he name is fake, to begin with, a faux-nym echoing imaginary Algonquian or Haudenosaunee place names. In the second place, it was originally little more than a small hole in a wetland adjacent to the Saranac River, fed by Ray and Roger Brooks. In the 1820s “Colonel” Pliny Miller, who earned his honorific at the Battle of Plattsburgh, built the first dam three miles downstream in the village of Saranac Lake, to float the big pine and spruce logs of the Saranacs and the Sawteeth to his waiting lumber mill, doubling
