The Devil's
Dance Chambers
Most storied
of our New World rivers is the Hudson. Historic scenes have been
enacted on its shores, and Indian, Dutchman, Briton and American
have invested it with romance. Before the river Shatemuc
the king of streams the red man called it had broken through
the highlands, those mountains were a pen for spirits who had rebelled
against the Manitou.
After the waters
had forced a passage to the sea these evil ones sought shelter in
the glens and valleys that open to the right and left along its
course, but in time of tempest, when they hear Manitou riding down
the ravine on wings of storm, dashing thunderbolts against cliffs,
it is the fear that he will recapture them and force them into lightless
caverns to expiate their revolt, that sends them huddling among
the rocks and makes the hills resound with roars and howls.
At Devils
Dance Chamber, a slight plateau on the west bank, between Newburgh
and Crum Elbow, the red men performed semi-religious rites as a
preface to their hunting and fishing trips or ventures on the war-path.
They built a fire, painted themselves, and in that frenzy into which
savages are so readily lashed, and that is so liken to the action
of mobs in trousers, they tumbled, leaped, danced, yelled, sang,
grimaced and gesticulated until Manitou disclosed himself, either
as a harmless animal or a beast of prey. If he came in the former
shape the augury was favorable but if he showed himself as a bear
or panther it was a warning that they seldom dared disregard.The
crew of Hudsons ship, the Half Moon, having chanced on one
of these orgies, were so impressed by the fantastic spectacle that
they gave the name Duyvells Dans Kamer to the spot. Years
afterwards, when Stuyvesant ascended the river, his doughty retainers
were horrified, on landing below the Dans Kamer, to discover hundreds
of painted figures frisking there in the firelight. A few surmised
that they were but a new generation of savages holding a powwow,
but most of the sailors fancied that the assemblage was demoniac,
and that the figures were spirits of dead Indians repeating a scalp-dance
and reveling in the mysterious fire-water that they had brought
down from the river source in jars and skins. The spot was at least
once profaned with blood, for a young Dutchman and his wife, of
Albany, were captured here by an angry Indian, and although the
young man succeeded in stabbing his captor to death, he was burned
alive on the rock by the friends of the Indian whose wrath he had
provoked. The wife after being kept in captivity for a time, was
ransomed.
From Myths
and Legends of Our Own Land, page 41; Charles M. Skinner.
By permission of J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia, Penn.
The picture
is of Gomez trading with local Indians from Stickleys, The
Craftsman, November 1909
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