Page:Historic towns of the middle states (IA historictownsofm02powe).pdf/56

 troublous days. Second to New York in size and resources, it served as a wary sentinel and tremulous alarm-bell to the exposed province. For well-nigh a century, all beyond it to the west and north, except the hamlet of Schenectady and the French settlements on the St. Lawrence, was wilderness and savages. It occupied a post of the gravest peril and responsibility. We get a glimpse of the situation and of the current history in the scene on that Sunday morning, the 9th of February, four years after the granting of the charter, when Symon Schermerhoorn, shot through the thigh, told at the north gate of the stockade his breathless story of the night attack and the horrible massacre at Schenectady.

Between the hostile French in Canada and the little frontier city on the Hudson roamed the tribes of the Iroquois confederacy, upon whose friendship and fealty in large measure hung the destiny of the English possessions. The stockade, thirteen feet high, would have been of little account if that living bulwark of savage allies had yielded to the arms or the bribes of the French. That the bulwark did not yield, that the fealty of the Indians was won and, through every peril, kept unbroken,