Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, vol 1 | Page 5

death on rocks
and trees; yet, knowing how ugly-tempered he could be, his neighbors
were better inclined to believe that he had driven the horse into a gallop,
intending to drag the girl for a short distance, as a punishment, and to
rein up before he had done serious mischief. On this supposition he was
arrested, tried, and sentenced to die on the scaffold.
The tricks of circumstantial evidence, together with pleas advanced by
influential relatives of the prisoner, induced the court to delay sentence
until the culprit should be ninety-nine years old, but it was ordered that,
while released on his own recognizance, in the interim, he should keep
a hangman's noose about his neck and show himself before the judges
in Catskill once every year, to prove that he wore his badge of infamy
and kept his crime in mind. This sentence he obeyed, and there were
people living recently who claimed to remember him as he went about
with a silken cord knotted at his throat. He was always alone, he
seldom spoke, his rough, imperious manner had departed. Only when
children asked him what the rope was for were his lips seen to quiver,
and then he would hurry away. After dark his house was avoided, for

gossips said that a shrieking woman passed it nightly, tied at the tail of
a giant horse with fiery eyes and smoking nostrils; that a skeleton in a
winding sheet had been found there; that a curious thing, somewhat like
a woman, had been known to sit on his garden wall, with lights shining
from her finger-tips, uttering unearthly laughter; and that domestic
animals reproached the man by groaning and howling beneath his
windows.
These beliefs he knew, yet he neither grieved, nor scorned, nor
answered when he was told of them. Years sped on. Every year
deepened his reserve and loneliness, and some began to whisper that he
would take his own way out of the world, though others answered that
men who were born to be hanged would never be drowned; but a new
republic was created; new laws were made; new judges sat to minister
them; so, on Ralph Sutherland's ninety-ninth birthday anniversary,
there were none who would accuse him or execute sentence. He lived
yet another year, dying in 1801. But was it from habit, or was it in
self-punishment and remorse, that he never took off the cord? for, when
he drew his last breath, though it was in his own house, his throat was
still encircled by the hangman's rope.

BIG INDIAN
Intermarriages between white people and red ones in this country were
not uncommon in the days when our ancestors led as rude a life as the
natives, and several places in the Catskills commemorate this fact.
Mount Utsayantha, for example, is named for an Indian woman whose
life, with that of her baby and her white husband, was lost there. For
the white men early found friends among these mountains. As far back
as 1663 they spared Catherine Dubois and her three children, after
some rash spirits had abducted them and carried them to a place on the
upper Walkill, to do them to death; for the captives raised a Huguenot
hymn and the hearts of their captors were softened.
In Esopus Valley lived Winnisook, whose height was seven feet, and
who was known among the white settlers as "the big Indian." He loved
a white girl of the neighborhood, one Gertrude Molyneux, and had
asked for her hand; but while she was willing, the objections of her
family were too strong to be overcome, and she was teased into
marriage with Joseph Bundy, of her own race, instead. She liked the

Indian all the better after that, however, because Bundy proved to be a
bad fellow, and believing that she could be happier among barbarians
than among a people that approved such marriages, she eloped with
Winnisook. For a long time all trace of the runaway couple was lost,
but one day the man having gone down to the plain to steal cattle, it
was alleged, was discovered by some farmers who knew him, and who
gave hot chase, coming up with him at the place now called Big Indian.
Foremost in the chase was Bundy. As he came near to the enemy of his
peace he exclaimed, "I think the best way to civilize that yellow serpent
is to let daylight into his heart," and, drawing his rifle to his shoulder,
he fired. Mortally wounded, yet instinctively seeking refuge, the giant
staggered into the hollow of a pine-tree, where the farmers lost sight of
him. There, however, he was found by Gertrude, bolt upright, yet dead.
The unwedded widow brought her dusky children to the place and
spent the remainder