The entire scene is one of loneliness and desolation, yet a quiet, peaceful home for the octogenarian hunter Nelson and his devoted and equally aged sister. How different all this from what it was in the hey-day of prosperous Billy Cloyd! The hum of the mills, the busy teams of horses and ox-spans bringing in the logs, the carpenters and boatmen, the large family of the successful woodsman, their guests, and the hunters and surveyors who often made the house their headquarters.
It was at the time that the line of the Sunbury and Erie Railroad was being surveyed from Rattlesnake, now Whetham, to Erie, and one surveying crew was quartered at Castlecloyd. A few weeks earlier Dr. J. T. Rothrock had stopped there, but was now further west, camping with Mike Long, the wolf hunter, in the midst of a great deer and pigeon country in Elk County.
Those were days of reckless waste of our natural resources, according to the good Doctor. One of the surveyors, so as not to have to curve his line, ordered that three giant original white pines be cut. All the stumps were measured by Dr. Rothrock and averaged considerably over six feet in diameter. They were, of course, left to rot in the woods, thousands of feet of lumber of priceless value today!
Philip L. Webster, who died a few years ago in Littletown, now Bradford, was also a member of one of these surveying parties on Elk Creek, a branch of the Clarion River; on one occasion he saw four elks together, in a swale.
As “Buffalo Bill” had been the professional hunter for the Northern Pacific engineering crews, Jim Jacobs, “The Seneca Bear Hunter,” was attached to Mr. Webster’s organization in the same capacity. Instead of bison roasts, Jacobs was to furnish fresh elk steaks, and he kept the surveyors, axmen and chain-carriers supplied with plenty of it all summer long.
The members of the party billeted at Castlecloyd were composed of young Philadelphia gentlemen, sons of prospective stockholders in the new railroad, finely educated, traveled youths, whose love of adventure had been fired by the deeds of their colleagues, the Brothers Kane. One of them stood out more brilliantly than the rest for his scholarly attainments and poetic nature. He was young Wayne Stewardson, scion of a distinguished Quaker house of that name, and probably connected with the family who owned the lands on Kettle Creek, once occupied by Ole Bull.
The young man had been educated at the university in his native city, and in Europe. His early upbringing had been in great cities, and his sentimental tastes came out in a peculiar admiration of spires, chimneys, towers, stacks, vanes, arched roofs, corbels and crockets. He would wander for hours just at evening watching the skyline in the changing light, peopling the growing shadows with all manner of grotesque shapes and chimeras. His love of shadowland was so great that he fell naturally to cutting charming silhouettes of his friends, his likeness of the lovelorn and ill-fated Dr. E. K. Kane being highly prized.
His visit to the Sinnemahoning Country was his first induction into the heart of nature, and his admiration of man’s handicraft as exemplified in minarets and high gables softened to a deep reverence for the spiral, columnar forms of the giant pines as they serrated the skyline of the Allegheny summits.
There was a bench between two red maple trees, on the bank of the Sinnemahoning, just in front of Castlecloyd, where he would sit after supper, watching the crimson sunset reflected in the stream, with the dusky shapes of the ancient trees athwart, and the sky gradually becoming less of rose and more of mother-of-pearl, behind the sentinel pines on the comb of the mountains beyond Birch Island. It was more beautiful than anything he had ever seen in cities, in its sheer ferocious wildness.
One evening, on hearing a woman’s voice humming an old tune, he looked around, beholding Cloyd’s pretty daughter sitting, watching the afterglow from the portal of the classic doorway. Her knees were crossed, revealing pretty, plump little legs, encased in blue cotton stockings. His first thought at seeing her was to recall Poe’s youthful lines, “Helen Thy Beauty is to Me.” Previously he had not noticed her much, except that she seemed more than ordinarily good-looking and refined, for the drudge’s life she was living. Now that, like himself, she was a person who took notice of her surroundings, she must be different, he thought, and have a soul more in keeping with her lovely appearance.