Spread the meadows and the cornfields,
Stood the groves of singing pine trees,
And beyond them stood the forest,
Henry W. Longfellow.
It is also pleasant to remember that the Mahicans as a tribe were true and faithful to us during the war of the Revolution, and when the six nations met in council at Oswego, at the request of Guy Johnson and other officers of the British army, "to eat the flesh and drink[page 179] the blood of a Bostonian," Hendrick, the Mahican, made the pledge for his tribe at Albany, almost in the eloquent words of Ruth to Naomi, "Thy people shall be our people, and whither thou goest we will be at your side."
The Mourdener's Kill, with its sad story of a girl tied by Indians to a horse and dragged through the valley, flows into the Hudson above Castleton. Two miles above this near the steamer channel will be seen Staats Island on the east, with an old stone house, said to be next in antiquity to the old Van Rensselaer House, opposite Albany. It is also a fact that this property passed directly to the ancestors of the present family, the only property in this vicinity never owned by the lord of the manor. Opposite the old stone house, the point on the west bank is known as Parda Hook, where it is said a horse was once drowned in a horse-race on the ice, and hence the name Parda, for the old Hollanders along the Hudson seemed to have had a musical ear, and delighted in accumulating syllables. (The word pard is used in Spenser for spotted horse, and still survives in the word leopard.)
The Castleton Bar or "overslaugh," as it was known by the river pilots, impeded for years navigation in low water. Commodore Van Santvoord and other prominent citizens brought the subject before the State legislature, and work was commenced in 1863. In 1868 the United States Government very properly (as their jurisdiction extends over tide-water), assumed the completing of the dykes, which now stretch for miles along the banks and islands of the upper Hudson. Here and there along our route between Coxsackie and Albany will be seen great dredges deepening and widening the river channel. The plan provides for a system of longitudinal dykes to confine the current sufficiently to allow the ebb and flow of the tidal-current to keep the channel clear. These dykes are to be gradually brought nearer together from New Baltimore toward Troy, so as to assist the entrance of the flood-current and increase its height.
Where Hudson winds his silver way