iagara one of the oldest of Indian names-Description

em as they are enunciated by the human voice touches a chord to which the heart instinctively responds. So it is with the name of the great cataract. No one can hear it correc

ad a peculiar force and justness with those who first applied it. Baron La Hontan, who spent several years among the Indians, noticed the remarkable fact concerning their language that it

ir mission at Quebec, and from thence extended their operations westward. In 1626, they reached the large and powerful tribe of Indians which occupied the splendid domain which may be described with proximate accuracy as bounded by a line commencing at a point on the southerly shore of Lake Ontario, about thirty miles west of the mouth of the Genesee

lly spread themselves out in a broad, bright channel, over a plain, open country, having a slight declivity, just sufficient to make a gentle current, thereby adding the living beauty and force of motion to the broad expanse of a lake-like surface, that

ock of the stream. Breaking and bounding, surging and resurging, flashing and foaming, rushing fiercely upon some huge bowlder, recoiling an instant, then madly leaping entirely over it, rushin

pids are beautiful; the falls are grand; those are exhilarating, these are inspi

cs; the majestic monotone, the bow, the cloud, which is its veil by night, its crowning glory and beauty by day. The

ds above

lm, majestic current, smiling with dimples and reversed in occasional eddies, but neither broken by rapids nor impeded by islands. Finally it is lost in the lake, after passing an immense bar formed by the enormous mass of sedimentary matter carried down

by considering that it requires the water drainage of a quarter of a continent to sustain them, and that