along and covered it with an embankment. The
whole Catskill region is full of charming places, and the vast summer
crowds who visit it never tire of the bracing atmosphere, and the
magnificent and ever-changing panorama of cloud and sunshine and
diversified landscape, exhibited from its magnificent mountain tops.
"'Tis here the eastern sunbeams gild
The hills which rise on either hand;
Till showers of purple mist are spilled
In glittering dewdrops o'er the land."