II Indian Villages Upper Valley HE Indian population on the upper Susquehanna was centred in small villages. It was never large. Parkman, in reference to the whole continent, has remarked that the Indians everywhere were few and scattered Even in parts thought to be well peopled, " one might sometimes journey for days together through the twilight forest and meet no human form." Around the Susquehanna villages small clearings had usually been made. Apple-orchards had been planted and there were frequent corn-fields; but otherwise the virgin territory bore few indications that men were dwelling upon it. The foot of Otsego Lake was a favorite resort. In that fact Cooper found the origin of the word Otsego, the particular place where meetings were held being Council Rock. A meaning cited by Campbell is " clear, deep water," but other writers, like Morgan, pass the word by without defining it. Dr. Beauchamp gives the forms Otesaga and Osten Annals of Tryon County. The author of this work, William W. Campbell, was born in Cherry Valley in 1806, and died in 1881. He was graduated from Union College, read law with Judge Kent, and practised in New York, where, in 1849, he was appointed a Justice of the Superior Court. From 1857 until 1865 he was a Judge of the State Supreme Court for the Sixth District. He also served a term in Congress. His Annals were published in 1831, and a revised edition with a new title, Border Warfare, in 1849. A third edition came out 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 1738, 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. missionaries called it Otsego Lake, which is perhaps the earliest use of the name on record. On the Augsburg map of the province, dated 1777, occurs the form "Lake Assega," which would imply that the name had then found official acceptance. Excellent hunting and fishing were here to be obtained. The first settlers on the site of Cooperstown found arrow-heads and stone hatchets in great abundance. The apple-trees were of large size. Cooper thought the place had been more or less frequented by Indian traders for a century before the regular settlement began. The English early recognized the Susquehanna as a gate-way to the South. In 1721 the King was advised to erect a fort near where the river flows out of the lake. Remains of ancient villages on the river at points below Cooperstown have often been discovered. Small relics in considerable numbers have been preserved in private hands. Perhaps the largest collection ever made was the one destroyed in the Oneonta Normal School fire in the winter of 189293. It had been formed by W. E. Yager, and numbered somewhere about 1,500 specimens. It was the only loss by that fire which State appropriations have not been able to replace. In 1892 on a farm near the old Goodyear Mills was found a cup of clay that had been used for melting lead. Another find in the same place was a pipe-bowl. When Gideon Hawley came down the valley in 1753, he found at the mouth of Schenevus Creek, or the Charlotte, a village of some size, then inhabited and called Towanoendlough, which * Generally said to have been named after an Indian who lived on the stream, but A. Cusick told Dr. Beauchamp that the word meant first hoeing of corn. The form Sheniba occurs on a map dated 1790. |