The railroads cross the height of land between the sources of the Lehigh and the affluents of the Susquehanna, through the Sugar Notch, at about eighteen hundred feet elevation. When the train moves out to the western verge of Nescopec Mountain there suddenly bursts upon the gladdened sight the finest scenic view in Pennsylvania--over the fair Vale of Wyoming, with all its gorgeous beauties of towns and villages, forests and farms, under the bright sunlight, and having laid across it the distant silver streak of the glinting Susquehanna River, all spread out in a magnificent picture seen from an elevation of twelve hundred feet above the river level. For nearly twenty miles the Susquehanna can be traced through the long, trough-like valley, from where it breaks in through the Lackawannock Gap in the North Mountain, under Campbell"s Ledge, far to the northward, away down south to where it pa.s.ses out the narrow gorge at Nantic.o.ke Gap. The long ridges of the Nescopec and Moosic Mountains enclose the valley on one side, and over on the other are the great North Mountain or Shawnee range, and the higher ridge of the main Allegheny range behind. In the distant northeast the view is prolonged up the Lackawanna Valley. In this splendid Wyoming Vale, spread out like a map, is a landscape of rich agriculture, dotted over with towns and villages, coal-breakers and huge culm-piles, the long snake-like streaks of railways crossing the scene bearing their little puffing engines. It looks much like what one sees out of a balloon. Here is the village of Nantic.o.ke, then Plymouth, then the spreading city of Wilkesbarre, and, far beyond, the foliage-hidden houses of Pittston, near the gorge where the river flows in. Between them all are cl.u.s.ters of villages and black coal heaps, with myriads of the little green and brown fields, making distant farms. The river reaches sparkle in the light as the long shadows are cast from the mountains, and the train runs rapidly down the mountain side and across the valley to its chief city, Wilkesbarre.
When the broad and shallow and rock-strewn river Susquehanna, on its way down from Otsego Lake in New York to the Chesapeake, breaks through the North Mountain, its valley expands to three or four miles in width, making a fertile region between the high enclosing ridges which the Indians called Maughwauwama, or the "extensive flat plains."
This sonorous name underwent many changes, finally becoming known as Wyoming. Luzerne County is the lower and Lackawanna County the upper portion of this noted valley, which is the greatest anthracite coal-field in the world. These Wyoming coal measures underlie seventy-seven square miles, having veins averaging eighty feet in thickness, and about eighty thousand tons to the acre, the aggregate deposit of coal being estimated to exceed two thousand millions of tons. The large population and enormous production have caused all the railways to send in branches to tap its lucrative traffic, so that it is the best-served region in Pennsylvania. It has two large cities--Wilkesbarre, in Luzerne, and Scranton, in Lackawanna.
Wilkesbarre is on the eastern Susquehanna river bank, a town of forty thousand people, named after the two English champions of American Colonial rights. It covers much surface in the centre of the valley, with suburbs spreading far up the mountain sides. But from almost every point of view in the city the outlook is over black culm-heaps or coal-breakers or at rows of coal cars, so that there is a monotony in the steady reminder of the source of their riches, the omnipresent anthracite. About twelve miles northwest of Wilkesbarre, up in the North Mountain range, is the largest lake in Pennsylvania--Harvey"s Lake--elevated nearly thirteen hundred feet and covering about two square miles. It is named after one of the early pioneers from Connecticut, and its outflow comes down to the Susquehanna near Nantic.o.ke Gap. Its pleasant sh.o.r.es are a favorite resort of the Wilkesbarre people. The flourishing city of Scranton is about nineteen miles north of Wilkesbarre, in the Lackawanna Valley. It has grown to a population of a hundred thousand people, and is picturesquely situated among the coal mines, with a higher elevation than Wilkesbarre, being nearly eleven hundred feet above tide, at the confluence of the Roaring Brook with the Lackawanna River; and it has extensive iron industries, being the chief city of northeastern Pennsylvania. The Wyoming and Lackawanna coal pits, while the greatest anthracite producers, are not generally so deep as those of the Lehigh or Schuylkill regions. The deepest Pennsylvania shaft goes down seventeen hundred feet near Pottsville. Some of the Wyoming galleries run a mile and a half underground from the shaft, following the coal veins underneath and far beyond the Susquehanna.
This noted Wyoming Vale, in the early history of the Pennsylvania frontier, was bought from the Iroquois Indians, the "Six Nations," by an a.s.sociation of pioneer settlers from Connecticut. Good management, due largely to the judicious methods of the early missionaries, kept them at peace with the Indians. Count Zinzendorf, with a companion, came up from Bethlehem in 1742, before the Connecticut purchase, and founded a Moravian mission among the Shawnees in the valley. It is said that they were suspicious of European rapacity and plotted his a.s.sa.s.sination, and the historian relates that the Count was alone in his tent, reclining upon a bundle of dry weeds, destined for his bed, and engaged in writing or in devout meditation, when the a.s.sa.s.sins crept stealthily up. A blanket-curtain formed the door, and, gently raising the corner, the Indians had a full view of the patriarch, with the calmness of a saint upon his benignant features. They were struck with awe. But this was not all. The night was cool, and he had kindled a small fire. The historian continues: "Warmed by the flame, a large rattlesnake had crept from its covert, and, approaching the fire for its greater enjoyment, glided harmlessly over one of the legs of the holy man, whose thoughts at the moment were not occupied upon the grovelling things of earth. He perceived not the serpent, but the Indians, with breathless attention, had observed the whole movement of the poisonous reptile; and as they gazed upon the aspect and att.i.tude of the Count, their enmity was immediately changed to reverence; and in the belief that their intended victim enjoyed the special protection of the Great Spirit, they desisted from their b.l.o.o.d.y purpose and retired. Thenceforward the Count was regarded by the Indians with the most profound veneration."
When the Revolution came, the settlement was a thriving agricultural colony of about two thousand people, scattered over the valley, with a village on the river sh.o.r.e just above the present site of Wilkesbarre.
In June, 1778, a force of British troops, Tories and Indians entered the valley and attacked them, and on July 3d the terrible Wyoming ma.s.sacre followed, in which the British officers were unable to set any bounds to the atrocious butchery by their savage allies, who killed about three hundred men, women and children. The poet Campbell has painted the previous pastoral scene of happiness and content in "Gertrude of Wyoming," and told the tale of atrocity perpetrated by the savages, which is one of the most horrible tragedies of that great war. This poem tells of
"A stoic of the woods--a man without a tear."
Beside the river below Pittston and near the village of Wyoming, having the great North Mountain for a background, was Fort Forty, the scene of the chief atrocities of the ma.s.sacre, the site being now marked by a granite obelisk. Here is the burial-place of the remains of the slaughtered. "Queen Esther"s Rock" is pointed out, where the half-breed Queen of the Senecas, to avenge the death of her son, is said to have herself tomahawked fourteen defenceless prisoners. Most of the survivors fled after this horror, and they did not return to the valley until long after peace was restored, when the infant settlement was renewed in the founding of Wilkesbarre. Far up on the side of the grand peak guarding the northern portal of the Lackawannock Gap is the broad shelf of rock which embalms in "Campbell"s Ledge" the memory of the great English poet who has so graphically told the harrowing tale.
THE TERMINAL MORAINE.
The Delaware River above the "Forks," at the mouth of the Lehigh, breaks through a narrow notch in the Chestnut Hill ridge known as the "Little Water Gap," while farther to the northeast the ridge continues through New Jersey as the Jenny Jump Mountain. Above this is the noted "Foul Rift," where the river channel is filled with boulders and rocks of all sizes and shapes, the dread of the raftsmen who gave it the name, for many a raft has been wrecked there. But while this place is shunned by the navigator, it has an absorbing attraction for the geologist. This was where the great "Terminal Moraine" of the glacial epoch crossed the Delaware, recalling the "Ice Age," to which reference has already been made. When the vast Greenland ice-cap crept down so as to overspread northeastern America and northwestern Europe and filled the intervening Atlantic bed, it broke off many rocky fragments in its southward advance, scratching the surfaces of the ledges, and the fragments held in its grip, with striated lines and grooves in the direction of its movement. The ice steadily flowed southward, coming over mountain and valley alike in a continuous sheet, enveloping the ocean and adjacent continents, and finally halted on the Delaware about sixty miles north of Philadelphia. Its southern verge spread across America from Alaska to St. Louis, and thence to the Atlantic on the northern coast of New Jersey. Its southern boundary entered Western Pennsylvania near Beaver, pa.s.sing northeast to the New York line; then turning southeast, it crossed the Lehigh about ten miles northwest of Mauch Chunk and the Delaware just below Belvidere. It crossed New Jersey to Staten Island, traversed the length of Long Island, and pa.s.sed out to sea, appearing on Block Island, Cape Cod, St. George"s Bank and Sable Island Shoal, south of Nova Scotia. The boundary of the glacier west of the "Foul Rift" on the Delaware appears as a range of low gravel hills, which are piled upon the slate hills of Northampton farther west, and reach the base of the Blue Ridge three miles east of the "Wind Gap." The boundary here mounted and crossed the Kittatinny ridge sixteen hundred feet high, being well shown upon its summit, and then pa.s.sed over the intervening valley to the Broad Mountain or Pocono range. The Delaware at the "Foul Rift" is elevated two hundred and fifty feet above tide; and where the glacier boundary crossed the mountains in the interior it was at about twenty-six hundred feet elevation on the highest land in Potter County, the Continental watershed.
This vast glacier was so thick as to overtop even Mount Washington, for it dropped transported boulders on the summit of that highest peak in New England. Its southern edge in Pennsylvania was at least eight hundred feet thick in solid ice. A hundred miles back among the Catskills it was thirty-one hundred feet thick, and two hundred miles back in northern New England it was five thousand to six thousand feet thick, being still thicker farther northward. The Pocono k.n.o.b, near Stroudsburg, in Pike County, Pennsylvania, out-topped the glacier, and jutted out almost like an island surrounded by ice. The late Professor H. Carvill Lewis, who closely studied this glacier, has described how, all over the country which it covered, it dropped what is known as the "northern drift," or "till," or "hardpan," in scattered deposits of stones, clay, gravel and _debris_ of all kinds, brought down from the northward as the ice moved along, and irregularly dumped upon the surface, thickly in some places and thinly in others, with many boulders, some of enormous size. It abraded all the rock surfaces crossed, and transported and rounded and striated the fragments torn off in its resistless pa.s.sage. The line of farthest southern advance of the ice is shown by the "Terminal Moraine," stretching across country, which put the obstructions into the "Foul Rift." A glacier always pushes up at its foot a mound of material composed of fragments of rocks of all shapes and sizes, which the ice has taken up at various points along its flow and carried to its terminus, thus forming the moraine. This "Terminal Moraine" has been traced and carefully studied for four hundred miles across Pennsylvania, showing throughout a remarkable acc.u.mulation of drift materials and boulders, heaped into irregular hills and hollows over a strip of land nearly a mile wide. The action of the Delaware River currents at the "Foul Rift" has washed out the finer materials and cobblestones, leaving only the larger boulders and rocks to perplex the navigator.
Some of the performances of this great glacier in the region adjacent to the Delaware are remarkable. It has carried huge granite boulders from the far north and planted them all along the summit of the Kittatinny where it crossed. It has torn out big pieces of limestone, some of them thirty feet long, from their beds in Monroe County, north of this range, carried them in the ice more than a thousand feet up its steep northern face and over the summit, finally dropping them on the south side in the moraine in the slate valley of Northampton.
These immense limestone rocks made comparatively short journeys, but one ponderous boulder of syenite from the Adirondacks was found in Northampton, well rounded and dressed, having travelled in the ice at least two hundred miles. There has also been found a "glacial groove"
upon the rocks of the Kittatinny near the Water Gap, where some ponderous fragment, imbedded in the ice, as it moved along has gouged out a great scratch six feet wide and seventy feet in length. Although this ice had evidently resistless power in its slow motion, yet it seems to have had small influence upon the topography of the country.
It appears to have merely "sand-papered" the surfaces of the rocks. It pa.s.sed bodily across the sharp edges of the upright sandstone strata of the Kittatinny, yet has not had appreciable effect in cutting the ridge down, the glaciated portion east of the "Wind Gap" appearing as high and as sharply defined as the unglaciated part to the westward of the moraine. The glacier made many lakes north of the moraine, due to the "kettle holes" and obstruction of streams by unequal deposits of drift. It is inferred in the estimates of the duration of the glacier, from astronomical data, that the cold period began two hundred and eighty thousand years ago, the greatest cold being many thousand years later. The intense cold began moderating eighty thousand years ago, but the sea of ice remained long afterwards, and steadily diminished under the increasing heat. So many thousand years being required for melting, there are data inducing the belief that the ice-cap did not retreat from this part of the country back to Greenland until within ten thousand or fifteen thousand years ago. Then came the floods of water from the melting glacier, and it is significant that the Indians in the s.p.a.cious valley northwest of the Kittatinny called that fertile region the "Minisink," meaning "the waters have gone," indicating their legendary memory of the floods following the melting and retreat of the glacier and the final outflow of its waters.
THE DELAWARE WATER GAP.
Belvidere, the "town of the beautiful view," nestles upon the broad terraces under the Jersey ridges at the mouth of Pequest Creek, and looks prettily out upon the high hills and distant mountains across the Delaware. Above the town, the river makes a great bend to the westward in rounding the huge and almost perpendicular ma.s.s of Manunka Chunk Mountain, a name which has been got by a process of gradual evolution from its Indian t.i.tle of "Penungauchung." Here, through a gorge just above, is got the first view of the distant Water Gap, cleft down in the dark blue Kittatinny ten miles away. Approaching it as the river winds, all the views have this great Gap for the gem of the landscape, the ponderous wall of the Kittatinny stretching broadly across the horizon and steadily rising into greater prominence as it comes nearer.
"I lift my eyes and ye are ever there, Wrapped in the folds of the imperial air, And crowned with the gold of morn or evening rare, O, far blue hills."
As it is gradually approached, the Gap and its enclosing ridge attain enormous proportions, dwarfing the smaller hills, among which the narrow, placid river flows below; and it is realized how tame are all the other ridges through which the Delaware has pa.s.sed compared with this towering Blue Ridge, having the low-lying Blockade Mountain just behind, and partly closing the Gap. Soon we reach the foot of the range, and, bending with the river suddenly to the left, enter the Gap. Scarcely have we entered when the river, which has been swinging to the left, bends around again gradually to the right, and in a moment we are through the gorge, the river then circling around the Blockade Mountain, which has been so named because it seems always stupidly in the way.
The Indians called the Water Gap "Pohoqualin," meaning "the river between the mountains." The Delaware flows through it with a width of eight hundred feet and at an elevation of about three hundred feet above tide. It is twenty-nine miles northeast of the Lehigh Gap where the Lehigh River pa.s.ses the Blue Ridge, and there are five other gaps between them, of which the "Wind Gap," heretofore referred to, is the chief. For many years this Wind Gap provided the only route to reach the country north of the Kittatinny. About two and a half miles southwest of the Delaware is "Tat"s Gap," named in memory of Moses Fonda Tatamy, an old time Indian interpreter in this region, and familiarly called "Tat"s" for short. The greatest of all these pa.s.ses, however, is the Water Gap, where the Blue Ridge, rent asunder, has two n.o.ble peaks guarding the portals, towering sixteen hundred feet high, and named in honor of the Indians--Mount Minsi in Pennsylvania, after the tribes of the Minisink, and Mount Tammany in New Jersey, for the great chief of the Lenni Lenapes.
"Crags, knolls and mounds, in dire confusion hurled, The fragmentary elements of an earlier world."
The Water Gap is a popular summer resort, there being numerous hotels and boarding-houses in eligible locations all about it, and the romantic scenery has been opened up by roads and paths leading to all the points of view. It is on such a stupendous scale, and exhibits the geological changes wrought during countless ages so well, that it always attracts the greatest interest. To the northward spread the fertile valleys of the Minisink; and the Delaware, which below the Gap flows to the southeast, pa.s.sing through all the ridges, comes from the northeast above the Gap, and flows along the base of the Kittatinny for miles, as if seeking the outlet which it at length finds in this remarkable pa.s.s.
THE MINISINK.
From the elevated points of outlook at the Water Gap the observer can gaze northward over the fertile and attractive hunting-grounds of the Minsis, the land of the Minisink stretching far up the Delaware, and from the Kittatinny over to the base of the Pocono Mountain. This is the region of the "buried valleys," remarkable trough-like valleys, made during an ancient geological period, and partially filled up by the _debris_ from the great glacier. From the Hudson River in New York, southwest to the Lehigh, and just beyond the Kittatinny range, two long valleys, with an intervening ridge, stretch across the country. The Delaware River, from Port Jervis to Bushkill, flows down the northwestern of these valleys, then doubles back on itself, and breaks through the intervening ridge at the remarkable Walpack Bend into the other valley, and follows it down to the Water Gap. The northwestern valley begins at Rondout on the Hudson, crosses New York State to Port Jervis, where the Delaware, coming from the northwest, turns to the southeast into it, occupying it for thirty miles to Bushkill, and then the valley continues past Stroudsburg, just above the Water Gap, to the Lehigh River at Weissport, below Mauch Chunk.
The other valley is parallel to it at the base of the Kittatinny.
These valleys, underlaid by the shales as bed-rocks, have been filled up with drift by the glacier from one hundred to seven hundred feet in depth, and they const.i.tute the famous region of the Minisink.
In this fertile district was the earliest settlement made by white men in Pennsylvania, the Dutch from the Hudson River wandering over to the Delaware at Port Jervis through these valleys, and settling on the prolific bottom lands along the river, many years before Penn came to Philadelphia. They opened copper-mines in the Kittatinny, just above the Water Gap, and made the old "Mine Road" to reach them, coming from Esopus on the Hudson. The records at Albany of 1650 refer to specimens brought from "a copper-mine at the Minisink." The Provincial authorities at Philadelphia do not appear to have had any clear knowledge of settlers above the Water Gap until 1729, when they sent a surveyor up to examine and report, and he found Nicholas Depui in a snug home, where he had bought two islands and level land on the sh.o.r.e from the Indians some time before. Like the Dutch settlers above, Depui had no idea where the river went to. He was a French Huguenot exile from Holland, and, without disputing with the surveyor, he again bought his land, nearly six hundred and fifty acres, in 1733, from the grantees of the Penns. His stockaded stone house was known as Depui"s Fort, and after him the Water Gap was long called "Depui"s Gap." Old George La Bar was the most famous resident of the Water Gap. Three brothers La Bar, Peter, Charles and Abraham, also French Huguenots, lived near the Gap, and each married a Dutch wife. In 1808, however, this region became too crowded for them, and Peter, at the age of eighty-five, migrated to Ohio to get more room. When ninety-eight years old his wife died, and in his one hundredth year he married another out on the Ohio frontier, and lived to the ripe age of one hundred and five. Peter, when he migrated, left his son George La Bar at the Gap, where he had been born in 1763. George was the famous centenarian of Pennsylvania, who died at the age of one hundred and seven, being a vigorous axeman almost until the day of his death. He was too young for a Revolutionary soldier, but when the War of 1812 came he was too old. In 1869, at the age of one hundred and six, a visitor describes him as felling trees and peeling with his own hands three wagon-loads of bark, which went to the tannery. He never wore spectacles, always used tobacco, voted the straight Democratic ticket, and at every Presidential election from Washington to Grant, and could not be persuaded to ride on a railway train, regarding the cars as an innovation.
In this region of the Minisink is the pleasant town of Stroudsburg, the county-seat of Monroe, its beautiful valley being well described by a local authority as "full of dimpling hills and fine orchards, among which stalwart men live to a ripe old age upon the purest apple whisky." Its finest building, the State Normal College, handsomely located on an elevated ridge, has three hundred students. The town was named for Jacob Stroud, a pioneer and Indian fighter, who was with General Wolfe when he scaled the Heights of Abraham, and, capturing Quebec, changed the map of Colonial America. Marshall"s Creek comes down to join its waters with Brodhead"s Creek below Stroudsburg, and a few miles above displays the pretty little cataract of Marshall"s Falls. Six miles northwest of Stroudsburg is the Pocono k.n.o.b, rising in stately grandeur as it abruptly terminates the Pocono Mountain wall on its eastern face. It was this k.n.o.b which stood out as an island in the edge of the great glacier, a deep notch separating its summit from the plateau behind, and the Terminal Moraine encircles its sides at about two-thirds its height. In the river bottom lands are fertile farms, and a great deal of tobacco is raised. Thus the river leads us to Bushkill and the great Walpack Bend. The Delaware, coming from the northeast, impinges upon the solid sandstone wall of the "Hog"s Back,"
the prolongation of the ridge dividing the two "Buried Valleys." This ridge bristles with attenuated firs, and hence its appropriate name.
The Big Bushkill and the Little Bushkill Creeks, uniting, flow in from the west, and the Delaware turns sharply eastward and then back upon itself around the ridge into the other valley, and resumes its course southwest again down to the Water Gap. This double Walpack curve, making a perfect letter "S," is so narrow and compressed that a rifleman, standing on either side, can readily send his bullet in a straight line across the river three times. The Indian word Walpack means "a turn hole." The Delaware here is a succession of rifts and pools, making a constant variation of rapids and still waters, with many spots sacred to the angler, and displaying magnificent scenery as the lights and shadows pa.s.s across the beautiful forest-covered hills enclosing its banks.
BUSHKILL TO PORT JERVIS.
Bushkill village is in a picturesque location, opening pleasantly towards the Delaware. It is also just over the Monroe border, in Pike County, long ago described by Horace Greeley as "famous for rattlesnakes and Democrats," but now more noted for its fine waterfalls and attractive scenery, its many streams draining numerous beautiful lakes, and dancing down frequent roaring rapids in the journey to the Delaware. The falls of the Little Bushkill near the village is the finest cataract in Pennsylvania. From Bushkill, bordering the eastern bank of the Delaware, for thirty miles up to Port Jervis, is one of the best roads in the world. The Marcellus shales of the Buried Valley, which form the towering cliffs bordering the river along the base of which the road is laid, make a road-bed as smooth and hard as a floor, the chief highway of this district, for the railway has not yet penetrated it. Over on the other side of the river the great Kittatinny ridge presents an almost unbroken wall for more than forty miles from the Water Gap up to Port Jervis. Frequent creeks come in, all angling streams, the chief of them being Dingman"s, which for several miles displays a series of cataracts, and at its mouth has the noted Pike County village of "Dingman"s Choice,"
at which is located the time-honored Dingman"s Ferry, across the Delaware. The source of Dingman"s Creek is in the Silver Lake, about seven miles west of the Delaware, and in its flow it descends about nine hundred feet, breaking its way over the various strata of Catskill, Chemung and Hamilton sandstones. The upper cataracts, called the Fulmer and Factory Falls and the Deer Leap, are located in a beautiful ravine known as the Childs Park, while, below, the creek pours over the High Falls, one hundred and thirty feet high, a short distance from the river. Near this is the curious Soap Trough, an inclined plane descending one hundred feet, always filled with foam, down which comes the Silver Thread, a small tributary stream. The gorge by which Dingman"s Creek comes out is deep and ma.s.sive, the entrance being a narrow canyon cut down into the Marcellus shales which make the towering cliffs along the river. There are also fine cataracts on the Raymondskill and the Sawkill, flowing into the Delaware above. The cliffs here rise into Utter"s Peak, elevated eight hundred feet, giving a magnificent view along the valley.
The little town of Milford, the county-seat of Pike, is one of the gems of this district, spread over a broad terrace on the bluff high above the Delaware, with a grand outlook at the ponderous Kittatinny in front, rising to its greatest elevation at High Point, six miles away, where a hotel is perched on the summit. Surrounded by mountains, the late N. P. Willis, when he visited Milford, was so impressed by its peculiar situation that he described it as "looking like a town that all the mountains around have disowned and kicked into the middle." Thomas Quick, Sr., a Hollander, who came over from the Hudson in 1733, was the first settler in Milford. His noted son, Thomas Quick, the "Indian Killer," was born in 1734. "Tom Quick," as he was called, was brought up among the Indians, and had the closest friendship for them; but when the terrible Colonial war began, the savages, in a foray, killed and scalped his father almost by his side, Tom being shot in the foot, but escaping. Tom vowed vengeance, and ever afterwards was a perfect demon in his hatred of the Indians, sparing neither age nor s.e.x. After the French and Indian war had closed and peace was proclaimed, he carried on his own warfare independently. The most harrowing tales are told of his Indian murders, some being horribly brutal. He never married, but hunted Indians and wild beasts all his life, and was outlawed by the Government, it being announced that no Indian who killed him would be punished; but he finally died in bed in 1796. He was entirely unrepentant during his last illness, regretting he had not killed more Indians; and after saying he had killed ninety-nine during his life, he begged them to bring in an old Indian who lived in the settlement, so that he might appropriately close his career by killing the hundredth redskin. The most noted Milford building is "Pinchot"s Castle," on the hillside above the Sawkill, a Norman-Breton baronial hall, the summer house of the Pinchot family of New York, whose ancestor, a French refugee after Waterloo, was an early settler here.
Seven miles above Milford the Delaware River makes the great right-angled bend in its course, from the southeast to the southwest, which is known as the "Tri-States Corner," and here, on the broad flats at the mouth of the Neversink River, is the town of Port Jervis.
From the village of Deposit, ninety miles above, the Delaware descends in level five hundred and seventy feet; and from Port Jervis down to the Water Gap, forty-three miles, the descent is one hundred and twenty-seven feet. In the first it falls six feet per mile and in the latter only three feet, the difference being caused by the entirely changed conditions above and below the great bend. Above, the Delaware flows through the ridges by a winding ravine cut transversely across the hard rocks almost all the way, while below, it meanders parallel to the ridges along the outcrop of the softer rocks of the Marcellus shales and Clinton formations in the long, trough-like buried valleys.
The Neversink comes from the northeast through one of these valleys which is prolonged over to the Hudson, the source of the Neversink being on a divide of such gentle slope that the large spring making the head sends part of its waters the other way, through Rondout Creek into the Hudson. A long, narrow peninsula, just at the completion of the great bend, juts out between the Neversink and the Delaware, ending in a sharp, low, wedge-like rocky point, the extremity being the "Tri-States Corner," where the boundary line between New Jersey and New York reaches the Delaware, and ends in mid-river at the boundary of Pennsylvania. This spot was located after a long boundary war, and the fact is duly recorded on the "Tri-States Rock," down at the end of the point. The Delaware and Hudson Ca.n.a.l, constructed in 1828, and coming over from Rondout Creek through the Neversink Valley, made Port Jervis, which was named after one of its engineers. The ca.n.a.l goes up the Delaware to the Lackawaxen, and then follows that stream to Honesdale. The Erie Railway also comes through a gap in the Kittatinny (here called the Shaw.a.n.gunk Mountain, meaning the "white rocks"), descends to Port Jervis, and then follows up the Delaware. These two great public works have made the prosperity of the town, which has a population of over ten thousand. The long and towering ridge of Point Peter, forming the northwestern boundary of the Neversink Valley, and thrust out to the Delaware, bounding the gorge through which the river comes, overlooks the town. On the other side is the highest elevation of the Kittatinny and the most elevated land in New Jersey, High Point, rising nineteen hundred and sixty feet.
THE CATSKILL FLAGS.
The broadened valley of the Delaware extends a short distance above Port Jervis, the ca.n.a.l and railway rounding the ponderous battlements of Point Peter and then proceeding up the river, one on either bank.
About three miles above the "Port," as it is familiarly called, the valley contracts to a rock-enclosed gorge, for here the Delaware emerges from its great canyon in the Catskill series of rocks, in the bottom of which it flows from Deposit, at the northern boundary of Pennsylvania, eighty-seven miles above. The remarkable change seen in the surrounding topography indicates the presence of a different rock formation from that pa.s.sed below, and the river runs out of the Catskill rocks over the "Saw-mill rift." For thirty miles above, to the northern line of Pike County, at Narrowsburg, the river banks mostly are only mere shelves a few rods wide, and frequently present nothing but the faces of rocky walls, rising perpendicularly from the water to a height of six hundred feet or more. From the expanding limestones below, the valley here suddenly contracts in the flags and ledges of the Catskill series. All the small streams coming from the bluffs back of the cliffs descend with rapid fall, and frequently over high cascades. These Catskill flags, built up in vast construction, rear their gaunt and weather-beaten jagged walls and wood-crowned turrets on high. Perched far up on the New York side, at the narrowest part of this remarkable gorge, is an eyrie called the "Hawk"s Nest," which gives a wonderful view, reached by a road carved out of the rocky side of the abyss. This road, hung on the perpendicular wall five hundred feet over the river, is the only available route to the part of New York north of Port Jervis. The ca.n.a.l and railway, far below, are each set on a shelf cut out of the rocky banks. The enclosing cliffs rise higher as the river is ascended, sometimes reaching an elevation of twelve hundred feet; and here for miles are seen the famous Delaware and Starucca flags, rising hundreds of feet in a continuous wall of bluish-gray and greenish-gray flaggy sandstones. They are extensively quarried and shipped to New York. Both railway and ca.n.a.l construction through this deep cleft were enormously costly.
THE BATTLE OF LACKAWAXEN.
Here is Shohola Township, on the Pennsylvania sh.o.r.e, a wild and rocky region fronting on the river for about ten miles, and Shohola Creek rushes down a rocky bed through a deep gorge to seek the Delaware. It was at this place the surveyors" line was drawn from the Lehigh over to the Delaware, after Marshall"s fateful walk. The "Shohola Glen," a favorite excursion ground, has the channel of the creek, only forty feet wide, cut down for two hundred feet deep into the flagstones, and it plunges over four attractive cascades at the Shohola Falls above.
A short distance northward the Lackawaxen flows in through a fine gorge, broadening out as the Delaware is approached; and the ca.n.a.l, after crossing the latter on an aqueduct, goes up the Lackawaxen bank.
A grand amphitheatre of towering hills surrounds the broad flats where the Lackawaxen brings its ample flow of dark amber-colored waters out of the hemlock forests and swamps of Wayne County to this picturesque spot. Here was fought, on July 22, 1779, the battle of Lackawaxen or the Minisink, the chief Revolutionary conflict on the upper Delaware.
The battlefield was a rocky ledge on the New York side, elevated about five hundred feet above the river, amid the lofty hills of Highland Township, in Sullivan County. The noted Mohawk chief, Joseph Brandt, with a force of fifteen hundred Indians and Tories, came down from Northern New York to plunder the frontier settlements. Most of the inhabitants fled down to the forts on the Lehigh or across the Blue Ridge, upon his approach; but a small militia force was hastily gathered under Colonels Hathorn and Tusten to meet the enemy, whom they found crossing the Delaware at a ford near the Lackawaxen.
Hathorn, who commanded, moved to attack, but Brandt rushed his Indians up a ravine, intercepting Hathorn just as he got out on the rocky ledge, and cutting off about fifty of his rear guard. Hathorn had ninety men with him, who quickly threw up a rude breastwork, protecting about a half-acre of the ledge. Their ammunition was scant, it was a terribly hot day, they had no water, and were soon surrounded; but for six hours they bravely defended themselves, when, the ammunition being all gone, the Indians broke through their line.
Tusten was attending the wounded, and with seventeen wounded men, whom he was alleviating, was tomahawked, all being ma.s.sacred. The others fled, many being slain in the pursuit. Forty-four of the little band were killed, and the fifty in the rear guard who had been cut off were never afterwards heard of. Years afterwards, the bones of the slain in this terrible defeat were gathered on the field and taken across the Blue Ridge to Goshen for interment, and in 1822 a monument was erected at Goshen in their memory, Colonel Hathorn, who was then living, making an address. On the centenary anniversary in 1879 a monument was dedicated on the field, where faint relics of the old breastwork were still traceable on the rocky ledge perched high above the river, almost opposite the mouth of the Lackawaxen.
THE SYLVANIA SOCIETY.
The county of Wayne is separated from the county of Lackawanna by the great Moosic Mountain range, the divide between two noted rivers, the Lackawaxen and the Lackawanna. The former, draining its southeastern slopes to the Delaware, was the "Lechau-weksink" of the Indians, meaning "where the roads part," evidently referring to the parting of the Indian trails at its confluence with the Delaware; the latter, flowing out to the Susquehanna on its northwestern side, was the "Lechau-hanne," or "where the streams part," signifying the forks of two rivers. We ascend the Lackawaxen, finding the route up the gorge along the ca.n.a.l towpath, once the great water way of the Delaware and Hudson Company for bringing out coal, but now abandoned, as the railway route is cheaper. This ca.n.a.l, opened in 1828, was one hundred and seventeen miles long, and ascended from tidewater on the Hudson at Rondout to four hundred and fifty feet elevation at Port Jervis, and nine hundred and sixty-five feet at Honesdale. Its route throughout is through grand river gorges and the most magnificent scenery.
It was in this beautiful region, just south of the river, that Horace Greeley, in 1842, started what he called the "Sylvania Society,"
founded to demonstrate the wisdom of "the common ownership of property and the equal division of labor," which Greeley was then advocating by lectures and in his newspaper. Many eminent persons took stock in the society at $25 per share, and the experiment of co-operative farming was begun in a region of rough and rocky Pike County soil, where the amateur farmers also found amus.e.m.e.nt, for it is recorded that "the stream was alive with trout, and the surrounding hills were equally well provided with the largest and liveliest of rattlesnakes." They had weekly lectures and dancing parties, the colony at one time numbering three hundred persons, Mr. Greeley, who took the deepest interest, frequently visiting them. The society was a success socially and intellectually, but the labor problem soon caused trouble. A Board of Directors governed the farm and a.s.signed the laborers their work, the principle of equality being observed by changing them from one branch of labor to another day by day. But trouble soon came, for there were too many wayward sons sent out from New York to the colony who never had worked and never intended to, but preferred going fishing. Various of the females also decidedly objected to taking their turns at the washtub. The abundance of rattlesnakes had influence, and one day a venturesome colonist brought in seventeen large rattlers, causing dire consternation. They tanned the skin of one big fellow, and made it into a pair of slippers, which were presented to Mr. Greeley on his next visit. As is usually the case, the colonists had ravenous appet.i.tes, and it was impossible to raise enough food crops to feed them, so that food had to be bought, and the capital was thus seriously drawn upon. In 1845 they had a prospect of a generous yield at the harvest, when suddenly, on July 4th, a deadly frost killed all their crops; and this ended the experimental colony.
In two days everybody had left the place, and Greeley was almost heartbroken at the failure of his cherished plans. A mortgage on the farm was foreclosed and the land sold to strangers. A Monroe County farmer, who had invested $1800 in the enterprise and lost it, became so angry at the collapse that he went to New York, as he said, "to give Horace Greeley a Monroe County Democrat"s opinion of him." He found the great editor at work in the _Tribune_ office, and began berating him. Greeley, as soon as a chance was given, asked his visitor how much he had lost by the failure. He replied, "Eighteen hundred dollars;" when, without further parley, Greeley drew a check for the amount and handed it to him. The farmer was so astonished and impressed by this most unexpected action that he immediately became, as he afterwards stated, "a Greeley Whig," and remained one all his life.
ASCENDING THE LACKAWAXEN.
At Glen Eyre, the Blooming Grove Creek flows merrily into the Lackawaxen, coming out from Blooming Grove Township to the southward, an elevated wooded plateau in the interior of Pike, which is the common heading ground for numerous streams radiating in every direction, and containing a score of attractive lakes. This region is a wilderness where deer, bears and other wild animals roam, while the streams are noted angling resorts. In it are the two famous "k.n.o.bs,"
the highest elevations of the whole Pocono range, the southern or "High k.n.o.b" rising two thousand and ten feet, out-topping the Kittatinny "High Point." This "k.n.o.b" stands like a pyramid, at least five hundred feet above all the surrounding country, excepting its neighbor, the "North k.n.o.b," which is only one hundred feet lower.
These are the northeastern outposts of the Pocono range. Upon the top of the "High k.n.o.b" is a large boulder of white conglomerate, dropped by the ice in the glacial period, and this summit gives the most extensive view in Pennsylvania, over dark, fir-covered ridges in every direction, interspersed with lakelets glistening in the sunlight.
There is not a house to be seen, and scarcely a clearing, but all around is one vast wilderness. The greater part of this region is the estate of the "Blooming Grove Park a.s.sociation," covering thirteen thousand acres, surrounded by a high fence, and stocked with game and fish, there being over $300,000 invested in the enterprise. Here elk and deer are bred, there are abundant hares and rabbits, and also woodc.o.c.k, grouse and snipe shooting. The s.p.a.cious club-house is elevated high above the rocky sh.o.r.es of Lake Giles, a most beautiful circular sheet of clear spring water, fourteen hundred feet above tide, and to it the anglers and hunters take their families and enjoy the pleasures of the virgin woods.