The Lost Indian Mine and Early History of Glendale
Copyright 1969 by
Dr. John Edward McKee, Port Richey, Florida

I have recently visited the scene of my birth and childhood approximately half a mile from the breast of the dam in the Prince Gallitzin State Park at Glendale, Pa. and that visit has brought back memories enough to fill a volume.

I parked above the breast of the dam and gave an extemporaneous historical lecture to the people assembled there. A pair of lovers were strolling around holding hands. They came to me and asked a lot of questions. God bless them.

When I stopped talking a local gentleman, Mr. Clair Davis said his grandmother used to live near Saint Augustine, ten or twelve miles south of Glendale, and that she often saw Indians coming down this way and returning in three days with lead. This would suggest that the lead was approximately half way between Glasgow and Saint Augustine. When I finished a similar lecture in Chicago a gentleman said he had heard this story all of his life, but never knew before where it happened.

My grandfather, Issac Gates, born in 1818, was the first settler at Glendale. He purchased large tracts of land direct from the government. Built dams and operated sawmills.

He carried the saw for his first mill on his back twenty one miles over the highest range of the Allegheny Mountains from Tyrone, and made the rest of it on location. Here was Free Enterprise at its best and it was a million times better than the great delusion we now have in philosophy and economy. The first timbers he sawed on this mill may still be seen in the home of the late Michael Nedymier at Beaver Vally.

He made brick, built a store, post office, lodge hall, school, church and parsonage before there was more than two log cabins in Altoona, eighteen miles away. Some people think the park should have been named for Issac Gates.

My mother, Mary M. Gates, was born in 1855 in a beautiful hewn pine log home between Slate Run and Main Stream that vandals burned in 1910. Her birthplace like the Garden of Eden--perhaps some place in the general area of the Persian Gulf--is now under water. The Great Deluge may have been caused by the collapse of an aqueous Jupiter-like canopy that raised the oceans from the old continental shelf depth to their present levels.

My father, John Silas Mckee, was born at Fallen Timber, about three miles away, in 1855. The place was given this name because a violent storm had uprooted a swath of forest trees there before the coming of the white men. That storm, like Lochinvar, came out the west, and the trees fell toward the east. They were almost completely decayed when my father first saw them more than a hundred years ago. When he left Fallen Timber in 1887 he sold his property there consisting of a large field or city block, three houses and blacksmith shop for seven hundred and fifty dollars.

One thing that influenced Issac Gates to purchase land there was a powerful E.S.P. experience he had while standing near where I was born and looking south or up the stream. This spot can still be located by the three fir trees and black walnut tree that my brother, F.M. McKee, and I planted sixty-eight years ago.

The E.S.P. message was "Someday there will be SOMETHING WONDERFUL up that valley!" My mother had this same profound conviction. And once a stranger walked out into the field where my grandfather had stood, approximately three hundred feet south of the fir trees, and stood there motionless for a long time. Then he came to our house and said to my mother "I have just had the strangest experience of my life. Someday there will be SOMETHING WONDERFULL up that valley."

I had the same inspiration from early childhood, and have stood for many hours looking up that valley and dreaming of spiritual things, of colleges and world wide labors. I have just finished my 330th work and will publish it soon.

I parked my trailer there and relived those years. Some of my writings have reached fifty to seventy editions and one has reached one hundred million readers and is still going strong. The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. I knew I would leave some "Footprints on the sands of time." But I did not forsee that I would live in a trailer coach and haul it around fifty thousand miles.

That "SOMETHING WONDERFUL" is clearly our beautiful lake and park.

One of the vivid memories my visit brought back occured sixty two years ago when I went with my father, John Silas Mckee, and an elder brother, F.M. Mckee, to spear suckers (we called it gigging in those days) and I saw for the first time in my life, stratified rock along Slate Run by the weird flickering light of pine chip torches.

The rocks looked to me like the stone wall in our cellar when we went down there at night with a kerosene lantern, and I was sure they were the foundation of an ancient dwelling of some pre-historic giant, and I asked my father, "Who put those stones in there?" He replied laconically, Who made this world?"

I have often thought about those rocks through a lifetime of the study of geology, but have decided with the Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan, that "It is more important to know the Rock of Ages, then the ages of the rocks."

My grandmother, Mary Troxell, was born at Sinking Valley, near Hollidaysburg, Pa. in 1819. When she was a young child her parents migrated over the mpountain road to what is now known as the Perry Troxell farm near Glasgow.

They carried two small children and all of their earthly possessions or tied them on a cow's back. Here again was Free Enterprise at its best. They were free people with the dew of youth on their brows and the spirit of Caleb in their breasts. Little Mary carried a litter of kittens and a chicken with its feet tied togther.

Soon after they established their new home they were surprised one morning to learn that a small group of Indians had silently arrived in the night and had made camp near the spring. The Indians soon left and in three days returned with all the lead they cared to carry. They again made an overnight stop and silently departed into the forests.

For several years they repeated this program each October. Some white men attempted to follow the Indians and were tied up to trees three days and three nights for their trouble.

One year an old Indian woman accompanied the men but became too sick to go farther. The Troxell family extended the courtesy of food and shelter and warmth, but before the Indian men returned with the lead her spirit had departed to the Great Beyond.

She would walk out and face the setting sun, wave her arms and chant something in her language. My grandmother, even at the age of eighty nine, would stand up and repeat the words and gestures of the old Indian woman. It was a beautiful, a sincere and an impressive demonstration.

She told the Troxell family that as the Indians were fading from the scene, and the white man was here to stay, they might as well know where the lead was so they could use it. She told how to cross three streams and arrive at stream covered with large flat stones and with a steep hill near the stream. To stand in the water in line with three pine trees up the steep slope and lift up a large flat stone and find the lead.

Slate Run fits this description better than any other stream in this area, but intensive searching here and over a wide area for years failed to locate the lead deposit. The Indians returned for lead only one more time after the death of the old woman.

Lead is usually found in a ore called galena and is easily refined by heat. Perhaps the early prospectors did not know this and may have beeb looking at it or standing on the stuff and did not recognize it. The known lead deposits in the Alleghenies are only pockets and of no commerical value.

The Red Man is gone. The pine and the hemlock sing his requiem. His secrets, like the experiences of childhood, are gone forever. "The Eternal Dawn, with out a doubt, will break over hill and plain and put all stars and candles out eer we be young again."