Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
Beside the river below Pittston and near the village of Wyoming,
having the great North Mountain for a background, was Fort Forty, the
scene of the chief atrocities of the massacre, the site being now
marked by a granite obelisk. Here is the burial-place of the remains
of the slaughtered. "Queen Esther's Rock" is pointed out, where the
half-breed Queen of the Senecas, to avenge the death of her son, is
said to have herself tomahawked fourteen defenceless prisoners. Most
of the survivors fled after this horror, and they did not return to
the valley until long after peace was restored, when the infant
settlement was renewed in the founding of Wilkesbarre. Far up on the
side of the grand peak guarding the northern portal of the
Lackawannock Gap is the broad shelf of rock which embalms in
"Campbell's Ledge" the memory of the great English poet who has so
graphically told the harrowing tale.
THE TERMINAL MORAINE.
The Delaware River above the "Forks," at the mouth of the Lehigh,
breaks through a narrow notch in the Chestnut Hill ridge known as the
"Little Water Gap," while farther to the northeast the ridge continues
through New Jersey as the Jenny Jump Mountain. Above this is the noted
"Foul Rift," where the river channel is filled with boulders and rocks
of all sizes and shapes, the dread of the raftsmen who gave it the
name, for many a raft has been wrecked there. But while this place is
shunned by the navigator, it has an absorbing attraction for the
geologist. This was where the great "Terminal Moraine" of the glacial
epoch crossed the Delaware, recalling the "Ice Age," to which
reference has already been made. When the vast Greenland ice-cap crept
down so as to overspread northeastern America and northwestern Europe
and filled the intervening Atlantic bed, it broke off many rocky
fragments in its southward advance, scratching the surfaces of the
ledges, and the fragments held in its grip, with striated lines and
grooves in the direction of its movement. The ice steadily flowed
southward, coming over mountain and valley alike in a continuous
sheet, enveloping the ocean and adjacent continents, and finally
halted on the Delaware about sixty miles north of Philadelphia. Its
southern verge spread across America from Alaska to St. Louis, and
thence to the Atlantic on the northern coast of New Jersey. Its
southern boundary entered Western Pennsylvania near Beaver, passing
northeast to the New York line; then turning southeast, it crossed the
Lehigh about ten miles northwest of Mauch Chunk and the Delaware just
below Belvidere. It crossed New Jersey to Staten Island, traversed the
length of Long Island, and passed out to sea, appearing on Block
Island, Cape Cod, St. George's Bank and Sable Island Shoal, south of
Nova Scotia. The boundary of the glacier west of the "Foul Rift" on
the Delaware appears as a range of low gravel hills, which are piled
upon the slate hills of Northampton farther west, and reach the base
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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