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New York - Folklore Natural phenomena, special occupations like lumbering and mining, and stirring events,such as riots and wars, supply the stimulus for traditional stories, customs, ballads, and songs—for much that we call folklore. Particularly rich in such folklore are the mountain regions of New York State, the valleys of the Mohawk and the Hudson, and the St.Lawrence and Genesee regions. Indian life and character have been popularized in sentimental-heroic style by James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; the latter took the liberty of making the Onondaga chief Hiawatha an Ojibway and transplanting him from New York to the West. Historically, however, according to Arthur C. Parker, Hiawatha was an Iroquois chief who 'was spokesman for the greater mind of Dekanawidah whom the Mohawk nation recognizes as its great culture hero and the founder of its civic system.' In the Dekanawidah legend Hiawatha was born of a Huron virgin and was destined by his mother's dream to journey to the Many Hill Nation, the Iroquois, and raise up the Great Tree of Peace. After heroically overcoming many obstacles, he fulfilled his mother's dream, brought about peace and unity, and established the Confederacy. Indian legends lurk in more than 500 Indian place names in New York State; and many others, often with the theme of young love ending in tragedy, are identified with conspicuous natural features like mountain ranges, waterfalls, and high cliffs overlooking rivers and lakes. Associated with the gorge of Kaaterskill Clove is a legend worthy of the fancy of a sculptor. Ontiora, an evil spirit, was transformed into the Catskills for his misdeeds. His bones became the rocks and crags, his flesh the rising ground, his blood the sap of trees. He lies prone with one knee raised, his face to the sky. His forebead is rough and vast, his nose long;.his eyes are North and South Lakes, from which tears flow down in streams that seam and wrinkle his cheeks. The story of early contacts between whites and Indians on the New York frontier is scattered through a mixture of fact and legend associated with the names of pioneers of the type idealized by James Fenimore Cooper in Natty Bumppo. Cooper once referred to one Shipman as 'the Leather-Stocking of the [ Cooperstown] region,' but controversy still rages as to whether this was David Shipman of Cooperstown or Nathaniel Shipman of Hoosick Falls. Ava, an Oneida County hamlet, believes its own Nathaniel Foster, Jr., was the original of Cooper's hero, while Syracuse supports Ephraim Webster for that honor. Like Onondaga's Webster, the Genesee's candidate, Ebenezer 'Indian' Allen, married Indian women but did not take his vows too seriously. In the Bumppo tradition also is Timothy Murphy, Schoharie's Revolutionary hero. The themes of Dutch and English folklore, concentrated chiefly in the Hudson Valley, are ghosts and ghost ships and buried treasure. Out of the wealth of Dutch legend and the folk he knew so well Washington Irving gave the world Rip Van Winkle and the mountain dwarfs, Ichabod Crane and the headless horseman, Heyliger's adventures, and Diedrich Knickerbocker. Kinderhook folk know quite certainly that Katrina Van Tassel was the belle of the Van Alen family—you can see her picture in the old Dutch Van Alen house; and Ichabod Crane was the eccentric Merwin, who taught and flogged the Dutch boys in the little schoolhouse that stood where the white one does now. Wax manikins of both these persons have been placed in the local House of History. There is a legend of the survivors of a Dutch crew who, unable to relocate a buried treasure because of a shift in the shore line and channel of Annsville Creek, swore to continue the search until they found the gold. At low tide, in the dark of the moon, folks say, their wraiths still pursue the unavailing quest under a weird light, while a white hound bays. Tappan Zee, in the Hudson between Westchester and Rockland Counties, harbors many ghosts, goblins, and witches. In the old days Rambout Van Dam, who lived at Spuyten Duyvil, was in the habit of rowing to distant Kakait, a secluded hamlet at the north end of Tappan Zee. One fateful Saturday night he joined in a quilting frolic there, which was followed, as usual, by dancing and drinking. Van Dam lingered until past twelve. Then, heedless of warning, he set out to row home on the Sabbath, swearing that he would not land until he reached Spuyten Duyvil. A curse was put upon him, and he is doomed to ply his craft on the broad river until Judgment Day. Thunder Mountain (Dunderberg), at the southern gate of the Hudson Highlands, was populated in Colonial days by a crew of goblins, whose Mein Heer was a Dutch-clad 'bulbous-bottomed goblin' in trunk hose and sugarloaf hat, with a speaking trumpet through which he bawled his orders for winds and lightnings. At his command the imps cavorted in the air and played pranks with the rigging of passing ships, though they never molested a mariner plying the river if he lowered his peak in homage to Mein Heer, the keeper of the mountain. The legends about Captain Kidd and his fabulous treasure are epic in their completeness and circumstantial details. He is said to have buried his loot near the eastern end of Long Island, on Gardiner's Island, in Gardiner's Bay, and at several points along the Hudson. The prospect of finding Kidd's treasure has stirred many people to dig at numerous places, thus far vainly. Kidd's Plug, part of the craggy steep on the Hudson called Cro' Nest, a knob projecting like a bung, is said to conceal a cavern in which the pirate cached some of hisgold. According to the most elaborate of the legends, Captain Kidd was anxious for the security of a Spanish maiden rescued in a fight in the South Seas from the pirate Ballridge. Sailing secretly up the Hudson to Catskill, he entrusted his bride, Isabelle del Puerto, to the care of an old Negro woman, Dora, who lived in a little house at the foot of Kaaterskill Clove. During Kidd's absence Ballridge spied Isabelle on the cliff above Fawn's Leap, pursued and caught her, bound her to his horse, and rode off to' his house near Leeds. Here he imprisoned her in a room, importuned her for her love, and persecuted her. She escaped, was recaptured, and suffered a horrible death. After her burial, her footsteps were heard nightly passing back and forth before the door of the Leeds house, and a white horse was seen galloping home with her ghost trailing from a rope. Captain Kidd was captured in the Red Sea, taken to London, and hanged; and, says the legend, Ballridge wore a silk cord around his neck until his death. Often a ghost story was connected with a historical event. A Dutch family of Saratoga County filled up the well on their farm because it was haunted nightly by the ghost of a woman without a head, believed to be the spirit of one who had been massacred on the farm by Canadians and Indians in 1748. Hans Anderson, who tilled a farm back of Peckskill, was worried into his grave by the leaden-faced likeness of a British spy whom he had hanged by General Putnam's orders. A ghost ship, which has been sighted at intervals for 160 years off New Rochelle and along Long Island Sound, is thought to be the phantom of a British warship seized by the farmers of Long Island off Throgg's Neck in the bleak winter of 1777, when the British crew were bent on felling their trees for firewood. The battlefield of Bedford is haunted by apparitions of the Dutch and Indian warriors of 1644; the whooping Indians who had been beheaded in the fray battle again with their ghostly skulls teetering upside down on their shoulders. Around Pelham, in Westchester County, treasure hunters were once frightened away by a phantom troop of British Regulars, and a wedding breakfast was interrupted by a skirmish of Revolutionary ghosts. An old Huguenot tale tells of little girls on their way to fetch water being frightened by the ghost of a Hessian soldier. Even horses saw ghosts in Eastchester, where during a Thanksgiving turkey shoot three horses balked at passing a 'gallows tree' and their riders took down a stone fence in order to pass around it. On Long Island the spirit of Thomas Paine has been seen wandering, on dark nights, between his two graves. (He was buried in New Rochelle, Westchester.) Numerous traditional stories, originating in events of the Revolution, the War of 1812, or the Civil War, have been colored in retelling until they have become part of local folklore. One story describes how by a ruse 20 spirited Colonials held up and captured the advance guard of the British at Bemis Heights. Popular in Rochester is the story that in May 1814,ss when 13 British ships threatened Charlotte, 33 Rochesterians marched in and out through a screen of trees and 'bluffed' the British Navy by creating the illusion of superior numbers. In the Robin Hood tradition is the story of Claudius Smith and his seven years of predatory warfare, and his hiding places in the Ramapo Mountains. There is the story of the 'scythe tree' in Waterloo, and in Tappan the account of the mysterious tar barrel in an elm tree that burned as a signal to the country of the signing of peace terms with Great Britain. Belief in witches has been another rich source of folklore. Housewives feared the witch because she had power to bring bad luck to the family, sour the milk, and make churning abortive. Well-known charms were employed to break her spell: a silver coin was dropped into the churn; the horseshoe over the door was placed with open part up so that good luck would not run out. Since a witch could transform herself into a black cat, a strange cat was always a dreaded visitor and under no circumstances was allowed to cross one's path. The traditional lore of Sullivan County includes Old Meg, the Hag, 'the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter,' hermit 'queen' of an intermarrying family of 400 who dwelt in cabins and caves in the wooded hills of Sullivan and Orange Counties. She was a withered old woman, over six feet tall and exceedingly thin; her skin was yellow, her hair was black and long, and her chin was covered with a three-inch beard. She had supernatural power in healing and in telling fortunes. One day Old Meg was missing. Sam Quick, hunting woodchuck, pushed through a halfhidden path and under a chestnut tree came upon Meg's body pierced by a large splinter of jagged stump thrust through her back and a foot beyond. On Saturday afternoon 200 men held a wake around her cabin, and at midnight set it afire and departed. Writing in 1899 in the Port Jervis Union, J.V.Morrison told how as a boy he listened to witch stories in the slave cabins of the Delaware Valley. Tashee, a slave 'witch finder,' told Morrison that he could recognize the evil eye, the witch spots on the body, and the black cats that were imps of familiar spirits; and that he knew how to make compounds baleful to those he desired to injure, and talismans, amulets, and charms to protect him from witchery. He could put a spell on a tomb. so that not even the Witch of Endor could raise the dead. Old Tashee told about witches going to a farmer's pasture at midnight, clutching the mane's of twin colts and riding them through the air to the witches' feasting place, and riding them back in the morning. They did this so often the colts became thin and weak and their manes all matted. Tashee greased, soaped, and unsnarled their manes and put them in separate pastures far apart. He then went to the farmer's house to find the. witch. When an old maid came in he knew her to be the witch for 'she rolled up her evil eye' and turned up her nose at him. 'We took a shoe of the mare's right hind foot and put it in the fire among the coals and I told them next day noon, when she came there, to ask her to stay. to dinner, and just as she was going to sit in the chair, one of them must take the tongs and slip the red-hot shoe in the seat for her to sit on. She was branded, the colts' manes came out all right, and I got a quart of whiskey and a dollar for the job.' One of the chief delights of common folk in leisure time or as an adjunct to work has always been singing or chanting familiar songs and ballads. Usually these are handed down orally from generation to generation. Some of them—well-known ballads like 'Sir John Randall'—have been transported from the Old World; others, like 'Fair Charlotte' and the 'Jam at Gerry's Rock,' originated in other States: still others, like the 'Blue Mountain Song' and 'Low Bridge, Everybody Down,' are the creations of New York State folk groups or individuals. In any case, as the song has been absorbed by the community, the identity of the author or authors has been lost. The singing and the musical accompaniment are simple and artless—there are, for instance, farmers' families where an 'ear for music' has been inherited for several generations; and it is not uncommon to see the hard hand of the farmer 'pick a tune' on the old organ or fiddle.