AMERICA. TWO IRISH HEROINES. HOW KATE AND ELLEN CROWLEY SPEND THEIR LIVES.

Editor's note: The following excerpts are from the Freeman's Journal (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) Saturday 22 February 1879; - Page 6-7; the first half of an article in the 1878-11-24 Sunday Mercury (New York, N. Y.), November 24, 1878.. Thank you to Contributing Scholar George A. Thompson for finding, cataloging and transcribing this article. The language, spelling and grammar of the article reflects the time period when it was written.

Saugerties Lighthouse. Hudson River Maritime Museum collection

They live in a lighthouse not over one hundred and twenty miles from New York,
on the Hudson River, keep it themselves, and their lamp is always trimmed and burning,
and on a foggy night when the light is not visible you can hear one of them a mile off
blowing a fog horn herself; for the Government has been too mercenary to give them
one of the automatic kind. Moreover, they have saved many lives. Miss Kate C.
Crowley is the mistress and keeper of Saugerties Lighthouse.  She is capable of any
daring deed involving danger or self-sacrifice; and as to the manner in which
the lighthouse is kept, it is unexcelled.

It was a bright, starlight night, and the writer sat in the pilot house, talking to the
steersmen, who guided the steamer safely through the shadows of the frowning peak of
the Highlands, and answered questions or volunteered information between the
rotations of the wheel. As we turned a bend in the river a light that looked like a star of
the first magnitude twinkled far away in the distance. That's  fifteen miles away; said
the man at the wheel.;That's Saugerties Light. We';ll lose it again a dozen times in the
turns of the river. Do I know the girls? Well, no, not to speak to ';em, but I';ve seen ;em
on the river many a time by daylight, pulling away a great heavy row-boat that no two
river men would care to handle in one o£ them gales that sweep down through the
mountains. Well, it was one of these occasions, I was comin' up the river on the old
Columbus after she'd got out of carryin'; passengers, and took to the towin' business.
We'd got little north of Rondout. and I was all alone at the wheel; I heard a rumblin';
behind me, and I looked around, and when I saw a great big cloud with thunderheads
rushing up from the south, I knew we were going to catch a ripper. We were then pretty
nearly abreast of Tivoli, and Saugerties Lighthouse was only about two miles ahead. A
sloop loaded with bluestone, which had just put out from the mouth of Esopus Creek,
and was standing down the river, went over when the squall, struck her; and soon I saw
two men struggling in the water.

Hardly a minute elapsed before two female forms were seen fluttering around
the small boat by the lighthouse.  In another minute it was launched, and it bobbed up
and down in the seething, foaming waters. The two girls, bare-headed, with a pair of
oars apiece, began pulling toward the men in the water. The waves ran so high, the
gale blew so madly, the thunder roared so incessantly, and the lightning flashed in such
blinding sheets, that it seemed impossible for the women ever to reach the men, to keep
headway, or to keep from being swamped. But they never missed the opportunity of a
rising billow to give them leverage, and they managed by steady pulling to get ahead
until they reached the men in the water. The great danger was that the tossing boat
would strike the sailors and end their career, but one of the gals leaned forward over the
bow of the boat, braced her feet beneath the seat on which she had been sitting,
stiffened herself out for a great effort, and as her sister kept the bow of the craft
crosswise to the waves, caught one of the men beneath the arms as he struck out on
top of a billow, lifted and threw him by main force into the middle of the boat, and then
prepared, for the other man. He had got hold of the sloop's rudder, which had got
unshipped, and was floating on the water. He let go and swam towards the row-boat,
and was hauled in also by the woman and his half-drowned comrade. You couldn't
have got any river boatmen to do what those girls did.

Ellen is a brunette, tall, slim, with dark eyes and dark hair. When Kate is animated she is exceedingly pretty. She has a [illegible] of milk-white teeth, and dimpled cheeks, and looks at you with a pair of large eyes full in the face. She said: "We are simply two girls trying to do our duty here in this quiet place, taking care as best we can of our blind father and aged mother."

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