This descent brings the Genesee River down from the higher plateau to what is known as the "Genesee Level," for at the end of the defile, fifteen miles below Portage, it flows out of the highlands over pleasant lands and with gentler current. Here on the "Genesee Flats" is the village of Mount Morris, and near it has been placed, alongside the ravine, the rude log cabin, which was originally on the higher land above Portage, the Indian "Council House of Cascadea," where the Iroquois chiefs often met. At the removal in 1872, the services were conducted in the Senecas language, several Indians attending, and the identical "pipe of peace" given by Washington to Red Jacket was passed around. Nearby the river emerges through a Titanic gateway in the rocks to the pastoral region stretching far to the northward, while far over on the eastern verge is the village of Geneseo, sloping up the ascent. Its Indian name, meaning the "beautiful valley," is also given the river. After meandering placidly for miles across these flats, the Genesee River reaches the "Flour City of the West," Rochester, the storage and distributing mart for this fertile valley, getting its original start and title from the prolific wheat crops. And here the Genesee plunges down another waterfall which gives power to the Rochester mills. When De Witt Clinton, in 1810, exploring the route for the Erie Canal, crossed the river here, there was not a house. The place was afterwards the "Hundred Acre Tract," planned in 1812 for a settlement by three adventurous frontiersmen, and the town was named for one of them, Nathaniel Rochester. After a few years, the spreading fame of the fertility of the Genesee Valley attracted a large population, and it became known as the garden spot of the then "West," so that out of this grew the flour-mills which have continued to be Rochester's chief industry. The Genesee River flows through with swift current, the Erie Canal being carried over on a massive stone aqueduct and the New York Central Railroad upon a wide bridge, and about a hundred yards beyond, the river plunges down the great Rochester Fall. The ledge over which it tumbles is a perpendicular wall, straight and regular in formation, and almost without fragments of rock at the foot, so that the fall is a clear one. The shores below are lined with huge stone mills and breweries, to which races on each bank conduct the water from a dam above the railroad bridge. This Rochester Fall, down which Sam Patch jumped to his death, is ninety-six feet high. Below it, the river flows through a somewhat wider channel, gradually bending to the left, and then it goes down a second cataract of twenty-five feet height, and finally, at some distance, over a third and broken fall of eighty-four feet. As at Portage, this second succession of triple cataracts sinks the river bed deeper and deeper into the gorge, so that the enclosing walls are in some places over three hundred feet high.