Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

Today is my wife’s birthday! I am saying that in the assumption that you’re reading this on the day it comes out, and not, say, on microfilm fifty years from now. So I wanted to take this moment to wish my wife a happy birthday.

I asked her, since this column is published on her birthday, if there was some special topic she’d like me to write about. My wife, who does not care one way or the other about local history, thought it over for a couple of days and then asked if I’ve written about the Giantess recently.

The Giantess is my favorite Henry Shoemaker story. Shoemaker, a folklorist and writer from McElhattan, wrote down a lot of old legends in his books. My favorite one of them is “Tales of the Bald Eagle Mountains,” and it’s from that book that this particular story comes.

The story begins with a young Native American prince, Pipsisseway. He was the son of King Ironwood, of the Susquehannocks. Yes, I am fully aware that the Native American tribes didn’t have kings and princes; I suspect there were a few liberties taken to make the stories more relatable to the Eurocentric crowd. Pipsisseway fell in love with a girl from another tribe, who left him for someone else. We’ve all been there.

Brokenhearted, Pipsisseway ordered up a statue of his lost love, a giant statue carved out of stone. Now, the statue turned out to be cursed—One of the things about Shoemaker’s writing is how flowery and convoluted it is. The curse involved the stonecutter, several clay sculptors, a labor dispute, and a mob scene that resulted in a death, but the whole thing is too ridiculously complicated to go into right here. So I’ll sum it up and save you several pages worth of narration: There was a curse on the statue.

Pipsisseway had the statue placed on the mountain, but the curse happened, and crops died. Floods and fires ripped through the land. Disease killed people. And King Ironwood finally put the brakes on his impulsive son, ordering the Giantess to be taken down and buried underneath the waters of McElhattan Run.

Many years went by. Pipsisseway married a girl named Meadow Sweet, and they had a child together. King Ironwood died, and Pipsisseway became the king. And, eventually, he had the Giantess statue dug up and put back on the mountain.

Well, you can pretty much guess what happened next. The curse returned. And it was the same story all over again—Dead crops, disease, fire, floods. Pipsisseway’s wife and son were threatened by a flood, and he ran to save them. He saved them both, but died in the attempt.

So the tribe buried him beside McElhattan Run. And they took down the Giantess, and buried it in the run beside him. The story ends with a spooky little speculation about what will happen the next time the Giantess is found.

Some people will tell you the story was made up by Henry Shoemaker, that there was no legend and no Giantess. Shoemaker has been accused of this kind of thing a lot. But there’s one detail they don’t know.

An article in the Clinton Democrat on September 15, 1870 says that a giant statue was dug up by some workmen in McElhattan Run. It was “said to be the work of some ancient artist”, and the headline was “The Giantess of McElhattan.” Now, 1870 was ten years before Shoemaker was born, so he could not possibly have made this up, as so many people have accused him of. So there may really be a Giantess…And a curse. Oh, happy birthday, honey!