you. The name betrays its family, its relationship to other flowers,
and gives the mind something tangible to grasp. It is very difficult
for persons who have had no special training to learn the names of
the flowers from the botany. The botany is a sealed book to them.
The descriptions of the flowers are in a language which they do not
understand at all. And the key is no help to them. It is as much a
puzzle as the botany itself. They need a key to unlock the key.
One of these days some one will give us a handbook of our wild flowers,
by the aid of which we shall all be able to name those we gather in
our walks without the trouble of analyzing them. In this book we shall
have a list of all our flowers arranged according to color, as white
flowers, blue flowers, yellow flowers, pink flowers, etc., with place
of growth and time of blooming; also lists or sub-lists of fragrant
flowers, climbing flowers, marsh flowers, meadow flowers, wood flowers,
etc., so that, with flower in hand, by running over these lists we
shall be pretty sure to find its name. Having got its name, we can
turn to Gray or Wood and find a more technical description of it if we
choose.
II
THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS
On looking at the southern and more distant Catskills from the Hudson
River on the east, or on looking at them from the west from some point
of vantage in Delaware County, you see, amid the group of mountains,
one that looks like the back and shoulders of a gigantic horse. The
horse has got his head down grazing; the shoulders are high, and the
descent from them down his neck very steep; if he were to lift up his
head, one sees that it would be carried far above all other peaks,
and that the noble beast might gaze straight to his peers in the
Adirondacks or the White Mountains. But the head and neck never come
up; some spell or enchantment keeps it down there amid the mighty herd;
and the high round shoulders and the smooth strong back of the steed
are alone visible. The peak to which I refer is Slide Mountain, the
highest of the Catskills by some two hundred feet, and probably the
most inaccessible; certainly the hardest to get a view of, it is hedged
about so completely by other peaks,—the greatest mountain of them all,
and apparently the least willing to be seen; only at a distance of
thirty or forty miles is it seen to stand up above all other peaks. It
takes its name from a landslide which occurred many years ago down its
steep northern side, or down the neck of the grazing steed. The mane of
spruce and balsam fir was stripped away for many hundred feet, leaving
a long gray streak visible from afar.
Slide Mountain is the centre and the chief of the southern Catskills.
Streams flow from its base, and from the base of its subordinates,
to all points of the compass,—the Rondout and the Neversink to the
south; the Beaverkill to the west; the Esopus to the north; and several
lesser streams to the east. With its summit as the centre, a radius of
ten miles would include within the circle described but very little
cultivated land; only a few poor, wild farms in some of the numerous
valleys. The soil is poor, a mixture of gravel and clay, and is subject
to slides. It lies in the valleys in ridges and small hillocks, as if
dumped there from a huge cart. The tops of the southern Catskills are
all capped with a kind of conglomerate, or "pudden stone,"—a rock of
cemented quartz pebbles which underlies the coal measures. This rock
disintegrates under the action of the elements, and the sand and gravel
which result are carried into the valleys and make up the most of the
soil. From the northern Catskills, so far as I know them, this rock has
been swept clean. Low down in the valleys the old red sandstone crops
out, and, as you go west into Delaware County, in many places it alone
remains and makes up most of the soil, all the superincumbent rock
having been carried away.
Slide Mountain had been a summons and a challenge to me for many
years. I had fished every stream that it nourished, and had camped
in the wilderness on all sides of it, and whenever I had caught a
glimpse of its summit I had promised myself to set foot there before
another season had passed. But the seasons came and went, and my feet
got no nimbler, and Slide Mountain no lower, until finally, one July,
seconded by an energetic friend, we thought to bring Slide to terms by
approaching him through the mountains on the east. With a farmer's son
for guide we struck in by way of Weaver Hollow, and, after a long and
desperate climb, contented ourselves with the Wittenberg, instead of
Slide. The view from the Wittenberg is in many respects more striking,
as you are perched immediately above a broader and more distant sweep
of country, and are only about two hundred feet lower. You are here on
the eastern brink of the southern Catskills, and the earth falls away
at your feet and curves down through an immense stretch of forest till
it joins the plain of Shokan, and thence sweeps away to the Hudson and
beyond. Slide is southwest of you, six or seven miles distant, but is
visible only when you climb into a treetop. I climbed and saluted him,
and promised to call next time.
We passed the night on the Wittenberg, sleeping on the moss, between
two decayed logs, with balsam boughs thrust into the ground and meeting
and forming a canopy over us. In coming off the mountain in the
morning we ran upon a huge porcupine, and I learned for the first time
that the tail of a porcupine goes with a spring like a trap. It seems
to be a set-lock; and you no sooner touch with the weight of a hair one
of the quills, than the tail leaps up in a most surprising manner, and
the laugh is not on your side. The beast cantered along the path in my
front, and I threw myself upon him, shielded by my roll of blankets.
He submitted quietly to the indignity, and lay very still under my
blankets, with his broad tail pressed close to the ground. This I
proceeded to investigate, but had not fairly made a beginning when
it went off like a trap, and my hand and wrist were full of quills.
This caused me to let up on the creature, when it lumbered away till
it tumbled down a precipice. The quills were quickly removed from my
hand, when we gave chase. When we came up to him, he had wedged himself
in between the rocks so that he presented only a back bristling with
quills, with the tail lying in ambush below. He had chosen his position
well, and seemed to defy us. After amusing ourselves by repeatedly
springing his tail and receiving the quills in a rotten stick, we made
a slip-noose out of a spruce root, and, after much manœuvring, got
it over his head and led him forth. In what a peevish, injured tone
the creature did complain of our unfair tactics! He protested and
protested, and whimpered and scolded like some infirm old man tormented
by boys. His game after we led him forth was to keep himself as much
as possible in the shape of a ball, but with two sticks and the cord
we finally threw him over on his back and exposed his quill-less and
vulnerable under side, when he fairly surrendered and seemed to say,
"Now you may do with me as you like." His great chisel-like teeth,
which are quite as formidable as those of the woodchuck, he does not
appear to use at all in his defense, but relies entirely upon his
quills, and when those fail him he is done for.
After amusing ourselves with him awhile longer, we released him and
went on our way. The trail to which we had committed ourselves led us
down into Woodland Valley, a retreat which so took my eye by its fine
trout brook, its superb mountain scenery, and its sweet seclusion,
that I marked it for my own, and promised myself a return to it at
no distant day. This promise I kept, and pitched my tent there twice
during that season. Both occasions were a sort of laying siege to
Slide, but we only skirmished with him at a distance; the actual
assault was not undertaken. But the following year, reinforced by two
other brave climbers, we determined upon the assault, and upon making
it from this the most difficult side. The regular way is by Big Ingin
Valley, where the climb is comparatively easy, and where it is often
made by women. But from Woodland Valley only men may essay the ascent.
Larkins is the upper inhabitant, and from our camping-ground near his
clearing we set out early one June morning.
One would think nothing could be easier to find than a big mountain,
especially when one is encamped upon a stream which he knows springs
out of its very loins. But for some reason or other we had got an idea
that Slide Mountain was a very slippery customer and must be approached
cautiously. We had tried from several points in the valley to get a
view of it, but were not quite sure we had seen its very head. When on
the Wittenberg, a neighboring peak, the year before, I had caught a
brief glimpse of it only by climbing a dead tree and craning up for a
moment from its topmost branch. It would seem as if the mountain had
taken every precaution to shut itself off from a near view. It was
a shy mountain, and we were about to stalk it through six or seven
miles of primitive woods, and we seemed to have some unreasonable fear
that it might elude us. We had been told of parties who had essayed
the ascent from this side, and had returned baffled and bewildered.
In a tangle of primitive woods, the very bigness of the mountain
baffles one. It is all mountain; whichever way you turn—and one turns
sometimes in such cases before he knows it—the foot finds a steep and
rugged ascent.
The eye is of little service; one must be sure of his bearings and push
boldly on and up. One is not unlike a flea upon a great shaggy beast,
looking for the animal's head; or even like a much smaller and much
less nimble creature,—he may waste his time and steps, and think he
has reached the head when he is only upon the rump. Hence I questioned
our host, who had several times made the ascent, closely. Larkins laid
his old felt hat upon the table, and, placing one hand upon one side
and the other upon the other, said: "There Slide lies, between the two
forks of the stream, just as my hat lies between my two hands. David
will go with you to the forks, and then you will push right on up." But
Larkins was not right, though he had traversed all those mountains many
times over. The peak we were about to set out for did not lie between
the forks, but exactly at the head of one of them; the beginnings of
the stream are in the very path of the slide, as we afterward found. We
broke camp early in the morning, and with our blankets strapped to our
backs and rations in our pockets for two days, set out along an ancient
and in places an obliterated bark road that followed and crossed and
recrossed the stream. The morning was bright and warm, but the wind
was fitful and petulant, and I predicted rain. What a forest solitude
our obstructed and dilapidated wood-road led us through! five miles
of primitive woods before we came to the forks, three miles before we
came to the "burnt shanty," a name merely,—no shanty there now for
twenty-five years past. The ravages of the bark-peelers were still
visible, now in a space thickly strewn with the soft and decayed trunks
of hemlock-trees, and overgrown with wild cherry, then in huge mossy
logs scattered through the beech and maple woods; some of these logs
were so soft and mossy that one could sit or recline upon them as upon
a sofa.
But the prettiest thing was the stream soliloquizing in such musical
tones there amid the moss-covered rocks and boulders. How clean it
looked, what purity! Civilization corrupts the streams as it corrupts
the Indian; only in such remote woods can you now see a brook in all
its original freshness and beauty. Only the sea and the mountain forest
brook are pure; all between is contaminated more or less by the work of
man. An ideal trout brook was this, now hurrying, now loitering, now
deepening around a great boulder, now gliding evenly over a pavement
of green-gray stone and pebbles; no sediment or stain of any kind,
but white and sparkling as snow-water, and nearly as cool. Indeed,
the water of all this Catskill region is the best in the world. For
the first few days, one feels as if he could almost live on the water
alone; he cannot drink enough of it. In this particular it is indeed
the good Bible land, "a land of brooks of water, of fountains and
depths that spring out of valleys and hills."
Near the forks we caught, or thought we caught, through an opening, a
glimpse of Slide. Was it Slide? was it the head, or the rump, or the
shoulder of the shaggy monster we were in quest of? At the forks there
was a bewildering maze of underbrush and great trees, and the way did
not seem at all certain; nor was David, who was then at the end of
his reckoning, able to reassure us. But in assaulting a mountain, as
in assaulting a fort, boldness is the watchword. We pressed forward,
following a line of blazed trees for nearly a mile, then, turning
to the left, began the ascent of the mountain. It was steep, hard
climbing. We saw numerous marks of both bears and deer; but no birds,
save at long intervals the winter wren flitting here and there, and
darting under logs and rubbish like a mouse. Occasionally its gushing,
lyrical song would break the silence. After we had climbed an hour or
two, the clouds began to gather, and presently the rain began to come
down. This was discouraging; but we put our backs up against trees and
rocks, and waited for the shower to pass.
"They were wet with the showers of the mountain, and embraced the rocks
for want of shelter," as they did in Job's time. But the shower was
light and brief, and we were soon under way again. Three hours from
the forks brought us out on the broad level back of the mountain upon
which Slide, considered as an isolated peak, is reared. After a time we
entered a dense growth of spruce which covered a slight depression in
the table of the mountain. The moss was deep, the ground spongy, the
light dim, the air hushed. The transition from the open, leafy woods to
this dim, silent, weird grove was very marked. It was like the passage
from the street into the temple. Here we paused awhile and ate our
lunch, and refreshed ourselves with water gathered from a little well
sunk in the moss.
The quiet and repose of this spruce grove proved to be the calm that
goes before the storm. As we passed out of it, we came plump upon the
almost perpendicular battlements of Slide. The mountain rose like a
huge, rock-bound fortress from this plain-like expanse. It was ledge
upon ledge, precipice upon precipice, up which and over which we
made our way slowly and with great labor, now pulling ourselves up by
our hands, then cautiously finding niches for our feet and zigzagging
right and left from shelf to shelf. This northern side of the mountain
was thickly covered with moss and lichens, like the north side of a
tree. This made it soft to the foot, and broke many a slip and fall.
Everywhere a stunted growth of yellow birch, mountain-ash, and spruce
and fir opposed our progress. The ascent at such an angle with a roll
of blankets on your back is not unlike climbing a tree: every limb
resists your progress and pushes you back; so that when we at last
reached the summit, after twelve or fifteen hundred feet of this sort
of work, the fight was about all out of the best of us. It was then
nearly two o'clock, so that we had been about seven hours in coming
seven miles.
Here on the top of the mountain we overtook spring, which had been
gone from the valley nearly a month. Red clover was opening in the
valley below, and wild strawberries just ripening; on the summit the
yellow birch was just hanging out its catkins, and the claytonia, or
spring-beauty, was in bloom. The leaf-buds of the trees were just
bursting, making a faint mist of green, which, as the eye swept
downward, gradually deepened until it became a dense, massive cloud in
the valleys. At the foot of the mountain the clintonia, or northern
green lily, and the low shad-bush were showing their berries, but long
before the top was reached they were found in bloom. I had never
before stood amid blooming claytonia, a flower of April, and looked
down upon a field that held ripening strawberries. Every thousand feet
elevation seemed to make about ten days' difference in the vegetation,
so that the season was a month or more later on the top of the mountain
than at its base. A very pretty flower which we began to meet with well
up on the mountain-side was the painted trillium, the petals white,
veined with pink.
The low, stunted growth of spruce and fir which clothes the top of
Slide has been cut away over a small space on the highest point, laying
open the view on nearly all sides. Here we sat down and enjoyed our
triumph. We saw the world as the hawk or the balloonist sees it when
he is three thousand feet in the air. How soft and flowing all the
outlines of the hills and mountains beneath us looked! The forests
dropped down and undulated away over them, covering them like a carpet.
To the east we looked over the near-by Wittenberg range to the Hudson
and beyond; to the south, Peak-o'-Moose, with its sharp crest, and
Table Mountain, with its long level top, were the two conspicuous
objects; in the west, Mt. Graham and Double Top, about three thousand
eight hundred feet each, arrested the eye; while in our front to the
north we looked over the top of Panther Mountain to the multitudinous
peaks of the northern Catskills. All was mountain and forest on every
hand. Civilization seemed to have done little more than to have
scratched this rough, shaggy surface of the earth here and there.
In any such view, the wild, the aboriginal, the geographical greatly
predominate. The works of man dwindle, and the original features of
the huge globe come out. Every single object or point is dwarfed; the
valley of the Hudson is only a wrinkle in the earth's surface. You
discover with a feeling of surprise that the great thing is the earth
itself, which stretches away on every hand so far beyond your ken.
The Arabs believe that the mountains steady the earth and hold it
together; but they had only to get on the top of a high one to see how
insignificant they are, and how adequate the earth looks to get along
without them. To the imaginative Oriental people, mountains seemed to
mean much more than they do to us. They were sacred; they were the
abodes of their divinities. They offered their sacrifices upon them.
In the Bible, mountains are used as a symbol of that which is great
and holy. Jerusalem is spoken of as a holy mountain. The Syrians were
beaten by the Children of Israel because, said they, "their gods are
gods of the hills; therefore were they stronger than we." It was on
Mount Horeb that God appeared to Moses in the burning bush, and on
Sinai that he delivered to him the law. Josephus says that the Hebrew
shepherds never pasture their flocks on Sinai, believing it to be
the abode of Jehovah. The solitude of mountain-tops is peculiarly
impressive, and it is certainly easier to believe the Deity appeared
in a burning bush there than in the valley below. When the clouds of
heaven, too, come down and envelop the top of the mountain,—how such
a circumstance must have impressed the old God-fearing Hebrews! Moses
knew well how to surround the law with the pomp and circumstance that
would inspire the deepest awe and reverence.
But when the clouds came down and enveloped us on Slide Mountain,
the grandeur, the solemnity, were gone in a twinkling; the
portentous-looking clouds proved to be nothing but base fog that wet
us and extinguished the world for us. How tame, and prosy, and humdrum
the scene instantly became! But when the fog lifted, and we looked from
under it as from under a just-raised lid, and the eye plunged again
like an escaped bird into those vast gulfs of space that opened at our
feet, the feeling of grandeur and solemnity quickly came back.
The first want we felt on the top of Slide, after we had got some rest,
was a want of water. Several of us cast about, right and left, but no
sign of water was found. But water must be had, so we all started off
deliberately to hunt it up. We had not gone many hundred yards before
we chanced upon an ice-cave beneath some rocks,—vast masses of ice,
with crystal pools of water near. This was good luck, indeed, and put a
new and brighter face on the situation.
Slide Mountain enjoys a distinction which no other mountain in the
State, so far as is known, does,—it has a thrush peculiar to itself.
This thrush was discovered and described by Eugene P. Bicknell, of New
York, in 1880, and has been named Bicknell's thrush. A better name
would have been Slide Mountain thrush, as the bird so far has only
been found on the mountain.[46:1] I did not see or hear it upon the
Wittenberg, which is only a few miles distant, and only two hundred
feet lower. In its appearance to the eye among the trees, one would
not distinguish it from the gray-cheeked thrush of Baird, or the
olive-backed thrush, but its song is totally different. The moment I
heard it I said, "There is a new bird, a new thrush," as the quality
of all thrush songs is the same. A moment more, and I knew it was
Bicknell's thrush. The song is in a minor key, finer, more attenuated,
and more under the breath than that of any other thrush. It seemed as
if the bird was blowing in a delicate, slender, golden tube, so fine
and yet so flute-like and resonant the song appeared. At times it was
like a musical whisper of great sweetness and power. The birds were
numerous about the summit, but we saw them nowhere else. No other
thrush was seen, though a few times during our stay I caught a mere
echo of the hermit's song far down the mountain-side. A bird I was not
prepared to see or hear was the black-poll warbler, a bird usually
found much farther north, but here it was, amid the balsam firs,
uttering its simple, lisping song.
[46:1] Bicknell's thrush turns out to be the more southern
form of the gray-cheeked thrush, and is found on the higher
mountains of New York and New England.
The rocks on the tops of these mountains are quite sure to attract
one's attention, even if he have no eye for such things. They are
masses of light reddish conglomerate, composed of round wave-worn
quartz pebbles. Every pebble had been shaped and polished upon some
ancient seacoast, probably the Devonian. The rock disintegrates where
it is most exposed to the weather, and forms a loose sandy and pebbly
soil. These rocks form the floor of the coal formation, but in the
Catskill region only the floor remains; the superstructure has never
existed, or has been swept away; hence one would look for a coal mine
here over his head in the air, rather than under his feet.
This rock did not have to climb up here as we did; the mountain stooped
and took it upon its back in the bottom of the old seas, and then got
lifted up again. This happened so long ago that the memory of the
oldest inhabitant of these parts yields no clue to the time.