Page:The Old New York Frontier.djvu/52

 THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER

ha, and says they are traditionally supposed to refer to Council Rock. In crossing from the Mohawk to the Susquehanna, Indians regularly came by way of this lake.

The rock had unquestionably been a favorite haunt of theirs. Cooper describes it as "a large isolated stone that rested on the bottom of the lake, apparently left there when the waters tore away the earth from around it, in forcing for themselves a passage down the river." The trees that overhung it formed "a noble and appropriate canopy to a seat that had held many a forest chieftain during the long succession of unknown ages in which America and all it contained existed apart as a world by itself." In times of extreme low water the rock now appears as an oval cone about nine feet in diameter one way and six the other. From the bed on which it rests it rises about four and a half feet. When the water is extremely high the rock is covered.

It is clear that the Indians did not know the lake by the name Otsego. In Dongan's time they called it "the lake whence the Susquehanna takes its rise." Colden, in 1 73 8, referred to it in similar terms. The Mohawk chief Abraham, in 1745, described certain lands to William Johnson as lying " at the head of Susquehanna Lake," and an Onondaga orator at Johnson Hall, in 1765, called it "Cherry Valley Lake." In letters written from the lake in 1765,

in 1880 from the printing-office of John L. Sawyer, of Cherry Valley. Judge Campbell was the father of the late Douglas Campbell, author of The Puritan in Holland, England and America, published in 1892. Judge Campbell wrote his Annals while studying law in Cherry Valley. He occupied a room in the Cherry Valley Academy, afterward converted into a hotel, and burned in July, 1894. In that building, in the summer of 1892, the author had the pleasure of meeting his widow. Of all books devoted to the early history of the Susquehanna Valley, Campbell's Annals, the first important one to be published, is perhaps first in intrinsic charm. Stone's work is largely devoted to other parts of the country,