Legends of the Shawangunk2 JR.pdf - Friends of the Sabbath ...

36 Legends of the Shawangunk.
ger the Jerseymen were in full retreat for the woods. Some stray shots were sent after
them by some of the young men in the rear of the line of battle, with no effect. With this
the military operations of the day concluded.
Some time after this the Jerseymen made another effort to capture the Major and
Captain Johannes Westbrook. They chose the Sabbath as the time when, and the door of
the church as the place where, they would be the most certain of taking their prey.
Somewhere between the years 1764 and 1767 one Sabbath morning, a strong party
surrounded the church armed with clubs. The Major and Captain Westbrook were among
the congregation of worshippers. After the services were concluded and the people were
coming out of the church, both men were captured and made prisoners, but not until after
a long, rough-and-tumble struggle. The Major, being reckoned the more dangerous of the
two, was taken and confined for a while in a Jersey prison.
THE MASTODON.
THE Shawangunk region, even were it wanting in any other recommendation to historic
mention, is remarkable as having been the home of the Mastodon. Almost under the
shadow of the rock-ribbed ascents, deep in the peat and marl of the adjacent valleys,
several skeletons of these huge monsters have been exhumed, some of them the largest
and most complete specimens that have come to the sight of man. In a tamarack swamp
near Montgomery, in 1845, a gigantic and perfect skeleton was found in a peat bog with
marl beneath, where it stood in an erect position, as if the animal lost its life in search of
food by getting mired. In the place where its stomach and intestines lay was found a
large mass of fragments of twigs and grass, hardly fossilized at all—the remains,
doubtless, of the undigested dinner of the monster. This skeleton was eleven feet high
and upwards of twenty feet long, and weighed 2000 pounds. It is now in a museum in
Boston. Another skeleton scarcely less remarkable for its size and completeness, was
dug up in the year 1872 in the town of Mount Hope. This weighed 1700 pounds, and is
now on exhibition in New Haven, Conn. No less than nine skeletons, more or less entire,
have been exhumed within the limits of Orange county.
The era and haunts of this monster mammalia furnish abundant material for
consideration, and is of interest both as attracting the superficial notice of the tourist and
eliciting the more profound speculations of the geologist. Whether we contemplate the
antiquity of his remains entombed for unknown ages in the peat and marl of a swamp—
preserved by the antiseptic property of the medium that caused his death; or whether we
think of his lordly mastery over the other beasts of his time, of the majesty of his tread
over valley and mountain, of his