Chapter 18

THE LAKE OF ROMANCE AND FISHERMEN

The period from 1870 to 1880 was one of rapid growth and development in Cooperstown. The permanent population increased to over two thousand souls, and a number of fine summer residences were erected. Almost all of its natural advantages Cooperstown owes to Otsego Lake. These had been long appreciated by residents of the village, and now began to be generally sought by visitors from afar. In summer, the shores of the lake come to be dotted with the camp-houses and tents of those who sought relief from the swelter of cities in the cool forests of Otsego, and found delight in the sailing and fishing for which the Glimmerglass is famous.

In the summer of 1870 Capt. Daniel B. Boden began regular steam navigation of Otsego Lake by means of a small steamboat which he had brought to Cooperstown by railroad, and which had been used as a gunboat in Southern waters during the Civil War. The boat was renamed the _Mary Boden_. In the following summer a rival steamboat was launched, much larger than the former, called the _Natty Bumppo_, and owned principally by A. H. Watkins and Elihu Phinney. At the beginning of the next season the conservative folk of the village were scandalized by the _Mary Boden_, which then commenced to make lake trips on Sunday, a breach of ancient custom in which the owners of the _Natty Bumppo_ indignantly declined to compete. On a night early in July there was an alarm of fire, a great blaze at the lake front, and villagers running to the scene found that one of the steamboats was in flames and beyond hope of salvage. A small child at a front window of Edgewater, watching the fire, clapped her hands, and cried out, "It's the wicker [wicked] boat! It's the wicker boat!" But it was not the wicked boat that was ablaze. It was the _Natty Bumppo_, which burned to the water's edge a total loss, the boat that had never left its dock on Sunday. The event was long recalled by some in the village as an instance of grave error in the usually correct dispensations of Providence. The _Natty Bumppo_ was replaced, in the next season, by a new steamboat bearing the same name. The new _Natty Bumppo_ and the old _Mary Boden_ were the famous boats of the lake until they were succeeded by the _Pioneer_ and the _Cyclone_, and later by the _Deerslayer_, the _Pathfinder_, and the _Mohican_.

Aside from the use of canoes, the first general navigation of the lake was undertaken in 1794 by a man known as Admiral Hassy, who in his day was the most celebrated fisherman of Otsego. He had a large flat boat which he called the ship _Jay_, and upon which he used boards for sails. This craft was safe, but not speedy.

Some thirty years later a group of enterprising individuals built a horse-boat as a means of transporting lake parties. The boat had at each end a high cabin topped by a platform. These excrescences caught whatever breeze was blowing, and made the craft unmanageable. The struggles of the two poor horses who were expected to propel the boat were not equal to a gale of Pierstown trade-winds. More than once a lake party starting for Three-Mile Point, aboard this vessel, found itself stranded on the opposite shore.

During the first half of the century a "general lake party" in the summer corresponded to the "select ball" of each winter as constituting one of the two great social events of the year in Cooperstown. It ought to be said that the term "lake party" had a distinct social significance, and the word "picnic," which came later to be used to describe the same thing, meant to the elder inhabitants an affair that had quite lost the flavor of the older custom, and the use of the word was regarded as one of the signs of social decadence.

The means of navigation most often used by the lake parties was a huge scow propelled by long oars. A typical lake party was given in July of 1840, when Governor Seward visited Cooperstown. On the way home upon the lake the old scow, according to custom, was stopped opposite to the Echo, and several persons tried their voices to show off the wonderfully clear reverberations that would be flung back from the eastern hillside. But the master of this art was "Joe Tom," the negro who had been chief cook of the lake party, and was now at one of the long oars of the scow. On being asked to awaken the famous echo, Joe Tom shouted, "Hurrah for Governor Steward!" and when the echo came back, "You've got it to a 't,' Joe!" exclaimed Governor Seward.

At this period the authority in aquatic affairs, and the most renowned fisherman of the lake, was Commodore Boden. Miss Cooper says of her father's novel _Home as Found_ that the one character in it "avowedly and minutely drawn from life" was that of the Commodore, "a figure long familiar to those living on the lake shores--a venerable figure, tall and upright, to be seen for some three score years moving to and fro over the water, trolling for pickerel or angling for perch, almost any day in the year, excepting when the waters were icebound in winter."[120] The commodore was of quite imposing appearance, handsome alike in form and figure, straight as an arrow, and lithe as an Indian, with silvery locks that hung gracefully down upon his shoulders. His method of fishing was fascinating to watch. Standing erect in his boat, the commodore would paddle from the outlet of the lake to some inviting patch of weeds, and there, in quite shallow water, noiselessly drop his anchor. Then, wielding a rod nearly twenty feet in length, he would "skip" his tempting bait--generally the side of a small perch--with amazing vigor and marvellous dexterity, oftentimes taking fifteen or twenty pickerel in less than an hour. To see him strike, manipulate and land a fish weighing three or four pounds, his pliant rod bending nearly to a semicircle, was a spectacle not to be forgotten.[121]

In 1850 Peter P. Cooper brought from the Lake Ontario a little schooner, and became so famous as a boatman and fisherman that he was regarded as the successor of Admiral Hassy and Commodore Boden. Capt. Cooper established a boat livery which included five sailboats and twenty rowboats. He developed the fisheries of Otsego Lake on a big scale, having introduced the gill net as a means of catching bass. In the spring of 1851 there were taken from the lake 25,000 bass. The gill net which Capt. Cooper introduced is made of the best kind of linen thread, with meshes from two to two and a half inches square. The net is about three feet wide, having leads attached to one edge, and corks fastened to the other. The leaded edge is carried to the bottom of the lake, while the other is buoyed up by the corks, making a complete fence across the lake at its bottom, even where it is very deep. The fish swim against the fence, which at once yields to their force, but as it yields, forms a sack whose meshes gather about their fins and tail, making it impossible to back out or otherwise escape. Their efforts serve only to entangle the fish more deeply in the net. Elihu Phinney, the most expert amateur fisherman of the period, denounced Capt. Cooper's gill net as the "most deadly and abominable of all devices."

The Otsego bass never exceed about six pounds in weight, the average being much smaller. Occasionally a lake trout of larger size is caught. With hook and line trout of great size are not often taken. On Friday, August 21, 1908, Alexander S. Phinney caught with hook and line, near Kingfisher Tower, a trout thirty-six inches long and weighing twenty pounds. He tussled with this trout for an hour, with six hundred feet of line, before he succeeded in landing him in the boat. In the next season the same fisherman caught a trout weighing eighteen pounds. So far as authentic records go, these two trout are the largest fish ever caught in the lake with hook and line.

The conditions in Otsego Lake are favorable for the artificial propagation of fish, and many plantings have been made, at first by private enterprise, and afterward by the State. The lake extends in a direction from N. N. East to S. S. West about nine miles, varying in width from about three quarters of a mile to a mile and a half. The surface of the lake is 1,194 feet above tide-water. The average depth is about fifty feet, although about two miles north of the village soundings have been taken to a depth of one hundred and fifty feet, while toward the midst of the lake the depths are greater. In many places the water deepens gradually from the shore, but along the eastern bank there are points at which, Fenimore Cooper declared, "a large ship might float with her yards in the forest." The lake is chiefly supplied from cold bottom springs. Its only constant tributaries are two small streams, whose entire volume is not half that of its outlet, the Susquehanna River, which here begins its long journey to Chesapeake Bay. The upper and lower portions of the lake, being shallow and weedy, afford ample pickerel grounds, while the middle portion and whole eastern shore are admirably adapted, by deep water and soft marl bottom, to the coregoni and salmon trout, and nearer shore, by rocky bottom and sharp ledges, to the rock bass, black bass, and yellow perch. Large fish find an abundant food supply in the "lake shiner," an exquisitely beautiful creature and dainty morsel, about four inches long.

The fish for which the lake has become famous among epicures is the "Otsego bass." In _The Pioneers_, published in 1823, Fenimore Cooper expressed the general opinion when he put into the mouth of one of his characters this eulogy of the Otsego bass: "These fish are of a quality and flavor that in other countries would make them esteemed a luxury on the tables of princes. The world has no better fish than the bass of Otsego; it unites the richness of the shad to the firmness of the salmon." More than sixty years later much the same opinion prevailed, when Elihu Phinney described Otsego bass as "beyond all peradventure the very finest fresh water fish that swims."

There has long been a difference of opinion as to whether the so-called Otsego bass is to be regarded as a distinct species. Louis Agassiz, the highest authority of his time, after careful analysis pronounced the Otsego bass to be "in its organic structure a distinct fish, not found in any other waters of the world." In 1915 Dr. Tarleton H. Bean, the New York State fish culturist, declared that the so-called Otsego bass "is merely the common Labrador whitefish which has become dwarfed in size by some peculiarities of its habitat." De Witt Clinton, a former governor of New York, wrote the first scientific description, accompanied by a drawing, of this fish, which he called "the Salmo Otsego, or the Otsego Basse."[122] At the time when Clinton wrote, the whitefishes were placed in the genus Salmo. In 1911, in the bulletin of the United States bureau of fisheries,[123] Dr. Evermann asserted concerning Clinton's drawing of Otsego bass, which he had examined, that "the cut, although crude, plainly shows _Coregonus clupeaformis_. The form is elliptical, and the back shows the dark streaks along the rows of scales usually characteristic of that species." The same author, in collaboration with Dr. Jordan,[124] says concerning the common whitefish: "This species, like others of wide distribution, is subject to considerable variations, dependent upon food, waters, etc. One of these is the so-called Otsego bass, var Otsego (Clinton), a form landlocked in Otsego Lake at the head of the Susquehanna River."

There are Otsego fishermen who are not impressed by this array of learning, and still insist that the Otsego bass is quite different from any other fish in the world. The _Otsego Farmer_ in 1915 summed up the matter thus: "Otsego bass is not what is ordinarily termed whitefish, but is probably a species of the same family. As a matter of fact, Otsego Lake has been stocked with whitefish fry from the Great Lakes, and now the nets of fishermen are always filled with a mixture of whitefish and Otsego bass. Whatever Dr. Bean may think about it, any Otsego Lake fisherman can tell the difference, and any epicure having once tasted Otsego bass is never again deceived by whitefish."

A view which seems to reconcile these diverse opinions is that of Alexander S. Phinney, the most famous amateur fisherman of Otsego at the beginning of the twentieth century. He holds that Otsego bass is quite distinct from whitefish, but believes that the true Otsego bass has disappeared, giving place to a hybrid fish, now called Otsego bass, but really a cross between that variety and the whitefish with which Otsego has been stocked from the Great Lakes.

As many as five thousand Otsego bass have been taken with one draught of the seine, but in view of the great difficulty of catching any with hook and line, the following suggestion from an old authority, Seth Green, is still of interest: "The Otsego bass can be taken with small minnows or red angle worms. I think if your tackle is very fine, and you do not twitch when they bite, they will swallow the bait. Put five or ten hooks (O'Shaunessy 8's, forged) on a fine snell, and loop them five feet apart; with a small sinker at the end. Bait some with small minnows (an inch or so in length) and some with worms. Cast out as far as you can from the boat, and let it lie half or three quarters of an hour on the bottom, feeling now and then to see if you have one on. The best way is to let them hook themselves. The angle worms, if used for bait, should be strung on to the hook with both ends left dangling. A light stroke must be made and the fish handled very carefully."

Many fishermen are successful in taking Otsego bass with hook and line in winter, by fishing through the ice. No sooner has the lake become frozen from shore to shore, usually after Christmas, than the whole surface becomes dotted with the shanties of fishermen, which remain until the ice begins to weaken in the spring. The typical fisherman's shanty on the ice-bound lake is about five by six feet in floor space, and six feet high. It has a window, and the floor is so arranged that it can be raised to keep the fisherman above the water that sometimes floods the surface of the ice. Holes are cut through the floor, and through the ice beneath, for the admission of the fishing lines. The shanty is warmed by a small stove, with its stove-pipe sticking out through the roof. A chair and a coal box complete the furniture.

Two methods of fishing through the ice for Otsego bass are used by the occupants of the shanties. According to one method the hook is dropped to the bottom of the lake, and the fish are attracted to its vicinity by bait strewn on the bottom. The other method is used nearer shore, where the baited hook is let down part way toward the bottom, to tempt the fish that move amid the grass and weeds.

There are others besides fishermen to whom the frozen surface of Otsego Lake offers the means of pleasure and occupation. In some seasons the freezing of the lake occurs within a few hours, after a great and sudden fall in temperature, during a night of calm and intense cold. At such times, before snow has fallen upon the surface, the lake presents a scene of splendor. The ice is quite transparent, and has the effect of a great sheet of glass spread out amid the hills. This offers a perfect surface for skating, and attracts not only the boys and girls of the village, but a large number of their elders. The lake grows lively with the gracefully gliding promenade of skaters, with here and there a group playing at hockey, while others disport themselves at "crack the whip." The friction of so many gliding feet imparts to the frozen surface a low and weirdly humming sound, and the droning note is echoed by the hills, until the valley resounds with monotonous music. There are times when the lake is so well frozen that skaters traverse the entire length. In some seasons ice-boats have been used, slanting from end to end of the lake with prodigious speed. As the winter advances and the ice grows stronger, driving upon the lake becomes common, and horse-races upon the ice have sometimes been included among the winter sports.

At about five miles above the foot of the lake, and extending across it from shore to shore, a large fissure in the ice usually appears during the winter. This fissure is sometimes so wide that a team cannot cross it, and many years ago a span of horses was accidentally driven into it. The crevice in the ice has caused much speculation. The lake is narrow at the place where the crack appears, and the fissure is supposed to be created by expansion from the north and from the south, causing the ice to rise several feet in gable-like form until the ridge cracks, for fragments of ice are found on each side of the crevice.[125]

The tremendous forces exerted by the expansion of the freezing lake cry aloud on still winter nights, whenever, after a period of thawing weather, the mercury suddenly drops to a point far below zero. On such nights, while the trees of the surrounding forest here and there begin to be so penetrated with the fierce cold that they crack like rifle-shots, the ice-bound lake sets up an unearthly groaning, and the cavernous sound of its bellowing echoes dismally over the sleeping village, like the trumpetings of some huge leviathan in agony.

Cooperstown has a winter harvest-time, in January or February, when ice is cut from the lake for the summer supply. This industry occupies a large force of men, with plows, saws, hooks, crowbars, horses and bob-sleds, for several weeks. The ice taken from Otsego Lake, from ten to twenty inches thick, according to the severity of the winter, is always pure as mountain dew, and clear as crystal.

The midsummer view of Otsego Lake at one time included, in the clearings along the western shore and hillsides, a great luxuriance of hop-vines. The golden wreaths of hops, as they hang ripening in the August sunshine, sweeping in graceful clusters from the tall poles, or swinging in the breeze in umbrella-like canopies, add a more picturesque feature to the landscape than any other growing crop.

Hops have a part in the story of Cooperstown, which was at one time the centre of the most important hop-growing industry in America. Hop culture was introduced into Otsego county about the year 1830. In 1845 only 168,605 pounds were produced. In 1885, within a radial distance of forty miles from Cooperstown was included more than half of the hop-producing region of the United States.

The hop-picking season, during the latter part of August, has given a picturesque character of its own to the life of the village and environs. In the primitive days of the industry, when the harvesting of the crop did not require any additional help from outside of the immediate region, the task of hop-picking was lightened by the enjoyment of social pleasures and romantic excitements that came to be associated with it by the young people of Otsego. At the beginning of the picking season, in those days, anyone passing through the country would meet wagon after wagon, of the style known as a "democrat," loaded down with gay and lively maidens, with one or two young men to each load. On reaching the hop-yard to which they were assigned, these frolicsome parties exchanged their holiday attire for broad-rimmed hats and working dresses. Boxes were placed about the hop-yard, four pickers to each, the boxes being divided into four sections holding ten bushels apiece, and into these were dropped the clusters picked from the vines by nimble fingers. Experienced hands can fill two or more boxes in a day, for which as much as fifty cents a box used to be paid.

The midday lunch was taken beneath the shade of the nearest tree, or, in case the pickers were boarded by the grower, all adjourned to the largest room in an out-building, where a rural feast was spread with no niggard hand. Hop-pickers expect to live on the fat of the farmer's land, and as a rule they are not disappointed. Whole sheep and beeves vanish like manna before the Israelites in the short three weeks of the picking season, while gallons of coffee, firkins of butter, barrels of flour, and sugar by the hundred weight are swallowed up in the capacious maw of the small army. The nightly hop-dance used to be an indispensable adjunct of the picking season, much counted upon by the gay throng, but rather frowned upon, as an occasion of scandal, by staid and proper seniors.

With the great increase in hop-production during the early 'eighties, the romance of hop-picking, on many farms, gave place to a picturesque but undesirable invasion of vagabondage from the large cities. Some farmers continued to choose their pickers from among the better sort of young men and maidens of the neighborhood, but many large growers, requiring a great number of hands for a short season, resorted to the unemployed of neighboring cities, and the result was an annual immigration from Albany, Troy, Binghamton, and other cities farther north, which taxed the capacity of the railways. Among these workers many were honest and capable, but a large part of them were attracted by the prospect of three weeks of board and lodging, with an amount of pay which, if small, was sufficient for a glorious spree. It became the custom in Cooperstown to augment the village police force during the hop-picking season, for city thugs were likely to be abroad, and when the pickers were paid off their revels were apt to become both obnoxious and dangerous.

Hops will be seen growing in the summer along the shores and hillsides of Otsego Lake, so long as beer is made; for, aside from the very limited amount required to leaven bread, and the comparatively small amount used in druggists' preparations, there is no use for hops except in the making of beer. But never again will there be in Otsego such luxuriance of hop-culture as that which developed in the 'eighties before the Pacific coast learned to compete successfully with the hop-growers of New York State.

Hop-culture is a gamble which in Otsego county has made fortunes for some farmers and brought ruin to others. The growth of the product is singularly at the mercy of freaks of weather, and its preparation for the market is beset by many possibilities of failure. It is a crop of which it is most difficult to count the final cost, or to predict the market price. It has varied in price more than any other product of the soil. In 1878 the entire crop was marketed at from five to twelve cents a pound. But for many years every farmer in Otsego remembered the season of 1882-83, when the average cost of producing a pound of hops was ten cents, and hops were selling at a dollar a pound, so that, as was said at the time, "five pounds of hops could be exchanged for a barrel of flour."[126] Many farmers made money at this time, but some held their hops for an even higher price, and lost. One farmer held thousands of pounds of hops in his great barn, and kept buying in the crops of other farmers, awaiting a price of $1.20, at which he had resolved to sell. Two years later the hops were still in the barn, and nine-tenths of their value was lost. There were other tragedies of this sort, yet for years afterward, while some continued to grow hops at a fair profit, many a farmer in the vicinity of Cooperstown, lured by the hope of a dollar-a-pound season, was kept on the verge of poverty by his faith in the golden vine.

Otsego Lake is chiefly famous as the scene of events in two of Cooper's _Leather-Stocking Tales_. There are glimpses of it in _The Pioneers_, while in _The Deerslayer_ the whole action revolves about this lake, which throughout the story is called the "Glimmerglass." The scenes of incidents in these two tales are still pointed out on Otsego Lake, and have become as much a part of its history as of its romance.

To begin with points described in _The Deerslayer_, the beehive-shaped rock where the youthful Leather-Stocking had his rendezvous with Chingachgook is that now known as Council Rock, and still juts above the water at the outlet of the lake, near the western shore of the Susquehanna's source. Here it was that exactly at sunset, to keep his appointment with Leather-Stocking, the tall, handsome, and athletic young Delaware Indian suddenly appeared in full war-paint, standing upon the rock, having escaped his lurking foes. Not far from this point, at a short distance down the river, Deerslayer got his first glimpse of the beautiful Judith Hutter, as she peered from the window of the "ark," which had been moored beneath the screening foliage of overhanging trees. It was through these waters, and through the outlet, soon afterward, that Floating Tom Hutter and Hurry Harry, aided by Deerslayer, drew the ark back into the lake in the nick of time to escape a band of hostile Iroquois.

On the western side of the lake, just beyond the O-te-sa-ga as one travels northward, the first little bay that indents the shore, now called Blackbird Bay, and somewhat changed in shape and aspect by fillings of soil and other improvements at the Country Club, is the "Rat's Cove," where Floating Tom Hutter was fond of keeping his ark anchored behind the trees that covered the narrow strip of jutting land. Here it was, at the beginning of the story, that Deerslayer and Hurry Harry sought Tom in vain, and on this margin of the lake the buck appeared at which Hurry took the shot that awakened the echoes of the Glimmerglass. Adjacent to this bay, in the midst of the stretch of land between the O-te-sa-ga and the Country Club house, was the Huron camp in which Hutter and Hurry were captured by the redskins; and the quantities of arrowheads found here in later times suggest that it actually was a favorite place of Indian encampment.

North of Blackbird Bay and the Country Club, and beyond Fenimore Farm, are Glimmerglen Cove and Brookwood Point, where charming residences that overlook the lake add their own attractions to the names of "Glimmerglen" and "Brookwood," by which they are known. The stream that gushes into the lake from Brookwood is the one in which Hetty Hutter made her ablutions, and from which she drank, while on her lonely way southward to the Huron camp, in her simple-minded scheme for the rescue of her father and Hurry Harry.

A short distance north of Brookwood there empties into the lake a stream which is worth tracing toward its source as far as the hillside beyond the road that skirts the lake, for here the water comes tumbling down from the height in the beautiful Leatherstocking Falls. A shady glen is here, a favorite resort of small picnic parties, and while nothing of Cooper's romance has been added to the scene except the name, some interest may be found in the traces of an old mill which once got its power from Leatherstocking Falls.

Some tense situations in the story of the _Deerslayer_ are associated with Three-Mile Point, the present picnic resort of Cooperstown; and a full understanding of the events described as having taken place on this spot almost depends upon some reference to the actual conformation of the land. It was on the northern side of the projecting point that Hetty had landed on the errand just referred to, setting her canoe adrift. Wah-ta-wah promised to meet her Delaware lover, Chingachgook, at the same landing-place, on the next night, at the moment when the planet Jupiter should top the pines of the eastern shore. Here came Chingachgook and Deerslayer in their canoe, at the appointed time, to steal the maiden from the Hurons, but found that she could not keep the tryst. Around this point Deerslayer gently propelled his canoe southward until he gained a view of the fire-lit camp, which the Hurons had moved from the region of Blackbird Bay to the southern slope of Three-Mile Point. Back again to its northern side he paddled softly, and having joined Chingachgook, they left the canoe on the beach near the point, and made their stealthy detour, approaching the camp from the west, in the shadow of the trees, informing Wah-ta-wah of their presence by Chingachgook's squirrel-signal. The spring that still bubbles for the refreshment of picnickers on the northern shore of the Point was the one which Wah-ta-wah made a pretext to draw away from the camp the old squaw who guarded her, and here Deerslayer throttled the vigilant hag, while Chingachgook and his Indian sweetheart raced for the canoe. Here, when Deerslayer released his grip to follow them, the squaw alarmed the camp. Along the stretch of beach he ran eastward to the place where the lovers were already in the canoe awaiting him, and from this point Deerslayer pushed their canoe to safety, yielding himself to capture.

It was at Five-Mile Point that the Hurons were afterward encamped when Deerslayer, whom they had released on parole, returned at the appointed hour to redeem his plighted word. Back of Five-Mile Point is a picturesque rocky gorge called Mohican Canyon, through which a brook ripples, with clumps of fern and rose peeping from the crevices of its rugged walls. Having fulfilled his pledge, Deerslayer soon ventured the dash for liberty that so nearly succeeded; and, after making a circuit of the slope, it was along the ridge of Mohican Canyon that he ran at top speed to try a plunge for the lake, with the whole band of Indians in pursuit.

In the open area of Five-Mile Point, after his recapture, Deerslayer was bound to a tree, and became a target for the hairbreadth marksmanship of Huron tomahawks, preliminary to being put to torture.

North of this spot, and along the shore, Hutter's Point is of interest to the reader of the _Leather-Stocking Tales_, for here is the path by which Deerslayer reached the lake at the beginning of his romantic history, and gained his first view of the Glimmerglass. In the second chapter of the _Deerslayer_, Cooper's famous description of the lake as it was when the first white man came, based upon his own recollection of it when nine-tenths of its shores were in virgin forest, was conceived from the angle of Hutter's Point.

Not far from the northern end of the lake a faint discoloration of the water, with a few reeds projecting above the surface, reveals the location of the so-called "sunken island," where the waters of the lake shoal from a great depth, and offer the site upon which, at the southern end of the shoal, Cooper's imagination built the "Muskrat Castle" of Tom Hutter, at which the terrific struggle with the Indians occurred when Hutter was killed. At the northern end of the sunken island was the watery grave in which the mother of Judith and Hetty lay, and which afterward became the grave of Hutter, and finally of Hetty herself.[127]

Across the lake, on its eastern shore, south of Hyde Bay, is Gravelly Point, to which Hutter's lost canoe drifted, and where Deerslayer killed his first Indian. Farther south is Point Judith, now marked by Kingfisher Tower, where Deerslayer, returning to the Glimmerglass fifteen years after the events described in the story, found the stranded wreck of the ark, and saw fluttering from a log a ribbon that had been worn by the lovely Judith Hutter. Here "he tore away the ribbon and knotted it to the stock of Killdeer, which had been the gift of the girl herself."

Toward the foot of the lake the eastern hills and shore belong to scenes of Leather-Stocking's elder days, as described in _The Pioneers_. North of Lakewood Cemetery a climb up the precipitous mountainside leads to Natty Bumppo's Cave, which, with some poetic license in his treatment of its dimensions, the novelist employs as a setting for the final climax of his story. To the platform of rock over the cave, as a refuge from the forest fire, Leather-Stocking guided Elizabeth Temple and Edwards, and carried the dying Chingachgook. On this spot, with his glazing eyes fixed upon the western hills, the last of the Mohicans yielded up his spirit. Here was the scene of Captain Hollister's charge at the head of the Templeton Light Infantry, so swiftly followed by the revelation of the mystery which the cave concealed.

Not far from the spot upon which the Leather-Stocking monument now stands, near the main entrance of Lakewood cemetery, the log hut of Leather-Stocking stood, and afterward, according to the story, Chingachgook was buried there. Farther southward, the road that branches off to ascend Mount Vision is the one by which Judge Temple and his daughter approached the village in the opening scene of the story, and it was during their descent from the upper level of this road that the buck was shot by Edwards and Leather-Stocking, when Judge Temple's marksmanship had failed. Near the branching of this road a stairway climbs the mountain, and reaches the pathway of Prospect Rock, where Elizabeth found the old Mohican, and was trapped by the forest fire. Upon this natural terrace a rustic observatory now stands, which offers a superb view of the lake and village.

It was on the summit of Mount Vision, overlooking the village, that Elizabeth Temple was faced by a panther crouching to spring upon her, and had resigned herself to a cruel death, when she heard the quiet voice of old Leather-Stocking, followed by the crack of the rifle that saved her life, as he said:

"Hist! hist! Stoop lower, gal; your bonnet hides the creatur's head!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 120: _Pages and Pictures_, 301.]

[Footnote 121: Elihu Phinney in Shaw's _History of Cooperstown_.]

[Footnote 122: Letter to John W. Francis, 1822.]

[Footnote 123: Vol xxix, p. 35.]

[Footnote 124: U.S. National Museum, Bulletin 47, p. 465.]

[Footnote 125: Livermore, _History of Cooperstown_, p. 133.]

[Footnote 126: G. P. Keese, _Harper's Magazine_, October, 1885.]

[Footnote 127: For the purpose of the story, as he explains in the preface of _The Deerslayer_, Cooper places the "sunken island" farther south, nearly opposite to Hutter's Point, and at a greater distance from the shore than its real situation.]