99 How to Found a Settlement (1785-90)

I began with the disadvantage of a small capital and the incumbrance of a large family and yet I have already settled more acres than any man in America. There are forty thousand souls now holding directly or indirectly under me and I trust that no one amongst so many can justly impute to me any act resembling oppression. I am now descending into the vale [end] of life and I must acknowledge that I look back with self-complacency upon what I have done and am proud of having been an instrument in reclaiming such large and fruitful tracts from the waste of the creation. In 1785 I visited the rough and hilly country of Otsego where there existed not an inhabitant nor any trace of a road. I was alone three hundred miles from home without bread, meat, or food of any kind. Fire and fishing tackle were my only means of subsistence. I caught trout in the brook and roasted them on the ashes. My horse fed on the grass that grew by the edge of the waters. I laid me down to sleep in my watch-coat, nothing but the melancholy wilderness around me. In this way I explored the country, formed my plans of future settlement, and meditated upon the spot where a place of trade or a village should afterwards be established.

In May 1786 I opened the sales of 40,000 acres which in sixteen days were all taken up by the poorest order of men. I soon after established a store and went to live among them and continued so to do till 1790, when I brought on my family. For the ensuing four years the scarcity of provisions was a serious calamity. The country was mountainous, there were neither roads nor bridges. But the greatest discouragement was in the extreme poverty of the people, none of whom had the means of clearing more than a small spot in the midst of the thick and lofty woods so that their grain grew chiefly in the shade. Not one in twenty had a horse and the way lay through rapid streams, across swamps, or over bogs. If the father of a family went abroad to labor for bread, it cost him three times its value before he could bring it home and all the business on his farm stood still till his return.

I resided among them and saw too clearly how bad their condition was. I erected a store-house and during each winter filled it with large quantities of grain purchased in distant places. I procured from my friend Henry Drinker a credit for a large quantity of sugar kettles. He also lent me some pot ash kettles which we conveyed as we best could. Sometimes by partial roads on sleighs and sometimes over the ice. By this means I established pot ash works among the settlers and made them debtor for their bread and laboring utensils. I also gave them credit for their maple sugar and pot ash at a price that would bear transportation and the first year after the adoption of this plan I collected in one mass forty-three hogsheads of sugar and three hundred barrels of pot and pearl ash, worth about nine thousand dollars. This kept the people together and at home, and the country soon assumed a new face. I had not funds of my own sufficient for the opening of new roads but I collected the people at convenient seasons and by joint efforts we were able to throw bridges over the deep streams and to make, in the cheapest manner, such roads as suited our then humble purposes.

This was the first settlement I made and the first attempted after the revolution. It was of course attended with the greatest difficulties. Nevertheless, to its success many others have owed their origin. It was besides the roughest land in all the state and the most difficult of cultivation of all that has been settled. But for many years past it has produced everything necessary to the support and comfort of man. It maintains at present eight thousand souls with schools, academies, churches, meeting-houses, turnpike roads, and a market town. It annually yields to commerce large droves of fine oxen, great quantities of wheat and other grain, abundance of pork, pot ash in barrels, and other provisions. Merchants with large capitals and all kinds of useful mechanics reside upon it. The waters are stocked with fish, the air is salubrious, and the country thriving and happy.

If the poor man who comes to purchase land has a cow and a yoke of cattle to bring with him, he is of the most fortunate class. But as he will probably have no money to hire a laborer, he must do all his clearing with his own hands. Having no pasture for his cow and oxen, they must range the woods for subsistence. He must find his cow before he can have his breakfast and his oxen before he can begin his work. Much of the day is sometimes wasted and his strength uselessly exhausted. Under all these disadvantages, if in three years he attains a comfortable livelihood, he is pretty well off. His children, yet too young to afford him any aid, require a school and are a burden upon him. His wife bearing children and living poorly in an open house is liable to sickness. If then in addition to all this he should be pressed by his landlord, he sinks under his distress. But if at this critical moment he be assisted and encouraged, he will soon begin to rise.

Indeed justice and policy combine to point out the duty of the landlord. For if a man has struggled ten years in vain and is at the end of that time unable to pay, not only humanity but self-interest dictates another course and some new expedient for reciprocal advantage. So here the tenant instead of being driven for the principal, will not only keep his possession but retain the privilege of re-acquiring the principal at a future day by the very produce of the lands. He will be happy in the idea of still preserving his home, will pay his rent with cheerfulness. And the landlord has so much certainly added to his capital, whether the tenant re-purchases the fee or not: the improvements if he does purchase it and if not the price agreed upon.

Some rich theorists let the property they purchase lie unoccupied and unproductive and speculate upon a full indemnity from the future rise in value, the more so as they feel no want of the immediate profits. But I can assert from practical experience that it is better for a poor man to pay forty shillings an acre to a landlord who heads the settlement and draws people around him by good plans for their advancement and arrangements for their convenience than to receive an hundred acres gratis from one of these wealthy theorists. For if fifty thousand acres be settled so that there is but one man upon a thousand acres, there can be no one convenience of life attainable. Neither road, school, church, meeting, nor any other of those advantages without which man’s life would resemble that of a wild beast.

Of this I had full proof in the circumstances of the Burlington company. They were rich and purchased a tract of sixty-nine thousand acres and made a deed of gift of one hundred acres out of each thousand to actual settlers, and this they were bound to do in compliance with a condition in the king’s patent. They provided these settlers with many articles of husbandry under the particular agency of Mr. Nathaniel Edwards. But he very soon returned and not long afterwards the settlers followed, stating that they could not support themselves so far in the woods in that scattered situation. I then resided in Burlington and when I undertook to make the settlement on those very lands where so rich a company had failed, it was thought a romantic undertaking for a man unprovided with funds to attempt what gratuitous donations had not been able to achieve. Nevertheless I succeeded and for that very reason that I made no partial gifts but sold the whole at a moderate price with easy payments, having for myself a handsome profit. And people were readily induced to come when they saw a number of co-operators and the benefits of association.

You have now before you as well as I can explain, the advantages and the difficulties which belong to an enterprise in new lands. But let me be clearly understood in this, that no man who does not possess a steady mind, a sober judgment, fortitude, perseverance, and above all common sense can expect to reap the reward which to him who possesses those qualifications is almost certain.

Source: William Cooper, A Guide in the Wilderness (1810), 12-21. https://archive.org/details/toldcontemporari03hartrich/page/96/mode/2up