The Story of Chautauqua. Jesse Lyman Hurlbut
and ga-da-quah is "taken out" or as some say, "leaped out." Thus Chautauqua means "where the fish was taken out," or "the place of the leaping fish." The name was smoothed out by the French explorers, who were the earliest white men in this region, to "Tchadakoin," still perpetuated in the stream, Chadakoin, connecting the lake with the Allegheny River. In an extant letter of George Washington, dated 1788, the lake is called, "Jadaqua."
From the shore of Lake Erie, where Barcelona now stands, to the site of Mayville at the head of Lake Chautauqua ran a well-marked and often-followed Indian trail, over which canoes and furs were carried, connecting the Great Lakes with the river-system of the mid-continent. If among the red-faced warriors of those unknown ages there had arisen a Homer to sing the story of his race, a rival to the Iliad and the Nibelungen might have made these forests famous, for here was the borderland between that remarkable Indian confederacy of central New York, the Iroquois or Five Nations,—after the addition of the Tuscaroras, the Six Nations—those fierce Assyrians of the Western Continent who barely failed in founding an empire, and their antagonists the Hurons around Lake Erie. The two tribes confronting each other were the Eries of the Huron family and the Senecas of the Iroquois; and theirs was a life and death struggle. Victory was with the Senecas, and tradition tells that the shores of Chautauqua Lake were illuminated by the burning alive of a thousand Erie prisoners.
It is said that the first white man to launch his canoe on Lake Chautauqua was Étienne Brule, a French voyageur. Five years before the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, with a band of friendly Hurons he came over the portage from Lake Erie, and sailed down from Mayville to Jamestown, thence through the Chadakoin to the Allegheny and the Ohio, showing to the French rulers in Canada that by this route lay the path to empire over the continent.
Fifteen years later, in 1630, La Salle, the indomitable explorer and warrior, passed over the portage and down the lake to the river below. Fugitives from the French settlements in Nova Scotia, the Acadia of Longfellow's Evangeline, also passed over the same trail and watercourses in their search for a southern home under the French flag. In 1749, Captain Bienville de Celoron led another company of pioneers, soldiers, sailors, Indians, and a Jesuit priest over the same route, bearing with him inscribed leaden plates to be buried in prominent places, as tokens of French sovereignty over these forests and these waters. Being a Frenchman, and therefore perhaps inclined to gayety, he might have been happy if he could have foreseen that in a coming age, the most elaborate amusement park on the border of Tchadakoin (as he spelled it on his leaden plates) would hand down the name of Celoron to generations then unborn!
In order to make the French domination of this important waterway sure, Governor Duquesne of Canada sent across Lake Erie an expedition, landing at Barcelona, to build a rough wagon-road over the portage to Lake Chautauqua. Traces of this "old French road" may still be seen. Those French surveyors and toilers little dreamed that in seven years their work would become an English thoroughfare, and their empire in the new world would be exploited by the descendants of the Puritan and Huguenot!
During the American Revolution, the Seneca tribe of Indians, who had espoused the British side, established villages at Bemus and Griffiths points on Lake Chautauqua; and a famous British regiment, "The King's Eighth," still on the rolls of the British army, passed down the lake, and encamped for a time beside the Outlet within the present limits of Jamestown. Thus the redskin, the voyageur, and the redcoat in turn dipped their paddles into the placid waters of Lake Chautauqua. They all passed away, and the American frontiersman took their place; he too was followed by the farmer and the vinedresser. In the last half of the nineteenth century a thriving town, Mayville, was growing at the northern end of the lake; the city of Jamestown was rising at the end of the Outlet; while here and there along the shores were villages and hamlets; roads, such as they were before the automobile compelled their improvement, threaded the forests and fields. A region situated on the direct line of travel between the east and the west, and also having Buffalo on the north and Pittsburgh on the south, could not long remain secluded. Soon the whistle of the locomotive began to wake the echoes of the surrounding hills.
In its general direction the lake lies southeast and northwest, and its widest part is about three miles south of Mayville. Here on its northwestern shore a wide peninsula reaches forth into the water. At the point it is a level plain, covered with stately trees; on the land side it rises in a series of natural terraces marking the altitude and extent of the lake in prehistoric ages; for the present Chautauqua Lake is only the shrunken hollow of a vaster body in the geologic periods. In the early 'seventies of the last century this peninsula was known as Fair Point; but in a few years, baptized with a new name Chautauqua, it was destined to make the little lake famous throughout the world and to entitle an important chapter in the history of education.
CHAPTER II
THE FOUNDERS
Every idea which becomes a force in the world has its primal origin in a living man or woman. It drops as a seed into one mind, grows up to fruitage, and from one man is disseminated to a multitude. The Chautauqua Idea became incarnate in two men, John Heyl Vincent and Lewis Miller, and by their coördinated plans and labors made itself a mighty power. Let us look at the lives of these two men, whose names are ever one in the minds of intelligent Chautauquans.
John Heyl Vincent was of Huguenot ancestry. The family came from the canton of Rochelle, a city which was the Protestant capital of France in the period of the Reformation. From this vicinity Levi Vincent (born 1676), a staunch Protestant, emigrated to America in the persecuting days of Louis XIV., and settled first at New Rochelle, N. Y., later removed to New Jersey, and died there in 1736. For several generations the family lived in New Jersey; but at the time of John Heyl Vincent's birth on February 23, 1832, his father, John Himrod Vincent, the great-great-grandson of the Huguenot refugee, was dwelling at Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Dr. Vincent used to say that he began his ministry before he was six years old, preaching to the little negroes around his home. The family moved during his early childhood to a farm near Lewisburg, Pa., on Chillisquasque Creek, where at the age of fifteen he taught in the public school.
When not much above sixteen he was licensed as a local preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church. He soon became a junior preacher on a four weeks' circuit along the Lehigh River, which at that time seems to have been in the bounds of the old Baltimore Conference. He rode his circuit on horseback, with a pair of saddlebags behind him, and boarded 'round among his parishioners. His saintly mother, of whose character and influence he always spoke in the highest reverence, died at this time, and soon after he went to visit relatives in Newark, N. J. There he served as an assistant in the city mission, and at the same time studied in the Wesleyan Academy on High Street. A fellow student, who became and continued through a long life one of his most intimate friends, the Rev. George H. Whitney, said that young Vincent differed from most of his classmates in his eager desire for education, his appetite for book-knowledge leading him to read almost every volume that came his way, and his visions, then supposed to be mere dreams, of plans for the intellectual uplift of humanity. It was his keenest sorrow that he could not realize his intense yearning for a course in college; but perhaps his loss in youth became a nation's gain in his maturer years.
In 1853 he was received formally as a member "on trial" in the New Jersey Conference, at that time embracing the entire State. His first charge as pastor was at North Belleville, later known as Franklin, now Nutley, where a handsome new church bears his name and commemorates his early ministry. His second charge was at a small suburb of Newark, then called Camptown, now the thriving borough of Irvington. His ministry from the beginning had been marked by an interest in childhood and youth, and a strong effort to strengthen the work of the Sunday School. At Camptown he established a definite course of Bible teaching