SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON

AND

The Six Nations

“MAKERS OF AMERICA”

SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON

AND

The Six Nations

BY

WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFIS

AUTHOR OF “THE MIKADO'S EMPIRE,” “COREA THE HERMIT

NATION,” “MATTHEW CALBRAITH PERRY,” ETC.

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD, AND COMPANY

Publishers

Copyright, 1891

By Dodd, Mead, and Co.

All rights reserved.

University Press:

John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.

Dedication.

Like my friend, the late Judge John Sanders, of Scotia,

Schenectady County, N. Y., who took off his hat when meeting

descendants of the heroes of Oriskany, the bloodiest, the most

stubbornly contested, and perhaps the decisive battle in the War

of the American Revolution, the writer makes his bow to the

people of the Mohawk Valley, and to them, and to the memory

of their brave ancestors, dedicates this sketch of one of the Makers

of America.

PREFACE.

The Mohawk Valley in which Sir William Johnson spent his adult life (1738–1774) was the fairest portion of the domain of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. In this valley I lived nine years, seeing on every side traces or monuments of the industry, humanity, and powerful personality of its most famous resident in colonial days. From the quaint stone church in Schenectady which he built, and in whose canopied pews he sat, daily before my eyes, to the autograph papers in possession of my neighbours; from sites close at hand and traditionally associated with the lord of Johnson Hall, to the historical relics which multiply at Johnstown, Canajoharie, and westward,—mementos of the baronet were never lacking. His two baronial halls still stand near the Mohawk. I found that local tradition, while in the main generous to his memory, was sometimes unfair and even cruel. The hatreds engendered by the partisan features of the Revolution, and the just detestation of the savage atrocities of Tories and red allies led by Johnson’s son and son-in-law, had done injustice to the great man himself. Yet base and baseless tradition was in no whit more unjust than the sectional opinions and hostile gossip of the New England militia which historians have so freely transferred to their pages.

In the following pages no attempt at either laudation or depreciation has been made. My purpose has been simply to set forth the actions, influence, and personality of Sir William Johnson, to show the character of the people by whom he was surrounded, and to describe and analyze the political movements of his time. I confess I have not depicted New York people in the sectional spirit and subjective manner in which they are so often treated by New England writers. The narrow and purely local view of some of these who have written what is called the history of the United States, greatly vitiates their work in the eyes of those who do not inherit their prejudices. Having no royal charter, the composite people of New York, gathered from many nations, but instinct with the principles of the free republic of Holland, were obliged to study carefully the foundations of government and jurisprudence. It is true that in the evolution of this Commonwealth the people were led by the lawyers rather than by the clergy. Constantly resisting the invasions of royal prerogative, they formed on an immutable basis of law and right that Empire State which in its construction and general features is, of all those in the Union, the most typically American. Its historical precedents are not found in a monarchy, but in a republic. It is less the fruit of English than of Teutonic civilization.

Living also but a few yards away from the home of Arendt Van Curler, the “Brother Corlaer” of Indian tradition, and immediately alongside the site of the old gate opening from the palisades into the Mohawk country, I could from my study windows look daily upon the domain of the Mohawks,—the places of treaties, ceremonies, and battles, of the torture and burning of captives, and upon the old maize-lands, even yet rich after the husbandry of centuries. Besides visiting many of the sites of the Iroquois castles, I have again and again traversed the scenes of Johnson’s exploits in Central New York, at Lake George, in Eastern Pennsylvania, and other places mentioned in the text. With my task is associated the remembrance of many pleasant outings as well as meetings with local historians, antiquarians, and students of Indian lore. I have treated more fully the earlier part of Johnson’s life which is less known, and more briefly the events of the latter part which is comparatively familiar to all. I trust I have not been unfair to the red men while endeavouring to show the tremendous influence exerted over them by Johnson; who, for this alone, deserves to be enrolled among the Makers of America.

My chief sources of information have been the Johnson manuscripts, which have been carefully mounted, bound, and are preserved in the State Library at Albany. They were indexed by my friends, the late Rev. Dr. H. A. Homes, and Mr. George R. Howell, the accomplished secretary of the Albany Institute. To the former I am especially indebted. The printed book to which I owe special obligations is Mr. William L. Stone’s “Life and Times of Sir William Johnson, Bart.” These two superbly written octavo volumes, richly annotated and indexed, make any detailed life of Johnson unnecessary, and form a noble and enduring monument of patient scholarship.

For generous assistance at various points and in details, I have to thank, and hereby do so most heartily, Mr. Edward F. De Lancey, of New York; Mr. William L. Stone, of Jersey City; Prof. A. L. Perry, of Williams College; Mr. Berthold Fernow, keeper of the State Archives, Albany; Rev. J. A. De Baun, D. D., of Fonda; Rev. J. H. Hubbs, of Grand Rapids, Mich.; Rev. Henry R. Swinnerton, of Cherry Valley; Mr. R. A. Grider, the chief American specialist and collector of powder-horns and their art and literature; Mr. A. G. Richmond, archæologist in Indian relics, of Canajoharie, N. Y.; Mrs. I. E. Wells of Johnson Hall at Johnstown; Mr. Ethan Akin, of Fort Johnson at Akin near Fonda; James Fuller, Esq., of Schenectady, N. Y.; and Major J. W. MacMurray, U. S. N.; besides various descendants of the militiamen who served under the illustrious Irishman who is the subject of the following pages.

W. E. G.

Boston, Mass.,

May 21, 1891.

CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.
THE FIRST SETTLERS OF THE MOHAWK VALLEY.

The Mohawk Valley was first settled by men escaping from feudalism. The manor-system, a surviving relic of the old days of lordship and villeinage, had long cursed England, Germany, and Holland, though first outgrown and thrown off in the latter country. It was from this system, almost as much as from Church laws, that the Pilgrim Fathers were glad to escape and find free labour as well as liberty of conscience in Holland,—the land where they “heard,” and found by experience, “that all men were free.”

The Netherlands was the political training-school of the Pilgrims, and of most of the leaders of the Puritans, who before 1640 settled New England. In America they were more fortunate than their more southern neighbours, in that they were freed from the semi-feudalism of the Dutch Patroons and the manor-lords of Maryland and Virginia. The Hollanders, on coming to New Netherland and settling under the Patroons, enjoyed far less liberty than when in their own country. They were practically under a new sort of feudalism unknown in their “Patria.” Their Teutonic instincts and love of freedom soon, however, drove them to relinquish their temporary advantages as manor-tenants, and to purchase land from the Indians and settle in the “Woestina,” or wilderness. These Dutch farmers cheerfully braved the dangers and inconveniences of “the bush,” in order to hold land in fee simple and be their own masters.

It was this spirit of independence that led a little company of worthy sons or grandsons of men who had fought under William the Silent, to settle in the “Great Flat,” or Mohawk Valley. They were led by Arendt Van Curler, who, though first-cousin of the absentee Patroon Van Rensselaer, of Rensselaerwyck, had educated himself out of the silken meshes of semi-feudalism. Finding men like-minded with himself, who believed that the patroon or manor-system was a bad reversion in political evolution, he led out the Dutch freemen, and founded the city of Schenectady. On the land made sacred to the Mohawks for centuries, by reason of council-fires and immemorial graves, this free settlement began. Here, not indeed for the first time in New Netherlands, and yet at a period when the proceeding was a novelty, the settlers held land in fee simple, and demanded the rights of trade.

It was before 1660 that these men, who would rather have gone back to Patria, or Holland, than become semi-serfs under a manor-lord, came to Van Curler, or “Brother Corlaer” as the Iroquois called him, and asked him to lead them westward. In Fort Orange, July 21, 1661, in due legal form, by purchase from and satisfaction to the Mohawk Indian chiefs, the Indian title was extinguished. Thus, by a procedure as honourable and generous as William Penn’s agreement with the Lenni Lenapes under the great elm at Shackamaxon, was signalized the entrance of Germanic civilization in the Mohawk Valley.

Early in the spring of 1662 Van Curler led his fourteen freemen and their families into their new possession. Travelling westward, up what is now Clinton Avenue in Albany, until they reached Norman’s Kill, they struck northward, following the Indian trail of blazed trees, until after a circuit of twenty miles they reached their future home, on a low plateau on the banks of the Mohawk. On this old site of an Indian village they began the erection of their houses, mill, church, and palisades. The aboriginal name of the village, from which the Mohawks had removed, pointed to the vast piles of driftwood deposited on the river-flats after the spring floods; but not till after the English conquest did any one apply the old Indian name of the site of Albany—that is, “Schenectady”—to Van Curler’s new settlement. Both French and Indians called the village “Corlaer,” even as they also called the Mohawk River “the river of Corlaer,” and the sheet of water in which he was drowned, not after its discoverer, Champlain, but “Corlaer’s Lake.” Nevertheless, since the Mohawks had already retired from the Hudson River, and “the place outside the door of the Long House” was no longer Albany, but “Corlaer,” they and the Europeans, soon after 1664, began to speak of the new settlement as “Schenectady;” especially, as by their farther retirement up the valley, “Corlaer” was now the true “Schenectady;” that is, outside the door of the Iroquois confederacy or Long House. Schenectady enjoys the honour of being more variously spelled than any other place in the United States; and its name has been derived from Iroquois, German, and Japanese, in which languages it is possible to locate the word as a compound. It is a softened form of a long and very guttural Indian word.

Then was begun, by these Dutch freeholders, the long fight of fifty years for freedom of trade with the Indians. Their contest was against the restrictive jealousy of Albany, including both Colony and Manor. With Dutch tenacity they held on, until victory at last crowned their persistence in 1727.

In a word, in its initiation and completion, the opening of the Mohawk Valley to civilization forms a noble episode in the story of American freedom. One of the first places in New York on which the forces representing feudalism and opposed to freeholding of land, and on which mediæval European notions arrayed against the ideas which had made America were beaten back, was at Schenectady, in the throat of the Mohawk Valley. Here was struck by liberty-loving Hollanders a key-note, of which the long strain has not yet ceased.

The immigrants who next followed the Dutch pioneers,—like them, as real settlers, and not as land-speculators and manor-builders,—and who penetrated still farther westward up the valley, were not English, but German. These people, who, as unarmed peasants in the Rhine Valley, had been unable to resist the invasion of Louis XIV. or to face the rigours of poverty in their desolated homeland, made the best sort of colonists in America. Brought by the British Government to settle on remote frontiers, to bear the brunt of contact with Indians, Spaniards, and Frenchmen, these sturdy Protestants soon proved their ability, not only to stand their ground, but to be lively thorns in the sides of despotic landlords, crown-agents, and governors.

The “first American rebel” Leisler, born at Mannheim in Germany, was a people’s man. In his own rude way he acted with the intent of making ideas dominant then, which are commonplace now. His “rebellion” grew out of a boast made by the British Lieutenant-Governor Nicholson, that the Dutch colonists were a conquered people, and not entitled to the right of English citizenship. Hanged, by order of a drunken English governor, near the site of the Tribune Building, May 16, 1691, it is more than probable that he will yet have his statue in the metropolitan city of America. He belongs to the list of haters of what is falsely named aristocracy, the un-American state-church combination, and other relics of feudalism which survive in England, but which had been cast off by the Dutch Republic, in whose service as a soldier he had come to America. His place in the list of the winners of American liberty is sure.[^[1]]

Under Governor Hunter’s auspices, in 1710, nearly three thousand Germans from the Palatinate settled along the Hudson and in New York. By a third immigration, in 1722, ten per cent was added to the population by the Palatines, who settled all along the Mohawk Valley, advancing farther westward into the “Woestina.” At German Flats and at Palatine Bridge their “concentration” was greatest. So jealous were the money-loving English of their wool-monopoly, that these Germans were forbidden under extreme penalties to engage in the woollen manufacture. The same intense jealousy and love of lucre which, until the Revolution, kept at home all army contracts that could possibly be fulfilled in Great Britain, prescribed the ban which was laid on the Mohawk Valley Palatines. With chains thus forged upon the Germans, who were expected to furnish “naval stores,” there was no encouragement for them to raise sheep or improved stock. In this way it happened that Sir William Johnson was later enabled to boast that he was the first who introduced fine sheep and other live-stock in the Mohawk Valley.

The characteristics of these Germans were an intense love of liberty, and a deep-seated hatred against feudalism and the encroachments of monarchy in every form. The great land-owners, both Dutch and English, who wished to use these people as serfs, found that they possessed strange notions of liberty. Poor as they were, they were more like hornets to sting than blue-bottles to be trapped with molasses. The Hessian fly had a barb in his tail. Loyal to the Crown, they refused to submit to the tyranny of the great landlords. It was one of these Germans, a poor immigrant, that first fought and won the battle of the freedom of speech and of the press. Now, intrenched in the Constitution of the United States, it is to us almost like one of the numerous “glittering generalities” of the Declaration of Independence, at which Englishmen smile, but which Americans, including the emancipated negroes, find so real. Then the freedom of the press was a dream. In 1734 John Peter Zenger, who incarnated the spirit and conscience of these Palatine Germans, was editor of the “New York Weekly Journal.” He was reproached as a foreigner and immigrant, for daring to criticise the royal representatives, or ever to touch upon the prerogatives of Governor Cosby, the king’s foolish representative. Zenger was imprisoned, but managed to edit his paper while in jail. At his trial he was defended by Hamilton, a lawyer from a colony whose constitution had been written by the son of a Dutch mother, in Holland, where printing had been free a century or more before it was even partially free in England. James Alexander Hamilton was the Scottish lawyer who had left his European home, to the detriment of his fortune, in order to enjoy richer liberty in Pennsylvania. He it was who first purchased Independence Square in Philadelphia, for the erection thereon of the State House, in which the Liberty Bell was to hang, and “proclaim liberty to all the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof.” Going to New York at his own expense, he, without fee, defended Zenger and secured his acquittal. This event marks an important point in the making of America and in the story of American freedom. It was in its effects as significant as the skirmish at Lexington. The doctrine, novel at that time in England but not in Holland, was advanced, that the truth of the facts in the alleged libel could be set up as defence, and that in this proceeding the jury were judges both of the law and the facts.

Though hundreds of Germans left New York for the greater advantage of land and the liberty of Pennsylvania, which had been settled under republican influences, yet those Palatines who rooted themselves in the Schoharie and Mohawk Valleys proved one of the best stocks which have made the American people. They were never popular with the men or women who wanted to make America a new London or a new England, with courts and castles, aristocracy and nobles, so called, entail and primogeniture, the landlords of feudal domain, and other old-world burdens. Honest, industrious, brave, God-fearing, truthful, and clean, they soon dotted the virgin forest with clearings, farms, and churches. Whatever else in their wanderings they lost or were robbed of, they usually managed to hold to their hymn-books and Bibles, and, in the case of the Reformed Churchmen, their Heidelberg Catechism. Their brethren in Pennsylvania—the holy land of German-Americans—published the first Bible in America, printed in a European tongue; and many early copies found their way northward. They lived on terms of peace with the Indians, treating these sons of the soil with kindness, and helping them in generous measure to the benefits of Christianity. The most honest and influential of Johnson’s Indian interpreters were of Dutch or German stock.

Though other nationalities—Scottish, Irish, English—afterward helped to make the Mohawk Valley at first polyglot, and then cosmopolitan, it was by people of two of the strongest branches of the Teutonic race that this fertile region was first settled. The dominant idea of these people was freedom under law, reinforced by hearty contempt for the injustice which masquerades under the forms of prerogative and of “majesty.” For all the self-styled, insolent vicegerents of God, in both Church and State, they felt a detestation, and were glad to find in America none of these. If found, they felt bound to resist them unto the end. Theirs was the democratic idea in Church and State, and they expressed it strongly.

It was this spirit which explains the rude and rough treatment, by Germans of both sexes, of arrogant royal agents and landlords in the Schoharie Valley, and which at the erection of churches built by public money, in which only a liturgical sect could worship, led to turbulence and riot. Certain historic old edifices now standing were once finished only after the king’s bayonets had been summoned to protect masons and carpenters from people who hated the very sight of an established or government church, built even partly by taxation, but shut to those of the sects not officially patronized.

Among such a people, strong in the virtues of unspoiled manhood; exhilarant with the atmosphere and splendid possibilities of the New World; trained in the school of Luther’s Bible and the Heidelberg Catechism; taught by Dutch laws commanding purchase of land from the aborigines, and by the powerful example of Van Curler and their domines or pastors, to be kind to the Indians,—Sir William Johnson, one of the greatest of the makers of our America, came in 1738. It was the daughter of one of the people of this heroic stock that he married. At a susceptible age he learned their ideas and way of looking at things, especially at their method of justly treating the Indians of the Six Nations, who were looked upon as the rightful owners of the soil. Among these people Johnson lived all his adult life. He was ever in kindly sympathy with them, never sharing the supercilious contempt of those who were and who are ignorant alike of their language, abilities, and virtues.

CHAPTER II.
JOHNSON AS AN INDIAN TRADER.

There is probably no good foundation for the local tradition, mentioned by Gen. J. Watts De Peyster, in his Life of Gen. John Johnson (Preface, p. ii, note), that the family name of William Johnson was originally “Jansen, and that the first who bore it and settled in Ireland was a Hollander, who, like many of his countrymen, went over afterward with William III. in 1690, won lands and established themselves in Ireland.” The subject is not mentioned in the Encyclopædia Britannica, and but slightly treated in English works of reference, while he has been unjustly slighted by American writers of history. According to his own account, William Johnson was born in Smithtown, County Meath, near Dublin, Ireland, in 1715.[^[2]] His mother was Anne Warren, sister of the brothers Oliver and Peter, who became famous officers in the British Navy; and his father, Christopher Johnson, Esq. Writers and biographers enlarge upon the ancient and honourable lineage of his mother’s family, but say little about his father’s. To an American this matters less than to those who must have a long line of known ancestry, real, reputed, or manufactured.

After some schooling at a classical academy, William was trained to a mercantile career. When about twenty-two years old, he fell in love with a lass whom his parents refused to permit him to marry. This obstacle, like a pebble that turns the course of the rivulet that is to become a great river, shaped anew his life. The new channel for his energies was soon discovered.

His uncle, Capt. Peter Warren, R. N., who had just returned from a cruise, heard of his nephew’s unhappy experience, and made him the offer of a position promising both wealth and adventure. Land speculation was then rife; and Captain Warren, like many other naval officers, had joined in the rush for lucre by buying land in the fertile Mohawk Valley. This was in addition to land which was part of his wife’s dowry, so that his estate was large, amounting, it is said, to fifteen thousand acres. He appointed young Johnson his agent, to work his farm and sell his building-lots. The young Irishman at once responded to the proposition. He crossed the Atlantic, and promptly reported in New York.

Captain Warren, then about thirty years old, had married Susan, the oldest daughter of Stephen De Lancey; and it was probably to the old house, then thirty-eight years old, which still stands (in which Washington took farewell of his generals in 1783), that the young Irishman came. He was possessed of a fine figure, tall and strong, was full of ambition and energy, with a jovial temper, and a power of quick adaptation to his surroundings. In short, he was a typical specimen of that race in which generous impulses are usually uppermost, and one of the mighty army of Celtic immigrants who have helped to make of the American people that composite which so puzzles the insular Englishman to understand.

New York and Albany people were already getting rich by inland as well as foreign trade, and the naval officer wished to invest what cash he could spare from his salary or prize money in a mercantile venture, to be begun at first on a modest scale in a frontier store. “Dear Billy,” as his uncle addressed him in his letters, was not long in discovering that the ambition of nearly every young man was to get rich, either in the inland fur or West India trade, so as to own a manor, work it with negro slaves, and join in the pomp and social splendour for which the colony was already noted. It is more than probable that the ambition to be rich and influential was strongly reinforced during his stay on Manhattan Island.

The journey north, made according to the regular custom, was by sloop up the Hudson, past the Palisades, the Highlands, the Catskills, and the Flats, to Albany. After a few days in the only municipality north of New York,—a log city with a few smart brick houses,—spent in laying in supplies, the young immigrant would pass through the pine-barrens, and after a day’s journey reach the State Street gate of palisaded Schenectady.

In the house of the tapster, or innkeeper, he would probably stay all night. He would find the Street of the Martyrs (so named after the massacre of 1690), and of the Traders, together with Front, Ferry, Church, and Niskayuna Streets, lined with comfortable, one-storied, many-gabled dwellings, with here and there neat houses, all or partly of brick. Each house stood with its cosey bivalve door, shut at the bottom to keep out pigs and chickens and to keep in the babes, and open at the top to admit light and air. The scrupulously neat floors spoke of the hereditary Dutch virtue of cleanliness. On the table could be seen a wealth of plain but wholesome food, such as few farmer-folk in the old countries of Europe could boast of. The bill of fare would include the well-cured hams for which “the Dorp” was famous, all kinds of savoury products of the hog, besides every sort of bread, pie, cake, and plain pastry, baked to a shining brown in the ample ovens of stone or brick, which swelled like domes outside of the houses, at the rear of the kitchens. Savoury and toothsome were the rich “crullers” which Captain Croll, the good church-elder and garrison-commander of Rensselaerwyck, had invented during a winter-season of meat-famine. On many a house veered iron weathercocks, especially on the few brick fronts monogrammed with dates in anchors of iron; while on the new church, only four years old, but the third in the history of the growing town, glittered the cock of Saint Nicholas in gilt. It rested over a belfry which held a most melodious bell, cast at Amsterdam, in dear old “Patria,” in the rim of which, as well-founded tradition insisted, many a silver guilder, spoon, and trinket had been melted. Perhaps Johnson, like many a European and even New England militiaman, did not understand why the Dutch built their stone fortress-like churches at the intersection of two streets. Some even hinted at stupidity; but the Dutchmen, for the same reason that they loop-holed the walls, so located their chief public buildings at the centre of the village as to be able to sweep the cross streets with their gun-fire in case of an attack by French or Indians, or both.

In Schenectady, Johnson would find that many of the men were away in the Indian country, with their canoes and currency of strouds, duffels, and trinkets, trading for furs. He would soon learn that many could speak the Indian tongue, some of the younger men and girls being excellent interpreters; while he would notice that wampum-making, or “seewant,” for money, made by drilling and filing shells, was a regular and legitimate industry. Possibly the young churchman may have stayed over a Sunday, and in the large stone edifice, capable of seating over six hundred persons, heard, if he did not understand, the learned Domine Reinhart Erichzon preach. After the liturgy and psalms, read by the clerk or fore-reader, the domine, in gown and bands, ascended the wineglass-shaped pulpit to deliver his discourse.

In any event, whether Johnson’s stay was long or short in the Dorp, we should see him making exit through the north gate, and either going landward along the Mohawk, which is hardly possible, or, as is more probable, loading his goods and outfit on one of the numerous canoes always ready, and rowing or being rowed up the river. The twenty-four miles or so of distance could be easily covered, despite the rifts and possible portages, in a single day. Evening would find him, either in camp on the new estate or hospitably lodged in some log-house of the Dutch or German settlers. He was now in the heart of what the Dutch have been wont to call the Woestina, or wilderness, but which was now too much settled to be any longer so spoken of,—the term beginning to be then, as it is now, restricted to a locality near Schenectady.

Warren’s Bush, or Warren’s Burg, was the name of the farm which the young Irishman was to cultivate. Warrensburg was the written name, but almost any new settlement was usually spoken of as “bush.” It lay on the south side of the Mohawk, some distance east of the point where the creek, fed by the western slopes of the Catskills, empties into the river, and was named Schoharie, from the great mass of driftwood borne down. No more fertile valleys than these, watered by the rain or melted snows of the Catskills and Adirondacks, exist. Besides the river-flats that were kept perennially fertile by nearly annual overflows and a top dressing of rich silt, the old maize-lands of the Mohawk were vast in extent, and all ready for the plough. The region west of Albany was then spoken of by the colonists as “the Mohawk country,” from the chief tribe of the Iroquois who inhabited it. Let us glance at the human environment of the new settler.

Besides a few small houses of white men, standing singly along the river, there were villages and fortified large towns of the Mohawks, called, in the common English term of the period, “castles.” The scattered lodges of the Indians were found near most of the settlements, such as Schenectady, Caughnawaga, Stone Arabia, or Fort Plain, and often their cabins were found inside the white men’s fortifications, as in Fort Hunter; but in the palisaded Indian towns, hundreds and even thousands were gathered together. All the white settlements along the Mohawk or Hudson were near the river, the uplands or clearings beyond the flats not being considered of much value. On the Hudson, besides Albany, were Half Moon and Saratoga, which latter stood, not over the wonderful ravine from which gushes the healing water of the mineral springs, but several miles to the eastward. Along the Mohawk were Schenectady, Crane’s Village, Fort Hunter, Warrensburg, a hamlet, Caughnawaga (or Fonda), Canajoharie, Palatine, German Flats, and Burnet’s Field, now called Herkimer. Over in Cherry Valley were, later on, Scottish settlers, and in Schoharie more Germans.

Besides Jellis Fonda at Caughnawaga (now Fonda), who was a great Indian trader, and afterward major of militia, Johnson’s most congenial neighbour was a fellow Irishman, John Butler. He had come out from the old country as a lieutenant of infantry in the ill-fated expedition for the reduction of Canada in 1711; when, through stormy weather and the ignorance of the pilots, the greater part of the fleet under Sir Hovenden Walker was destroyed in the St. Lawrence, and over a thousand men drowned. As one of the purchasers, with Governor Cosby and others, of a tract of sixty thousand acres of land, seven miles from the site, later called Johnstown, in which stood Johnson Hall, Lieutenant Butler cultivated and improved his portion. To each of his two sons, Walter and John, he gave a large farm, and both he and his sons were very influential among the Indians. The father served as lieutenant, holding the same rank for seventy years; and the two sons were afterward captains in the Indian corps, under Johnson, in the Lake George campaign. To this family the new settler, Johnson, became warmly attached; and the friendship remained unbroken until the coming of death, which the Arabs call the Severer of Friendships.

This line of settlements formed the frontier or line of outposts of civilization. On every side their frontagers were the Iroquois, or Indians of Five Nations, while right among them were the Mohawks. Only one English outpost faced Lake Ontario. This was the trading-station of Oswego. Here in 1722, the daring governor, William Burnet, aiming at the monopoly of the fur-trade, in defiance of the French, and in the face of the Seneca Indians’ protest, unfurled the British flag for the first time in the region of the Great Lakes. He built the timber lodge at his own expense, and encouraged bold young men, mostly from Albany and the valley settlements, to penetrate to Niagara and beyond. These commercial travellers—prototypes of the smart, well-dressed, and brainy drummers of to-day, and in no whit their inferiors in courage, address, and fertility of resource—went among the western Indians. They learned their language, and so opened the new routes of trade that within a twelvemonth from the unfurling of the British flag at Oswego there were seen at Albany the far-off lake tribes and even the Sioux of Dakota. Trade received such a tremendous stimulus that in 1727 Governor Burnet erected a regular fort at Oswego, where, in 1757, a French traveller found sixty or seventy cabins in which fur-traders lived. A promising settlement, begun by the Palatine Germans at Herkimer, was called Burnet’s Field, or, on the later powder-horn maps, Fort Harkiman.

The fur-trade in our day calls for the slaughter annually of two hundred million land quadrupeds; drives men to ravage land and ocean, and even to rob the water animals of their skins; sends forty million peltries annually to London alone, and is still one of the great commercial activities of the world. It was relatively much greater in Johnson’s day; and to gain a master’s hand in it was already his ambition. It was the year 1738, the date of the birth of George III. of England, whom later he was to serve as his sovereign. Arriving in the nick of time, Johnson began at once the triple activities of settling his uncle’s acres with farmers, of opening a country store, and of clearing new land for himself. This latter was rapidly accomplished, Indian fashion, by girdling the trunks one year, thus quickly turning them into leafless timber, and planting either corn or potatoes the next season, in the now sunlighted and warm ground. Or the standing timber was cut down and by fire converted into potash, two tons to the acre, which was easily leached out, and was quickly salable in Europe.

Corn or maize was the crop which above all others enabled the makers of America to hold their own and live; and corn was the grain most plentifully raised in the Mohawk Valley, though wheat was an early and steady crop. Corn meal is still sold in England as “Oswego flour,”—a name possibly invented by Johnson, who became a large exporter of grain and meal.

To be landlord’s agent, pioneer settler, farmer, and storekeeper all in one, Johnson needed assistance in various ways and resolved to have it. He had from the first come to stay for life and grow up with the country. He was probably in America less than a year before he took as his companion, Catharine, the daughter of a German Palatine settler named Weissenburg, or Wisenberg.[^[3]] Kate was the only wife Johnson ever had, and the only woman with whom he lived in wedlock. She is described as a sweet-tempered maiden, robust in health, fairly dowered with mental abilities, and with a good influence over her husband. No record of the marriage ceremony has yet been found; but the couple, if not joined in wedlock by some one of the Dutch or German clergymen of the Valley, as is most likely, had their wedding before the Rev. Thomas Barclay, an English Episcopal missionary. Mr. Barclay laboured at Fort Hunter, and in the little English church officiated for years, as well as at Albany and Schenectady; but the records of Fort Hunter have not survived the accidents of time. When in 1862 the dust of this maker of America was disturbed, and his bones sealed up in granite for more honourable burial, a plain gold ring was found, inscribed on the inside, “June. 1739. 16.” This date may have been that of his marriage with “Lady” Johnson, his own lawful wife, who probably needed no title to adorn the beautiful character which tradition bestows upon her. Johnson, when a baronet with laurelled brow, and a fame established on two continents; the head of a family in which were two baronetcies, father and son,—an honour unparalleled in American colonial history,—made a will, preserved in Albany, in which he desired the remains of his “beloved wife Catharine” interred beside him. Of Molly Brant, his later mistress, he spoke and wrote as his housekeeper; of the Palatine German lawfully wedded to him, as his beloved wife.

Doubtless, also, for the first years of married life, through her exemption from family cares, though these weighed lightly in early colonial days, in the absence of the artificial life of the cities, she was enabled to attend to the store, while her husband worked in the field, rode with grist to the mill, or traded with the Indians in their villages. Their first child, John, was not born until they had crossed the Mohawk River, and occupied Mount Johnson, in 1742.

We can easily sum up the inventory of a country store on the frontier over one hundred and fifty years ago, whose chief customers were farmers, trappers, bos-lopers or wood-runners, hunters, and Indians. On the shelves would be arranged the thick, warm, woollen cloth called “duffel,” which made “as warm a coat as man can sell,” and the coarse shoddy-like stuff named “strouds;” in the bins, powder, shot, bullets, lead, gun-flints, steel traps, powder-horns, rum, brandy, beads, mirrors, and trinkets for the Indians, fish-hooks and lines, rackets or snow-shoes, groceries, hardware, some of the commonest drugs, and building articles.

In trading, a coin was rare. The money used was seewant, or wampum, but most of the business done was by barter; peltries, corn, venison, ginseng, roots, herbs, brooms, etc., being the red man’s stock in trade. The white settlers paid for their groceries and necessities of civilization in seewant, or wampum, potash, and cereals. One of the earliest in the collection of Johnson’s papers at Albany is a letter to “Dear Billy” from Captain Warren at Boston, suggesting a shipment in the spring, from the farm at Warrensburg, of grain and other produce to Boston by way of Albany.

Being of robust health, with a strong frame and commanding figure, jovial in disposition and easy in manners, Johnson was not only able to show habitual industry, but in the field-sports and athletic games to take part and make himself popular alike with the muscular young Dutch and Germans and with the more lithe red men. The famous castle or palisaded village of the Mohawks on the hill-slopes back of Auriesville, now visible to all passengers by railway, and marked by the shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs, was but a short distance to the westward. Here Johnson soon became known as a friend as well as an honest trader. His simple and masterly plan was, never to lie, cheat, or deceive, and never to grant what he had once refused. To the red men much of a white man’s thinking was a mystery; but truth was always simple, and as heartily appreciated as it was easily understood.

As early as May 10, 1739, we find this man of restless activity planning to locate a branch trading-house on the Susquehanna, two hundred miles to the south. Already he had seen the advantages and prospect of speedy wealth in the fur-trade, a privilege won years before by his Schenectady neighbours. He now entered diligently into it, employing a number of runners or bos-lopers, who scoured the woods and valleys populated with Indians, in his interest, diverting the trade from Albany to his own post. This was the beginning of jealous quarrels between him and the Albanians. That his eye was keenly open to every new advantage or possibility of progress, was seen in his buying as early as 1739, after one year’s residence in the valley, a lot of land across the Mohawk, on which ran a stream of water, the Chucktununda Creek, with abundance of potential mill-power. To ride horseback with bags fifteen miles to Caughnawaga every time meal was needed, was too much loss of time and energy. The German women had long carried bags of wheat and maize from Schoharie to Schenectady, traversing the distance on foot, bearing corn in coming and grist in returning, on their backs. There was a mill at Caughnawaga, and one owned by the Dutch Church at Schenectady, both sufficiently distant. Johnson saw at once in a mill ease and revenue. The Indian name of the stream, Chucktununda, is said to mean “stone roofs or houses,” and was applied to other watercourses with banks of overhanging rocks which formed shelter during rain. This coveted spot became later the famous “Mount” Johnson, on which the stone fortress-mansion still stands, at Akin, three miles west of Amsterdam and visible to all railway travellers as they fly between the great Lake City and New York.

The appearance of the Mohawk Valley, though still unchanged in its great cosmic features of sky, mountain, and main watercourses, was vastly different a century and a half ago. On its surface were many minor features quite different from those which to-day greet the eye of traveller, denizen, or palace-car inmate. Then the primeval forest, rich in game, covered hill and dale, except along the river-flats, where were great expanses of meadow in the wide level of the valley. Here were maize-fields surrounding the Indian villages for miles.

Owing, however, to the largeness of forest area, the streams were of greater proportions and much more numerous than at present. Fish were vastly abundant, and so tame as to be easily caught, even with the hand of Indian or white skilled in wood and water craft. Animal life was rich and varied to a degree not now easily imaginable or even credible, did not the records of geology, of contemporary chronicles, and the voices of tradition all agree on this point. Then the “wild cow” or bison, though rapidly diminishing, owing to the introduction of fire-arms, was still a source of fur and food. Besides the elk, deer were plentiful on the hills, often seen drinking at night and early in the morning at the river’s brink, and occasionally were killed inside of the new settlements. A splendid specimen of elk horns from a buck shot by Johnson on his own grounds, was presented by him to Chief Justice Thomas Jones, who wrote a loyalist history of New York during the Revolutionary War, and long adorned the hall of Fort Neck mansion on Long Island. Smaller fur-bearing animals were beyond the power of arithmetic. Wolves were uncomfortably numerous, active, and noisy. To their ceaseless nocturnal music there were slight pauses of silence, except when some gory battle-field or scalping-party’s raid or unusual spoil of hunters became the storm-centre, and gathered them together from a radius of many miles. Most notable of all the animals, in physical geography, in commerce, and for clothing, was the beaver. This amphibious creature of architectural instincts was the great modifier of the earth’s surface, damming up tens of thousands of the hill streams which fed the great rivers, and thus causing a vast surface of the land, otherwise dry, to be covered with water, while it greatly changed the appearance of the landscape. There are to-day thousands of grassy and mossy dells which even the inexperienced eye sees were once the homes of the beavers, while thousands of others have long since, under the open sun, become fertile meadows. The beaver, by yielding the most valuable of the furs, furnished also the standard of value in trade. The beaver as seen on the seal of the city of York, like the prehistoric pecus, or cattle, which made pecuniary value, or the salt of the ancient salary or rice in old Japan, was quoted oftener than coin.

The Indian trails of New York were first obliterated by wagon-roads or metaled turnpikes, and then covered by iron rails and wooden ties. The flanged iron wheels have taken the place of the moccasin, as loco-motor and freight-carrier; but in Johnson’s time the valleys, passes, and portages or “carries” were all definitely marked, and generally easily visible, on account of the long tramping of inturned feet. There are places to-day on the flinty rock polished by long attrition of deer-leather soles; and wherever the natural features of the landscape point to the probable saving of linear space, there skilled search usually reveals the old trail. One of the first proofs of the genius of Johnson and the entrance in his mind of continental ideas was his thorough study of the natural highways, trails, and watercourses of the Iroquois empire, and the times and methods of their punctual migrations. He soon found that while late autumn, winter, and spring was their season for trapping and shooting their game, June, July, and August formed the period when the peltries were brought in for sale. In early autumn they went fishing, or their travelling-parties were on peaceful errands, such as attending those council-fires which filled all the atmosphere with blue haze. As a rule, the Indians avoided the mountains, and dwelt in the valleys and well-watered regions, where fish and game for food, osiers and wood fibres for their baskets, clay for their rude pottery abounded, and where pebbles of every degree of hardness were at hand, to be split, clipped, drilled, grooved, or polished for their implements of war, ceremony, and religion. In savage life, vast areas of the earth’s surface are necessary for his hunting and nomad habits. Agriculture and civilization, which mean the tilling and dressing of the earth, enable a tribe to make a few acres of fertile soil suffice, where one lone hunter could scarcely exist. The constant trenching upon the land of the wild hunter and fisherman, by the farmer and manufacturer, who utilize the forces of Nature, and the resistance of the savage to this process, make the story of the “Indian question.”

Apart from the pretext of religion, equally common to all, the main object of French, Dutch, and English traders was fur, as that of the New England coast men was fish. The tremendous demand of Europe and China kept the prices of peltries high, and it was in this line of commercial effort that fortunes were most quickly made, most of the early profits being reckoned at twenty times the amount of outlay. Until 1630 a strict monopoly of two trading-companies shut out all interlopers from the Indian country.

In 1639, at the foundation of Rensselaerwyck, trade was nominally thrown open to all. What was formerly done covertly by interlopers and servants of the company, became the privileges of every burgher. Though still rigidly denied to outsiders, traders’ shops soon sprung up along the muddy streets of the colony, and an immense business was done over the greasy counters. The gallon kegs of brandy, called ankers; a puncheon of beer; a pile of shaggy woollen stuffs, then called duffles, and now represented most nearly by Ulster or overcoat cloth; a still coarser fabric called strouds, for breech clouts and squaws’ clothes, with axes and beads, formed the staple of the cheaper order of shopkeepers. In the better class of dealers in “Indian haberdashery,” and in peltries, potash, and ginseng, the storehouses would have an immense array of all sorts of clothes, hats and shoes, guns, knives, axes, powder, lead, glass beads, bar and hoop iron for arrow-heads, and files to make them, red lead, molasses, sugar, oil, pottery, pans, kettles, hollow ware, pipes, and knick-knacks of all sorts. It was not long before the desire to forestall the markets entered the hearts of the Dutch as well as the French; and soon, matching the courier du bois, or hardy rangers of the Canadian forests, emerged the corresponding figure of the bos-lopers, or commercial drummers. This prototype of the present natty and wide-awake metropolitan, in finest clothes, hat, and gloves, with most engaging manners and invincible tongue, was a hardy athlete in his prime, able to move swiftly and to be ever alert. He was well versed in the human nature of his customers. Skilled in woodcraft, he knew the trails, the position of the Indian villages, the state of the tides, currents, the news of war and peace, could read the weather signs, the probabilities of the hair and skin crops, the fluctuations of the market, and was usually ready to advance himself by fair advantage, or otherwise, over his white employer or Indian producer. Rarely was he an outlaw, though usually impatient of restraint, and when in the towns, apt to patronize too liberally the liquor-seller.

In this way the market was forestalled, and the choicest skins secured by the Albany men, who knew how to select and employ the best drummers. So fascinating and profitable was this life in the woods, that agriculture was at first neglected, and breadstuffs were imported. The evil of the abandonment of industry, however, never reached the proportions notorious in Canada, where it sometimes happened that ten per cent of the whole population would disappear in the woods, and the crops be neglected. When, too, Schenectady, Esopus, and the Palatine settlements in the Mohawk Valley were fully established, the farmers multiplied, the acreage increased, and grain was no longer imported. It was, from the first, the hope and desire of the Schenectady settlers to break the Albany monopoly, and obtain a share of the lucrative trade. This was bitterly opposed for half a century, and many were the inquisitorial visits of the Albany sheriffs to Schenectady and the Valley settlements, to seize contraband goods; but usually, on account of the steady resistance of both magistrates and citizens, they who came for wool went home shorn. The foolish Governor Andros went so far as to lay upon the little village an embargo,—one of the silly precedents of the “Boston Port Bill,”—by a most extraordinary proclamation forbidding any wagons and carts to ply between the city of Albany and the Dorp of Schenectady, except upon extraordinary occasions; and only with the consent of the Albany magistrates could passengers or goods be carried to the defiant little Dutch town. All such official nonsense ultimately proved vain, and its silliness became patent even to the Albany monopolists; and Schenectady won the victory of free trade with the Indians.

This point of time was shortly after the coming of Johnson, who thus arrived at a lucky moment; and at once entering to reap where others had sown, he became a man of the new era. He found the situation free for his enterprise, which soon became apparently boundless. He cultivated the friendship not only of the Indians, but of the white wood-runners, trappers, and frontiersmen generally; and by his easy manners, generosity, and strict integrity, bound both the red and the white men to himself. He was a “hail-fellow-well-met” to this intelligent class of men, and all through his wonderful career found in them a tremendous and unfailing resource of power. Johnson laid the foundations of permanent success, deep and broad, by the simple virtues of truth and honesty. He disdained the meanness of the petty trader. His word was kept, whether promise or threat. He refused to gain a temporary advantage by a sacrifice of principle, and soon the poorest and humblest learned to trust him. His word, even as a young man, soon became bond and law. The Indians, who were never able to fathom diplomacy, could understand simple truth. Two of the most significant gestures in the sign language of the Indians are, when the index finger is laid upon the mouth and moved straight forward, as the symbol of verity; and the same initial gesture expresses with sinuosities, as of a writhing serpent, symbolical of double dealing, prevarication or falsehood. The tongue of the truth-speaker was thus shown to be as straight as an arrow, while that of the liar was like a worm, or the crooked slime-line of a serpent. In this simple, effective way Johnson’s business enlarged like his land domains from year to year, while on knowledge of the Indians and their language, and of the physical features of the Mohawks’ empire, he soon became an authority. As early as 1743 he succeeded in opening a direct avenue of trade with Oswego, doing a good business not only in furs, but in supplying with provisions and other necessaries both the white trappers and petty traders who made rendezvous at the fort. He was now well known in Albany and New York, and soon opened correspondence with the wealthy house of Sir William Baker & Co., of London, as well as with firms in Atlantic seaports and the West Indies.

He prepared for a wider sphere of influence by improving his land north of the Mohawk River. He began the erection on it of a strong and roomy stone house,—one of the very few edifices made of cut stone then in the State, and probably the only one west of the Hudson River. This house is still standing, and kept in excellent repair by its owner and occupant, Mr. Ethan Akin. It is two and a half stories high; its dimensions are 64 by 34 feet; the walls, from foundation to garret, are two feet thick. There is not to-day a flaw in them, nor has there ever been a crack. The roof, now of slate and previously of shingles, was at first of lead, which was used for bullets during the Revolutionary War. Part of the house seems to have been sufficiently finished for occupancy by the summer of 1742, for here, on the 5th of November, his son John was born. Around the house he planted a circle of locust-trees, two or three of which still remain. His grist-mill stood on Chucktununda Creek, which flowed through his grounds; and near it was the miller’s house. This branch of his business—flour manufacture—was so soon developed that cooperage was stimulated, and shipments of Johnson’s Mohawk Valley flour were made to the West Indies and to Nova Scotia. Grand as his stone dwelling was, a very patroon’s mansion,—and it is probable that one of Johnson’s purposes in rearing what was then so splendid a mansion was to impress favourably the Indians,—he became none the less, but even more, their familiar and friend. He joined in their sports, attended their councils, entertained the chiefs at his board, feasted the warriors and people in his fields, and on occasions put on Indian costume. In summer this would mean plenty of dress and liberal painting, but in winter, abundance of buckskin, a war-bonnet of vast proportions, and a duffel blanket. Yet all this was done as a private individual and a merchant, having an eye to the main chance. He as yet occupied no official position. His domestic life in these early days at the Mohawk Valley must have been very happy; and here were born, evidently in quick succession and probably before the year 1745, by which time the stone house was finished, his two daughters, Mary and Nancy. About sixty yards north of the mansion was a hill on which a guard-house stood, with a lookout ever on the watch. On account of this hill the place was often spoken of as “Mount” Johnson. In time of danger a garrison of twenty or thirty men occupied this point of wide view.

Despite his many cares, Johnson enjoyed reading and the study of science. He ordered books and periodical literature regularly from London. His scientific taste was especially strong in astronomy. To the glorious canopy of stars, which on winter nights make the mountain-walled valley a roofed palace of celestial wonders, Johnson’s eyes were directed whenever fair weather made their splendours visible. In autumn the brilliant tints of the sumach, dogwood, swamp-maple, sassafras, red and white oak, and the various trees of the order of Sapindaceæ filled the hills and lowlands with a glory never seen in Europe. His botanical tastes could be enjoyably cultivated, for in orchids, ferns, flowering plants, and wonders of the vegetable world, few parts of North America are richer than the Mohawk Valley.

CHAPTER III.
THE SIX NATIONS AND THE LONG HOUSE.

The military nerves of the continent of North America lie in the water-ways bounding, traversing, or issuing from the State of New York. Its heart is the region between the Hudson and the Niagara. In these days of steam-traction, when transit is made at right angles to the rivers, and thus directly across the great natural channels of transportation, New York may be less the Empire State than in the days of canoes and bateaux. Yet even now its strategic importance is at once apparent. In the old days of conflict, first between the forces of Latin and Teutonic civilization, and later between British king-craft and American democracy, it was the ground chosen for struggle and decision.

Before the European set foot on the American continent, the leading body of native savages had discovered the main features of this great natural fortress and place of eminent domain. Inventors of the birch-bark canoe, the red man saw that from this centre all waters of the inland ocean made by the great lakes, the warm gulf, and the salt sea, could be easily reached. With short land-portages, during which the canoe, which served as shelter and roof at night and house and vehicle by day, could be carried on the shoulders, the Indian could paddle his way to Dakota, to Newfoundland, or to Hudson’s Bay on the north, or the Chesapeake and the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico on the south. In his moccasins he could travel as far. From New York State the pedestrian can go into twenty States and into two thirds of the territory of the United States without leaving the courses of valleys. No other State can so communicate between the east and the west without overcoming one or more mountain ridges. The T-shaped Hudson-Mohawk groove in the earth’s crust unites the valleys east of Massachusetts. With such geographical advantages, added to native abilities, the Iroquois were able to make themselves the virtual masters of the continent of North America.

Here, accordingly, was built the Long House; that is, was organized the federation of the Five Nations. Like the Pharaohs, Sultans, Mikados, and European princes of the world which we call old, because of its long written history, these forest sovereigns named their government after their house. The common edifice of the Iroquois was a bark structure fifty or more feet long, and from twelve to twenty feet wide, with doors at either end. In each dwelling lived several families.

So also, in the Great Long House, stretching from the Hudson to the Niagara, dwelt at first five families. The Mohawks occupied the room at the eastern end of the house, in the throat of the Mohawk Valley, the schenectady, or “place just outside the door,” being on the “mountain-dividing” or Hudson River. More exactly, the place of “Ye treaties of Schenectady” was at the mouth of Norman’s Kill, a little south of Albany. Here was the place of many ancestral graves, where multitudes of the dead lay, and where Hiawatha, their great civilizer, dwelt.

Of all the tribes the Mohawks were, or at least in England and the colonies were believed to be, the fiercest warriors. It was after them that the roughs in London in the early part of the eighteenth century were named, and the term was long used as a synonym with ferocious men. The tea-destroyers in Boston Harbor in 1774 also took this name. Next westward were the Oneidas, inhabiting the region from Little Falls to Oneida Lake. The Onondagas at the centre of the Long House, in the region between the Susquehanna and the eastern end of Lake Ontario, had the fireplace or centre of the confederacy. The Cayugas lived between the lake named after them and the Genesee Valley. The Senecas occupied the country between Rochester and Niagara. The evidence left by the chips on the floors of their workshops, show that their most ancient habitations were on the river-flats and at the edges of streams. Later, as game became scarcer, they occupied the hills and ledges farther back. On these points of vantage their still later elaborate fortifications of wood were built. As the rocks of New York make the Old Testament of geology, so the river-strands and the quarries are the most ancient chronicles of unwritten history, in times of war and peace.

How long the tribes of the Long House lived together under the forms of a federated republic, experts are unable to tell. It is believed that they were originally one large Dakota tribe, which became separated by overgrowth and dissensions, and later united, not as a unity, but as a confederation. The work of Dr. Cadwallader Colden, who in 1727 published his “History of the Five Nations,” has been too much relied upon by American and English writers. It was one of the very first works in English on local history published in the province of New York. Utterly ignoring the excellent writing of the Dutch scholars, Domine Megapolensis, De Vries, and the lawyer, Van der Donck, who wrote as men familiar with their subject at first hand; ignoring also the personal work of Arendt Van Curler,—Colden compiled most of his historic matter from French authors.

According to the tradition of the Algonkin Indians of Canada, which Colden gives at length, the Iroquois were at first mainly occupied in agriculture, and the Algonkins in hunting. The various wars had developed in the Iroquois the spirit of war and great powers of resistance, so that they held their own against their enemies. Another of the many bloody campaigns was to open on the shores of the lake named after Champlain, when Europeans appeared on the scene, and trustworthy history begins. Champlain, it seems, did not desire to join in the Indian feuds, but was compelled to do so in order to retain the friendship of the Hurons. This first use of fire-arms in Indian warfare meant nothing less than revolution in politics, in methods of war, in the influence of chiefs, and in other elements of Indian civilization. What gunpowder began, alcohol completed.

This much seems certain, that at the opening of the seventeenth century the whole continent was a dark and bloody ground, in which war was the rule and peace the exception; in which man hunted man as the beasts and fishes destroy and devour one another. The Iroquois, speaking substantially one language, were as an island in a great Algonkin ocean. Unlike mere fishermen and hunters they were agriculturists, and many hundred square miles were planted with their maize, squashes, pumpkins, beans, tobacco, and other vegetables, edible or useful. They were able to store up corn for long campaigns and to brave a season of famine. The streams furnished them with fish, and they hunted the deer, elk, bison, and smaller animals for flesh or furs; but their noblest game was man. To kill, to scalp, to save alive for torture, to burn his villages and houses, to wreak vengeance on his enemies, was rapture to the savage.

Before they knew gunpowder, the Iroquois, equipped with flint weapons and clothed in bark armour, often fought in the open field and with comparative personal exposure. Their battles were by masses of men who were led by chiefs, and their tactics and strategy resembled those of white men before the introduction of fire-arms. One famous field in the open ground near Schenectady was long pointed out in Indian tradition as the place where the great battle between the Iroquois and the Algonkins had been fought before the coming of the whites. For the defence of their villages they built palisades with galleries for the defenders to stand on, and with appliances at hand to put out fires, or to repel assaults and drive off besiegers. Theirs was the age of stone and wood; but their civilization was based on agriculture, which made them superior to that of their neighbours, whom they had compelled to be tributary vassals.

The apparition of the white man and the flash of Champlain’s arquebus, vomiting fire and dealing death by invisible balls, changed all Indian warfare and civilization. Gunpowder wrought as profound a revolution in the forests of America as in Europe. Bark or hide shields and armour were discarded; bows and arrows were soon left to children; the line and order of battle changed; fighting in masses ceased; the personal influence of the chiefs decreased, and each warrior became his own general. Individual valour and physical strength and bravery in battle counted for much less, and the dwarf was now equal to the giant.

An equally great revolution in industry took place when the stone age was suddenly brought to a close and the age of metals ushered in. The iron pot and kettle, the steel knife, hoe, hatchet, and the various appliances of daily life made more effective and durable, almost at once destroyed the manufacture of stone and bone utensils. The old men lost their occupation, and the young men ceased to be pupils. This loss of skill and power was tremendous and far-reaching in its consequences; and its very suddenness transformed independent savages into dependents upon the white man. In time of famine or loss of trade, or interruption of their relations with the traders caused by political complications, the sufferings of the Indians were pitiable.

Champlain’s shot dictated the reconstruction of Indian warfare; but the Iroquois took to heart so promptly the lesson, that the Algonkins north of the St. Lawrence were able to profit little by their temporary victory. Full of hate to the French for interfering to their disadvantage, the Mohawks at once made friends with the Dutch.

Both Hudson and Champlain had visited Mount Desert Island, and thence separating had penetrated the continent by the great water-ways, both reaching the heart of New York within a few miles of each other. While the French founded Quebec, and settled at Montreal, the Dutch made a trading settlement on the Hudson at Norman’s Kill, Tawasentha. This “place of many graves” and immemorial tradition was the seat of their great civilizer and teacher, Hiawatha, who had introduced one phase of progress. It was now destined to be the gateway to a new era of change and development. As in Japan, at the other side of the globe, at nearly the same time white men, gunpowder, and Christianity had come all together.

It was not out of disinterested benevolence that the confederate savages sought the friendship of the Hollanders. They came to buy powder and ball, to arm themselves with equal weapons of vengeance, and to protect themselves against the French.

But if Champlain was a mighty figure in the imagination of the red man of the Mohawk Valley, there was coming a greater than he. This new man was to impress more deeply the imagination of all the Iroquois, and his name was to live in their language as long as their speech was heard on the earth. Champlain was a bringer of war; “Corlaer” was an apostle of peace.

Arendt Van Curler is a perfectly clear figure in the Indian tradition, and in the history and documentary archives of the Empire State. Having no descendants to embalm his name in art or literature, he has not had his monument. Yet he deserves to have his name enrolled high among the makers of America. The ignorance, errors—and there is a long list of them—of writers on American and local history concerning Arendt Van Curler, have been gross and inexcusable. It were surely worth while to know the original of that “Corlaer” after whom the Indians named, first the governors of New York, and later the governors of English Canada, and finally Queen Victoria, the Empress of India. To the Iroquois mind, Corlaer was the representative of Teutonic civilization. Other governors of colonies and prominent figures among the pale-faces, they called by names coined by themselves, just as they named their own warriors from trivial incidents or temporary associations. Even the King of Great Britain was only their unnamed “Father;” but as our ablest American historian, Francis Parkman, has said: “His [Van Curler’s] importance in the eyes of the Iroquois, and their attachment to him are shown by the fact that they always used his name (in the form of Corlaer) as the official designation of the governor of New York, just as they called the governors of Canada, Onontio, and those of Pennsylvania, Onas. I know of no other instance in which Iroquois used the name of an individual to designate the holder of an office. Onontio means ‘a great mountain;’ Onas means ‘a quill or pen;’ Kinshon, the governor of Massachusetts, ‘a fish.’ ”[^[4]]

Rev. I. A. Cuoq, in his “Lexique de la Langue Iroquoise,” also remarks that the title Kora, the present form of [Van] Curler, given even yet to the kings and queens of England and to the English governors of Canada, is a purely Iroquois creation; while that of Onontio, used of the French king and governors, was given for the first time to Montmagny, the successor of Champlain. Quite differently from their method in the case of Van Curler, they translated, with the aid of the French missionaries, Montmagny’s name, rendering it freely by Onontio, which means, strictly speaking, “the beautiful mountain,” rather than “the great mountain.” The term Onontio was used until the end of the French dominion in America, whereas Kora [or Corlaer] is still in vogue; Queen Victoria being to the Canadian Indians Kora-Kowa, or the great Van Curler.

As first-cousin of Kilian Van Rensselaer, Arendt Van Curler, a native of the country near Amsterdam, but probably of Huguenot descent, reached America in 1630, and became superintendent and justice of the colony at Rensselaerwyck. From the very first he dealt with the Indians in all honour, truth, and justice. He was a man of sterling integrity, a Dutch patriot, and a Christian of the Reformed faith, but also a man of continental ideas, a lover of all good men, and a Catholic in the true sense of the term. He rescued from death and torture the Christian prisoners in Mohawk villages; and his first visit into, or “discovery” of the Valley as far as Fonda in September, 1642, was to ransom Father Jogues. His description of “the most beautiful land on the Mohawk River that eye ever saw,” and the journal of his journey, probably sent with his letter of June 16, 1643, to the Patroon, form the first written description of the Valley. He mastered the vernacular of the savages, visited them at their council-fires, heard their complaints, dealt honestly with them, and compelled others to do the same. The first covenant of friendship, made in 1617, between the Dutch and the Iroquois, and its various later renewals, he developed into a policy of lasting peace and amity. The scattered links of friendship between the Dutch and the confederacy of Indians he forged into an irrefragable chain, which, until the English-speaking white men went to war in 1775, was never broken. In 1663 he saved the army of Courcelles from starvation and probably destruction. Winning alike the respect of the French in Canada, and of their enemies, the Mohawks, he was invited to visit the governor, Tracy, in Quebec. On his journey thither in 1667, he was drowned in Lake Champlain near Rock Regis, the boundary-mark between the Iroquois and Algonkin Indians. This lake, like the Mohawk River, and the town of Schenectady which he founded, the Indians and Canadians called Corlaer.

Rarely, if ever, was a council held in Albany or at Johnson’s house or at the Onondaga fireplace, that Corlaer’s name was not mentioned, and their “covenant chain” with him referred to under the varied figures of rhetoric.

Van Curler’s policy was continued and expanded by Peter Schuyler, a son of Van Curler’s warm personal friend, Philip Schuyler. As the Iroquois in speaking never closed the lips, but used the orotund with abundance of gutturals, they were unable to pronounce properly names in which labial consonants occurred. They could not say Peter; so they called their friend “Quider.” The policy of Johnson was simply a continuation and expansion of that of these two Hollanders, Van Curler and Schuyler. There was no name of any white man that Johnson heard oftener in the mouths of the Indians than that of Corlaer; and yet, in the index of seventy thousand references to the Johnson manuscripts in Albany there is no reference to this founder of the Dutch policy of peace with the Indians.

In their political and social procedures, in public discourse, and in the etiquette of councils, no denizens of European courts were more truly bond-slaves to etiquette and custom than these forest senators. In certain outward phases of life—especially noticed by the man of hats, boots, and clean underclothing—the Indian seems to be a child of freedom, untutored and unsophisticated. In reality he is a slave compared to the enlightened and civilized man. He is by heredity, training, and environment fettered almost beyond hope. His mind can move out of predestined grooves only after long education, when a new God, new conceptions, induced power of abstract reasoning, and an entirely new mental outlook are given him. First of all, the savage needs a right idea of the Maker of the universe and of the laws by which the creation is governed; and then only does his mental freedom begin. So far from being free from prescribed form, he is less at liberty than a Chinese or Hindu. His adherence to ceremonial runs into bigotry. The calumet must be smoked. The opening speech must be on approved models. The wampum belts are as indispensable in a treaty as are seals and signatures in a Berlin conference or a Paris treaty. To challenge tradition, to step out of routine, to think for himself, and to act according to conviction, is more dangerous and costly to him than to one who has lived under the codes of civilization.

To gain his almost invincible influence over these red republicans of the woods, Johnson, like his previous exemplars, had to let patience have her perfect work. He had to stoop to them in order to lift them up. He even learned to outdo them in ostentation of etiquette, in rigid adherence to form, in close attention to long speeches without interruption, in convincing eloquence, in prolixity when it was necessary to subdue the red man’s brain and flesh by the power of the tongue, and in shine and glitter of outward display. Like a shrewd strategist, this typical Irishman knew when to exercise his native gift of garrulity in talking against time, and when also to condense into fiery sentences the message of the hour.

One chief reason, however, why the Iroquois preferred to talk with him more than with the average colonial grandee, was because they were not when before him at the mercy of interpreters. Despite the fact that time was of little value to the savage, it was rather trying to an Indian orator, after dilating for an hour or two in all the gorgeous eloquence of figurative language, to the manifest acceptance of his own kinsmen at least, to have an interpreter render the substance of his oration in a few sentences. Unaccustomed to abstract reasoning, the Indian was perforce obliged to draw the images of thought entirely from the environment of his life on land and water. Hence his speech superabounded with metaphors. He thoroughly enjoyed the discourse of one of his pale-faced brothers whose flowery language, while insufferably prolix to his fellow-whites, ran on in exuberant verbosity. In such a case, as Johnson soon learned to know, the sons of the forest felt complimented and flattered. Rarely was a speaker interrupted. Extreme rigidity of decorum was the rule at their councils. On great and solemn occasions the women were called as witnesses and listeners to hold in their memory words spoken or promises given.

There were other resources of human intercourse besides words. The wampum strings that reminded one of rosaries, or the belts made of hundreds and thousands of black and white shells, served as telegrams, letters missive, credentials, contracts, treaties, currency, and most of the purposes in diplomacy and business. The principal chief of a tribe had the custody of these archives of State. A definite value was placed upon these drilled, polished, and strung disks or oval cylinders of shell. The Dutch soon learned to make a better fabric than the Indian original, and they taught the art to the other colonists. Weeden, in his “Economic History of New England,” has shown how great an aid to commerce this, the ancient money of nearly all nations, proved in the early days when coined money was so scarce. The belts used as newsletters, as tokens of peace or war, as records of the past, or as confirmations of treaties, were often generous in width and length, beautifully made, and fringed with coloured strings. Schenectady was a famous place of wampum or seewant manufacture; and Hille Van Olinda, an interpreter, received in 1692 two pounds eight shillings for two great belts. Two others of like proportions cost three pounds twelve shillings. A large quantity of this sort of currency was always carried by the French to win over the Indians to their side. The same commercial and diplomatic tactics were also followed by the English, and especially by Johnson.

The Iroquois had also a rude system of heraldry. A traveller over the great trails or highways, or along the shores of the great water-ways most often traversed, would have seen many tokens of aboriginal art. The annals of the Jesuit missionaries and of travellers show that besides the hideously painted or carved manitou or idols found at certain well-known places, the trees and rocks were decorated with the totem signs. The wolf, the bear, the tortoise, were the living creatures most frequently seen in effigy on tent, robes, or arms. Or they were set as their seal and sign-manual on the title-deeds of lands bartered away, which the white man required as proofs of sale and absolute alienation, though often the red man intended only joint occupancy. In the Iroquois Confederacy there were eight totem-clans, which formed an eight-fold bond of union in the great commonwealth. Less important symbols were the deer, serpent, beaver, stone pipe, etc. In their drawings on trees or rocks there were certain canons of art well understood and easily read. A canoe meant a journey by water; human figures without heads, so many scalps; the same holding a chain, as being in alliance and friendship; an axe, an emblem of war, etc. A rude fraternity, with secrets, signs, and ceremonies,—the freemasonry of the forest,—was also known and was powerful in its influence. In family life, inheritance was on the female side; and on many subjects the advice of the women was sought and taken, and as witness-auditors they were a necessity at solemn councils, as well as made the repository of tradition.

Exactly what the religion of the Indians was it would be hard to say. To arrange their fluctuating and hazy ideas into a system would be impossible. Whatever the real mental value of their words “manitou” and “wakan,” or other terms implying deity, or simply used to cover ignorance or express mystery, it is evident that the blind worship of force was the essence of their faith. Living much nearer to the animal creation than the civilized man, they were prone to recognize in the brute either a close kinship or an incarnation of divine power. Extremes meet. The current if not the final philosophy of the scientific mind in our century, and that of the savage, have many points in common. All animated life was linked together, but the red man saw the presence of the deity of his conception in every mysterious movement of animate or inanimate things. Even the rattlesnake was the bearer of bane or blessing according as it was treated. Alexander Henry, the traveller from Philadelphia, relates that on meeting a snake four or five feet long, which he would have killed, the Iroquois reverently called it “grandfather,” blew their tobacco smoke in puffs toward it to please the reptile, and prayed to it to influence Colonel Johnson “to take care of their families during their absence, to show them charity, and to fill their canoes with rum.” When, afterward, they were on the lake and a storm arose, Henry came very near being made a Jonah to appease the wrath of the rattlesnake-manitou, but fortunately the tempest passed and it cleared off.

The Indians invented the birch or elm bark canoe, the racket or snow-shoe, the moccasin, all of which the white frontiersmen were quick to utilize when they saw their value. They also taught the settlers the use of new kinds of food, and how to get it from the soil or the water. To tread out eels from the mud, catch fish with the hand or with fish-hooks of bone, and to till the ground, even in the forest, for maize, squashes and pumpkins, were lessons learned from the red man. Frontier and savage life had many points in common, and not a little Indian blood entered into the veins of Americans. There were hundreds of instances of women as well as men rescued from their supposed low estate as captives who preferred to remain with the Indians in savage life. Often white settlers were saved from death by starvation by friendly red men or half-breeds; while half the plots of the savages failed because of the warnings given by friendly squaws, or boys who were usually not full-blooded.

Great changes took place within the Iroquois Confederacy after the advent of the white man. His fire-arms, liquor, fences, and ideas at once began to modify Indian politics, hunting, social life, and religion. The unity of interests was broken, and division and secession set in, as steady currents, to weaken the forest republic. Large numbers of the Iroquois emigrated westward to live and hunt in Ohio and beyond, and joined the Ottawa confederacy. Others left in bands or groups, and made their homes in Pennsylvania, Virginia, or the Southwest, to get away, if possible, from the white man’s fences and fire-water. Others followed their religious teachers into Canada, and made settlements there. These losses were only in a measure made good by the addition to the Long House of a whole tribe from the South, the Tuscaroras, whose ancestral seats had been in the Carolinas.

North Carolina was one of the majority of the original thirteen States first settled by a variety of colonists,—French, German, Swiss, Scottish, and Irish, as well as English. At first red and white men lived at peace; but soon the inevitable “question” came, and the Indians imagined that they could show themselves superior to the pale-faces. Making what white historians call a “conspiracy,” but striking what they believed to be a blow for home and freedom, they rose, and in one night massacred in or near Roanoke alone one hundred and thirty-seven of the white settlers. Their murderous act at once drew out the vengeance of Governor Craven of South Carolina, who sent Col. John Barnwell, an Irishman, who marched with a regiment of six hundred whites and several hundred Indian allies. Without provision trains, but subsisting as Indians do in a wilderness unbroken by villages, farms, or clearings, Barnwell struck the Tuscaroras in battle, and reduced their numbers by the loss of three hundred warriors. Pursuing them to their fortified castle, he laid siege and compelled surrender. By successive blows, this “Tuscarora John,” by death or capture, destroyed one thousand fighting men, and compelled the remainder of the tribe to leave the graves of their fathers, and emigrate northward. Only a remnant reached New York. The Tuscaroras joined the Iroquois Confederacy in 1713, and the federated forest republic then took upon itself the style and title of the Six Nations.

Nearly a century afterward, when the Iroquois Confederacy was a dream, and the Southern Confederacy beginning to be woven of the same stuff, the descendant of “Tuscarora John,” who had added a new tribe to the Long House, gave at Montgomery, Alabama, the casting vote that made Jefferson Davis President of a new one in the many forms of federation on the North American continent. About the same time the great English historian, Freeman, neglecting for the nonce the distinction between history and prophecy, began his work on the “History of Federal Government, from the Achaian League to the Disruption of the United States of America,” only one volume of which was published, the events of 1863–1865 compelling the completion of the work to be indefinitely postponed.

How far the various attempts of the red man to combine in federal union for common strength or defence, and especially those in the stable political edifice in New York, were potent in aiding the formation of the American Commonwealth, is an interesting question worthy of careful study. That it was not without direct influence upon the minds of those constructive statesmen like Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Monroe, who came so numerously from States nearest the Long House, and most familiar with Iroquois politics, cannot be denied. The men of the English-speaking colonies which had been peopled from continental and insular Europe, were inheritors of classic culture. They naturally read the precedents furnished by Greece and Rome; but they were also powerfully affected by the living realities of the federal republics of Holland and Switzerland, as well as in the aristocratic republic of Venice, while in the one nearest England many of them were educated. It is not too much to affirm, however, that the power of this great example at home, on the soil and under their eyes, was as great in moulding opinion and consolidating thought in favour of a federal union of States, as were the distant exemplars of the ancient world, or in modern Europe. Though we give him no credit, and spurn the idea of political indebtedness to the red man, with almost the same intolerant fierceness that some of the latter-day New England Puritans deny obligations to the Dutch Republic that sheltered and educated their fathers, yet our government is in a measure copied from that of the forest republicans, whose political edifice and conquests shaped the history and civilization of this continent. In still retaining the sonorous names given to our mountains, valleys, and rivers, and in transferring these to our ships and men-of-war; in giving the effigy of the Indian a place on our municipal coats of arms and seals of State, we are proving that in our memory at least of the aboriginal dwellers on the soil they are not wholly forgotten. These graphic symbols are, indeed, but shadows; but beyond all shadow is substance.

While the white man’s gunpowder and bullets, war, diseases, fire-water, and trade wrought profound changes for better or worse, usually the latter, the Indians were not stolid or unreceptive to his religion. Both the Roman and the Reformed teachers won many disciples in the Long House. Almost as soon as the learned Domine Megapolensis arrived at Fort Orange, he began to learn the language of the Mohawks. He was soon able to preach to them and to teach their children. This was three years before John Eliot began his work in Massachusetts. The pastors at Schenectady did the same, translating portions of the Bible and of the liturgy of the Netherlands Reformed Church, and of the Book of Common Prayer. The missionary efforts of the Dutch Christians soon bore definite and practical results. The Reformed Church records show large numbers of Indians baptized or married or buried according to Christian rites. There are also frequent instances of adult communicant membership in the Mohawk, Hudson, Raritan, and Hackensack Valleys. Hundreds of Indian children were trained in the same catechetical instruction, and in the same classes with those of the whites. As a general rule, the Hollanders and other peoples from the Continent lived in kindness and peace with their red brethren. The occasional outbreaks of the savages in massacre, fire, and blood were not by those of New York, but from Canada. The Indians were set on like dogs by the French, who stimulated the thirst for blood by political and religious hatreds; and the English repaid in kind. Rarely was the peace broken between the people of New Netherlands and New York except by causes operative in, and coming from Europe.

The first Roman Catholic who entered the bounds of the State of New York was Isaac Jogues, who was captured by the Mohawks while ascending the St. Lawrence River. One of the sweetest spirits and noblest characters that ever glorified the flesh he dwelt in, Isaac Jogues was brought captive into the Mohawk Valley to be reserved for fiendish torture. Ransomed by Arendt Van Curler, and assisted to France by Domine Megapolensis, these three men of the Holy Catholic Church became ever after true friends. The surface discords of church names were lost in the deeper harmonies of their one faith and love to a common Saviour. Bressani was later assisted in like manner. Returning willingly, by way of Quebec, after his fingers, once chewed to shapeless lumps between the teeth of the Mohawks, had been kissed by nobles and ladies in the court at Versailles, Jogues reached, four years later (1647), the scene of his martyrdom and nameless burial. His severed head, mounted upon one of the palisades of the Indian castle, was set with its face to Canada, whence he came, in insult and defiance.

Nevertheless, the French Jesuit missionaries, with unquailing courage and fervent faith, persevered; and Poncet, Le Moyne, Fremin, Bruyas, and Pierron passed to and fro through Albany to continue the work in what they had already named as the Mission of the Martyrs. In 1667 St. Mary’s Chapel was established at the Indian village which stood on the site of Spraker’s Basin. In 1669 St. Peter’s Chapel was built of logs on the sand-flats at Caughnawaga near Fonda, by Boniface. Here in 1676 the Iroquois maiden Tegawita—the White Lily of the Mohawks, the now canonized saint—was baptized by James de Lamberville. From 1642 to 1684 was the golden age of early missions of the Roman form of the Christian faith in New York. Then it was abruptly brought to a close, not because of Indian animosity or Protestant opposition, but by the Roman Catholic Governor Dongan in the interests of British trade.

Perhaps this interruption was not wholly dictated by greed, but was strongly influenced by political interests. This fact must be noted. When Catharine Ganneaktena, an Erie Indian woman adopted into the Oneida tribe, was led to serious thought by Bruyas, to whom she taught the language in 1668, and with her Christian husband was persecuted by the pagans, the couple left for Montreal. Here she was baptized and confirmed by Bishop Laval. Instructed by Raffeix, who was somewhat of a statesman, Catharine invited several of her family in New York to Canada, and early in 1670 they founded the Indian village of La Prairie, where members of the Iroquois Confederacy might come to settle. According to the code of laws established in this Christian community, every one must renounce belief in dreams, polygamy, and drunkenness. This settlement was destined to be a powerful influence, not only in the Christianization of the Indians, but upon the politics of New York. In 1674, the wife of Kryn, “the great Mohawk,” who had conquered the Mohegans, became a Christian, and her husband abandoned her. Happening in his wanderings to visit the Christian village of La Prairie, Kryn was impressed with the peace and order reigning in it, and after a time became a Christian.

Returning to his home on the Mohawk, Kryn told what he had seen, and persuaded forty of his fellows from Caughnawaga (now Fonda, New York) to follow him. They reached La Prairie on Easter Sunday, 1676. From this time forth Kryn was an active missionary, on one occasion talking over a whole party of sixty Mohawks sent by Dongan on a raid against the French, and converting four of them to Christianity. He also persuaded the Oneidas and Onondagas to keep peace with the French, and in this was aided by the remarkable influence of Garakonthie, the Christian protector of “the black coats.” It was Kryn who led, and it was these “praying Indians” from Canada who with the French were sent by Frontenac to destroy Schenectady in 1690; and it was he who just before the attack harangued them to the highest pitch of fury. His especial pretext for revenge was the murder of sixty Canadian Indians by the Iroquois about six months previously.

For many years La Prairie was the gathering-place of seceders from the confederacy who had adopted the religion of their French teachers. In 1763 the village had three hundred fighting men; during the Revolution the number increased, and at present the Indian reservation at Caughnawaga, about twenty miles from Montreal, contains about thirteen hundred Roman Catholic Indians. These facts explain why the Mohawks and others of the confederacy had so many relatives fighting for the French, and why the political situation in New York, until the fall of French dominion, was so complex. As a rule, the Iroquois preferred the more sensuous religion of the French, while eager also for the strouds, duffels, guns, and blankets of the Dutch. Under Gallic and British influences, their hearts were as often divided as their heads were distracted. They were like tourists from Dover to Calais, when in the choppy seas which seethe between the coasts of England, France, and Holland.

In 1684 Jean de Lamberville, the last Jesuit settler in New York among the Iroquois, departed for Canada amid the lamentations of the Onondagas who escorted him. In a few generations all traces of the work of the French missionaries had vanished from the Mohawk Valley. In our days, when under the farmer’s plough or labourer’s pickaxe, the earth casts out her dead, the copper rings with the sign of the cross tell the touching story of the Indian maiden’s faith. Under the eloquent pen of John Gilmary Shea the thrilling story of labour and martyrdom glows. The Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs at Auriesville shows that even modern piety can find fresh stimulus in recalling the events which have made the Mohawk Valley classic ground to devout pilgrims as well as to the scholar and patriot.

For over a century—from 1664 until 1783—the diplomatic, military, and eleemosynary operations of British agents and armies among the Iroquois were actively carried on. These were prolonged and costly, and had much to do with making the enormous public debt of England, still unpaid. The effect was to affect powerfully the imagination of the British public. It was not merely the fiction of Cooper which created the tendency of the Englishman just landed at Castle Garden to look for painted and feathered Indians on Broadway. The author of “Leatherstocking” did but stimulate the imagination already fed by the narratives of returned veterans. Thousands of soldiers, who had heard the war-whoop in forest battles, told their stories at British hearthstones until well into this century. They, with Cooper, are responsible for the idea that forests grow in Philadelphia. The fear still possessing English children that American visitors, even of unmixed European blood, may turn red or black, is one prompted by tradition as well as by literary fiction.

CHAPTER IV.
THE STRUGGLE FOR A CONTINENT.

For the possession of the North American continent two nations, France and England, representing the two civilizations, Roman and Teutonic, which dominate respectively Southern and Northern Europe, contended. France, in America, embodied the Roman or more ancient type of civilization, in which government and order were represented by the priest and the soldier, while the people had little or nothing to do with the government, except to obey. External authority was everything; inward condition, little or nothing. The French system was not that of real colonization, but of military possession; and the desired form of social and political order was that based on monarchy and feudalism. In the despotism of a Church subordinate to a ruler in Italy, and of a State represented by a monarch, the individual was lost, and the people’s function was simply to submit and pay taxes. They were taught to look upon their privileges and enjoyments as the gifts of the sovereign and of the Church. Authority emanated from the government, which represented God, and represented Him infallibly.

The English colonists, whose leaders had been largely trained in the Dutch Republic, represented the best elements of Teutonic civilization, those of English blood being more English than the Englishmen left behind, and more Teutonic than the Germans. Most of the principles and institutions wrought out in the experience of the colonists, especially those now seen to be most peculiarly American, were not of British, but of continental origin. New England was settled mostly by immigrants who had left England before 1640; and nearly all their leaders had come by way of Holland, receiving their political and military education in the United States of Holland, and under its red, white, and blue flag.

The strong hereditary instincts of Germanic freedom were best represented in the seventeenth century by the Hollanders, who in the little republic had long lived under democratic institutions. Nearly all the leading men who settled New England had come to America after a longer or shorter stay in Holland, where they imbibed the republican ideas which they transported as good seed to America. The Pilgrims, who were the first settlers of Massachusetts; many of the Puritans who came later to Boston and Salem; the leaders of the Connecticut Colony,—Hooker, Davenport, and many of their company,—had all been in Holland. The military commanders—Miles Standish, John Smith, Samuel Argall, Lyon Gardiner, Governor Dudley, and others—had been trained in the Dutch armies. Thus it came to pass that while the makers of New England were English in blood and language, their peculiar institutions were not of England, but directly borrowed from the one republic of Northern Europe.

The Middle States were all settled under the Netherlands influences. Even in New York, where through the patroon system semi-feudal institutions very much like those of aristocratic England had begun, the innate love of liberty in the people ultimately broke through these as a seed through its shell. The full growth was the typical American State of New York, whose constitution possessed more of the features of the National Constitution of 1787 than any other of the original thirteen States. Feudalism and its ideas were thus for the most part left behind or soon outgrown. The Church, even when united with the State, as was the case in some of the colonies, was of democratic form. The system of landholding and registry, the town-meeting, and the written and secret ballot,—all Germanic ideas,—with many customs and practical political ideas brought from Holland, made the people free, developed the individual man, and gave the colonies a reserve of strength and endurance impossible in Canada.

In their plan of strategy, the French idea was to limit the English domain within and east of the Alleghany Mountains by a chain of forts stretching from Quebec along the Great Lakes, down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans. This was a scheme of magnificent distances, involving enormous energy and expense, especially while the English held the seacoast and bases of supplies. It was evident that for any hope of success in their mighty territorial scheme the aborigines must be secured as allies. In this work the priest could do more than the soldier. Hence the zeal and energy of the spiritual orders were invoked, and put under tribute to the grand design of Gallicizing America.

On the other hand, to overcome the plans of the French, there must be that which could neutralize the wiles of the Jesuit as well as the ability of the soldier. In every war between France and England, Americans must bear a part; and until the ultimate question should have been decided, the Indian held, on this continent, the balance of power. Neutrality to red or white man was impossible. The spring, the dominating idea of diplomacy and war in Europe was this doctrine of the balance of power; but in America it was less a speculative notion than a practical reality. The American Indian would be the decisive element until one or other of the two nations and civilizations became paramount.

A fresh disturbance of this doctrinal stability in European politics occurring near the middle of the eighteenth century, at once caused the scales to oscillate in America, gave the French the first advantage, and compelled William Johnson to follow up Van Curler’s work, and to be the most active agent and influence among the Mohawks which had been felt since the death of “Brother Corlaer.” This series of episodes is called in Europe “The War of the Austrian Succession.” It was begun by Frederick the Great of Prussia, against Maria Theresa of Austria. In America it is known in history as the “Old French War.”

The “Old” French War (not that of 1753) was declared by Louis XV., March 15, 1744. The news was known all along the Canada borders by the end of April. The tidings travelled more slowly in the English language; and it was the middle of May, after the French had attacked the English garrison at Canso and compelled it to surrender, before the startling facts aroused the colonies. Already the Indian hatchets had been sharpened, and the plan of raid and slaughter well made, when the governor of New York, relying on the Indians as the great breakwater against the waves of Canadian invasion, called a council of the chiefs of the confederated Six Nations at Albany, which met June 18, 1744.

The settlers soon found that, in this as in previous wars, the French and Canadian Indians were the more aggressive party, while the military authorities of New York relied on a defensive policy. The governor, George Clinton,—not the ancestor of the Clintons in the United States, but the sixth son of the Earl of Lincoln,—had arrived in September, 1743. He was an old sea-dog, an ex-admiral, who knew as much about civil government as one of his powder-monkeys on shipboard. It seemed to be the policy of the British Government to send over decayed functionaries and politicians who were favourites at court, but in every way unfitted for the great problems of state in the complex community whose borders were on Canada, where French power was intrenched. Too many of these nominees of the Crown considered it to be their first duty to build up their private fortune. Nevertheless, it was Clinton—who had probably been influenced by his fellow-sailor, Captain Warren—who summoned William Johnson, the trader, into public life.

Despite the superiority of the British fleet, the French moved more quickly, and were first in America with reinforcements. The open water-way from Canada into the heart of New York was the military nerve of the continent. It made the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys the objective point of the French invaders. The war, though not yet declared, was to last five years, and, as we shall see, developed all the inherent energies of Johnson, the young Irishman, who had already shown powers of leadership. The military policy of the French was to keep the English frontier in a state of ceaseless alarm, by small parties of stealthy savages striking their blows unexpectedly all along the line from Oswego to Hoosic. The story of the numberless petty raids is well told in Drake’s “Particular History;” but in some cases the details are now extant only in written accounts found in the Johnson papers, in church records, in family Bibles, and on tombstones in Mohawk Valley and in New England.

Johnson soon found himself where the Robinson Crusoe of poetry wished to be,—“in the midst of alarms;” but his temper rose into the heights of unshakable calm as the dangers increased. Invited, with his wife and three infant children, to come and live in Albany till the war was over, he declined, and remained at Mount Johnson, losing no opportunity to win, to keep, and to increase his influence over the Iroquois. His abilities and power were, as we have seen, brought to the notice of the new governor, indirectly through his uncle, but immediately through the introduction of Chief Justice De Lancey, a brother of his uncle’s wife. In the month of April, 1745, William Johnson received a commission as one of the justices of the peace in the county of Albany, which then extended from Coeymans to Herkimer.

At this point the strictly private life of Johnson ended, and his political career began. The situation of Mount Johnson was within easy reach of all important places in the province which were likely to be the seat of war. An easy day’s ride on horseback would bring him to Albany, whence, by either land or water, the country was opened northward to Crown Point, or southward to New York. Thence, over a cross route by way of Saratoga Springs, a strong man well mounted could, by hard riding, reach Mount Johnson from the foot of Lake George in a day and part of a night. Westward also, by river or land route, there was easy access to all the tribes of the Long House and to all the Mohawk Valley settlements.

Johnson’s uncle, Captain Warren, had by the capture of a privateer distinguished himself at sea, and receiving promotion to the grade of Commodore, was ordered to command the naval forces for the reduction of Louisburg. By his energy and ability strict blockade was maintained while the American citizen soldiery under Pepperell tightened the coils of investment. When the “Vigilante,” a French frigate laden with reinforcements in men and provisions, had been decoyed and captured, the fortress was surrendered. Warren became an admiral; and Pepperell, a merchant like Johnson, was made a baronet,—the former one day, the latter one month, after receipt of the news in England.

Chronology was in this case a key to English jealousy of the colonists, whose growing strength and republicanism monarchical Britain feared. The joy of the Americans was excessive. It culminated in Boston, where “Louisburg Square” still preserves the name. The gladness on this side of the Atlantic equalled the astonishment, flavoured with jealousy, which fell upon Europe. One would have thought that it would salt wholesomely the inborn contempt which the regular officers of the king’s troops felt toward provincial fighters, but it did not; and Braddock, Loudon, Abercrombie, and their foolish imitators were yet numerously to come. Indeed, this success of provincial Americans induced a jealousy that was to rankle for a generation or more in British breasts, to the serious disadvantage of both Great Britain and the colonies, as we shall soon see.

Meanwhile, Indian affairs were in a critical condition, and the signs of danger on the frontier were ominous. For reasons not here to be analyzed, there were bad feelings between the Iroquois and the Albany people. Rumours of the purpose of the English to destroy the Indians were diligently kept in circulation by both lay and clerical Frenchmen. Those who wore canonicals and those who wore regimentals were equally industrious in fomenting dissatisfaction. The uneasiness of the Mohawks was so great that they sent several chiefs to confer with their brethren, the Caughnawaga Indians, in Canada. It was generally believed that the French would attack Oswego. There is also evidence that attempts were made to kidnap Johnson, against whom, as a relative of Admiral Warren, as one of the captors of Louisburg, and as the man who especially influenced the Iroquois in favour of the English, the French had an especial grudge. It was known that from the fort at Crown Point scalping parties issued at intervals; but mere rumours turned into genuine history when Longmeadow, Massachusetts, was attacked and burned by French Indians. On Nov. 17, 1745, the poorly fortified Dutch village of Saratoga on the Hudson was attacked by an overwhelming force of over six hundred French and Indians. After easy victory the place was given over to the torch, and the sickening story of the massacre of Schenectady was repeated.

In French civilization the priest and the soldier always go together. They are the two necessary figures, whether in Corea, Africa, Cochin China, or Canada. The soldier, Marin, was in this case led by the priest, Picquet. Besides the massacre, in which thirty persons were killed and scalped, sixty were made prisoners; and the whole fertile farming country, blooming with the flower and fruit of industry, was desolated for many miles. Many of the captives were negroes, and a majority of the whole number died of disease in the prisons of Quebec. One of the best accounts of this massacre—meagre in details—is contained in a letter to Mr. Johnson from Mr. Sanders, of Albany. It was nine days after this event that Johnson received the urgent letter inviting him to move for safety to Albany.

A line of fire and blood, ashes and blackness, was now being drawn from Springfield to Niagara. All men were under arms, and each was called to watch every third night. No house was safe, except palisaded or built of logs for defence. The forts were repaired and garrisoned. The bullet moulds were kept hot, and extra flints, ramrods, and ammunition laid out all ready, while weary sentinels strained ear and eye through each long, dark night.

Out from the gateway of Crown Point, like centrifugal whirlwinds of fire, swept bands of savages, who swooped down on the settlements. Almost under the shadow of the palisades of Albany, Schenectady, and the villages along the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys, men were shot and their scalps taken to decorate Canadian wigwams. The little “God’s Acre” in every settlement on the Mohawk began to fatten with victims who had died out of their beds. Perhaps none of these ancient sleeping-places has been reverently emptied in order to consign their memorials of once active life to more enduring public honour in the modern cemeteries, but the number of perforated skulls surprises the beholder. In these mute witnesses to the disquiet of the past, he reads the story of ancestral danger and suffering. The devout frontiersman made his way to church on the Lord’s Day with his loaded gun on his shoulder, its flint well picked and its pan well primed. He took his seat at the end of the pew, only after sentinels had been posted and arms made ready for instant use. Slight wonder was it that the effects of all-night vigils, and the unusual posture of repose in a pew, rather than the length of the Domine’s sermon, induced sleep even in meeting.

Most of the churches were loop-holed for defence, and even in the few old houses occasionally found with projecting second floor, we see an interesting survival of the old days, when from both church and dwelling a line of gun-barrels might at any hour decorate the eaves with gargoyles spouting fire and death. Away from the villages, the farmers, building a block-house on some commanding hill, and if possible over a well or spring, kept a sentinel on the roof while they laboured in the fields. Horn in hand, the watcher surveyed the wide stretches of valley, or scrutinized the edges of the clearing, to give warning of the approach of skulking red or white murderers. Yet human nerves would weary, and after constant strain for months with no near sign of danger, vigilance would often relax at the very moment when the enemy opened fire and raised his yell. Men would laugh to-day at warnings, while, perhaps, the boys in play would set up mock sentinels at the gateways, who on the morrow would be scalped or be bound and on their way to Canada.

The twofold plan of campaign decided on in England was the old one first formulated by Leisler in 1690, looking to the invasion and subjugation of Canada, attempted again in 1711, when a German regiment in New York was raised for the purpose, and which was frustrated by the disaster to the British fleet. The land and naval forces of New and Old England were now to make rendezvous at Louisburg, and move up the St. Lawrence to Quebec, while the provincial militia of the middle and lower colonies, combined with the Iroquois if possible, should capture the French fort, St. Frederick, at Crown Point, and the city of Montreal.

The disastrous inaction of King George and the London lords, arising probably from jealousy of the provincials, and the rumours of a great French fleet under D’Anville to be sent against New England, caused the abandonment of the expedition to Quebec. This, however, was not known by submarine electric cable; and meantime New York politics, at which we must now glance, had become interesting.

Two friends, the Chief-Justice De Lancey and Governor Clinton, quarrelled over their cups at a convivial gathering, and this took place just after the latter had renewed the former’s commission for life. Happening, too, on the eve of the great council of the Six Nations, which Clinton had summoned at Albany, just when that town was pestiferous with small-pox and bilious fever, the outlook for successful negotiations was not very promising. Messrs. Rutherford, Livingston, and Dr. Cadwallader Colden were the only members of his council who came with Clinton, while of the expected Indians only three had arrived. These, for the two scalps with the blood hardly dried on the hair, were rewarded with strouds and laced coats, and sent to drum up recruits, while the governor waited a month for the tardy, suspicious, and sullen savages to appear before him.

Matters looked dark indeed. Yet when Mohawk runners, despatched by Johnson on a scouting expedition to Crown Point, arrived, bringing news of French preparations for a descent upon Schenectady and the Valley, and possibly upon Albany, the governor was unable to see the imminent danger. He still waited; he still believed wholly in the defensive policy, and seemed satisfied, because for the fort on the Hudson at Saratoga, now Easton, a sum equal to about eight hundred dollars had been voted by the Assembly. This sum enabled the colonial engineers to build a palisade one hundred and fifty feet long, with six redoubts for barracks, all of timber, and to mount on platforms twelve cannon of six, twelve, and eighteen pound calibre. In this way the summer was wasted in waiting; for the Indians came not, and Clinton’s ambition to be a powerful diplomatist with the Indians was for the present baffled.

Believing this was a matter between French and English alone, strongly inclining to neutrality, and diligently persuaded thereto by the French Jesuits, the Iroquois sulked at home. Not only did they flatly refuse to meet the governor, but some of the chiefs went openly over to the French.

Meanwhile the white settlers were, according to Johnson’s report, abandoning their farms along the Mohawk, and concentrating in the block-houses or palisaded towns. Besides having sent Indian scouts to the Champlain country, Johnson wrote urgent letters to Clinton stating the case, and asking him to open his eyes to the facts. To protect Johnson’s stores of eleven thousand bushels of grain, while standing his ground, the governor sent a lieutenant and thirty men. Another militia company was despatched to the upper Mohawk Castle. Having done these things, Clinton, who had as early as the 4th of August officially notified Governor Shirley of Massachusetts that he would proceed against Crown Point with the warriors of the Five Nations, was at his wits’ end. He had alienated Colonel Schuyler and the members of the Board of Indian Commissioners, mostly faithful and trusted men well known in the provinces. In the quarrel of the governor with De Lancey, these ranged themselves on the side of the chief justice.

It is too clumsy an attempt at explanation of the difficulty between the king’s agent, Clinton, and the Board of Indian Commissioners, to ascribe the causes chiefly or entirely to the “rascality” of the commissioners, who “abused their office for private peculation,” or to the ambition of De Lancey. It is not necessary in one who appreciates the great abilities of Johnson to describe him as a white lily of honesty and purity. English authors, the Tory historians of the Revolution, and the prejudiced writers of American history, who reflect their own narrowness and sectional views, take delight in maligning the character of the men of colonial New York simply because they were Dutch. As matter of unsentimental fact, there is much to be said on both sides. The people of New York were not anxious to send the Indians on the war-path, nor to furnish white soldiers to guard their squaws and pappooses while they were away from their villages. They were not at all persuaded of the superior honesty either of the governor or his advisers and appointees. The greater facts are also clear, that the New York Assembly was vigilantly jealous of the people’s liberties, and was determined at all hazards to limit the royal prerogative as far as possible. Since his quarrel with De Lancey, the governor had shown excessive zeal in maintaining the rights of the king. On the other hand, most of the steps necessary to make New York an independent state had, as the British Attorney-General Bradley declared, already been taken by his Assembly, which of twenty-seven members had fourteen of Dutch descent. These men were determined to teach the king’s agent that he must bow to the will of the people, who were more important than king and court, and make no advance in monarchical ideas. They saw that the governor was under the close personal influence of Cadwallader Colden, a radical Tory, who they suspected prepared most of Clinton’s State papers; and they set themselves in array against this intermeddler on royalty’s behalf. Again the petty jealousy which burned steadily in all the colonies made these Dutchmen enjoy paying back the New Englanders in their own coin some of the slights and insults of the past. The former had long looked down in contempt on the settlers of New Amsterdam, and their sons now repaid them in kind, and were on the whole rather glad to snub Shirley and to annoy Clinton for so deferring to the wishes of the latter. Clinton seemed lacking in tact, and was unable to conciliate the members of the Board of Indian Commissioners, who one and all, led by Schuyler, resigned.

In a word, Clinton had begun his administration by trying to bully and drive the Dutchmen. Now, those who know the men of this branch of the Teutonic race have always found by experience that when their hearts are won they are easily led. All attempts to drive them, however, usually result as Alva’s and Philip’s plans resulted in the Netherlands, where three hundred thousand Spaniards were buried; or as in South Africa, where Dutch boers hold their own against British aggression. It took Clinton some years to learn the lesson, but it was the same experience of failure and retreat.

At his wits’ end, Governor Clinton turned to the man for the hour. William Johnson was offered the appointment of Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and at once accepted. Thus, at thirty-one years, opened in full promise the splendid career of the Irish adventurer.

While no man in the province or continent comprehended more clearly the gravity of the situation, no one better understood all the elements in the case, the ground of faith in the immediate improvement of affairs, and the ultimate supremacy of the British cause. Johnson was a man of continental ideas. Without losing an instant of time he at once set himself to the task of getting hold of the chief men of the Six Nations. He first sent wampum belts to the Pennsylvanian Indians and the Esopus tribe, asking their co-operation with the Albany Council. He put on Indian dress, and for weeks gave himself up to their pastimes. Sparing not paint, grease, ochre, feathers, games, or councils, he arrayed himself as one of their own braves. He encouraged them to get up war-dances, in order to excite their martial spirit. He was speedily successful in turning the tide of opinion in one whole canton of the Confederacy in favour of attending the Albany Convention.

It was probably about this time that Johnson was formally adopted into the Mohawk tribe, made a chief, and received that name which was ever afterward his Indian title. This habit of the Iroquois, of especially and significantly naming prominent personages, is still in vogue. When some Dakota Indians visited Boston in 1889, after seeing Charlestown and Bunker Hill Monument, they called on Governor Brackett, and named him the “Great Rock in the Clouds.”

The title which the Mohawks gave their new white chief and leader in 1746, was, according to the anarchic and unscientific spelling of the time, War-ragh-i-yah-gey. The term may be translated “Chief Director of Affairs.” It may with economy of vocables be spelled Wa-ra-i-ya-gé.

Other matters contributed to this success, and utilized the work of others. Conrad Weiser, the Pennsylvanian German interpreter, had been recently among the tribes as far as Ohio, influencing them in favour of the English. A happy accident—the coming of a delegation of Chickasaws from the West and South to invade Canada, and to invite the Senecas to take part and pilot them—awoke this most western division of the Iroquois Confederacy to the importance of the accession. The simultaneous offers of alliance and aid by other scattered tribes led to a complete change of views. In a word, the Senecas resolved to sit at the Albany caucus. With the tribes at each end, the west and the east of the Long House, thus in substantial accord, Johnson directed the Mohawks to send out runners to the whole confederation. Thus the work of winning over the other few tribes, at least so far as attendance at Albany was concerned, proved to be comparatively easy.

Even the feuds and quarrels which at the time divided the Long House seemed to work for Johnson’s fame and the English cause. For some reason in Iroquois politics, occult to a white man, the house was divided against itself: the Senecas, Onondagas, and Mohawks composed one great faction; the Oneidas, Cayugas, and Tuscaroras formed the other and weaker. The latter tribe from the Carolinas, which had joined the Confederacy a generation before, in 1712, were far from being won over so as to take up arms for the English. When the fighting braves and counselling old men came to pow-wow with the large faction, the first thing done by them was to give the Mohawks, especially, a vigorous scolding for having acted so presumptuously and independently without taking council of the whole Confederacy. After lively debate and rejoinder, it was agreed by all to go to Albany, but with the river between the factions on their journey. So, along the banks of the Mohawk the delegates of the Confederacy marched as far as Schenectady, when quitting the river, the trail across country and to Norman’s Kill was followed. All but three of the Mohawk chiefs had been won to the English side. Of these, two of the Bear-totem clan lived at the upper castle at Canajoharie, and the third of the Tortoise-totem clan at the lower castle on the hill near Schoharie Creek. These dignitaries were finally persuaded by Rev. Mr. Barclay, then living among the Mohawks, and the famous Dr. Cadwallader Colden, who knew the Indians well, and later became the historian of the Six Nations.

It was a decisive moment in the history of America when on the 8th of August, 1746, the two rival divisions marched down old Patroon Street, the Clinton Avenue of to-day, and into State Street to Fort Frederick. Leading the Mohawk band in all the paraphernalia of Indian dress and decoration, with abundant ochre and plumes, was the pale-faced man, Johnson, who could whoop, yell, leap, dance, run, wrestle, play racket, and eat dog-hash—drawing the line at the cannibal feast,—with the best champions in any of the six tribes. The double column moved past Fort Frederick, where now stands the Episcopal Church, the Indians firing their guns and the fort its ordnance. Then the gates of the sallyport swung open, and in the largest room of the fort the red men squatted and were served with food.

CHAPTER V.
A CHAPTER IN THE STORY OF LIBERTY.

When the conference opened, August 19, Dr. Cadwallader took the place of Governor Clinton, who was down with fever. The two delegates from Massachusetts, Mr. Nelles and Colonel Wendell, were also present, but none from Connecticut appeared. Colden’s speech was a bubble of rhetoric, fairly dazzling with the prismatics of a lively imagination. It rehearsed facts, fancies, and prophecies appropriate to the situation. The colossal but purely mythical preparations supposed to be made in Great Britain, in the reality of which the sailor-governor himself heartily believed, were duly set forth. Then the wrongs suffered by the Indians at the hands of the “perfidious” French were detailed, until the braves were stirred in eye and nostril, and the chiefs grunted out, “Yo-hay! yo-hay!” (“Do you hear! do you believe!”), and general applause in Indian fashion followed as the interpreter finished each sentence. The war spirit was further roused by flatteries which fell like oil on the flames, kindling the fiercest enthusiasm. After the usual promises of gifts and equipment, with assurance of reward and booty in the future, the orator wound up by narrating the murder of some white men, their brothers, even since their arrival in Albany, and calling upon his hearers for immediate and permanent revenge.

Taking it all in all, this speech of Clinton and Colden’s is a fair sample of the lies, false promises, and irresponsible assertions on which the red man has been fed, from the first coming of the whites, to the battle with the Sioux, near Pine Ridge Agency, in January, 1891. The proper peroration of the speech, according to Indian etiquette, was the casting down of a wampum war-belt with verbal assurances and in symbolic intent that the British would live and die with their brethren the Iroquois. When this was done, a war-whoop was raised that must have been heard in every cabin and iron-monogrammed brick-house in the colony and manor.

On that very day, as was soon afterward learned, the French were at Fort Massachusetts,[^[5]] which had been built by Col. Ephraim Williams. It stood in the meadows east of Williamstown, under the shadow of old Greylock, beyond the present town of North Adams. After two days’ siege the brave garrison surrendered and were led away to Canada. The French lost forty-seven men. The fort was afterward, in 1747, rebuilt, and was the scene of more than one attack by the enemy.

The council-fire was then raked up, so that the braves might have time to sleep, smoke, and deliberate for reply. When the council re-opened on the 24th, the governor was present, and the first orator at the rekindled fire was an Onondaga chief. After the usual efflorescence of forest rhetoric, he promised in the name of the Seven Nations—a small army of eight hundred braves from Detroit and the Lake country, the Missesagues, having temporarily joined the confederates for the common purpose—to dig up the hatchet against the French and their allies. They further agreed to roast alive any French priest who came among them. The next day was devoted to distributing the presents sent from the king and the governors of Virginia and Massachusetts; the new tribe, Missesagues, receiving one fourth. On the 26th the kettle was hung over the fire, and a great war-dance held, in which, after unusual smearings of paint, the weird, wild, and guttural, but pathetic songs were sung. After a few private interviews with the chiefs, and further tickling of their palms with presents and their stomachs with fire-water, the council-fire was put out by separation and scattering. Part of the Valley Indians remained in Albany, in token of their loyalty to the English, while most of them returned to their castles to organize war-parties. Unfortunately an epidemic of the small-pox broke out at this time all along the Valley, carrying off hundreds of the Indians, among whom were the two delegates from the Missesagues.

Other councils were held with lesser bodies of Indians; and Johnson, despite the raging of the small-pox among the Valley Indians, endeavoured to keep the savages on the war-path toward Canada; but little was accomplished during the summer. While the coming French fleet was destroyed by storm, Johnson increased his fortune by being appointed government contractor for Oswego, and his fame by being commissioned by Clinton as Colonel of militia. The only campaign in 1747 was one of paper and ink, Shirley and Clinton being the chief combatants. There were also raids and fights on the New England borders, but little took place that needs to be chronicled here. Clinton and De Lancey kept up their quarrels; the former warning Johnson of his illustrious relative, venting his wrath on the Dutch legislators, and taking high-handed vengeance on Judge Daniel Horsmanden. This champion of the Assembly and people, and one of the ablest jurists in the province, was most obnoxious, politically, to the king’s representatives. He was also personally offensive as being the co-worker with Chief-Justice De Lancey.

On the 12th of September Horsmanden was suspended from service as a member of the council. The fact was published in the journal; but no reason was given for this, except that the governor announced that he would explain his action to the king. Horsmanden was also removed from his other positions,—as commissioner to meet the representatives of the other colonies, and as judge and recorder of the city. This act of the governor’s still further irritated the “stubborn Dutchmen,” whose hostility now turned into a war to the knife. Even though savages were ravaging the suburbs of New York, it is doubtful whether they would have been turned from their determination to fight absolutism, in the person of Clinton. When the governor announced the return of Johnson from his fruitless search after the enemy at Crown Point, the temper of the Assembly was not improved. They were tired of having the praises of Johnson sounded in their ears. They still refused, in the face of Johnson’s contract, while still in force, to furnish extra guards for the fulfilment of his stipulation in provisioning Oswego. They also adhered to their determination not to yield to the governor’s demands, so long as he thwarted their purposes. In affirming their former resolutions, they, nevertheless, offered to indemnify Johnson if through accident he became a loser by fulfilling his contract.

Meanwhile, the governor held counsel with the New England commissioners, and despite the remonstrances of the members, bluffed off his little Parliament until October 5. The frontier was still exposed. It was hard to get volunteers for Oswego, largely owing to the abominable drunkenness of the officers there, and the lack of good discipline. Two companies from Colonel Schuyler’s regiment were therefore drafted for the purpose. It being practically impossible to maintain the weak force at Saratoga, this post, which had been named Fort Clinton, was burned by order, and the ordnance and stores removed to Albany. In this unpleasant state of affairs Colonel Johnson was summoned to New York, and on October 9 was examined by the committee of the Executive Council. He exposed the grave state of affairs, in that the Indians had been kept from hunting for a whole year, and were now destitute. Unless something were speedily done, he felt he must abandon Mount Johnson and his interests in the Mohawk Valley. He even imagined that his leaving would be the general signal for an exodus of all the white people from the Mohawk basin. He recommended the erection of forts both in the Seneca and the Oneida districts. He believed that these measures, with plenty of presents, and the ferreting out of the miscellaneous rumsellers who debauched the Indians, would make safe the northern frontier and save the colony.

Clinton’s message to the Assembly, October 6, was presented with high praises of Johnson, a vindication of himself, and an exhortation to act promptly and liberally, as the Iroquois sachems were waiting with Johnson in the city to see what would be done in their behalf. The conquest of Crown Point was still in view; and men, money, and supplies were asked for. It was intimated that the Crown (the mother country) had already done its full part, and that the colonies should now do theirs.

Still the Assemblymen, who thought the Indians ought to have been allowed to go on their hunting, ought to have been kept friendly, but not stirred up to fight the French or be sent to Canada, and ought to have stayed in New York to guard their own old men and squaws instead of having white men drafted to do it, distrusted the servant of the king and the tool of Colden, and doubted the fitness of the governor’s appointees to office. They questioned the wisdom of the governor’s general policy; and they intimated, with only too good reason, that the money so freely distributed for the Indians was not properly and publicly accounted for. They voted promptly all that was necessary for the expedition against Canada. They fully realized the necessity of holding firm the loyalty of the Six Nations; and to keep it, they offered at once to vote the sum of eight hundred pounds, provided the persons chosen to distribute the people’s money were such as they approved of. In regard to the forts on the distant frontier, so near Canada, they considered that the other colonies should share the expense of permanently guarding the king’s dominions.

In answer to these defiant resolutions, which practically impeached the governor, Clinton sent a curt and insulting note of less than one hundred words. The Dutchman’s ire now blazed fiercely. After the significant ceremony of locking the door and laying the key on the table, they proceeded to issue a manifesto, marshalling in review the whole proceedings since June 6, 1746. They censured him for removing the former commissioners of Indian affairs, and for practically making Dr. Colden the real administrator of affairs in the cabinet, and Colonel Johnson in the field. They sneered at the pretensions and vanity of the governor in his constant boasting of what he claimed to have done. They charged him with treating the people of the colony with contempt, and with insulting them by vile epithets. They complained of the many brief and inconvenient adjournments to which he had needlessly subjected them. Especially were they enraged in their feelings at the deference paid, at their expense, to the commissioners from Massachusetts and Connecticut. They claimed that they ought to have been kept in session, in order that they might have been advised with, and their opinions consulted from time to time as to the matters under consideration.

In this last point, especially, the Dutch blood was roused; for although in monarchical England the power of making treaties is vested in the sovereign, yet in the Dutch Republic, then a living reality before their eyes, the States-General, like the United States Senate, shared with the Stadtholder or President the right of treaty-making, and had the power of veto upon all compacts. Even in Great Britain, the exercise of the treaty-making power by the king was subject to parliamentary censure, and ministers negotiating a disadvantageous treaty were liable to impeachment. This right had been several times exercised in the sixteenth and even in the fifteenth century.

The address wound up by this declaration: “No treatment your Excellency can use toward us, no inconveniences how great soever that we may suffer in our own persons, shall ever prevail upon us to abandon, or deter us from steadily preserving the interest of our country.”

A committee waited upon the governor on the 9th of October, to present the address; but the angry executive would not hear it, nor receive a copy, and three days later replied with all the artillery of rhetoric and abuse which he and his secretary were able to load into the document. It was as full of vituperation as a carronade of later day was of langrage shot. As to their complaint that the money intended for Indian presents was not honestly distributed, he charged the House with telling “as bold a falsehood as ever came from a body of men.” He was in no way accountable to the Assembly for the manner in which he distributed the money of the Crown. He charged them with violating both the civil and military prerogatives of the king. “Nor will I,” he said, “give up the least branch of it [the military prerogative] on any consideration, however desirous you may be to have it, or to bear the whole command.” He also asserted, with some attempt at humour, that their farce of locking the door and placing the key upon the table—a symbolic act charging breach of privilege upon the executive—was a high insult to King George’s authority, and in so far, an act of disloyalty. He charged that they were assuming the rights and privileges of the House of Commons, and renouncing their subjection to the Crown and Parliament. He had his Majesty’s express command not to suffer them to bring some matters into the House, nor to debate upon them; and he intimated that he had a right to stop proceedings when they seemed to him improper or disorderly. After a tirade upon their insolence and unbecoming conduct, his peroration was a warning not to infringe upon the royal prerogative.

Safety-valves having thus been opened through the ink-bottles, the war of words ceased, and both governor and legislators proceeded to diligence in business. In expectation that Massachusetts and Connecticut would bear their quota of expense, the governor was requested, October 15, to carry out his plan of sending gunsmiths and other mechanics to live among and assist the tribes of the Confederacy westward of the Mohawks. Four days after, however, news came from England ordering the disbanding of all the levies for the expedition to Canada. This was disheartening alike to the governors and the people of the colonies; but some compromise measures were amicably agreed upon between Clinton and the Assembly.

Peace, in New York City at least, seemed almost at hand, when Clinton again attempted folly in trying to muzzle the press. The Assembly had ordered Parker, the public printer, to publish the address and remonstrance of the Assembly, in which they asserted the rights of the people. The governor commanded him to desist. Parker stood by the people and their Assembly, as against the king and his foolish governor. After Cosby’s ignominious failure to restrain the liberty of the press by imprisoning Zenger, this act of Clinton’s seemed like that of a madman or a man who had no memory. The Assembly ordered Parker to print their manifests, and to furnish each member with two copies, “that their constituents might know it was their firm resolution to preserve the liberty of the press.”

In a word, all this wrangle between colonial governor and Assembly was really the cause of popular liberty against monarchy, of ordered freedom under law against despotism. It was part of the chequered story of liberty, in which the people of New York were in no whit behind those of any of the colonies, but rather led them. Clinton, by his blunders, and Colden, by his toryism, helped grandly forward the American revolution, while the names of Parker and Zenger belong with those of the promoters of order and freedom. When on the 25th day of November, 1747,—significant date, for on that day, only thirty-six years later, King George’s troops and mercenaries evacuated that very city of New York, in which Clinton had illustrated the folly of monarchy,—after addressing, or rather berating, the people’s representatives, he concluded his address with the significant words:—

“Your continued grasping for power, with an evident tendency to the weakening of the dependency of the province on Great Britain, accompanied by such notorious and public disrespect to the character of your governor, and contempt of the king’s authority intrusted with him, cannot longer be hid from your superiors, but must come under their observation, and is of most dangerous example to your neighbours.”

It was, indeed, true that New York was setting what was in the eyes of the Tories a most dangerous example to her neighbours. Most of the people of this colony were descendants of those who had come from the Dutch Republic, where the taxation without consent had been resisted for centuries, and where resistance to monarchy and feudal ideas had been exalted into a principle. It was this determined spirit, reinforced by the lovers of liberty, whether of Huguenot, Irish, Scottish, or Welsh blood, or men from the mother country who believed that the rights of Englishmen were still theirs, that made New York lead all the thirteen original colonies in outgrowing the colonial spirit. New Yorkers first took the steps which must logically and actually lead to separation from the transatlantic country, whose language was indeed spoken in America, but by colonists who had continued the institutions not of monarchical England, but of republican Holland.

CHAPTER VI.
A TYPICAL FRONTIER FIGHT WITH INDIANS.

To reorganize the demoralized militia of the northern counties, Governor Clinton in November offered the command of the entire frontier to Johnson, who after due consideration accepted. Besides having the confidence of the people, among whom he was personally popular, Johnson, being backed by the Executive Council, was able to do the work expected of him, and bring about much needed reform, especially in improving the quality of the officers and the general discipline. The able-bodied men of the Mohawk Valley, mostly Dutch and German, with a few English, Irish, and Scots, were organized into nine companies of militia. Each village or settlement had its company of one hundred men, the most westward being at German Flats. Schenectady had two companies, and at Albany there were several; while all the farmers living in the open country, between forts or palisaded villages, were likewise enrolled.

Johnson’s wealth as farmer, fur-trader, army-contractor, and salaried officer was now steadily increasing. Even the victualling of Oswego ceased to be a losing enterprise, since the Assembly, in February, 1748, voted two hundred pounds to reimburse him for the extraordinary charges to which he had been put. The same Assembly, however, voted one hundred and fifty pounds to Mr. Horsmanden, whom Clinton had arbitrarily deposed from the Council, and also appointed an agent to reside in London to represent them and act with them and for the people against the governor. In this the Dutch legislators were following a precedent which their fathers had established, in having agents to represent them to the States-General in Holland, and which they continued under English rule, when they sent Peter Stuyvesant to the Court of King Charles II. in 1667.

The expedition to Canada being wholly given up, it was necessary to conciliate the Indians with presents. In April, Johnson set out to Onondaga, the central council-fire of the Iroquois Confederacy, to meet the delegates of all the tribes, in order to ascertain their temper and invite them to a great council at Albany. His other purposes in going were to circumvent the schemes of Joncaire the French Jesuit, and talk the Indians into giving their permission to have forts erected in their country. As usual, he was not too squeamish in the use of means to accomplish his purpose. He wrote from Albany, April 9, 1748, to Captain Catherwood: “I shall leave no stone unturned to accomplish what I go at, either by fair or foul means; for if they are obstinate—I mean the Onondagas—I shall certainly talk very harsh with them, and try what that will do.”

Leaving Mount Johnson with a guard of fifty men, with Captain Thomas Butler and Lieutenant Laurie as officers, he set off, in bateaux heavily laden with presents and provisions, up the Mohawk. To move these loaded boats against the current, by punting, pushing, pulling, sailing, or floating their way along, was slow work, but was safely accomplished. Some of the Indians had come with pleasant remembrances of the courtesy of Mount Johnson. They felt deeply that sort of gratitude which has been defined as a “lively sense of favours to come.” Having arrived some days before, and waited with attenuated rations, they were ravenous when Johnson and his stores arrived on April 24. After a salute of fire-arms and the unfurling of a British flag, three bark houses were assigned to the company, while Johnson was escorted to a large new lodge in which the mats were fresh and clean. That night a feast was given to the Indians out of the stores brought, all business being deferred until next day.

With all formality of pipes and tobacco, splendour of Indian and civilized costume, the council opened next morning. It was a contest of tongues, and one garrulous Irishman was here to enter the lists and to pit himself, with seemingly interminable prolixity of speech and the fixed ammunition of Indian rhetoric, against a host of tireless tongues. With plenty of talk to fill their ears and abundance of good things to tickle their stomachs, Johnson succeeded in strengthening the covenant of Corlaer; and the issue of the council was, on the whole, all that, even to Johnson, could be expected. In reporting results, Johnson suggested to the governor that proper regulation of the sale of rum among the Indians was the first thing to be considered.

Clinton, while happy in knowing that the Iroquois would come to the Albany council, was brooding over the tendency everywhere manifest in the colonies to assert their independence. Johnson’s full report of the tongue-victory at the Onondaga council was laid before the Assembly, June 21. The governor added, that to hold the Indians loyal to the English it would be necessary to prosecute the expedition against Crown Point, and at once make arrangements for exchange of prisoners. In this latter suggestion, and with that recommending a severe enactment against rumsellers, the Assembly at once concurred. A few days after came news of the treaty of peace at Aix-la-Chapelle.

Johnson, by unremitting exertion, had succeeded in securing the largest attendance of Indians that had ever assembled in Albany. They came from all the tribes of the Confederacy and from the lake region westward, besides remnants of New England and Hudson River Indians. Many of these Indians had never seen a civilized town, and greatly enjoyed the regular meals and other comforts of civilization, while interested in studying houses with chimneys, carpets, glass windows, and other things unknown to forest life. Great preparations had been made to receive them and to keep them in the best of humour. What with the clerks, quartermasters, interpreters, and others of the official class, the militia and the citizens, the farming folk who had flocked into the city to see the sights, in addition to villagers from the region around, Albany had never before beheld so large a population, nor shown such picturesque activity in her streets. In the oldest city in any of the colonies north of the municipality on Manhattan Island, these few days in the month of July were long remembered.

The eighteenth day of July had come; and all the Indians expected, hundreds in number, had already arrived, and were beginning to think “Brother Corlaer” was as dilatory as his war operations had all along been. Governor Shirley and the Massachusetts commissioners, however, had come; and all lay down at night expecting the great palaver would be but a day or two off. But before Clinton was to arrive, they were to learn how near the enemy was even at that moment.

In the evening exciting news was brought them from Schenectady. A battle had been fought between a party of Canadian Indians and the militia and villagers just beyond Schenectady, in which twenty whites had been killed and a number taken prisoners. The drums at once beat to quarters, and Captain Chew with one hundred militiamen and two hundred of the Indians, told off from those in convention, marched at once in pursuit. The Indians from Albany expected to head off the raiders, and hence went along the usual trails to Canada; but this time the Canada savages had retreated along the Sacandaga road and creek, “by a different road from what they used to go,” as Onnasdego, an Onondaga sachem, said to Clinton in his oration a few days afterward. Johnson remained in Albany attending to his horde of guests; while Captain Chew and his band made vain pursuit. On the 22d, the day of the opening of the council, he received a letter from Albert Van Slyck, dated “Schonaictaiday, July 21st, 1749,” giving a brief detail of the bloody affray. Van Slyck was an honest Dutch farmer, whose defective powers in English composition were in contrast with his courage; and his Dutch-English account is difficult to make certain sense of, especially in its blotted, time-stained, and torn condition in the Johnson manuscripts at Albany; but, except some entries in the family Bibles of people in or near the town, this is the only known contemporaneous writing by one who was in the fight. It is not mentioned even in Parkman’s “Montcalm and Wolfe,” nor in the colonial or more recent histories, except Drake’s, though sometimes referred to inaccurately.

Further, it was difficult, until 1752, for an intelligent Hollander or American of Holland descent, whose ancestors since 1581 had adopted the calendar of Christendom to keep the run of English chronology, which was eleven days behind the rest of the world. For over a century and a half, England was very much in the condition of Russia of the present day, as compared with the rest of Europe. The English used “the old style,” or the calendar of Julius Cæsar, while the continental nations made use of the modern or Gregorian calendar. It may be that this explains why Van Slyck dated his letter one year ahead, 1749, instead of 1748.

Van Slyck’s letter describes an event which for a generation formed a leading topic at the evening firesides of the people of Schenectady, and of many in Connecticut. The tremendous loss in men, chiefly heads of families, that fell upon this frontier town is almost unknown to history; yet the fight at Beechdale was one of the most stubbornly contested little battles of the Old French War. Instead of being “an autumnal foray” upon a party of woodmen, it was a stand-up, hand-to-hand fight by the Schenectady men against savages who were consummate ambuscaders, and well versed in all the arts of woodcraft and the tricks most likely to confound raw militiamen.

The battle-field lies on the Toll Farm, three miles west of Schenectady, and is visible from the car-windows to the right of a train on the New York Central Railroad going westward. A company of Schenectady men were at Maalwyck, a place not far from the town, on the north side of the river. Messrs. Dirk Van Voast and Daniel Toll, with Toll’s negro slave, Ryckert, left their comrades to find their horses which had strayed off. A few minutes after they had left, firing was heard in the direction in which they had gone, by the Van Slyck brothers, Adrian and Albert, one of whom was afterward in the fight and wrote the meagre account which is now among the Johnson papers. They at once sent a messenger, their negro slave, to Schenectady to give the alarm, which was doubtless sounded out from the belfry of the strong fortress-church by the Widow Margarita Veeder, the klok-luider or bell-ringer at that time. The summons came first before noon. The negro delivered his message, bidding the men go out to Abraham De Graaf’s house at Beukendal, where Van Slyck would meet them.

At this time there was a company of New England militia in the town under the command of Captain Stoddard, who was then absent, his place being filled by Lieut. John Darling. The militiamen were from Connecticut, and were raw levies unused to Indian warfare. They started off accompanied by five or six young men and Daniel Van Slyck, another brother of the writer. The party numbered about seventy men in all. Another company of armed men, whose number is not stated, left for the scene of conflict a few minutes later, to see if they could find or see Daniel Toll.

Toll and Van Voast, after leaving the Van Slycks at Maalwyck, had reached a place two miles away, near the house of De Graaf, and called in Dutch, Poopendaal, or later, Beukendal or Beech Dale. Within or beyond the dale, was a well-known place on hard clayey soil, full of deer-licks at which the deer used to come to lick the salt. At this kleykuil, or clay-pit, the two men imagined they heard, about ten o’clock, the sound of horses’ hoofs stamping on the hard ground, but with a regularity that seemed very suspicious. Approaching warily nearer, they discovered that the noise came from a party of Indians playing quoits. Almost as soon as the two white men came in sight, they were fired on by the savages, who had seen their coming. Toll was instantly killed, and Van Voast was wounded and made prisoner. The black man, Ryckert, fled toward Schenectady.

The wily savages now prepared to ambuscade the party which they knew would soon appear from Schenectady. For this purpose they laid a sensational trap in a field, somewhat off from the path and in a defile near the creek, which was surrounded with forest and bush. Taking the dead body of Mr. Toll, they set it up against a fence and tied a live crow in front of the corpse. This curious sight of a wild crow flying up and down before an apparently living man they knew would at once excite the attention, especially of the impulsive and unwary young men who, as they supposed, would be the first on the field. The sequel proves they were not disappointed.

Lieutenant Darling and his Connecticut men marched out, cautiously searching for the enemy, but seeing no trace of any. At Mr. Simon Groot’s unoccupied house they found Adrian Van Slyck, who with a few men had arrived and learned from the negro boy Ryckert, that his master, Mr. Toll, had been shot. Though nearly paralyzed with fear, he offered to point out the place where he fell. The negro was furnished with a horse, and acted as pilot to the advance party of about forty men. Soon after they had gone, Ackes Van Slyck arrived and remained with his men near the house.

Pretty soon the strange phenomenon of a crow playing near a man arrested their attention, and they at once marched into the trap to see the curious sight. Very soon they discovered that the man was a corpse, and the crow was tied to it with a string. At this moment when nearly all were in the defile along the creek, and off their guard, the crash of the enemy’s guns enlightened them as to the situation. They found themselves in a ravine or hollow curved like a horseshoe, and nearly surrounded on both sides by woods, from which puffs of white smoke and flashes of fire were issuing from unseen enemies. Eight or ten of the whites were at once stretched dead on the clay ground, and then the yelling savages leaped out of cover with knife and hatchet.

The militiamen soon broke and ran, but the Schenectady men bravely stood their ground. It took a moment to deliver their fire, and then with musket clubbed or thrown aside, the fighting became, for a few minutes, a series of desperate encounters between white and red man, in which it happened more than once that both buried their knives in each other. After the battle the bodies of Glen, De Graaf, and other noted Indian fighters were found alongside their dead enemies with whom they had wrested in deadly struggle. In this hand-to-hand fight twelve of the party of whites were killed, and five made prisoners; Lieutenant Darling’s company losing seven men, who were shot dead, and six missing.

Adrian Van Slyck and a company of New York militiamen now reached the scene, where the little band of whites were found behind trees and stumps holding the enemy at bay; Lieutenant Darling having been killed at the first fire, Ackes Van Slyck was directing the fight. No sooner had the New York reinforcements got into the line of Indian fire, than they all fled in the most cowardly manner. Adrian Van Slyck and the two or three Schenectady men who stood by him in this part of the field were shot down.

The rest of the original party of whites now retreated out through the western entrance of the vale, and joined by Albert Van Slyck and a few men from the village, reached the house of Abraham De Graaf near by. This substantial edifice—still standing, but used as a dried-apple bleacher when the writer visited it—was not then occupied, but was new and strong, and stood on commanding ground. The fact of its being empty shows the condition of affairs; the people who lived in isolated farm-houses being at this time gathered almost wholly in palisaded villages or other fortified places.

Hastily entering, they barred the door, and reaching the second story, tore off all the boards near the floor and eaves, and prepared for a stubborn defence. With their keen marksmanship they kept the enemy at bay, completely baffling the savages, who peppered the house in vain. While this siege was going on, the two Indian lads left in charge of Dirk Van Voast, eager to see the fight, tied their prisoner to a tree, and climbing up the slope of the ravine, became absorbed in the firing. Van Voast succeeded in reaching his knife, cut the thongs binding him, and ran off to Schenectady, meeting another squad of armed men from the village hastening to the scene. These were led by Jacob Glen, and Albert Van Slyck, the writer describing the event.

Van Slyck had hoped to gather enough men to get out and surround the Indians so as to capture the whole band; but Garret Van Antwerp, fearing lest the town would be left without a garrison in case of attack, would suffer no more to leave the palisades. However, this last reinforcement reached the battle-ground in time to drive off the savages, who were fighting the previously sent party from behind trees, and to save the bodies of Adrian Van Slyck and the dead men near him from being scalped and stripped. Seeing this last party approaching, the savages drew off, retreating up the Sacandaga road. All the whites, including the last comers, the scattered out-door fighters behind trees, and the little garrison in the house, now united. They proceeded at once to count up their loss, and to gather up the dead men and load them on wagons for burial in Schenectady.

What the loss of the Indians was in this battle, as in most others, the white men were never able to find out. Except at the scene of the first firing and ambuscade, Indian corpses were not visible. The first purpose of the redskins, as soon as the opening fury of battle slackened, was to conceal their loss. To run out from cover, even in the face of the fire, and draw away the corpses of their friends, was their usual habit, and to this they were thoroughly trained. Exposure in such work was more cheerfully borne than in regular combat, though usually the dead body was reached by cautious approach, and with as much concealment as possible in the undergrowth. A noose at the end of a rope was skilfully thrown over the head of the corpse, and the end of the rope carried back into cover. As skilfully as a band of medical students or resurrectionists can put a hook under the chin of a corpse and hoist it up from under the coffin-lid half sawed off, the savages in ambush would draw the body of their fallen comrade out of sight, to be quickly concealed or buried. Indian fighters often told stories of dead men apparently turning into snakes and gliding out of sight. Owing to this habit of the Indians, it was very difficult to arrive at the exact execution done by the white man’s fire. As most of the Schenectady men were trained Indian fighters, the loss of the savages was probably great.

This was a sad day for Schenectady. One third of the white force engaged were dead or wounded. Twenty corpses—twelve of them Schenectady fathers, sons, or brothers, and eight Connecticut men—were laid on the floor of a barn, near the church, which is still standing. The sorrowing wives, mothers, and sisters came to identify the scalped and maimed dear ones. Thirteen or fourteen men were missing, while the number of wounded was never accurately known. In the Green Street burying-ground, east of the “Old Queen’s Fort,” the long funeral procession followed the corpses, while Domine Van Santvoord committed dust to dust.

Many are the touching traditions of sorrow connected with this “Beukendal massacre.” So it, indeed, appeared to the people of Schenectady, because of so many of their prominent men thus suddenly slain. To them it was in some sense a repetition of the awful night of Feb. 8, 1690. Yet, instead of its being a massacre, it was a stand-up, hand-to-hand fight in Indian fashion, and a typical border-battle. In the superb and storied edifice of “The First Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Schenectady, in the county of Albany,”—so called in the old charter given by King George II., and so rich in the graphic symbols of “the church in the Netherlands under the Cross,” as well as of local history,—a tablet epitomizing the history of the church in its five edifices was set in its niche after the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of the church, celebrated June 21, 1880. It is “in pitiful remembrance of the martyrs who perished in the massacres of February 9th, 1690, and July 18th, 1748.” From the rear church window one may still look, in 1891, on the barn on the floor of which the bodies were brought and laid for identification on the day when the sturdy Dutch-American Albert Van Slyck signed his letter to “Coll. William Johnson at Albany,” “your Sorrowfull and Revengfull friend on those Barbarous Enemys, and am at all Times on your Command.”

Clinton, accompanied by his satellite, Dr. Colden, and some other members of his council, arrived in Albany, July 20. The next day, after those necessary ceremonies to which the Indians are as great bond-slaves as their civilized brethren, the council fairly opened. A great palaver ensued, and talk flowed unceasingly for hour after hour, until many ears needed rest even more than the few busy tongues. The governor wound up his long address by referring to the battle of Beukendal, so recent and so near by.

After three days of smoke and thought, a wordy warrior from Onondaga replied for the Confederacy in prolix detail. The day was closed with a dance by the young braves, and the king’s health was drunk in five barrels of beer.

On the following day the River Indians spoke, expressing gratitude for favours past, and asserting that if they had been present when news of the Schenectady battle reached Albany, they would have cheerfully joined in pursuit, even to the gate of Crown Point.

By this time it was no longer possible to suppress the news of peace in Europe, and the poor savages who had been goaded into digging up the hatchet and neglecting their hunting, and who were thirsting for revenge, were now left in the lurch, and told to go quietly home. Nevertheless, most of the colonists were satisfied with the result of the council, and Johnson’s popularity increased. The Iroquois were pleased when they found that both Shirley and Clinton were about to send back all the French prisoners to Canada, and to ask for the return of both the white, red, and black captives, who had been carried away from their homes south of the St. Lawrence.

Lieutenant Stoddard and Captain Anthony Van Schaick went to Canada, and into the Indian country; but their success was not gratifying. Only twenty-four prisoners accompanied Lieutenant Stoddard when he left Canada, June 28, 1750. The white boys and girls who had nearly or wholly forgotten their old home and kin, and had been adopted into the tribes, declined, or were forced to decline, going back. Occasionally white women had abjured their religion, and in other cases the red squaws threatened sure death to the adopted captives should they try to return, even at the French governor’s orders. With the Indians, however, exchange was more easy, though the savages were unable to understand the delays of diplomacy between Clinton and Gallissonière; and to pacify them, Johnson was often at his wits’ end. However, by his personal influence, by visits of condolence, by social participation in their games and feasts, by persistent patience, public eloquence, private persuasion, and the frequent use of money and other material gifts, he won fresh laurels of success. In spite of the diplomacy of La Gallissonière, the ceaselessly active Jesuit priests, French cunning and strategy on the one hand, and English and Dutch weakness and villany on the other, he held the whole Iroquois Confederacy loyal to the British Crown. The greatness of Johnson is nobly shown in thus foiling the French and all their resources.

This year, amid manifold commercial, military, and domestic cares, he entertained the famous Swedish botanist, naturalist, and traveller, Peter Kalm, with whose name the evergreen plant Kalmia is associated. He had come at the suggestion of Linnæus to investigate the botany and natural history of North America. He arrived at Fort Johnson with a letter from Dr. Colden, who was as fond of physical science as he was of his Toryism. After dispensing courtly hospitality, Johnson furnished him with a guide to Oswego and Niagara, and a letter to the commandant at the former place. Kalm’s “Voyage to North America” was translated and published in London in 1777, and the map accompanying it is of great interest. After him was named that family of evergreens in which is found the American laurel, Kalmia latifolia, which has been proposed as the national flower of the United States.

CHAPTER VII.
AT THE ANCIENT PLACE OF TREATIES.

The Old French War, or the War of the Austrian Succession, was foolishly begun in Germany, and foolishly ended in Europe, Asia, and America. The peace which came without honour settled nothing as regarded the questions at issue in America. In reality this treaty guaranteed another American war. Louisburg was again handed over to the French in exchange for Madras. All prisoners in the three continents were to be released without ransom, and a return of all conquered territory and property was agreed to. The balance of power now rested level on its fulcrum, ready for some fly’s weight to tilt it and cause the scale-pans to bounce.

In what part of the world first? With unspeakable disgust the raw troops and scarred veterans, and the people generally of the colonies, received the news. Not a few thought it was time to think of not only fighting their own battles, but of making their own treaties. The continental or American spirit, already a spark, was fanned almost to a flame.

Meanwhile, in home politics, New York was steadily advancing in the pathway that was to merge into the highway of national independence. To a New England writer, accustomed to the unbridled laudation of his own State and ancestry as those who led the Teutonic-American colonies in the struggle for liberty, the doings in the New York Assembly may seem “teapot-tempest politics.” To those less prejudiced, it is a noble chapter in the story of freedom, when they see an ultra-Tory British governor fast relegated to a position of impotence, though backed by the able Tory, Cadwallader Colden, while the people’s will is manifested in persistent limitation of the royal prerogative.

This was the state of affairs in May, 1750, when, on the death of Philip Livingston, Col. William Johnson was appointed to a seat in the governor’s Executive Council. The Livingstones were sturdy men of Scottish descent, descended from a Presbyterian minister who had been banished for non-conformity. Like so many of the founders of America, the Pilgrim Fathers and most of the chief settlers of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, he reinforced his democratic ideas by some years’ residence in the Dutch Republic, living gladly under the red, white, and blue flag of the United States of Holland. The Livingstones in America married into families of Dutch descent, and thereby were still further imbued with Republican ideas. Robert and Philip had been secretaries of Indian affairs, and had thus gained great favour and influence over the Iroquois. Of their descendants, one was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and others were officers in the Revolutionary army, while others are even yet adorning the annals of freedom, progress, and order.

Clinton was, no doubt, very glad to have, in place of a Livingstone, one who was so loyally devoted to the Crown, and so good a personal friend as Johnson near him, Johnson, however, was not sworn in and seated until 1751.

The state of affairs was growing worse and worse, and Clinton the foolish had attempted to stay the tide of democracy by having no Assembly called for two years. When, however, it met on Sept. 4, 1750, Johnson’s bills for six hundred and eighty-six pounds, for provisions sent to Oswego, were cheerfully paid; but the vote was so made that the governor’s claims were, as he thought, invaded. However, for good reasons, and fearing the loss of trade, he submitted. Could Johnson’s invaluable services have been acknowledged without also making recognition of Clinton’s pretensions, the Assembly would have been more liberal. The remarks and strictures of the biographer and eulogist of Johnson about the Dutch traders of Albany, and “the love of gain so characteristic of that nation” (sic) seem strange when the same love of gain was, and is, equally characteristic of Englishman, Yankee, Scotsman, Huguenot, and Quaker. No one will justify the members of the New York Colonial Assembly in all their acts, especially those which were clearly contemptible; but we cannot see that Johnson, Clinton, or the English loved either lucre or liquor any less than the Albany Dutchmen. Indeed, it was the well-founded suspicion that Clinton was using his office largely to recoup his broken fortunes that made the representatives resist him at every point. Johnson, however, finding that the Assembly and the governor could never be reconciled, and that his first bill of two thousand pounds would be likely, under existing circumstances, to remain unpaid, resigned his office of Superintendent of Indian Affairs. To his Iroquois friends he announced this step by sending wampum belts to all the chief fortified towns of the Confederacy.

Neither war nor peace had settled the question of the boundary lines between the French and English possessions in America. The French claimed the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys by right of prior discovery by La Salle and others. The English based their ownership on occupation by the Iroquois or their vassals, and because the Five Nations were allies of Great Britain. Both parties now began anew to occupy the land. The race was westward through the Ohio Valley to the Mississippi. The starting-points were from tidewater Virginia and from Montreal. Not on parallel lines, but toward the apex of a triangle, and straight toward collision, the movement began. The Ohio Company was formed with a grant of six hundred thousand acres by the English Government, chiefly to speculators in Virginia. George Washington was one of the first to be smitten with the fever of speculation, and to the end of his days he made investments in the Western lands as eagerly as many do now in Western farm mortgages.

La Gallissonière instructed Celoron de Bienville, one of the four famous brothers of a remarkable family, to occupy definitely the Ohio Valley in the name of Louis XIV., King of France. Like a sower going forth to sow, Bienville went in a canoe with a sack full of leaden plates, depositing one in the soil at the mouth of every important tributary, so as to publish to the world that from the source of the Ohio to its mouth, the country watered by it belonged to France. Up to 1891 several of these plates have been dug up,—coming thus to resurrection like faint memories of vanished dreams.

While thus the lines of empire were once more drawn between Celt and Teuton, the same masters again held the key to the situation,—the Iroquois. To win these over to French alliance or vassalage, all the arts of peace were now to be employed by the ablest intellects employing the strongest forces of religion, education, diplomacy, cunning, and material gifts. France with her compact military and religious system in America was a unity. Soldier, priest, and semi-feudal tenant were parts of one machine moved by one head. With the unity of a phalanx and the constrictive power of a dragon, she expected to crush to atoms, or at least coop up between mountains and sea, the English colonies. The heterogeneous collection of people from north continental and insular Europe, of many languages and forms of religion, dwelling between the Merrimac and the Everglades, were held together only by the one tie of allegiance to the British Crown.

Francis Picquet, priest, soldier, and statesman, saw the necessity of securing the loyalty of the Six Nations; and receiving the French Governor’s assent, established himself at La Presentation, on the St. Lawrence River, between Oswego and Montreal, a fort and a chapel. Ostensibly his mission was the conversion of the Iroquois. No more strategic point could have been selected. Whether for peace, war, trade, voyaging, or education and general influence, the site was supremely appropriate. When Johnson heard of the man called, according to which side of the border his name was spoken, “Apostle of the Iroquois” or “Jesuit of the West,” he was alarmed, especially when he learned that this lively hornet, Joncaire, was busy in fomenting trouble among the tribes in the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi. Before long, this Jean Cœur had succeeded in reviving between the Iroquois and western tribes and the Catawbas an old feud. Very soon Clinton received word from Gov. James Glenn, of South Carolina, that the Senecas were on the war-path and murdering the Catawbas. In this action the Senecas were repeating one of the numerous southern raids to which their grandfathers had been addicted, and one of which Col. John Washington, ancestor of George, assisted to repel. At Johnson’s suggestion, Clinton now invited all the tribes composing the Confederacy or in alliance with the Iroquois to meet at the ancient place of treaties,—the ground on which now stands the new Capitol at Albany,—while Clinton himself called upon the governors of all the colonies to form a plan of union for uniting the tribes and resisting French aggression. On the 28th of June, 1751, the tribes met in Albany, again to renew the covenant first confirmed by Arendt Van Curler. There were present delegates from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and South Carolina, and Indians from the Great Lakes, besides six Catawba chiefs and representatives of the Six Nations.

The first point made by the Iroquois was that Colonel Johnson should be reappointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs. They begged leave to try to influence him by sending a string of wampum to him at Mount Johnson. They despatched a swift footman to his house. A man is a finer animal than a horse, and, in the long run, swifter and more enduring. They chose two human soles rather than four horse’s hoofs for their messenger. Johnson met the wampum-bearer at Schenectady; but when at Albany, despite the eloquence of Clinton and the Indians, he firmly declined serving again while his salary depended upon the Assembly. He now took the oath of office and his seat in the governor’s Council. He retained this dignity while he lived.

The great council formally opened on the 6th of July, 1751. Besides the usual eloquence there was much singing, with ceremonial dances and enjoyment of that aboriginal custom and product,—the pipe and tobacco. The sucking and actual whiffing of the calumet, the metaphorical burying of the hatchet and planting of the tree of peace, signified that war was over between the Southern and Northern Indians. The confederates living above the not yet made Mason’s and Dixon’s line clasped hands across the bloody chasm with the Southerners, and peace again reigned from Pilgrim Land to the Salzburger Germans in Ogelthorpe’s country. The “late unpleasantness” was past. After the usual drinking of fire-water and distribution of presents, the council adjourned, and the Indians went home.

While the Pennsylvania traders were establishing posts on the Ohio, under British authority, the French were also busy. Early in September, from a French deserter, Johnson learned the startling news that a great fleet of canoes manned by twelve hundred Frenchmen and two hundred Adirondack Indians, had passed Oswego, bound for the Ohio. News also arrived by a Cayuga chief that at Cadaracqui a large French man-of-war was being built for the reduction of Oswego. This fort was then in command of Lieutenant Lindsay, founder of the Scottish settlement at Cherry Valley.

Johnson was in New York attending to his duties as a member of the Council, when the harassing news was received. In addition to the anxiety this caused him, he was selected by Clinton to do what proved to be a disagreeable task to himself, and in the eyes of the people’s representative a repulsive one. Indeed it seemed to them to be doing the governor’s dirty work. When the House sent to the Council an act for paying several demands upon the colony, it pleased Clinton and the Council to demand vouchers, and Johnson was sent to the Assembly to request them. The offended and angry representatives of the people declared that the demand was extraordinary and unprecedented, and declined to consider the request until the first of May. The Council, angry in turn, sent Johnson back with a bill of their own originating,—in clear violation of right precedent and propriety, “applying the sum of five hundred pounds for the management of Indian affairs and for repairing the garrison at Oswego.”

As might be expected, this bill was not allowed even a second reading, but a motion was at once passed “that it was the great essential and undoubted right of the representatives of the people of this colony to begin all bills from raising and disbursing of money,” and that the bill of the Council should be rejected. In an address to the governor it was intimated that the one thousand pounds recently voted for entertaining the Indians at the council at Albany had been used for other purposes than the public good. After four days of foolish resistance, the governor, knowing he was unable to make headway when so clearly in the wrong, passed all the bills. Then, gratifying a personal spite at the expense of the public, he dissolved the Assembly.

All this was what those who think the story of American liberty was fought out chiefly in New England would call the “teapot-tempest politics of the New York Assembly.” Yet here was the great principle upon which republican government is founded, and for which Holland revolted against Spain, and the American colonies against England; “our great example,” as Franklin declared, being the Dutch republic.

The Dutch had, centuries before, beyond the dikes of Holland, developed and fought for the doctrine of “no taxation without consent;” and Clinton, Colden, and their coadjutors were clearly in the wrong. Further, the representatives were right in hinting that Clinton and his flatterers were too anxious to improve their own fortunes, and to make the people pay for their needless junketings enjoyed in the name of public service. Those who read the local history of the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys know how burdensome to the people was the silly and costly pageantry of royal governors on their travels.

Johnson, probably with his eyes needfully opened, on reaching his home after the dissolution of the Assembly, found the outlook for the ultimate occupation of the mid-continent by the English rather gloomy. The French held the frontier of New York on its three strategic lines,—Crown Point, La Presentation, and Niagara. They were now planning to plant a mission, which should mean a fort and a church, at Onondaga Lake, near which had perhaps been—if we so interpret the inscription on the Pompey stone—a Spanish settlement once destroyed by the Senecas. Even if the stone, inscribed with the symbols and chronology of Christendom, were that of a captive, it is a mournful but interesting relic.

When Johnson heard the news, the Jesuits had already succeeded in winning the consent of the chiefs even at this ancient hearth of the Iroquois Confederacy. Such a move must be checkmated at once. Despite the raw and inclement weather of late autumn, and his desire for rest and reading, Johnson determined on a journey with its attendant exposure. He set out at once for Onondaga. Summoning the chief men, he asked them, as a proof of their many professions of friendship, to give and deed to him the land and water around Onondaga Lake, to the extent of two miles in every direction from the shores, for which he promised a handsome present. Unable to resist their friend, the sachems signed the deed made out by Johnson, who handed over money amounting to three hundred and fifty pounds, and left for home. Writing to Governor Clinton, he offered the land to the Government of New York at the price he had paid. Thus were the designs of the French again foiled.

With the country at peace, and himself released from the responsibility of Indian affairs, Johnson began to indulge himself more and more in literary pursuits, the development of the Mohawk Valley, the moral and intellectual improvement of the Indians, and the social advantage of the white settlers. He had already a pretty large collection of books from London in his mansion, but he sent an order, August 20, 1752, to a London stationer for the “Gentlemen’s Magazine,” the “Monthly Review,” the latest pamphlets, and “the newspapers regularly, and stitched up.” He persuaded many of the Mohawks to send their children to the school at Stockbridge, Mass., founded by John Sergeant in 1741, and served after his death by America’s greatest intellect, Jonathan Edwards. His uncle, the admiral, had already given seven hundred pounds to the support of this school. Johnson’s correspondence was with the Hon. Joseph Dwight, once Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, who had married Mr. Sergeant’s widow, and was deeply interested in Indian education.

In 1753 Rev. Gideon Hawley, who had taught the children of the Mohawks, Oneidas, and Tuscaroras at Stockbridge, was sent from Boston to establish a mission school on the Susquehanna River, west of Albany. Visiting Mount Johnson, the young missionary was received by the host in person at the gate. He spent a night enjoying the hospitality, and left with Johnson’s hearty godspeed. Hawley was able to pursue his work quietly until the breaking out of the war in 1756. After serving as chaplain to Col. Richard Gridley’s regiment, he spent from 1757 to 1807, nearly a half-century of his long and useful life, among the Indians at Mashpee, Mass.

Johnson was also in warm sympathy with the efforts of Dr. Eleazar Wheelock, who since 1743, when he began with Samson Occum, a Mohegan Indian, had been steadily instructing Indian youths at Lebanon, Conn. “Moor’s Indian Charity School,” as then called, was set upon a good financial basis when in 1776 Occum and Rev. Nathaniel Whitten crossed the ocean, and in England obtained an endowment of ten thousand pounds; William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, being president of the Board of Trustees. At this school, among the twenty or more Indian boys, Joseph Brant, sent by Johnson, was educated under Dr. Wheelock. Later the Wheelock school was transferred to Hanover, N. H., and named after Lord Dartmouth. On the college seal only, the Indian lads are still seen coming up to this school instead of attending Hampton in Virginia, or Carlisle in Pennsylvania. However, ancient history and tradition, after long abeyance, were revived when, in 1887, a full-blooded Sioux Indian, Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman, was graduated from Dartmouth’s classic halls.

Various other attempts were made by Johnson, especially during the last decade of his life, to interest the British authorities in Church and State in the spiritual improvement of the Indians. The evidences of his good intentions and generous purposes are seen in his correspondence. Interesting as they are, however, they bore little fruit, owing to the outbreak of the Revolution which divided both the red and the white tribes. The baronet built a church for the Canajoharie Indians, and supported religious teachers for a while at his own expense. In 1767, being a man above his sect, he would have had the Indian school, which grew into Dartmouth College, removed, and established in the Mohawk Valley. Sectarian influence and ecclesiastical jealousies at Albany prevented his plan from being carried out. The Valley was thus without a college, until Union, founded and endowed almost entirely by the Dutchmen of Schenectady, was established in 1786, free from sectarian control, as its name implies. Under Eliphalet Nott’s presidency of sixty-two years, its fame became national, and within its walls have been educated some of the most useful members of the aboriginal race called, by accident, Indians.

Admiral Warren died in Dublin, July 29, 1752, of fever; and Johnson received the news shortly before setting out to attend the Executive Council in New York, which met in October.

Fortunately for the Commonwealth, Governor Clinton had taken other advice than that so liberally furnished in the past by the particular member so obnoxious to the Assembly; and his opening message was commendably brief, being merely a salutation, which was as briefly and courteously returned. Now that the Tory firebrand was “out of politics” for a while, peace once more reigned. An era of good feeling set in, and harmony was the rule until Clinton’s administration ended. A new Board of Indian Commissioners was chosen, by a compromise between the governor and his little parliament. Plans for paying the colonial debt, for strengthening the frontier, and for establishing a college were all carried out.

Oswego was the watch-house on the frontier. In the early spring of 1753 the advance guard of a French army left Montreal to take possession of the Ohio Valley. Descried alike by Iroquois hunters at the rapids of the St. Lawrence and by the officers at Oswego, the news was communicated to Johnson by foot-runners with wampum and by horseback-riders with letters. Thirty canoes with five hundred Indians under Marin were leading the six thousand Frenchmen determined to hold the domain from Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico.

Whether troubled the more by the encroachments of the warlike French, or by the English land-speculators and enterprising farmers who were now clearing forests and settling on their old hunting-grounds, the Indians could scarcely tell. Dissatisfied at having lost officially their friend Johnson, disliking the commissioners, seeing what they considered as their property, the Ohio, invaded by the French, while the New York Government seemed to be inert or asleep, they sent a delegation to lay their complaints before the governor and Council in New York. There they roundly abused the whole government, and threatened to break the covenant chain. As matter of fact, the trouble concerning land patents arose out of transactions settled before Clinton’s time, which could not at once be remedied in curt Indian fashion. All legal land alienations in New York were, after the custom originating in Holland, and thence borrowed by the American colonists and made a national procedure in all the United States, duly registered; and into these examination must be made. Both house and governor, however, agreed in choosing Johnson as the man for the critical hour, and requested him to meet the tribes at the ancient council-fire at Onondaga. Johnson, hearing that the Iroquois had broken faith and again attacked the Catawbas in the Carolinas, hastened matters by summoning one tribe, the Mohawks, to meet him at his own home.

Again the stone house by the Mohawk became the seat of an Indian council, and was enveloped in clouds of tobacco smoke. Johnson, compelling them to drink the cup mingled with upbraiding and kindness, while bountifully filling their stomachs from his larder, sent them away in good humour, and most of them burning with loyalty. Besides thus manifesting his singular power over the Mohawk savages, he met the representatives of the United Confederacy at Onondaga, September 9. The result of the ceremonies, the eloquence, the smoke, and the eating was that the confederates, though sorely puzzled to know what to do between the French and the English, promised loyalty to the brethren of Corlaer. They would, however, say nothing satisfactory concerning the Catawbas, some of whose scalps, and living members reserved for torture, even then adorned their villages.

Governor Clinton had grown weary of the constant battle which he was, probably with the stolid ignorance of many men of his time and class, fighting against the increasing power of popular liberty. He saw it was vain to resist the spirit which the Dutch, Scots, and French Huguenots had brought into New York with them, or inherited from their sires, and he longed for a rest and a sinecure post in England. He liked neither the New York people nor the climate. When therefore his successor, Sir Danvers Osborne, arrived on Sunday, October 7, Clinton hailed the day as one of the happiest of his life. He shortly after sailed for home, to spend the remainder of his years in a post for which he was better fitted,—the governorship of Greenwich Hospital. He died in 1761, fourteen years before the breaking out of the war which his own actions had strongly tended to precipitate. His son, Sir Henry, led the British regulars and mercenaries who were bluffed in North Carolina, driven off at Fort Moultrie, and finally won victory at Long Island. He failed to relieve Burgoyne, fought the drawn battle at Monmouth, captured Charleston, dickered with Arnold, left Cornwallis in the lurch, and returning baffled to England, shed much ink in defending himself against his critics. Another family of Clintons shed high lustre on the American name and the Empire State. One added another river parallel to the Mohawk, flowing past Johnson’s old home, and joining the waters of the Great Lakes to those of the Hudson and the Atlantic, making the city of New York the metropolis of the continent.

Sir Danvers Osborne’s career in America was a short tragedy in three acts. It lasted five days. He came to be ground as powder between the upper millstone of royal prerogative and the nether disk of popular rights. He came from an aristocratic and monarchical country, whose government believed that it was the source of power to the people, to colonists whose fathers had been educated mostly under a republic, where it was taught that the people were, under God, the originators of power. Charged with instructions much more stringent than those given to his predecessor, he was confronted in the town-hall by the city corporation, whose spokesman’s opening sentence was that “they would not brook any infringement of their liberties, civil or religious.” On meeting his Council for the first time, he was informed that any attempt to enforce the strict orders given him and to insist upon an indefinite support, would be permanently resisted. That night the unfortunate servant of the king took his own life. He committed suicide by hanging himself on his own garden wall.

De Lancey, the chief-justice, was now called to the difficult post of governor, and to the personally delicate task of serving King George and his former associates, whom he had so diligently prodded against Clinton, Colden, and Johnson. This was especially difficult, when the Assembly found, in the instructions to Sir Danvers Osborne, how diligently the late governor and his advisers had slandered and misrepresented them to the British Government. The good results of a change in the executive were, however, at once visible, and the Assembly promptly voted money for the defence of the frontier, for the governor’s salary, for his arrears of pay as chief-justice, for Indian presents, for his voyage to Albany, and indeed, for everything reasonable. They added a complaint against Clinton, and a defence of their conduct to the Crown and Lords of Trade, which De Lancey sent to London.

The clouds of war which had gathered in the Ohio Valley now broke, and M. Contrecœur occupied Fort Du Quesne. George Washington began his career on the soil of the State of Pennsylvania, in which his longest marches, deepest humiliations, fiercest battles, and most lasting civil triumphs were won; and on the 4th of July, 1754, honourably surrendered Fort Necessity. The French drum-beat was now heard from Quebec to Louisiana. The English were banished behind the Alleghanies, and their flag from the Ohio Valley.

It was now vitally necessary that the colonies should form a closer union for defence against French aggression and the inroads of hostile savages. The Iroquois tribes had been able to unite themselves in a stable form of federalism. Why could not the thirteen colonies become confederate, and act with unity of purpose? Besides so great an example on the soil before them, there was the New England Confederation of 1643, which had been made chiefly by men trained in a federal republic. Both the Plymouth men and many of the leaders of New England had lived in the United States of Holland, and under the red, white, and blue flag. There they had seen in actual operation what strength is derived from union. Concordia res parvæ crescunt (“By concord little things become grand”), was the motto of the Union of Utrecht, familiar to all; but in New York the republican motto Een-dracht maakt Macht (“Union makes strength”) needed no translation, for its language was the daily speech of a majority of the people.

It seemed now, at least, eminently proper that the Congress of Colonies should be in the state settled first by people from a republic, and at Albany, the ancient place of treaties, and at the spot in English America where red and white delegates from the north, east, west, and south can even now assemble without climbing or tunnelling the Appalachian chain of mountains.

By direction of the Lords of Trade, the governments of all the colonies were invited to meet at Albany, so that a solemn treaty could be at one time made with all the Indian tribes, by all the colonies, in the name of the king.

For treaty-making with the Iroquois, the most powerful of all the Indian tribes, there was only one place,—Albany. Dinwiddie, of Virginia, vainly wanted it at Winchester, Va., while Shirley, of Massachusetts, jealous of New York, and a genuine politician, wished to keep himself before the voters, and to come after the elections were over. His party was more than his province or the country. As the Indians had already, according to orders from England, been notified, the New York Assembly declined to postpone time or place.

In Albany the streets were cleaned and repaired by order of the City Council, and the delegates were given a public dinner at the municipal expense. The Congress met in the City Hall on the 19th of June, 1754, twenty-five delegates from nine colonies being present; and whether in personal or in representative dignity formed the most august assembly which up to this time had ever been held in the Western World. The colonies were named in the minutes according to their situation from north to south. All were represented, except New Jersey, the Carolinas, and Georgia.

The business proper began when Johnson read a paper, which was the official report of the Board of Commissioners on Indian Affairs, in which the political situation was exposed. In it propositions were made to build forts in the Onondaga and Seneca countries, with a missionary in each place; to forbid the sale of rum, and to expel and keep the Frenchmen out of the Indian castles. The speech, prepared as the voice of the Congress, was delivered June 28 to the Indians who were present, and who had to be urged by the governor to attend. After various conferences and much speech-making on either side, including an address by Abraham, a scorching philippic by King Hendrick,—both Mohawk sachems and brothers,—and the distribution of gifts, the Indians went home apparently satisfied. To the edification of delegates from some of the colonies, where Indians were deemed incapable of understanding truth and honour, they found that Governor De Lancey and Colonel Johnson treated them as honest men who understood the nature of covenants. Whereas the laws of Joshua and Moses had been elsewhere applied only too freely to Indian politics by the elect of Jehovah, the New York authorities really believed that the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule had a place in Indian politics.

Other questions of vital interest to the colonies were discussed. On the fifth day of the session of the Congress, while waiting for the Indians to assemble, a motion was made and carried unanimously that “a union of all the colonies” was absolutely necessary for their security and defence. A committee of six was appointed to prepare plans of union, and from the ninth day until the end of the session this important matter was under debate. On the 9th of July the Congress voted “That there be a union of his Majesty’s several governments on the continent, so that their councils, treasure, and strength may be employed in due proportion against their common enemy.” On the 10th of July the plan was adopted, and ordered to be sent to London for the royal consideration.

How far this Albany plan of union, which looked to a Great Council of forty-eight members meeting at Philadelphia under a President-general, resembled or foreshadowed the National Constitution of 1787, we need not here discuss. Certain it is, that though the exact plan proposed was rejected, both by the colonies and by Great Britain, the spirit of the movement lived on. Between the year 1754 and that of 1776 was only the space of the life of a young man. Between the “Congress”—the word in this sense was a new coinage, dating from the meeting of colonial delegates in Albany, after the burning of Schenectady in 1690—in the State House at Albany and the one in Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia, the time was even less. Certain it is that the assembly of representatives of the colonies at Albany in 1690 was the first occasion of the popular use of the word “Congress” as now used, and usually written with a capital, while that in 1748 made it a word of general acceptance in the English language. Before that time and meeting it had other significations not so august; but while these have fallen away, the other and chief signification in English remains. Further, from this time forth the “Continental”—that is, the American as distinct from the British, the independent as discriminated from the transatlantic—idea grew. In common speech, the continental man was he who was more and more interested in what all the colonies did in union, and less in what the king’s ministers were pleased to dictate. More and more after the Albany Congress Wycliffe’s idea prevailed,—that even King George’s “dominion was founded in grace” and not on prerogative. More and more the legend on the coins, “Georgius Rex Dei Gratia,” faded into the nature of a fairy tale, while the idea grew that the governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed. To those wedded to the idea that religion can live only when buttressed by politics, that a church owes its life to the state, this increase of democratic doctrines was horrible heresy, portending frightful immorality and floods of vice. A State without a King, a Church without politically appointed rulers and the support of public taxation, a coin without the divine name stamped on it, were, in the eyes of the servants of monarchy, as so many expressions of atheism. Not so thought the one member of the Albany Congress who lived to sign the Declaration of Independence and the National Constitution of 1787,—Benjamin Franklin, who incarnated the state founded politically by Penn; nor the Quaker, Stephen Hopkins, of Rhode Island, who lived to put his sign-manual to Jefferson’s immortal document, July 4, 1776.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE BATTLE OF LAKE GEORGE.

By the movements in Western Pennsylvania, the war had already broken out, though the diplomatists on the transatlantic side had not yet said so. By the first week in May, the raids on the northern border began by the destruction of Hoosic, within ten miles of Fort Massachusetts. The half-naked or starving refugees reaching Albany furnished a vivid object-lesson of reality. Under Johnson’s vigilance and activity, the people in the forts, block-houses, and palisaded villages were kept on guard night and day. In this work he was ably seconded by Governor De Lancey. Politics make strange bed-fellows; and the late critic and opponent, now that he occupied the seat of the person whom he had, largely out of party spirit, opposed, became a warm friend of his friend Johnson, the untiring frontiersman.

When in New York, Feb. 28, 1755, Johnson learned of the official declaration of war, and the sailing from Cork, Ireland, of General Braddock with one thousand regulars, bound for Alexandria, Va.; and to this place Johnson with Governor De Lancey made a journey. At the council held by the five royal governors, expeditions against Nova Scotia, Crown Point, Niagara, and Fort Du Quesne were planned. Johnson was again made Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and appointed as major-general to command the forces for the reduction of Crown Point.

The story of the success of one of these expeditions and the failure of two of them under Braddock and Shirley, is known to all. We may now glance at that under Johnson. After a great council held in June, attended by eleven hundred of all ages and sexes, to the devastation of Johnson’s larder, King Hendrick and many hundred fighting men promised to be ready for war. After various delays, the motley army gathered from the colonies left Albany August 8, 1755, and on the 28th Johnson reached the Lake of the Holy Sacrament. A true courtier, he changed the name given by Isaac Jogues, which had superseded the Indian term, Andiatarocte; and in honour of his sovereign George, and “to ascertain his undoubted right there,” called the beautiful water by the name it still bears. The modern fanciful name “Horicon” seems to be nothing more than a printer’s mistake, glorified by a romancer.

Parkman’s magic pen has drawn the picture of the movements of Dieskau, the German, and his French and Indian forces opposed to the provincial army, and has brilliantly described the camp and forces at Lake George, when, on the morning of Sept. 8, 1755, the Canadians, Indians, and French, numbering fifteen hundred, being, unknown to the English, only an hour’s march distant, one thousand men sallied out from the camp to capture Dieskau and his forces. The spirit of Braddock seemed to be still in the air; and the men—New England and New York militia—sallied out jauntily, expecting easy victory, but in reality to what proved “the bloody morning scout.” They were led by Col. Ephraim Williams—whose will, creating what is now Williams College, had been made a few days before at Albany—and by Lieutenant-Colonel Whiting. In three divisions the little army marched out and soon disappeared from view in the forest, just before nine o’clock a. m. The two columns, French and English, were thus approaching each other in a narrow road, like trains on a single track in a tunnel.

Not knowing what the issue might be, Johnson made preparation for all risks. He at once ordered trees felled and laid lengthwise. With these and the wagons, bateaux, and camp equipage, he constructed a rough line of defence, which faced all along the one side of the camp which an assaulting party might be reasonably expected to attack,—that is, on that side of the rough quadrangle which was parallel to the lake. At that portion fronting the road, he planted three of his heaviest pieces of cannon, one thirty-two and two eighteen-pounders. Another was posted a little way round to the left, while five howitzers of smaller calibre, with the mortars, one of thirteen-inch, and four of smaller calibre, were stationed to throw shell in the morasses and woods on the flanks. The superb artillerist, Major William Eyre, with a company of British sailors, served the guns.

The situation then was as follows: Colonel Williams’s party was marching southward along the stump-embossed road cut by Johnson’s axemen a few days before. After advancing two miles he halted for the other divisions to come up, and then moved in a solid body. With what seems incredible carelessness, neglecting to send out scouts, they moved on, Braddock-like, unsuspicious of danger, imagining that the French were miles away.

On the contrary, Dieskau’s scouts had watched their departure from the camp, and quickly reported the news to the German baron. He at once ordered his regulars to halt, and sent the Canadians and Indians into the forest, three hundred paces ahead, with orders to lie flat on the ground behind trees, rocks, and bushes, and make no noise or sign until the regulars had fired, when all were to rise and surround the English.

Here, then, was a horseshoe ambuscade in a swampy spot. It was another case of “the fatal defile.” The regulars were, to the party approaching them, invisible, for they lay behind a swell of ground. All was as silent as the grave when the head of Colonel Williams’s line entered the trap. Had it not been for the treachery of the Indians, or the warning signal of the French Iroquois to their kindred, given by the discharge of a gun,—though it may be possible that this unexpected shot was an accident,—the English would have been nearly annihilated. But before the party had passed the calks of the horseshoe at the ends of the ambuscade, the war-whoop and the countless puffs of smoke and whistling bullets told the whole story. The silent wilderness at once became hell.

Colonel Williams at once took in the situation, and mounting a rock to direct his men, ordered them to spread out on the hill to the right. He was soon shot through the head. Hendrick had fallen at the first fire. The Americans were rallied by Nathan Whiting, and retreated stubbornly, contesting the ground rod by rod, and firing from behind trees and rocks at the Canadians and Indians, who followed the same tactics. Where they met reinforcements sent out by Johnson, their firing was more steady and destructive.

It was near Bloody Pond that Lieutenant Cole and the three hundred men sent out from camp by Johnson met them, and ably covered their retreat, so that the wounded were brought in, and the main body reached the camp in good order about ten o’clock. Le Gardeur, the officer to whom Washington had surrendered a few months before, commanded the Canadian Indians in this battle, and was slain. The savages, seeing the English out of the way for the present, at once fell back to scalp and plunder the slain Americans. Dieskau ordered them off, refusing to let them stop and thus lose time. Though obeying, they were angry and insubordinate, and later in the day sneaked out of the fight, to return like dogs to their vomit of war. Dieskau ordered the bugles to sound the assembly, and re-formed his forces, hoping by a rush on Johnson’s camp to capture it at once. Unfortunately for him, he had to reckon with Indians and bush-rangers instead of with trained soldiers.

Once inside the camp, the Massachusetts men were ranged on the right, the Connecticut men on the left, with the New York and New Hampshire men between. Five hundred troops were posted on the flanks in reserve. Lying down flat on their stomachs behind the hastily thrown up barricade, they lay awaiting the enemy, whom they expected at a double-quick pace.

Everything now depended on the steadiness of the militia. The officers threatened death to all who flinched from the foe. All eyes were bent on the woods in front, and especially down the road whence they expected to see the regulars rush on them with levelled bayonets. Could raw provincials, commanded by a fur-trader and a lawyer, face the veterans of Europe?

Three long, cold iron noses poked out at them were too much for Dieskau’s Indians. The black-mouthed cannon, intercepting with their round circles a charming view of the blue lake ahead, took away the courage of the bush-rangers, and both reds and whites scattered and took to the woods. To the exasperation of Dieskau, all his life used to regular military formations, his great host melted away from his sight in the undergrowth and behind trees; where, now creeping forward, now squatting or lying, they began a dropping fire in the front and on the flanks of the Americans. In traditional European style, the French regulars, in white uniforms and with glittering bayonets, marched up and delivered their volleys from double ranks.

Platoon-firing was then the orthodox method of war. The long, thin lines of battle which now obtain in the field, and which the Americans taught to Europe, were not then known to men accustomed to the cleared land and level fields of the Low Countries, and of Europe generally. Soon moving forward into the clearing, and deploying to double width, the regulars fired by platoons of three lines,—the first file of men kneeling down, and the rear, or third file, delivering their volleys over the shoulders of those of the second line in front. Aiming too high and being too far off for the effective range of flint-lock smooth-bores, the result of their general miss was to arouse the spirits of the Americans, even to gayety. After the first hour their nerves became more steady, and they aimed with deadly effect, while the irritated and excited veterans fired too high to do much execution. When the cannon served by the sailors under Major Eyre began to tear their ranks with round shot and canister, the great gaps made among the white coats cheered the provincials still more. Gallantly dressing up, they endeavoured for many minutes to present an orderly front; but, finally, Dieskau had to break from the road, and moving to the right in the face of a murderous fire, began the attack on the three regiments of Colonels Williams, Ruggles, and Whitcomb. Here for another hour they stood their ground manfully, in the face of a fire whose rapidity and accuracy were the astonishment of Dieskau, who bravely led his troops until struck down.

The commanders on either side in this battle were wounded, and had to retire in favour of others. Johnson, shortly after the first volley of the French regulars, was struck by a ball in the thigh which made a painful flesh wound. The ball broke no bones, but was never extracted, and the lacerated nerves troubled him more or less all his life thereafter. He retired to his tent, and Gen. Phineas Lyman took command, cheering his men, and exposing himself with reckless bravery both behind and outside the barricade. In fact, this battle of Lake George was Lyman’s battle, and was largely Lyman’s victory.

Dieskau had bravely led his men during several hours, but while giving an order to his Indians to move farther to the left, he approached so near the intrenchments that he received, from an American standing behind a tree, his first wound. Ordering the Chevalier de Montreuil to take command, and to order retreat if necessary, then to do his best, and to send men to remove him, Dieskau crawled near a tree and sat with his back against it. One Canadian sent to remove him was picked off by an American, and fell across the baron’s wounded knee. The other went off for assistance; but soon after his disappearance the retreat was sounded. A renegade Frenchman, on the American side, then approached within twelve paces of the German baron, and deliberately shot him, the bullet traversing his hips. Dieskau had received, in all, five wounds.

Blodget, a sutler in Johnson’s army, stood like a war-correspondent on the hill near by, watching the fighting. He was thus enabled to make a sketch of the battle, which he published as a cheap print, “with a full though short history,” some weeks afterward, in Boston. Even the wagoners, in the intervals between carrying to Surgeon Williams the wounded who lay on the ground behind the log-house, took their part in fighting; each probably doing as much execution as the average farmer’s boy. For, despite the hot fire so long maintained, the number of killed and wounded on the enemy’s side, except among the French regulars whose white uniform made them easy targets, was not very great. It was not easy to hit men ensconced behind trees or stumps, or occasionally rising in the smoke above the underbrush, while the enemy could, during most of the time, see only here and there a head. The Mohawks in the camp were mostly useless, except to keep up yelling while their white brothers fought beyond the breastworks; and they enjoyed seeing how the pale faces fought. Nevertheless, about forty of their number lost their lives during the day in ambuscade and battle.

While this attack of the regulars on the right was progressing, the French Canadians and the Abenaki Indians boldly attempted to flank the left of the camp, many of them even going away round toward the lake, and clustering in a morass where the musketry fire could not well reach them. Fortunately, however, Johnson had posted a field-piece advantageously on the extreme left of his front, which now harassed the squatting Indians, while on those in the marsh the mortars and howitzers were trained. Although the howitzers split and became useless, the mortars did well; and some shells skilfully dropped drove the lurking enemy away, and completely relieved this flank of danger.

Brave as were the Americans behind the rude barricade, they did not excel the French regulars, who fought until they were nearly annihilated. It was well into the afternoon when they were deserted by hundreds of French forest-rangers and Canadian Indians, who, seeing no hope of winning the day, skulked away to the scene of the morning’s ambuscade,—the one set to plunder, and the other to scalp the slain. About four o’clock so many of the white-coated regulars were prone on the ground and so few in action, all their officers being disabled, while the fire of the others had slackened, that the Americans began to get out of their breastworks, and to fight in the woods. This made the French give way so visibly that the whole of Lyman’s force rushed out on the enemy with their hatchets and clubbed muskets, pushing them out of ambush into full retreat. This onset took place between four and five o’clock p. m., and resulted in completely driving the enemy off the field.

The fighting was not yet over, for the third battle on this eventful day was yet to take place. Hearing the distant firing, Colonel Blanchard, of Fort Lyman, sent out a party of two hundred and fifty men under command of the brave Captain McGinnis, who, with his Schenectady men, led the van. Warily approaching the place of the morning’s ambuscade, with scouts ahead, they succeeded in getting between the piled-up baggage of the French army and a vidette of five or six men who were keeping a lookout on a hill. Moving farther up the road, they found a party of three hundred French and Indians, consisting of those who had plundered the slain, and of other remnants of the beaten army, who were eating cold rations out of their packs. They sat along Rocky Brook and the marshy pond. McGinnis and his men approached stealthily until within firing distance, and then, after a volley, charged like tigers upon their prey.

In the fight which ensued the Americans contested against heavy odds; but although their brave captain was mortally wounded, he directed their movements till the firing ceased, and the third battle of this eventful day resulted in victory. Not till the next evening did the scattered band of Dieskau’s army meet, exhausted and famished, at the place where they had left their canoes.

The next day the marshy pool, in places reddened with the blood of the slain, thrown into it to save burial, was given the name—which it ever afterward kept—of “Bloody Pond.” When the writer saw it, in 1877, the sunbeams danced merrily on its dimpled face, as the snow-white and golden pond-lilies were swayed by the morning’s breeze, rippling the water’s surface, while yet held at anchor beneath. In this threefold battle the Americans lost most heavily in the “bloody morning scout” at the ambuscade,—their total being two hundred and twenty killed, and ninety wounded. The well-plied tomahawks, after the surprise in the woods, and the poisoned bullets of the French Canadians accounted for the disproportionate number of the dead over the wounded. Among the officers were Colonel Williams, Major Ashley, Captains Keys, Porter, Ingersoll, and twelve others. Captain McGinnis died in the camp two days afterward. Of the Indians, beside Hendrick, thirty-eight were slain. On the French side the loss must have been fully four hundred, or probably one third of those actually engaged.

In this battle farmers and traders prevailed over European troops, trained woodcraftsmen, and fierce savages. The honours of the command belong equally to three men. The credit of the defences, and the excellent disposition of marksmen, artillery, and reserves, belongs to Johnson, who, unfortunately, was wounded in the hips in the first part of the battle, and had to leave the field for shelter. The command then devolved upon Gen. Phineas Lyman, who deserves equal honour with Johnson. The Connecticut general, cool and alert, displayed the greatest courage, and was largely influential in securing the final result. To McGinnis belongs the credit of winning a victory,—the second of the day, in what may be called the third battle of this eventful 8th of September. Nevertheless, such are the peculiarities of the military mind, that Johnson never mentioned Lyman’s name in his official despatch. For this reason, and because they unjustly suspected cowardice in Johnson during the battle, and because they saw comparatively little of him before and after it, withal being sectional and clannish in their opinions, Johnson was extremely unpopular with the New England soldiers. Their judgments have mightily influenced the accounts of the threefold battle of Lake George as found in the writings of New England annalists and historians.