LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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