Volume III Part 6 (1/2)

Upon the Hudson River's ”Long Reach” is the favorite locality of the winter ”ice-boat races,” this exhilarating sport in boats on runners speeding over the ice, before the wind, being much enjoyed. A few miles above Poughkeepsie the reach comes to an abrupt termination, in the bent and narrow pa.s.s, where the cliffs compress the channel and form the crooked strait known as the Crom Elbow, the Dutch and English words having the same meaning. Above, the western sh.o.r.e for a long distance is lined with apple orchards and vineyards, while the eastern bank for over thirty miles is a succession of villas interspersed with hamlets. Moving northward, the n.o.ble Catskill range comes into full view, gradually changing from distant gray to nearer blue, and then to green with the closer approach. Along the river for many miles, where these magnificent mountains give such a grand front outlook, there are a series of old Knickerbocker estates, many occupied by the descendants of the early settlers. Here was the princely home of the late William B. Dinsmore of Adams Express Company, a business begun in 1840 with two men, a wheelbarrow and a boy, Dinsmore being one of the men and the late John Hoey of Long Branch the boy. Dinsmore built his gorgeous palace on the Hudson--and died. On the western sh.o.r.e is Pell's great apple orchard, s.h.i.+pping the fruit from twenty-five thousand trees all over the world. Some distance above, the Rondout Creek comes out through a deep gorge, having the twin cities of Rondout and Kingston nestling among its bordering hills. They have together over twenty-five thousand people. This was the outlet of the abandoned Delaware and Hudson Ca.n.a.l. Kingston Point, the mouth of the creek, was the place of earliest Dutch settlement in this part of New York, where they called it Wittwyck, or the ”Wild Indian Town,” and for defense built a redoubt, whence come the name of Rondout.

The historic city of Kingston spreads back to Esopus Creek, a short distance inland, and was the Esopus town of colonial times, the name coming from the Indian dwellers here, meaning ”the river.” The old ”Senate House” of Kingston, built in 1676, was the first meeting-place of the New York Legislature, and it now contains a collection of Dutch and other relics. The Esopus Indians broke up the original settlements with a terrible ma.s.sacre, but Huguenot refugees came and re-peopled the place, and during the Revolution Esopus was such a ”nest of rebels” that when the British came along in 1777 they burnt it. This punishment was inflicted because it was made the capital and the first New York State Const.i.tution had been framed here during the preceding February. The tale is told that the British landing to burn the town scared a party of Dutch laborers, who briskly scampered off.

One of them stepped on a hay-rake, and the handle flying up gave him a sharp rap on the head. Being frightened more than hurt, and sure that a Britisher closely pursued him, he fell on his knees, and imploringly exclaimed, ”Mein Gott, I give up; hooray for King Shorge!” Kingston is a great producer of flagstones and manufactory of Rosendale cements, made from a fine-grained, hard, dark-blue stone, which is broken, burnt in kilns with coal, ground, and then prepared for market. Mixed with clean sharp sand, this cement becomes in time entirely impervious to water, and has all the strength of the best natural building stones.

GREAT HISTORIC ESTATES.

The solid old German burgher William Beckman came over from his native Rhine in 1647, and went sailing up the Hudson, his Fatherland memories being delighted at the sight of a n.o.ble hill on the eastern bank, opposite Rondout Creek. He settled there, building a house, and behind the hill started the town of Rhinebeck, a combination of his own name and that of his native river. This well-known Rhinecliff stands up alongside the Hudson, much like a vine-clad slope bordering the great German river, and is adorned with the ancient Beckman House, a stone structure built for a fort and dwelling. Famous estates surround Rhinebeck. Here is Ellerslie, the summer home of Levi P. Morton, formerly Vice-President, fronting the river for a long distance. The Astor estate of Rokeby, which was the home of William B. Astor and his son William Astor, is north of Rhinebeck, the house, surmounted by a tower, standing in a s.p.a.cious park about a mile back from the river.

Rokeby was a noted place in Revolutionary days, the home of General Armstrong, whose daughter married the elder Astor. Here is the Fleetwood estate, with its old house, built in 1700, having the ”cannon-room” in front, with a port-hole facing the river. Here are Wilderstein and Grasmere, the home of the Livingston descendants, also Wildercliff, built by Rev. Freeborn Garrettson, one of the founders of the Methodist Church in America, its name signifying the ”wild Indian's cliff.” Garrettson was educated in Maryland for the Church of England. As a matter of conscience he afterwards espoused the cause of the Methodists, then in their infancy, entered their ministry, freed his slaves, and preached the gospel of Methodism everywhere, declaring his firm faith in a special Providence, and often proving it in his own person. Once a mob seized him and was taking him to jail, when a sudden and overpowering flash of lightning dispersed them, and he was left unmolested. In 1788 he came to New York in missionary work, and was made Presiding Elder of the district between Long Island Sound and Lake Champlain. Coming to Clermont, among his converts was the sister of Chancellor Livingston, and he married her in 1793, shortly afterwards building his house at Wildercliff. This was long a home for Methodist clergymen, his daughter continuing his hospitality.

Another historic estate, just above Rokeby, is Montgomery Place, the home of another Livingston, the widow of General Montgomery, who was in the colonial attack upon Quebec, by Wolfe, and afterwards, in the early days of the Revolution, led a forlorn hope against Quebec, and perished as Wolfe had before him. His young widow lived here a half-century, and her brother's descendants now possess it.

Krueger's Island, on the eastern sh.o.r.e, discloses in a grove a picturesque ruin, with broken arches, specially imported from Italy by a former owner of the island to give it a flavor of antiquity. The Catskills now rise in grander view, the Plattekill Clove comes down out of them, and Esopus Creek from the south flows into the Hudson.

The Dutch called this Zaeger's Kill, which time corrupted into Saugerties, a pleasant factory village built behind the flats at the creek's mouth, and having the Catskills for a splendid background.

Opposite, on the eastern bank, is Tivoli, and near here is located the parent estate of these historic homes. Robert Livingston came from Scotland to America in 1672 and married a member of the Schuyler family, who was the widow of a Van Rensselaer. He was a patrician of high degree, of the family of the Earls of Linlithgow, and seeking a home in the American wilderness, settled on the Hudson. He first lived at Albany, and being Secretary to the Indian Commissioners, he acquired extensive tracts of land fronting the river, which afterwards became the basis of great wealth. In 1710 these lands were consolidated under one English patent, giving him a princely domain of one hundred and sixty-two thousand acres for an ”annual rent of twenty-eight s.h.i.+llings, lawful money of New York,” equalling about $3.50. This ”Livingston Manor” gave him a seat in the Colonial Legislature, and he built his manor-house upon a gra.s.sy point along the Hudson River bank, at the mouth of ”Roeleffe Jansen's Kill,”

flowing in a few miles north of Tivoli. The greater part of the manor descended to his son Robert, who built a finer mansion there, known as ”Old Clermont,” which the British burnt during the Revolution. In this house was born the grandson, the famous Chancellor of New York, Robert R. Livingston, who had so much to do with guiding the course of the State in that momentous era. He built the present Clermont mansion on the river bank above Tivoli. It is on a bluff sh.o.r.e, a grand estate surrounding it, and sloping gradually up to the hill-tops stretching to the horizon behind. This estate extended back originally to the Berks.h.i.+re hills. The full glory of the Catskills is spread out in panorama before this noted mansion, with the distant hotels perched on the mountain tops.

Chancellor Livingston was sent Minister to France, and when he returned he brought over merino sheep, introducing them into this country. His great honor as a man of science comes from his connection with Fulton's steamboat experiments. He met Fulton in Paris, and was closely connected with the first steamboat on the Hudson, which in fact could not have been built without his aid. By the help of Livingston's money, Fulton in 1807 built this steamboat in New York, naming her the ”Clermont” in his honor. The experiment was publicly derided as ”Fulton's Folly,” but he persevered and succeeded. The ”Clermont” was one hundred feet long, twelve feet beam and seven feet depth. In September, 1807, she made the first successful experimental trip from New York to Albany in thirty-six hours, charging the pa.s.sengers $7.50 fare. She afterwards made regular trips, and on October 5, 1807, the _Albany Gazette_ announced: ”Mr. Fulton's new steamboat left New York on the 2d, at ten o'clock A.M., against a strong tide, very rough water, and a violent gale from the north. She made a headway against the most sanguine expectations and without being rocked by the waves.” Chancellor Livingston in Jefferson's Administration negotiated the cession of Louisiana by France to the United States, and ripe with honors, he died at Clermont in 1813.

THE CATSKILL MOUNTAINS.

Opposite these great estates, the Catskill Mountains rise in all their glory, spreading across the western horizon at a distance of eight to ten miles from the Hudson River. They stretch for about fifteen miles, and the range covers some five hundred square miles. The most prominent peaks in the view are Round Top and the High Peak, rising thirty-seven hundred and thirty-eight hundred feet, and in front of them, on lower elevations, are the summer hotels that have such superb views over the Hudson River valley. The town of Catskill on the river--a flouris.h.i.+ng settlement of five thousand people--is the usual point of entrance, and from it a railway extends back to the bases of the mountains. An inclined plane railway over a mile long then ascends the face of the range, sixteen hundred feet high, to the hotels. This ”Otis Elevating Railway,” which accomplishes its journey in about ten minutes, is said to be the greatest inclined road in the world. The Indians knew these grand peaks as the Onti Ora, or ”Mountains of the Sky,” thus named because in some conditions of the atmosphere they appear like a heavy c.u.mulus cloud hanging above the horizon. The weird Indian tradition was that among these mountains was held the treasury of storms and suns.h.i.+ne for the Hudson, presided over by the spirit of an old Indian squaw who dwelt within the range. She kept the day and the night imprisoned, letting out one at a time, and made new moons every month and hung them up in the sky, for they first appeared among these mountains, and then she cut up the old moons into stars. The great Manitou also employed her to manufacture thunder and clouds for the valley. Sometimes she wove the clouds out of cobwebs, gossamers and morning dew, and sent them off, flake by flake, floating in the air, to give light summer showers. Sometimes she would blow up black thunder-storms and send down drenching rains to swell the streams and sweep everything away. All these storms coming from the west appeared to originate in the mountains. The Indians also told of the imps that haunted their dells, luring the hunters to places of peril. When the Dutch colonists came along, they sent expeditions into the mountains, searching for gold and silver, but chiefly found wildcats, causing them to be named the Kaatsbergs, and from this their present t.i.tle has come to be, in time, the Kaatskills or the Catskills.

These attractive mountains are a group of the Alleghenies, having spurs extending northwest and west, at right angles to the general trend of the range, thus giving them quite a different form from that usual in the Allegheny ridges. They a.s.sume also more of the abrupt and rocky character of the Alpine peaks, and instead of the usual folds or fragments of arches commonly seen elsewhere, the Catskill crags are ma.s.ses of piled-up strata in the original horizontal position. They have a most precipitous declivity facing the east towards the river valley. Deep ravines, which the Dutch called ”Cloves,” are cut into them by the mountain torrents, descending in places in beautiful cascades, sometimes for hundreds of feet. This aggregation of rocky cliffs and rounded peaks, and the intersecting gorges and smiling verdant valleys, have become a great resort for the summer pleasure-seeker, with myriads of hotels and boarding-places, where it is said that eighty to a hundred thousand people will go in the season. Their eastern verge is drained by the Hudson, while the many brooks and kills flowing out to the westward are gathered into the two branches that form the Delaware River.

From their eastern front, where the huge hotels, built at twenty-four hundred feet elevation, are anch.o.r.ed by ponderous chain cables to keep them from being overthrown by the wind, there is an unrivalled view over the valley. The Hudson River stretches a silvery streak across the picture, and can be traced nearly a hundred miles from West Point up to Albany. Its distant diminutive steamboats slowly move, and like a s.h.i.+ning thread, as the western sun strikes the car-windows and is reflected, a railway train glides along the bank ten miles away, seen so well, and yet so small. The perpendicular mountain wall brings the valley almost beneath one's feet, the buildings looking like children's toy houses, the trees like dwarfed bushes, and the fields, with their alternating green and brown colors, contrasting as the s.p.a.ces on a chess-board. Wagons crawl like little ants upon the narrow mud-colored lines representing roads. The broad valley, though its surface is rugged and has high hills surmounted by patches of woodland, is so far below that it appears from above as a flat floor.

Thus it stretches off to the river, with a sparkling pond here and there, and extending beyond to the eastern horizon the view is enclosed by the dark-blue Berks.h.i.+re hills in Ma.s.sachusetts, forty miles away. Behind them, on favored days, rise like a misty haze, off to the northeast, the White Mountains of New Hamps.h.i.+re. It was in this region that James Fenimore Cooper located the ”Leather Stocking Tales,” for his home at Cooperstown was on the Catskills' western verge. Natty b.u.mppo climbed up the mountain to get this wonderful view. ”What see you when you get there?” asked Edward. ”Creation,”

said Natty, sweeping one hand around him in a circle, ”all creation, lad,” and then he continued, ”If being the best part of a mile in the air, and having men's farms at your feet, with rivers looking like ribands, and mountains bigger than the 'Vision' seeming to be haystacks of green gra.s.s under you, give any satisfaction to a man, I can recommend the spot.”

RIP VAN WINKLE AND THE KAATERSKILL.

These Catskill Mountains were purchased from the Indians on July 8, 1678, by a company of Dutch and English gentlemen, who took their t.i.tle 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 b.a.l.l.s, 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 s.h.i.+p'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 pa.s.sing 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 G.o.d 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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.”