The river has moved at will from one side of its alluvial plain to the other, and its threats to change its course are not to be taken lightly. Until 1830 it flowed past Northampton, around the great ox-bow to Easthampton and then back to the watergap between Mount Tom and Mount Holyoke. It served as the main line of communication to the Atlantic seaboard and was a much travelled route. In the spring of that year high water breached the narrow neck of land between the two ends of the meander loop, and practically overnight the route to New London was shortened by three miles. Although the event was not a source of rejoicing to the landowners, Northampton declared a day of thanksgiving because they were now, thanks be to Providence, three miles nearer the sea. How often the river has changed its course may never be determined, but the floodplain is grooved with swampy or silt-filled ox-bow lakes, not only near Northampton, but all the way from Brattleboro, Vermont, to Middletown, Connecticut. They tell of older shifts in the course of a river which still displays its brute power within the limits of its alluvial plain. The inundation of 1936 did more than scour the river’s floodplain; it left thick deposits of sand and silt upon many of the fields. Each preceding flood has done the same sort of thing, dropping coarse sand in greatest abundance on the banks where the river flowed straightest. Flood by flood, the deposit has risen higher on these favored sites, where the swift main current slackens as it spreads over the broad, flat plain. Today the banks form natural levees sloping away from the river at many points southward from the Sunderland Bridge. Just when the river started to shift back and forth across its alluvial plain is not revealed, but it was long before the white man penetrated the country. Indian graves and campsites have been laid bare as the high water of each new flood has removed the silt left during earlier inundations. The sites rarely yield any implement brought by the Europeans; they record long years of Indian occupation in the land called Norwottock, a land in which the red man found a river which temperamentally shifted its course in response to periodic floods. The floodplain ends at a rise in the road not far east of Hadley. The rise is a scalloped embankment, reminiscent of the high bank on the river bend downstream from Hadley; even the long narrow swamp at the base looks like a filled ox-bow, and the scallops look like bites which the hungry river took from its banks. This embankment continues northward past Mount Warner, following the present channel closely through North Hadley, and it passes just east of Sunderland village. Corresponding banks are present on the west side of the stream in South Deerfield and Hatfield. Within the confines of those terraces the Connecticut has had free play, but its course has never strayed east or west of these well defined boundaries.