The Potomac is one of the chief among the many rivers draining the
Allegheny Mountains. It originates in two branches, rising in West
Virginia and uniting northwest of Cumberland; is nearly four hundred
miles long; has remarkably picturesque scenery in the magnificent
gorges and reaches of its upper waters; breaks through range after
range of the Alleghenies, and after reaching the lowlands becomes a
tidal estuary for a hundred miles of its final course, broadening to
six and eight and ultimately sixteen miles wide at its mouth in the
Chesapeake. Washington is near the head of tidewater, one hundred and
twenty-five miles from the bay; and for almost its entire course the
Potomac is an interstate boundary, between Maryland and West Virginia
and Virginia. Its name is Indian, referring to its use in their
primitive navigation, the original word "Petomok" meaning "they are
coming by water"--"they draw near in canoes." The Alleghenies, where
this noted river originates, are a remarkable geological formation.
The Atlantic Coast of the United States has a general trend from the
northeast to the southwest, with bordering sand beaches, and back of
them a broad band of pines. Then, towards the northwest, the land
gradually rises, being formed in successive ridges, with intervening
valleys, until it reaches the Alleghenies. The great ranges of this
mountain chain, which is geologically known as the Appalachian System,
run almost parallel to the coast for over a thousand miles, from the
White Mountains of New Hampshire down to Alabama. They are noted
mountains, not very high, but of remarkable construction, and are said
to be much older in geological formation than the Alps or the Andes.
They are composed of series of parallel ridges, one beyond the other,
and all following the same general course, like the successive waves
of the ocean. For long distances these ridges run in perfectly
straight lines, and then, as one may curve around into a new
direction, all the others curve with it. The intervening valleys are
as remarkable in their parallelism as the ridges enclosing them. From
the seaboard to the mountains the ranges of hills are of the same
general character, but with less elevation, gentler slopes, and in
most cases narrower and much more fertile valleys.
The South Mountain, an irregular and in some parts broken-down ridge,
is the outpost of the Alleghenies, while the great Blue Ridge is their
eastern buttress. The latter is about twenty miles northwest of the
South Mountain, and is the famous Kittatinny range, named by the
Indians, and in their figurative language meaning "the endless chain
of hills." It stretches from the Catskills in New York southwest to
Alabama, a distance of eight hundred miles, a veritable backbone for
the Atlantic seaboard, its rounded ridgy peaks rising sometimes
twenty-five hundred feet north of the Carolinas, and much higher in
those States. It stands up like a great blue wall against the
northwestern horizon, deeply notched where the rivers flow out, and is
the eastern border for the mountain chain of numerous parallel ridges
of varying heights and characteristics that stretch in rows behind it,
covering a width of a hundred miles or more. Within this chain is the
vast store of minerals that has done so much to create American
wealth--the coal and iron, the ores and metals, that are in
exhaustless supply, and upon the surface grew the forests of timber
that were used in building the seaboard cities, but are now nearly all
cut off. The great Atlantic Coast rivers rise among these mountain
ridges, break through the Kittatinny and flow down to the ocean, while
the streams on their western slopes drain into the Mississippi Valley.
The Hudson breaks through the Kittatinny outcrop at the West Point
Highlands, the Delaware forces a passage at the Water Gap, the Lehigh
at the Lehigh Gap, below Mauch Chunk; the Schuylkill at Port Clinton,
the Susquehanna at Dauphin, above Harrisburg, and the Potomac at
Harper's Ferry. All these rivers either rise among or force their
winding passages through the various ranges behind the great Blue
Ridge, and also through the South Mountain and the successive parallel
ranges of lower hills that are met on their way to the coast, so that
all in their courses display most picturesque valleys.