Oatka Creek (/oʊˈætkə/oh-AT-kə) is the third longest tributary of the Genesee River, located entirely in the Western New York region of the U.S. state of New York. From southern Wyoming County, it flows 58 miles (93 km) to the Genesee near Scottsville, draining an area of 215 square miles (560 km2) that includes all or part of 23 towns and villages in Wyoming, Genesee, Livingston and Monroe counties as well. Its name means "leaving the highlands" or "approaching an opening" in Seneca.
Like its parent stream it originated during the end of the last Ice Age, as glacial impact on the upper Allegheny Plateau created a rolling landscape streams could gradually erode through, The Oatka carved a deep groove known today as the Oatka Valley, where the upper creek's two major settlements would be established. Native Americans of the Seneca nation established a few settlements along it where clearings arose in the forest. The Revolutionary War's Sullivan Expedition, brought the valley's fertile soil to the attention of the emerging nation, and the region was opened for settlement shortly after the war.
For a time the Oatka was called Allan's Creek after the area's first settler, Ebenezer "Indian" Allan. Its waterpower facilitated early 19th-century European settlement of the abundant fertile lands in the Holland Purchase. Today it remains an important regional resource, used for water supply and recreational purposes, and actively protected to assure water quality. It is a popular trout stream, stocked from the oldest fish hatchery in the Western Hemisphere near its mouth. A dam in Le Roy makes the section below it a losing stream, dry during the warm months of the year as the stream flows through subterranean channels.
Read more about Oatka Creek: Course, Watershed, Wildlife, Geology, History, River Modifications, Economy, Tributaries
Famous quotes containing the word creek:
“It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)