Chapter I: Front Matter

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Transcriber’s Note:

This version of the text cannot represent certain typographical effects. Italics are delimited with the ‘_’ character as _italic_.

The illustrations have been re-positioned slightly to avoid falling within a paragraph.

Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for details regarding the handling of any textual issues encountered during its preparation.

INDEX

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Page
Foreword 3
Introduction 5
Tulliallan 9
At His Bedside 31
The Prostrate Juniper 40
Out of the Ashes 51
Wayside Destiny 64
The Holly Tree 77
The Second Run of the Sap 96
Black Chief’s Daughter 108
The Gorilla 122
The Indian’s Twilight 135
Hugh Gibson’s Captivity 147
Girty’s Notch 161
Poplar George 175
Black Alice Dunbar 186
Abram Antoine, Bad Indian 199
Do You Believe in Ghosts? 219
A Stone’s Throw 234
The Turning of the Belt 247
Riding His Pony 265
The Little Postmistress 271
The Silent Friend 290
The Fountain of Youth 298
Compensations 310
A Misunderstanding 326
A Haunted House 339

OUTPOSTS OF THE ALLEGHENIES. (Photograph by W. H. Rau.)
Frontispiece
]

Allegheny Episodes

Folk Lore and Legends Collected in
Northern and Western Pennsylvania

_By_ HENRY W. SHOEMAKER

Volume XI Pennsylvania Folk Lore Series

“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.

_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.

HENRY W. SHOEMAKER.

Department of Forestry,
State Capitol, Harrisburg,
February 23, 1922.

P. S.–Thanks are also due to Mrs. E. Horace Quinn, late of Bucknell University, for her kindness in revising the proofs.

9-5-22.