Alexandersmap

    Tag: Mohawk River

    • Onondaga

      Long before present-day Syracuse dominated the lake that bears their name, the Onondaga lived in this area.  Onondaga means “hill people”, and there are certainly plenty of those in the region.  If you look at a map of the area, you see that there’s another dominant feature in this region: water.  Lake Ontario is just to the north and west of Lake Onondaga.  The finger lakes are southwest.  And the Mohawk River cuts an East-West corridor from Albany to roughly Lake Oneida, which connects to Lake Onondaga via the Oneida and Seneca Rivers.  This network of waterways was a superhighway for native populations, and later for Basque and French traders, and eventually British colonists and the waves of settlers who followed them.  Salt production was a major industry for early settlers to the Syracuse area as they tapped into the massive natural deposits around the southern part of Lake Onondaga.

      In my fourth year of crew, I rowed on Lake Onondaga in the summer of 1988 in the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Regatta.  This regatta was memorable for me for a few reasons.  That year Northeastern University had an accident on the way to the regatta and their rigger was killed.  The Heavyweight Men went on to win the IRA’s that year, and I witnessed the race.  To say Northeastern was a sentimental favorite after that event is an understatement.

      When you drive down I-90 you cross the lake outlet between the Seneca River and Lake Onondaga where Syracuse has their boathouse.  This is where we launched during the IRA’s and I still have vivid memories of my time there that bubble to the surface whenever I cross this outlet in the daylight.

      The Onondaga were one of the five original tribes in the Iroquois Nation.  The Oneida and Mohawk were to their East, and the Seneca and Cayuga were to their West.  So the Onondaga as the middle tribe were the logical “keepers of the fire” for the five nations.

      During the Revolutionary War, the Onondaga fought on the British side and paid for this in 1779 Sullivan Campaign led by Major General John Sullivan.  George Washington brought the fight to them in a series of coordinated raids in when the United States won.  Thousands of Iroquois fled to Canada and many starved in the winter of 1779-1780.  Their homeland was settled by New York veterans of the Revolutionary War as part of the Military Tract of Central New York.  Today there are roughly 500 people living in the Onondaga Nation Reservation just south of Syracuse.

      Lake Onondaga has suffered its own affront, as a company called Allied-Signal, which later became Honeywell, and other companies used the lake as a dumping ground for Mercury and other toxic chemicals.  Years of dredging and capping the bottom of the lake were completed in 2017.  The Onondaga consider the lake sacred.  Corporations considered it a convenient dumping ground.  It seems to me that the way the Onondaga lived on the land and the waterways that cut across it is preferable to the way that those who came after them have treated each.  I know that in 1988 I wasn’t thinking about how much mercury I was rowing over as we competed in the IRA’s.

    • Taming the Mohawk River

      Taming the Mohawk River

      The Erie Canal was first proposed when Thomas Jefferson was President.  The sheer expense and amount of labor that it would take were much more than Jefferson could imagine, and he described it as a “little short of madness”.   However, the upside for a canal that would open up the west to commerce was immense.  Investors saw a clear return on investment, and DeWitt Clinton, the Governor of New York, supported the project.  Opponents called it Clinton’s folly, but in the end he was proven right.

      The Mohawk River, a powerful East-West tributary to the Hudson River, was chosen as a key part of the Erie Canal, and 110 miles of the river were re-purposed as part of the it.  But rivers run wild, and the Mohawk River was no exception.  The engineers designed a series of trusses that stepped the river down while also regulating the flow.  These were effectively dams that looked like bridges.  Each had a lock for boat traffic, seen on the right in the photo below.  Today these trusses are massive steel and concrete structures that run the length of the Mohawk River.  While the barge traffic has given way to pleasure craft, the canal remains an engineering marvel.

      There’s no doubt that the Erie Canal was a massive success, and helped bring the resources and natural wealth of the western interior to the east, making cities like Buffalo, Rochester, Albany and New York much richer in the process.  Its hard not to be impressed with the scale of the Erie Canal, but there’s a part of me that would love to have seen what it looked like before 1817, when the first shovels cut into the ground in Utica.  It’s not lost on me that it was the year after Captain Clement died in my “neighborhood” in New Hampshire.  These were big years for the country, finding its place in the world after two wars with Great Britain.  The Erie Canal would fuel the industrial revolution and help the North win the Civil War.  It would be another hundred years before the world realized just how powerful the United States had become when we entered World War I.  It’s easy to see how much the canal meant for the sustained economic growth of this nation.

      The Mohawk River, like the tribe that shares its name who lived alongside it, was forever changed by the rapid expansion west.  Just like the Niagara River, the Colorado River and the Columbia River, the Mohawk River that flows into the Hudson has shrunken from a mighty river to a fraction of what it once was.  The taming of rivers is at once an impressive feat of engineering and a sad tale of man bending natural resources to our will.  I like my rivers on the wild side, but write that knowing that the taming of the Merrimack River in Lowell created that city, and as a side bar made it possible for me to row in college.  So just as I am who I am partly because of the taming of the Merrimack River, so too America is what it is because of the taming of the Mohawk River.