This vast prairie extends northward to and beyond the Great Lakes, and
it is recorded that in the early history of the proposed legislation
for the "Northwest Territory," Congress gravely selected as the names
of the States which were to be created out of it such ponderous
conglomerates as "Metropotamia," "Assenispia," "Pelisipia" and
"Polypotamia," titles which happily were long ago permitted to pass
into oblivion. Northward, in Ohio, the region stretches to Lake Erie,
the most southern and the smallest of the group of Great Lakes above
Niagara. It is regarded as the least attractive lake, having neither
romances nor much scenery. Yet, from its favorable position, it
carries an enormous commerce. It is elliptical in form, about two
hundred and forty miles long and sixty miles broad, the surface being
five hundred and sixty-five feet above the ocean level. It is a very
shallow lake, the depth rarely exceeding one hundred and twenty feet,
excepting at the lower end, while the other lakes are much deeper, and
in describing this difference of level it is said that the surplus
waters poured from the vast _basins_ of Superior, Michigan and Huron,
flow across the _plate_ of Erie into the deep _bowl_ of Ontario. This
shallowness causes it to be easily disturbed, so that it is the most
dangerous of these fresh-water seas, and it has few harbors, and those
very poor, especially upon the southern shore. The bottom of the lake
is a light, clayey sediment, rapidly accumulated from the wearing away
of the shores, largely composed of clay strata. The loosely-aggregated
products of these disintegrated strata are frequently seen along its
coast, forming cliffs extending back into elevated plateaus, through
which the rivers cut deep channels. Their mouths are clogged by
sand-bars, and dredging and breakwaters have made the harbors on the
southern shore, around which have grown the chief towns--Dunkirk,
Erie, Ashtabula, Cleveland, Sandusky and Toledo. The name of Lake Erie
comes from the Indian "tribe of the Cat," whom the French called the
"Chats," because their early explorers, penetrating to the shores of
the lake, found them abounding in wild cats, and thus they gave the
same name to the cats and the savages. In their own parlance, these
Indians were the "Eries," and in the seventeenth century they numbered
about two thousand warriors. In 1656 the Iroquois attacked and almost
annihilated them.
The Lake Erie ports in the "Buckeye State" of Ohio, so called from the
buckeye tree, are chiefly harbors for shipping coal and receiving ores
from the upper lakes, their railroads leading to the great industrial
centres to the southward. Near the eastern boundary of Ohio is
Conneaut, on the bank of a wide and deep ravine, formed by a small
river, broadening into a bay at the shore of the lake, the name
meaning "many fish." Here landed in 1796 the first settlers from
Connecticut, who entered the "Western Reserve," as all this region was
then called. On July 4th of that year, celebrating the national
anniversary, "they pledged each other in tin cups of lake water,
accompanied by a salute of fowling-pieces," and the next day began
building the first house on the Reserve, constructed of logs, and long
known as "Stow Castle." Conneaut is consequently known as the
"Plymouth of the Western Reserve," as here began the settlements made
by the Puritan New England migration to Ohio. On deep ravines making
their harbors are Ashtabula, an enormous _entrepôt_ for ores, and a
few miles farther westward, Painesville, on Grand River, named for
Thomas Paine. Beyond is Mentor, the home of the martyred President
Garfield, whose large white house stands near the railway. All along
here, the southern shore of Lake Erie is a broad terrace at eighty to
one hundred feet elevation above the water, while farther inland is
another and considerably higher plateau. Each sharp declivity facing
northward seems at one time to have been the actual shore of the lake
when its surface before the waters receded was much higher than now.
The outer plateau having once been the overflowed lake bed, is level,
excepting where the crooked but attractive streams have deeply cut
their winding ravines down through it to reach Lake Erie.