Nobody knows, or will ever know, how this lake got its smooth-sounding Indian name. Some tell us that the word means "the place of mists"; others, "the place high up"; still others that its form, two lakes with a passage between, gave it the name, "a bag tied in the middle," or "two moccasins tied together." Mr. Obed Edson of Chautauqua County, who made a thorough search among old records and traditions, which he embodied in a series of articles in _The Chautauquan_ in 1911-12, gives the following as a possible origin. A party of Seneca Indians were fishing in the lake and caught a large muskallonge. They laid it in their canoe, and going ashore carried the canoe over the well-known portage to Lake Erie. To their surprise, they found the big fish still alive, for it leaped from the boat into the water, and escaped. Up to that time, it is said, no muskallonge had ever been caught in that lake; but the eggs in that fish propagated their kind, until it became abundant. In the Seneca language, _ga-jah_ means fish; and _ga-da-quah_ is "taken out" or as some say, "leaped out." Thus Chautauqua means "where the fish was taken out," or "the place of the leaping fish." The name was smoothed out by the French explorers, who were the earliest white men in this region, to "Tchadakoin," still perpetuated in the stream, Chadakoin, connecting the lake with the Allegheny River. In an extant letter of George Washington, dated 1788, the lake is called, "Jadaqua." From the shore of Lake Erie, where Barcelona now stands, to the site of Mayville at the head of Lake Chautauqua ran a well-marked and often-followed Indian trail, over which canoes and furs were carried, connecting the Great Lakes with the river-system of the mid-continent. If among the red-faced warriors of those unknown ages there had arisen a Homer to sing the story of his race, a rival to the Iliad and the Nibelungen might have made these forests famous, for here was the borderland between that remarkable Indian confederacy of central New York, the Iroquois or Five Nations,--after the addition of the Tuscaroras, the Six Nations--those fierce Assyrians of the Western Continent who barely failed in founding an empire, and their antagonists the Hurons around Lake Erie. The two tribes confronting each other were the Eries of the Huron family and the Senecas of the Iroquois; and theirs was a life and death struggle. Victory was with the Senecas, and tradition tells that the shores of Chautauqua Lake were illuminated by the burning alive of a thousand Erie prisoners.