According to Daniel Mark, born in 1835, (died 1922), when the aged Seneca Indian, Isaac Steel, stood beside the moss-grown stump of the giant “Grandfather Pine” in Sugar Valley, in the early Autumn of 1892, he was silent for a long while, then placing his hands over his eyes, uttered these words: “This is the Indians’ Twilight; it explains many things; I had heard fromfrom Billy Dowdy, when he returned to the reservation in 1879, that the tree had been cut by Pardee, but as he had not seen the stump, and was apt to be credulous, I had hoped that the report was untrue; the worst has happened.”

Then the venerable Redman turned away, and that same day left the secluded valley, never to return.

The story of the Grandfather Pine, of Sugar Valley, deserves more than the merely passing mention already accorded it in forestry statistics and the like. Apart from being probably the largest white or cork pine recorded in the annals of Pennsylvania sylviculture–breast high it had to be deeply notched on both sides, so that a seven foot cross-cut saw could be used on it–it was the sacred tree of the Seneca Indians, and doubtless of the earlier tribes inhabiting the country adjacent to the Allegheny Mountains and the West Branch Valley.

It was a familiar landmark for years, standing as it did near the mouth of Chadwick’s Gap, and could be seen towering above its fellows, from every point in Sugar Valley, from Schracktown, Loganton, Eastville and Carroll.

Professor Ziegler tells us that the maximum or heavy growth of white pine was always on the winter side of the inland valleys; the biggest pines of Sugar Valley, Brush Valley and Penn’s Valley were all along the southern ridges.

Luther Guiswhite, now a restauranteur in Harrisburg, moving like a voracious caterpillar easterly along the Winter side of Brush Valley, gradually destroyed grove after grove of superb original white pines, the Gramley pines, near the mouth of Gramley’s Gap, which Professor Henry Meyer helped to “cruise”, being the last to fall before his relentless juggernaut.

Ario Pardee’s principal pineries were mostly across the southern ridge of Nittany Mountain, of Sugar Valley, on White Deer Creek, but the tract on which the Grandfather Pine stood ran like a tongue out of Chadwick’s Gap into Sugar Valley, almost to the bank of Fishing Creek. It is a well known story that after the mammoth pine had been cut, Mike Courtney, the lumberman-philanthropist’s woods boss, offered $100 to anyone who could transport it to White Deer Creek, to be floated to the big mill at Watsontown, where Pardee sawed 111,000,000 feet of the finest kind of white pine between 1868 and 1878.

The logs of this great tree proved too huge to handle, even after being split asunder by blasting powder, crushing down a number of trucks, and were left to rot where they lay. Measured when prone, the stem was 270 feet in length, and considering that the stump was cut breast high, the tree was probably close to 276 feet from root to tip. The stump is still visible and well worthy of a visit.

In addition to boasting of the biggest pine in the Commonwealth, one of the biggest red hemlocks also grew in Sugar Valley, in the centre of Kleckner’s woods, until it was destroyed by bark peelers in 1898. It dwarfed the other original trees in the grove, mostly superb white hemlocks, and an idea of its size can be gained when it is stated that “breast high” it had a circumference of 30 feet.

When Billy Dowdy, an eccentric Seneca Indian, was in Sugar Valley he told ’Squire Mark the story of the Grandfather Pine, then recently felled, and while the Indian did not visit the “fallen monarch” on that occasion, he refrained from so doing because he said he could not bear the sight. The greatest disaster that had yet befallen the Indians had occurred, one that they might never recover from, and meant their final elimination as factors in American history.

Dowdy seemed unnerved when he heard the story of the demolition of the colossal pine, and it took several visits to the famous Achenbach distillery to steady his nerves so that he could relate its history to his old and tried friend the ’Squire. In the evening, by the fireside, showing emotion that rarely an Indian betrays, he dramatically recited the story of the fallen giant.

Long years ago, in the very earliest days of the world’s history, the great earth spirit loved the evening star, but it was such an unusual and unnatural attachment, and so impossible of consummation that the despairing spirit wished to end the cycle of existence and pass into oblivion so as to forget his hopeless love. Accordingly, with a blast of lightning he opened his side and let his anguish flow away. The great gaping wound is what we of today call Penn’s Cave, and the never ending stream of anguish is the wonderful shadowy Karoondinha, now renamed John Penn’s Creek.

As time went on fresh hopes entered the subterranean breast of the great earth spirit, and new aspirations towards the evening star kindled in his heart of hearts. His thoughts and yearnings were constantly onward and upward towards the evening star. He sought to bridge the gulf of space and distance that separated him from the clear pure light of his inspiration. He yearned to be near, even if he could not possess the calm and cold constellation so much beyond him. He cried for an answer, but none came, and thought that it was distance that caused the coldness, and certainly such had caused the great disappointment in the past.

His heart was set on reaching the evening star, to have propinquity with the heavens. Out of his strong hopes and deep desires came a tall and noble tree, growing in eastern Sugar Valley, a king among its kindred, off there facing the shining, beaming star. This tree would be the symbol of earth’s loftiest and highest aspirations, the bridge between the terrestrial and the celestial bodies. It was earth’s manliest, noblest and cleanest aspiration, standing there erect and immobile, the heavy plates of the bark like gilt-bronze armor, the sparse foliage dark and like a warrior’s crest.

The Indians, knowing full well the story of the hopeless romance of the earth spirit and the evening star, or Venus, as the white men called it, venerated the noble tree as the connecting link between two manifestations of sublimity. They only visited its proximity on sacred occasions because they knew that the grove over which it dominated was the abode of spirits, like all groves of trees of exceptional size and venerable age.

The cutting away of most of the bodies of original pines has circumscribed the abode of the spiritual agencies until they are now almost without a lodgement, and must go wailing about cold and homeless until the end of time, unless spiritual insight can touch our materialistic age and save the few remaining patches of virgin trees standing in the valley of the Karoondinha, the “Stream of the Never Ending Love”, now known by the prosaic cognomen of “Penn’s Valley”.

The Tom Motz tract is no more, the Wilkenblech, the Bowers and the Meyer groves are all but annihilated. Where will the spirits rest when the last original white pine has been ripped into boards at The Forks, now called Coburn? No wonder that Artist Shearer exclaimed, “The world is aesthetically deal!”deal!”

The Indians were greatly dismayed at the incursion of white men into their mountain fastnesses, so contrary to prophecy and solemn treaties, and no power seemed to stem them as they swept like a plague from valley to valley, mountain to mountain. The combined military strategy and bravery of Lenni-Lenape, Seneca, Cayuga, Tuscarora and Shawnee failed before their all-conquering advance. How to turn back this white peril occupied the mind and heart of every Indian brave and soothsayer.

One evening just as Venus in the east was shedding her tranquil glory over the black outline of the pine covered ranges of the Nittanies, a mighty council of warriors and wise men, grave and reverent, assembled under the Grandfather Pine. Hitherto victory, while it had rested with the white invaders, had not been conclusive; there was still hope, and the Indians meant to battle to the end.

It was during this epochal conclave that a message was breathed out of the dark shaggy pigeon-haunted tops of the mighty tree. Interpreted it meant that the Indian braves and wise men were reminded that this great pine reached from heaven to earth, and by its means their ancestors used to climb up and down between the two regions. In a time of doubt and anxiety like this, the multitudes, conferring beneath the tree, were invited to ascend to hold a council with the stars, to exchange views and receive advice as to how the insidious white invader could be kept in proper bounds, and to preserve the glory and historic dignity of the Indian races. The stars, which were the spirits of undefeated warriors and hunters and huntresses of exceptional prowess–their light was the shimmer of their silvery targets–had always been the allies of the red men.

In solemn procession the pick of the assemblage of Indian warriors and wise men ascended the mighty tree, up, up, up, until their forms became as tiny specks, and disappeared in the dark lace-like branches which merged with the swart hues of the evening heavens. They set no time for their return, for they were going from the finite to the infinite, but they would be back to their beloved hills and valleys in plenty of time, and with added courage and skill, to end the regime of the pale faced foes.

Every wife and mother and sweetheart of a warrior who took this journey was overjoyed at the privilege accorded her loved one, and none begrudged being left behind to face the enemy under impaired leadership, or the risk of massacre, as in due course of time the elite would return from above and rescue them from their cruel tormentors.

Evidently out of space, out of time, was almost the equivalent of “out of sight, out of mind” for all who had witnessed the chosen band of warriors and warlocks ascend the pine, even the tiny babes, reached maturity and passed away, and yet they had not returned or sent a message. The year that the stars fell, in 1833, brought hopes to the anxious ones, but never a falling star was found to bring tidings from that bourne above the clouds.

Generation after generation came and went, and the ablest leaders still were absent counseling with the stars. Evidently there was much to learn, much to overcome, before they were fully fledged to return and battle successfully.

The succeeding generations of Indian braves fought the white foes as best they could, yet were ever being pushed back, and they were long since banished from Sugar Valley where grew the Grandfather Pine. Occasionally those gifted with historic lore and prophecy journeyed to the remote valley to view the pine, but there were no signs of a return of the absent Chieftains.

It was a long and weary wait. Were they really forsaken, or were there affairs of great emergency in the realm of the evening star that made them tarry so long? They might be surprised on their return to find their hunting territories the farms of the white men, their descendants banished to arid reservations on La Belle Riviere and beyond. They had left in the twilight; they would find the Indians’ Twilight everywhere over the face of the earth. It was a sad prospect, but they never gave up their secret hope that the visitors to strange lands would return, and lead a forlorn hope to victory.

Then came upon the scene the great lumberman, Ario Pardee. The bed of White Deer Creek was “brushed out” from Schreader Spring to Hightown, to float the millions of logs that would pile up wealth and fame for this modern Croesus. What was one tree, more or less–none were sacred, and instead of being the abode of spirits, each held the almighty dollar in its heart.

Pardee himself was a man of dreams and an idealist, vide Lafayette College, and the portrait of his refined and spiritual face by Eastman Johnson, in the rotunda of “Old Pardee”. Yet it was too early a day to care for trees, or to select those to be cut, those to be spared; the biggest tree, or the tree where the buffaloes rubbed themselves, were alike before the axe and cross-cut; all must fall, and the piratical-looking Blackbeard Courtney was the agent to do it.

Perhaps trees take their revenge, like in the case of the Vicar’s Oak in Surrey, as related by the diarest Evelyn–shortly after it was felled one of the choppers lost an eye and the other broke a leg. Mike Courtney, it is reported, ended his days, not in opulent ease lolling in a barouche in Fairmount Park with Hon. Levi Mackey, as had been his wont, but by driving an ox-team in the wilds of West Virginia!

The Grandfather Pine was brought to earth after two days of chopping by an experienced crew of woodsmen; when it fell they say the window lights rattled clear across the valley in Logansville (now Loganton). It lay there prone, abject, yet “terrible still in death”, majestic as it sprawled in the bed that had been prepared for it, with an open swath of forest about that it had maimed and pulled down in its fall.

Crowds flocked from all over the adjacent valleys to see the fallen monarch, like Arabs viewing the lifeless carcass of a mighty lion whose roar had filled them with terror but a little while before.

Then came the misfortune that the tree was found to be commercially unprofitable to handle, and it was left for the mould and the moss and the shelf-fungi to devour, for little hemlocks to sprout upon.

Billy Dowdy was in the West Branch Valley trying to rediscover the Bald Eagle Silver Mine–old Uriah Fisher, of the Seventh Cavalry, can tell you all about it–when the story was told at “Uncle Dave” Cochran’s hotel at Pine Station that Mike Courtney had conquered the Grandfather Pine. It is said that a glass of the best Reish whiskey fell from his nerveless fingers when he heard the news. He suddenly lost all interest in the silver mine on the Bald Eagle Mountain, which caused him to be roundly berated by his employers, and dropping everything, he made for Sugar Valley to verify the terrible story. ’Squire Mark assured him that it was only too true; he had strolled over to Chadwick’s Gap the previous Sunday and saw the prostrate Titan with his own eyes.

The Indians’ twilight had come, for now the picked band of warriors and warlocks must forever linger in the star-belt, unless the earth spirit, out of his great love, again heaved such a tree from his inmost creative consciousness.

SometimesSometimes the Indians notice an untoward bright twinkling of the stars, the evening star in particular, and they fancy it to be reassuring messages from their marooned leaders not to give up the faith, that sometimes they can return rich in wisdom, fortified in courage, ready to drive the white men into the sea, and over it to the far Summer Islands. When the stars fell on the thirteenth of November, 1833, it was thought that the starry hosts were coming down en masse to fight their battles, but not a single steller ally ever reported for duty.

Old John Engle, mighty Nimrod of Brungard’s Church (Sugar Valley), on the nights of the Northern Lights, or as the Indians called them, “The Dancing Ghosts”, used to hear a strange, weird, unaccountable ringing echo, like exultant shouting, over in the region of the horizon, beyond the northernmost Allegheny ridges. He would climb the “summer” mountain all alone, and sit on the highest summits, thinking that the wolves had come back, for he wanted to hear them plainer. In the Winter of 1859 the distant acclamation continued for four successive nights, and the Aurora covered the entire vault of heaven with a preternatural brilliance. Great bars of intensely bright light shot out from the northern horizon and broke in mid-sky, and filled the southern skies with their incandescence. The sky was so intensely red that it flared as one great sheet of fire, and engulfed the night with an awful and dismal red light. Reflected on the snow, it gave the earth the appearance of being clothed in scarlet.

The superstitious Indians, huddled, cold and half-clad, and half-starved in the desert reservations, when they saw the fearful glow over beyond Lake Erie, and heard the distant cadences, declared that they were the signal fires and the cries for vengeance of the Indian braves imprisoned up there in star-land, calling defiance to the white hosts, and inspiration to their own depleted legions, the echo of the day of reckoning, when the red men would come to their own again, and finding their lost people, lead them to a new light, out of the Indians’ twilight.