THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
PRESENTED BY
PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND
MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID
W. H.H.MURRAY S WORKS.
ADVENTURES IN THE WILDERNESS ; OR, CAMP
LIFE IN THE ADIRONDACK^. Illustrated. Cloth,
$1.25; Paper, 5O cts.
ADIRONDACK TALES. Vol. I. : Story The Keg- Told
Me, and The Man Who Didn t Know Much. Illus
trated. $1.50.
ADIRONDACK TALES. Vol. II. : The Man Who
Missed It, and The Mystery of the Woods. In press.
HOW JOHN NORTON THE TRAPPER SPENT HIS
CHRISTMAS, and Other Stories. Illustrated.
Cloth, $1.25; Paper, 5O cts.
THE BUSTED EX-TEXAN, and Other Stories. Illus
trated. Cloth, $1.00.
DAYLIGHT LAND. Superbly illustrated with 15O
Engravings, printed in tints, from paintings by
J. D. Woodward, C. Broughton and other artists.
Unique paper covers. $2.5O; Cloth, $3.5O ; Cloth,
extra gilt, $4.OO.
MAMELONS and UNGAVA. Two Canadian Idyls.
New. $1.5O.
LAKE CHAMPLAIN AND ITS SHORES. New. $1.
DEACONS. Illustrated. Cloth, 75 cts. ; Paper, 5O cts.
TO DIE IS GAIN. Religious Address. Paper, 25 cts.
CONTINENTAL UNITY. Paper, 25 cts.
LAKE CHAMPLAIN
AND
ITS SHORES
W. H. II. MURRAY
AUTHOR OF "ADVENTURES IN THE WILDERNESS," "DAYLIGHT LAND,
"ADIRONDACK TALES," " MAMELONS," " UXGAVA," ETC.
BOSTON
DE WOLFE, FISKE & CO.
363 WASHINGTON STREET
COPYRIGHT, 1890,
BY W. II. H. MURRAY
C. J. PETERS & SON,
TYPOGRAPHERS AND ELECTROTYPERS,
146 HIGH STREET, BOSTON.
DEDICATION.
BECAUSE OF HIS ADMIRATION AND AFFECTION
FOR LAKE CHAMPLAIN AND HIS SERVICES IN BRINGING IT
INTO POPULAR NOTICE ; BECAUSE OF HIS HIGH STANDING AND NOBLE
NESS OF NATURE ; AND BECAUSE HE IS MY FRIEND,
I DEDICATE THIS LITTLE VOLUME TO THE
* 3. ffircgorg Smitlj.
THE AUTHOR.
BCKLINGTON, VT.,
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
A PREPARATORY CHAPTER . . . 5
PART I.
THE TRADITIONAL AND HISTORIC PERIOD ... 43
PART IL
THE GREAT NATIONAL PARK ....... 115
PART III.
LAKE CIIAMPLAIX AND THE FACILITIES IT OFFERS
TO YACHTSMEN 131
SAILING DIRECTIONS 162
PART IV.
HISTORICAL REMINISCENCES AND FACTS CON
NECTED WITH THE SHORES OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN, 186
THE GAME FISH AND FISHING OF LAKE
ClIAMPL AlX 237
INTRODUCTION.
I HAVE prepared this volume in the interest
of history and of pleasure both. In the first
place I desired to collect and popularize
certain facts and incidents which have re
mained hidden from general observation or
published in such a disconnected manner as
to be practically useless in the cause of
correct knowledge. I wished also to correct
certain errors of place and name and con
clusion that writers and speakers have inva
riably fallen into when mentioning matters
connected with Lake Champlain and its
shores. Above all else I desired to call
national attention, especially that of scholars
and students in our colleges and public schools,
to the historic events which had occurred
2 INTRODUCTION.
in this valley, and their intimate connection
with American liberty and civilization;, for
it seemed to me that these would be in
tensely interested in a theme so significant,
and to which their attention may never have
been directly called. I had at the start a
larger work in contemplation, and for years
have been collecting material for it ; but
under the present condition of the public
taste in respect to letters it is not likely
that such a work would be commercially
profitable to a publisher ; and as we are
now living, as regards literature, in a regime of
dollars and cents, when mental efforts are
weighed in the same scale with sugar and
hams, the question which decides all schol
arly ventures is, whether it will pay or not.
The historical section of this little volume
should, therefore, be regarded by the reader
as a suggestion rather than a treatment of
the subject.
I desired, furthermore, to commend this
INTRODUCTION. 3
lake to the favor of the American people,
not only because of its historic connections,
but because while it stands at present com
paratively unoccupied, it nevertheless supplies
to them, for the purpose of recreation, one
of the most desirable pleasure resorts of the
country. Having seen most of the localities
of the continent noted for their beauty, I
can but declare that I know no other spot
which for loveliness of appearance, majesty
of scenery, and varied resources of entertain
ment can compare with Lake Champlain.
Nature has signalized and history has em
phasized it with such charms and attractions
that it challenges the attention and invites
the presence of all who love the one or
are impressed with the other. As among
waterfalls there is but one Niagara in the
country, so among lakes there is but one
Champlain. Geographically connected as it is
with the Horicon and the Hudson on the
south and the St. Lawrence on the north ;
4 INTRODUCTION.
with the Adirondacks and the White Moun
tains on the west and east, it invites the
visitors of these celebrated localities to the
spectacle of its marvellous beauty and the view
of its historic places and ruins.
THE AUTHOR.
A PREPARATORY CHAPTER.
OUTDOOR LIFE.
THE tendency of our times is to quit the
fields, and crowd into the street ; to desert
the hillside, and pore over a book in some
study. The tide of our civilization sets towards
the cities. The drift of the age is all urban.
We are a nation of city-builders, and the arti
ficial characteristics of city population are fast
printing themselves upon the body of society.
We are tattooed from head to foot with city
impressions, and if these impressions could only
be repeated in color, we should see how few of
the markings are natural, and how many are
the result of art and the skill of human ap
pliance. The problem of government on the
continent is the problem of controlling the
population of our cities. The republic to-night,
in the number of its votes, is not agricultural
6 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER.
and rural, it is commercial, mechanical, urban.
The cities of America already dictate the policy
of America. Even religion is growing to be
metropolitan. The time was when the great
lights of theology and of pulpit power were
country pastors. The time was in Connecticut,
when Porter at Washington, and Bellamy at
Bethlehem, and Beecher on Litchfield Hill,
directed the religious life of Connecticut
churches. To-day the pastors in those villages
exercise no appreciable influence on the morals
or the religious opinions of the State. To-day,
the best preachers, by a tendency of the time
that no power can resist, are drawn into the
cities. The best thinkers are either in, or
grouped around, our universities ; and the
social life, the intellectual stimulus and the
religious characteristics of our universities are
moulded into the form of metropolitan customs
and associations. The home-life of the nation
has been influenced to the same extent and in
the same direction. The homesteads of New
England have passed, or are fast passing, from
the control of New England men and women,
into the hands of those of foreign extraction.
OUTDOOR LIFE. 7
It is safe to say that the old New England
home-life is already a thing of the past. Even
the fireplace, which had in it such elements
of cheerfulness and good health that it would
seem able to withstand any innovation, has
now become such a rarity as to be a matter
of pleasurable surprise when you enter a house
and see a cheerful fire burning. These things
are straws which show the drift of the current
and the swiftness of it. In these changes are
written the history of a revolution a revolu
tion in manners, in usage, in habits of living ;
and such a revolution is more radical, far-
reaching, and momentous in its influence than
one which is expressed in war and battle. The
roar of cannon and the gleam of swords are
less significant of change than the destruction
of New England homesteads, the bricking-
up of New England fireplaces, and the doing
away with the New England well-sweep ; for
these show a change in the nature of the cir
culation itself, and prove that the action of the
popular heart has been interrupted, modified,
and become altogether different from what it
was.
A PREPARATORY CHAPTER.
Now city life means indoor life. Cities are
made up of houses, and composed of buildings
that men build. And those that live in cities,
from the necessities of their condition, live in
houses. From the houses where they sleep,
men pass to the houses where they work, and
they take the shortest cut from the one to
the other and bribe the inventiveness of the
age to supply them with the quickest locomo
tion. Our amusements as well as our business
are all within-doors. The games which our
children play are parlor games ; and the games
which the children of a country play photo
graph the future life of the country. The
amusements of a nation more than its business
shape the character of it. The difference
between the recreation of a Parisian and the
recreations of a Swiss mountaineer portray the
difference between the two men ; and as they
differ so will their children. Their virtues even
are unlike, both in nature and the mode and
sphere of their exercise. The one is strong,
hearty, healthy ; the other is weak, suave,
feverish. The one is impulsive, the other
constant.
OUTDOOR LIFE. 9
The great lack of our cities the lack which
should challenge our gravest attention is seen
in the absence of playgrounds for our children.
What every American city needs are places
where the boys can skate and coast, and race
and wrestle ; where the girls can romp and
gather flowers, and hold their sociables under
the shadow of trees and on the banks of
streams. The absence of these facilities which
are essential to the proper development of boy
hood and girlhood for the real health of their
bodies, the growth of their minds, and the
purity of their morals will tell fatally on
the rising generation. You can t grow trees
of tough fibre without the help of wind. No
richness of soil, no sunniness of exposure, no
nursing of skilled arboriculture will give unto
the hickory the fineness of its fibre, or to the
oak its stalwart strength. It must bear the
pressure of currents ; it must stand up against
the violence of atmospheric commotion; it
must have charged into it the conservatism of
frost and the pliancy which comes from move
ment and moisture. You can t grow strong
trees under a glass roof. No more can you grow
10 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER.
boys into strong men by any indoor culture.
Neither the care of love, nor the skill of medi
cine, nor the appliances which money can buy,
nor any system of schoolroom education will
give unto them those forces and inculcate those
principles which they need when the tasks and
duties of manhood are laid upon them. They
need the freedom of the fields and the stream.
They must breathe of the strength of the wind.
They must receive through the pores of their
skin the ministry of the sun. They must have
the discipline of weariness and risk. They
must be strengthened in their courage by oppo
sition, and learn self-mastery and self-respect
under the provocation of active companionship
with nature and with their mates. I take no
stock in the babying of boys. I resent the
fashion which makes little girls nothing but
animated dolls. The girls that make the best
women, the best wives, the best mothers, are
the girls that are educated in the school of
industry, in the school of service for others ; in
that school in which every scholar has his own
burden to bear and is taught how to bear it.
The beauty of natural life is seen in its
OUTDOOR LIFE. 11
liberties. The tyranny which is the worst form
of tyranny is not the tyranny of the strong,
gauntleted hand, but the tyranny of soft
fingers and gloved palms. Luxury is the
heaviest oppression. Boys and girls are ruined
by what they have, by the lavishness of paren
tal giving, and not by what they lack. The
women that gave most of us birth, and en
dowed us with their strength, were women that
worked themselves, and whose doing day by
day and week by week made them strong.
The faces back of us that we love most are the
wearied faces, wearied in their services of love,
wearied in nightly vigils and daily ministra
tions of actual toil.
There is a ministration also which comes to
the soul of one who lives the outdoor life of
nature. The best wisdom of the world has
never been printed. You can t find it in books.
It has never been translated out of the sky, the
flower, the white passing cloud, the running
stream, -and the rustling leaf into words.
Knowledge can be obtained out of books. But
knowledge is only the gross, fleshly body of
wisdom ; and the soul of wisdom, the fine spirit
12 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER.
of intelligence, the divinity of fact, and law,
and life expressive of persons, and force, and
things, abhors the crash of the printing-press.
The discoveries that have lifted the world
were not made by book-readers. Galileo ques
tioned the heavens, and from amidst their
starry splendors, from the still distance of their
dim depths, they answered him with the stupen
dous assertion that the earth moved through
space. The scholars of the world laughed at
him ; the ecclesiastics arraigned him, and, with
the threat of torture, made his lips declare a
lie. But he knew then, and we know to-day,
that the heavens had not lied to him, and that
nature had taught him a wisdom worth all the
libraries of the world. Watt did not get the
hint of the marvellous energy of compressed
steam from poring over books. He questioned
a natural force, and that force revealed unto
him a secret mighty enough to revolutionize
civilization.
Newton found the power which propels the
machinery of the universe, hanging on the
bough of an apple-tree saw in the force of an
apple the mystery of motion, and an answer to
OUTDOOR LIFE. 13
questions which had puzzled the wise from the
birth of the race. Franklin opened up a new
world of knowledge while playing with a kite.
The winds lifted his interrogation into the
heavens, and the heavens answered it with the
revelation of a hitherto unknown power a
power which to-day makes thought universal,
and brings the remotest parts of the earth face
to face. Men read the books of Agassiz, but
he himself read wisdom in the fin of the fish,
the wing of the bird, and the living organisms
of nature. Audubon spent forty years in field
and forest, on the seashore and the banks of
streams to show scholars how profound was their
ignorance of what was perched on their house
tops, confined in their cages, and building nests
in every thicket and grove in the land.
And so I might go on with the enumeration,
but of what avail would it be ? I have said
enough to give your minds the direction of my
thought. You can see how little of that
knowledge which is profitable, which is essen
tial to civilization itself has come from the
study of the library, and how much has come
from the great outdoors. The true library to
14 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER.
read the library on whose shelves and in
whose alcoves is not a useless volume is the
library of nature. Her facts are recorded in
forces ; are apprehended in the operations of
laws ; are written in the structure of animals,
and visible in the nature of things. And if
one is ambitious after knowledge ; if he craves
facts ; if he hungers after information, then let
him leave his house, turn his back on his books,
and go where great men have always gone. -
to the very source and fountain-head of accu
rate intelligence, and drink of the flowing
streams as they flowed.
But there is a finer knowledge than that
which relates to the mind. It is the knowledge
of that which has for its object the inspiration
and building-up of the soul.
Now, the weak point in American society
to-day is its artificiality. The life of many is
but a vain show. They seem to be what they
are not. They surround themselves with
splendid appearances, while they themselves are
ignoble. They purchase a magnificent frame,
within the golden borders of which they insert
a daub and call it a work of a master. We
OUTDOOR LIFE. 15
have made money too fast in the last forty
years. We have developed the material pros
perity of the country too rapidly not to have
had the standard by which the worth and
worthlessness of things are measured inverted.
Wealth stands for worth. Beauty of face
makes good the absence of beauty of soul.
Sensationalism in the pulpit draws better than
true oratory. Shystering in law pays as well
as a solid legal ability. Spread-eagle and bun
combe in Congress, and nimble facility for
voting money in behalf of great " internal
improvements, 1 and of voting money, too, in
behalf of one s self, carry the suffrage of a dis
trict against patriotism, ability, and unimpeach
able character. There is a craving desire on the
part of everybody to seem to know more than
they know, to be worth more than they are
worth, to look beautiful when nature has made
them plain, to talk knowingly about books that
they have never read ; and this spirit of artifi
cial living, this tendency to exaggerate one s
self, has passed its virus into the very blood of
American life.
We know that every age and every nation
16 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER.
has its characteristic vice, as every face has its
prominent feature. The vices of nations are
personal and distinctive. History will empha
size this suggestion to your memory. The vice
of Rome was military glory, an inordinate
thirst for empire, a craving for universal power.
She tossed her eagles into the air and charged
them to draw the line of their flight to the
boundaries of the world. They did. But
wherever they flew, they flew with dripping
talons, and the shadow of their wings as they
passed over peoples and kingdoms was to those
who dwelt underneath the shadow of death.
That was her vice, and it finally slew her with
its own sword.
The vice of Greece, the land of sun and song,
was worship of the human body. Greece
deified the physique, idolized the human struc
ture, and bowed in adoration before the god her
wit and care and culture had made. For its
brow she wreathed her laurels, in its praise she
sang her songs, and to perpetuate its beauty
and glory she wrought, with a thousand edu
cated chisels, her matchless marbles. Her
deities were only large men and large women
OUTDOOR LIFE. 17
with majestic faces and perfect limbs and beau
tiful forms. Her vice was poetic, was refined,
was spirituelle, but none the less vice. Her
gods were mortal, and of course the worshipers
could not outlive the gods. She pushed the
triumph of her civilization to the limit of the
possible as regards human development. It
rose like a rocket to the apex of its flight,
burst in the day of Pericles in a shower of
glory, then faded forever from the sky.
The vice of Spain was bigotry. She made a
pride of her narrowness. The Spaniard w r ould
not investigate, and in the arrogance of his
ignorance he forbade investigation. Into his
narrow mind the dream of a new world could
not enter. His priest-ridden intellect could not
admit to itself the mighty movement of the
heavens, nor his senses acknowledge that the
earth beneath his feet was forever rolling on in
its sublime career. He scoffed at Columbus,
and threatened Galileo with the rack. He
advertised himself as the bigot of the ages.
The- vice of France, since the time of Charle
magne, has been fickleness. France has been
like a sea, blown upon and tossed. France has
18 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER.
been like a ship running in a gale, crowded
with canvas, without an anchor on deck, and
without a helm. Her career has been rapid,
but eccentric now empire, now kingdom, now
republic, now anarchy. To-day blindly obe
dient to priests ; to-morrow, a total disregarder
of all religious convictions. France has been
as a man subject to intermittent insanity. To
day she is sane ; to-morrow she is kept at her
work at the point of the bayonet.
The vice of Germany is scepticism the
scepticism which is born of libraries, which is
breathed by those who spend their days and
their nights in the dim recesses of misty
alcoves ; the scepticism which comes from the
over-reading of books, and too little and too
narrow observation of men ; the scepticism
which the specialist is exposed to, whose mind
is forever condensed into one ray and focalized
upon one minute point ; who knows one truth,
but knows not the relations which it sustains to
a thousand other truths, and who has never
mastered the sublime harmony of the arranged
whole.
The vice of England well, what is it ? It
OUTDOOR LIFE. 19
is selfishness. The selfishness of fifty thousand
landholders who will not part with an acre
that the millions living around them may own
a square foot of the soil which the sweat of
their industry moistens and irrigates to fruitful-
ness ; the selfishness of hereditary aristocracy
jealous of its honors honors which they have
never fought for, but which have been trans
mitted to them ; of fame which they have
never won on the sea nor the battle-field ; of
immense wealth, to whose full coffers their
hands have never contributed a dollar. A self-
is] mess which regards the whole world as only
a huge sponge, providentially made and filled
witli the moistening of riches for the British
lingers to grasp and press the golden contents
into British coffers.
And so I might question all nations, from
the beginning of history down to the present
time, and we should see that each nation and
each age has had its characteristic, prevailing,
and distinguishing vice. Well, what is the vice
of America ? It is not military glory as was
Rome s ; for we do not thirst for conquest, and
our young men prefer the employment of peace
20 A PREPARATORY CHAPTER.
to the risk and the deprivations of war. It is
not deification of the physique. I wish we re
garded our bodies with greater reverence, and
gave unto them the attention of finer care. It
is not bigotry ; for we are liberal and tolerant.
Twenty denominations and twice as many
creeds live at peace within our borders. It is
not fickleness ; for we are stable. Through the
most radical and rattle-brained Yankee in New
England there runs a broad, strong streak of
conservatism. Blood will . tell ; and the old
Puritan blood, the constitution-loving blood of
old England, the blood which wrung the great
Magna Charta from King John, and gave to
the world constitutional liberty this blood,
which flows in our veins to-day, gives unto us
all a sense of caution ; a jury-like patience in
hearing both sides of a case ; a determination
not to jump before we look. I never saw a
Yankee yet that had not at least ten-twentieths
of old fogy blood in his veins. I never yet
saw a Yankee as impulsive as an Irishman, or
as wild-headed as a Frenchman, or as subject
to spasms and fits as an Italian. It is not
scepticism ; for we are reverent and believing,
OUTDOOR LIFE. 21
I think 1 may say credulous. The Yankee
loves his creed as the Irishman loves a cudgel.
It enables him to whack a man religiously.
The old Adam in him, which "his piety forbids
him to express in profanity, he can let out in
theological argument. The amount of irrelig-
iousness which a Maine Baptist and a New
Hampshire Congregationalist can work out of
themselves in the course of a forty-minute
religious discussion of their respective tenets
can never be computed by the resources of the
calculus.
What, then, is the characteristic vice of
America ? What is the distinctive weakness
of our character ? What is the prevailing
shame of the day ? It is artifice. The Ameri
can character is not a genuine one. It is a
made-up character a character based upon
seeming, not being. This vice is spread
through all the thousand and one possible ex
pressions of society. You can see it crop out
everywhere. Men love to seem to be rich,
richer than they are ; and to keep up appear
ances they sacrifice integrity, peace of mind,
domestic happiness, and even commercial honor
A PREPARATORY CHAPTER.
itself. Women join in this feeling of rivalry.
They dress for appearances and not for comfort
and health. Their standard is to outshine
some one, to outdo some one, and to cast into
the shade some more modest or more truthful
neighbor. Girls love to he thought handsomer
than they are, and leave the true road which
leads the human figure and face up to beauty,
health, and that way of life and dress which