Hunting was good on Beartown hills,-so-called, tradition says because a pioneer of Lee killed a bear in the forest depths with a knotted rope's end. A story handed down at Beartown is of a circuit preacher, who remarked after a scanty contribution: "It is as hard to convert one of ye Beartown sinners as it is for a shad to climb an apple-tree- yea,tail foremost." The river washes the fore-feet of the Bear at Ice Glen before it leaves Stockbridge meadows to leap southward toward the Great Wigwam" in a place called Ousetonuck" (Great Barrington). On its path thither the river passes below the face of the sacred crag of Maris-nos-see-klu,[1] - the Fisher's Nest, - on whose proud summit no Indian treads without first casting his reverential tribute of a stone upon the monumental cone on its southern slope.

This pile of stones on Monument is one of the mysterious shrines,[2] of the aborigine, of whose import no Indian will speak.

Many believe that it may be a memorial to that gentle and sorrowful maid who threw herself over the white precipice to assuage a despairing love, having been forbidden to marry her warrior-cousin through the unchanging law of the forefathers. To Bryant was related by a squaw the romance of the Indian maid of Monument Mountain:

"It was a summer morning, and they went to this old precipice. About the cliffs Lay garlands, ears of maize, and shaggy skins Of wolf and bear, the offerings of the tribe Here made to the Great Spirit, for they deemed, Like worshipers of the elder time, that God Doth walk on the high places. . . . Below her-waters resting in the embrace Of the wide forest. . . . She gazed upon it long, and at the sight Of her own village peeping through the trees, And her own dwelling, and the calm roof Of him she loved. . . . She threw herself from the steep rock and perished."

The wild legendary existence of the Indians of the Hounsatonic merged into the celebrated Stockbridge Mission. The silent fishing-grounds at the double Ox-Bow -whose beauty aroused such enthusiasm in the gentle soul of Dean Stanley - became their school-ground.

In those days The Hill [3] and The Plain were the two parts of Stockbridge, and you might have stood with Missionary John Sergeant in the doorway of his Mission House on the Hill- already famous in Great Britain -and listened to a conch-shell's blast drowning the song of the bobolinks. wherebv David Nau-nau-ka-nuk, the tithing-man, summoned Mohican and Mohawk chiefs and men of the Six Nations into the little church on the Plain; hence now, from vine-clad bell-tower, the Children's Chimes chant softly to the valley that day is done. Presently from the line of wigwams on Stockbridge Street you perceived Indian converts appear with tools and set to building or planting after the English manner. Konkapot, commissioned as Captain by Gov. Belcher, built and shingled his barn on the brook [4] named in his honor. The schoolmaster and first magistrate was the Rev. Timothy Woodbridge.

The Indians in their turn introduced the English to the squash, as Ku-tu-squash, or Vine-Apple, and impressed the whites with the dignity of their ancient laws of hospitality. A Muh-he-ka-neuw who enter the home of a neighbor says nothing until he has eaten, and no one speaks whilst the squaw hastens to set forth food.[5]