Jacks Mountain, Seen from Belleville

This is the beautiful Jacks Mountain, as seen from Machpelah Cemetery, in the churchyard of the Presbyterian Church in Belleville.  The quaint little village of Belleville is picturesque and serene, like so many towns in these broad and verdant valleys between their wooded peaks.  They call this region "The Big Valley," and it lies low between Stone Mountain, where I was camped, and Jacks Mountain, in the distance.  Everything here is so neatly tended--lawns, fields, farms, roadsides.  Most people have a little patch of flowers planted around the base of their mailbox.  It's so unlike the western part of the state, where we have a more "wabi-sabi" approach to landscaping--evidence perhaps of the historic impacts of German vs. Scotch-Irish settlers?  Jacks Mountain was named after Jack Armstrong, a fur trader who, in 1743, took a horse from a Delaware Indian as repayment of a debt.  The Delaware assembled some friends and followed Armstrong into the mountains, where they murdered him and his two companions in early 1744.  By the 1740s, tensions between the Delaware Indians and white settlers were mounting, though this incident occurred ten years before the outbreak of the French and Indian War.  

It's hard to believe that there was once terror and bloodshed in an idyllic place like this.  See how the clouds cast their shadows playfully over the flanks of the bloodstained mountain.  There are old, old secrets here, things that will never be told, crimes that will never be solved, sins that will never be confessed.  If there is a deity who keeps track of such things, then only She knows the things the mountain will never tell.