AMERICA - Joel Cook

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composed of fragments of rocks of all shapes and sizes, which the ice has taken up at various points along its flow and carried to its terminus, thus forming the moraine. This "Terminal Moraine" has been traced and carefully studied for four hundred miles across Pennsylvania, showing throughout a remarkable accumulation of drift materials and boulders, heaped into irregular hills and hollows over a strip of land nearly a mile wide. The action of the Delaware River currents at the "Foul Rift" has washed out the finer materials and cobblestones, leaving only the larger boulders and rocks to perplex the navigator.

      Some of the performances of this great glacier in the region adjacent to the Delaware are remarkable. It has carried huge granite boulders from the far north and planted them all along the summit of the Kittatinny where it crossed. It has torn out big pieces of limestone, some of them thirty feet long, from their beds in Monroe County, north of this range, carried them in the ice more than a thousand feet up its steep northern face and over the summit, finally dropping them on the south side in the moraine in the slate valley of Northampton. These immense limestone rocks made comparatively short journeys, but one ponderous boulder of syenite from the Adirondacks was found in Northampton, well rounded and dressed, having travelled in the ice at least two hundred miles. There has also been found a "glacial groove" upon the rocks of the Kittatinny near the Water Gap, where some ponderous fragment, imbedded in the ice, as it moved along has gouged out a great scratch six feet wide and seventy feet in length. Although this ice had evidently resistless power in its slow motion, yet it seems to have had small influence upon the topography of the country. It appears to have merely "sand-papered" the surfaces of the rocks. It passed bodily across the sharp edges of the upright sandstone strata of the Kittatinny, yet has not had appreciable effect in cutting the ridge down, the glaciated portion east of the "Wind Gap" appearing as high and as sharply defined as the unglaciated part to the westward of the moraine. The glacier made many lakes north of the moraine, due to the "kettle holes" and obstruction of streams by unequal deposits of drift. It is inferred in the estimates of the duration of the glacier, from astronomical data, that the cold period began two hundred and eighty thousand years ago, the greatest cold being many thousand years later. The intense cold began moderating eighty thousand years ago, but the sea of ice remained long afterwards, and steadily diminished under the increasing heat. So many thousand years being required for melting, there are data inducing the belief that the ice-cap did not retreat from this part of the country back to Greenland until within ten thousand or fifteen thousand years ago. Then came the floods of water from the melting glacier, and it is significant that the Indians in the spacious valley northwest of the Kittatinny called that fertile region the "Minisink," meaning "the waters have gone," indicating their legendary memory of the floods following the melting and retreat of the glacier and the final outflow of its waters.

      THE DELAWARE WATER GAP.

      Belvidere, the "town of the beautiful view," nestles upon the broad terraces under the Jersey ridges at the mouth of Pequest Creek, and looks prettily out upon the high hills and distant mountains across the Delaware. Above the town, the river makes a great bend to the westward in rounding the huge and almost perpendicular mass of Manunka Chunk Mountain, a name which has been got by a process of gradual evolution from its Indian title of "Penungauchung." Here, through a gorge just above, is got the first view of the distant Water Gap, cleft down in the dark blue Kittatinny ten miles away. Approaching it as the river winds, all the views have this great Gap for the gem of the landscape, the ponderous wall of the Kittatinny stretching broadly across the horizon and steadily rising into greater prominence as it comes nearer.

      "I lift my eyes and ye are ever there,

      Wrapped in the folds of the imperial air,

      And crowned with the gold of morn or evening rare,

      O, far blue hills."

      As it is gradually approached, the Gap and its enclosing ridge attain enormous proportions, dwarfing the smaller hills, among which the narrow, placid river flows below; and it is realized how tame are all the other ridges through which the Delaware has passed compared with this towering Blue Ridge, having the low-lying Blockade Mountain just behind, and partly closing the Gap. Soon we reach the foot of the range, and, bending with the river suddenly to the left, enter the Gap. Scarcely have we entered when the river, which has been swinging to the left, bends around again gradually to the right, and in a moment we are through the gorge, the river then circling around the Blockade Mountain, which has been so named because it seems always stupidly in the way.

      The Indians called the Water Gap "Pohoqualin," meaning "the river between the mountains." The Delaware flows through it with a width of eight hundred feet and at an elevation of about three hundred feet above tide. It is twenty-nine miles northeast of the Lehigh Gap where the Lehigh River passes the Blue Ridge, and there are five other gaps between them, of which the "Wind Gap," heretofore referred to, is the chief. For many years this Wind Gap provided the only route to reach the country north of the Kittatinny. About two and a half miles southwest of the Delaware is "Tat's Gap," named in memory of Moses Fonda Tatamy, an old time Indian interpreter in this region, and familiarly called "Tat's" for short. The greatest of all these passes, however, is the Water Gap, where the Blue Ridge, rent asunder, has two noble peaks guarding the portals, towering sixteen hundred feet high, and named in honor of the Indians—Mount Minsi in Pennsylvania, after the tribes of the Minisink, and Mount Tammany in New Jersey, for the great chief of the Lenni Lenapes.

      "Crags, knolls and mounds, in dire confusion hurled,

      The fragmentary elements of an earlier world."

      The Water Gap is a popular summer resort, there being numerous hotels and boarding-houses in eligible locations all about it, and the romantic scenery has been opened up by roads and paths leading to all the points of view. It is on such a stupendous scale, and exhibits the geological changes wrought during countless ages so well, that it always attracts the greatest interest. To the northward spread the fertile valleys of the Minisink; and the Delaware, which below the Gap flows to the southeast, passing through all the ridges, comes from the northeast above the Gap, and flows along the base of the Kittatinny for miles, as if seeking the outlet which it at length finds in this remarkable pass.

      THE MINISINK.

      From the elevated points of outlook at the Water Gap the observer can gaze northward over the fertile and attractive hunting-grounds of the Minsis, the land of the Minisink stretching far up the Delaware, and from the Kittatinny over to the base of the Pocono Mountain. This is the region of the "buried valleys," remarkable trough-like valleys, made during an ancient geological period, and partially filled up by the débris from the great glacier. From the Hudson River in New York, southwest to the Lehigh, and just beyond the Kittatinny range, two long valleys, with an intervening ridge, stretch across the country. The Delaware River, from Port Jervis to Bushkill, flows down the northwestern of these valleys, then doubles back on itself, and breaks through the intervening ridge at the remarkable Walpack Bend into the other valley, and follows it down to the Water Gap. The northwestern valley begins at Rondout on the Hudson, crosses New York State to Port Jervis, where the Delaware, coming from the northwest, turns to the southeast into it, occupying it for thirty miles to Bushkill, and then the valley continues past Stroudsburg, just above the Water Gap, to the Lehigh River at Weissport, below Mauch Chunk. The other valley is parallel to it at the base of the Kittatinny. These valleys, underlaid by the shales as bed-rocks, have been filled up with drift by the glacier from one hundred to seven hundred feet in depth, and they constitute the famous region of the Minisink.

      In this fertile district was the earliest settlement made by white men in Pennsylvania, the Dutch from the Hudson River wandering over to the Delaware at Port Jervis through these valleys, and settling on the prolific bottom lands along the river, many years before Penn came to Philadelphia. They opened copper-mines in the Kittatinny, just above the Water Gap, and made the old "Mine Road" to reach them, coming from Esopus on the Hudson. The records at Albany of 1650 refer to specimens brought from "a copper-mine at the Minisink." The Provincial authorities at Philadelphia do not appear to have had any clear knowledge of settlers above the Water Gap until 1729, when they sent a surveyor up to examine and report, and he found Nicholas Depui in a snug home, where he had bought two

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