Local History: Luzerne County, PA , Lackawanna County, PA, Wyoming County, PA

 Transcriber's notes: I have transcribed this book as written and spelled, with the exception of footnotes and italics which cannot be saved as ASCII Text. The author H. Hollister makes reference to and footnotes several author's and books and to name a few they are: Smith's History of New York; American Antiquities; Charles Miner's History of Wyoming; Colonial Records, Pennsylvania Archives; Westmoreland Records and Chapman's History of Wyoming. Any footnote important to the meaning of the passage has been inserted within the text.

I have also noted the original page number in the book as "page x" so that the reader can use their browser to "find" the page referenced in the "Index to History of the Lackawanna Valley" already transcribed. Click on "Edit" then "Find in Page" and type in the page you want.

 

HISTORY OF THE LACKAWANNA VALLEY

by

H. Hollister, M.D.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

SECOND EDITION

ENTIRELY RE-WRITTEN

NEW YORK

PRINTED BY C. A. ALVORD, 15 VANDEWATER STREET

1869

 

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PREFACE (to the first edition)

In presenting to the public these "Contributions," it seems proper to state that the collection of the embodied facts was more the result of the love possesed by the writer for such incidents and history, than the hope of either a pecuniary reward, or a literary reputation.

Becoming familiar with a few features in the history of the Lackawanna Valley, the writer was induced, by the solicitations of his friends, to put them into a shape whereby their publication might possibly awaken an interest, or perhaps elicit new and more connected material from a region where nothing yet had been done in the way of gathering its local history.

From the absence of a proper and continued record--from indistinct and often conflicting memories--and from the death of all who were familiar with its earliest settlement, it is very probable that events narrated are sometimes given in an imperfect, and even in an inaccurate manner. It would not be surprising if such was the fact; but the reader must bear in mind that not only the personal, but the general history recorded here was written while the author was engaged in a large practice, and harassed by all the continual anxieties occurring in one of the most exhausting and thankless professions in the country.

While the author asks no indulgence from this circumstance, yet he apprehends that a practice of twelve years, with its too often accompanying annoyances--compelled to view human nature

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in every possible light, and encounter it in its most humiliating aspect--eminently fits him to bear the murmurs of those who suppose that a volume can be as easily written as read.

None of the Sketches are arranged in chronological order; many are necessarily brief, meager, and unsatisfactory, owing to the great dearth of material; while some, it is possible, do better justice to the subject.

It would have given pleasure to the writer, to have presented a genealogical view of the original families in the valley; but as this contemplated feature would necessarily have enlarged the volume beyond its intended limits, without adding much to the general interest, it was abandoned.

The obligations of the writer are due to all his friends, who have, by their liberal subscriptions to the volume, manifested such an interest in its welfare.

H. HOLLISTER

Providence, Pa., 1857

---------

The volume, of which a second edition is now published, has been so thoroughly modified and revised in its general outline, as to present the features of a different, and I trust, a better work than the preceding one. Very many pages have been wholly obliterated; the remainder re-written and radically changed, while a number of pages of interesting historical matter--sought after from trustworthy records and testimony with an earnestness that possibly may deserve expressions of approbation and success--have been added thereunto.

In my former volume, I gave but a general recognition of the favors of my friends, who, in various ways, contributed toward its successful development. In this, I desire to return especial thanks to several persons whose manly sympathies and generous aid lay me under a grateful obligation and remembrance.

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For materials drawn from the Pennsylvania Archives and Colonial Records, and other authorities, appropriate acknowledgment appears in its proper place. In addition to these sources of information, fully noted and credited, I would return thanks to G. B. NICHOLSON,ESQ., for access to the Westmoreland Records; to B. H. THROOP, M.D., for valuable suggestions in regard to the volume; to SELDEN T. SCRANTON, of Oxford Furnace, N.J. for acts of friendship which characterize his desire to make every man's pathway blossom with the rose; to S. B. STURDEVANT, M. D., for favors which were given in so cheerful a manner as to greatly enhance their value; to the Rev. Dr. PECK, for the biographical sketch of the late Hon. GEORGE W. SCRANTON; to Hon. STEUBEN JENKINS, whose antiquarian knowledge promises to the world an invaluable documentary history of Gen. Sullivan's celebrated Wyoming expedition in 1779; to STEPHEN ROGERS and D. YARINGTON, for papers concerning the settlement of Carbondale; to N. ORR & Co., of New York, and EUGENE FRANK, of Wilkes Barre, for their skillful execution of the cuts adorning the work, and to HARPER & BROTHERS, for the sale and use of electrotypes, illustrating scenes in the Lackawanna Valley.

The author of the following pages, who was not born upon the banks of the Lackawanna, but was nurtured among her mountains, would do injustice to is own feeligns did he not gratefully acknowledge the kind, yet undeserved, ecomiums of the editorial fraternity, and the favorable reception the community gave his "Contributions" in 1857. May he not indulge in the hope that the young valley is not now less athletic and friendly than then?

H. HOLLISTER

Providence, Pa., 1869.

page 6 (blank)

page 7 (List of Illustrations)

page 8 (blank)

page 9 through 15

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INDIAN HISTORY OF WYOMING                                                                                                                       17 - 29

INDIAN VILLAGE OF CAPOOSE                                                                                                   29 - 39

LACKAWANNA RIVER AND VALLEY                                                                                  40 - 43

WAS WYOMING ONCE A VAST LAKE?                                                                                                43 - 49

WAR-PATHS                                                                                                                                                                                                49 - 50

INDIAN SPRING UPON THE MOOSIC MOUNTAIN                                 50 - 51

INDIAN RELICS AND FORTIFICATIONS                                                                                              51 - 59

INDIAN APPLE-TREE                                                                                                                                          59 - 61

BEACON FIRES                                                                                                                                                             61 - 63

SILVER MINE ON THE LACKAWANNA                                                                           63 - 64

GOLD MINE                                                                                                                                                                           64 - 67

SALT SPRINGS                                                                                                                                                              67 - 68

LEAD MINE                                                                                                                                                                             68 - 70

GENERAL HISTORY                                                                                                                                             70 -105

GENERAL HISTORY (continued)                                                                                                   105 -121

ISAAC TRIPP                                                                                                                                                                       121 -130

WESTMORELAND                                                                                                                                                    130 -132

WILLENPAUPACK SETTLEMENT                                                                                                                      132 -134

JAMES LEGGETT                                                                                                                                                      134 -137

FIRST WAGON ROAD FROM PITTSTON TO THE DELAWARE            137 -139

MILITARY ORGANIZATION                                                                                                                                            139 -141

RELIGION, MORALITY AND STILL-HOUSES                                                      141 -148

MILLS UPON THE LACKAWANNA                                                                                                                   148 -149

DR. JOSEPH SPRAUGE                                                                                                                               150 -151

DR. WILLIAM HOOKER SMITH-OLD FORGE                                                     151 -154

THE SIGNAL TREE                                                                                                                                                  154 -154

THE WYOMING MASSACRE                                                                                                               155 -177

GENERAL HISTORY (resumed)                                                                                                      177 -186

PROVIDENCE TOWNSHIP AND VILLAGE                                                                                        186 -205

DUNMORE                                                                                                                                                                               206 -211

HISTORY OF SCRANTON                                                                                                                         211 -268

BLAKELEY                                                                                                                                                                                269 -273

YANKEE WAY OF PULLING A TOOTH                                                                            274

THOMAS SMITH                                                                                                                                                           275

SETTLEMENT OF ABINGTON                                                                                                           275 -282

THE GREAT HUNTER, ELIAS SCOTT                                                                                282 -284

"DRINKER'S BEECH" - (Now Covington)                                                                         284 -288

SETTLEMENT OF JEFFERSON                                                                                                     288 -291

CHASED BY A PANTHER                                                                                                                           291 -293

DUNNING                                                                                                                                                                                   293 -295

CARBONDALE                                                                                                                                                                 295 -300

LACKAWANNA VALLEY IN 1804                                                                                                 300 -310

FORMATION OF TOWNSHIPS; PRIMITIVE MINISTERS                                      310 -314

PROPRIETORS' SCHOOL FUND AND PRIMITIVE SCHOOLS                  314 -316

PATHS AND ROADS                                                                                                                                            317 -322

THE RISE OF METHODISM IN THE VALLEY                                                       322 -326

SMELLING HELL                                                                                                                                                         326-328

FORMATION OF ANTHRACITE COAL                                                                              328 -329

ORGANIC REMAINS FOUND IN THE COAL STRATA                                                329 -331

MINERALS AND MINING                                                                                                                             331 -332

COAL LANDS FIFTY YEARS AGO                                                                                                                    332 -333

THE DISCOVERY AND INTRODUCTION INTO USE OF

ANTHRACITE COAL                                                                                                                      333 -343

WILLIAM AND MAURICE WURTS                                                                                                                     343 -363

FALLING IN OF THE CARBONDALE MINES                                                        363 -367

EARLIEST MAIL ROUTE THROUGH THE VALLEY                                  367 -369

THE PENNSYLVANIAL COAL COMPANY                                                                                          369 -372

FROM PITTSTON TO HAWLEY                                                                                                      372 -379

DELAWARE, LACKAWANNA, AND WESTERN RAILROAD    379 -393

LACKAWANNA AND BLOOMSBURG RAILROAD                                                               393 -396

SKETCH OF THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE LEHIGH AND

SUSQUEHANNA RAILROAD                                                                396 -403

HON. GEORGE W. SCRANTON                                                                                                    403 -410

LEHIGH VALLEY RAILROAD                                                                                                               410 -417

APPENDIX                                                                                                                                                                                419 -442

page 16 (blank)

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INDIAN HISTORY

The Indian's side of history can never be written, because traditions runing back through centuries, and cherished only by the red man whom they concerned, perished with

the race that knew them. We shall read of homes reddened by the tomahawk or charred by the fagot, but not of the wrongs urging the wild man to defend the spot where his wigwam stood. When the plain cabins of the Dutch first rose on the banks of the Hudson, all the Indians "on the Connecticut, Hudson, Delaware, and Susquehanna rivers, were in subjugation to the "Five Nations" whose capital near the placid waters of the Onondaga Lakes, lay but a day's walk or two from the head-springs of the Lackawanna.

In 1827, Cusick published traditions of the Tuscaroras running from "twenty-five hundred winters before Columbus's discovery of America" down to the days of Mahomet. "About the time of Mahomet's career in 602, a great Tyrant arose on the Kaunaseh, now Susquehanna River, who waged war with the surrounding nations, from which it appears that while in Africa, Europe and Asia revolution succeeded revolution, empires rose on the ruins of empires, that in America the same scenes were acting on as great a scale--cultivated regions, populous cities and towns, were reduced to a wilderness, as in the other countries."

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The Mohawks, asserting sovereignty over the proud Pequots and Narragansetts, numbering many hundred warriors, and exacting tribute from all the New England tribes as late as the sixteenth century, claimed the wilderness from the Connecticut to Wyoming. Massasoit, the ever warm friend of the Pilgrims, and his son Philip, afterward celebrated as King Philip, had frequent conflicts with this haughty, powerful tribe. The Dutch gave them the name of Maquos. The French, between whom war was almost perpetual, called them Iroquois.

When Captain John Smith was carried prisoner to the castle of Powhatan, in 1607, he learned that the "Sas-que-sah-ha-noughs" (Susquehanna Indians), living upon the river by this name, "are a Gyant like people and are thus atyred", giving in his work a graphic illustration of a chief "atyred" in all the gorgeous style of the wild man.

The Confederation known as the Six Nations, formed by the union of Mohawks, Senacas, Onondagos, Oneidas, Cayugas, and the Tuscaroras, was not only formidable in the number of its warriors, but so democratic in the character of its organization, and so terrible in the exercise of its power, that few new settlements, made along the frontier, acquired either growth or age without harm or apprehension. Its power was absolute and unquestioned; its government a limited monarchy. This was vested in a Great Sachem or Chief, directed by a Council of Braves and aged warriors noted for wisdom and bravery. Its ever-burning Council Fire blazed fromthe plains of

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Oh-na-qu-go, while the edicts and wishes of the assembled sachems, carried to Manhattan's shore by runners, were known and respected even in the far-off region of the magnolia and palmetto. With a dialect whose strange intonations bewildered the ear of the white man, and whose tongue, destitute of labials, was so diverse and corrupted from the parent language, that many of the tribes living on the same stream could only converse through an interpreter; with neither books nor charts, with no history but the wigwam's lore, no guide but the moon's gray twilight, no valley was sunk too far away in the mountains, no stream stretched its tranquil length through grounds too remote from the war-path to escape the notice of men clad in skins, who occupied and gave them a name.

Charles Miner, in his really unequaled and charming History of Wyoming, remarks, with truth, that, "in unraveling the tangled web of Indian history, we found ourselves in the outset extremely embarrassed, especially when reading the pages of Heckewelder and other writers of the United Brethren. The removal of tribes or parts of tribes to the valley; their remaining a brief period and then emigrating to some other place, without any apparent motive founded in personal convenience, consistency, or wisdom, perplexed us exceedingly, as we doubt not it has others."

The forest between the Hudson and Lake Huron constituted the sachemship of the Iroquois, or Five Nations, whose "smokes" ascended from the mountains of Vermont to the head-waters of the Delaware, Susquehanna, and the Ohio. The number of their warriors in 1660 was estimated by Chalmers to have been twenty-two hundred, while Bancroft puts the figure at ten thousand. Their language, spoken by the Pequods, the Narragansetts, the Mohawks, and Delawares, was the mother-tongue that

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welcomed the Pilgrims and plead for Smith on the Chickahominy, through the fervid lips of Pocahontas. Between the Delaware and the Susquehanna, in the narrow, green plateau of the Lackawanna, dwelt a division of the Lenni-Lenape--the Minsi or Monsey clan, which, like the tribes at Wyoming, stripped of their glory by the Iroquois, melted away into other tribes strolling through the wilderness as conquerors. The Senacas and Oneidas, two of the rudest, most vindictive, as well as energetic members of the confederated Nations, took the most prominent part in the affairs of Wyoming. Their villages were strung around the lesser lakes feeding Ontario while their seat of government was located at Onondaga, now Syracuse.

"The Onondagos", writes Miner, "were eminent as counselors, distinguished for eloquence, perhaps revered, like the tribe of Levi, as the priesthood of the confederacy, to whose care was committed the keeping or kindling the sacred fire around which their most solemn deliberations were held." After the Senacas and Oneidas, whose camp-fires gave a savage cheer to Wyoming as early as 1640, had removed to the land of the Iroquois, feebler tribes, which had lost favor with the civil sachems or the great war chiefs, were concentrated in this lovely region under the immediate eye and reach of royal prerogative.

Thus came the Shawnees from southern everglades, whose names are yet affixed to the lower portion of Wyoming Valley, and thus the Nanticokes, in 1748, came from the Chesakawon on the Chesapeake, and found shelter on the Susquehanna until their removal to Onondaga in 1755. The Delawares, of whom Teedyuscung was long the leading sachem, playing an important part in the history of Wyoming, taunted as women and treated as vassals, were ordered by the Six Nations, in the most imperious manner, into this valley in 1742.

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At a great Council held at Philadelphia, July 12, 1742, where over two hundred warriors were assembled to talk with the Governor of Pennsylvania, in regard to the transgressions of the Delawares, who had sold lands on the river Delaware fifty years before, and who had refused to removed from the same, Canassategoe addressed them thus:--

"Cousins, you ought to be taken by the hair of your head and shak'd severely till you recover your senses and become sober. Our Brother Onas' (footnote: Penn received from the Indians the name of Onas i.e., quill or pen, from the fact that he governed by these instead of guns.) case is very just and plain and his Intentions to preserve friendship; on the other Hand your Cause is bad, your Heart far from being upright, and you are maliciously bent to break the Chain of friendship with our Brother Onas. But how came you to take upon you to Sell Land at all? We conquered You, we made Women of you; you know you are Women, and can no more sell Land than women. You have been furnished with Cloaths and Meat and Drink by the Goods paid you for it, and now You want it again like Chiildren as you are. Did you ever tell Us that you had sold this Land in the Dark? did we ever receive any Part, even the Value of a Pipe Shank, from you for it? You have told Us a Blind Story that you sent a Messenger to Us to inform Us of the Sale, but he never came amongst Us, nor we never heard any thing about it. This is acting in the Dark, and very different from the Conduct our Six Nations observe in their Sales of Land. On such Occasions they give Publick Notice and invite al the Indians of their united Nations, and give them a share of the Presents they receive for their Lands. This is the behaviour of the wise United Nations, but we find you are none of our Blood. You Act a dishonest part not only in this but in other Matters. Your Ears are ever Open to Slanderous Reports about our

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Brethren. For all these we charge You to remove instantly. We don't give you the liberty to think about it. You are Women; take the Advice of a Wise Man and remove immediately. You may return to the other side of the Delaware where you came from, but we don't know whether Considering how you have demean'd yourselves you will be permitted to live there, or whether you have not swallowed that Land down your Throats as well as the Land on this side. We, therefore, Assign you two Places to go to--either to Wyomin or Shamokin. You may go to either of these Places, and then we shall have you more under our Eye, and shall see how You behave. Don't deliberate, but remove away and take this Belt of Wampum."

This peremptory command, given in such a haughty and offensive manner, admitting of no evasion or appeal, was obeyed by the Delawares, who at once repaired to the Wyoming hunting-grounds. "Such," says Chapman, "was the origin of the Indian town of Wyoming. Soon after the arrival of the Delawares and during the same season (the summer of 1742), a distinguished foreigner, Count Zinzendorf, of Saxony, arrived in the Valley on a religious mission to the Indians. This nobleman is believed to have been the first white person that every visited Wyoming. He was the reviver of the ancient church of the United Brethren, and had given protection in his dominions to the persecuted Protestants who had emigrated from Moravia, thence taking the name of Moravians, and who, two years before, had made the first settlement in Pennsylvania.

"Upon his arrival in American, Count Zinzendorf manifested a great anxiety to have the Gospel preached to the Indians; and although he had heard much of the ferocity of the Shawanese, formed a resolution to visit them. With this view he repaired to Tulpehocken, the residence

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of Conrad Weiser, a celebrated interpreter and Indian agent for the Government, whom he wished to engage in the cause, and to accompany him to the Shawanese town.

"Weiser was too much occupied in business to go immediately to Wyoming, but he furnished the Count with letters to a missionary of the name of Mack, and the latter, accompanied by his wife, who could speak the Indian language, proceeded immediately with Zinzendorf on the projected mission.

"The Shawanese appeared to be alarmed on the arrival of the strangers, who pitched their tents on the banks of the river a little below the town, and a council of the chiefs having assembled, the declared purpose of Zinzendorf was deliberately considered. To these unlettered children of the wilderness, it appeared altogether improbable that a stranger should have braved the dangers of a boisterous ocean, three thousand miles broad, for the sole purpose of instructing them in the means of obtaining happiness after death, and that, too, without requiring any compensation for his trouble and expense; and as they had observed the anxiety of the white people to purchase land of the Indians, they naturally concluded that the real object of Zinzendorf was either to procure from the lands at Wyoming for his own use, to search for hidden treasures, or to examine the country with a view to future conquests. It was accordingly resolved to assassinate him, and to do it privately, lest the knowledge of the transaction should produce a war with the English, who were settling the country below the mountains.

"Zinzendorf was alone in his tent, seated upon a bundle of dry weeds, which composed his bed, and engaged in writing, when the assassins approached to execute their bloody commission. It was night, and the cool air of September had rendered a small fire necessry to his comfort and convenience. A curtain formed of a blanket

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and hung upon pins, was the only guard to the entrance of his tent.

"The heat of his fire had aroused a large rattlesnake which lay in the weeds not far from it; and the reptile, to enjoy it more effectually, crawled slowly into the tent and passed over one of his legs undiscovered. Without, all was still and quiet, except the gentle murmur of the river at the rapids about a mile below. At this moment, the Indians softly approached the door of his tent, and slightly removed the curtain, contemplated the venerable man, too deeply engaged in the subject of his thoughts to notice either their approach, or the snake which lay extended before him. At a sight like this, even the heart of a savage shrunk from the idea of committing so horrid an act, and quitting the spot, they hastily returned to the town, and informed their companions that the Great Spirit protected the white man, for they had found him with no door but a blanket, and had seen a large rattlesnake crawl over his legs without attempting to injure him. This circumstance, together with the arrival soon afterward of Conrad Weiser, procured Zinzendorf the friendship and confidence of the Indians, and probably contributed essentially toward inducing many of them, at a subsequent period, to embrace the Christian religion.

"The Count having spent twenty days at Wyoming returned to Bethlehem, a town then building by his Christian brethren on the north bank of the Lehigh, about eleven miles from its junction with the Delaware."

In the recently published life of Count Zinzendorf, by Dr. Gil, of London, this visit, as well as the character of the Indians at Wyoming, are thus described. "The Count as missionary to give these Indians a practicable insight into the religion he came to teach, by simply leading

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a Christian life amongst them, and when favorable impressions had thus been made and inquiry was excited, he preached the leading truths of the gospel, taking care, not to put more things into their heads than their hearts could lay hold of. His mode of approaching them was careflly adapted to their distinctive peculiarities; his last tour, in the autumn of 1742, after crossing the primeval forest, he pitched his tent a short distance from 'Wayomick' the capital of the Shawanos, and remained there three weeks, observing the habits of the people, and conversing with them, so as to make himself familiar with their ideas, before he proceeded more directly with the special object of his mission. He found this tribe to be one of the most corrupt and most opposed to the truth. They soon concerted violent measures to get rid of him, and would have killed him and his companions, but that his interpreter, in whose absence the murder was to have been committed, returned unexpectedly and discovered the plot. Such was the form in which these poor savages manifested their hatred to a man whose motives they could not comprehend, and whom they looked upon as an intruder."

When Conrad Weiser, a celebrated indian interpreter, visited Wyoming in 1754, he reported that he found but three Indian towns between Shamokin and Wyoming--Os-ko-ha-ny, Nis-ki-beck-on (Nescopeck) and Woyamock. He also reported that the Indians on the Susquehanna had seem some of the New England men that came "as spies to Woyamock last fall, and they saw them making draughts of the land and rivers." The Delawares had built "Woyamock, and twelve miles higher up the river a town called Asserughney, where about twenty Indian Delawares, all violently against the English" were found at this time.

This village stood between the bold precipice, famed

page 26

the world over as Campbell's Ledge, and the mouth of the Lackawanna, on the eastern bank of the Susquehanna. This, like all their villages, was small, as hunting

(Engraving of Campbell's Ledge)

page 27

and fishing were the main sources of supporting the population, naturally averse to labor. This high ledge, affording an uninterrupted look-out over the valley below, was used by the Indians not only thus to guard their wigwams, nestled along the river, but to kindle their beacon-fires at the evening or midnight hour, as they were wont to be kindled on the Scottish highlands in the days of Wallace and Bruce, to show those who watched the portentous flame the presence of danger, or signal the movements of an enemy.

While Asserughney was the Indian name of the town, Adjouqua was applied to the lower portion of the Lackawanna Valley. This castle, or encampment, was the upper one of the Delawares in Wyoming. It was a point of importance beause of its favorable location for trading purposes. The great war-path from the inland lakes of New York to Wyoming and the South, and the trail down the Lackawanna from the Minisink homes on the Delaware, passed through it. Fur-parties, and dusky chiefs, with their captives, alike followed the solitude of its passage through these true Indian lands.

Capoose village, up the shallow Lackawanna, eight miles from Asserughney, was built a few years previous to this and occupied by the Monseys, who, like the more numerous Delawares, paid tribute to the Tartars of the western world at Onondaga. These villages were constructed in primitive fashion, from green bark, boughs, and weeds. As the war-paths passed through them, they

page 28

were alike threatened by nomadic tribes, espousing the interests of the English or the French. This led the Six Nations, in June, 1756, to depute Og-ha-gha-dish, a chief of the Iroquois, living on the north branch of the Susquehanna, to ask the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania to build a fort at the mouth of the Lackawanna. At a Conference held at the camp at Armstrong's, June 10, 1756, between Col. William Claphan and Og-ha-gha-disha, the chief thus addressed the colonel:--

"My Brother: The Iroquois have sent me as a representative of the whole nation to treat with you (producing a belt of wampum), and will ratify all my contracts. Brother: they agreed to your building a fort at Shamokin, but are desirous that you should also build a fort three days' journey in a canoe higher up the North Branch in their country, at a place called Adjouquay, and this belt of wampum is to clear the road to that place. Brother: If you agree to my proposal in behalf of my nation, I will return and immediately collect our whole force to be employed in protecting your people while you are building a fort in our country at Adjouquay, where there is a good situation and fine soil at the entrance of a deep creek on a level plain five miles extending and clear of woods. Adjouqua is fourteen miles above Wioming, and old women may carry a heavy pack of skins from thence to the Minisink and return to Adjouqua in two mights. My Brother: The Land is troubled, and you may justly apprehend danger, but if you grant our request we will be together, and if any danger happens to you, we will share ti with you. My Brother (laying down a belt of wampum folded in the middle):

page 29

this describes your path to Shamokin; unfolding the belt and extending it to its full length, this is your road to Adjouquay." Governor Morris thanked the chief for his kind speech, and in his reply said: "Brother: I am desired to build another fort fourteen miles above Wioming, at a place called Adjouquay. I have agreed to this request, and am taking measures to do it out hand, about which I shall want to consult you."

A line of forts, some twenty miles apart stretched along the frontier from the Potomac to the Delaware in 1756-58. Stroudsburg, the pretty shire town of the county of Monroe, although taking its name from Colonel Jacob Stroud, who commanded Fort Penn at this point during the Revolutionary war, received a definite step toward a settlement from the presence of one of the most eastern of these outposts, erected in 1757--Fort Hamilton.

INDIAN VILLAGE OF CAPOOSE.--TEEDYUSCUNG

The low, rich bottom on the western border of the Lackawanna, between Providence and Scranton, was known to the earliest explorers as "Capoose Meadow"--a name probably given to perpetuate the memory of a civil chief, Capoose, excelling in the art of agriculture and peace. The Monseys, or a prominent branch of that tribe, left the Minisink and diffused through the Lackawanna Valley, as early as any authentic history comes down to the white man from the Lenni-Lenapes. As this village was visited in 1742 by Count Zinaendorf, who named the county Saint Anthony's Wilderness, its date and occupancy must have been considerably anterior to this. This tribe, rudely gashing the margin of the Lackawanna for the reception of maize as early as 1700, appears originally to have been an off-shoot of the Delawares. Their history

page 30

and habits are so assimilated as to indicate a common origin. Both spoke the Algonquin language of the Iroquois--a language abounding in vowels and fertile in dialect--obeyed laws emanating from the same source and both are intimately associated in colonial and provincial history. The Monseys, like every tribe, scattered along the Susquehanna and its branches, acknowledged the supremacy of the Onondaga head, and were so nomadic in their habits, that the Pennsylvania archives often refer to Monsey warriors from Wickalousin (Wyalusing), Chokonot (Cochecton), and from many other places along the rivers of the Province. When the Delawares moved to Ohio, the Monseys accompanied them, and ultimately dissolved into that conquered nation. Vast tracts of land was claimed by the Monseys and Delawares, who jointly occupied New Jersey, the Schuylkill Basin, and the rich valley of the Delaware in 1646. January 30, 1743, Capoose gave to Moses Totomy, a Delaware of some local influence, power of attorney to sell these lands to the whites, or transact any other business with the Government relating to lands claimed by him. The greater portion of these domains were thus sold by Capoose to Governor Penn in October, 1758. Thus the upper border of Adjouquay, exquisite in the beauty of woods veined with springs and creeks, whose waters ran to the sea unruffled save by rock or deer, rich in game and fish, easy of conquest, was selected by Capoose for his home after the English began to encroach upon forest-lands east of the Hudson. The hunting-grounds of Capoose extended down the Lackawanna and Nay-aug, and up the river to its very head-waters. The Scranton race-course is within the ancient border of Capoose; the Diamond mines open upon its western border.

Their burial-place, long since smoothed down by a plow, lay on the high bank of the Lackawanna, a quarter

page 31

of a mile above their town, where vast quantities of relics have been found heretofore by the antiquarian. Although the whole valley was familiar with the tawny cabin dwellers, long before the blankness of their lives were marked by the intrusion of the pale-face, ignorant even of the topography of the country, this clearing or meadow of

(Engraving: Indian Map of Capoose Meadows)

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Capoose, was the main one found in the valley by the pioneer, where the wigwam stood on a cultivated spot. And even here, as the men were too lazy to plant the corn, or secure the scanty harvest, the labor fell upon the more submissive squaws. The Indian artisans were skilled in the art of manufacturing, from flint and stone, implements for agriculture and the chase, elegant arrow-heads and spear points; the rude pebble, and sometimes the rarer silex were shaped into pipes and ornaments of symbolic meaning while bowls were fashioned from dried clay with an ingenuity never equaled by the white man within the stone period. While their war-path ran along under the sycamore and vine fringing the bank of the Lackawanna, the waters of the stream, sometimes wild in its uprising, opened a favorite highway for their canoes descending with the silent warriors to the plains of Wyoming.

In accordance with the usual habit practiced by the Indians, of annually burning over their hunting-grounds with a view of destroying the smaller trees in the way of securing game, there was remaining, when the whites appeared, little underbrush to interfere in the chase around Capoose, now known as Tripp's Flats. The forest around it was stocked with game. the pheasant whirred from the brake in conscious security, the duck rode in the stream as it it were its own, the rabbit squatted in the laurel in drowsy attitude, the moose and elk stood among the pines or thundered through them like the tread of cavalry; the deer browsed daintly upon the juicy leaf while the Moosic slope, unshorn of its foliage, offered the panther and bear but little shield from the quick poised arrow of the woodsman. The beaver, muskrat, and otter, enlivened the stream in whose waters fish swam in schools. Perch, pike, and even shad, filled the Lackawanna, while every jouous brook from the mountain was spotted with trout. Hooks, constructed with singular ingenuity from bone, or nets woven from the inner bark of trees, or even the stone-tipped spear, which they threw

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with admirrable adroitness at a distance of thirty feet, while the fish were moving rapidly, never failed to supply the wigwam with food.

Capoose himself was a contemporary of Teedyuscung of the Delawares, but so diverse in character and termperament, that while the latter was ambitious for distinction, and prominent in council gatherings, where he jointly looked after the interests of the Monseys and his own tribe, Capoose, undecked with the emblems of war, lived in amity with the whites, encouraged the culture of the soil, and left behind him a name untarnished with either blood or carnage.

Long after the occupancy of this region by Capoose, the Moravians indented a settlement in the Province above the Blue Mountain. On the wild waters of the Ma-ha-noy, where it joins the Lehigh, eighteen miles above Bethlehem, these Indian civilizers encamped in 1743. "Except the erection of the fort," says Miner, "this was the first settlement in a northeast direction in Pennsylvania, above the Kittatinny Ridge or Blue Mountain." This was about forty miles from Wyoming, and the only road intervening was the narrow path of the warrior.

Easton, the shire-town of Northampton County, admirably located for agricultural purposes or traffic with the men who patrolled the forest, laid out for a village in 1750, and Lower Smithfield, on the Delaware, above the present village of Stroudsburg, had but a few clearings opened in 1751, occupied by Charles Broadhead, Samuel Dupue, John McMichael, John Carmeckle, John Anderson, James Tidd, Job Bakehorn, and Henry Dysert. These were held under proprietory auspices. No attempt had yet been made to settle Wyoming or Lackawanna. The hunter and trapper coveting furs, more bold than the emigrant, unwilling to risk his life for a doubtful home, had ventured hither, but the French and Indian wars of this period arrested explorations, and sent alarm into every inland settlement within the Province.

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Braddock's defeat in 1755, disastrous especially in western Pennsylvania, illuminated the whole frontier with burning cabins. The French, promising large rewards for scalps to those they assured should again be reinstated upon lands already sold the English, readily won over the red-men, of whom thirty were reported at Wyoming, November 9, 1755, and "much larger bodies up the river and branches."

The Indians, never slumbering, but ever ready to sway to and fro, as success alternated with either party, indulging in the hope that the English might be expelled from their former plains, entered into an alliance with the French with extraordinary zeal and readiness. Gnaddenhutten was burned in 1755 by "a band of Indians coming from Wyoming", and the plantations of Mr. Broadhead, some twenty-five or thirty miles from Bethlehem, of Frederick Heath on Pocho Pochto Creek, and Mr. Calvers, McMichael's, and "houses and families thereabouts were attacked by the Indians at daylight and burnt down by them." Mr. Broadhead estimated the number of warriors at two hundred. This attack upon the settlers was marked by the same atrocity characterizing much of the border warfare. As all the Susquehanna and Lackawanna Indians except the Monseys were disposed for peace in the spring of 1757, Mr. Miner concludes that the Oneidas and Senekas from the lakes formed the war party. Hostilities had been suspended against the Delawares living "on the east side of the northeast branch of the Susquehanna", when they were complained of as being the most troublesome, and of whom Conrad Weiser reported in December, 1755, as being alienated from the English and living at Schantowano (Wayomack) in a town called Nescopeckon.

Had not the Wyoming Indians caught the war spirit

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at the war-dance, there certainly would have been no necessity for desiring peace on one side, or the suspension of hostilities on the other. Instead of being the above-named tribes alone, it is probable that the Delawares, exasperated by the sale of Wyoming lands to Connecticut people, or the Monseys, not yet desiring peace, issuing from the wigwams of Capoose, were jointly guilty of this murderous breach of good faith toward the United Brethren.

In 1757, Teedyuscung, the proud, jealous head of the Delawares, requested the Governor of Pennsylvania to so fix and define his land around his village on the Susquehanna that "his children can never sell or yours ever buy them", and to remain so forever. He also asked the Proprietary Government to assist him in building houses at Wyoming before corn-planting time. Ten log houses, "twenty feet by fourteen in the clear, and one twenty-four by sixteen, of squared logs, and dovetailed", were built for him in 1758. To check or crush the ambitious projects of New England men about forming a colony at Wyoming, influenced their erection by Pennsylvania quite as much as any especial regard for the Delaware sachem. One of the masons was killed and scalped by six hostile Indians while engaged at this labor.

A treaty of peace was held at Easton, November 8, 1756, with great pomp and ceremony, when the conflicting interests of either party were long talked over and harmoniously adjusted amid the clattering of tongues and the smoke of the calumet. To cripple the French, against whom the English had formally proclaimed war in 1756, or rather to render the treaty of any practical value, the Iroquois, proud of their stength, never wielded in vain, and conscious of the wrongs of their fathers, they were impatient to redress, had first to be reconciled and consulted. "The influence of Sir William Johnson", says

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Miner, "agent of Indian affairs, was invoked to bring the Six Nations to a new Congress. Neither presents nor promises were spared, and in October, 1758, there was opened at Easton, one of the most imposing assemblages ever beheld in Pennsylvania. Chiefs from the Six Nations were there, namely, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras. There were also present embassadors from the tributary tribes of Minisinks, Mohicans, Wapingers, and Shawanese. Both the Governors of Pennsylvania and New Jersey attended; with Sir William Johnson and George Crogan, Esq., sub Indian agent, a deputation from the Provincial Assembly at New Jersey, and a large concourse of eminent citizens from Philadelphia and the neighboring counties. Teedyuscung on the way to the conference having fallen in company with the chief who had commanded the expedition against the Gnadenhutten and Fort Allen, high words arose between them, when the king raised his tomahawk and laid the chief dead at his feet. From that moment, though vengeance might slumber, he was a doomed man, a sacrifice alike to policy and revenge. At the Congress Teedyuscung, eloquent and of imposing addres, took at first a decided lead in the debates." But one of the chiefs of the Six Nations, says Chapman, "on the other side expressed in strong language his resentment against the British colonists, who had killed and imprisoned one of his tribe, and he, as well as other chiefs of their nations, took great umbrage at the importance assumed by Teedyuscung, whom, as one of the Delawares they considered in some degree subject to their authority. Teedyuscung, however, supported the high station which he held, with dignity and firmness, and the different Indian tribes at length became reconciled to each other. The conference having continued eighteen days and all causes of misunderstanding between the English and Indians being removed, a general treaty of peace was concluded on the twenty-sixth day of October. At this

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treaty the boundaries of the different purchases made from the indians were more particularly described, and they received an additional compensation for their lands, consisting of knives, hats, caps, looking-glasses, tobacco-boxes, shears, gun-locks, combs, clothes, shoes, stockings, blankets, and several suits of laced clothes for their cheiftains, and when the business of the treaty was completed, the stores of rum were opened and distributed to the Indians, who soon exhibited a scene of brutal intoxication."

Although for many years afterward, the tomahawk hung over the Lackawanna and Susquehanna setlements like a shadow over the mountain, the decline of the Indian empire in American can be dated from the last-mentioned treaty, while the power of the hitherto victorious French, then marching through the forest with General Forbes to attack Fort Du Quesne, was so suddently shaken by the desertion of their allies, as to result in their defeat in this expedition, and their final overthrow in Northern America.

During this year, many of the Delawares and Monseys, and most of the Shawanese removed from the valley westward.

When Teedyuscung visited Easton, in July, 1756, Major Parsons was requested to keep a written memoranda of the general behavior and conversation of the king, from which it would seem that the high position assumed and maintained by him in Council, was hardly compatible or consistent with his ordinary life. "The king and his wild company were perpetually drunk, very much on Gascoon, and at times abusive to the inhabitants, for they all spoke English more or less. The king was full of himself, saying frequently, that which side soever he took must stand, and the other fall; repeating it with insolence, that he came from the French, who had pressed him much to join them against the English, that now he was in the middle between the French and English, quite

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disengaged from both sides, and whether he joined the English or French, he would publish it aloud to the world, that all nations might know it. That he was born among the English, somewhere near Trenton, and is near fifty years old. He is a lusty, raw-boned man, haughty, and very dsirous of respect and command; he can drink three quarts or a gallon of rum a day, without being drunk; he was the man that persuaded the Delawares to go over to the French, and then attack our frontiers, and he, and those with him, have been concerned in the mischief done to the inhabitants of Northampton County. Some of the Indians said, that between forty or fifty of their people came to Drahoga, from one of the lakes, about the time they set out, in order to fall upon our inhabitants, and addressed Teedyuscung to head them, but he told them he was going to the Governor of Pennsylvania to treat with him concerning a peace, which the Mohocks had advised him to do, and therefore he ordered them to sit still till he came back again to them. The town people observed that the shirts which the Indian women had on were made of Dutch table-cloths, which it is supposed they took from the people they murdered on our frontiers. The king, in one of his conversations, said that only two hundred French, and about eighty Indians were at the lake, where most of the English are, and that he could bring the most or all of them off. The Governor invited Teedyuscung and the Indians to dine with him, but, before dinner, the king, with some of them came to the Governor, and made the Governor four speeches, giving four strings of wampum, after the Indian manner: one to brush thorns from the Governor's legs, another to rub the dust out of his eyes to help him see clearly, another to open his ears and the fourth to clear his throat that he might speak plainly. Teedyuscung claimed to be king of ten nations. Being asked what ten nations, he answered, the united Six Nations: Mohawk, Onondagoes, Oneidas, Senecas, Cyugas, and Tuscaroras;

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and four others, Delawares, Shawanees, Mohickons, and Munsies, who would all ratify what he should do. He carried the Belt of Peace with him, and whoever would, might take hold of it. But as to them that refused, the rest would all join together and fall upon them.

"All the Indians, in short, would do as he would have them, as he was the great man. The Governor used the same four ceremonies to Teedyuscung, accompanied with four strings of wampum, after which the Governor and Indians went to dinner, escorted by a detachment of the First Battalion of the Pennsylvania Regiment. Conrad Weiser, the interpreter, was first introduced to Teedyuscung at this time, who, after watching his movements a single day, reported to the Council "that the king and the principal Indians being all yesterday under the force of liquor, he had not been favored with so good an opportunity as he could have wished of making himself acquainted with their history, but, in the main, he believed Teedyuscung was well inclined; he talked in high terms of his own merit, but expressed himself a friend to this Province." Teedyuscung, at this council, was alleged to have been the instigator of the Indian outrages upon the whites in 1755, by sending large belts of wampum to various tribes on the war-path; but the shrewd informer or negotiator, with a view of personal advantage and emolument, informed Governor Morris that, as Teedyuscung had brought on the war, he was the only person that could effect a peaceful solution of all Indian affairs. To do this, "Teedyuscung must have a belt of wampum at least five or six feet long and twelve rows broad; and besides the belt, he must have twelve strings to send to the several chiefs, to confirm the words that he sends."

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LACKAWANNA RIVER AND VALLEY

 

The Indians, ever having an extraordinary appreciation of the beauties of nature, have given to their rivers and lakes, their mountains and valleys, names really rich and expressive. The transposition, however, of many of these names from language to another, has so corrupted and changed their primitive expression, that much of their beauty is partially lost or wholly destroyed.

In the Algonquin or Iroquois vernacular, the valley was called Ad-jou-quay; in the harsher dialect of the Delawares where no adjectives were known, spoken by all intervening clans, from the Minisinks, on the Delaware, to Shamokin, it was known as Lee-ha-ugh-hunt or Lee-haw-hanna,, pronounced Lr-hr-hr-nr (Lar-har-har-nar), the letter a either being silent, or in the Indian gutteral, having the sound of r. In succeding years, the modifications and construction of the word became so great as to become at length a matter of provincialism.

Although in 1759 the stream was designated ad Lee-ha-ugh-hunt by the Monseys and Delawares living upon its banks, who complained of the intrusion fo the whites at its mouth, the original map of Westmoreland (Wyoming) showing the Connecticut surveys in 1761, records it as Lack-aw-na. In 1762 the stream was known as Lee-ha-wa-nock; in 1771 as Lam-aw-wa-nak; in 1772 as Lock-o-worna; in 1774, Lackawanna and Lock-a-warna; in 1778 as Lac-u-wanack; in 1790 as Lak-u-wanuk; in 1791 as Lackawanny. From 1791 down to about 1837-'8, it was recognized both in private and offical parlance as Lack-a-wannock. "Wannock" lopped off by gradual

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habit at this time, became obsolete, and wanna took its place, thus adopting, as far as the idioms of language would permit, the original name as transmitted to us from Teedyuscung. Lackawanna is a corruption of the Indian "Lee-ha-ugh-hunt", or "Lee-haw-hanna"; Lee-haw, or Lee-ha, the prefix, signifies the forks or point of intersection; hanna, as in Susquehanna, Toly-hanna, Toppa-hannock, Rappa-hannock, Tunk-hannock, and Tunk-hanna, implies, in Indian language, a stream of water. Hence the name, Lar-har-har-nar, or Lackawanna, the meeting of two streams--a name highly poetic and sweet sounding.

The valley of the Lackawanna, picturesque and salubrious to a delightful degree, watered by a stream from which it derived its name, lies about one hundred and thirty-eight miles northwest of New York in a direct line. it is about thirty-five miles in length, runs south and southeast, and in its general topographical configuration is nothing more or less than a continuation, or rather extension, of the northern right arm of the classic and celebrated Valley of Wyoming cut in twain by Campbell's Ledge. The most northerly deposit of stone or anthracite coal found in America, enriches its entire border from the head of the Lackawanna, among the grand old beech and maples, down to its very mouth. The valley is, in fact, a gem carved out of a mountain of coal. Rimmed on either side by the coal and iron-clad Moosic, beautiful in its midwinter or summer foliage, wrapping its jewels in harmonious beds, it reposes like a rough cradle or canoe, tapering off at its upper extremity in a narrow unimportant intervale. A few miles above Carbondale, the valley, already narrowed before, is more successfully interrupeted by a succession of bowlders or hills, facetiously termed "Hog's Back", from their sharp, bristling

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appearance. Now and then the mountain cleft for a trout brook, elbows against the stream, giving its waters, too swift and shallow for navigable purposes, graceful and gradual fall.

The Lackawanna River rises principally in Susquehanna County, but one considerable branch emerges from the same marshy region in Wayne that sends out the Starucca, Lackawaxen, and Equinunk to join the Delaware, which, after many counter and diverse movements, for a distance of at least fifty miles, pours its gentle volume into the Susquehanna at Pittston. Along its banks, shorn of the fairest portion of timber by the lumberman, the landscape is singularly fine, with slope, field, and village, while the stream itself offers to the eye every variety of smooth water, pool , and rapids. Here its margin, rock-bound and abrupt, is carved from the low-browed cliff, and there the alluvial meadow or cornfield ready for the husbandman, attests the luxurious character of the soil.

Along the central and lower portion, coal of the finest quality is found in profusion, interstratified in many places with iron-ore of the most desirable and productive character.

The confluence of the Lackawanna and Susquehanna is described int he following beautiful lines by the late Mrs. Sigourney:--

THE SUSQUEHANNA

ON ITS JUNCTION WITH THE LACKAWANNA

By Mrs. Sigourney.

Rush on, glad stream, in thy power and pride

To claim the hand of thy promised birde,

For she hastes from the realms of the darkened mine,

To mingle her murmured vows with thine:

Ye have met, ye have met, and your shores prolong

The liquid toss of your nuptial song.

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Methinks ye wed as the white man's son

And the child of the Indian King have done.

I saw the bride as she strove in vain

To cleanse her brow from the carbon stain;

But she brings thee a dowry so rich and true

That thy love must not shrink from the tawny hue.

Her birth was rude in a mountain cell,

And her infant freaks there are none to tell;

Yet the path of her beauty was wild and free.

And in dell and forest she hid from thee;

But the day of her fond caprice is o'er,

And she seeks to part from thy breat no more.

Pass on, in the joy of thy blended tide,

Through the land where the blessed Miquon died.

No red-man's blood with its guilty stain,

Hath cried unto God from that broad domain;

With the seeds of peace they have sown the soil,

Bring a harvest of wealth for their hour of toil.

On, on, through the vail where the brave ones sleep,

Where the waving foliage is rich and deep.

I have stood on the mountain and roamed through the glen,

To the beautiful homes of the Western men;

Yet naught in that region of glory could see

So fair as the vale of Wyoming to me.

WAS WYOMING ONCE A VAST LAKE?

The Kittatinny, or Blue Ridge, which skirts along Pennsylvania and Virginia is probably one of the most even ranges in the world. At its base it rarely exceeds a mile, while its summit, covered with perpetual foliage, preserves an uniformity of height that distinguishes it from all other mountains stretched across the country.

At some period in the world's history, this ridge doubtless was the margin of a vast lake into which ran the waters of the Chemung, Chenango, Delaware, and the Susquehanna, and over mountain, moor, and valley., rolled one common wave. Evidence of this is written upon rock and mountain around us, while the earth from the

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hill-side mine, disdains to coneal its share of the water spoils. The vast quantity of petrified shells, alluvials, and strata of shale and clay and organic remains, found along the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Susquehanna, and many other valleys, and the character of these rivers, all running in a transverse or cross direction, have been compelled to wash out by slow and triumphant progress or rupture the obstructing heights to find their way to the sea, suggest the inquiry, Were they not once the bottoms of immense lakes? And did not the finny tribes, the huge serpent, and the whale, sport in these inland salt waters in times of yore?

No one can carefully examine the strata of the mountains of the United States, especially, the Alleghanies or Blue Ridge, or even glance at the map, without finding a fact existing in no other part of the world, that all their principal ridges cross the great as well as the lesser rivers instead of running parallel with them. The Delaware, Susquehanna, Potomac, and Shenandoah, all issue from the steep mountains of the Blue Ridge.

One of the most distinguished authors and eminent naturalists, C. F. Volney, who visited Harper's Ferry in 1796, and who gave the stubject great attention and research, believed that "the chain of the Blue Ridge in its entire state, completedly denid the Potomac a passage onward, and that then all the waters of the upper part of the river, having no issue, formed several considerable lakes, which spread themselves between the Blue Ridge and the chain at Kittatinny, not only to the Susquehanna and Schuylkill, but beyond the Schuylkill, and even to the Delaware. It is obvious that the lakes flowing off must have changed the whole face of the lower country. Several branches having at once or in succession given passage to the streams of water now called James, Potomac, Susquehanna, Schuylkill, and Delaware, their general and common reservoir was divided into as many distinct lakes, separated by the risings of the ground that

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exceeded this level. Each of these lakes had its particular drain, and this drain being at length worn down to the lowest level, the land was left completely uncovered. This must have occurred early with the James, Susquehanna, and Delaware, because their basins are more elevated, and it must ahve happened more recently with the Potomac, for the opposite reason, its basin being the deepest of all."

How far the Delaware then extended the reflux of its waters toward the east, he could not ascertain; "however, it appears its basin was bounded by the ridge that accompanies its left bank; and which is the apparent continuation of the Blue Ridge and North Mountain. it is probable that its basin has always been separate from that of the Hudson, as it is certain that the Hudson has always had a distinct basin, the limit and mound of which is above West Point, at a place called the Highlands."

Schoolcraft and Professor Beck, and other eminent writers, also subscribe to this theory. The basin of the Lackawanna, viewed from the summit of the mountain back of Scranton, or from one of the more elevated points farther up the valley, exhibits the internal appearnace and form of a lake so plainly, that the idea of the ancient existence of one here is indubitably forced upon the observer. Other circumstances tend to confirm this impression, as the heaps of detached rock strewn below many of the gorges, especially at the Delaware Water Gap, where the waters were held back until the great embankment gave way before the weight of the vast body of water above, or by attrition, convulsion, or glacier action, and brought down all that stratum of earth and mud which now gives some agricultural strength and value to the shores of the lower Delaware.

A few yards above the bridge, across the Susquehanna at Pittston, can be seen a huge rock of many thousand

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tons in weight, of which Mr. Charles Miner thus writes: "Standing on the bank of the river a little below the mouth of the Lackawanna, and looking northward, it appears as if by some power little short of omnipotent, the solid rock had been cloven down near a thousand feet to open a passage for the water. Being on the river-bank twelve years ago, with the able and lamented Mr. Packer, then chairman of the senatorial committee, to view the coal region of Luzerne, he pointed to a huge mass of broken and contorted rock, evidently out of place, which now lies at Pittston Ferry, between the canal and river, and expressed the decided and not improbable opinion, that in the convulsion of nature which separated the mountain above us, this mass must have been torn away and borne by the rushing flood to its present resting place. Twenty miles below, where the Susquehanna takes leave of the plains, the mountains are equally lofty and precipitous. In many places the rocks distinctly exhibit the abrasions of water many feet above the highest pitch to which the river has ever been known to rise, going to show, that at some very remote period, this had been a lake, and indicating that there had been a chain of lakes probably along the whole line of the stream. Banks of sand-hills, covered with rounded stone, manifestly worn smooth by attrition, similar stones being found wherever wells are sunk, tend to confirm the opinion. The soil is chiefly alluvial, and the whole depth and surface, so far as examined, show great changes by the violent action of water."

The existence of this lake or lakes, made by the intervening hills, explains the appearance of the several stages or flats observed along the Wyoming plains and the Lackawanna, and even at Cobb's Gap, where the roaring brook flees from the Pocono, as if the water once had a greater volume than now, or was higher at one period

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than at another, and by some means was drained off in such a manner that the receding wave made a new mark of embankment, indicating the original height of the shore of these lakes and rivers.

On the very summit of the Pocono Mountain, about twenty miles east of the Lackawanna, lies a broad marsh, elevated many hundred feet above the Delaware Water Gap, 1,969 feet above tide-water, covered in a few places, as can be seen from the passing cars, with a deep strata of sand, similar to that found on the sea-shore, which in spite of the drainage of the water around it by these great breaks in the mountain, has maintained its sedentary and original position, while the subsiding waters hollowed out the valleys and formed cascades of beauty, which marked and enlivened the wild landscape long after the Noachian deluge.

Mr. Schoolcraft, well known to the reading public as one of the most accurate and entertaining writers and explorers in American antiquities, corroborates this theory, and asks the questions, "May we not suppose that the great northern lakes are the remains of such an ocean?" If not so, they were probably the mere remnant of a great inland sea.

The weight of the accumulated waters, coming from the north, assisted perhaps by volcanic agency, possibly made the various gaps int he mountains, and as the liberated waters took up the line of march to the sea, the whole geological features of the lower country acknowledged the power of the watery plowshare. Whether this abyss boiled with a heat far beyond the temperature of white-hot iron, from the immense furnaces below over the seams of liquid coal, or at what period this watery or eruptive

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conquest transpired, lies so far beyond the earliest time of any written or traditional history, that no explanation or data is known other than that found written upon the terraced rock along the sides and bottoms of these ancient mountain lakes.

Contemporary with these phenomena, or in more pre-Adamic times, it is evident that the topographical character of the Lackawanna valley was essentially changed. the geological conformation of the country along the stream; the character, form, and direction of the Alleghany range thrown across southern New York; its mean altitude near the Great Bend of the Susquehanna River being but little if any greater than at Tioga Point; the comparative freshness and shape, as well as the confusion of all the strata of earth, stone, and coal, along the Lackawanna, with the general appearance of the country traversed by the Susquehanna and Lackawanna, afford abundant evidence of the correctness of this conclusion.

Instead of breaking off so abruptly from its apparent course at this point, and cautiously feeling its way far along the border of the mountains, until it reached Tioga Point, and then carrying its current through a passage ruptured through successive ridges, until, with all its beauty and boldness, it opened into the slackened waters of Wyoming, it probably struck boldly down into a channel now closed by some great upheaval or disturbance in the geological world, and sought the valley where now the Lackawanna mingles with the waters of the Susquehanna.

Trace up the Susquehanna, step by step, to the Highlands of New York, or down through its narrow passage to Wyoming, and not a single vein or spar of coal is visible; go up to the Lackawanna, modest in its volume, to the indicated point, and more than midway from the mouth of the stream, coal deposits, grand in their character and exhaustless in their creation, everywhere appear; all of which confirms the theory, that, whatever local

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causes or convulsion once effected the mineralogical features of the valley, the way of the ocean, or the waters of a much larger stream than the Lackawanna once occupied its place.

No less than five veins of coal have been washed away from the eastern side of the Lackawanna, a mile above Scranton, by the propelling flood of olden time, and their crushed and blackened deposition found in the alluvial banks below. The city of Scranton, or the old village proper, embracing the sand banks, stands upon such a singular deposit.

Very many of our mountain notches appear like volcanic outlets. The evidence of subterranean or oceanic volcanic fires exists to-day in the ocean, and now and in a moment's clamor, make food of coasts and cities. Their existence explain why the carboniferous and even the granitic strata of rock are inclined to the horizon in angles of forty-five degrees and upward in so many of the mountain ranges throughout the coal basins of Pennsylvania, and which is so especially noticed and delineated in the huge ledge of rocks thus sloping in distinct lamination or layers in the well-know notch of the mountain between Providence and Abington, about two miles northwest of Scranton, called "Leggett's Gap".

WAR-PATHS

 

One of the three long-trodden paths of the warrior leading out of Wyoming, led eastward to Coshutunk (Cochecton), a small Indian settlement upon the shore of the upper Delaware. Leaving the valley at Asserughney village, standing at the mouth of the stream, it followed the eastern bank of the Lackawanna up to Springbrook, Stafford Meadow, and Nayang or Roaring Brook, crossing the last two named ones a short distance below the present location of Scranton, and passed into the Indian town of Capoose. Here one path led off to Oquago, New

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York (now Windsor), about forty miles distant, through Leggett's Gap and the Abingtonian wildnerness, while the other, diverging from Capoose in an easterly direction, plunged boldly into the forest, passing along where Dunmore now stands, up the mountain slope to its very summit. This foot-path crossed the Moosic range near the residence of the late John Cobb, Esq., and thence through Little Meadows, in Salem, and the low Wallenpaupack country beyond. This trail seldom ran through the gaps, but it generally, like many of their war-paths, kept the higher ground, or where the woods were less dense, because the warriors, agile and quick-sighted on the march, preferred climbing over a considerable elevation, to the labor of cutting a trail through more level ground, or deep wooded ravines, with their stone hatchets; besides this, overlooking points were chosen invariably, so that upon entering or leaving a valley, they could better discover the approach or presence of an enemy. Of this narrow trail, worn to the depth of several inches in many places on the mountains where roots and rocks offered no resistance to passing moccasins, few indeed, are the remaining traces where the warrior and the war-song enlivened the way but a little over a century ago. Near the mountain spring, however, this old Indian path for several hundred yards to the east of it, was so deeply indented as to show its depth and general outline even to-day.

The first rude wagon-road cut out and opened from the Hudson River to Wyoming Valley, for the pack-horse or wheels, followed this track the greater portion of the way because of its being the most direct route from Connecticut to the backwoods of Lackawanna and Wyoming, then called Westmoreland by the Yankees, who began to people it.

INDIAN SPRING

Almost upon the very summit of the Moosic Mountain, between the valley and Cobb's settlement, by the side of

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this old trail, bubbles from the earth a large spring, called the "Indian Spring". No matter how parched the lips of mother-earth--how shrunken the volume of streams elsewhere, this spring, indifferent to drought or flood, in summer or winter, is ever filled to its brim with cold pure water.

Away from the world's hot pulse; hemmed in by the pine whose waving tops give partial entrance to the noon-day sun, and once gave shelter to rovers of the wilderness strolling from tribe to tribe with friendly or avenging tomahawk, and lifting its fountain as it does almost from the very top of a high vertical ledge, running nearly a mile before it opens into Cobb's Gap, this spring from its peculiar location, has much to render it attractive and romantic to the visitor. It forms one of the lesser tributaries of Roaring Brook, from whence Scranton is supplied with water.

In July, 1788, two persons were killed at this point. Fleeing from Wyoming Valley resounding with the exultant shout of the tories and their red auxiliaries, and the faint cries of the captives reserved for ransom or torture, they bent over, thirsty and exhausted, for the invigorating draught. They never rose from their knees. The hatchet of the savage, intently watching the victims, flew from the ambush; the stony knife dripped through their scalps and the wolves at night made long and loud their carnival over the unresisting dead.

A large red rock rims one side of this spring, whose crimson color tradition imputes to the blood of the victims thus immolated.

INDIAN RELICS AND FORTIFICATIONS.

No evidence is found of Indian forts along the Lackawanna, although there existed one or more a few miles below its mouth, one of which is thus described by Chapman in his History of Wyoming:--

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"In the valley of Wyoming, there exist some remains of Indian fortifications, which appear to have been constructed by a race of people very different in their habits from those who occupied the place when first discovered by the whites. Most of these ruins have been so much obliterated by the operations of agriculture, that their forms can not now be distinctly ascertained. That which remains the most entire was examined by the writer during the summer of 1871, and its dimensions carefully ascertained; although, from frequent plowing, its form had become almost destroyed. It is situated in the township of Kington, upon a level plain on the north side of Toby's creek, about one hundred and fifty feet from its bank, and about a half mile from its confluence with the Susquehanna. It is of an oval or elliptical form, having its longest diameter from the northwest to the southeast, at right-angles to the creek, three hundred and thirty-seven feet, and its shortest diameter from the northeast to the southwest, two hundred and seventy-two feet. On the southwest side, appears to have been a gateway about twelve feet wide,opening toward the great eddy of the river, into which the creek falls. From present appearances, it consisted, probably, of only one mound or rampart, which, in height and thickness, appears to have been the same on all sides, and was constructed of earth; the plain on which it stands, not abounding in stone.

"On the outside of the rampart is an intrenchment or ditch, formed, probably, by removing the earth of which it is composed, and which appears never to have been walled. The creek, on which it stands, is bounded by a high steep bank on that side, and at ordinary times is sufficiently deep to admit canoes to ascend from the river to the fortification. When the first settlers came to Wyoming, this plain was covered with its native forest, consisting principally of oak and yellow pine; and the trees which grew in the rampart and in the intrenchment, are said to have been as large as those in any other part of

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the valley; one large oak, particularly, upon being cut down, was ascertained to be seven hundred years old. The Indians had no traditions concerning these fortifications, neither did they appear to have any knowledge of the purposes for which they were constructed. They were, perhaps, erected about the same time with those upon the waters of the Ohio, and probably by a similar people, and for similar purposes."

Another fortification existed on Jacob's Plains, or the upper flats in Wilkes Barre. its situation is the highest part of the low grounds, so that, only in extraordinary floods, is the spot covered with water." This fort seems to have been of about the same in form, shape and size, to that described by Chapman, and in its interior, near the southern line, the ancient people all concur in stating that there existed a well.

At the confluence of the Lackawanna with the Susquehanna, Indian graves and remains of wigwam life were found in great abundance sixty years ago. Skeletons exhumed by the waters of the spring freshets, lay in such numbers along the banks of the rivers, and so familiar had they become to the thoughtless passer, that boys were often seen with a thigh-bone in each hand drumming Yankee Doodle upon the whitened skulls, thus found upon the plain around them. Some of these wre doubtless the remains of the warriors who fell in the battles of the valley, as bullets corroded and white, and sometimes broken arrow-heads, were found wedged in the bones, indicating the precise manner of their death.

Others, crumbling the moment they were uncovered, or only furnishing a dark and peculiar deposit, bore evidence of greater age int heir burial. Bowls and pots of the capacity of a gallon or more, ingeniously cut form soap-stone, and ornamented with rich designs of beauty to the Indian's eye, were often found preserved with the

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remains. As none of this soap-stone is found nearer this place than Maryland or New Hampshire, it would seem to indicate the migratory as well as the commercial character of the tribe once possessing them. Hard, highly polished, and handsomely dressed stones, five or six inches in length, fitted for the hand, and used, probably, for skinning deer and other animals, hatchets, beads, and the silent calumet, here and there intemingled with the remains.

On the brink of the western range of the Moosic, in Leggett's gap, between Providence and Abington, an Indian grave was found in a very singular manner a number of years ago. A quick-footed deer, fleeing from his pursuer, leaped upon the end of a gun-barrel projecting from the ground, and brought it to the hunter's view. A little excavation exposed a large quantity of silica or flint stones worked into arrow and spear heads, a stone tomahawk, a French gun-barrel, an iron hoe, and some human bones, much decayed. The skeleton lay on its right side, with the knees drawn up, the head reclining toward the east, while immediately over reposed the implements and weapons of the deceased. The hoe and the gun, both much corroded, were probably obtained from the French, while their burial with the warrior upon this rugged spur of the mountain would indicate the time of their deposit as a period of peace. In his lap were found the arrows, made from one to two inches in length. Nearly a hundred small snail-shells, all fitted for stringing, and which had probably been used for belts or beads, lay immediately under the arrows. There was also a pipe, made from dark stone, one end of it being shaped for a stopple, and could be used for a whistle to gather the tribe from afar down the ravine, and the other for a scoop or spoon. This singular contrivance, if not used for a whistle, proably achieved great usefulness in porridge or broth. A small quantity of mineral, resembling black-lead, intended, doubtless, for medicine, had also been deposited in the isolated grave, beside the departed hunter.

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A portion of these, and a vast quantity of other interesting relics of the red-man, in a fine state of preservation, are now in the possession of the writer, open and free to all who choose to visit them.

Upon the western bank of the Lackawanna, in the upper portion of Capoose Meadow, in Providence, opposite the residence of the late Dr. Silas B. Robinson, slopes off a gentle mound, where, in 1795, a number of Indian graves were discovered and exhumed by a party of settlers in search of antiquarian spoils. As one of the mounds seemed to have been prepared with especial attention, and contained, with the bones of the warrior, a great quantity of the implements of the deceased, it was supposed, erroneously no doubt, to have been the grave of the chieftain Capoose. These graves, few in number, perhaps pointed to the last of the group of Monsey warriors who had offered incense and sacrifice to the Great Spirit at Capoose. The strings of wampum and their war instruments--for which this mound was disturbed--bore them company as they lay piled over with the gray sand of the meadow, and were protected and comforted on their long journey by the rude, yet cherished, amulets. These graves, endowed with no utterance but that of uncertain tradition, have been so obliterated by the operations of agriculture that little or no trace of them now appears to the unpracticed eye.

Arrows, stone vessels, tomahawks and knives, stone mortars and their accompanying pestles for pounding corn into nas-ump, or samp, and other curious relics of Indian times, are occasionally found in the valley, and although time has robbed them of much of their original beauty and usefulness, they have not lost, nor never can lose, their savage interest.

To the antiquarian, however, nothing could provoke more inqiry and interest than the remains of an ancient Indian mound or encampment, found in Covington, Luzerne County, near the line of the Delaware, Lackawanna

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and Western Railway, which to all appearances were as old as those existing in Wyoming Valley. These remains were discovered in 1833 by Mr. Welch, then a draughtsman in the Land Office at Washington, while he was hunting along Bell-meadow Brook, a small tributary of the Lehigh, on the Pocono. The accidental discovery of a piece of pottery among the loose pebbles on the bank of the brook, so different in character to any thing he had ever seen before, naturally awakened his curiosity, and led to the subsequent excavation of a vast quantity of sharp and flinty arrow and spear heads, a large stone hatchet, bowls of immese capacity, fashioned and baked from sand and clay. These bowls were indented upon their sides with deep finger prints, and some were tastily ornamented with characters original and unique.

The late Richard Drinker, Esq., of Scranton, a gentleman eminent in his day for genial philosophy and social abilities, to whom the writer was indebted for the above facts, was present at the time of their discovery, and described the pottery thus found as being enormous in quantity. An elegant short pipe, belonging probably to a squaw, was also found immediately under the tomahawk, in so perfect a state of preservation that it was to all appearances, as fit for the consumption of their favorite weed as when first fashioned into shape. A huge pile of elk bones and teeth were also found, but the bones crumbled to dust the moment they were exposed to the touch or air. Underneath them all, lay the remains of a great camp-fire, which was probably hurriedly deserted, and as hurriedly smothered with sand and stone to the depth of twelve or fourteen inches. Ashes, coals, and half-burned brands, one of which still bore the marks of a hatchet distinctly upon it, were spread over a surface of at least fifteen feet.

The most singular article exhumed, was a number of flat, delicately smoothed stone, somewhat resembling a carpenter's whetstone in shape and size, each one bored

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with two or three small circular holes near the extremity or the center. Whether these had been drilled and used for weaving fish-nets from wood or hemp, constructing belts of wampum, or for other mechanical or ornamental purposes, is a matter of inquiry or conjecture.

Trees of Norway girth have grown upon the edge of this brook since this camp-fire went out forever, and almost upon these remains, one immense hemlock, green in its foliage, has defied the storms of centuries as it stands like a Roman sentinel of old, over this ancient sepulcher of the forgotten savage.

The absence of iron and copper utensils among the debris, furnished abundant proof that these relics had been deposited by the red-men in the stone period, long before their knowledge of the European race, but why they were thus left isolated from their war-paths, or the purpose or the cause of their smothered fire, the learned antiquarian can only conjecture.

The beaver, caught more for its furs than its castoreum--now a considerable medicinal agent--once held their court in a low marsh or meadow adjoining this camp, from which the Indians evidently obtained sand for their pottery.

In fact the Lackawanna, and the wilder waters of the Le-hr (Lehigh), were inhabited by the beaver at the time of the first settlement of the valley by the whites. Across these streams, especially the upper Lehigh, they built their "beaver dams" upon the most scientific principles of the engineering art, living upon ash, birch, poplars and the softer wood, of which they were particularly fond. In the depest part of the pond they built their houses, resembling somewhat the wigwam of the Indian, with a floor of saplings, sloping toward the water like an inclined plane. Here, secure in their moted castle, they

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slept with their tails under water, ascending the floor with the rise of the stream. Rafting, when the rivers were swollen, destroyed their dams, and drove the beaver to creeks more quiet and remote. In 1826 there came from Canada an old trapper in search of the coveted furs, who caught with his traps all of these industrious animals but a single one lingering along the Lehigh and the Lackawanna; this lonely beaver by sharpened instinct, defied the trapper's cunning for a year or two, when, wandering down the swifter waters of the Alanomink in search of his lost companions, he was killed near Stroudsburg.

Is it not a little curious that with all the romantic ancient history of the Wyoming and Lackawanna valleys, so little attention until recently has been given toward gathering and preserving the various Indian implements once used in peace or in war? The writer has a passion for the old--not the old hills covered with forests, through whose hoary locks centuries have rustled unnumbered and unsung--but the lingering relics of a race, the bravest the world ever knew, which convey at once to the mind the glory of another day and another race. These links and landmarks of remote antiquity; the rarer implements of copper sometimes found in their ancient graves; the rude inscriptions which mark the first impulses of the wild-men toward letters or written legend; the stone battle-ax or tomahawk once flung or brandished by the brave exulting over his fallen foe; the knife whose scalping edge gleamed alike over the victim in the cradle or the field; the keen edged arrow twanged upon its fatal mission, or the calumet cherished afar for its silent and subduing power once smoked around the forest encampment--all are so associated with by-gone times, that as the plow now and then up-turns some little memento of the warrior's life, it astonishes the antiquarian to learn, that, aside from the really valuable and magnificent collection of Hon. Steuben Jenkins of Wyoming, and those possessed by the writer,

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so few of these memorials have been treasured up in the valley to-day. Such a group of Indian relics, embracing every variety able to illustrate the life, religion, and character of the former occupants of the country, long before the aggressions and repeated wrongs of the white man had become a great national reproach, and had turned the simple savage into a western heathen, compelled to fight for a standing-place, or starve with plenty around him and yet beyond his reach, could not fail to be invaluable as years rendered their possession difficult or quite impossible.

Whatever might have been the former character of Indian warfare in the earliest history of Wyoming, or however much the infant settlements throughout the country may have suffered from the fagot and the knife--when the cries of helpless womanhood and the innocence of childhood plead alike in vain--it is established by indubitable evidence of government officials, and elsewhere, that in the more recent wars the Indians have not been the agressors. We know, by living testimony, that they have been crowded, inch by inch, southward and westward by the constant incursions and shameful encroachments of the Caucasian race, until, from being a great, proud, and powerful nation, respected for their virtues and feared for their strength, they have been reduced to a mere handful of lurking warriors, rendered desperate by maltreatment and impoverished by misfortune.

INDIAN APPLE-TREE

In a description of New Netherland (New York), published at Amsterdam, in 1671, the appearance of the New Netherlanders (Indians of the Island of New York), are thus described, and will answer every description of the

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Lackawanna Indians:-- "this people is divided into divers nations, all well-shaped and strong, having pitch-black and lank hair, as coarse as a horse's tail, broad shoulders, small waist, brown eyes, and snow-white teeth; they are of a sallow color, abstemious in food and drink. Water satisfies their thirst; high and low make use of Indian corn and beans, flesh meat and fish, prepared all alike. The crushed corn is daily boiled to a pap, called by them sappaen. They observe no set time for meals. Whenever hunger demands, the time for eating arrives. Beaver's tails are considered the most savory delicacy. Whilst hunting, they live some days on roasted corn, carried about the person in a little bag. A little corn in water swells to a large mass. Henry Hudson relates that he entered the river Montaines in the latitude of forty degrees, and there went ashore. The Indians made strange gambols with dancing and singing; carried arrows, the points of which consisted of sharp stones, fastened to the wood with pitch; they slept under the blue sky, on little mats of platted leaves of trees; suck strong tobacco; are friendly, but very thievish. Hudson sailed up thirty miles higher, went into a canoe with an old Indian, a chief over forty men and seventeen women, who conducted him ashore. They all abode in one house well built of the bark of oak-trees."

The domestic habits of the Monsey tribe, when not engaged in warfare, were extremely simple and lazy. Patches of open land or "Indian clearings" early were found in the valley, where onions, cantaloupes, beans, and corn, and their favorite weed, tobacco, were half cultivated by the obedient squaw.

On the low strip of land lying upon either side of the street railroad, midway between Scranton and Providence, and near the cottage built some years since by Dr. Throop, now known as the "Atlantic Garden", there

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was found by the first white explorers into the valley, a permanent camp-place which had, to all appearances, long been used for tillage and a dwelling-place. Within this ancient clearing the passer can hardly fail to observe an apple-tree standing on the east side of the road, cragged and venerable, even if some of its limbs betoken the approach of age or the presence of neglect. Its precise location can be seen upon the Indian map of Capoose Meadow. This is the Indian apple-tree, of great age, thirteen and a half feet in circumference, and possibly was planted by the friendly hand of Capoose, more than a century ago. By arms selfish and rude, this old tree, which deserves a protecting fence to honor its memory, was bereft of its mates many years ago, because their wide-spread branches threw too much shade upon the inclosing meadow! A few sprigs of grass probably repaid for the destroying act. This single tree now stand alone as a relic of primitive husbandry at Capoose, affording in the summer months,by its green foliage, as ample shade to the lolling ox or idle boy as it once gave to the squaw or her lord when he skimmed along the La-ha-ha-na in his own canoe. In one of the apple-trees thus cut down, in 1804, were counted one hundred and fifty concentric circles or yearly growths, thus dating the tree back to a time long before the reports of the trapper or the story of the Indians came out of the valley to the whites. Seventy years ago a large wild-plum orchard, standing in a swale adjoining this clearing, hung with millions of the juicy fruit, while the grape, with almost tropical luxuriance, purpled the intermingling tree-tops. The vines, none of which now remain, as well as the apple-trees, were no doubt the result of Indian culture.

BEACON-FIRES AND INDIAN LEGEND

.

Every gorge or up-shooting point in the range diversifying the valley is enriched with its tradition and story. In the Indian wars, the Moosic or Cobb Mountain,

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affording as it did an admirable view of the entire valley, and a wide scope of country toward the Wallenpaupack and Delaware, was long used by the forest men for the location of their beacon fires. Campbell's Ledge, from its sharp altitude, so located as to overlook both valleys as far as inhabited by them, was held in corresponding importance from this fact.

So well were these evening lights understood by them that the warriors could be collected to any given point with rare speed and certainty. Should any thing on their part demand hasty action, fire after fire would spring up with wonderful rapidity on every height and plateau, at intervals of a few miles, upon the mountain-tops; and as they successively gleamed their lurid light to the sky, they conveyed a meaning to the savage mind well known as if their native guttural had told it in the valley. Once lighted, these beacon-fires, around which the warriors danced and sang in their wild joy, or prepared meals after the march of the day, could be seen for a great distance. No language was more silent or expressive to the inhabitant of the forest; none awoke greater danger to the pioneer than their appearance.

No matter how sudden or swift the pursuit, when the fireplace was reached the red chieftains had vanished, leaving nothing behind them but expiring brands. Along many of the higher peaks of the mountain, generally upon the eastern border of the Lackawanna, can yet be seen faint traces of these ancient beacons. Huge, gray stones, partially cracked by the heat of the fire whose location it marked, have been visited by the writer, upon an eminence distinguished at Spring Brook, near the residence of our hospitable and humorous friend, Edward Dolph. This peak is one of the prominent ones, where this primitive manner of telegraphing carried dismay or hope to many a watching woodsman down in the valley. These places faced the valley, and this one, unlike the others visited, appears not to have been disturbed in its

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solitude since the brand of the sachem expired a century ago.

Few portions of country afford a broader scope for legendary research than that along the Susquehanna and Lackawanna. Here, immured in the forest, marked only by paths and streams, and surrounded by every element of simplicity and beauty, the river clans smoked the peace-pipe or danced the war-dance, with whoops and halloos, and went forth with paint and sharpened weapon to gather the scalps of the spoilers of their threshold.

SILVER MINE ON THE LACKAWANNA

Of the value of precious metals the Indians knew little or nothing until taught it by the whites, and then, learning to their dismay how fatal to their narrowing hunting-grounds were the aggressions of the expanding settlements, they practiced every possible caution in concealing all knowledge of mines and minerals in every portion of the wilderness. The Indian who, in thoughtless or drunken mood, betrayed the secret of their location, paid the penalty of his guilt by sudden death or lingering torture. Yet about one hundred years ago the whites learned by treachery, and lost by misfortune, knowledge of a silver mine located about two miles up the Lackawanna from its mouth.

In 1766 the Six Nations complained to the Proprietary Government at Philadelphia of white persons who had dug into a silver mine, twelve miles above the Delaware town of Wy-wa-mick, and carried away in canoes three loads of ore. An Indian trader named Anderson, who had brought a few goods up the river, was suspected of being the transgressor.

John Teal, a German, who died some years ago at an advanced age, threw some additional ight upon the location of this hidden silver mine. He had lived long enough with the wild tribes to understand their dialect,

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and enjoy the confidence of an aged chief of the Oneidas, residing in western New York, who had assisted to efface every outward and visible evidence of the existence of this mine. When the chieftain saw that his days were few, he called his friend Teal to his wigwam, to intrust him with secrets of no longer consequence to the Indian. He informed him that there were three salt springs, one silver, one gold, and one lead mine in the vicinity of Wyoming, and all used by them while in possession of the country. The silver mine, long known to the scattered tribes, was on the northeast side of the Lackawanna, above a high ledge or mountain, half an hour's walk from the River Susquehanna, twelve miles above Wyoming. After the first Wyoming massacre, in 1763, the dwellers in wigwams, hoping to retain occupancy forever of the rich plains, coveted by triple parties, used this mine to their advantage; but when the intruders again made their appearance in such formidable numbers as to annihilate the long-cherished hope, the mine was so artfully concealed from the whites that none yet have found the spot yielding the precious metal.

Traditions, treasured up by old settlers half a century ago, tell of an excavation in the bank of the Lackawanna, between Old Forge and the Barnum farm, similar to that described in the Pennsylvania Archives of 1766.

That a silver mine was known and worked by the aborigines in this vicinity, is unquestionably proved by the fact that official complaint was made by them of the depredations of Anderson, but its precise location remains at present in great doubt.

GOLD MINE

The chief described the gold mine as being under a ledge of rocks, a few miles above Wyoming Valley, at a point where a rock of the height of an Indian covered a spring.

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(page contains an engraving: Top of Bald Mount)

Five miles westward from Scranton, in a direct line, on the western side of the mountain forming the boundary between the townships of Providence and Newton, rises a long ledge of rock known as Bald Mount, which, from its altitude, offers, when the day is clear, so wide a view of field, forest, and lake, that, in spite of the steep, zigzag way of approaching it, has become during the summer hours, a popular resort for parties loving the romance of mountain life. At its very base lies the village of Milwaukie, watered by a stream turned to good mill account before it enters the Susquehanna, five miles below. Eight or ten villages can be seen from the mount, which, shorn of its larger trees by the force of the wind sometimes sweeping over it with great fury, is left comparatively bald, and thus given it a name. One large rock, prominent in position, is perforated with numerous holes of the capacity of from a quart to a gallon, as shown by the preceding illustration of Bald Mount. These were probably used by the Indian women for pounding their

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corn into samp. The large number of stone pestles found near it many years ago favor this theory.

Under this precipice can be seen one large conglomerate rock, evidently removed some distance down the mountain by the natives to conceal the real origin of the spring. In the removal of this rock the trees, bent at the time, grew up with a very perceptible inclination toward it. From beneath its honest features emerges a spring, surpassed in the purity of its waters by no other in the world, where many metallurgists and others have supposed the gold mine was located. Explorations hitherto made upon every side of Bald Mount have failed to satisy expectations naturally awakened by these t