USA > New York > New York City > In olde New York; sketches of old times and places in both the state and the city > Part 7
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once used by the Indians for corn-lands, but which in their retreat westward had been abandoned.
Early in May, 1713, a large body of the people, some five hundred in number, proceeded by water to Albany, with the purpose of entering the valley from thence. Conrad Weiser, one of the seven captains, was the leader, - Pastor Kockerthal remaining at the Camps. There is no more beautiful drive to-day than the old road from Albany to Scoharie, which follows the line of the Indian trail that led the emigrants to their happy valley. The company journeyed on foot: they had neither vehicle nor draft-animal of any sort. The men carried their arms, seeds, im- plements, and household effects on their backs; each matron had a babe in arms, a group of little toddlers beside her, and perhaps a sack of provisions or bundle of clothing on her back. An Indian, in paint and feathers, led the way. Thus accoutered, they were three days making the journey. At night they camped in the open air, building fires to keep away the wolves. Up the heights of the Helderberg, one of the northern- most spurs of the Catskills, they toiled, and on over ridge and valley, until, on the third day, from the foot-hills of Fox Creek they caught sight of the Scho- harie intervale. It is dotted now with villages and rich with broad, green fields surrounding farmhouses where content and abundance reside, - one of the garden-spots of the Empire State, - a valley so lovely
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that when viewed on a June day from its encircling hills the eye is loath to turn from the entrancing sight. It was beautiful then, though art had done nothing for it; and eagerly the wanderers thronged into it and began the erection of their homes. They established themselves in seven villages, each named after its head man, and to each householder was allotted forty acres of land to clear, fence, and till as his own. The settlement soon grew into a thrifty and prosperous community, and for sixty years nothing occurred to disturb its serenity except the recurrence of one question, that of the title to the lands.
At an early period, Nicholas Bayard, an agent of the Crown, arrived, and sent word to the householders that if they would describe to him the boundaries of their land he would give them a free deed in the name of the queen. But the people had grown suspicious of government officials, and, looking on this as some new device to deprive them of their lands, treated the agent so roughly that he fled to Schenectady. From that place he again offered to give to whoever would appear there with a single ear of corn and describe his boundaries a free deed and title in perpetuity. The people, however, still suspicious, refused this offer; and Bayard then repaired to Albany, where he sold the title to the Scoharie lands to five landholders, - one of them being Robert Livingston, Jr. These gentlemen soon called on the settlers, either to pur-
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chase the lands they had cleared, take out loans, or be evicted, and, no notice being taken of the summons, sent the sheriff of Albany to dispossess them. It was a general notion that the Palatines were a mild, inoffen- sive, pusillanimous people, who would submit to any injustice rather than break the peace: so the sheriff proceeded on his mission unaccompanied by even a deputy, and, putting up at the public house in Weiser's dorf, made known his conditions to the villagers. It is not recorded that the men made any objection to these harsh terms; but the mob of women that soon gathered at the door convinced him that he had made a mistake. They were Amazons, these women, strong daughters of the hoe and plough, bare-armed, scant of skirt, strong-limbed from frequent journeys to Schenectady bearing the bag of grain to be floured; and it was but the work of a moment for two of them to hustle the little sheriff from his retreat into their midst. There he was knocked down, rolled in the mire where the hogs wallowed, and then placed on a rail and ridden "skimmington " through four villages, - Hartman's, Bruna's, Smith's, and Fox's dorfs, - in all, hissed and hooted at and pelted with mud as the rogue who had come to deprive the people of their homes. At length the poor wretch, more dead than alive, was set down on the Mill bridge, seven miles from his starting-point, and bidden to betake himself to his masters, lest worse evils should befall him. Our
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heroines, however, paid dearly for their sport on this occasion. For a long time their liege-lords refused to go to Albany to trade, sending their wives instead, well knowing that they would be held responsible for the sheriff's discomfiture. After a while, however, thinking the storm had blown over, several of them ventured, and were summarily seized by the proprietors and kept in prison until they agreed to pay the price demanded for their lands.
It is time, however, that we should return to glance briefly at the history of their fellow-pioneers whom we left on the Hudson. These as a body remained where Governor Hunter had placed them until after the death of the good pastor Kockerthal in 1719. In 1721 some of the more enterprising began agitating a removal to the rich bottomlands of the Mohawk promised by Queen Anne. Their agents were sent out, and selected a tract of land at the confluence of Canada Creek with the Mohawk, on which the pros- perous towns of Herkimer and German Flats now stand. Governor Burnett confirmed this tract to them by a patent dated January 17, 1722, and a detachment of ninety-two persons made a settlement here, proba- bly in the spring of that year. To each head of a family was allotted forty acres of land, and the indus- try of the owners soon made every acre as productive as a garden.
The long-coveted material for homes was at last
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secured to them, and hope made every muscle active and enduring. For thirty-five years the settlers lived a sort of Acadian life. Their Indian neighbors, the Six Nations, through the influence of Sir William Johnson, continued at peace with the English. Ques- tions of title and boundaries which disturbed their compatriots at Scoharie were never raised here. Their lands were perhaps the richest ever tilled, and, with their simple and economical habits, a generation was sufficient to make them thrifty and comfortable land-holders, with large framed dwellings, capacious barns, schools, churches, and mills. This fair dream of peace was rudely dispelled, however, in the autumn of 1757, when a body of three hundred French and Indians, under M. De Belêtre, suddenly appeared before the settlements on the north side of the Mohawk. Part of the inhabitants fled to rude forts, or, rather, block-houses, which had been constructed for such an emergency, and from this retreat beheld the torch applied to their houses, barns, and ricks, their live- stock herded for driving away, and such of their rela- tives as had not been able to reach the fort captured or inhumanly butchered. Next the enemy appeared before the block-house and summoned the people to surrender, threatening to show no mercy if compelled to take it, and the captains, deeming discretion the better part of valor, opened the gates. The command- ing officer then massed the prisoners, as he had the
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plunder, and the long, weary march to Canada was begun. The settlement was utterly laid waste. Sixty buildings were burned, forty dead were left on the ground unburied, and one hundred and fifty men, women, and children were borne away into the wilder- ness to suffer the horrors of Indian captivity.
The settlements on the south side, directly opposite, were untouched, the ravagers fearing to remain long in the neighborhood, lest news of their exploits should bring Sir Willaim and his Iroquois upon them. With this single exception, however, the three principal Palatine settlements - on the Mohawk, the Sco- harie, and the Hudson - enjoyed, during the colonial era, the blessings of peace. Sir William died early in 1774, some said by his own hand to avoid acting against his friends in the struggle which he saw to be inevitable. The struggle quickly followed his death, and it found the unhappy Palatines on the border between the two contending factions. Fate to this people must have seemed inexorable. Considering the persecutions and miseries they had suffered in the Old World, the oppres- sions and extortions that met them in the New, and the horrors visited upon them in the Revolutionary struggle, we must admit that there never lived a people more hardly used. At the beginning of hostilities, it will be remembered, the Six Nations renewed their allegiance to the British cause, and the Crown at once let them loose on the American settlements, stimulating
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their native ferocity by the offer of a bounty of eight dollars for every scalp brought in.
The Palatine settlements, from their defenseless condition, and the fact that the people were less skilful in the use of arms than their Yankee neighbors, became early a favorite hunting-ground for the red rangers. The murders, burnings, torturings, and other atrocities committed here during the war would be deemed in- credible were they not so well authenticated. Wives saw their husbands murdered, scalped, and impaled on the pickets that fenced their gardens. Wives were brained and scalped before the eyes of their husbands, children in the presence of their parents; babes were torn from their mothers' breasts to be dashed upon the stones; and the hellish carnival generally ended with the burning of all that the settler had gathered by years of toil, and the carrying away into captivity of such as savage fancy had spared.
These outrages were committed, not by large bodies of men whose coming could be discovered and guarded against, but by detached bands, whose approach was as stealthy as the panther's and who sprang upon the settlements in the secure hour when no danger was apprehended. Their effect was to almost depopulate the Mohawk Valley. In 1781 it was estimated that fully one third of the inhabitants had been killed or captured; and most of the remainder had fled within the American lines for safety.
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It is pleasant to know, however, that this was the last severe affliction visited upon this long-suffering people. After the war the survivors returned to their ruined homes; the soil was left them, and returned generous harvests, as if in pity for their misfortunes, and a gen- eration later the visitor to the beautiful valley could discover scarcely a trace of the ruthless hand of war.
CHAPTER XI
A DECAYED STRONGHOLD
L
OITERING at Ticonderoga, through bright autumn days, long after the stream of tourists had run away, we made many voyages of discovery, each so interesting that it might with profit occupy a week of a summer sojourn. One should establish himself at the pretty village of Ticonderoga, up the outlet of Lake George, where one finds good hotels and all the amenities. Lake George is three miles away on the south, and Lake Champlain two miles on the east, while at the door in the falls of the outlet is almost every variety of form that falling water can assume. This outlet, as it leaves Lake George, is a considerable mill stream of clear cold water, sparkling and murmuring among meadows until reaching the village it falls nearly 250 feet in as many yards, cover- ing almost at a leap the difference in level between the two lakes. In its natural state the cataract must have been a romantic picture, but its waters are now 1 so obstructed by dams and vexed by mill-wheels that much of their beauty has vanished. Pulp mills en- 1 This was written in 1886.
RUINS OF FORT TICONDEROGA, LAKE CHAMPLAIN Reproduced from an old print. The ruins are on the lower hill at the right
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gaged in making paper from the poplar which grows along the lake shore, a woolen mill, and long, low workshops, in which the graphite found in the neigh- boring hills is prepared for market, are now clustered beside the cataract, and about them lies the village comprising some 1900 inhabitants. Below, the out- let flows through a woody glen to Lake Champlain, so deep and quiet that it is easily navigable by small steamers; and then comes the lake, - so narrow and shallow here that the Vermont Central has thrown a draw-bridge across it to connect its system with that of the Delaware and Hudson, but lengthening itself out like a ribbon to Whitehall, twenty-two miles south. One might spend days rounding the fir-clad promon- tories or skirting the gently-circling bay shores with- out discovering one half its beauties.
The great feature of interest, however, is old Fort Ticonderoga. As one glides from the outlet into the lake he sees over a marsh on the left a gaunt, craggy promontory rising abruptly out of the water and stretching back into the forest a well-defined wall of trap a hundred feet above the level of the lake. The railway coming up from Whitehall pierces the barrier by a tunnel. On the right, in the curve of the bay formed partly by this promontory, is the dock where the large lake steamers land their passengers for Lake George. This promontory is Ticonderoga, one of the most historic spots in America. Clambering up its
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ledges to the summit, one finds a green, slightly rolling plateau, with black rocks outcropping here and there among the grass, and in its center gaunt and ragged walls of masonry. In some of them embrasures still gape, and beside them moat and sally-port, north and west bastions, parade, and barracks are still traceable. A little further east, where the cliff projects over the water, may be defined the outlines of a redoubt. Sheep are feeding now among the grim ruins, and one may linger all day without being disturbed by any
chance passer. It is a strange, eventful history that of this rock. When the French engineers of Baron Dieskau first selected it, and raised here the walls of their Fort Carillon, they did it to command the great highway between the English colonies on the south and their own Dominion of Canada, a highway which, making use of the Hudson and the two lakes - George and Champlain - gave almost uninterrupted water communication between the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic at New York. And so it came about that all the wars between these French and English colonies resolved themselves into a struggle for the possession of this commanding rock. In like manner it became the first point aimed at and won by the American colonies in their later struggle against England for independence. Strange memories cluster about the gray old ruin, which a dreamy October day is apt to revivify. First a thousand gay Frenchmen in blue
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coats, and half as many Iroquois in war paint and feathers, march away up the outlet toward Lake George, bound on the congenial errand of a midnight assault on some unguarded fortress or sleeping settlement. But in a few days they come streaming back broken, defeated. They have met Johnson and his provin- cials at Fort William Henry, at the head of the lake. Next, Vaudreuil comes on the same errand, wading through the March snows, but is broken on the same sturdy barrier. But the Frenchmen still persist, and five months later Montcalm, with pennons waving over 8000 men in arms, comes up the lake bound to sweep the English from Lake George. He does it, but the year is hardly out ere Abercrombie, with 15,000 Englishmen, sits down before the fort and demands its surrender. There is a heady fight, and the fort holds out, but the English retreat only to reappear the next year under an abler general, and overthrow the French power in America.
Under English rule the old fort saw peaceful days. The quict lakes were no more the field of contending nations. Iroquois and Mohawks went no more on the warpath. A corporal's guard of forty men lounged about the crumbling ramparts, watched the lizard basking in the sally-port, drank King George's health, and shuffled cards on unused drumheads. Then came the morning of the 10th of May, 1775, when in the gray dawn a motley band of frontiersmen in backwoods
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garb, headed by one Ethan Allen, of Bennington, swarmed over the parapets and drew up on the parade. We should like to have seen the expression of the old red-faced martinet who commanded when confronted by this band of farmers and ordered to surrender "in the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.
CHAPTER XII
THE ORISKANY MONUMENT
G T LIDING swiftly eastward on the New York Central Railroad and nearing the little village of Oriskany, in Oneida County, a tall shaft on a neighboring hilltop to the right flashed by. The monument is to General Herkimer and the brave patriots of 1777, and it marks the Oriskany battle-field as well. The whole region is storied ground. We left the train at the little station of Oriskany, and walked back along the tow-path of the canal for the first mile, thence across the latter by a bridge and along a rural lane to the highway which skirts the brow of the hill on which the monument stands. In his cottage overlooking the battle-field, we found Mr. Rolin M. Lewis, the custodian of the grounds, who added much to the interest of our visit by personally guiding us to the scenes of greatest interest, and which, being unmarked, we would have found by our- selves difficult to determine.
The monument stands where the battle was fought, on the edge of a sharp bluff rearing itself above the Mohawk Valley, on a plot of five acres of meadow
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purchased by the Association for the purpose. It is of Maine granite, eighty-five feet high above the base, which is of the valley limestone. On each side of the die of the pedestal is a tablet of bronze six feet wide and four and a half high. Two of the bronzes are pictorial, and represent one, General Herkimer direct- ing the fight after receiving his mortal wound, the other a pioneer and Indian engaged in deadly struggle. On one of the remaining tablets is the dedication, and on the other a roster containing the names of those patriots engaged in the fight, as far as they could be learned - but 250 out of 800. The dedication was written by Professor Edward North, of Hamilton College, and is in excellent taste. It is as fol- lows:
"Here was fought the battle of Oriskany on the 6th day of August, 1777. Here British invasion was checked and thwarted. Here Gen. Nicholas Herkimer, intrepid leader of the American forces, though mor- tally wounded, kept command of the fight, till the enemy had fled. The life blood of more than 200 patriot heroes made this battle-ground sacred for- ever.
"This Monument was built A.D. 1883 in the year of Independence 107, by grateful dwellers in the Mohawk Valley, under the direction of the Oneida Historical Society, aided by the National Government and the State of New York."
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The first mover in the matter of erecting this monu- ment was the Continental Congress of 1777, which passed the following resolution :
"That the Governor and Council of New York be desired to erect a monument at Continental expense of the value of $500 to the memory of the late Briga- dier-General Herkimer, who commanded the militia of Tryon County, in the State of New York, and was killed fighting gallantly in defence of the liberties of these States."
But the people were too poor to give effect to this praiseworthy resolution, and it slumbered until in 1876 the Oneida Historical Society was formed at Utica, when it actively began the work so long delayed. Public meetings were held, the press enlisted, Con- gress was appealed to, and at length induced to vote the original sum of $500, with interest amounting to $4100, to which the Legislature of New York added $3000 conditional to a like sum being raised by private subscription. The monument was erected in 1883, and dedicated with appropriate ceremonies, in the presence of a large audience, on the 6th of August, 1884, the 107th anniversary of the battle.
The visitor can but be charmed with the outlook from the spot. At his feet is the winding, gently un- dulating valley of the Upper Mohawk, covered with tilth and grange, the new-born river sparkling in its midst. The Erie Canal runs at the foot of the bluff, and
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beside it the great national highway, the New York Central, with its four roadways over which ten trains every hour pass. Half-a-dozen boats are in sight on the canal, moving sedately in such striking contrast to the roar and rush of the train. Rome is but six miles away on the west, Utica nine miles on the east. Across the valley the hills rise gently in alternate farm and forest, with the spire of more than one village church pricking above the greenery.
"This battle of Oriskany," said our friend musingly, "would be considered a mere skirmish in our day, but it wrought ulterior results of the greatest importance. Down there in the Mohawk Valley at Herkimer, twenty-four miles distant, in 1725 a colony of German Palatines from the Rhenish Palatinate had been settled. As has been well said, because they were so well used to fire, and sword, battle, siege, and massacre at home, they could better stand the savage incursions to which that frontier fort was then exposed.
"Among these Palatines was a certain John Jost Herkimer, or properly Hercheimer, who had a son Nicholas, who in 1776 had risen to be a leader among his people, and for that reason had been appointed Brigadier-General of the militia of Tryon County. The British plan of battle directed Burgoyne to march down Lake Champlain, and Colonel St. Leger with an auxiliary force to enter the Mohawk Valley at its head and move down it, swelling his column with the
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Tories and Indians who were numerous then, and gathering from its rich fields supplies for the main column, which he was to join at Albany. On the 16th of July Herkimer heard that St. Leger had appeared at Oswego with a large force bent on this expedition, and he at once issued his proclamation calling for volunteers to repel the invader. On the 4th of August he set out with 800 men to meet the foe who had in- vested Fort Stanwix, which stood yonder in the valley near the present site of Rome. St. Leger, apprised of his coming, sent forward his Tories and Indians to form an ambush in yonder ravine, and in the heavy timber which then covered this hill. Herkimer's van guard came marching along the road yonder, little suspecting danger, when suddenly they were saluted with a volley and the deafening yells of the savages. Fortunately the German farmers were untrammeled by discipline. They broke ranks at once, and fought as their enemies fought, from tree to tree and from rock to rock. For five long hours the battle continued. Herkimer's white horse was early killed under him, and he was mortally wounded; he directed his saddle to be placed on a fallen tree and calmly sat on it, smok- ing his pipe and commanding the battle. Two hun- dred of the patriots lay dead, when suddenly the savages lost heart and fled, giving the day to the brave Herkimer and his followers. St. Leger's march was stayed. Burgoyne, deprived of his ally, and of the
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expected provisions, surrendered, and Continental affairs assumed an entirely new phase."
Mr. Lewis took us to a spot on the hillside near the ravine and pointed out the site of the tree on which Herkimer sat to direct the battle, and then into the ravine to see a corduroy road hastily laid by General Herkimer on the day of the battle for his troops to cross. A ditch had recently been dug across it, cutting through some of the logs which were seen to be still in good heart. Several of them since the erection of the monu- ment had been carried to the sawmill and sawn into canes, which had been quickly disposed of as relics of the fight.1
1 This article was written in 1883.
CHAPTER XIII
JOHNSON HALL1
A S I sit at my window in the village hotel of Johns- town, I see across green meadows a fine old country seat set on a little elevation in a pretty park of native trees. The villagers know it as Johnson Hall, the former seat of Sir William Johnson, Baronet. Perhaps no house in the land has seen stranger vicissi- tudes. Council after council of red men has been held within its walls; throngs of painted savages have surrounded it, sometimes bent on merry-making, sometimes on war. Settlers have fled to it for refuge. In its old library for twelve long years centered all the wires that directed the Indian affairs of the northern colonies. Then spies were continually going out from it into all the Indian country, and swift runners bear- ing belts or messages from the Canada tribes, from the Ottawas, Wyandots, Senecas, and Shawnees, and from the outposts of Detroit and along the lakes, were continually arriving. It has been the scene too of a generous hospitality. An Indian princess once pre- sided there as its mistress, and entertained at her
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