Glens Falls was once known by Mohican Indians as chepontuc, a hard place to get around, and the two branches of the falls are separated by an island of harder rock containing Cooper's Cave, actually two connected caves, made famous by James Fenimore Cooper's 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans. Once at the northern end of lands occupied by the Mohican Nation, the area came under Iroquois, or Mohawk, control in the early 1600s, and in 1788 Col. John Glen of Schenectady bought the land and built the first mills there. From 1755 to 1759, England and France struggled for control of the region between Lake Champlain and the Hudson River in the conflict often called the French and Indian War, fought by European armies aided by colonial militias and Native American allies. In this war, the colonial militias of New York and New England gained military experience later vital in the American Revolution, but the fighting also included a major British and American defeat at Fort William Henry on Lake George. The British-held log fortress stood between the French base on Lake Champlain, later called Fort Ticonderoga, and the British base at Fort Edward, a few miles east of Glens Falls, and was commanded by Lt. Col. Monro with support from New England militia units. In August 1757, a French army under General Montcalm, aided by hundreds of Indian allies, besieged and captured Fort William Henry; although Montcalm promised Monro's surrendered troops safe conduct back to Fort Edward, he failed to prevent some of his Indian allies from attacking and killing some of them and their families and carrying off others as captives. In 1826, James Fenimore Cooper, already known for his tales of the American Revolution, made the Fort William Henry massacre the central event of The Last of the Mohicans and set a critically important scene in Cooper's Cave at Glens Falls, helping make the place famous throughout the world through a novel still read in over thirty languages and retold in numerous movies.