Pardee himself was a man of dreams and an idealist, vide Lafayette College, and the portrait of his refined and spiritual face by Eastman Johnson, in the rotunda of “Old Pardee”. Yet it was too early a day to care for trees, or to select those to be cut, those to be spared; the biggest tree, or the tree where the buffaloes rubbed themselves, were alike before the axe and cross-cut; all must fall, and the piratical-looking Blackbeard Courtney was the agent to do it.
Perhaps trees take their revenge, like in the case of the Vicar’s Oak in Surrey, as related by the diarest Evelyn–shortly after it was felled one of the choppers lost an eye and the other broke a leg. Mike Courtney, it is reported, ended his days, not in opulent ease lolling in a barouche in Fairmount Park with Hon. Levi Mackey, as had been his wont, but by driving an ox-team in the wilds of West Virginia!
The Grandfather Pine was brought to earth after two days of chopping by an experienced crew of woodsmen; when it fell they say the window lights rattled clear across the valley in Logansville (now Loganton). It lay there prone, abject, yet “terrible still in death”, majestic as it sprawled in the bed that had been prepared for it, with an open swath of forest about that it had maimed and pulled down in its fall.
Crowds flocked from all over the adjacent valleys to see the fallen monarch, like Arabs viewing the lifeless carcass of a mighty lion whose roar had filled them with terror but a little while before.
Then came the misfortune that the tree was found to be commercially unprofitable to handle, and it was left for the mould and the moss and the shelf-fungi to devour, for little hemlocks to sprout upon.
Billy Dowdy was in the West Branch Valley trying to rediscover the Bald Eagle Silver Mine–old Uriah Fisher, of the Seventh Cavalry, can tell you all about it–when the story was told at “Uncle Dave” Cochran’s hotel at Pine Station that Mike Courtney had conquered the Grandfather Pine. It is said that a glass of the best Reish whiskey fell from his nerveless fingers when he heard the news. He suddenly lost all interest in the silver mine on the Bald Eagle Mountain, which caused him to be roundly berated by his employers, and dropping everything, he made for Sugar Valley to verify the terrible story. ’Squire Mark assured him that it was only too true; he had strolled over to Chadwick’s Gap the previous Sunday and saw the prostrate Titan with his own eyes.
The Indians’ twilight had come, for now the picked band of warriors and warlocks must forever linger in the star-belt, unless the earth spirit, out of his great love, again heaved such a tree from his inmost creative consciousness.
A FENCE OF WHITE PINE STUMPS, ALLEGHENIES
Sometimes[Sometimes] the Indians notice an untoward bright twinkling of the stars, the evening star in particular, and they fancy it to be reassuring messages from their marooned leaders not to give up the faith, that sometimes they can return rich in wisdom, fortified in courage, ready to drive the white men into the sea, and over it to the far Summer Islands. When the stars fell on the thirteenth of November, 1833, it was thought that the starry hosts were coming down en masse to fight their battles, but not a single steller ally ever reported for duty.