USA > New York > Essex County > Westport > Bessboro: A history of Westport, Essex Co., N.Y. > Part 6
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We are sure that spring has come only when we have heard, ou the edge of the evening, the cry of the whip- poorwill.
The oldest family which can trace lineal descent within the borders of the town is that of the rattle- shake. They are found in but one locality -- that of the remoter parts of the Split Rock range. Here they have dens in the rocks, and when there was a bounty paid by the town for each rattle, people living near by used to go into, the mountains to their dens and kill them in large numbers. I believe the bounty is no longer paid, which seems a pity, as these unpleasant neighbors must be increasing. There is no record of any person being bitten by them within the memory of living man. I have tried to draw out rattlesnake stories from people who have lived loug in the rattlesnake re- gion, but never heard of even a cow in the pasture which suffered from the wound of a rattlesnake bite. I have been told that it was unpleasant to find one of the un- eanny things in a cock of hay in the hay field, or to come upon one sleeping comfortably in your back kitchen, but the rattlesnake is not pugnacious, and would rather run than fight. The Indians tried to pro- pitiate them by always speaking politely of them as "the old bright inhabitants."
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CLIMATE.
The climate of Westport is, like its dialect, that of New England. It is often described by the natives, (who could not be induced to exchange it for that of any other spot on earth,) as "nine months winter and three months late in the fall." Granting that there are moods and seasons when this description has a ring of solemn reality, it fails as a literal formula in one essen- tial point. It gives an impression of continuity, of monotony, and never, never could the worst enemy of our climate call it monotonous! No, we have endless variety. Our winter is long and cold. A fire lighted to warm the house in November will not be suffered to go out until the next March, perhaps April. We do not expect much snow until after Christmas, though in ex- ceptional years we have had a heavy fall for Thanks- giving which has stayed upon the ground until the next spring. If you winter in Westport, pray for suow. Anything but an "open winter." A foot of hard packed show, good sleighing, no drifts, a clear air, and life may be not only tolerable but merry. Even heavy snows, with high winds and deep drifts, have an interest and enjoyment, and set one to quoting lines from "Snow- bound" with much relish. Often there are marvelous displays of the aurora borealis, ou clear cold nights.
The lake freezes over at any time between the first of January and the middle of February. About ouce in every generation there comes one of those exceptional winters when the lake does not freeze over at all. If it freezes late, we are likely to have no good crossing
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on the ice from Westport to Basin Barbor, a distance of four miles. The crossing from Arnold's bay to Barber's point is the one most used. The lake is nar- rower from Rock Harbor to Basin Harbor, but this is entirely out of the ordinary line of travel. When the ice is discovered to be firm enough to bear up a horse, some one, usually a man living near the shore, whose family, perhaps, has performed the same public service for generations, like the Barbers of Barber's point, will go on the ice and "bush out a road" from one shore to the other, choosing the best places to cross the cracks, turning out for air holes, etc. This road is outlined by bushes fixed in holes in the ice, and will be used by all travelers until the ice becomes weak and treacherous in the spring.
The ice breaks up, as a rule, between the last of March and the first of May. Sometimes it melts slowly and gradually under a constantly rising temperature, but more often it goes out with tempestuous winds, which toss and grind it against the shore, sometimes piling it many feet high. The breaking up of the ice is always eagerly longed for, and occasions much re- mark and discussion. The relief from the tension of the "long and dreary winter" is always very noticeable.
Charles Dudley Warner described our spring when he described that of New England,-that is, he de- seribed one spring, knowing full well that no one spring time is ever like another. Sometimes it is long and tedious, exaggerating Coleridge's line.
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"Spring comes slowly up this way."
Sometimes we have a howling blizzard one week, and the next, --
"Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer -- " and we have not had any spring at all.
I have gathered pussy willows by the side of a dusty roxd early in March, and on the other hand, I have seen my tomato plants seared by a frost the first night in June. These two events represent the extremes of my own experience, and may be taken to demonstrate the fact that upon our calendar spring is a movable feast. But,-"Thanks be !" as Mr. Dooley says, it al- ways is spring when it comes, and it always brings summer.
No higher praise of our summers can be said or sung than that over and over again, year after year, they force us to forgive our climate for the winters. Our summers and autumns are the loveliest in the world, or at least they seem so to us who love the "north countree."
I have no statistics of the temperature, or the rain- fall, or the velocity of the wind, nor do I know that any one ever took the trouble to observe these things scien- tifically in Westport. I know that the thermometer sometimes touches ninety degrees above in the sum- mer, and twenty below in the winter, but these are ex- tremes not repeated in every season.
Along the lake shore the temperature is equalized to a certain degree by the proximity of a large body of water, so that sudden changes are not so much felt as
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in the mountains. Frost comes earlier in the autumn and later in the spring upon the highlands than along the lake, and of course Nichols pond and the river freeze much earlier than Lake Champlain.
DIALECT.
Our dialect you will find reproduced in the New England fiction of Miss Wilkins, Miss Jewett and Mr. Howells. You will also find it in "David Harum." But its most perfect copy, drawn with the keenest sense of its shades and fancies, you will find in the inimitable sketches of Rowland E. Robinson. He is dead now, alas! and he will never take us again to hear the talk in "Uncle 'Lisha's Shop," nor let us go hunting with Sam Lovel. How well he knew the speech of the conutry folk, and with what love and enjoyment he set it down ! He lived only a few miles away, across the lake in the town of Ferrisburgh, near Basin Harbor, and the people that he knew had the same ways, and the same thoughts and the same forms of expression as the people of Westport. Our amazement is sometimes expressed in the mysterious allusion of "What iu Sam Hill!" or "What in tunket!" We clip out of our speech every vowel and consonant that can possibly be spared. We say, "We sh'd think 't Sam Lov'l 'n' Pel'tiah 'n' 'mongst 'em might 'a' ketched ev'ry dum fish 'n th' lake b' this time," precisely like Mr. Robin- son's characters. At the same time, most of us are perfectly well able to write a letter in good dietionary
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English, or to make a speech, or to carry on a conver- sation, and only drop into the dialect when we feel it quite proper to the occasion. We are conscious of our dialect and connoisseurs in its use, like the Scotch, and unlike the English, who drop their h's and final g's in serene belief that all the world does the same.
But we have those among us who are not conscious of their dialect. I do not mean the city visitors, but the French Canadians who form a certain proportion of our population. Mr. Robinson has given us the type in his Antwine, +-and many and many au "Antwine" is ours ! His broken speech, a mixture of Canadian patois and Yankee English, his small wiry form, the traces of his Indian ancestry shown in swarthy skin, high cheek bones, black bead-like eyes and straight black hair, his industry, his cleanliness and thrift, bis incapacity to rise to wealth or office, his illimitable family,-all these characteristics mark the people known familiarly and not disrespectfully as "Canucks." They probably came in very early, as soon as laborers were required upon the farms or in the iron works, and, easily satis- fied with simple conditions, have been content to stay.
These two forms of dialect seem to have modified each other but little, the native New England speech beiug altogether the prevailing language. A close ob- server can trace in the latter some modifications caused by the summer floods of strangers from Boston and New York. Thus the youth who was wont to auswer an inquiry with a drawling "Wha-a-at ?" and a vacuous stare, (a "gasp" we call it in the dialect, now responds
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with & "Beg pardon?" and an engaging smile. The bear stories of the Oldest Inhabitant are still couched in the origins) tongue, but the hotel porter who takes your bag at the station might defy you to prove him not born in New York.
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HISTORY OF WESTPORT
FIRST PART. 1609-1785. I.
apagajo
Indian Occupation.
The first inhabitants of Westport were the savage Iroquois, one of the most powerful of the native tribes. Their nomad life, with homes in wigwam-and lodge, was peculiarly adapted to leaving no permanent trace upon the soil. The beaver whom they hunted has left more lasting impress of his labor than they. The red Indian never built a dam, and the bark canoe which was the crowning effort of his skill and industry needed no wharf at which to land. Why should he bridge a stream that his enemy might cross more quickly than he ? But we often pick up an arrow head, chipped with infinite patience out of stone. On land that has been cultivated for a century, we plow up arrow heads with point and edges as sharp as when the Indian hunter took aim along the shaft and pulled the bow string to send it on its errand to foe or prey.
If we can point to any local monument of the Indian, it is in two places which we call Indian burying grounds, from the quantity of arrow heads which have been found there. Perhaps we should call them battle grounds if our knowledge was more complete. Ou the Boquet
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river, a little below Wadhams Mills, is a place always referred to as "the old Indian burying ground," and ou the shore of Lake Champlain, south of the village and north of Holt's brook, is another. Here I am told that hundreds of arrow heads have been discovered.
Another remarkable sign of Indian occupation is found on the top of one of the mountains of the Split Klock range, overlooking North Shore, on the land bought in 1838 by Mr. William Guy Hunter. Here are found quantities of stone chippings, such as are left when Indian pipes and other utensils are made, and which always indicate an Indian work-shop. The place com- mauds an extended view, and no doubt some tribe of the Iroquois was in the habit of eucamping here at in- tervals in its wanderings. The stone chippings are of a peculiar kind of stone, unlike any in the vicinity, and geologists say that it is found only on the shores of Lake Superior. Students of Indian character and cus- toms find no difficulty in believing that the stone was brought here from that place, and supplied material for the first manufacture carried on upon our soil.
Large, bowl-like hollows, worn into the solid rock, fonud on the hillsides of the Split Rock range, I have heard called "Indian Mortars," but these are no doubt due to glacial action.
1609-1755.
The first white man whose eyes rested upon the shores of Westport was the discoverer of the lake, the brave and brilliant Samuel de Champlain, a soldier in
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the service of France. He passed by on July 4, 1609 the leader of an Indian war-party in twenty-four canoes. After fighting a battle at the head of the lake with the Iroquois, he returned, near the end of July, passing by again on his way to Quebec, founded only the year be- fore. His remark upon the eastern border of what is uow Essex county is this : "These parts, though agree- able, are not inhabited by any Indians, in consequence of their wars." In this it was said to be different to the opposite shore, the level bottom lands of Vermont, where were many Iroquois villages, with cultivated fields.
Another reason doubtless influenced the Indians in their avoidance of these shores. It was that they were a corn-raising people, so far as their practice of the art of agriculture went, and our clay soil is not adapted to corn. An Indian village was always set up upon sandy or gravelly loam, if possible. Then the deep water of the lake, with the wide sweep for stormos upon it, was very dangerous for the Indian's frail canoe, and for common every day life he chose shallower water.
We do not know the name of the first white man who set foot upon our soil, but there is little doubt that it was one of the band of Jesuit missionaries whofollowed close after Champlain, traversing all this region again and again with the tireless feet and the unquenchable hope of the religions fanatic. Devoted, highminded men were these missionaries, with an utter disregard of selfish motives unsurpassed in the history of the mind of man. They lived among the savages, making
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themselves subject unto them, and often faring worse than they. They were as patient as they were brave and no sublimity of heroism can ever rise above the serenity with which they looked forward to martyrdom as the consummation of their work.
There is a singular proof of the visits of these mis- sionaries to our shores. In the summer of 1875, Dr. S-wall S. Cutting, while walking along the shore of the lake near Hunter's Bay, on North Shore, found among the sand and pebbles a little ebony image of the Virgin and Child, such as might be used in the devotions of a devout Catholic, or shown to the wondering eyes of savages, hearing for the first time of the Mother and Child of Bethlehem. This image must have been lost by a missionary or by some one of his dusky converts, perhaps in the time of Champlain, perhaps much later. It may have belonged to Father Jogues himself, one of the most interesting and pathetic figures in all the his- tory of New France.#
Isaac Jogues was born in Orleans, France, in 1607, He was a Roman Catholic priest, and belonged to the order of Jesuits. He came to the new cor_ tinent in 1636, passing through the settlement on the St. Lawrence to the Indian mission on Lake Huron, to which he had been assigned. Here he remained six years, laboring with self-sacrificing fervor in his barren field,
*The image found by Dr. Cutting was presented by him to the museum of Brown University, where it may probably be seen now. If Westport had had a museum of her own, as every town should have, this interesting relic would now be treasured in the scenes to which it belongs.
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and in 1642 he went to Quebec to obtain supplies for his mission. Returning in a canoe which was one of the foremost in a little fleet of twelve, filled with Huron Indians, he was captured at the mouth of the Richelieu river by a party of Iroquois, and carried captive up the Richelieu and Lake Champlain, to the south. He might have escaped, but seeing his companions taken, he gave himself up. He was beaten with war-clubs, and his finger nails torn off by the teeth of the Iroquois. The two priests with him, Conture and Goupil, were also tortured.
"On the eighth day," (Aug. 9,) says Parkman, in his "Jesuits iu North America," "they approached their camp, on a small island near the southern end of Lake Champlain. The warriors, two hundred in number, armed with clubs and thorny sticks, ranged themselves in two lines, between which the captives were compelled to pass up the side of a rocky hill. On the way, they were beaten with such fury that Jogues, who was the last in the line, fell powerless, drenched in blood and half dead. As the chief man among the French cap- tives, he fared the worst. In the morning they re- sumed their journey. And now the lake narrowed to the semblance of a tranquil river."
That the island mentioned was the one now included within the limits of the township of Westport, and sometimes called "No Man's Land," there is no doubt whatever. There are no other islands near the south- ern end of the lake except Rock and Mud islands, near
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the Vermont shore, and neither one is large enough to afford a camp for two hundred Indians.
The captives were taken by way of Lake George to the Iroquois villages on the Mohawk river. For a year Jogues remained a miserable captive among these hn- man wolves, finding his only solace in an occasional opportunity to baptise a dying Indian baby, or a cap- tive perishing at the stake.
The Dutch of Fort Orange forgetting all barriers of blood or religion, tried in vain to ransom him. Finally Arendt van Corlear, the governor so beloved and re- spected by the Indians, who was afterward drowned in Lake Champlain, contrived to help him to escape to France. There the queen herself kissed his mutilated hands, and he was courted and praised, but the order of Jesuits knows how to make full use of such spirits as that of Isaac Jogues, and in a few months' time he was sent back to Canada. It is said that when this decision of his superiors was communicated to him, for a mo- ment bis heart of flesb failed him, and he cried out that this cup might pass from him. One's heart goes out in passionate pity for the man thus sent back to his doom. In 1646 he made three journeys through Lake Cham- plain, and it may be that he stood again on the island which was the scene of his former tortures, but we do not know. The third time that he traversed the lake he returned to the Mohawk, as he well knew, for the last time. On the eighteenth of October, 1646, he was struck down in an Iroquois wigwam, and his blood
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consecrated the soil of the "Mission of the Martyrs" among the Mohawks.
Parkman thus describes the personal appearance of Father Jogues. "His oval face and the delicate mould of his features indicated a modest, thoughtful and re- fined nature. He was constitutionally timid, with a sensitive conscience and great religious susceptibilities. He was a finished scholar, and might have gained a literary reputation ; but he had chosen another career, and one for which he seemed but ill fitted. Physically, however, he was well matched with his work; for, though his frame was slight, he was so active that none of the Indians could surpass him in running."
For a hundred years after the death of Father Jogues we have no record of any event occurring within the limits of our town. Dark forests, rushing streams, steep cliffs or sloping shore, it was traversed by wild beasts and wild men, furnishing shelter and food to both in the same degree. If any human habitation was known here it was that of some Iroquois tribe, but it is not likely that even the family life of a savage went on under any tree of ours. This was the frontier, as the boundary line between the northern Indians and the Iroquois was drawn through Rock Dunder, near Burlington, about thirty miles to the north. This made of Lake Champlain nothing but a war-path, roamed over by painted warriors who had left wives and chil- dren in their villages upon the Mohawk or the St. " Lawrence.
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But had there been eyes to see, many a sight worth seeing, many a sight to stir one's blood, to start a tear or a ery of rage, went past these shores. War-parties of French and Indians swept by, upon the winter ice, with snow shoes and sledges, or in fleets of bark canoes in summer, returning again with trophies of wretched prisoners and bloody scalps. Bands of Dutch or English, always with their horde of Indian allies, were sent out in retaliation for these forays, and but reversed the grim order. Thus, twenty years after the death of Jogues, a nobleman of France, Lord de Cour- celles, sent from the court of the king to govern Canada, with that thirst for wild adventure so universal among the French who came to the new world, made a winter's march of three hundred miles into the country of the Mohawks, with a party of six hundred men. Twice, indeed, he went in the same year, once in January, when our bay was frozen and the ice covered with four feet of snow, and again in the still waters of September. It was he and his men whose lives were saved by that same Corlear who planned and carried out the escape of Father Jogues. In all the bloody story, there is nothing that we might not better spare than the record of the nobility of Arendt van Corlear, a Dutchman of Schenectady. The next summer he too passed by, going to Canada for a friendly visit to De Courcelles, Perhaps he stopped to rest in Baie des Roches Fendu, and drank of the stream which runs into it. But he never saw the place again, nor did he
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reach Canada, but was drowned "while crossing a large bay," which is believed to mean Willsboro bay.
The Schuylers often looked upou our shores. In 1690 John Schuyler, grandfather of that Philip Schuy- ler of the Revolution who looked upon them oftener still, went down the lake to Canada, camping "a mile beyond Cruyn Paint," as he says, sturdily making the name as Dutch as he was able, and then returned from a successful raid against the enemy. The next summer Major Peter Schuyler met his Indian allies at Crown Point, and went and returned likewise. To the stretch of shore which we now call the lake front of Westport, one war party was only like another, and we need not give details of all.
History begins to close in around this bit of earth in which our interest now centers, with the approach of the first home life in the Champlain valley. This was in the French village at Crown Point.
The French took possession of the peninsula of Crown Point and fortified it in 1731. These were the first fortifications ever built upon the lake, and this act first made colonization possible. A fort and a gar- rison of soldiers mean as much security as any place between Albany and Montreal could at that time afford. A good stone fort, called Fort St. Frederic, (named after the French Secretary of War, Frederic Maurepas,) was built close to the water's edge, and thirty men were sent to keep it. Almost at the same time came French colonists from Canada and set- tled on both shores, as near the fort as possible. A
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little village lay south-west of the fort, on the shore of the bay, with comfortable houses and barns. In twenty years' time there were fourteen farms occupied within the protection of Fort St. Frederic. All the records of the time contain frequent reference to this settlement. Here, then, were near neighbors of West- port, even though Westport was not yet, nor would be for the space of another generation. Doubtless the hunters and trappers of the village hunted deer and moose, panther and bear, wolf and lynx, upon our ter- ritory, and trapped the beaver and mink and otter upon the Hammond and the Stacy brooks, and learned every turn of our points and bays by heart.
The same year the French made a rough map of the lake, which was perfected the next year, and is still known as "the Quebec map." This was by no means the first map made of this region, but it was the first which could be called complete.
The Iroquois were the most intellectual of all the In- dians kuown to the white men. Their mental capacity was quite sufficient for the making and understanding of a rude map, if their necessities required it. We can easily imagine some old and infirm chief, too feeble to lead the young men of his tribe to the hunting grounds or the battle fields of Caniadare Guarante, tracing upon the ground, or upon a sheet of birch bark, the outline of these shores. In later days, after the coming of the whites, such maps were sometimes preserved by being woven into the pattern of a belt of wampum. But no doubt we may say that with the coming of Champlain
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in 1609 came the first map-maker. His map of the lake which he sent to France in 1612 is the first one known. After him, the Jesuit missionaries often drew maps of their journeyings to make clear the reports sent home to their superiors. But the first actual sur- vey, with auy claim to exactness, was made at the time of the establishment of the first military post.
The French engineers did their work well, and the Quebec map was a very good one. Upon it were based grants of land from the king, but we do not find record of any portion of our soil being granted to any individ- nal by the French king. They named our bay, and drew its outline with careful exactness, but had no reason to penetrate the interior.
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