USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Pittsfield > The history of Pittsfield (Berkshire County), Massachusetts, from the year 1734 to the year 1800 > Part 6
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The name by which they called themselves, as nearly as English type can represent its multitudinous syllables, was Mo-he-ka- neew, - in the plural, Mo-he-ka-neok ; signifiying " the people of the great waters which are continually in motion,"- that is, which ebb and flow. This unwieldy patronymic was mellowed by the Dutch to Mahican, as it is written in the early Pittsfield deeds;
shed between the colonists and the children of the soil which ever occurred among its hills.
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by the English to Mohican ; and, finally, has passed into poetry and history as the sonorous Mohegan. The national tradition is, that the progenitors of the race on this continent, having crossed the great waters at a point in the North-west where the opposite coasts approach very near to each other, were compelled by famine to disperse through the wilderness, and thus lost what- ever of civilized arts and manners they had previously possessed, - " apostatized," as their Christianized chronicler expresses it.1
Pursuing their way to the south-east,- still driven by hunger, or impelled by that centrifugal restlessness which urged the na- tions away from their eradle, - they crossed many great waters, but none which ebbed and flowed like Mohekunnuk, " the river of their nativity," until they reached the Hudson. Pleased with the resemblance of that noble stream, in this respect, to that which ebbed and flowed in their Asian home, they called it Mahican- ittuck ; anticipating a bad American practice by reduplicating, in the land of their adoption, the name which had been dear in the land of their birth.
Finding, in addition to the charm of association, that the shores of the great river abounded in game, and its waters with fish, while the soil and climate favored their easy-going agriculture, the way-worn and hungry people determined here to fix their permanent habitation.
Flourishing in this new home, the Mohegans ran the usual career of successful Indian nationalities. Carrying carnage and desolation among neighbors as savage as themselves, they de- stroyed some weaker tribes, protected and affiliated others. The terror of their name spread far to the east and west; and prob- ably it was at this era that one of their tribes penetrated into south-eastern Connecticut, and, there establishing themselves, achieved among the natives of that region the proud title of Pequots, - the destroyers.
On their western border, the Mohegans reduced the six nations - not yet confederate-to the utmost straits. They even threatened that afterwards-powerful empire - or, rather, most of its then independent parts - with total extinction. But at that unknown epoch when the wonderful league was formed which constituted the Iroquois in war one people, - one ambitious, revengeful, and irresistible nation, - the fortunes of the Mohegans
1 Hendrick Aupaumut in Hist. Stockbridge.
4
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began to wane; and they were soon glad to accept the alliance, for mutual defence, of the Wappingers, and other river-tribes, with whom, up to that time, they had been at continual war. But the combined forces of the eastern shore proved too weak to withstand the enemy, to whom a wise union had suddenly given the almost undisputed empire of the forest. The allies were defeated by the Iroquois, in a decisive battle fought near Rhinebeck on the IIudson, at a date so recent that the first Dutch farmers found their fields still strewn with the bones of the slain.
The defeated party was reduced to vassalage, which, although not of so degrading a character as that imposed on the unfortunate Leni Lenape, - who descended from the rank of warriors to the political condition of squaws, - must have been sufficiently galling ; especially in cases like that of the treaty of Tawesentha, when the belt of friendship, held at one end by the Dutch and at the other by the Iroquois, rested upon the shoulders of the Mohe- gans and of ".the nation of women," in token of their common subjugation.
Fretting under the yoke, the conquered but still high-spirited race soon rebelled; and in 1625 we find them again in arms against their ancient enemy. The attempt to regain their inde- pendence on their own soil miserably failed. The uprising was suppressed ; and, after a merciless war of three years' duration, the greater portion of the Mohegans were either killed or captured, and the remainder were driven into the Valley of the Connecticut. IIere they were hospitably received by their kinsmen of the previous migration, - the Pequots. But difficulty soon arose from the ambition of Uncas. A separation ensued, and then those intrigues at Boston and Hartford which brought destruction upon the Pequot branch.
If, as has been said, there was any feudal subjection of the Mohegans in the Connecticut Valley to the Iroquois, it must have been an uneasy and often interrupted relation ; for Arnold Mon- tague, who wrote of the last days of the Dutch dominion on the Hudson, and published his account in 1671, reports the Mohawks as constantly at war with the Mohegans, which latter also main- tained " a constant animosity against the Dutch."
At last, in 1664, as the English fleet was approaching to convert the New Netherlands into New York, the Mohegans were embold- ened, perhaps instigated, to harry the Province upon its opposite
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frontier ; and thus the old fire again broke forth. The Mohegans attacked the Mohawks, destroyed cattle at Greenbush, fired a barn at Claveraek, and ravaged that eastern bank of the Hudson which had been the home of their fathers. But, on the 8th of the following September, -this devastation having occurred in July, - the Dutch governor surrendered Fort Amsterdam, and the New Netherlands ceased to be. Thenceforward the governments of New York and Massachusetts, subject to the same crown, strove to stanch the feuds which prevailed between the tribes within their borders; so that the Mohawk and the Mohegan did not again meet in battle until the war of the Revolution, when the former adhered to the king, and the latter espoused the cause of the people.
After the forced exodus of the great body of the Mohegans, in 1628, their ancient hunting-grounds upon the hills seem to have been occupied by the few who were released from captivity, or who crept back from exile and hiding; and, after such fierce conflicts and such general expatriation, the wonder is, not that so few, but that any remained. The components and form of Indian commu- nities are, however, proverbially fluctuating as the sand-hills of the desert; and, in the disturbanee produced by colonial agencies, sources were found from which, in some small degree, to replenish dispeopled Moheganland. Along the river-shore at Claveraek, Kinderhook, and Greenbush, the Dutch began to spread their settlements, and press the natives to the hills. On the north, the Schaghticokes prospered, and threw out their branches along the Housatonic. Straggling Horikans, perhaps, wandered down from the Upper Winterberge. Meanwhile, the relations between the Iroquois and their Mohegan feudatories became more intimate and genial, - doubtless through the kind offices of the Oneidas, who, before their incorporation into the Six Nations, had incurred a debt of gratitude to the then-powerful Mohegans, which they seem now faithfully to have discharged. " The Mohawks, Onondagas, Cayu- gas, and Senecas are our uncles," said the Stockbridge chroniclers; " but the Oneidas and Tuscaroras are our brothers."
Still the statement of the exceeding meagreness with which the Indians peopled Western Massachusetts needs no qualification ; and what inhabitants there were, were mostly Mohegan. Even when an attempt was made, about 1750, to introduce Mohawks into the mission settlement at Stockbridge, the effort met with no success,
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notwithstanding the strenuous exertions of the commissioners, sustained by lavish appropriations of money by the General Court.
We have few data upon which to found an estimate of the number of natives who, before its settlement, occupied the ter- ritory now known as Berkshire. When the mission was estab- lished at Stockbridge, an effort was made to gather all of the nation into one community in that town; and, in 1736, ninety had thus been collected. One hundred and twenty were reported in 1740; and, by 1747, these had increased to two hundred. In 1785, when they were about to remove to the Oneida country, the community had grown to the number of four hundred and twenty souls. But of these, a majority had come from beyond the Hoosacs upon one side, and the Taconics on the other.
There is, indeed, no reason to believe, that, even in the palmiest days of Mohegan empire, any considerable number of the tribe ever dwelt permanently in the mountainous regions of their country. Indeed, we have positive evidence to the contrary in an account written by Capt. Hendrick Aupaumut, one of their later chroniclers, and preserved by President Dwight. As the customs of the nation are described in this paper, the business of the chase was pursued with system. The sanop, to be sure, might replenish his larder from the neighboring woods, whenever appetite or opportunity suggested. But the red deer did not, as an ordinary morning occurrence, bound by the Indian village, and receive an invitation in the guise of a flint arrow-head to the wigwam dinner. The year was, therefore, divided into two great hunting-seasons, - one in the fall, when they hunted the deer, bear, beaver, otter, raccoon, fisher, and martin, for winter clothing, and drying-meat; the other in the spring, when they chased the moose upon the Green Mountains, - the Taconics and Hoosacs. The latter season com- menced about the first of March, and was succeeded by a supple- mentary trapping of otter, beaver, and other amphibious animals, as soon as the ice broke up in the streams and lakes. Good care was, however, taken that the stay among the mountains should not exceed two months.
The conclusion which we reach, then, is, that the few Mohegans who kept their lodges permanently at Poontoosuck lived amid an abundance of game, which, throughout the year, they shared with such hunting-parties of their countrymen as chose to join them, which many probably did at the time of the fall hunt. But, in
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the early spring, the whole valley, with its surrounding hillsides, was alive with the hunters of the moose, - the broad-horned "winter-deer; " and, as the ice melted from the waters, their banks were lined with the forms of the trappers, as, now bending, now creeping, they cautiously examined their thick-set snares.
Of what wild adventure, of what wily craft, the scenes now familiar to us were witnesses in those grand hunts, or during the desperate struggles for tribal independence which have been por- trayed, imagination only can tell; unless, indeed, antiquarian research shall yet discover some fragments of the story, imbed- ded perhaps, as much which goes to make up this chapter was found, in documents otherwise dry as dust.
We need not here pursue the topic further. The fairest era in the Mohegan's story - that of his introduction to Christian civili- zation - belongs to the annals of Stockbridge. But, while Pitts- field may well envy her beautiful sister-town, the memories of that noble missionary enterprise, and of the great men who were connected with it, happily she has also little of that tragic inter- est, so far as events occurring upon her own soil are concerned, which connects the red man so sadly with the early history of many New-England towns. The first inhabitants and their fathers had already, in other places, borne their full part in the dangers, sufferings, and losses inflicted by savage warfare, as, in all respects, they had contributed their full share in laying the foun- dations of the commonwealth. The names they bore were not strange to Massachusetts history, but had been hallowed in that baptism of blood which, for a century of cruel years, was poured ont over the Valley of the Connecticut.
Military rolls - almost lost among similar memorials of honor which war after war has accumulated in the archives of Massachu- setts - still preserve the names of some, afterwards among the foun- ders of Pittsfield, who, when younger men, of Springfield, Northamp- ton, Westfield, and other towns, fought in "the old Indian wars." But the record of individual suffering and achievement is scant; while of the daring women, who, with husband and son, braved the dangers of that lurid frontier, only here and there an incident is told: of which one, in which an ancestress of the Janes-Brown families of Pittsfield was the heroine, must suffice for an illustra- tion. This lady, the wife of Benjamin Janes, was, says Rev. Frederic Janes (the historian of the family), conspicuous in the
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tragic perils and sufferings at Pasconiac, near Northampton Vil- lage, in 1704, - saw her four children murdered by the savages, and was herself tomahawked, scalped, and left for dead; but recovered, after two years of suffering, and bore four other chil- dren. One of her grandsons, Elijah, settled in Pittsfield about 1763, and other of her descendants at various times. 1
1 In the foregoing chapter, the accounts of the customs and pre-historic migra- tions of the Mohegans are gathered from the traditions preserved by President Dwight. For the story of their wars with the Iroquois, I have depended chiefly upon the documentary history of New York, and the histories of that State by Dr. E. B. O'Callaghan and John Romeyn Brodhead.
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CHAPTER II.
GRANTS. - SURVEYS. - SALES.
[1620-1741.]
Advance of Population Westward in Massachusetts. - History of the Western Boundary of Massachusetts. - First Settlement on the Housatonic. - Disposi- tion by the General Court of Wild Lands in Hampshire County. - Jacob Wen- dell. - John Stoddard. - Grant to Stoddard. - Grant to Boston. - Boston sells to Wendell. - Adjustment of the Rights of Wendell, Stoddard, and Philip Livingston. - Cost, Form, and Dimensions of the Township.
'T THE tide of population, setting westward from Plymouth Rock, in the brief space of twenty-six years advanced to the shores of the Connecticut, where Springfield was founded in 1636. Thirty additional years carried it forward but barely ten miles to West- field, where, stayed at the base of Tekoa Mountain, it paused for more than half a century, until suddenly, in 1725, it overleaped the Iloosacs, and the village of Sheffield was planted upon the broadest and most fertile meadows of the Housatonic. Twenty-seven years more elapsed before a permanent settlement was effected at belated Poontoosuck. "Thus one hundred and sixteen years intervened be- tween the settlement of Springfield and that of Pittsfield: The Con- necticut Valley, with its people decimated by repeated massacre and harried by hordes of savages, whose apparent numbers were enhauced by their mode of warfare, - this valley, with fields more abundant than husbandmen, - had small temptation to offshoot its scanty population into a region whose frowning mountains even now turn eastward their most rugged front, and which then lay in most provoking contiguity to the war-path of the Canadian foe.This, however, was by no means the sole or even the chief cause which postponed the western settlements. It was little effect, except when war actually existed, that such obstacles were wont to have in staying the progress of Massachusetts population when the interests of the Province demanded that it should advance.
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The impediment which proved effectual was the uncertainty of the New-York boundary, which a series of conflicting royal grants and charters had involved in a curious complication that was only finally disentangled by what New York called "intrusion," but Massachusetts a bold assumption of just territorial rights.1 .
The antagonistic positions maintained by the two Provincial Governments may, perhaps, be best exhibited in dialogue, thus : -
MASSACHUSETTS. - Under royal charter granted A.D. 1691 by King William and Queen Mary, of blessed memory, my territory extends as far west as that of Connecticut, in virtue of the words following; to wit, "westward as far as our colonies of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and the Narragansett countrie."
NEW YORK. - Nay ; but these words refer to the eastern and not to the western bounds of Connecticut : rightfully construed, they do not bring you even to the Connecticut River. However, up to that line, it is no concern of mine; but observe, in 1674, - seven- teen years antecedent to your charter from William and Mary, - Charles the Second granted, among other territories, to his brother, the Duke of York, " all the lands from the west side of the Con- necticut to the east side of Delaware Bay." And to the Duke's title my government succeeds.2
MASSACHUSETTS. - True, as to Charles's grant; and that was not the only portion of my proper territory the royal rascal tried to steal for his brother, the sometime papist tyrant, before his corrupt judges robbed me legally, or at least with some of the forms of law, of the whole.
NEW YORK. - But you will not deny, that, your charter having been vacated in chancery, it was competent for the King to dispose as he pleased of the lands reverting to him.
MASSACHUSETTS. - We need not discuss that. The decree in chancery issued in 1684. It could have no effect upon transactions in 1674, when, if at all, the Duke's rights must have accrued from the last confirmation of his grant of which there is any pretence. By the King's patent, only such title could have passed as was then in him, not that which he may afterwards have acquired. Now,
1 Resulting, however, in an amicable adjustment of claims.
2 New York also contended that the boundary established between that Province and Connecticut was not that contemplated by the original patents, but was con- ceded by a special agreement between the parties, for reasons not applicable to the case of Massachusetts ; among which, one was the actual occupation of the territory by Connecticut colonists.
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in 1674, I was living under the grand old charter which made the Atlantic and Pacific seas my eastern and western bounds.
NEW YORK. - IIold! Not so fast ! Remember that your ' grand old charter" - that of the first Charles, in 1628, I suppose you speak of - limits itself by this restriction : " Provided also that the said islands, or any the premises by the said letters-patent in- tended or meant to be granted, were not then actually possessed or inhabited by any other Christian prince or state." Now, about the year 1608, "as appears from the book entituled 'The British Empire in America,'" Henry Hudson discovered the lands of this prov- ince; and, by virtue of that discovery, the Dutch - whose title is merged in mine, and under whom, as well as the Duke, I claim - possessed and occupied the same as far north-easterly as the Con- necticut River, near which, I doubt not, it may be made to appear many Dutch people were settled.1
And thereupon Massachusetts made an issue of fact, denying any such sufficient occupation by the Dutch as was alleged, except as regarded a narrow strip of territory along the Hudson.
The controversy continued many years, and was finally ter- minated, without an adjudication upon its original merits, by an agreement entered into by the parties, after an amicable conference by their representatives at Hartford, in 1773./ The boundary then consented to was substantially that claimed by Massachusetts; but, instead of being a continuation due north of the Connecticut line, it was made to deflect considerably towards the east by a corresponding divergence in the course ' of the Hudson River, between which and Massachusetts it was provided that a space of twenty miles should at all points intervene.
Until this arrangement was effected, the uncertain dividing-line was a constant source of trouble, vexation, and anxiety ; some- times resulting in violence, and once at least in bloodshed, between parties who acted under conflicting patents from the rival Governments. In general, however, the influence of the royal governors prevented a resort to extreme measures. Massachusetts maintained her jurisdiction up to the boundary which she claimed. New York ruled beyond it. Conflicts arose only in the few cases in which the two Governments had granted the same tracts to
1 Papers relating to the Livingston Manor and the New-Hampshire Grants, N. Y., Doc. Hist., and Col. Docs.
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different parties, and principally as to those now mostly included in the towns of Sheffield, Mount Washington, and Egremont, but which were known to New-York colonial geography as the tracts of Taghkanik and Westenhook in the manor of Livingston.
Previous to the conference of 1773, New York, nevertheless, did not in terms relinquish her pretensions to any of the territory claimed by Massachusetts west of the Connecticut River. On the contrary, she rather insisted upon their validity; and, while hinting that equity might require the Crown to confirm to individ- uals the lands actually possessed and improved by them, she clogged this concession by insisting upon the quit-rents which lands in her patents paid to the royal revenue. These rents had sometimes furnished corrupt officials with a pretext for extortion, and had always been fruitful of discontent, even among those who had accepted grants specifically charged with them.
In Massachusetts, no such tribute was known. Her settlers boasted themselves freeholders, -a title which conferred not only substantial rights, but much-prized burgher dignity. They therefore especially dreaded transfer to a government whose lands were universally held under what they deemed a feudal tenure. The New-York officials, on the other hand, were contemplating with impatient longing the sums which the quit-rents due upon the lands unjustly withheld by Massachusetts ought to bring into their treasury ; Gov. Hardy estimating them, in 1756, at £2,000 · per annum, and Lieut .- Gov. Colden, in 1764, being content with the more moderate demand of £1,200. We can thus well com- prehend the relief which must have been afforded to the people of Pittsfield, as well as of her sister towns, by the result of the Hartford conference, which was doubtless one of the causes that, in the ensuing ten years, vexed as they were with war and financial disorder, nearly doubled her population.
The line agreed upon in 1773 was not, however, finally run until 1787, when Congress, at the request of the States interested, ap- pointed a commission for the purpose, consisting of Rev. Dr. John Ewing, a distinguished savan of Philadelphia; David Rittenhouse, the celebrated astronomer; and Thomas Hutchins, the national geographer-general. All the science of even this distinguished triad was, however, insufficient to correct the variations of the magnetic needle among the iron-laden hills of Taconic; and
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the line was not precisely that contemplated by the parties : but the error was of trifling moment as compared with the amity of contiguous States. The line, therefore, remains as it was then fixed, with the slight exception caused by the cession of Boston Corner to New-York in 1855, which, although made for the con- venience of those living upon that little tract, incidentally rectified, in part, the error of 1787.1
¿We must now return to the period when the pioneer civilization of Massachusetts, after its long pause upon the banks of the Con- necticut, was about to advance at one bound to those of the Housatonic.
Between the years 1717 and 1722, it became apparent, from the course of New York, that the boundary between that Province and Connecticut, agreed upon in 1683-4, must soon be run.
Roughly, that agreement was upon a line about twenty miles east of the Hudson ; and it was manifest, as well from observation as from the express declaration of the representatives of New York, that Connecticut, in obtaining a boundary so far westward of that originally conceded to her, had been mainly aided by boldly pushing forward her population to the farthest limits which she claimed.
Every consideration, then, urged Massachusetts to a similar course ; while the precedent of Connecticut imparted confidence to settlers in the titles founded upon a basis which had proved sufficient in the southern Province. Nine years of peace since Queen Anne's War had also reinvigorated the frontier, and filled it with young men impatient for a new advance into the wilder- ness.
In 1722, therefore, one hundred and seventy-seven citizens of Hampshire County petitioned the General Court for a grant of lands in the Valley of the " Housatunnuk or Westbrook."" Some of the best minds 2 in the councils of the Province then represented the old county, and strongly favored, if they had not indeed suggested, the petition : and accordingly the townships
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