Myths and Legends of Our Own Land Part 38

Caverns have frequently been used as hiding-places for things of more or less value--generally less. Saltpetre Cave, in Georgia, for instance, was a factory and magazine for saltpetre, gunpowder, and other military stores during the Civil War. The Northern soldiers wrecked the potash works and broke away tons of rock, so as to make it dangerous to return.

Human bones have been found here, too, but they are thought to be those of soldiers that entered the cave in pursuit of an Indian chief who had defied the State in the '40's. He escaped through a hole in the roof, doubled on his pursuers, fired a pile of dead leaves and wood at the mouth, and suffocated the white men with the smoke.

Spaniards worked the mines in the Ozark Hills of Missouri two hundred years ago. One of the mines containing lead and silver, eighteen miles southwest of Galena, was worked by seven men, who could not agree as to a division of the yield. One by one they were killed in quarrels until but a single man was left, and he, in turn, was set upon by the resurrected victims and choked to death by their cold fingers. In 1873 a Vermonter named Johnson went there and said he would find what it was the Spaniards had been hiding, in spite of the devil and his imps. He did work there for one day, and was then found dead at the mouth of the old shaft with marks of bony fingers on his throat.

The seven cities of Cibola, that Coronado and other Spanish adventurers sought in the vast deserts of the Southwest, were pueblos. A treacherous guide who had hoped to take Coronado into the waterless plain and lose him, but who first lost his own head, had told him a tale of the Quivira, a tribe that had much gold. So far from having gold these Indians did not know the stuff, but the myth that they had h.o.a.rded quant.i.ties of it has survived to this day and has caused waste of lives and money. Towns in New Mexico that have lain in ruins since 1670, when the Apaches butchered their people--towns that were well built and were lorded by solid old churches and monasteries erected by the Spanish missionaries--these towns have often been dug over, and the ruinous state of Abo, Curari, and Tabira is due, in part, to their foolish tunnelling and blasting.

A Spanish bark, one day in 1841, put in for water off the spot where Columbia City, Oregon, now stands. She had a rough crew on board, and it had been necessary for her officers to watch the men closely from the time the latter discovered that she was carrying a costly cargo. Hardly had the anchorchains run out before the sailors fell upon the captain, killed him, seized all of value that they could gather, and took it to the sh.o.r.e. What happened after is not clear, but it is probable that in a quarrel, arising over the demands of each man to have most of the plunder, several of the claimants were slain. Indians were troublesome, likewise, so that it was thought best to put most of the goods into the ground, and this was done on the tract known as Hez Copier's farm. Hardly was the task completed before the Indians appeared in large numbers and set up their tepees, showing that they meant to remain. The mutineers rowed back to the s.h.i.+p, and, after vainly waiting for several days for a chance to go on sh.o.r.e again, they sailed away. Two years of wandering, fighting, and carousal ensued before the remnant of the crew returned to Oregon. The Indians were gone, and an earnest search was made for the money--but in vain. It was as if the ground had never been disturbed. The man who had supervised its burial was present until the mutineers went back to their boats, when it was discovered that he was mysteriously missing.

More than forty years after these events a meeting of Spiritualists was held in Columbia City, and a "medium" announced that she had received a revelation of the exact spot where the goods had been concealed. A company went to the place, and, after a search of several days, found, under a foot of soil, a quant.i.ty of broken stone. While throwing out these fragments one of the party fell dead. The spirit of the defrauded and murdered captain had claimed him, the medium explained. So great was the fright caused by this accident that the search was again abandoned until March, 1890, when another party resumed the digging, and after taking out the remainder of the stone they came on a number of human skeletons. During the examination of these relics--possibly the bones of mutineers who had been killed in the fight on sh.o.r.e--a man fell into a fit of raving madness, and again the search was abandoned, for it is now said that an immutable curse rests on the treasure.

STORIED WATERS, CLIFFS AND MOUNTAINS

MONSTERS AND SEA-SERPENTS

It is hardly to be wondered at that two prominent scientists should have declared on behalf of the sea-serpent, for that remarkable creature has been reported at so many points, and by so many witnesses not addicted to fish tales nor liquor, that there ought to be some reason for him. He has been especially numerous off the New England coast. He was sighted off Cape Ann in 1817, and several times off Nahant. Though alarming in appearance--for he has a hundred feet of body, a s.h.a.ggy head, and goggle eyes--he is of lamb-like disposition, and has never justified the attempts that have been made to kill or capture him. Rewards were at one time offered to the seafaring men who might catch him, and revenue cutters cruising about Ma.s.sachusetts Bay were ordered to keep a lookout for him and have a gun double shotted for action. One fisherman emptied the contents of a ducking gun into the serpent's head, as he supposed, but the creature playfully wriggled a few fathoms of its tail and made off. John Josselyn, gentleman, reports that when he stirred about this neighborhood in 1638 an enormous reptile was seen "quoiled up on a rock at Cape Ann." He would have fired at him but for the earnest dissuasion of his Indian guide, who declared that ill luck would come of the attempt. The sea-serpent sometimes shows amphibious tendencies and occasionally leaves the sea for fresh water. Two of him were seen in Devil's Lake, Wisconsin, in 1892, by four men. They confess, however, that they were fis.h.i.+ng at the time. The snakes had fins and were a matter of fifty feet long.

When one of these reptiles found the other in his vicinage he raised his head six feet above water and fell upon him tooth and nail--if he had nails. In their struggles these unpleasant neighbors made such waves that the fishermen's boat was nearly upset.

Even the humble Wabash has its terror, for at Huntington, Indiana, three truthful damsels of the town saw its waters churned by a tail that splashed from side to side, while far ahead was the prow of the animal--a leonine skull, with whiskers, and as large as the head of a boy of a dozen years. As if realizing what kind of a report was going to be made about him, the monster was overcome with bashfulness at the sight of the maidens and sank from view.

In April, 1890, a water-snake was reported in one of the Twin Lakes, in the Berks.h.i.+re Hills, but the eye-witnesses of his sports let him off with a length of twenty-five feet.

Sysladobosis Lake, in Maine, has a snake with a head like a dog's, but it is hardly worth mentioning because it is only eight feet long-hardly longer than the name of the lake. More enterprise is shown across the border, for Skiff Lake, New Brunswick, has a similar snake thirty feet long.

In Cotton Mather's time a double-headed snake was found at Newbury, Ma.s.sachusetts,--it had a head at each end,--and before it was killed it showed its evil disposition by chasing and striking at the lad who first met it.

A snake haunts Wolf Pond, Pennsylvania, that is an alleged relic of the Silurian age. It was last seen in September, 1887, when it unrolled thirty feet of itself before the eyes of an alarmed spectator--again a fisherman. The beholder struck him with a pole, and in revenge the serpent capsized his boat; but he forbore to eat his enemy, and, diving to the bottom, disappeared. The creature had a black body, about six inches thick, ringed with dingy-yellow bands, and a mottled-green head, long and pointed, like a pike's.

Silver Lake, near Gainesville, New York, was in 1855 reported to be the lair of a great serpent, and old settlers declare that he still comes to the surface now and then.

A tradition among the poor whites of the South Jruns to the effect that the sea-monster that swallowed Jonah--not a whale, because the throat of that animal is hardly large enough to admit a herring--crossed the Atlantic and brought up at the Carolinas. His pa.s.senger was supplied with tobacco and beguiled the tedium of the voyage by smoking a pipe. The monster, being unused to that sort of thing, suffered as all beginners in nicotine poisoning do, and expelled the unhappy man with emphasis. On being safely landed, Jonah attached himself to one of the tribes that peopled the barrens, and left a white progeny which antedated Columbus's arrival by several centuries. G.o.d pitied the helplessness of these ignorant and uncourageous whites and led them to Looking-Gla.s.s Mountain, North Carolina, where He caused corn and game to be created, and while this race endured it lived in plenty.

Santa Barbara Island, off the California coast, was, for a long time, the supposed head-quarters of swimming and flying monsters and sirens, and no Mexican would pa.s.s in hearing of the yells and screams and strange songs without crossing himself and begging the captain to give the rock a wide berth. But the noise is all the noise of cats. A s.h.i.+pwrecked tabby peopled the place many years ago, and her numerous progeny live there on dead fish and on the eggs and chicks of sea-fowl.

Spirit Canon, a rocky gorge that extends for three miles along Big Sioux River, Iowa, was hewn through the stone by a spirit that took the form of a dragon. Such were its size and ferocity that the Indians avoided the place, lest they should fall victims to its ire.

The Hurons believed in a monster serpent--Okniont--who wore a horn on his head that could pierce trees, rocks, and hills. A piece of this horn was an amulet of great value, for it insured good luck.

The Zunis tell of a plumed serpent that lives in the water of sacred springs, and they dare not destroy the venomous creatures that infest the plains of Arizona because, to them, the killing of a snake means a reduction in their slender water-supply. The G.o.ds were not so kind to the snakes as men were, for the agatized trees of Chalcedony Park, in Arizona, are held to be arrows shot by the angry deities at the monsters who vexed this region.

Indians living on the sh.o.r.e of Canandaigua Lake, New York, tamed a pretty spotted snake, and fed and petted it until it took a deer at a meal. It grew so large that it eventually encircled the camp and began to prey on its keepers. Vainly they tried to kill the creature, until a small boy took an arrow of red willow, anointed it with the blood of a young woman, and shot it from a ba.s.swood bow at the creature's heart. It did not enter at once; it merely stuck to the scales. But presently it began to bore and twist its way into the serpent's body. The serpent rolled into the lake and made it foam in its agony. It swallowed water and vomited it up again, with men dead and alive, before it died.

The monster Amhuluk, whose home is a lake near Forked Mountain, Oregon, had but one pa.s.sion-to catch and drown all things; and when you look into the lake you see that he has even drowned the sky in it, and has made the trees stand upside down in the water. Wherever he set his feet the ground would soften. As three children were digging roots at the edge of the water he fell on them and impaled two of them on his horns, the eldest only contriving to escape. When this boy reached home his body was full of blotches, and the father suspected how it was, yet he went to the lake at once. The bodies of the children came out of the mud at his feet to meet him, but went down again and emerged later across the water. They led him on in this way until he came to the place where they were drowned. A fog now began to steam up from the water, but through it he could see the little ones lifted on the monster's horns, and hear them cry, "We have changed our bodies." Five times they came up and spoke to him, and five times he raised a dismal cry and begged them to return, but they could not. Next morning he saw them rise through the fog again, and, building a camp, he stayed there and mourned for several days. For five days they showed themselves, but after that they went down and he saw and heard no more of them. Ambuluk had taken the children and they would live with him for ever after.

Crater Lake, Oregon, was a haunt of water-devils who dragged into it and drowned all who ventured near. Only within a few years could Indians be persuaded to go to it as guides. Its discoverers saw in it the work of the Great Spirit, but could not guess its meaning. All but one of these Klamaths stole away after they had looked into its circular basin and sheer walls. He fancied that if it was a home of G.o.ds they might have some message for men, so camping on the brink of the lofty cliffs he waited. In his sleep a vision came to him, and he heard voices, but could neither make out appearances nor distinguish a word. Every night this dream was repeated. He finally went down to the lake and bathed, and instantly found his strength increased and saw that the people of his dreams were the genii of the waters--whether good or bad he could not guess. One day he caught a fish for food. A thousand water-devils came to the surface, on the instant, and seized him. They carried him to a rock on the north side of the lake, that stands two thousand feet above the water, and from that they dashed him down, gathering the remains of his shattered body below and devouring them. Since that taste they have been eager for men's blood. The rock on the south side of the lake, called the Phantom s.h.i.+p, is believed by the Indians to be a destructive monster, innocent as it looks in the daytime.

So with Rock Lake, in Was.h.i.+ngton. A hideous reptile sports about its waters and gulps down everything that it finds in or on them. Only in 1853 a band of Indians, who had fled hither for security against the soldiers, were overtaken by this creature, lashed to death, and eaten.

The Indians of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas believed that the King Snake, or G.o.d Snake, lived in the Gulf of Mexico. It slept in a cavern of pure crystal at the bottom, and its head, being shaped from a solid emerald, lighted the ocean for leagues when it arose near the surface.

Similar to this is the belief of the Cherokees in the kings of rattlesnakes, "bright old inhabitants" of the mountains that grew to a mighty size, and drew to themselves every creature that they looked upon.

Each wore a crown of carbuncle of dazzling brightness.

The Indians avoided Klamath Lake because it was haunted by a monster that was half dragon, half hippopotamus.

Hutton Lake, Wyoming, is the home of a serpent queen, whose breathing may be seen in the bubbles that well up in the centre. She is constantly watching for her lover, but takes all men who come in her way to her grotto beneath the water, when she finds that they are not the one she has expected, and there they become her slaves. To lure victims into the lake she sets there a decoy of a beautiful red swan, and should the hunter kill this bird he will become possessed of divine power. Should he see "the woman," as the serpent queen is called, he will never live to tell of it, unless he has seen her from a hiding-place near the sh.o.r.e--for so surely as he is noticed by this Diana of the depths, so surely will her spies, the land snakes, sting him to death. In appearance she is a lovely girl in all but her face, and that is shaped like the head of a monster snake. Her name is never spoken by the Indians, for fear that it will cost them their lives.

Michael Pauw, brave fisherman of Paterson, New Jersey, hero of the fight with the biggest snapping-turtle in Dover Slank, wearer of a scar on his seat of honor as memento of the conflict, member of the Kersey Reds--he whose presence of mind was shown in holding out a chip of St. Nicholas's staff when he met the nine witches of the rocks capering in the mists of Pa.s.saic Falls--gave battle from a boat to a monster that had ascended to the cataract. One of the Kersey Reds, leaning out too far, fell astride of the h.o.r.n.y beast, and was carried at express speed, roaring with fright, until unhorsed by a projecting rock, up which he scrambled to safety. Falling to work with bayonets and staves, the company despatched the creature and dragged it to sh.o.r.e. One Dutchman--who was quite a traveller, having been as far from home as Albany--said that the thing was what the Van Rensselaers cut up for beef, and that he believed they called it a sturgeon.

STONE-THROWING DEVILS

There is an odd recurrence among American legends of tales relating to a.s.saults of people or their houses by imps of darkness. The shadowy leaguers of Gloucester, Ma.s.sachusetts, kept the garrison of that place in a state of fright until they were expelled from the neighborhood by a silver bullet and a chaplain's prayers. Witchcraft was sometimes manifested in Salem by the hurling of missiles from unseen hands. The "stone-throwing devil" of Portsmouth is the subject of a tradition more than two centuries of age, but, as the stone-thrower appears rather as an avenger than as a gratuitously malignant spirit, he is ill treated in having the name of devil applied to him. In this New Hamps.h.i.+re port lived a widow who had a cabin and a bit of land of her own. George Walton, a neighbor, wanted her land, for its situation pleased him, and as the old woman had neither money nor influential friends he charged her with witchcraft, and, whether by legal chicanery or mere force is not recorded, he got his hands upon her property.

The charge of witchcraft was not pressed, because the man had obtained what he wanted, but the poor, houseless creature laid a ban on the place and told the thief that he would never have pleasure nor profit out of it. Walton laughed at her, bade her go her way, and moved his family into the widow's house. It was Sunday night, and the family had gone to bed, when at ten o'clock there came a fierce shock of stones against the roof and doors. All were awake in a moment. A first thought was that Indians were making an a.s.sault, but when the occupants peered cautiously into the moonlight the fields were seen to be deserted. Yet, even as they looked, a gate was lifted from its hinges and thrown through the air.

Walton ventured out, but a volley of stones, seemingly from a hundred hands, was delivered at his head, and he ran back to shelter. Doors and windows were barred and shuttered, but it made no difference. Stones, too hot to hold a hand upon, were hurled through gla.s.s and down the chimney, objects in the rooms themselves were picked up and flung at Walton, candles were blown out, a hand without a body tapped at the window, locks and bars and keys were bent as if by hammer-blows, a cheese-press was smashed against the wall and the cheese spoiled, hay-stacks in the field were broken up and the hay tossed into branches of trees. For a long time Walton could not go out at night without being a.s.sailed with stones.

Bell, book, candle, and witch-broth availed nothing, and it was many a day before peace came to the Walton household.

In 1802 an epidemic of a.s.sault went through the Berks.h.i.+re Hills. The performance began in a tailor's shop in Salisbury, Connecticut, at eleven of the clock on the night of November 2, when a stick and lumps of stone, charcoal, and mortar were flung through a window. The moon was up, but nothing could be seen, and the bombardment was continued until after daylight. After doing some damage here the a.s.sailants went to the house of Ezekiel Landon and rapped away there for a week. Persons were struck by the missiles, and quant.i.ties of gla.s.s were destroyed. Nothing could be seen coming toward the windows until the gla.s.s broke, and it was seldom that anything pa.s.sed far into a room. No matter how hard it was thrown, it dropped softly and surely on the sill, inside, as if a hand had put it there. Windows were broken on both sides of buildings at the same time, and many sticks and stones came through the same holes in the panes, as if aimed carefully by a gunner.

A hamlet that stood in Sage's ravine, on the east side of the Dome of the Taconics, was a.s.sailed in the same way after nightfall. One house was considerably injured. No causes for the performance were ever discovered, and n.o.body in the place was known to have an enemy--at least, a malicious one.

At Whitmire Hill, Georgia, the spot where two murders were committed before the war, is a headless phantom that comes thundering down on the wayfarer on the back of a giant horse and vanishes at the moment when the heart of his prospective victim is b.u.mping against his palate. At times, however, this spook prefers to remain invisible, and then it is a little worse, for it showers stones and sods on the pedestrian until his legs have carried him well beyond the phantom's jurisdiction.

The legends of buried treasure, instanced in another place, frequently include a.s.saults by the ghosts of pirates and misers on the daring ones who try to resurrect their wealth.

Forty-seven years ago, in the towns.h.i.+p of St. Mary's, Illinois, two lads named Groves and a companion named Kirk were pelted with s...o...b..a.l.l.s while on their way home from a barn where they had been to care for the stock for the night. The evening had shut in dark, and the accuracy of the thrower's aim was the more remarkable because it was hardly possible to see more than a rod away. The s...o...b..a.l.l.s were packed so tightly that they did not break on striking, though they were thrown with force, and Kirk was considerably bruised by them. Mr. Groves went out with a lantern, but its rays lit up a field of untrodden snow, and there was no sound except that made by the wind as it whistled past the barn and fences. Toward dawn another inspection was made, and in the dim light the s...o...b..a.l.l.s were seen rising from the middle of a field that had not a footprint on it, and flying toward the spectators like bullets. They ran into the field and laid about them with pitchforks, but nothing came of that, and not until the sun arose was the pelting stopped. Young Kirk, who was badly hurt, died within a year.

The men of Sharon, Connecticut, having wheedled their town-site from the Indians in 1754, were plagued thereafter by whoops and whistlings and the throwing of stones. Men were seen in the starlight and were fired upon, but without effect, and the disturbances were not ended until the Indians had received a sum of money.

Without presuming to doubt the veracity of tradition in these matters, an incident from the writer's boyhood in New England may be instanced. The house of an unpopular gentleman was a.s.sailed--not in the ostentatious manner just described, yet in a way that gave him a good deal of trouble.

Dead cats appeared mysteriously in his neighborhood; weird noises arose under his windows; he tried to pick up letters from his doorstep that became mere chalk-marks at his touch, so that he took up only splinters under his nails. One night, as a seance was about beginning in his yard, he emerged from a clump of bushes, flew in the direction of the disturbance, laid violent hands on the writer's collar, and b.u.mped his nose on a paving-stone. Then the manifestations were discontinued, for several nights, for repairs.

STORIED SPRINGS

Like the Greeks, the red men endowed the woods and waters with tutelary sprites, and many of the springs that are now resorted to as fountains of healing were known long before the settlement of Europeans here, the gains from drinking of them being ascribed to the beneficence of spirit guardians. The earliest comers to these sh.o.r.es--or, rather, the earliest of those who entertained such beliefs--fancied that the fabled fountain of eternal youth would be found among the other blessings of the land. To the Spaniards Florida was a land of promise and mystery. Somewhere in its interior was fabled to stand a golden city ruled by a king whose robes sparkled with precious dust, and this city was named for the adventurer--El Dorado, or the Place of the Gilded One. Here, they said, would be found the elixir of life. The beautiful Silver Spring, near the head of the Ocklawaha, with its sandy bottom plainly visible at the depth of eighty feet, was thought to be the source of the life-giving waters, but, though Ponce de Leon heard of this, he never succeeded in fighting his way to it through the jungle.