USA > New York > The old New York frontier : its wars with Indians and Tories, its missionary schools, pioneers, and land titles, 1614-1800 > Part 23
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Indians still dwelt along this stream, and made claims to the judge's land. But a council soon resulted in an agreement by which his title was ac- knowledged after the Indians had received several presents, including a barrel of rum. For six months Mrs. Wattles never saw any white man except her husband and his brother. Wolves were numerous in the forest, and their frequent howling made the nights extremely uncomfortable.
About 1800 Judge Wattles sold his farm, and for twenty-five years afterward lived in East Sidney. He lies buried there in a rural cemetery. As a magistrate he acted for a large territory, and when Delaware County was organized became county judge. Standing at his grave in the autumn of 1891, a thought arose which remains potent still. It was that when Sluman Wattles died, he took a man's life along with him.
Not long after the arrival of Nathaniel Wattles, James Hughston, also of Lebanon, followed in his steps and settled on a farm near the bridge that crosses the Ouleout, just above its mouth. His wife came on horseback, with a bed and other arti- cles strapped to a horse behind her. For her first child she utilized a piece of a hollow tree, or a sap trough, as a cradle. Mr. Hughston served as a magistrate in Sidney for about forty years. He was also supervisor for several terms, and was once elected
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to the Legislature. He was the father of Jonas A. Hughston,* and died in 1846. Later settlements along the Ouleout were made by Stephen Dewey, who came in 1797, Captain Oliver Gager, Nathaniel Wolcott, and Josiah Thatcher.
Timothy Beach before coming to the valley had settled on a farm in Connecticut, after giving up a life at sea, during which he had once been ship- wrecked and had fallen among pirates. He set out for the Susquehanna with a son twelve years of age, leaving the Hudson at Catskill, where a few families were living. He crossed the wilderness to the Sus- quehanna, the distance nearly 100 miles, and had a half-breed Indian for his guide.
From Cairo Mr. Beach followed the Potawa trail on horseback through "a wilderness of the most hideous description," tenanted by deer, panthers, and wolves, with which they had more than one encoun- ter. At last the travellers reached the Susquehanna, where Nathaniel Wattles, says Priest, " kept a skiff for the accommodation of those who wished to cross and recross." They started down the river and on reaching a point near the site of Bainbridge, Mr. Beach had a dream in which his father warned him against going further. His intention had been to settle in Oghwaga, but he concluded now to return to the Ferry.
Mr. Beach had a considerable sum of money on his person, and his son had unguardedly made this fact known to the Indian guide. Other Indians, in consequence, had now appeared on the shore. The guide gave a loud outcry, causing them to rush into the water toward Mr. Beach's boat. Mr. Beach
* Member of Congress in 1855-1856, and afterward United States Marshal at Shanghai, China, where he died in 1862.
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met them in a friendly way and gave them a keg of rum, with which they went ashore, where they were soon reduced to a state of unconsciousness. Under cover of a terrific thunderstorm, Mr. Beach got safely away. By daybreak he and his son had pushed the boat up the stream to the mouth of Carr's Creek. From this point they proceeded on foot through the dripping forest, and secured the aid of Mr. Wattles in bringing the boat over the remaining distance.
At the Ferry Mr. Beach met Richard and Daniel Ogden, who were making a tour of exploration, and decided to settle at that place. Selecting some land he returned to Connecticut, travelling on horseback through the woods with his boy behind him. In November he began his return journey to Wattles's Ferry with his family, choosing the route by the Con- tinental road and Otsego Lake. They camped one night on the site of Cooperstown, and at the mouth of Cherry Valley Creek met a party of Indians on their way to hunting grounds. When they reached their destination, they " discovered the remnants of a few log-houses tumbled to ruins, said to have been the habitations of a few Scotch settlers who had pene- trated the wilderness before the revolution."
The trees were now bare of leaves, late autumn having set in. "Exactly opposite this situation," says Priest, in his narrative, which is given as Beach's own story, "stood a lofty mountain, exceedingly steep and thickly timbered with evergreen pines, the haunt of panthers, bears and wolves, while at its base meandered the Susquehanna." Around the few log - houses were small clearings with sugar- maples plentiful in the adjacent forest. In one of the houses, signs of occupation were seen. A half loaf of bread, baked from pounded corn, was lying on
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a table made from a split log, while near the door stood the stump of a tree that had been hollowed out at the top for use in pounding corn with a pes- tle. Soon the occupants returned. They were white men, hunters, and had a deer, which Mr. Beach and his family were invited to share with them. In one of the other log-huts was found the skeleton of a man named Skillings, who had been killed by the Indians.
The second year after his arrival, Mr. Beach found near the river a large chest filled with various domestic articles, including three linen spinning wheels and two flax hatchels, which had been hidden by former settlers. Priest says that much ironware had been buried "at the upper end of Unadilla Village near the water's edge." Mr. Beach met with an untimely fate. The third year after he arrived he was conveying a man with a blacksmith's kit of tools down the river in a canoe, during high water, and when near the place where his father had ap- peared to him in a dream on his first visit, the canoe was upset and he was drowned. His body was found some twenty miles further down the stream and buried five miles below the site of Binghamton. By this time, a considerable increase had been made in the population of the valley. Mills had been erected, schools started, and doctors and merchants had arrived.
Mr. Beach came during the same year that the Johnstons returned. Of the five families he found none had been on the ground more than a few months. The land he took up was long afterward known as the John M. Betts farm. He had a brother named Ebenezer, who was one of the first settlers in the woods back of Catskill-" a man," says Priest,
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" of great activity and benevolence of nature like his brother." Although Timothy came to the Susque- hanna from Weston, Conn., his family was an an- cient one in Stratford. Descendants still live in Franklin and Walton. A son was William Beach, known familiarly as "Pump" Beach, who led a nomadic sort of life as a pedler, and writer of rude verse.
At Wattles's Ferry stood a hotel and perhaps a store, the usual pioneer promises that a town would grow up. But other men soon arrived, by whom it was determined that the village for this neighbor- hood should lie on the other side of the river. Nat- ure, indeed, aided them, for there was found a stream flowing into the Susquehanna which pro- vided power for mills, the stream called Martin Brook. The men who founded this settlement across the river, that was to take the name of Una- dilla Village, one of the most beautiful of smaller villages in that part of the country, were from Con- necticut. Eminent among them were Daniel Bis- sell, Guido L. Bissell, Solomon Martin, and Gurdon Huntington, some of whom arrived as early as 1790.
Each of these men, in a different way, was a fine example of the New England pioneer who abandoned the comforts of his native locality and went westward to subdue forests and found thriving villages. Here at Unadilla they purchased large tracts of land, built houses, grist and saw mills, opened a hotel, started a store, and erected a school-house. The house which Gurdon Huntington built still stands in the centre of the village in its original condition, and on its original site, the oldest structure in all that neigh- borhood.
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Ten years after these men came, an old primitive road to Catskill was converted into a turnpike. The tide of immigration then set in with new vigor. Two important men who came from Connecticut in 1800 were Isaac Hayes and Curtis Noble. They became frontier merchants, large minded, enterprising, and popular, and in the course of a few years were mas- ters of an extensive trade up and down the valley, and embracing the hill-country to the north and south. A kind of flat-bottom boat called an ark conveyed to the Chesapeake the produce of the country, and from New York, over the turnpike, they brought into the valley such articles in general use as the pioneers could not themselves produce. Four years later came Stephen Benton from Sheffield, Mass. He opened another store and became a large factor in frontier life. Next arrived from Chester, Conn., Sherman Page, a lawyer who rose to local eminence as a judge and twice went to Con- gress.
Once the stream to Wattles's Ferry had set in, it flowed strong and full. Trails and marked trees were at first the only guides across from Catskill, but each pioneer had done something to cut away the brush and mark out the better paths. No wagon, however, penetrated as far as the ferry until 1787. When the pioneer bound for places further west had reached the river, the remaining distance proved less difficult, for here he could secure a " battoe." Colonel William Rose, the pioneer of Binghamton, came by this route. Before him, Joseph Leonard had made the first white settlement in Bingham- ton, coming up from the Wyoming Valley ; but Colonel Rose followed him two weeks later, taking the wilderness route to Wattles's Ferry. Indians
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were often seen by him on his journey down the river.
In the same year, came the family of Mr. Whit- ney, founder of Whitney's Point, who has left a record of the settlements he observed along the way. Thirteen miles out from Catskill were the two fami- lies of Joseph Shaw and Captain Trowbridge, both of whom afterward went on to Binghamton. Ten miles further on they found a single white man. From thence to Windham they passed one or two families. Another thirteen miles brought them to the home of two brothers, and three miles further to the home of Mr. Moore. Harpersfield, in which were dwelling five or six families, lay twenty miles beyond this point. In Franklin they found a small settlement, and between the Ouleout and the mouth of the Unadilla a few families.
Only an Indian trail existed westward from this point. The Whitneys had come into the country with a wagon as far as the ferry, and were the first persons who attempted the use of one in this wilder- ness. It was not until the winter of 1788 that a sleigh could be drawn as far down the river as Bing- hamton. Until 1790, settlers at Binghamton came to Wattles's Ferry to get their corn ground. The mill at East Sidney, built by Abraham Fuller, early in the war, or just before it, owned later in the cen- tury by Silas Bennett, and afterward called Dibble's Mills, long supplied patrons from very distant places.
Early settlers in Tioga County came in 1791 on foot to Wattles's Ferry from Stockbridge, Mass., with packs on their backs. Owego was settled in 1786 by a man who entered from Otsego Lake. Settlers on the Genesee often arrived by Wattles's Ferry. One of the Binghamton pioneers was a man named
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Dickinson, who brought with him a boy destined to distinction as Daniel S. Dickinson. It would be easy to multiply instances of men, the founders of large and flourishing towns in Southern and Western New York, who penetrated the wilderness by the highway that had Wattles's Ferry for the terminus of travel by foot or horse and the beginning of travel by boat.
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IV
William Cooper, of Cooperstown
1785
W ILLIAM COOPER, the father of the novelist, wishing to learn the boundaries of lands in which he had an interest, came to Otsego Lake in 1785, accompanied by a party of surveyors. These lands were those which George Croghan had secured in 1768, as compensation for lands lost elsewhere under the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. Croghan had mortgaged them to William Franklin, son of Benjamin Franklin, and in default of payment judgments of foreclosure had been ob- tained against him. The title by various deeds of assignment afterward passed to Mr. Cooper and Andrew Craig, both of Burlington, N. J.
Mr. Cooper arrived in the autumn by way of Cherry Valley, and obtained his first sight of the lake, which his son was to celebrate as Glimmerglass, from the top of a tree on the hill east of Coopers- town known as Mt. Vision. In the following spring he induced several families to settle on his land. One of these was Israel Guild, and another was John Miller. William Ellison and a widow named John- son were among others who soon came. Mr. Cooper brought his wife into the country for a visit in 1787. He drove in a chaise from the Mohawk
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to the head of the lake, and went down the lake in a canoe. Mrs. Johnson erected a frame house in 1786, which was used as a hotel. In 1786 William Abbott arrived, and then James White.
. By the summer of 1787, the most of the Cooper lands about the lake had been taken up, many of the settlers coming from Connecticut. Mr. Cooper built a house for himself in 1789, and in October, 1790, brought his family into the country, the house- hold, including the servants, numbering fifteen, and the youngest member of it an infant destined to wide literary fame .* The settlement in 1790 is estimated to have embraced thirty-five other inhabitants, and by 1791 to have had twenty houses and stores, with 100 inhabitants. Richard R. Smith, son of Richard Smith, of the Otego patent, in the winter of 1789- 1790, opened the first store. A court-house and jail had been built in 1791. Mr. Smith was the first sheriff of the county. From his father, in 1793, he acquired title to a tract of land on the lake, the same being a part of the Croghan patent. Feni- more Cooper says the settlement in 1795 had fifty buildings-an incongruous group from which "rose the mansion of the judge, towering above all its neighbors." Fruit-trees, which the Indians had cul- tivated, were already " beginning to assume the moss
* No authorized life of James Fenimore Cooper has been written, it having been his wish that none should be. But an excellent substitute, in the form of a biographical essay or study, has been published by Pro- fessor Lounsbury, the note in which it is written being seen in its final passage as follows: "America has had several authors, gifted with higher spiritual insight than he, with broader and juster views of life, with finer ideals of literary art, and, above all, with far greater delicacy of taste. But she counts on the scanty roll of her men of letters, the name of no one who acted from purer patriotism or loftier principles. She finds among them all no manlier nature and no more heroic soul." Cooper died at the age of sixty-two, having spent about thirty-seven years of his life in Cooperstown.
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( From an engraving, by J. B. Forrest, of a miniature by H. Chilton. )
WILLIAM COOPER
and inclination of age." William Cooper's later residence, the Elizabethan mansion called Otsego Hall, was erected in 1797-1799."
An early storekeeper was a Frenchman named F. Z. Le Quoy, or Le Quoy de Mersereau, who had been Governor of the French Island of Martinique in the West Indies. By a curious coincidence M. Renouard, who had settled several miles to the west- ward, one day in 1793 while in Cooperstown, entered M. Le Quoy's store to purchase some tobacco and, astonished to find that he knew the proprietor, walked out in an indignant state of mind. While Governor of Martinique, Le Quoy, it appears, had refused to confirm the appointment of Renouard as port captain of St. Pierre, and an estrangement was the result.+
Very little has been known by the general public, of William Cooper. The cyclopædias have almost entirely neglected him. That he founded the town which bears his name ; that he dealt largely in fron- tier lands ; that he was the first judge of Otsego County-these facts have been familiar, but they
* R. Monroe Smith erroneously says Richard Smith of the Otego pat- ent built this mansion, lived in it for some years, called it Smith Hall, and sold it to Cooper, who "changed the name to Otsego Hall." Smith Hall stood elsewhere. In a deed from Richard Smith to Samuel Albro for land in lot 44 of the Otego patent, dated October 3, 1795, and among Mr. Coad's papers, Smith is described as " of Smith Hall in the township of Unadilla." Cooperstown, then as now, was in the township of Otsego. Smith Hall really stood in what is now the town of Laurens, then a part of the town of Unadilla. The house was still standing a few years ago.
t It is quite possible that Le Quoy had made the acquaintance of a beautiful daughter of Martinique named Josephine de La Pagerie who, after her first husband, the Viscount de Beauharnais, had been guillo- tined in Paris during the Reign of Terror, became the wife of Napoleon Bonaparte. Josephine was born in Martinique in 1763. She remained there until 1778, when she went to France. In 1787 she returned to Martinique, remaining three years, nursing her aged mother. After the French Revolution began, she returned to Paris; and Le Quoy, about the same time, came to New York, whence he went to Cooperstown.
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practically stand alone. William Cooper was more than a capable frontiersman, who reared a son des- tined to become famous. He was himself a man of intelligence, gifted, and cultivated. His mind had breadth, acuteness, and force. He knew how to write, and wrote with grace and power.
Near the close of his life, or about 1800, he wrote a series of letters concerning his work in the settle- ment of the New York frontier and in 1810 they were published in Dublin, where their purpose ap- pears to have been to promote immigration. From these letters many things are apparent, and the most striking is that Judge Cooper was a much larger factor in the settlement, not only of Otsego County, but of several other counties in this State beyond Otsego, than has commonly been supposed. With an honest pride, he recalled that " there are 40,000 souls now holding land, directly or indirectly, under me." He had " already settled more acres than any man in America." Judge Cooper suc- ceeded in this work when others had failed. His mind was practical and far-sighted, his spirit liberal. The man had a genius for bringing men together in the wilderness and making them prosper.
The reader may also learn from these letters that Fenimore Cooper's literary gifts came to him by in- heritance. His father wrote with a command of him- self, a mastery of expression, a clearness and power which, if not at all rare in literature, certainly come to us in these letters as a delightful surprise. Feni- more Cooper's use of English has been admired, with qualifications. It is obvious that he was not a supreme master of style. He was somewhat wanting in literary feeling. The things admired in his books have been admired, in spite of certain
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defects, as pure literature. But the novelist's father had style. There is hardly a line in these letters that one would blot out or change. They fit the purpose and hold the attention. Nothing in them has been carelessly done.
The extracts printed below show something of the work this pioneer did for Otsego and other counties, and something of the life amid which Fenimore Cooper spent his childhood and youth-in that distant wilderness where Leather Stocking fished in the waters of the lake, and hunted in the still forests that covered the Otsego hills.
I began with the disadvantage of a small capital, and the encumbrance of a large family, and yet I have already set- tled more acres than any man in America. I am now de- scending the vale of life, and I must acknowledge that I look back with self-complacency upon what I have done, and am proud of having been an instrument in reclaiming such large and fruitful tracts from the waste of creation. And I ques- tion whether that sensation is not now a recompense more grateful to me than all the other profits I have reaped.
In 1785 I visited the rough and hilly country of Otsego, where there existed not an inhabitant, nor any trace of a road; I was alone, 300 miles from home, without bread, I meat, or food of any kind ; fire and fishing tackle were my only means of subsistence. I caught trout in the brook and roasted them on the ashes. My horse fed on the grass that grew by the edge of the waters. I laid me down to sleep in my watch coat, nothing but the melancholy wilderness around me. In this way I explored the country, formed my plans of future settlement, and meditated upon the spot where a place of trade or a village should afterward be es- tablished.
In May, 1786, I opened the sales of 40,000 acres, which in sixteen days were all taken up by the poorest order of men. I soon after established a store, and went
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to live among them, and continued so to do till 1790, when I brought on my family. For the ensuing four years the scarcity of provisions was a serious calamity ; the country was mountainous, and there were neither roads nor bridges.
But the greatest discouragement was in the extreme poverty of the people, none of whom had the means of clearing more than a small spot in the midst of the thick and lofty woods, so that their grain grew chiefly in the shade ; their maize did not ripen, their wheat was blasted, and the little they did gather they had no mill to grind within twenty miles' distance; not one in twenty had a horse, and the way lay through rapid streams, across swamps, or over bogs. They had neither provisions to take with them nor money to purchase them; nor if they had, were any to be found on their way. If the father of a family went abroad to labor for bread, it cost him three times its value before he could bring it home, and all the business on his farm stood still till his return.
I resided among them, and saw too clearly how bad their condition was. I erected a storehouse, and during each Winter filled it with large quantities of grain, purchased in distant places. I procured from my friend, Henry Drinker, a credit for a large quantity of sugar kettles; he also lent me some potash kettles, which we conveyed as best we could, sometimes by partial roads on sleighs, and sometimes over the ice. By this means I established potash works among the settlers, and made them debtor for their bread and laboring utensils. I also gave them credit for their maple sugar and potash, at a price that would bear trans- portation, and the first year after the adoption of this plan I collected in one mass 43 hogsheads of sugar and 300 barrels of pot and pearl ash, worth about $9,000. This kept the people together and at home, and the country soon assumed a new face.
I had not funds of my own sufficient for the opening of new roads, but I collected the people at convenient seasons, and by joint efforts we were able to throw bridges over
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OTSEGO HALL, COOPERSTOWN ( The home of J. Fenimore Cooper. ) (Built by Cooper's father in 1797-99: improved by Cooper in 1834: destroyed by fire in 1853; the grounds now a village park. )
WILLIAM COOPER
the deep streams, and to make, in the cheapest manner, such roads as suited our then humble purposes.
Of the famine which arose in 1789, and which Judge Cooper relieved, the following account is given :
In the Winter preceding the Summer of 1789, grain rose in Albany to a price before unknown. The demand swept all the granaries of the Mohawk country. The number of beginners who depended upon it for their bread greatly aggravated the evil, and a famine ensued which will never be forgotten by those who, though now in the enjoy- ment of ease and comfort, were then afflicted with the cruelest of wants.
In the month of April, I arrived among them with several loads of provisions, destined for my own use and that of the laborers I had brought with me for certain necessary opera- tions; but in a few days all was gone, and there remained not one pound of salt meat, nor a single biscuit. Many were reduced to such distress as to live upon the root of wild leeks; some more fortunate lived upon milk, whilst others supported nature by drinking a syrup made of maple sugar and water. The quantity of leeks they eat had such an effect upon their breath that they could be smelled at many paces distant, and when they came together it was like cattle that had been pastured in a garlic field. A man of the name of Beets mistaking some poisonous herb for a leek, eat it, and died in consequence. Judge of my feelings at this epoch, with 200 families about me and not a morsel of bread.
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