Part One of American Settler Legends opens a new shelf: five tales from Charles M. Skinner's Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (1896), the Dutch and English colonial legends of the Hudson Valley and New England — Rip Van Winkle's twenty-year sleep in Skinner's own retelling, an Albany baker taught what a dozen means, the goblin of Dunderberg, a Boston man still driving home through the storm, and the night Windham, Connecticut, armed itself against an army of frogs.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
In this part:
- Rip Van Winkle — Skinner's retelling of the Catskill legend: Rip follows a silent dwarf and his keg up South Mountain, drinks with the still, strange bowlers, and wakes twenty years later in a village that has become a republic.
- The Baker's Dozen — Baas Volckert Jan Pietersen Van Amsterdam of Albany sends an old woman to the devil for one cake too many, is bewitched for his stinginess, and learns from Saint Nicolaus himself why a dozen is thirteen.
- Dunderberg — the Heer of Donder Berg, the bulbous Dutch goblin of the Hudson Highlands, sends his imps out with the squalls, until a dominie's song of Saint Nicolaus routs him from a schooner's bowsprit.
- Peter Rugg, the Missing Man — a Boston man swears he will see home that night in spite of the storm of 1770, and is driving still, his little daughter beside him, asking every road for the way to Boston.
- The Windam Frogs — Windham, Connecticut (Skinner prints the tale's heading "Windam"), July 1758: the town turns out with muskets against voices in the night that cry "Colonel Dyer!" and "Elderkin, too!" — and finds its invaders in a ditch of fighting frogs.
The tales:
00:59 — Rip Van Winkle
08:43 — The Baker's Dozen
12:01 — Dunderberg
14:48 — Peter Rugg, the Missing Man
19:00 — The Windam Frogs
Source: Charles M. Skinner, Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1896), read from the Project Gutenberg lawful copy. Skinner (1852–1907). This shelf tells American settler legends only — the colonial Dutch and English tradition Skinner collected here; it does not claim to cover the folk tales of the United States as a whole, and the traditions of the Native nations belong to their own shelves. Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus is held for a future ruling and is not read. Narrated by Orson. Opening and closing theme: Imperial Violin Masquerade — with a short instrumental separator between stories, and no music under the narration.
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