Appalachian Lore: Killy, Killy, Killy: A Story of Peter's Mountain, Halifax, Pennsylvania

 Killy, Killy, Killy

A Story of Peter’s Mountain, Halifax, Pennsylvania

The original story is featured in the collection of Susquehanna Legends: Collected in Central Pennsylvania … (1913)

By the folklorist Henry Wharton Shoemaker

High up among the crags of Peter’s Mountain, crags as vivid and pink in color as his breast, circled the sparrow hawk, shrilly calling “Killy, killy, killy,” that cloudless autumn morning. As he flew hither and thither uttering his mournful cries, the clear blue of his wings seemed a part of the sun enameled sky.

The story continues on, speaking of the ancient monsters and dragons that once walked the earth, and the gods of old. Before settling in on the tale of a man, Keow, who falls in love with the daughter of the chieftain Wulitehasu. The meeting happens in the midst of a plague.

There was a pestilence raging among the tribes who wintered about the foot of Peter’s Mountain. Keow, whose home was far off among the headwaters of the Susquehanna, was sent for, and responded cheerfully. Over the snow and ice he came on primitive snow-shoes made of beech bark. It was an easy task for him to cure the disease; had he been sent for sooner there need not have been any deaths. As it was he cured all the survivors, and changed wholesale mourning into rejoicing.

The love between Keow and the woman, Killy, was not meant to be and she marries another. In his despair and blind vengeance, Keow turns his rival into a sparrow hawk. This is why the bird shrieks the name, “Killy.” In the story, the heartbroken Killy does not live long after her husband is transformed into a hawk.

Sparrow hawk is the old name for what is now called an American kestrel. The males have blue-gray wings. It is the most common falcon in Pennsylvania. They do make a shrill killy, killy, killy. Their numbers have declined in the state with both farmland development and possibly pesticides playing roles in their dwindling numbers.

With the story of Killy at an end, it is time to circle back to the plague that was mentioned in the tale…

Outbreaks of smallpox occurred in the local, indigenous Susquehannock populations during the years of 1654 through to 1661. This disease would have been detrimental to the native populations. Unlike Europeans, whose ancestry had been exposed to the disease for thousands of years prior, with immunities building in both smallpox and measles by the 14^th century; the native populations had been untouched by the illness.

According to the National Institute of Health, it is estimated that ninety-five percent of the native populations were killed by infectious diseases brought by Europeans. The Columbian Exchange of 1492, a term for the various animals, plants, cultures, and diseases that spread between the Old World and the New, carried with it the illnesses of plague, typhus, cholera, measles, and smallpox, among others. The disease exchange was most decidedly one-sided.

Fortunately for the modern world, smallpox has been eradicated. The disease was characterized by a skin rash and small bumps or blisters that could turn into scabs and scars. Accompanying these signs, a person could also have a fever, chills, headaches, back pain, or a general feeling of being unwell (malaise).

In the 1700s, scientific efforts to control the disease were occurring in Europe and the Americas. The earliest form of inoculation, in this case, variolation, came to Europe in 1721 from the Ottoman Empire. In this instance, the skin of a healthy person is marked and smallpox pustules, or pus, is placed into the mark on the arm. This would cause the patient to contract a mild form of the disease. Once a person had the disease, they would not catch it a second time.

The concept was brought to England by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of a British ambassador. Three years prior, while in Constantinople, she pleaded with the Scottish surgeon Dr. Charles Maitland to inoculate her five-year-old son.

As she described it to her friends in a letter,

“The small pox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of ingrafting, which is the term they give it.”

"Mary Wortley Montagu," Jonathan Richardson the younger - The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202. Public Domian.

The procedure caught on in England, before traveling to the Americas. In 1775, General Washington issued orders for his troops to receive the inoculation. In his orders for his troops on February 5^th, 1775, he stated that,

Finding the Small pox to be spreading much and fearing that no precaution can prevent it from running through the whole of our Army, I have determined that the troops shall be inoculated. This Expedient may be attended with some inconveniences and some disadvantages, but yet I trust in its consequences will have the most happy effects. Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence we should have more to dread from it than from the Sword of the Enemy.

A vaccine was later developed in 1796 by Dr. Edward Jenner, making it the first vaccine developed against a contagious disease.  

For the indigenous populations of the Americas, these developments were too late to save the vast majority of the tribes. While there are other diseases that may be the source for the reference in the “Killy, Killy, Killy” folktale, smallpox is the most fitting to the area and the time period. In the 1700s, an epidemic of Yellow Fever did occur near the same area. By that time, the native populations had already been forced out of the region.