Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
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 sunshine 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."
THE DUTCH AND THE SHAKERS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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