Trending
First, I’m going to do something I never do: I’m going to say something negative about Henry Wharton Shoemaker.
I wouldn’t be the first. Shoemaker was one of my big heroes, but he was controversial. He was a writer, and wrote a lot of books about local legends–Curses, monsters, ghosts, and ancient battles. His stuff is a lot of fun to read, but that’s where the negative aspect comes in.
A lot of people claimed that his work was made up. Not made up by ancient people who believed the legends, but made up by Shoemaker himself. His detractors called it “Fakelore” and have often talked about how Shoemaker invented his stories and passed them off as local legend.
Shoemaker denied this, claiming that his stories were written down exactly the way they were told to him. “The query has frequently been made by readers,” he wrote in his book “Pennsylvania Mountain Stories,” “Whether the stories were true or made up by the author. As so many of the tales are devoted to subjects of a more or less supernatural order they cannot very well be true; neither are they of the author’s invention. The stories were told to him, mostly after supper, by old settlers at lumber camps, farm houses, and backwoods taverns where he stopped.”
I’ve always been a big Shoemaker fan. I love the stories, and I like the idea that there are all these local legends of the paranormal floating around the county. And I’ve always believed that Henry Shoemaker was telling the truth–That he was honest, and did write down the stories just as they were told to him. Unfortunately, I could never really prove that.
Now, maybe, I can make a good case for it.
The thought process occurred to me when I was considering my favorite Shoemaker story, “The Giantess,” in “Tales of the Bald Eagle Mountains.” Shoemaker wrote a story about a giant stone statue from a Native American tribe in the McElhattan area with a curse on it, and says that it remains buried there.
I found an article in the Clinton Democrat from September 15, 1870, that claimed a statue matching that description had actually turned up. While working on property owned by the West Branch Camp Meeting Association, workmen found a large stone sculpture of a human. The article said,”Its classical defined features and the general contour of the statue are calculated to carry the imagination of the beholder back to the dark ages of the world, when images were worshipped.”
The article suggests that the Giantess story has some merit to it. And as the article came out ten years before Shoemaker was born, it pretty much proves that Shoemaker didn’t make up the Giantess story. He wasn’t that talented. The article was written by John Q. Dice, an elderly lumberman who was one of Shoemaker’s sources.
Henry Shoemaker talked to a lot of people to get his stories, but some of them were regulars: John Dice, Seth Nelson, Jesse Logan, Daniel Mark. So, consider: Is it possible that some of these guys exaggerated the stories, and Shoemaker wrote them down exactly the way he was told?
Of course it’s possible. (I think I have a bet with my friend Norman on this.) When you’re talking about cursed statues and ghosts, anything is possible. There is one story that I know to be false for sure: “The Mountain Soldier’s Presentiment,” a tale about a Civil War soldier who predicted his own death. No soldier of that name ever existed, and the unit in the story wasn’t in existence during the time that particular battle was said to have been fought. And when I re-checked the story, Shoemaker began by crediting John Dice with telling it to him.
John Dice was the source of several Shoemaker stories, and he may have been telling Shoemaker.Well, I can’t say in the paper, but it rhymes with “cool split.” And just so you don’t get the idea I’m throwing only John Dice under the bus, let me talk about Seth Nelson, who was quite the coolsplitter himself.
Nelson was from the Keating area, and one of Shoemaker’s sources. He liked to tell tall tales, there’s no denying that–He told stories of taking on bears and panthers in hand-to-hand combat, and claimed to have lost and regained his sight. In 1833, he claimed to have been hit in the head by meteors. He even told his children that he was immortal, and as he’s been buried in Nelsonville Cemetery since 1905, it’s pretty safe to say he’s dead.
All of these guys were the sort to enjoy tall tales–Without a doubt, if they caught a minnow, it would have turned into a great white shark by the time they got it home. When I sit down and figure out who told what story, a pattern emerges: Some of the most unbelievable stories came from the same couple of guys. In other words, somebody may have made up these legends–But it wasn’t Shoemaker.
Henry Shoemaker told the truth all along. He wrote down the stories exactly the way they were told to him; his only interest was in preserving the legends for future generations. And as it’s been over fifty years since his death, and here I am still writing about this stuff, his plan worked. And that, more than anything else, is what made Shoemaker himself a legend.
—
Lou Bernard is a Lock Haven resident with a keen interest in the history of this area. He is adult services coordinator at Ross Library and may be reached at ross13@rosslibrary.org or 570-748-3321.