Washington came to the vicinity of Chautauqua Lake in 1753, when he was scarcely of age, and this journey makes his earliest diary. He went from Williamsburgh to Fredericksburgh, thence to Alexandria, thence to Winchester in the valley of Virginia, thence to Cumberland, Maryland, and down the Monongahela River and up the Alleghany to French Creek, or the Venango. All the land was then a wilderness. Washington reported from hearsay, at Venango, that there were four forts, the first of them on French Creek near a small lake, the next on Lake Erie about 15 miles from the other, from which it was 120 miles to the fort at the falls of Lake Erie. From the fort on Lake Erie to Montreal was about 600 miles, which the French only required four weeks to traverse in good weather. Washington noted the good land about Venango and the extensive and rich meadows, one of which was four miles in length. When Washington was interested in connecting Lake Erie with the waters of the Ohio by a canal, he was very explicit in addressing General William Irvine about the climate traits of Chautauqua Lake; this General Irvine was a doctor born in Ireland and settled at Carlisle, Pa., and he was among the first men to understand the climate of Lake Erie, and he managed to get for Pennsylvania a frontage on this lake.
In the pursuit of climate, it is probable that the first movements were made by the people of the populous states of Virginia and Pennsylvania. Any one who possesses a library of travels in America, conveying successive pictures of our social life from colonial times down to the day of railroads, will discover numbers of perished watering places.
For instance, about the time of the Revolution, the chief summer resorts in Pennsylvania were about York, as at York Springs, and I possess pictures of old log hotels at some of these resorts, where the outspurs of the Blue Mountains gave a little altitude above the surrounding plains. The wounded soldiers in the Revolution were sent up to Ephrata and Litiz and Bethlehem, where the air was good and nurses were to be had.
These Blue Mountains were not ascended until 1716, when Governor Spotiswood of Virginia undertook to find where the rivers of that state had their fountains, and he took an ensign in the British army and went to the frontier, where he was joined by some gentlemen and some militia rangers, about fifty in all, with pack-horses and much liquor, and this little army started out from near the site of the battle of Chancellorsville, and it took them a week to get to the top of the Blue Ridge at Swift Run Gap, thirty-six days after the Governor had left Williamsburgh. They went down into the Shenandoah Valley and called that flowing river the Euphrates. So much delighted was Spotiswood with the air and scenery of the mountains that he instituted an order of knighthood called the Tramontane order.
Such was the beginning of human knowledge of the Alleghanies, nearly 170 years ago. The lives of three not very old men would have spanned from that day to this. The nearest approach of that Alleghany range, of which the Blue Ridge was the first parallel, to the great interior lakes of North America, is at Chautauqua. At this lake the Alleghany ridge, which divides the sources of the Ohio valley from the great lakes, is between 800 and 1400 feet high, every hill arable, and the earliest settlers observed how quickly the apples, pears and plums succeeded in the mild climate. They were surprised to find, at an altitude of more than 1300 feet above the ocean, a noble sheet of water 20 miles long. Some of the earliest settlers in this region came from the Blue Mountain country, buying their land from the Holland Land Company of New York, of which William H. Seward was long the attorney. Some of the first settlers pitched their cabins about 1803.
It is understood that Chautauqua Lake was first navigated about 1782, when the Revolutionary war was almost done and the battle of Yorktown had been fought. Desirous of keeping up some show of hostility, about 1800 British and Indians were sent to recapture Pittsburgh, and they launched their canoes on this lake, but their spies came back and told them that the Americans were on the lookout. Earlier than this, about 1752, when the French resolved to seize on the head waters of the Ohio, they left Niagara Fort by water in April and got to a place they called Chadacoin (undoubtedly Chautauqua) on Lake Erie, where they began to cut timber and prepared to build a fort, but their engineer coming on afterward put a stop to it, saying that the Chautauqua River was too shallow to carry out any craft with provisions to the Ohio. The man who had begun building the fort, M. Babeer, was so much pleased with the spot that he insisted on continuing his work, and he demanded that his opponent give him a certificate to excuse himself to the governor for not selecting so good a place. Consequently the fort was built at Erie, or Presqu’Ile.
The region about Chautauqua Lake is therefore, in an imperial sense, the oldest in America, the neighborhood for which two great empires contended, and at the time the French were meditating the seizure of these high lands and water-courses, twelve Virginians, two of whom were named Washington, formed the Ohio Company, before the year 1750.
Thus a third of a century only elapsed between the discovery of the Blue Ridge and the enterprises to connect the Alleghanies and the lakes on the part of two distinguished nations.
The high lands and hills about Chautauqua were familiar objects to the subjects of Louis XV. on their way to meet the adolescent Washington, and young Jumondville, who fell before Washington’s night assault, had cooled his fevered eyes on the green forests of the Chautauqua summits. In forty-six years more, old General Wayne, who used this region as the base of observations against the Indians of Michigan and Ohio, closed his eyes almost within sight of the Chautauqua hillocks, and, while his body was still lying in the fort where he breathed his last, Commodore Perry was building a crude navy to sweep Lake Erie of the British. Perry came through New York state to Lake Ontario, from thence went to Buffalo and took a sleigh on the ice for Erie, also passing within sight of the high knobs of Chautauqua. Several of his vessels went from the region of Buffalo, and at the age of twenty-seven this young officer won a fame hardly surpassed in the naval history of the New World.
The influence of the lake and western climate on the seamen and soldiers who visited it was almost immediately seen in their location hereabout and settling of many towns on the southern shore of Lake Erie, and if both sides of this lake were American, there seems to be little doubt that it would now be approaching the time of being the greatest center of population in the New World. That center has been driven down the hot Ohio valley by the limitations of our boundary, which giving not American soil to the north of Lake Erie, has reluctantly abandoned the cool summer air and clear fine winters of the lakes for the hot limestone inclosures of the streams to the south.