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.
| 1400–1600 a. d. | Occupation of the region between | |
| the Niagara and the Hudson | ||
| River by the Indian tribes | ||
| of the Long House. | ||
| { July 29. | Defeat of the Iroquois near | |
| { | Ticonderoga, N. Y., by | |
| { | Champlain. | |
| 1609, | { Sept. 1–23. | Hendrick Hudson explores the |
| { | river as far as the Mohawk. | |
| 1613. | Hollanders build on Manhattan and Nassau Islands. |
| 1617. | Iroquois form an alliance with the Dutch. |
| 1623. | Jesse De Forest and the Walloons settle and found New York City.—Fort Orange built.—Settlement at Albany. |
| 1630. | Patroon Kilian Van Rensselaer.—Arrival of Arendt Van Curler. |
| 1642. | Van Curler enters the Mohawk Valley and ransoms Isaac Jogues. |
| 1661. | Van Curler founds the city of Schenectady. |
| 1664. | English Conquest of New Netherlands. |
| 1667. | Kryn leads the Caughnawaga Indians to Canada. |
| 1690. | Massacre at Schenectady. |
| 1710. | Palatine Germans in New York. |
| 1713. | The Tuscaroras join the Iroquois Confederacy. |
| 1715. | Sir William Johnson born. |
| 1722. | Palatines settle in Mohawk Valley.—Oswego founded. |
| 1738. | Johnson settled at Warrensburgh, N. Y. |
| 1740. | Johnson made head of the Indian Department. |
| 1754. | The Congress and Council at Albany. |
| 1755. | Battle of Lake George. |
| 1757. | Massacre at German Flats. |
| 1759. | Surrender of Niagara to Johnson.—Fall of Quebec and the French power in America. |
| 1763. | Conspiracy of Pontiac.—Johnstown founded, and Johnson Hall built. |
| 1768. | Treaty at Fort Stanwix. |
| 1770. | January 18, First bloodshed of the Revolution. |
| 1771. | First battle of the Revolution at Alamance, N. C. |
| 1772. | Division of Albany County.—Johnstown made the county-seat of Tryon County. |
| 1774. | Death of Sir William Johnson. |
| 1777. | Battle of Oriskany. |
| 1778. | Massacre at Cherry Valley. |
| 1779. | Brant at Minnisink.—General Sullivan’s Expedition against the Six Nations. |
| 1782. | New York’s Western lands transferred to the nation. |
| 1783. | Tories banished from the Mohawk Valley. |
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.
