Our excursion was extended to the public-house situated on the other side of the Delaware Gap, where we found a live specimen of the red fox of this country (Canis fulvus, Desm.), which we had not before met with. Loaded with plants, and other interesting objects, we returned to 36 Broadhead's house, where all the persons of our party successively arrived, each with something interesting. Some boys brought me the beautiful water-snake which we had seen on the preceding day. Mr. Bodmer had taken a faithful view of the Gap, near Dietrich's public-house.
We left Broadhead's on the 25th of August, early in the morning. The place which we wished to reach on this day is called the Pokono, and is the most elevated point of the first chain of the Alleghanys or Blue Mountains. Our road led in a south-westerly direction, along Cherry Creek, through a pleasant valley diversified with meadows, thickets, and woods, and gradually ascending.
As we rose higher and higher over gentle hills, we met a disagreeable, raw, cold wind, and reached, on the elevated plain, an isolated church, with a few habitations round it. On our asking the name of the place, a person, pretty well dressed, said, "he did not himself know the name of the place; the clergyman, a German, came, about once in a month, from Mount Bethel, to preach here."
On reaching the top, we saw before us the highest ridge of the Blue Mountains, the summit of which, as I have said, is called Pokono, where an unbroken tract of dark forests covers the whole wilderness. We gradually advanced towards a more bleak and elevated region, where pines and firs more and more predominated. On an elevated plain we were surrounded, as far as the eye could reach, with woods or thickets of low oaks, from which numbers of slender, half-dried, short-branched pines (Pinus rigida) shot up. These pines originally formed the forest—the oaks, only the underwood; but the former have, for the most part, perished in the fires, with which the settlers have, in the most unwarrantable manner, without any necessity whatever, destroyed these primeval forests. On a part of the highland, cleared of wood, through which the road passes, we saw a row of new wooden houses, and at once perceived that timber is the source of the subsistence of the inhabitants. Boards, planks, shingles, everywhere lay about, and large quantities are exported. Shops, where most of the common necessaries of life were sold, had already been established in this new settlement.
From this place, called Chestnut Hill, from the abundance of chestnut trees in the forests, the road declines a little, and you see, on all sides, numerous saw mills, which prepare for use the chief product of the country. The outside cuts of the pine and firs were piled up in large stacks; scarcely any use is made of them, and they may be bought for a trifle. We had to pass five or six times the windings of Pokonbochko Creek, the banks of which are agreeably bordered with thickets of alder, birch, willow-leaved spiræa, and the Lobelia cardinalis. A great number of skins of different animals were hung up at the house of a tanner, such as grey and red foxes, racoons, lynxes, &c., which led us to ask what beasts of the chase were to be met with, and we learned that deer and other large animals are still numerous. Rattlesnakes abound in these parts; they showed us many of their skins stuffed, and one very large one was hung up on the 37 gable end of a house. Some persons eat these dangerous serpents from a notion that, when dressed in a certain manner, they are an effectual remedy against many diseases.
We had here a foretaste of the wild scenery of North America, which we might expect to find in perfection, in uninterrupted primeval forests on the Pokono; we, therefore, did not stop here, but hastened to the less inhabited, more elevated, and wilder region, where the mixture of firs in the forest already began to preponderate. We halted, and took our dinner at an isolated public-house, kept by a man of German origin, whose name is Meerwein. Forests surrounded the verdant meadows about the house, in which woodcocks were numerous. In a little excursion in the forest I saw splendid bushes of Rhododendron maximum, kalmia, Andromeda, Rhodora canadensis, Ceanothus vaccinum; and in the shade of the first, Orchis ciliata, with its beautiful orange-coloured flowers, which is found also nearer to Bethlehem.
The entertainment in this solitary house was pretty good and reasonable; all the inmates, except one man, were Germans. If we had stopped for the night, they would have gone out for us with their guns, as deer and pheasants abound in the forests. Having taken the opportunity of forwarding our collections to Bethlehem by the stage which passed the house, we proceeded on our journey. From this place the road continues to ascend, traversing a fine thick wood, frequently crossing the stream. An undergrowth of scrub oak and chestnut is spread uniformly, and without interruption, over the whole country, the pines, as already mentioned, rising above it, most of which have suffered by fire; for in the dry season these woods have often been destroyed by extensive conflagrations, which have generally been caused by the negligence of the wood-cutters and hunters. Even now, clouds of smoke rose at a distance, and announced a fire in this great lonely wilderness. The high road is here carried directly through the forest; it is, for the most part, laid with wood, covered with earth, which requires carriages with good springs.
When you have nearly reached the most elevated part of this wilderness, and look back, you have a grand prospect. Lofty ridges rise one above another in a narrow valley, all covered with dark forests, and, on the right and left, high walls of rock close the valley. We soon reached the highest summit of the Pokono, or second chain of the Blue Mountains, which, as I have said, forms the most easterly of the Alleghanys.
Mr. Moser, a young botanist, had accompanied us from Bethlehem, and I undertook with him an excursion to a neighbouring lake on the top of the Pokono, while Dr. Saynisch prepared the birds that had been killed, and our other hunters went out to look for stags and woodhens.
We proceeded about half an hour along the high road, when we perceived the summit of the Pokono, and then turned to the right towards an old decayed cottage, where oxen were grazing among the thick bushes, and followed a scarcely perceptible path through the wilderness. We crossed a valley, with thickets and scorched pines rising above them, where the ground was covered with various kinds of plants. An old path led us half a league over an eminence; after which we 38 found a valley, where the lake, called Long Pond, is situated, surrounded by low reeds and rushes, among pine woods and various interesting shrubs. On the narrow lake we found a small boat, in which Mr. Moser pushed about to botanize. He procured in this manner the pretty blue flowering Pontederia lanceolata, a red flowering utricularia, nymphæa, &c. Though this wilderness was perfectly lonely, we did not see any water-fowl, and, in fact, very little animal life, so that the botanist finds much more employment than the zoologist. The lake is about a mile long, has but little open or clear water, and receives its supply from the Tonkhanna Brook. When Mr. Moser reached the bank again, he called to me that he was very near a rattlesnake, the rattle of which he had distinctly heard; but, though we looked diligently, we could not find the animal which we had long wished to possess, because the ground was so thickly overgrown with plants. One of the sons of Mr. Sachs, our landlord, had been lately bitten by a rattlesnake while fishing, and they affirmed that he was soon cured by tea made of the bark of the white ash, which is said to be an infallible antidote to the bite of serpents.