208 APPENDIX. 



Mr. Newhouse is a native of Brattleboro, Vt. His pater- 

 nal grandfather was an English soldier, who, having been 

 taken prisoner by the Americans at the battle of Bunker Hill, 

 afterwards adopted this country as his home. From Brattle- 

 boro the parents of Mr. Newhouse removed during his in- 

 fancy to Colerain, Mass. ; and in 1820, when he was fourteen 

 years old, the family emigrated to Oneida County, N. Y. 

 This central part of the State of New York, if not then an 

 actually new country, retained some of the features of a fron- 

 tier settlement. The Erie Canal, though it was building, was 

 not finished till several years later; and travel was mainly 

 accomplished by means of stage-coaches, which at some sea- 

 sons plowed their toilsome way through seas of mud. The 

 large kinds of game, as deer, bears and wolves, were not ex- 

 tinct in the great forest basin of Oneida Lake. Fur-bearing 

 animals and salmon abounded in the streams ; and a remnant 

 of the Iroquois Indians, several thousand in number, inhabit- 

 ing reserved lands in this and the neighboring counties, with 

 their bow-and-arrow proclivities, gave a somewhat primitive 

 cast to the population. 



With a stout constitution and a taste for field-sports, drawn 

 perhaps from his English forefathers, Mr. Newhouse found 

 his youth not inaptly placed in such a region. While mak- 

 ing the usual school attainments in education, and rendering 

 his share of assistance on the family farm, he also became 

 known as a successful woodsman, wise in the ways of all 

 sorts of game, from wild geese to honey-bees, and from bull- 

 pouts to bears. The instinct of a successful hunter or trap- 

 per amounts almost to a sixth sense ; and this inevitable track- 

 ing faculty which enables one man to detect the signs of 

 game and to seize the strategic point for its capture, which 

 to another are quite unintelligible, was strong in young New- 

 house. It is unsafe for a pigeon to alight, or for a muskrat 

 to make an audible plunge, within three miles of such a boy. 

 Vulpine cunning may suffice to elude the common range of 

 observation, but it is no match for the awakened sharpness of 

 the practiced woodsman. 



The need of a trapper in a new country is not piano-fortes, 



