History of Bradford County, Pennsylvania, with biographical selections, Part 4

Author: Bradsby, H. C. (Henry C.)
Publication date: 1891
Publisher: Chicago, S. B. Nelson
Number of Pages: 1340

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Thus passed the golden summer with its ripened fruits and brown nuts-nature's bounty to all animal life. And then the sere and yellow leaf of autumn, the first frost, and lo, what an entrancing vision of beauty spreads out over the great old hills and the sweeping valleys. The season of the festival of the foliage is here in its annual visit. In banks and billows rolling up the mountain side, soft and rich in all the tintings of the rainbow blending away in the distance with the clouds beyond and spreading down to the silvery mountain stream far below.

And the four seasons have come and gone, and thus the centuries and ages were reeled off with nothing here in beautiful Bradford to appreciate all this natural wealth and beauty more than the fish, the bird and the wild beasts and the wilder and fiercer savages.

In the fulness of time to this new and beautiful region came the ever wandering white man-the "pale face" as he was described by the natives; the wandering home-seeker abroad upon the face of the earth; the fugitive from the Old World persecution, the bloodiest and

HISTORY OF BRADFORD COUNTY.

most pitiless that has ever struck poor suffering men, women and even little children. Stripped of his goods, and striped with the lash, broken on wheels and nailed up in barrels filled with spikes, blown up with hand-bellows to the most intolerable torture; thrown in dungeons, and damp prison walls, tortured for confessions to madness, their tongues cut out, their ears cut off, and branded with hot irons and burned over slow fires of a few green fagots, so slow and so infernal that the poor creatures would struggle and bury their chains deep in the flesh to get their faces down close to the smoke that they might hurry the prolonged death agony to an end. These horrible sufferings came to these poor fugitives in the name of the Heavenly Father and His meek and Lowly Son, who suffered and died that all men might be saved. Whole communities and large classes of people were driven from country to country in the East, because they were heretics; one country would drive out the Moors from Spain; the Jews from France, and thus from every district in the Old World communities were exterminated by persecution or became flying fugitives before the inappeasible wrath of their fellow-men. As the last hope the poor unfortunates turned their faces toward America, and in the frail barks steered into the deep waters, and the calms and storms of the elements were welcomed with prayers and hymns to the Almighty for their escape from their pursuers-the victims of the cruelest fanaticism that has ever darkened the face of the earth. The escape from the Old to the New -- from the lands of churches and civilization to that of the wilderness and savagery. They came with their immigrant chests and the old black family clasp-bibles, in the heart of home and religious freedom. Poor in this world's goods, rich only in their deep and abiding religious faith. Landing upon these shores, these deep religious men erected their altars, and commenced the supreme work of founding the new empire. They made immigration a science ; founded a new civilization and builded the State whose foundation rested upon the Bible. Their surroundings at their old home, the circumstances enfolding them in the wilderness, in the end distinguished them as the most remarkable people in all the annals of history. They became savagely religious, unconquerably brave, and fiercely dog- matic, as they daily read their family Bible and spelled out the syl- lables, and with horrid pronunciation accepted even detached sen- tences in the most literal sense, and then girded about their loins with the flaming sword of Gideon, ready to inflict upon heretics the same pitiless persecutions that had driven them in their poverty and ntter wretchedness from their homes and their native lands. They were as brave and hardy as they were cruel and inconsistent against what they esteemed an error of faith. The North American pioneer is the une- qualed character in all time and all ages. A crude bundle of incon- sistencies, a power, nevertheless, something like the volcanic forces beneath the earth's surface. Hardly pausing where he first struck the sea coast, he planted the outpost, dressed himself in the skins of the wild animals he had slaughtered, shouldered his long flint-lock rifle, and pushed his way into the deepest forests, and westward the star of empire forged its way. A terrible bundle of incongruities and incon-

HISTORY OF BRADFORD COUNTY.

sistencies-too intense in his faith even to be merciful, so overflowing with doctrinal religion, his visions fixed on heaven, fearing nothing mortal, and hating everyone who crossed in the least any of his dog- mas, he forgot all gratitude, and with studied guile and craft he would circumvent and strike to the heart his only benefactor. The pioneers, the silent men, the avant-coureurs of the most remarkable movement of mankind in all history-the miracle of miracles. What secret force was it that ever pushed this wandering nomad on and o'er, across the seas, the rivers and the mountains, across the continent ?

So far as we can now find the record evidence, the first man who was ever in what is now Bradford county was Conrad Weiser, an Indian interpreter. He was on his way to attend a council of the Iroquois, or the Five Nations, at Onondaga, and passed up the Susque- hanna river, its entire length from the bay, and reached Tioga, the Indian town at the junction of the Chemung and Susquehanna rivers, March 29, 1737. This place was the " door" to the Indian tribes to the north in New York, and here the traveler stopped several days and noted many of the peculiarities of the Indians. His journal of his trip was the first known to the world of the north branch of the wind- ing river that passes through the entire State of Pennsylvania. He was received with marked kindness, and partook of the food prepared by the great chief's bride, even eating it with the relish of a keen appetite after witnessing the mode of its preparation. He sums up his description of the settlement as consisting "of a few people, and all hungry," their chief food being the juice of the sugar tree. For a healthy person, who has camped out all his life, that was rather a deli- cate diet.

This is the oldest record of the coming here of a white man, yet it assuredly is not the fact that there were none of the "pale faces" who preceded Weiser. The lower portion or mouth of the Susque- hanna river had beeen known to the whites more than one hundred years before Weiser came on his trip. The explorers, trappers and hunters, those restless busy, men who were spying out every nook and corner of the new continent, must have followed up so important a stream as the Susquehanna years and years before this man passed through here on his mission to the Onondaga council. It was fifteen years after the interpreter came, 1755, that Lewis Evans published the first crude map of the " Middle British Colonies;" in this was the out- lines of what is now Bradford county, as well as this portion of north- ern Pennsylvania and southern New York. The Indians had seen the "pale faces" before Weiser brought his here. His appearance was not regarded by them as either supernatural or even remarkable. They could converse with him as he understood their jargon, and could use signs, grunts and gestures that were much of the common language among the various tribes.

In 1743, John Bartram, a noted English botanist, in company with Conrad Weiser, and Indians as guides, and Lewis Evans traveled from Philadelphia to Onondaga-leaving the former place July 3d-and they describe the "terrible Lycoming wilderness" through which they passed with much weary labor and suffering, as they slowly ascended

HISTORY OF BRADFORD COUNTY.

the river over the same route the guide Weiser had learned well in his previous trip. These parties passed on beyond Onondaga to the lakes. These men traveled on horseback, and so far as is now known were the first who had come with horse transportation.

In 1745, Spangenburg and Zeisberger, missionaries of the Moravian Church, made a visit to the Indians along the Susquehanna river. They reached the Wyalusing village, June 11th. They, like the other visi- tors, were simply travelers on their way to the New York Indian Confederacy, whose headquarters were at Onondaga.

Three years after this, in August, 1748, the Nanticoke Indians came up the river from the eastern shore of Maryland. A portion of this tribe stopped at the month of Towanda creek. They cleared small patches of ground, and the squaws planted and raised corn in the Indian fashion-planting year after year in the same hills, the only part of the soil they disturbed in their primitive agriculture.

Zeisberger returned to Philadelphia, and two years later induced Bishop Cammerhoff to accompany him on an expedition to Onondaga. He had deeply interested his superior in the church work along the beautiful Susquehanna. Like the other expeditions, they traveled all the way to Onondaga, making only brief stops at the many small villages along the banks of the stream. All this time these travelers bivouacked under the twinkling stars, or sought cover in the rude wig- wams of the natives, subsisting upon the game that fell in their way, or partaking of the not very delicate viands of the savage repasts. They had become innred to the hard life of travelers in the "terrible wilderness."

William Penn, the great and pure man, had made his treaty in 1682 with the Indians, at Shackamaxon, and then for more than sixty years the province was at peace with the savages, and the friendliest inter- course existed between these two peoples. When this good man had long passed away, his Christian teaching had been forgotten, and the year that Weiser appeared as a traveler along the Susquehanna, 1737, the arts of deception and diplomacy were introduced in the trades for the Indian lands. Grasping at the possession of the lands and reck- lessness of honesty or integrity of their agents became a flagrant part of the intercourse with these simple children of the woods. The " walking purchases," in which lands were measured by walks, began to be used to cheat outrageously. The Delawares refused to recognize a treaty for their possessions of this kind, and would not remove from their lands. These were some of the first symptoms of what followed soon after, and is known in our history as the French war, in which the Indians sided with the French and were the tools of some of the bloodiest massacres in colonial times. After the defeat of Braddock in July, 1755, the whole frontier blazed out in war. In terrible fury the savages poured down upon the scattered defenseless settlers of the frontier. Some of the noted Indians who had been baptized into the church by the Moravian missionaries, apostatized and turned upon the people in implacable hatred. The Bradford county Indians, although some of them, it was supposed, had now become exemplary Christians, especially those at Wyalusing, joined in the war upon the whites and

HISTORY OF BRADFORD COUNTY.

forgot all Christian precepts as well as their friendship for the pale faces.

The Pontiac war, the most noted in the annals of troubles with Indians, broke upon the country in 1763. Northern Pennsylvania was then the border settlement, the most exposed always to the fierce marauds of the savages.

In May, 1760, Christian Fredrick Post, a Polish Prussian, and missionary of the Moravian Church, arrived at Papunhauk's village (Wyalusing), and preached the next day. This was the first sermon, so far as we can know, ever preached in the county. This place had rival chief inen, Papunhauk and Job Chillaway-the latter speaking English fluently. They were Christians, and the Moravian Church sent to that place a missionary, Zeisberger, accompanied by a man named Anthony. Zeisberger was recalled to Bethlehem in 1763. The Moravian converts at Wyalusing were taken to Bethlehem for protec- tion from the raiders who were devastating the country. After the Pontiac war these good Indians returned, and the intrepid missionary, Zeisberger, accompanied by a man named Smick and his wife, returned to Wyalusing, where they were permanently stationed in charge of the Indian Church. The place was now re-named-Friedenhütten-" huts of peace."

Another Moravian mission was at Sheshequin, at the mouth of Cash creek, where were a few families of the Monsey Indians. This place was reckoned a day's journey from Wyalusing. Rev. Roth was the stationed missionary at this place. On August 4, 1771, his wife gave birth to a child. This is said to be the first white child born in Brad- ford county.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PIONEERS.

A COMPARATIVE STUDY-" THE SIMPLE ANNALS " OF THE WORLD'S REMARKABLE MEN-THE HARD SCHOOLS OF FATE THAT PRODUCED THEM-THE SILENT MEN OF THE WILDERNESS-THEIR WORK- THE SPLENDID RESULTS AND THE PAUCITY OF RESOURCES AT THEIR COMMAND-THE MEN WHO MADE EMIGRATION A SCIENCE AND BUILT AN EMPIRE FOUNDED ON THE BIBLE-THE SAXON AND THE GAUL-THE FUR TRADE-THE COUREURS DES BOIS-ETC.

HE ripest scholars are realizing that the "simple annals of the C poor" is the interesting and most important branch of history; and it will come to pass that the history of nations will no longer be considered written and completed when there is the long and dreary recital of the kings' and princesses' lives and the doings of the royal nur- sery and bedchamber, where a great era is marked by a princely birth, baptism or death; or a long account is given of wars and battles in

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HISTORY OF BRADFORD COUNTY.

which the life and habits of the commander and his doings are the chief objects to be related in the minds of the historian. Once the history of a nation or people was but little more than a rescript of the morning court bulletins ; his supreme, august majesty's menu, and the commotion among the courtiers and vast army of retainers, when he opened for the day his blood-shot eyes; who had the honor of handing his supreme highness the towels; how he swore and kicked his grand master of the hounds ; and then how the little ones were up betimes, taking their royal porridge from gold spoons, and such other misérable nonsense through volume after volume, to be read with consuming delight by all the living, and passed on to posterity as "history." Kings and their households, wars and the commanders, and the bloody battles they fought, were for centuries all that was supposed to be worth any attention from the historian. Royalty was everything, the common people nothing. The people believed implicity, because so all were taught, that this was the order of heaven ; that fate had so ordained that one man and his household were to have and enjoy the earth, and that all else was made to slave for and give up their lives at the whim or pleasure of this divinely-born ruler. The people were born to these monstrous beliefs, and the king, gen- erally the most ignorant and superstitious of all, believed that he was sent of God to do with the lives of the people what he listed. To be looked upon by the king was a supreme honor, to be touched by his hand was to be cured of even incurable diseases. When he rode abroad, couriers with loud bugle hlasts preceded and warned the peo- ple to clear the highway, to hide themselves, and to prostrate their bodies in the dirt. The king, though often the lowest and meanest man in the realm, was immaculate, possessing all wisdom, could not sin and could do no wrong. The average king and queen of history, if stripped of the miserable fictions and superstitions concerning their lives, will be found to be a shabby lot, with hardly a redeeming quality or a gleam of superior intelligence in the whole gang. In the nature of things, in the whole of their education, it was not possible for them to be either wise or good men and women. The beliefs drilled ' into them, commencing even before they could lisp, were inconsistent with good sense, and, therefore, in violation of all good morals. These wicked superstitions about royalty grew with the ages, like the boys rolling a snowball, until the long sufferings of mankind became so frightful, and then the miseducated turned upon themselves, destroy. ing and rending one another, in the belief that it was all the results of their own wickedness and lack of faith and fealty to their "divine ruler." If here and there a genius was born, who dared to think the least bit aloud in behalf of suffering mankind, they would rush upon him like wild beasts and tear him limb from limb.

It is but a brief century or two ago when this was the belief of the generality of mankind. It was an awful sentiment to prevail throughout the half-civilized world, and the marvel will forever remain, how it was possible in such conditions that civilization could advance at all. Yet it has advanced regularly. It is still advancing, notwithstanding that there is yet a very large contingent of men

HISTORY OF BRADFORD COUNTY.

making the same obstruction in its way that was so marked two cen- turies ago. The world slowly emerged from the dark ages-how it did so is one of the mysteries. Certainly man, like other things in creation, possesses inherent forces, that, in the long centuries, can not be resisted to evolve from the lower plane and spirally ascend into the purer air and the warm and better sunshine.

The story of the American immigrants -- the pioneers of this conti- nent-is by far the most important and really the most interesting of any of the great movements of the human race since the earliest dawn of history. It has remapped the entire world. Their first com- ing to America, so bravely leading the way for the innumerable throng to follow, was the incomparable era in history, the turning point in the long struggle between ignorance and brutal life and that blessed civilization that is now running so brightly round the world. These early pioneers were the little persecuted bands of the Old World, flee- ing from inflictions far worse than death, and in their rude ships brav- ing the dangers of the unknown seas on their way to the New World ; fugitives from the inappeasable wrath of their fellow-man, and espec- ially of their divinely appointed king, they braved the treacherous ele- ments of the waters, to land upon the shores of the cannibal savages, and the dark old forests that were alive with both wild beasts and wilder men, to beat them back or destroy them. Often there were colonies of them that had been fugitives all over Europe, and, when stripped of all earthly possessions, with nothing more than stout hearts and resolute hopes, they came across the ocean ; forgetting home and the bones of their dead, and their native land and its childhood memories, they came to create a new civilization. They made emigration a sci- ence, and founded the earth's greatest empire upon the old family Bible that they had so carefully kept and guarded in their long wanderings. These little bands, from Florida to Massachusetts, made their landings at points along the shore. Their first concern was a church service, to thank God for the free air they at last were permitted to breathe. These little colonies sometimes utterly perished from the earth, but there were others to take their places and carry on the battle against savagery. What odds, apparently, were against them in this contest, and yet how these feeble beginnings have so quickly conquered and overrun the continent ! The savage man and beast, sickness in its multiple form of new and strange diseases, the absence of all resources to help the grim and hardy old pioneers, were some of the obstacles that they set about overcoming.

The circumstances required religious, earnest, brave and hardy men, and such they were supremely. They were made to want freedom because of their cruel persecutions at the hands of their fellow-man. Such an age would naturally create a new and distinct race of men, because man adjusts himself to his environments, and herein in this victory over the vast wilderness was the victory of all mankind, and it has given us the historical era in the movements, the advances and recoils of the human mind.

These people had their strong prejudices and mastering super- stitions, and perhaps, in their times and circumstances, it were best it

HISTORY OF BRADFORD COUNTY.

should be so. They came from the Old World where these things were intrenched in the deep and hopeless ignorance of the masses. They were the first people in the world who in moral affairs looked to God, and in all else looked to themselves. Self-reliance and those nobler qualities of a nobler manhood could only come of such a school. With energies ever alert, and senses whetted to the keenest edge, they slept upon their arms, and from the cradle to the venerable grandsire everyone learned to do picket duty over his own life. Their lives are the evidence that the highest possible acquirement of a people is that self-reliance and robust manhood that quails before nothing that is mortal.

This was the first loosening movement of men of those bonds that bound our remotest ancestors to the blind faith and adoration of their kings or rulers-that species of national fetich for the stupid or brutal- born king-which grew up in all men's hearts, and that seemed to mul- tiply as the royal master descended in the scale of life. Whether it were the new-born babe-a little, animated bundle of scrofula or inher- ited blood disease-or whether it were some coarse monster, a moral leper, idiot or madman, it was all the same; he was their national fetich, and the meaner he was, it seems, the more sacred he became.

The first arrivals on American soil that came here for homes and havens from the cruelties they had left behind, no doubt, were but little aware, either of the permanent effects to come of their move- ment, or of the deep causes that impelled them. Indeed, they felt that their loyalty to the king was unabated. Thank God, in this one thing they builded better than they knew ; otherwise we would have had no Revolution, no Washington or Patrick Henry, no liberating of men's minds and bodies from the cruel thrall of the dreary past.

The results that come as the effects of men's lives are the only tests by which we can measure the great and small. When we add to this test a consideration of the resources each one had at command then in the history of the race, where is there a people to compare with the American pioneer? This silent man of the unbroken soli- tude, this man of great action and of little speech, this unwritten hero, came and went with no trumpet's blast and blare, no note of fame, no shouting rabble nor train of flatterers-indeed with no other thought but that he was of no more consequence to the great world at large than the wild game he pursued and killed; yet in his greatest obscur- ity and humility he stood side by side with many of the world's celeb- rities, how incomparably would he rise above them.

Our young school children learn to look with interest at the rather cheap wood-cut in the old school books, representing Napoleon on his white horse, his martial cloak fluttering in the breeze, as at the head of his army he is seen crossing the Alps. He is the "Young Corsican," the "Little Corporal," the "Great Emperor," at the head of his invincible army and its fluttering eagles, on his mission of death and ' woe, conquering and subjugating the world by sword and fire. Kings were his playthings, and empire was his booty. It was new and ple- bian blood among the effete and nerveless royal breeding nests of the Old World. In his earlier and the better part of this wanderer's career

HISTORY OF BRADFORD COUNTY.

the bluest blood from the longest line of royal ancestors was no more to him than that of the humblest soldier of the line. We can not know the bounds of this man's original ambition. Whatever it was, there is but little doubt that in time it changed, and instead of being the world's liberator he would be its conqueror and oppressor. No man has ever yet met and missed so great an opportunity as did Napoleon. Had he devoted his genius to the true welfare of mankind-liberated them, and then by his military power forced them to accept the libera- tion and to recast their thoughts on the subject of every man's right to absolute liberty, instead of driving to the one mean and low thing of becoming the great emperor, of simply destroying existing dynas- ties to supplant them with yet more cruel ones, how different might the story of Europe have been to what it is now. How radically dif- ferent might have been the memory of himself left as the world's legacy. If this man ever were great, he fell from that high estate, perished ignobly, and is now literally nothing to the world. Had Napoleon been smothered in his cradle, it would have been no loss to mankind. His life was not great, because it was not good. He cared only for his own aggrandizement, and was indifferent as to the cost to mankind. It was a feverish, turbulent life, ending, as it deserved, in wreck and ruin, and the drunken Parisian mob, when it toppled over the great mausoleum that held his remains, were nearer in accord with the eternal fitness of things than were the mistaken authorities who taxed the poor unpaid laborers of France to build the glittering obe- lisk. There is many a costly marble or granite pile standing guard over the moldering remains of some of the world's most conspicuous shams and frauds. To the clear-eyed man they are mere sores and blotches on the fair face of the earth, the ugly evidences of so much unpaid or slave labor, and are so many wretched object lessons to teach the young minds to meanly admire a mean thing.

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History of Bradford County, Pennsylvania, with biographical selections, Part 4

Author: Bradsby, H. C. (Henry C.) Publication date: 1891 Publisher: Chicago, S. B. Nelson Number of Pages: 1340

Author: Bradsby, H. C. (Henry C.)
Publication date: 1891
Publisher: Chicago, S. B. Nelson
Number of Pages: 1340