A little way up the stream the Manor Lord, Frederick Filipse, purchased a ferry right and afterwards erected a bridge with a toll gate between the island and the main shore. Near the mouth of the creek occurred, in the early fifties, one of the most dreadful of the steamboat disasters of which the history of the Hudson presents not a few: it was the burning of the Henry Clay, which is more fully noticed in another chapter. The earliest historic account that associates the white discoverers with Spuyten Duyvil dtaes September, 1609. Henry Hudson, or his scribe. Master Juet, records a fight which he had at this place with some Indians who came out in their canoes and attacked the Half Moon with arrows. The yacht of the discoverer was at the time anchored at the mouth of the creek. Here was the gathering place for the Indians w^ho menaced Manhattan in colonial days. Here nearly a

From Spuyten Duyvil to Yonkers 195

thousand braves came together and threatened to destroy New Amsterdam, during Governor Stuyvesant's absence in the South. The frightened burghers of the little city took to the forts like rabbits to their burrows, for they had tasted the tender mercies of the Mohawks and other redskin neighbours. During the Revolution, Spuyten Duyvil was regarded as an important point and the heights were fortified. The road which ran about the base of the hill was the scene of many a wild foray and the echoing hillsides resounded with the shouts of marauding cattle thieves and the lowing of frightened herds, urged towards the lines by their reckless drivers. Now the mouth of the creek is shut by a drawbridge and the northern shore is a place of division between the passenger and freight trains of the New York Central Railroad, the former swinging inland to take the course by way of Kingsbridge, along the Harlem, and the latter still following the original line of the road, by the river shore.