GEOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF THE CHAUTAUQUA 

 LAKE REGION 



By Hon. Obed Edson of Sinclairville, N. Y. 



(This address was originally delivered before the Chautauqua Society of 

 History and Natural Science at Jamestown, Jan. 17, 1884. Aug. 7, 1884, it was 

 delivered in the Hall of Philosophy at Chautauqua, N. Y., and March 14, 1884, 

 at the annual meeting of the Agricultural Association of Western New York in 

 Randolph, Cattaraugus County, N. Y.) 



The beautiful lake of Chautauqua that spark] es near us lies 

 in a notch that is cut deeply across a range of grass-covered hills 

 which for many miles divide the basin of the Great Lakes from the 

 Valley of the Mississippi. To mingle with the waves of the Gulf 

 of Mexico, its waters have to flow southward successively through 

 six water courses ; the Chautauqua outlet, the Cassadaga, the 

 Conewango, the Allegheny, the Ohio and Mississippi, per- 

 forming a long and sinuous journey of two thousand five hundred 

 miles. Yet Chautauqua Lake is almost within eyesight of Lake 

 Erie, and is seven hundred and thirty feet above it. Scarce a barrier 

 prevents its waters, in a short and rapid dash of some half dozen 

 miles, from mingling with the waves of Lake Erie, and with them 

 to meet the sea upon the ice-bound coast of Labrador, nearly four 

 thousand miles northward from the mouth of the Mississippi. This 

 paradox of lakes, like a thousand others that brightly glisten upon 

 the plains or darkly gleam among the mountains of America, is the 

 product of a glacier. The rounded hills and sloping valleys that 

 border it, and all the graceful forms that are moulded upon the 

 landscape around it, are the sculpturings of ice. The extensive area 

 in which it lies, comprising four thousand square miles, including 

 the principal part of the counties of Chautauqua, Cattaraugus, and 

 a part of Allegany, in New York, and also the greater portions of 

 Warren and McKean, and a part of Potter, in Pennsylvania, is 

 called by Prof. Carll and other geologists, the Chautauqua basin. It 

 consists of long, irregular valleys, having crooked and often 

 ragged branches, separated from each other by irregular ranges of 

 hills. This basin lies south of the summit of the ridge that divides 

 the waters that flow into Lake Erie from those that flow into the 

 Mississippi, at an average altitude above that lake of seven or eight 

 hundred feet; the hills that bound it often rising five hundred and 

 even a thousand feet higher. 



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