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 7
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20
-
* " An old gentleman, who came over the road in an early day, says the trees looked as if they had been gnawed down by beaver."- Turner's Phelps and Gorham's Purchase.
95
to the pleasant plains of Germany. When it was night, and the awful howling of the wolves all around scared the children, or when the crash of great trees, overturned by the high and whirling winds of autumn, woke the wives from dreams of home, or when the alarmed men, aroused in the mid-watches by strange uproars, looked out into the darkness to see enormous black clouds sailing over head, and the obscure cliffs looming around, while goblins squeaked and whistled in the air, and kicked the tents over, then they all gave way to dismal lamentations. The equinoctial storms came on in due time, and it was sufficiently dis- heartening to see the dreary rains pour down hour after hour, while the gorges were filled with fog, and vapours steamed up from the swollen torrents, and the mountains disguised themselves in masks of mist, or seemed, like Laplanders, to muffle themselves in huge hairy clouds, and to pull fur-caps over their faces. No retreat could be hoped for. Behind them were the clamorous creeks which they had forded, and which, like anacondas, would have swallowed the whole colony but for the Guide, who was wiser than ten serpents, and outwitted them : behind them were bears, were owls exceeding cruel, were wild men and giants, which were only held in check by the hunter's rifle. The Guide was merciless. The tall Pennsylvanians hewed the trees, and roared out all manner of boisterous jokes, as if it were as pleasant a thing to flounder through the wilderness as to sit smoking in the quiet orchards of the Rhine.
They arrived at the Laurel Ridge of the Alleganies,
.
96
.
which divided the Lycoming from the head waters of the Tioga. Over this, a distance of fifteen miles, the road was to be opened-no great matter in itself, surely, but it could hardly have been a more serious thing to the emigrants had they been required to make a turnpike over Chimborazo. When, therefore, they toiled over these long hills, sometimes looking off into deep gulfs, sometimes descending into wild hol- lows, sometimes filing along the edges of precipices, their sufferings were indescribable. The Guide was in his element. He scoured the ravines, clambered over the rocks, and ever and anon the Germans, from the tops of the hills, heard the crack of his rifle in groves far below, where the elk was browsing, or where the painted catamount, with her whelps, lurked in the tree tops. Not for wild beasts alone did the hunter's eye search. He could mark with pleasure valleys and mill streams, and ridges of timber : he could watch the labors of those invisible artists of autumn, which came down in the October nights and decorated the forests with their frosty bushes, so that the morning sun found the valleys arrayed in all the glory of Solomon, and the dark robe of laurels that covered the ranges, spotted with many colors, wherever a beech, or a ma- ple, or an oak thrust its solitary head through the crowded evergreens : he could smile to see how the " little people" that came through the air from the North Pole were pinching the butternuts that hung over the creeks, and the walnuts which the squirrels spared, and how the brisk and impertinent agents of that huge monopoly, the Great Northern Ice Associa-
97
tion, came down with their coopers and headed up the pools in the forest, and nailed bright hoops around the rims of the mountain ponds. The Indian Summer, so brief and beautiful, set in-doubly beautiful there in the hills. But the poor emigrants were too disconsolate to observe how the thin haze blurred the rolling ranges, and the quiet mist rested upon the many-colored val- leys, or to listen to the strange silence of mountains and forests, broken only by the splashing of creeks far down on the rocky floors of the ravines. Certain birds of omen became very obstreperous, and the clamors of these were perhaps the only phenomena of the season noticed by the pilgrims. Quails whistled, crows cawed, jays scolded, and those secdy buccaneers, the hawks, sailed over head, screaming in the most piratical man- ner-omens all of starvation and death. Starvation, however, was not to be dreaded immediately ; for the hunter, roving like a hound from hill to hill, supplied the camp abundantly with game.
The men wept, and cursed Captain Williamson bit- terly, saying that he had sent them there to die. They became mutinous. "I could compare my situation," said the Guide, "to nothing but that of Moses with the children of Israel. I would march them along a few miles, and then they would rise up and rebel." Mutiny effected as little with the inflexible commander as grief. He cheered up the downhearted and fright- ened the mutinous. They had fairly to be driven. Once, when some of the men were very clamorous, and even offered violence, Patterson stood with his back to a tree, and brandishing his tomahawk furiously, said 10
98
" If you resist me, I will KILL you -- every one of you." Thereupon discipline was restored.
They worked along slowly enough. At favorable places for encampment they built block-houses, or Plocks, as the Germans called them, and opened the road for some distance in advance before moving the families further. These block-houses stood for many years landmarks in the wilderness. September and October passed, and it was far in November before they completed the passage of the mountains. The frosts were keen; the northwesters whirled around the hills, and blustered through the valleys alarmingly. Then a new disaster befell them. To sit of evenings around the fire smoking, and drinking of coffee, and talking of the Fatherland, had been a great comfort in the midst of their sorrows ; but at length the supply of coffee was exhausted. The distress was wild at this calamity. Even the men went about wailing and ex- claimed, " Ach Kaffee ! Kaffee ! mein lieber Kaffee !" (Oh ! Coffee ! Coffee ! my dear Coffee !) How- ever no loss of life followed the sudden failure of Cof- fee, and the column toiled onwards.
At the place now occupied by the village of Bloss- burgh, they made a camp, which, from their baker who there built an oven, they called "Peter's Camp." Paterson, while hunting in this neighborhood, found a few pieces of coal which he cut from the ground with his tomahawk. The Germans pronounced it to be of good quality. A half century from that day, the hill which the guide smote with his hatchet, was " punched full of holes," miners were tearing out its jewels with
99
pickaxes and gunpowder, and locomotives were carying them northward by tons.
Pushing onward seven miles further they made the " Canoe Camp," a few miles below the present village of Mansfield. When they reached this place, their supply of provisions was exhausted. The West Branch youths cleared two acres of ground ; Patterson killed an abundant supply of game, and went down with some of his young men to Painted Post, thirty miles or more below. He ordered provisions to be boated up to this place from Tioga Point, and returned to the camp with several canoes .* He found his poor peo- ple in utter despair. They lay in their tents bewail- ing their misfortunes, and said that the Englishman had sent them there to die. He had sent a ship to Hamburgh, he had enticed them from their homes, he had brought them over the ocean on purpose that he might send them out into the wilderness to starve. They refused to stir, and begged Patterson to let them die. But he was even yet merciless. He blustered about without ceremony, cut down the tent-pole with his tomahawk, roused the dying to life, and at length drove the whole colony to the river bank.
Worse and worse! When the Germans saw the slender canoes, they screamed with terror, and loudly refused to entrust themselves to such shells. The woodsmen, however, put the women, the children and
* Some of the canoes were made at the camp and some were pushed up from Painted Post. Capt. Charles Wolcott, now resid- ing near Corning, went up with a canoe and brought down twenty- four Germans.
100
the sick, into the canoes almost by main force, and launched forth into the river, while the men followed by land. Patterson told them to keep the Indian trail, but as this sometimes went back into the hills, and out of sight of the river, they dared not follow it for fear of being lost. So they scrambled along the shore as best they could, keeping their eyes fixed on the flotilla as if their lives depended upon it. They tumbled over the banks ; they tripped up over the roots ; where the shores were rocky, they waded in the cold water be- low. But the canoes gliding merrily downward wheel- ed at last into the Chemung, and the men also, accom- plishing their tedious travels along the shore, emerged from the wilderness, and beheld with joy the little cabins clustered around the Painted Post.
Here their troubles ended. Flour and coffee, from Tioga Point, were waiting for them, and when Peter the Baker turned out warm loaves from his oven, and der lieber Kaffee steamed from the kettles with grateful fragrance, men and women crowded around the guide, hailed him as their deliverer from wild beasts and pe- rilous forests, and begged his pardon for their bad behaviour.
It was now December. They had been three months in the wilderness, and were not in a condition to move onward to the Genesee. Patterson, with thirty of the most hardy men, kept on, however, and opened the road up the Conhocton to Danville and the place of destination. The others remained through the winter of 1793 at Painted Post. " They were the simplest creatures I ever saw," said an old lady ; " they had
101
a cow with them, and they loved it as if it was a child. When flour was scarcest, they used to feed her with bread."
The whole colony was conducted to the Genesee in the spring. There was, at this time, a single settler in the valley of the Conhocton, above the settlements near Painted Post. The fate of the first potato crop of the Upper Conhocton is worthy of record. This settler had cultivated a little patch of potatoes in the previous summer, and of the fruits of his labor a few pecks yet remained, buried in a hole. The Germans snuffed the precious vegetables and determined to have them. Finding that they could be no more restrained from the plunder of the potato hole than Indians from massacre, Patterson told them to go on, and if the owner swore at them to say, " thank'ce, thank'ee," as if receiving a present. This they did, and the settler lost his treasures to the last potato. The Guide paid him five times their value, and bade him go to Tioga Point for seed.
Once they came unexpectedly upon a single Indian, in the woods, boiling a mess of succotash in a little kettle ; and so intent was he upon his cookery that he did not observe the approach of the emigrants. "Ist das ein wilder mann ?" (is this a wild man ?) said the Germans, (it was the first savage they had seen,) and crowded around him with eager curiosity. He did not once look up-perhaps for a display of Indian impert- urbability ; but Patterson said that the poor barbarian was so frightened at finding himself suddenly surround-
10 *.
102
ed by- a crowd of strangers, "jabbering Dutch," that he dared not lift his eyes.
After manifold tribulations, the Germans were at last deposited at the Genesee, with the loss of but one man, who was killed in the mountains by a falling tree. The subsequent fortunes of this ill-starred colony can be told in few words .*
At Williamsburgh, they were abundantly provided for. Each family received a house and fifty acres of land, with a stock of provisions for present use, and household and farming utensils. Cattle and sheep were distributed amongst them, and nothing remained for them to do but to fall to work and cultivate their farms. Hardly a settlement in Western New York had such a munificent endowment as the German set- tlement on the Genesee. But it soon became apparent that the leader of the colony had failed to regard the instructions of Mr. Colquhoun. Instead of recruiting his numbers from the sturdy and industrious Saxon population, as directed, he had collected an indiscrim- inate rabble from the streets of Hamburgh, not a few of whom were vagabonds of the first water. They were lazy, shiftless, and of the most appalling stupi- dity. Breeding cattle were barbacued. Seeds, instead of being planted in their fields, vanished in their ket- tles ; and when provisions were exhausted, Captain Williamson was called upon to despatch a file of pack- horses to their relief. The emigrants were greatly disappointed in the land which received them, and com- plained with bitterness of the treachery that enticed
* Turner's Hist. of Phelps & Gorham's Purchase.
103
them from the blessed gutters of Hamburgh, first to starve in frightful mountains, and then to toil in hungry forests.
At length they broke out into open and outrageous rebellion. Captain Williamson, who was on the ground, was assailed by Berezy and the rabble, and as he him- self says, " nothing could equal my situation but some of the Parisian scenes. For an hour and a half I was in this situation, (in a corner of a store, between two writing desks,) every instant expecting to be torn to pieces." However, with the assistance of a few friends he kept the mob at bay, till Berezy at length quelled the tumult. The colonists then drove away or killed all the cattle on the premises, and held a grand ca- rousal. The mutiny lasted several days, till the Sheriff of Ontario mustered a posse of sufficient strength, and descended upon them by forced marches, and made prisoner the ringleader. Berezy, in the meantime, had gone to the East, where he made arrangements for the removal of his colonists to Canada. This transfer was at last effected, greatly to the relief of the London As- sociation and their agent, to whom the colony had been, from the beginning, nothing but a source of expense and vexation.
B
CHAPTER V.
THE SETTLEMENTS OF BATH-GEN. M' CLURE'S NARRATIVE.
HAVING conducted his Germans, at last, through the wilderness, and deposited them in a Canaan where the copper-colored Amalekites, and Jebusites, and Hiv- ites, had consented to an extinguishment of title, and were behaving themselves with marked civility, al- though a few battalions of discomfited Philistians hov- ered sulkily on the Canadian frontiers and glowered from the bastions of Niagara and Oswego .* Captain Williamson prepared to go up to the forest in person and lay the foundation of a new Babylon on the banks of the Conhocton. The enemies of the gallant Cap- tain have intimated that instead of making the illus- trious city of the Euphrates his model, he studied to attain the virtues of Sodom and the graces of Gomor- rah, which will be shown to be a malicious slander.
Sixteen miles above the mouth of the Conhocton, the valley of the Crooked Lake, uniting nearly at right angles with the river valley, opens in the hills a deep and beautiful basin, which presents, when viewed from an elevation, a rim of ten or fifteen miles in cir-
* The British did not evacuate those posts till 1796.
105
cuit. The British officer, standing on the almost per- pendicular, yet densely wooded heights above the river, south of the old church of Bath (handsomely called in an early Gazetteer, " a tremendous and dismal hill,") looked down upon a valley covered with a pine forest, except where the alluvial flats, close at the foot of the dark hemlocks of the southern range, supported their
noble groves of elm and sycamore, and where a little round lake shone in the sunlight below the eastern heights. A ring of abrupt highlands, unbroken as it seemed, except by a blue gorge in the North-the gateway of the gulf of Crooked Lake-imprisoned the valley, and these surrounding hills, to which several hundred additional feet of altitude were given by the view from the southern wall, rose sometimes to the dignity of mountains. The prospect is wonderfully beautiful at the present day, from that place, where to view his valley the Scottish Captain may have (at any rate, ought to have) lain a bed of moss above the rocks, which just at the summit jut over the tops of the huge rough trees that cling to the side of the hill even to the foot of the precipice which surmounts it. But wilder and more beautiful was the picture spread out before the Captain's eye. Description would re- call the scene but feebly. Let each patriotic citizen, however, imagine as he can how all the ranges and ridges, the knobs and promontories, were covered with the richness of the forest, and consider that pleasant little lake just below the rising sun, how it glittered among the deep-green pines, and the little river also ; how it wrangled with the huge sycamores that lay
106
across its channel like drunken giants, and how it was distressed with enormous, frightful roots which clung to its breast with their long claws like nightmares, but came forth, nevertheless, from these tribulations with a bright face, and sparkled delightfully among the elms and willows.
In this valley the gallant city-builder determined to found his metropolis. Here should all the caravans of the West meet ; here should rise mills and stupen- dous granaries ; here should stand the Tyre of the West, sending forth yearly fleets of arks, more in num- ber than the galleys of the ancient city, to make glad the waters of. Chesapeake. Whatever fallacy in his Political Economy may have enticed the Scot hither, there is certainly no place where the Demon of Busi- ness, had he seen fit to build him a den in these re- gions, could have been more pleasantly situated, if such a consideration were worthy of the notice of his dusty and bustling genius. To the propitiation of this Divinity, the wealth of the Pulteneys and the labors of their minister were devoted for the next two years. Every device that ingenuity could suggest, every force that fortune could employ, every experiment that en- ergy dared attempt, were tried by the bold and efficient Cadmus of the Conhocton to divest the commerce of the West from the Mohawk and the Hudson, and to guide it down the Northwestern Branch of the Susque- hanna.
Western commerce has unfortunately leaked through another tunnel. The Demon which we worshipped, seemed, for a time, about to yield
107
to our entreaties, and snuffed the incense that smoked on our altar with every appearance of satisfaction. As a wary bear walks seven times around the trap with suspicious eyes, hesitating to bite the tempting bait, yet is sometimes on the point of thrusting his nose, at a venture, within the dangerous jaws of steel, but finally turns away with a growl, so this wary Caliban, after long debating with himself, at last refused to set foot on the pretty trap of Captain Williamson, and dug himself dens in the north where he might wallow in the mire of canals and marshes, and duck his head in the Genesee cataract. The political economist, looking at this day from the Rollway Hills, beholds a melancholy spectacle. Below him is a valley of farms on which a single column of the primitive pines re- main like that square of the Old Guard which stood for a moment after the route at Waterloo. A dark and almost unbroken forest covers the hill sides, and he looks down upon the streets and steeples of an idle and shady shire town, surrounded by pastures or mea- dows and groves, which has nothing to do but to enter- tain the county's rogues and to supply the citizens with law and merchandise. Neither the whistle of the locomotive nor the horn of the canal pilot is heard there ; the wolf has hardly deserted its environs- hounds yet follow the deer in the woods around it- logs are yet tumbled down the rollways above it. No warehouses line the river banks-no long ranks of grist-mills grumble that deep harmony so charming to our ears. The gallant Captain's city somehow failed to become a city. The wealth that was of right ours
108
took to itself wings and flew to the east. Albany and New York, being stout and remorseless robbers, plun- dered us by force. Syracuse and Utica, being no older than we, stole our riches secretly, thieves that they are-(thieves from infancy and by instinct, for they stole their very names from a couple of decrepit and toothless old cities of the other hemisphere, as some young vagabonds have just conscience enough to pick the pockets of blind beggars in the street)-and to this day those cities stand in the face of all the world bedecked with their ill-got finery. The beauti- ful air-castle which shone before the eyes of the Ba- ronet, after promising a great many times to become marble, at last bade defiance to chemistry, rolled itself up into a shapeless fog, and returned to the oxygen from which it came. This is no secret, and to have reserved the announcement of it till in the regular course of this history it was due would have been un- necessary. No body for whom the story is told would have been in suspense-no body would have been stunned had the fact been reserved as a kind of pero- rating thunder-bolt. It is so well known to our citi- zens generally that their shire town is a very imperfect type of any of those ancient cities heretofore alluded to, and a very modest rival of those overgrown and raw-boned young giants suckled by the Demon, our enemy aforementioned, along the lakes and canals, that one without miraculous ingenuity will despair of work-
ing up its downfall into any kind of historical clap- trap, to astound or terrify. The plot for the subver- sion of the city of New York failed-failed so utterly
109
that but comparatively few living men know that it was ever dreamed of. Sixty years after the Scottish Captain looked down with great hopes upon the valley of his choice, a Senator of the United States, address- ing the Legislature of this State, guests of the city of New York, in one of the great hotels of that metropo- lis, told them of a traveller's prediction at the begin- ning of this century, that the valley of the Conhocton would contain the great commercial city of the west .* The announcement was received with laughter by all, and with astonishment by many. The laughter of the Legislature of 1851 was fortunately a thing which sel- dom occasioned distress to the object of it, and the citizens of Steuben County were not in consequence so benumbed as to make it necessary for them to discon- tinue for a time their ordinary avocations.
Founders of cities should always look out for omens, and of all ominous creatures they should especially keep a sharp look-out for snakes, which are above all things prized by soothsayers. If it be true that there is more in serpents than is " dreamed of in our philo- sophy," Capt. Williamson was favored with omens to a degree unusual even with founders of cities. The Pine Plains, (as the valley of Bath was afterwards known,) were infested with multitudes of rattlesnakes. Probably there was at that time no district in the Western country where these dragons met with greater toleration. But, in truth, toleration had little to do with the matter. They had taken, possession of the
*See Chap. 9, for the Speech of Mr. Senator Seward.
11
110
valley, and held it by tooth and nail. In length, cir- cumference, ugliness and wisdom, it is safe to say that the rattlesnakes of the Pine Plains challenged compe- tition. There was no one to bruise their heads but the occasional Indian, and their hideous tribes increased and multiplied to a degree truly discouraging to mice and moles. From the little fiery serpent with ne'er a rattle in his tail, up to the monstrous black and deadly sluggard, coiled under the bush and ringing alarms with his twenty rattles, the whole plain was given up to them. When Patterson, the hunter, first visited this Paradise, he was startled at their multitude. Gliding from bush to bush, slipping under logs, re- treating with angry colors before his path,-now coiled up under a tree, when hard pressed, and wagging their heads in defiance, now rattling a tail full of warnings beneath the shrubs, this snakish populace inspired the hunter with dread. Fairly afraid to go farther by land, he took the river and waded three or four miles, till he believed himself fully beyond the boundaries of this habitation of dragons. Tradition says, that when the plot of the village of Bath was surveyed, the number of rattlesnakes killed by the surveyors passed account. Tradition, however, has failed to preserve details, and many rare " snake-stories" are probably lost for ever. These rattlesnakes have eluded extermination like the Seminoles. Driven from the plains they betook them- selves to the mountains, like the illustrious persecuted in all ages. The steep, bold and sandy mountain, from the summit of which the rising summer sun first shines, is the last retreat of these once numerous tribes.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.