On Tuesday, the line of march was taken up through the broken, swampy, and mountainous country. For their night’s camp the men were happy to find a level plain, but the next day they had to go through Bear Swamp, which was then a horrible dark quagmire six miles long. Having a clay bottom, the black mire held the water which flowed tortuously through the spongy soil, in which the vegetation of centuries had made a peaty mass, which the recent rains had made as unstable as a jelly and slippery as soap. Here was the divide of waters between the Susquehanna and the Saint Lawrence rivers, flowing into the Atlantic at Labrador or Hatteras. The Indian trail through this soggy country passed through defiles, over mounds and through ravine after ravine, rough and scrubby, while through all meandered a stream of dark water. Only with the most tremendous toil were the Continentals able to get through, and the rear guard did not reach hard ground until long after noon next day. The cannon were pulled through only by the toil of hundreds of men at the drag ropes, or by laying on the worst places corduroy, or a rough road of trees and brushwood. Many horses were mired and abandoned, and scores of packs with precious bags of flour and ammunition were lost. Altogether it was a most terrible experience, much worse than in the Pennsylvania swamp, called “The Shades of Death,” which they had traversed. For years afterwards, that horrible night formed the blackest memory and gave the most disturbing element to the dreams of the old soldiers. In our time, as we travel through this drained and dry valley between the green walls of the hills on either side, we wonder as we look over the celery gardens where Bear Swamp was. Within half a century after Sullivan’s march and return, the forests were cleared and the Chemung canal, bearing millions of cubic feet of timber to the great cities, and especially to build the Maryland privateers for the War of 1812, traversed and drained the swamp. To-day smiling farms and vegetable gardens on either side of the well laid beds of the steam railway and electric trolley line fill the sunny and beautiful valley.