THE HISTORY OF STRATFORD

Golden Hill Indians
The Housatonic
The Wepawaug
Cupheags and Pequannock
Weantinock
Goodyear's Island
Indian Slaves
Indian Remnants
Indian Troubles
New Indian Papers

THE HISTORY OF STRATFORD

Wm. Howard Wilcoxson

Stratford Indians

Trouble with the Indians

Establishing Title to the Land

Indian Deeds and Relics

White Hills Purchase

FORREST MORGAN

Lifestyles, Government, Religion and War

Indian Titles and Mohegan Land Troubles

Sowheag, Uncas, and Miantonomo

Owenoco, the Son of Uncas

THE HOUSATONIC

CHARD POWERS SMITH

The Promised Land
Heathen in the Land
The Lord's Scouts

The Land and The Lord

The Next Seven Tribes

ALEXANDER JOHNSTON

Connecticut Indian History

The Pequot War

Chard Powers Smith - The Housatonic

The Promised Land

The First Billion and a Half Years

New England has never quite forgotten that in the old days it was a separate continent. The old days were the first five and most of the sixth day of Biblical creation. Or, if you prefer, they were almost all of a billion and a half years of geologic history which the scientists find recorded in the rocks. It is only in the last fifty million years or so that New England has accepted the inevitable and joined the unwieldy continental union which we call North America.

The old continent of New England went north into Canada about as far as the present St. Lawrence River, and south to include Long Island. Its eastern shore was a good way out in what we call the Atlantic, and sometimes its western shore included most of modern New York State. The scientists called it Acadia, because that is a pretty name, or perhaps because they lack proper respect for New England. To the northwest, beyond a stretch of ocean, was another little continent which they call Canadia. To the southwest was another names Appalachia.

From the earliest geologic time, western Acadia, where the valley was to be, has been “the place beyond the mountains.” From the age of fire and steam, when the earth’s crust was cooling into shape, it remained restless over this upland. Every twenty or thirty million years, either the underlying fire or the lateral pressure of the contracting earth’s crust would heave up volcanic peaks five or six miles into the sky. Then the volcanoes would quirt down, the broken crust would lie jagged in upended fragments, and for a quiet aeon frost and water would whittle down the giants, spilling out the sediment in strata that filled the valleys and lay eastward and westward over lowlands and out over the ocean floor. Then another period of fire and shrinking crust would thrust up mountains again, and the whole process would be repeated. October Mountain, Monument, Bear, Everett, Riga, Cannan, Sharon, Skiff, and the hundreds of others are the worn stumps pf what were once the loftiest mountains in the world. Throughout these ages, the drainage of Acadia’s western highland was into either the western or the eastern ocean. There was no ancestral, north-and-south Housatonic Valley where a great river ran into the southern sea.

During most if the billion and a half years of the old days there was life of sorts around Acadia or upon it. For the first billion years it was all in the sea or in the rivers, with a little greenery groping into the air along the shores. During this time, the fish got such a head start that the Yankees haven’t yet been able to catch them all. After a billion years, real forests and flowering plants began to cover the gray rocks, and the oldest fossils in New England are of some of the later from the western mountains where the valley was to be. Certain fish experimented with breathing air, and out of these amphibians reptiles emerged that ranon the land and forgot the water entirely. The old days ended picturesquely with the dinosaurs, the biggest animals that ever lived. They left their footprints and bones here and carried their ponderosity up into the western mountains. After the dinosaurs were exterminated-by what process is still in doubt—the new days, the epoch of recent life, dawned with little mammals that suggested their modern descendants. On the biblical analogy, the sixth and last day of creation began.

This end of the old days and the dawn of the new occurred about fifty million years ago. Geologically, it was marked by a very special mountain uplift which involved dew if any volcanic eruptions and was not a local affair in Acadia. It likewise involved Canadia and Appalachia, generally the whole eastern part of the great new continent whose coast line is lifted out of the ocean. From southern Appalachia, in modern Alabama, to northern Arcadia, in modern Quebec, it was as if some earth-huge Titan put his hands on the carpet of the earth’s crust about two hundred miles apart and pushed them steadily together for perhaps a million years. The carpet, much of which had before been on the ocean floor, bowed up in a thousand-mile-long welt running exactly northeast and southwest. The welt was the whole Appalachian ridge, the backbone of eastern North America. It shed off the sea between Appalachia and Acadia and Canadia forever, and lifted its western slope far out to drain the ocean from the great plains and complete the rough outlines of the big continent. The high point of the new range was in New York, a little west of where the primordial Berkshires had been. Everywhere from the new heights, new rivers began to pour southeast to the Atlantic, the beginnings of most of the great rivers of the eastern seaboard today, the Santee, the James, the Potomac, the Rappahannock, the Susquehanna, the Delaware, the Connecticut, The Merrimack, the Kennebec, and among them the Housatonic.

In the beginning, the Housatonic was a straight river flowing southeast all the way, and the lower third of the modern stream, traveling southeast from the big bend at Scatacook in northern Sherman, still runs in its primeval, fifty-million-year-old-bed. Above the bend, the original upper reaches came straight down from the northwest, far over in New York State beyond the future Hudson Valley. For a precarious age, it looked as if one of New England’s big rivers was going to be sourced in New York. But the primitive Hudson, them a mere tributary of the Delaware, took care of that. Nibbling its way headward, it broke through the banks of the Housatonic and stole its headwaters. What had before been the biggest tributary of the Housatonic, running south out of Massachusetts to join at Scatacook, became the main stream that has since boiled around the big bend there. Deprived of its original sources, the Housatonic became a smaller river, as its old shore lines high along the hills below Gaylordsville bear witness. But it became exclusively a New England river, and the geologic honors of both New York and New England were saved.

Meanwhile, the promised land had swarmed increasingly with life. At first it was a tropical jungle, with the diminutive ancestors of tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses, tapirs, horses, and dogs. Later, as the climate grew cooler, the forest took its modern form, and the animals began to look like moose, deer, wolf, bear, and bison, while the monarchs were the mastodon and the saber-toothed tiger.

A million years ago, the Glacial Ages began. For four periods about a hundred thousand years each, the valley lay under an ice sheet at least a thousand feet deep. Between the glaciations there were long temperature periods when life returned. The weigh and slow flow of the glaciers did not alter the topography of the region. But it did scoop off the precious topsoil from the hills and dump it into the ocean south of Long Island that until very recently was part of the mainland. Having scraped off the soil, the ice sandpapered and scratched he underlying granite, deposited piles of gravel here and there, and scattered everywhere the billions of boulders that the Yankees have hauled out of the ground and piled into walls.

It was only twenty thousand years ago that the fourth ice sheet was all gone, and the time since had been to short for much topsoil to weather out of the rocks. The landscape was taking its complete modern aspect, and the new forest teemed with the creatures man has known, including the vanished heath hen, passenger pigeon and wild turkey. In migration time, the flocks of pigeons overshadowed the sun and made a fluttering twilight in the forest. Waterfowl and fish crammed the streams and ponds, and every spring lamprey eels and solid shoals of shad ran up the river and its tributaries. Otter and beaver were plentiful a vast natural larfer and wardrobe was preparing.

There is no evidence that the valley-or any other part of America-ever cradled any of the primitive ancestors of Man. That grave responsibility was left to the more experimental, old world. After he finally entered this continent from the west, New England was probably the last region to accept this strange, nervous creature. No one knows just when he slipped through the mountains into the valley of the Housatonic. But it the rock-recorded, geologic time is an hour, it was less than a thousandth of a second ago. It was late in the twilight of the sixth day of Biblical creation, and here the analogy of Genesis breaks down. Having set man in New England, the Lord neither rested nor let him rest.