OCCUPATION AND SETTLEMENT.
Now that Canada was conquered and the French armies withdrawn from
Ticonderoga and Crown Point, all the country lying between Lake
Champlain and the Connecticut, commonly called the Wilderness, was open
to settlement.
In 1696, long before the granting of French seigniories on Lake
Champlain, Godfrey Dellius, a Dutch clergyman of Albany, had purchased
of the Mohawks, who claimed all this territory, an immense tract,
extending from Saratoga along both sides of the Hudson River and Wood
Creek, and on the east side of Lake Champlain, twenty miles north of
Crown Point. The purchase was confirmed by New York, but three years
later was repealed, "as an extravagant favor to one subject."
In 1732 Colonel John Henry Lydius purchased of the Mohawks a large tract
of land situated on "the Otter Creek, which emptieth itself into Lake
Champlain in North America, easterly from and near Crown Point." The
deed was confirmed by Governor Shirley of Massachusetts in 1744. This
tract embraced nearly the whole of the present counties of Addison and
Rutland. It was divided into townships, and most of it sold by Lydius
to a great number of purchasers,[25] some of whom settled upon it. The
township of Durham was originally settled under this grant, but the
settlers, finding the title imperfect, applied for and obtained letters
patent under New York.[26]
The French colony at Point a Chevalure vanished with the shadow of the
banner of France. The young forest soon repossessed the fields where
almost the only trace of husbandry was the rank growth of foreign weeds.
House walls were crumbling about cold hearthstones and smokeless
chimneys, and thresholds untrodden but by the nightly prowling beast or
the foot of the curious hunter. There was no remembrance of the
housewife's hand but the self-sown lilies and marigolds that mingled
their strange bloom with native asters and goldenrods above the graves
of forsaken homes. From where the sluggish waters of the narrow channel
are first stirred by Wood Creek, to where the waves of Champlain break
on Canadian shores, there was not one settlement on its eastern border,
nor any inhabitant save where some trapper had built his cabin in the
solitude of the woods, and dwelt hermit-like for a time while he plied
his lonely craft.
The Wilderness had not long rested in the silence of peace when it was
invaded by a throng of pioneers, who came to wrest its soil from the
ancient domination of the forest, and upon it to build their homes.
Farmers and sons of farmers, while serving in the colonial armies, had
noted during their painful marches through it what goodly soil slept in
the shadow of this wilderness; keen-eyed rangers, chosen from hunters
and trappers for their skill in woodcraft, when on their perilous
errands had penetrated its depths wherever led an Indian trail or wound
a stream to float a canoe, and knew what it held for men of their craft,
and each had planned, when peace should come, to return to the land that
gave such promise of fruitful fields or the easier garner of peltry.
Lumbermen, too, knew its wealth of great pines; and speculators were
casting greedy eyes upon the region, and plotting for its acquisition.
As the soldiers who guarded its posts, or crossed and recrossed the
savage wilderness, were of New England origin, it naturally followed
that most of the actual settlers came from the same provinces. Thus,
from the very first, each little community of hardy and industrious
pioneers was clearly stamped with the New England character. Such
inspiration, such love of home, as glows in the hearts of all
mountaineers, they drew from the grand companionship of the stern and
steadfast mountains, the Crouching Lion, Mansfield, Ascutney, whose
heavenward-reaching peaks shone white with snow when winter reigned, or
summer came or lingered in the valleys,--landmarks enduring as the
world, that stand while nations are born and flourish and pass away.
Sometimes the pioneer left his family in the older settlements while he,
with a neighbor or two, or often alone, went into the wilderness to make
the beginning of a new home. A pitch was located, and the herculean task
of making a clearing begun, the apparently hopeless warfare of one puny
hand against a countless army of giants that towered above him. Yet one
by one the great trees toppled and fell before his valiant strokes. The
trunks of some were built into a log-house, with a puncheon floor and
roof of bark; more were rolled into heaps and burned, and the first
patch of cleared soil was planted with corn or sown with wheat. After
weeks and months of this toil and hardship and loneliness, perhaps not
once broken by the sight of a fellow-being, when the tasseled corn and
the nodding wheat hid the blackened stumps of the scant clearing, the
giants still hemmed him in, their lofty heads the horizon of his little
world, the bounds of his briefly sunlit sky. When his crops were housed,
and the woods were gaudy with a thousand autumnal tints to where the
glory of the deciduous trees was bounded by the dark wall of "black
growth" on the mountains whose peaks were white with snow, he shouldered
axe and gun and went southward, following the army of crows that raised
a clamor of amazement at this intrusion on their immemorial domain.
While the little clearing slept under the snow, and the silent cabin
made the wintry loneliness of the forest more lonely, he spent a winter
of content among old friends and neighbors, and in the spring set forth
on horseback, or with an ox-team, with wife and children or newly wedded
bride, and scant outfit of household stuff, to take permanent possession
of the new home, where, if the burden of loneliness was lightened, the
weariness of toil, privation, and anxiety was not lessened. Nature was
the only neighbor of the new-comers, kind or unkind, according to her
impartial mood to all her children, now a friend and consoler, with
sunshine and timely shower, flowers and birdsong and hymns of wind-swept
pines, now relentless, assailing with storm and bitter stress of cold.
Miles of weary forest path marked only by blazed trees, or miles of
toilsome waterway, lay between them and their kind, or help or sympathy
in whatever trouble might befall them. Such consolation as religion
might give must be sought at the fountain-head of all religion, since
church and gospel ministrations were left behind.
The old warpaths became the ways of peace, and on lake and river, that
before had borne none but warlike craft, now fared the settler's boat,
laden with his family and household goods, skirting the quiet shore or
up the slow current of a stream, through intervales whose fat soil as
yet nourished only a luxuriant verdure of the forest. From afar the
eternal roar of a cataract boomed in swelling thunder along the green
walls of the lane of waters, foretelling the approaching toil of a
portage. But no foeman lurked behind the green thicket, and the voyagers
were startled by no sound more alarming than the sudden uprising of
innumerable waterfowl, the plunge of an otter disturbed in his sport, or
the mellow cadence of the great owl's solemn note.
The granting of lands, which had been interrupted by the war, was again
begun by the governor of New Hampshire, Benning Wentworth, and in
different parts of the region surveyors were busy running the lines of
townships and lots. There was a flavor of discovery and adventure in
their weary toil that gave it zest, as, with no guide but the compass,
they were led through sombre depths of the primeval forest, where the
footsteps of civilized man had never before fallen, and set the bounds
of ownership where had never been sign of possession but the mark of the
patient beaver's tooth, bark frayed by the claw of the bear, the antler
of the moose, and the brands of the brief camp-fire of the savage. At
night they bivouacked where with the fading of daylight their labors
ended, prepared their rude supper by the fire that summoned a host of
weird and grotesque shadows to surround them, and slept to the grewsome
serenade of the wolf's long howl and the panther's scream.
The conditions of the grants or charters were, that every grantee should
plant and cultivate five acres within five years for every fifty acres
granted; that all white and other pine trees fit for masting the royal
navy should be reserved for that use, and none felled without royal
license; that after ten years a yearly rent of one shilling for each
hundred acres, also for a town lot of one acre, which was set to each
proprietor, a yearly tribute of one ear of Indian corn, both to be paid
on Christmas Day. In each township that he granted, the thrifty governor
had five hundred acres set apart to himself, still known as the
governor's lot, and marked on the old township maps, drawn on the backs
of the charters, with the initials "B. W." In each township one share of
two hundred acres was set apart for the Society for the Propagation of
the Gospel in Foreign Parts, one for a glebe for the Church of England,
one for the first settled minister, and one for a school in said town.
The isolated townships constituted little commonwealths, with
governments of their own, every inhabitant and freeholder having liberty
to vote in the town-meetings, and the three or five selectmen being
invested with the chief authority.
Naturally the proprietors to whom the township was granted were the most
potent factors in its welfare and government, and, if actual settlers,
took the most prominent part in its affairs.
Frequently they offered bounties for the building of gristmills and
sawmills, and the forty dollars bounty offered induced the building of
such mills, that in their turn failed not to attract settlers; for it
was not unusual for pioneers to go twenty miles on foot with a grist to
the nearest mill, or to make as tedious journeys for a load of boards,
the more tedious that all the environing forest was full of unattainable
lumber.
Many of the towns now most populous and important were then uninhabited
and unnamed. Bennington, the first township granted by New Hampshire,
had its hamlet, its principal building, the Green Mountain Tavern,
conspicuous for its sign, a stuffed catamount. Here the fathers of the
unborn State often sat in council, moistening their dry deliberations
with copious mugs of flip served by their confrere, landlord Stephen
Fay. Brattleboro, within whose limits Fort Dummer was built and the
first permanent settlement made, although it boasted the only store in
the State, was of less importance; while Westminster, with its
court-house and jail, assumed more. But at Vergennes, then known as the
First Falls of Otter Creek, where the beavers had scarcely quit building
their lodges on the driftwood that choked the head of the fall, there
lived only Donald McIntosh, the stout old soldier of the Pretender's
futile array and of Wolfe's victorious army, and half a dozen other
settlers, whose cabins clustered about the frequently harried mills.
Where now is the beautiful city of Burlington, the unbroken forest
sloped to the placid shores of Petowbowk; and the Winooski, from its
torrential source to where its slow current crawls through the broad
intervales to the lake, turned no mills, and, but for its one
block-house and the infrequent cabins of adventurous pioneers, was as
wild as when its devious course was but the warpath of the Waubanakee.
Thence to Canada stretched the Wilderness, its solitude as supreme as
when, a century and a half before, the French explorer first beheld its
snow-clad mountain peaks.
Oftener than human voice, the sonorous call of the moose, the wolf's
long howl, the panther's cry, awoke its echoes, and the thud of the axe
was a stranger sound than the rarest voice of nature. The eagle,
swinging in majestic survey of the region, beheld far beneath him to the
southward, here and there, a clustering hamlet and settlements creeping
slowly upon his domain; here and there a mill, where a stream had been
stayed in its idle straying; and here and there on the green bosom of
the forest the unhealed wound of a new clearing, the bark roof of a
settler's cabin, and the hazy upward drift of its chimney smoke; then to
the northward, as far as his telescopic vision ranged, no break in the
variegated verdure but the silver gleam of lake and stream, or the
rugged barrenness of mountain tops.
Although the settlement of the newly opened region did not progress with
anything like the marvelous rapidity that has marked the occupation of
new Territories and States in later times, yet it was remarkable, in
consideration of the tedious journeys that must be made to the new
pitch, with slow ox-cart or sled, or on horseback, where, if there were
roads at all, they were of the worst, or they were made by weary oar or
waft of unstable wind. Furthermore, there was but comparatively slight
overflow of population from the older provinces, or influx of
immigration to American shores.
The settlers in the Wilderness soon found their peaceable possession
obstructed by an obstacle which they had scarcely foreseen,--not by the
harassments of a foreign or savage foe, which now seemed hardly
possible, nor by the inert and active forces of nature that had always
to be taken into account, but by the jealous rivalry and greed of two
provincial governments, both claiming the same territory, and both
deriving their authority from the same royal source.
This controversy between New Hampshire and New York, concerning their
respective boundaries, began with the first English settlement of the
region, and continued till after the close of the Revolution. It
constitutes the most unique feature of the history of the commonwealth;
and though it retarded its settlement, and afterward for years its
admission into the Union, it was the real cause of its becoming an
independent State. For undoubtedly, if the claims of either province had
been undisputed by the other, the region would have quietly taken its
place as part of that, and have had no individual existence. But the
aggressions which the people were compelled to resist schooled them to a
spirit of independence that most naturally led them to establish a
separate government.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] In an indenture made 30th December, 1761, Colonel Lydius grants to
Thomas Robinson, merchant, of Newport, in the Colony of Rhode Island,
one sixtieth of the township No. 24, called Danvis, for the "sum of one
Shilling money one peppercorn each year for seventy years (if demanded)
and after twenty years five Shillings sterling annually, forever, on the
Feast Day of St. Michael the Archangel, for each hundred acres of arable
Land."
[26] Petition of Colonel Spencer and others. _Doc. Hist. N. Y._ vol. iv.
p. 575.