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CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 3 1924 079 596 650 
 
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 121 
 
 fyxmll Uttivmitg Jibatig 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 Bji.VY.?>.^ju^ 
 
 Axs^iqs ife|w)itf 
 
 97»4 
 
W. H. H. MURRAY'S WORKS. 
 
 ADVENTURES IN THE "WILDERNESS ; OR, CAMP 
 LIFE IN THE ADIBONDACKS. Illustrated. Cloth, 
 $1.25 ; Paper, 50 cts. 
 
 ADIRONDACK TALES. Vol. I. : Story The Keg Told 
 Me, and The Man Who Didn't Know Much. Illus- 
 trated. $1.50. 
 
 ADIRONDACK TALES. Vol. II.: The Man Who 
 Missed It, and The Mystery of the Woods. In press. 
 
 HOW JOHN NORTON THE TRAPPER SPENT HIS 
 CHRISTMAS, and Other Stories. Illustrated. 
 Cloth, $1.25 ; Paper, 50 cts. 
 
 THE BUSTED EX-TEXAN, and Other Stories. Illus- 
 trated. Cloth, $1.00. 
 
 DAYLIGHT LAND. Superbly illustrated with 150 
 Engravings, printed in tints, from paintings by 
 J. D. Woodward, C. Broughton and other artists. 
 Unique paper covers, $2.50 ; Cloth, $3.50 ; Cloth, 
 extra gilt, $4.00. 
 
 MAMELONS and UNGAVA. Two Canadian Idyls. 
 New. $1.50. 
 
 LAKE CHAMPLAIN AND ITS SHORES. New. $1. 
 
 DEACONS. Illustrated. Cloth, 75 cts. ; Paper, 50 cts. 
 
 TO DIE IS GAIN. Religious Address. Paper, 25 cts. 
 
 CONTINENTAL UNITY. Paper, 25 cts. 
 

DEDICATION. 
 
 because of his admiration ako arfection 
 for lake chahplain and his services in bringing it 
 into popular notice ; because of his high standing and noble- 
 ness of nature; and because he is uy friend, 
 i dedicate this little volume to the 
 
 The Author. 
 
 BDBUHaTON, Vt., 
 
LAKE CHAMPLAIN 
 
 AND 
 
 ITS SHORES 
 
 W. H. H. MURRAY 
 
 AUTUOR OF " ADVEUTOKES IN THE WILDERNESS," " DAYLIGHT LAND,' 
 "ADIRONDACK TALES," " MAMEL0N9," " UNGAVA," ETC. 
 
 BOSTON 
 DE WOLFE, FISKE & CO. 
 
 365 Washington Street 
 

 Copyright, 1890, 
 By W. H. H. Mubbay 
 
 \y 
 
 ■^ 
 
 'HAChl 
 
 
 C. J. PETERS <b SON, 
 
 TyPOOKAPHERS AND E LECTROTYPERB, 
 146 HlQH eTHUT, BOSTON. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Inteoduction 1 
 
 A Preparatory Chapter 5 
 
 PART I. 
 The Traditioxal and Historic Period ... 43 
 
 PART II. 
 The Great National Park : 115 
 
 PART III. 
 
 Lake Champlain and the Facilities it offers 
 
 to Yachtsmen 131 
 
 Sailing Directions 162 
 
 PART IV. 
 
 Historical Eeminiscences and Facts con- 
 nected with the Shores op Lake Champlain, 186 
 
 The Game Fish and Fishing of Lake 
 Champlain 237 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 I HAVE prepared this volume in the interest 
 of history and of pleasure both. In the first 
 place I desired to collect and popularize 
 certain facts and incidents which have re- 
 mained hidden from general observation or 
 published in such a disconnected manner as 
 to be practically useless in the cause of 
 correct knowledge. I wished also to correct 
 certain errors of place and name and con- 
 clusion that writers and speakers have inva- 
 riably fallen into when mentioning matters 
 connected with Lake Champlain and its 
 shores. Above all else I desired to call 
 national attention, especially that of scholars 
 and students in our colleges and public schools, 
 to the historic events which had occurred 
 
2 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 in this valley, and their intimate connection 
 with American liberty and civilization; for 
 it seemed to me that these would be in- 
 tensely interested in a theme so significant, 
 and to which their attention may never have 
 been directly called. I had at the start a 
 larger work in contemplation, and for years 
 have been collecting material for it ; but 
 under the present condition of the public 
 taste in respect to letters it is not likely 
 that such a work would be commercially 
 profitable to a publisher ; and as we are 
 now living, as regards literature, in a rSgime of 
 dollars and cents, when mental efforts are 
 weighed in the same scale with sugar and 
 hams, the question which decides all schol- 
 arly ventures is, whether it will pay or not. 
 The historical section of this little volume 
 should, therefore, be regarded by the reader 
 as a suggestion rather than a treatment of 
 the subject. 
 
 I desired, furthermore, to commend this 
 
INTRODUCTION. 3 
 
 lake to the favor of the American people, 
 not only because of its historic connections, 
 but because while it stands at present com- 
 paratively unoccupied, it nevertheless supplies 
 to them, for the purpose of recreation, one 
 of the most desirable pleasiire resorts of the 
 country. Having seen most of the localities 
 of the continent noted for their beauty, I 
 can but declare that I know no other spot 
 which for loveliness of appearance, majesty 
 of scenery, and varied resources of entertain- 
 ment can compare with Lake Champlain. 
 Nature has signalized and history has em- 
 phasized it with such charms and attractions 
 that it challenges the attention and invites 
 the presence of all who love the one or 
 are impressed with the other. As among 
 waterfalls there is but one Niagara in the 
 country, so among lakes there is but one 
 Champlain. Geographically connected as it is 
 with the Horicon and the Hudson on the 
 south and the St. Lawrence on the north ; 
 
4 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 with the Adirondacks and the White Moun- 
 tains on the west and east, it invites the 
 visitors of these celebrated localities to the 
 spectacle of its marvellous beauty and the view 
 of its historic places and ruins. 
 
 THE AUTHOR. 
 
A PREPARATORY CHAPTER. 
 
 OUTDOOR LIFE. 
 
 The tendency of our times is to quit the 
 fields, and crowd into the street ; to desert 
 the hillside, and pore over a book in some 
 study.. The tide of our civilization sets towards 
 the cities. The drift of the age is all urban. 
 We are a nation of city-builders, and the arti- 
 ficial characteristics of city population are fast 
 printing themselves upon the body of society. 
 We are tattooed from head to foot with city 
 impressions, and if these impressions could only 
 be repeated in color, we should see how few of 
 the markings are natural, and how many are 
 the result of art and the skill of human ap- 
 pliance. The problem of government on the 
 continent is the problem of controlling the 
 population of our cities. The republic to-night, 
 in the number of its votes, is not agricultural 
 
6 A PREPAKATORY CHAPTER. 
 
 and rural, it is commercial, mechanical, urban. 
 The cities of America already dictate the policy 
 of America. Even religion is growing to be 
 metropolitan. The time was when the great 
 lights of theology and of pulpit power were 
 country pastors. The time was in Connecticut, 
 when Porter at Washington, and Bellamy at 
 Bethlehem, and Beecher on Litchfield Hill, 
 directed the religious life of Connecticut 
 churches. To-day the pastors in those villages 
 exercise no appreciable influence on the morals 
 or the religious opinions of the State. To-day, 
 the best preachers, by a tendency of the time 
 that no power can resist, are drawn into the 
 cities. The best thinkers are either in, or 
 grouped around, our universities ; and the 
 social life, the intellectual stimulus and the 
 religious characteristics of our universities are 
 moulded into the form of metropolitan customs 
 and associations. The home-life of the nation 
 has been influenced to the same extent and in 
 the same direction. The homesteads of New 
 England have passed, or are fast passing, from 
 the control of New England men and women, 
 into the hands of those of foreign extraction. 
 
OUTDOOR LIFE. 7 
 
 It is safe to say that the old New England 
 home-life is already a thing of the past. Even 
 the fireplace, which had in it such elements 
 of cheerfulness and good health that it would 
 seem able to withstand any innovation, has 
 now become such a rarity as to be a matter 
 of pleasurable surprise when you enter a house 
 and see a cheerful fire burning. These things 
 are straws which show the drift of the current 
 and the swiftness of it. In these changes are 
 written the history of a revolution — a revolu- 
 tion in manners, in usage, in habits of living ; 
 and such a revolution is more radical, far- 
 reaching, and momentous in its influence than 
 one which is expressed in war and battle. The 
 roar of cannon and the gleam of swords are 
 less significant of change than the destruction 
 of New England homesteads, the bricking- 
 up of New England fireplaces, and the doing 
 away with the New England well-sweep ; for 
 these show a change in the nature of the cir- 
 culation itself, and prove that the action of the 
 popular heart has been interrupted, modified, 
 and become altogether different from what it 
 was. 
 
8 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER. 
 
 Now city life means indoor life. Cities are 
 made up of houses, and composed of buildings 
 that men build. And those that live in cities, 
 from the necessities of their condition, live in 
 houses. From the houses where they sleep, 
 men pass to the houses where they work, and 
 they take the shortest cut from the one to 
 the other and bribe the inventiveness of the 
 age to supply them with the quickest locomo- 
 tion. Our amusements as well as our business 
 are all within-doors. The games which our 
 children play are parlor games ; and the games 
 which the children of a country play photo- 
 graph the future life of the country. The 
 amusements of a nation more than its business 
 shape the character of it. The difference 
 between the recreation of a Parisian and the 
 recreations of a Swiss mountaineer portray the 
 difference between the two men; and as they 
 differ so will their children. Their virtues even 
 are unlike, both in nature and the mode and 
 sphere of their exercise. The one is strong, 
 hearty, healthy ; the other is weak, suave, 
 feverish. The one is impulsive, the other 
 constant. 
 
OUTDOOR LIFE. 9 
 
 The great lack of our cities — the lack which 
 should challenge our gravest attention — is seen 
 in the absence of playgrounds for our children. 
 What every American city needs are places 
 where the boys can skate and coast, and race 
 and wrestle ; where the girls can romp and 
 gather flowers, and hold their sociables under 
 the shadow of trees and on the banks of 
 streams. The absence of these facilities which 
 are essential to the proper development of boy- 
 hood and girlhood — for the real health of their 
 bodies, the growth of their minds, and the 
 purity of their morals — will tell fatally on 
 the rising generation. You can't grow trees 
 of tough fibre without the help of wind. No 
 richness of soil, no sunniness of exposure, no 
 nursing of skilled arboriculture will give unto 
 the hickory the fineness of its fibre, or to the 
 oak its stalwart strength. It must bear the 
 pressure of currents ; it must stand up against 
 the violence of atmospheric commotion; it 
 must have charged into it the conservatism of 
 frost and the pliancy which comes from move- 
 ment and moisture. You can't grow strong 
 trees under a glass roof. No more can you grow 
 
10 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER. 
 
 boys into strong men by any indoor culture. 
 Neither the care of love, nor the skill of medi- . 
 cine, nor the appliances which money can buy, 
 nor any system of schoolroom education will 
 give unto them those forces and inculcate those 
 principles which they need when the tasks and 
 duties of manhood are laid upon them. They 
 need the freedom of the fields and the stream. 
 They must breathe of the strength of the wind. 
 They must receive through the pores of their 
 skin the ministry of the sun. They must have 
 the discipline of weariness and risk. They 
 must be strengthened in their courage by oppo- 
 sition, and learn self-mastery and self-respect 
 under the provocation of active companionship 
 with nature and with their mates. I take no 
 stock in the babying of boys. I resent the 
 fashion which makes little girls nothing but 
 animated dolls. The girls that make the best 
 women, the best wives, the best mothers, are 
 the girls that are educated in the school of 
 industry, in the school of service for others ; in 
 that school in which every scholar has his own 
 burden to bear and is taught how to bear it. 
 The beauty of natural life is seen in its 
 
OUTDOOR LIFE. 11 
 
 liberties. The tyranny which is the worst form 
 of tyranny is not the tyranny of the strong, 
 gauntleted hand, but the tyranny of soft 
 fingers and gloved palms. Luxury is the 
 heaviest oppression. Boys and girls are ruined 
 by what they have, by the lavishness of paren- 
 tal giving, and not by what they lack. The 
 women that gave most of us birth, and en- 
 dowed us with their strength, were women that 
 worked themselves, and whose doing day by 
 day and week by week made them strong. 
 The faces back of us that we love most are the 
 wearied faces, wearied in their services of love, 
 wearied in nightly vigils and daily ministra- 
 tions of actual toil. 
 
 There is a ministration also which comes to 
 the soul of one who lives the outdoor life of 
 nature. The best wisdom of the world has 
 never been printed. You can't find it in books. 
 It has never been translated out of the sky, the 
 flower, the white passing cloud, the running 
 stream, and the rustling leaf into words. 
 Knowledge can be obtained out of books. But 
 knowledge is only the gross, fleshly body of 
 wisdom ; and the soul of wisdom, the fine spirit 
 
12 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER. 
 
 of intelligence, the divinity of fact, and law, 
 and life expressive of persons, and force, and 
 things, abhors the crash of the printing-press. 
 
 The discoveries that have lifted the world 
 were not made by book-readers. Galileo ques- 
 tioned the heavens, and from amidst their 
 starry splendors, from the still distance of their 
 dim depths, they answered him with the stupen- 
 dous assertion that the earth moved through 
 space. The scholars of the world laughed at 
 him ; the ecclesiastics arraigned him, and, with 
 the threat of torture, made his lips declare a 
 lie. But he knew then, and we know to-day, 
 that the heavens had not lied to him, and that 
 nature had taught him a wisdom worth all the 
 libraries of the world. Watt did not get the 
 hint of the marvellous energy of compressed 
 steam from poring over books. He questioned 
 a natural force, and that force revealed unto 
 him a secret mighty enough to revolutionize 
 civilization. 
 
 Newton found the power which propels the 
 machinery of the universe, hanging on the 
 bough of an apple-tree — saw in the force of an 
 apple the mystery of motion, and an answer to 
 
OUTDOOR LIFE. 13 
 
 questions which had puzzled the wise from the 
 birth of the race. Franklin opened up a new 
 world of knowledge while playing with a kite. 
 The winds lifted his interrogation into the 
 heavens, and the heavens answered it with the 
 revelation of a hitherto unknown power — a 
 power which to-day makes thought universal, 
 and brings the remotest parts of the earth face 
 to face. Men read the books of Agassiz, but 
 he himself read wisdom in the fin of the fish, 
 the wing of the bird, and the living organisms 
 of nature. Audubon spent forty years in field 
 and forest, on the seashore and the banks of 
 streams to show scholars how profound was their 
 ignorance of what was perched on their house- 
 tops, confined in their cages, and building nests 
 in every thicket and grove in the land. 
 
 And so I might go on with the enumeration, 
 but of what avail would it be ? I have said 
 enough to give your minds the direction of my 
 thought. You can see how little of that 
 knowledge which is profitable, which is essen- 
 tial to civilization itself has come from the 
 study of the library, and how much has come 
 from the great outdoors. The true library to 
 
14 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER. 
 
 read — the library on whose shelves and in 
 whose alcoves is not a useless volume — is the 
 library of nature. Her facts are recorded in 
 forces ; are apprehended in the operations of 
 laws ; are written in the structure of animals, 
 and visible in the nature of things. And if 
 one is ambitious after knowledge ; if he craves 
 facts ; if he hungers after information, then let 
 him leave his house, turn his back on his books, 
 and go where great men have always gone, — 
 to the very source and fountain-head of accu- 
 rate intelligence, — and drink of the flowing 
 streams as they flowed. 
 
 But there is a finer knowledge than that 
 which relates to the mind. It is the knowledge 
 of that which has for its object the inspiration 
 and building-up of the soul. 
 
 Now, the weak point in American society 
 to-day is its artificiality. The life of many is 
 but a vain show. They seem to be what they 
 are not. They surround themselves with 
 splendid appearances, while they themselves are 
 ignoble. They purchase a magnificent frame, 
 within the golden borders of which they insert 
 a daub and call it a work of a master. We 
 
OUTDOOR LIFE. 15 
 
 have made money too fast in the last forty 
 years. We have developed the material pros- 
 perity of the country too rapidly not to have 
 had the standard by which the worth and 
 worthlessness of things are measured inverted. 
 Wealth stands for worth. Beauty of face 
 makes good the absence of beauty of soul. 
 Sensationalism in the pulpit draws better than 
 true oratory. Shystering in law pays as well 
 as a solid legal ability. Spread-eagle and bun- 
 combe in Congress, and nimble facility for 
 voting money in behalf of great " internal 
 improvements," and of voting money, too, in 
 behalf of one's self, carry the suffrage of a dis- 
 trict against patriotism, ability, and unimpeach- 
 able character. There is a craving desire on the 
 part of everybody to seem to know more than 
 they know, to be worth more than they are 
 worth, to look beautiful when nature has made 
 them plain, to talk knowingly about books that 
 they have never read ; and this spirit of artifi- 
 cial living, this tendency to exaggerate one's 
 self, has passed its virus into the very blood of 
 American life. 
 
 We know that every age and every nation 
 
16 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER. 
 
 has its characteristic vice, as every face has its 
 prominent feature. The vices of nations are 
 personal and distinctive. History will empha-- 
 size this suggestion to your memory. The vice 
 of Rome was military glory, an inordinate 
 thirst for empire, a craving for universal power. 
 She tossed her eagles into the air and charged 
 them to draw the line of their flight to the 
 boundaries of the world. They did. But 
 where-^er they flew, they flew with dripping 
 talons, and the shadow of their wings as they 
 passed over peoples and kingdoms was to those 
 who dwelt underneath the shadow of death. 
 That was her vice, and it finally slew her with 
 its own sword. 
 
 The vice of Greece, the land of sun and song, 
 was worship of the human body. Greece 
 deified the physique, idolized the human struc- 
 ture, and bowed in adoration before the god her 
 wit and care and culture had made. For its 
 brow she wreathed her laurels, in its praise she 
 sang her songs, and to perpetuate its beauty 
 and glory she wrought, with a thousand edu- 
 cated chisels, her matchless marbles. Her 
 deities were only large men and large women 
 
OUTDOOR LIFE. 17 
 
 with majestic faces and perfect limbs and beau- 
 tiful forms. Her vice was poetic, was refined, 
 was spirituelle, but none the less vice. Her 
 gods were mortal, and of course the worshipers 
 could not outlive the gods. She pushed the 
 triumph of her civilization to the limit of the 
 possible as regards human development. It 
 rose like a rocket to the apex of its flight, 
 burst in the day of Pericles in a shower of 
 glory, then faded forever from the sky. 
 
 The vice of Spain was bigotry. She made a 
 pride of her narrowness. The Spaniard would 
 not investigate, and in the arrogance of his 
 ignorance he forbade investigation. Into his 
 narrow mind the dream of a new world could 
 not enter. His priest-ridden intellect could not 
 admit to itself the mighty movement of the 
 heavens, nor his senses acknowledge that the 
 earth beneath his feet was forever rolling on in 
 its sublime career. He scoffed at Columbus, 
 and threatened Galileo with the rack. He 
 advertised himself as the bigot of the ages. 
 
 The vice of France, since the time of Charle- 
 magne, has been fickleness. France has been 
 like a sea, blown upon and tossed. France has 
 
18 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER. 
 
 been like a ship running in a gale, crowded 
 with canvas, without an anchor on deck, and 
 without a helm. Her career has been rapid, 
 but eccentric — now empire, now kingdom, now 
 republic, now anarchy. To-day blindly obe- 
 dient to priests ; to-morrow, a total disregarder 
 of all religious convictions. France has been 
 as a man subject to intermittent insanity. To- 
 day she is sane ; to-morrow she is kept at her 
 work at the point of the bayonet. 
 
 The vice of Germany is scepticism — the 
 scepticism which is born of libraries, which is 
 breathed by those who spend their days and 
 their nights in the dim recesses of misty 
 alcoves; the scepticism which comes from the 
 over-reading of books, and too little and too 
 narrow observation of men ; the scepticism 
 which the specialist is exposed to, whose mind 
 is forever condensed into one ray and focalized 
 upon one minute point ; who knows one truth, 
 but knows not the relations which it sustains to 
 a thousand other truths, and who has never 
 mastered the sublime harmony of the arranged 
 whole. 
 
 The vice of England — well, what is it ? It 
 
OUTDOOR LIFE. 19 
 
 is selfishness. The selfishness of fifty thousand 
 landholders who will not part with an acre 
 that the millions living around them may own 
 a square foot of the soil which the sweat of 
 their industry moistens and irrigates to fruitful- 
 ness ; the selfishness of hereditary aristocracy 
 jealous of its honors — honors which they have 
 never fought for, but which have been trans- 
 mitted to them ; of fame which they have 
 never won on the sea nor the battle-field ; of 
 immense wealth, to whose full coffers their 
 hands have never contributed a dollar. A self- 
 ishness which regards the whole world as only 
 a huge sponge, providentially made and filled 
 with the moistening of riches for the British 
 fingers to grasp and press the golden contents 
 into British coffers. 
 
 And so I might question all nations, from 
 the beginning of history down to the present 
 time, and we should see that each nation and 
 each age has had its characteristic, prevailing, 
 and distinguishing vice. Well, what is the vice 
 of America ? It is not military glory as was 
 Rome's ; for we do not thirst for conquest, and 
 our young men prefer the employment of peace 
 
20 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER. 
 
 to the risk and the deprivations of war. It is 
 not deification of the physique. I wish we re- 
 garded our bodies with greater reverence, and 
 gave unto them the attention of finer care. It 
 is not bigotry ; for we are liberal and tolerant. 
 Twenty denominations and twice as many 
 creeds live at peace within our borders. It is 
 not fickleness ; for we are stable. Through the 
 most radical and rattle-brained Yankee in New 
 England there runs a broad, strong streak of 
 conservatism. Blood will tell ; and the old 
 Puritan blood, the constitution-loving blood of 
 old England, the blood which wrung the great 
 Magna Charta from King John, and gave to 
 the world constitutional liberty — this blood, 
 which flows in our veins to-day, gives unto us 
 all a sense of caution ; a jury-like patience in 
 hearing both sides of a case ; a determination 
 not to jump before we look. I never saw a 
 Yankee yet that had not at least ten-twentieths 
 of old fogy blood in his veins. I never yet 
 saw a Yankee as impulsive as an Irishman, or 
 as wild-headed as a Frenchman, or as subject 
 to spasms and fits as an Italian. It is not 
 scepticism ; for we are reverent and believing, 
 
OUTDOOR LIFE. 21 
 
 I think I may say credulous. The Yankee 
 loves his creed as the Irishman loves a cudgel. 
 It enables him to whack a man religiously. 
 The old Adam in him, which his piety forbids 
 him to express in profanity, he can let out in 
 theological argument. The amount of irrelig- 
 iousness which a Maine Baptist and a New 
 Hampshire Congregationalist can work out of 
 themselves in the course of a forty-minute 
 religious discussion of their respective tenets 
 can never be computed by the resources of the 
 calculus. 
 
 What, then, is the characteristic vice of 
 Aintirica ? What is the distinctive weakness 
 of our character ? What is the prevailing 
 shame of the day ? It is artifice. The Ameri- 
 can character is not a genuine one. It is a 
 made-up character — a character based upon 
 seeming, not being. This vice is spread 
 through all the thousand and one possible ex- 
 pressions of society. You can see it crop out 
 everywhere. Men love to seem to be rich, 
 richer than they are ; and to keep up appear- 
 ances they sacrifice integrity, peace of mind, 
 domestic happiness, and even commercial honor 
 
22 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER. 
 
 itself. Women join in this feeling of rivalry. 
 They dress for appecarances and not for comfort 
 and health. Their standard is to outshine 
 some one, to outdo some one, and to cast into 
 the shade some more modest or more truthful 
 neighbor. Girls love to be thought handsomer 
 than they are, and leave the true road which 
 leads the human figure and face up to beauty, 
 health, and that way of life and dress which 
 leads to health. They resort to artificial 
 methods, to art, and contrivance, and wit, whose 
 nature is hypocrisy, and whose ultimate issue 
 can be nothing but mortification and a broken- 
 down constitution. A really frank, open, 
 genuine person is so rarely met with to-day 
 that it is almost dangerous to be so, for such a 
 one is a marked person, and sensible and sensi- 
 tive people shrink from being remarked upon 
 and gossiped about ; and so, from self-defence, as 
 it were, because of the evil usage of the times, 
 even they who would be natural are compelled 
 to adopt the wretched habit of evasion and 
 semi-hypocrisy. This, of course, leads to inju- 
 rious reticence, and this habit of reticence 
 affects not only social circles injuriously, but 
 
OUTDOOR LIFE. 23 
 
 every circle. The man of business does not 
 dare to reveal the state of his business, does 
 not dare to say how little capital he is doing 
 business on, and so evasion and deceit, false- 
 hood and pretentiousness, even lying itself, are 
 the inevitable resorts of his policy. These are 
 the things that honeycomb the foundation of 
 credit and charge the air full of suspicion, 
 which trade, having breathed, becomes para- 
 lyzed through all her members. Into the same 
 dreadful habit falls the politician who thinks 
 one thing and says another. He knows what 
 is the truth, but he won't say it. He is not 
 frank and open and fair in his talk to his con- 
 stituents. And so strongly has this habit 
 become settled as a rule and policy among 
 American politicians, that he is called the best 
 politician who can conceal most and deceive 
 most. He who has that which enables him to 
 be a first-class, gilt-edged rascal is called a first- 
 class, successful politician. 
 
 And the same tendency can be seen in the 
 pulpit. Many men in the pulpits of the coun- 
 try to-day are not saying their latest thought to 
 their people. If you ask them why, they will 
 
24 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER. 
 
 tell you because they dare not do it. The man 
 will say, "If I should tell my people what I 
 think about the inspiration of some books of 
 the Old Testament ; if I should give them my 
 ideas of the book of Job, such as all scholars 
 know ; if I should even enumerate the errors 
 of translation which my acquaintance with 
 Greek and Hebrew liave brought me, my 
 church would rise up and demand my dismis- 
 sion, my deacons would charge me with danger- 
 ous tendencies, and my brothers in the ministry 
 around about me would among themselves 
 speak of my honesty as folly, and in council 
 declare me an unsafe guide." 
 
 The reason why so many preachers are dull 
 is because they are repetitious. There is no 
 fragrance in the flowers they gather week by 
 week for their people, because they are the 
 faded flowers, the withered bouquets that have 
 hung in the theological garrets for a hundred 
 and fifty years. No wonder that the people 
 sniff them and find no pleasure therein ; no 
 wonder that they endure preaching rather than 
 love it. There is nothing more strongly de- 
 manded by the necessities of the times than 
 
OUTDOOR LIFE. 25 
 
 that each preacher should begin to be honest 
 in dealing with his people, should begin to 
 appear intellectually conscientious and give 
 forth to his congregation his latest convictions 
 of truth, and the result of his latest investiga- 
 tion as a student of truth. The human mind 
 is a growth, not a substance, and in order that 
 it may become a power its growth must be kept 
 before the people. It is like that Apocalyptic 
 tree of which John dreamed, " which yielded 
 its fruit every month, and whose leaves were 
 for the healing of the nations." So a preach- 
 er's mind should ripen its monthly fruitage for 
 the people's taste, and the suggestions which 
 the winds of occasion would blow down from 
 its branches, as leaves are blown from the trees, 
 would be such sugo-estions as never before came 
 
 DO 
 
 forth from the branches of the human mind. 
 And the people who sit under the shadow of 
 such a ministry find their food ever fresh and 
 its offerings ever new. And this habit of 
 speaking out one's latest thought in the min- 
 istry would make a minister thoughtful, would 
 stir a thousand beneficent agitations, and keep 
 the parish surroundings lively with mental in- 
 
26 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER. 
 
 terchanges and spiritual impartments. The 
 man whose parish to-night is calm, but calm 
 with the dead level of mental stagnation, 
 should at once start a breeze in that parish, and 
 stir his people with rippling discussions ; and if 
 enemies, if bigotry, if envy seize upon his 
 frankness and his intellectual candor and his 
 spiritual honesty, and strive to convert them 
 into weapons to fight him with, he should stand 
 forth in the might of genuine nature, panoplied 
 in the power of truthful studentship, clothed in 
 the armor of one who speaks what the Lord 
 gives him to say, whether man will hear or 
 forbear. And so acting he would find that 
 danger would cease to be danger, risk would 
 lose its characteristic of peril, and to his own 
 life would come a magnificent growth, and into 
 it his people would grow with him. 
 
 I hold that beyond all other men clergymen 
 should live as much as possible out of doors. 
 Like plants they need air, they need sunshine, 
 they need the ministrations of the natural. In 
 this way they become simple, devout, bold, and 
 true. Nature inspires no cowards. Nature be- 
 gets no pedantry. Nature suggests no bigotry. 
 
OUTDOOR LIFE. 27 
 
 The spirit of devotion tabernacles among the 
 hills. Neither saint nor sinner can truly wor- 
 ship God while he sleeps under a shingled roof. 
 Visions of duty, vast, sublime, overwhelming, 
 never come to one who sleeps in a chamber 
 whose measurement is ten by twelve. You must 
 leave your houses, friends, and go forth into the 
 open air. Leave the city and go into the wilder- 
 ness, and there, far from human habitations, 
 make your bed beneath the stars, and lift your 
 eyes toward the magnificent dome in which they 
 shine, and feel the weight of the immense 
 distances settling on you, or ever you can know 
 the majesty of God or the solemn joy of which 
 the soul is capable when it is lifted heavenward 
 in worship. 
 
 Not only is the religious nature developed by 
 outdoor influence, not only does nature develop 
 the spiritual faculties, but the social nature is 
 influenced to an equal extent by her benign 
 power. Nature is full of voices, and they are 
 all happy. Nature never scolds, never chafes, 
 never frets, never worries one. She is full of 
 music, and fun and merriment are her delight. 
 I have lain for many an hour hidden amid her 
 
28 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER. 
 
 leaves and lier grasses, and seen denizens of 
 lake and forest act out their natures uncon- 
 scious of my observation. I have laughed till 
 tears stood in my eyes to see the playfulness of 
 her fish and her birds, the gambols and mis- 
 chievous pranks of her animals. 
 
 Now, all men are made to laugh. Every man 
 can be tickled if you find the right nerve. No 
 man is so crusty that he won't mellow up at a 
 picnic, or on a fishing trip, or at a fox hunt. 
 And the laughing which nature prompts is 
 never bitter, never cynical. Nature brings out 
 the real human that lies latent in one, uncaps 
 the choked-up springs of merriment in the 
 bosom, and sets the rivulet of laughter flowing. 
 The laughter of indoor life is smothered, con- 
 strained, puckered into forms of politeness ; 
 but the laughter of the outdoor life is large 
 and hearty and thoroughly jolly. " No one 
 laughs well who doesn't laugh loud," says the 
 old proverb ; and the proverbs of a people are 
 the wisdom of a people condensed. The fact is, 
 the funniest laughter is the laughter that one 
 has alone. It is very well to laugh in company, 
 for custom and benevolence alike demand it; 
 
OUTDOOR LIFE. 29 
 
 but, for the most part, company laiighter is 
 forced. It is a made-up, artificial thing, or else 
 too slight and decorous to be hearty and ade- 
 quate. But when the spirit of fun gets into 
 one when all alone by himself to such an extent 
 as to fairly possess him, and he sits down and 
 puts his hands against his sides, and opens his 
 mouth, and begins to sway backward and 
 forward until his eyes rain with mirth, and 
 he fairly wrestles inwardly with his hilarity; 
 then his laughter is the genuine thing. We live 
 within-doors too much to be happy. Life 
 becomes too much of a routine, an exhibition 
 of one and the same experience. We should 
 seek more variety. We should open ourselves 
 up to the exhilaration of incident. We should 
 go forth and stand in the midst of many 
 objects, and rejoice our eyes with varied sights 
 and court contact with the accidental and the 
 romantic. 
 
 In this way we should find refreshment ; our 
 days would tingle with novel sensations, and we 
 should go to our homes at night as bees fly to 
 their hives, having visited a dozen fields, and 
 drawn the sweetness from a thousand flower- 
 
30 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER. 
 
 cups. In this way we should become thor- 
 oughly healthy ; and health .is something of 
 which we have all heard, but which few have 
 ever had. They say there is such a thing! 
 Doctors tell us of it, and we pay them for 
 the news, — that is all. Life means eating and 
 sleeping. He who can't eat his food with a 
 relish, — and a goodly amount of it, too, — he 
 who can't sleep soundly at night and late 
 in the morning, does not know what living 
 means. Dyspepsia is a bad bedfellow. The 
 Florentines, after Dante had written his won- 
 derful poem called " The Inferno," used to point 
 him out as he passed along the streets of the 
 city, saying, " There goes the man who has been 
 to hell." A dyspeptic does not need to be a 
 poet to have that remark made of him. 
 
 But how glorious is man's estate after he has 
 eaten a good dinner ! What solid dignity he 
 has attained ! What a satisfactory sense of sub- 
 stantialness is his ! How the blessed feeling of 
 fulness adds to his self-respect ! And with what 
 an vinctuous complacency he can regard his fel- 
 low-men ! A full stomach is the very mother 
 of sweetest charity. Our fathers had the 
 
OUTDOOR LIFE. 31 
 
 insane idea that early rising was proper ; but 
 our fathers — worthy men as they were — had 
 their delusions, and were victims of misconcep- 
 tions. They lacked experience, and most of 
 us know that they were mistaken. I agree with 
 the witty Frenchman who said that " The only 
 reason why a man should wake up, was found 
 in the fact that it enabled him to roll over and 
 go to sleep again! " 
 
 The trouble of it is, friends, people do not 
 know how to appropriate the influences of 
 nature. Most people know enough to eat 
 bread when it is on the table in front of them. 
 But how to eat the food that is in the wind and 
 sunshine, that lurks in the fragrance of the 
 fields, and descends in manna from the sky, 
 they are ignorant. They are so artificial that 
 they do not know how to live a natural life. 
 They go at nature awkwardly. The life at sea- 
 side hotels and at mountain resorts is too often 
 a broad farce. No wonder that the humorist and 
 the satirist find it serviceable for their purpose. 
 Loafing is not an art ; it is a gift ; and one of 
 the best gifts ever bestowed upon man. Indo- 
 lence in the economy of nature is analogous to 
 
32 A PREPARATORY CHAITER. 
 
 sleep. A man don't need to be lazy all the 
 while, but off and on as it were ; and by spells ; 
 and the spells shouldn't be too far apart. I've 
 seen men in the woods that were as much out 
 of place as a buzz-wheel in church. They took 
 their activity there ; they took their energy 
 there ; they took their anxieties there. They 
 were always running from spot to spot ; always 
 in full swoop. They never found a perch nor 
 settled down. Now, the human system is like 
 an engine ; it can run fast, run far, run long. 
 It can do royal service and perform manifold 
 ministries. But there comes a time when it 
 must be slowed up and run into the shop for 
 repairs. 
 
 Now, among all the experiences of outdoor 
 life — happy and grateful as they are — not one 
 is more satisfactory than that of sleeping when 
 your bed is made under the pines, or on the 
 shore of still lakes, or the banks of murmuring 
 streams. Night invites you to repose, and 
 slumber with gentle movement takes you to 
 her embrace, as a mother lifts her drowsy child 
 to the cradle of her bosom. 
 
 What a luxury such sleep is, and how little 
 
OUTDOOR LIFE. 33 
 
 of the real quality we have in the cities! 
 Imagine your bed-chamber of odorous bark, and 
 your bed of pungent boughs. Your couch 
 made under murmuring trees and within a few 
 yards of the lazily moving water, whose motions 
 caress rather than chafe the shore. Stretched 
 your full length on such a couch, spread in such 
 a place, the process of falling asleep becomes an 
 experience. You lie and watch yourself to ob- 
 serve the gradual departure of your senses. 
 Little by little you feel yourself passing away. 
 Slowly and easily as an ebbing tide you begin 
 to pass into the dim and insensible realm beyond 
 the line of feeling. At last a moment comes in 
 which you know you are passing over the very 
 verge of consciousness. You are aware that 
 you are about to fall asleep. Your cheek but 
 partially interprets the cool pressure of the 
 night wind ; your ears drowsily surrender the 
 lingering murmur of beach and pine ; your 
 eyes droop their lids little by little ; your nose 
 slightly senses the odor of the piny air, as you 
 mechanically draw it in ; the chest falls as it 
 passes as mechanically out, and then — you are 
 asleep. 
 
34 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER. 
 
 The hours pass, and still you sleep on. The 
 body, in obedience to some occult law of force 
 within the insensible frame, still keeps up its 
 respirations ; but you are somewhere — sleep- 
 ing. At last the pine above you, in the deep 
 hush which precedes the coming of dawn, stills 
 its monotone, and silence weaves its airy web 
 amid the motionless stem. The water falls 
 asleep. The loon's head is under its spotted 
 wing, and the owl becomes mute. The deer 
 has left the shore, and lies curved in its mossy 
 bed. The rats no longer draw their tiny wake 
 across the creek, and the frogs have ceased their 
 croaking. All is quiet. In the profound quiet, 
 and unconscious of it all, the sleeper sleeps. 
 What sleep such sleeping is ! and what a ministry 
 is being ministered unto mind and body through 
 the cool, pure air, pungent with gummy odors 
 and strong with the smell of the sod and the 
 root-laced mould of the underlying earth ! 
 
 We wear out too fast, friends, in this country. 
 We value ourselves too much as if we were bits 
 of machinery. Our lives ascend like the rocket 
 — suddenly explode and leave darkness. They 
 should rise like the sun in gradual ascension, 
 
OUTDOOR LIFE. 35 
 
 and decline with the even movement of unex- 
 hausted powers passing on into other realms. 
 The problem of the next thirty years, in this 
 country, is not one of money-making, or of 
 mind-making, or of soul-making, but the 
 problem is one that underlies all these, and 
 on the proper solution of which they all 
 depend — it is body-making. The births of 
 the future must be healthy births. What 
 is the use of bringing cripples into the 
 world, whether they are crippled in limb, in 
 stomach, in size and formation of the chest, or 
 in the blood-system ? As a country, we are giv- 
 ing birth to a monstrous number of idiots, and 
 weaklings, and of incipient, embryo criminals. 
 We can't afford to keep on taxing our indus- 
 tries with their support, imperilling society with 
 their violence, or burdening our sympathies with 
 their presence. Healthy parentage is a solution 
 of this problem. You can't expect that nervous 
 motherhood and fevered fatherhood will ever 
 stand parents to healthy offspring. The laws of 
 life, about which the average man and woman 
 are so ignorant, should be taught and obeyed as 
 the ten commandments, for the next fifty years. 
 
36 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER. 
 
 From the great outdoors of God — pure air, 
 strong wind, warm sunshine, plain diet, restful 
 periods of time, and the religious sensitiveness 
 which is closely connected with these influences 
 of Nature, — from these nuist come our salva- 
 tion. If we would brick up the flues of our 
 furnaces and put the old-fashioned fire-place, or 
 even the open grate, into the rooms of our 
 houses, we would prove by that act that our 
 civilization, at least, isn't stupid, and that we 
 are too sensible to pay men for killing us with 
 their infernal inventions. 
 
 The prime object of architecture should be to 
 bring as much of the outdoors as is possible 
 within-doors. Many American houses are more 
 like ornamental prisons than places of happy 
 residence. We furnish our parlors with every- 
 thing but fresh air • and sunshine. We should 
 have more glass in our windows arid screen 
 them less with heavy draperies. You can't 
 import an Axminster so fine, or a damask from 
 Lyons so rich, or a Persian rug so gorgeous, 
 that a streak of warm sunshine on the floor is 
 not, for the purposes of health and happiness, 
 worth them all. No colored marble, or massive 
 
OUTDOOR LIFE. 37 
 
 carving of oak and walnut, can make good to 
 the family life the fireplace of our fathers. 
 How pure and sweet is the air of a room thus 
 ventilated ! How merry the play of sparks and 
 the crackling of brands ; how cheerful the 
 glowing coals ; how pure the whitened ash ; 
 liow genial the issuing warmth. Our sleeping 
 apartments are often more like cells than cham- 
 bers. The moment you get below a certain 
 level of wealth in our cities, the chambers in 
 which men and women sleep are filled with an 
 atmosphere dense, damp, and vitiated by being 
 repeatedly breathed. Those of us who have 
 lived in camp, who have slept for weeks under 
 the sky, Avith the delicious night winds blowing 
 the odor of lily and pine into our nostrils, can 
 recall what a smothering sensation we experi- 
 enced the first night we were compelled to sleep 
 in the chamber of a house. What a pity that 
 men will stint themselves of the free air and 
 lock themselves in from the bright sunshine, 
 when God has filled the world lavishly with 
 both. And, above all, what a pity that men 
 will allow their characters to be shaped by 
 influences which contract and warp them, when 
 
38 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER. 
 
 round about on all sides influences have been 
 provided calculated to make them wide, gener- 
 ous, and symmetrical. 
 
 The brightest sign of the times is the fact 
 that men and women are beginning to turn 
 their faces toward the country, and in the good 
 old-fashioned way, too. They are beginning to 
 long for easier lives, for quietness and the 
 absence of parade. The gilded bells on the 
 king's fool are not called music in the palace 
 to-day, and the gaudy tinsel of his habit is no 
 longer admired. It is a hopeful sign when the 
 wealthy merchant goes back to his ancestral 
 home, to the little farm where he was born, and 
 finds enjoyment in once more holding the plough 
 and mowing the meadow ; finds delight in his 
 sleek oxen, his fine-bred colt, and his herd of 
 Jerseys. It is a healthful sign when the woman 
 of fashion leaves her Saratogas at home, and, 
 tucking a few necessary articles of comfortable 
 clothing into her valise, starts with her husband 
 for a two months' trip in the Adirondacks, or a 
 month's camping and yachting on Lake Cham- 
 plain. It's a healthful sign when our young 
 men take to boating and ball-playing, when 
 
OUTDOOR LIFE. 39 
 
 the pliant rod becomes a fascination, and the 
 long-range rifle a delight. It is a hopeful sign 
 when our young ladies are seen studying flori- 
 culture, learning to sit a saddle properly, 
 acquiring suppleness of limb on graceful skates, 
 and laughingly facing after dinner a four miles' 
 tramp. It is a hopeful sign when men are 
 beginning to ask themselves why the old fire- 
 place was banished and to demand its restora- 
 tion ; to ask why the windows of their dwelling 
 are drawn by the architect so small, and why 
 parlors are made so gloomy, more fit for the 
 residence of a hermit than a happy-hearted 
 man. These are the bright evidences, the rosy 
 tints flushing with delicate warmth the sky, 
 which declare that the dawn of a new day is at 
 hand; a day in which we Shall get back to the 
 simplicity of nature, shall put a proper value 
 upon the charm of quietness, shall bring the 
 light and purity of the outdoor world into our 
 houses, ay, and into our souls too. 
 
 The future will be wiser and better than we 
 have been. It will be more frank, more gen- 
 uine, more manly and womanly. The men and 
 women of the future will be so strong in these 
 
40 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER. 
 
 virtues that they will have no motive to be 
 hypocrites. Society will gauge people by what 
 they are intrinsically, and not by what their 
 fathers gave them, or they themselves have 
 acquired, of material gain and artificial honor. 
 By and by we shall stop building houses, and go 
 to building homes. Houses can be made of 
 mortar and brick, of marble and polished 
 woods, but home can be made only from sun- 
 shine, from pure air, from flowers in the win- 
 dows, from good health and contented minds. 
 The architects of the next century will take up 
 the plans of our dwellings, will examine our 
 tenement houses and say, " How could men and 
 women have lived in such places ? How could 
 they have slept in such chambers ? Where could 
 the sunshine and pure air they needed have 
 come from ? How could their women have 
 climbed so many stairs ? How could their 
 lungs have stood the dust of their furnaces ? 
 Where were the playgrounds for the children?" 
 They will read of our social habits, peruse the 
 stories of our hypocrisies, of our frauds and our 
 shams, and exclaim, " How could they have been 
 so insincere, so pretentious, so artificial in their 
 
OUTDOOR LIFE. 41 
 
 standards of judgment and their action ? " They 
 will examine the methods of our cooking, and ex- 
 claim, " How could men and women eat such 
 stuff ? " Our social habits will be inspected, and 
 it will be the marvel of the future that women 
 should wear such dresses, and men drink such 
 liquors as we do. For the time is coming when 
 common-sense shall be fashion, the frankness 
 of truth be custom, and the simplicity of nature 
 the rule. 
 
 Hail to that future ! when all that is beautiful, 
 frank, and true in the outdoor realm ; all that is 
 mirthful, genuine, and grand in what God has 
 made, shall be introduced into the homes of the 
 Avorld, and imitated in the lives of those who 
 shall then live, and who shall be happy in their 
 living. 
 
LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 PART I. 
 
 THE TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 
 
 Champlain, the man, was the last of a long 
 line of navigators, explorers, and heroes, who, 
 with a courage that was of the highest and a 
 perseverance that never faltered for two hun- 
 dred years, sought for one thing — the North- 
 west passage. Champlain, the lake, marks the 
 westernmost point of their progress in their 
 heroic seeking. With Champlain the long line 
 ended. And here, in his discovery of the lake, 
 the long seeking of the ancient mariners to 
 find, by sailing westward, the passage to 
 Cathay, ended also. Looking backward from 
 Champlain, what a vista! looking onward 
 from Champlain, what a history ! Since Cham- 
 plain, there have been wars, revolutions, the 
 
44 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 birth of a mighty government and a developing 
 civilization to whicli the history of this lake 
 furnishes a key. Before Champlain there were 
 myths, traditions, legends, and suggestive 
 murmurings of knowledge disbelieved for a 
 thousand years. 
 
 EARLT TRADITIONS OF AMERICA. 
 
 For the mouth of antiquity was not silent 
 in respect to this western world of ours. 
 Hesiod, with his finger on the sounding chord, 
 sang of the gardens of the Hesperides and 
 poiired his prophetic song out into the otherwise 
 stirless gloom that hung darkly above the 
 western sea. Plato in faultless prose told the 
 story of Atlantis, that mystical island far 
 beyond the Pillars of Hercules, as his ancestor 
 Solon had received it from the lips of the old 
 Egyptian priests of Sais, who held for truth, 
 beyond doubt, what modern savants, because of 
 their ignorance perhaps, have looked upon as a 
 myth and a mythical catastrophe. The Phoeni- 
 cian sailors swore that their eyes had seen a fair 
 and lovely country lying low down in the west- 
 ern waves, and Carthaginian mariners indorsed 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 45 
 
 the story and declared that their prows 
 had touched the golden sands of unknown 
 islands in unknown seas, whose airs were soft 
 and sweet with breath of spice and balm. And 
 Pytheas, a sailor of Old Greece in the time of 
 Alexander the Great, told to the wondering 
 Mediterranean gossips of a country lying to the 
 north and west, beyond the confines of the 
 world, whose shores were solid ice and whose 
 men were clothed like animals. And Madoc 
 of Wales — so say the bards — brought back 
 from voyages strange stories of strange lands 
 beyond the sunset, and, sailing forth again with 
 many ships and men, came not back, neither 
 he, his ships, nor his men, but were swallowed up 
 by monsters or sunk beneath the fateful waves, 
 being punished because he sailed beyond the 
 seas of God. The airs of the old world fairly 
 pulse and throb with stirring myth and dark, 
 weird tales and clear-sounding prophecy of 
 blessed isles and fragrant lands where dwelt the 
 gods beyond the sunset and the sunset sea. 
 
 Then come the Norsemen — those brave sea- 
 bees who swarmed out of the stormy north 
 seeking the honey of plunder. They swept 
 
•46 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 down upon England, Belgium, and Normandy, 
 and, buzzing far and near, pushed their fearless 
 flight as far as Sicily and Southern Italy. 
 Then they turned northward and in 874 drew 
 the line of their flight as far as Iceland, six 
 hundred miles from their Norwegian hive, in 
 the wild northern seas. In 1874, the descend- 
 ants of these old Sea Kings of the North cele- 
 brated not the centennial but the millennial anni- 
 versary of their settlement in Iceland. 
 
 From Iceland to Greenland is scant two 
 hundred miles. These old Norse sailors were 
 brave and cared no more for wave and tempest 
 than the stormy petrel. We know that King 
 Olaf's ship, the Long Serpent, was a hundred 
 and forty feet from stem to stern, and that 
 many of their vessels carried full two himdred 
 men. With such ships such men could go any- 
 where and laugh — as the}' did, as they rolled 
 over them and through it — at billows and 
 storm. And in 985 Erik the Red, with twenty- 
 five ships, set sail for Greenland. He doubled 
 Cape Farewell and planted a colony on the 
 eastern coast and called it Eriksfiord. For 
 four hundred years Greenland was a see of 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 47 
 
 papal Rome, and the names of seventeen suc- 
 cessive bishops can be read on the records of 
 Holy Church. The colony throve, and where 
 to-day is barren land and inhospitable ice, three 
 hundred farms and villages once flourished. 
 
 In the Sagas it is written that in 996 Biarne 
 Herjulfson, a son of Herjulf, a Norse navigator, 
 sailing from Iceland to Greenland, was blown by 
 storm far west, and sighted, amid the fogs that 
 swathed it, a Newfoundland. He did not land, 
 but hurried back and told the news to those at 
 home. The story stirred the very souls of those 
 Norse seamen, and four years later, in the year 
 1000, Leif Erikson, with a stout ship well 
 manned, sailed forth to test the story that 
 Herjulfson had told. They reached an island 
 — Newfoundland, doubtless — and called it 
 Helluland, and then a wooded coast — Nova 
 Scotia — and named it Markland. Then they 
 sailed southward for two days with fair wind, 
 and sighted land and went ashore. It was a 
 pleasant land, and where they landed the wild 
 grapes hung thick from vines that made the 
 trees their arbor railing, and in their joy they 
 called the country Vinland. On this shore they 
 
48 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 wintered and thus the coast of Massachusetts 
 first knew the white man. All this four 
 hundred years before Columbus. 
 
 Then followed Thorwald, brother of Leif 
 Erikson, in 1002. For three years he dwelt in 
 Vinland until war arose between him and the 
 natives, and in battle he was killed. And so 
 the long contest that is not wholly ended yet, 
 although a thousand years have nearly passed, 
 between the white man and the red for the 
 possession of the continent began, and the old 
 Norseman sailor and sea-king was, perhaps, the 
 first white man that fell — the first fruit of 
 that harvest of death that the red sickles of 
 war for all these eight hundred and eighty-eight 
 years have been busily reaping. 
 
 Then came others, both men and women, to 
 the same shore, and with them they brought 
 cattle and sheep, and made a brave effort to 
 plant themselves in the country. But the 
 natives fought them, and pirate hordes invaded 
 Greenland itself ; and later, a plague, called the 
 Black Death, swept over Europe and Scandi- 
 navia like a wave of desolation, and the colony 
 or colonies in Massachusetts perished and 
 eventually passed from the minds of men. 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 49 
 THE OLD-TIME MARINERS. 
 
 Then came John Cabot and his son Sebastian. 
 The Cabots were of Venice, — City of the sea, 
 — whose streets are rivers and whose carriages 
 are boats. There was John Cabot born and 
 reared amid gondolas and gondoliers — ships 
 whose sails were colored silk and whose com- 
 manders were proud as Doges. The dream of 
 sea-going Venice was ever of the West and 
 of undiscovered lands beyond the setting sun, 
 of which old sailors for a thousand years had 
 told strange stories. In 1496 the Cabots made 
 home in Bristol, England — whether banished 
 out of Venice or having journeyed forth of their 
 own free will, I know not. But being in 
 Bristol, King Henry VII., anxious to win his 
 share of undiscovered lands and gains, gave 
 him permission to traffic in foreign parts, on 
 condition that the Crown should have one-fifth 
 of all the profits ; and so the old Venetian, in 
 1497, sailed out of the Bristol Channel, hoping 
 to find a western passage to the kingdom of 
 Cathay or China. Having sailed west by north 
 seven hundred leagues, as he computed, he came 
 
50 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 upon the coast of Labrador, which he supposed 
 to be the eastern shore of China. He landed 
 and planted the Royal Standard and named the 
 country Prima Vista. Then did the flag of 
 England first wave above the continent, and 
 the brave man who flung its red folds to 
 the breeze was born in ancient Venice and 
 learned the art of sailing ships upon the tide- 
 less sea. From Labrador he sailed southward 
 along the coast six hundred miles, and then 
 returned to Bristol. The king gave him a pen- 
 sion, and empowered him to "impress six 
 English ships, and sailors enough to man them, 
 and go forth again and make farther search for 
 the Northwest passage." But for some cause 
 the expedition never sailed ; and of John Cabot 
 we know no more. "He gave England" — as 
 a writer has said — "a continent, and no one of 
 all the English race knows his burial-place." 
 All this a full year before Columbus saw the 
 mainland of America. 
 
 The next year, 1498, his son Sebastian, with 
 two ships, sailed from England for China and 
 Japan, still seeking the Northwest passage. 
 He sailed far up what we know as Davis's 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 51 
 
 Straits, in the month of July, 1498, and was, 
 probably, the first white man that ever saw the 
 marvel of twenty-four hours of continuous day- 
 light. We can imagine the wonder that filled 
 the souls of these old mariners as they sailed 
 onward day after day, without an evening and 
 without a night. Then came the icebergs, 
 floating down like mountain ranges upon him, 
 and he wore ship and sailed steadily southward, 
 still searching along the coast for the North- 
 west passage, until he came to Chesapeake Bay. 
 Nineteen years later, in 1517, Sebastian entered 
 the bay to which a century later Henry Hudson 
 gave his name, and thence, in subsequent 
 voyages, explored the coast of South America 
 as far as La Plata ! 
 
 The great fact to remember in this connec- 
 tion is that it was in virtue of these discoveries 
 of the two Cabots — father and son — that 
 England laid claim to all or nearly all of the 
 North American continent. Strange that in 
 all their searching they never found the mouth 
 of the St. Lawrence. We now come to that. 
 
 During all these years France had not be- 
 stirred herself to find new worlds or claim a 
 
52 LAICE CIIAMPLAIN. 
 
 share of those already found. But at last 
 Francis I. aroused himself and said, " Shall 
 Spain, Portugal, and England divide all 
 America between them and give me no share ? 
 I would like to see the clause in Father Adam's 
 will which bequeaths that vast inheritance to 
 them." 
 
 There was, at that time, in France a Floren- 
 tine, skilled* in navigation, named Verazzano, 
 and him Francis sent forth to make discoveries. 
 He landed first at Chesapeake Bay, and then 
 sailing northward along the same course which 
 the Cabots had previously sailed, named the 
 whole country, whose coast he had skirted only. 
 New France, and claimed it for Francis. At 
 this point we see the conflicting claims of 
 France and England spring up side by side, and 
 the cause of the long and bloody wars between 
 them for the possession of the continent is seen. 
 In 1523 the strife really began — a strife that 
 never ceased until Wolfe brought it to a close 
 tAvo hundred and thirty-two years after on the 
 Plains of Abraham. 
 
 When we remember the size of the vessels in 
 which these vast voyages and astonishing dis- 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 53 
 
 coveries were made, the mind is filled with as- 
 tonishment. Jacques Cartier's ships ranged 
 from sixty down to fifteen tons measurements. 
 Martin Frobisher, that stout old English mari- 
 ner, pushed northward to the bay that bears 
 his name, in a ship — if such a large-sounding 
 word may be used to describe so small a boat — 
 of only five and tiventy tons! In 1553, Sir 
 Hugh Willoughby, in a bark of scarce a hun- 
 dred tons, seeking the path to China, sailed into 
 a Lapland harbor, and there cast anchor for- 
 ever. For the next year he and all his crew 
 were found in their floating sepulchre, frozen 
 stiff and solid as marble. Sir Humphrey Gil- 
 bert, half-brother to Raleigh, and of the same 
 heroic spirit, sailing homeward from the New- 
 foundland coast, Avas overtaken by a great 
 tempest. His ship was called the Squirrel, of 
 ten tons burden, and, sitting in the stern-sheets 
 as night came down upon the seething sea, with 
 his Bible on his knees, he called aloud to the 
 crew of his consort sailing by his side, and said, 
 " Fear not, comrades, Heaven is as near by sea 
 as by land." And, saying this, he disappeared 
 from sight. 
 
54 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 Henry Hudson, in 1609, in a little craft of 
 thirty tons, called the Half Moon, seeking, like 
 all others, a way to China, penetrated the 
 depths of Hudson's Bay, and wintered amid 
 its awful cold. In the spring, he, with his son 
 and seven other faithful souls, were turned 
 adrift by his mutinous crew, and never again 
 were they heard nor seen by men. The mighty 
 sheet of water that bears his name is both his 
 grave and monument. 
 
 In 1603 Samuel Champlain, in two little 
 barks, of ttvelve and fifteen tons burden, pushed 
 boldly out from the French coast, crossed the 
 Atlantic safely, and returned to prepare another 
 voyage ! 
 
 During all this period of knowledge and igno- 
 rance both — knowledge on the part of those 
 who had sailed and seen ; ignorance on the part 
 of those who had stayed steadfastly at home, 
 made books and read them, and knew nothing 
 save what their narrow, local, and egotistic 
 knowledge of their own country and literature 
 gave them : a period covering a thousand 
 years at least — the fated lake now known as 
 Lake Champlain lay stretched between its 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 55 
 
 amphitheatre of hills like some ancient arena, 
 awaiting, through the still dark hours of night, 
 the coming of dawn, the struggle, and the 
 audience. We say fated : for on no other single 
 body of water on the globe, so far as known to 
 history or tradition, have so many battles been 
 fought, so many brave men died, such mighty 
 issues been settled by the sword, or such mo- 
 mentous questions — as judged by their connec- 
 tion with the government and development of 
 the human race — been decided by the arbitra- 
 ment of arms. For here on this lake the two 
 great and antagonistic interpretations of Chris- 
 tianity met, in the armed representatives of two 
 warlike races, face to face, and, for a hundred 
 years, the fierce struggle lasted without inter- 
 mission, save when, at intervals, like two strong 
 wrestlers, equally matched, by mutual consent 
 they released their grip each on the other, and 
 stood apart for a space to renew their breath 
 and summon up their powers for a longer and 
 deadlier clinch. For it must be remembered 
 that it was not in Germany or Geneva, at the 
 Hague or among the mountains of Southern 
 France, that Protestantism gained its everlasting 
 
56 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 triumph over its Papal rival, but here between 
 the Green Mountains and the Adirondack peaks 
 and on the shores and waters of Lake Cham- 
 plain was the final and decisive contest between 
 these two mighty and inherently hostile forces 
 waged — a contest which gave to Protestant 
 thought and its resultant liberty the civic pos- 
 session of a continent, and, through its develop- 
 ing civilization, inspired by its own genius, the 
 wealth, the commerce, the literatures, the gov- 
 ernment, and even the fashions of the modern 
 world. Here also, on this lake, the feudal 
 system, which was both the body and soul of the 
 Gallic effort in America, and whose ambition 
 was nothing less than entire possession of the 
 country from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky 
 Mountains, and from the Southern to the 
 Northern Gulf, after a century of struggle and 
 intrigue, and a dozen bloody campaigns, found 
 its Waterloo. Nominally, the conflict was closed 
 at Quebec, — and the death of Wolfe and Mont- 
 calm both on that fatal field of Abraham 
 Martin, outside the walls of the citadel, natur- 
 ally and properly gave to that brief engage- 
 ment between a few hundred men a historic 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 57 
 
 brilliancy wliich fixes the gaze of all eyes upon its 
 flashing splendor. But the great French leader 
 knew well the truth and told it plainly when, 
 a year and more before he fought his final battle, 
 he warned the French monarch and his minister 
 of war that the only hope for France to keep 
 her hold upon the continent was to maintain 
 her grip on Lake Champlain. And when the 
 flag of France was lowered, at Amherst's resist- 
 less advance, at Ticonderoga, and Crown Point, 
 it was then decided that the American conti- 
 nent was to be the home of an English Protes- 
 tant civilization, and not the seat of a Papal- 
 Gallic power. And if the student of American 
 nationality would know the facts of its history, 
 he must not begin with the feeble skirmish at 
 Lexington, or the fierce disorderly fight on 
 Bunker Hill, but come to this lake, for on it 
 and its shores he will easily discover that 
 Bunker Hill would never have been fought by 
 the men whose fierce courage and knowledge of 
 arms made it historic, had they not learned the 
 deadly use of weapons, the value of discipline, 
 and been nurtured in martial spirit by the war- 
 like culture they received under the most skilful 
 
58 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 and bravest generals of figliting England, in 
 their campaigns, battles, and forays against the 
 French and Indians here in the valley of Cham- 
 plain. 
 
 In what school was Schuyler of New York 
 trained? Where did Putnam of Connecticut 
 learn to fight ? Where did the grit of Stark of 
 New Hampshire get its razor edge? Whence 
 came the cannon that manned the works of 
 Washington on Dorchester heights and enabled 
 him to drive the British out of Boston ? Fighting 
 against whom and where did New England and 
 New York men learn the use of arms, the habits 
 of obedience, the coolness of veterans under fire, 
 and that indifference to numbers which more 
 than once held the Revolutionary army together 
 and made it formidable to its foe ? Here it 
 was, here on Lake Champlain and its connecting 
 waters, that the men who fought so bravely under 
 Prescott, Putnam, Stark, Gates, and Washington 
 learned the lesson of war and from it, as a mar- 
 tial school, graduated as veterans for the Revolu- 
 tionary struggle. Is it not a most strange 
 thing that although nearly three centuries have 
 passed since the curtain was lifted and the first 
 
TRADITIONAL ANT) HISTORIC PERIOD. 59 
 
 act of ca drama to which a hemisphere supplied 
 the audience and in whose successive scenes the 
 most ambitious Icings, astute diplomats, famous 
 generals, the greatest financiers, and the most 
 dauntless spirits of Europe and England were 
 the actors, was played, there is not, with the 
 exception of Mr. Parkman's little silhouette of 
 the subject — a single page of accurate history 
 written ? A hundred and thirty-two years ev»n 
 have come and gone since off the southeast 
 point of Valcour Island the last French flag 
 that waved about the waters of Champlain was 
 lowered, but American scholarship has in all 
 these years made no effort to collect the preg- 
 nant and impressive facts connected with the 
 French occupation of the lake, or prevent those 
 precious facts from drifting on the slow but 
 ever-moving current of time into oblivion. 
 
 CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 It was then, as the last of a long line of 
 glorious predecessors, that Champlain came 
 seeking, as all before him had done, the North- 
 west passage. None braver than he had ever 
 gone before him. Twenty times did he cross 
 
60 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 the Atlantic — once in a shallop of sixteen tons 
 and once in one of barely twelve. Verily, he 
 was a sailor of whom the bravest of the old 
 mariners who had preceded him need not be 
 ashamed. In this mercenary age it were hard 
 to make men understand the motive which held 
 him to his performance amid perils numberless 
 and incredible labors. For he was not ani- 
 mated by the love of gold. Wealth he never 
 sought. He was not ambitious of lands and 
 feudal sovereignties, nor, so far as we can judge, 
 was he even ever emulous of fame. His was 
 the adventurous spirit, the seeking soul, the 
 searching mind, the eye eager to see new sights, 
 the ear that longed to hear strange sounds, and 
 the heart that craved to feel those fresh emo- 
 tions which belong to the child-world and the 
 child-man. There was within him a rage for 
 knowledge. To see the waters of hitherto un- 
 seen seas ; to inhale the wild odors of savage 
 woods, never breathed by man ; to stand upon 
 the summits of untrodden mountains; to hear 
 the plunge of mighty waterfalls deeply hidden 
 in the enveloping forests ; to behold the glories 
 of sunrises and of sunsets such as dwellers in 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 61 
 
 cities never see ; to experience the unusual, the 
 extraordinary, and the marvellous ; in short, an 
 unquenchable thirst for discovery was the ani- 
 mating motive in the bosom of Champlain. He 
 was neither warrior, nor missionary, nor trader, 
 nor scientist. His inspiration was not of the 
 sword nor of the cross. Wealth he contemplated 
 with indifferent eyes. To found a family or 
 establish an empire he never dreamed. But to 
 sail, to see, to hear, to feel, to know the joy of 
 knowing what others knew not and of feeling 
 what others never felt — this to Samuel 
 Champlain was life. 
 
 CHAMPLAIN's entrance into THE LAKE. 
 
 It was the 3d of July, 1609, when Cham- 
 plain first gazed upon the lake which subse- 
 quently bore his name, and which to-day is the 
 sole monument that perpetuates his fame. We 
 do not know certainly the exact hour, but it 
 was early in the morning when the canoe which 
 bore him glided out from between the over- 
 hanging maples and cedars which lined either 
 bank of the Richelieu, and entered the broader 
 waters of the lake. The spectacle which met 
 
62 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 his eyes was one which brought exclamations of 
 astonishment from his mouth, and as his canoe 
 swept onward over the level water new beauties 
 and wider expanses of natural loveliness broke 
 upon his view. Even then he was a world-wide 
 traveller. He had visited Mexico, Vera Cruz, 
 and Panama. The luxuriant loveliness of the 
 tropics and the more sober beauties of semi-tropi- 
 cal regions were familiar to him. He had seen 
 the best that the continent of Europe had to 
 show. He had gazed upon the green meadows of 
 Acadia and the awful grandeurs of tlie Saguenay. 
 But never before had he looked upon a scene of 
 such picturesque beaiity, and such varied loveli- 
 ness, as this body of water presented to his 
 appreciative eyes as it lay revealed in the dewy 
 light of this warm July morning. 
 
 Not a breath was moving in the air. The 
 lake, between its widening shores, stretched 
 before him smooth as glass. Thi-ough it the 
 noiseless paddles moved the noiseless bark in 
 which he stood and gazed. Behind him came the 
 twenty-four canoes, silently following his silent 
 wake. The paddles rose and sank in perfect 
 unison. The ochred faces of the Indians and 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTOIIIC PERIOD. G3 
 
 their feathered scalp-locks showed brilliantly in 
 the morning light. The air was odorous with 
 the perfumes of gums and flowers. Here and 
 there lilies starred the water whitely. Large 
 fish leaped, splashed, and drove their sharpened 
 wedge of motion along the level surface. 
 Through the dewy air came the pure, SAveet note 
 of the hermit thrush. Far overhead the hunting 
 eagle, sweeping round and round in watchful cir- 
 cles, came to a sudden stop, fluttered for a moment, 
 and then, with rightly balanced poise, drove head- 
 long downward into the lake. Ducks blackened 
 the water for acres. The mother-does watched 
 the playful fawns bounding along the sand. The 
 lumbering moose waded laboriously shoreward, 
 and on the marshy bank stood at gaze. Above, 
 the sky was sapphire. Over the eastern moun- 
 tains the sun showed redly. The mighty woods 
 came to the water's edge, an unbroken mass of 
 natural forest. The lake, to which he was to 
 give his name while living, that was to be his 
 everlasting monument when dead, welcomed his 
 entrance between her shores with the finest ex- 
 pressions of her loveliness. Champlain had come 
 to his own, and his own received him gladly. 
 
64 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 Thus they passed slowly up the lake. The 
 time that it took to make the passage of the 
 lake from its outlet to the point at which they 
 fought their battle with the Iroquois proved 
 that the party not only moved without haste, 
 but that Champlain, according to his custom, 
 circumnavigated its islands and made a thor- 
 ough exploration of its shores. For he entered 
 it on the 3d of July, and it was the 29th 
 of the month, as he records, when, paddling 
 along in the night, his party ran against the 
 Iroquois. These twenty-six days gave him suf- 
 ficient time to examine the lake carefully. 
 This he undoubtedly did. Champlain was not 
 only a soldier and a navigator, but he was a 
 sportsman as well, a tourist, and a poet. He 
 loved nature for nature's sake. He did not 
 enter this lake to seek gold or foes. He was 
 seeking the Northwest passage, and a great 
 water-course to the west. Strange as such an 
 idea seems to us, it was a living reality to him, 
 as it had been to all the old mariners before him. 
 Both as a lover of nature and as an explorer, 
 bent on his romantic search, he would naturally 
 move slowly through the great water-course 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 65 
 
 which, passing out from the mouth of the Riche- 
 lieu, he saw suddenly in long and glorious per- 
 spectives before him. 
 
 For Champlain was then as now a lake of 
 wide expanses and magnificent distances. It is 
 not walled into trough-like proportions as is 
 Memphremagog, nor has it the interruptions or 
 tame appearances of Moosehead, nor is it 
 smothered between monstrous mountains so 
 that its borders straighten and oppress it, as is 
 the case with the Horicon. But it is long and 
 wide and spacious. The eye ranges along per- 
 spectives that a hundred miles do not measure, 
 and the vistas which stretch before the gazer, 
 whether of water or of land, terminate in the 
 vagueness and dimness of distance. Lake 
 Champlain is not a lake that can be seen in a 
 day or in a week, and when we read in Cham- 
 plain's record that he was twenty-six days in 
 making the distance between the outlet and the 
 southernmost point of his exploration, near 
 Ticonderoga, we know, instinctively, how the 
 days Avere filled with labors and with pleasures. 
 For neither in Nova Scotia nor on the banks of 
 the St. Lawrence from Labrador to Lachine, had 
 
66 LAKE CHAIMPLAIN. 
 
 he ever found such sport as the waters, the 
 islands, and the shores of this lake gave him. 
 In his journal he records with amazement the 
 quantity and size of the fish which filled the 
 waters of the lake and the streams flowing into 
 it. And he was not a man to deny himself the 
 pleasures of the rod or of the gun when game 
 was plenty and the hunger of many justified the 
 sportsman's privilege. For twenty-six days he 
 shot and fished to his heart's content, circum- 
 navigated the islands, explored the shores, ex- 
 amined the forests, and penetrated the rivers in 
 search of pleasure and of knowledge. Then sud- 
 denly his habit changed. His fishing and his 
 hunting ceased, and the explorer and sportsman 
 became a warrior. For, from what is now Apple- 
 tree Point or the northern shore of Burlington 
 Bay, the Algonquin chiefs pointed out to him the 
 significant shaft of " Mohawk Eock," and told 
 him that when they passed beyond its line they 
 were within the country of the terrible Iroquois 
 and must look to their caution and their cour- 
 age for preservation. Champlain's gala day 
 was passed, and he was now drawing nigh to the 
 saddest day for him and France that either ever 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 67 
 
 knew ; the day when he should shed blood 
 without cause. The blood of that United Peo- 
 ple, the strongest, and most warlike confederacy 
 of Red men on the continent, and of whom 
 the fame was as wide as their sovereignty, that 
 they never forgot a friend or forgave a foe. 
 Strange fate this which befell the just and 
 humane Champlain ; that, stumbling on, in his 
 ignorance of Indian politics and power, he 
 should, by one bhmdering shot, on the shores of 
 this lake that was to bear his name, decide the 
 character of a civilization, and forfeit a conti- 
 nent to France. 
 
 The picture of the battle between Champlain 
 and his allies and the Iroquois is thus drawn by 
 himself : — 
 
 " BATTLE WITH THE IROQUOIS. 
 
 "At nightfall we embarked in our canoes, 
 and as we were advancing noiselessly onward 
 we encountered a war party of Iroquois at the 
 point of a cape which juts into the lake on the 
 west side. It was on the 29th of the month 
 and about ten o'clock at night. They and we 
 began to shout, seizing our arms. We with- 
 
68 LAKE CHAJMPLAm. 
 
 drew to the water, and the Iroquois paddled to 
 the shore, arranged their canoes, and began to 
 hew down trees with villainous-looking axes 
 and fortified themselves very securely. Our 
 party kept their canoes one alongside of the other, 
 tied to poles, so as not to run adrift, in order to 
 fight all together if need be. When everything 
 was arranged they sent two canoes to know if 
 their enemies wished to fight. They answered 
 that they desired nothing else, but that there 
 was not then light enough to distinguish each 
 other and that they would fight at sunrise. 
 This was agreed to. On both sides the night 
 was spent in dancing and singing, mingled with 
 insults and taunts. Thus they sung, danced, 
 and insulted each other until day broke. My 
 companions and I were concealed in separate 
 canoes belonging to the savage Montagnais. 
 After being equipped with light armor, each of 
 us took an arquebus and went ashore. I saw 
 the enemy leaving their barricade. They were 
 about two hundred men, strong and robust, who 
 were coming toward us with a gravity and 
 assurance that greatly pleased me, led on by 
 three chiefs. Ours were marching in similar 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 69 
 
 order, who told me that those who bore the 
 three lofty plumes were the chiefs and that I 
 must do all I could to kill them. I promised to 
 do the best I could. The moment we landed 
 they began to run toward the enemy, who stood 
 firm and had not yet perceived my companions, 
 who went into the bush with some savages. Ours 
 commenced calling on me with a loud voice, open- 
 ing way for me and placing me at their head, 
 about twenty paces in advance, until I was about 
 thirty paces from the enemy. The moment 
 they saw me they halted, gazing at me and I at 
 them. When I saw them preparing to shoot at 
 us, I raised my arquebus, and, aiming directly 
 at one of the chiefs, two of them fell to the 
 ground by this shot, and one of their com- 
 panions received a wound of which he died 
 afterwards. I had put four balls in my arque- 
 bus. Ours, on witnessing a shot so favorable 
 to them, set up such tremendous shouts that 
 thunder could not have been heard, and yet 
 there was no lack of arrows on one side or the 
 other. The Iroquois were greatly astonished at 
 seeing two men killed so instantaneously, not- 
 withstanding that they were provided with 
 
70 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 arrow-proof armor woven of cotton thread and 
 wood. This frightened them very much. 
 
 "Whilst I was reloading, one of my com- 
 panions fired a shot, which so astonished them 
 anew, seeing their chiefs slain, that they lost 
 courage, took to flight, and abandoned the 
 field and their fort, hiding in the depths of 
 the forest, whither pursuing them, I killed some 
 others. Our savages also killed several of them 
 and took ten or twelve of them prisoners. The 
 rest carried off the wounded. Fifteen or six- 
 teen of ours were wounded. These were 
 promptly treated. 
 
 " After having gained this victory, our party 
 amused themselves plundering Indian corn and 
 meal from the enemy, and also their arms, 
 which they had thrown away the better to run. 
 And having feasted, danced, and sung, we 
 returned three hours afterwards with the 
 prisoners." 
 
 Such is Champlain's description of the battle. 
 As to the exact locality of the fight there has 
 been much learned (?) dispute. To my own 
 mind there can be no doubt as to it. The 
 place was nigh Ticonderoga. Champlain dis- 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 71 
 
 tinctly marks the locality on liis map of the 
 lake: that is enough to settle it. On their 
 return trip, Champlain was compelled to be a 
 spectator of one of those appalling scenes 
 incident to Indian warfare, — the torture of a 
 prisoner. It imdoubtedly took place at Wills- 
 boro' Point, near where the hotel now stands. 
 Champlain strove in vain to save the victim 
 from the torture, and to deliver him from pro- 
 longed agonies ; and, finally, in mercy, shot him 
 dead at the stake. 
 
 It was in this encounter that the Aquanu 
 Schioni — United People, as the confederated 
 Indians called themselves — saw for the first 
 time a Christian white man, and were taught 
 their first lesson in the humane ethics of what 
 is called Christianity. It was in this battle 
 also that the red warriors of the Mohawk had 
 their first introduction to a Frenchman. For a 
 hundred and fifty years they carried the mem- 
 orj of it on the edge of their tomahawks and 
 the points of their seal ping-knives. More than 
 once the recollection of the wrong done them 
 on the shore of Champlain by the armed repre- 
 sentative of Old France, of the blood of 
 
72 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 their chiefs there ruthlessly shed, stood like a 
 wall of fire between the feeble English settle- 
 ment south of them and the French and Indian 
 hordes which were marshalled to destroy them 
 in the north. More than once France, through 
 Church and State, practised all the arts of per- 
 suasion and intimidation to entice the dreaded 
 Iroquois to her side or wedge them from their 
 alliance with the English, and failed. They 
 could not forget what France had done to them 
 in their first encounter near Ticonderoga. The 
 slaughter of the Indian chiefs by Champlain 
 was not only a crime but a political blunder — 
 a blunder of such magnitude and so far-reach- 
 ing in its after results as to become monu- 
 mental. As it needs but a single stone dropped 
 into the feeble current at its source to decide in 
 which direction a river shall flow — whether 
 toward the south or toward the north — so it 
 needs but one act by one of the participants at 
 the beginning of the course of events to decide 
 what, years after, shall be the character of the 
 results and final outcome of them. If Cham- 
 plain could have foreseen what his slaughterous 
 shots had done for France that morning ; could 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 73 
 
 he but have heard the yells of hate, the screams 
 of agony, the shrieks of torture which were to 
 rise for a hundred years as awful echoes to his 
 fatal gun, he would then and there have turned 
 his arquebus against himself and expiated 
 with his own life his crime against France and 
 humanity. It has been said that long before he 
 died he realized both his sin and his blunder, 
 and with sincere contrition bemoaned the one 
 and deplored the other. But on the day the 
 crime was done and blunder committed he did 
 neither. For after the battle was over and the 
 tumult had died away, flushed with victory, 
 standing on the shore of the lake with the 
 vision of its loveliness stretching onward before 
 him, he joyfully claimed it for France and 
 named it with his own name. 
 
 The student can but be impressed with the 
 good-fortune that attended Champlain in his 
 life and remained faithful to his memory after 
 death. In this respect he stands in sharp con- 
 trast with that throng of adventurous spirits 
 whose courage and whose toils were equal to his 
 own, but who, in life and death, missed his happy 
 fortunes. 
 
74 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 De Soto sleeps in a nameless grave on the bank 
 of the river he discovered but could not name. 
 Sir Humphrey Gilbert perished on a tempestuous 
 night in mid-ocean. His grave is a sailor's grave, 
 without name and without spot. John Cabot 
 gave to England a continent, and not an English- 
 speaking man knows Avhere he is buried. Leif 
 Erickson discovered America four hundred years 
 before Columbus was born, and the fame of the 
 great deed has been given to another. Sir 
 Hugh Willoughby found death and forgetful- 
 ness in an unknown Lapland harbor. Henry 
 Hudson was turned adrift from his ship by his 
 mutinous crew in the midst of the bay that 
 bears his name, and at the prime of life, with 
 his little son, drifted to an unknown death. 
 La Salle, the noblest spirit after Champlain, 
 and the most daring soul old France ever sent 
 westward, sleeps where he was murdered under 
 the verbenas of an unknown Texan prairie. 
 Verendrye, first of white men to see the sum- 
 mits of the Rocky Mountains, slumbers tombless. 
 Jogues, the priest, first of his race to see the 
 Horicon, was tomahawked in a Mohawk village, 
 while the name he gave to the lake has been" 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 75 
 
 shoved aside for that of the coarse Hanoverian 
 King. What strange fortunes befell these old- 
 time wanderers who explored the world, who 
 gave islands and continents to civilization, who 
 by their exploits clomb to the highest levels of 
 fame, and who were thus pursued by an ironical 
 fate even after they had passed through the port- 
 als of death ! For, of them all, Champlain left, 
 in dying, to the clear knowledge of men who 
 were to come after, the two things they most 
 wish to know and visit — a grave and a monu- 
 ment. For, at Quebec the tourist and pilgrim 
 can see the spot where his body sleeps, and in 
 the lake that bears his name they can behold a 
 monument as magnificent and enduring as his 
 fame. 
 
 MOHAWK KOCK. 
 
 In Burlington Bay there stands a rock. 
 Straight up from out the water it rises, bare of 
 soil and sharply pointed, a veritable interroga- 
 tion point to puzzle the curious voyager. Has 
 it special geologic or historic significance, and, if 
 it has, who may tell its origin or declare its con- 
 nection ? Is it the core of some island washed 
 
76 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 away by the waves of ages ; a geologic remnant 
 of ancient days, shrunken from fair and verdant 
 fulness to this bare spike of stone ; or was it 
 shot u.pward by some terrific force which, long 
 pent, was suddenly let loose in throe or spasm of 
 Nature ; a volcanic spear-point of stone darted 
 out of chaos when all her forces were hot in 
 maddest action ? Who will answer the dumb 
 interrogation of this strangely pointed stone, or 
 translate from the historic silences around and 
 above it messages of knowledge ? 
 
 Men call it Rock Dunder, a meaningless name 
 gotten from a silly tradition, too silly to men- 
 tion. This is a monumental stone standing here 
 in Burlington Bay, a memorial shaft, older than 
 the column of Trajan, older than the Agora of the 
 Greeks. The fame of this rock was continental. 
 Centuries upon centuries before the white man 
 came, it was known to every Indian warrior from 
 Cape Breton to Lake Erie, and from Labrador 
 to Florida. Among all the Red Nations it was 
 known and named with awe. It was a landmark 
 to half the continent, a landmark of nationality 
 and empire, a pillar of authority, a symbol of 
 sovereignty sustained by a thousand battles dur- 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 77 
 
 ing years innumerable. For, from Lake Huron 
 running east even to this rock in Burlington 
 Bay, came the boundary line between the 
 Iroquois and Algonquin, the two great Indian 
 races which held the continent east of the 
 Mississippi, as modern men of different and 
 hostile races hold their countries whose bounda- 
 ries touch and which for either party to cross 
 means war. 
 
 Of all the Indian tribes the confederated Five 
 Nations were ever the most renowned. They 
 were more civilized than the Greeks when Solon 
 framed his code for his countrymen ; they were 
 as brave as the Greeks who fought at Ther- 
 mopylae. Their chiefs loved battle like the 
 old Norse Vikings. The Everglades of Florida 
 paid them tribute, and the Esquimaux of Labra- 
 dor had felt the weight of their tomahawks. 
 The tribes of the Mississippi acknowledged 
 their sovereignty, and the nations that camped 
 round the shores of Lake St. John kept their 
 sentinels pushed well southward in dread of their 
 fierce invasion. But of the Five Nations, each 
 fierce as a hunting eagle, the Mohawks stood in 
 war pre-eminent, unmatched, and invincible. 
 
78 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 What of this? Much. This rock in Bur- 
 lington Bay, in that former time, was Mohawk 
 Rock ; the landmark of their northern bound- 
 ary ; their miite and savage challenge to all the 
 great tribes of the North, to come beyond it 
 southward if they dared. It is not known what 
 they called it in their tongue ; the old writings 
 spell it differently and give it different interpre- 
 tations. I care nothing for them, for it is plain 
 that all speak of it out of their ignorance. 
 Of it all, only one thing is certain, which is 
 that this pointed spire of stone in Burlington 
 Bay was known to the Indians of half the con- 
 tinent as Mohawk Rock, and that it marked the 
 northern point of their savage power and fierce 
 dominion. 
 
 To this rock they came to declare war or 
 peace with all the other tribes. Around it they 
 gathered in their war canoes for fierce invasions 
 northward. From this mute rock they fought 
 their way into the Huron country, until they 
 held in their firm grasp Hochelaga, now Mont- 
 real. North of this bare rock the Mohawk 
 might go as far as his bravery could carry him, 
 but south of this great national sign no Huron 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 79 
 
 might ever come one step and live. Away, then, 
 with the silly name that local ignorance has 
 given to this historic stone, this monument of 
 ancient times, old with unnumbered centuries 
 when Champlain came, and give back to it that 
 significant and noble name by which the Red 
 races knew it, when by them it was, in peace 
 and war, treaty and tribute, mentioned, in honor 
 or in fear, as " Mohawk Rock." 
 
 There are localities in the world which, when 
 visited, provoke the imagination. There are 
 spots from which the fancy of man with free 
 wing starts for flight as naturally as a waking 
 bird from his morning perch. I have visited 
 such localities and felt their influence upon me. 
 I have gone as pilgrim to such places, and from 
 their altitude gazing backward beheld the mar- 
 tial pomp and glory of departed days. What 
 might not this old stone tell us if it might speak 
 of old-time wars and peace, of treaties made and 
 broken by the old-time warriors who gathered in 
 solemn councils within sight of it, feasted their 
 friends and tortured their captive foes beneath 
 the mighty pines which lined in those far days 
 with a forest wall the shores of Burlington Bay ? 
 
80 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 Some night, if you have imagination, when 
 the lake sleeps, and through the dusk the lights 
 of heaven shine dimly, paddle out across the 
 still water, climb this ancient rock, and, sitting 
 upon the crest of it, listen to the silence brooding 
 around you ; that silence which is not empty 
 but full of knowledge and understanding of 
 what it has seen and heard. Make your mood 
 receptive, and, it may be, you will see and hear 
 many things, — the low murmur of solemn 
 council, the battle chant, the orator's appeal, the 
 signal for assault, the dying yell, the tortured 
 victim's moan, the funeral lament. Nor shall 
 your eyes lack sights that will enlarge them; 
 for onward through the gloom in long lines with 
 measured paddle stroke you Avill see canoes of 
 war come on, pass you, and disappear sweeping 
 northward ; and all around the shores where 
 now the city stands, your eyes will see a great 
 wood of pines, lighted up with a thousand fires 
 so that each trunk stands forth like a dark 
 brown pillar, and, in the wood thus lighted, you 
 will behold hundreds upon hundreds of warriors, 
 ochred for battle, passing to and fro. And with 
 this vision of aboriginal life and times standing 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 81 
 
 vividly outlined in person and circumstance 
 before you, you will realize what so few learn, 
 that to him. who has knowledge and imagination 
 both there is no hidden past. The thing which 
 puzzles us is not the past but the future ; not 
 the door which has been shut, but that strange 
 door which has never been opened. For who, 
 although knocking with reddened knuckles 
 against it, may start even an echo ? The lost 
 past we can reconquer, but the future, who may 
 invade it, or who, of it, may tell us one single 
 thing ? 
 
 TICONDEROGA. 
 
 I do not propose to write the history of the 
 rocky bluff which lies between the waters of 
 Lake Champlain and the outlet of the Horicon. 
 Lacking the proportions and grandeur of Cape 
 Diamond at Quebec, it nevertheless matches it 
 in historic significance. If Quebec was the head, 
 Ticonderoga and Crown Point were the two 
 mailed hands of the French power, and, with 
 these two hands, until they were severed from 
 her body, France held the country firmly in her 
 grasp. In the surrendej: of Quebec the colonial 
 
82 LAKE CIIAMPLAIN. 
 
 effort of France on this continent expired. Its 
 last breath was breathed with the dying gasp of 
 Montcalm, but it received its death-blow at 
 Ticonderoga. There it was that the steel of 
 England, directed by the skill of Pitt and driven 
 home by the conqueror of Louisburg, reached 
 its vitals. From Ticonderoga she staggered 
 toward Quebec as a wounded bear drags herself 
 to her den, not in hopes of escaping death, but 
 that she may make, at its mouth, one more and 
 her last fight for her cubs. 
 
 The aborigines called the stony promontory 
 Cheonderoga, or the place of many and mellow 
 sounds, in reference to the dull roar of the falls, 
 and the soft sounds of the rushing rapids that 
 filled the smothering woods with mellow noise 
 as the clear waters of the Horicon tumbled or 
 rushed over their obstructions a mile beyond. 
 
 The French, acknowledging the poetic justice 
 of the name, called it Carillon, — the Place of 
 Chimes, — and year after year the soldiers of 
 France within the fortress listened to the 
 cadence of the falling waters of summer nights 
 and fancied that they heard the church chimes 
 of their native land. It is a wonder that the 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 83 
 
 stolid English who drove out the French did not 
 rechristen it Camel's Neck, or that the vulgariz- 
 ing American settlers who succeeded the Briton 
 did not stigmatize it as Hog Point. But, pro- 
 tected by some rare fortune or the Genius of the 
 place, to whose unknown name we offer our 
 grateful acknowledgments, it still retains its old 
 Indian name, with a slight alteration in its 
 spelling. 
 
 The fortress whose ruins the tourist may still 
 see and explore was built by the French in 
 1756. And to the student of history and the 
 traveller alike they are the most interesting 
 ones on the continent. The fortress was sur- 
 rounded by water on three sides, and a portion 
 of the remaining side was a dense swamp. 
 This landward side was defended by a breast- 
 work nine feet in height and a thick abattis of 
 fallen trees whose branches were sharpened to a 
 point. This abattis was six rods deep along the 
 entire breastwork, and dense, and constituted a 
 horrible tangle of impenetrable obstruction. 
 Against this breastwork, protected by its fright- 
 ful abattis, the incompetent Abercrombie sent, 
 time and again, in vain and successive charges, 
 
84 LAKE CHAMPLAISr. 
 
 the finest regiments of England and the colo- 
 nies. For four hours the unequal and awful 
 contest lasted, and when at last the signal to 
 retire was sounded and the maddened but ex- 
 hausted soldiery drew back from the gory spot, 
 two thousand bodies were left in that awful 
 parallelogram — twenty-three rods long by eight 
 rods wide — to emphasize the incompetency of 
 English generalship, and French skill and cour- 
 age. It was the bloodiest battle ever fought on 
 land before or since upon the continent, as the 
 naval battle off Plattsburgh was the bloodiest 
 battle ever fought on any water known to 
 history. 
 
 The next year, General Amherst conquered 
 the fortress with little, if any, loss. But 
 Montcalm, Levis, Boulamaque and the white- 
 coated troops that loved the battle with them 
 were not there, or the victor of Louisburg would 
 have won it by skill if he won it at all, rather 
 than by bravery. For England never had a 
 commander on this continent that might be 
 compared with Montcalm, unless his companion 
 in death — the gifted but delicate Wolfe — 
 might be called his peer. 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 85 
 
 One summer night I visited this most historic 
 of all our historic places, this most romantic of 
 all our ruins, and watched the night out seated 
 upon its crumbled walls or wandering along its 
 mounded ramparts. The moon was at its full, 
 and its white ghostly light gave fitting illumi- 
 nation to the spot where so many in other years 
 had fought and died. I doubt if any, even the 
 dullest, might be so placed and not have both 
 memory and imagination quickened. As for 
 myself, I will confess that night and its emo- 
 tions remain after a quarter of a century of 
 time as clearly and impressively engraved on my 
 memory as the features of my mother's face. To 
 me as to the red men Ticonderoga was a name of 
 nature, suggestive of mellow sounds, for to my 
 ears, through the damp air of dewy upland and 
 foggy river, there came the murmur of rapids 
 and the voices of the waters of the falls mel- 
 lowed by the distance. Then came the memory 
 of later times, — of war and battles, — and I 
 heard the measured fall of sentinel feet; the 
 hourly call from angle unto angle ; and caught 
 the gleam of cannon on the ramparts and of 
 stacked arms and long lines of blanketed forms 
 
86 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 sleeping on the warm turf beyond the glacis. 
 Below me on the pallid water I saw canoes 
 come noiselessly out of distance and into dis- 
 tance go as noiselessly. To the angle of the 
 wall nigh where I sat Montcalm came and on it 
 seated himself. Soon De Levis joined him, 
 then Boulamaque with Bourgansville. And 
 last of all Marin, the scout, the only rival in 
 skill and courage that Rogers and Putnam ever 
 had, and who saved the latter from the stake,* 
 even when the fascots were on fire around him. 
 Together in low tones thfey talked of France 
 and loved ones ; of battles fought and won ; of 
 comrades dead or distant ; of perils passed and 
 
 ' Putnam, while scouting, was taken a prisoner by some of 
 Marin's command. They bound him to a tree and one of the 
 Indians amused liimself by seeing how near he could throw his 
 tomahawk to the prisoner's head without touching it. Putnam 
 bore the ordeal unflinchingly, and at the close of it a Canadian 
 put his fusee at Putnam's breast and snapped it. Fortunately it 
 missed Are, at which the scoundrel gave him a severe blow in the 
 face with the butt end of his gun. Putnam was then taken to the 
 spot where the Indians were encamped, and his clothes stripped 
 from him. They then bound him to a tree, piled a great brush 
 heap around him, and set it on fire. It was at this moment, when 
 the flames were penetrating through the brush toward his body, 
 that his great rival and foe, with whom he had fought a hundred 
 skirmishes, — Marin, — burst through the throng of Indians, scat- 
 tered the burning brushes and brands, and cut the withes that 
 bound Putnam to the stake with his knife. 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 87 
 
 perils yet to come. Then round them gathered 
 their great foes : Lord Howe — who in the field 
 matched the younger Pitt in the cabinet, whose 
 virtues made him envied of death, over whose 
 lifeless form the rough Putnam sobbed like a 
 girl, and the largest army England ever mar- 
 shalled in America stood appalled at its loss : 
 Abercrombie, the incompetent, to whom Mont- 
 calm lifted his chapeau in derision ; Amherst, 
 cautious, persistent, brave, with the laurels of 
 Louisburg on his brow ; Campbell of Inverawe, 
 mysteriously fated unto death; Rogers, the 
 great scout — the only scout of fame, who after 
 Lexington loved the King of England better 
 than his country ; Arnold, Townshend, Lyman, 
 Johnson, Montgomery, Gates, Ethan Allen, 
 Seth Warner, Remember Baker, Stark, and 
 Putnam — all came as to a familiar place and 
 stood before me making such a group of fame, 
 as history cannot equal at any other citadel or 
 ancient battle plain save one — Quebec. 
 
 Then came the dawn and with it the rush of 
 feet, the sharp click of a firelock at the postern, 
 and the stentorian voice of Ethan Allen de- 
 manding of Laplace that the fortress be surren- 
 
88 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 dered to him, speaking " in the name of 
 Jehovah and the Continental Congress." ^ 
 
 With such recollections and musings was my 
 mind filled as I sat or wandered amid the ruins 
 of Ticonderoga on that moon-lighted summer 
 night, until with the hours of it moving in con- 
 cert, the dim stars passed from sight, and over 
 the mountains of the east the sun rose resplen- 
 dently strong and bright, lighting with his 
 rays a great and prosperous land whose liberty 
 and religion owe so much to Ticonderoga, 
 
 1 The following address was delivered by Ethan Allen to his 
 eighty-three compatriots as they stood on the western shore of the 
 lake, after they had been ferried across ready to make their des- 
 perate attempt to capture the fortress. The date was May 10, 
 1773, and the hour was that of early dawn. I preserve the words 
 of the address, as illustrative of the bravery of the leader and the 
 led. 
 
 " Friends and fellow-soldiers, you have for years past been a 
 scourge and a terror to arbitrary power. Your valor has been 
 famed abroad and acknowledged, as appears by the advice and 
 orders to me from the General Assembly of Connecticut to sur- 
 prise and take the garrison now before us. I propose to advance 
 before you and in person conduct you through the wicket gate; for 
 we must this morning either quit our pretensions to valor or pos- 
 sess ourselves of this fortress in a few minutes; and inasmuch 
 as it is a desperate attempt, which none hut the bravest of men 
 dare undertake, I do not urge it on any contrary to his will. 
 You who will undertake it with me voluntarily poise your 
 firelocks." 
 
 Allen relates that every man did poise his firearm. 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 89 
 
 whose ruins still stand to remind every citizen 
 of the Great Republic of their everlasting 
 debt. 
 
 CROWN POINT. 
 
 Next to Ticonderoga in interest to the stu- 
 dent of American history, and in some respects 
 superior to it, stands Crown Point and the 
 region around about it. Geographically it is in 
 truth Tlie Gate of the Lake, for such is the nar- 
 rowness of the lake at this point that the 
 feeblest of armaments might close it to all pass- 
 age. The French early perceived the impor- 
 tance of this peculiarity of its topography from 
 a military point of view, and built a fort there 
 as early as 1731.* It was 1759 when, at the 
 
 ' The fortress which the Frencli built in 1731 was called Fort 
 St. Frederic, and was so utterly destroyed by them when they 
 evacuated it in 1759, that, on the arrival of General Amherst's 
 command, he found only blackened walls and ruined passages. It 
 was because of the blackened chimneys of the burned houses that 
 were left standing amid the surrounding ruins that the locality 
 received the name of " Chimney Point," a name by which it is still 
 known. 
 
 Amherst immediately traced out the lines of a new fort some 
 forty rods west of the site of the old Fort St. Frederic. -He 
 planned a magnificent fortification. The ramparts were twenty-five 
 feet thick, over twenty feet in height and of solid masonry. The cur- 
 
90 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 victorious advance of Amherst, they left it for- 
 ever. For more than a hundred years the 
 banner of France had waved above the walls of 
 the fortress that French power had erected^_ani. 
 held in evidence that Lake Champlain and its 
 shores belonged to it. 
 
 It is a strange fact that historically Crown 
 Point is a mystery and a puzzle. There are 
 many evidences that at some unknown period 
 it was the centre of a large population. Proofs 
 of a populous and permanent occupation are 
 not wanting. It is evident even now that the 
 shores of Bulwagga Bay, for many rods, at 
 places, were, at some remote period, graded and 
 artificially sloped to the water. Signs tif 
 ancient fences and enclosures as of gardens 
 and door-yards may still be seen. In some of 
 these enclosures aged fruit trees, of whose plant- 
 ing none living knew, were standing within the 
 recollection of present owners. There is an 
 
 tains were from fifty to one hundred yards in length, and the cir- 
 cuit of the ramparts measured over eight hundred yards. A deep 
 and wide ditcli hewn from tlie solid rock surrounded the entire 
 worlc. It was never completed, althougli what was done on it cost 
 the English government over ten millions of dollars. It is this 
 work, undertaken by Amherst in 1759, the ruins of which are now 
 visible to the tourist. 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 91 
 
 old street that can be traced, made of broken 
 stone like the macadamized roads of to-day. 
 Ancient cellars, some of them hewn from the 
 solid rock, still line this street. There is a 
 sidewalk made of flagging still to be seen, but 
 none can tell who laid it. These stones are 
 jyorn, and show that they have been pressed by 
 countless feet. There are, moreover, two large 
 graveyards, — 
 
 " Great cities filled with pale inhabitants," 
 
 which tell that hundreds and thousands who 
 lived, loved, and labored once were here. 
 
 Settlers who came in to settle the country 
 after the Revolution said that they found a 
 large tract, miles in extent, with not a tree or 
 bush on it, that had evidently been highly culti- 
 vated. In these same fields, now largely over- 
 grown with a heavy forest, asparagus, herbs, 
 and bushes usually cultivated by man can still 
 be seen. Rogers, the famous scout, in one of 
 his letters, speaks of wide fields around Crown 
 Point, and that they were covered with noble 
 crops. He also writes of settlements on the 
 east side of the lake, and of " three hundred 
 
92 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 men, chiefly inhabitants of the adjacent vil- 
 lages." But if there were " three hundred 
 men" in these villages, then the total popula- 
 tion on the east side of the lake, within sight of 
 the fort, must have been at least fifteen hun- 
 dred. How many, then, were probably on the 
 toest side, where the real centre and power, the 
 military possession and commerce, were ? Kalm, 
 the Swedish traveller, said that "about the fort 
 in 1749 were a large settlement, and pleasant 
 cultivated fields and gardens." There is no 
 doubt that Crown Point was at one time not 
 only the centre of a vast aboriginal traffic in 
 skins and peltries, but also of a large commer- 
 cial exchange between the French and Dutch 
 and English settlements of which we have no 
 record. My own belief is that at one time 
 the population of Crown Point was not less 
 than five thousand souls. Any intelligent 
 tourist will find this locality a most interesting 
 one to visit and examine. 
 
 The campaign of 1759, under the command 
 of Amherst, secured the possession of the con- 
 tinent to England. The French left Crown 
 Point, as they had a few days before left Ticon- 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 93 
 
 deroga, on his approach forever, and Amherst at 
 once set to work to erect an impregnable and 
 magnificent fortress. The ruins of this work 
 still bear witness to its original strength and 
 splendor. With those at Ticonderoga they com- 
 pose the most extensive and impressive ruins 
 erected by white men on the continent. The 
 trenches and ramparts can still be clearly 
 traced. The barracks still remain in part. 
 The great bakery is well preserved. The old 
 fireplaces are to be seen, and on the walls 
 names and scribblings traced by hands that 
 have been powerless to hold pen or knife for a 
 hundred years. The last time I visited the site 
 of old Fort Frederick at Crown Point, sheep 
 were feeding on the grassy rampart, and a 
 phoebe was singing her liquid note at the mouth 
 of the old magazine. 
 
 Arnold's battle at valcoue island. 
 
 We are not an admirer of Benedict Arnold, 
 considered in the light of a military commander 
 only, and wholly apart from the dastard act 
 which made him infamous as a traitor to his 
 country. Nor can we find in his career as a 
 
94 LAKE CIIAMPLAIN. 
 
 commander in his various undertakings any 
 justification of the honorable placie which histo- 
 rians have awarded him. For, so far as we are 
 aware, he never won a victory or accomplished 
 anything of practical value to the cause that he 
 served for years with undoubted personal 
 courage. That he was brave in battle and 
 energetic in preparation is true, but the same 
 might be claimed for hundreds and thousands 
 to whom fame was never awarded, and in whose 
 behalf no claim of it might, with any show of 
 reason, be advanced. If success is in warlike 
 undertakings the proper gauge of merit, the 
 court from whose decision no appeal can be 
 taken, then Benedict Arnold was never deserv- 
 ing of especial honor or honorable mention in 
 history, for success never attended his efforts. 
 
 Judged by his record, if he was a hero at all, 
 he was a hero of failures. Offensively egotistic 
 and vain, envious and revengeful to a degree, 
 mean and dishonest, a boaster and a liar, he 
 deserved condemnation and contempt for the 
 meanness of his personal traits and innumerable 
 acts of injustice long before the inherent wicked- 
 ness of his nature and the growing sinfulness of 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 95 
 
 his career culminated in his betrayal of his 
 country. His battle at Valcour was not only a 
 defeat, but a defeat that might have been 
 avoided. 
 
 It was the middle of August when he took 
 command of his fleet at Crown Point. It was 
 respectable in the number of its vessels and their 
 armament. It was re-enforced before the 11th 
 of October, when he fought the battle at Valcour, 
 until it carried over eighty guns and seven hun- 
 dred men. At Ticonderoga and Crown Point 
 General Gates had an army of nearly ten thou- 
 sand troops. They were in a good state of disci- 
 pline, and efficiently armed. Crown Point was 
 then, as it had been for a hundred years, the 
 key to the position. Behind its batteries Arnold 
 could, at any time, if pushed by the English, 
 have found safety for his fleet. Wisdom re- 
 quired, nay, demanded, that he should fight the 
 English — when he fought them — in the open 
 lake, so that in case of defeat he might retire 
 behind the guns of Crown Point, or even, if 
 necessary, above the protecting works at Ticon- 
 deroga. This plan he was urged to adopt by 
 Waterbury and other captains of his ships. 
 
96 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 Why he did not adopt it is explainable only on 
 the ground of his complete incompetency to 
 command in a large undertaking. What he did 
 do was to place his whole fleet — which he knew 
 was inferior to that of his antagonist — in such 
 a position that it could not fight save at close 
 quarters, and, in case of defeat, could not retire 
 in safety or together. The result was that his 
 men fought bravely and his fleet was destroyed. 
 
 Valcour Island lies on the western side of the 
 lake, several miles below Cumberland Head. 
 Between it and the shore there is half a mile 
 of water. The entrance to this passage between 
 the island and shore is wider from the south 
 than from the north. Allowing that the English 
 fleet would attack him from the south — which 
 it did — he would, in case he was defeated, be 
 entirely cut off from the line of retreat, and have 
 no resort save the negligence of the victors or 
 sheer luck. This was all pointed out to him by 
 his captains, but he gave them no heed. He 
 anchored his fleet in a line from Valcour to the 
 shore and waited the coming of Pringle ! 
 
 It was October 11, and at eight o'clock of the 
 morning, when the English fleet were discovered 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 9T 
 
 off Cumberland Head. The wind was blowing 
 freshly from the north, and before it the fleet, 
 with swelling canvas, was booming rapidly 
 along. Past Valcour, a mile to the east of it, 
 they swept, every glass directed and every eye 
 gazing southward, expecting that Arnold would 
 be discovered far up the lake. Imagine their 
 surprise when, suddenly, they saw his whole 
 fleet bunched inside of Valcour ! A glance re- 
 vealed its inferiority to their own, and the cer- 
 tainty of their victory. It was reported that 
 the English commander, as he wore his ship 
 around toward the west, took a long look at 
 Arnold's position through his glass, and ex- 
 claimed to General Carlton, who was standing 
 by his side : '' What a brave fool he is ! " An 
 accurate description ! 
 
 There is no need to describe the battle. The 
 Americans fought with courage, of course. 
 Arnold did the work of a common gunner, 
 pointing nearly every piece on the Congress 
 himself. Waterbury, on the "Washington, 
 fought his ship like a commander, from . the 
 quarter-deck, and at the close of the conflict was 
 the only active officer on board. It was Water- 
 
98 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 bury who had been most insistent that the fleet 
 should make its fight on the open water of the 
 lake and from the south of the enemy. Even 
 after the English appeared off Cumberland Head, 
 it is recorded that he went on board the Con- 
 gress, and urged Arnold to get under way and 
 run the fleet out from the pot-hole where it was 
 anchored. The battle was fought and won by 
 the English gunboats only and one schooner. 
 The Thunderer, the Loyal Convert, the Inflexi- 
 ble, and the larger vessels of the English took 
 no part in the action. Pringle had been unable 
 to bring them up to windward in time. They 
 were not needed. The defeat of Arnold was 
 complete, and would have been ignominious but 
 for the courage of his captains and the bravery 
 of his men. The only vessels that succeeded in 
 reaching Crown Point were one sloop, one 
 schooner, a gondola, and a galley. No wonder 
 that the principal officers of his fleet called him 
 "The Evil Genius of the North." He should 
 have been cashiered and dismissed from ser- 
 vice . in disgrace. But General Gates, for some 
 unaccountable reason, covered up the facts 
 of the case in his report to Congress, and 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 99 
 
 thus enabled the most incompetent of com- 
 manders to become the worst of traitors to his 
 country.^ 
 
 1 It seems proper that the following incident, illustrative of the 
 " cruelty of the savage," as It is well accredited, should be pre- 
 served. While the fight was being hotly contested, a Mrs. Hay, 
 who lived in a house on the mainland near the scene of the con- 
 flict, carrying her infant in her arms, went to a spring near tlie 
 lake which flowed through a dense thicket. To her horror she sud- 
 denly found herself in the midst of a large force of Indians, terrible 
 in their war paint, and all armed with guns and tomahawks. She, 
 realizing her peril, clasped her babe to her bosom, and burst Into 
 tears. An aged chief approached her, and, unable to console her 
 in her own language, gently wiped her tears from her cheeks with 
 the soft fringe of his hunting shirt, and then motioned her to re- 
 turn to her house, where she remained unmolested. This is only 
 a typical case of the treatment which white women received at the 
 hands of the red Indian, whom the historian Parkman goes out of 
 his way — whenever he can find the least excuse — to revile and 
 malign. I have heard a thoroughly informed student of our Indian 
 wars publicly assert that there was not a single instance in our his- 
 tory of a white woman having been outraged or insulted by a pure- 
 blooded Indian, nor of one being tortured as a captive, no matter 
 how bitterly she may have fought them, and only a few cases of 
 white women being killed, even in the moments of their wildest 
 rage. If Mr. Parkman will recall the ordinary treatment wliich 
 maidens and matrons alike received at the hands of the Christian 
 and civilized soldiery of Kurope when a city was captured and 
 sacked; if he will recall the unnamable tortures which were in- 
 flicted hy priestly exemplars of the mercies of God in Peru; or the 
 horrible mutilations and agonizing deaths inflicted on the Wal- 
 denses and Huguenots by the sanction or order of the Vice-gerent 
 of God on earth — the recollection might, perhaps, make him 
 more fair and scholarly in his indictment of the Indian race. 
 
100 lake champlain. 
 
 macdonough's victory in plattsburg's bay. 
 
 The battle between the American and English 
 fleet off Plattsburg, Sept. 11, 1813, was one 
 which can be recalled with pride by the coun- 
 trymen of those who won and those who lost ; 
 for the fight was one of the most desperate 
 ever fought in ships, and from first to last the 
 contest was waged by either party with equal 
 skill and courage. The same blood was in 
 either host, and the same grim, stubborn way of 
 fighting characterized the ships that bore the 
 Stars and the ships that bore the Cross. The 
 armaments were nearly the same in number 
 and calibre of their guns and in the force of 
 fighting men engaged, while the commandants 
 of the hostile fleets were men of tried skill 
 and courage, and the captains under them were 
 of that metal whose edge loved the fierce fric- 
 tion of the fray and sharpened to it as it raged 
 on. 
 
 The conditions which preceded and attended 
 the conflict were rare and rarely perfect. Each 
 fleet was built in expectation of it and under 
 the eye of the admiral who was to bring it into 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 101 
 
 action. Macdonough was of figliting stock 
 and fame, and at Vergennes had built his ves- 
 sels and armed them for this fight. Downie 
 knew well whom and what sort of a man he 
 was to meet, and had prepared a perfect equip- 
 ment for the desperate meeting wisely and well. 
 Each knew that the fight was to be on level 
 water and within pistol range, where every 
 shot would tell, and that the perfection of 
 armament and the skill and courage with which 
 the guns were served would decide the issue. 
 Each knew that when it came it would be a 
 duel — a duel to the death ; and that grit — the 
 grit of the most warlike blood of the world — 
 would settle it. Each knew also that two 
 armies drawn up in battle array on the nigh 
 shores, under the same banners which floated 
 over the two fleets, would supply the audience 
 fit for such a noble scene, while two nations 
 would wait in suspense for the first tidings of 
 the fray. Seldom, if ever, in the history of 
 naval warfare have such stimulating conditions 
 preceded and attended a contest between the 
 contestants. 
 
 It was eight o'clock of the morning when the 
 
102 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 British vessels rounded Cumberland Head and 
 got their first view of their foe, who lay in 
 battle line awaiting them. Macdonough's 
 arrangement of his ships was perfect. From 
 near Crab Island his line stretched straight 
 across the bay northward to a point abreast of 
 Cumberland Head, but somewhat inside of it. 
 At the head of the line was the Eagle, Captain 
 Henly commander. The Eagle was a brig as 
 to its rig, mounting twenty guns and manned 
 with one hundred and fifty men. Next to her 
 in order, toward the south, lay Macdonough 
 with the flag-ship, the Saratoga, mounting 
 twenty-six guns, with two hundred and twelve 
 men. Then came the Ticonderoga, Cassin com- 
 manding, with seventeen guns and one hundred 
 and ten men ; and next in order, ending the 
 line near Crab Island, was the Preble, Budd 
 commanding, with seven guns and thirty men. 
 She lay so near the shoal stretching northeast- 
 ward from the island as to prevent the line 
 from being turned by the enemy. 
 
 To the rear of the first line of battle thus 
 placed were ten gunboats mounted with twenty- 
 four, eighteen, and twelve pounders, and 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 103 
 
 carrying some thirty-five men each, and so 
 placed as to command the intervals between the 
 vessels of the front line and able to support 
 them in emergency. In this wise manner had 
 Macdonough made his line of battle; and, 
 standing on the high shore above Plattsburg, 
 one can in imagination see to-day his fleet lying 
 ready for action. 
 
 Macdonough' s spirit was of the highest, his 
 mood heroic. A captain of one of his ships 
 signalled to inquire if it would not be well to 
 serve a ration of grog to the crews before the 
 conflict opened — a custom universal in those 
 days on fighting ships thus placed. He de- 
 clined the suggestion and signalled back that 
 his men should fight that fight braced by no 
 other stimulant than their native courage and 
 their patriotic love for their country. It has 
 been said that his brave reply was received 
 with cheers by the entire fleet. In this braA'^e 
 style and spirit, as the British bore up against 
 them, the Americans stood silently and bravely 
 at their guns, while the two hostile armies on 
 the shore paused in their initial skirmishing, each 
 regiment standing at rest to see the fight begin. 
 
104 LAKE CIIAMPLAIN. 
 
 The English fleet was brought into action in 
 a manner worthy of the brave Downie's reputa- 
 tion and the best traditions of their naval ser- 
 vice. He bore up against the Saratoga, and 
 anchored within two cable-lengths without 
 firing a shot. The Confiance was a frigate ; 
 her armament thirty-seven guns, with a crew of 
 three hundred men. There were many of her 
 officers and men who had fought under Nelson 
 at Trafalgar and knew how to fight a ship in 
 silence until she sunk. Lying thus at shortest 
 range, on level water, abreast of the Saratoga, 
 she poured into her her broadside of twenty- 
 four-pounders with an explosion as of one gun. 
 The effect of the awful discharge was terrific. 
 Macdonough's ship shook from stem to stern as 
 the monstrous weight of plunging metal struck 
 her, and staggered like a man hit suddenly on 
 the breast by a giant's fist. That one fearful 
 discharge disabled forty of her crew. 
 
 Thus was the battle opened, and for two 
 hours and a half, with the thunder of heated 
 guns, the crash of shattered wood, the shout 
 and cheers of men, the snapping of booms and 
 yards and masts, swathed from sight in sulphur- 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 105 
 
 ons smoke, the brave antagonists fought it out. 
 None flinched. The brave Downie fell dead on 
 his deck. Twice was Macdonough down. Once 
 the head of a gunner, severed from his body, 
 was driven against him with such violence that 
 it knocked him into the scuppers. No man was 
 called wounded in either fleet if he could keep 
 on his feet or pass ammunition on his knees. 
 Midshipman Lee of the Confiance said that he 
 doubted if there were five men out of the three 
 hundred that were not killed or wounded. The 
 Saratoga was hulled fifty-five times and was 
 twice on fire. The Confiance was hulled one 
 hundred and five times. The Americans lost 
 one man in every eight, killed or wounded, and 
 at the close of the action there was not a mast 
 in either fleet fit for use. In both fleets the 
 lower rigging hung down as if but just placed, 
 in setting up, over the mastheads. The masts 
 themselves were so splintered that they looked 
 like bimches of matches, and the sails, tattered 
 and begrhned with powder, like bundles of old 
 rass. Well-informed writers have said that it 
 was the bloodiest naval battle ever fought by a 
 fleet of ships. 
 
106 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 The last time I passed over the historic water 
 on which this dreadful battle was fought, it was 
 in a yacht at whose peak, at equal height, the 
 Red Cross of St. George and the Stars and 
 Stripes waved in evidence of the friendship and 
 affection which now exists between the two 
 great nations which seventy-six years ago 
 fought each other so fiercely in Plattsburg Bay. 
 
 FORT MONTGOMERY. 
 
 At the northern end of the lake, where it 
 narrows into the river Richelieu, at the national 
 boundary line, stands Fort Montgomery. It is 
 a large fine military work of chiselled stones, 
 each and every one being laid with the skill of 
 finest masonry. It was begun in 1844, imme- 
 diately upon the conclusion of the Webster-Ash- 
 burton Treaty, which moved our national line 
 northward from Cumberland Head to the outlet of 
 the lake, which gave us not only much valuable 
 territory, but, in case of war with Great Britain 
 or Canada, a strategic position absolutely beyond 
 price. This fort is not completed, and never will 
 be, I trust. We need no military works upon 
 this continent along the line which divides the 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 107 
 
 northern from the southern half of it. 
 Whether Canadians or States men, we Ameri- 
 cans are one in destiny. Our race character- 
 istics, our commercial interests, our social 
 customs, our political habits and ambitions 
 are the same. Geographically, the American 
 continent is a unit, and the great people who 
 are to inhabit it for centuries to come must be a 
 united people. Three hundred millions south 
 of the St. Lawrence and thirty millions north 
 of it are an impossibility. If in their igno- 
 rance or wilfulness the smaller section would 
 not coalesce with the larger, it would surely and 
 shortly be overborne, not by the force of arms, 
 perhaps, but by the pressure of competitive 
 commerce, the preponderating influences of 
 trade and literature, and those social, fiscal, 
 and political forces which are generated by a 
 swift-moving and all-powerful development. It 
 would be the height of folly for Canadians to 
 ignore continental facts and forces, and set 
 themselves against the inevitable, or by wrong- 
 ful policies seek to interrupt the flow and result 
 of natural sequence. And it is nothing short of 
 crime for our representatives at Washington to 
 
108 T.AKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 treat the so-called Canadian question as if it 
 were one of present paltry gain of dollars and 
 cents, whose total is too inconsiderable, in the 
 great bulk of national commerce, to be worthy 
 of attention. Ottawa and Washington should 
 act with large intelligence, not with petty scru- 
 tiny of petty things, and with one great thought 
 ever in mind, that this vast continent and all 
 the people on it are, by wise management, to be 
 welded into one mighty and homogeneous nation, 
 and that, too, speedily. To me there are no 
 Canadians as distinct from us in the States. I 
 refuse to regard them in that light. We are, 
 upon this continent, already seventy millions of 
 Celtic, Saxon, and German blood — the three 
 bloods that rule the world to-day, and are to 
 rule it for all the future — and we are all Amer- 
 icans, no more separate than Georgia is separate 
 from Vermont or New York from Ontario. 
 And, hence, I say, I am glad that Fort Mont- 
 gomery was never completed, and trust it never 
 will be. Its casemates and its cannon represent 
 the past, a past forever dead and buried, and not 
 the present, much less the future. There has 
 been enough of war and blood upon the Riche- 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 109 
 
 lieu. Let there be no more forever. For cent- 
 uries it was the Riviere aux Iroquois, and 
 savages made it a river of blood. Then came 
 the white man, and for two hundred years it 
 was the river Richelieu, and the refined barbar- 
 ism of cultured courts, plotting cabinets, and 
 ambitious ministers crimsoned its current, its 
 sedges and its lilies, with the blood of armies. 
 But we have come to happier times, and to-day 
 the pleasure yacht, the happy tourist, the heavy 
 boat of commerce type it, and the merry laugh 
 and lover's song, in the place of rifle and cannon- 
 shot, are heard in the bright daylight and the 
 dewy evening between its maples and its wil- 
 lows. 
 
 Fort Montgomery can but be of great inter- 
 est to the tourist, and will well repay a visit of 
 inspection. It was built by day's work, and 
 under inspection of officers of ability, and at a 
 cost, even as it stands, of over three millions of 
 dollars, to the government. There is no fortress 
 in the country that will give a visitor a better 
 idea of what a first-class military work is than 
 this structure at the outlet of Lake Charaplain. 
 It is in plain view from the Central Vermont 
 
110 LAKE CIIAMPLAIN. 
 
 Railroad, and but a short distance from the 
 track. Yachts and boats can approach it from 
 the water-side to the very walls ; it is thus most 
 easy of access to the travelling public, and will 
 prove to those who visit it a most instructive 
 and suggestive spectacle. 
 
 THE RIVER RICHELIEU. 
 
 The roots of a nation's history are in its 
 rivers. They were its earliest pathways, and 
 its infant trade was nursed upon their banks. 
 On them its pioneer life was lived, its earliest 
 battles fought, and its first sufferings borne. 
 Along their banks its experimental crops were 
 grown, and on the current between them floated 
 to market. The rivers of a land are its most 
 ancient highways, and he who travels observ- 
 ingly on them is brought face to face with the 
 olden times. 
 
 The Richelieu — all unknown as it is to the 
 average American — is a marvel among rivers. 
 There is, perhaps, no other river on the globe of 
 equal length that can match it with traditions 
 so potent to quicken the imagination or with a 
 history so closely connected with the progress of 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. Ill 
 
 the human race. To the red man it was known 
 as the Riviere aux Iroquois, so called from 
 Labrador to Lake Huron, because the savage 
 Iroquois used it as the great highway of their 
 hostile forays into the North. In the skin tent 
 of the Esquimaux, in the bark wigwam of the 
 Montagnais at the mouth of the Saguenay, in 
 the great Indian villages of Lake Huron, and in 
 the buffalo-skin tepee of the Western Indians, 
 this river was called by one and the same 
 name — the name of their dreaded foes, that no 
 distance intimidated and no opposition appalled. 
 There was no river on the continent that had so 
 wide a fame before the white man came as this 
 stream which delivers the waters of Lake Cham- 
 plain into the St. Lawrence. 
 
 Then came the white man. French ambition 
 builded its eyrie on the lofty and bald promon- 
 tory of Quebec. Dutch commerce centred its 
 growing trade on Manhattan Island, and the 
 Puritans laid the foundations of a common- 
 wealth around Massachusetts Bay. And for 
 two hundred years this water-course became 
 the great highway between the hostile forces 
 thus gathered at the North and the South. 
 
112 LAICE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 Great armies, year after year, toiled up and 
 floated down its stream. Health and sickness, 
 the wounded and the well, the living and the 
 dying, came and went on its current. Between 
 its verdant banks, first of white men who ever 
 saw them, came Champlain. Then follow 
 Frontenac, Montcalm, Wolfe, Arnold, Mont- 
 gomery, Schuyler, Sullivan, Carlton, Dieskau, 
 Johnson, Putnam, Rogers, and all the great 
 chiefs and scouts of the old wars. All these 
 with their thousands and tens of thousands of 
 followers, titled and unknown alike, came and 
 went with the years along this stream. The 
 great Richelieu and the greater Pitt, kings, 
 generals of fame and noted diplomats, have 
 all studied intently the rude maps on which 
 this little waterway was traced, as men study 
 the cause and course of war, and the way to 
 victory and empire. There is Bloody Isle, 
 whose sands and sedgy reeds have many a time 
 been red with human blood. There is Isle le 
 Noix, with its old earthworks, within whose 
 embankments an army might fight, and where 
 many an army has stood. The elms now grow 
 full seventy feet in height upon their grassy 
 
TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD. 113 
 
 curvature, and in the long summer days white 
 lambs nibble and play in the old embrasures 
 where cannon once exploded. There is the 
 Cove of Death, where bloodiest ambush once 
 was made, and where red and white men fought 
 with knife and tomahawk, and rifle-clubbed, 
 until the shallow channel was paved with bodies, 
 so thick and deep that the living made of them 
 a causeway over which they plunged to get at 
 each other's throats. There is scarcely a curve 
 in this stream, or point reaching out into it, or 
 isle or sandbar, that has not been fought over 
 time and time again by men who fought each 
 other face to face and breast to breast. I doubt 
 if any stretch of river of equal length in any 
 country on the globe has so much of history in 
 it as this little waterway only some seventy 
 miles in length, known as the Richelieu. 
 
 And yet, how little is this fact appreciated 
 even by the intelligent portion of the great 
 Republic whose liberty and prosperity, ay, even 
 whose existence as an historic possibility, more 
 than once depended on the fate of martial ex- 
 peditions that came and went along its tide ! 
 
 Moreover, it is a most lovely river ; lovely to 
 
114 LAKE CIIAMPLAIN. 
 
 see and to sail on. Next to the Racquette, as it 
 was before man destroyed its beauty, I re- 
 member it as as lovely a bit of water as I ever 
 boated. It is a stream of gentle current, green 
 flowery banks with many a curve and charming 
 stretch, well canopied with maples, and fringed 
 with shrubberies that scent the air with their 
 sweet odors. It is an easy day's paddle or sail 
 from the lake to St. John. In a steam-launch 
 it could be made, both the coming and the go- 
 ing, the excursion of a day. To all who read 
 this book, I commend it as one that cannot fail 
 to prove most enjoyable in the act, and delight- 
 ful in reminiscence. It is an actual loss to one 
 who loves the beautiful or appreciates the his- 
 toric, not to have traversed this section of the 
 Richelieu. 
 
PART II. 
 THE GREAT NATIONAL PARK. 
 
 If the reader will take a map of the conntry, 
 and, beginning at Niagara Falls, draw a line 
 eastward to Mount Desert, and, with this as the 
 central line, construct a parallelogram, he will 
 have embraced within it such a grouping of 
 natural scenery both as regards sublimity and 
 beauty, along with such a multitude of resources 
 for human recreation and entertainment, as may 
 not be found elsewhere in connection, either on 
 this continent or in Europe. In Niagara he 
 beholds a world-renowned marvel. To it there 
 is, among waterfalls, no rival on the globe. It 
 is a majestic appearance of nature. In its awful 
 exhibition, majesty and sublimity reveal their 
 highest expression. In its contemplation the 
 beholder enjoys an experience which can never 
 be repeated. He sees, he feels, and out of that 
 
116 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 seeing and feeling there grows up and with 
 him remains forever a magnificent memory. 
 Niagara is at once the sublimest of spectacles 
 and the most impressive of recollections. 
 
 Northward of the great cataract flows the 
 St. Lawrence ; a river which surpasses all others 
 in the world in the mystery of its origin,^ the 
 length and number of its tributaries, the enor- 
 mous amount of water it delivers to the ocean, 
 the evenness of its flow,* the multitude of its 
 rapids and islands ; the varied loveliness of its 
 riparian scenery, and the dim traditions and his- 
 toric memories which haunt, like summer reflec- 
 tions of night and day, its glassy stream. 
 
 Thirty years ago the Thousand Islands were 
 scarcely known to the American public. To-day 
 they are noted from one end of the country to 
 
 1 The Five Great Lakes which make the St. Lawrence a geo- 
 graphical wonder are themselves a mystery. Geology cannot 
 explain them. Even that stupendous Guess known as the Glacial 
 Theory loses its audacity in the presence of these phenomena. 
 Even its imagination, which soars like the frigate bird above 
 human knowledge and never touches earth, tumbles ignomini- 
 ously to the ground as it comes to these inland oceans, and con- 
 fesses it is unable to suggest the cause of these stupendous excava- 
 tions at the level centre of the continent. 
 
 ' It is said that the St. Lawrence does not change its level eight 
 inches the whole year round. 
 
THE GREAT NATIONAL PARK. 117 
 
 the other. The charm of their tranquil loveli- 
 ness is as delightful to the mind as the specta- 
 cle of Niagara is appalling. The poet and 
 scholar, the artist and philosopher, the weary 
 business man and college student, the angler and 
 tourist, — that hiveless bee that buzzes from 
 flower to flower and gathers sweetness only for his 
 own transient entertainment, — wealth, fashion, 
 and fame, all resort to this picturesque section 
 of the noble river, as fairies of every order are 
 said in elfin lore to gather once each year at the 
 most lovely centre of fairyland. If our Eastern 
 country had no other attractions for the tourist 
 and lover of nature than Niagara and the 
 Thousand Islands, these alone would make it 
 famous, and draw from the South and West 
 thousands upon thousands of visitors each year. 
 But what may we say of the Adirondacks, 
 that Venice of the woods, whose highways are 
 rivers, whose paths are streams, and whose car- 
 riages are boats ? Thirty years ago they were a 
 wilderness, a wild, unvalued section of the 
 Empire State, unknown and unnoted save to 
 a few sportsmen and their guides. Suddenly 
 they were revealed. A little volume was pub- 
 
118 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 lished which told of their extent, their charm- 
 ing characteristics, their sanitarian qualities, and 
 their provisions for sport. The great, ignorant, 
 stay-at-home, egotistic world laughed and jeered 
 and tried to roar the book down. They called 
 it a fraud and a hoax. The pictorials of the 
 day blazoned their broadsides with caricatures of 
 " Murray and his fools." Innumerable articles 
 were written to the press, and editorials pub- 
 lished, denying that there was any such extent 
 of woods in the State, any such number of lakes, 
 any such phenomenal connection of waterways, 
 any such possibilities of pleasure and health as 
 the little book portrayed. It should be remem- 
 bered that there were then no hotels in the 
 woods, no railroad facilities of entrance and 
 exit, no accommodation for sick or well, no 
 moneyed interest, as there is to-day, to assist the 
 influence of that first publication. But the 
 facts of geography and the truth of nature were 
 in it, and it successfully breasted the current 
 of adverse criticism and hostile comment, of 
 innuendo and jeer, and carried the fame of the 
 woods over the continent ; and to-day there is 
 no spot betwixt the two oceans or the two 
 
THE GREAT NATIONAL PARK. 119 
 
 gulfs better known or more loved by those who 
 visit them than the far-famed Adirondacks. 
 
 Many years have passed since I visited them. 
 And since I kindled my last campfire on the 
 Racquette I have lighted many in many places, 
 and as widely apart as the continent would 
 allow. And I can well imagine that many 
 changes have come to the woods whose quietude 
 and loneliness and the absence of the coming 
 and going of men made them so attractive to 
 me when, in other years, I visited them. They 
 even say that the little wild island I loved in 
 the Racquette, and on whose ledge of rock, 
 under untouched trees, I built my lodge, has 
 been civilized by the axe and the plough, and 
 that the divine silence of the Sabbath air is 
 jarred into discord by the clang and rattle of a 
 chapel .bell ! But, in spite of all these sad 
 changes and profanations, I doubt not that the 
 woods still have their beauty, the mountains 
 keep their majesties, the lakes glass storm and 
 shine by day and the stars at night, and that 
 the pools are as clear and cool as of yore, albeit 
 they lack the flash and gleam of finny splendor 
 which shot them through and through with color 
 
120 LAKE CIIAMPLAm. 
 
 in the days when I checked their smooth surface 
 with my trailing flies. 
 
 Yes, the woods are still there, the mountains 
 abide, the lakes murmur converse to the shores, 
 the rivers flow on, the pools still go round, and 
 the trees in the warm nights drop their odorous 
 gums to the scented mould, as they did when I 
 saw and heard and breathed their beauty and 
 perfume. And while these remain, the Adiron- 
 dack wilderness must ever be what it is to-day, 
 the most unique, picturesque, charming, and 
 healthful section of the continent ; the one place 
 for all to visit, and which not to have seen is to 
 remain untravelled. 
 
 But what shall we say of the Horicon,* of 
 Au Sable Chasm, of the springs of Saratoga, of 
 the valley of the Le Moile, of the Green Moun- 
 tains, whose ridges should be white witl^ hotels, 
 of the Upper Connecticut and Winnipiseogee, of 
 the ■ White Mountains, of which no one has 
 
 ' I do not insist on this name, but I do insist that the name of 
 the coarse, stupid Hanoverian King of England shall not be used 
 to designate this most wild and impressive of American lakes. Lac 
 St. Sacrement is not appropriate, Lake George is a vulgarization, 
 and, if it cannot be known as Lac aux Iroqiiois — Lake of the Iro- 
 quois — which is doubtless its truest name, then I prefer the name 
 that Cooper used to designate it, — the Horicon — Silvery Water. 
 
THE GREAT NATIONAL PARK. 121 
 
 written fittingly since that priest of God and of 
 nature both, Starr King, died ? For the eye that 
 sees not only the outward form but the inner 
 spirit which the form conceals from most ; the 
 ear that hears not only the undulating sound 
 which strikes all ears alike, but the voice which 
 dwells within the sound and is alone worth hear- 
 ing because it alone signalizes it with meaning ; 
 the nose which distinguishes between the 
 breaths it draws, divides common from uncom- 
 mon air, and calls that only worthy of praise 
 that is distinguished with some fine quality ; a 
 choice perfume, a rare fragrance, a 'pungent 
 trace of ozone, — that unembodied vitalness 
 breathed into lower atmospheres out of God's ; 
 he who has not these and other rare gifts is not 
 fitted to write of woods and waters, of lakes and 
 mountains, of day and night, as they come from 
 and go into eternity, because he cannot sense 
 their high significance or materialize their fine, 
 volatile qualities into the solid, opaque charac- 
 ters of human language. These gifts King had, 
 and, had he lived, he would have interpreted 
 the White Hills as they deserve. But, alas, he 
 died, killed, as was the poet White, by the 
 
122 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 fervid zeal of his own genius ; and the famous 
 mountains remain without a prophet until this 
 day. 
 
 Within this parallelogram, moreover, are the 
 Rangeley Lakes, and Moosehead ; Bar Harbor 
 and Mount Desert, and Poland Springs ; and 
 nigh to its southern line are the beaches of New 
 Hampshire and Massachusetts, Lexington and 
 Bunker Hill. And fringing the eastern end of 
 it are the caribou and moose regions of 
 northern Maine and New Brunswick, the 
 salmon rivers that are to anglers as the magnet 
 is to grains of steel, and but a little way 
 beyond lie the peaceful meadows of Acadia, 
 and the home of Evangeline. 
 
 Now at the centre of this marvellous paral- 
 lelogram, crowded as it is with wonders of 
 nature, with every class of scenery known to 
 mountains and forests, rivers and lakes, and 
 provided with every provision for sport and 
 recreation, pleasure and health, which the enter- 
 prise and money of men can provide, is located 
 Lake Champlain, in many respects the most 
 interesting and attractive section of the whole. 
 It is characterized by the length and breadth of 
 
THE GREAT NATIONAL PARK. 123 
 
 its waters ; the multitude and loveliness of its 
 islands ; the majesty of its surrounding moun- 
 tains ; the pastoral beauty of its shores, and the 
 historic memories with which it is and must 
 ever remain in vital and vivid connection. 
 
 For the lover of aboriginal traditions and 
 relics it supplies a field absolutely unexplored. 
 To the angler it gives a habitat of the black 
 bass as abundantly stocked as any other stretch 
 of American water. To the yachtsman it 
 affords opportunities of pleasure, navigation, 
 and amateur seamanship as ample as sound or 
 ocean coast supply, while to the canoeist and 
 campist it extends, in its bays and rivers, its 
 islands and its shores, its golden beaches and 
 bold promontories, ideal conditions of recreation 
 and enjoyment, and the health which comes to 
 those who love the outdoor life and world. 
 
 Nor is it less remarkable for its connections. 
 The Adirondacks come to its western beach, and 
 the Green' Mountains slope gradually down to 
 its eastern shore. The Chasm of the Au Sable 
 is within easy walk of it, and the Horicon is its 
 nigh neighbor. Tho. ruins of Ticonderoga and 
 Crown Point are on it, and the delights of the 
 
124 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 Hudson within a few hours' travel, while by its 
 outlet to the north the steam-launch and sailing- 
 yacht can glide downward to the broad St. 
 Lawrence, and thence go upward to the Thou- 
 sand Islands or downward to Quebec, Mont- 
 morency, and the Saguenay. Its waters are 
 traversed by steamers that, in size and appoint- 
 ments, are excelled only by the floating palaces 
 of Long Island Sound, and the railways that 
 touch it at many points enable the tourist to 
 pass, by day or night, in any direction. Intelli- 
 gently estimated, and weighed in the balance of 
 considerate comparison, it is the most beautiful 
 lake on the continent, and to him who sees it 
 for the first time it is both a revelation and an 
 education. 
 
 Congress may resolve and newspaper corre- 
 spondents may with hasty pen declare that 
 this or that spot, distinguished by some local 
 phenomena, shall be known as the National 
 Park, but neither formal resolution nor hasty 
 verdict of casual writers can change the geog- 
 raphy of the continent or the facts of nature ; 
 and these declare — and with an emphasis that 
 cannot be misunderstood or unheeded by the 
 
THE GREAT NATIONAL PARK. 125 
 
 intelligent — that the Great National Park, for 
 the whole American people, lies within the lines 
 of the parallelogram I have suggested, and to it 
 there is not now, and never can be, on the con- 
 tinent, a rival. Niagara, the Thousand Islands, 
 the Adirondacks, the Horicon, Champlain with 
 its battle memories, the White Mountains, and 
 the coast of Maine are all in it, and there they 
 will remain forever. These great and admira- 
 ble objects of nature can never be removed 
 either to the south or west, but will abide where 
 God has placed them ; and to them, to see, to 
 admire, to marvel, and enjoy, will the thousands 
 and millions of the American people who love 
 nature and have reverence for shrines annually 
 journey. 
 
 It was on the shores of the Atlantic that the 
 Republic was born. Here was she cradled, and 
 here was her early loveliness grown. The 
 American people know this fact, and to the 
 East will the millions continue to come as to 
 the birthplace of the nation. The continental 
 lines of travel will cross the continent from 
 ocean to ocean, not from gulf to gulf, and the 
 millions upon millions that are in the years to 
 
126 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 come to people the prairies and valleys of the 
 Great West will seek recreation and pleasure 
 among the hills and lakes, the rivers and 
 mountains, of the section I have suggested, 
 and which is, by nature and fact, and is des- 
 tined to be called, The Great National Park 
 of the Republic. 
 
 If those who now control the present lines of 
 travel, and who, with their successors, should 
 naturally construct the additional accommoda- 
 tions as called for, are wise, they will do well 
 to bear in mind that the places the people want 
 to see are here in the East, and that the great 
 bulk of the people who would fain see them 
 are in the West. The places are here, the 
 people are there, and how to bring people and 
 places together easily and quickly is the prob- 
 lem for them to solve. The pleasure resorts of 
 which we have spoken find their patrons to-day 
 chiefly from the cities of the Atlantic Coast. 
 But the population east of the Alleghanies and 
 the Great Lakes is but a small fraction of the 
 mighty total which represents the nation. The 
 sceptre of numbers has already passed to 
 the prairies, and the sceptre of wealth is sure 
 
THE GREAT NATIONAL PARK. 127 
 
 to follow. But what are these compared with 
 those great centres of population which will be 
 grouped here and there clean across the great 
 basin which extends westward to the Rocky 
 Mountains ? It is not beyond reason to believe 
 that at least one of those Western cities will 
 have, within fifty years, more inhabitants than 
 Philadelphia, New York, and Boston combined. 
 If the causes which have given London its five 
 millions are not so exceptional as never to 
 be operant again or elsewhere, then is it as 
 certain as the sun shines that Chicago, at 
 some period not remote, will have within her 
 corporate limits from ten to fifteen millions 
 of people. 
 
 If the Republic endures in peace and prosper- 
 ity, there surely will be gathered within two 
 centuries on the shore of Lake Michigan a 
 city which for the wealth and number of its 
 citizens, the magnificence of its appearance, and 
 the power of the forces it represents, has never 
 been equalled since men were grouped into 
 nations, felt the force of centralization, and 
 built cities to express the grandeur of their 
 ambitions and the glory of their civilization. 
 
128 LAKE CIIAMPLAm. 
 
 The old New-England nests are empty and 
 cold because the young birds which once filled 
 and warmed them with life have flown abroad. 
 With their wings came longings, and singly and 
 in flocks they went forth to find new places for 
 new nests and new colonies. But the lines of 
 their flight were not hidden, and the world 
 knows whither they went and where they are. 
 But with them went love for the old places and 
 memory ; and the sons and daughters of New 
 England remember her mountains and her 
 lakes, her rivers and her shores, and the homes 
 of their fathers. Nor will they ever forget her 
 hilltops and her valleys. These and their de- 
 scendants still see the stars of the East and 
 love them, and while blood is thicker than 
 water and prosperity abides with the nation, a 
 long and ever growing procession of men and 
 women, half pilgrims and half tourists, will 
 with the coming of summer and autumn jour- 
 ney eastward to see the fields and woods, the 
 lakes and hills that their forefathers saw, and 
 rekindle the torch of family affection at the 
 hearthstones of their ancestors. The "West and 
 the East of the nation stand connected as 
 
THE GREAT NATIONAL PARK. 129 
 
 children are connected with parents and midday 
 is related to morning. 
 
 I foresee the day, not as remote but nigh, 
 when the Great Lakes shall be utilized for the 
 purposes of pleasure as fully as for traffic ; when 
 magnificent steamers shall take the summer 
 tourists at Chicago wharves and transport them 
 eastward ; when the Thousand Islands and 
 Niagara shall be in direct water connection for 
 excursionists from the West ; when long trains 
 of palace cars shall run direct, without change, 
 from Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, and 
 Denver to the Adirondacks, Lake Champlain, 
 and the White Mountains ; the lovely Winni- 
 pesaukee, the lakes of Maiiie and its celebrated 
 beaches ; when the great pleasure resorts of 
 the nation, which are here and ever will 
 remain here in the East, will be in as direct 
 and facile connection with the cities of the 
 West as are Philadelphia, New York, and 
 Boston to-day ; and I anticipate that this annual 
 visitation of thousands from the West to the 
 East, as prompted by the love of pleasure, of 
 health and ancestral memories, will not be the 
 least among those unifying forces upon which 
 
130 LAKE CIIAMPLAIN. 
 
 we must rely to preserve the great Republic, as 
 its millions multiply, in tlie unity which is born 
 from and maintained by mutual acquaintance 
 and affection between its widely separated 
 sections. 
 
PART III. 
 
 LAKE CHAMPLAIN AND THE FACILITIES 
 IT OFFERS TO YACHTSMEN. 
 
 Each summer the tide of travel on the 
 Atlantic slope sets with a stronger and deeper 
 current northward. The mountains and the 
 sea, the woods and the beaches are in rivalry, 
 and slowly but surely the mountains and the 
 woods are winning. The cities of the seaboard 
 are like ovens each summer, and thousands 
 come pouring out of them when driven by the 
 awful heat, crying, " Whither shall we go ? " 
 
 To the seashore ? Certainly, if you cannot 
 find a better resort ; but all of us know that 
 the seashore is but little better than the oven, 
 and often worse. The dead glare, hour after 
 hour, on the level and blistering sea ; the rank 
 smells of the marsh bogs and the oozy flats 
 steaming stenchfully under the hot rays when 
 the tide is out ; the night fogs and chilly, damp 
 
132 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 mornings ; the soppy mists which roll their 
 wetness even into your sleeping-chamber; and 
 then the dismal, rainy mornings when the grass, 
 is as seaweed and all the trees drip cheerlessly, 
 oh, I know well what the much-lauded seashore 
 is, for I was born on it. 
 
 Lord Byron is the only one who ever made 
 the sea attractive. He pitched the resonance of 
 his verse to the keynote of its thunder, and 
 sent the jar and terror of its waves through the 
 structure of his stanzas, so that they roll and 
 reel and come tumbling down upon you as you 
 read, as billows upon a beach — thunderingly. 
 He too, gifted being as he was, could catch its 
 softer moods and make its whispers run along 
 his lines so coyly and soothingly that the reader 
 is made, perforce, to admire its majesties and 
 gentleness. But all the time, if you be a coast- 
 born man, you have an uneasy feeling that the 
 poet is fooling you — that it is all false and not 
 true which you are reading ; a poetic fiction and 
 not the actual fact. 
 
 And that is the case truly. For the sea is 
 murderous, cruel, and catlike in its treacherous 
 habits, and all shore men know it. It tempts 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 133 
 
 one out upon its surface, toys with you for an 
 hour most pleasantly to yourself; then sud- 
 denly and fiercely tosses you up, and you, com- 
 ing down beneath an overturned boat, — why, 
 the " beautiful sea " has enriched its vast death- 
 chamber with another corpse ! 
 
 Two yachtsmen, after storm, — out of whose 
 clutch their yacht had been wrenched as by the 
 hand of God, — were strolling on a beach one 
 morning, with the dear old pines on the one 
 hand and the dread billows still rolling hungrily 
 on the other, when, clambering around a point 
 of slippery rocks, they suddenly saw, half 
 embedded in the sand, two white faces lying 
 side by side. A man's and woman's face, both 
 young, lying so closely that the pale cheeks 
 almost touched. Doubtless they had, Avhen 
 warm with life, touched each other lovingly a 
 thousand times, for surely these two lying 
 thus on a foreign beach, a thousand leagues 
 from home, were lovers, death-mated. They 
 were young emigrants seeking by faith 
 another and a better country. God grant 
 they found it ! 
 
 See his strong boots reaching heavily above 
 
134 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 the knee, and her stout shoes. But how shapely 
 the full foot within, and how finely death has 
 marbled it in beauty ! Poor, brave little foot, 
 thou didst come to the end of thy journey sud- 
 denly. Thy sunrise was thy noonday and 
 thine evening too ! See the sand in the man's 
 beard. The sand is so like the hair in color 
 that thou must look close to see the sifted 
 grains. And the young woman's, what a sable 
 wealth was given her for ornament ! How 
 could hers be so black, she being a German 
 girl ? Or was there in her veins a dash of that 
 old race, older than Egypt's, who for unnum- 
 bered ages dwelt where Spain now is ; who, 
 tradition says, conquered the world, and the 
 swarth beauty of whose women can be found 
 here and there to-day on every shore of the 
 round earth ? I know not. I only know that 
 two yachtsmen found one morning two faces 
 lying half embedded in the sand; one of a 
 man, the other a woman's ; the man's beauti- 
 fully blond, the woman's gloriously dark ; 
 lying so closely each to the other that they 
 almost touched, and so saying, " Oh, finder of 
 us, we are two lovers murdered by the dreadful 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 135 
 
 sea ; but we kissed each other in the white surf 
 out yonder before we died." 
 
 But what shall I say of the unseen faces — 
 the faces that disappear in storm and wreck 
 and are never found ? Have I not time and 
 again sat on the gray rocks by the sea line with 
 closed eyes and seen them stretch away in rows, 
 a hundred, a thousand white faces, all having the 
 same white, rigid look on them? Yes, I have 
 seen the bottom of the sea revealed — a hell of 
 sight — the still white faces, and above and 
 among them the dreadful creatures that eat 
 them — the creatures that make the life of the 
 sea; the eyeless and sightless things that are 
 directed in their courses by other senses than 
 that of sight. You love the sea ? Love it 
 then in your ignorance, and thank God you are 
 ignorant, or else can see nothing save the sur- 
 face. A great and dreadful deceit is the sea, 
 and we who have sailed on it know it. 
 
 But the woods, the dear, frank, innocent 
 woods. God bless them ! They kill no one. 
 At their sweet roots no lovers, sleeping, die. 
 Along their green edges no man and maiden lie 
 side by side, dead, killed by their treachery. 
 
136 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 Once in a hundred years, perhaps, one man, 
 and he by accident, is killed by the falling of a 
 tree — some poor, dead tree that could not 
 stand one instant longer, nor help from falling 
 just then and there. Ay, the dear woods that 
 kill no one, tempt no one, but rather warn you 
 to keep out of their depths, near their bright 
 margins, where the sun shines, flowers bloom, 
 and open spaces are ; the woods that cool you 
 so with their stored coolness ; rest you so with 
 their untaxed restfulness; that never moan of 
 nights because they have killed any one, but 
 rather because any one, for any cause, must be 
 killed, the world over. Yes, yes. John was 
 right. There will be " no sea there ! " Had 
 he been shipwrecked ? Had he some morning 
 strolling on the beaches of the Isle of Patmos 
 found two white faces embedded in the sand ? 
 No matter from Avhat cause or by what awful 
 fact inspired with shrinking, the old Divine 
 Dreamer sensed the truth. Man has wreck and 
 death enough here. It is only just that he 
 should journey beyond it when he enters the 
 vast hereafter. 
 
 I predict, therefore, that the great tide of 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 137 
 
 American travel will soon set northward away 
 from the treacherous, murderous, dirty sea, to 
 the frank, clean woods that are inland, and 
 which make all this far north country sweet 
 with their odorous gums, even to the white line 
 where snow never melts. Oh, if I might only 
 spend my years beneath the trees, eat under 
 them, sleep under them, work, dream, and die 
 under them ! How strange that when Heaven 
 waits only on the decision of our wills we refuse 
 to say the word or take the step, and so adjourn 
 it indefinitely until by the passage of that swift 
 force which we name death we are pushed sud- 
 denly out of our hesitation and are in our 
 heaven, perhaps " in the twinkling of an eye." 
 
 What companionship there is in trees ! Who 
 ever saw two alike? This one — a mighty 
 trunk — is vast and round, and smooth as an 
 Egyptian column. Yonder there stands a group, 
 seven in all, grave as statesmen, — 
 
 "On whose ivied brows the cares of nations sit." 
 
 The central one suggests the Websterian type, 
 strong, rough, and massive. Others yonder are 
 sprightly, suave, and pliant, polite, insinuating ; 
 
138 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 while others, on that island there, are simply 
 gigantic posts with sap in them, that stand like 
 the old Dutch burghers in heaviest armor, per- 
 fectly symbolizing the old Dutch motto, " Made 
 to stand, not run." Not a bad motto, friend, 
 by which to shape the character of your boy in 
 these fickle times of ours. And then, how 
 chatty trees can be. Naturalists tell us that in 
 all forms of life there is sex. The trees are, 
 therefore, male and female, and have their court- 
 ships and their wooings too. Perhaps there are 
 flirtations among them ; who can tell ? If so, 
 how delicious they must be, for their conceal- 
 . ment is so perfect ! 
 
 I take it that, all things considered, yachting 
 is the most healthful and manly recreation a 
 man can take, and that, in all the conditions of 
 enjoyment to the average lover of nature, yacht- 
 ing in inland waters is superior to yachting on 
 the outer seas. For inland boating, while the 
 yachtsman, beyond doubt, misses the impressive 
 grandeur of the outer sea, its magnificent exhi- 
 bitions of force and the grave majesty of its 
 vast spaces, he is, on the other hand, the 
 recipient of many favors which appeal delight- 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 139 
 
 fully to his senses and minister in a rare degree 
 to his mind and sonl. 
 
 To an American yachtsman, especially, inland 
 yachting has a peculiar charm, and yields him 
 a singular enjoyment. His is the only coimtry 
 inhabited by civilized nations which, in its size 
 and facilities of water communication, is conti- 
 nental. To say that a yacht of eight or ten 
 tons can be sailed by a party of tourists four or 
 five thousand miles without passing out of inland 
 waters, and never over the same course twice, 
 is a statement calculated to astound a European, 
 and even an American, we fancy, would have 
 to look up his geography a little to credit it. 
 But, if he will take his map, he will see at a 
 glance how easily the thing can be done, and 
 that the five thousand miles can easily be made 
 ten thousand, if the party can extend its vaca- 
 tion time a month or so. Burlington, or rather 
 this lake lying in front of Burlington, is the 
 natural centre and starting-point for such mag- 
 nificent touring. It is large enough to supply 
 facilities for aquatic training requisite for such 
 as, not having it, must prepare themselves for 
 these splendid voyages. It is the only lake in 
 
140 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 all this east country of ours that can serve as a 
 school in which practical knowledge of yachts 
 and yachting can be taught. It is, moreover, so 
 placed as to be easily accessible from the great 
 seaboard cities, from which the majority of our 
 true tourists and sportsmen come. It is sur- 
 rounded by natural scenery of the highest 
 order. Its shores and bays are alive with his- 
 toric memories, which quicken patriotism and 
 ennoble the character of whosoe'er receives their 
 inspiration. Here are ruins of ancient forts. 
 Here the lines of old-time earthworks still stand. 
 Here nature has accumulated chasm, gorge, and 
 mountains for the lover of the grand and pic- 
 turesque to admire, and he who sails its blue 
 water recalls that in days that are past the 
 two most martial races of all the world, and the 
 two rival civilizations of modern times, stood 
 for a hundred years in arms, and contended 
 fiercely for no less a prize than the possession 
 of the American continent. Verily, what other 
 lake can offer the young yachtsman the oppor- 
 tunity to learn the art of sailing his little craft 
 safely amid such enjoyable and inspiriting sur- 
 roundings as can this one, located as it is nigh 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 141 
 
 the great centres of our population, and amid 
 the noblest sights of nature ? 
 
 Observe, moreover, the water connections of 
 this lovely and extended lake. Sailing hence, 
 the yachtsman finds an easy outlet through the 
 Richelieu River to the St. Lawrence — that 
 marvellous stream along whose level channel 
 half the fresh water of the globe, it is said, is 
 poured downward to the sea. The Richelieu 
 River takes him to the St. Lawrence ; down its 
 broad current he descends to Quebec, whose 
 prominence in American history lifts it more 
 loftily before the student's mind than the rocky 
 promontory on which it stands lifts it before 
 his eyes. Downward still he floats until he 
 beholds Montmorenci's fleecy falls, whose waters 
 leap from a loftier height than Niagara plunges. 
 Below he finds the shrine of St. Anne, around 
 which pilgrims by the thousand kneel each year, 
 and realize the miraculous powers of heaven, 
 as the suppliants are said to have realized it of 
 old. Still downward he sails past the Lsle of 
 Bacchus, as Jacques Cartier called the beautiful 
 island we have foolishly dubbed the Isle of 
 Orleans ; past the huge bulk of Tourmente, 
 
142 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 until we come abreast of the stupendous exhibi- 
 tion of nature called the entrance to the 
 Saguenay, and creep inward through the gloomy- 
 portal to such a vision as mortal man never 
 shuddered at elsewhere. And what shall we 
 say of the sail up this strange and solemn 
 waterway, which the old mariners verily be- 
 lieved, and plainly stated, led to hell — or of 
 Tadousac, that oldest town site, perhaps, on the 
 continent ; or of the Riviere du Loup, where, in 
 the warm lush summer days, the government 
 of Canada and gathered aristocracy hold high 
 carnival, and politicians play lawn tennis and 
 croquet, while playing far deeper games and 
 for nobler prizes than these light ones can yield ? 
 Or of Dalhousie, far, far below, where the Bay 
 of Chaleur invites and warns the yachtsman, 
 and the most stupendous fossil trees on all the 
 globe lie half embedded in the worn banks for 
 the tourist to gaze and marvel at? Verily is 
 not this an excursion the like of which has 
 never been taken by any party on this conti- 
 nent ? And when the little yacht comes sailing 
 back from this fair cruise, should she not be 
 cheered right roundly for the demonstration she 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 143 
 
 h;is made ; a demonstration in the interest of 
 outdoor life and sport, and of all who love the 
 airs of health, the sights and sounds of nature, 
 and would fain encourage and advance the 
 innocent pleasures of the world and help set 
 the fashion, which, if followed for a few genera- 
 tions by the people, will fill the land with fair 
 women and manly men ? 
 
 Or if the party be of those who love the 
 " gentle art," what a voyage it would be ! For 
 is there better ground for rod and reel than 
 Champlain and the tributaries of the St. Law- 
 rence afford ? Black bass — what true angler 
 does not love the sturdy fish that " fights it 
 out " to the bitter end, and yields the battle 
 only with his life ? And are there nineteen 
 miles of coast, from Quebec downward to the 
 mouth of the Restigouche and the Miramichi, 
 that he does not sail past the mouth of streams 
 that are the haunt of salmon and sea trout, 
 while every tumbling torrent on either shore is 
 full of spotted trout, that jump for joy to see 
 the "fair deceit" trail past their cool retreats? 
 Verily the true angler should love the little 
 yacht that can thus waft him to such sport, and 
 
144 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 bring him cheerily home with flowing sails from 
 scenes and victories which will keep the torch 
 of memory aglow, and brighten with its gentle 
 ray the darkness of descending years. Or if 
 he loves the rifle, and is not timid of the autumn 
 gale, can he land on either shore for a hundred 
 leagues and not be in the very home of the 
 moose and the caribou, and on waters speckled 
 with ducks and geese and brant ? Or, if he 
 loves the silent forests, the blazed line, and the 
 untrodden mosses of deep woods, can he not 
 push his solitary trail northward to the Lake 
 St. John, and farther yet — if he be ambitious 
 and fearless — to that recently rediscovered 
 lake known to the Jesuits, but lost to human 
 knowledge for two hundred years, the mysteri- 
 ous Mistassinni ? Surely here, in this vast 
 region, stretching clean from the northern bank 
 of the St. Lawrence to Hudson Bay, the born 
 woodsman can find the loneliness he loves, and 
 the furred animals in whose capture he finds 
 full exercise of his skill and the vigorous 
 pleasure of watchful, busy days and weird 
 nights. And all these pleasures, and many 
 beside, can be had by him who owns, and sails 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 145 
 
 knowingly, his little yacht with a month's 
 leisure at his command, from the blue waters of 
 Burlington Bay. 
 
 But one does not need to sail beyond the 
 waters of Lake Champlain itself to find enjoy- 
 ment to satisfy the most exacting. For here 
 one can find, in the highest degree, experiences 
 to satisfy both soul and sense. The lake is large 
 enough to accommodate the yachtsman with 
 a month's cruising, during which no day shall 
 be a repetition of the preceding ones. Of all the 
 lakes in our great country, Champlain is, by 
 common consent of those acquainted with its 
 characteristics, the most beautiful. The Horicon 
 is certainly the most charming and picturesque, 
 but it lacks breadth of view, and affords the eye 
 no grandeur of perspective. It is pent, con- 
 fined, and too closely fenced by the hills and 
 mountains which rise from its very shore line, to 
 allow the eye to gaze widely and far off. I 
 have camped and boated on it much and often, 
 and am free to confess that after a few weeks 
 I always wearied of it, and longed for a wider 
 stretch of water and those perspectives of 
 vision which, because of their dim distance, 
 
146 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 perhaps, and the changes in line and color, never 
 tire or appear the same, as the days multiply. 
 Memphremagog and Winnipesaukee are most 
 lovely bits of inland water, but they also are 
 too small and otherwise unfitted for yachting. 
 You can picnic, but you cannot journey on them, 
 and a perpetual picnic is as tiresome as a per- 
 petual camp-meeting. But Lake Champlain has 
 width and length, broad spaces and extensive 
 views. Yoii can sail one hundred and thirty 
 miles in a straight line from north to south ; its 
 bays are many and deep, and each has its char- 
 acteristics which distinguish it from the others, 
 and make for the artistic eye a separate study, 
 and give to the lover of the beautiful in nature 
 a fresh and pleasurable sensation. Then, too, 
 from what other lake in all the land can one 
 behold such mountain scenery as from Cham- 
 plain ? To the west for one hundred miles, loom 
 the Adirondacks, with their myriad peaks cloud- 
 capped or clearly outlined against the farther 
 sky. To the east the Green Mountains, far 
 enough away to show at their best, lift their 
 lofty sides, verdant to their summits ; while in 
 the lake itself float islands of all shapes and 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 147 
 
 sizes, from the pillar of brown rock tufted with 
 its dwarf pines, to Grand Isle, to circle which 
 you must fetch a circuit of fifty miles. Cham- 
 plain is no pond, no narrow, petty lake even, 
 but a great body of long, wide water, where 
 winds can blow and blue waves roll as on some 
 deep, broad arm of the sea itself. Moreover, 
 Lake Champlain is historic to a degree beyond 
 any other body of water in America. At 
 Tadousac, at the mouth of the Saguenay, and 
 at Quebec, the student senses the antique as the 
 nose inhales the aroma of flowers blown through 
 the air by noiseless winds from afar. But be- 
 fore Quebec was founded, Champlain's arque- 
 bus, right opposite Burlington here, had shed 
 Iroquois blood, and started a terrible echo 
 among the hills above Crown Point, which died 
 not away until it was finally drowned by the 
 crash of Wolfe's musketry on the Plains of 
 Abraham, one hundred and fifty years later. 
 From the northern end of this famous lake, up 
 the Richelieu came Frontenac, came Montcalm, 
 came Burgoyne, came all those great martial 
 movements, whether under French or English 
 banners, which, during the early or later wars. 
 
148 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 threatened the whole south country, which 
 flowed victoriously on, and were not stopped 
 until the Hudson itself was sighted from the 
 ruins of Fort William Henry and the heights 
 above Saratoga. Along these shores on the 
 west, Putnam and Rogers scouted and fought. 
 Here is Plattsburg Bay and Cumberland Head, 
 where Macdonough fought his glorious fight. 
 Here, off Vergennes, chased by the English 
 admiral, Arnold fired his ship, whose timbers 
 can be seen through the clear waters to-day. 
 Here is Ticonderoga, in front of whose fatal 
 abattis Abercrombie left two thousand of his 
 bravest dead, and within whose walls Ethan 
 Allen demanded its surrender " in the name of 
 God and the Continental Congress." But why 
 enumerate ? There is scarcely a bay or promon- 
 tory upon the lake that has not some historic 
 recollections clustering around it, half of them 
 unwritten. For here History sits holding her 
 unlettered scroll, waiting for some Prescott or 
 Parkman to write upon them the marvellous 
 stories of other and heroic days, when English 
 civilization and American liberty successively 
 contended for victory upon the bosom and along 
 the sides of this lake. 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 149 
 
 I foresee the day when a thousand pleasure 
 yachts shall whiten these blue waters with their 
 sails, and other thousands of summer cottages 
 shall stretch their line of healthy, happy life 
 along the shores and speck with color the 
 islands of this lake. Why should it not be so ? 
 Why should not the seaboard cities turn their 
 eyes this way for summer homes and summer 
 pleasui'e ? Here land is cheap. Here are all 
 the conditions for health. Here is splendid 
 sporting. Here are the rarest facilities for 
 yachting. Here is scenery unsurpassed in the 
 world. Here are excellent food markets easily 
 accessible. Here the telephone and telegraph 
 can connect every cottager with his city busi- 
 ness and friends. And here are swift connec- 
 tions by rail not only with the seaboard cities 
 of the States, but with all that is attractive in 
 Canadian scenery and life, from the Bay of 
 Chaleur to Niagara. He who thinks that Lake 
 Champlain and its sightly shores are not 
 destined to be speedily possessed by lovers of 
 the beautiful and seekers of needed rest and 
 health thinks meanly of the average intelli- 
 gence of the health-seeking, pleasure-loving 
 
150 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 American. Fifteen years ago^ and the Adiron- 
 dack region was almost unknown. A few 
 dozens of sportsmen visited it each summer. 
 Twenty houses, mostly built of logs, were all 
 that were there. To-day a hundred thousand 
 people visit the woods each year, and great 
 hotels stand on the shores of little lakes, where 
 then a man might camp in solitude. What has 
 caused this wondrous change ? Why do the 
 people by thousands rush thitherward to-day ? 
 Simply because the people were told of the 
 sport, pleasure, and health they could find in 
 that then far-off and unknown place. The 
 demand existed. It was met with a supply ; 
 knowledge was furnished them, and the people 
 responded promptly, as they always will. That 
 is all that need be said to cover the whole ground. 
 There are thousands all over the country who 
 know I will not write one word in favor of any 
 sport or place in reference to the benefits to be 
 derived from it by them, if I am not intelligent 
 and well-informed. They know that I do not 
 sell my pen as a hireling to praise what is not 
 praiseworthy. I love the outdoor life and 
 world, the pure air of water stretch, and the 
 
YACHTINCx FACILITIES. 151 
 
 mountain tops, and the pure tliouglit and life 
 that come to those who breathe it, and I would 
 that all those who love these things with me 
 may enjoy them with me. Hence, at times, I 
 write to them — known and unknown to me by 
 name and face — to tell them what I have found 
 and where I have found it — health, peace, and 
 the new vigor which comes from restful days 
 and quiet nights, filled through all their dewy 
 hours with sweet sleep — " sleep which knits 
 up the ravelled sleave of care," and pleasures 
 which stimulate the frame and warm the 
 blood like ancient wine. And to all such I say. 
 Come to Lake Champlain and spend the sum- 
 mer here. You who love the water, send up your 
 boats and yachts or build them here, and I will 
 warrant you such pleasant and spirited yacht- 
 ing as is rarely found. You who love the tent 
 and social camp-fire, verily is there not room 
 here for an army of tents, and yet not one 
 shall see the other ; you who need the rest and 
 health found in pure, cool mountain air, come 
 to the base of these hills, amid whose tops God 
 generates the ozone of life, and, floating on the 
 level water, breathe its vigor in. 
 
152 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 The extraordinary facilities which Lake 
 Champlain offers the yachtsman in his enjoy- 
 ment of his favorite pastime are not unknown 
 or unappreciated by many ; but to thousands 
 they are unknown, and hence this publishment. 
 
 It is beyond question the safest sailing and 
 cruising ground that the amateur yachtsman 
 can find. Here he can serve his apprenticeship 
 to skill under the best possible conditions. 
 First and foremost, it is a tideless water. The 
 given sailing depth on reef and shoal, in chan- 
 nel and mouth of rivers, is a constant one. 
 Where the yachtsman can go in the morning 
 he can go at midday and in the moon-lighted 
 evening ; in calm or stormy weather. Those 
 who, as amateurs and strangers, have sailed the 
 Atlantic coast or the lower St. Lawrence, with 
 its ebb and flood of from ten to fifteen feet, 
 know how to appreciate this fact in its relation 
 to safety and absence of anxiety on the part of 
 a skipper. Furthermore Lake Champlain is 
 long and wide enough for cruising and racing 
 both. Its bays are deep and its islands many. 
 Squalls are infrequent and cannot approach the 
 lake without making plain revelation of their 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 153 
 
 approach. Tn case of need, refuge is easily and 
 quickly found behind island or within bay. A 
 fool, it is said, can capsize a boat even behind 
 a breakwater or within a basin, but he who 
 allows any serious accident to befall his yacht 
 on Champlain must be a genius of idiocy. 
 There has never been an accident to a yacht 
 handled by a yachtsman on the lake within my 
 knowledge, and I never expect there will be. 
 
 The yachting interest of the lake finds its 
 natural centre at Burlington. In front of this 
 city the lake is wide and free of all obstruc- 
 tions. Here a triangular race of thirty miles 
 can be sailed with every yacht, from start to 
 finish, under the gazer's eye — a very rara con- 
 dition in regattas. Indeed, we know no other 
 course in front of a city of which this state- 
 ment can be made. On a pier at the foot of 
 the principal street of the city, within a few 
 rods of the Central Vermont Depot and the 
 wharf of the Champlain Transportation Com- 
 pany, the Lake Champlain Yacht Club has 
 erected its large and commodious clubhouse. 
 No other clubhouse on the continent gives to its 
 members and their guests such a magnificent 
 
164 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 vision of natural loveliness and sublimity. 
 The lake rolls its waves to its doors, and the 
 motion of its water gives animation to the 
 scene. From its wide, high balconies the eye 
 beholds a spectacle of unrivalled loveliness and 
 majesty. Directly in front and stretching far 
 to right and left the lake itself, with glint of 
 sun by day and gleam of stars by night, unrolls 
 its crystal spaces. To the left, in plain view, 
 stands Mohawk Eock, dumb reminder of a de- 
 parted race and immemorial years. To the 
 right is Bluff Point, to which geologists go to 
 translate the messages of eternity to time. In 
 the middle of the lake the islands of the Foiir 
 Winds ride at anchor. The nighest point of 
 the farther shore is that one on which Cham- 
 plain shot the captive Iroquois chief to save 
 him from further torture by his Algonquin con- 
 querors. To the northward, in clear view, Point 
 Trembleau thrusts its rocky promontory out into 
 the murmuring water, and with its beach of 
 iron sand gives to the lake the greeting of the 
 mountains. While in the west the Adirondack 
 peaks — a hundred summits crowding upward 
 in confusion — penetrate the clear atmosphere 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 155 
 
 and serrate the blue of the farther sky with the 
 edges of their dark formation. To one who 
 admires the beautiful in nature it is worth the 
 ride of a thousand miles to enjoy for a single 
 day and evening the freedom of the balconies 
 and the observation roof of the clubhouse of 
 the Lake Champlain Yacht Club at Burlington. 
 The club was founded in 1887, and for other 
 uses than mere aquatic sports demand. It was 
 felt by its founders that Lake Champlain would 
 soon attract national attention. The martial 
 splendor of its history and the momentous 
 political significance of the glorious drama, the 
 various and exciting scenes of which had all 
 been played upon its waters and its shores, 
 would compel the interest and presence of 
 thousands upon thousands. The yachtsman, 
 canoeist, and angler would come as a matter of 
 course ; but these would constitute but a frac- 
 tion of the multitude that would visit this most 
 lovely and historic section of the United States 
 — a section where nature seems to have entered 
 into rivalry with tradition and history to de- 
 monstrate which might exert the strongest 
 influence on the intelligent iand travelling por- 
 
156 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 tion of mankind. As well might Lexington, 
 Bunker Hill, and Plymouth Rock remain un- 
 visited, as that Isle La Motte, Colchester Point, 
 Plattsburg, Valcour, Crown Point, Ticonder- 
 oga, and Burlington Bay be much longer 
 neglected by the students of American history 
 and the tourists of the country. They fully ap- 
 prehended also the significance of its geograph- 
 ical location — that it lay at the centre, from 
 east to west, of that remarkable parallelogram 
 of country which begins with Niagara and the 
 Thousand Isles and ends at Bar Harbor and 
 Mount Desert, and within which, beside these 
 famous localities and resorts of pleasure, are 
 grouped also the Adirondacks and the Chateau- 
 gay region, the Horicon and Saratoga Springs, 
 the Green Mountains and the upper Connecti- 
 cut, the world-advertised White Hills, the lakes 
 of Maine, and the justly celebrated fountain of 
 health at Poland Springs ; and connected with 
 these famous resorts more than five hundred 
 hotels, to which the visiting guests annually 
 pay a tribute of more than fifteen millions of 
 dollars. 
 
 The gentlemen who founded the Lake Cham- 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 167 
 
 plain Yacht Club saw these facts, and that the 
 lake on which they lived was the natural and 
 magnificent centre of this marvellous stretch 
 of country in which Nature, in rivalry with 
 herself, has crowded every variety of scenery 
 and every charm that can attract the tourist. 
 Into this noted parallelogram of space she has 
 grouped her cataracts and waterfalls ; her 
 gorges and chasms ; her mountains and valleys ; 
 her lakes and rivers; stocked these with fish, and 
 the forest spaces with game ; and over all, they 
 perceived. Tradition had thrown the glamour 
 of her charm, and that upon the vast and 
 gloomy front of prehistoric times History had 
 blazoned the vivid record of glorious transac- 
 tions. Apprehending these things, they felt that 
 the God who created this continent and grouped 
 its marvels in such close connection had, in this 
 eastern section of it, located the Great National 
 Park of the Republic and made Lake Champlain 
 the natural and appropriate centre and central 
 charm of it. 
 
 The club, the originating and establishing 
 motive of which sprang from such a clear and 
 noble apprehension, was not created to serve a 
 
158 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 local purpose or encourage one fashion of recrea- 
 tion, however manly and desirable ; but rather 
 to disseminate needed and quickening informa- 
 tion to the country, and to serve the highest 
 purposes of patriotism and American social life. 
 Hence its membership was limited to no class 
 or locality, nor to national lines ; for it was felt 
 by the originators of the club that the beauty 
 of the lake was of so high an order, and its 
 historic associations so influential and far-reach- 
 ing, as judged in the light of our developing 
 civilization, that in the truest sense of it, as of 
 no other body of water on the continent, it 
 belonged to the entire continent and the whole 
 world. 
 
 Its membership was from the beginning, and 
 is still, cosmopolitan. It is naturally composed 
 of gentlemen of intelligence, public spirit and 
 standing. Many of its members are men of 
 national fame. Its annual dues are too slight 
 to be burdensome to any, but ample, from the 
 largeness of its membership, for all purposes of 
 needed revenue. As regards yachts and yacht- 
 ing, it has a fleet of nearly forty well-built 
 boats, which is rapidly increasing. Its sailing 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 159 
 
 section is composed of catboats, sharpies, 
 Burgess-modelled sloops, and English cutters; 
 nearly all of them new boats and of much larger 
 size than is generally found in amateur clubs. 
 Its clubhouse is not the resort of yachtsmen 
 and canoeists alone, but even in a greater degree 
 of ladies and gentlemen who love the sight of 
 rolling and rippling water ; of passing sails and 
 steamers ; of green islands and majestic moun- 
 tains ; the shady balcony and cool currents of 
 wind ; cheerful companionship and restful quiet. 
 Its rooms and wide verandas are opened and 
 maintained by the members as a favorite noon- 
 day and evening resort, a quiet, peaceful loung- 
 ing-place and restful refuge from office rush 
 and noisy hotel for themselves and their guests. 
 A more delightful one might not be imagined. 
 
 Hospitality is the characteristic of American 
 club life, and especially of yachting-club life, 
 and the officers and local members of this club 
 are not behind their brother clubmen in the 
 exercise of this most ancient and honorable of 
 virtues. Not only do all visiting yachtsmen, 
 but all travellers and tourists who visit this re- 
 markable region, receive every possible courtesy 
 
160 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 at their hands. The club might almost be 
 called a Bureau of Information in the interest 
 of visitors, so willing are its local officers and 
 members to assist the transient guest of the 
 city with all needed knowledge. 
 
 I publish in this connection the list of the 
 officers of the club, that all who may wish to 
 correspond with them may know whom to 
 address. It is their desire, as it is of the entire 
 body of the membership of the club, that it 
 should receive additions from every State of the 
 Union and every Province of Canada ; and they 
 do, through my words, make public this desire, 
 and cordially invite all who intend to visit Lake 
 Champlain or would assist them in rendering 
 services to those who do visit it, to unite them- 
 selves to the club, that they and their friends 
 may enjoy its privileges and assist them in 
 their efforts to serve the public with courteous 
 assistance and fitting hospitality. 
 
 OFFICERS OF THE CLUB. 
 
 Commodore, W. Seward Webb; vice-commo- 
 dore, W. A. Crombie ; president, J. Gregory 
 Smith ; first vice-president, Elias Lyman ; second 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 161 
 
 vice-president, H. LeGrand Cannon ; secretary, 
 Joseph Auld ; treasurer, Horatio Hickok ; meas- 
 urer, A. C. Tuttle ; fleet captain, Horatio 
 Loomis ; fleet surgeon, A. P. Grinnell, M.D. 
 Executive Committee: Horatio Hickok, W. H. 
 H. Murray, A. C. Tuttle, F. W. Smith, D. W. 
 Robinson, C. F. Carter, N. F. Merrill, Elias 
 Lyman, R. G. Severson, Joseph Auld, Alvaro 
 Adsit, J. A. Averill, Jacob G. Sande^-s, A. C. 
 Whiting, H. M. Phelps, C. A. Murray, F. E. 
 Smith, E. C. Smith, S. W. Cummings, J. G. 
 Hindes, H. H. Noble, Walter C. Witherbee, A. 
 G. Whittemore, W. A. Crombie, Theodore S. 
 Peck, H. J. Brookes, H. LeGrand Cannon, F. J. 
 Hawley, J. B. Tresidder, L. C. Grant, T. P. W. 
 Rogers, Samuel Keyser. Regatta Committee: 
 L. C. Grant, Chester Griswold, A. C. Whiting, 
 Horace J. Brookes, M. B. Adams. House Com- 
 m,ittee : H. LeGrand Cannon, W. A. Crombie, 
 T. P. W. Rogers. Membership Committee: 
 Horatio Hickok, Elias Lyman, A. C. Whiting, 
 F. W. Smith, W. H. H. Murray. Committee on 
 Printing : Horatio Hickok, Joseph Auld, A. G. 
 Whittemore. 
 
162 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 SAILING DIRECTIONS. 
 
 FROM BURLINGTON GOING NORTH. 
 
 Opposite Burlington are no obstructions that 
 are not visible in daylight. 
 
 Juniper Island (lighthouse). — To the south 
 is Juniper Reef (buoyed) ; eight feet on reef at 
 low water ; buoy on northwest corner ; can go 
 close to it ; to the south go one-third of a mile, 
 no nearer to buoy. 
 
 Shelburn Bay. — Two miles of safe sailing; 
 free of reefs. North of the mouth of this bay, 
 near the centre of the entrance, a half-mile to 
 the north, is Proctor's Reef ; buoy on northwest 
 corner. Can sail near the buoy, but give a 
 quarter of a mile margin if you go to the south 
 of it. 
 
 Juniper Island Reef. — Running out toward 
 Mohawk Rock a third of a mile ; advise not 
 coasting too near the island unless with pilot. 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 163 
 
 Four Brothers. — Southwest from Burlington, 
 four miles distance. Give these a quarter of a 
 mile berth to the south, east, and west ; to the 
 north three-quarters of a mile, for in that 
 direction there are three reefs, called " Three 
 Bunches" {not huoyed). These reefs have at 
 least six feet of Avater on them. Yachts can 
 land safely on the Brothers in quiet weather. 
 These islands are pleasant ones to visit, and 
 from them a superb view of the lake can be 
 had in all directions. 
 
 West by north, almost directly opposite 
 Burlington, is Willsborough Point, and west of 
 the point is the entrance to Willsborough Bay. 
 This bay is about five miles in depth. At the 
 head stands the village of Willsborough. The 
 entrance is free from all obstructions ; large 
 yachts can enter and sail the bay to its head 
 safely. This is a beautiful sheet of water, very 
 much land-locked and secluded, so that it in 
 fact seems like a separate lake. 
 
 Fort Douglas is north of Willsborough Bay 
 some three and a half miles, and has a dock at 
 which yachts could be moored in safety. 
 
 Schuyler's Island (Isle Chapon, by the French) 
 
164 LAKE CHAJIPLAIN. 
 
 is to the northeast, and water is of good depth 
 between it and the mainland. 
 
 Schuyler s Reef is to the southeast of the 
 island, some mile and a quarter. It is buoyed 
 on the east side. In coasting give a third of a 
 mile to this reef. About six feet of water is 
 on it, so that to small yachts no danger may be 
 apprehended in good weather sailing nearer. 
 
 Ferris Rock is northeast of Schuyler's Island 
 about one and a half miles. It is buoyed ; 
 buoy is at the centre. A yacht can sail within 
 a hundred feet of it safely. 
 
 Point Tremhleau is a bold, rocky projection 
 northwest of Schuyler's Island, on mainland, 
 and has good depth of water in front of it. 
 
 Port Kent, one mile to the north, has a good 
 mooring basin at the dock. The bay between 
 the dock and Point Trembleau is not good 
 anchoring-ground ; plenty of water, but hard 
 bottom. Of course, with a northwest or south 
 wind, yachts would find excellent refuge there, 
 but should the wind shift to the east or north- 
 east or southeast, anchors would not hold, and 
 to escape going ashore a yacht would have to 
 get under way. At Port Douglas, or, better 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 165 
 
 yet, in Willsborough Bay, in such an event, a 
 yacht could find the best of refuge ; or, going 
 behind Valcour Island, in case the wind was 
 from the east or southeast, a yacht would find 
 the safest of accommodation. 
 
 North of Port Kent, some two miles, is a 
 bank of sand (buoyed) ; small yachts can go 
 inside of it, but it is safer to stand outside of it. 
 
 Au Sable Point is three miles and more to 
 the north of Port Kent. Southeast of the 
 point, a quarter of a mile from the shore, is a 
 buoy ; can sail near it safely, but if the wind is 
 strong from north or east better stand out a 
 little. 
 
 Sailing north from Au Sable Point, lay your 
 course centrally between Valcoiar Island and 
 mainland until you come to the northwest 
 point of the island, when you will find — two- 
 thirds the distance from the island to main 
 shore — a reef (buoyed), with five feet of water 
 on it. Water is of good depth on either side. 
 
 Bluff Point is a projection of mainland 
 immediately to the north, and is now made a 
 commanding object by the magnificent hotel 
 recently built upon it. 
 
166 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 Crab Island. — Two miles from north end 
 of Valcour Island, due north, is Crab Island. 
 Give this island a berth of nearly a quarter of 
 a mile all round it. 
 
 Coming back to Valcour Island, we would 
 say, — 
 
 Garden Island is to the south of Valcour a 
 half a mile, and a quarter of a mile east of 
 Garden Island is Garden Island Ledge. This 
 has eight feet of water ; safe sailing all round 
 both island and ledge. 
 
 On the east side of Valcour Island, about a 
 third of the distance from the southern end, is 
 Smuggler's Cove. This is a small recess of 
 water with a narrow entrance. There is from 
 five to six feet of water in this cove. It is a 
 pretty, secluded spot to lunch or camp in, and 
 a small yacht would find it a very safe and 
 pleasant mooring-ground. There is a little 
 spring of water here, very agreeable, and handy 
 for picknickers. 
 
 Sloop Cove is located half-way of the island 
 of Valcour, on the east side. It has only twoDr 
 three feet of water in it, and hence is not safe 
 to enter unless in case of small, light-draft 
 boats and still weather. 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 167 
 
 North of Sloop Cove, about a mile distant, is 
 a rock separated by a short distance from main 
 shore. We call attention to this rock because 
 to the north of it, about a quarter of a mile, is 
 a reef (not buoyed). On it is five and a half 
 feet of water. This reef is small in extent. 
 With the exception of this unbuoyed reef, the 
 entire east side of Valcour Island can be coasted 
 by yachts of good size safely. 
 
 From Valcour Island to Plattsburg is 
 unobstructed sailing (excepting Crab Island, 
 previously mentioned). The entrance to Platts- 
 burg Harbor, viz., inside the breakwater, is 
 plain sailing, and the yachtsman needs no 
 directions from me. 
 
 Cumberland Bay, lying between Plattsburg 
 and Cumberland Head, is not adapted for 
 yachts on the western half of it. The eastern 
 half gives good water. Nevertheless, in case of 
 a stiff southerly wind I would not advise sailing 
 in this bay. Better stand out to the south of" 
 Cumberland Head, where the courses are free 
 of all obstruction. 
 
 It is well for skippers of small yachts to 
 bear in mind that in case of strong southerly 
 
168 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 winds the stretch south of Cumberland Head 
 for ten miles is the roughest on the lake. Such 
 a wind blows with unobstructed sweep for 
 nearly thirty miles down the lake. Salt-water 
 yachtsmen are inclined to underrate the capa- 
 city of inland water to test the seagoing ability 
 of a craft or the skill of a skipper, but we who 
 sail Champlain — and some of us were born on 
 the coast and know what "rough water" is — 
 can testify that a skipper who beats his boat up 
 the lake from Plattsburg to Burlington with 
 even half a gale blowing from the south will 
 have a wet boat and wet sails too before he has 
 passed Colchester Reef. We, therefore, regard- 
 ing safety as the first thing to consider in pleas- 
 ure yachts, advise all small yachts to be careful 
 of this stretch of water in stronsj southerlv 
 winds. 
 
 Gravelly Point is north of Cumberland Head 
 some two miles. It is easily recognized by the 
 gravelly shale that composes the shore. We 
 call attention to it because from all southerly 
 and western and northwest wind, it makes a 
 very fine anchorage ground. The bottom is a 
 good holding one, and yachts can lie close in 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 169 
 
 within two hundred feet of the beach in safety. 
 But in case the wind shifts to the east or north 
 or northeast, the skipper must move out. In 
 this case he finds a safe and easy run round 
 Cumberland Head to Plattsburg. 
 
 From Gravelly Point coasting north six miles 
 brings you to the Light Tower (Point au Roche), 
 and to it is clean sailing with good water. Just 
 opposite the Light (half a mile) is Point au 
 Roche Reef, in which is seven feet of water with 
 good depth on either side. 
 
 Isle La Motte is north of Point au Roche 
 Light some two miles. Take the west side and 
 you will find good water without obstruction 
 until you come to the north end of the island, 
 where you must bear in mind 
 
 Point au Fer. — This is one mile to the north 
 of the Light Tower, on the north end of the 
 island. It is nearly three-fourths of a mile 
 long, and should be given a good margin. But 
 there is nearly a mile width of good sailing 
 water between it and the island, so no skipper 
 needs feel troubled. 
 
 After passing this reef, the course lies open 
 to you to Rouse s Point. You can sail half a 
 
170 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 mile or so from the shore and feel that you have 
 goodly space of good water on either hand. At 
 Rouse's Point is good anchorage and the north- 
 ernmost one of the lake. 
 
 We will now return to Burlington. 
 
 Shelburn Bay is about three miles from the 
 clubhouse, and is about two miles deep. It is 
 free of shoals and reefs and is good sailing 
 ground. Good-sized yachts can be sailed to 
 within one-fourth of a mile of its end without 
 danger. If the wind is from the northwest and 
 strong, the water in the bay is quite rough, and 
 in beating back a small sailboat should be care- 
 fully handled. 
 
 Saxtons Reef is about one and a half miles 
 south of Shelburn Point, and half a mile from 
 shore. It is buoyed on west side. There is 
 eight feet of water on the one part of it and 
 eleven feet on the other. It is safe to go within 
 forty rods on either side of it. 
 
 Quaker Smith's Reef is opposite the point of 
 that name and some one and a half miles from 
 Saxton's Reef, bearing south by west from it. 
 It is about three-fourths of a mile from the 
 shore, and has seven feet of water on it. It is 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 171 
 
 buoyed and is of small extent. It is safe to go 
 nigh to it. 
 
 Opposite Quaker Smith's Reef is the Bluff, 
 and from said bluff there stretches out to 
 the west a shoal for nearly one-fourth of a 
 mile. The point of the shoal has only five and a 
 half feet in it, and should therefore be borne in 
 mind by cruising parties, especially if they are 
 making for 
 
 Quaker Smith's Bay. — This bay is back of 
 the point of the same name, and makes excel- 
 lent anchorage ground for yachts of any size, 
 as it has depth of water from ten to twenty 
 feet and good bottom. It is also perfectly pro- 
 tected from all winds, and has a wide, easy 
 entrance. In entering this bay bear in mind 
 that to the south and east some one-fourth of a 
 mile is a reef with only some five and six feet 
 of water on it. 
 
 This bay is the harbor where W. S. Webb, 
 Commodore of the Champlain Yacht Club, moors 
 his several yachts. And during the summer 
 the reef alluded to is buoyed by his care ; but 
 the government has no buoy on it. 
 
 From Quaker Smith's Point to Sloop Island, 
 
172 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 opposite Essex, there are no obstructions of any 
 sort. 
 
 About five miles south of Sloop Island some 
 mile and more you come to Cedar Beach, a 
 favorite resort of campers and picnickers. 
 
 Pickett Island, Cedar Island, and Gardiner 
 Island, lie south of Cedar Beach, between it and 
 Thompson's Point. East of Gardiner Island, 
 which is the largest of the three, is good 
 anchorage for all winds, and there is good depth 
 of water to get in and out of this fine harbor, 
 so that no one need fear to push for it if in any 
 stress. 
 
 Thompsons Point is opposite Cloven Rock, 
 and is a resort of many campers and cottagers. 
 The waters around it are well stocked with fish, 
 and anglers find much excellent sport here- 
 abouts. Perhaps there is no place on the lake 
 which is more liked by those who are familiar 
 with the beauty and sporting facilities of this 
 locality than Thompson's Point and its adjoin- 
 ing waters. 
 
 Otter Creek is some three miles south of 
 Thompson's Point. This creek or river, for in 
 all rights it is a river, being the longest one in 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 173 
 
 Vermont, and navigable to ships of good size as 
 far up as the Falls at Vergennes, eight miles, 
 is noted in history. Here Arnold, when pressed 
 by the pursuing British fleet, ran his flagship 
 ashore and set her on fire, escaping with his crew 
 overland to Crown Point. Fort Cassin stands 
 at the mouth of the river and did good service 
 in its day. It was in this river that Mac- 
 donough built and fitted out his fleet with 
 which he won his noted victory of Plattsburg. 
 But this river is not an easy one for a stranger 
 to enter from the lake, and I would not advise a 
 yachtsman to attempt it without a local pilot or 
 in clear and quiet weather, when he might 
 " feel " his way safely in. 
 
 South of this point I need give no direction, 
 as the lake is open and clear of all dangerous 
 places to Ticonderoga. It is, in fact, a contin- 
 uous harbor, and all a skipper has to do is " not 
 to sail into the fences," as the local saying is. 
 
 We will now begin to cruise northward. 
 Split Bock, once called, far more eupho- 
 niously. Cloven Rock, is a curiosity, and savants 
 
174 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 differ as to its origin. Historically it has been 
 mistaken by many writers for Mohawk Mock, 
 which stands in Burlington Bay. Historically 
 there is no significance to Cloven Rock what- 
 ever, and it is interesting only as a curious 
 freak of nature. 
 
 Whalons Bay is immediately north of it, and 
 is good for all winds save northerly ones. 
 From these Gardiner Island, right opposite, is 
 excellent mooring-ground. 
 
 Cruising northward, you come to Essex, where 
 ample accommodation for yachts and yachts- 
 men will be found. 
 
 Bouquet River lies north of Essex some 
 three miles. Here a sandbar stretches some 
 one-half mile from its mouth. A yacht draw- 
 ing six feet should give a good half-mile 
 from the shore to be safe. Indeed, in cruising, 
 no skipper should run in nearer than this dis- 
 tance between Cloven Rock and Willsborough 
 Point, unless slowly feeling his way in on some 
 quiet day. But, with this caution, a yacht has 
 a free run from Cloven Rock until it comes to 
 the Four Brothers, opposite Burlington, which 
 we have already described. 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 176 
 
 SAILING NORTH FROM BURLINGTON ON THE 
 EAST SIDE OF THE LAKE. 
 
 Apple-Tree Shoals are two and one-fourth 
 miles from the clubhouse, northwest, and are 
 southeast from Apple-Tree Point, about three- 
 fourths of a mile. Buoy on northwest corner. 
 They stretch southeast from the buoy some 
 forty rods. Depth of water five and a half feet. 
 
 Apple- Tree Point should be allowed one-eighth 
 of a mile. 
 
 Wlnooski River enters the lake some two 
 miles north of Apple-Tree Point. No yacht 
 without pilot should seek to enter, I mean even 
 small yachts, because of a wide deposit of sand 
 that has been delivered into the lake from the 
 river, and makes it inaccessible. In fact, this 
 deposit of sand extends from Apple-Tree Point 
 clean round to Colchester Point, and northward 
 from Colchester Point two and a half miles 
 farther. In cruising, no yacht should be carried 
 within a line drawn from Apple-Tree Point to 
 Colchester Point. It should be also borne in 
 mind, in case of a southerly wind, that this is a 
 bad lee shore and should be avoided. 
 
176 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 Good fishing is found off the mouth of and 
 in Winooski River. This river is a delightful 
 one to boat on up to the rapids near Winooski 
 village. There is no good reason to doubt that 
 Champlain in his first exploration of the lake 
 entered the Winooski and visited the falls ; and 
 it was doubtless from Lone Rock Point or Apple- 
 Tree Point that his red associates pointed out to 
 him the terrible Mohawk Rock, beyond which 
 they must not go, unless with the utmost cau- 
 tion and prepared for attack. 
 
 In cruising from Burlington northward a 
 yacht should, from Apple-Tree Point, lay its 
 course to the west of Colchester Shoals until it 
 commands a view of Cumberland Head. These 
 shoals are buoyed on the northern point of them 
 and extend from the buoy about one-half mile 
 to the south and east of it. At low ^ water 
 these shoals are visible, but at high water they 
 are covered. 
 
 1 We use tlie terms high and low water not in reference to any 
 tide, of course, but to the fact that in the spring of the year the 
 water in the lake is higher by some six or seven feet than it is later 
 in the season. The depth of water as marked by us in these notes 
 always refers to the depth when the water of the lake is at its low- 
 est point. 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 177 
 
 Colchester Beef is northeast of the Shoals 
 about three-fourths of a mile. It is a columnar 
 rock of imposing height, and on its crest is a 
 lighthouse. In pleasant or calm weather the 
 rock can be approached safely by small boats. 
 By an iron ladder visitors can reach the keeper's 
 lodge, and from it a lovely view of the lake is 
 obtainable. 
 
 Hog-Back Beef is half a mile to the north- 
 east of the Light Station. It is buoyed. The 
 buoy is on the northwest corner. The reef is 
 not of large extent, and nearly if not quite visi- 
 ble at low water. 
 
 Hog-Back Island is north of this reef one- 
 fourth of a mile, and east of this, stretching to 
 the north two and a fourth miles, is the projec- 
 tion of Sandy Shoals, before alluded to. 
 
 We advise that in cruising all yachts keep to 
 the west of Colchester Reef, unless under pilot- 
 age. Although there is a good passage between 
 these several obstructions above mentioned to 
 one who knows the waters, nevertheless, as 
 there is little distance saved, it is better to 
 stand out to the west of them all. 
 
 Jones Bock is north of Colchester Light 
 
178 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 some two miles, due north. It is not buoyed, 
 and has six feet of water on it. 
 
 Stave Island Ledge is one-half a mile north 
 of this with five feet of water on it. No buoy. 
 
 Stave Island is one-half mile north of this. 
 
 Carlton Prize is three-fourths of a mile north. 
 Due north of Stave Island and northwest of 
 this, one-fourth of a mile, is Providence Island. 
 
 Between Stave Island and Providence Island 
 is good depth of water, and no obstructions ex- 
 cept Carlton's Prize (visible). 
 
 East of Providence Island and near to it is 
 good anchorage against all winds. 
 
 Mallei's Bay is a lovely bit of water, and its 
 shores are much frequented and admired. But 
 off the entrance are the several reefs and 
 shoals above mentioned, making it difficult of 
 access to a stranger. We advise yachtsmen 
 who desire to visit this beautiful section of the 
 lake to take a pilot at Burlington for the cruise. 
 The officers and local members of the Lake 
 Champlain Yacht Club are always glad to assist 
 visiting yachtsmen in every way, and good local 
 pilots will be commended to them on applica- 
 tion. 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 179 
 
 Providence Island is not only a good anchor- 
 age ground if caught in a squall or storm, but 
 is provided with a hotel, and visitors will find 
 not only accommodation as regular guests, but 
 also supplies such as are needed on a cruise or in 
 camp. 
 
 The outlet from the moorings at Providence 
 Island going northward is a good one although 
 not wide, and through it a yacht can pass to the 
 north into wide waters free of all obstructions 
 until it comes to 
 
 Sister Island Beef, one-fourth of a mile 
 southeast of the South Sister Island. This reef 
 is buoyed at the west end, is not large, and has 
 good water on all sides. 
 
 South Sister Island is not to be approached 
 either on the north or south of it very closely ; 
 and the same can be said of 
 
 North Sister Island, southeast of which are 
 two bunches of rock (not buoyed), so that, in 
 fact, a skipper should not sail either near to or 
 between these islands unless perfectly familiar 
 with the ground. If he is cruising to the north 
 of the Gut, he should keep to the west of these 
 islands, where he will find open water to Isle La 
 
180 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 Motte, with the exception of Point au Roche 
 Reef, previously mentioned. But if he is bound 
 for St. Albans Bay, or Maquam Bay, or wishes to 
 cruise down the east side of North Hero and 
 must pass through the Gut, he should sail a 
 course intermediate between Sister Islands and 
 the shore of South Hero, which will bring him 
 safely to the entrance of the Gut off Long Point. 
 From this point I decline to give farther 
 direction, not wishing to take the responsibility. 
 The passage of the Gut from Long Point to 
 Knight's Point is a blind and crooked one and 
 not to be attempted by a skipper unless familiar 
 with the ground. In case of fair weather, light 
 wind, and a small yacht, no doubt the passage 
 might be threaded safely ; but in case of a larger 
 yacht or strong breeze or of a squall the pass- 
 age, under any circumstances, is not an easy one 
 to make, and unless under good pilotage shoiild 
 never be attempted. For this northern cruise, 
 which in many respects is by far the most inter- 
 esting one that the lake presents, all visiting 
 yachtsmen would do well to put themselves in 
 communication with the officers of the Cham- 
 plain Yacht Club at Burlington, and through 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 181 
 
 them obtain a competent pilot. This is the wise 
 and safe course to pursue, and we earnestly com- 
 mend it to all who sail Lake Champlain. 
 
 Tlie Middle Reef — sailors know it as Bull 
 Reef — is north of Sister Islands half a mile, and 
 consists of two parts, South and North Bunch. 
 There is good (narrow) water between them as 
 there is good water between them and the North 
 Hero shore, but the passage is narrow, and be- 
 tween the North Reef and North Hero shore not 
 over one-fourth of a mile. In cruising north 
 the course should be laid to the west of these 
 islands and reefs. By doing this the run is 
 made without obstructions from Providence 
 Island to the south end of Isle La Motte, off the 
 south end of which is 
 
 mil's Island, between which and the shore 
 is a small reef with only three feet of water, 
 nearly midway between the island and Isle La 
 Motte. 
 
 To the north of east, one-fourth of a mile 
 from it, is a small reef with seven and a half feet 
 on it, and to the southeast of Hill's Island half 
 a mile distant is a reef (buoyed) with five feet 
 on it. 
 
182 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 Towns Reef is about three-fourths of a mile 
 from Hill's Inland, bearing nearly southeast (not 
 buoyed by government, a private buoy may be 
 on it in summer). It is some one-fourth of a 
 mile from the shore of North Hero and about 
 three-fourths of a mile southwest of Pelot's Point. 
 
 Horse-Slioe Shoal is equidistant between Isle 
 La Motte and the entrance to Missisquoi Bay. 
 It is a long, narrow shoal, stretching nearly 
 north and south, about a mile long. It is not 
 buoyed nor is it visible unless in exceptional cir- 
 cumstances and to good eyes. But by remem- 
 bering that it lies nearly equidistant between the 
 two shores, and that good water is on either side 
 of it, it is not difficult to pass. 
 
 To the north of this is open water until you 
 come to 
 
 Reynolds Point, where is the swinging bridge 
 which is opened for the passage of crafts. From 
 this point lay your course due north, bearing 
 perhaps a trifle to the west for the dock at 
 Rouse's Point, to which point we conducted you 
 safely in our cruise down the western shore of 
 the lake ; and where, with flag honors, we leave 
 you. 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 183 
 
 CRUISING EAST OP NORTH HERO. 
 
 Pelofs Point is the entrance to Missisquoi 
 Bay from the western side of North Hero, and 
 is opposite the southern portion of Isle La 
 Motte. The entrance to the Alburgh Passage to 
 the Bag, as it is called, is between Pelot's Point 
 and Alburgh Point opposite, to the north, and is 
 not difficult. There is a shoal (buoy on the 
 south end) nearly equidistant between the two 
 points, on which is seven feet of water. If the 
 yacht draws more water than this, or over five 
 feet, the course should be laid between the buoy 
 and Pelot's Point to the south of it, a passage of 
 good water about one-fourth of a mile in width. 
 
 Pelofs Bay lies within the mouth of the pass- 
 age to the south, and is the mooring-ground of 
 Mr. Saunders of Albany, N. Y., who has a 
 fine summer camp on Pelot's Point, on the west 
 side of the bay. In this bay is excellent mooring- 
 ground, protected from all winds. 
 
 Alburg Passage is the narrow stretch of 
 water lying between Alburg Tongue and North 
 Hero, leading into Missisquoi Bay, and is free of 
 obstructions until you come to the railroad 
 
184 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 bridge, where there is a draw. North of the 
 draw a mile or more is the 
 
 Alhurgh Hotel, or Alburgh Springs Hotel, 
 which is so well and favorably known that I 
 need not do more than thus mention it. 
 
 From this hotel the course bears north by east 
 until you enter the main body of Missisquoi Bay, 
 when the course curves to the east and south 
 until you come to the famous 
 
 High-Gate Springs Hotel, located at the south- 
 ern extremity of the bay, and whence you will 
 naturally begin your return cruise, which can be 
 by the same course you entered or- through 
 Maquam Bay and the large body of water east 
 of North Hero. 
 
 There is no question but that the wide and 
 long stretch of water east of the two Heroes is 
 one of the most lovely and picturesque on Lake 
 Champlain. It also abounds with fish, and by 
 many is regarded as the best black-bass ground 
 in the lake. It is beautifully studded with 
 islands, and bounded with lovely shores, and 
 should be visited by all yachtsmen and tourists. 
 But we do not feel like attempting a verbal 
 pilotage of this expanse of water, for fear that. 
 
YACHTING FACILITIES. 185 
 
 trusting to it or encouraged to go beyond the 
 courses marked out by us, some misadventure 
 should happen. We earnestly recommend all to 
 visit this delightful section of the lake, and at 
 the same time as earnestly advise local pilotage 
 until the visiting yachtsmen learn the water for 
 themselves. As we have before said, the officers 
 of the Lake Champlain Yacht Club at Bur- 
 lington will gladly supply all needed information 
 or assistance to all visitors seeking it. 
 
PART IV. 
 
 HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES AND FACTS 
 CONNECTED WITH THE SHORES OF LAKE 
 CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 A QUARTER of a century has passed since my 
 studentship of Lake Champlain and its shores 
 began, and the farther my investigations were 
 pushed the more was I astonished at the wealth 
 of interesting material which lay scattered about 
 on all sides, waiting to be collected and properly 
 arranged for popular perusal. The period of 
 time to be investigated in the interest of his- 
 torical knowledge covers nearly three centuries, 
 and during all these three hundred years there 
 is not one of the multitude of events which 
 have happened on this lake which has not been 
 closely connected with, and had a more or less 
 powerful influence upon, the course and develop- 
 ment of American history. The destiny of 
 Canada and the United States alike was decided 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 187 
 
 by what occurred on its waters and shores, and 
 yet no adequate examination into or presenta- 
 tion of these doings has ever been made by an 
 American writer. The absence of such a state- 
 ment as tlie subject demands seems to me to be 
 a matter of such poignant regret as may not 
 be felt or gauged by one unless he has given 
 some attention to it and is measurably well 
 informed in respect to the long and persistent 
 struggle in which France and England engaged 
 for the possession of the continent, and which, 
 for the most part, was fought out on this lake. 
 
 It was my intention, in the closing section of 
 this little volume, to have drawn at least a 
 silhouette portrait of this momentous contest, 
 that my readers might have a partial knowledge 
 of what it meant to them : of its connection 
 with American liberty and civilization, and how 
 it made Lexington, Bunker Hill, Yorktown, 
 free schools and free churches, possible. But 
 my publisher cannot accommodate me with the 
 space which the briefest possible presentation of 
 the subject would require, and hence I must 
 forego the attempt. It only remains for me to 
 fill the few pages at my command with such 
 
188 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 selections from a mass of notes and data I have 
 made and collected as seem most likely, in a 
 detached and disconnected form, to interest my 
 readers. I imagine that to some — not the least 
 discerning — these abbreviated notes, jottings, 
 and memoranda of events, persons, and things 
 will make the most interesting and valuable 
 pages of this little book. 
 
 AENOLD NOT AT TICONDEROGA WHEN CAPTURED 
 BY ETHAN ALLEN. 
 
 It is in the interest of the facts of history 
 that I record my conviction that Arnold was 
 not with Allen and his party at the capture 
 of Ticonderoga, and did not arrive there until 
 several days after its capture. I am well aware 
 that Ira Allen, in his history of Vermont, and 
 Dr. Williams, state that Arnold, with a commis- 
 sion from Massachusetts as Colonel, arrived at 
 Castleton before Allen left there, and claimed of 
 Allen the right to supplant him in the com- 
 mand of the expedition, and that they state, 
 moreover, that he renewed the demand on the 
 morning of the 10th of May, when about to 
 attempt to enter the fortress. Their statements 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 189 
 
 have been copied by nearly all historians since, 
 and have been accepted as true by the people 
 at large. Nevertheless, the statements of Ira 
 Allen and Dr. Williams are directly contradicted 
 by others, whose knowledge of the facts of the 
 case and entire honesty cannot be successfully 
 impeached, and especially by one whose word, 
 were it not supported — as it is abundantly — 
 by others, and by many corroborating circum- 
 stances, appears to me to be absolutely con- 
 clusive. 
 
 Nathan Beman was Allen's guide on that 
 occasion. He was eighteen years of age, intelli- 
 gent and honest. He had as a boy played with 
 the children of the officers of the fort, and 
 knew every nook and angle of it. It was 
 because of his intimate knowledge of the 
 fortress and the grounds around it, and his 
 general intelligence, that he was selected by 
 Allen for this responsible duty. From the cir- 
 cumstances of the case he was by Allen's side 
 continuou.sly. This Nathan Beman must have 
 known the facts of the matter, and he always 
 and repeatedly asserted, in the most positive 
 manner, in after years, that Arnold did not 
 
190 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 accompany the expedition, was not present with 
 the party on the night of the attack and 
 capture, and did not arrive at Ticonderoga till 
 several days after its capture. Beman's testi- 
 mony was fully and often corroborated by many 
 others who had knowledge of the facts, nor did 
 Ethan Allen, in his account of the affair, make 
 the least mention of or allusion to Arnold as 
 being present until after the capture of the 
 fort. The fact seems to us as firmly established 
 as competent testimony can establish any fact 
 of history, that Benedict Arnold was not with 
 the expedition, and had no part whatever in 
 the capture of Ticonderoga. 
 
 WINOOSKI RIVER. 
 
 The Winooski River is not only a very beauti- 
 ful stream, but to a peculiar degree historic. 
 The Abenakis Indians originally occupied the 
 east side of the lake from opposite Mohawk 
 Rock to the northern end of Missisquoi Bay, 
 and the Winooski River was, because of its 
 multitude of salmon and the beauty of its banks, 
 a favorite resort of theirs. It was along this 
 river also that the old Indian trail ran which 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 191 
 
 led over to the Connecticut, and was much used 
 by all the northern tribes in friendship with 
 the Abenakis, in their annual migrations to and 
 from the seacoast. The Indians and French 
 alike used this route in their forays against the 
 English settlements in western Massachusetts. 
 It was down this river that the captives taken 
 at Deerfield were brought in the winter of 1704, 
 on their fearful journey to Canada. There is 
 no section in New England more interesting to 
 those who are curious as to ancient times and 
 early colonial matters than that which lies 
 between Burlington Bay and Missisquoi Bay. 
 The Abenakis were not only a brave tribe, but 
 a large and most ancient one. The famous Urn 
 in the Museum of the University is believed to 
 be of their manufacture, and its artistic excel- 
 lence is of such high order as to provoke curi- 
 osity as to the origin of this ancient people, 
 and the development of manufacture among 
 them. At the mouth of the La Moille River 
 they evidently had a large and permanent en- 
 campment, for many graves have been dis- 
 covered there in which the skeletons exhumed 
 were found to have been buried in a sitting 
 
192 LAKE CHAMrLAIN. 
 
 posture, facing westward, and in these were 
 many aboriginal relics finished with great per- 
 fection. The whole region is of interest to 
 antiquarians. 
 
 IKA ALLEN. 
 
 Ira Allen was the youngest of six sons, and 
 was born in Cornwall, Ct., April 21, 1751. 
 His brother, Ethan Allen, was the first-born, 
 and became more noted in the annals of the 
 times from the accident of age and circum- 
 stance rather than from superior ability ; for Ira 
 Allen, in many respects, outranked him in 
 mental capacity, especially as applied to the 
 management of commercial affairs. The ser- 
 vices he rendered the State of Vermont, which, 
 in fact, he organized — for no one could claim 
 that the timid and slow-moving Chittenden was 
 anything more than a figurehead in the spirited 
 movements and audacious negotiations of the 
 time — were of the highest order. Allowing 
 that he was subtle to a degree, at times an intri- 
 gant to the verge of disloyalty, and unduly 
 moved by personal and selfish considerations, it 
 should nevertheless be remembered that in these 
 
HISTORICAL llEMIXISCEXCES. 193 
 
 characteristics he simply reflected the fashion of 
 the times and the habits of the men with whom 
 he was associated. Surrounded by sharpers, it 
 is not to be wondered at if he became at times 
 and in certain connections a sharper himself. 
 The Aliens were not saints, and Ira, like his 
 brothers, would not, we presume, by a conclave 
 of angels, have been selected for canonization. 
 But his faults were largely those of nature, and 
 his failings such as were shared with him by 
 the best of his associates. The leading spirits 
 that with their shrewdness and their courage, 
 out of fourfold opposition, hewed the State of 
 Vermont, wore nearly all born in Connecticut 
 and New Hampshire, which is the same as 
 saying that they were "on the make," and 
 had little scruple how they made it, if Avithin 
 the law. And as at first there was no law 
 save such as their ambition dictated and their 
 rifles enforced, they did pretty much as they 
 pleased. To them the valley of Champlain was 
 as the promised land to the Israelites, and 
 they went in to possess it, and they did ! 
 
 It should be remembered that Ethan Allen 
 was taken prisoner soon after the commence- 
 
194 LAKE CriAMPLAIN. 
 
 ment of the Revolutionary War, and was car- 
 ried a captive to England. Remember Baker 
 — probably the most able of the group — was 
 killed at Isle la Noix by an Indian. Seth 
 Warner joined the Continental army, as also 
 did others of prominence — so that Thomas 
 Chittenden and Ira Allen were left in absolute 
 control of public affairs. These two men were, 
 to all intents and purposes, dictators. Allen 
 was by far the stronger spirit and of more 
 brilliant parts. His physical appearance was 
 imusually attractive; his address pleasing, and 
 his" manners those of a gentleman. In counsel 
 he was astute, and in action bold ; to the ability 
 and courage of his family was, in his case, 
 added suavity ; the smooth suavity of a natural 
 born diplomat. His mind was capable of large 
 conceptions, and his disposition was generous. 
 He was public-spirited to a degree, especially 
 where his own interests were coincident with 
 those of the public. 
 
 As a city, Burlington owes to him its early 
 prominence, and the university which crowns 
 its site, its existence and location. It was his 
 hand that drew the memorial to the Legislature 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 195 
 
 one hundred years ago — 1789 — which secured 
 for it the assistance of the State and its location 
 at Burlington. He accompanied the memorial 
 with a subscription of £4,000. 
 
 At this time, Ira Allen was one of the richest 
 men in the country. He owned three hundred 
 thousand acres of land on the shore of the lake. 
 His immense domain stretched from Ferrisburg 
 to the Canada line, and included the most de- 
 sirable land of eleven townships. To me, having 
 knowledge of the territory embraced, the magnifi- 
 cent forests standing on it, the immense fisheries 
 with which it abounded, the marble quarries it 
 contained, the wealth of its soils, and the majestic 
 scenery which distinguished it, it was the most 
 magnificent estate ever owned by one individual 
 in a civilized community on the globe. 
 
 Of the misfortunes that befell him in later 
 years ; of the injustice he experienced, and the 
 miseries he endured ; how he was robbed of 
 reputation and property ; how his liberty even 
 was threatened, and to escape unjust imprison- 
 ment he was compelled to fly the State he had 
 created, may not be written here. The wrongs 
 and misfortunes of Ira Allen, on the eastern side 
 
196 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 of the lake, and of William Gilliland, on the 
 shore directly opposite, are the direst I ever 
 read of inflicted on deserving men, under form 
 of law, in a civilized community. It is enough 
 to say that the man whose wisdom and courage 
 created Vermont ; whose diplomacy preserved 
 it from devastation by the British ; whose fore- 
 sight made the victory at Bennington possible 
 to American arms ; whose public spirit and gen- 
 erosity erected its university, and who, by his 
 ability in business, became its wealthiest citizen, 
 died in exile and poverty, and was buried by 
 charity in an unknown grave. And, stranger 
 than all, there is not within the borders of 
 Vermont a monument or even a tablet erected 
 to his memory ! 
 
 THE BOUQUET RIVER. 
 
 By one event this little and little-known 
 stream is lifted into historic prominence, and 
 is connected with famous measures and men ; an 
 event which brought the attention of Europe to 
 its banks, and profoundly stirred the humane 
 emotions of mankind. It is strange that a spot 
 should be forgotten on which an act was done, 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 197 
 
 only 122 years ago, of so horrible a nature that 
 it aAvoke the thunders of Chatham's eloquence, 
 and filled with horror the bosom of the Christian 
 Avorld; an act which harmonized the popular 
 factions in the American colonies and united 
 them in one common impulse of indignation and 
 rage against the host of Burgoyne at Saratoga. 
 It seems fitting that I should rescue from for- 
 getfulness the act which made the Bouquet 
 noted throughout a hemisphere, and will for- 
 ever make it noted in the history of the 
 continent. 
 
 Previous to his advance, Burgoyne had sent 
 out a summons to the Indians to meet him at 
 the falls of the Bouquet. The result was that 
 they obeyed him in such numbers and animated 
 with such ferocity that he was alarmed, and 
 filled with forebodings as to the issue of his own 
 act. It was June 20, 1777, that he convened 
 the chiefs in council. The council was held 
 about half a mile below the house of William 
 Gilliland. Burgoyne addressed them and in- 
 vited them to join him in his campaign against 
 the Americans. A chief — chosen to represent 
 the assembled tribes — accepted the invitation 
 
198 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 in a speech of such eloquence and ferocity that 
 it startled the English officers — for in it he 
 pledged his kindred to a merciless warfare 
 against the colonies. The treaty was ratified 
 with savage orgies, and England stood con- 
 demned for enlisting wild hordes of savages as 
 her allies in a contest against men of her own 
 blood and civilization. What a subject this 
 famous council and the influences of it would 
 make for a historic poem or romance ! 
 
 BATEAUX. 
 
 These boats are constantly mentioned, not 
 only in the early records of military operations 
 on the lake, but as supplying the settlers with 
 their principal means of transportation in times 
 of peace. They were not only in use upon 
 Champlain, but also upon the Hudson and the 
 Mohawk. We have often been asked what was 
 the fashion of these popular and most service- 
 able craft ? To this interrogation the correct 
 answer is — that they were long narrow boats 
 with flat bottoms. They were from six to 
 twelve feet in width, and from sixteen to thirty 
 feet in length. As a rule, they were not decked 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 199 
 
 over, but some had a partial deck and a cabin 
 at the stern. They were propelled by oars and 
 sails both. In shallow water they were pushed 
 along by poles. They drew, even when loaded, 
 but a foot or so of water, and running before 
 a good wind sailed quite fast. I have seen the 
 large bateaux on the St. Lawrence, with their 
 immense square sails, running before the wind, 
 outsail the crack yachts of the Canadians. 
 
 The Bouquet is a picturesque and beautiful 
 river. Its source is among the Adirondacks, 
 and its course a long and crooked one. It flows 
 into the lake at Willsborough. It may have 
 been named after General Bouquet, or from the 
 multitude of flowers which in spring and sum- 
 mer adorned its banks, or from bouquet, the 
 French word for flume or trough, which term is 
 descriptive of the appearance of the river below 
 the falls. At these falls the original settlement 
 of William Gilliland, Esq., was made. This 
 remarkable and noted man was the great 
 pioneer of the western shore of Champlain. 
 His history, in its vicissitudes, struggles, wrongs, 
 and forlorn death, surpasses the creations of the 
 
200 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 wildest romance. The Bouquet and Wills- 
 borough are well worth visiting, if for no other 
 object than in respect to the memory of the 
 noble and unhappy man who first selected its 
 lovely banks for his home. (See note on Wil- 
 liam Gilliland.) A part of General Burgoyne's 
 fleet entered the Bouquet, and British gunboats 
 bombarded and captured Willsborough village 
 during the War of 1812. 
 
 The Four Brothers — or lies de Quatre 
 Vents, The Islands of the Four Winds, as the 
 French named them — are a beautiful group of 
 islands, and should be visited by all tourists of 
 the lake. The French gave characteristic and 
 vividly descriptive names to physical objects and 
 geographical peculiarities. They were excelled 
 only by the aboriginals in this respect. The 
 English had less imagination and poetry in their 
 make-up, and hence their nomenclature is puerile 
 or vulgar. Their rude displacement of French 
 and Indian names was a misfortune to the 
 country. I cannot better illustrate this than 
 by reminding the reader, as his eyes dwell upon 
 one of the loftiest peaks of the Green Moun- 
 
HISTORICAL RKMINISCENCES. 201 
 
 tains, that the French called it "Lion Couchant" 
 — a noble appellation. The English looked at 
 the same sublime formation and called it 
 " Camel's Rump ! " a damnable name. It has 
 since been " improved " by us Americans into 
 " Camel's Hump." Ye gods, what a name for 
 such a noble mountain ! I pray you, reader, 
 help me to popularize the old French appella- 
 tion of " The Crouching Lion." 
 
 FISH AND FISHING. 
 
 The abundance of fish in Lake Champlain 
 when its shores were first settled was a matter 
 of surprise to the settlers. The records that 
 were made at that time by honest and honorable 
 men, while they stir astonishment, nevertheless 
 are above impeachment. It is doubtful if any 
 body of water on the continent was ever visited 
 by such vast numbers of salmon as Champlain 
 once was. The rivers flowing into the lake 
 were as thick with them, at times, as are the 
 rivers of the Pacific coast to-day. It was dan- 
 gerous to attempt to ride a spirited horse 
 through them because of the multitude of 
 salmon that actually packed the water. As late 
 
202 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 as 1823, fifteen liundred pounds were taken at 
 Chesterfield, at one haul of the seine. They 
 were taken in great quantities at Plattsburg 
 in 1824-25. Civilization has its triumphs, it is 
 true, but what a pity that it achieves them at 
 the cost of such a vast destruction. If the 
 lake had the fish to-day that it had even fifty 
 years ago, it would bring millions of dollars 
 to the two States that border its waters. 
 
 CLOVEN ROCK. 
 
 It is a pity that the name " Split " has been 
 allowed to fix itself to this singular and pic- 
 turesque formation. The French called it 
 Roche rendu, and its original name in English 
 was Cloven Rock. May I ask that pilots, 
 correspondents, and tourists assist me to restore 
 to it its old-time appropriate name ? Cloven 
 Rock contains considerable surface, and is sepa- 
 rated from the promontory near it by a fissure 
 some ten feet wide. Much exaggeration is 
 indulged in by makers of " guide-books " touch- 
 ing this physical curiosity, especially as to the 
 depth of the fissure ; some stating that it goes 
 down^ve hundred feet ! the fact being it doesn't 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 203 
 
 go down at all. For at low water the tourist 
 can walk through the fissure on solid rock and 
 dry rock at that ! But who expects facts in a 
 guide-book ? 
 
 Essex, originally called Elizabeth, was named 
 by William Gilliland, the original proprietor 
 of the site of the village, after his wife. 
 Elizabethtown is not to be confounded with it, 
 although named by the same party and for the 
 same reason. Mr. Gilliland designated many 
 places within the limits of his immense posses- 
 sions by the names of members of his family. 
 
 Crab Island was originally called St. 
 Michael's Island. After Macdonough's battle, 
 it was called Hospital Island, because those who 
 were wounded in that fight, whether American 
 or English, were landed there for treatment. 
 
 Valcour Island is in New York State, and 
 is the largest island in the lake belonging to 
 that State. It is a most interesting spot, his- 
 torically considered. Between it and the west- 
 ern shore, Arnold fought his desperate fight 
 with Carle ton. On the east side Amherst cap- 
 
204 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 tured the French bateaux fleeing from Crown 
 Point toward Canada, and thus extinguished for- 
 ever the French possession of and title to the 
 lake. To the northeast of the same island, 
 Macdonough won his famous victory. 
 
 The La Moille River. — This river was un- 
 doubtedly entered by Champlain in 1609. It 
 was called by him La Mouette, or Gull River, 
 because this species of birds were very plentiful 
 at its mouth. In Charlevoix's map of 1744, it 
 is written La Riviere a la Mouelle, this change 
 from Champlain' s nomenclature being due un- 
 questionably to a failure on the part of the writ- 
 ing clerk to cross the two t's. The transition 
 from La Mouelle to La Moille is an easy one. 
 In this case a blunder is acceptable, because 
 La Moille is a pleasant word, but I confess to a 
 wish that the name Champlain gave it may be 
 preserved and popularized, and that we might 
 still know it as he knew it — as La Mouette. 
 
 HISTORIC SITES. 
 
 I presume that all who have knowledge of the 
 route would unhesitatingly admit that the 
 journey by water from New York up the Hud- 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 205 
 
 son, and througli the Whitehall Canal to Lake 
 Champlain, and down the lake to Rouse's Point, 
 would bring the voyager in view of more lovely 
 and majestic scenery and memorable historic 
 sites than any other tour of equal length that 
 might be taken on the continent. For on this 
 voyage he would pass West Point and old Fort 
 Orange — now Albany — and in sight of the 
 very spot where stood the tree to which Putnam 
 was bound to be tortured in 1757; Forts Edward 
 and Miller — near the former of which Miss 
 McCrea was murdered. He would pass near the 
 spot where General Burgoyne surrendered his 
 sword, October 17, 1777, and where the brave 
 Frazier fell. Farther on is the South Bay of 
 Lake Champlain, where General Dieskau landed 
 his forces in his vain attempt to capture General 
 Johnson's army on Lake George. Then he would 
 come to the world-renowned ruins of Ticon- 
 deroga, and a little farther on to Crown Point, 
 where the French, in 1731, built Fort St. 
 Frederick, and, later, General Amherst, in 1759, 
 began the magnificent fortress that was cap- 
 tured from the English by Colonel Seth Warner, 
 the day after Ethan Allen seized, with his band 
 
206 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 of Green Mountain boys, Ticonderoga. At 
 Valcour Island, he beholds the scene of the 
 brave naval fight Arnold made with the English 
 fleet, and, to the east of the same island, the 
 spot where the English gunboats, under Amherst, 
 captured the last boats to bear the French flag 
 on the lake, as they were fleeing northward 
 after they had evacuated Crown Point. Between 
 this island and Cumberland Head, he sails over 
 water where the brave Macdonough won his 
 great victory against his equally brave but less 
 fortunate antagonist — one of the fiercest con- 
 flicts ever fought by ships on any water. While 
 at the Isle La Motte, he can still see the mounds 
 that mark the spot where once stood Fort St. 
 Anne — the first fort built on the lake, and 
 around whose walls was the first settlement 
 ever made by civilized men in the State of 
 Vermont or on the lake. For Fort Anne was 
 built in 1665, while the little fort on Chimney 
 Point was erected in 1690, and old Fort Dum- 
 mer — a mere block house — on the west bank 
 of the Connecticut, was put up in 1724. Is it 
 not a strange thing that so few Americans have 
 ever gone over this course, unequalled as it 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 207 
 
 is for the beauty of its scenery, and the 
 multitude of its historic sites and inspiring 
 memories ? 
 
 VERGENNES 
 
 Is a most interesting locality. Although in 
 respect to its population it is but a village, and 
 not a large one at that, it, nevertheless, is one 
 of the oldest cities in the United States, for it 
 was incorporated October 23, 1788. By its 
 ancient charter of incorporation it is four hun- 
 dred and eighty by four hundred rods in extent. 
 Its first mayor was elected March 12, 1789. 
 He was Enoch Woodbridge, subsequently chief 
 justice of the Supreme Court. In 1798, a State- 
 house was erected here, and in that year the 
 General Assembly held its session in it. 
 
 The first settler was Donald Mcintosh, a 
 native of Scotland. He fought in the battle of 
 Culloden. He emigrated to this country with 
 General Wolfe's army, and died July 14, 1803, 
 aged eighty-four years. Otter River passes 
 through the city, and its falls give abundant 
 power for manufacturing purposes. During the 
 war this power was utilized far more than it is 
 
208 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 now. The river is navigable to the foot of the 
 falls, some seven miles from the lake, for vessels 
 of large draft. It was here that Macdonoiigh 
 fitted out his fleet with which he won his cele- 
 brated victory against the English off Platts- 
 burg. It has an excellent hotel, and is one of 
 the prettiest villages on the shore of the lake. 
 Tourists would find the sail up the river and a 
 stroll through this little old city most enjoyable. 
 
 TICONDEROGA. 
 
 That the reader may have certain momentous 
 events in close sequence and easily memorized, 
 I would note, — 
 
 That the skirmish at Lexington occurred 
 April 19, 1775. 
 
 Ethan Allen, with his band of followers, cap- 
 tured Ticonderoga May 10, 1775. 
 
 Seth Warner captured the fortress at Crown 
 Point the next day. 
 
 In these forts they found more than two hun- 
 dred pieces of cannon, some mortars, howitzers, 
 and an immense amount of military stores, and 
 beside these a large quantity of ship and boat 
 building material. Soon after, the only armed 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 209 
 
 sloop on the lake was captured at St. Jolins. 
 And thus at the very beginning of the Revolu- 
 tionary War, Lake Champlain, with all its power 
 and prestige, and which had cost England half 
 a century to capture, passed into the hands of 
 the patriots. Many of the cannon captured at 
 Ticonderoga were drawn by ox-teams to Boston, 
 and enabled General Washington to make good 
 his works on Dorchester Heights. 
 
 THE EAELY HISTORY OF VERMONT. 
 
 As a matter of interest to the younger 
 readers of these pages, I make the following 
 epitomized statement of facts relating to Ver- 
 mont before she became a State. 
 
 The tract of unoccupied mountainous terri- 
 tory which lay in 1749 between Connecticut 
 River and Lake Champlain was then claimed 
 by both the provinces of New Hampshire and 
 New York. Both, of course, were English 
 provinces and under royal governors. In that 
 year the governor of New Hampshire began to 
 make grants to individuals and town charters 
 to organized bodies. The governor of New 
 York was greatly incensed at this proceeding of 
 
210 LAKE CIIAMPLAIN. 
 
 his rival, and carried the matter to the king in 
 England. In 1764, it was decided by him that 
 all the territory west of the Connecticut and 
 east of the St. Lawrence, on a line drawn 
 through Lake Champlain, belonged to the 
 Province of New York. But during these 
 sixteen years, before the matter was thus de- 
 cided, ;the governor of New Hampshire had 
 made one hundred and thirty-six grants to honu- 
 fide settlers, chiefly to men of character and 
 means from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and 
 Connecticut. These " grants " thus given (sold) 
 to these settlers by the governor of New Hamp- 
 shire, the governor of New York pronounced 
 null and void, and summoned said settlers to 
 purchase new titles to their land of him. Un- 
 fortunately, he fixed the price at a very high 
 figure. Some of the towns complied with his 
 demand, but the majority refused to pay twice 
 over for their lands. This is why what is now 
 Vermont was originally called " New Hamp- 
 shire Grants," and how they were brought into 
 a contest with New York, which lasted a quarter 
 of a century, and was of a most bitter char- 
 acter. 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 211 
 
 The governor of New York acted with great 
 energy, not to say cruelty, in the matter ; for he 
 proceeded to grant the lands which the settlers 
 would not repurchase, to others, and actions of 
 ejectment were brought, and judgment obtained 
 against them in the Albany courts. The set- 
 tlers on the grants were thus compelled either to 
 surrender the lands they had paid for and the 
 houses they had built and the improvements 
 they had made, or resist these unjust proceed- 
 ings against them. As they were brave men, 
 they naturally decided on the latter course, and 
 when the New York officers came among them 
 to eject them from their possessions by force, 
 they resisted them with arms. Many of these 
 officers were roughly handled, and treated to 
 flagellations more or less severe ; whence arose 
 the term " Beech Seal," viz., if a sheriff had the 
 " Beech Seal " put upon him, it meant that he 
 had been publicly whipped- The grim humor 
 of the term was fully appreciated, no doubt, by 
 one of the parties to the transaction, at least. 
 It is to the honor of the militia of New York to 
 record that they refused to be parties to the at- 
 tempt to enforce so unjust a decision. 
 
212 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 It was amid such scenes and in defence of 
 the rights of the settlers that Ethan Allen 
 came into prominence. He was born in Con- 
 necticut and came of good stock. With him 
 and with equal spirit stood Remember Baker, 
 who was born in Connecticut also. No bolder 
 men ever lived ; nor were they lacking in educa- 
 tion or sagacity. These two rallied their fellow- 
 settlers to the contest, and devised measures for 
 the common welfare. In 1774 the governor of 
 New York caused an act to be passed to the 
 effect that unless the offenders surrendered 
 themselves to the authorities of that province 
 within seventy days they should be indicted in 
 a court of that colony for a capital offence, and, 
 if convicted, should suffer death without benefit 
 of clergy. At the same time a proclamation 
 was issued offering a reward of fifty pounds for 
 the apprehension of Ethan Allen, Seth Warner, 
 and six others. This embittered the feeling of 
 the settlers, and the conflict grew hotter and 
 hotter until the breaking out of the war 
 between Great Britain and the colonies put a 
 stop to the controversy for the time being. As 
 to what followed, I must refer my readers to the 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 213 
 
 histories of the time, as I may not extend this 
 note to greater length. 
 
 THE FIRST SETTLEMENT IN VERMONT. 
 
 As there has been much difference in the 
 statements of local historians as to when and 
 where the first settlement by white men was 
 made in Vermont, we will record the following 
 facts : — 
 
 Fort Dummer was built in 1724, and was 
 located in the present town of Brattleboro — at 
 the south-east corner of it. It was an ordinary 
 block house built of logs, and not of large 
 size. It was strictly a military post and not a 
 settlement in the proper sense of the word. 
 
 In 1690 (March 26) Captain Jacobus de Warm 
 was sent from Albany with a small body of 
 men to build a fort at the narrows of the lake, 
 near Avhat afterward was known as Crown 
 Point. He built a small stone fort at what is 
 now Chimney Point, in the town of Addison. 
 
 From this it appears that the settlement at 
 Chimney Point in the town of Addison was 
 made thirty-four years earlier than the one 
 made in Brattleboro. 
 
214 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 The third fact is that the French built Fort 
 St. Aime, afterward named, from the officer who 
 constructed it, Fort La Motte, upon the Isle La 
 Motte, in the year 1665. Of this there is and 
 can be no question. It therefore appears that 
 the settlement on Isle La Motte was made 
 twenty-five years before that at Chimney Point, 
 and fifty-nine years before Fort Dummer was 
 built on the Connecticut, at Brattleboro. The 
 location of this old fort, which, were it now 
 standing, would be over two centuries old, can 
 still be traced by discernible mounds, on one of 
 which stands a white pine over six feet in diam- 
 eter. The Isle La Motte is regarded by many 
 as the most beautiful one in the lake. 
 
 CHAMPLAIN AT BURLINGTON. 
 
 Hon. Thomas H. Canfield, several years since, 
 made a very exhaustive canvass of the facts 
 bearing upon this question, and a written 
 presentation of them, as brought out by 
 this examination. Indeed his article is one 
 of the clearest in point of style, and valuable 
 as viewed in the light of material collected, 
 of all the numberless ones that have been pre- 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 215 
 
 pared by native writers, for it includes not only 
 the evidences which go to prove that Champlain 
 entered the Winooski, but a vast amount of in- 
 formation concerning the early navigation of 
 the lake, and many other interesting matters 
 associated with it. Without entering into a 
 full exposition of my views touching Cham- 
 plain's visit to the vicinity of Burlington Bay, 
 I beg to state that there is no reason to think 
 that he did not enter the Winooski, while there 
 exists the strongest evidence to prove that he 
 did. It is in his own record that he entered 
 the La Moille River — Riviere de la Mouette or 
 Gull River, as he called it — and, from inference, 
 it follows that he would not pass the Winooski 
 without entering it also. I make no doubt but 
 that he went up the Winooski as far as the 
 falls, and that he visited Burlington Bay, getting 
 his first view of it, probably, from some point 
 between what is now the park and the railway 
 tunnel. From this point he could clearly dis- 
 cern the mountains to the south and west on the 
 western shore, — as he says in his journal he did, 
 — which he could not do from any other point 
 so clearly unless it may have been from Apple- 
 
216 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 Tree Point. From one of these two positions he 
 undoubtedly got his first glimpses of Mohawk 
 Rock, of which and its significance as marking 
 the boundary line between the United People 
 and the northern Indians he must have been 
 repeatedly told by his savage associates from 
 the hour they first entered the lake. His 
 allusion also to " groves of chestnut-trees " 
 fixes, conclusively, the fact of his presence in 
 this locality, for it is well known that the 
 chestnut-tree was not indigenous on the western 
 shore of the lake to a point so far north, while 
 it is well established that large groves of chest- 
 nut-trees were standing on the eastern side of 
 the lake at least as far north as the La Moille 
 River. 
 
 SOURCE OP MODERN SOILS. 
 
 The rich soils of the Champlain Valley, which 
 to-day are so productive under cultivation, are 
 accounted for by the geological fact that, at not 
 a very remote period, much of it was under 
 ocean water. The shells of mollusks are found 
 in abundance in the clays and sand several hun- 
 dred feet above the present water level. The 
 
HISTORTCAI. RE]^nNISCENCES. 217 
 
 bones of the whale now in the State Museum 
 were discovered sixty feet above the level of the 
 lake. These rich soils, which are the source of 
 modem agricultural wealth, were — geologically 
 speaking — recently covered with the waters of 
 the ocean, and were permanently enriched 
 thereby. Portions of Chittenden, Addison, Rut- 
 land, and Franklin counties, and the whole of 
 Grand Isle, share the benefits of this creative 
 cause. 
 
 WILD GAME. 
 
 It is comparatively but recent that wild game 
 both of animals and birds were unusually plenty 
 on Lake Champlain and its shores. As noted 
 in another place in this volume, salmon were ex- 
 ceedingly plenty in the Saranac and other rivers 
 flowing into the lake, as late as 1824. Among 
 birds the wild pigeons were so plenty in the 
 forests around it as to be beyond estimation. 
 The old records and diaries are filled with men- 
 tion of them, and bear ample testimony of the 
 astonishment with which their numbers filled 
 the minds of the early settlers. In one of the 
 towns the following record is to be found : 
 
218 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 " The number of pigeons is immense. Twenty- 
 five nests are often found on one tree. Acres of 
 such trees are to be seen anywhere. For hun- 
 dreds of acres the ground underneath them is 
 covered with their droppings to the depth of 
 two inches. Their noise in the evening and at 
 night is so troublesome that people cannot sleep. 
 When the young are grown to a suitable size, 
 just before they are ready to fly, it is common 
 for the settlers to cut down the trees and gather 
 a horse-load in a few minutes." 
 
 THE BEAVEK. 
 
 Among the wild animals once exceedingly 
 numerous on the shores of Lake Champlain 
 were the otter and beaver. The one family 
 gave its name to the longest river in the State, 
 and the other were not only very numerous but 
 were noted among dealers in peltry for their 
 size and the high quality of their fur. These 
 extraordinary animals have been banished the 
 larger part of the continent, and it is a rarity to 
 see one even in the menageries and the gardens 
 of natural history. Only a few sportsmen even, 
 probably of my generation, have ever been so 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 219 
 
 placed as to study the habits of these extraordi- 
 nary animals ; and those of the generation that 
 are to succeed us will doubtless never be able by 
 any amount of journeying within the limits of 
 the country to become personally acquainted 
 with them. These facts suggest to me the value 
 of a note that shall preserve, in the best possible 
 form of expression, the knowledge of the char- 
 acteristics and the habits of an animal the cap- 
 ture of which has given such wide employment 
 to commerce, assisted pioneer life in its develop- 
 ment, and given to taste and wealth one of the 
 most beautiful coverings ever made for human 
 use. T do not propose to trust my own knowl- 
 edge in describing this animal, but will tran- 
 scribe the best description I have ever read 
 of the beaver, as written by one of the early 
 settlers of Vermont, who was not only a scholar 
 but a naturalist of such gifts and attainments 
 as few men enjoy. I refer to Doctor Samuel 
 Williams, LL.D. The following is his descrip- 
 tion of the beaver ; and beyond what he has 
 written there is nothing to be said of the animal. 
 " The American beaver is between three and 
 four feet in length, and weighs from forty to sixty 
 
220 LAKE CHAMPLAm. 
 
 pounds. His head is like that of a rat, inclined to 
 the earth ; his back rises in an arch between his 
 head and tail. His teeth are long, broad, strong, 
 and sharp. Four of these, two in the upper 
 and two in the under jaw, are called incisors. 
 These teeth project one or two inches beyond 
 the jaw, and are sharp, and curved like a car- 
 penter's gouge. In his fore feet. the toes are 
 separate, as if designed to answer the purposes 
 of fingers and hands. His hind feet are accom- 
 modated with webs, suited to the purpose of 
 swimming. His tail is a foot long, an inch 
 thick, and five or six inches broad. It is cov- 
 ered with scales, and with a skin similar to that 
 of a fish. 
 
 " In no animal does the social instinct and habit 
 appear more strong or universal than in the 
 beaver. Wheresoever a number of these ani- 
 mals are found, they immediately associate and 
 combine in society, to pursue their common 
 business and welfare. Everything is done by 
 the united counsels and labors of the whole 
 community. Their societies are generally col- 
 lected together in the months of June and July ; 
 and their numbers when thus collected frequently 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 221 
 
 amount to two or three hundred ; all of which 
 immediately engage in a joint effort to promote 
 the common business and safety of the whole 
 society ; apparently acting under a common in- 
 clination and direction. When the beaver is 
 found in a solitary state, he appears to be a 
 timid, inactive, and stupid animal. Instead of 
 attempting any important enterprise, he con- 
 tents himself with digging a hole in the earth 
 for safety and concealment. His genius seems 
 to be depressed, his spirits broken, and every- 
 thing enterprising is lost in an attention to 
 personal safety ; but he never loses his natural 
 instinct to find or form a pond.' When com- 
 bined in society, his disposition and powers 
 assume their natural direction, and are exerted 
 to the highest advantage. Everything is then 
 undertaken which the beaver is capable of per- 
 forming. 
 
 " The society of beavers seems to be regulated 
 and governed altogether by natural dispositions 
 and laws. Their society, in all its pursuits and 
 
 ' A young beaver was tamed in the southern part of this State. 
 He became quite inoffensive, and withoutany disposition to depart, 
 but was most of all pleased when he was at work forming a dam 
 in a small stream near the house. 
 
222 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 operations, appears to be a society of peace and 
 mutual affection, guided by one principle, and 
 under the same direction. No contention, dis- 
 agreement, contrary interests or pursuits, are 
 ever seen among them; but perfect harmony 
 and agreement prevails through their whole 
 dominions. The principle of this union and 
 regulation is not the superior strength, art, or 
 activity of any individual. Nothing has the 
 appearance, among them, of the aiithority or in- 
 fluence of a chief or leader. Their association 
 and management have the aspect of a pure and 
 perfect democracy, founded on the principle of 
 perfect equality, and the strongest mutual 
 attachment. This principle seems to be suffi- 
 cient to preserve the most perfect harmony, and 
 to regulate all the proceedings of their largest 
 societies. 
 
 " When these animals are collected together, 
 their first attention is to the public business and 
 affairs of the society to which they belong. 
 The beavers are amphibious animals, and must 
 spend one part of their time in the water and 
 another upon the land. In conformity to this 
 law of their natures, their first employment is 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 223 
 
 to find a situation convenient for both these 
 purposes. With this view, a lake, a pond, or a 
 running stream of water is chosen for the scene 
 of their habitation and future operations. If 
 it be a lake or a pond that is selected, the water 
 is always of such depth that the beavers may 
 have sufficient room to swim under the ice, and 
 one of which they can have an entire and un- 
 disturbed possession. If a stream of water is 
 chosen, it is always such a stream as will form a 
 pond that shall be every way convenient for 
 their purpose. And such is their foresight and 
 comprehension of these circumstances, that they 
 never form an erroneous judgment, or fix upon 
 a situation that will not answer their designs and 
 convenience. Their next business is to construct 
 a dam. This is always chosen in the most con- 
 venient part of the stream ; and the form of it 
 is either direct, circular, or with angles, as the 
 situation and circumstances of the water and 
 land require ; and so well chosen are both the 
 place and the form of these dams, that no engi- 
 neer could give them a better situation and 
 form either for convenience, strength, or dura- 
 tion. The materials of which the dams are 
 
224 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 constructed are wood and earth. If there be a 
 tree on the side of the river, which would 
 naturally fall across the stream, several of the 
 beavers set themselves, with great diligence, to 
 cut it down with their teeth. Trees to the big- 
 ness of twenty inches diameter are thus thrown 
 across a stream. They next gnaw ofE the 
 branches from the trunk, that the tree may 
 assume a level position. Others, at the same 
 time, are cutting down smaller trees and sap- 
 lings from one to ten inches diameter. These 
 are cut into equal and convenient lengths. 
 Some of the beavers drag these pieces of wood 
 to the side of the river, and others swim with 
 them to the place where the dam is to be built. 
 As many as can find room are engaged in sink- 
 ing one end of these stakes, and as many more 
 in raising, fixing, and securing the other end. 
 While many of the beavers are thus laboring 
 upon the wood, others are equally engaged in 
 carrying on the earthen part of the work. 
 The earth is brought in their mouths, formed 
 into a kind of mortar with their feet and tails, 
 and spread over the vacancies between the 
 sticks. Saplings and the small branches of 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 225 
 
 trees are twisted and worked up with the mud 
 and slime, until all the vacancies are filled up, 
 and no crevice is left in any part of the work 
 for the water to find a passage through. The 
 magnitude and extent of the dams, which the 
 beavers thus construct, is much larger than we 
 should imagine was possible to be effected by 
 such laborers or instruments. At the bottom, 
 the dam is from six to twelve feet thick ; at the 
 top it is generally two or three feet in width. 
 In that part of the dam which is opposed to the 
 current, the stakes are placed obliquely ; but on 
 that side where the water is to fall, the stakes 
 are placed in a perpendicular direction, and the 
 dam assmnes the same form and position as the 
 stakes. The extent of these works is from fifty 
 to a hundred feet in length, and always of 
 such a height as to effect the purposes they 
 have in view. The ponds which are formed by 
 these dams are of all dimensions, from four or 
 five to five or six hundred acres. They are gen- 
 erally spread over lands abounding with trees and 
 bushes of the softest wood, maple, birch, alder, 
 poplar, willow, etc. The better to preserve 
 their dams, the beavers always leave sluices or 
 
226 LAKE CHAMPLALN. 
 
 passages near the middle for the redundant 
 waters to pass off. These sluices are generally 
 about eighteen inches in width and depth, and 
 as many in number as the waters of the stream 
 generally require. 
 
 " When the public works are completed, their 
 domestic concerns and affairs next engage their 
 attention. The dam is no sooner completed, 
 than the beavers separate into small bodies, to 
 build cabins, or houses for themselves. These 
 houses are built upon piles, along the borders of 
 the pond. They are of an oval form, resembling 
 the construction of an haycock ; and they vary 
 in their dimensions, from four to ten feet in 
 diameter, according to the number of families 
 they are designed to accommodate. They are 
 always of two stories, generally of three, and 
 sometimes they contain four. Their walls are 
 from two to three feet in thickness, at the 
 bottom ; and are formed of the same material 
 as the dams. They rise perpendicularly a few 
 feet, then assume a curved form, and terminate 
 in a dome or vault, which answers the purpose 
 of a roof. These edifices are built with much 
 solidity, and neatness. On the inward side, they 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 227 
 
 are smooth, but rough on the outside ; always 
 impenetrable to the rain, and of sufficient 
 strength to resist the most impetuous winds. 
 The lower story is about two feet high: the 
 second story has a floor of sticks, covered with 
 mud : the third story is divided from the 
 second, in the same manner, and terminated by 
 the roof raised in the form of an arch. Through 
 each floor, there is a communication ; and the 
 upper floor is always above the level of the 
 water, when it is raised to its greatest height. 
 Each of these huts has two doors ; one, on the 
 land side, to enable them to go out and procure 
 provisions by land ; another under the water, 
 and below where it freezes, to preserve their 
 communication with the pond. If this at any 
 time begins to be covered with ice, the ice is 
 immediately broken, that the communication 
 may not be cut off with the air. 
 
 " In these huts, the families of the beavers 
 have their residence. The smallest of their cabins 
 contain one family, consisting generally of five 
 or six beavers ; and the largest of the buildings 
 will contain from twenty to thirty. No society 
 of animals can ever appear better regulated, or 
 
228 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 more happy, than the family of beavers. The 
 male and the female always pair. Their selec- 
 tion is not a matter of chance, or accident ; but 
 appears to be derived from taste, and mutual 
 affection. In September, the happy couple lay 
 up their store of provisions, for winter. This 
 consists of bark, the tender twigs of trees, and 
 various kinds of soft wood. When their pro- 
 visions are prepared, the season of love and 
 repose commences : and during the winter they 
 remain in their cabins, enjoying the fruits of 
 their labours, and partaking in the sweets of 
 domestic happiness. Towards the end of winter, 
 the females bring forth their young, to the num- 
 ber of three or four. Soon after, the male retires 
 to gather fish, and vegetables, as the spring 
 opens; but the mother remains at home, to 
 nurse and rear up the offspring, until they are 
 able to follow their dams. The male occasion- 
 ally returns, but not to tarry, until the fall of 
 the year. But if any injury is done to their 
 public works, the whole society are soon col- 
 lected, and join all their forces to repair the 
 injury, which affects their commonwealth. 
 " Nothing can exceed the peace and regularity 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 229 
 
 which prevails in the families, and through the 
 whole commonwealth of these animals. No 
 discord or contention ever appears in any of 
 their families. Every beaver knows his own 
 apartment, and store house ; and thei;e is no 
 pilfering or robbing from one another. The 
 male and the female are mutually attached to, 
 and never prove unfriendly, or desert one 
 another. Their provisions are collected, and 
 expended, without any dissension. Each knows 
 its own family, business, and property ; and they 
 are never seen to injure, oppose, or interfere 
 with one another. The same order and tran- 
 quillity prevail through the commonwealth. 
 Different societies of beavers never make war 
 upon one another, or upon any other animals. 
 When they are attacked by their enemies, they 
 instantly plunge into the water, to escape their 
 pursuit: and when they cannot escape, they 
 fall an easy sacrifice. 
 
 " In the arts necessary for their safety, the 
 beavers rise to great eminence. The situation, 
 direction, form, solidity, beauty, and durability 
 of their dams, are equal to anything of the kind, 
 which has ever been performed by man. They 
 
230 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 always form a right judgment, which way the 
 tree will fall ; and when it is nearly cut down, 
 they appoint one of their number, to give notice 
 by a stroke of his tail, when it begins to fall. 
 With their tails, they measure the lengths of 
 their dams, of the stakes they are to use, of a 
 breach that is made in their works, and of the 
 length of the timber that is necessary to repair 
 it. When an enemy approaches their dominions, 
 the beaver which makes the discovery, by strik- 
 ing on the water with his tail, gives notice to 
 the whole village of the approaching danger; 
 and all of them instantly plunge into the 
 water. And when the hunters are passing 
 through their country, some of their number 
 appear to be sentinels, to give notice of their 
 approach. 
 
 " The colour of the beaver is different, accord- 
 ing to the different climates, which they in- 
 habit. In the most northern parts, they are 
 generally black ; in Vermont they are brown ; 
 and their color becomes lighter as we approach 
 towards the south. Their fur is of two sorts, 
 all over their bodies. That which is longest, is 
 generally about an inch long, but on the back 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 231 
 
 it sometimes extends to two inches, gradually 
 shortening towards the head and tail. This 
 part is coarse, and of little use. The other part 
 of the fur consists of a very fine and thick 
 down, about three quarters of an inch long, so 
 soft that it feels like silk, and is that which is 
 used in manufactories. Castor, of so much use 
 in medicine, is produced from the body of the 
 beaver. It is contained in four bags, in the 
 lower belly. 
 
 " The largest of these animals, of which I 
 have any certain information, weighed sixty- 
 three pounds and an half ; but it is only in a 
 situation remote from, and undisturbed by the 
 frequent appearances of men, that they attain 
 their greatest magnitude, or their highest per- 
 fection of society. The beaver has deserted all 
 the southern parts of Vermont, and is now to 
 be found only in the most northern and uncul- 
 tivated parts of the State." 
 
 VERMONT MARBLES. 
 
 Among all the ornamental stones used in 
 architecture, either ancient or modern, not one 
 is more prized by wealth, knowledge, and taste, 
 
232 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 than marble ; and in no place on the globe has 
 nature made so extensive and rich a deposit as 
 along the eastern shore of Lake Champlain. 
 Here she has placed the purest white and the 
 dunnest black, the blue, the gray, the rose and 
 pink, almost side by side. Between the white 
 and black over forty shades are grouped. Every 
 color and tint required for interior embellish- 
 ment, from the delicate shade of the sea-pink 
 shell to the flaming splendor of sapphire, from 
 snow to jet ; the neutral grays, the cerulean 
 blues, the mottled, the veined, the composite ; 
 all are here. What unchiselled vases, what 
 unhewn statues, what unshaped monuments, 
 what dormant shafts and unraised columns, 
 what mansions, palaces, and sovereign capitols, 
 are lying unbuilded on the shores of Lake Cham- 
 plain, awaiting the word that shall shape them 
 to fit proportion, and set them to be admired of 
 all and stand until they crumble, in the light of 
 day! 
 
 The development of the marble industry in 
 Vermont might have been far more rapid than 
 it has been, and, vast as it now is, much more 
 so, had it not been for that miserable habit 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCP:S. 233 
 
 which has ever clung to Americans of estiraat- 
 ing a foreign, imported product of more value 
 than the native and competing one. In refer- 
 ence to the introduction and use of American 
 marble, this unpatriotic and wretched habit has 
 exerted a most injurious influence. When Ver- 
 mont marble was first offered in competition 
 with the foreign, there were few who were will- 
 ing even to test its value or to admit that it had 
 any, especially as answering the requirements of 
 the higher grades of use and excellence. 
 
 Its purity of color could not be questioned, for 
 when compared with imported stones the gazer's 
 eye could but see its high quality. Nor could 
 one deny that its grain was fine or that it 
 was susceptible of the most beautiful polish. 
 Thus from one position after another were its 
 opponents driven until it was finally conceded 
 that comparative ability to stand exposure to 
 the elements must decide its relative rank. 
 That settled it, for the Italian marbles cannot re- 
 sist the disintegrating forces of our climate like 
 the native ones that are quarried on the shores 
 of Lake Champlain. 
 
 Rutland has long been the centre of this vast 
 
234 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 industry, so vast that no one can conceive of it 
 unless he visits the quarries and sees for him- 
 self. The pioneer firm is that of Sheldon & 
 Company, of West Rutland. It began opera- 
 tions in the spring of 1850, and from a small 
 plant has grown into mammoth proportions. 
 Its capacity was such as far back as 1875-76 
 that it was able to deliver to the national gov- 
 ernment for use in the national cemeteries two 
 hundred and forty thousand headstones ! This 
 one contract involved the shipment of six thou- 
 sand tons of sawn marble each year. And this 
 they were able to do loithout interfering with 
 their regidar business. 
 
 To many of those who shall visit Lake Cham- 
 plain, an excursion of a day to the vast marble 
 quarries of West Rutland, Sutherland Falls, 
 and Swanton, would be the most instructive 
 and entertaining they might take. It would 
 interest them to see whence are to come the 
 monuments, the statues, and the palaces of the 
 future, as grief, art, and wealth shall call them 
 forth. The manufacture of marble, by which 
 is meant the preparation of the original block 
 for its destined purpose, is a most interesting 
 
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES. 235 
 
 study. To see with one's own eyes how the 
 " angel hidden in the stone " is summoned forth 
 and made to stand before the gazer in all its 
 celestial beauty is an object lesson of the rarest 
 sort. If you have a day to spare, ladies and 
 gentlemen, visit the marble quarries of these 
 noted localities. 
 
236 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 AUTHOR'S NOTE. 
 
 Although it is not generally known, never- 
 theless it is held by those who have knowledge 
 of the matter, that no body of water in the 
 country affords better sport for anglers than 
 Lake Champlain. That the subject might be 
 intelligently and attractively treated, we enlisted 
 the co-operation of Mr. A. Nelson Cheney of 
 Glens Falls, N.Y., whose volume on "Fishing 
 with the Fly," and many contributions to the 
 press, have given him a deserved reputation in 
 angling matters both at home and abroad, and 
 caused him to be honored as an authority on all 
 subjects connected with the fish and fishing of 
 America. His essay, at our request, is written 
 from the standpoint of personal knowledge and 
 experience, and will be read with delight by all 
 who are lovers of rod and reel. May it not be 
 hoped that some day, not remote, he will favor 
 the country with a volume on fish and fishing 
 on Lake Champlain ? It is an ample theme for 
 a pen like his, and we know no other writer in 
 the country who could do the work as he could 
 do it. 
 
GAME FISH AND FISHING. 237 
 
 THE GAME FISH AND FISHING OF LAKE 
 CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 By A. NELSON CHENEY. 
 
 The history, the romance, and the legends of 
 Lake Champlain have met with greater or less 
 recognition at the hands of those who have 
 striven to make the fair fame of the lake 
 known to the world, but to the angler familiar 
 with its waters it is , often surprising that its 
 fish and its fishing have been passed over with 
 scant courtesy. Particularly is this the case 
 when it is considered that the lake which bears 
 the name of Samuel Champlain affords some of 
 the very best angling with rod and line that is 
 to be found in all this broad land, remarkable 
 as it is for prolificness of species and prodigality 
 in numbers of what are known to the sports- 
 men as game fish. True it is, lamentably true, 
 that the kingly salmon no longer finds its way 
 from the sea through the St. Lawrence and 
 
238 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 Richelieu rivers to the streams flowing into the 
 lake on either side ; the brook-trout, fontinalis, 
 
 — the prince of the fountains, — if it ever was 
 known in the lake, has taken its departure with 
 the French name, Iracosia, applied to the water ; 
 the lake-trout, that the Indians called Namay- 
 cush, has also disappeared as effectively as the 
 Iroquois name of the lake, Caniaderi Guarunte 
 
 — " the lake that is the gate of the country " ; 
 but with the departure of the salmonidce — fish 
 of royal lineage — the gate was left ajar that 
 strangers might enter the water of promise, and 
 there remained behind and took deep root other 
 fish less aristocratic, but sweet of flesh, game 
 on the hook, fi'uitful of increase, strong to re- 
 sist murder, outrage, and untimely death by 
 net, spear, and torch and other engines of 
 destruction that have made the salmon family 
 but a memory. To-day these hardy, fighting, 
 gamy fish abound in the lake, thrive and mul- 
 tiply, giving pleasure and health to thousands 
 who seek their capture ; and who shall say it is 
 not the survival of the fittest ? 
 
 Approaching the lake from the south, its 
 appearance is not inviting. The marshy shores 
 
GAME FISH AND FISHING. 239 
 
 and the water, thick and discolored as it is by 
 washing against banks of clay that hold it in 
 check, are not pleasing to one who has angled 
 in limpid waters framed in pebbly shores and 
 backed by the green of forests; so many an 
 angler has condemned the lake and turned back 
 at the sight of its " tail." 
 
 It is strange, but a fact, that people living 
 within fifty miles of Lake Champlain speak of 
 its waters as muddy. They do not know it; 
 and it shall be our pleasure to introduce them, 
 and we hope others, to some of the beauties and 
 attractions of this grand sheet of water — a 
 Mecca for anglers. 
 
 The fish that now holds first place in the 
 waters of the lake, and in the esteem of the 
 angler as a rod fish, is the small-mouth black 
 bass, Micropterus dolomieu. The large-mouth 
 black bass, or Oswego bass, Micropterus sal- 
 moides, is also found here, but it inhabits reedy, 
 marshy bays and creeks, and is not sought by 
 the angler, so that hereafter by black bass we 
 shall mean the small-mouth. This fish loves 
 the rocks, gravel, sand, and clear water, and in 
 the lake it finds such an abundance of suitable 
 
240 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 food that, fishing for black bass from Maine to 
 Michigan and from Canada to Virginia, we have 
 not found its superior, and scarcely its equal, 
 for the table; and its game qualities are not 
 exceeded by the black bass of any other waters. 
 A bass hooked while the writer was fishing off 
 Wood's Island, near St. Albans Bay, jumped 
 clear of the water seven times before it was 
 brought to the landing-net. There are hun- 
 dreds of acres of shoals in the lake, affording 
 the very best possible breeding-grounds for the 
 bass, and, with anything like moderation in 
 fishing and a due regard for tlie close season, 
 its black-bass fishing should always be of the 
 best. The blacb bass is the game fish of 
 the people, because its haunts are accessible in 
 waters of civilization, waters ploughed by crafts 
 of commerce as well as of pleasure, and it is 
 found at its best in broad lakes and mighty 
 rivers, where the trout of mountain streams 
 and secluded forest lakes would sicken and die, 
 harried by revolving propellers and turning 
 paddle-wheels. Being a spring-spawning fish, 
 the eggs of the black bass hatch quickly, and as 
 the spawning-beds and fry, when hatched, are 
 
GAME FISH AND FISHING. 241 
 
 guarded by the parent fish, the young black 
 bass are not subjected to casualties that threaten 
 the extermination of other species of game 
 fish. Taking fly or bait boldly; fighting des- 
 perately when hooked ; leaping from the water 
 like the salmon and the tarpon; toothsome 
 when prepared for the table, Nature evidently 
 intended the black bass to be, as it is now gen- 
 erally accepted, the universal game fish of the 
 United States east of the Rocky Mountains. 
 
 At the lower or northern end of the lake, 
 east of the islands North and South Hero, or 
 Grand Isle, as the southernmost of the Hero 
 Islands is called ; south of McQuam Bay and 
 north of the sandbar bridge, is a portion of the 
 lake, about twenty-one miles long north and 
 south and five miles wide, which is very like a 
 lake of itself, as it has but two comparatively 
 narrow openings, the Gut and Alburgh Passage, 
 into the main lake, to which anglers have given 
 the title Great Back Bay. 
 
 This great bay is referred to with much 
 justice as the home of the black bass. Within 
 its confines are a dozen islands, and bars, shoals, 
 or reefs which cannot be numbered. On the 
 
242 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 north is Missisquoi Bay, which is evidently 
 the winter resort for many of the fishes of the 
 lake, because there they find water of a higher 
 temperature than in the lake itself. This bay 
 is not only a winter resort and feeding-ground 
 for game fishes, but it is a breeding-ground for 
 fish food. The water of Back Bay is as clear 
 almost as the water of famed Lake George, and 
 has a depth of over one hundred and fifty feet, 
 according to the government charts, although 
 the average depth is perhaps about fifty feet, 
 while there are acres of shoals and bars with 
 water from five to twenty feet deep over them. 
 Mt. Mansfield and Camel's Hump look down 
 on the bay from the Vermont side, and Mt. 
 Marcy, White Face, and other Adirondack 
 mountains look down from the New York side, 
 so that altogether there is a vastness about the 
 scene which is impressive. The islands and 
 the shores of the Back Bay furnish fine camping 
 sites, and there are hotel accommodations for 
 those who object to an outing under canvas. 
 The fish laws of Vermont, w^hich obtain on the 
 waters of Back Bay, make the legal season for 
 black-bass fishing from June 1 to February 1 ; 
 
GAME FISH AND FISHING. 243 
 
 but no bass may be captured and retained less 
 than ten inches in length. 
 
 June is the season for fly-fishing, for at that 
 time the bass are on the shores and in shallow 
 water ; but later in the season if one casts a fly 
 at nightfall or early in the morning on the 
 shallow water over sandbars and shoals, where 
 the bass come to feed, reasonable success may 
 result. For bait-fishing with minnows, grass- 
 hoppers, crickets, frogs or crawfish, a rocky or 
 pebbly shoal is selected, where the water is from 
 ten to twenty feet deep, and there the boat is 
 anchored. The bass of Lake Champlain are 
 caught in remarkably shallow water, and only 
 in the month of August is it necessary to resort 
 to the greater depth of water mentioned. At all 
 times bass may be caught in very shallow water 
 by fishing on the bars and shoals before day- 
 light in the morning and after dark at night. 
 This is not as pleasant for the angler as good 
 daylight, but it secures large fish. A leaf from 
 my fishing journal will give a case in point. 
 When first I fished the waters of Back Bay, 
 I found it customary with the anglers as- 
 sembled at a favorite resort on the shore to eat 
 
244 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 a leisurely breakfast and get on the water about 
 half-past seven or eight o'clock. The bay is a 
 place of magnificent distances, as it requires a 
 pull of three or four miles for the boatman to 
 reach the fishing points most in favor, so that an 
 hour and a half more was required before the 
 bait was offered to the fish. This was contrary 
 to all teachings which point to success in 
 angling, or in other things, and, although the 
 landlord informed me that I was violating 
 tradition, and the boatman told me a bass never 
 had been taken in the lake at such a heathenish 
 hour, I ordered my boat to be ready an hour 
 before daybreak on a certain morning. I do 
 not think I realized before how much " sand " 
 it required to fly in the face of tradition, upset 
 custom, and do in Rome what the Romans 
 said, with a satisfied smile of superiority, would 
 bring me rich, dewy, rosy experience, but no 
 fish. When I came in that morning, only a 
 little late for the regular breakfast, there must 
 have been something in the appearance of the 
 string of black bass that my boatman placed 
 with some pride on the grass before the hotel 
 door, either the number of them or their size, 
 
GAME FISH AND FISHING. 246 
 
 that caused the Romans to think that while 
 the very early morning air was certainly not 
 good to prolong the life of a big black bass, it 
 might be of benefit to the angler. This is 
 merely conjecture ; but a few mornings later, 
 when my boatman, Warren Greene, called me 
 at three o'clock a. m., he whispered through the 
 half-open door : " Joe Armstrong got up when 
 I did, and it looks as though his man was going 
 a-fishing." 
 
 Before I finished dressing and made a cup of 
 coffee over a spirit-lamp, Warren was again at 
 my door to say, "Two boats have started 
 already, and two other guides are up and get- 
 ting their boats ready." East of Wood's 
 Island is a vast sand shoal, cone-shaped, with 
 the island for its base, and the apex in the 
 direction of the rising sun. At the point of the 
 " bar," as the shoal is called, the water drops 
 suddenly to about fifteen feet in depth, as it 
 likewise does on the north side, but on the bar 
 itself the water is scarcely more than six feet 
 deep. Just at the point of the bar the fishing 
 is considered best, particularly if there is a cur- 
 rent. This current is made by the wind blow- 
 
246 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 ing several days from north or south and piling 
 up the water in the opposite end of the bay, 
 when it sets back to its normal condition, 
 producing a decided flow like a river. The 
 bass are on the watch for any food that may 
 drift along past the point, and to strike them 
 at such a time means a big bag of fine fish. 
 The point of the bar was supposed to be fully 
 ripe for fishing the morning that Warren was 
 impatient because I waited for my cup of coffee. 
 The time was the 10th of August, and when we 
 put out from the boat-house it was in the dark- 
 ness which precedes the dawn; and Warren 
 observed that we would reach the bar long 
 before we could see the shore landmarks by 
 which to locate the point; but he thought he 
 could " hit it pretty close in the dark." As we 
 neared the bar two boats could be seen dimly, 
 anchored about where we judged the point 
 should be ; but Warren whispered that he did 
 not think either boat was over just the right 
 spot, and I hastily baited my hook with a grass- 
 hopper, as Warren peered here and there ahead 
 of the boat, hoping to see something to guide 
 him to the location we were seeking. I cast my 
 
GAME FISH AND FISHING.- 247 
 
 'hopper on the water, dragging it behind the 
 boat, when suddenly it was snapped up by a 
 hungry bass. And I turned to Warren and 
 told him to drop anchor qiiickly and let the 
 boat swing back with the current about fifteen 
 feet. There was a splash as the anchor went 
 down at the bow, and another as the bass 
 jumped at the stern, and the boat dropped back 
 the length of the slack-rope as Warren stepped 
 toward me with the landing-net. The bass was 
 now in, now out of the water, but neither of us 
 could see the fish when it was out any more 
 than when it was in, and I finally reeled it to 
 the boat, and the net was placed under it by an 
 exercise of faith — a three and one-half pound 
 fish, just the fighting size. The current was 
 strong and the bass greedy, for another 'hopper 
 on the hook was taken as quickly as the first, 
 and the bass as quickly lost from not being well 
 hooked. There was no sound of revelry from 
 either of the other boats as I hooked the third 
 bass, which came to the net after a struggle, 
 and I thought we might wait for more light, 
 which shortly came stealing up over the Green 
 Mountains, faintly, but sufficient to show the 
 
248 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 bass when hooked and led to the net. Before 
 the sun fairly appeared above the hills, I noticed 
 the light color of the bass, which was evidence 
 that the fish had been on the white sand all 
 night (a bass will quickly take on the general 
 color of the bottom on which it rests), and that 
 we were fishing directly over the bar. This I 
 remarked to Warren, and he glanced around, 
 chuckled quietly, shut one eye knowingly, 
 jerked his head over his left shoulder, and 
 said, — 
 
 " Do you see the big pine square over the 
 north gable of the barn on the island and the 
 notch in the hill in line with the point on 
 Potter Island ? " Sure enough ! The boat was 
 anchored as fairly over the point of the bar as 
 Warren could have anchored it at high noon 
 with the sun shininor and all the landmarks 
 located with a theodolite. The other boats 
 were taking an occasional bass, but they had 
 missed the point and they knew it only too 
 well. A bass that proved to weigh four and a 
 quarter pounds when it was landed, took my 
 bait, and, as he jumped from the water and 
 showed his dark green sides in the sunlight, I 
 
GAME FISH AND FISHING. 249 
 
 said, " Here is a bass that has just come on to 
 the bar from the grass for its breakfast, and 
 now we shall have to wait for such as come 
 straggling along to feed ; we have cleaned the 
 bar of such bass as have been here all night." 
 This proved true, and after waiting for a time 
 we moved about one hundred yards to a patch 
 of grass bottom with an occasional water-weed 
 growing near to the surface. Casting the 
 baited hook over, there was no response on the 
 part of fish of any kind, for this is famous yel- 
 low-perch ground, and I concluded there was a 
 big bass " there or thereabouts " which held the 
 perch in reserve and made them backward 
 about coming forward. The diagnosis was 
 correct, for there was a bite, and the next 
 moment a " barn-door " (any one who fishes in 
 Lake Champlain will soon learn that a " barn- 
 door" is a black bass of the largest calibre) 
 was shaking its head in the air with the hook 
 fast in its jaw. As "Warren put the net under 
 the fish and brought it into the boat, he said it 
 was a "barn-door," sure enough; and as he 
 hooked the scales through its mouth and they 
 marked full five pounds, he added, " That's 'old 
 
250 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 glory,' the biggest bass taken in the bay this 
 year." When we went in, we had twenty-six 
 black bass, which weighed fifty-six pounds ten 
 ounces, and eighteen of them weighed just ten 
 pounds less, or forty-six pounds ten ounces. 
 
 North of Diadama Island is another shoal, of 
 pebbles instead of sand, and here there is ex- 
 cellent bass-fishing, particularly at night or 
 morning. West of Diadama is a clump of big 
 rocks, and west of Diadama shoal is another, 
 where as good fishing may be found as any one 
 could wish. Gull Rock and Long Reef, and the 
 middle reef between Gull Rock and the north 
 end of Butler's Island, and in the cove at the 
 south of Butler's Island, is good fishing. Pop 
 Squash furnishes fine fishing also, but one 
 should have a boatman to show him a score 
 of good places where large bass and plenty of 
 them may be taken. 
 
 The yellow perch from this pure, clear water 
 make an excellent pan fish ; they are really 
 sweeter than the bass (if I may be forgiven the 
 heresy), and they can be taken in large numbers 
 wherever there is grass bottom or weeds. It is 
 the custom to despise the yellow perch where 
 
GAME FISH AND FISHING. 251 
 
 the black-bass fishing is so good as at Back Bay, 
 but, feeling hungry for perch one day, I went 
 with Warren to the grass where the five-pound 
 bass was taken, and caught seventy-six large 
 perch, and, as the Indian said of his venison 
 killed out of season, " call it bulldog or moun- 
 tain sheep, it is good to eat." 
 
 A fish that is esteemed by some more highly 
 for the table than the black bass is the pike- 
 perch, or wall-eyed pike, Stizostedium vitreum. 
 The pike-perch has a cousin, S. Canadense, 
 popularly known as Sanger, or Sandpike, more 
 beautiful in coloring than the pike-perch, but 
 smaller, as it rarely grows to exceed fifteen 
 inches, while the pike-perch grows to ten 
 pounds and upward. Both of these fish are 
 found in Lake Champlain, and the legal season 
 for catching them is the same as that of the 
 black bass. Pike-perch are frequently taken 
 while fishing for black bass,' but to make a 
 business of catching them the best time is June 
 and late in the fall. They are caught by still- 
 fishing with live minnows. Even in June and 
 late autumn, the fishing for pike-perch is not as 
 good as it is through the ice in winter, for they 
 
252 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 go on the sandbars in great numbers three 
 months before the spawning season, which is in 
 March and April, and there remain until they 
 spawn and disperse. They are very prolific, 
 casting two or three hundred thousand eggs, 
 and they spawn when they reach a pound in 
 weight. Like all spring-spawning fish, except 
 the black bass, their eggs furnish food for other 
 predaceous fishes. The black bass is an ex- 
 ception because, as already stated, they guard 
 their spawning-beds; the bullhead and sunfish 
 being the only other fish that exercise this care 
 over eggs and young. A fish that can scarcely 
 be called a game fish, yet is taken occasionally 
 on the hook in Lake Champlain, strange as the 
 statement may appear, is the lake shad, so- 
 called, but which really is the whitefish of the 
 great lakes, Coregonus clupeiformis. This fish 
 is protected by the laws of Vermont from 
 November 1 to November 15, and the law is 
 about as effective as that which protects the 
 black bass, for the whitefish spawns as late as 
 the first week in December, the greater number 
 spawning from the 15th of November to the 
 1st of December, and the black bass spawns 
 
GAME FISH AND FISHING. 253 
 
 during nearly the entire month of June. The 
 laws mean well, but do not actually cover what 
 they are intended to cover, viz., the breeding- 
 season. It is not so unusual for whitefish to 
 take a baited hook as it might be supposed. 
 They are caught in winter through the ice in 
 one or more of the Adirondack lakes, in such 
 numbers as to make it worth the while fishing 
 for them, and one angler has taken a number in 
 Back Bay in summer, and he told me that with 
 their delicate mouths they were not an insignifi- 
 cant fish on the rod ; and certainly there is no 
 more delicately delicious fish on the table than 
 a whitefish fresh from the water. The masca- 
 longe, Esox nohilior, the nobler pike, is some- 
 times taken in Lake Champlain, and if the New 
 York Fish Commission is successful in culti- 
 vating the fish artificially at Chautauqua Lake, 
 it is to be hoped that the same work may be 
 taken up at Lake Champlain, and the water 
 made to teem with this great game fish. There 
 are parts of the lake admirably suited to this 
 fish, and it is well worth the experiment to 
 make it common in the water. 
 
 The pike, Esox lueius, commonly called 
 
254 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 pickerel, also called fresh-water shark, slimy- 
 snake, and other choice names, is omnipresent 
 in Lake Champlain. It bobs up when least 
 expected, and a hook baited with a live minnow 
 is never safe from its long jaws. A gentleman 
 casting a fly on Diadama bar for black bass 
 announced to a friend who was with him, that 
 there was a supreme satisfaction in fly-fishing 
 for bass, for even if the bass did not rise to the 
 fly the pickerel would not, and if there was 
 any particular fish that he cordially disliked 
 it was a pickerel. The first fish that he hooked 
 was a pickerel that tore his fly in tatters. 
 While the pickerel is generally regarded with 
 disfavor by those who seek the black bass, it 
 must be confessed that a pickerel from clear, 
 cold water in the autumn, if properly dressed, 
 by some other fellow, makes good eating ; but 
 these conditions do not exist usually as do those 
 other conditions of warm, thick water, and the 
 odor of Avater weeds and rank vegetation and 
 general sliminess that hangs about the fish. A 
 fish that in any other country than America 
 would be considered a sporting fish is the chub 
 or fall fish, Semotilus hullaris. It is a beautiful 
 
GAME FISH AND FISHING. 255 
 
 silvery fish, fights well on the hook, takes fly 
 and bait, and it is found in schools in Lake 
 Champlain, but to the bass-fisher it is a nui- 
 sance. When hooked, the fall fish acts not 
 unlike the brook trout, and Professor Goode 
 says that in Massachusetts it is called the 
 " cousin trout," because of its trout-like habits. 
 Yet this fish is caught only to be Ihrown away. 
 
 Another fish found in the lake must have a 
 short notice, although it is anything but a game 
 fish. This fish is called the sheeps-head, but it 
 is the fresh-water drum, Haploidonotus grun- 
 niens, and is as worthless for any purpose as 
 any fish that I know. If it is distinguished for 
 anything it is for its ear-bones, which are called 
 ^' lucky-bones." These bones, two in each fish, 
 are about the size of a nickel and of the texture 
 of ivory, but pearly white; and have plainly 
 marked on the surface a letter L, which cer- 
 tainly stands for lucky-bone. They may possi- 
 bly be lucky, but they do not work in pairs. 
 
 I had been fishing in Back Bay for a week 
 with two Texas friends, and during the last 
 day's fishing a " sheeps-head" was taken in one 
 of the boats, and the boatman took out the 
 
256 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 lucky-bones from the head of the fish and pre- 
 sented one to one of the Texans and the other 
 to the writer, " for luck." "We gibed the third 
 member of our party, the major, because he had 
 no visible, tangible, material evidence of luck 
 in his whole outfit, but promised he should 
 share in our dividends — and he did. He de- 
 clared that he did not desire to have any 
 "mullet-head luck," and that the letter L in 
 our cases stood for lunatics. The next morning, 
 we started from St. Albans to go through Lakes 
 Champlain and George, and at Burlington 
 reached the steamboat dock in time to get a 
 square view of the stern of the Vermont steam- 
 ing away to Ticonderoga, and the major growled 
 something about " luck," which did not begin 
 with </. We were told that by crossing the 
 lake to Westport on another steamer, we could 
 catch the Montreal train, which would overtake 
 the boat, and we joyfully told the major that 
 the lucky-bones would work all right when we 
 had mastered the combination. 
 
 Our steamer reached the Westport dock 
 seventeen minutes after the train had steamed 
 away southward ; and there the major offered 
 
GAME FISH AND FISHING. 257 
 
 to buy the lucky-bones, and the negotiations 
 might have ended in a riot if the major had not 
 happened to see a man on the dock with a fine 
 string of black bass, which he went to ask 
 about, and found they were caught from the 
 dock. 
 
 We ordered a carriage to take us to Au 
 Sable Chasm, and while waiting for it, the 
 owner of one lucky-bone bantered the owner of 
 the other to run a foot-race, with the major for 
 finish judge, for a cool, well-favored, robust, 
 carefully selected bottle of the juice of the 
 grape, extra dry. The race was run, and the 
 major decided it a dead heat. Three times he 
 ordered it run over, because it was a dead heat, 
 although there were several yards between the 
 runners at the finish, before we discovered that 
 he was trying to kill the contestants. When 
 we reached the hotel we found we had time to 
 go through the chasm before dinner, and started 
 at once. At the Grand Flume we found a boat 
 but no boatman, and the major insisted that 
 "this is luck; but such luck!" We reached 
 the outlet without " going up the flume," but 
 there was no wagon to take us to the hotel. 
 
258 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 The major glared, but speech failed him, and 
 when finally we did get to the hotel, late for a 
 hot dinner but just in time for a cold one, the 
 storm-cloud burst with a clatter that would 
 have made the dogs of war stick their tails 
 between their hinder legs, and strike out for 
 the brush. The riot act read something after 
 this style : " This is Saturday, and our only 
 chance to get to our families is the midnight ex- 
 press from Montreal, provided we can drive to 
 the depot without the horses running away, 
 which I doubt. On the train are men, women, 
 and children that never harmed either one of 
 you, never heard of you and never wish to, 
 and they will be sleeping peacefully, innocently, 
 never dreaming that each of you has a lucky- 
 bone in his pocket, and it is a bad night for 
 the train to jump the track. You start to-night, 
 and I shall wait until Monday, for I cannot 
 trust myself on a railway train with those lucky- 
 bones. You have tried them on water and on 
 land, and they do not work ; neither of you can 
 fly, to try them in the air ; sell them to me, and 
 I will send them to a man who stole a pail of 
 bait-fish from me at Lake George, and they will 
 
GAME FISH AND FISHING. 259 
 
 ruin his fishing forever." We knew the man, 
 and sold out our luck. This experience is given 
 as a warning, and it may be added that directly 
 after the bait-appropriator received the lucky- 
 bones he lost the biggest fish that ever he 
 hooked. 
 
 Something like fifteen years ago I was in 
 Port Henry in March or April, and the hotel- 
 keeper where I dined regretted that he was 
 unable to give ine some " ice-fish " for my 
 dinner. It was to me a new fish, and I was then 
 informed that they were comparatively new to 
 Lake Champlain, but were caught through the 
 ice in great quantities at that season. A de- 
 scription of the fish made me think that they 
 were the smelt, Osmerus mordax, and when, later, 
 samples were sent to me, that is what they 
 proved to be. They were then caught near 
 Port Henry and at Westport. I have since 
 learned of their being taken opposite Burling- 
 ton and at Plattsburg. At one point they were 
 called frost-fish, but where that was I do not 
 recall. If they are taken in one part of the 
 lake they should be found in other parts, and 
 I presume they are. They furnish fishing at a 
 
260 LAKE CHAMPLAIN. 
 
 season when nothing better offers, and every 
 one knows that they are good when fried in fat 
 like a cruller and served with sauce tartare. 
 During the coming spring the United States 
 Fish Commission will furnish a million lake- 
 trout fry to be planted in Lake Champlain, and 
 there seems no good reason why this fine fish 
 should not thrive therein and furnish excellent 
 angling and a new and choice food fish. Troll- 
 ing for lake trout is not fly-fishing, but when a 
 fifteen-pound Namaycush is hooked at the sxir- 
 face on a light rod it is fishing " good enough 
 for the Jones family." A sentiment which 
 upholds the fish laws as just and proper is 
 rapidly growing with all people. Canadian 
 authorities are working in harmony with the 
 Vermont Fish Commission to stop the netting of 
 fish in Missisquoi Bay, that vast breeding and 
 feeding ground, and the prospect for good and 
 varied fishing in Lake Champlain was never 
 better since the salmon disappeared than to-day. 
 Recalling the pleasures we have enjoyed, most 
 heartily do we commend the splendid rod-fish- 
 ing to be found in Lake Champlain to brother 
 anglers. To the fly-fisher we make no sugges- 
 
GAME FISH AND FISHING. 261 
 
 tion as to lures, for his fly-book will contain, 
 somewhere between its covers, just the combina- 
 tion of feathers, silk, mohair, and tinsel, when 
 deftly cast, to draw to the landing-net black 
 bass to satisfy the most exacting. To the bait- 
 fisher we will say that on the shores of the lake 
 and in the small streams thereof, there may be 
 found in abundance the shiniest minnows for 
 early fishing, the biggest and yellowest grass- 
 hoppers and fattest and blackest crickets for 
 midsummer fishing, and the greenest frogs and 
 thinnest-shelled crayfish for later fishing. 
 
 To those who visit fair Champlain and partake 
 of and enjoy her wealth of game fishes, her 
 health-giving air, her glorious, sunny days and 
 peaceful, restful nights, may there come again 
 and again, in the language of the lamented 
 Westwood, the nineteenth-century Walton, — 
 
 " Oh, the pleasant roaming 
 Homeward through the gloaming ! 
 
 Oh, the heavy creel, alack ! Oh, the joyful greeting ! 
 Oh, the jokes and laughter, 
 And the sound sleep after. 
 
 And the happy, happy dreams, all the sport repeating ! "