In his northward journey he had many thrilling experiences, such as crossing the covered bridge at Northumberland at midnight, riding on the trucks of a freight train to Jersey Shore and frightening fishermen at Hagerman’s Run. When last seen he was near the flourishing town of Woolrich, frightening old and young, so much so that a young local sportsman offered a reward of “five hundred dollars dead, one thousand dollars alive”, putting the Snyder County gorilla in the same category with the Passenger Pigeon as a natural history curiosity.
And in this terrible disguise Hornbostl Pfatteicher is expiating his sins, black as the satanic form he has assumed, and when his penance is over to be shed for the newer and better life.
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The Indian’s Twilight
According to Daniel Mark, born in 1835, (died 1922), when the aged Seneca Indian, Isaac Steel, stood beside the moss-grown stump of the giant “Grandfather Pine” in Sugar Valley, in the early Autumn of 1892, he was silent for a long while, then placing his hands over his eyes, uttered these words: “This is the Indians’ Twilight; it explains many things; I had heard from[from] Billy Dowdy, when he returned to the reservation in 1879, that the tree had been cut by Pardee, but as he had not seen the stump, and was apt to be credulous, I had hoped that the report was untrue; the worst has happened.”
Then the venerable Redman turned away, and that same day left the secluded valley, never to return.
The story of the Grandfather Pine, of Sugar Valley, deserves more than the merely passing mention already accorded it in forestry statistics and the like. Apart from being probably the largest white or cork pine recorded in the annals of Pennsylvania sylviculture–breast high it had to be deeply notched on both sides, so that a seven foot cross-cut saw could be used on it–it was the sacred tree of the Seneca Indians, and doubtless of the earlier tribes inhabiting the country adjacent to the Allegheny Mountains and the West Branch Valley.
It was a familiar landmark for years, standing as it did near the mouth of Chadwick’s Gap, and could be seen towering above its fellows, from every point in Sugar Valley, from Schracktown, Loganton, Eastville and Carroll.
Professor Ziegler tells us that the maximum or heavy growth of white pine was always on the winter side of the inland valleys; the biggest pines of Sugar Valley, Brush Valley and Penn’s Valley were all along the southern ridges.
Luther Guiswhite, now a restauranteur in Harrisburg, moving like a voracious caterpillar easterly along the Winter side of Brush Valley, gradually destroyed grove after grove of superb original white pines, the Gramley pines, near the mouth of Gramley’s Gap, which Professor Henry Meyer helped to “cruise”, being the last to fall before his relentless juggernaut.
Ario Pardee’s principal pineries were mostly across the southern ridge of Nittany Mountain, of Sugar Valley, on White Deer Creek, but the tract on which the Grandfather Pine stood ran like a tongue out of Chadwick’s Gap into Sugar Valley, almost to the bank of Fishing Creek. It is a well known story that after the mammoth pine had been cut, Mike Courtney, the lumberman-philanthropist’s woods boss, offered $100 to anyone who could transport it to White Deer Creek, to be floated to the big mill at Watsontown, where Pardee sawed 111,000,000 feet of the finest kind of white pine between 1868 and 1878.