Indian Princess Paid Ultimate Sacrifice For Love ... Or Did She?

1-22-10

OK, here’s the story.  (Or one of them.)
Princess Utsayantha fell in love with a young white settler and, before long, she was with child.
Her furious father tomahawked the baby.  In grief, the mother drowned herself in the lake near the mountain that both bear her name today.
Anne Willis, repository of town history, is skeptical.
The story of an Indian princess falling in love with a young colonial – ala Pocahontas and John Smith – and coming to grief appears again and again, Jungian like, in early American settings.
No doubt it reflects an underlying reality – young men and young women, whatever their cultures, do tend to connect (even today).  But beyond that, who knows?
Here are some stories that Anne Willis will repeat with more confidence:
• When the British burned Kingston in 1777, a patroon made land available in the Catskills to the burned-out townspeople, and they became Stamford’s original settlers.  For decades, Chisolm-Trail-like, farmers would drive cattle, sheep and even turkeys to the Hudson for shipment by boat to New York City.
• Stamford’s famous sons include Ned Buntline, an adventurer and journalist who’s credited as inventor of the dime novel, churning out such wildly popular best-sellers as “Buffalo Bill Cody: King of the Border Men”
• During the hey-day of Stamford’s 20 grand hotels, Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weismuller, former Olympians and future movie Tarzans, were swimming instructors at pool the grand Rexmere Hotel (now BOCES’ Frank Cyr Educational Center).
• In 1870, blasting for a quarry (or a flash flood, depending on the version) in Gilboa, just over the Delaware-Schoharie line, uncovered a petrified forest.  In the 1920s, when construction began on the Gilboa Dam that created the Schoharie Reservoir, more of the stone trees – of the fern-like genus Wattieza – were found. 
Describing Miss Willis as a repository is hardly an exaggeration.  Her mother, Daisy DeSilva, nee Willis, nee Rogers, worked for decades at the old Stamford Mirror-Recorder.
Anne’s mom was very thorough.  In those days before computerized databases, she clipped the weekly newspaper and created scrapbooks, one a year, complete with index.  She then condensed the scrapbooks into bound notebooks.  She did this for 50 years.
(The newspaper’s publisher, Leo DeSilva, must have been impressed:  He married Daisy in 1950.)
The daughter, who inherited the scrapbooks, notebooks and the job of village historian when her mother passed away in 1980, still has them neatly stacked in the office of her Beaver Street home.
Anne Willis was born in Roxbury, but moved when she was 3 years old – her parents separated; her father was a Methodist minister/photographer – into her great-uncle and -aunt’s home with her mother , two brothers and sister Margaret.
The dubious story of Princess Utsayantha brought another to mind: “The Talking Cats of South Gilboa.”
On returning home from “Spook Woods” one evening, a member of the pioneer Mann family reported seeing two male cats dragging along a third cat between them.  The cats chased him to the edge of the woods and, as he looked back, one of the cats called out:  “Tell Molly Meyers she can come home now, because Jed Hawkins is dead.”
Later, Anne Willis discovered a similar story in a book of Irish folktales.