There are yet two other lakes westward of Seneca, Keuka and Canandaigua. This region was generally first peopled by the Puritans, but others also came in, and at the outlet of Keuka is the town of Penn Yan, so called from the Pennsylvanians and Yankees who settled it, their descendants being the shrewd and thrifty race known as the "New York Yankees." There are extensive vineyards on Keuka where are made some of the best American clarets and champagnes, the centre of that industry being Hammondsport, at the head of the lake. Beyond is Canandaigua Lake, the town of Canandaigua standing at its northern end upon a surface gently sloping towards its shores. The word means the "place chosen for a village." The heads of all these lakes are in the southern highlands, making the watershed, south of which the streams are gathered into the Canisteo River, meaning "the board on the water," which flows into the Chemung, the "big horn," and thence by the Susquehanna down through Pennsylvania to the Chesapeake. The Erie Railway, coming eastward by a wild and lonely route across the Allegheny ranges, goes down the pretty Canisteo Valley to Hornellsville, a purely railroad town of twelve thousand people, which has grown up around the shops and stations. Below, the valley broadens, and is picturesque between its high bordering ridges, the stream meandering in wayward fashion over the almost flat intervale. It passes Addison and the town with the unique name of Painted Post, so called from an Indian monument inscribed in colors, and as the Canisteo River broadens with the contribution of its swelling tributaries, it reaches the active manufacturing city of Corning, having ten thousand people, and here falls into the Chemung, which comes up northward out of the Allegheny ranges in Pennsylvania to meet it. The Chemung Valley is a broad and fertile section of flat and highly cultivated bottom lands, having in its heart the city of Elmira, with thirty-five thousand inhabitants and many industrial establishments, making it a busy railroad centre. Here is the Elmira Reformatory, the Elmira Female College, and the various "Water Cures," a species of remedial establishment flourishing throughout Western New York, where there is apparently no limit to the efficacy or bountifulness of the water-supply. The broad Chemung flows through Elmira and beyond down its rich and wide-spreading valley, until at Athens it loses itself in the swelling waters of the Susquehanna.
THE VALLEY OF THE GENESEE.
Among the rugged mountains of Potter County, in the northern part of Pennsylvania, the highest land in the State, are the springs feeding the headwaters of three noted rivers, seeking the ocean in opposite directions. The Allegheny flows westward and afterwards southward to the Ohio; the west branch of the Susquehanna goes eastward to break through the entire Allegheny chain in seeking the Atlantic; and the smaller stream, the Genesee, flows northward through New York between two long Allegheny ridges, the chief affluent of Lake Ontario. The Genesee passes through a valley of great beauty and gives water-power to many mills, a canal also being constructed to improve its navigation. After a romantic course of one hundred and fifty miles it empties into the lake at Charlotte, seven miles north of Rochester. For much of the distance its course is through a magnificent gorge, with a succession of cataracts that are renowned in American scenery. Where it first attacks the highlands of New York to break out of them, it plunges deeper and deeper down a series of grand cataracts at Portage. Here the Erie Railway, coming from the westward, has boldly thrown a stupendous bridge across the tremendous chasm and almost over the top of the highest cataract. The river makes a gorge in the yielding rocks, sinking from two hundred and fifty to six hundred feet deep, and here are the Portage Falls, one cataract after another making the stream-bed lower, the walls of the wild ravine rising almost perpendicularly. The railway, crossing at the most favorable place, has built one of the highest bridges in the country, elevated two hundred and thirty-five feet above the river, resting upon lightly-framed steel trusses. From the car windows the river can be seen far below in what seems a narrow fissure, the current boiling along and then tumbling down the cataract, the edge of which crosses the river diagonally almost beneath the bridge. The waters pour into a chasm seeming almost bottomless as the spray obscures it. The ravine extends northward, and in the distance the waters go over a second fall and then a third, the chasm finally curving around to the right, making a bend, closing the view more than a mile away, with an enormous wall of bare rock. The three cataracts fall respectively seventy, one hundred and ten and one hundred and fifty feet—called the Upper, Middle and Lower Portage Falls—and for several miles below, the river flows through the deeper ravine amid equally magnificent surroundings.
This descent brings the Genesee River down from the higher plateau to what is known as the "Genesee Level," for at the end of the defile, fifteen miles below Portage, it flows out of the highlands over pleasant lands and with gentler current. Here on the "Genesee Flats" is the village of Mount Morris, and near it has been placed, alongside the ravine, the rude log cabin, which was originally on the higher land above Portage, the Indian "Council House of Cascadea," where the Iroquois chiefs often met. At the removal in 1872, the services were conducted in the Senecas language, several Indians attending, and the identical "pipe of peace" given by Washington to Red Jacket was passed around. Nearby the river emerges through a Titanic gateway in the rocks to the pastoral region stretching far to the northward, while far over on the eastern verge is the village of Geneseo, sloping up the ascent. Its Indian name, meaning the "beautiful valley," is also given the river. After meandering placidly for miles across these flats, the Genesee River reaches the "Flour City of the West," Rochester, the storage and distributing mart for this fertile valley, getting its original start and title from the prolific wheat crops. And here the Genesee plunges down another waterfall which gives power to the Rochester mills.
When De Witt Clinton, in 1810, exploring the route for the Erie Canal, crossed the river here, there was not a house. The place was afterwards the "Hundred Acre Tract," planned in 1812 for a settlement by three adventurous frontiersmen, and the town was named for one of them, Nathaniel Rochester. After a few years, the spreading fame of the fertility of the Genesee Valley attracted a large population, and it became known as the garden spot of the then "West," so that out of this grew the flour-mills which have continued to be Rochester's chief industry. The Genesee River flows through with swift current, the Erie Canal being carried over on a massive stone aqueduct and the New York Central Railroad upon a wide bridge, and about a hundred yards beyond, the river plunges down the great Rochester Fall. The ledge over which it tumbles is a perpendicular wall, straight and regular in formation, and almost without fragments of rock at the foot, so that the fall is a clear one. The shores below are lined with huge stone mills and breweries, to which races on each bank conduct the water from a dam above the railroad bridge. This Rochester Fall, down which Sam Patch jumped to his death, is ninety-six feet high. Below it, the river flows through a somewhat wider channel, gradually bending to the left, and then it goes down a second cataract of twenty-five feet height, and finally, at some distance, over a third and broken fall of eighty-four feet. As at Portage, this second succession of triple cataracts sinks the river bed deeper and deeper into the gorge, so that the enclosing walls are in some places over three hundred feet high. This gorge is all within the limits of the city, the falls and rapids having a total descent of two hundred and sixty feet. This immense water-power, with the traffic facilities of canal and railway, have made the city, so that there is a population of a hundred and forty thousand around the Genesee Falls, and manufactures of flour, beer, clothing, leather and other articles, valued at $75,000,000 annually. In the neighboring region there is also extensive seed-growing, the Rochester nurseries occupying miles of the level surface. Rochester University has two hundred students and valuable geological collections. The city has been a headquarters for the Spiritualists and advocates of Women's Rights. The Genesee emerges from the rocky gorge below Rochester, and flows in more tranquil course northward through a ravine carved deeply into the table-land, to Lake Ontario, at the little port of Charlotte.
LOCKPORT, CHAUTAUQUA AND ERIE.
Westward from Rochester the country is underlaid by red sandstones, and at Medina quarries are plentiful, this reproduction of the Arabian "City of the Prophet" being an extensive supplier of these dark-red Medina sandstones, as the geologists call them. Beyond, at Lockport, the higher terrace is reached, and here the Erie Canal is raised by an imposing series of five double locks from the Genesee level up to the Lake Erie level. Through these locks and by means of a subsidiary canal an immense water-power is obtained which is utilized by the Lockport mills. The much lower Genesee level is marked by the base of a bluff, stretching through the town and across the adjacent region, evidently the bank of an ancient lake.
In western New York a high ridge crosses the country south of Lake Erie, and to the southward of its most elevated portion there stretches the elongated Chautauqua Lake, almost bisected by two jutting points at its centre. This charming lake is eighteen miles long, three or four miles wide, and elevated seven hundred and thirty feet above Lake Erie, its outlet draining southward into a tributary of the Allegheny River. Its elevation above tide is nearly thirteen hundred feet. The low hills enclosing it are popular summer resorts, and on the western bank in the season are drawn enormous crowds to the Chautauqua Assembly, which has established the "Summer School of Philosophy" for education. There are often twenty to thirty thousand people here at one time, and the plan has been so successful that it has various imitators elsewhere, the "Chautauqua idea" being varying instruction with recreation. The Indians named this lake, from the mists arising, Chautauqua, or "the foggy place." Beyond this popular resort the land falls away, and crossing the New York western boundary into the "Pennsylvania Triangle," a jutting corner thrust up to Lake Erie, a fine harbor is found at Erie, known in earlier history by its French name of Presque Isle. This triangle of the Keystone State, giving about forty miles of coast-line on the lake, has a history. The early surveyors discovered that, owing to misdescriptions in various English grants, this large triangular tract was, from a legal standpoint, "nowhere." It was north of Pennsylvania, west of New York and east of the Connecticut Western Reserve, which became part of Ohio. Pennsylvania finally bought it, paying the United States Government, in 1792, $150,640 for it, and also getting the Indian title for £1200. It was a good purchase, for Erie harbor is the best on the lake. Erie has about fifty thousand people, and is in a picturesque situation, owing to the beauty of the bay and the outlying island, which was formerly a peninsula. There is additional protection by a breakwater, making an extensive basin with spacious docks that have a large trade. The French were the early settlers, building their "Fort de la Presque Isle" in 1749, which was one of the chain of outposts they projected between the St. Lawrence and the Ohio. It was here that Commodore Perry hastily built the rude fleet with which he gained the noted victory over the Anglo-Canadian fleet on Lake Erie in 1813, and back here he afterwards in triumph towed his prizes. The remains of his flagship lie in the harbor. Perry's guns were the heaviest in that memorable contest for control of the lake, and therefore he won. In Lake Side Cemetery is buried Captain Charles Vernon Gridley, who commanded Admiral Dewey's flagship, the "Olympia," at the battle of Manila Bay in 1898.
THE CITY OF BUFFALO.
Dunkirk, in New York, northeast of Erie, is another harbor on the lake, and a terminal of the Erie Railway, the land hereabout being the monotonous level plain of western New York. Rounding the eastern end of Lake Erie, at the head of its outlet stream, the Niagara River, is Buffalo, the chief port of the lake and the metropolis of western New York. It is surrounded for miles upon the level land with railway terminals and car-yards, amid which factories, breweries, coal-pockets, cattle-pens and grain elevators are distributed. This great city, which has grown to four hundred thousand population, takes it name from the American bison, who roamed in large herds over the lands adjacent to Lake Erie as late as 1720, and thus gave the name to Buffalo Creek. The city covers a broad surface at the foot of Lake Erie, and is coeval with the nineteenth century, having been founded in 1801; but in the earlier years it was only a military post, and did not assume a commercial standing or begin to grow much until after the opening of the Erie Canal. The neighboring post of Niagara, a short distance down that river, was of more importance in the early days of the frontier, for it was on Niagara River, in 1669, that the Sieur de La Salle, who described the frozen stream as "like a plain paved with polished marble," built and in the following summer launched the "Griffin," the first rude vessel that explored the Upper Lakes. Afterwards one or two trading cabins appeared on Buffalo Creek, and then there was constructed a stockade fort. For thirty years the hunters and traders fought the savages and captured wild beasts, and then, after an interval of peace, the War of 1812 came with new ravages, during which the little settlement around the stockade at Buffalo was burnt by the British, who held the fort at the entrance to Niagara River. When the Erie Canal was opened, the expansion of the settlement became rapid, and its eligible position at the point where the lake commerce had to connect with the canal and the railways leading to the Atlantic seaboard has since given full scope to business enterprise and made it a large and wealthy city.