The Old New York Frontier/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
Why this History
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Why this History
REASONS for writing this history may in some numbers be cited. About one hundred and sixty years before the Revolution—earlier, in fact, than the landing of the Pilgrims—these lands had been visited by white men. Traders had travelled along the Indian trails of the Mohawk and Susquehanna valleys periodically all through that century and a half, while for at least a quarter of a century before the Revolution, missionaries had engaged in constant labor on the Susquehanna. By the missionaries, schools and churches were founded, and a beneficent and fruitful work was well under way when the war put a sudden end to peaceful activities. The lands on the Susquehanna for a considerable time were the frontier of the province of New York, the Unadilla River, one of the tributaries of the larger stream, forming another part of that boundary line between the Indians and the English, which was established by the treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768. Beyond this line no settlements were made until after the war, when the white man secured his first titles in that fertile region of Central and Western New York.
During the Revolution the upper Susquehanna became a base of operations from which the Indians and Tories, who had fled from the Mohawk and Schoharie valleys, found their way back into the settled parts of New York, and under Joseph Brant, Colonel John Butler, Walter H. Butler, and Sir John Johnson wrought their destruction. After peace returned, the history of these Susquehanna lands is the history of a chain of prosperous settlements founded mainly by men from New England States on sites where Scotch-Irish, German, and other pioneers had taken up lands before the conflict. Thus it becomes a history, furnishing a type of the settlement of Central New York.
In the history of the upper Susquehanna Valley as a highway, three distinct periods might be named. First come the trails of the Indian era, dating from immemorial times and including the years of the fur traders and the Protestant missions. Second is the time from 1770 to 1783, when by turns the valley was a road for pioneers coming into the country, to be driven out by fire and the tomahawk; a road for Indians bent on spoliation or massacre; a route by land and water for the soldiers of General Clinton; and, finally, a route along which the Indians, stirred to bitter revenge by General Sullivan’s ravages, penetrated and laid waste all that remained of the Mohawk and Schoharie settlements. Third comes the period after the peace, when the valley was the road for settlers bound for the "Southern Tier" and Pennsylvania by way of Wattles’s Ferry, from 1784 on for many years, and when from about 1800 it became at Unadilla the terminus of two great turnpikes, the Catskill and the Ithaca, which were the railroads of their time and along which for a quarter of a century ran the main course of trade and travel for a large inland territory.
This history has long waited for consecutive and full narration. More than half a century ago several writers dealt with certain interesting parts of it. Campbell, with an able and gentle hand, wrote the story of the settlement of Cherry Valley, and of stirring events in Tryon County during the Revolution. Stone wrote the biography of Brant as might one who loved Brant and honored his memory. Simms gathered into his several publications an extensive and curious array of material. Jay Gould, when still under age, revived much that Campbell and Simms had brought to light, and added other valuable information. Cooper, with accuracy and fulness, recorded the annals of the settlement developed by his father on Otsego Lake, all of which Cooper himself may be said to have seen and a large part of which he afterward was.
Some of these and other chronicles were printed sixty or more years ago. They all long since had passed out of print and out of the convenient reach of purchasers, some of them being now very scarce books. At the time of their publication, moreover, a large store of important material, printed and unprinted, which is now to be found in State archives and in libraries, was either inaccessible, or for other reasons was not drawn upon.[1] This is true in eminent degree of the missionaries, of whom very little has been heretofore written, and by the above-mentioned writers, nothing. It is true in large degree of the Border Wars, the real origin and motives of which, especially on the side of Brant and his Indian followers, as well as the full details affecting this frontier, the author believes he has here more clearly set forth. In fact, by combining the new material with the old, it has now become possible to prepare a continuous historical record of the valley, covering the period from our day back to the years when the feet of white men first followed the Indian trails of the Susquehanna, almost three centuries ago.
But there are limitations which seem destined always to exist. Beyond certain dates, those of about two hundred years ago, the historical explorer has at times little more to guide him than isolated facts, and his imagination, as he seeks to find a way about in the dim twilight of Indian legend and scattered lore. It is not until the close of the seventeenth century that he is well assisted by illuminating records.
Previous to the Revolution, the growth and spread of settlements in America had been extremely slow everywhere. More than a century elapsed after Columbus found the New World, before Hendrick Hudson discovered the stream that bears his name. A still longer period passed away before the Pilgrims disembarked from the Mayflower. When permanent settlements were first planted in the Susquehanna Valley, two and a half centuries had come and gone since that memorable voyage from the Port of Palos.
Those centuries, so barren of history here, had witnessed events of great pith and moment elsewhere. England had gone forward from the Wars of the Roses almost to the reign of George III. Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Dryden, and Pope are among those gifted men of genius by whom her intellectual greatness had been advanced. Her political destiny meanwhile had been broadened and deepened under Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and Cromwell. In France had lived Richelieu and Louis XIV., while under Charles V. and Philip II. a vast Spanish empire had come into existence and decayed. On the banks of the Hellespont, only forty years before the voyage of Columbus, expired the last remnant of the Empire of Rome, which embraced at one time, as Gibbon said, “the fairest part of the earth and the most civilized portion of mankind.”
On American soil we can point to little of striking renown during those generations. Near the end of them Washington had become a name associated honorably with the French War. Jonathan Edwards had astonished men in Europe, as well as here, with the vigor and subtlety of his mind. Franklin had made contributions to human knowledge of great worth and potency. But of other eminent names the records are bare. For the most part men had been born, had lived, toiled, and died absorbed in the simple pursuits of trade and domestic life.
In the province of New York the first successful men were fur traders who exchanged Dutch goods for beaver skins. During more than half a century after Hudson's arrival these Dutchmen did scarcely anything more. Villages grew up on Manhattan Island and in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys. The trader's boat penetrated down the head-waters of the Susquehanna. But wherever villages were founded, they were not so much permanent settlements as trading-posts. Theodore Roosevelt has justly observed that while the Dutch aspired to secure large wealth for the mother-country, they were devoid of ambition to found on these shores a free Dutch nation.
As traders, the Dutch never promised to open a way to great national wealth. For the eleven years between 1624 and 1635 the beaver skins received in Holland numbered only 80,182, and the otter and other skins, 9,447, or about 8,ooo skins of all kinds per year. Albany, the fur depot for the whole interior, was described by Father Jogues, in 1644, as "a miserable little fort called Fort Orange, built of logs with four or five pieces of Breteuil cannon and as many swivels, with some twenty-five or thirty houses built of boards with thatched roofs." Except in the chimneys, "no mason's work had been used."
Scarcely more enterprise marked the first years of English rule. As late as 1695 the trade amounted to only £10,000, while in 1678 Governor Andros reported that a merchant worth $2,500 or $5,000 was "accounted a good, substantial merchant," and a planter "worth half that in movables" was a prosperous citizen. The value of all estates in the province was only $750,000. Clearly, that was a time of very small things, but they were among the fruitful beginnings of a land and people from which was to grow the greatest of all the States, and in them this frontier had an ample share.
- ↑ Noteworthy material of this kind includes: The Documentary History of the State of New York, 4 vols., 8vo; The New York Colonial Documents, 15 vols., quarto; The New York Colonial and Land Papers, 63 Ms. vols., fol.; The Public Papers of Governor George Clinton, edited by Hugh Hastings, State Historian, 4 vols., 8vo, the same being the part thus far published of the Clinton Manuscripts in the State Library, comprising 48 large folio volumes, these manuscripts having been largely used in the preparation of this work through permission from the State Library; The Journals of the Legislative Council and Provincial Congress, 4 vols., quarto; The New York Revolutionary Papers, 2 vols., quarto; The New York State Archives, 1 vol., quarto; The Journals of the Sullivan Expedition; The Draper Collection of Brant Manuscripts in the library of the Wisconsin Historical Society at Madison, 23 vols., large octavo; The Sir William Johnson Manuscripts, in the State Library, 25 vols., large folio, and all of Parkman’s writings. Most important of all this material, in so far as relates to the Border Wars, are the Clinton Papers and Manuripts. The intelligence shown by Mr. Hastings in initiating and carrying forward the publication of these papers deserves special recognition. Only in the light of this correspondence can the whole story of this frontier in the Revolution be clearly understood. Stone saw some of the papers, but many others seem never to have passed under his eyes. A fuller list of authorities, the majority of which were unknown to earlier writers, will be found in the bibliography at the end of this volume.