In this fertile district was the earliest settlement made by white men in Pennsylvania, the Dutch from the Hudson River wandering over to the Delaware at Port Jervis through these valleys, and settling on the prolific bottom lands along the river, many years before Penn came to Philadelphia. They opened copper-mines in the Kittatinny, just above the Water Gap, and made the old "Mine Road" to reach them, coming from Esopus on the Hudson. The records at Albany of 1650 refer to specimens brought from "a copper-mine at the Minisink." The Provincial authorities at Philadelphia do not appear to have had any clear knowledge of settlers above the Water Gap until 1729, when they sent a surveyor up to examine and report, and he found Nicholas Depui in a snug home, where he had bought two islands and level land on the shore from the Indians some time before. Like the Dutch settlers above, Depui had no idea where the river went to. He was a French Huguenot exile from Holland, and, without disputing with the surveyor, he again bought his land, nearly six hundred and fifty acres, in 1733, from the grantees of the Penns. His stockaded stone house was known as Depui's Fort, and after him the Water Gap was long called "Depui's Gap." Old George La Bar was the most famous resident of the Water Gap. Three brothers La Bar, Peter, Charles and Abraham, also French Huguenots, lived near the Gap, and each married a Dutch wife. In 1808, however, this region became too crowded for them, and Peter, at the age of eighty-five, migrated to Ohio to get more room. When ninety-eight years old his wife died, and in his one hundredth year he married another out on the Ohio frontier, and lived to the ripe age of one hundred and five. Peter, when he migrated, left his son George La Bar at the Gap, where he had been born in 1763. George was the famous centenarian of Pennsylvania, who died at the age of one hundred and seven, being a vigorous axeman almost until the day of his death. He was too young for a Revolutionary soldier, but when the War of 1812 came he was too old. In 1869, at the age of one hundred and six, a visitor describes him as felling trees and peeling with his own hands three wagon-loads of bark, which went to the tannery. He never wore spectacles, always used tobacco, voted the straight Democratic ticket, and at every Presidential election from Washington to Grant, and could not be persuaded to ride on a railway train, regarding the cars as an innovation.
In this region of the Minisink is the pleasant town of Stroudsburg, the county-seat of Monroe, its beautiful valley being well described by a local authority as "full of dimpling hills and fine orchards, among which stalwart men live to a ripe old age upon the purest apple whisky." Its finest building, the State Normal College, handsomely located on an elevated ridge, has three hundred students. The town was named for Jacob Stroud, a pioneer and Indian fighter, who was with General Wolfe when he scaled the Heights of Abraham, and, capturing Quebec, changed the map of Colonial America. Marshall's Creek comes down to join its waters with Brodhead's Creek below Stroudsburg, and a few miles above displays the pretty little cataract of Marshall's Falls. Six miles northwest of Stroudsburg is the Pocono Knob, rising in stately grandeur as it abruptly terminates the Pocono Mountain wall on its eastern face. It was this Knob which stood out as an island in the edge of the great glacier, a deep notch separating its summit from the plateau behind, and the Terminal Moraine encircles its sides at about two-thirds its height. In the river bottom lands are fertile farms, and a great deal of tobacco is raised. Thus the river leads us to Bushkill and the great Walpack Bend. The Delaware, coming from the northeast, impinges upon the solid sandstone wall of the "Hog's Back," the prolongation of the ridge dividing the two "Buried Valleys." This ridge bristles with attenuated firs, and hence its appropriate name. The Big Bushkill and the Little Bushkill Creeks, uniting, flow in from the west, and the Delaware turns sharply eastward and then back upon itself around the ridge into the other valley, and resumes its course southwest again down to the Water Gap. This double Walpack curve, making a perfect letter "S," is so narrow and compressed that a rifleman, standing on either side, can readily send his bullet in a straight line across the river three times. The Indian word Walpack means "a turn hole." The Delaware here is a succession of rifts and pools, making a constant variation of rapids and still waters, with many spots sacred to the angler, and displaying magnificent scenery as the lights and shadows pass across the beautiful forest-covered hills enclosing its banks.
BUSHKILL TO PORT JERVIS.
Bushkill village is in a picturesque location, opening pleasantly towards the Delaware. It is also just over the Monroe border, in Pike County, long ago described by Horace Greeley as "famous for rattlesnakes and Democrats," but now more noted for its fine waterfalls and attractive scenery, its many streams draining numerous beautiful lakes, and dancing down frequent roaring rapids in the journey to the Delaware. The falls of the Little Bushkill near the village is the finest cataract in Pennsylvania. From Bushkill, bordering the eastern bank of the Delaware, for thirty miles up to Port Jervis, is one of the best roads in the world. The Marcellus shales of the Buried Valley, which form the towering cliffs bordering the river along the base of which the road is laid, make a road-bed as smooth and hard as a floor, the chief highway of this district, for the railway has not yet penetrated it. Over on the other side of the river the great Kittatinny ridge presents an almost unbroken wall for more than forty miles from the Water Gap up to Port Jervis. Frequent creeks come in, all angling streams, the chief of them being Dingman's, which for several miles displays a series of cataracts, and at its mouth has the noted Pike County village of "Dingman's Choice," at which is located the time-honored Dingman's Ferry, across the Delaware. The source of Dingman's Creek is in the Silver Lake, about seven miles west of the Delaware, and in its flow it descends about nine hundred feet, breaking its way over the various strata of Catskill, Chemung and Hamilton sandstones. The upper cataracts, called the Fulmer and Factory Falls and the Deer Leap, are located in a beautiful ravine known as the Childs Park, while, below, the creek pours over the High Falls, one hundred and thirty feet high, a short distance from the river. Near this is the curious Soap Trough, an inclined plane descending one hundred feet, always filled with foam, down which comes the Silver Thread, a small tributary stream. The gorge by which Dingman's Creek comes out is deep and massive, the entrance being a narrow canyon cut down into the Marcellus shales which make the towering cliffs along the river. There are also fine cataracts on the Raymondskill and the Sawkill, flowing into the Delaware above. The cliffs here rise into Utter's Peak, elevated eight hundred feet, giving a magnificent view along the valley.
The little town of Milford, the county-seat of Pike, is one of the gems of this district, spread over a broad terrace on the bluff high above the Delaware, with a grand outlook at the ponderous Kittatinny in front, rising to its greatest elevation at High Point, six miles away, where a hotel is perched on the summit. Surrounded by mountains, the late N. P Willis, when he visited Milford, was so impressed by its peculiar situation that he described it as "looking like a town that all the mountains around have disowned and kicked into the middle." Thomas Quick, Sr., a Hollander, who came over from the Hudson in 1733, was the first settler in Milford. His noted son, Thomas Quick, the "Indian Killer," was born in 1734. "Tom Quick," as he was called, was brought up among the Indians, and had the closest friendship for them; but when the terrible Colonial war began, the savages, in a foray, killed and scalped his father almost by his side, Tom being shot in the foot, but escaping. Tom vowed vengeance, and ever afterwards was a perfect demon in his hatred of the Indians, sparing neither age nor sex. After the French and Indian war had closed and peace was proclaimed, he carried on his own warfare independently. The most harrowing tales are told of his Indian murders, some being horribly brutal. He never married, but hunted Indians and wild beasts all his life, and was outlawed by the Government, it being announced that no Indian who killed him would be punished; but he finally died in bed in 1796. He was entirely unrepentant during his last illness, regretting he had not killed more Indians; and after saying he had killed ninety-nine during his life, he begged them to bring in an old Indian who lived in the settlement, so that he might appropriately close his career by killing the hundredth redskin. The most noted Milford building is "Pinchot's Castle," on the hillside above the Sawkill, a Norman-Breton baronial hall, the summer house of the Pinchot family of New York, whose ancestor, a French refugee after Waterloo, was an early settler here.
Seven miles above Milford the Delaware River makes the great right-angled bend in its course, from the southeast to the southwest, which is known as the "Tri-States Corner," and here, on the broad flats at the mouth of the Neversink River, is the town of Port Jervis. From the village of Deposit, ninety miles above, the Delaware descends in level five hundred and seventy feet; and from Port Jervis down to the Water Gap, forty-three miles, the descent is one hundred and twenty-seven feet. In the first it falls six feet per mile and in the latter only three feet, the difference being caused by the entirely changed conditions above and below the great bend. Above, the Delaware flows through the ridges by a winding ravine cut transversely across the hard rocks almost all the way, while below, it meanders parallel to the ridges along the outcrop of the softer rocks of the Marcellus shales and Clinton formations in the long, trough-like buried valleys. The Neversink comes from the northeast through one of these valleys which is prolonged over to the Hudson, the source of the Neversink being on a divide of such gentle slope that the large spring making the head sends part of its waters the other way, through Rondout Creek into the Hudson. A long, narrow peninsula, just at the completion of the great bend, juts out between the Neversink and the Delaware, ending in a sharp, low, wedge-like rocky point, the extremity being the "Tri-States Corner," where the boundary line between New Jersey and New York reaches the Delaware, and ends in mid-river at the boundary of Pennsylvania. This spot was located after a long boundary war, and the fact is duly recorded on the "Tri-States Rock," down at the end of the point. The Delaware and Hudson Canal, constructed in 1828, and coming over from Rondout Creek through the Neversink Valley, made Port Jervis, which was named after one of its engineers. The canal goes up the Delaware to the Lackawaxen, and then follows that stream to Honesdale. The Erie Railway also comes through a gap in the Kittatinny (here called the Shawangunk Mountain, meaning the "white rocks"), descends to Port Jervis, and then follows up the Delaware. These two great public works have made the prosperity of the town, which has a population of over ten thousand. The long and towering ridge of Point Peter, forming the northwestern boundary of the Neversink Valley, and thrust out to the Delaware, bounding the gorge through which the river comes, overlooks the town. On the other side is the highest elevation of the Kittatinny and the most elevated land in New Jersey, High Point, rising nineteen hundred and sixty feet.
THE CATSKILL FLAGS.
The broadened valley of the Delaware extends a short distance above Port Jervis, the canal and railway rounding the ponderous battlements of Point Peter and then proceeding up the river, one on either bank. About three miles above the "Port," as it is familiarly called, the valley contracts to a rock-enclosed gorge, for here the Delaware emerges from its great canyon in the Catskill series of rocks, in the bottom of which it flows from Deposit, at the northern boundary of Pennsylvania, eighty-seven miles above. The remarkable change seen in the surrounding topography indicates the presence of a different rock formation from that passed below, and the river runs out of the Catskill rocks over the "Saw-mill rift." For thirty miles above, to the northern line of Pike County, at Narrowsburg, the river banks mostly are only mere shelves a few rods wide, and frequently present nothing but the faces of rocky walls, rising perpendicularly from the water to a height of six hundred feet or more. From the expanding limestones below, the valley here suddenly contracts in the flags and ledges of the Catskill series. All the small streams coming from the bluffs back of the cliffs descend with rapid fall, and frequently over high cascades. These Catskill flags, built up in vast construction, rear their gaunt and weather-beaten jagged walls and wood-crowned turrets on high. Perched far up on the New York side, at the narrowest part of this remarkable gorge, is an eyrie called the "Hawk's Nest," which gives a wonderful view, reached by a road carved out of the rocky side of the abyss. This road, hung on the perpendicular wall five hundred feet over the river, is the only available route to the part of New York north of Port Jervis. The canal and railway, far below, are each set on a shelf cut out of the rocky banks. The enclosing cliffs rise higher as the river is ascended, sometimes reaching an elevation of twelve hundred feet; and here for miles are seen the famous Delaware and Starucca flags, rising hundreds of feet in a continuous wall of bluish-gray and greenish-gray flaggy sandstones. They are extensively quarried and shipped to New York. Both railway and canal construction through this deep cleft were enormously costly.
THE BATTLE OF LACKAWAXEN.
Here is Shohola Township, on the Pennsylvania shore, a wild and rocky region fronting on the river for about ten miles, and Shohola Creek rushes down a rocky bed through a deep gorge to seek the Delaware. It was at this place the surveyors' line was drawn from the Lehigh over to the Delaware, after Marshall's fateful walk. The "Shohola Glen," a favorite excursion ground, has the channel of the creek, only forty feet wide, cut down for two hundred feet deep into the flagstones, and it plunges over four attractive cascades at the Shohola Falls above. A short distance northward the Lackawaxen flows in through a fine gorge, broadening out as the Delaware is approached; and the canal, after crossing the latter on an aqueduct, goes up the Lackawaxen bank. A grand amphitheatre of towering hills surrounds the broad flats where the Lackawaxen brings its ample flow of dark amber-colored waters out of the hemlock forests and swamps of Wayne County to this picturesque spot. Here was fought, on July 22, 1779, the battle of Lackawaxen or the Minisink, the chief Revolutionary conflict on the upper Delaware. The battlefield was a rocky ledge on the New York side, elevated about five hundred feet above the river, amid the lofty hills of Highland Township, in Sullivan County. The noted Mohawk chief, Joseph Brandt, with a force of fifteen hundred Indians and Tories, came down from Northern New York to plunder the frontier settlements. Most of the inhabitants fled down to the forts on the Lehigh or across the Blue Ridge, upon his approach; but a small militia force was hastily gathered under Colonels Hathorn and Tusten to meet the enemy, whom they found crossing the Delaware at a ford near the Lackawaxen. Hathorn, who commanded, moved to attack, but Brandt rushed his Indians up a ravine, intercepting Hathorn just as he got out on the rocky ledge, and cutting off about fifty of his rear guard. Hathorn had ninety men with him, who quickly threw up a rude breastwork, protecting about a half-acre of the ledge. Their ammunition was scant, it was a terribly hot day, they had no water, and were soon surrounded; but for six hours they bravely defended themselves, when, the ammunition being all gone, the Indians broke through their line. Tusten was attending the wounded, and with seventeen wounded men, whom he was alleviating, was tomahawked, all being massacred. The others fled, many being slain in the pursuit. Forty-four of the little band were killed, and the fifty in the rear guard who had been cut off were never afterwards heard of. Years afterwards, the bones of the slain in this terrible defeat were gathered on the field and taken across the Blue Ridge to Goshen for interment, and in 1822 a monument was erected at Goshen in their memory, Colonel Hathorn, who was then living, making an address. On the centenary anniversary in 1879 a monument was dedicated on the field, where faint relics of the old breastwork were still traceable on the rocky ledge perched high above the river, almost opposite the mouth of the Lackawaxen.