LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

a civilizing education in humanizing their features and modifying their nomadic traits. They have quite a noted military organization and band at the School. Dickinson College, a foundation of the Methodist Church, is at Carlisle, having begun its work in 1783, when it was named after John Dickinson, then the President of Pennsylvania, who took great interest in it and made valuable gifts. Among its graduates were President James Buchanan and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. Carlisle was President Washington's headquarters in 1794, during the "Whisky Insurrection" in Western Pennsylvania. After the United States Government got fairly started, the Congress in 1791 imposed a tax of seven cents per gallon on whisky. This made a great disturbance among the frontier settlers of Pennsylvania, who were largely Scotch-Irish, the population west of the Kittatinny to the Ohio River being then estimated at seventy thousand. They had no market for their grain, but they made it into whisky, which found ready sale. A horse could carry two kegs of eight gallons each on the bridle paths across the mountains, and it was worth a dollar a gallon in the east. Returning, the horseback load was usually iron worth sixteen cents a pound, or salt at five dollars a bushel. Every farmer had a still, and the whisky thus became practically the money of the people on account of its purchasing value. Opposition to the tax began in riots. A crowd of "Whisky boys" from Bedford came into Carlisle and burnt the Chief Justice in effigy, setting up a liberty pole with the words "Liberty and No Excise on Whisky." President Washington called for troops to enforce the law, and this angered them. One John Holcroft, a ready writer, appeared, and wrote sharp articles against the law and the army, over the signature of "Tom the Tinker." These were printed in handbills, and the historian says "half the trees in Western Pennsylvania were whitened with Tom the Tinker's notices." Officials sent to collect the tax were roughly treated, farmers who paid it were beaten by masked men, and one man who rented his house to a tax collector was captured at midnight by a crowd of disguised vigilants, who carried him into the woods, sheared his hair, tarred, feathered and tied him to a tree.

      Soon there were gathered at Carlisle an army of thirteen thousand men from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia, under Governor Henry Lee of Virginia. President Washington and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton came to Carlisle, and accompanied the troops, in October, 1794, on their march across the mountains to Bedford. The Governors of New Jersey and Pennsylvania led the troops of their respective States, and in the army were many Revolutionary veterans. As they advanced they found Tom the Tinker's notices on the trees, of which the following is a specimen:

      "Brethren, you must not think to frighten us with fine arranged bits of infantry, cavalry and artillery, composed of your watermelon armies taken from the Jersey shores. They would cut a much better figure in warring with crabs and oysters about the banks of the Delaware. It is a common thing for Indians to fight your best armies in the proportion of one to five; therefore we would not hesitate to attack this army at the rate of one to ten."

      The soldiers riddled these notices with bullets and pressed on, hunting for "Tom Tinker's men," as the insurgents came to be called. But they never seemed able to find them. All the people seen told how they were forced by threats, and when asked where the persons were who threatened them, replied, "Oh, they have run off." The army finally reached Pittsburg, the people submitted to the law and paid the tax, the insurrection was suppressed, and the army returned and was disbanded. The whisky excise was peacefully collected afterwards until the tax was repealed.

      In the Lebanon Valley east of Harrisburg are important iron furnaces, and here are the "Cornwall Ore Banks," which is one of the greatest iron-ore deposits in the world—less rich than some others, possibly, but having a practically exhaustless supply almost alongside these furnaces. There are three hills of solid iron ore, one of them having been worked long before the Revolution, the original furnace, still existing, dating from 1742. This great Cornwall iron mine was bought in 1737 for $675, including a large tract of land. A half-century later $42,500 was paid for a one-sixth interest, and to-day a one-forty-eighth interest is estimated worth upwards of $500,000. These ores have some sulphur in them, and are therefore baked in ovens to remove it. They yield about 50 per cent. of iron. A geologist some time ago reported upon the ore banks that there were thirty millions of tons of ore in sight above the water-level, being over three times the amount taken out since the workings began in the eighteenth century. The deposits extend to a depth of several hundred feet under the surface, thus indefinitely multiplying the prospective yield.

      THE SUSQUEHANNA HEADWATERS.

      Otsego Lake, the source of the Susquehanna River, is one of the prettiest lakes in New York State, and is at an elevation of eleven hundred feet above tide. It is nine miles long and about a mile wide, the Susquehanna issuing from its southern end at Cooperstown, a hamlet of two thousand people, beautifully situated amid the high rolling hills surrounding the lake. The name of the lake comes from the "Ote-sa-ga rock" at the outlet, a small, round-topped, beehive-shaped boulder a few rods from the shore, just where the lake condenses into the river. This was the Indian Council rock, to which they came to hold meetings and make treaties, and it was well-known among the Iroquois and the Lenni Lenapes. James Fenimore Cooper, the novelist, who has immortalized all this region, called the lake the "Glimmerglass." His father, Judge William Cooper, founded the village of Cooperstown in 1786, afterwards bringing his infant son from Burlington, New Jersey, where he was born in 1789. Here the great American novelist lived until his death in 1851, his grave, under a plain horizontal slab, being in the little churchyard of Christ Episcopal Church. There is a monument to him in Lakewood Cemetery, about a mile distant, surmounted by a statue of his legendary hunter "Leatherstocking," who has been described as "a man who had the simplicity of a woodsman, the heroism of a savage, the faith of a Christian, and the feeling of a poet." The old Cooper mansion, his home, Otsego Hall, was burnt in 1854, and its site is marked by a rock in the middle of the road, surrounded by a railing. "Hannah's Hill," named after his daughter, and commanding a magnificent view, which he always described with rapture, is on the western shore of the lake, just out of town. The charm of Cooper's genius and the magic of his description have given Otsego Lake a world-wide fame. In one place he described it as "a broad sheet of water, so placid and limpid that it resembled a bed of the pure mountain atmosphere compressed into a setting of hills and woods. Nothing is wanted but ruined castles and recollections, to raise it to the level of the scenery of the Rhine." And thus has the poet sung of it:

      "O Haunted Lake, from out whose silver fountains

      The mighty Susquehanna takes its rise;

      O Haunted Lake, among the pine-clad mountains,

      Forever smiling upward to the skies—

      A master's hand hath painted all thy beauties;

      A master's mind hath peopled all thy shore

      With wraiths of mighty hunters and fair maidens,

      Haunting thy forest-glades forevermore."

      All around Otsego Lake and its neighborhood are the scenes which Cooper has interwoven into his novel, The Deer-Slayer. About seven miles northwest are the well-known Richfield Springs (magnesia and sulphur), near Candarago Lake. This Indian name, meaning "on the lake," has recently been revived to supersede the old title of Schuyler's Lake for this beautiful sheet of water, enbosomed in green and sloping hills, which is the chief scenic charm of Richfield. To the eastward from Otsego Lake is the romantic Cherry Valley, another attractive summer resort, and the scene of a sad Indian massacre in 1778, the site of the old fort that was then captured being still exhibited, with the graves of the murdered villagers, to whom a monument has been erected. A few miles farther, in a narrow upland wooded valley surrounded by high hills, are the Sharon Springs (sulphur and chalybeate), which in earlier times were so popular with our German citizens, who were attracted by the resemblance to the Fatherland, that the place was called the "Baden-Baden of America." The name of Sharon came from Sharon in Connecticut, and the spring water is discharged with a crust of white and flocculent sulphur into a stream not inappropriately called the Brimstone Brook. In this valley, east of the springs, one of the last Revolutionary battles was fought, Colonel Willett's American force in 1781 routing a detachment of Tories and Indians with severe loss. There are grottoes in the neighborhood abounding in stalactites and beautiful crystals of sulphate of lime. Not far away is the noted Howe's Cave, an immense cavern, said to extend for eleven

Скачать книгу