University of Virginia Library

CHRONICLE I.

About five-and-twenty miles from the ancient and renowned city
of Manhattan, formerly called New-Amsterdam, and vulgarly
called New-York, on the eastern bank of that expansion of the
Hudson, known among Dutch mariners of yore, as the Tappan
Zee, being in fact the great Mediterranean Sea of the New-Netherlands,
stands a little old-fashioned stone mansion, all made
up of gable-ends, and as full of angles and corners as an old
cocked hat. It is said, in fact, to have been modelled after the
cocked hat of Peter the Headstrong, as the Escurial was modelled
after the gridiron of the blessed St. Lawrence. Though but of
small dimensions, yet, like many small people, it is of mighty
spirit, and values itself greatly on its antiquity, being one of the
oldest edifices, for its size, in the whole country. It claims to be
an ancient seat of empire, I may rather say an empire in itself,
and like all empires, great and small, has had its grand historical
epochs. In speaking of this doughty and valorous little pile, I
shall call it by its usual appellation of “The Roost;” though
that is a name given to it in modern days, since it became the
abode of the white man.

Its origin, in truth, dates far back in that remote region commonly
called the fabulous age, in which vulgar fact becomes mystified,
and tinted up with delectable fiction. The eastern shore
of the Tappan Sea was inhabited in those days by an unsophisticated
race, existing in all the simplicity of nature; that is to say,
they lived by hunting and fishing, and recreated themselves occasionally
with a little tomahawking and scalping. Each stream
that flows down from the hills into the Hudson, had its petty
sachem, who ruled over a hand's breadth of forest on either side,
and had his seat of government at its mouth. The chieftain who
ruled at the Roost, was not merely a great warrior, but a medicine-man,
or prophet, or conjurer, for they all mean the same
thing in Indian parlance. Of his fighting propensities, evidences
still remain, in various arrow-heads of flint, and stone battle-axes,
occasionally digged up about the Roost: of his wizard powers,
we have a token in a spring which wells up at the foot of the bank,
on the very margin of the river, which, it is said, was gifted by
him with rejuvenating powers, something like the renowned Fountain
of Youth in the Floridas, so anxiously but vainly sought after
by the veteran Ponce de Leon. This story, however, is stoutly
contradicted by an old Dutch matter-of-fact tradition, which declares
that the spring in question was smuggled over from Holland
in a churn, by Femmetie Van Blarcom, wife of Goosen Garret
Van Blarcom, one of the first settlers, and that she took it up by
night, unknown to her husband, from beside their farm-house near
Rotterdam; being sure she should find no water equal to it in
the new country—and she was right.

The wizard sachem had a great passion for discussing territorial
questions, and settling boundary lines, in other words, he had

the spirit of annexation; this kept him in continual feud with the
neighboring sachems, each of whom stood up stoutly for his hand-breadth
of territory; so that there is not a petty stream nor
rugged hill in the neighborhood, that has not been the subject of
long talks and hard battles. The sachem, however, as has been
observed, was a medicine-man, as well as warrior, and vindicated
his claims by arts as well as arms; so that, by dint of a little
hard fighting here, and hocus pocus (or diplomacy) there, he managed
to extend his boundary line from field to field and stream to
stream, until it brought him into collision with the powerful
sachem of Sing Sing.[1] Many were the sharp conflicts between
these rival chieftains for the sovereignty of a winding valley, a
favorite hunting ground watered by a beautiful stream called the
Pocantico. Many were the ambuscades, surprisals, and deadly
onslaughts that took place among its fastnesses, of which it grieves
me much that I cannot pursue the details, for the gratification of
those gentle but bloody-minded readers, of both sexes, who
delight in the romance of the tomahawk and scalping-knife. Suffice
it to say, that the wizard chieftain was at length victorious,
though his victory is attributed, in Indian tradition, to a great
medicine, or charm, by which he laid the sachem of Sing-Sing
and his warriors asleep among the rocks and recesses of the valley,
where they remain asleep to the present day, with their bows
and war-clubs beside them. This was the origin of that potent
and drowsy spell, which still prevails over the valley of the Pocantico,
and which has gained it the well-merited appellation of Sleepy
Hollow. Often, in secluded and quiet parts of that valley, where
the stream is overhung by dark woods and rocks, the ploughman,
on some calm and sunny day, as he shouts to his oxen, is surprised
at hearing faint shouts from the hill-sides in reply; being,
it is said, the spell-bound warriors, who half start from their
rocky couches and grasp their weapons, but sink to sleep again.

The conquest of the Pocantico was the last triumph of the
wizard sachem. Notwithstanding all his medicines and charms,
he fell in battle, in attempting to extend his boundary line to the
east, so as to take in the little wild valley of the Sprain, and his
grave is still shown, near the banks of that pastoral stream. He
left, however, a great empire to his successors, extending along
the Tappan Sea, from Yonkers quite to Sleepy Hollow, and known
in old records and maps by the Indian name of Wicquaes-Keck.

The wizard Sachem was succeeded by a line of chiefs of whom
nothing remarkable remains on record. One of them was the
very individual on whom master Hendrick Hudson and his mate
Robert Juet made that sage experiment gravely recorded by the
latter, in the narrative of the discovery.

“Our master and his mate determined to try some of the
cheefe men of the country, whether they had any treacherie in
them. So they took them down into the cabin, and gave them
so much wine and aqua vitæ, that they were all very merrie; one
of them had his wife with him, which sate so modestly as any of
our countrywomen would do in a strange place. In the end, one
of them was drunke; and that was strange to them, for they
could not tell how to take it.”[2]

How far master Hendrick Hudson and his worthy mate carried
their experiment with the sachem's wife, is not recorded, neither
does the curious Robert Juet make any mention of the after
consequences of this grand moral test; tradition, however, affirms
that the sachem, on landing, gave his modest spouse a hearty rib-roasting,
according to the connubial discipline of the aboriginals;
it farther affirms, that he remained a hard drinker to the day of
his death, trading away all his lands, acre by acre, for aqua vitæ;
by which means the Roost and all its domains, from Yonkers to
Sleepy Hollow, came, in the regular course of trade, and by right
of purchase, into the possession of the Dutchmen.

The worthy government of the New Netherlands was not suffered
to enjoy this grand acquisition unmolested. In the year
1654, the losel Yankees of Connecticut, those swapping, bargaining,
squatting enemies of the Manhattoes, made a daring inroad
into this neighborhood, and founded a colony called Westchester,
or, as the ancient Dutch records term it, Vest Dorp, in the right
of one Thomas Pell, who pretended to have purchased the whole
surrounding country of the Indians; and stood ready to argue
their claims before any tribunal of Christendom.

This happened during the chivalrous reign of Peter Stuyvesant,
and roused the ire of that gunpowder old hero. Without
waiting to discuss claims and titles, he pounced at once upon the
nest of nefarious squatters, carried off twenty-five of them in
chains to the Manhattoes, nor did he stay his hand, nor give rest
to his wooden leg, until he had driven the rest of the Yankees
back into Connecticut, or obliged them to acknowledge allegiance
to their High Mightinesses. In revenge, however, they introduced
the plague of witchcraft into the province. This doleful

malady broke out at Vest Dorp, and would have spread throughout
the country had not the Dutch farmers nailed horse-shoes to
the doors of their houses and barns, sure protections against
witchcraft, many of which remain to the present day.

The seat of empire of the wizard sachem now came into the
possession of Wolfert Acker, one of the privy counsellors of
Peter Stuyvesant. He was a worthy, but ill-starred man, whose
aim through life had been to live in peace and quiet. For this he
had emigrated from Holland, driven abroad by family feuds and
wrangling neighbors. He had warred for quiet through the fidgetting
reign of William the Testy, and the fighting reign of Peter
the Headstrong, sharing in every brawl and rib-roasting, in his
eagerness to keep the peace and promote public tranquillity. It
was his doom, in fact, to meet a head wind at every turn, and be
kept in a constant fume and fret by the perverseness of mankind.
Had he served on a modern jury he would have been sure to have
eleven unreasonable men opposed to him.

At the time when the province of the New Netherlands was
wrested from the domination of their High Mightinesses by the
combined forces of Old and New England, Wolfert retired in
high dudgeon to this fastness in the wilderness, with the bitter determination
to bury himself from the world, and live here for the
rest of his days in peace and quiet. In token of that fixed purpose
he inscribed over his door (his teeth clenched at the time)
his favorite Dutch motto, “Lust in Rust,” (pleasure in quiet). The
mansion was thence called Wolfert's Rust—(Wolfert's Rest), but
by the uneducated, who did not understand Dutch, Wolfert's
Roost; probably from its quaint cock-loft look, and from its having
a weather-cock perched on every gable.

Wolfert's luck followed him into retirement. He had shut
himself up from the world, but he had brought with him a wife,
and it soon passed into a proverb throughout the neighborhood
that the cock of the Roost was the most henpecked bird in the
country. His house too was reputed to be harassed by Yankee
witchcraft. When the weather was quiet every where else, the
wind, it was said, would howl and whistle about the gables; witches
and warlocks would whirl about upon the weather-cocks, and
scream down the chimneys; nay it was even hinted that Wolfert's
wife was in league with the enemy, and used to ride on a
broomstick to a witches' sabbath in Sleepy Hollow. This, however,
was all mere scandal, founded perhaps on her occasionally
flourishing a broomstick in the course of a curtain lecture, or raising
a storm within doors, as termagant wives are apt to do,
and against which sorcery horse shoes are of no avail.

Wolfert Acker died and was buried, but found no quiet even
in the grave: for if popular gossip be true, his ghost has occasionally
been seen walking by moonlight among the old gray moss-grown
trees of his apple orchard.