XVIII
The Turning of the Belt
There are not many memories of Ole Bull in the vicinity of the ruins of his castle today. Fifteen years ago, before the timber was all gone, there were quite a few old people who were living in the Black Forest at the time of his colonization venture, who remembered him well, also a couple of his original colonists, Andriesen and Oleson, but these are no more. One has to go to Renovo or to Austin or Germania to find any reminiscences now, and those have suffered through passing from “hand to mouth” and are scattered and fragmentary. They used to say that the great violinist was, like his descendants, a believer in spiritualism, and on the first snowy night that he occupied his unfinished mansion, chancing to look out he saw what seemed to him a tall, white figure standing by the ramparts.
Fearing that it was some skeld come to warn him of impending disaster to his beloved colony, he rushed out hatless, only to find that it was an old hemlock stab, snow encrusted.
Disaster did come, but as far as local tradition goes Ole Bull had no warning of it. The hemlock stab which so disturbed him has been gone these many years, but a smaller one, when encased in snow, has frightened many a superstitious wayfarer along the Kettle Creek road, and gone on feeling that he had seen “the ghost of Ole Bull.”
But unaccountable and worthy of investigation are the weird strains of music heard on wild, stormy nights, which seem to emanate from the castle. Belated hunters coming down the deep gorge of Ole Bull Run, back of the castle, or travelers along the main highway from Oleona to Cross Forks, have heard it and refused to be convinced that there is not a musician hidden away somewhere among the crumbling ruins. The “oldest inhabitants,” sturdy race of trappers, who antedated Ole Bull’s colonists, declare that the ghostly musician was playing just the same in the great virtuoso’s time, and that it is the ghost of a French fifer, ambushed and killed by Indians when his battalion was marching along the “Boone Road” from Fort Le Boeuf to the memorable and ill-starred attack on Fort Augusta at Sunbury in 1757.
At the mention of “Boone Road” another question is opened, as there is no historic record of such a military highway between Lake Erie and the West Branch of the Susquehanna River. The afore-mentioned very old people used to say that the road was still visible to them in certain places; that there could be no doubt of its existence and former utilization.
Daniel Boone, if he be the pioneer of that name who first “blazed it out,” was a very young man during the “French and Indian War,” and his presence in that part of the country is a mooted question. Perhaps it was another “Boone,” and a Norseman, for many persons named “Bonde” or “Boon” were among the first Swedish settlers on the Lanape-Wihittuck, or Delaware River, unconsciously pioneering for their famous cousin-German, Ole Borneman Bull.
In all events, the French fifer was shot and grievously wounded, and his comrades, in the rout which ensued, were forced to leave him behind. After refreshing himself at the cold spring, which nearly a century later Ole Bull named “Lyso”–the water of light–he crawled up on the hill, on which the castle was afterwards partly erected, to reconnoitre the country, but dropping from exhaustion and loss of blood, soon died. The wolves carried away his physical remains, but his spirit rested on the high knoll, to startle Ole Bull and many others, with the strains of his weird, unearthly music.
It seems a pity that these old legends are passing with the lives of the aged people, but the coming of Ira Keeney, the grizzled Civil War veteran, as caretaker for the handsome Armstrong-Quigley hunting lodge, on the site of one of the former proposed fogderier Walhalla, has awakened anew the world of romance, of dashing exploits in the war under Sheridan and Rosecrans, of lumbering days, wolves, panthers and wild pigeons, all of which memories the venerable soldier loves to recount.
Yet can these be compared with the legend that Ole Bull, seeing a Bald Eagle rise from its nest on the top of a tall oak near the banks of Freeman’s Run, named the village he planned to locate there Odin, after the supreme deity[deity] of the Scandinavian mythology, who took the form of an eagle on one period of his development. His other settlements or herods he called Walhalla, Oleona and New Bergen. Planned at first by the French to be a purely military route for ingress to the West Branch country, but owing to the repulse at Fort Augusta, very infrequently traversed by them, if at all, it became principally an overland “short cut” for trappers, traders, travelers and settlers, all of whom knew its location well.