The Palatine Emigration. 



127 



also received a salary as chief inspector. The particular 

 employment in which they were to engage, the production 

 of turpentine, etc., could not yield at the best for two 

 years, they began to feel that they were treated as slaves 

 or servants, their provisions were salted or of the worst 

 kind, the soil was unpropitious, the tar making prospects 

 bad, and mutinies or insurrections occurred among them 

 against the orders to which it was attempted to subject 

 them. The military, sixty soldiers, were brought down 

 from Albany to compel obedience, and the arms which 

 had been brought back by the 800 who enlisted in 1711 

 in the expedition against Canada under Cols. Nicholson , 

 Whiting, and Schuyler were forcibly taken away from 

 them, to render them incapable of resistance. 



The largest number ever reported as settling at these 

 places on the river was 2,209, which the government in 

 England thought was more than could have been there. 

 In June, 1711, there were in all 1,874 persons. At the end 

 of the year 1711, there were perhaps 1,100 at East Camp, 

 and 600 at West Camp. 



In their depressed condition, a portion of them deter- 

 mined to transport themselves elsewhere, where they could 

 be free husbandmen, as the larger part of them had been 

 formerly, and not to remain to be treated, as they regarded 

 it, worse than tenants, unable to choose the kind of labor 

 they should engage in. Weiser says also that in 1712-13, 

 all were declared to be free to go and settle wherever 

 they pleased. By intercourse with the Indians of the 

 Mohawk tribe in England, their leading men had learned 

 that there was land on Schoharie river where they should 

 be welcome to settle, and both parties believed that the 

 provincial government had no claims to interfere with 

 them if they should move there. Their deputies in the 

 latter part of 1711 went and selected the land, which was 

 very promising in its character, of great fertility and was 



