Down
the Susquehanna to the Chesapeake
by Jack Brubaker
Generations of village residents have gathered for recreation and sometimes celebration at the lake’s outlet, where the water remains relatively clear. Many of Cooperstown’s visitors, however, are as oblivious of the North Branch’s start as N. P. Willis was initially in the 1840s. No one has made it easy to recognize that a river begins here. The Susquehanna River Basin Commission erected the first plaque marking the source in 1996; it stands at a less-than-obvious site in a grove of maple trees fifty yards from the water.
The low-key nature of all things unrelated to baseball contributes
to the Susquehanna’s relative obscurity in Cooperstown.
Besides, the tiny park at the river’s start was privately
owned and quietly guarded until 1957. Then Fenimore Cooper’s
great-grandson donated an acre and a quarter to the Village
of Cooperstown with the condition that it remain forever
undeveloped. From the juncture of River and Lake streets
the village constructed a flight of stone steps leading
to the lake, river, and floodplain. The terraced Cooper
tract is called Council Rock Park.
Old state markers at the top of the steps commemorate two
singular features of the lake. One is Council Rock. The
other, a metal plaque bolted to a boulder on the outlet’s
eastern shore, marks General Clinton’s dam, a temporary
military device that helped the Continental Army win the
War of Independence.
Mohawks gathered at Council Rock, which rests in the lake a few yards from the outlet. Arrow points and chips have been found in large numbers on the shore, often called Indian Point. Council Rock is (and apparently was, even before Cooperstown’s dam raised the level of the lake) the only rock rising above lake water, so Native Americans as well as early white settlers considered it a landmark.
Deerslayer and Chingachgook meet at Council Rock in The Deerslayer. Cooper describes the feature at the opening of the novel, as Deerslayer and Hurry Harry canoe from Otsego into the Susquehanna’s outlet: "The rock was not large, being merely some five or six feet high, only half of which elevation rose above the lake. The incessant washing of the water, for centuries, had so rounded its summit, that it resembled a large beehive in shape, its form being more than usually regular and even."
Louis Jones, a Cooperstown folklorist, reported an "old Mohawk Indian" story connected with Council Rock. A black-robed missionary disparaged the Mohawks’ religion. In contrast, he told them, his God could perform great miracles. He could move mountains, for example. Then a Mohawk chief asked the missionary a question. If he had such complete faith, the chief wondered, did the missionary believe that his God could move Council Rock? The missionary said his God could do that. "Well, then," said the chief, "we will test your faith. We will roll the rock on top of you and your faith being what it is, your God will move it off your back." The Mohawks rolled the rock on top of the missionary. They say his skeleton is still beneath the boulder.
While the Native Americans may have gotten the best of one missionary, they did not survive white settlement. The Revolution ruined the Iroquois. By the late 1780s, tribes had abandoned settlements at Cooperstown and at the huge village at Onoquaga (along both sides of the North Branch well downstream at what are now Afton and Windsor). For several decades, small groups of Iroquois returned to the Cooperstown area in the summer months to hunt, fish, sell goods to whites, and beg for food. By 1850, as Fenimore Cooper’s daughter, Susan, noted, white settlement had obliterated everything related to Native American occupation except Council Rock.
A poignant memorial to the Iroquois—a large mound of earth with a medium-sized oak tree growing at its center—lies off Main Street just east of the outlet. Workers uncovered a number of Native American skeletons while grading this property in 1874. The property owner, Mrs. Alfred Corning Clark, gathered the bones and buried them at the foot of the mound. She marked the mound with a granite slab and an epitaph composed by the Reverend William Wilberforce Lord, village rector and a poet. It reads:
White Man, Greeting!
We, near whose bones you stand,
Were Iroquois. The wide land
Which now is yours was ours.
Friendly hands have given back
To us enough for a tomb.
The inscription on the boulder plaque at the Susquehanna’s outlet is not similarly poetic and is only partially informative: "Here was built a dam the summer of 1779 by the Soldiers under Gen. Clinton to enable them to join the forces of Gen. Sullivan at Tioga." An uninformed visitor may well wonder: How could a dam help this army?
General James Clinton led half of the crucial Sullivan-Clinton expedition against the Iroquois and their British sponsors. He was second in command to General John Sullivan. George Washington directed Sullivan to cross into central Pennsylvania from Easton and ascend the Susquehanna to Tioga. He ordered Clinton to move from Albany along the Mohawk to Canajoharie, cross to Otsego Lake, and travel down the Susquehanna to meet Sullivan.
Clinton arrived at the foot of Otsego in early July 1779. He held his army of 1,800 men and 220 bateaux there until early August, waiting for the lake waters to rise behind a dam his engineers had constructed at the outlet. Some accounts say the water level rose a foot. Some say two or three feet. One says four feet, which is about the additional amount of water held in the lake by the 1905 dam. The reason for the damming was simple: Clinton’s boats were too heavily weighted with supplies to descend a summer-shallow Susquehanna. Without additional water, those boats would have run aground on fallen trees or rocks, or they would have banged against the river’s clay banks and stopped dead in a slow flow. Clinton’s engineers planned to create an artificial flood similar to the "splashes" used by raftmen and loggers in the next century to raise the level of water on Susquehanna tributaries to a useful rafting stage. At the outlet, soldiers placed logs collected from the adjacent woodland atop a boulder foundation and waited for Lake Otsego to rise.
On August 8, after pressure had built for five weeks behind the rock-and-log jam, Clinton’s soldier-sailors moved the bateaux into the river. At six o’clock that night, they broke the dam. The river, which had been nearly dry, filled quickly. The boats, manned by three soldiers each, took off at the peak of the flood the next morning and ran thirty miles down the swollen river. Clinton’s soldiers marching alongside the Susquehanna traveled just over half that distance.
The flood swelled the North Branch for more than 100 miles and forced major tributaries, including the Chenango River at Binghamton, to reverse course at their mouths. The Gazetteer of the State of New York reported that the sudden change in water level at midsummer terrified the Iroquois, who thought the Great Spirit had intervened on the side of the soldiers. When Clinton finally joined forces with Sullivan at Tioga on August 22, the Iroquois found more to dread: the combined force of 5,000 men marched into their country and laid waste to village after village, field after field.
While waiting for the lake to rise, Clinton’s troops had celebrated the revolutionaries’ third Independence Day with considerable firing of artillery and drinking of rum. In commemoration, Cooperstown residents traditionally have made their own racket at the outlet each July. An artillery piece dubbed the Cricket exploded here a half century after Clinton’s flood. On the Fourth of July, about 1870, some residents, annoyed by the boat-snagging boulders remaining from the dam, dynamited the impediments as the climactic event of the day’s celebration.
The Susquehanna’s outlet also has hosted more mundane activities. James Fenimore Cooper, grandson and namesake of the novelist, described some of the nineteenth-century pleasures Cooperstown residents enjoyed at the junction of lake and river in his Reminiscences of Mid-Victorian Cooperstown: "In dry times the residents would draw water in barrels and hogsheads from the river here. Here the bold and lawless youth of the town would enjoy the forbidden pleasure of swimming in the nude, going under water when an infrequent boat passed; and here on rare Sundays the more modest Baptists were dipped."
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©2002 The Penn State University