AMERICA - Joel Cook

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islands and level land on the shore from the Indians some time before. Like the Dutch settlers above, Depui had no idea where the river went to. He was a French Huguenot exile from Holland, and, without disputing with the surveyor, he again bought his land, nearly six hundred and fifty acres, in 1733, from the grantees of the Penns. His stockaded stone house was known as Depui's Fort, and after him the Water Gap was long called "Depui's Gap." Old George La Bar was the most famous resident of the Water Gap. Three brothers La Bar, Peter, Charles and Abraham, also French Huguenots, lived near the Gap, and each married a Dutch wife. In 1808, however, this region became too crowded for them, and Peter, at the age of eighty-five, migrated to Ohio to get more room. When ninety-eight years old his wife died, and in his one hundredth year he married another out on the Ohio frontier, and lived to the ripe age of one hundred and five. Peter, when he migrated, left his son George La Bar at the Gap, where he had been born in 1763. George was the famous centenarian of Pennsylvania, who died at the age of one hundred and seven, being a vigorous axeman almost until the day of his death. He was too young for a Revolutionary soldier, but when the War of 1812 came he was too old. In 1869, at the age of one hundred and six, a visitor describes him as felling trees and peeling with his own hands three wagon-loads of bark, which went to the tannery. He never wore spectacles, always used tobacco, voted the straight Democratic ticket, and at every Presidential election from Washington to Grant, and could not be persuaded to ride on a railway train, regarding the cars as an innovation.

      In this region of the Minisink is the pleasant town of Stroudsburg, the county-seat of Monroe, its beautiful valley being well described by a local authority as "full of dimpling hills and fine orchards, among which stalwart men live to a ripe old age upon the purest apple whisky." Its finest building, the State Normal College, handsomely located on an elevated ridge, has three hundred students. The town was named for Jacob Stroud, a pioneer and Indian fighter, who was with General Wolfe when he scaled the Heights of Abraham, and, capturing Quebec, changed the map of Colonial America. Marshall's Creek comes down to join its waters with Brodhead's Creek below Stroudsburg, and a few miles above displays the pretty little cataract of Marshall's Falls. Six miles northwest of Stroudsburg is the Pocono Knob, rising in stately grandeur as it abruptly terminates the Pocono Mountain wall on its eastern face. It was this Knob which stood out as an island in the edge of the great glacier, a deep notch separating its summit from the plateau behind, and the Terminal Moraine encircles its sides at about two-thirds its height. In the river bottom lands are fertile farms, and a great deal of tobacco is raised. Thus the river leads us to Bushkill and the great Walpack Bend. The Delaware, coming from the northeast, impinges upon the solid sandstone wall of the "Hog's Back," the prolongation of the ridge dividing the two "Buried Valleys." This ridge bristles with attenuated firs, and hence its appropriate name. The Big Bushkill and the Little Bushkill Creeks, uniting, flow in from the west, and the Delaware turns sharply eastward and then back upon itself around the ridge into the other valley, and resumes its course southwest again down to the Water Gap. This double Walpack curve, making a perfect letter "S," is so narrow and compressed that a rifleman, standing on either side, can readily send his bullet in a straight line across the river three times. The Indian word Walpack means "a turn hole." The Delaware here is a succession of rifts and pools, making a constant variation of rapids and still waters, with many spots sacred to the angler, and displaying magnificent scenery as the lights and shadows pass across the beautiful forest-covered hills enclosing its banks.

      BUSHKILL TO PORT JERVIS.

      Bushkill village is in a picturesque location, opening pleasantly towards the Delaware. It is also just over the Monroe border, in Pike County, long ago described by Horace Greeley as "famous for rattlesnakes and Democrats," but now more noted for its fine waterfalls and attractive scenery, its many streams draining numerous beautiful lakes, and dancing down frequent roaring rapids in the journey to the Delaware. The falls of the Little Bushkill near the village is the finest cataract in Pennsylvania. From Bushkill, bordering the eastern bank of the Delaware, for thirty miles up to Port Jervis, is one of the best roads in the world. The Marcellus shales of the Buried Valley, which form the towering cliffs bordering the river along the base of which the road is laid, make a road-bed as smooth and hard as a floor, the chief highway of this district, for the railway has not yet penetrated it. Over on the other side of the river the great Kittatinny ridge presents an almost unbroken wall for more than forty miles from the Water Gap up to Port Jervis. Frequent creeks come in, all angling streams, the chief of them being Dingman's, which for several miles displays a series of cataracts, and at its mouth has the noted Pike County village of "Dingman's Choice," at which is located the time-honored Dingman's Ferry, across the Delaware. The source of Dingman's Creek is in the Silver Lake, about seven miles west of the Delaware, and in its flow it descends about nine hundred feet, breaking its way over the various strata of Catskill, Chemung and Hamilton sandstones. The upper cataracts, called the Fulmer and Factory Falls and the Deer Leap, are located in a beautiful ravine known as the Childs Park, while, below, the creek pours over the High Falls, one hundred and thirty feet high, a short distance from the river. Near this is the curious Soap Trough, an inclined plane descending one hundred feet, always filled with foam, down which comes the Silver Thread, a small tributary stream. The gorge by which Dingman's Creek comes out is deep and massive, the entrance being a narrow canyon cut down into the Marcellus shales which make the towering cliffs along the river. There are also fine cataracts on the Raymondskill and the Sawkill, flowing into the Delaware above. The cliffs here rise into Utter's Peak, elevated eight hundred feet, giving a magnificent view along the valley.

      The little town of Milford, the county-seat of Pike, is one of the gems of this district, spread over a broad terrace on the bluff high above the Delaware, with a grand outlook at the ponderous Kittatinny in front, rising to its greatest elevation at High Point, six miles away, where a hotel is perched on the summit. Surrounded by mountains, the late N. P Willis, when he visited Milford, was so impressed by its peculiar situation that he described it as "looking like a town that all the mountains around have disowned and kicked into the middle." Thomas Quick, Sr., a Hollander, who came over from the Hudson in 1733, was the first settler in Milford. His noted son, Thomas Quick, the "Indian Killer," was born in 1734. "Tom Quick," as he was called, was brought up among the Indians, and had the closest friendship for them; but when the terrible Colonial war began, the savages, in a foray, killed and scalped his father almost by his side, Tom being shot in the foot, but escaping. Tom vowed vengeance, and ever afterwards was a perfect demon in his hatred of the Indians, sparing neither age nor sex. After the French and Indian war had closed and peace was proclaimed, he carried on his own warfare independently. The most harrowing tales are told of his Indian murders, some being horribly brutal. He never married, but hunted Indians and wild beasts all his life, and was outlawed by the Government, it being announced that no Indian who killed him would be punished; but he finally died in bed in 1796. He was entirely unrepentant during his last illness, regretting he had not killed more Indians; and after saying he had killed ninety-nine during his life, he begged them to bring in an old Indian who lived in the settlement, so that he might appropriately close his career by killing the hundredth redskin. The most noted Milford building is "Pinchot's Castle," on the hillside above the Sawkill, a Norman-Breton baronial hall, the summer house of the Pinchot family of New York, whose ancestor, a French refugee after Waterloo, was an early settler here.

      Seven miles above Milford the Delaware River makes the great right-angled bend in its course, from the southeast to the southwest, which is known as the "Tri-States Corner," and here, on the broad flats at the mouth of the Neversink River, is the town of Port Jervis. From the village of Deposit, ninety miles above, the Delaware descends in level five hundred and seventy feet; and from Port Jervis down to the Water Gap, forty-three miles, the descent is one hundred and twenty-seven feet. In the first it falls six feet per mile and in the latter only three feet, the difference being caused by the entirely changed conditions above and below the great bend. Above, the Delaware flows through the ridges by a winding ravine cut transversely across the hard rocks almost all the way, while below, it meanders parallel to the ridges along the outcrop of the softer rocks of the Marcellus shales and Clinton formations in the long, trough-like buried valleys. The Neversink comes from the northeast through one of these valleys which is prolonged over to the Hudson, the source of the Neversink being on a divide of such gentle slope that the large spring making the head sends part of its waters the other way,

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