than at another, and by some means was drained off in such a manner that the receding wave made a new mark of embankment, indicating the original height of the shore of these lakes and rivers.

On the very summit of the Pocono1 Mountain, about twenty miles east of the Lackawanna, lies a broad marsh, elevated many hundred feet above the Delaware Water Gap, 1,969 feet above tide-water, covered in a few places, as can be seen from the passing cars, with a deep strata of sand, similar to that found on the sea-shore, which, in spite of the drainage of the water around it by these great breaks in the mountain, has maintained its sedentary and original position, while the subsiding waters hollowed out the valleys and formed cascades of beauty, which marked and enlivened the wild landscape long after the Noachian deluge.

Mr. Schoolcraft, well known to the reading public as one of the most accurate and entertaining writers and explorers in American antiquities, corroborates this theory, and asks the question, "May we not suppose that the great northern lakes are the remains of such an ocean?''? If not so, they were probably the mere remnant of a great inland sea.

The weight of the accumulated waters, coming from the north, assisted perhaps by volcanic agency, possibly made the various gaps in the mountains, and as the liberated waters took up the line of march to the sea, the whole geological features of the lower country acknowledged the power of the watery plowshare. Whether this abyss boiled with a heat far beyond the temperature of whitehot iron, from the immense furnaces below over the seams of liquid coal, or at what period this watery or eruptive

1 Pocono is the name given by the white people to the mountain dividing the Delaware from the Susquehanna, after the Indian name of the stream that flows from it, called by them Poco-hanne, which signifies a stream issuing from a mountain. "Hanne means flowing water; Tunk-hanne, the smallest among other streams in the same locality. Tope-hanne (Tolyhannah), alder creek or stream, &c. 'American Antiquities, p. 367.

conquest transpired, lies so far beyond the earliest times of any written or traditional history, that no explanation or data is known other than that found written upon the terraced rock along the sides and bottoms of these ancient mountain lakes.

Contemporary with these phenomena, or in more preAdamic times, it is evident that the topographical character of the Lackawanna Valley was essentially changed. The geological conformation of the country along the stream; the character, form, and direction of the Alleghany range thrown across southern New York; its mean altitude near the Great Bend of the Susquehanna River being but little if any greater than at Tioga Point; the comparative freshness and shape, as well as the confusion of all the strata of earth, stone, and coal, along the Lackawanna, with the general appearance of the country traversed by the Susquehanna and Lackawanna, afford abundant evidence of the correctness of this conclusion.

Instead of breaking off so abruptly from its apparent course at this point, and cautiously feeling its way far along the border of the mountains, until it reached Tioga Point, and then carrying its current through a passage ruptured through successive ridges, until, with all its beauty and boldness, it opened into the slackened waters of Wyoming, it probably struck boldly down into a channel now closed by some great upheaval or disturbance in the geological world, and sought the valley where now the Lackawanna mingles with the waters of the Susquehanna.

Trace up the Susquehanna, step by step, to the Highlands of New York, or down through its narrow passage to Wyoming, and not a single vein or spar of coal is visible; go up to the Lackawanna, modest in its volume, to the indicated point, and more than midway from the mouth of the stream, coal deposits, grand in their character and exhaustless in their creation, everywhere appear; all of which confirms the theory, that, whatever local

causes or convulsions once effected the mineralogical features of the valley, the wave of the ocean, or the waters of a much larger stream than the Lackawanna once occupied its place.

No less than five veins of coal have been washed away from the eastern side of the Lackawanna, a mile above Scranton, by the propelling flood of olden time, and their crushed and blackened deposition found in the alluvial banks below. The city of Scranton, or the old village proper, embracing the sand banks, stands upon such a singular deposit.

Very many of our mountain notches appear like volcanic outlets. The evidence of subterranean or oceanic volcanic fires exists to-day in the ocean, and now and in a moment's clamor, make food of coasts and cities. Their existence explain why the carboniferous and even the granitic strata of rock are inclined to the horizon in angles of forty-five degrees and upward in so many of the mountain ranges throughout the coal basins of Pennsylvania, and which is so especially noticed and delineated in the huge ledge of rocks thus sloping in distinct lamination or layers in the well-known notch of the mountain between Providence and Abington, about two miles northwest of Scranton, called "Leggett's Gap."

WAR-PATHS.

One of the three long-trodden paths of the warrior leading out of Wyoming, led eastward to Coshutunk (Cochecton), a small Indian settlement upon the shore of the upper Delaware. Leaving the valley at Asserughney village, standing at the mouth of the stream, it followed the eastern bank of the Lackawanna up to Springbrook, Stafford Meadow, and Nayaug or Roaring Brook, crossing the last two named ones a short distance below the present location of Scranton, and passed into the Indian town of Capoose. Here one path led off to Oquago, New

York (now Windsor), about forty miles distant, through Leggett's Gap and the Abingtonian wilderness, while the other, diverging from Capoose in an easterly direction, plunged boldly into the forest, passing along where Dunmore now stands, up the mountain slope to its very summit. This foot-path crossed the Moosic range near the residence of the late John Cobb, Esq., and thence through Little Meadows, in Salem, and the low Wallenpaupack country beyond. This trail seldom ran through the gaps, but it generally, like many of their war-paths, kept the higher ground, or where the woods were less dense, because the warriors, agile and quick-sighted on the march, preferred climbing over a considerable elevation, to the labor of cutting a trail through more level ground, or deep wooded ravines, with their stone hatchets; besides this, overlooking points were chosen invariably, so that upon entering or leaving a valley, they could better discover the approach or presence of an enemy. Of this narrow trail, worn to the depth of several inches in many places on the mountains where roots and rocks offered no resistance to passing moccasins, few indeed, are the remaining traces where the warrior and the war-song enlivened the way but a little over a century ago. Near the mountain spring, however, this old Indian path for several hundred yards to the east of it, was so deeply indented as to show its depth and general outline even to-day.

The first rude wagon-road cut out and opened from the Hudson River to Wyoming Valley, for the pack-horse or wheels, followed this track the greater portion of the way, because of its being the most direct route from Connecticut to the backwoods of Lackawanna and Wyoming, then called Westmoreland by the Yankees, who began to people it.

INDIAN SPRING.

Almost upon the very summit of the Moosic Mountain, between the valley and Cobb's settlement, by the side of

this old trail, bubbles from the earth a large spring, called the Indian Spring." No matter how parched the lips of mother-earth-how shrunken the volume of streams elsewhere, this spring, indifferent to drought or flood, in summer or winter, is ever filled to its brim with cold pure water.

Away from the world's hot pulse; hemmed in by the pine whose waving tops give partial entrance to the noonday sun, and once gave shelter to rovers of the wilderness strolling from tribe to tribe with friendly or avenging tomahawk, and lifting its fountain as it does almost from the very top of a high vertical ledge, running nearly a mile before it opens into Cobb's Gap, this spring from its peculiar location, has much to render it attractive and romantic to the visitor. It forms one of the lesser tributaries of Roaring Brook, from whence Scranton is supplied with water.

In July, 1788, two persons were killed at this point. Fleeing from Wyoming Valley resounding with the exultant shout of the tories and their red auxiliaries, and the faint cries of the captives reserved for ransom or torture, they bent over, thirsty and exhausted, for the invigorating draught. They never rose from their knees. The hatchet of the savage, intently watching the victims, flew from the ambush; the stony knife dripped through their scalps, and the wolves at night made long and loud their carnival over the unresisting dead.

A large red rock rims one side of this spring, whose crimson color tradition imputes to the blood of the victims thus immolated.

INDIAN RELICS AND FORTIFICATIONS.

No evidence is found of Indian forts along the Lackawanna, although there existed one or more a few miles below its mouth, one of which is thus described by Chapman in his History of Wyoming :—