Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 10.djvu/87

 THE

���RANITE neNTHLY.

A NEW HAMPSHIRE MAGAZINE.

TDevoted to Literature, biography, History, and State Progress.

��Vol. X.

��MARCH, 1887,

��No. 3,

��HON. ARETAS BLOOD.

��When, in the early part of the eighteenth century, a few hardy pio- neers gathered about Amoskeag falls to found a settlement in the wilder- ness, they were prepared to wrest a livelihood from the sterile soil, and defend their possessions and families from Indian marauders. It was a frontier settlement, greatly exposed to attack, but it was shunned by the dusky warriors, who dreaded the prowess and the unerring aim of the new comers. The men at the falls carried the war into Canada, and in return for early Indian atrocities the Rangers retaliated with sword and fire-brand in distant savage fast- nesses. Though stern and warlike and aggressive, these children of Scotch Covenanters and Massachu- setts Puritans were law-abiding and God-fearing men and women. There were Goffe, Hildreth, Kidder, McNeil, Stark, Hadley, Stevens, Martin, Em- erson, Perham, Blodgett, Nutt, Ri- dell, McMurphy, Hall, McClintock, Dickey, Gamble, Anderson, Leslie, whose descendants have left an im- press on state and national history.

��While using Amoskeag falls for fish- ing for shad, for salmon, and for lamprey-eels, the most sanguine of those early settlers in his wildest dreams could not have pictured the fair city of Manchester, with its tens of thousands of busy artisans, which the future was to uprear on the banks of the Merrimack river.

In the early part of the present cen- tury, when this continent had received the impetus of freedom, and the peo- ple were surging onward to occupy our vast domain, the highest honors and the richest rewards lay in politi- cal preferment. The greatest intel- lects were devoted to law, to states- manship, or to politics. Ship-build- ing and foreign commerce offered a field for the energies of the most ad- venturous. Agriculture was the great occupation of the American people. The giowth of the cities, centres of commerce and government, was slow and gradual. The advent of the rail- road was the dawn of a new era in the history of the world. Steam had already been utilized for ocean travel, but the locomotive was destined to

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