The Project Gutenberg eBook, America, Volume IV (of 6), by Joel Cook

Transcriber's Note:

Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

The Title Page and Table of Contents for this book refer to it as Volume IV. The page and chapter numbering is consistent with this being the second half of the previous volume (whose title page says it is Volume III but whose Table of Contents refers to it as Volume II.

EDITION ARTISTIQUE

The World's Famous Places and Peoples

AMERICA

BY
JOEL COOK

In Six Volumes
Volume IV.

MERRILL AND BAKER
New York London

THIS EDITION ARTISTIQUE OF THE WORLD'S FAMOUS PLACES AND PEOPLES IS LIMITED TO ONE THOUSAND NUMBERED AND REGISTERED COPIES, OF WHICH THIS COPY IS NO. 205

Copyright, Henry T. Coates & Co., 1900

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME IV

A GLIMPSE OF THE BERKSHIRE HILLS.

XI.

A GLIMPSE OF THE BERKSHIRE HILLS.

Berkshire Magnificence—Taghkanic Range—Housatonic River—Autumnal Forest Tints—Old Graylock—Fitchburg Railroad—Hoosac Mountain and Tunnel—Williamstown—Williams College—North Adams—Fort Massachusetts—Adams—Lanesboro—Pittsfield—Heart of Berkshire—The Color-Bearer—Latimer Fugitive Slave Case—Old Clock on the Stairs—Pontoosuc Lake—Ononta Lake—Berry Pond—Lily Bowl—Ope of Promise—Lenox—Fanny Kemble—Henry Ward Beecher—Mount Ephraim—Yokun-town—Stockbridge Bowl—Lake Mahkeenac—Nathaniel Hawthorne—House of the Seven Gables—Oliver Wendell Holmes—Lanier Hill—Laurel Lake—Lee—Stockbridge—Field Hill—John Sergeant—Stockbridge Indians—Jonathan Edwards—Edwards Hall—Sedgwick Family and Tombs—Theodore Sedgwick—Catherine Maria Sedgwick—Monument Mountain—The Pulpit—Ice Glen—Great Barrington—William Cullen Bryant—The Minister's Wooing—Kellogg Terrace—Mrs. Hopkins-Searles—Sheffield—Mount Everett—Mount Washington—Shays' Rebellion—Boston Corner—Salisbury—Winterberg—Bash-Bish Falls—Housatonic Great Falls—Litchfield—Bantam Lake—Birthplace of the Beechers—Wolcott House—Wolcottville—John Brown—Danbury—Hat-making—General Wooster—Ansonia—Derby—Isaac Hull—Robert G. Ingersoll's Tribute—Berkshire Hills and Homes.

BERKSHIRE MAGNIFICENCE.

In ascending the Hudson River, its eastern hill-border for many miles was the blue and distant Taghkanic range, which encloses the attractive region of Berkshire. When the Indians from the Hudson Valley climbed over those hills they found to the eastward a beautiful stream, which they called the Housatonic, the "River beyond the Mountains." This picturesque river rises in the Berkshire hills, and flowing for one hundred and fifty miles southward by a winding course through Massachusetts and Connecticut, finally empties into Long Island Sound. Berkshire is the western county of Massachusetts, a region of exquisite loveliness that has no peer in New England, covering a surface about fifty miles long, extending entirely across the State, and about twenty miles wide. Two mountain ranges bound the intermediate valley, and these, with their outcroppings, make the noted Berkshire hills that have drawn the warmest praises from the greatest American poets and authors. Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Hawthorne, Beecher and many others have written their song and story, which are interwoven with our best literature. It is a region of mountain peaks and lakes, of lovely vales and delicious views, and the exhilarating air and pure waters, combined with the exquisite scenery, have made it constantly attractive. Beecher early wrote that it "is yet to be as celebrated as the Lake District of England, or the hill-country of Palestine." One writer tells of the "holiday-hills lifting their wreathed and crowned heads in the resplendent days of autumn;" another describes it as "a region of hill and valley, mountain and lake, beautiful rivers and laughing brooks." Miss Sedgwick, who journeyed thither on the railroad up the Westfield Valley from the Connecticut River, wrote, "We have entered Berkshire by a road far superior to the Appian Way. On every side are rich valleys and smiling hillsides, and, deep-set in their hollows, lovely lakes sparkle like gems." Fanny Kemble long lived at Lenox, in one of the most beautiful parts of the district, and she wished to be buried in its churchyard on the hill, saying, "I will not rise to trouble anyone if they will let me sleep here. I will only ask to be permitted once in a while to raise my head and look out upon the glorious scene."

To these Berkshire hills the visitors go to see the brilliant autumnal tints of the American forests in their greatest perfection. When copious autumn rains have made the foliage luxuriant, much will remain vigorous after parts have been turned by frosts. This puts green into the Berkshire panorama to enhance the olives of the birch, the grayish pinks of the ash, the scarlets of the maple, the deep reds of the oak and the bright yellows of the poplar. When in such a combination, these make a magnificent contrast of brilliant leaf-coloring, and while it lasts, the mantle of purple and gold, of bright flame and resplendent green, with the almost dazzling yellows that cover the autumnal mountain slopes, give one of the richest feasts of color ever seen. This magnificence of the Berkshire autumn coloring inspired Beecher to write, "Have the evening clouds, suffused with sunset, dropped down and become fixed into solid forms? Have the rainbows that followed autumn storms faded upon the mountains and left their mantles there? What a mighty chorus of colors do the trees roll down the valleys, up the hillsides, and over the mountains!" From Williamstown to Salisbury the region stretches, the Taghkanic range bounding it on the west, and the Hoosac Mountain on the east. The northern guardian is double-peaked Old Graylock, the monarch of the Berkshire hills, in the Taghkanic range, the scarred surfaces, exposed in huge bare places far up their sides, showing the white marble formation of these hills.

WILLIAMSTOWN TO PITTSFIELD.

The Fitchburg railroad, coming from Troy on the Hudson to Boston, crosses the northern part of the district and pierces the Hoosac Mountain by a famous tunnel, nearly five miles long, which cost Massachusetts $16,000,000, the greatest railway tunnel in the United States. This railroad follows the charming Deerfield River Valley up to the mountain, from the east, and it seeks the Hudson northwestward down the Hoosac River, the "place of stones," passing under the shadow of Old Graylock, rising in solid grandeur over thirty-five hundred feet, the highest Massachusetts mountain, at the northwest corner of the State. A tower on the top gives a view all around the horizon, with attractive glimpses of the winding Hoosac and Housatonic Valleys. Nearby is Williamstown, the seat of Williams College, with four hundred students, its buildings being the chief feature of the village. President Garfield was a graduate of this College, and William Cullen Bryant for some time a student, writing much of his early poetry here. Five miles eastward is the manufacturing town of North Adams, with twenty thousand people, in the narrow valley of the Hoosac, whose current turns its mill-wheels. A short distance down the Hoosac, at a road crossing, was the site of old Fort Massachusetts, the "Thermopylæ of New England" in the early French and Indian War, where, in 1746, its garrison of twenty-two men held the fort two days against an attacking force of nine hundred, of whom they killed forty-seven and wounded many more, only yielding when every grain of powder was gone.

Journeying southward up the Hoosac through its picturesque valley, the narrow, winding stream turns many mills, while "Old Greylock, cloud-girdled on his purple throne," stands guardian at its northern verge. There are various villages, mostly in decadence, many of their people having migrated, and the mills have to supplement water-power with steam, the drouths being frequent. Of the little town of Adams on the Hoosac, Susan B. Anthony was the most famous inhabitant, and in Lanesboro "Josh Billings," then named H. W. Shaw, was born in 1818, before he wandered away to become an auctioneer and humorist. The head of the Hoosac is a reservoir lake, made to store its waters that they may better serve the mills below, and almost embracing its sources are the branching head-streams of the Housatonic, which flows to the southward. This part of the intervale, being the most elevated, is a region of sloughs and lakes, from which the watershed tapers in both directions. Upon this high plateau, more than a thousand feet above the tidal level, is located the county-seat of Berkshire, Pittsfield, named in honor of William Pitt, the elder, in 1761. The Boston and Albany Railroad crosses the Berkshires through the town, and then climbing around the Hoosac range goes off down Westfield River to the Connecticut at Springfield. The Public Green of Pittsfield, located, as in all New England towns, in its centre, is called the "Heart of Berkshire." Upon it stands Launt Thompson's noted bronze statue of the "Color-Bearer," cast from cannon given by Congress,—a spirited young soldier in fatigue uniform, holding aloft the flag. This statue is reproduced on the Gettysburg battlefield, and it is the monument of five officers and ninety men of Pittsfield killed in the Civil War. At the dedication of this statue was read Whittier's eloquent lyric, "Massachusetts to Virginia," which was inspired by the "Latimer fugitive slave case" in 1842. An owner from Norfolk claimed the fugitive in Boston, and was awarded him by the courts, but the decision caused so much excitement that the slave's emancipation was purchased for $400, the owner gladly taking the money rather than pursue the case further. Thus said Whittier:

"A voice from lips whereon the coal from Freedom's shrine hath been

Thrilled as but yesterday the breasts of Berkshire's mountain men;

The echoes of that solemn voice are sadly lingering still

In all our sunny valleys, on every wind-swept hill.

"And sandy Barnstable rose up, wet with the salt sea-spray;

And Bristol sent her answering shout down Narragansett Bay;

Along the broad Connecticut old Hampden felt the thrill,

And the cheer of Hampshire's woodmen swept down from Holyoke Hill:

"'No slave-hunt in our borders—no pirate on our strand!

No fetters in the Bay State—no slave upon our land!'"

Bordering this famous Green are the churches and public buildings of Pittsfield, while not far away a spacious and comfortable mansion is pointed out which for many years was the summer home of Longfellow, and the place where he found "The Old Clock on the Stairs"—the clock is said to still remain in the house. The Pittsfield streets lead out in every direction to lovely scenes on mountain slopes or the banks of lakes. The Agassiz Association for the study of natural history has its headquarters in Pittsfield, there being a thousand local chapters in various parts of the world. This pleasant region was the Indian domain of Pontoosuc, "the haunt of the winter deer," and this is the name of one of the prettiest adjacent lakes just north of the town on the Williamstown road. Ononta is another of exquisite contour, west of the town, a romantic lakelet elevated eighteen hundred feet, which gives Pittsfield its water supply, and has an attractive park upon its shores. On the mountain to the northwest is Berry Pond, its margin of silvery sand strewn with delicate fibrous mica and snowy quartz. Here, in various directions, are the "Opes," as the beautiful vista views are called, along the vales opening through and among the hills. One of these, to the southward, overlooks the lakelet of the "Lily Bowl." Here lived Herman Melville, the rover of the seas, when he wrote his sea-novels. The chief of these vales is to the northwest of Pittsfield, the "Ope of Promise," giving a view over the "Promised Land." We are told that this tract was named with grim Yankee humor, because the original grant of the title to the land was "long promised, long delayed."

LENOX.

A fine road, with exquisite views, leads a few miles southward to Lenox, the "gem among the mountains," as Professor Silliman called it, standing upon a high ridge at twelve hundred feet elevation, and rising far above the general floor of the valley, the mountain ridges bounding it upon either hand, being about five miles apart, and having pleasant intervales between. There is a population of about three thousand, but summer and autumn sojourners greatly enlarge this, when throngs of happy pilgrims from the large cities come here, most of them having their own villas. The crests and slopes of the hills round about Lenox are crowned by mansions, many of them costly and imposing, adding to the charms of the landscape. At the head of the main street, the highest point of the village, stands the old Puritan Congregational Church, with its little white wooden belfry and a view all around the compass. This primitive church recalls many memories of the good old times, before fashion sought out Lenox and worshipped at its shrine:

"They had rigid manners and homespun breeches

In the good old times;

They hunted Indians and hung up witches

In the good old times;

They toiled and moiled from sun to sun,

And they counted sinful all kinds of fun,

And they went to meeting armed with a gun,

In the good old times."

Far to the northward, seen from this old church, beyond many swelling knolls and ridges, rises Old Graylock, looking like a recumbent elephant, as the clouds overhang its twin rounded peaks, thirty miles away. From the church door, facing the south and looking over and beyond the village, there is such a panorama that even without the devotion of the inspired Psalmist, one might prefer to stand in the door of the Lord's house rather than dwell in tent, tabernacle or mansion. This glorious view is over two valleys, one on either hand, their bordering ridges covered with the fairest foliage. To the distant southwest, where the Housatonic Valley stretches away in winding courses, the stream flowing in wayward fashion across the view, there are many ridgy hills, finally fading into the horizon beyond the Connecticut boundary. The immediate hillside is covered with the churchyard graves, and then slopes down into the village, with its surrounding galaxy of villas, among which little lakes glint in the sunlight. It is no wonder that Fanny Kemble, who lived here at intervals for many years, desired to be buried at this church door, for she could not have found a fairer resting-place, though Henry Ward Beecher, another summer sojourner, in his enthusiasm expressed the hope that in her life to come she would "behold one so much fairer that this scenic beauty shall fade to a shadow."

The earliest settlements in this part of the Berkshires, then a dangerous Indian frontier, were in 1750; and a few years later, when peace was restored, lands were bought and two towns started, one called Mount Ephraim and the other Yokun-town, after an Indian chief. The Duke of Richmond, whose family name was Lenox, had taken strong ground in favor of the American colonists, and in gratitude these towns, when subsequently incorporated, were called, the former Richmond, and the latter Lenox. The duke's coat-of-arms hangs upon the wall in the village Library of Lenox. In 1787 Lenox was made the county-seat of Berkshire, so continuing for eighty-one years, and its present church was built in 1806, replacing an older one. It began to be a summer resort at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and became fashionable after Fanny Kemble, then the great celebrity, visited it about 1838, and stopped at the "Berkshire Coffee House," setting the fashion of early rising by requiring her horse to be saddled and bridled and promptly at the door at seven o'clock in the morning, for a daily gallop of ten or twelve miles before breakfast. Lenox has now developed into so much wealth, fashion and luxury, that it is known as "the Newport of the Berkshires." Its one long village main street contains the Library and hotels, and in all directions pleasant roads lead out to the hills and vales around, which are developed in every way that wealth and art can master. The broad and charming grass-bordered main street, under its rows of stately overarching elms, leads southward down the hill among the villas. The deep adjacent valleys, with their many and varied knolls and slopes, give such grand outlooks that dwellings can be placed almost anywhere to advantage, most of them being spacious and impressive, their elaborate architecture adding to the attractions.

THE STOCKBRIDGE BOWL.

Southward from Lenox is the outer elevated rim of the "Stockbridge Bowl," a deep basin among the hills, and one can look down within this grand amphitheatre upon Lake Mahkeenac nestling there, with the rocky and chaotic top of the distant Monument Mountain closing the view beyond. There are attractive villas perched upon all the knolls and terraces surrounding this famous "Bowl," and one modest older mansion overlooks it among so much modern magnificence—Nathaniel Hawthorne's "House of the Seven Gables," the remains of which are still shown. Here he lived for a few years in a quaint little red wooden house, looking as if built in bits, and having a glorious view for miles away across the lake. Mrs. Hawthorne once described this house in a letter to her mother as "the reddest little thing, which looks like the smallest of ten-foot houses." Nearby is the farm where he got milk, the route to which he called the "milky-way." They have named the road leading out from Lenox to this house, in his honor, "Hawthorne Street." The view over the lake from its back windows was so enchanting that he was very proud of it, and Mrs. Hawthorne records that one day Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who then lived near Pittsfield, rode down to make a call. They insisted on his coming in "to get a peep at the lake through the boudoir window," while Hawthorne himself held the doctor's horse at the door. The humorist, on returning, acknowledged the kindness with a pleasantry, saying, "Is there another man in all America that ever had such honor as to have the author of 'The Scarlet Letter' hold his horse?"

The rides around the "Stockbridge Bowl" are delicious. Over the hills they go, up and down the terraces widely encircling the grand basin, now under arching canopies of elms, then through the forest, past little lakelets, with fascinating views in all directions, and always having the placid lake for a central gem down in the "Bowl." There are villas on all the points of vantage—red-topped and white-topped—the princely palaces of wealthy bankers and merchants. One of the most noted of these villas on Lanier Hill, high above the "Bowl" and the surrounding vales, gives opportunity to overlook several lakes, and study the rock-ribbed structure of the charming region, thrust up in crags and layers of white marble. The walls and stonework of the buildings are chiefly white, contrasting prettily with the foliage and greensward. Here is seen the Laurel Lake, and beyond is the village of Lee, nestling in the deep valley along the winding Housatonic, its tall white church spire rising among the trees, yet far down among the surrounding hills. All the adjacent slopes are covered with villas, and the marble-quarries and paper-mills have made the town's fortune. There are about four thousand people, and the Lee quarries are among the most noted in America. The pure white marble, cut out of deep fissures alongside the Housatonic, has built many famous structures, including the two largest buildings in the country, the Capitol at Washington and the Philadelphia City Hall, and also St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. Lee was named in the Revolution, after "Light Horse Harry" of Virginia.

STOCKBRIDGE AND ITS INDIANS.

Across an intervening ridge beyond the "Bowl" is the village of Stockbridge. The wayward Housatonic encircles Lee, and flows athwart the valley towards the west, thus making a meadow on which this pleasant settlement stands. In the autumn, turkeys strut about, and pumpkins lie profusely in the fields, preparing for the annual New England feast of roast turkey and pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving Day—the great Puritan holiday that has spread over the country. Monument Mountain and Bear Mountain to the southward guard the smaller glen into which the highway leads, with Stockbridge scattered through it upon the winding river banks. This region was settled earlier than Lenox, the first colonists from the Connecticut Valley venturing out upon the Indian trail across the Hoosac range in 1725 to take up a grant in the Southern Berkshires. They found here, on the river bank, the Mohican Indian village of Housatonnuc, and established relations of the greatest friendliness. Field's Hill overlooks the town, where Cyrus W. Field, of Atlantic cable memory, and his brothers were born. Stockbridge has been described as one of "the delicious surprises of Berkshire," quiet and seemingly almost asleep beneath its embowering meadow elms under the rim of the hills upon the river-bordered plain. Upon the wide green street stands a solid square stone tower, with a clock and chimes, bearing the inscription, "This memorial marks the spot where stood the little church in which John Sergeant preached to the Indians in 1739." This handsome tower, standing in front of the Congregational Church, was the gift of David Dudley Field to his birthplace.

These Indians called themselves the Muhhekanews, or "the people of the great moving waters," and Sergeant was sent as a missionary among them, laboring fifteen years. They were afterwards called the Stockbridge Indians. Jonathan Edwards, the renowned metaphysician, who had differences with the church at Northampton, succeeded Sergeant, and came out into the Berkshire wilderness, living among these Indians and preaching by the aid of interpreters. This great pastor lived happily at Stockbridge for six years on an annual salary of $35, with $10 extra paid in fuel, and in one of the oldest houses of the village wrote his celebrated work on The Freedom of the Will. He left Stockbridge to become President of Princeton College in New Jersey. The Stockbridge Indians had a wonderful tradition. They said that a great people crossed deep waters from a far-distant continent in the northwest, and by many pilgrimages marched to the seashore and the valley of the Hudson. Here they built cities and lived until a famine scattered them, and many died. Wandering afterwards for years in quest of a precarious living, they lost their arts and manners, and part of them settled in the village on the Housatonic, where the Puritans found them. They gladly received Sergeant's ministry, and he baptized over a hundred of them, translating the New Testament and part of the Old into their language. When Edwards came, in 1751, there were one hundred and fifty Indian families, and but six English families. Many were in the Continental army in the Revolution, and a company of these Indians won distinction in the battle of White Plains, near New York. They were dispersed in later days, some going to Western New York and others to the far West; but on the slope of a hill adjoining the river remains their old graveyard, a rugged weather-worn shaft surmounting a stone pile to mark it.

Monument to Jonathan Edwards, Stockbridge, Mass.

Upon the green village main street is Edwards' little old wooden house, having three small windows above the ponderous door. It is now called "Edwards Hall," and a granite obelisk out in front, erected by his descendants in 1871, preserves the memory of the great divine. Over opposite is the venerable Sedgwick Mansion, the home of the famous Sedgwick family. Farther up the street is the Cemetery, where the most interesting feature is the enclosure set apart for their tombs, the graves being arranged in circles around the central tomb of Judge Theodore Sedgwick, the founder. He was a native of Hartford, born in 1746, migrated to Sheffield in Berkshire, and finally settled at Stockbridge after the Revolution, becoming one of the leading statesmen of New England, prominent in the old Federal party, Member of Congress and Senator from Massachusetts, and Speaker of the House. He was subsequently made Judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, dying in office in 1813. His children and descendants surround his grave, among them his daughter, the distinguished authoress, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, born at Stockbridge in 1789, who died in 1867.

A few miles to the southeast is Monument Mountain, the Indian "Fisher's Nest," one of the most curious and attractive of the Berkshire hills on account of its position and form, although the summit is not very high, less than thirteen hundred feet. Its rock formations are fine, being of white quartz, and on the eastern side is a detached cliff with a huge pinnacle nearly a hundred feet high, known as the "Pulpit." Hawthorne greatly admired this mountain, at which he looked from his boudoir window across the lake, and in its autumn hues he said it appeared like "a headless sphinx wrapped in a rich Persian shawl," seen across a valley that was "a vast basin filled with sunshine as with wine." The mountain received its modern name from a cairn found on the summit, the tradition telling of a mythical Indian maiden who got crossed in love, and as a consequence jumped off the topmost cliff, being dashed to pieces. Her tribe, when they passed that way, each added a stone to the pile, thus building the cairn. There are many stones thrown all around this peculiarly rugged mountain, which is piled up with white marble crags in a region where abrupt peaks are seen almost everywhere. In among these cliffs is the Ice Glen, a cold and narrow cleft where ice may be found in midsummer, it is so secluded from sunshine. The appearance of Monument Mountain made a strong impression on William Cullen Bryant, who thus described it:

"To the north, a path

Conducts you up the narrow battlements.

Steep is the western side, shaggy and wild,

With many trees and pinnacles of flint,

And many a haughty crag. But to the east

Sheer to the vale go down the bare old cliffs,

Huge pillars that in middle heaven uprear

Their weather-beaten capitals—here dark

With the thick moss of centuries, and there

Of chalky whiteness, where the thunderbolt

Hath smitten them."

GREAT BARRINGTON.

To the southward farther, the widening Housatonic circles about the valley, bordered with willows and alders, and hidden frequently by cliffs and forests. Hills terrace the horizon, with mountain peaks among them. Through the gorges the road follows down the circling river, which constantly turns more mill-wheels, its waters pouring over frequent white marble dams and bubbling upon rapids, with steep tree-clad slopes adorning the banks and making attractive views. Monument Mountain's long ridge gradually falls off, and the intervale broadens as the Housatonic winds in wider channel to Great Barrington. This is another typical New England village, embowered by the stateliest of elms, spreading along its broad green-bordered street, with a galaxy of hills encircling the intervale in which it stands, and lofty Mount Everett rising grandly over its southwestern verge. To the eastward is the special hill of Great Barrington, giving the town its name. Beecher described it as "one of those places which one never enters without wishing never to leave." William Cullen Bryant for several years, ending with 1825, was the town clerk of Great Barrington, and the records of that time are in his handwriting; his house is still preserved. For a quarter of a century Dr. Samuel Hopkins lived here, the hero of Mrs. Stowe's novel, the Minister's Wooing. On the lowlands by the river is the costliest country-house in the Berkshires, Kellogg Terrace, built by Mrs. Hopkins-Searles, a magnificent structure of blue and white marbles, with red-tiled roofs, and most elaborately fitted up, upon which $1,500,000 was expended. It is carefully concealed from view from the village street by a massive stone wall and well-arranged trees. This mansion principally illustrates the affection the New England emigrant always bears for the home of youth. Mark Hopkins went away from the Berkshires to California to make a fortune and die. His childless widow, a native of Great Barrington, had $30,000,000, and came back to live on the farm where she had spent her childhood. She determined to rear a memorial, and built this French-Gothic palace of the native Berkshire marbles, exceeding at the time, in costliness and magnificence, any other private dwelling outside of New York City. As the building gradually grew, she became so enamored of it and its designer that she took the architect, Mr. Searles, for a second husband. Then she died, and he became its possessor. Yet it cannot be seen, except by climbing up a high hill to the eastward, where one can look down upon its red-tiled roofs on the low-lying meadow almost by the river side. The Congregational Church of Great Barrington has the Hopkins Memorial Manse, regarded as the finest parsonage in the United States, which cost $100,000 to build.

Following farther down the Housatonic, the village of Sheffield, another domain of marble quarries, is reached, with the same broad, quiet, green-bordered and elm-shaded village street, and famed for having furnished the marble to build Girard College and its magnificent colonnade at Philadelphia. The "Sheffield Elm" in the southern part of the town, a noble tree of great age, was given fame by the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." To the westward is the broad and solid mass of Mount Everett, often called Mount Washington, the southern outpost of the Taghkanic range, and the sentinel guarding the southwestern corner of Massachusetts, as Old Graylock guards the northwest corner. This mountain rises over twenty-six hundred feet, the "Dome of the Taghkanics." From its summit can be surveyed to the westward the valley of the Hudson, while beyond, at the horizon, the distant Catskills hang, in the words of Dr. Hitchcock, "like the curtains of the sky." The Connecticut boundary is not far away, and beyond it, southward, are successive ranges of hills. The Housatonic winds through productive valleys, with herds quietly grazing, and tobacco and other crops growing. This is in the town of Mount Washington, which was part of the great Livingston Manor that stretched in front of the mountain over to the Hudson, and the first settlers were Dutch, who came up from that valley. This region was the scene of the close of Shays' Rebellion in 1787, the insurgents who had convulsed western Massachusetts, and attacked and plundered Stockbridge, being chased down here by the troops, and a considerable number killed and wounded before they were dispersed.

TO SALISBURY AND BEYOND.

The southwestern corner of Massachusetts, projecting westward into New York outside the Connecticut boundary, is known as Boston Corner. To the southward, in the northwestern corner of Connecticut, is Salisbury, where the Taghkanic range falls away into lower hills. Beecher described this country as a constant succession of hills swelling into mountains, and of mountains flowing down into hills. This is a quiet region, formerly a producer of iron ores, and it was early settled by the Dutch, who came over from the Hudson in 1720. They were a timid race, however, fearing the rigors of climate, and, coming thus to the edge of what looked like an Alpine land of dreariness beyond, they would not venture farther into the forbidding hills. The mountainous region to the north and east they inscribed on their maps as a large white vacant space, which they coolly named "Winterberg." The township has two noted ravines, solitary, rugged and attractive, and both containing cascades. In one to the westward is the celebrated Bash-Bish Falls, and the other to the northward is Sage's Ravine, just beyond it being Norton's Falls. The Bash-Bish is said to have got its name in imitation of running, falling waters. It descends nearly five hundred feet in cataracts and rapids, the finest cascades in the Berkshires, and then flows out westward to the Hudson. The Housatonic, going southward through Salisbury, plunges down its Great Falls over rocky ledges for sixty feet descent, making a tremendous noise and a fine display. To the eastward of the Housatonic Valley, at an elevation of eleven hundred feet, on a broad plateau, is Litchfield, consisting chiefly of two broad, tree-shaded streets crossing at right angles, the chief buildings fronting on the central village Green. On the southwestern outskirts is Bantam Lake, the largest in Connecticut, covering a little over a square mile of surface. The most famous house in Litchfield, which has been moved, however, from its original location, is unpretentious, the old-time wooden mansion in which Rev. Lyman Beecher lived when pastor here, from 1810 to 1826, and where was born the famous authoress, Harriet Beecher, in 1812, who married Rev. Calvin E. Stowe, and the famous preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, in 1813. In the Wolcott House at Litchfield was born Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury, he and his father both having been Connecticut Governors. To this house was brought, in the Revolution, the leaden statue of King George III., which stood on the Bowling Green of New York, to be melted into bullets. These were the favorite Indian hunting-grounds of Bantam around the lake, and when Litchfield was first settled, about 1720, the village was surrounded by a palisade, lest the savages should return to their coveted region to take forcible possession. Litchfield for a half-century after the Revolution had the most noted law school in America. To the northward, at Wolcottville, where there are now large factories, lived Captain John Brown, a noted Revolutionary soldier, and here was born in 1800 his grandson, "Old John Brown of Osawatomie."

Yet farther southward, but still among the hills, west of the Housatonic Valley and near the New York boundary, is Danbury, famous for its hat-factories, a town of about twenty thousand people. The first hat-factory in America was opened at Danbury in 1780 by Zadoc Benedict, three men making three hats a day. The factories now turn out several thousand a day. In May, 1777, the Hessians attacked Danbury and destroyed a large amount of the Revolutionary army supplies, and it is recorded of the tragic event that Danbury was "ankle-deep in pork-fat." On that memorable occasion it is said that when the raiders were advancing up a hill a bold and reckless Yankee farmer rode to its crest and shouted loudly, "Halt, the whole universe; break off by kingdoms!" This demonstration alarmed the Hessians, who thought a formidable force coming, and they halted to defend themselves, deploying skirmishers and getting up their cannon to the front. It was in an attack upon these raiders near Danbury that General Wooster was mortally wounded, and the Danbury Cemetery contains his monument. The constantly broadening Housatonic River winds among the Connecticut hills in its steady course southeastward to its confluence with the Naugatuck, a smaller stream coming down through a pretty valley from the north, its Indian name meaning "one tree," referring to an ancient tree on its banks which was a landmark for the aborigines. The Naugatuck tumbles over a waterfall in the Indian domain of Paugussett, furnishing power for the mills of Ansonia, noted for its clocks. Near the confluence of the rivers is the great Housatonic dam, six hundred feet long and twenty-three feet high, constructed at a cost of $500,000 for the manufacturers of Derby, who make pins, tacks, stockings, pianos and many other articles. Commodore Isaac Hull, born in 1773, was the most distinguished native of Derby, the commander of the frigate "Constitution" when she captured the "Guerriere" in 1812. Then in stately course the broad Housatonic flows southward, to finally empty into Long Island Sound. The beauties of the Berkshire hills, so much of which are made by the Housatonic's wayward course, have been the theme of universal admiration, and their praises abound in our best American literature. It was after a visit there that Robert G. Ingersoll made his happy phrases in contrasting country and city life:

"It is no advantage to live in a great city, where poverty degrades and failure brings despair. The fields are lovelier than paved streets, and the great forests than walls of brick. Oaks and elms are more poetic than steeples and chimneys. In the country is the idea of home. There you see the rising and setting sun; you become acquainted with the stars and clouds. The constellations are your friends. You hear the rain on the roof and listen to the rhythmic sighing of the winds. You are thrilled by the resurrection called Spring, touched and saddened by Autumn, the grace and poetry of death. Every field is a picture, a landscape; every landscape a poem; every flower a tender thought; and every forest a fairy-land. In the country you preserve your identity, your personality. There you are an aggregation of atoms, but in the city you are only an atom of an aggregation."

The historian of the Berkshires, Clark W. Bryan of Great Barrington, thus poetically describes the Berkshire hills and homes:

"Between where Hudson's waters flow

Adown from gathering streams,

And where the clear Connecticut,

In lengthened beauty gleams—

Where run bright rills, and stand high rocks,—

Where health and beauty comes,

And peace and happiness abides,

Rest Berkshire's Hills and Homes.

"The Hoosac winds its tortuous course,

The Housatonic sweeps

Through fields of living loveliness,

As on its course it keeps.

Old Saddleback stands proudly by,

Among Taconic's peaks,

And rugged mountain Monument

Of Indian legend speaks.

"Mount Washington with polished brow,

Green in the summer days,

Or white with winter's driving storms,

Or with autumn's flame ablaze,

Looms up across the southern sky,

In native beauty dressed—

The home of Bash-Bish, weird and old,

Anear the mountain's crest.

"And still each streamlet runs its course,

And still each mountain stands,

While Berkshire's sons and daughters roam

Through home and foreign lands;

But though they roam, or though they rest,

A thought spontaneous comes,

Of love and veneration for

Our Berkshire Hills and Homes."

THE ADIRONDACKS AND THEIR ATTENDANT LAKES.

XII.

THE ADIRONDACKS AND THEIR ATTENDANT LAKES.

The Great North Woods—Mount Marcy or Tahawus—Schroon Lake—Raquette River—View from Mount Marcy—Door of the Country—Lake George—Horicon, the Silvery Water—Isaac Jogues—Sir William Johnson—Lake George Scenery and Islands—Sabbath Day Point—Lake George Battles and Massacres—The Bloody Morning Scout—Colonel Ephraim Williams—Baron Dieskau Defeated and Captured—Fort William Henry—Fort Carillon—General Montcalm—Massacre at Fort William Henry—Alexandria—Ticonderoga—Abercrombie's Expedition—General Lord Howe—Rogers' Slide—Howe Killed and Abercrombie Defeated—Amherst's Expedition—Carillon Captured—Fort Ticonderoga—Conquest of Canada—Ethan Allen Captures Ticonderoga—Lake Champlain—Samuel de Champlain Explores It—Defeats the Iroquois—Crown Point—Port Henry—Bulwagga Mountain and Bay—Fort St. Frederic—Westport—Split Rock—Rock Reggio—Port Kent—Vermont—The Green Mountains—Bennington—John Stark—Rutland—Killington Peak—Mount Mansfield—Forehead, Nose and Chin—Camel's Hump—Maple Sugar—Burlington—University of Vermont—Ethan Allen's Grave—Winooski River—Smuggler's Notch—Montpelier—Hessian Cannon—St. Albans—Ausable Chasm—Alice Falls—Birmingham Falls—Grand Flume—Bluff Point—Lower Saranac River—Plattsburg—Fredenburgh's Ghost—McDonough's Victory—Chateaugay Forest—Clinton Prison—Rouse's Point—Richelieu River—Chambly Rapids—Entering the Adirondacks—Raven Pass—Bouquet River—Elizabethtown—Mount Hurricane—Giant of the Valley—Ausable River—Flats of Keene—Mount Dix—Noon Mark Mountain—Ausable Lakes—Adirondack Mountain Reserve—Mount Colvin—Verplanck Colvin—Long Pond Mountain—Pitch-Off Mountain—Cascade Lakes—Mount Mclntyre—Wallface—Western Ausable River—Plains of Abraham—North Elba—Whiteface—Old John Brown's Farm and Grave—Lake Placid—Mirror Lake—Eye of the Adirondacks—Upper Saranac River—Harrietstown—Lower Saranac Lake—Ampersand—Canoeing and Carrying—Round Lake—Upper Saranac Lake—Big Clear Pond—St. Regis Mountain and River—St. Germain Carry—St. Regis Lakes—Paul Smith's—Raquette River and Lake—Camp Pine Knot—Blue Mountain and Lake—Eagle Lake—Fulton Lakes—Forked Lakes—Long Lake—Tupper Lakes—Mountains, Woods and Waters—The Forest Hymn.

THE GREAT NORTH WOODS.

The Adirondack wilderness covers almost the whole of Northern New York. This region is an elevated plateau of about fifteen thousand square miles, crossed by mountain ranges. It stretches from Canada down almost to the Mohawk Valley, and from Lake Champlain northwest to the St. Lawrence, in rugged surface, the plateau from which its peaks arise being elevated about two thousand feet above the sea. Five nearly parallel mountain ranges cross it from southwest to northeast, terminating in great promontories upon the shores of Lake Champlain. The most westerly is the Clinton or Adirondack range, beginning at the pass of Little Falls upon the Mohawk River and crossing the wilderness to the bold Trembleau Point upon the lake at Port Kent. This range contains the highest peaks, the loftiest of them, Mount Marcy or Tahawus, rising fifty-three hundred and forty-five feet, while Mounts McIntyre, Whiteface, Seward and several others nearby approximate five thousand feet. A multitude of peaks of various heights are scattered through the region, over five hundred being enumerated. They are all wild and savage, and were covered by the primeval forests until the ruthless wood-chopper began his destructive incursions. The stony summits of the higher mountains rise above all vegetation, excepting mosses and dwarf Alpine plants. The geological formation is mainly granitic and other primary rocks. In the valleys are more than a thousand beautiful lakes of varying sizes, generally at fifteen hundred to two thousand feet elevation, Schroon Lake, the largest, being the lowest, elevated eight hundred and seven feet, while the highest is "The Tear of the Clouds," at forty-three hundred and twenty feet elevation, one of the Hudson River sources. Some of these lakes are quite large, while others cover only a few acres, and most of them are lovely and romantic in everything but their prosaic names; and their scenery, with the surrounding mountains and overspreading forests, is unsurpassed. The labyrinth of lakes is connected by intricate systems of rivulets which go plunging down myriads of cascades, their outlets discharging into several well-known rivers, the chief being the Hudson. The largest and finest stream within the district is the Raquette River, rising in Raquette Lake and flowing westward and northward to the St. Lawrence. Around it, in the olden time, the Indians gathered on snowshoes to hunt the moose—the snowshoe being the French Canadian's "raquette," and hence the name. The Ausable and Saranac pass through romantic gorges and flow northeastward to Lake Champlain. This "Great North Woods," as it was called by our ancestors, is being so greatly despoiled of its forests, that to preserve the water supply of the Hudson, as well as to protect its scenic attractions, New York is making a State Park to include four thousand square miles, of which nearly one-half is now secured, having cost about $1,000,000. Railways are gradually extending into the district; it is becoming dotted with summer hotels and camping-grounds; and is one of the most popular American pleasure resorts.

The highest peak, Mount Marcy, has a summit which is a bare rock of about four hundred by one hundred feet, elevated more than a mile, and its outlook gives a splendid map of the Adirondacks. All about are mountains, though none are as high; McIntyre and Colden are close companions, with the dark forests of the St. Lawrence region stretching far behind them to the northwest. To the northward is the beautiful oval-shaped Lake Placid, with Whiteface rising beyond it, and nearby, to the westward, is the Indian "Big Eye," Mount Seward, which, with the "Giant of the Valley," rises far above the attendant peaks. Behind these, the hills to the northward gradually melt into the level lands along the St. Lawrence, out of which faintly rises the distant Mount Royal, back of Montreal. The Vermont Green Mountains bound the eastern horizon, with the hazy outline of Mount Washington traced against the sky through a depression in that range, thus opening an almost deceptive view of the distant White Mountains. The Catskills close the southern view. The vast wilderness spreads all around this noble mountain, its white lakes gleaming, its dark forests broken by a few clearings, and smokes arising here and there disclosing the abiding-places of the summer sojourner. Off to the northeast stretches the long glistening streak of Lake Champlain, low-lying, the telescope disclosing the sails of the vessels like specks upon its bosom, and the Vermont villages fringing the farther shore. This narrow, elongated lake, filling the immense trough-like valley between the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains of Vermont, the Indians called as one of its names (for it had several) Cania-de-ri-qua-rante, meaning "The door of the Country." Naming everything from a prominent attribute, to their minds the chief use of this long water way was as a door to let in the fierce Hurons from Canada when they came south to make war upon the Mohawks or the Mohicans. Many a brave warrior, both Indian and white, has gone through that door to attack his foes, one way or the other. As far back as tradition goes, the dusky savages were darting swiftly along the lake in their canoes, bent upon plunder or revenge. Then came Champlain, its white discoverer, to aid the Hurons with his arquebuse in their forays upon the Mohawks and Iroquois. In the ante-Revolutionary days many a French and Indian horde came along to massacre and destroy the English and Dutch settlements in the Hudson Valley. Then the current changed, and the English beat back their foes northward along the lake. Again it changed, as Burgoyne came in triumph through that door to meet defeat at Saratoga. Finally, in 1814, the last British forces moved southward on the lake, but they, too, were beaten. Since then this famous door has stood wide open, but only tourists and traders are passing through, though zest is given the present exploration by its warlike history of two centuries.

LAKE GEORGE.

Upon the southeastern border of the Adirondacks is Lake George, its head or southern end being nine miles north of Glen's Falls on the Hudson River. No American lake has had so many songs of praise; it is a gem among the mountains, its picturesque grandeur giving it the deserved title of the American Como. It reminds the Englishman of Windermere and the Scot of charming Loch Katrine, for while it is larger, it holds a place in our scenery akin to both those famous lakes. Embowered amid high hills, a crystal mirror set in among cliffs and forest-clad mountains, their wild and rugged features are constantly reflected in its clear spring waters. Its scenery mingles the gentle and picturesque with the bold and magnificent. George Bancroft, referring to its warlike history, says: "Peacefully rest the waters of Lake George between their ramparts of highlands. In their pellucid depth the cliffs and the hills and the trees trace their images, and the beautiful region speaks to the heart, teaching affection for nature." It is long and narrow, having more the character of a river than a lake, lying almost north and south, in a deep trough among the mountains, its waters discharging from the north end into Lake Champlain, and while thirty-six miles long, it is nowhere more than two or three miles wide. Washing the eastern verges of the Adirondacks, the bold ranges give it the rare beauties of scenery always presented by a mountain lake. Its surface is two hundred and forty-three feet above tide-water, and in some places it is over four hundred feet deep, the basin in which it rests being covered with a yellow sand, so that the bottom is visible through the pellucid waters at great depth. It is dotted with romantic islands, beautiful hill-slopes border the shores, and the background rises into dark and bold mountains. This magnificent lake was Horicon, or the "Silvery Water" of the Mohicans, a name which Cooper, the novelist, vainly endeavored to revive for it. The Mohawks called it Andiatarocte, or the "Place where the Lake Closes." The Hurons, as it appeared much like an appendage to Lake Champlain, named it Canaderioit, or the "Tail of the Lake." The first white man who saw it was the young French Jesuit missionary, Isaac Jogues, who had been captured on the St. Lawrence by a band of Mohawks, and was brought through it a captive in 1642, and after horrible maltreatment escaped to Albany. He went home to France, and in 1646 came out again, determined to convert them. His canoe entered its quiet waters on his beneficent mission on the eve of the festival of Corpus Christi, and he named it Lac du Saint Sacrament. He went on to the Mohawk Valley and ministered to them, but soon they murdered him. The French prized its clear and sparkling waters so highly that they were sent to Canada for baptismal uses. When Sir William Johnson came along more than a century later and took possession for England, he brushed aside all these romantic names, and in honor of his King George II., called it Lake George, the name which remains.

A charming steamboat ride over the lake best discloses its delicious scenery as one glides among the lovely islands, and through scenes like a fairy-land, their brilliant prospects constantly changing. At almost every hour from noon to eve, or in the gathering storm, the islands of Lake George—which are said to equal in number the days of the year—exhibit ever new phases. They may sleep under the cloud-shadow, and then the sun brightly breaks over them; they present a foreground of rough rocks or of pebble and shingle-covered beach, or an Acadian bower of rustic beauty, while the landscape is filled with the spreading waters and the distant-tinted hills. Tea Island, near the head of the lake, is a picnic-ground; Sloop Island has its tree-trunks looking like the spreading sails of a single-masted vessel; Diamond Island yields beautiful quartz crystals. Near the centre of the widest portion of the lake is Dome Island, richly wooded, and resembling the noted "Ellen's Isle" of Loch Katrine. The Sisters are diminutive islets, lonely in their isolation. The beautiful Recluse Island has a picturesque villa, while all about it rise high mountains. Green Island bears the Sagamore, and behind it the encircling shores of Ganouskie Bay are lined with villas at Bolton, which look out upon a grand archipelago. Green Island covers seventy acres, and is a perfect gem of rich green surface. On the shores and islands all about are numerous summer camping-places, a favorite resort being the Shelving Falls, coming through the Shelving Rock, an impressive semicircle of Palisades, behind which rises the lake's greatest mountain, ever present in all its views, Black Mountain, elevated twenty-nine hundred feet. Just beyond, the towering hills thrust out on either hand contract the waters into the Narrows, dotted with a whole fleet of little islands, the most picturesque part of the lake, and here a brief fairy-like glimpse of the hamlet of Dresden is got, nestling under these great mountains, down Bosom Bay. Northward from the Narrows, a long projecting point of low and fertile land stretches out on the western side, still retaining that air of restful peace which in the eighteenth century secured it the name of Sabbath Day Point. Farther on, and near the outlet, Rogers' Slide is on one side and Anthony's Nose on the other, these bold cliffs contracting the lake into a second Narrows. Beyond these are lower and less interesting shores, and finally, at the foot, its waters are discharged through the winding Ticonderoga Creek into Lake Champlain.

LAKE GEORGE BATTLES AND MASSACRES.

The historical associations of Lake George are of the deepest interest, for it was the route between the colonial frontier and Lake Champlain, and the scene of great military movements and savage combats. For over a century this attractive region was the sojourning place of religious devotees coming down from Canada to convert or conquer the heathen Iroquois, or of hostile expeditions moving both north and south—Indians, French, Dutch, English—all passing over its lovely waters; and it was the scene of two of the most horrid massacres of the colonial wars. Whenever there was war between France and England this lake saw fierce conflicts, the red men taking part with the whites on both sides. In 1755 Sir William Johnson's expedition started northward from the Hudson to capture Crown Point on Lake Champlain, advancing from Glen's Falls to Lake George, over the route still taken. Colonel Ephraim Williams of Massachusetts commanded part of this expedition, and was ambushed by the French and Hurons near the lake, in what was called the "Bloody Morning Scout." Upon the road still exist grim memorials of the ambush and massacre in the "Bloody Pond" and "Williams' Rock." He had twelve hundred troops and two hundred Mohawk Indians, and both Williams and the white-haired Mohawk chief, Hendrick, were slain, with hundreds of their followers, and the bodies of the dead were thrown into the pond. When the brave Williams started on this sad expedition he had a presentiment of his fate and made his will at Albany, giving his estate to support a free school, and from this bequest was founded the well-known Williams College, at Williamstown, in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts. A monument on the hillside, resting upon "Williams' Rock," was erected in 1854 by the College Alumni, to mark the place of his death, while deep down in the glen is the sequestered pond which, tradition says, had a bloody hue for many years.

After the surprise and massacre, Johnson's main forces, which had been at the head of Lake George and heard the firings came up and engaged the French, defeating them with great slaughter, wounding and capturing Baron Dieskau, their commander, who was badly maltreated until Johnson, learning who he was, sent for surgeons, took him into his own tent, and, although wounded himself, had Dieskau's wounds dressed first. The Mohawks, furious at the massacre and loss of their old chief, Hendrick, wanted to kill Dieskau, and a number of them, going into the tent, had a long and angry dispute in their own language with Johnson, after which they sullenly left. Dieskau asked what they wanted. "What do they want!" returned Johnson. "To burn you, by God, eat you, and smoke you in their pipes, in revenge for three or four of their chiefs that were killed. But never fear; you shall be safe with me, or else they shall kill us both." A captain and fifty men were detailed to guard Dieskau, but next morning a lone Indian, who had been loitering about the tent, slipped in and, drawing a sword concealed under a sort of cloak he wore, tried to stab the disabled prisoner. He was seized in time, however, to prevent the murder. The distinguished captive, as soon as his wounds permitted, was carried on a litter over to the Hudson, and sent thence to Albany and New York. He was profuse in his expressions of gratitude, and remarked of the provincial soldiers that in the morning they fought like good boys, about noon like men, and in the afternoon like devils. He returned to Europe in 1757, but he never recovered from his wounds and died a few years later. Johnson after the battle built a strong fort at the head of Lake George to hold his position, while the straggling French and Indians, who had retired to the foot of the lake, entrenched themselves at Ticonderoga. Thus was built the famous Fort William Henry by the English, named in honor of the Duke of Cumberland, brother of King George II., the hero of Culloden, while the French named their entrenched camp at Ticonderoga Fort Carillon, or the "Chime of Bells," in allusion to the music of the waterfalls in the outlet stream flowing beside it between the lakes.

Bitter enemies thus holding either end of Lake George, it became a constant battleground. In 1757, after numerous skirmishes, a considerable British and Colonial force was collected at Forts Edward and William Henry, intended to attack Carillon and Crown Point and drive the French down Lake Champlain. General Montcalm then commanded the French, and learning what was going on, and that the main British force was at Fort Edward, he swiftly traversed the lake with a large army and cut off and besieged Fort William Henry, garrisoned by twenty-five hundred men. The commander at Fort Edward was afraid to send reinforcements, and after a few days the British garrison, their guns dismounted and their works almost destroyed, were forced to capitulate. No sooner had they laid down their arms and marched out of the fort and an adjacent entrenched camp, than the Indian allies of the French, the fierce Hurons, fell upon them, plundering indiscriminately and murdering all they could reach, there being fifteen hundred killed or carried into captivity, and over a hundred women slain, with the worst barbarities of the savage. Montcalm did his best to restrain them, but was powerless. The fort was an irregular bastioned square, formed by gravel embankments, surmounted by a rampart of heavy logs laid in tiers, the interstices filled with earth, and it was built almost at the edge of the lake, the site being now occupied by a hotel. The French spent several days demolishing it. The barracks were torn down and the huge logs of the rampart thrown into a heap. The dead bodies filling the casemates were added to the mass, which was set fire, and the mighty funeral pyre blazed all night. Then the French sailed away on the lake, and Parkman says "no living thing was left but the wolves that gathered from the mountains to feast upon the dead." When the English on the subsequent day sent a scouting party from Fort Edward they found a horrible scene; the fires were still burning, and the smoke and stench were suffocating, the half-consumed corpses broiling upon the embers. The fort had mounted nineteen cannon and a few mortars, a train of artillery which Johnson had highly prized. The French carried these guns off with them to Carillon, and they afterwards had a chequered history. The English subsequently retook them at Carillon, and changed the name of that fort to Ticonderoga. At the dawn of the Revolution, Ethan Allen and his Vermonters surprised Ticonderoga and got them. Then the guns were drawn on sledges to Boston, and did notable service in the American siege and capture of that city, afterwards going into many engagements with Washington's army.

ATTACKING CARILLON.

The Lake George outlet stream, which the French called Carillon, from its waterfalls, was known by the Indians as Ticonderoga, or "the sounding waters." It winds through a ridge about four miles wide between the lakes, is pretty but turbulent, and falls down two series of cascades, giving music and water-power to the paper and other mills at the villages of Alexandria and Ticonderoga, the descent being two hundred and thirty feet. The upper cascade at Alexandria goes down rapids descending two hundred feet in a mile, and the lower cascade is a perpendicular fall of thirty feet at Ticonderoga, this village being called by its people "Ty," for short. Here stood the original French Fort Carillon guarding the pass at the verge of Lake Champlain. After the horrible massacre at Fort William Henry, the British colonists determined upon revenge, and General James Abercrombie, who had been made the Commander-in-Chief of all the British forces in North America through political influence, gathered an army of nearly sixteen thousand men at the head of the lake, while Montcalm was at Carillon with barely one-fourth the number. Abercrombie, however, was little more than the nominal British commander. General Wolfe described him as a "heavy man;" and another soldier wrote that he was "an aged gentleman, infirm in body and mind." The British Government meant that the actual command should be in the hands of General Lord Howe, who was in fact the real chief, described by Wolfe as "that great man" and "the noblest Englishman that has appeared in my time, and the best soldier in the British army;" while Pitt called him "a character of ancient times; a complete model of military virtue." This young nobleman, then in his thirty-fourth year, was Viscount George Augustus Howe, in the Irish peerage, the oldest of the three famous Howe brothers who took part in the American wars. The army, Parkman says, "felt him from General to drummer-boy." In that army were also two future famous men, Israel Putnam and John Stark.

They advanced northward on Lake George, July 5, 1758, in a grand flotilla of over a thousand boats, with two floating castles, the procession brilliant with rich uniforms and waving banners, and the music from its many bands echoing from the enclosing hills. Fenimore Cooper, in Satanstoe, gives a vivid description of this pageant. Passing beyond the Narrows, Abercrombie, on a Sunday morning, landed upon the fertile Sabbath Day Point to refresh his men before making the attack, thus naming it. Among them was Major Rogers, the Ranger, and in front could be seen the steep and rugged cliff of Rogers' Slide, named after him, its face a comparatively smooth inclined plane of naked rock, rising four hundred feet. The tale, as Rogers told it, was, that the previous winter, fleeing from the Indians, he practiced upon them a ruse, making them believe he had actually slid down this rock to the frozen surface of the lake. He was on snowshoes, the savages following, and ran out to the edge of the precipice, casting down his knapsack and provision-bag. Then turning around and wearing his snowshoes backward, he went to a neighboring ravine, and making his way safely down, fled over the ice to the head of the lake. The Indians saw the double set of shoe-marks in the snow, and concluded two men had jumped down rather than be captured. They saw Rogers going off over the ice, and believing he had safely slid down the face of the cliff, regarded him as specially protected by the Great Spirit and abandoned the pursuit. Thus has his name clung to the remarkable rock, though he was said to be a great braggart, and there were people who suggested that he ought to have been a leading member of the "Ananias Club." Beyond the slide, at the foot of the lake, is the low-lying Prisoners' Island, where the British kept the captives they took, and nearby Howe's Landing, where the army landed to attack Fort Carillon.

There was then a dense forest covering almost all the surface between the lakes, greatly obstructed by undergrowth, and Montcalm had protected his position at Carillon with massive breastworks of logs, eight or nine feet high, having in front masses of trees cut down with their tops turned outwards, thus making it almost impossible for an enemy to get through, the sharpened points of the broken branches bristling like the quills of a porcupine. As the British troops advanced in four columns, they got much mixed up in the forest and undergrowth, and Howe, with Putnam and a force of rangers at the head of the principal column, although they could not see ahead, suddenly came upon the French, were challenged, and a hot skirmish followed, in which Howe was shot through the breast and dropped dead. Then all was confusion, but they beat this French advanced force and killed or captured most of them. The loss of Howe, however, was irretrievable, for Abercrombie, deprived of his advice, seemed unable to direct. The fort was attacked after a fashion, but the troops floundered about in the woods and the network of felled trees, suffered from a murderous fire, and were beaten and hurled back discomfited to the shore of the lake. A few days later the shattered army, having left nearly two thousand dead and dying in front of Carillon, sailed back up the lake again to Fort William Henry. Leadership had perished with Lord Howe. His monument is in Westminster Abbey, London, having been erected to his memory by the General Court of the Colony of Massachusetts, who voted £250 for it. So proud was Montcalm of his victory that he caused a great cross to be erected on the battlefield, with an inscription in Latin composed by himself, which is thus translated:

"Soldier and chief and rampart's strength are naught;

Behold the conquering Cross! 'Tis God the triumph wrought."

TICONDEROGA.

Abercrombie was superseded after this disaster and went home, his successor in command being Baron Jeffrey Amherst, who the next year led another grand martial procession northward along the lake to attack the French. His expedition had better success, for it resulted in the conquest of Canada, and the treaty of peace which followed closed the great "Seven Years' War" most triumphantly for England. Fort Carillon, the name of which the English changed to Fort Ticonderoga, stood upon a high rocky promontory, the termination of a mountain range, the extremity, then called Sugar Loaf Hill, but since named Mount Defiance, rising eight hundred and fifty feet above Lake Champlain. It is a lofty peninsula, nearly a square mile in surface, almost surrounded by water, with a swamp on the western side. When Amherst advanced, the French garrison was meagre, for Wolfe was threatening Quebec, and Montcalm had gone with reinforcements to repel him; so that actually without a struggle they abandoned the fort, after blowing up the magazine and burning the barracks. Amherst then pushed on to conquer Canada, and the war ending, the British regarded this and Crown Point, ten miles northward on Lake Champlain, as among their most important posts, commanding the route to the new Dominion. Both were greatly enlarged and strengthened, over $10,000,000 being expended upon them, an enormous sum for that day, so that they became the most elaborate British fortresses in the American colonies, the citadel and field works of Ticonderoga including an area of several square miles, having buildings and barracks and defensive constructions anterior to the Revolution, covering almost the entire surface. In 1763 France ceded Canada to England, and afterwards Ticonderoga was neglected and partially decayed. When the Revolution began in 1775 it was one of the earliest strongholds captured by the Americans. Ethan Allen, with eighty men, crossed over Lake Champlain from Vermont, surprised the small and unsuspecting garrison of fifty men in the night, and Allen, penetrating to the bedside of the astonished commandant, made his famous speech demanding surrender. "In whose name?" asked the surprised officer. "In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress." The Americans held it for two years, when Burgoyne, on his southern march in 1777, besieged it, and discovering that Mount Defiance, not then in the works, completely commanded it, he dragged cannon up there and erected batteries, which soon compelled the garrison to abandon it, and the British were in possession until the war closed.

Old Fort Ticonderoga

Ticonderoga has since fallen into utter decay, but parts of the ruins are now preserved as a national memorial. A portion of wall and a dilapidated gable enclosing a window still stand, and make a picturesque ruin on top of a high slope rising from Lake Champlain, with a background of timbered hills. These forests to the west and south have grown during the nineteenth century, and are full of the remains of the old redoubts and entrenchments. Well-defined dry ditches are traced beyond the ramparts, with the barrack walls surrounding the parade-ground, an old well, and also the sally-port on the water side where Allen and his bold Green Mountain boys effected their entrance. During many years after the fort fell into ruins, the neighbors carried off its well-cut brick and stone work to build the growing villages on Lake Champlain's shores. All the surroundings are now eminently peaceful. The invaders, no longer warlike, are on pleasure bent; the inhabitants make paper and textiles, saw lumber, and also manufacture good lead-pencils from graphite found nearby. Sheep contentedly browse amid the relics of the great fortress, and vividly recall Browning's pastoral:

"Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles

Miles and miles

On the solitary pasture where our sheep,

Half-asleep,

Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop

As they crop—

Was the site of a city, great and gay,

(So they say.)"

LAKE CHAMPLAIN.

The elongated and narrow water way of Lake Champlain stretches northward one hundred and twenty-six miles, dividing New York from Vermont, and its head, south of Ticonderoga, extending to Whitehall, is so contracted between generally low and swampy shores, that it there seems more like a river than a lake, in some places being scarcely two hundred yards across. Northward, however, it broadens into a much wider lake, the greatest unobstructed breadth being about ten miles, opposite Burlington, Vermont, where it seems to expand almost into a sea. The widest part of all is beyond this, being about fifteen miles across, but with intervening islands. Over sixty islands are scattered about this attractive lake, the contour of the shores being very irregular, with numerous indenting bays. The northern outlet is by the Richelieu River and the Chambly Rapids into the St. Lawrence. Lake Champlain fills a long trough-like valley, bordered by mountain ranges. When compared with Lake George, however, its shores present a striking difference. There the declivities generally descend abruptly to the water, but on Champlain the distant ranges, usually far away on either side, have in front, bordering the water, wide stretches of meadow and farm land and broad green slopes. Upon the Vermont shore the prevailing aspect is a pastoral region, having the Green Mountains rising in the distant eastern background. These are the "Verts Monts," which the earliest French explorer of the St. Lawrence, Jacques Cartier, saw from afar off, when the Indians of Hochelaga, where Montreal now stands, took him to the top of their mountain—"Mont Real"—to show him the glorious southern landscape. These mountains gave Vermont its name, their highest peaks rising behind Burlington, Mount Mansfield and the Camel's Hump. The New York shore of the lake to the westward presents barren and mountainous scenery, the terminations of the Adirondack ranges being occasionally pushed out as bold promontories to the water's edge, while behind them the higher peaks loom in dark grandeur against the horizon.

The adventurous French warrior and pioneer Samuel de Champlain was the first European who sailed upon the waters of Champlain, and he gave it his name. Anxious for exploration and adventure, in 1609 he joined a band of Huron and Algonquin warriors on an expedition against their enemies, the Mohawks and Iroquois in New York. After a grand war-dance at Quebec they set out, ascending the St. Lawrence and Richelieu, and on July 4th they entered the lake, Champlain having two French companions, and the three being armed with arquebuses. As they progressed towards the south, nearing the haunts of the Iroquois, they travelled only at night, hiding by day in the forest. On July 29th, while thus hiding, Champlain fell asleep and had a dream, wherein he beheld the Iroquois drowning in the lake, and, trying to rescue them, was told by his Huron companions that they were good for nothing, and had better be left to their fate. When he awoke he told them of his vision, and they were delighted. That very night they observed a flotilla of Iroquois canoes, heavier and slower than their own, in motion on the lake before them. Each saw the other, and mingled war-cries pealed over the dark waters. The Iroquois, not wanting to fight on the lake, landed and made a barricade of trees, which they cut down. The Hurons lashed their canoes together and remained a bowshot off-shore, shouting and dancing all night on their frail vessels. It was agreed they should fight in the morning, and until dawn the two parties abused each other, shouting taunts and defiance "much," writes Champlain, "like the besiegers and besieged in a beleaguered town," Champlain and his two companions, as day approached, put on their light armor and lay in the bottom of their canoes to keep hidden. Soon they all landed unopposed, and then the Iroquois, some two hundred in number, came out of their barricade to fight. The Hurons, who had surrounded Champlain, now opened their ranks, and he passed to the front, levelled his arquebuse and fired,—a chief fell dead, and soon another rolled among the bushes. Then the Hurons gave a yell, which Champlain says would have drowned a thunderclap, and the forest was filled with whizzing arrows. The Iroquois for a moment replied lustily, and the other Frenchmen, who were in the thicket on their flank, gave successive gunshots, which they could not withstand, but soon broke and fled in terror. The Hurons pursued them like hounds through the bushes, some were killed and more were taken prisoners, and the arquebuse, till now unknown to them, had won the victory. Then the victors, with their captives and spoils, withdrew to the St. Lawrence; and Champlain had thus assisted at the beginning of the awful series of conflicts which these lakes witnessed during two centuries. This fight was in the neighborhood of Crown Point, on Bulwagga Bay.

The latest of these conflicts on the lake was Commodore McDonough's brilliant victory over the British fleet in 1814, since which time the history of Lake Champlain has been peaceful. Despite this early discovery and naming, however, it was not until long afterwards that it was generally known by the present name. The Mohawks and Iroquois, as already explained, called it the "Door of the Country." Among their other bitter foes were the Abenaqui Indian nation of New England, who called it Lake Potoubouque, or "the waters that lie between," that is, between their country and the land of the Iroquois. For similar reasons the French in Canada called it the "Iroquois Sea." A Dutch officer having afterwards been drowned here, both the French and the English for a long time styled it after him, "Corlaer's Lake." These names, however, all long ago vanished, and since the eighteenth century it has borne, undisputed, the name of Champlain, the great Father of Canada.

CROWN POINT.

Progressing northward from Ticonderoga, the lake suddenly makes a right-angled narrow bend to the westward, its channel compressed between a broad, flat, low promontory coming up from the south, and the protruding opposite shore that encircles and almost meets it. These are the Champlain Narrows, the southern promontory being Crown Point, and the opposite rock compressing the channel Chimney Point. A broad bay opens behind Crown Point to the westward, and under the shadow of Mount Bulwagga, the end of one of the long Adirondack ranges, is the village of Port Henry, a producer of iron-ores, there being furnaces here as well as on the shore south of Crown Point. Upon the southern promontory, thus thrust out between the lake and Bulwagga Bay, are the ruins of the famous fortress of Crown Point, which so well guarded the narrow crooked channel and its approaches, and closed the "door of the country" leading from Canada. Soon after Champlain's time the French, who held all this region, built a stone fort on the opposite point, and ambitiously planned a province, stretching from the Connecticut River to Lake Ontario, of which this was to be the capital. A town was started, with vineyards and gardens, and the "Pointe de la Couronne," as it was called, became widely known. Early in the eighteenth century the French built Fort St. Frederic here in the form of a five-pointed star, with bastions at the angles, and its ruins yet remain, showing traces of limestone walls, barracks, a church, and tower. For thirty years this fort was the base of supplies for forays on the colonial settlements, but it fell before Lord Amherst's march northward in 1759. This English conquest translated the "Pointe de la Couronne" into Crown Point, and then the British Government constructed enormous works to control the lake passage. There thus was built the great English fortress of Crown Point, covering the highest parts of the peninsular promontory southwestward from the old French fort. The limestone rocks were cut into deeply, and ramparts raised twenty-five feet thick and high, the citadel being a half-mile around. The ruins of these heavy walls, the ditches, spacious parade and demolished barracks, give an idea of the costly but obsolete military construction of that time. These extensive works were blown up by an exploding powder magazine.

From the northeastern bastion of Crown Point a covered way leads to the lake, and here a well was sunk ninety feet deep for a water supply. Tradition told of vast treasures concealed by the French, and so excited did the people become that a joint-stock company was formed to search for them, clearing out the well and making excavations, but nothing was found but some lead and iron. The ruins are in lonely magnificence to-day, the red-thorn bushes brilliantly adorning them, and the place is a popular picnic-ground. From the northern ramparts there is a magnificent view of the distant Green Mountains on the right hand, with their gentle fields and meadows stretching down to the lake, and the rugged Adirondack foothills on the left, the distant dark mountain ranges looming far away behind them, with the huge broad-capped "Giant of the Valley" standing up prominently. Gazing at their sombre contour, the reason can be readily divined why the Indians called this vast weird region Cony-a-craga, or the "Dismal Wilderness." The higher Adirondack summits, composed of the hardest granite, are said by the geologists to be the oldest land on the globe and the first showing itself above the universal waters. Some distance above Port Henry is Westport Landing, the village standing in the deep recesses of Northwest Bay, where the long ridge of Split Rock Mountain, stretching towards the northeast, makes a high border for the bay. This curious ridge is of historical interest. The outer extremity is a cliff thirty feet high, covering about a half-acre, and separated from the main ridge by a cleft twelve feet wide cut down beneath the water. This cliff was the ancient Rock Reggio, named from an Indian chief drowned there, and was for a long time the boundary between the New York Iroquois and the Canadian Algonquins, whose lands were held respectively by the English and the French. It is mentioned in various old Colonial treaties as fixing the boundary between New York and Canada, but during the Revolution the Americans passed far beyond it, conquering and holding the land for seventy-seven miles northward to the present national boundary.

THE GREEN MOUNTAINS.

Above, the lake gradually broadens, and at the widest part are seen, on opposite sides, the village of Port Kent with its furnaces, and the flourishing Vermont city of Burlington. The great Adirondack ridge of Trembleau runs abruptly into the water as a sort of guardian to Port Kent, and just above, Ausable River flows out through its sandy lowlands into the lake. Vermont, which makes the entire eastern shore of Champlain, is a region of rural pastoral joys with many herds and marble ledges, a land of fat cattle and rich butter-firkins, overlooked by mountains of gentle slope and softened outline. Southward from Lake Champlain is Bennington, in a mountain-enclosed valley, near which was fought in August, 1777, the famous battle in which Colonel John Stark's Green Mountain boys cut off and signally defeated Baum's detachment of Burgoyne's army. It is now a flourishing manufacturing town. East of the head of Lake Champlain is Rutland, the centre of the Vermont marble-quarrying industry and the site of the great Howe Scale Works, a city of twelve thousand people. Three-fourths of the marble produced in the United States comes from this district of Vermont, and the Sutherland Falls Quarry at Proctor, near Rutland, is said to be probably the largest quarry in the world. These quarries are in the flanks of the Green Mountains which stretch northward, making the watershed between the upper Connecticut River and Lake Champlain. The Killington Peak, forty-two hundred and forty feet high, is not far from Rutland.

Mansfield, the chief of the Green Mountains, is behind Burlington, and rises forty-three hundred and sixty-four feet. Seen from across the lake, it presents the upturned face of a recumbent giant, the southern peak being the "Forehead," the middle one the "Nose," and the northernmost and highest the "Chin." The latter, as seen against the horizon, protrudes upwards in most positive fashion, rising three hundred and forty feet higher than the "Nose," about a mile and a half distant. This decisive-looking Chin is thus upraised about eight hundred feet from the general contour of the mountain, while the Nose is thrust upward four hundred and sixty feet, its nostril being seen in an almost perpendicular wall of rock facing the north. Mansfield is heavily timbered until near the summit, and a hotel is perched up there at the base of the Nose, both Nose and Chin being composed of rock ledges, which have been deeply scratched by boulders dragged over them in the glacial period. These Green Mountains extend down from Canada, and terminate in the Taghkanic and Hoosac ranges of Berkshire in Massachusetts. They do not attain very high elevations, the Camel's Hump, south of Mansfield, rising forty-one hundred and eighty-eight feet. This was the "Leon Couchant" of the earliest French explorers, and it bears a much better resemblance to a recumbent lion than to a camel's back. The western slopes of these mountains are chiefly red sandstone, while their body and eastern declivities are granite, gneiss and similar rocks, and they are filled with valuable mineral products, marbles, slates and iron-ores. Their slopes have fine pastures of rich and nutritious grasses, and the green and rounded summits present a striking contrast to the lofty, bare and often jagged peaks of the White Mountains of New Hampshire beyond them. There are cultivated lands on their slopes, at an elevation as high as twenty-five hundred feet, and in and about them are the forests producing the dear, delicious maple sugar:

"Down in the bush where the maple trees grow,

There's a soft, moist fall of the first sugar snow;

And the camp-fires gleam,

And the big kettles steam,

For the maple-sugar season has arrived, you know;

And these are the days when you'll find on tap

The sweetest of juices, which is pure maple sap."

BURLINGTON AND MONTPELIER.

Burlington, the chief Vermont city, is built on the sloping hillside of a grandly curving bay, making a resemblance to Naples and its bay, which has inspired a local poet to address the city as "Thou lovely Naples of our midland sea." It has fifteen thousand people, and its prosperity has been largely from the lumber trade, the logs coming chiefly from Canadian and Adirondack forests. It is attractive, with broad tree-embowered streets, the elm and maple growing in luxuriance, while the hills run up behind the town into high summits. One of these, the College Hill, rising nearly four hundred feet, has the fine buildings of the University of Vermont, attended by six hundred students, its tower giving a superb outlook over Lake Champlain, which at sunset is one of the most gorgeous scenes ever looked upon. Lafayette laid the corner-stone of this college on his American visit in 1825, and his statue in sturdy bronze adorns the grounds. The finest college building is the Billings Library, presented by Frederick Billings, a projector, and once President of the Northern Pacific Railway. All about these hills there are attractive villas and estates, enjoying the view, of which President Dwight wrote, when wandering over New England in search of the historic and picturesque, that "splendor of landscape is the peculiar boast of Burlington." On the northern verge of College Hill is the city's burial-place of the olden time—Green Mount Cemetery. Here Ethan Allen is buried, a tall Tuscan monument surmounted by a statue marking the spot, which is enclosed by a curious fence made of cannon at the corners and muskets with fixed bayonets. Allen lived at Burlington during his later life, dying there in February, 1789.

College Hill falls off to the northward to a broad intervale, down which winds the romantic Winooski or Onion River, flowing into Lake Champlain a short distance above Burlington. It comes out of a gorge in the Green Mountains, where it falls down pretty cascades and rapids. This Winooski gorge was a dreaded defile in the early days of the New England frontier, for by this route the fierce Hurons came through those mountains from Champlain and Canada to make forays upon the Massachusetts and New Hampshire border settlements. This gorge passes between Mount Mansfield and the Camel's Hump. To the northward is the noted "Smuggler's Notch" beyond the Chin of Mansfield, between it and Mount Sterling beyond, the name having been given because in the olden time contraband goods were brought through its gloomy recesses from Canada into New England. An affluent of the Winooski, the Waterbury River, comes out of this notch, a rapid stream. Upon the upper Winooski is Montpelier, the Vermont State Capital, pleasantly situated among the mountains near the centre of the commonwealth. Its State House is a fine structure of light granite, surmounted by a lofty dome. Massive Doric columns support its grand portico, under which stands the statue, in Vermont marble, of Ethan Allen, by Vermont's great sculptor, Larkin G. Mead. Here are also two old cannon which Stark captured from the Hessians at Bennington. They were afterwards used by the Americans with good effect throughout the Revolution, and subsequently were part of the army equipment taken to the western frontier. In the War of 1812 the British captured them in Hull's surrender at Detroit, but they were recaptured in a subsequent battle in Canada, and were sent as trophies to Washington. Congress ultimately gave them to Vermont, and they were placed in the State Capitol as relics of the battle of Bennington. Admiral George Dewey is a native of Montpelier, born there December 26, 1837. St. Albans, a great railroad centre and market for dairy products, is north of Burlington, near Lake Champlain, a picturesque New England town, with the elm-shaded central square. It is fourteen miles from the Canada border, and an important customs station. Of it, Henry Ward Beecher wrote that "St. Albans is a place in the midst of greater variety of scenic beauty than any other I remember in America."

AUSABLE CHASM.

One of the chief Adirondack rivers flowing into Lake Champlain is the Ausable. Its branches come out of the heart of the mountains, one through the beautiful Keene Valley and the other through the Wilmington Notch, and uniting at Ausable Forks, it flows along the northwestern side of the long ridge terminating in Trembleau Point at Port Kent, and enters the lake just above. The river escapes from the mountains through the wonderful gorge of Ausable Chasm. It is an active stream, bringing down vast amounts of sand, which wash through this gorge and are spread over the flats north of Trembleau, where the river flows out through two mouths. These prolific sand-bars, when first seen by the French, caused them to name the stream Ausable, the "river of sands." This renowned chasm, in its colossal magnificence and bold rending of the hard sandstone strata, is one of the wonders of America. A local poet has written on a little kiosk adjoining the river chasm this rhythmic explanation of its origin:

"Nature one day had a spasm

With grand result—Ausable Chasm."

This splendid gorge, cut down in getting out of the highlands, is carved in the hardest Potsdam sandstones. It is a profound, and in most of its length a very narrow chasm, with almost vertical walls from seventy to one hundred and fifty feet high, the torrent pouring through the bottom being compressed within a width of eight to thirty feet, and rushing with quick velocity. The chasm is about two miles long, having several sharp bends, the stratified walls being built up almost like artificial masonry. The sides are frequently cut by lateral fissures, making remarkable formations, and the tops of the enclosing crags are fringed with a dense growth of cedars. The river of dark amber-colored water first comes out of the forest past Keeseville, where mills avail of its water-power, and then pours over the ledges of the Alice Falls, the finest in the Adirondacks. This splendid cataract of forty feet descent is above the entrance to the gorge, much of it being an almost sheer fall, having magnificent foaming watery stairways down the ledges, bordering it with their delicate lacework on either hand. The dark waters tumble in large volume into an immense amphitheatre, which has been rounded out by the torrent during past ages. Then bending sharply to the right, the river goes down some rapids and over a mill-dam built just above the chasm. The opening of this extraordinary rent in the earth is startling. Suddenly the river pours over a short fall, and then down another deep one strangely constructed, the line of the cataract being almost in the line of the stream. These are the Birmingham Falls, down which the Ausable plunges into the deep abyss, while high above stands a picturesque stone mill whose wheels are turned by the waters, and just below a light iron bridge carries a railway over the gorge.

It is difficult to describe the profound chasm opening below the Birmingham Falls. It is a prodigious rent in the earth's crust, making sudden right-angled turns. The visitor at first goes down a long stairway and walks on the rocky floor adjoining the torrent, enormous walls rising high above. There are various formations made by the boiling waters, ovens, anvils, chairs, pulpits, punch-bowls and the like, and, judging by their names, the Devil seems to be the owner of most of them. The chasm turns sharply around the "Elbow," and the waters rush through the narrow passage of "Hell Gate." There are many caves and lateral fissures, all the masonry being hewn square, as in fact the whole gorge is, such being the regularity of the stratification and the accuracy of the angles and joints,—the ponderous walls, reared on high, sometimes almost close together, making the deep pass narrow and gloomy. The gorge finally contracts so much there is no further room for walking, and a boat is taken for the remainder of the journey down the "Grand Flume." The torrent carries the boat along swiftly, guided by strong oarsmen both at bow and stern, swinging quickly around the bends, shooting the rapids and whirling through the eddies. After rushing along the "Flume," embracing the narrowest portions of the profound chasm, the boat finally floats out into the "Pool," where the waters at length settle into rest as they pass from the broken-down sandstone strata to the flat land beyond, where the river flows through its two mouths into the lake.

PLATTSBURG AND ITS NAVAL BATTLE.

Northward from Ausable River, Lake Champlain contains a number of large islands. Valeur Island is near the New York shore, and in the narrow channel separating them, in 1776, a desperate naval contest was fought between Arnold and Carleton, resulting in the defeat of the Americans. Beyond are the large islands of Grand Isle, South Hero and North Hero. Standing in an admirable position on Bluff Point, a high promontory on the western shore, is the great Hotel Champlain, elevated two hundred feet above the lake. To the north the Saranac River, coming from the southwest, flows out of the Adirondacks through its red sandstone gorge into Cumberland Bay, and at its mouth is the pleasant town of Plattsburg, having a population of seven thousand. The broad peninsula of Cumberland Head, projecting far to the southward into the lake, encloses the bay in front of the town. Plattsburg's greatest fame comes from its battle and Commodore McDonough's victory in 1814. The earliest settler was a British army officer, one Count de Fredenburgh, who built a sawmill at a fall near the mouth of the Saranac; but he was made way with early in the Revolution, and many have been the startling tales since told of his ghostly figure, in red coat and knee-breeches, stalking about the ruins of the old mill at Fredenburgh Falls. After the war, New York State confiscated the property and gave it to Zephaniah Platt and his associates, who established the town, and in 1785 rebuilt the mill. Plattsburg had become a place of so much importance that in the War of 1812-15 the English sent a large force from Canada for its capture. They attacked it on a Sunday morning in September, 1814, Sir George Prevost commanding the land forces and Commodore Downie a fleet of sixteen vessels. General Macomb had a small American detachment entrenched on the southern bank of the Saranac in hastily constructed earthworks, some remains being yet visible. The naval contest, however, decided the day, the superior British fleet being overcome by the better American tactics. McDonough had but fourteen vessels, anchored in a double line across the mouth of Cumberland Bay. As the British fleet rounded Cumberland Head to make the attack, a cock that was aboard McDonough's flag-ship, the "Saratoga," suddenly flew upon a gun and crowed lustily. This was esteemed a good omen, and giving three cheers, the Americans went to work with a will. After two hours' conflict the British fleet was defeated and captured. Downie was killed early in the action, and with fifteen other officers sleeps in Plattsburg Cemetery. McDonough was crushed by a falling boom, and afterwards was stunned by being struck with the flying head of one of his officers, knocked off by a cannon-shot, but he was undaunted to the end. Honors were heaped upon him, Congress giving him a gold medal, and he was also presented with an estate upon Cumberland Head overlooking the scene of his victory.

Plattsburg has the chief United States military post on the Canadian border, there being usually a large force stationed at the extensive barracks. It is also the terminus of railways coming from the Adirondacks, originally built to fetch out the iron-ores, of which it is an active market. One of these railways comes from Ausable Forks. Another is the Chateaugay Railroad, which has a circuitous route around the northern and eastern verges of the wilderness, from the Chateaugay and Chazy Lakes, where are the ore beds in a dismal region. Lyon Mountain, one of the chief ore producers, has its mines at two thousand feet elevation above the lake. Stretching far away to the northward is the immense Chateaugay forest and wilderness, extending into Canada. This railroad passes Dannemora, where is located the Clinton Prison, a New York State institution, at which it is said "they always have a number of people of leisure, who pass their time in meditation, making nails, cracking ore, and in other congenial pursuits." The railroad route cuts into the red sandstone gorge of the Saranac, and follows its valley out to Plattsburg. Some distance north of Plattsburg, and at the Canadian boundary, is Rouse's Point, a border customs station. This is the northern end of Lake Champlain, which discharges through the Richelieu or Sorel River into the St. Lawrence, the waters descending about one hundred feet, and mostly by the Chambly Rapids. The Chambly Canal, which locks down this descent, provides navigation facilities from Champlain to the St. Lawrence waters.

ENTERING THE ADIRONDACKS.

From Westport on Lake Champlain is one of the favorite routes into the Adirondacks. The name of this dark region originally came from the Mohawks, who applied it in derision to the less fortunate savages that inhabited the forbidding forests. The luxurious Mohawk, living in fertile valleys growing plenty of corn, could see nothing for his dusky enemy in this dismal wilderness to eat, excepting the dark trees growing on its mountain sides, and therefore the Mohawk called these people the Adirondacks, or "the bark and wood eaters." The actual derivation of the word is thought to come from the Iroquois root "atiron," meaning "to stretch along," referring to the mountain chains. Starting from Westport, we penetrate the region by a steep road into the Raven Pass, known as the "Gate of the Adirondacks," going through one of the ridges, among juniper bushes and aspen poplars, and thus get to the pleasant valley beyond, where flows the lovely Bouquet River. Here are a bunch of red-roofed cottages surrounded by elms contrasting prettily with the green fields, with boarding-houses and hotels interspersed, making up the village of Elizabethtown, the county-seat of Essex, which is hereabout called E-Town, for short. It spreads over the flat bottom of a fertile valley, encompassed around by high mountains. Circling all over the valley and yet concealed in deep gorges is the Bouquet River, which flows out to Lake Champlain, near the Split Rock. To the westward rises the sharp bare granite top of Mount Hurricane, nearly thirty-eight hundred feet, and to the southwest the towering Giant of the Valley, over forty-five hundred feet. Cobble Hill, rising two thousand feet, closes up the western end of the main village street, its ball-like top being a complete reproduction of a huge cobble-stone. Out to the northward goes a wild mountain road, through the Poke o' Moonshine Pass, leading to Ausable Chasm, twenty-three miles away.

Travelling westward from E-Town, we mount the enclosing slope of the Pleasant Valley, and through the gorge alongside Mount Hurricane, up the canyon of the western branch of Bouquet River. Crossing the summit among the granite rocks and forests, we then descend into another long, trough-like valley, stretching as a broad intervale far away both north and south, through which flows Ausable River. This intervale includes the charming "Flats of Keene," the sparkling Ausable waters meandering quietly over them beneath overhanging maples and alders, quivering aspens and gracefully swaying elms, occasionally dancing among the stones and shingle in some gentle rapid. Here are farmhouses, with many villas, the great mountain ridges protecting the valley from the wintry blasts. This intervale has in the eastern ridge the Giant of the Valley, with Mount Dix alongside, rising nearly five thousand feet, and to the southward, reared thirty-five hundred feet, exactly at the meridian, is the graceful Noon Mark Mountain, which casts the sun's noon shadow northward over the centre of the "Flats of Keene." The river, coming from the south, flows out of the lower Ausable Lake or the Long Pond, and dashes swiftly down its boulder-covered bed. Its waters are gathered largely from the eastern flanks of Mount Tahawus, and also from the galaxy of attendant peaks—Dix, Noon Mark, Colvin, Boreas, the Gothics, and others—grandly encircling the southern head of the attractive Keene Valley. The Ausable River rises under the brow of Tahawus, and flowing through the two long and narrow Ausable Lakes at two thousand feet elevation, traverses the whole length of the Keene Valley northward, to unite with its western branch at Ausable Forks, and thence goes through the great chasm to Lake Champlain. The head of the Keene Valley with the adjacent mountain slopes, extending through parts of three counties and covering a tract of forty square miles, is the "Adirondack Mountain Reserve." This reservation gives complete protection to the fish and game, and also preserves the forests and sources of the water supply. The Lower Ausable Lake is about two miles long and the Upper Ausable Lake nearly the same length, there being over a mile's distance between them. Some of the highest and most romantic of the Adirondack peaks environ these lakes. The sharply-cut summit of Mount Colvin rises forty-one hundred and fifty feet alongside them. The Ausable Lakes are in the bottom of a deep cleft between these great mountains, their sides rising almost sheer, two thousand feet and more above them. The lake shores are steep and rocky walls, reared apparently to the sky, the deep and contracted cleft making the lakes look more like rivers, surmounted high up the rocks by overhanging foliage, the trees diminutive in the distance. Of the Upper Ausable Lake, Warner writes that "In the sweep of its wooded shores, and the lovely contour of the lofty mountains that guard it, this lake is probably the most charming in America."

ADIRONDACK ATTRACTIONS.

The western guardian peaks of the Keene Valley are the main range of the Adirondacks, including Mount Marcy or Tahawus. Mount Colvin, alongside the Ausable Lakes, was named in honor of Verplanck Colvin, the New York surveyor and geologist, who devoted years of energy to the survey of this wilderness, and perhaps knew it better than anyone else. He was always in love with it, and thought that few really understood it. He described it as "a peculiar region, for though the geographical centre of the wilderness may be readily reached, in the light canoe-like boats of the guides, by lakes and rivers which form a labyrinth of passages for boats, the core, or rather cores, of this wilderness extend on either hand from these broad avenues of water, and in their interior spots remain to-day as untrodden by men and as unknown and wild as when the Indian paddled his birchen boat upon those streams and lakes. Amid these mountain solitudes are places where, in all probability, the foot of man never trod; and here the panther has his den among the rocks, and rears his savage kittens undisturbed, save by the growl of bear and screech of lynx, or the hoarse croak of the raven taking its share of the carcass of slain deer." The tangled Adirondack forest may to some seem monotonous and even dreary, but Mr. Street, the poet-writer of the region, thus enthusiastically refers to it: "Select a spot; let the eye become a little accustomed to the scene, and how the picturesque beauties, the delicate minute charms, the small overlooked things, steal out like lurking tints in an old picture. See that wreath of fern, graceful as the garland of a Greek victor at the games; how it hides the dark, crooked root, writhing snake-like from yon beech! Look at the beech's instep steeped in moss, green as emerald, with other moss twining round the silver-spotted trunk in garlands or in broad, thick, velvety spots! Behold yonder stump, charred with the hunter's camp-fire, and glistening black and satin-like in its cracked ebony! Mark yon mass of creeping pine, mantling the black mould with furzy softness! View those polished cohosh-berries, white as drops of pearl! See the purple barberries and crimson clusters of the hopple, contrasting their vivid hues!—and the massive logs peeled by decay—what gray, downy smoothness! and the grasses in which they are weltering—how full of beautiful motions and outlines!"

From the Keene Valley we climb up the gorge of a brisk little brook to the westward, and passing through the notch between Long Pond Mountain and the precipitous sides of the well-named Pitch-Off Mountain, come to the pair of elongated deep and narrow ponds between them,—the Cascade Lakes,—stretching nearly two miles. Huge boulders line their banks with a wall of rough and ponderous masonry, entwined with the roots of trees, and like the Ausable Lakes, they are another Alpine formation, their surfaces being at twenty-one hundred feet elevation, yet resting in the bottom of a tremendous chasm. An unique cascade, falling in successive leaps for seven hundred and fifty feet down the southern enclosing mountain wall, has given them the name—a delicate white lace ribbon of foaming water, finally passing into the lower lake. The grand dome of Mount McIntyre, in the main Adirondack range, rises in majesty to an elevation of fifty-two hundred feet, a sentinel beyond the western entrance to this remarkable pass. Formerly iron-ores were found here, but iron-making has been abandoned for the more profitable occupation of caring for the summer tourist. Beyond these lakes the summit of the pass is crossed, and there is a farm or two upon a broad plateau, at twenty-five hundred feet elevation, the highest cultivated land in New York State. Comparatively little but hay, however, can be raised, the seasons are so short and fickle. Deer haunt this remote region, and their runways can be seen. Emerging from the pass, with the little streams all running westward to the Ausable's western branch, there is got a fine view of the main Adirondack range, with the massive Mount McIntyre and the almost perpendicular side of Wallface rising beyond, the deep notch of the famous Indian Pass, cut down between them, showing plainly. Both peaks tower grandly above a surrounding galaxy of bleak, dark mountains.

OLD JOHN BROWN OF OSAWATOMIE.

This broad flat valley of the Western Ausable, the stream winding through it in a deeply-cut gorge, and surrounded on the south and west by an amphitheatre of the highest Adirondack peaks, is the township of North Elba in Essex county; and the valley and its fertile borders are the "Plains of Abraham." It is a farming district, so well enclosed by the mountains that the soil is fairly tillable. These plains gradually slope northwestward to the banks of two of the most noted of the Adirondack waters, Lake Placid and the Mirror Lake, with old Whiteface Mountain for their guardian, "heaving high his forehead bare." Here are the scattered buildings of the village of North Elba on the plains, and the more modern and fashionable settlement beyond at the lakes. To the southward is the great rounded top of Tahawus, the highest Adirondack peak, displayed through an opening vista, and at the northern border grandly stands Whiteface, the black sides abruptly changing to white, where an avalanche years ago denuded the granite cliffs near the top and swept down all the trees. Here at North Elba was the home and farm of "Old John Brown of Osawatomie." He had been given this homestead by Gerrit Smith, the great New York Abolitionist, in 1849, and there had also been founded here a colony of refuge for the negro slaves. It was then a remote and almost unknown place in the wilderness. Brown settled in the colony and built his little log house and barn near a huge boulder which stood a short distance from the front door. Here he formed his plan for liberating the slaves, and from here went to engage in the Kansas border wars of 1856. Returning, for three years he brooded on plans to liberate the negroes, and after further conflicts in Kansas projected the expedition into Virginia for the capture of Harper's Ferry in October, 1859. He declared his object to be to free all the slaves, and that he acted "by the authority of God Almighty." After his capture and conviction he discouraged efforts at liberation, saying, "I am of more use to the cause dead than living." After his death his body was brought up here to his home in the wilderness, for he had said, "When I die, bury me by the big rock, where I love to sit and read the word of God." Here he was buried on a bitterly cold day in December, 1859, a few sorrowing friends conducting the services and covering up his body in the frozen ground.

The old gravestone of his grandfather was brought from New England and put at the head of the grave, but it was soon so chipped off and broken by relic-hunters, it had to be enclosed in a case for preservation. Behind the grave rises the huge boulder on which has been carved, in large letters, "John Brown, 1859." The old gravestone is full of names both front and back, containing the record of his own death, and that of three sons, two losing their lives at Harper's Ferry and one in Kansas. The record of his life, graven on the stone, is: "John Brown, born May 9, 1800, was executed at Charleston, Va., Dec. 2, 1859." It is here that

"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,

And his soul goes marching on."

Forty years afterwards, in 1899, the remains of seven of his companions in the Harper's Ferry raid were removed here and interred beside him. This region no longer knows Brown's kindred, for all have disappeared. Yet in the world's mutations, nothing could be more strange than that this remote wilderness, originally selected as a refuge and hiding-place for runaway slaves, should have become one of the most fashionable and popular health resorts in America. The farm and graves are now kept by New York State as a public park.

LAKE PLACID TO PAUL SMITH'S.

Lake Placid, nestling at the base of old Whiteface and elevated eighteen hundred and sixty feet above the sea, is often called the "Eye of the Adirondacks." Its mountain environment has made it almost a rectangle, four miles long and two miles wide. Down its centre, arranged in a row, are three beautiful islands, named respectively the Hawk, Moose and Buck, two being large and high and the third smaller. These divide it into alternating spaces of land and water much like a chess-board. To the eastward is the pretty Mirror Lake, about three miles in circuit. Both lakes have high wooded shores, and around them are gathered the hotels, cottages and camps of a large summer settlement. Surrounded by a grander galaxy of finer and higher mountains than any other lakes of this region, here is truly the "Eye" that views these dark Adirondacks in all their glory. These mountains are all sombre, and some almost inky black; many are hazy in the distance. To the northeast the Wilmington Pass, alongside Whiteface, lets out the western branch of Ausable; to the southward, the Indian Pass opening between McIntyre and Wallface is a source of the Hudson; to the westward, on the spurs of lower ranges, are the forests separating these lakes from the Saranacs. There are more than a hundred peaks around, of varying heights and features, among them the greatest of the Adirondacks. Embosomed within this wonderful amphitheatre is the glassy-surfaced lake, protected from the winds and storms, which is so attractive and so peaceful that it fully deserves its name, Lake Placid.

Crossing again to the westward through the forests and over the ridges, we come into the valley of the Saranac, with its lakes, and the ancient village of Harrietstown under the long ridge of Ampersand Mountain. Here on the Lower Saranac Lake is another summer settlement of villas, hotels and camps. Behind the mountain there is a little lake out of which flows a stream so crooked and twisted into and out of itself, turning around sweeping circles without accomplishing much progress, that its discoverers could not liken it to anything more appropriate than to the eccentric supernumerary of the alphabet, the "&." Thus the name of the "Ampersand" of the old spelling-books was applied first to the stream, and then to the lake and mountain, the latter being the guardian of the many lakes of this region. The Lower Saranac Lake is at fifteen hundred and forty feet elevation, and the Ampersand Mountain rises a thousand feet above it. A pretty church in the village is appropriately named for St. Luke the Physician, and here is located the Adirondack Sanitarium, this district being a favorite refuge for consumptives. The Chateaugay railroad comes in here, but the district beyond to the south and west has neither railroads nor wagon roads. It is such a labyrinth of lakes and water courses it can only be traversed in boats.

The whole western part of the Adirondacks is an elevated tableland, containing many hills and peaks, but saturated by water ways. Therefore "canoeing and carrying" is the method of transportation. The Lower Saranac Lake is five miles long, and beyond it is Round Lake, over two miles in diameter, beyond that being the Upper Saranac Lake, nearly eight miles long and dotted with islands. There are portages between them where the canoes have to be carried. The outlet of the Upper Saranac is a magnificent cataract and rapid, descending thirty-five feet in a distance of about one hundred yards. From the Upper Saranac Lake other portages, or "carrys," as they are called, lead over to the Blue Mountain region, the Raquette River and the Tupper Lakes to the westward. The Adirondack ranges here are lower, and the forests get denser, but all about are dotted the summer settlements, some of them displaying most elaborate construction. Every place has its boat-house and canoe-rack, and boats are moving in all directions. At the head of the Upper Saranac is St. Regis Mountain, and a long "carry" of about four miles through the forest goes over to the Big Clear Pond, the head of the Saranac system of waters. Crossing this lake, yet another "carry" takes us over the watershed. This is a famous portage in the liquid district, the "St. Germain carry" of over a mile between the Saranac headwaters and the sources of St. Regis River, flowing out westward and then northward to the St. Lawrence. It leads to the series of St. Regis Lakes, and finally on the bank of the Lower St. Regis to the great hotel of the woods—Paul Smith's—with many camps surrounding the shores of the lake. Apollus Smith, a shrewd Yankee, came here many years ago, when the locality was an unbroken wilderness, and built a small log house in the forest as an abiding-place for the hunter and angler. It was repeatedly enlarged, and with it the domain, now covering several thousand acres, until the hostelrie has become an unique mixture of the backwoods with modern fashion, and is everywhere known as the typical house of the Adirondack region. Upon the hill behind the hotel is the attractive little church of "St. John in the Wilderness," appropriately built of logs hewn in the surrounding forest.

ADIRONDACK LAKES.

To the westward is the water system of the Raquette River, leading to the St. Lawrence; this stream, the chief one in the district, flowing out of Raquette Lake. This lake is irregularly shaped, about ten miles long, and surrounded by low hills, its elevation being nearly eighteen hundred feet. The dense forests that are adjacent teem with game, and its hotels and private camps are among the best in the region, "Camp Pine Knot" being especially famous as the most elaborate and attractive of its kind in America. Blue Mountain rises to the eastward nearly thirty-eight hundred feet, and at its southwestern base is the Blue Mountain Lake, having on its southern edge the small Eagle Lake, where lived in a solitary house called the Eagle's Nest the noted "Ned Buntline," the author. To the southwest of Raquette are the chain of eight Fulton Lakes. North of Raquette are the Forked Lakes, and northeast of it, following down the Raquette River, Long Lake, which is fourteen miles long and barely a mile wide in the broadest part, having Mount Seward rising at its northern end. To the northwest, still following down the Raquette, are the Tupper Lakes. These are a few of the larger lakes in this labyrinth of water courses, there being hundreds of smaller ones; and, as the forest and water ways extend northwest, the land gradually falls away towards the great plain adjoining the St. Lawrence. These regions, however, are remote from ordinary travel, and the western Adirondack forests are rarely penetrated by visitors excepting in search of sport.

This wonderful region has only during recent years attracted general public attention as a great sanitarium and summer resort, but its popularity constantly increases. Its dark and forbidding mountains have become additionally attractive as they are better known, probably for the reason, as John Ruskin tells us, that "Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery." Its universal woods and waters have a resistless charm. As one wanders through the devious pathways, or glides over the glassy surface of one of its myriad lakes, the vivid coloring and richness of the plant life recall Thomson, in the Seasons:

"Who can paint

Like Nature? Can imagination boast

Amid its gay creation hues like her's?

Or can it mix them with that matchless skill,

And lose them in each other, as appears

In every bud that blows?"

But after all, the great Adirondack forests, vast and trackless, much of them in their primitive wildness, are to the visitor possibly the grandest of the charms of this weird region. The "Great North Woods" still exist as the primeval forest on many square miles of these broad mountains and deep valleys, recalling in their solitude and grandeur William Cullen Bryant's Forest Hymn:

"The groves were God's first temples. Ere man learned

To hew the shaft and lay the architrave,

And spread the roof above them—ere he framed

The lofty vault, to gather and roll back

The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood,

Amidst the cool and silence he knelt down

And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks

And supplication."

CROSSING THE EMPIRE STATE.

XIII.

CROSSING THE EMPIRE STATE.

The Mohawk Valley—Cohoes and its Falls—Occuna's Death—Erie Canal—De Witt Clinton—New York Central Railroad—Mohawk and Hudson Railroad—Schenectady—Union College—Amsterdam—Fort Johnson—Sir William Johnson—Johnstown—The Iroquois or Six Nations—Senecas—Red Jacket—Cayugas—Onondagas—Oneidas—Tuscaroras—Mohawks—Joseph Brant—The Noses—Little Falls—Herkimer—Utica—Classic Names—Rome—Trenton Falls—Lake Ontario—The Lake Ridge—Black River—Cazenovia Lake—Oneida Lake—Oneida Community—Oswego River—Oswego—Onondaga Lake—Syracuse—Salt Making—Syracuse University—Otisco Lake—Skaneateles Lake—Owasco Lake—Auburn—William H. Seward—Cayuga Lake—Ithaca—Fall Creek—Cascadilla Creek—Taghanic Falls—Cornell University—Ezra Cornell—John McGraw—Seneca Lake—Havana Glen—Watkins Glen—Geneva—Hobart College—Seneca River—Keuka Lake—Penn Yan—Hammondsport—Canandaigua Lake and Town—Canisteo River—Hornellsville—Painted Post—Corning—Chemung River—Elmira—Genesee River—Portage Falls—Genesee Level—Mount Morris—Council House of Cascadea—Geneseo—Rochester and its Falls—Sam Patch—Medina Sandstones—Lockport—Chautauqua Lake—Chautauqua Assembly—Pennsylvania Triangle—Erie—Perry's Victory—Captain Gridley's Grave—Dunkirk—Buffalo—Sieur de la Salle and the Griffin—Grain Elevators—Prospect Park—Fort Porter—Fort Erie—Niagara River—Grand Island—Niagara Falls—Niagara Rapids—Father Hennepin's Description—Charles Dickens—Professor Tyndall—Anthony Trollope—Geological Formation—Appearance of Niagara—Goat Island—Luna Island—Cave of the Winds—Terrapin Rocks—Three Sisters Islands—The Horseshoe—Condemned Ship Michigan—Lower Rapids—Whirlpool—Niagara Electric Power—Massacre of Devil's Hole—Battles of Queenston Heights, Chippewa and Lundy's Lane.

THE FALLS AT COHOES.

The valley of the Mohawk River provides one of the best routes for crossing the Empire State, from the Hudson over to Lake Erie. Within sight of the Hudson, the Mohawk pours down its noble cataract at Cohoes. This is a waterfall of nearly a thousand feet width, the descent being seventy-eight feet. The banks on either side are quite high, with foliage crowning their summits, and between is a perpendicular wall of dark-brown rocks making the cataract, having a sort of diagonal stratification that breaks the sombre face into rifts. In a freshet this is a wonderful fall, the swollen stream becoming a dark amber-colored torrent with adornments of foam, making a small Niagara. The river is dammed about a mile above, so that at times almost the whole current is drawn off to turn the mill-wheels of Cohoes, making paper and manufacturing much wool and cotton, one of its leading establishments being the "Harmony Knitting Mills." In digging for the foundations of its great buildings alongside the river, this corporation several years ago exhumed one of the most perfect skeletons of a mastodon now existing, which is in the State Museum at Albany. Cohoes has about twenty-five thousand population, and its name comes from the Iroquois word Coh-hoes, meaning a "canoe falling." A brisk rapid runs above the falls, and a touching Indian legend tells how the rapid and fall were named. Occuna was a young Seneca warrior (one of the Iroquois tribes), and with his affianced was carelessly paddling in a canoe at the head of the rapid, when suddenly the current drew them down towards the cataract. Escape being impossible, they began the melancholy death-song in responsive chants, and prepared to meet the Great Spirit. Occuna began: "Daughter of a mighty warrior; the Great Manitou calls me hence; he bids me hasten into his presence; I hear his voice in the stream; I see his spirit in the moving of the waters; the light of his eyes danceth upon the swift rapids." The maiden responded, "Art thou not thyself a great warrior, O Occuna? Hath not thy tomahawk been often bathed in the red blood of thine enemies? Hath the fleet deer ever escaped thy arrow, or the beaver eluded thy chase? Why, then, shouldst thou fear to go into the presence of the Great Manitou?" Then said Occuna, "Manitou regardeth the brave, he respecteth the prayer of the mighty! When I selected thee from the daughters of thy mother I promised to live and die with thee. The Thunderer hath called us together. Welcome, O shade of Oriska, invincible chief of the Senecas. Lo, a warrior, and the daughter of a warrior, come to join thee in the feast of the blessed!" The canoe went over the fall; Occuna was dashed in pieces among the rocks, but the maiden lived to tell the story. The Indians say that Occuna was "raised high above the regions of the moon, from whence he views with joy the prosperous hunting of the warriors; he gives pleasant dreams to his friends, and terrifies their enemies with dreadful omens." Whenever the tribe passed the fatal cataract they solemnly commemorated Occuna's death.

THE ERIE CANAL.

Just above Cohoes, the Erie Canal crosses the Mohawk upon a stately aqueduct, twelve hundred feet long, and it then descends through the town by an elaborate series of eighteen locks to the Hudson River level. This great water way made the prosperity of New York City, and is the monument of the sagacity and foresight of De Witt Clinton, Governor of New York, who, despite all obstacles, kept advocating and pushing the work until its completion. The construction began in 1817, and it was opened for business in 1825. The first barge going through had a royal progress from Buffalo, arriving at Albany at three minutes before eleven o'clock on the morning of October 26, 1825. There being no telegraphs, a swift method was devised for announcing her arrival, both back to Buffalo and down the Hudson River to New York. Cannon placed within hearing of each other, at intervals of eight or ten miles, were successively fired, announcing it in both cities, the signal being returned in the same way. By this series of cannon-shots the report went down to New York and came back to Albany in fifty-eight minutes. When the first barges from Buffalo reached New York they were escorted through the harbor by a grand marine procession, which went to the ocean at Sandy Hook, where Governor Clinton poured in a keg of water brought from Lake Erie. The original Erie Canal cost $7,500,000, but it was afterwards enlarged and deepened, and further enlargements are still being made. It is fifty-six feet wide at the bottom and seventy feet at the surface, with seven feet depth of water. The barges are stoutly built and carry cargoes of seven to nine thousand bushels of grain. The canal is three hundred and fifty-five miles long, and gradually descends from Lake Erie five hundred and sixty-eight feet to the tidal level of the Hudson River, there being seventy-two locks passed in making the journey. This work, with its feeders and connections with the St. Lawrence River by the Champlain and Oswego Canals and the enlargements, has cost New York $98,000,000, and the maintenance costs $1,000,000 a year. It carries a tonnage approximating four millions annually, and is now free of tolls. Usually it carries half the grain coming to New York City. There are various projects for its further enlargement to twelve feet depth to accommodate larger boats, and its future usefulness is a theme of wide discussion. Its route across New York State is naturally the one of easiest gradient, passing from Buffalo over the flat plain of Western New York, descending to the lower level of the Genesee Valley, then crossing the plain immediately north of the central lake district of New York, and finally by the Mohawk Valley, getting an easy passage through the narrow mountain gorge at Little Falls, and thence alongside that stream to the Hudson.

Closely accompanying the canal, the great Vanderbilt line, the New York Central Railway, crosses New York from Albany to Buffalo. It runs for seventeen miles, from Albany to Schenectady, and then follows up the Mohawk Valley. This seventeen miles of road is probably the oldest steam railroad in the United States—the Mohawk and Hudson Company, chartered in April, 1826. The commissioners organizing it met for the purpose at John Jacob Astor's office in New York City, July 29, 1826, and sent an agent over to England to inquire into its feasibility, and he came back with the plans, and was put in charge at $1500 salary. This was Peter Fleming, the first manager. The original power was by horses, and afterwards steam was used in daytime only, horses continuing the night work, it not being considered safe to use steam after dark. One car, looking much like an old-fashioned stage-coach, made a train. There were fourteen miles of level line, the remainder being inclined planes, where horses did the most work. When the car approached the station the agent met it, blocking the wheels with a wedge, which was removed when the car started again. As business increased, more cars were added to the trains, and then a guard was put on top of the first car back of the locomotive, to watch the train and see that everything moved right. He frequently notified the engineer to stop when a car was seen bobbing about sufficiently to indicate that it was off the track. This primitive road was the beginning of the New York Central Railroad, which was gradually extended westward.

ASCENDING THE MOHAWK.

Schenectady on the Mohawk is a quaint old town of Dutch foundation, now devoted considerably to hops and butter, and largely to the trade in brooms. The Indians called it Skaunoghtada, or "the village seen across the plain," and hence the name. It was an early outpost of the Patroon at Albany, who sent Arent Van Corlaer to build a fort and trade in furs with the Indians in 1661. There were two horrible massacres here in the colonial wars. This comfortable city spreads broadly on the southern bank of the river and has over twenty thousand people. It is the seat of Union College, the buildings, upon a height overlooking the valley, being prominent. The college is part of the foundation of Union University, organized by the coöperation of various religious denominations, embracing medical, law and engineering schools, and also the Dudley Observatory at Albany. Such eminent men as Jonathan Edwards and Eliphalet Nott have been its presidents. Some distance up the Mohawk is Amsterdam, another flourishing town, and the whole region thereabout is covered with fields of broom-corn, the Mohawk Valley being the greatest producer of brooms in America, and the chief broom-makers the Shakers, who have several settlements here. To the northward of the river above Amsterdam is Fort Johnson, a large stone dwelling which was the home of Sir William Johnson, the noted pioneer and colonial General. In 1738, at the age of twenty-three, he came out from England to manage Admiral Warren's large estates in the Mohawk Valley. He soon became very friendly with the Indians, the Mohawks adopting him as a sachem, and he had much to do with the Indian colonial management. He finally became the superintendent of the affairs of the Indian Six Nations, the Iroquois, and got his title of baronet for his victory over the French in 1755 at Fort William Henry, on Lake George. He was in the subsequent campaigns, captured Fort Niagara in 1759, and was present at the surrender of Montreal, and finally of Canada, the next year. For his services in these important conflicts the King gave him a tract of one hundred thousand acres north of the Mohawk, long known as "Kingsland" or the "Royal Grant." He brought in colonists and started Johnstown on this tract. He was active in his duties as head of the Indian Department, his death in 1774 resulting from over-exertion at an Indian Council. He was the great pioneer of the Mohawk, his influence over the Indians being potential, and his village of Johnstown, about eight miles north of the river, now having about five thousand people. He had a hundred children by many mistresses, both Indian and white, his favorite, by whom he had eight children, being the sister of the famous Mohawk chief, Joseph Brant.

THE LEAGUE OF THE SIX NATIONS.

All this region, and the lands westward beyond the Central Lake District of New York, was the home of that noted Indian Confederation of America which the French named the Iroquois. When the earliest French explorers found them, they were the "Five Nations"—the Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas and Mohawks. Their name as a league was Hodenosaunee, meaning "they form a cabin,"—this being their idea of a combination, offensive and defensive, and within their figurative cabin the fire was in the centre at Onondaga, while the Mohawk was the door. They were great warriors, and their tradition was that the Algonquins had driven them from Canada to the south side of Lake Ontario. Subsequently a portion of the Tuscaroras came up from the South, and being admitted to the Confederacy, it became the "Six Nations." They had considerable warlike knowledge. Near Elmira, which is close to the Pennsylvania boundary south of Seneca Lake, their ancient fortifications are still visible, having been located with the skill of a military engineer as a defense against attacks. Fort Hill at Auburn was also an Iroquois fortification that has yielded many relics, and other works constructed by them are shown in various places. The league carried on almost continuous warfare against the neighboring tribes and the frontier colonists, and were conspicuous in all the colonial wars. When in their greatest prosperity they numbered about fifteen thousand, and over ten thousand now exist, being located on Canadian reservations adjacent to the St. Lawrence River, and on eight reservations in New York, where there are about five thousand, in civilized life, chiefly engaged in agriculture. In the ancient league they were ruled by the Council of Sachems of the various tribes, the central council-fire being upon the shore of Onondaga Lake, and the Atotarho, or head sachem of the Onondagas, being chief of the league.

In colonial New York the westernmost tribe was the Senecas, whose hunting-grounds extended from the Central Lake District to Lakes Ontario and Erie. When the Dutch pioneers encountered these Indians they were found to have the almost unpronounceable name of "Tsonnundawaonos," meaning the "great hill people," and the nearest the Dutch could come to it was to call them "Sinnekaas," which in time was changed to Senecas. The Quakers took great interest in them, with such fostering care that three thousand Senecas now live on the sixty-six thousand acres in their reservations. They have their own Indian language and special alphabet, and portions of the Scriptures are printed in it. In their days of power they had two famous chiefs—Cornplanter, also called Captain O'Beel, the name of his white father, he being a half-breed, and Red Jacket. The latter lived till 1830 in the Senecas' village near Buffalo. His original Indian name was Otetiani, or "Always Ready," and the popular title came from a richly-embroidered scarlet jacket given him by a British officer, which he always had great pride in wearing. He was a leader among the Indians of his time and an impressive orator. Next eastward of the Senecas were the Cayugas, who, when discovered by the French on the banks of their lake, had about three hundred warriors, and in the seventeenth century, under French tutelage, their chiefs became Christians. A remnant of the tribe is in the Indian Territory. The Onondagas were the "men of the mountain," getting their name from the highlands where they lived, south of Onondaga Lake. There are about three hundred now on their reservation and as many more in Canada. Their language is regarded as the purest of the Iroquois dialects, and its dictionary has been published. Farther eastward, where the granite outcroppings of the southern Adirondack ranges appeared, were the Oneidas, the "tribe of the granite rock," now having on their reservation at Oneida Castle over two hundred, with many more in Wisconsin and Canada. The Tuscaroras came into the league in 1713, and were given a location on the southeastern shore of Oneida Lake, and they are now on a reservation in Western New York, where over three hundred live, with more in Canada. Their name was of modern adoption, after they had assumed some of the habits of the whites, and means the "shirt-wearers."

The Mohawks lived farther east, in the Mohawk Valley, among the limestone and granitic formations of the Adirondacks and Eastern New York, and they were the Agmaque, meaning "the possessors of the flint." Within the league their name was Ganniagwari, or the "She-Bear," whence the Algonquins called them Mahaque, which the English gradually corrupted into Mohawk, the name being also adopted for their river. The early Dutch settlers at Albany made a treaty with them which was lasting, and the English also had their friendship. Their most noted chief was Thayendanega, better known as Joseph Brant, who espoused the English cause in the Revolution and held a post in the Canadian Indian Department, his tribe then extending throughout the whole region between the St. Lawrence and the Hudson. He visited England in 1786 and collected money to build a church for his people, and published the Prayer-Book and the Gospel of Mark in Mohawk and English. He steadily exerted himself after the Revolution to maintain peace between the frontier Indians and the United States, being zealously devoted to the welfare of his tribe. He had an estate on the shore of Lake Ontario, where he died in 1807.

LITTLE FALLS AND UTICA.

In ascending the Mohawk valley the distant view is circumscribed on the south by the Catskills and Helderbergs, and on the north by the Adirondack ranges. The outcrops of the latter compress upon the river in long protruding crags covered with firs and known as the "Noses." There are various villages, started in the eighteenth century as frontier posts among the Indians. There are also hop-fields in plenty and much pasture, and finally the hills become higher and the valley narrower as Little Falls is reached, where the Mohawk forces a passage through a spur of the Adirondacks, known as the Rollaway. The river, approaching the gorge, sharply bends from east to south, and plunges wildly down a series of rapids, the town being set among the rocky precipices right in the throat of the defile. The place is heaped with rocks, the stream falling forty-two feet within a thousand yards, the descent forming three separate cataracts, which give power to numerous mills on the banks and clustering upon an island in the rapids. They make cheese and paper, and on either hand precipitous crags rise five hundred feet above them. The pass is very narrow, compressing the Erie Canal and the New York Central and West Shore Railways closely upon the river; in fact, the canal passage has been blasted out of the solid granite on the southern river-bank. Here can be readily studied the crystalline rocks of the Laurentian formation, which are described as "part of the oldest dry land on the face of the globe." It is this pass through the mountains, made by the Mohawk, that gives the Erie Canal and the Vanderbilt railways their low-level route between the Atlantic seaboard and the West. All the other trunk railways climb the Allegheny ranges and cross them at elevations of two thousand feet or more, while here the elevation is not four hundred feet, thus avoiding steep gradients and expensive hauling. The Rollaway stretches for a long distance, clothed to its summit with pines and birches.

Beyond, the amber waters of Canada Creek flow in from the north, giving the Mohawk a largely increased current, and the land becomes a region of gentle hills, with meadows and herds, a scene of pastoral beauty, the great dairy region of New York. Here is Herkimer, which was an Indian frontier fort, and a few miles farther is Utica, the dairymen's and cheese-makers' headquarters, a city of fifty thousand people. The whole Mohawk valley for miles has an atmosphere of peacefulness and content, innumerable cows and sheep grazing and resting upon the rich pastures. The river is narrow and meanders slowly past Utica, which is built to the southward along the banks of the canal. This city also grew up around an Indian border post. General Schuyler, who came westward from Albany, seeking trade, built Fort Schuyler here in 1758, the grant of land being known as Cosby's Manor. Then a block-house was built, but the settlement, known as Old Fort Schuyler, grew very little until after the canal was opened. Utica had the honor of producing two of the leading men of New York, Roscoe Conkling and Horatio Seymour, the latter having been Governor of New York and the Democratic candidate for President when General Grant was first elected in 1868. The city rises gradually upon a gentle slope south of the Mohawk, until it reaches one hundred and fifty feet elevation, Genesee street, the chief highway, wide and attractive, extending back from the river and across the canal, bordered by elegant residences, fronted by lawns and fine shade trees. Its leading public institution is the State Lunatic Asylum, but its pride is the regulation of the butter and cheese trades of New York.

In journeying through New York, it is noticed that there is an ambitious nomenclature. The towns are given classic names, as if there had been an early immigration of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Thus we were at Troy on the Hudson, and coming up the Mohawk have passed Fonda, Palatine bridge and Ilion on the route to Utica, while farther on are Rome and Verona. It seems that in the primitive days of New York old Simeon de Witt was the Surveyor General, and under his auspices the remorseless college graduate is said to have wandered over the country with instrument and map and scattered broadcast classic names. These flourish most in Western New York. Albion and Attica, Corfu and Palmyra, are near neighbors there, the latter being chiefly known to fame as the place where the original Mormon apostle, "Joe Smith," claimed to have found the sacred golden plates of the Mormon bible and the stone spectacles through which he interpreted the signs written upon them. Memphis is near by, and Macedon and Jordan are adjacent villages. Pompey, Virgil and Ulysses are named up, and Ovid is between Lakes Seneca and Cayuga, with Geneva at the foot of Seneca and Ithaca at the head of Cayuga. Auburn—"loveliest village of the plain"—is to the eastward, and Aurelius, Marcellus and Camillus are railway stations on the route to Syracuse, one of whose former names was Corinth. To the southward is Homer, having Nineveh and Manlius near by; Venice is not far away, and Babylon is down on Long Island. The Mohawk thus heads in classic ground, rising in the highlands of Oneida about twenty miles north of Rome, past which it flows a small and winding brook through the almost level country. Rome, unlike its ancient namesake, has no hills at all, but is built upon a plain, having grown up around the Indian frontier outpost of Fort Stanwix of the Revolution, the battle of Oriskany, in August, 1777, which cut off the reinforcements going to Burgoyne at Saratoga, thus helping to defeat him, having been fought just outside its limits. There are about seventeen thousand people in Rome, which is a prominent lumber market, being at the junction of the Erie and Black River Canals, the latter fetching lumber down from Canada, which has come through Lake Ontario. From Rome the narrow Mohawk flows to Utica, and thence with broadening current onward to the Hudson, its whole length being about one hundred and forty miles. Its gentle course and pastoral beauty remind of the pleasant lines of that poet of nature, John Dyer:

"And see the rivers how they run

Through woods and meads, in shade and sun,

Sometimes swift, sometimes slow,—

Wave succeeding wave, they go

A various journey to the deep,

Like human life to endless sleep!"

TRENTON FALLS.

In the hills north of Utica, the West Canada Creek cuts its remarkable gorge at Trenton Falls. It is a vigorous stream, rising in the western slopes of the Adirondacks and flowing to the Mohawk. In getting down through the limestone rocks from the highlands to the plain adjacent to the river, it passes into the ravine, giving a magnificent display of chasms, cascades and rapids, in a gorge of such amazing construction that it is regarded as a wonder second only to Niagara. During the ages, the torrent has cut through over four hundred layers of the stratified limestone, exposing the geological formation to full view, with the fossil organic remains deposited there as the world was built. In descending the ravine, there are five prominent cataracts, besides rapids, all compressed within two miles distance, the aggregate descent being three hundred and twelve feet. This wonderful gorge was the Indian Kauy-a-hoo-ra, or the "Leaping Water," and from its color they called the stream Kahnata, the "amber water," a name readily corrupted into Canada Creek. The Dutch called the place after the Grand Pensioner of Holland, Oldenbarneveld, he having sent out the first colonists under a grant known as the "Holland Patent." It was in this region Grover Cleveland spent his early life. A grandson of Roger Sherman, who had charge of the Unitarian church here, is regarded as the discoverer of the ravine in 1805, and he did much to make it known to the world. His grave is within sound of the Sherman Fall.

Entering the chasm at the lower end, where the stream passes out from the rock terrace to the plain, the ravine is found to be about one hundred feet deep, the almost perpendicular rocky walls built up in level layers as if by hands, the well-defined separate strata being from one inch to a foot in thickness, and narrowest at the bottom. Hemlocks and cedars crown the blackened rocks, their branches hanging over the abyss, while far below, the boisterous torrent rushes across the pavement of broad flagstones forming its bed. Descending to the bottom, the impression is like being in a deep vault, this subterranean world disclosing operations lasting through ages, during which the rocks have slowly yielded to the resistless power of the water and frost that has gradually cut the chasm. Fossils and petrifactions found in the deepest strata are trod upon, and each thin layer of the walls, one imposed upon the other, shows the deposit of a supervening flood happening successively, yet eternity only knows how long ago. And ages afterwards the torrent came, and during more successive ages carved out the gorge, until it has penetrated to the bottom of the limestone.

The torrent flows briskly out of the long and narrow vault, while some distance above is the lowest of the series of cataracts—the Sherman Fall—where the water plunges over a parapet of rock forty feet high into a huge basin it has worked out. The amber-colored waters boil furiously in this cauldron. Above the Sherman Fall the stream flows through rapids, the chasm broadening and the lofty walls rising higher as the hill-tops are more elevated, mounting to two hundred feet above the torrent at a lofty point called the Pinnacle. The floor of the ravine is level, and becomes quite wide, with massive slabs, weighing tons, resting upon it, showing the power of freshets which bring them down from above, and will ultimately carry them completely through the gorge to its outlet, so resistless is the sweep of the raging flood at such times, when every bound these huge stones make over the rocky floor causes the neighboring hills to vibrate, the stifled thunder of their progress being heard above the roar of waters. At the head of this widened gorge is the High Falls, in a grand amphitheatre, the cataract broken into parts and combining all the varieties of cascade and waterfall, being one hundred feet high, and the walls of the chasm rising eighty feet higher to the surface of the land above, which keeps on rising as the ends of the limestone strata are surmounted. The top of this High Fall is another perpendicular wall stretching diagonally across the chasm, and below it the protruding layers of rock form a sort of huge stairway. Down this the waters fall in varying fashion, finally condensing as a mass of whirling, shifting foam into a dark pool beneath. This splendid cataract is fringed about with evergreens and shrubbery, for between the dark thin slabs of limestone are inserted thinner strata of crumbling shale, and these give root-hold to the cedars and other nodding branches clinging to the walls of the ravine. The waterfall begins at the top with the color of melted topaz, and is unlike anything elsewhere seen, for the hemlocks and spruces of the mountain regions impart the amber hue to the torrent. Descending, the changing tints become steadily lighter, until the brown turns to a creamy white, which is finally lost under the cloud of spray at the foot of the lower stairway slide, while beyond, the water rushes away black in hue and driving forward almost as if shot from a cannon.

Above is another great amphitheatre, floored with rocky layers, upon which the stream flows in gentler course. In this is the Milldam Fall, a ledge about fourteen feet high, over which the waters make a uniform flow all across the ravine. This has above it an expanded platform of level slabs almost a hundred feet wide, fringed on each side with cedars, the attractive place being called the Alhambra. At the upper end a naked rock protrudes about sixty feet high, from which a stream falls as a perpetual shower-bath. The creek rushes down another complex stairway in the Alhambra Cascade. The ravine above suddenly contracts, and the walls beyond change their forms into shapes of curves and projections. Another cascade of whirling, foaming waters is passed, and a new amphitheatre entered, where great slabs of rock have fallen from the walls and lie on the floor, ready to be driven down the ravine by freshets. The torrent here develops another curious formation, known as the Rocky Heart. Curved holes are being rounded out by whirling boulders of granite, which are kept constantly revolving by the running water, and thus readily act upon the softer limestones. The chasm goes still farther up to the Prospect Falls, a cataract twenty feet high, near the beginning of the ravine.

Canada Creek passes out of the lower end of the gorge, where the limestone layers are exhausted, and their edges fall off in terraces sharply to the lower level, and almost down to the surface of the stream. All about the broadened channel, as it flows away towards the Mohawk, lie the huge slabs and boulders driven down through the chasm by repeated freshets, with the amber waters foaming among them. This wonderful ravine is a geological mine, disclosing the transition rocks, the first containing fossil organic remains. In the lower part of the chasm they are compact carbonate of lime, extremely hard and brittle, and a dark blue, almost black, in color. At the High Fall, and above to the Rocky Heart, the upper strata are from twelve to eighteen inches thick, and composed of the crystallized fragments of the vertebræ of crinoidea and the shells of terebratulæ. These fossils of the Silurian period are numerous. The strata throughout the chasm are remarkably horizontal, varying, as they ascend, from one inch to eighteen inches in thickness. They are very distinct, and separated by a fine shaly substance which disintegrates upon exposure to the air or moisture. From the top to the bottom of the ravine small cracks extend down perpendicularly, and run in a straight line through the whole mass across the stream. These divide the pavements into rhomboidal slabs. The most interesting fossils are found, among them the large trilobite, a crustacean that could both swim and crawl upon the bottom of the sea. This extraordinary place is in reality a Titanic fissure, cracked through the crust of mother earth, down which roars and dashes a tremendous torrent.

THE LAKES OF NEW YORK.

The northwestern boundary of the State of New York is formed by Lake Ontario, of which the St. Lawrence River is the outlet, flowing northeastward into Canada. Ontario is the smallest and the lowest in level of the group of Great Lakes, its name given by the Indians meaning the "beautiful water." It is about one hundred and eighty miles long, and its surface is two hundred and thirty-one feet above tide, but it is fully five hundred feet deep, so that it has more depth below the ocean level than the lake surface is above. It has a marked feature along its southern shore, where a narrow elevation known as the "Lake Ridge" extends nearly parallel with the edge of the lake, and from four to eight miles distant. The height of this ridge usually exceeds one hundred and sixty feet above the lake level, and in some places is nearly two hundred feet, and it is, throughout, from five to twenty feet above the immediate surface of the land, there being a width at the summit of some thirty feet, from which the ground slopes away on both sides. This ridge is regarded as an ancient shore-line formed by the waters of the lake, and the chief public highway on the southern side of the lake is laid for many miles along its summit. The main tributaries of Ontario from New York are the Black, Oswego and Genesee Rivers. The Black River gathers various streams draining the western slopes of the Adirondacks, and its name comes from the dark amber hue of the waters. It flows northwest through a forest-covered region, pours down Lyons Falls, a fine cataract of seventy feet, passes the manufacturing towns of Lowville and Watertown, and finally discharges by the broadened estuary of Black River Bay into the east end of Lake Ontario. From Rome, on the Mohawk, a canal is constructed northward to the Black River.

Westward from Rome the land is an almost level plain, rising into the Onondaga highlands to the southward. Cazenovia Lake, among these hills, sends its outlet northward over the plain to Oneida Lake. There are various little lakelets between, but the ground is impregnated with sulphur, so that their waters are bitter, and one is consequently named Lake Sodom. Oneida is a large lake, twenty-three miles long and several miles broad, with low and marshy shores. In the fertile dairy region to the southeastward is located the "Inspiration Community" of Oneida, founded in 1847 by John Humphrey Noyes, a Vermont preacher. In 1834, when twenty-three years old, he experienced what he called a "second conversion," and announced himself a "perfectionist." He preached his new faith and finally established the Oneida Community for its demonstration, with about three hundred members. They maintain the perfect equality of women with men in all social and business relations, and have become quite wealthy as manufacturers, farmers and dairymen. The outlet of Oneida Lake, and in fact the outlet streams of all the lakes of Central New York, discharge into Oswego River, which flows northward into Lake Ontario. Oswego means "the small water flowing into that which is large," and the port at its mouth, noted for its flour and starch-mills, has about twenty-five thousand people, and is the largest city on the New York shore of Lake Ontario. This was an early French settlement in the seventeenth century, when the river was known by them as the "river of the Onondagas."

The great plain south of Lake Ontario, which is believed to have been itself formerly a lake bed, rises into highlands farther southward, and the noted group of lakes of Central New York are scattered in the valleys which are deeply fissured into these highlands. Most of these lakes are long and narrow, and they nestle in almost parallel valleys, their waters occupying the bottoms of deep ravines. These lakes present much fine scenery, and their shores are among the most attractive parts of New York. They display vineyards and fruit orchards and extensive pastures, and their present names are the original titles given them by the Iroquois, many of whom still live on reservations near them. Southwest of Oneida is Onondaga Lake, and farther west Skaneateles and Owasco. Then beyond is the larger Cayuga Lake, and to the westward Seneca, the largest of the group, sixty miles long, elevated two hundred feet above Lake Ontario, and of great depth, estimated to exceed six hundred feet. This lake was never known to be frozen over but once, and that was late in March many years ago; steamboats traverse it every day in the year. Cayuga Lake is of similar character, but of slightly less size and elevation, and in some places is so deep as to be almost unfathomable. These parallel lakes are separated by an elevated ridge only a few miles wide, and their great depth, descending much below the level of Ontario, into which they discharge, gives evidence to the geologists that their waters originally drained to the southward. Westward of Seneca is Keuka or the Crooked Lake, the Indian name meaning "the lake of the Bended Elbow." It is a pretty sheet of water, having an angle in its centre, from which starts out another long and narrow branch, so that its spreading arms make it look much like the aboriginal signification. It is elevated two hundred and seventy-seven feet above the level of Seneca Lake, which is only seven miles away. Beyond Keuka is Canandaigua Lake, the westernmost of the group.

THE SYRACUSE SALT-MAKERS.

Onondaga Lake is comparatively small, being six miles long and about a mile broad, and it is noted for its salt wells, which have made the prosperity of the city of Syracuse, the largest in Central New York, built along Onondaga Creek south of the lake, and upon the slopes of the higher hills to the eastward. An Indian trader started the town in the eighteenth century, and soon afterwards Asa Danforth began making salt at Salt Point on the lake, calling his village Salina. When the Erie Canal came along the place grew rapidly, and it is now a great canal and railroad centre, with lines radiating in various directions, and from it the Oswego Canal goes northward to Lake Ontario. The city has a population approximating a hundred thousand. The salt springs come out of the rocks of the Upper Silurian period, and are located chiefly in the marshes bordering Onondaga Lake. The brine wells are bored in the lowlands surrounding the lake to a depth of two hundred to over three hundred feet. The State of New York controls the wells and pumps the brine to supply the evaporating works, which are private establishments, a royalty of one cent per bushel being charged. The main impurity that has to be driven out of the brine is sulphate of lime, and the finer product has a high reputation, the "Onondaga Factory-Filled Salt" being greatly esteemed. The salt wells were known to the Indians, and the French Jesuit missionaries found them as early as 1650, taking salt back to Canada. In 1789 they yielded five hundred bushels, and they have since produced as high as nine millions of bushels a year, the annual product now being about three millions. The brine is first pumped into small shallow vats, where it remains until the carbonic acid gas escapes and the iron is deposited as an oxide. It is then led to the evaporating vats, all processes being used, solar as well as boiling. The land bordering the marshy shores of Onondaga Lake is framed around by rows of factories and heating furnaces, while out on the marshes are clusters of little brown houses, each covering a well and pump. From there the brine is led through conduits made of bored logs, called the "salt logs," to the evaporating vats and factories, some going long distances. Everything throughout the whole district is profusely saturated with salt.

Syracuse is one of the handsomest cities of the Empire State. The New York Central Railroad passes through the centre of the business section, the locomotives and ordinary traffic sharing the main street in common, in front of the chief hotels and stores, for thus has the town grown up. Just northward, the Erie Canal also goes through the heart of the city, giving on moonlight nights scenes that are almost Venetian. The streets are broad, and ornamental squares are frequent, the chief residential highways—James, Genesee and University Streets—being bordered with imposing dwellings surrounded by extensive grounds. Magnificent trees line the streets and broad lawns stretch back to the dwellings, everything being open to public view, so that in these parts the town is practically a vast park. To the eastward rises University Hill, crowned by the buildings of Syracuse University, a Methodist foundation having eleven hundred students. Holden Observatory adjoins the grand graystone main college building, and from this high hill there is a magnificent view over the city and the oval-shaped lake and its salt marsh border off to the northwest. The southern view is enclosed by the Onondaga highlands, out of which Onondaga Creek comes through a deep and winding valley. Back among these dark blue distant hills still live in pastoral simplicity the remnants of the "Men of the Mountain,"—the Onondagas,—the ruling power of the famous Iroquois Confederation.

AUBURN, ITHACA AND CORNELL.

Westward from Syracuse the country is full of lakes. Otisco Lake,—the "Bitter-nut Hickory,"—is an oval four miles long, embosomed in hills. To the northwest of Otisco is Skaneateles Lake—the "Long Water"—the most picturesque of all, set among most imposing hills, which, notwithstanding the lake is elevated eight hundred and sixty feet, still rise twelve hundred feet above its surface, giving the waters the deeply blue tinge of an Italian scene. This lovely lake is sixteen miles long, and in no place more than a mile and a half wide, its outlet having a fine cataract. To the westward is Owasco Lake—"the bridge on the water floating"—eleven miles long and a mile wide, walled in by rocky bluffs, yet having its shores diversified by meadows and farm land. About two miles northward, on its outlet, is the busy manufacturing city of Auburn, with thirty thousand people, which was the home of William H. Seward, Governor and Senator from New York, who was President Lincoln's Secretary of State during the Civil War. Its most extensive establishment is the Auburn Prison, covering about eighteen acres, enclosed by walls four feet thick and twelve to thirty-five feet high, there being imprisoned usually about twelve hundred convicts. The surface of the city is varied by hills, making handsome villa sites, and the Owasco Lake outlet flows down a series of rapids, falling one hundred and sixty feet, and utilized by no less than nine dams to turn the wheels of many mills. Captain Hardenburgh was the first settler here in 1793, the original name being "Hardenburgh's Corners." On Fort Hill, one of the highest elevations, the top of which is supposed to be an eminence originally raised by the ancient Mound-Builders, and was an Iroquois fortification, is the Cemetery where are interred the remains of William H. Seward, who died in 1872.

After crossing a rich grazing country, farther to the westward is Cayuga Lake—the name meaning "Where they take canoes out"—stretching from the level plain of Central New York southward into the highlands, making the watershed between the affluents of the St. Lawrence and the Susquehanna. Progressing southward along the long and narrow lake, the hills are found to grow steadily higher, and they reach an elevation of several hundred feet above its surface. The bordering rocky buttresses rise up as columns and walls, with accurately-squared corners, their perpendicular stratification making the flagstone layers that have been loosened by the frost stand on edge and separately, seeming almost ready to topple over, while heaps of broken fragments are strewn at their bases, which, being pulverized by the action of frost and water into small particles, produce a smooth and narrow beach. At the head of the lake the deep valley is prolonged farther southward between even higher enclosing ridges, the Cayuga Inlet winding through it. Here, about a mile from the lake, is a flourishing town of twelve thousand people, reproducing the name of the Ionian Island that was the fabled kingdom of Ulysses—Ithaca. It is the centre of a grazing region, producing cheese, butter and wool, and its water-power has given some manufacturing activity, but it is chiefly known to fame from the surrounding galaxy of waterfalls and the possession of Cornell University.

Cayuga Lake, at its head, has a rugged verge, and in the glens and gorges descending four to five hundred feet from the hills to the lake and its prolonged southern valley, are some of nature's most beautiful sanctuaries. Fall Creek has eight cataracts within a mile, all of them charming. It comes tumbling down the Triphammer Fall into a basin, then over one cascade after another until it plunges down a foaming precipice and finally goes over the Ithaca Fall, one hundred and sixty feet high and about as wide. Alongside the lake, near the outlet of this brook, are remarkable formations,—Tower Rock, a perfect columnar structure forty feet high, and Castle Rock, a massive wall with a grand arched doorway opened through it—both strange freaks of nature. The ravine of Cascadilla Creek to the southward is also filled with cascades, and on an elevated plateau between the two gorges is Cornell University. The most noted waterfall of Cayuga is the Taghanic—the original Indian word meaning "Water enough." A stream flows in from the western hills a short distance north of Ithaca, and the fall is two hundred and fifteen feet high and some distance back in the ridge. Its interesting features are the great height, the very deep ravine and its sharply-defined outlines, and the splendid views; and its admirers regard it as a worthy rival of the much-praised Swiss Staubbach. The water breaks over a cleanly-cut table-rock, falls perpendicularly, and excepting in freshets, it changes into clouds of spray before reaching the bottom. The rocky enclosing walls rise four hundred feet high around it, being regularly squared as if laid by human hands, and this is the highest American waterfall east of the Rockies.

High above Ithaca, standing upon the brow of the ridge making its eastern border, are the imposing buildings of Cornell University, devoted to the free education of both sexes in all branches of knowledge, the spreading college campus elevated four hundred feet above the lake. Here are educated eighteen hundred students, who have about one hundred and eighty instructors. The College of Forestry, established in 1898, is the only one in the country. The University has munificent endowments, becoming constantly more valuable, as lands of steadily increasing worth are among the holdings, the aggregate being estimated at $8,000,000. At the edge of Ithaca is the mansion which was the home of Ezra Cornell the founder, who amassed a fortune mainly in telegraphy, he then being at the head of the Western Union Company. To his generosity was added the proceeds of the ample school lands of New York State, the gift of the Federal Government, which he selected with scrupulous care, and these gave the University its start. He died in 1874. Others gave supplementary gifts. John McGraw of Ithaca gave McGraw College, the central building on the campus, two hundred feet long, with a tower rising one hundred and twenty feet, containing the great University bell with full chimes, and having a view forty miles northward along the lake and almost half as far southward through the deep valley. This structure is flanked by the North and South University buildings, each one hundred and sixty-five feet long, all three substantially constructed of dark blue stone with light gray limestone trimmings. There are also the Sibley Building, and the magnificent Cascadilla Hall, nearly two hundred feet long, which is a residence for instructors and students. The Sage College for females and other handsome buildings adorn the campus, including an armory, for everything is taught, and a battery of mounted cannon guards the approach to the grounds.

HAVANA AND WATKINS GLENS.

Seneca Lake, the largest of the group, is a short distance west of Cayuga, and its prolonged southern valley is bordered by ridges rising even higher, through which the streams have carved remarkable gorges. Two of the larger torrents coming into the prolonged Seneca Valley have hewn out of the hillsides, one on either hand, romantic fissures of wide renown,—the Havana and Watkins Glens. The Havana Glen is three miles south of the lake and about a mile long, being cut out of the eastern wall of the valley. The ravine is steep, having quite a large stream. Its characteristic is that the water and frost have made great fissures and caverns, but so fashioned them that all the joints and corners are right-angles. The cascades are successions of ledges, the water apparently running down a staircase. If the stream runs over a waterfall, it comes from a level ledge as if running over a wall. If it rushes through a gorge, all the corners are square, the sides perpendicular and the bottom level. If a brigade of stonemasons had built the place it could hardly have been more accurately constructed. Several of the cascades are magnificent, the "Bridal Veil" and the "Curtain Falls" going down a maze of rocky ledges, their frothy waters making resplendent sheets of exquisite lacework. In one place the stream flows through a perfectly square grotto known as the "Council Chamber," entering this great hall by a right-angled bend from an adjoining square-cut grotto of similar character. Each is a perfect apartment, the water rushing from one to the other through an entry-like passage, from which it makes a square turn. The glen is quite steep, and its "Central Gorge" is a narrow fissure, clean-cut and deep, making a half-dozen right-angled bends, each lower than the other, the torrent rushing around the sharp corners and over the straight edges with wild swiftness and clouds of spray. The visitor mounts ladders and steps through the spray, and the glen can be followed a long distance upward past many cascades, its picturesqueness being enhanced by the huge tree-trunks the torrent occasionally brings down and lodges in the many angular bends.

Watkins Glen

Watkins Glen, carved out of the western wall of the valley just at the head of Seneca Lake, is constructed upon a grander scale, yet entirely different. The torrent has hewn it among similarly laminated rocks, but the erosive processes have made vast amphitheatres, their great size dwarfing the diminutive brook flowing like a thread at the bottom. The entrance, level with the floor of the valley, presents the same squared and angular features as Havana Glen, but inside it is a grand amphitheatre enclosed within perpendicular stone walls three hundred feet high, and is proportionately spacious. It is quickly seen, however, that within the grand hall the rocky layers, instead of being squared and angular, have been smoothed and rounded by the waters, the small but dashing stream flowing over the floor by graceful curves through circular pools and winding channels. This glen is built on a prodigious scale, being over three miles long, and its head rising eight hundred feet above the valley. A narrow cascade eighty feet high falls at the far end of the entrance amphitheatre, and climbing up, the visitor enters "Glen Alpha," the first of the vast chambers. There are successive glens and caverns as one proceeds onward and upward through the "Cavern Gorge" and "Glen Obscura," where a hotel and chalet are perched on the rocky ledges at four hundred feet elevation. Above is the "Sylvan Gorge," and then the fissure broadens out into its grandest section, the "Glen Cathedral," a magnificent nave, with walls rising nearly three hundred feet, the rocky layers giving it a level stone floor. It has the "Pulpit Rock" and "Baptismal Font," and climbing out one hundred and seventy feet upward alongside a cascade, the visitor then goes onward past more grottoes, falls and gorges for a long distance, until the "Glen Omega" is reached at the top. Here an airy railway bridge of one of the Vanderbilt roads spans it at two hundred feet height above the floor.

The shores of Seneca Lake, as one progresses northward, present various pretty little glens cut deeply into the bordering hills, and as these become lower there are vineyards and pastures displayed. Gradually the bluffs disappear, giving place to extensive farm lands as the level plain at the outlet is reached. Here, in imitation of a noble Swiss example, the town of Geneva has been built at the foot of the lake, its chief street extending along the western bank, with villas peeping out from the foliage. This is a prominent nursery town, florists and seedsmen being its chief merchants, and a large part of the adjacent country being devoted to seed-growing and propagation. Hobart College, a leading Episcopal foundation, is at Geneva. The outlet of the lake is the Seneca River, having an attractive waterfall, and after gathering the outflow of this group of Central New York lakes, it goes away northeastward to Oswego River.

CANISTEO AND CHEMUNG RIVERS.

There are yet two other lakes westward of Seneca, Keuka and Canandaigua. This region was generally first peopled by the Puritans, but others also came in, and at the outlet of Keuka is the town of Penn Yan, so called from the Pennsylvanians and Yankees who settled it, their descendants being the shrewd and thrifty race known as the "New York Yankees." There are extensive vineyards on Keuka where are made some of the best American clarets and champagnes, the centre of that industry being Hammondsport, at the head of the lake. Beyond is Canandaigua Lake, the town of Canandaigua standing at its northern end upon a surface gently sloping towards its shores. The word means the "place chosen for a village." The heads of all these lakes are in the southern highlands, making the watershed, south of which the streams are gathered into the Canisteo River, meaning "the board on the water," which flows into the Chemung, the "big horn," and thence by the Susquehanna down through Pennsylvania to the Chesapeake. The Erie Railway, coming eastward by a wild and lonely route across the Allegheny ranges, goes down the pretty Canisteo Valley to Hornellsville, a purely railroad town of twelve thousand people, which has grown up around the shops and stations. Below, the valley broadens, and is picturesque between its high bordering ridges, the stream meandering in wayward fashion over the almost flat intervale. It passes Addison and the town with the unique name of Painted Post, so called from an Indian monument inscribed in colors, and as the Canisteo River broadens with the contribution of its swelling tributaries, it reaches the active manufacturing city of Corning, having ten thousand people, and here falls into the Chemung, which comes up northward out of the Allegheny ranges in Pennsylvania to meet it. The Chemung Valley is a broad and fertile section of flat and highly cultivated bottom lands, having in its heart the city of Elmira, with thirty-five thousand inhabitants and many industrial establishments, making it a busy railroad centre. Here is the Elmira Reformatory, the Elmira Female College, and the various "Water Cures," a species of remedial establishment flourishing throughout Western New York, where there is apparently no limit to the efficacy or bountifulness of the water-supply. The broad Chemung flows through Elmira and beyond down its rich and wide-spreading valley, until at Athens it loses itself in the swelling waters of the Susquehanna.

THE VALLEY OF THE GENESEE.

Among the rugged mountains of Potter County, in the northern part of Pennsylvania, the highest land in the State, are the springs feeding the headwaters of three noted rivers, seeking the ocean in opposite directions. The Allegheny flows westward and afterwards southward to the Ohio; the west branch of the Susquehanna goes eastward to break through the entire Allegheny chain in seeking the Atlantic; and the smaller stream, the Genesee, flows northward through New York between two long Allegheny ridges, the chief affluent of Lake Ontario. The Genesee passes through a valley of great beauty and gives water-power to many mills, a canal also being constructed to improve its navigation. After a romantic course of one hundred and fifty miles it empties into the lake at Charlotte, seven miles north of Rochester. For much of the distance its course is through a magnificent gorge, with a succession of cataracts that are renowned in American scenery. Where it first attacks the highlands of New York to break out of them, it plunges deeper and deeper down a series of grand cataracts at Portage. Here the Erie Railway, coming from the westward, has boldly thrown a stupendous bridge across the tremendous chasm and almost over the top of the highest cataract. The river makes a gorge in the yielding rocks, sinking from two hundred and fifty to six hundred feet deep, and here are the Portage Falls, one cataract after another making the stream-bed lower, the walls of the wild ravine rising almost perpendicularly. The railway, crossing at the most favorable place, has built one of the highest bridges in the country, elevated two hundred and thirty-five feet above the river, resting upon lightly-framed steel trusses. From the car windows the river can be seen far below in what seems a narrow fissure, the current boiling along and then tumbling down the cataract, the edge of which crosses the river diagonally almost beneath the bridge. The waters pour into a chasm seeming almost bottomless as the spray obscures it. The ravine extends northward, and in the distance the waters go over a second fall and then a third, the chasm finally curving around to the right, making a bend, closing the view more than a mile away, with an enormous wall of bare rock. The three cataracts fall respectively seventy, one hundred and ten and one hundred and fifty feet—called the Upper, Middle and Lower Portage Falls—and for several miles below, the river flows through the deeper ravine amid equally magnificent surroundings.

This descent brings the Genesee River down from the higher plateau to what is known as the "Genesee Level," for at the end of the defile, fifteen miles below Portage, it flows out of the highlands over pleasant lands and with gentler current. Here on the "Genesee Flats" is the village of Mount Morris, and near it has been placed, alongside the ravine, the rude log cabin, which was originally on the higher land above Portage, the Indian "Council House of Cascadea," where the Iroquois chiefs often met. At the removal in 1872, the services were conducted in the Senecas language, several Indians attending, and the identical "pipe of peace" given by Washington to Red Jacket was passed around. Nearby the river emerges through a Titanic gateway in the rocks to the pastoral region stretching far to the northward, while far over on the eastern verge is the village of Geneseo, sloping up the ascent. Its Indian name, meaning the "beautiful valley," is also given the river. After meandering placidly for miles across these flats, the Genesee River reaches the "Flour City of the West," Rochester, the storage and distributing mart for this fertile valley, getting its original start and title from the prolific wheat crops. And here the Genesee plunges down another waterfall which gives power to the Rochester mills.

When De Witt Clinton, in 1810, exploring the route for the Erie Canal, crossed the river here, there was not a house. The place was afterwards the "Hundred Acre Tract," planned in 1812 for a settlement by three adventurous frontiersmen, and the town was named for one of them, Nathaniel Rochester. After a few years, the spreading fame of the fertility of the Genesee Valley attracted a large population, and it became known as the garden spot of the then "West," so that out of this grew the flour-mills which have continued to be Rochester's chief industry. The Genesee River flows through with swift current, the Erie Canal being carried over on a massive stone aqueduct and the New York Central Railroad upon a wide bridge, and about a hundred yards beyond, the river plunges down the great Rochester Fall. The ledge over which it tumbles is a perpendicular wall, straight and regular in formation, and almost without fragments of rock at the foot, so that the fall is a clear one. The shores below are lined with huge stone mills and breweries, to which races on each bank conduct the water from a dam above the railroad bridge. This Rochester Fall, down which Sam Patch jumped to his death, is ninety-six feet high. Below it, the river flows through a somewhat wider channel, gradually bending to the left, and then it goes down a second cataract of twenty-five feet height, and finally, at some distance, over a third and broken fall of eighty-four feet. As at Portage, this second succession of triple cataracts sinks the river bed deeper and deeper into the gorge, so that the enclosing walls are in some places over three hundred feet high. This gorge is all within the limits of the city, the falls and rapids having a total descent of two hundred and sixty feet. This immense water-power, with the traffic facilities of canal and railway, have made the city, so that there is a population of a hundred and forty thousand around the Genesee Falls, and manufactures of flour, beer, clothing, leather and other articles, valued at $75,000,000 annually. In the neighboring region there is also extensive seed-growing, the Rochester nurseries occupying miles of the level surface. Rochester University has two hundred students and valuable geological collections. The city has been a headquarters for the Spiritualists and advocates of Women's Rights. The Genesee emerges from the rocky gorge below Rochester, and flows in more tranquil course northward through a ravine carved deeply into the table-land, to Lake Ontario, at the little port of Charlotte.

LOCKPORT, CHAUTAUQUA AND ERIE.

Westward from Rochester the country is underlaid by red sandstones, and at Medina quarries are plentiful, this reproduction of the Arabian "City of the Prophet" being an extensive supplier of these dark-red Medina sandstones, as the geologists call them. Beyond, at Lockport, the higher terrace is reached, and here the Erie Canal is raised by an imposing series of five double locks from the Genesee level up to the Lake Erie level. Through these locks and by means of a subsidiary canal an immense water-power is obtained which is utilized by the Lockport mills. The much lower Genesee level is marked by the base of a bluff, stretching through the town and across the adjacent region, evidently the bank of an ancient lake.

In western New York a high ridge crosses the country south of Lake Erie, and to the southward of its most elevated portion there stretches the elongated Chautauqua Lake, almost bisected by two jutting points at its centre. This charming lake is eighteen miles long, three or four miles wide, and elevated seven hundred and thirty feet above Lake Erie, its outlet draining southward into a tributary of the Allegheny River. Its elevation above tide is nearly thirteen hundred feet. The low hills enclosing it are popular summer resorts, and on the western bank in the season are drawn enormous crowds to the Chautauqua Assembly, which has established the "Summer School of Philosophy" for education. There are often twenty to thirty thousand people here at one time, and the plan has been so successful that it has various imitators elsewhere, the "Chautauqua idea" being varying instruction with recreation. The Indians named this lake, from the mists arising, Chautauqua, or "the foggy place." Beyond this popular resort the land falls away, and crossing the New York western boundary into the "Pennsylvania Triangle," a jutting corner thrust up to Lake Erie, a fine harbor is found at Erie, known in earlier history by its French name of Presque Isle. This triangle of the Keystone State, giving about forty miles of coast-line on the lake, has a history. The early surveyors discovered that, owing to misdescriptions in various English grants, this large triangular tract was, from a legal standpoint, "nowhere." It was north of Pennsylvania, west of New York and east of the Connecticut Western Reserve, which became part of Ohio. Pennsylvania finally bought it, paying the United States Government, in 1792, $150,640 for it, and also getting the Indian title for £1200. It was a good purchase, for Erie harbor is the best on the lake. Erie has about fifty thousand people, and is in a picturesque situation, owing to the beauty of the bay and the outlying island, which was formerly a peninsula. There is additional protection by a breakwater, making an extensive basin with spacious docks that have a large trade. The French were the early settlers, building their "Fort de la Presque Isle" in 1749, which was one of the chain of outposts they projected between the St. Lawrence and the Ohio. It was here that Commodore Perry hastily built the rude fleet with which he gained the noted victory over the Anglo-Canadian fleet on Lake Erie in 1813, and back here he afterwards in triumph towed his prizes. The remains of his flagship lie in the harbor. Perry's guns were the heaviest in that memorable contest for control of the lake, and therefore he won. In Lake Side Cemetery is buried Captain Charles Vernon Gridley, who commanded Admiral Dewey's flagship, the "Olympia," at the battle of Manila Bay in 1898.

THE CITY OF BUFFALO.

Dunkirk, in New York, northeast of Erie, is another harbor on the lake, and a terminal of the Erie Railway, the land hereabout being the monotonous level plain of western New York. Rounding the eastern end of Lake Erie, at the head of its outlet stream, the Niagara River, is Buffalo, the chief port of the lake and the metropolis of western New York. It is surrounded for miles upon the level land with railway terminals and car-yards, amid which factories, breweries, coal-pockets, cattle-pens and grain elevators are distributed. This great city, which has grown to four hundred thousand population, takes it name from the American bison, who roamed in large herds over the lands adjacent to Lake Erie as late as 1720, and thus gave the name to Buffalo Creek. The city covers a broad surface at the foot of Lake Erie, and is coeval with the nineteenth century, having been founded in 1801; but in the earlier years it was only a military post, and did not assume a commercial standing or begin to grow much until after the opening of the Erie Canal. The neighboring post of Niagara, a short distance down that river, was of more importance in the early days of the frontier, for it was on Niagara River, in 1669, that the Sieur de La Salle, who described the frozen stream as "like a plain paved with polished marble," built and in the following summer launched the "Griffin," the first rude vessel that explored the Upper Lakes. Afterwards one or two trading cabins appeared on Buffalo Creek, and then there was constructed a stockade fort. For thirty years the hunters and traders fought the savages and captured wild beasts, and then, after an interval of peace, the War of 1812 came with new ravages, during which the little settlement around the stockade at Buffalo was burnt by the British, who held the fort at the entrance to Niagara River. When the Erie Canal was opened, the expansion of the settlement became rapid, and its eligible position at the point where the lake commerce had to connect with the canal and the railways leading to the Atlantic seaboard has since given full scope to business enterprise and made it a large and wealthy city.

The Buffalo suburbs are gridironed by railroads, and their terminals spread along the water-front and the sinuosities of Buffalo Creek. The grain elevators, as in all the lake cities, are a prominent feature, and they stand like huge monsters, forty of them, with high heads and long trunks along the creek and canal basins as if waiting for their prey. The fleets of vessels come over the lakes laden with grain from the West; tugs take them to one of these monsters, and down out of the long neck is plunged a trunk deep into the vessel's hold, which sucks up all the grain. It is stored and weighed and sent on its journey eastward. If this is by canal, the barge waits on the other side, and the grain runs down into it through another trunk; if by railway, the cars are run under or alongside the elevator and quickly filled. Then the lake vessels are laden with coal for the return voyage. While an American gives these elevators scant attention, being used to them, not so the foreigner, who regards them with the greatest curiosity. Thus wrote Anthony Trollope about them: "An elevator is as ugly a monster as has yet been produced. In uncouthness of form it outdoes those obsolete old brutes who used to roam about the semi-aqueous world and live a most uncomfortable life, with their great hungering stomachs and huge unsatisfied maws. Rivers of corn and wheat run through these monsters night and day. And all this wheat which passes through Buffalo comes loose in bulk; nothing is known of sacks or bags. To any spectator in Buffalo this becomes immediately a matter of course; but this should be explained, as we in England are not accustomed to see wheat travelling in this open, unguarded and plebeian manner. Wheat with us is aristocratic, and travels always in its private carriage."

The extensive commerce of Buffalo is varied by iron manufacturing, breweries, distilleries, oil refineries and other industries, but the elevators, coal chutes and railroad and canal business seem to overshadow everything else. The city has wide tree-lined streets, and is most handsome with its many fine buildings. There is an extensive system of attractive parks connected by boulevards; broad streets lined with well-built residences, and in the newer parts the level surface is filled with ornamental homes, some most expensively constructed and elaborately adorned. The well-kept lawns and gardens are fully open to view, and Delaware Avenue, thus bordered, is one of the most attractive streets. On the Main Street, among many impressive structures, is the huge Ellicott Square Building, said to be the largest office-building in the world, housing a business community approximating five thousand persons. There are also two public Libraries and many handsome churches.

The locality of greatest interest in Buffalo is probably the little Prospect Park out at the edge of Lake Erie, where its waters flow into Niagara River. The basins and harbor making the beginning of the Erie Canal, which we have traced all across New York State, are down at the edge of the lake, and a steep bluff, rising about sixty feet, makes the verge of the Park, and continues around along the bank of the river. Here it is crowned by an esplanade surrounding the remains of old Fort Porter, a dilapidated relic of bygone days of frontier conflicts. A couple of superannuated cannon point their muzzles across the water towards Canada, but otherwise the locality is peaceful. A small military force is kept here, probably to watch the British Fort Erie over on the opposite river bank, a few hundred yards off, but the worst conflicts now are bouts at playing ball. The protecting harbor breakwater is out in front, and seen down the Niagara River are the light trusses of the International Railway Bridge, spanning its swift current, and the Erie Canal alongside the bank. Into the narrow river sweeps the drainage of the Great Lakes, an enormous mass of water, and in the centre the city has placed a large crib, tapping the clear current for its water-supply. The powerful torrent flows steadily northward out of Lake Erie, with a speed of six or seven miles an hour, to make the Niagara cataract, twenty miles away, and show its tremendous force in the Niagara gorge. In the words of Goethe:

"Water its living strength first shows,

When obstacles its course oppose."

NIAGARA.

The Indians who first looked upon the world's greatest cataract gave the best idea of it in their appropriate name, "The Thunder of Waters." There is no setting provided for it in the charms of natural scenery; it has no outside attractions. All its beauty and sublimity are within the rocky walls of its stupendous chasm. The approaches from every direction are dull and tedious, the surrounding country being flat. The forests are sparse and there are few fine trees, these being confined to the verge of the abyss, and being generally of recent planting. The Niagara River flows northward from Lake Erie through a plain. The Lake Erie level is five hundred and sixty-four feet above the sea, and in its tortuous course of about thirty-six miles to Lake Ontario, the Niagara River descends three hundred and thirty-three feet, leaving the level of Ontario still two hundred and thirty-one feet above the sea. More than half of all the fresh water on the entire globe—the whole enormous volume from the vast lake region of North America, draining a territory equalling the entire continent of Europe, pours through this contracted channel out of Lake Erie. There is a swift current for a couple of miles, but afterwards the speed is gentler as the channel broadens, and Grand Island divides it. Then it reunites into a wider stream, flowing sluggishly westward, small islands dotting the surface. About fifteen miles from Lake Erie the river narrows and the rapids begin. They flow with great speed for a mile above the falls, in this distance descending fifty-two feet, Goat Island dividing their channel at the brink of the cataract, where the river makes a bend from the west back to the north. This island separates the waters, although nine-tenths go over the Canadian fall, which the abrupt bend curves into horseshoe form. This fall is about one hundred and fifty-eight feet high, the height of the smaller fall on the American side being one hundred and sixty-four feet. The two cataracts spread out to forty-seven hundred and fifty feet breadth, the steep wooded bank of Goat Island, separating them, occupying about one-fourth the distance. The American fall is about eleven hundred feet wide and the Canadian fall twice that width, the actual line of the descending waters on the latter being much larger than the breadth of the river because of its curving form. Recent changes, caused by falling rock in the apex of this fall, have, however, made it a more symmetrical horseshoe than had been the case for years. The Niagara River, just below the cataract, contracts to about one thousand feet, widening to twelve hundred and fifty feet beneath the new single-arch steel bridge recently constructed a short distance farther down. For seven miles the gorge is carved out, the river banks on both sides rising to the top level of the falls, and the bottom sinking deeper and deeper as the lower rapids descend towards Lewiston, and in some places contracting to very narrow limits. Two miles below the cataract the river is compressed within eight hundred feet, and a mile farther down, at the outlet of the Whirlpool, where a sharp right-angled turn is made, the enormous current is contracted within a space of less than two hundred and fifty feet. In the seven miles distance, these lower rapids descend about one hundred and four feet, and then with placid current the Niagara River flows a few miles farther northward to Lake Ontario.

The view of Niagara is impressive alike upon sight and hearing, and this impressiveness grows upon the visitor. From the bridge just below the American fall, and from the Canadian side, the whole grand scene is in full display, and quickly convinces that no description can exaggerate Niagara. The Indians first told of the falls, and they are indicated on Champlain's map of 1632. In 1648 the Jesuit missionary Rugueneau wrote of them as a "cataract of frightful height." The first white man who saw them was Father Louis Hennepin, the Franciscan, in 1678, who described them as "a vast and prodigious cadence of water which falls down after a surprising and astonishing manner, insomuch that the universe does not afford its parallel. The waters which fall from this horrible precipice do foam and boil after the most hideous manner imaginable, making an outrageous noise more terrible than that of thunder, for when the wind blows out of the south their dismal roaring may be heard more than fifteen leagues off." Upon Charles Dickens the first and enduring effect, instant and lasting, of the tremendous spectacle, was: "Peace—peace of mind, tranquility, calm recollections of the dead, great thoughts of eternal rest and happiness." The falls had a sanative influence upon Professor Tyndall, for, "quickened by the emotions there aroused," he says, "the blood sped exultingly through the arteries, abolishing introspection, clearing the heart of all bitterness, and enabling one to think with tolerance, if not with tenderness, upon the most relentless and unreasonable foe." After Anthony Trollope had looked upon the cataract he wrote: "Of all the sights on this earth of ours, I know no other one thing so beautiful, so glorious and so powerful. That fall is more graceful than Giotto's Tower, more noble than the Apollo. The peaks of the Alps are not so astounding in their solitude. The valleys of the Blue Mountains in Jamaica are less green. The finished glaze of life in Paris is less invariable; and the full tide of trade around the Bank of England is not so inexorably powerful."

GEOLOGICAL FORMATION OF NIAGARA.

The estimate is that nine hundred millions of cubic feet of water pour over Niagara every hour, and great as this mass is, there is a belief that half the water passing into Lake Erie from the upper lakes does not go over the falls, but finds its way into Ontario through a subterranean channel. Nothing demonstrates this theory, but it is advanced to account for the difference between the amount of water accumulated in the upper lakes and that going over the falls. The actual current is sufficiently enormous, however, and steadily wearing away the rocks over which it descends, it has during the past ages excavated the gorge of the lower rapids. The land surface, which is low at Lake Erie, scarcely rising above the level of its waters, gradually becomes more elevated towards the north, till near Lewiston it is about forty feet above Erie. The Niagara River thus flows in the direction of the ascent of this moderately inclined plane. Beyond this the surface makes a sudden descent towards Lake Ontario of about two hundred and fifty feet down to a plateau, upon which stands Lewiston on the American side and Queenston on the Canadian side of the river. There thus is formed a bold terrace looking out upon Ontario, from which that lake is seven miles away, and from the foot of the terrace the surface descends gently one hundred and twenty feet farther to the lake shore. The gorge through which the river flows is three hundred and sixty-six feet deep at this terrace. There is no doubt the first location of the great cataract was on the face of the terrace near Lewiston, and it has gradually retired by the eating away, year after year, of the rocky ledges over which the waters pour. This, however, has not been done in a hurry, for the geologists studying the subject estimate that it has required nearly thirty-seven thousand years to bring the falls from Lewiston back to their present location. In fact, from the stratification, Professor Agassiz expressed the opinion that at one time there were three distinct cataracts in Niagara River.

During the brief time observations have been made, great fragments of rocks have been repeatedly carried down by the current pouring over Niagara, the frosts assisting disintegration. This caused not only a recession but decided changes in appearance. Since 1842 the New York State geologists, who then made a careful and accurate topographical map, have been closely watching these changes, and the average rate of recession is estimated at slightly over two feet annually. In Father Hennepin's sketch of 1678 there was a striking feature, since entirely disappeared, a third fall on the Canadian side facing the line of the main cataract, and caused by a large rock turning the diverted fall in this direction, this rock falling, however, in the eighteenth century. The rate at which recessions occur is not uniform. No change may be apparent for several years, and the soft underlying strata being gradually worn away, great masses of the upper and harder formations then tumble down, causing in a brief period marked changes. At the present location of the cataract, sheets of hard limestone cover the surface of the country, and from the top of the falls to eighty or ninety feet depth. Shaly layers are under these. All the strata slope gently downward against the river current at the rate of about twenty-five feet to the mile. Above the falls, in the rapids, the limestone strata are piled upon each other, until about fifty feet more are added to the formation, when they all disappear under the outcropping edges of the next series above, composed of marls and shales. Through these piles of strata the cataract has worked its way back, receding probably most rapidly in cases where, as at present, the lower portion of the cutting was composed of soft beds of rock, which being hollowed out and removed by frost and water, let down the harder strata above. The effect of continual recession must be to diminish the height of the falls, both by raising the river level at their base and by the sloping of the surmounting limestone strata to a lower level. A recession of two miles farther, the geologists say, will cut away both the hard and the soft layers, and then the cataract will become almost stationary on the lower sandstone formation, with its height reduced to about eighty feet. This diminution in the Niagara attractions might be startling were it not estimated that it can hardly be accomplished for some twelve thousand years.

APPEARANCE OF NIAGARA.

The best view of the great cataract is from the Canadian shore just below it, where, from an elevation, the upper rapids can be seen flowing to the brink of the fall. A bright day is an advantage, when the green water tints are most marked. The Canadian shore above, curves around from the westward, and in front are the dark and precipitous cliffs of Goat Island, surmounted by foliage. The Canadian rapids come to the brink an almost unbroken sheet of foaming waters, but the narrower rapids on the American side are closer, and have a background of little islands, with torrents foaming between. The current passing over the American fall seems shallow, compared with the solid masses of bright green water pouring down the Canadian horseshoe. There, on either hand, is an edge of foaming streams, looking like clusters of constantly descending frosted columns, with a broad and deeply recessed, bright-green central cataract, giving the impressive idea of millions of tons of water pouring into an abyss, the bottom of which is obscured by seething and fleecy clouds of spray. On either side, dark-brown, water-worn rocks lie at the base, while the spray bursts out into mammoth explosions, like puffs of white smoke suddenly darting from parks of artillery. The water comes over the brink comparatively slowly, then falls with constantly accelerated speed, the colors changing as the velocity increases and air gets into the torrent, until the original bright green becomes a foaming white, which is quickly lost behind the clouds of spray beneath. These clouds slowly rise in a thin, transparent veil far above the cataract. From under the spray the river flows towards us, its eddying currents streaked with white. A little steamboat moves among the eddies, and goes almost under the mass of falling water, yet finds a practically smooth passage. Closer, on the left hand, the American fall appears a rough and broken cataract, almost all foam, with green tints showing through, and at intervals along its face great masses of water spurting forward through the torrent as a rocky obstruction may be met part way down. The eye fascinatingly follows the steadily increasing course of the waters as they descend from top to bottom upon the piles of boulders dimly seen through the spray clouds. Adjoining the American cataract is the water-worn wall of the chasm, built of dark red stratified rocks, looking as if cut down perpendicularly by a knife, and whitened towards the top, where the protruding limestone formation surmounts the lower shales. Upon the faces of the cliffs can be traced the manner in which the water in past ages gradually carved out the gorge, while at their bases the sloping talus of fallen fragments is at the river's edge. Through the deep and narrow canyon the greenish waters move away towards the rapids below. It all eternally falls, and foams and roars, and the ever-changing views displayed by the world's great wonder make an impression unlike anything else in nature.

GOAT ISLAND.

Niagara presents other spectacles; the islands scattered among the upper rapids; their swiftly flowing, foaming current rushing wildly along; the remarkable lower gorge, where the torrent making the grandest rapids runs finally into the Whirlpool basin with its terrific swirls and eddies—these join in making the colossal exhibition. Added to all is the impressive idea of the resistless forces of Nature and of the elements. Few places are better fitted for geological study, and by day or night the picture presents constant changes of view, exerting the most powerful influence upon the mind. Goat Island between the two falls is a most interesting place, covering, with the adjacent islets, about sixty acres, and it was long a favorite Indian Cemetery. The Indians had a tradition that the falls demand two human victims every year, and the number of deaths from accident and suicide fully maintains the average. There have been attempts to romantically rename this as Iris Island, but the popular title remains, which was given from the goats kept there by the original white settlers. It was from a ladder one hundred feet high, elevated upon the lower bank of Goat Island, near the edge of the Canadian fall, that Sam Patch, in 1829, jumped down the Falls of Niagara. He endeavored to gain fame and a precarious living by jumping down various waterfalls, and not content with this exploit, made the jump at the Genesee falls at Rochester and was drowned. A bridge crosses from the American shore to Goat Island, and it is recorded that two bull-terrier dogs thrown from this bridge have made the plunge over the American falls and survived it. One of them lived all winter on the carcass of a cow he found on the rocks below, and the other, very much astonished and grieved, is said to have trotted up the stairs from the steamboat wharf about one hour after being thrown into the water and making the plunge.

From the upper point of Goat Island a bar stretches up the river, and can be plainly seen dividing the rapids which pass on either side to the American and Canadian falls. A foot-bridge from Goat Island, on the American side, leads to the pretty little Luna Island, standing at the brink of the cataract and dividing its waters. The narrow channel between makes a miniature waterfall, under which is the famous "Cave of the Winds." Here the venturesome visitor goes actually under Niagara, for the space behind the waterfall is hollowed out of the rocks, and amid the rushing winds and spray an idea can be got of the effects produced by the greater cataracts. Here are seen the rainbows formed by the sunlight on the spray in complete circles; and the cave, one hundred feet high, and recessed into the wall of the cliff, gives an excellent exhibition of the undermining processes constantly going on. Upon the Canadian side of Goat Island, at the edge of the fall, foot-bridges lead over the water-worn and honeycombed rocks to the brink of the great Horseshoe. Amid an almost deafening roar, with rushing waters on either hand, there can be got in this place probably the best near view of the greater cataract. Here are the Terrapin Rocks, and over on the Canadian side, at the base of the chasm, are the fragments of Table Rock and adjacent rocks which have recently fallen, with enormous masses of water beating upon them. In the midst of the rapids on the Canadian side of Goat Island are also the pretty little islands known as the "Three Sisters" and their diminutive "Little Brother," with cascades pouring over the ledges between them—a charming sight. The steep descent of the rapids can here be realized, the torrent plunging down from far above one's head, and rushing over the falls. This fascinating yet precarious region has seen terrible disasters and narrow escapes. The overpowering view of all, from Goat Island, is the vast mass of water pouring down the Canadian falls. This is fully twenty feet in depth at the brink of the cataract, and it tumbles from all around the deeply recessed Horseshoe into an apparently bottomless pool, no one yet having been able to sound its depth. In 1828 the "Michigan," a condemned ship from Lake Erie, was sent over this fall, large crowds watching. She drew eighteen feet water and passed clear of the top. Among other things on her deck were a black bear and a wooden statue of General Andrew Jackson. The wise bear deserted the ship in the midst of the rapids and swam ashore. The ship was smashed to pieces by the fall, but the first article seen after the plunge was the statue of "Old Hickory," popping headforemost up through the waters unharmed. This was considered a favorable omen, for in the autumn he was elected President of the United States.

THE RAPIDS AND THE WHIRLPOOL.

The surface of Niagara River below the cataract is for some distance comparatively calm, so that small boats can move about and pass almost under the mass of descending waters. The deep and narrow gorge stretches far to the north with two ponderous international railroad bridges thrown across it in the distance, carrying over the Vanderbilt and Grand Trunk roads. An electric road is constructed down the bottom of the gorge on the American bank, and another along its top on the Canadian side. The water flows with occasional eddies, its color a brilliant green under the sunlight, the gorge steadily deepening, the channel narrowing, and when it passes under the two railroad bridges, which are close together, the river begins its headlong course down the Lower Rapids leading to the Whirlpool. With the speed of an express train, the torrent runs under these bridges, tossing, foaming and rolling in huge waves, buffeting the rocks, and thus it rushes into the Whirlpool. Viewed from the bottom of the gorge alongside the torrent, the effect is almost painful, its tempestuous whirl and headlong speed having a tendency to make the observer giddy. The rushing stream is elevated in the centre far above the sides, the waves in these rapids at times rising thirty feet, tossing wildly in all directions, and coming together with tremendous force. Huge rocks, fallen in earlier ages, evidently underlie the torrent. It was in these terrible rapids that several daring spirits, and notably Captain Webb in 1883, attempted, unprotected, to swim the river, and paid the penalty with their lives. More recently these rapids have been safely passed in casks, peculiarly constructed, although the passengers got rough usage. The Whirlpool at the end of the rapids is a most extraordinary formation. The torrent runs into an oblong pool, within an elliptical basin, the outlet being at the side through a narrow gorge not two hundred and fifty feet wide, above which the rocky walls tower for three hundred feet. Into this basin the waters rush from the rapids, their current pushing to its farthest edge, and then, rebuffed by the bank of the abyss, returning in an eddy on either hand. These two great eddies steadily circle round and round, and logs coming down the rapids sometimes swim there for days before they are allowed to get to the outlet. Upon the left-hand side of this remarkable pool the eddy whirls around without obstruction, while that upon the right hand, where the outlet is, rebounds upon the incoming torrent and is thrown back in huge waves of mixed foam and green, the escaping waters finally rushing out through the narrow opening, and on down more brawling rapids to the end of the deep and wonderful gorge, and thence in placid stream through the level land northward to Lake Ontario.

NIAGARA INDUSTRIES AND BATTLES.

The town of Niagara Falls, which has about seven thousand people, long had its chief source of prosperity in the influx of sight-seers, but it has recently developed into an important industrial centre through the establishment of large works utilizing the power of the falls by means of electricity. Some distance above the cataract on the American side a tunnel starts, of which the outlet is just below the American fall. This tunnel is one hundred and sixty-five feet below the river surface at the initial point, and passes about two hundred feet beneath the town, being over a mile long. Part of the waters of the Upper Rapids are diverted to the head of the tunnel, and by falling through deep shafts upon turbine wheels the water-power is utilized for dynamos, and in this way an enormous force is obtained from the electricity, which is used in various kinds of manufacturing, for trolley roads and other purposes, some of the power being conducted to Buffalo. A similar method is to be availed of on the Canadian side. It is estimated that in various ways the Niagara Falls furnish fully four hundred thousand horse-power for industrial uses, and the amount constantly increases. The largest dynamos in the world, and the most complete electrical adaptations of power are installed at these Niagara works.