Mohawk River

About

Kahnawake Mohawk and the Beaver Wars. The modern Mohawk runs flat and wide, a Class I river with an optimal paddling range of 500 to 4,000 CFS. USGS gauge 01355475 records a mean flow of about 2,400 CFS, with a historical figure near 2,160 CFS. Across its 149 miles the river passes through Herkimer, Oneida, and Schenectady counties, breaking into three distinct reaches. The Upper Mohawk runs 30 miles from Rome to Utica through a narrow valley. The Middle Mohawk stretches 70 miles from Utica to Schenectady along the Erie Canal corridor. The Lower Mohawk covers the final 50 miles from Schenectady to Cohoes Falls, where it drops into the Hudson.

The river's human story begins with the Kanien'kehá:ka, the People of the Flint, the easternmost nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Mohawk longhouse villages lined the valley for centuries before European contact. When the Dutch West India Trading Company opened the fur trade to individuals in 1639, the valley became a corridor of commerce, sending significant exports of beaver pelts downriver and drawing European traders deep into Iroquois country. Beginning in the 1680s, French missionaries and 'Praying Indians' established Kahnawake and other Mohawk Christian communities along the St. Lawrence, and those communities supplied guides and fighters — including on both sides of the 1690 Battle of Quebec — who shaped the Hudson Valley's colonial wars.

The Revolutionary War brought devastation to the valley. In 1779 the Sullivan Expedition destroyed dozens of Mohawk villages along the river, forcing most of the nation north to Canada. Within a generation the valley took on a new role. The Erie Canal opened in 1825, linking the Hudson River at Albany with Lake Erie at Buffalo by way of the Mohawk Valley. The canal followed the Mohawk for most of its length, transforming central New York into the most important commercial corridor in the early United States and triggering the rapid settlement of the Midwest.

Industry followed the water. The Mohawk watershed was logged from the 1830s through the 1920s, supplying the regional timber industry of 1850 to 1910 and the railroad expansion of 1860 to 1910. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators. The exhaustion of old-growth stands by 1910, the start of state forestry conservation in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s ended large-scale logging. Meanwhile the first systematic study of the river's hydrology came through USGS surveys of the 1870s to 1890s, gauging stations established from the 1880s to the 1910s, and state geological streamflow assessments of the 1910s to 1930s.

That scientific attention carried into the modern era. State water pollution control studies of the 1950s to 1970s and Clean Water Act assessments from 1972 to 2000 addressed more than a century of logging, agricultural, and industrial impacts, with restoration and TMDL programs the major current outcomes. Today the river is recognized as scenic and sits within the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor and the Mohawk River Watershed. New York's DEC laid out its restoration priorities in the 2015 Mohawk River Basin Action Agenda, a 110-page ecology document. Outfitters such as Adirondack Lakes & Trails run paddle trips and handle Erie Canalway logistics along the river.