THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER
tions appears a place in Pennsylvania called Great Island.[1]
A description of the upper valley was given in 1683 by Indian chiefs to James Graham and William Haig, agents of William Penn, who had arrived in Albany. From the Mohawk Valley to "the lake whence the Susquehanna river rises" they said the distance was "one day's journey," and from the lake "to the Susquehanna Castles," meaning the Indian towns in the Wyoming Valley, was ten days. From Oneida to "the kill which falls into the Susquehanna," this kill being the Unadilla River, was one and a half days' journey, and from the kill to its mouth was one day's journey.
- ↑ An interesting interpretation of the word Susquehanna has reached the author from the Iroquois village of Caughnawaga, above Montreal. He wrote to a French gentleman at that place to learn if the Marcoux Dictionary, preserved there in manuscript at the Jesuit Mission, could shed any light on the question. The gentleman replied that it gave none whatever, but he kindly submitted the matter to a learned abbe from another place and forwarded the abbe's reply, which is as follows, translated from the French:
"We are here inclined to think the word is a corruption of Sequana, the Latin word for the Seine. It is the opinion of M. B., who is here on vacation, opinion which for him has passed to the state of a certain truth since the adhesion of a Paulist father which has just reached us, and assures us that the Sequana of the United States has, like that of France, at its mouth a harbor called Havre de Grace, and that it was the French Huguenots who, settling in that place, brought together the name of the city and the name of the river."
To establish this theory it would be necessary to show that French Huguenots settled at the mouth of the river at a time earlier than the arrival of Smith, and proof of this is wanting. A romantic name Muddy Stream certainly is not. River with the Long Reaches is much better. Best of all is Great Island River, the name bestowed upon the stream by those who owned it. And by that name it would be both fitting and agreeable for those who love it to have it known.
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