"Brethren, you must not think to frighten us with fine arranged bits of infantry, cavalry and artillery, composed of your watermelon armies taken from the Jersey shores. They would cut a much better figure in warring with crabs and oysters about the banks of the Delaware. It is a common thing for Indians to fight your best armies in the proportion of one to five; therefore we would not hesitate to attack this army at the rate of one to ten."
The soldiers riddled these notices with bullets and pressed on, hunting for "Tom Tinker's men," as the insurgents came to be called. But they never seemed able to find them. All the people seen told how they were forced by threats, and when asked where the persons were who threatened them, replied, "Oh, they have run off." The army finally reached Pittsburg, the people submitted to the law and paid the tax, the insurrection was suppressed, and the army returned and was disbanded. The whisky excise was peacefully collected afterwards until the tax was repealed.
In the Lebanon Valley east of Harrisburg are important iron furnaces, and here are the "Cornwall Ore Banks," which is one of the greatest iron-ore deposits in the world—less rich than some others, possibly, but having a practically exhaustless supply almost alongside these furnaces. There are three hills of solid iron ore, one of them having been worked long before the Revolution, the original furnace, still existing, dating from 1742. This great Cornwall iron mine was bought in 1737 for $675, including a large tract of land. A half-century later $42,500 was paid for a one-sixth interest, and to-day a one-forty-eighth interest is estimated worth upwards of $500,000. These ores have some sulphur in them, and are therefore baked in ovens to remove it. They yield about 50 per cent. of iron. A geologist some time ago reported upon the ore banks that there were thirty millions of tons of ore in sight above the water-level, being over three times the amount taken out since the workings began in the eighteenth century. The deposits extend to a depth of several hundred feet under the surface, thus indefinitely multiplying the prospective yield.
THE SUSQUEHANNA HEADWATERS.
Otsego Lake, the source of the Susquehanna River, is one of the prettiest lakes in New York State, and is at an elevation of eleven hundred feet above tide. It is nine miles long and about a mile wide, the Susquehanna issuing from its southern end at Cooperstown, a hamlet of two thousand people, beautifully situated amid the high rolling hills surrounding the lake. The name of the lake comes from the "Ote-sa-ga rock" at the outlet, a small, round-topped, beehive-shaped boulder a few rods from the shore, just where the lake condenses into the river. This was the Indian Council rock, to which they came to hold meetings and make treaties, and it was well-known among the Iroquois and the Lenni Lenapes. James Fenimore Cooper, the novelist, who has immortalized all this region, called the lake the "Glimmerglass." His father, Judge William Cooper, founded the village of Cooperstown in 1786, afterwards bringing his infant son from Burlington, New Jersey, where he was born in 1789. Here the great American novelist lived until his death in 1851, his grave, under a plain horizontal slab, being in the little churchyard of Christ Episcopal Church. There is a monument to him in Lakewood Cemetery, about a mile distant, surmounted by a statue of his legendary hunter "Leatherstocking," who has been described as "a man who had the simplicity of a woodsman, the heroism of a savage, the faith of a Christian, and the feeling of a poet." The old Cooper mansion, his home, Otsego Hall, was burnt in 1854, and its site is marked by a rock in the middle of the road, surrounded by a railing. "Hannah's Hill," named after his daughter, and commanding a magnificent view, which he always described with rapture, is on the western shore of the lake, just out of town. The charm of Cooper's genius and the magic of his description have given Otsego Lake a world-wide fame. In one place he described it as "a broad sheet of water, so placid and limpid that it resembled a bed of the pure mountain atmosphere compressed into a setting of hills and woods. Nothing is wanted but ruined castles and recollections, to raise it to the level of the scenery of the Rhine." And thus has the poet sung of it:
"O Haunted Lake, from out whose silver fountains
The mighty Susquehanna takes its rise;
O Haunted Lake, among the pine-clad mountains,
Forever smiling upward to the skies,—
A master's hand hath painted all thy beauties;