Ithaca on Cayuga

Five or six hours drive north from New York City, cozy up there with Cayuga lake, with Cornell University, and wuth all that high culture , Ithaca is where the last glacier stopped.

The first white settlement was at the mouths of the ravines where the Iroquois had used to mound up the river deposits for their kitchen gardens while tending orchards on the slopes. Much of East Hill, where we are located, was kept as orchard well into the nineteenth century, but it probably has more, bigger trees now than ever. Before Ithaca wanted to be know as "Gorges", it was officially the Foysythia City, and before that, Forest City. And a fine sort of forest it is, with many gorges having shoulders which overflow with forsythia.

Because of the fluming gorges with their many sudden drops, Ithaca became the scene of intense small waterpower milling and manufacturing.. In the mid nineteenth century. there were catch dams, flumes, and mill ponds at at major drops in nearly every backyard gorge.

Ezra Cornell was one of the early gorge developers. He started young , one thing led to another, and before he was half old, he had developed Cornell University and converted orchard and pasture into a quarry with a stone-built campus on its high brow .

Cayuga and the Great Unknown

The best known Iroquis telling has it that our Finger Lakes, which look on the map like a handprint on the landscape, were formed by the hand of the Great Spirit. Modern minds, until recently, have begun to assume that the lakes were formed by the final shove and dive of the glacier which piled up the moraine of the Ithaca, Danby, and Dryden Hills. . But recent high technbology, scientific imaging has shown that the bedrock bottom of the lake is not U shaped, as it would be if carved by the glacier, but V shaped, and dug well below sea level, as if the lake was in fact clawed out by the hand of a god with very sharp fingernails.

We hope to be brought up to date on the that end of Ithaca history, and when more scientific results come to us we will report here. Anyone with new findings should please report them Here: VINGER LAKE?

The Iroquois were the ones before, but there were others before them.

It is written somewhere that the pre Algonquian people indigenous here at the time of the last glaciation (people who were small and yellow-skinned from a grass root diet) had,tried to halt the advance of the glacier by building huge bonfires at the forward lobe of the ice. As we know, the glacier did finally retreat and when it did so in the light of their bonfire, they let themselves believe that they themselves had driven the ice-world back..

The deluded and weakened grass-eaters, it is written, were subsequently driven out by pre-Iroquois Algonquians in a battle on the lake ice in which the yellow-skins resorted again to a fire they built on the lake which was presumably to banish the Algonquins like they banished the ice , but the fire only melted the lake ice, and drownd most of grass-eaters, while the Algonquins stayed off the ice and raided up the gorges....

In historical times, after the Algonquian occupation, came the Iroquois Cayugas, who were hard working, mostly peaceful farmers and hunters(women farmers, men hunters) who according to a 1973 Historic Ithaca pamphlet, "absorbed" the currently resident Todaraghroone into their culture and for hundreds of years headed an enlightened civilization of peace and equal rights , until we American nationalists came into being and burnt them out for siding with the British..

Then came the industrial revolution, the Ithaca water rush, and a lot more mostly tribeless people, including The Morses, the Cornells, then us , Now come you, And your are very welcome.

The lake-run rainbows, brown trout, and salmon have done famously well despite and because of fishermen , scientists, and foreign invaders such as the zebra mussel.

However, the Zebra mussels filter out the algae which starves the smelt, which in turn starves the landlocked salmon for certain B vitamins without which the young are born listless and stupid and such fish do not survie, even in schools.

,For now, the state breeds, feeds, and stocks salmon in the lake, and has been catching a few of them at the fish ladder on their way up the inlet, in order to give them their vitamins to see if that will help. We know there is another way.

In response to the deer invasion, the Village of Cayuga Heights and Cornell researchers have pioneered a program to develop contraceptives for the deer.

So far the deer have not adopted the suggested techniques.

The gorgeous and adaptable immigrant fireweed, or purple loosestrife is much despised because it invades wetlands and displaces native species like catails, while thatching over and drying up the wetland areas it colonizes. Here, you see a single queen fireweed which threatens a parking lot on the edge of Southwest Park, Ithaca's newest official natural area.