AMERICA - Joel Cook

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being estimated to exceed two thousand millions of tons. The large population and enormous production have caused all the railways to send in branches to tap its lucrative traffic, so that it is the best-served region in Pennsylvania. It has two large cities—Wilkesbarre, in Luzerne, and Scranton, in Lackawanna. Wilkesbarre is on the eastern Susquehanna river bank, a town of forty thousand people, named after the two English champions of American Colonial rights. It covers much surface in the centre of the valley, with suburbs spreading far up the mountain sides. But from almost every point of view in the city the outlook is over black culm-heaps or coal-breakers or at rows of coal cars, so that there is a monotony in the steady reminder of the source of their riches, the omnipresent anthracite. About twelve miles northwest of Wilkesbarre, up in the North Mountain range, is the largest lake in Pennsylvania—Harvey's Lake—elevated nearly thirteen hundred feet and covering about two square miles. It is named after one of the early pioneers from Connecticut, and its outflow comes down to the Susquehanna near Nanticoke Gap. Its pleasant shores are a favorite resort of the Wilkesbarre people. The flourishing city of Scranton is about nineteen miles north of Wilkesbarre, in the Lackawanna Valley. It has grown to a population of a hundred thousand people, and is picturesquely situated among the coal mines, with a higher elevation than Wilkesbarre, being nearly eleven hundred feet above tide, at the confluence of the Roaring Brook with the Lackawanna River; and it has extensive iron industries, being the chief city of northeastern Pennsylvania. The Wyoming and Lackawanna coal pits, while the greatest anthracite producers, are not generally so deep as those of the Lehigh or Schuylkill regions. The deepest Pennsylvania shaft goes down seventeen hundred feet near Pottsville. Some of the Wyoming galleries run a mile and a half underground from the shaft, following the coal veins underneath and far beyond the Susquehanna.

      This noted Wyoming Vale, in the early history of the Pennsylvania frontier, was bought from the Iroquois Indians, the "Six Nations," by an association of pioneer settlers from Connecticut. Good management, due largely to the judicious methods of the early missionaries, kept them at peace with the Indians. Count Zinzendorf, with a companion, came up from Bethlehem in 1742, before the Connecticut purchase, and founded a Moravian mission among the Shawnees in the valley. It is said that they were suspicious of European rapacity and plotted his assassination, and the historian relates that the Count was alone in his tent, reclining upon a bundle of dry weeds, destined for his bed, and engaged in writing or in devout meditation, when the assassins crept stealthily up. A blanket-curtain formed the door, and, gently raising the corner, the Indians had a full view of the patriarch, with the calmness of a saint upon his benignant features. They were struck with awe. But this was not all. The night was cool, and he had kindled a small fire. The historian continues: "Warmed by the flame, a large rattlesnake had crept from its covert, and, approaching the fire for its greater enjoyment, glided harmlessly over one of the legs of the holy man, whose thoughts at the moment were not occupied upon the grovelling things of earth. He perceived not the serpent, but the Indians, with breathless attention, had observed the whole movement of the poisonous reptile; and as they gazed upon the aspect and attitude of the Count, their enmity was immediately changed to reverence; and in the belief that their intended victim enjoyed the special protection of the Great Spirit, they desisted from their bloody purpose and retired. Thenceforward the Count was regarded by the Indians with the most profound veneration."

      When the Revolution came, the settlement was a thriving agricultural colony of about two thousand people, scattered over the valley, with a village on the river shore just above the present site of Wilkesbarre. In June, 1778, a force of British troops, Tories and Indians entered the valley and attacked them, and on July 3d the terrible Wyoming massacre followed, in which the British officers were unable to set any bounds to the atrocious butchery by their savage allies, who killed about three hundred men, women and children. The poet Campbell has painted the previous pastoral scene of happiness and content in "Gertrude of Wyoming," and told the tale of atrocity perpetrated by the savages, which is one of the most horrible tragedies of that great war. This poem tells of

      "A stoic of the woods—a man without a tear."

      Beside the river below Pittston and near the village of Wyoming, having the great North Mountain for a background, was Fort Forty, the scene of the chief atrocities of the massacre, the site being now marked by a granite obelisk. Here is the burial-place of the remains of the slaughtered. "Queen Esther's Rock" is pointed out, where the half-breed Queen of the Senecas, to avenge the death of her son, is said to have herself tomahawked fourteen defenceless prisoners. Most of the survivors fled after this horror, and they did not return to the valley until long after peace was restored, when the infant settlement was renewed in the founding of Wilkesbarre. Far up on the side of the grand peak guarding the northern portal of the Lackawannock Gap is the broad shelf of rock which embalms in "Campbell's Ledge" the memory of the great English poet who has so graphically told the harrowing tale.

      THE TERMINAL MORAINE.

      The Delaware River above the "Forks," at the mouth of the Lehigh, breaks through a narrow notch in the Chestnut Hill ridge known as the "Little Water Gap," while farther to the northeast the ridge continues through New Jersey as the Jenny Jump Mountain. Above this is the noted "Foul Rift," where the river channel is filled with boulders and rocks of all sizes and shapes, the dread of the raftsmen who gave it the name, for many a raft has been wrecked there. But while this place is shunned by the navigator, it has an absorbing attraction for the geologist. This was where the great "Terminal Moraine" of the glacial epoch crossed the Delaware, recalling the "Ice Age," to which reference has already been made. When the vast Greenland ice-cap crept down so as to overspread northeastern America and northwestern Europe and filled the intervening Atlantic bed, it broke off many rocky fragments in its southward advance, scratching the surfaces of the ledges, and the fragments held in its grip, with striated lines and grooves in the direction of its movement. The ice steadily flowed southward, coming over mountain and valley alike in a continuous sheet, enveloping the ocean and adjacent continents, and finally halted on the Delaware about sixty miles north of Philadelphia. Its southern verge spread across America from Alaska to St. Louis, and thence to the Atlantic on the northern coast of New Jersey. Its southern boundary entered Western Pennsylvania near Beaver, passing northeast to the New York line; then turning southeast, it crossed the Lehigh about ten miles northwest of Mauch Chunk and the Delaware just below Belvidere. It crossed New Jersey to Staten Island, traversed the length of Long Island, and passed out to sea, appearing on Block Island, Cape Cod, St. George's Bank and Sable Island Shoal, south of Nova Scotia. The boundary of the glacier west of the "Foul Rift" on the Delaware appears as a range of low gravel hills, which are piled upon the slate hills of Northampton farther west, and reach the base of the Blue Ridge three miles east of the "Wind Gap." The boundary here mounted and crossed the Kittatinny ridge sixteen hundred feet high, being well shown upon its summit, and then passed over the intervening valley to the Broad Mountain or Pocono range. The Delaware at the "Foul Rift" is elevated two hundred and fifty feet above tide; and where the glacier boundary crossed the mountains in the interior it was at about twenty-six hundred feet elevation on the highest land in Potter County, the Continental watershed.

      This vast glacier was so thick as to overtop even Mount Washington, for it dropped transported boulders on the summit of that highest peak in New England. Its southern edge in Pennsylvania was at least eight hundred feet thick in solid ice. A hundred miles back among the Catskills it was thirty-one hundred feet thick, and two hundred miles back in northern New England it was five thousand to six thousand feet thick, being still thicker farther northward. The Pocono Knob, near Stroudsburg, in Pike County, Pennsylvania, out-topped the glacier, and jutted out almost like an island surrounded by ice. The late Professor H. Carvill Lewis, who closely studied this glacier, has described how, all over the country which it covered, it dropped what is known as the "northern drift," or "till," or "hardpan," in scattered deposits of stones, clay, gravel and débris of all kinds, brought down from the northward as the ice moved along, and irregularly dumped upon the surface, thickly in some places and thinly in others, with many boulders, some of enormous size. It abraded all the rock surfaces crossed, and transported and rounded and striated the fragments torn off in its resistless passage. The line of farthest southern advance of the ice is shown by the "Terminal Moraine," stretching across country, which put the obstructions into the "Foul Rift." A glacier always pushes up at its foot a mound of

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