 may carry him back in
imagination, to the precise condition of society that we desire to delineate. It
is matter of history that the settlements on the eastern shores of the Hudson,
such as Claverack, Kinderhook, and even Poughkeepsie, were not regarded as safe
from Indian incursions a century since, and there is still standing on the banks
of the same river, and within musket shot of the wharves of Albany, a residence
of a younger branch1 of the van Rensselaers, that has loop-holes constructed for
defence against the same crafty enemy, although it dates from a period scarcely
so distant. Other similar memorials of the infancy of the country are to be
found, scattered through what is now deemed the very centre of American
civilization, affording the plainest proofs that all we possess of security from
invasion and hostile violence, is the growth of but little more than the time
that is frequently filled by a single human life.
    The incidents of this tale occurred between the years 1740 and 1745, when
the settled portions of the Colony of New-York were confined to the four
Atlantic counties, a narrow belt of country on each side of the Hudson,
extending from its mouth to the falls near its head, and to a few advanced
neighborhoods on the Mohawk and the Schoharie. Broad belts of the virgin
wilderness, not only reached the shores of the first river, but they even
crossed it, stretching away into New England, and affording forest cover to the
noiseless moccasin of the native warrior, as he trod the secret and bloody
war-path. A bird's eye view of the whole region east of the Mississippi, must
then have offered one vast expanse of woods, relieved by a comparatively narrow
fringe of cultivation along the sea, dotted by the glittering surfaces of lakes,
and intersected by the waving lines of rivers. In such a vast picture of solemn
solitude, the district of country we design to paint, sinks into insignificance,
though we feel encouraged to proceed by the conviction that, with slight and
immaterial distinctions, he who succeeds in giving an accurate idea of any
portion of this wild region, must necessarily convey a tolerably correct notion
of the whole.
    Whatever may be the changes produced by man, the eternal round of the
seasons is unbroken. Summer and winter, seed time and harvest, return in their
stated order, with a sublime precision, affording to man one of the noblest of
all the occasions he enjoys of proving the high powers of his far reaching mind,
in compassing the laws that control their exact uniformity, and in calculating
their never ending revolutions. Centuries
