They were, as I have before stated, the most powerful, the most crafty, the most cruel, the most savage, the most politic, the most enlightened, of all the Indian tribes of North America. They were subject to no power on earth but their own fierce wills, yet were under the almost complete control of Sir William Johnson. In a war with Great Britain, it could not have been expected that the people of the Six Nations would desert their ancient ally.

Such were the slumbering elements of discord that lay contiguous to each other, in seeming peace, within the limits of Tryon county at the date of its formation, on the eve of the Revolution.

V.

THE CONFLICT.

In the spring of 1774, Sir William held his last grand council with his Iroquois neighbors, the people of the Six Nations, at his manor house in Johnstown. It was an occasion of more than ordinary pomp and ceremony. Delegations of sachems, chiefs, warriors and women, from all the castles of the Six Nations, were entertained for days at Sir William's expense. On the last day of the council Sir William made a speech of more than usual eloquence and power. But the terrors of the impending conflict which he knew must soon come, seemed to cast an unwonted gloom over his spirit. Exhausted by his effort, he was carried to his bed to die, before the smoke had ceased to rise from the council fires.

In less than two years after Sir William's death the warcloud, which had been so long gathering, burst like a whirlwind over the valley of the Mohawk. Tryon county be

125

came a scene of desolation and blood, such as even the old
Wilderness, with all its savage horrors, had never seen
fore. It would weary us all to follow the fortunes of the
be-
several peoples who made up the inhabitants of Tryon
county through those terrible seven years of war.
history of the twelve years of the existence of Tryon coun-
The
ty would fill a volume. A mere glance at what occurred
during the war must suffice for these pages.

In pursuing this history, we should listen to the story of the first vigorous uprising, and the flight of Sir John Johnson and his father's numerous tenantry and loyal adherents, together with his ever faithful allies, the Mohawks, to Canada, in the summer of 1775. Our blood would curdle at the relation of the cruel butchery of Cherry Valley, on the 11th of October, 1778, which is second only in tragic interest to that of the far-famed valley of Wyoming, which occurred a few months earlier in the same year. narrative would reveal the sickening horrors of the several The raids made by Sir John Johnson's men and their savage allies, as they from time to time swooped down from their secure retreat beyond the St. Lawrence, upon the homes of their former neighbors in the valley of the Mohawk, leaving in their track nothing but blackened corpses and the ashes of ruined firesides.

We should stand in imagination by the side of the gallant Herkimer, the Palatine general, in the bloody ambuscade at Oriskany on the 5th day of August, 1777, when Brandt and his Mohawks, and Butler with his Tory rangers met their old neighbors, with whom they had been reared as children together on the banks of the Mohawk, in a

hand-to-hand conflict, each dying in the other's arms in the terrible rage of battle.

In the long recital of stirring events, perhaps nothing would interest us more than the details of Gen. Sullivan's avenging march with his army, in August, 1779, into the country of the far-off Senecas, in the Genesee valley, leaving nothing on his return but the ashes of villages and cornfields, and the scattered remnants of the once powerful confederacy.

And when the glad tidings of peace once more should come, we should see in Tryon county nothing but a desolate blood-stained wilderness. We should learn that when the war broke out in 1775, Gov. Tryon reported ten thousand whites and two thousand Indian warriors as comprising the population of Tryon county. Two years before the end of the war, the Indian tribes were broken and scattered. Of the ten thousand white inhabitants, one-third had espoused the royal cause and fled to Canada, one-third had been driven from their homes or slain in battle, and of the remaining third, three hundred were widows and two thousand were orphan children.*

Then, when peace was declared, we should see the old Dutch settlers of the valley and their neighbors, the Palatines, coming back to find the places of their old hearthstones overgrown with bushes, and fast reverting to the original forests. But they were now the masters of the valley, the true lords of Tryon county. And smiling through their tears, in 1784, they dropped the now odious name of Tryon, and called their county in honor of the lamented Montgomery.

* See Campbell's annals of Tryon county.

The name of the county of Charlotte was at the same time changed to Washington, and the two names, Tryon and Charlotte, have long since fallen out of human speech, and can now only be found in musty records or on the his

torian's page.

To-day the traveller, as he whirls along through the fertile valley of the Mohawk, in the palatial cars of the modern railroad which is built over the old Indian trail, perchance gets a glimpse of the old mansion called Fort Johnson, on the north bank of the river, which is one of the few remaining historical landmarks connected with the memory of Sir William, while Tribes Hill, Canajoharie, and other Indian names still suggest the old Mohawk occupancy, and Palatine Bridge connects the present with the long chain of historic circumstances which run back in unbroken course to the old homes of a people in the Rhineland of two hundred years ago. But he will hear nothing in all his journeyings of Tryon county.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE MANOR OF WILLSBORO.

"Life hath its harvest moons,

Its tasselled corn and purple weighted vine,
Its gathered sheaves of grain, the blessed sign
Of plenteous reaping, bread, and pure rich wine,
Full hearts for harvest tunes.

"Life hath its barren years

When blossoms fall untimely down;
When ripened fruitage fails to crown
The summer toil; when nature's frown
Looks only on our tears."

I.

SEIGNEURIES.

Of the many attempts in colonial times to follow in the New World the old order of things, the Dutch and English baronial manors founded upon the Hudson, and the French seigneuries on the St. Lawrence, were in a measure successful ones, but in the rugged soil of the Wilderness, all such efforts proved abortive. Among such unsuccessful efforts there is none which possesses a more melancholy interest than the now forgotten Manor of Willsboro, which was located near the mouth of the Boquet River, on Lake Champlain.

During the French occupancy of the Champlain valley, the Governor-General of Canada granted large tracts of land lying on both sides of the lake to several persons holding office under the French king. These grants were seigneuries over which the proprietors could exercise certain minor executive and judicial powers, after the manner of the feudal lords of the Old World. On two only of their seigneuries lying within the territory of Northern New York were settlements made by the French proprietors.