Down the historic Susquehanna

Table Of Contents

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I. A Trip of Much Promise, ... 1 Cooperstown, N. Y., August 15.

II. In the Pages of History, ... 8 Cooperstown, N. Y., August 16.

I. A Trip Of Much Promise

Cooi'EitsTowN, Otsego County, N. Y., Aug. 15.— The other day when I told a friend I proposed to spend a summer vacation in a trip making the entire length of the Susquehanna river from Lake Otsego to the Chesapeake, he said to me, sort of apologetically:

"I have always considered the Susquehanna such a useless river. It seems so big and lumbering, and it has not the charm of the Hudson for scenery or historic interest."

Before we parted, an hour later, I had so oppositely convinced my friend that I am sure he is now envying me the trip. As for myself I redoubled my enthusiasm over the summer scheme. So here I am at the head of the big river, looking forward with eagerness to a jaunt of many miles down stream and forearmed, as it would seem, from "reading up" on what I am to see in the way of fine scenery, of sites invested with historic interest, and mountains and vales replete with romantic legends and Indian tales.

A great many other persons are undeniably in the same boat with my friend. Perhaps I myself might have been as ignorant had I not had a grandfather who was familiar with every mile of the Susquehanna and who repeated many of its most interesting incidents as we traveled together along portions of its banks.

Casting about for a reason, it seems to me that the fame of the Susquehanna has two distinct setbacks which have led to its comparative neglect by travelers in search of the picturesque or fond of tracing the footsteps of American history.

One of these setbacks arose from the circumstance that the river was peopled by three different Commonwealths— Maryland,

Pennsylvania and New York. The New Yorkers look eastward to New York city and Albany. Similarly the Pennsylvanians mostly find a commingling of interest with Philadelphia. And out of all this grows much ignorance on the part of one section in the doings of another. In Maryland, for instance, little is known of the prosperity and attractiveness of the river valley within the limits of New York. While contrariwise I have at times found much apathy in Central New York about the history and development of the river in Maryland and Lower Pennsylvania.

Perhaps much of this isolation might have been overcome had the Susquehanna been regularly navigable by steamboats or had the railroads formed a single line from Cooperstown to Havre de Grace. Then a steady down-to-Maryland business would have ensued in big proportions and the charm of travel up and down the river would have been strong. , But the steamboats could not come and the railroads mainly turned eastward and westward in their building, and so the Susquehanna has been passed by travelers.

The importance of this consideration is seen by comparing the Susquehanna with the Hudson, beyond doubt the most admired of American rivers. Railroads on both banks and steamboats day and night carry tourists from New York to Albany through the entire region of beauty, legend and history. It is again made obvious by recalling the Potomac, the scenic portion of which is traversed by every passenger to or from the West over the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The Susquehanna river has not one, but half a dozen railroads. They follow every mile of its banks from Otsego to the Chesapeake, yet no less than eight changes of cars are required for a through journey.

And yet, in spite of such drawbacks, there is much of genuine interest to be found in a journey all the way along the Susquehanna. In its long and winding course from limpid Lake Otsego, its scenery is certainly as varied as that of any river. Sometimes through fertile valleys teeming with busy farmers; then again in narrow, rocky gorges, with mountains close by framing in views that are hard to excel, and contributing rushing cascades to swell the big stream; again past cities alive with industries and important as railroad centres. In all its windings it never has the fault of being monotonous, and often justly earns the application of those much-abused adjectives, "romantic," "noble" or "grand." No more pleasing lake scenery can be found than on and around Otsego; no more beautiful vale entered than that of Wyoming; no bolder views laid bare than above Harrisburg, where the river forces its way with abruptness through a gap in the Kictatinny Mountains; no finer rocky gorges than from Columbia to Port Deposit.

The painters have not neglected the Susquehanna, especially the men who led American art in the generation just passing away. Those who are familiar with the public and private galleries of our leading American cities can easily recall canvasses reproducing charming bits of river and mountain scenery from along the Susquehanna and the Juniata and other tributaries. In many instances these paintings are doubly valuable because they picture landscapes that have been greatly altered.

Statistics are dull sometimes, but then again they give much in short compass. It interests us to be told, for example, that in the country drained by the Susquehanna there are two millions and a quarter of inhabitants. When we ask what is included in this drainage area we are told by Government investigators that the Susquehanna drains 26,000 square miles, of which 6,000 are in New York, nearly 20,000 in Pennsylvania and a small fraction in Maryland. In other words, it comprises about one-seventh of New York State, in the southern and central portions, and slightly less than one-half of Pennsylvania, sweeping from beyond Scranton on the northeast almost to Johnstown on the southwest, and from beyond Lancaster on the southeast to the oil region of the northwest. Of course, the Susquehanna does not do this unaided. It has many, many active branches.

the chief among which are the Chenango and the Chemung, in New York State, and the Juniata and the West Branch, in Pennsylvania.

Incidentally let me remind you of one other fact concerning the Susquehanna which is of importance. It is, without exception, the longest river on the Atlantic seaboard, and is overtopped in size only by a few of the great broad Western rivers. Its length is counted as 420 miles. That of the West Branch is more than 200 miles.

The hundreds of towns found every few miles along the main river and its tributaries show how the two millions and a quarter of inhabitants are made up. It is true that there are no cities of the largest size, but there are many of the next size, the most conspicuous being Binghamtou, N. Y., at the junction of the Chenango river, which has 50,000; Elmira, on the Chemung, 33.000; Scranton, Pa., on the Lackawanna, 75,000; Wilkesbarre, on the main stream, 45,000; Williamsport, on the West Branch, 35,000; Harrisburg, on the main stream, 60,000; York, on Codorus creek, 30,000; Lancaster, on Conestoga creek. 40,000, and Altoona, 30,000.

We are told also by the Government experts already quoted that there is a goodly amount of water power in the rapids and descents of the Susquehanna and its many feeders. For instance. Lake Otsego is 1,193 feet above tidewater, so that the river has to descend that considerable amount in getting to Havre de Grace. Much of this power is utilized, but much of it is not, and we are assured that there are valuable opportunities to get power for manufactures along a portion of the West Branch not yet developed by railroads.

That one gap on the West Branch is the only part of the entire river which has not a railroad on the one bank or the other, sometimes on both. Close students of American development long ago observed how the rivers helped make the railroads great by yielding their banks to furnish available routes. This is especially noticeable in the case of the Susquehanna. Four of the great through lines to the West make use of portions of the river valley. They are the Pennsylvania, the Lehigh Valley, the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western and the Erie.

The Pennsylvania comes in from Philadelphia some miles below Harrisburg and leaves the Susquehanna at the mouth of the Juniata. The Lehigh Valley from New York enters the valley near Wilkesbarre and goes up stream to the mouth of the Chemung at Athens. The Erie approaches the river east of the town of Susquehanna and goes west with it to near Athens. Similarly the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western comes in at Great Bend and parallels the Erie to near Athens and beyond on the Chemung.

Indeed, if the Baltimore and Ohio may be considered as entering the valley when it crosses its mouth at Havre de Grace, it can, with propriety, be asserted that only one of the big routes from New York does not use the Susquehanna Valley. That one is the New York Central.

The first 16 miles of the river course below Lake Otsego is followed by the Cooperstown and Charlotte Valley Railroad; then for 80 miles to Susquehanna, the Delaware and Hudson Railroad is there; then come the Erie and the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western on both banks to Waverly and the Lehigh Valley from Waverly to AVilkesbarre; then from Wilkesbarre to Northumberland and Sunbury both banks are again occupied, the right by a division of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western and the left by a division of the Pennsylvania Railroad; from Sunbury to York Haven, through Harrisburg is the Northern Central Railroad, part of the Pennsylvania system, and from Harrisburg to the mouth of the river at Perryville the east bank contains the Columbia and Port Deposit divisions of the Pennsylvania. At Perryville the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore is tapped.

From which statements it is evident that the river is followed by railroads for each of its 420 miles, and that for nearly half of that distance there are tracks on both sides. Many other railroads come into the valley for a few miles here and there.

notably in the great anthracite coal belt around Wilkesbarre and to the east of the river below Sunbury. That coal belt is in a great measure responsible for the development of the Susquehanna Valley in population and wealth. Mines honeycomb it. railroads cut into it everywhere and annually there is dug out of it and transported to domestic and foreign markets the enormous amount of 50,000,000 tons of hard coal.

As hard coal has put railroads along one branch of the Susquehanna so has soft coal intersected the headwaters of the West Branch with other railroads. The West Branch rises in Cambria county, Pennsylvania, not far north of Cresson. The remarkable thing about this source is that it is on the west slope of the Alleghany mountains and that in order to get through to meet the North Branch at Northumberland it has to work its way through the mountains.

After it leaves Cambria county the West Branch enters the Clearfield coal region and running hither and thither in this region are half a dozen different railroad systems, including several divisions and branches of the Pennsylvania; the Pennsylvania and Northwestern; the Pittsburg and Eastern; the Buffalo.. Rochester and Pittsburg, and the Beech Creek Railroad, which after leaving the river at Clearfield again swings alongside of it at Lock Haven and goes with it to Williamsport, where the Beech Creek road ends and where it has an important traffic exchange with the Philadelphia and Reading. All these railroads are comparatively recent, because mining in the Clearfield coal region has only become important within the last decade.

From Clearfield to Karthaus is the one bit of the Susquehanna not yet taken up by railroads, but at Karthaus we again meet a ramification of the Pennsylvania system, the Philadelphia and Erie Road. On this line we may travel for more than a hundred miles down the river, through Williamsport and other flourishing towns and to the meeting place of the two big Susquehanna branches at Northumberland.

From Willianisport to Northumberland the Pennsylvania is on one bank, while an important division of the Philadelphia and Reading is on the other.

I nearly forgot to speak of the intimate relation of the Susquehanna to a greater city than any within its watershed. I mean Baltimore. When rafts and boats with flour and farm products began to go down stream in profusion, Maryland's metropolis was the natural market, though some of the traffic was diverted overland to Philadelphia. Then the latter city's merchants began to reach out, and the Baltimoreans, to keep the lead, first built a series of steamboats, which proved to be failures, then a canal and finally a railroad —the Northern Central. The canal is dead now, but the railroad still carries a goodly trade from the Susquehanna to Baltimore, though, of course, the manifold industries of the river towns are too great to be content with a single market.

Thoughtful men in Baltimore see the day when that city will have to draw on the Susquehanna for a water supply. Indeed, the cost and the advantages were fully weighed when the present supply was enlarged 20 years ago, though the Gunpowder river was then found sufficient. Today Baltimore has more than half a million inhabitants; the limit of the Gunpowder's capacity is foreshadowed and the Susquehanna will come next. Its water will have to be conveyed nearly 40 miles. Already the river is used in this way by cities further upstream, but none of them approach the magnitude of the Baltimore idea.

Were I interested in geology or in duckhunting and river fishing, there would be other avenues to open up delights on the Susquehanna for me. For the geologist there is a wonderful opportunity in a trip such as we promise.

I am not a hunter of duck nor a student of rocks, and so I look for the interesting side of my jaunt to the natural beauty of the river valley, to the incidents of its past and the industries and achievements of the present. In them is the hope of this pilgrimage.

II. In The Pages Of History

Cooperstown, Otsego County, N. Y., Aug. 16.— So many pretty notions get fractured nowadays by heartless seekers for facts that it was really no surprise for me to learn yesterday that all our old ideas concerning the meaning of the name Susquehanna will have to be revised.

It has been dinned into my ears from childhood — and I guess the same in your case, dear reader— that Susquehanna meant "long, crooked river," or else "broad, shallow river," or else "wide, muddy river," or "the river of rapids." All seemed appropriate to the big stream, and so you and I accepted the one or the other as being the true Indian name.

Now we are told that all were guesses, made by men with only a half knowledge of native tongues. In their place we are asked to believe that the Susquehanna is "the river of the people with booty taken in war." And in the light of this assertion the following facts are recalled:

Capt. John Smith, engaged in exploring the Chesapeake bay above Virginia in 1608, entered the mouth of the Susquehanna and there encountered a different set of Indians from those he had previously known. They were brave, noble-looking fellows of giant stature — decked out in war paint and evidently fresh from a fight, as they had much spoil in their canoes. The doughty Virginian was unable to talk with them directly, but he used as interpreter an Indian whose tongue he knew. When he asked the name of his new acquaintances, the interpreter — unable, possibly, to get or to understand the real tribal designation — replied that they were the Susquehannoeks. "the people of booty taken in war."

This, at least, is the theory of a recent scholar, who says that "sasquesa" meant "war booty," and "anough" meant "men." The older writers had maintained that "hanna" was "river," and that the first part meant either "crooked," "muddy," "shallow" or "rapids."

i'ou can take your choice among these theories and guesses. If you like the ones which are descriptive of the river, believe in them. Yet, if the latest be true, it is rather curious, is it not, that the accidental error of a not over-intelligent interpreter should have given such a pretty name to a big Indian tribe and, after them, to this great, majestic river?

I never reflect upon the name of the river without recalling how the truest of poets, Coleridge and Shelley, were both attracted by its sound and its suggestion of romance, and it was with positive pleasure that I read today what Robert Louis Stevenson said of the river when he crossed it in some of his travels through this country: "When I heard that the stream over which we passed was called the Susquehanna," wrote the English author, "the beauty of the name seemed part and parcel of the land. As when Adam, with divine fitness, named the creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley."

There were other Indian names than the one now borne. The Onondagas, of the Six Nations, called the river Ga-wa-no-wa-naneh, or "the great island river." Among the Indians of the West Branch that portion of the Susquehanna was known as Otzinachson, or the "river of demons," because of some tribal superstition that seems to have been widespread. "Quen-ish-achgek-ki," the stream of long reaches, was another name for the West Branch.

It is often said that Capt. John Smith was the first white man to view the Susquehanna, but it is necessary to go earlier than that. There is even a belief that the famous Feruando de Soto penetrated to this river, but aside from such a tradition it is true that the first white men here were Spaniards, and that they long antedated John Smith.

At an early day Spaniards were in the Chesapeake, and named it St. Mary's. From the bay they carried off a native to Mexico, where he was educated and baptized. This Indian returned to the Chesapeake with several Spanish priests, and some distance up "a large river flowing into the bay" they founded a missionary station, which they called Axacan. This river was most probably the Susquehanna, and these priests the first white men to visit it. Their fate was a sad one. Their Indian protege turned on them and assisted in killing them.

It is odd that while Smith, the Englishman, and these Spanish priests were the pioneers of the lower Susquehanna, it should be reserved for a Frenchman and three Dutchmen to be the first whites to see the upper portion. The Frenchman was Etienne Brule, a lieutenant of Samuel Champlain, the Governor of Canada, and a noted discoverer. Champlain, with the Huron Indians as allies, in 1615 planned an attack on the Iroquois in Central New York. With 12 Hurons Brule was sent to secure the aid of the Andastes or Carontonans, whose chief village seems to have been somewhere on the Susquehanna— possibly near Athens, possibly much farther down. After many hardships and several bloody fights Brule reached the Carontonan town and they started to join Champlain, but found he had returned to Canada. This caused Brule to return with the Carontonans and spend the winter in explorations. Among other things he descended the river to "its junction with the sea." a journey which was made, so he reported, "through a series of populous tribes at war with one another." Three years elapsed before this hardy explorer got back to Champlain. The narrative of his adventures has a strange fascination for us who live in the days of comfortable railroad travel through peaceful, populous towns.

About the same time three adventurous Dutchmen came into this wilderness from Albany, boated down the Susquehanna as far as the neighborhood of Wilkesbarre, crossed overland to the Delaware and thence on to New York. Quite a different trip from a similar canoe outing often taken now!

Nearly a century after the explorers came the traders, mostly established on that portion of the river now in Pennsylvania. Stories of them are fully retailed in the histories of that State. Many of them were French-Canadians. Some were noted characters, such as Conrad Weiser, who constantly served as the envoy of the Penns to the Indians.

In my last letter I mentioned that civilization moved up the Susquehanna instead of down. This is plainly shown by the dates of land purchases from the Indians. Maryland secured her portion in the seventeenth century. William Penn promptly saw the moral value of making purchases from the Indians, and in 1683, the year after Pennsylvania was settled, he enlisted the aid of Thomas Dongan, Governor of New York, who secured from the Indians a deed to "all that tract of land lying upon both sides the river commonly called or known by the name of the Susquehanna." Dongan, in 1696, transferred the title to Penn for the consideration of £100. What a miserable sum this now seems for a region where at least a million persons dwell. It was, of course, limited by the grants of royal charters, but, as I read it, it included the entire Susquehanna Valley within what is now Pennsylvania.

Penn seems not to have been satisfied with this title, for in 1700 he had it ratified by the Susquehannocks, and in 1701 by other Indian tribes. Later his sons began to make fresh purchases. They bought everything south of Harrisburg in 1736; up to the neighborhood of Sunbury in 1749 and 1758, and to Towanda in 1768. The last purchase by Pennsylvania was in 1784, when the area north of Towanda and west • of the Susquehanna was obtained. New York's purchases of the Susquehanna Valley occured in the same decade. Settlements in every case followed closely behind colonial purchases.

The Indian history of the Susquehanna is remarkable. It was dominated by the Iroquois, or Six Nations, who from their stronghold in Central New York, by using the Susquehanna mainly, but also the Mohawk, Hudson and Allegheny rivers, had built up an empire big in extent and powerful in kind.

Many times a year tne Iruquois in their war canoes went down the Susquehanna to the Chesapeake and compelled the submission of tribes as far as the Carolinas. The Journey was apparently no more to them than it is now to a traveler by train. They bested the Susquehannocks so often that they finally were able to force the remnant to abandon their Maryland and Pennsylvania haunts and take up an humble position under the conquerors' wing in New York. They did the same to the Lenni Lenapes on the Delaware, to the Nanticokes on the Eastern Shore and to the Shawnees higher up the Susquehanna. They kept the white man from fully settling the upper Susquehanna Valley for nearly a century after the lower part was peopled by whites.

There is no telling to what period their remarkable confederacy might have exteuded had they not adopted the British cause against the colonists. Then the Iroquois power was broken as quickly as it had been formed. The terrible Wyoming massacre in Susquehanna Valley and the massacre in Cherry Valley, on a tributary of the Susquehanna, caused the expedition of Gen. John Sullivan in 1779. He went up the river with a strong military force and was reinforced at the mouth of the Chemung by Gen. James Clinton, who had brought New York militia overland to Lake Otsego and then down the Susquehanna on rafts. General Sullivan burned Indian villages by the wholesale and gave the Iroquois a thrashing such as they had never had. After that they were willing enough to sell the fairest part of Central New York to the whites.

The Wyoming and Cherry Valley massacres are not the only dark stains of the sort in the Susquehanna Valley. After

Braddock's crushing defeat in 1755 the Indians, backed by French officers and soldiers, descended the river and spread terror in many promising Pennsylvania settlements. There were massacres at a number of points near Northumberland and in Cumberland Valley, and many more women and children were carried into captivity in Canada.

The remembrance of the fiendish cruelties practised by the Indians led to the most horrible crime of all, the murder in 1763 of the remnant of Susquehannock Indians, who had long made their homes near where the Conestoga creek empties into the Susquehanna in Lancaster county. A group of frontiersmen, known as ''the Paxton boys," in a wanton attack on the settlement and in a later fiendish charge upon a public building, to which the survivors of the first affair had been removed, made away with 20 Indians, many of them women and girls and none able-bodied warriors. It was a crime which cannot be justified.

As an echo of Indian occupation, stone weapons, utensils and implements are frequently found at every point of the river valley, many of them made from rocks which can only be traced hundreds of miles away. The skeletons of red men are also sometimes unearthed, some of them of giant type.

In addition to the Wyoming and Cherry Valley massacres, the Susquehanna figures in the Revolutionary War in other ways. Its lower fords and ferries were constantly crossed by armies and leaders going from North to South and South to North. And when the Continental Congress was driven out of Philadelphia by British occupation it removed first to York, then to Lancaster, both of them on tributaries of the river and not far from the latter.

In the contest of 1812 the mouth of the river again had a share of war. After terrorizing other towns at the head of Chesapeake bay the British fleet captured and burned Havre de Grace and the village of Lapidum, a few miles tip the river.

Again in the Civil War the Susquehanna was the "high-water mark of the Confederacy," Wrightsville being the nearest point to Philadelphia reached by any part of General Lee's army during the invasion of Pennsylvania in 1863.

Nor should it be forgotten that this same section played a prominent part in colonial times in the border wars of Lord Baltimore and the Penns, both struggling to spread their boundaries. This contest, frequently accompanied by bloodshed, developed a remarkable character in Col. Thomas Cresap, who upheld the Maryland claims in York and Lancaster counties with such courage as to make him one of the most interesting figures in American colonial life.

The varying origin of the families who peopled the different parts of the Susquehanna Valley is in itself a study. Quite naturally we at once think of the Palatinate Germans or Pennsylvania Dutch, who have for two centuries left the impress of their thrift upon the rich farming lands of lower Pennsylvania. Next below them, on lands more rugged and rocky, were thousands of Scotch-Irish families; and farther, in Maryland, families of English and Irish stock. In Central Pennsylvania the river banks were cleared by persons mostly of English origin, while from Wilkesbarre north there was a decided preponderance of New England immigrants, indirectly English. To these the last half century has added the Welsh slate-miners in the Peach Bottom region; the Italian, Hungarian, Russian, Polish and other Slavonic types in the coal mines, and the people of still other nationalities in the growing cities.

Besides the actual history of the Susquehanna, there is a wealth of interesting legend and folklore. I wish I had time to repeat it all.

III. Not Unsung By Poets

Cooperstown, Otsego County, N. Y., Aug. 17.— Yesterday I went into a bookstore to get a recent novel. The man behind the counter was one of those whom a book-lover delights to meet, one who knew and prized the books he sold. It was easy to get into a chat with him about the literature of the Susquehanna and the result will, I am sure, surprise you.

Cooper's name, of course, was first on our lips when we started to recall the poetry and novels in which the Susquehanna is well remembered. Then I spoke of Nathaniel P. Willis, most graceful of American authors, whose happy years of life beside this river at Owego found full expression in his varied writings. My friend, the bookseller, soon reminded me of Thomas Campbell and his epic, "Gertrude of Wyoming," while I, in turn, thought of other Englishmen, and suggested Coleridge and Southey, who, with the enthusiasm of youth, dreamed of placing their ideal colony of Pantisocracy upon the banks of the Susquehanna, which, like Campbell, neither of them had ever seen nor ever saw.

Wyoming's name brought to mind "The Death of the Fratricide," in which John Greenleaf Whittier has told in ballad form the fate of a hapless being who killed his own brother in the terrible Revolutionary tragedy. An echo of another massacre is found in "Jennie Marsh, of Cherry Valley," by George P. Morris, the editorial associate and friend of Willis.

Thus we discoursed for fully an hour, adding to our catalogue a goodly array of notable poets and romancers. It was a casual review, of course, and doubtless many were omitted whom you may now recall. But I cannot refrain from repeating lor you some of the things which then came in mind or which we found by turning to his well-stocked shelves.

The thread which binds Southey and Coleridge to the Susquehanna is a slender one, but it must be acknowledged that there is something deeply interesting in their dream of starting upon the Susquehana a brotherly community where private property was to be abolished, where two hours a day were to be spent in providing food and the rest of the time "in rational society and intellectual employment." Biographers of both poets tell how the scheme was talked of in 1794, when Coleridge was 22 and Southey two years younger, and how it was never realized because no funds were forthcoming and because the two wedded sisters and had to be practical enough to earn a livelihood.