by Graeme Davis
Peter had seen nothing, but he had heard the “Gun.”
“’Twas a mere flash in the pan to what I have heard, when the lake is in ’arnest,” said the old fellow, with the love of exaggeration so common with the vulgar. “Still, it was a gun.”
“A signal that the ‘Wandering Jew’ is near by; so, haul aft the sheets, and let us depart.”
In a quarter of an hour the boat was lying with her foresheet hauled over, and her helm down, within a hundred yards of the object of the long search of the whole party. It was deep water, and a slight ripple under what might be termed the cutwater of the tree indicated a movement. Perhaps a lower current forced forward the roots, which, in their turn, urged the trunk ahead. As often happens in such cases, the accidental formation of the original fracture, aided by the action of the weather, had given to the end of the trunk a certain resemblance to a human countenance. Peter was the first to point out the peculiarity, which he looked upon uneasily. Fuller soon observed it, and said the aspect was, in sooth, that of a demagogue. The forehead retreated, the face was hatchet-shaped, while the entire expression was selfish, yet undecided. As for the Seneca, he gazed on these signs with wonder, mingled with awe.
“We see here the wicked See-wise. The Great Spirit—call him Manitou, or call him God—does not forget what is wrong, or what is right. The wicked may flourish for a while, but there is a law that is certain to bring him within the power of punishment. Evil spirits go up and down among us, but there is a limit they can not pass. But Indians like this Swimming Seneca do much harm. They mislead the ignorant, arouse evil passions, and raise themselves into authority by their dupes. The man who tells the people their faults is a truer friend than he who harps only on their good qualities. Be that only a tree, or be it a man bound in this form, for a thousand winters, by the hand of the Great Spirit, it tells the same story. See-wise did once live. His career comes to us in traditions, and we believe all that our fathers told us. Accursed be the man who deceives, and who opens his mouth only to lie! Accursed, too, is the land that neglects the counsels of the fathers to follow those of the sons!”
“There is a remarkable resemblance between this little incident in the history of the Senecas and events that are passing among our pale-faced race of the present age. Men who, in their hearts, really care no more for mankind than See-wise cared for the fish, lift their voices in shouts of a spurious humanity, in order to raise themselves to power, on the shoulders of an excited populace. Bloodshed, domestic violence, impracticable efforts to attain an impossible perfection, and all the evils of a civil conflict are forgotten or blindly attempted, in order to raise themselves in the arms of those they call the people.”
“I know your present condition,” answered the young Seneca, openly smiling. “The Manitou may have ordered it for your good. Trust to him. There are days in which the sun is not seen—when a lurid darkness brings a second night over the earth. It matters not. The great luminary is always there. There may be clouds before his face, but the winds will blow them away. The man or the people that trust in God will find a lake for every See-wise.”
IN THE PINES
W. F. Mayer
1859
New Jersey’s dismal Pine Barrens are best known as the home of the Jersey Devil, one of America’s first homegrown legends.
On a stormy night in 1735, the story goes, Mother Leeds gave birth to a child which turned into a hoofed, winged monster before the midwife’s eyes: for Mother Leeds was a witch and the baby’s father was the Devil. Another version of the story says that when Mrs. Leeds found out she was pregnant with her thirteenth child, she said that if she were to have one more child, “may it be a devil.” In either case, the newborn monster killed the midwife and escaped up the chimney. Sightings have been reported in the area ever since.
Tracking down the origin of this tale is a difficult task. Almost nothing was written about it until 1909, when hundreds of alleged sightings were reported from South Jersey through Delaware and into Maryland. These seem to have been the work of a hoaxer who fitted a tame kangaroo with claws and bat-like wings in an attempt to publicize a Philadelphia museum, but they propelled the Jersey Devil into the mainstream of public consciousness and ever since it has rivaled Bigfoot as America’s favorite monster.
Recent research suggests that the monster tale may have arisen as a kind of political satire or allegory in the early eighteenth century. The Leeds family published anti-Quaker pamphlets after the Quakers suppressed Daniel Leeds’s almanac for its “pagan” use of astrology, starting a feud that lasted for two generations and saw Daniel’s son Titan Leeds accused of being “Satan’s Harbinger.” The conflict is scarcely remembered today, but it is perhaps significant that the Leeds family crest, which appeared on all Leeds publications under Titan’s editorship, was three wyverns—two-legged, bat-winged dragons that in the Leeds version looked very much like devils.
The following extract is from the May 1859 Atlantic Monthly. It is one of the earliest extant accounts of the Jersey Devil myth, and includes several other pieces of Pine Barrens folklore.
If I were a crow, or, at least, had the faculty of flying with that swift directness which is proverbially attributed to the corvine tribe, and were to wing a southwesterly course from the truck of the flag-staff which rises from the Battery at New York, I should find myself, within a very short time, about fifty miles from the turbulent city, and hovering over a region of country as little like the civilized emporium just quitted as it is well possible to conceive. Not being a crow, however, nor fitted up with an apparatus for flying,—destitute even of a balloon,—I am compelled to adopt the means of locomotion which the bounty of God or the ingenuity of man affords me, and to spend a somewhat longer time in transit to my destination.
Over the New Jersey Railroad, then, I rattled, one fine, sunshiny autumn morning, in the year that has recently taken leave of us, as far as Bordentown, a distance of some fifty-seven miles, on my way to a locality the very existence of which is scarcely dreamed of by thousands in the metropolis, who can tell you how many square miles of malaria there are in the Roman Campagna, and who have got the topography of Caffre Land at their fingers’ ends. It is a region aboriginal in savagery, grand in the aspects of untrammelled Nature; where forests extend in uninterrupted lines over scores of miles; where we may wander a good day’s journey without meeting half-a-dozen human faces; where stately deer will bound across our path, and bears dispute our passage through the cedar-brakes; where, in a word, we may enjoy the undiluted essence, the perfect wildness, of woodland life. Deep and far “under the shade of melancholy boughs” we shall be taken, if together we visit the ancient Pines of New Jersey.
In order to do so, we must make at Bordentown the acquaintance of Mr. Cox, and take our seats in his stage for a jolt, twelve miles long, to the village of New Egypt, on the frontier of the Pines. Although the forest is accessible from many points, and may be entered by a number of distinct approaches, I, the writer hereof, selected that via New Egypt as the most convenient to a comer from New York, and as, perhaps, the least fatiguing to accomplish.
But, oh! the horrors of those New Jersey roads! Mud? ’Tis as if all the rains of heaven had been concentrated upon all the marls and clays of earth, and all the sticky stratum plastered down in a wiggling line of unascertainable length and breadth! Holes? As if a legion of sharpshooters had been detailed for the defence of Sandy Hook, and had excavated for themselves innumerable rifle-pits or caverns for the discomfiture of unhappy passengers! Up hill and down dale,—with merciless ruts and savage ridges,—now, a slough, to all appearance destitute of bottom, and, next, a treacherous stretch of sand, into which the wheels sink deeper and deeper at every revolution, as if the vehicle were France, and the road disorder,—such is a faint adumbration of the state of affairs in the benighted interior of our petulant little whiskey-drinking sister State!
But all earthly things come to an end, and so, accordingly, did our three-hours�
� drive. The stage pompously rolled into the huddled street of its terminus, and deposited me, in the neighborhood of noon, on the stoop of the only tavern supported in the deadly-lively place. No long sojourn, however, was in store for me. Presently—ere I had grown tired of watching the couple of clodhoppers, well-bespattered as to boots and undergarments with Jersey mud, who, leaning against a fence in true agricultural laziness, deliberately eyed, or rather, gloated over the inoffensive traveller, as though he were that “daily stranger,” for whom, as is well known, every Jerseyman offers up matutinal supplications—a buggy appeared in the distance, and I was shortly asked for. It was the vehicle in which I was to seek my destination in the Pines; and my back was speedily turned upon the queer little village with the curiously chosen name. My driver, an intelligent, sharp-featured old man, soon informs me that he was born and has lived for fifty years in the forest. A curious, old-world mortal,—our father’s “serving-man,” to the very life! The Pines are to him what Banks and City Halls and Cooper Institutes and Astor Houses are to a poor cittadini; every tree is individualized; and I doubt not he could find his way by night from one end to the other of the forest.
We had driven no great distance, when my companion lifted his whip, and, pointing to a long, dark, indistinct line which crossed the road in the distance, blocking the prospect ahead and on either side, as far as the eye could reach, exclaimed: “Them’s the Pines!” As we approached the forest, a change, theatrical in its suddenness, took place in the scenery through which our course was taken. The rich and smiling pasture-lands, interspersed with fields of luxuriant corn, were left behind, the red clay of the road was exchanged for a gritty sand, and the road itself dwindled to a mere pathway through a clearing. The locality looked like a plagiarism from the Ohio backwoods. On both sides of our path spread the graceful undergrowth, waving in an ocean of green, and hiding the stumps with which the plain was covered, while far away, to right and left, the prospect was bounded by forest walls, and gloomy bulwarks and parapets of pines arose in front, as if designed, in their perfect denseness, to exclude the world from some bosky Garden of Paradise beyond. Not so, however; for our pathway squeezes itself between two melancholy sentinel-pines, tracing its white scroll into the forest farther than the eye can follow, and in a few moments we leave the clearing behind, and pass into the shadow of the endless avenue, and bow beneath the trailing branches of the silent, stern, immovable warders at the gate. We were fairly in the Pines; and a drive of somewhat more than three miles lay before us still.
The immense forest region I had thus entered covers an extensive portion of Burlington County, and nearly the whole of Ocean, beside parts of Monmouth, Camden, Atlantic, Gloucester, and other counties. The prevailing soils of this great area—some sixty miles in length by ten in breadth, and reaching from the river Delaware to the very shore of the Atlantic—are marls and sands of different qualities, of which the most common is a fine, white, angular sand, of the kind so much in request for building-purposes and the manufacture of glass. In such an arid soil the coniferae alone could flourish, and accordingly we find that the wide-spreading region is overgrown almost entirely with white and yellow pine, hemlock, and cedar. Hence its distinctive appellation.
It was a most lovely afternoon, warm and serene as only an American autumn afternoon knows how to be; and while we hurried past the mute, monotonous, yet ever-shifting array of pines and cedars, the very rays of the sun seemed to be perfumed with the aroma of the fragrant twigs, about which humming-birds now and then whirred and fluttered as we startled them, scarcely more brilliant in color than the gorgeous maples which grew in one or two dry and open spots. For three-quarters of an hour our drive continued, until at length a slight undulation broke the level of the sand, and a fence, inclosing a patch of Indian corn, from which the forest had been driven back, betokened for the first time the proximity of some habitation. In fact, having reached the summit of the slope, I found myself in the centre of an irregular range of dwellings, scattered here and there in picturesque disregard of order, and next moment my hand was grasped by my friend B. I had reached my destination,—Hanover Iron-Works,—and was soon walking up, past the white gateway, to the Big House.
Somewhat less than eighty years ago, Mr. Benjamin Jones, a merchant of Philadelphia, invested a portion of his fortune in the purchase of one hundred thousand acres of land in the then unbroken forest of the Pines. The site of the present hamlet of Hanover struck him as admirably adapted for the establishment of a smelting-furnace, and he accordingly projected a settlement on this spot. The Rancocus River forms here a broad embayment, the damming of which was easily accomplished, and one of the best of water-privileges was thus obtained. On the north of this bay or pond, moreover, there rises a sloping bluff, which was covered, at the period of its purchase, with ancient trees, but upon which a large and commodious mansion was soon erected. Here Mr. Jones planted himself, and quickly drew around him a settlement which rose in number to some four hundred souls; and here he commenced the manufacture of iron. At frequent intervals in the Pines were found surface-deposits of ore, the precipitate from waters holding iron in solution, which frequently covered an area of many acres, and reached a depth of from two or three inches to as many feet. The ore thus existing in surface-deposits was smelted in the iron-works, and the metal thence obtained was at once molten and moulded in the adjoining foundry. Here, in the midst of these spreading forests, many a ponderous casting, many a fiery rush of tons of molten metal, has been seen. Here, five-and-forty years ago, the celebrated Decatur superintended, during many weeks, the casting of twenty-four pounders, to be used in the famous contest with the Algerine pirates whom he humbled; and the echoes of the forest were awakened with strange thunders then. As the great guns were raised from the pits in which they had been cast, and were declared ready for proof, Decatur ordered each one to be loaded with repeated charges of powder and ball, and pointed into the woods. Then, for miles between the grazed and quivering boles, crashed the missiles of destruction, startling bear and deer and squirrel and raccoon, and leaving traces of their passage which are even still occasionally discovered. The cannon-balls themselves are now and then found imbedded in the sand of the forest. In this manner the guns were tried which were to thunder the challenge of America against the dens of Mediterranean pirates.
Hanover, too, in its day of pride, furnished many a city with its iron tubes for water and for gas, many a factory and workshop with its castings, many a farmer with his tools, but the glow of the furnace is quenched forever now. The slowly gathering ferruginous deposits have been exhausted, and three years have elapsed since the furnace-fires were lighted. The blackened shell of the building stands in cold decrepitude, a melancholy vestige of usefulness outlived. In consequence of the stoppage of the works, Hanover has lost seven-eighths of its population, and only about fifty inhabitants remain in the white cottages grouped about the Big House, who are employed in agricultural labors and occupations connected with the forest. Yet in this solitary nook the elegances and the tastes of the most cultivated society are to be found. The Big House, surrounded by its well-trimmed gardens sloping down to the broad Rancocus, with its comfortable apartments, and the diversified prospect which it commands, offers a resting-place which, although deep in the genuine forest, combines urban refinement with the quiet and seclusion of country-life.
Bright and early on the morning after my arrival, Friend B. was at my door; and after a savory, if hasty breakfast, we sounded boute-selle. Outside the gate a couple of forest-ponies were waiting,—stout, lively, five-year-olds, equal, if not to a two-forty heat, yet to twenty miles of steady trot without distress,—brown and sleek as you please, with the knowingest eyes, and intelligence expressed in the impatient stamp of the fore-foot, and good-humor in the twitching of the ear. Into the saddle and off, with the cheery breeze to bathe us in exhilaration, as it went humming around us laden with aromatic odors and mysterious whisperings of the pine-trees to the sea,—th
rough the dew-diamonded grass of the little lawn at the top of the hill,—past the great elm with its glistening foliage, and its carolling crew of just-awakened birds,—then a canter down the sandy slope to the edge of the forest, and again the pines are around us.
Before us lay a four-mile ride over a devious track among trees which my companion knows by heart. Paths diverge into the forest on either side, running north and south, east and west, straight and crooked, narrow and broad; but B. follows unerringly the right, though undistinguished trail. This knowledge of woodcraft,—how it appalls and wonder-strikes the unlearned metropolitan, accustomed as he is to numbered houses and name-boarded streets! No omnibus-driver threading the confusion of a great thoroughfare could shape his course with greater assurance and lack of hesitation than does B. through these endless avenues of heavy-foliaged pines, broken only now and then by some tangled, impenetrable brake of cedars, or by a charred and blackened clearing, where the coaler has been at work. I gradually grew to believe that he could call every tree by its name, as generals have been said to know every soldier in their armies.
At length we reached a clearing of one or two acres in extent, the site of Cranberry Lodge, and the terminus of our ride. In the centre of the lone expanse two unusually tall pines were left standing, at the base of which a curious structure nestled, which had been for several weeks the occasional hermitage of my companion. It was built entirely with his own hands, of cedar rails and white-pine planks, which he had cut and sawed from trees that his own hands had felled. A queer little cabin, some nine feet in length by five or six in breadth, standing all alone in the forest, with not a neighbor within a distance of at least four miles!