These Catskill Mountains were purchased from the Indians on July 8, 1678, by a company of Dutch and English gentlemen, who took their title 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 Washington 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 balls, 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 ship'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.