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 _pecu_niary value, or the salt of the ancient _sal_ary 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.
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[2] The young and charming Lord James Radcliffe, Earl of Derwentwater,
the idol of the Jacobites, was beheaded 24th of February, 1716; that is,
on the very day, it is claimed by Col. T. Bailey Myers, that Sir William
Johnson was born, and the wild fervour of a Jacobite loyalty was still
alive when Sir John was a boy.—DE PEYSTER’S _Life of Gen. John
Johnson_, Introd., p. xvi.
[3] Mr. E. F. De Lancey, the well-known writer on American history and
genealogy, knew personally the grandchildren of Sir William Johnson, and
has embodied valuable information about him and them in his notes to
Jones’s “History of New York during the Revolutionary War.” In his
letter to the writer, dated March 28, 1891, he kindly sent a transcript
from a letter in Mrs. Bowes’s own handwriting—“Information my father
gave me when with him. Catharine Wisenberg, a native of Germany, married
to Sir W. Johnson, Bart. in the U. States of America, died in 1759.”
Mrs. Bowes was a daughter of Sir John Johnson, who was a son of Sir
William Johnson. It is probable that the spelling Wisenberg is only the
phonetic form of Weissenburg. The local gossip and groundless
traditions, like those set down by J. R. Simms, are in all probability
worthless.