Page:The Old New York Frontier.djvu/32

 lands is the history of a chain of prosperous settlements founded mainly by men from New England States on sites where Scotch-Irish, German, and other pioneers had taken up lands before the conflict. Thus it becomes a history, furnishing a type of the settlement of Central New York.

In the history of the upper Susquehanna Valley as a highway, three distinct periods might be named. First come the trails of the Indian era, dating from immemorial times and including the years of the fur traders and the Protestant missions. Second is the time from 1770 to 1783, when by turns the valley was a road for pioneers coming into the country, to be driven out by fire and the tomahawk; a road for Indians bent on spoliation or massacre; a route by land and water for the soldiers of General Clinton; and, finally, a route along which the Indians, stirred to bitter revenge by General Sullivan’s ravages, penetrated and laid waste all that remained of the Mohawk and Schoharie settlements. Third comes the period after the peace, when the valley was the road for settlers bound for the "Southern Tier" and Pennsylvania by way of Wattles’s Ferry, from 1784 on for many years, and when from about 1800 it became at Unadilla the terminus of two great turnpikes, the Catskill and the Ithaca, which were the railroads of their time and along which for a quarter of a century ran the main course of trade and travel for a large inland territory.

This history has long waited for consecutive and full narration. More than half a century ago several writers dealt with certain interesting parts of it. Campbell, with an able and gentle hand, wrote the story of the settlement of Cherry Valley, and of