[44] See p. [107], for illustration of bear-trap.—Ed.
[45] Wilkes-Barre, seat of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, and eighteen miles southwest of Scranton, was laid out in 1769 and named jointly for John Wilkes and Colonel Barre, members of the British parliament. The town is near the famous "mammoth vein," of anthracite coal, nineteen million tons of which were mined in the vicinity of Wilkes-Barre in 1900. The census report for that year exhibited a population of 51,721.—Ed.
[46] The Susquehanna and Tide Water Canal Company was a consolidation of the Susquehanna Canal Company of Pennsylvania, and the Tide Water Canal Company of Maryland. It was encouraged by both states, Maryland lending it credit to the amount of a million dollars. It was opened in 1840. See Henry V. Poor, History of the Railroads and Canals of the United States (New York, 1860), p. 552.
In 1840 the total mileage of canals in Pennsylvania was twelve hundred and eighty; of which four hundred and thirty-two were owned by private companies; the total mileage of railroads in the same year was seven hundred and ninety-five. See Henry F. Walling and O. W. Gray, New Topographical Atlas of the State of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1872), p. 30.—Ed.
[47] The executive council of Philadelphia presented General William Ross with a costly sword for his "gallant services of July 4, 1788," in rescuing Colonel Pickering from kidnappers. Ross was later made general of the militia, and in 1812 elected to the state senate from the district of Northumberland and Luzerne; he died (1842) at the age of eighty-two.—Ed.
[48] Tomaqua lies in the coal district at the end of the little Schuylkill Valley, near Tuscarora. In this country the discovery of the coal has caused agriculture to be neglected, and thousands of people are said to have been ruined by unsuccessful speculations.—Maximilian.
[49] See Plate 5, in accompanying atlas, our volume xxv.—Ed.
[50] Josiah White, early interested in mechanics, purchased an estate on the Schuylkill, five miles above Philadelphia, constructed a dam across the river, and erected there a wire mill. Later, he sought a contract for furnishing Philadelphia with water by means of power generated at this dam. After long negotiations the city purchased the plant, belonging to White and Gillingham, his partner, and constructed the Fairmount water works. White, together with Erskine Hazard, then directed his activities to the Lehigh coal fields, and became the active promoter of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company. White resided at Mauch Chunk from 1818 to 1831, and then moved to Philadelphia where he died (1850) at the age of seventy. His name is inseparably connected with the canal system of Pennsylvania; see History of the Counties of Lehigh and Carbon (Philadelphia, 1884), p. 670.—Ed.
[51] Lehighton—a corruption of the Delaware, Lechauwekink, "where there are forks"—is a post borough in Carbon County, Pennsylvania, on the west bank of the Lehigh, twenty-five miles above Allentown. It was laid out in 1794 on the lands of Jacob Weiss and William Henry, and the population in 1900 is reported as 4,269.—Ed.
[52] Loskiel, in his history of the Indian Missions (pp. 415 and 416), gives the following account of this affair. "On the 24th of November, 1755, the house of the Indian Missionaries in Gnadenhütten, on the Mahony, was attacked in the evening by hostile Indians, and burnt. Eleven persons perished: viz., nine in the flames, one of the brethren was shot, and another cruelly butchered, and then scalped. Three brethren, and one sister (the wife of one of them), and a boy, escaped by flight; the woman and the boy, by a fortunate leap from the burning roof. One of those who escaped, the Missionary Sensemann, who, at the beginning of the attack, had gone out of the back door to see what might be the cause of the violent barking of the dogs, and who of course was not able to return to those whom he had left in the house, had the affliction to see his wife perish in the flames."—Maximilian.