And this was the situation, as I afterward read it in printed letters: "A few days after this conference with General Herkimer, Brant withdrew his warriors from the Susquehanna and joined Sir John Johnson and Col. John Butler, who were collecting a large body of Tories and refugees at Oswego, preparatory to a descent upon the Mohawk and Schoharie settlements.

While it is true, then, that the mountainous region, which now contains the counties of Schoharie, Otsego, Chenango, Broome, Delaware, &c., was a wilderness in 1775, the colonial governors had begun to make grants of its lands, some twenty years earlier.

Avoiding Schenectady and Albany, he might incline towards the old establishments of the descendants of the emigrants from the Palatinate, on the Schoharie, and reach the Hudson at a point deemed safe for his purposes, through some of the passes of the mountains in their vicinity.

Being a man of education, he at first devoted himself to the business of a land surveyor, in which capacity he was employed by Col. Vroman, to survey the boundaries of his tract of land in the then frontier settlement of Schoharie.

[Footnote 1: Simms' Schoharie.]

The other children all remained in Albany County, except Christian, who, when the jangling land disputes and conflicts of titles arose in Schoharie, followed Conrad Wiser, Esq.

Lawrence was the ancestor of the persons of this name in Schoharie County.

The districts of Albany and Schoharie was infested by Tories, and young Schoolcraft was ever on the qui vive to ferret out this most insidious and cruel of the enemy's power.

He spoke fluently the German and Dutch languages, and was thus able to communicate with the masses of the varied population, originally from the Upper Rhine and the Scheldt, who formed a large portion of the inhabitants of the then frontier portions of Albany County, including the wild and picturesque range of the Helderbergs and of the new settlements of Schoharie, the latter being in immediate contact with the Mohawk Iroquois.

EDMONDS, WALTER D. At Schoharie crossing.

SHAFER, DON CAMERON. Smokefires in Schoharie.

The brave frontier; a story of old Schoharie.

EDMONDS, WALTER D. At Schoharie crossing.

SHAFER, DON CAMERON. Smokefires in Schoharie.

The brave frontier; a story of old Schoharie.

Along the northern frontier, the Loyalist forces commanded by Sir John Johnson and Colonel Butler made repeated incursions into the Mohawk, Schoharie, and Wyoming valleys and, in each case, after leaving a trail of desolation behind them, they withdrew to the Canadian border in good order.

Alexander Macdonell, the former aide-de-camp of Bonnie Prince Charlie, fell with three hundred Loyalists on the Dutch settlements of the Schoharie valley and laid them waste.

In the early autumn, with a force composed of his own regiment, two hundred of Butler's Rangers, and some regulars and Indians, he crossed over to the Schoharie valley, devastated it, and then returned to the Mohawk valley, where he completed the work of the previous spring.

In 1780 Sir John Johnson destroyed in the Schoharie valley alone no less than eighty thousand bushels of grain; and this loss, as Washington wrote to the president of Congress, 'threatened alarming consequences.'

Look at the grin on himand his hatchet shined up like a Cayuga's war-axe!" I opened the despatch; it was from Schuyler, countermanding his instructions for me to go to Stanwix, and directing me to warn every settlement in the Kingsland district that McDonald and some three hundred Indians and renegades were loose on the Schoharie, and that their outlying scouts had struck Broadalbin.