Description
It is formed near Painted Post in Steuben County, just west of Corning by the confluence of the Tioga River and Cohocton rivers. It flows generally east-southeast through Corning, Big Flats, Elmira, and Waverly. It crosses into northern Pennsylvania before joining the Susquehanna River approximately 2 miles (3 km) south of Sayre.
The name of the river comes from an Iroquois language word meaning "big horn" or "horn-in-the-water", possibly dating from the discovery of large mammoth tusks in the river bed. The Lenape called the river cononogue, which had a similar meaning.
Most of the valley is cut into Devonian age shale, sandstone, and limestone. The hilltops are rounded by glaciation. The tributaries, particularly the Cohocton River, have captured some of the former Genesee River drainage, due to terminal moraines that filled some valley areas and diverted streams.
Read more about this topic: Chemung River
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“As they are not seen on their way down the streams, it is thought by fishermen that they never return, but waste away and die, clinging to rocks and stumps of trees for an indefinite period; a tragic feature in the scenery of the river bottoms worthy to be remembered with Shakespeare’s description of the sea-floor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)