USA > New York > Steuben County > History of the settlement of Steuben County, N.Y. including notices of the old pioneer settlers and their adventures, 1853 > Part 4
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fields and potato fields, presented a melancholy scene of devastation. The wild beasts quite lost heart, and began to retire to deeper solitudes, and the hunter de- termined to remove his household elsewhere, into a land as yet unmolested by plowmen and wood-choppers. In the year 1796, he boated his goods up the river to Painted Post, and kept for seven years the old tavern at Knoxville. At the end of that time, he moved up on the farm now occupied by one of his sons, two miles above the village of Painted Post, on the Tioga. It was quite a productive farm, yielding a crop of twenty- two wolves, nine panthers, bears a few, besides deer, shad and salmon uncounted.
He was of medium stature, and squarely built. When in his prime, he possessed great strength and activity, and was famed as "a very smart man." He never encountered a man who got the better of him in a scuffle. His acquaintance with the famous inter- preter, Horatio Jones,* commenced in true frontier chivalry. A party of Indians, with a few white men, had gathered around a camp-fire near the Genesee, when for some reason, the savages began to insult and abuse an individual who was standing by. At length they threw him into the fire. The man scrambled out. The Indians again seized him and threw him into the fire. Patterson, who stood near, a perfect stranger to the company, sprang forward, saying to the tormentors " Don't burn the man alive !" and dragged him off the
* A Pennsylvanian. Taken prisoner by the Indians when eigh- teen years of age ; he became, for his courage, strength and spirit, a favorite with his captors, and gained great influence over them.
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burning logs. Two or three of this genial party, displeased at the interruption of their diversions, im- mediately assaulted the hunter, but relinquished the honor of whipping him to Jones, who stepped forward to settle the affair in person. Jones was also famed as a " smart man," being powerful, well skilled in athletic sports, and able to maintain his authority over the Indians by strength of arm. Before the fight had lasted many minutes, the savages standing around be- gan to whisper in their own language, " He has got his match this time," with perhaps some little satis- faction, for the Interpreter used a rod of iron, and sometimes banged his people about without ceremony. Jones was badly beaten, and kept his wigwam for several days. At the trial of the Indians, Sundown and Curly-eye, at Bath, in 1825, (or about that time,) Jones, who was present as interpreter, laughed heartily over the matter, and sent his compliments to the old hunter.
He was of course a crack shot, and carried a rifle which killed where vulgar guns smoked in vain. In one of his excursions with Capt. Williamson, he found a wild ox roving over the vast Genesee Flats, which, by his sagacity and swiftness, baffled all the efforts of the Indians to destroy him. This beast was the last of several domestic oxen, which at times strayed to these marvellous meadows, and became wild as buffa- loes. They lived like the cattle of Eden in the luxu- rious pasture of the flats during the summer, and in the winter by thrusting their noses through the snow, ate the frozen grass below, and sustained life quite
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comfortably. All had been slain but the one which was now grazing in that great field, and his faculties had been so sharpened by the relapse to barbarism, that it was quite impossible for even the craft of the Indians to circumvent him. His scent was almost as keen as the elk's ; his eyesight was so quick and sus- picious, that before the red men could skulk within gunshot of him, he shook his great white horns and raced off through the high grass like an antelope. Capt. Williamson charged Patterson to lay low the head of this famous beast. The hunter crept along carefully while the ox was grazing, and when it raised its head and stared around the plain to discern an ene- my, lay flat in the grass. Either his patience or his skill was greater than that of the Indians, for he com- pletely out-generalled the wary animal, got within fair shooting range of it, fired and brought it down. The savages set up a great whooping, and crowded around the fallen ox as though it were a horned horse, or a sea-elephant. One of his noble horns, suitably carved and ornamented, afterwards hung at the hunter's side as a powder-horn.
He preserved in his old age all the characteristics of the hunter, and always found his chief pleasures in the vigorous pursuits to which his youth had been de- voted. When attending court at Bath, as a juryman, he was in the habit of going out in the morning, before any body was stirring, to the little lake, east of the village, and shooting a deer before breakfast. It is to be regretted that the reminiscences we have collected of this far-known character, and recorded in this and
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in succeeding chapters of this volume, are so scanty. More of the thousand tales, which he told of the "old times " to boys and neighbors and travellers, might doubtless be gathered even yet; but had they been taken from his own lips in his lifetime, they would have formed a volume of reminiscence and adventure of rare in- terest. There would have been, besides, a gain in ac- curacy ; for what we have collected were told twenty or thirty years ago to youngsters. Whatever was told by the old hunter himself was to be relied upon, for he was carefully and strictly truthful.
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CHAPTER III.
THE SETTLEMENTS MADE UNDER THE PURCHASE BY PHELPS AND GORHAM-PAINTED POST-THE FIRST SETTLER- THE SETTLEMENT OF THE UPPER VALLEY OF THE CANISTEO-THE CANISTEO FLATS-LIFE IN THE VALLEY-A WRESTLING MATCH-CAPTAIN JOHN-OLD ENEMIES-MAJOR VAN CAMPEN AND MOHAWK-A DISCOMFITED SAVAGE-CAPTURE OF A SAW-MILL-THE LOWER CANISTEO VALLEY-COL. LINDLY-A DEER-SLAYER IMMORTALIZED.
THE OLD TOWN OF PAINTED POST.
IN the summer of 1779, a numerous party of Tories and Indians, under the command of a Loyalist named McDonald and Hiakatoo, a renowned Seneca war-chief, returned to the north by way of Pine creek, the Tioga, and the Conhocton, from an incursion among the set- tlements on the west branch of the Susquehanna. They had suffered a severe loss in a conflict with the border- ers, and brought with them many wounded. Their march was also encumbered by many prisoners, men, women and children, taken at Freeling's Fort. A party of rangers followed them a few days, journeying into the wilderness, and found at their abandoned en- campment abundant proof of the manfulness with which
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the knives and rifles of the frontier had been used in repelling its foes, in the heaps of bark and roots which had been pounded or steeped in preparing draughts and dressings for the wounded warriors. Under the elms of the confluence of the Tioga and Conhocton, Captain Montour, a half-breed, a fine young chief, a gallant warrior and a favorite with his tribe, died of his wounds. He was a son of the famous Queen Cath- arine. His comrades buried him by the river side, and planted above his grave a post on which was painted various symbols and rude devices. This monument was known throughout the Genesee Forest as the Paint- ed Post. It was a landmark well known to all the Six Nations, and was often visited by their braves and chieftains .*
* This account of the origin of the Painted Post was given to Ben- jamin Patterson, the Hunter, by a man named Taggart, who was carried to Fort Niagara a prisoner by McDonald's party, and was a witness of the burial of Captain Montour, or at least was in the en- campment at the mouth of the Tioga at the time of his death. Col. Harper, of Harpersfield, the well known officer of the frontier militia of New York in the Revolution, informed Judge Knox, of Knoxville in this county, that the Painted Post was erected over the grave of a chief who was wounded at the battle of the Hog-back, and brought in a canoe to the head of the Chemung, where he died. At all events it was well understood by the early settlers, that this monument was erected in memory of some distinguished warrior who had been wounded in one of the border battles of the Revolution, and after- wards died at this place. The post stood for many years after the settlement of the county, and the story goes that it rotted down at the butt, and was preserved in the bar-room of a tavern till about the year 1810, and then disappeared unaccountably. It is also said to have been swept away in a freshet.
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At the Painted Post, the first habitation of civilized man erected in Steuben county, was built by William Harris, an Indian Trader. Harris was a Pennsylva- nian, and not long after the close of the Revolutionary war pushed up the Chemung with a cargo of Indian goods, to open a traffic with the hunting parties of the Six Nations, which resorted at certain seasons to the northwestern branches of the Susquehanna. A canoe or a pack-horse sufficed at that time to transport the yearly merchandise of the citizens of our county. Sixty- five years afterwards, an armada of canal boats and a caravan of cars hardly performed this labor. The precise date of Harris's arrival is unknown. Judge Baker, late of Pleasant Valley, found the trader estab- lished at his post in the spring of 1787. On Christ- mas night following, he went down to the Painted Post, and finding the cabin burned and the trader missing, he inferred that the latter had perhaps been killed by his customers-a disaster by no means unlikely to be- fall a merchant in a region where the position of debtor was much more pleasant and independent than that of creditor, especially if the creditor had the misfortune to be white and civilized. Harris, however, had met with no calamity. On the contrary, his intercourse with the Indians was of a very friendly and confiden- tial character. They rendered him much valuable assistance in setting up business, not of course by en- dorsing his paper, or advancing funds on personal se- curity; but by helping him to erect his warehouse, and patronising him in the handsomest manner afterwards. They even carried the logs out of which the cabin was
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built, on their shoulders, to the proposed site of the edifice, which was after all, to speak with strict ety- mology, a species of endorsement.
The savages manifested much zeal in promoting the establishment of a trading post at the head of the Che- mung, and indeed it was a matter of as much conse- quence at that time as the building of a Railroad De- pot is in modern days. Before that, the citizens of the county were obliged to go to Tioga Point, nearly fifty miles below, to buy their gunpowder, liquors, knives, bells, brads, and jews-harps ; and the pro- posal of Harris to erect a bazaar at the Painted Post, for the sale of these articles, was as vital concern to · the interests of the county as at the present day an offer of the government to establish a university in Tyrone or an observatory in Troupsburg would be. It was a great day for the county when the trader's cabin was finished, and his wares unpacked. Then the sachem might buy scalping knives and hatchets on the bank of his own river ; the ladies of the wilderness could go shopping without paddling their canoes to the Susquehanna, and the terrible warriors of the Six Nations, as they sat of an evening under their own elm trees, smoking pipes bought at the "People's Store," hard by, forgot their cunning ; when some renowned Captain Shiverscull, a grim and truculent giant, steeped to his elbows in the blood of farmers, and scarred with bullets and tomahawks like a target, sat upon a log, soothing his savage breast with the melodies of a jews- harp, or winding around that bloody finger, which had so often been twisted in the flaxen scalp-locks of Penn-
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sylvanian children, a string of beads, bought for his own ugly little cub, that lay asleep in the wigwam of · Genesee.
At the time of Judge Baker's visit, Harris was only temporarily absent. He afterwards returned to Painted Post with his son, and lived there a few years, when he again removed to Pennsylvania. One or two others are sometimes pointed out as the first settlers of the county ; but evidence, which must be regarded as re- liable and decisive, proves that the first civilized resi- dent was William Harris. It is possible, indeed, that before his advent some straggling adventurer may have wandered hither, built him a lodge, perhaps planted corn on the open flats, and afterwards strayed to parts - unknown, leaving no trace of his existence. There have always been, on the frontiers, eccentric geniuses, to whom such a line of conduct was no strange thing. There have always been, on the frontiers, a few vaga- bonds, who should have been born wolves, who forsake civilized homes and join the Indians, and are only hin- dered from living with the bears in their hollow trees, by the refusal of these sensible monsters to fraternize with such loafers. Hermits, hunters and vagabonds find their way into strange places, and it is by no means impossible that some pleasant island or open flat may have harbored one of these outlaws before any other wanderer, laying claim to civilization, smote our forests with the all-conquering axe. No such Ro- binson Crusoe, however, presents himself as a candi- date for historical honors, and it is, upon the whole, im- probable that any such preceded the trader, or if he
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did, that he enjoyed his solitude a great while unmo- lested. The "Man Friday " he would have been like- ly to catch here would most probably have caught him, and whisked his scalp off without winking.
Harris was a trader, and did not cultivate the soil. Frederick Calkins, a Vermonter, was the first farmer of Steuben. He made his settlement near the head of the Chimney Narrows, in 1788. After living there alone for a time, he returned to the east for his family. During this absence, Phelps and Gorham's surveyors made head-quarters at Painted Post, which accounts for the omission of his name in Judge Porter's narra- tive, quoted in the last chapter. George Goodhue fol- lowed Mr. Calkins in a year or two.
Township number two in the second range, was pur- chased of Phelps and Gorham, in 1790, by six pro- prietors, Frederick Calkins, Justus Wolcott, of East- ern New York, Ephraim Patterson, of Connecticut, Silas Wood, Caleb Gardener and Peleg Gorton. The price paid for the township was eight cents per acre.
The old town of Painted Post comprised the present towns of Hornby, Campbell, Erwin, Painted Post, Ca- ton and Lindley. The earliest settlers along the Che- mung and Conhocton were the six proprietors (except- ing Silas Wood), Eli and Eldad Mead, (1790,). David and Jonathan Cook, of New Jersey, (1790,) Judge Knox, of Eastern New York, (1793,) Benjamin Eaton, Elias Williams, Henry McCormick, Hezekiah Thur- ber, Bradford Eggleston, Samuel Colegrove, John Ber- ry and others. John Winters, a famous hunter, set-
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tled there at an early day, and families named Rowan, Waters, Van Wye, Turner, McCullick, &c.
Mr. Eli Mead was the first Supervisor of the town, and went on foot to Canandaigua, to attend the meet- ing of the Board of Supervisors of Ontario county.
Gen. McClure, speaking of the early settlers of that neighborhood, mentions " a man by the name of Ful- ler, who kept the old Painted Post Hotel. That an- cient house of entertainment, or tavern (as such were then called) was composed of round logs, one story high, and if I mistake not was divided into two apart- ments. This house was well patronized by its neigh- bors as by travellers from afar. All necessarily stop- ped here for refreshment, as well for themselves as for their horses. Fuller, the landlord, was a good natured, slow and easy kind of a man, but his better half, Nel- ly, was a thorough-going, smart, good-looking woman, and was much admired by gentlemen generally. To the wearied traveller, nothing can be more agreeable than a pleasant, obliging landlady. There were other respectable families settled at Painted Post, not many years after, (1794,) Thomas McBurney, Esq., Capt. Samuel Erwin, Frank and Arthur, his brothers, Capt. Howell Bull, John E. Evans, an Englishman, and others."
A mill was built on the Post Creek, near the Nar- rows, by Mr. Payne and Col. Henderson, as early as 1793 or 1794. This mill is described by the few who remember it, as having been mainly built of logs " so that you could drive a pig through it."
The first establishment, for the sale of goods to ci-
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vilized men, was kept by Benjamin Eaton. He went for his first stock to Wattles' Ferry (now Unadilla village) in a canoe, with a man and a boy, (Mr. Samuel Cook, of Campbelltown.) At that place he purchased another canoe, loaded his fleet with goods and returned to Painted Post.
Col. Arthur Erwin, the ancestor of a large family bearing his name, emigrated from Ireland before the Revolution. During the war he served in the Ameri- can army. He resided in Bucks County, Pennsyl- vania, and became the proprietor of a large landed es- tate. He was shot dead through the window of a log house at Tioga Point, in 1792, by an ejected squatter, who escaped.
Hon. William Steele, a well known and highly re- spected citizen of Painted Post, removed from New Jersey in 1819. He served in the war of the Revolu- tion, and was severely wounded and made prisoner at sea in 1780. In 1785 he was appointed clerk in the old Board of Treasury, and in 1794 he commanded a troop of horse and aided in suppressing the insurrection near Pittsburgh. He died in 1851. (Obituary notice in Corning Journal.)
THE SETTLEMENT OF THE UPPER VALLEY OF THE CANISTEO.
A party of boatmen attached to General Sullivan's army in the invasion of the Genesee in 1779, while awaiting in the Chemung River the return of their commander and his column from the north, pushed up
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the river as far as the Painted Post, out of curiosity to know how the land lay on the northwestern branches of the Susquehanna. Among the soldiers of Sullivan was Uriah Stephens, Jr., a Pennsylvanian. He believ- ing, from the report of the boatmen, that some fertile flat might lie among those northern hills where fron- tiersmen, not bountifully provided for in the lower val- leys, might found settlements and thrive for a time on venison and hominy, determined after the war to seek such a place and to emigrate thither.
Mr. Stephens belonged to a numerous family of New England descent, which had settled at an early day in the Wyoming region; and they, with other families which afterwards joined them in the settlement of the Upper Canisteo, suffered in the attack of the Indians and Tories on that ill-fated district in 1778. One of the oldest surviving members of the family was carried in the arms of a neighbor (James Hadley, also a settler of Canisteo,) from the farm to the fort, and though al- most an infant at the time retains distinctly the impres- sion made by the night alarm, the terror, the flight and the confusion. The wife of Col. John Stephens, a late well-known citizen, was once captured by a party of savages, and in the skirmish and rescue which ensued upon the pursuit of her captors by the border-men (one account says at the battle of the Hog-back) was wounded by a rifle ball fired by one of her friends. The Stephens', after several removals from Wysox, Queen Esther's Flats, and other localities, were living, in the fourth or fifth year after the close of the Revo- lutionary War, at Newtown.
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Several families, relatives and acquaintance, were found willing to engage in the enterprise of further emigration. In 1788, Solomon Bennet, Capt. John Jameson, Uriah Stephens, and Richard Crosby, started upon an exploration. Passing up the Chemung to Painted Post, they found there a few cabins, a half a dozen settlers, and Saxton and Porter, the surveyors of Phelps and Gorham. Penetrating further into the north by way of the Conhocton Valley, they found no lands which satisfied their expectations. On their re- turn they struck across the hills from the upper waters of the Conhocton, and after toiling through the dense forests which crowded the shattered region to the west- ward of that river, they came suddenly upon the brink of a deep and fine valley through which the Canisteo rambled, in a crooked channel marked by the elms and willows which overhung it. The prospect was singu- larly beautiful. The huge barriers of the valley laden with that noble timber which raftsmen for half a cen- tury have been floating through the cataracts of the Susquehanna, ran in precipitous parallels at a generous distance for several miles and then closing in, granted the river for its passage but a narrow gorge made dark by hemlocks. A heavy forest covered the floor of the valley. Groves of gigantic pine stood with their deep - green tops in the midst of the maples, the elms, and the white sycamores. So even was the surface of the . vale, so abrupt and darkly-shaded the ranges that en- closed it, that the explorers, looking down upon the tree tops that covered the ground from hill to hill, seemed to be standing above a lake of timber. At the
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lower part of the valley there was an open flat, of seve- ral hundred acres, overgrown with wild grass so high that a horse and rider could pass through the meadow almost unseen. It was like a little prairie, beautiful indeed, but strangely out of place in that rugged re- gion,-as if some great Indian prophet had stolen a choice fragment from the hunting grounds of the Mis- souri and hidden it in the midst of mountains bristling with gloomy hemlocks.
. The explorers decided to purchase the two townships on the river, which included the open flats. Eight other men joined in the purchase : Col. Arthur Urwin, Joel Thomas, Uriah Stephens, (father of Uriah Ste- phens, Jr.,) John Stephens, his son, William Wine- coop, James Hadley, Elisha Brown and Christian Kress.
- In the summer of 1789, a company of men were sent to the flats, who cut and stacked a sufficient quantity of wild grass to winter the cattle that were to be driven on. In the autumn of the same year, Uriah Stephens, the elder, and Richard Crosby, with por- tions of their families, started from Newtown to begin the proposed settlement. The provisions, baggage and families were carried up in seven-ton boats, while four sons of Mr. Stephens, Elias, Elijah, Benjamin and William, drove along the shore the cattle belonging to the two families in the boats, and to four other families which were to join them in the spring. From the mouth of the Canisteo to the upper flats, the movement was tedious and toilsome. Frequent rifts were to be as- cended, and the channel was often to be cleared of ob-
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structions, the trunks of trees and dams of drift-wood. On one day, they made but six miles. However, as the destinies, after forty centuries of hesitation, had decided that Upper Canisteo must be civilized, all obstacles were steadily surmounted. At the rifts, where the nose of the unwieldy boat, plowing under the water, at last wheeled about in spite of setting poles and swearing, and went down again to the foot of the rapids, every human thing that could pull, went on shore, took hold of a long rope, and hauled the barge up by main force. Thus for some three days the pioneers of Canisteo toiled up the hostile current, probably not without some little noise, as the shouting of boatmen, or the bawling of the youths on shore at the straggling cattle, which sometimes got entangled in the willow thickets by the little river, sometimes scrambled up the hill sides, sometimes stopped, shak- ing their horns in affright, when the wolf or fox bounded across the trail, or came racing back in paroxysms of terror, making the gorge to resound with strange bel- lowings, when they suddenly met the ugly and growling bear, sitting like a foot-pad upon his haunches in the middle of the path, and so near to their unsuspecting nostrils, that he might cuff the face of the forward bul- lock with his paw, before the startled cattle became aware that they had ventured into the lurking-place of the shaggy brigand.
At length the persevering voyagers landed on the upper flats. The astonished cattle found themselves almost smothered in the herbage of the meadows. The first thing to be devised was, of course, a habitation.
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The bark hut of the savage was the only structure which the wilderness had yet beheld, and was un- doubtedly a sufficient house for cannibals or philoso- phers ; but the pioneers, who were neither the former nor the latter, went straightway into the woods, cut down certain trees, and built a luxurious castle of logs, 26 feet long by 24 wide. There was but one room be- low. Four fire-places were excavated in the four corners, and they who know what caverns fire-places were in old times, can imagine the brilliant appearance of this Canisteo Castle at night, through the winter, when the blaze of burning logs in all the furnaces filled the cabin with light, and glimmering through the crevices, was seen by the Indian as he walked by on the crackling crust of the snow toward his lodge in the woods. In the following spring a family was en- camped before each of the fire-places, and occupied each its own territory with as much good humour as if divided from the others by stone walls and gates of brass.
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