And he shakes the woods on the mountain side,
When they drip with the rains of autumn tide.
"But when in the forest bare and old,
The blast of December calls,
He builds, in the star-light clear and cold,
A palace of ice where his torrent falls,
With turret, and arch, and fret-work fair,
And pillars blue as the summer air."
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