HISTORY OF STEUBEN COUNTY, NEW YORK. 



49 



renowned hunter and guide. Mr. Patterson was well ac- 

 quainted with the German language, and Col. Williamson 

 had entire confidence in his skill and ability. He was 

 abundantly supplied with money and means. Seven stout 

 young Pennsylvanians, well skilled in the use of the axe 

 and the rifle, were chosen by him as assistant woodsmen, 

 and these and the Germans were to open the road, while 

 the guide, in addition to his duties as commander of the 

 column, undertook to supply the camp with game. 



Judge McMaster gives the following graphic and very 

 interesting account of this enterprise : 



" It was in the month of September when the emigrants appeared 

 at the mouth of Lycoming Creek, ready for the march to the northern 

 paradise. ... A little way up the creek they commenced hewing the 

 road. Here the Germans took their first lessons in woodcraft. They 

 were not ready apprentices, and never carried the art to great perfec- 

 tion. We hear of them in after-years sawing trees down.-^- The 

 heavy frontier axe (nine-pounder, often) was to them a very grievous 

 thing. They became weary and lamej the discomforts of the woods 

 were beyond endurance, and their complaints grew longer and more 

 doleful at each sunset. But in a few weeks they found themselves 

 deep in the wilderness. The roaring of torrents, the murmur of 

 huge trees, the echoes of the glens, the precipices, at the feet of which 

 ran the creeks, the forests waving on the mountains and crowding the 

 r ivines like armies, were sounds and sights unknown to the pleasant 

 plains of Germany. When it was night and the awful howling of the 

 wolves all around scared the children, or when the crash of great 

 trees, overturned by the high and whirling winds of autumn, Avoke 

 the wives from the dreams of home, or when the alarmed men, aroused 

 in the mid-watches by strange uproars, looked out into the darkness 

 to see enormous black clouds sailing overhead and the obscure cliffs 

 looming around, wiiile goblins squeaked and whistled in the air and 

 kicked the tents over, then they all gave way to dismal lamentations. 

 The equinoctial storms came on in due time, and it was sufficiently 

 disheartening to see the dreary rains pour down hour after hour 

 while the gorges were filled with fog and vapors steamed up from the 

 swollen torrents, and the mountains disguised themselves in masks of 

 mist or seemed, like Laplanders, to muffle themselves in huge, hairy 

 clouds, and to pull fur caps over their faces. No retreat could be hoped 

 for. Behind them were the clamorous creeks which they had forded, 

 and which, like anacondas, would have swallowed the whole colony 

 but for the guide, who was wiser than ten serpents and outwitted 

 them; behind them were bears, were owls, exceeding cruel, were wild 

 men and giants, which were only held in check by the hunter's rifle. 

 The guide was merciless; the tall Pennsylvanians hewed the trees and 

 roared out all manner of boisterous jokes, as if it were as pleasant a 

 thing to flounder through the wilderness as to sit smoking in the quiet 

 orchards of the Rhine. 



•' They arrived at the Laurel Ridge of the Alleghanies, which di- 

 vided the Lycoming from the head-waters of the Tioga. Over this, a 

 distance of fifteen miles, the road was to be opened, — no great matter 

 in itself, surely, but it could hardly have been a more serious thing to 

 the emigrants had they been required to make a turnpike over Chim- 

 borazo. When therefore they toiled over these long hills, sometimes 

 looking off" into deep gulfs, sometimes descending into wild hollows, 

 sometimes filing along the edges of precipices, their sufferings were 

 indescribable. The guide was in his element. He scoured the ravines, 

 clambered over the rocks, and ever and anon the Germans, from the 

 tops of the hills, heard the crack of his rifle in groves far below, 

 where the elk was browsing, or where the painted catamount, with 

 her whelps, lurked in the tree-tops. Not for wild beasts alone did the 

 hunter's eye search. He could mark with pleasure valleys and mill 

 streams, and ridges of timber ; he could watch the labor of those invisi- 

 ble artists of autumn, which came down in the October nights and 

 decorated the forests with their frosty brushes, so that the morning 

 sun found the valleys arrayed in all the glory of Solomon, and the 

 dark robe of laurels that covered the ranges spotted with many colors. 



* "An old gentleman, who came over the road in an early day, says 

 the trees looked as if they had been gnawed down by beavers." — 

 Tamer's Phelps and Gorharu's Purchase. 



wherever a beech or a maple or an oak thrust its solitary head through 

 the crowded evergreens; he could smile to see how the "little people" 

 that came through the air from the North Pole were pinching the but- 

 ternuts that hung over the creeks, and the walnuts which the squir- 

 rels spared, and how the brisk and impertinent agents of that huge 

 monopoly, the Great Northern Ice Association, came down with their 

 coopers and headed up the pools in the forest, and nailed bright hoops 

 around the rims of the mountain ponds. The Indian summer, so 

 brief and beautiful, set in — doubly beautiful there in the hills. But 

 the poor emigrants were too disconsolate to observe how the thin haze 

 blurred the rolling ranges, and the quiet mist rested upon the many- 

 colored valleys, or to listen to the strange silence of mountains and 

 forest, broken only by the splashing of creeks far down on the rocky 

 floors of ravines. Certain birds of omen became very obstreperous, 

 and the clamors of these were perhaps the only phenomena of the 

 season noticed by the pilgrims. Quails whistled, crows cawed, jays 

 scolded, and those seedy buccaneers, the hawks, sailed overhead, 

 screaming in the most piratical manner, — omens all of starvation and 

 death. Starvation, however, was not to be dreaded immediately, for 

 the hunter, roving like a hound from hill to hill, supplied the camp 

 abundantly with game. 



" The men wept, and cursed Capt. Williamson bitterly, saying that 

 he had sent them there to die. ' I could compare my situation,' said 

 the guide, * to nothing but that of Moses with the children of Israel. 

 I would march them along a few miles, and then they would rise up 

 and rebel.' Mutiny eff"ected as little with the commander as grief. 

 He cheered up the downhearted, and frightened the mutinous. They 

 had fairly to be driven. Once, when some of the men were very 

 clamorous, and even ofi"ered violence, Patterson stood with his back to 

 a tree, and brandishing his tomahawk furiously, said, ' If you resist 

 me I will KILL you, — every one of you!' 



" They worked along slowly enough. At favorable places for en- 

 campment they built block-houses, or ^.»/oc7i:s, as the Germans called 

 them, and opened the road for some distance in advance before mov- 

 ing the families farther. These block-houses stood for many years 

 landmarks in the wilderness. September and October passed, and it 

 was far in November before they completed the passage of the moun- 

 tains. The frosts were keen ; the northwesters whirled around the 

 hills, and blustered through the valleys alarmingly. Then a new 

 disaster befell them. To sit of evenings around the fire smoking and 

 drinking of coff"ee, and talking of the fatherland, had been a great 

 comfort in the midst of their sorrows ; but at length the supply of 

 coffee was exhausted. The distress was wild at this calamity. Even 

 the men went about wailing, and exclaiming, ' Ach, kaff"ee ! kaffee, 

 mein .lieber katfee !' ( O/i, coffee ! coffee ! my dear coffee I) However, 

 no loss of life followed the sudden failure of coff"ee, and the column 

 toiled onward. 



"At the place now occupied by the village of Blossburg they made 

 a camp, which, from their baker who there built an oven, they called 

 ' Peter's Camp.' Patterson, while hunting in this neighborhood, 

 found a few pieces of coal, which he cut from the ground with his 

 tomahawk. The Germans pronounced it to be of good quality. A 

 half-century from that day, the hill which the guide smote with his 

 hatchet was 'punched full' of holes, miners were tearing out its jewels 

 with pickaxes and gunpowder, and locomotives were carrying them 

 northward by tons. 



" Pushing onward seven miles farther, they made the ' Canoe 

 Camp,' a few miles below the present village of Mansfield. When 

 they reached this place, their supply of provisions was exhausted. 

 . . . Patterson killed an abundant suppl}'- of game, and went down 

 with some of his young men to Painted Post, thirty miles or more 

 below. He ordered provisions to be boated up to this place from 

 Tioga Point, and returned to the camj^ with several canoes.f He 

 found his poor people in utter despair. They lay in their tents 

 bewailing their misfortunes, and said that the Englishman had sent 

 them there to die. He had sent a ship to Hamburgh, he had enticed 

 them from their homes, he had brought them over the ocean on pur- 

 pose that he might send them out into the wilderness to starve. They 

 refused to stir, and begged Patterson to let them die. But he was 

 even yet merciless. He blustered about without ceremony, cut down 



f Some of the canoes were made at the camp, and some were pushed 

 up from Painted Post. Capt. Charles Wolcott, of Corning, went up 

 with a canoe and brought down twenty-four Germans. 



