auqua means "where the fish was taken
out," or "the place of the leaping fish." The name was smoothed out by
the French explorers, who were the earliest white men in this region, to
"Tchadakoin," still perpetuated in the stream, Chadakoin, connecting the
lake with the Allegheny River. In an extant letter of George Washington,
dated 1788, the lake is called, "Jadaqua."

From the shore of Lake Erie, where Barcelona now stands, to the site of
Mayville at the head of Lake Chautauqua ran a well-marked and
often-followed Indian trail, over which canoes and furs were carried,
connecting the Great Lakes with the river-system of the mid-continent.
If among the red-faced warriors of those unknown ages there had arisen a
Homer to sing the story of his race, a rival to the Iliad and the
Nibelungen might have made these forests famous, for here was the
borderland between that remarkable Indian confederacy of central New
York, the Iroquois or Five Nations,--after the addition of the
Tuscaroras, the Six Nations--those fierce Assyrians of the Western
Continent who barely failed in founding an empire, and their antagonists
the Hurons around Lake Erie. The two tribes confronting each other were
the Eries of the Huron family and the Senecas of the Iroquois; and
theirs was a life and death struggle. Victory was with the Senecas, and
tradition tells that the shores of Chautauqua Lake were illuminated by
the burning alive of a thousand Erie prisoners.

It is said that the first white man to launch his canoe on Lake
Chautauqua was Etienne Brule, a French voyageur. Five years before the
landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, with a band of friendly Hurons he
came over the portage from Lake Erie, and sailed down from Mayville to
Jamestown, thence through the Chadakoin to the Allegheny and the Ohio,
showing to the French rulers in Canada that by this route lay the path
to empire over the continent.

Fifteen years later, in 1630, La Salle, the indomitable explorer and
warrior, passed over the portage and down the lake to the river below.
Fugitives from the French settlements in Nova Scotia, the Acadia of
Longfellow's _Evangeline_, also passed over the same trail and
watercourses in their search for a southern home under the French flag.
In 1749, Captain Bienville de Celoron led another company of pioneers,
soldiers, sailors, Indians, and a Jesuit priest over the same route,
bearing with him inscribed leaden plates to be buried in prominent
place