To Chautauquans the name Chautauqua means one thing; and yet I believe that anything pertaining to Chautauqua county must of necessity be of interest to the thousands who know and love the beautiful lake which bears the name. To this end has this rambling sketch of the oldest town in the county been prepared. It lies only seven miles away from the Chautauqua; at just the right distance for a day’s excursion from that point, when the student’s head, bewildered by so many good things, demands and needs a day’s rest and diversion. The drive is a delightful one, passing through the pretty little village of Mayville and over the hills, from one of which one gets a view of two lakes, beautiful Chautauqua flashing and sparkling under the mid-summer sun, glorious old Erie rolling his blue waters with slow and majestic movement. Then descending these hills one comes into the pleasant valley and into the dreamy old town. It has been said of it, that one-half of it is dead and the other half gone to its funeral, but to the tired heart and brain its peaceful quiet comes as a whiff of salt air or a breeze from mountain heights. With natural advantages equal to those of many noted watering places, it is somewhat of a mystery why the sleepy old place has never awakened and found itself famous.
But it lies, sleeping beauty that it is, dreaming, shut in by a range of dark green hills on one side and by the waters of the bluest of all the great lakes on the other. There are a few factories and mills within its precincts, but somehow no whirr of machinery nor other sound ever comes from them to break the stillness, which is Sabbath-like every day. It boasts of three railroads, but each at a respectful enough distance from the town, so that the faint shriek of the locomotive alone causes the sojourner to remember that far away, somewhere, outside, there is such a thing as a busy, noisy, bustling world. It is the home of solidity, respectability, and wealth. A place in which erring human nature finds it very easy to be good; in which the old-fashioned virtues of sobriety, temperance, and hospitality hold sway; in which no more reckless amusements than lawn tennis and teas, with an occasional reception at one of the many beautiful homes, or a clam-bake on the shores of the lake are permitted; a thoroughly drowsy old town.
Westfield, the oldest town of the famous Chautauqua county, New York state, lies on the shore of Lake Erie, fifty-seven miles west from Buffalo. It is a garden of the gods on a small scale. Lying back one mile and a half from the lake, it receives its breezes at exactly the right temperature. It is never too hot in summer; rarely too cold in winter.
The town is divided by a deep picturesque gorge, through which Chautauqua Creek runs, and whose sides are now high and rocky, now a bewildering and beautiful mass of wild grapevines, chestnut and willow, and shrubs of nearly every variety and description. It is spanned at seemingly the most inaccessible places by various bridges and ah! the beauty of that deep chasm on an autumn day, when it is ablaze with the color of maple leaf and sumach and golden rod. This gorge deepens and widens, grows more wild and gloomy as it runs back among the Chautauqua hills, until it culminates in a most remarkable freak of nature, known the country round as the “Hog’s Back,” of which a description will be given further on.
The first white settlement of this town, and of the entire county as well, was commenced in 1802, at what was long known as the Cross Roads, and which is now marked by a curious stone monument. The earlier history of these regions is dim and indistinct, but all tradition and history, as well as many curious relics which have been discovered, point to the fact that after the mound builders, the Neutral nations, or as they were called by the Senecas, the Kahkwas, were the first occupants of the soil of Chautauqua. They dwelt in forty villages, some of which were near Fort Niagara; some in Erie county, but the greater part of their territory extended west along the shore of Lake Erie, through Chautauqua county into Ohio. They were a strange race of people, famous hunters, exceedingly fierce and superstitious. The first knowledge had by Europeans of the Lake Erie regions, and of the tribes which inhabited them, was obtained by the French in Canada; their enterprise in this surpassing that of the British.
Father Lalement, in a letter to the Provincial of Jesuits in France, dated at St. Mary’s Mission, May 19, 1641, speaks of the Neutrals, and also of a warlike nation named the Eries, or the Nation of the Cat, so called from the extraordinary number of wild cats which infested their section, that lived to the south of Lake Erie and west of the Neutral nation. The Eries were great warriors and were a terror to the Iroquois. They fought with poisoned arrows, having no fire-arms.
Both these nations were cruelly destroyed by the Iroquois in 1651 and 1655. The final overthrow of the Neutral nation is supposed to have taken place near Buffalo; the destruction of the Eries, along the shore of the beautiful lake bearing this name. The whole force of the Iroquois embarked in canoes upon the blue waters of the lake, and after assaulting the Eries at a point, the exact location of which is not now known, scenes most horrible and revolting were enacted, and the brave Eries were totally annihilated in a fearful butchery.
The accounts of the destruction of these nations are found in the written narratives of the Jesuits, who were living at that time among the Indians of New York and Canada. From the extirpation of the Neutral and Erie nations, until its settlement by pioneers, Chautauqua county, and especially the portion along the shore of Lake Erie, was the home of the Senecas, the fiercest tribe of the Iroquois nation.
In 1679, La Salle, Tonti, his Italian lieutenant, Father Louis Hennepin and several others set sail from Cayuga Creek, a small stream emptying into Niagara River, for the foot of Lake Erie, steering west-southwest. They made many leagues, passing what is now Chautauqua county. They are supposed to be the first Europeans who saw the Chautauqua hills, gloomy and rugged, covered with mighty forests. The boundary line between the French and English possessions in America had long been a cause of contention, and the territory of Chautauqua county was included in the disputed ground. Communications between the French posts on the Mississippi and French forts in Canada were made by the long and tedious routes of the Mississippi, Green Bay routes, and afterward by Lake Michigan and the Wabash. The easy communication between Canada and the Mississippi by way of Lake Erie and Chautauqua Lake was not discovered until 1752, when the Marquis Du Quesne, having been appointed Governor-General of Canada, arrived there. He at once took more aggressive and decided measures to obtain possession of the disputed territory, than any of his predecessors had done. He immediately began to construct the long line of frontier forts which La Salle had suggested, that were to unite Canada and Louisiana by way of the Ohio. This bold step is regarded as leading to the French and Indian war, which resulted in losing Canada to the French. One of Du Quesne’s first acts was to open a portage road from the mouth of the Chautauqua Creek, which empties into Lake Erie a mile and a half from the town of Westfield, to the head of Chautauqua Lake, and thus open communication between Lake Erie and the head waters of the Ohio.
In a letter which he sends to the French minister of the marine and colonies, in Paris, he states that his intention is to begin his posts near the mouth of Chataconit, or Chautauqua Creek. This portage road was cut through the wilderness more than twenty years before the battle of Lexington, and yet traces of it to this day are to be seen in and about the town. In 1761 Sir William Johnson journeyed to Detroit to establish a treaty with the Ottawa confederacy. On his return, he sailed along the southern shore of Lake Erie, and in his journal speaks thus of this portage: