The Mountain Top Historical Society
Mark Twain observes the "locals"
From Mark Twain's Autobiography
Chapter XXIV
From Susy's Biography of Me [1885-6]
Mamma and papa have returned from Onteora and they have had a delightful
visit. Mr. Frank Stockton was down in Virginia and could not reach Onteora
in time, so they did not see him, and Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge was ill and
couldn't go to Onteora, but Mrs. General Custer was there, and mamma said
that she was a very attractive, sweet appearing woman.
[Dictated October 9, 1906] Onteora was situated high up in the Catskill
Mountains, in the centre of a far-reaching solitude. I do not mean that
the region was wholly uninhabited; there were farmhouses here and there,
at generous distances apart. Their occupants were descendants of ancestors
who had built the houses in Rip Van Winkle's time, or earlier; and those
ancestors were not more primitive than were this posterity of theirs. The
city people were as foreign and unfamiliar and strange to them as monkeys
would have been, and they would have respected the monkeys as much as they
respected these elegant summer-resorters. The resorters were a puzzle to
them, their ways were so strange and their interests so trivial. They drove
the resorters over the mountain roads and listened in shamed surprise at their
bursts of enthusiasm over the scenery. The farmers had had that scenery on
exhibition from their mountain roosts all their lives, and had never noticed
anything remarkable about it. By way of an incident: a pair of these primitives
were overheard chatting about the resorters, one day, and in the course of
their talk this remark was dropped:
"I was a-drivin' a passer of 'em round about yisterday evenin', quiet
ones, you know, still and solemn, and all to wunst they busted out to make
your hair lift and I judged hell was to pay. Now what do you reckon it was?
It wa'n't anything but jest one of them common damned yeller sunsets."
Citation: Twain, Mark. Chapters from Mark Twain's Autobiography, North
American Review (Sept. 1906 - Dec. 1907); BoondocksNet Edition, 2001.
http://www.boondocksnet.com/twaintexts/autobiography/
(Captured and formatted for MTHS website March 28, 2002).
