Chapter Four

SETTLEMENT

“No, Bess,” cried the Judge,..“he who hears of the settlement of a country, knows but little of the toil and suffering by which it is accomplished.”

—James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers, 235

IN The Pioneers JAMES FENIMORE COOPER celebrated the transformation of Otsego into a landscape of farms, but he rued the wasteful rapidity with which the settlers conquered the forest. He detected an irrational, emotional impulse at work in the slaughter of game, fish, and trees: a mass killing beyond all considerations of economic need and interest. Emigrating from districts already deforested and depleted of wildlife, settlers felt giddy with their new power to kill and consume nature on an unprecedented scale. In the novel only Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook limit their demands on nature; they alone seek an equilibrium with the forest and its creatures. The two old hunters despair at the invasion of Yankee settlers dedicated to destroying the trees and wildlife and determined to make a sport, a carnival of their carnage. Billy Kirby represents the aggressive newcomers waging spirited warfare on the forest. Gregarious, boisterous, boastful, and strong, Kirby delights in the destructive power he exercises over trees: “Chopping comes quite nateral to me, and I wish no other emplyment….To my eyes, they are a sore sight at any time, unless I’m privileged to work my will on them; in which case, I can’t say but they are more to my liking.”¹

The other settlers follow Kirby’s example in assailing nature with a mixture of vengeance and delight. Templeton erupts with excited activity on a spring morning when a vast flock of pigeons darkens the sky: “If the heavens were alive with pigeons, the whole village seemed equally in motion, with men, women, and children.” Armed with shotguns, pistols, bows and arrows, makeshift crossbows, long poles, and even a small cannon, the settlers rush to the slope of Mount Vision to indulge in an orgy of mindless, joyous, wasteful killing: “None pretended to collect the game, which lay scattered over the fields in such profusion, as to cover the very ground with the fluttering victims.” Excerpting the scene from the novel, a Cooperstown newspaper editor effused in 1823 that the pigeon hunt was “painted to the life, as we can vouch, having ourselves witnessed similar sport upon the same favoured spot.”²

One June night Templeton’s settlers again achieve a sense of communitas by gathering to slaughter Otsego bass pulled from the lake. Because “the slow, though certain adventures with hook and line were ill-suited to the profusion and impatience of the settlers,” they build a great bonfire to attract the fish to the beach and employ a boat to lay a seine net “fifty or sixty fathoms in length” into the dark water. Then the settlers haul on ropes to pull ashore the seine heavy with the fishes “entangled in the meshes of the net.” “Inflamed beyond the bounds of discretion” at “the sight of the immense piles offish, that were slowly rolling over on the gravelly beach,” the villagers deposit “the whole shoal of victims…in a hollow of the bank, where they were left to flutter away their brief existence.” The night and their energies spent, the villagers leave most of the fish to rot. “I call it sinful and wasty to catch more than can be eat,” Natty Bumppo declaims in futile disgust.³

Judge Marmaduke Temple tries to persuade Natty that they share a common unease with the wasteful slaughter of the pigeons and the bass: “Like all the other treasures of the wilderness, they already begin to disappear before the wasteful extravagance of man.” The judge insists that he can save a measure of nature, or at least slow its destruction, by enforcing new laws designed to restrict the settlers. But at both the pigeon hunt and the fish seining, he utterly fails to persuade his companions to limit their killing. Ineffectual, Temple forgets his qualms, succumbs to the excitement, and joins in the festive slaughter, manifesting his inability, ultimately, to rise above the emotional mass of common men.⁴

Recognizing the shallowness of Judge Temple’s laments, Natty rejects his overtures. Natty realizes that Temple profits from the settler invasion; and he understands, as the judge does not, that no law can restrain the carnage wreaked on nature by the settlers. Natty Bumppo pleads, “Put an ind, Judge, to your clearings. An’t the woods his work as well as the pigeons? Use, but don’t waste. Wasn’t the woods made for the beasts and birds to harbour in?” He later adds, “No, no: we are not much of one mind, Judge, or you’d never turn good hunting grounds into stumpy pastures.” Natty gives voice to James Fenimore Cooper’s understanding that his father’s profits and prospects as a frontier developer depended on the changes in the land effected by the settlers. By facilitating Otsego’s commercial integration into the international market, William Cooper accelerated the changes that Natty laments in the novel.⁵

SETTLERS   

During the late 1780s and early 1790s William Cooper aggressively and shrewdly accumulated thousands of acres in the Otsego country. But to avert financial ruin Cooper and Andrew Craig needed to reap a steady revenue in time to meet their own pressing debts to the men who had sold them Croghan’s securities. For, in selling land to cash-poor farmers, Cooper and Craig had to forgo down payments and look to the future when the settlers could pay out of the produce they generated by clearing and cultivating the land. Cooper’s sales and maneuvers would all come to naught if the buyers did not stay to improve and pay for their lands, if instead they forsook their Otsego lots to try again elsewhere. On the other hand, if his first settlers persisted, prospered, and paid, word of their success would draw additional settlers, sustaining and accelerating development. The first decade of settlement would make or break Cooper’s new settlement and his heavily leveraged estate.⁶

In the late 1780s it was far from certain that William Cooper was up to the complicated challenge of managing the settlement of thousands of acres in a distant forest. An outsider and a novice who had never before speculated in frontier land, he was not yet the self-assured expert in speculation and settlement who appears in the pages of A Guide in the Wilderness written in 1807, after he had succeeded. Before 1786 he had speculated in a few town lots and old farms in the tamed land of New Jersey, but he had never before taken on 29,350 acres of frontier land. He knew very little about either central New York or the techniques of settlement. Because he had ventured more than he was worth in buying the Otsego Patent, in indemnifying Sheriff Clyde, and in offering warrantee deeds, William Cooper faced ruin if his new settlement failed. Moreover, George Croghan and the Burlington Company were discouraging precedents. They had accrued heavy debts instead of revenue from their expensive efforts to attract paying settlers to the Otsego country before the war. Neither as wealthy nor as well connected politically as their predecessors, Cooper and Craig seemed doomed to fail.⁷

Croghan and the Burlington Company had attracted so few settlers because the Otsego hills presented an especially daunting challenge to settlement. On the one hand, Otsego was all too richly endowed with the wild life that settlers needed to subdue; a heavy, thick forest of hardwood and hemlock trees covered the hills and sheltered large populations of carnivorous mammals: bears, panthers, and wolves. On the other hand, Otsego was relatively unpromising for the grains cultivated by settlers. Owing to its elevation, 1,000 to 2,000 feet above sea level, Otsego had a growing season of only 100 to 150 days compared to 150 to 180 days in the lower, warmer Hudson and Mohawk valleys. Moreover, as a hilly country, Otsego had relatively few alluvial flats annually replenished with humus by spring floods. Consequently, settlers steadily depleted the nutrients of the Otsego soil as they stripped off the forest cover to plow and harvest for grains. Because Otsego’s upland soils did not bear up well under sustained grain cropping, settlers regularly had to clear new fields for cultivation—a laborious process with oxen and axes.⁸

The longer-resident Dutch and German settlers of upstate New York disdained the uplands and clung close to the Mohawk, Hudson, and Schoharie rivers, farming the fertile alluvial flats. Subject to annual floods, the flats were rich in topsoil and annual plants but relatively free from large, thick trees. A surveyor noted, “The Flats in general are easily Cleared; in many Places a Man might Clear an Acre in a Day,” in contrast to the heavily timbered hills, where it took about two weeks to clear an acre. To the Dutch and Germans, clearing the uplands hardly seemed worthwhile, given that the relatively thin topsoils of the hills began to wear out after a few years of grain cropping. Nahum Jones, a Yankee sojourning in the Mohawk valley, observed, “The Dutch People seldom attempt new settlements. They stick to the old Hive. A half dozen sons with their families will settle and continue upon the old farm with their father, though it contains no more than 200 acres. Before the [New] English came among them, they thought the upland of no worth.”⁹

Unlike the old-stock Yorkers, the postwar Yankee newcomers readily settled in the hills that resembled their New England homeland. Adept at clearing a heavily timbered land and reconciled to a hilly terrain, the Yankees were the perfect settlers for Otsego. Indeed, most Yankee settlers preferred to avoid the bottomlands as unhealthy and too expensive (and too crowded with the Dutch and Germans). Yankees were hill people; Yorkers were valley people. In defying New York’s authorities on behalf of Vermont’s independence, the rebellious Yankee Ethan Allen had boasted, “The Gods of the hills are not the Gods of the valley.” Mutual prejudice and animosity also worked to keep the two populations apart, concentrated in their different environmental niches. Fortunately for William Cooper, during the later eighteenth century circumstances impelled a swelling migration westward into New York by the very people best suited to settle his Otsego holdings.¹⁰

In the mid and late eighteenth century, population growth in the long-settled parts of New England set Yankees in motion northward and westward in search of the freehold land that grew increasingly expensive at home. By 1775 the typical southern New England farm of fifty acres was barely adequate to feed, house, heat, and clothe a family. New England’s shrinking farms also suffered increasingly from crop pests and from a soil exhaustion wrought by overcropping and overgrazing. Firewood had also grown scarce in southern New England as the Yankees cleared away most of the region’s forest. “The scarcity of fuel in the old settlements of New-England is becoming a very serious matter to the inland villages and towns….Land is there much too dear and scant to raise wood upon, and as men and women are raised with less labor than oaks the disproportion in supplies of fuel, will not only continue, but must encrease,” observed Elihu Phinney, who emigrated to Cooperstown. Yet Yankees continued to reproduce; the average couple reared six to seven children, only one of whom could obtain the home farm.¹¹

To escape looming poverty, thousands of young Yankees sought their own substantial freehold farms by emigrating to the frontier. The Yankees of Connecticut and western Massachusetts headed northward up the Connecticut and Housatonic valleys into the Berkshires and the Green Mountains. Some in this stream spilled over to the west, across the border into New York. That spillage became the main current after 1783 as the Yankee torrent flowed westward through Albany or Catskill into central, northern, and western New York. Almost all of William Cooper’s first buyers were hill Yankees from the border country where western Massachusetts and Vermont bounded on eastern New York. At least fifty-four of the seventy-four buyers came from three then contiguous counties—Berkshire in Massachusetts, Bennington in Vermont, and Albany in New York. Two especially large clusters of buyers came from the towns of Great Barrington (twenty-three) in Berkshire County and Hoosick (twelve) in Albany County.¹²

In addition to the push of population growth and land depletion at home, the Yankee migrants felt the pull of superior new opportunities in upstate New York. In particular, New York offered better lands and transportation for settlers keen to exploit the improving export market for American wheat. During the late 1780s and early 1790s the European demand for imported wheat surged as a consequence of bad harvests and devastating warfare on that continent. The swelling exports to Europe translated into enhanced prices and profits for the merchants and farmers dwelling in the Middle Atlantic states, then the great American breadbasket region. Lands previously marginal for wheat cultivation, by dint of relative infertility or distance from seaport market, assumed increased value during the 1790s. At 1772 price levels, farmers within 64 miles of a seaport could bear the cost to transport their wheat to market and still turn a profit; the enhanced prices of 1800 more than doubled that range, to 143 miles. Because Otsego lay about 80 to 100 miles from Albany, that doubling moved the region within the orbit of the wheat market. The unusually favorable market conditions more than compensated for Otsego’s relative agricultural liabilities.¹³

No state received a greater boost from the expanded wheat trade than New York, which possessed both an extensive hinterland of unsettled land and the Hudson-Mohawk system of navigable rivers that made it relatively easy and cheap for upstate farmers to get their produce to market. Near the juncture of the Mohawk with the Hudson, Albany became the great linchpin of the wheat trade in upstate New York. Employing heavy sleighs in winter and boats or wagons in summer and fall, farmer-teamsters brought wheat to Albany in loads of about 20 to 25 bushels at a time. Levi Beardsley recalled the two-and-a-half-day journey from Otsego to Albany on a sleigh laden with wheat: “It was a curious sight to observe the immense number of sleighs, on approaching the city; a string a mile long was no uncommon occurrence.” Albany’s merchants bought the wheat for loading onto sloops bound down the Hudson to New York City. Sold or consigned to the city’s wholesale merchants, the wheat was reloaded onto larger oceangoing ships for export to Europe. The ships returned with manufactured goods, especially cloth and metal tools, which then passed upriver in the sloops to Albany for dispersal among the farmer-customers in payment for their wheat.¹⁴

The wheat boom stimulated the Yankee emigration out of relatively infertile and inaccessible rural New England to the more fertile and market-accessible counties of upstate New York. Although not durable, the upland soils offered an initial bonus of virgin humus. Newly cultivated lands offered superior yields during the first few years of cropping: 20 to 25 bushels of wheat per acre, compared to the 12 to 16 that was the standard on older, long-tilled, upland fields. New lands also offered a temporary escape from wheat’s debilitating parasites—especially a fungus known as the blast (black stem rust) and an insect known as the Hessian Fly. Both parasites had followed the colonists from Europe to devastate the wheat crops in much of New England and eastern New York. Both would continue to follow westward, but, by racing ahead, the frontier settler obtained a few years’ dispensation. In 1795 the Cooperstown newspaper exulted, “Never Since America was first discovered did the American Farmers realize so much prosperity as in the present day.” The writer urged the settlers “to exert all your efforts to improve every inch of ground, and every hand that can be put to agriculture, in multiplying provisions of every kind with uncommon industry and perseverance; for you may not for ages to come, have such another opportunity.” Similarly, in The Pioneers Marmaduke Temple assures Billy Kirby, a Yankee settler, “So long as the old world is to be convulsed with wars, so long will the harvest of America continue.” The pace of Yankee settlement was sensitive to the ebb and flow of transatlantic political and economic forces.¹⁵

In sum, during the 1780s and 1790s Cooper enjoyed far better circumstances for settlement than Croghan and the Burlington Company had known during the 1760s and 1770s. He acquired and began to develop his Otsego settlement at an unusually auspicious moment. Cooper and Craig obtained the Otsego Patent in the mid-1780s at a bargain price because the recent war and economic hard times had depressed the value of frontier land. Then Cooper had the good fortune to develop his new property during the late 1780s and early 1790s, when land values surged on the New York frontier as thousands of Yankee settlers migrated westward and as the demand for and price of wheat surged. At the same time, most Yankees avoided the lands farther west along the Great Lakes and in the Ohio Valley, regarding them as too distant and dangerous so long as the Indians there remained formidable and hostile. During the 1780s and 1790s the Yankee emigrants were pushed out of New England, drawn into central New York, but deterred from proceeding on to the more fertile lands and more temperate climes farther west. Never before and never again was Otsego so attractive to so many new settlers as the moment when William Cooper became a developer.¹⁶

To hasten Otsego’s development, Cooper confronted a dual challenge. First, he had to learn how to work with his Yankee settlers. Although they were an industrious people skilled at turning marginal lands into farms, the Yankees also had a reputation with most New York landlords as cunning cheats and congenital troublemakers. Second, Cooper had to improve his settlers’ access to external markets, thereby enhancing and accelerating their ability to pay him for their lands.

YANKEES   

After the war Yankee migrants flocked to upstate New York in numbers that overwhelmed the old stock inhabitants, the diverse medley of Dutch, German, Scotch, English, and Huguenot French collectively called Yorkers. Compared with the diverse Yorkers, the Yankees were a homogeneous people. Almost all had descended from seventeenth-century Puritans who had fled from England to colonize Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and southern New Hampshire. A demanding region of long winters, stony hills, thin topsoil, and heavy forests, New England reinforced the Puritan impulses to frugality, industry, ingenuity, enterprise, and covetousness. In turn, those characteristics enabled the New Englanders to derive sustenance—sometimes prosperity, but rarely wealth—from the grudging land. Compared to other Americans, Yankees were a relatively equal and egalitarian people in the distribution of learning, property, and status. There were some wealthy and some dirt-poor Yankees, but most were literate and independent farmers, artisans, and traders of modest means but great pride. Preserving much of their Puritan heritage, the Yankees continued to think of themselves as God’s favored people and resorted to scriptural analogies to describe their actions and purpose. “Emigrants are swarming into these fertile regions in shoals, like the ancient Israelites seeking the land of promise,” observed Elkanah Watson, a Yankee migrant and Albany promoter. They worked so diligently, moved in such numbers, over long distances, and cleaved so tightly to one another against other ethnic groups that observers likened the Yankees to bees. “It is equally necessary that Yankees swarm as it is for bees,” one New York land speculator explained.¹⁷

Their relative equality had a paradoxical effect on Yankee character. On the one hand, Yankees were remarkably competitive, always seeking to win some small measure or token of superior learning, piety, property, or cunning. They prided themselves on every little triumph—in town politics, tavern argument, scriptural disputation, barnyard bargain, or common law litigation—especially if their victory turned on a small ploy of deception. On the other hand, their relative equality and homogeneity also encouraged the Yankees to cooperate in community institutions meant to achieve collective goals. The communal aspect of Yankee culture provided a limiting context for their contestatory behavior as individuals. More than any other people in eighteenth-century America, the Yankees entrusted their town governments with significant powers to sustain schools and churches and to regulate farms and transactions.¹⁸

The exodus of Yankees into New York brought them into conflict with the old-stock inhabitants, especially those of Dutch and German descent. Yankees could reconcile the paradox between their competition and their cohesion by uniting to contend with their new neighbors in New York. Utterly confident of their own superiority, the Yankees considered the Dutch to be stolid, slovenly, illiterate, immoral, and unambitious dullards. After declaiming against “the hateful & insipid & stupid race of the Dutch,” James Kent effused, “The Yankees are a glorious People. They at least have good & quick Sense & polished manners & Hospitality & a disposition to oblige & soothe the stranger & the Traveller & their women are amiable & sprightly & tender.” New Englanders liked to say that the way to make a Dutchman was to take a Yankee, “break his jaw, and knock his brains out.”¹⁹

Yorkers responded to the Yankee insults in kind. Because the Yankees pursued property and salvation simultaneously and with such unrelenting zeal, Yorkers regarded them as pushy hypocrites. Anne Grant, a landlord’s daughter, described the New English as “conceited, litigious, and selfish beyond measure,” as “people who acknowledged no superior, who had a thorough knowledge of law and scripture, ready to wrest to every selfish purpose.” In his 1760 will, the Westchester County landlord Lewis Morris, Jr., stipulated that his son Gouverneur was never to attend college in Connecticut, “lest he should imbibe in his youth that low craft and cunning so incident to the people of that country…though many of them, under the sanctified garb of religion, have endeavored to impose themselves on the world as honest men.”²⁰

Sharing this contempt for the newcomers, in The Pioneers James Fenimore Cooper represented the Yankee settler as Jotham Riddel: “He was of a thin, shapeless figure, with a discontented expression of countenance, and with something extremely shiftless in his whole air.” Judge Temple denounces Riddel as “that dissatisfied, shiftless, lazy, speculating fellow! he who changes his county every three years, his farm every six months, and his occupation every season! an agriculturist yesterday, a shoemaker to-day, and a schoolmaster to-morrow! that epitome of all the unsteady and profitless propensities of the settlers.” The classic border Yankee, Riddel sells his partly cleared Otsego farm to a “forehanded” newcomer and again moves west to repeat his life of clearing, building, and petty land speculating.²¹

Yorker landlords and Yankee settlers had especially good reasons to distrust each other. New York’s colonial governors had sold frontier lands in vast tracts to their wealthy and powerful friends and allies. Determined to live on the annual rents paid by hundreds of tenants, they preferred to lease rather than to sell land. Unlike the Yorkers, who usually accepted—and sometimes prospered under—tenancy, Yankees hated and resisted it. Timothy Dwight of Connecticut found, “In the Yeomanry of this country such a rivited habitual dislike to dependence and controul” that only the most desperate were “willing to live upon rent.” The Yankees who settled in the New York border counties often took up arms to defy the landlords who demanded rents or attempted evictions. During the 1770s, the Yankee settlers in the Green Mountains rebelled against their Yorker landlords, seceded from New York, and formed the independent republic of Vermont (which became a state in the American union in 1791). With great difficulty New York’s authorities and landlords suppressed the similar resistance that flared intermittently after 1751 (and most seriously in 1766, 1777, and 1791) in the long, hilly strip of land lying between the Hudson and the formal boundary with the New England states. After the Revolution, growing numbers of Yankee migrants pressed on beyond the Hudson and into the newly conquered hills of central New York. There they hoped to find landlords who would sell freehold title to the land. One of those waiting landlords was William Cooper.²²

As a New York landlord of Pennsylvania and Quaker origins, Cooper initially shared the prejudice against Yankee settlers. As a landlord, he had to be wary of their tricks and resistance. As a Pennsylvanian, he initially misunderstood and disdained the peculiar system of clearing and cultivating land that the Yankees had developed in New England. As a Quaker, he grew up in a culture that regarded the Yankees as violent, arbitrary, callous, and deceitful oppressors. Middle Atlantic Quakers resented the harrassment and persecution their New England brethren and sisters had suffered during the seventeenth century and again during the recent Revolutionary War.²³

However, frontier experience gradually taught Cooper to admire the Yankees as the very best settlers for his hilly and heavily forested lands. In 1791 Cooper insisted: “What would frighten a Pennsylvinnia farmer is the support of an Easternite. I mean the heavy timber. The Pensylvanyman would look Round and say ‘I shall starve before I can Clear me a farm in this kind of land,’ but the easternite will say, ‘here is a fine chance. I can get immediate Relief from the ashes and whilst I am waiting for the return of my first Crop, the [Maple] Sugar trees will afford me a very seasonable assistance.’ ” He praised the Yankees as “civil, well-informed, and very sagacious; so that a wise stranger would be much apter to conform at once to their usages than to begin by teaching them better.” He reconciled his need for Yankees with his Quaker distrust of their religion by rationalizing that the settlers were victims fleeing from their oppressive Calvinist clergy. In 1789 he announced, “This Valluable Contry is to be Setteled it apeares to me by the heretofore Priest-Riden and Opresd People of New England.” They would, he assured himself, find in him a tolerant and benevolent patron.²⁴

By working with the newcomers William Cooper ensured that Coopers-town would develop as a Yankee village surrounded by Yankee farms. His success and reputation as a landlord grew in symbiosis with the Yankee exodus into the Otsego country. Among the speculators of Albany, New York City, Philadelphia, and Burlington, Cooper became known as the preeminent developer of upcountry lands precisely because he knew better than anyone else how to attract and work with the Yankees who caused other landlords so much trouble. But, in the late 1780s, Cooper’s Otsego venture hung in the balance because too many poor Yankees migrated to his settlements at the wrong moment.

HUNGER   

During the late 1780s the severe hardships of frontier life imperiled Cooper’s vulnerable new settlements around Lake Otsego. During their first two years on the land, few settlers could clear and cultivate enough land to feed themselves. Thereafter they remained vulnerable to famine when crop diseases or early frosts cut short the harvest in their small clearings. Early settlers also had to fight an often losing battle to defend their orchards, poultry, and livestock from marauding bears and wolves, and to protect their grain and garden plants from pigeons, squirrels, and grasshoppers. In A Guide in the Wilderness, William Cooper recalled the early, difficult years of his Otsego settlements:

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; their maize did not ripen; their wheat was blasted, and the little they did gather they had no mill to grind within twenty miles distance; not one in twenty had a horse, and the way lay through rapid streams, across swamps, or over bogs. They had neither provisions to take with them, nor money to purchase them; nor if they had, were any to be found on their way. If the father of a family went abroad to labour 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.

Even when the settlers could raise sufficient crops, they suffered for the lack of bridges and roads to carry their produce to market and for their distance from gristmills to grind their grain into flour. Such settlers had to pound their corn by hand into meal with a pestle and mortar—long, tedious, back-numbing labor.²⁵

Hunger was especially severe and widespread during the late spring and early summer, after the previous harvest had been consumed and before the next ripened. The worst spring for the greatest number was in 1789, when famine prevailed, threatening Cooperstown and Cooper with ruin. In April he reported:

There remained not one pound of salt meat nor a single biscuit. Many were reduced to such distress, as to live upon the roots of wild leeks; some more fortunate lived upon milk, whilst others supported nature by drinking a syrup made of maple sugar and water. The quantity of [wild] leeks they eat had such an effect upon their breath, that they could be smelled at many paces distance, and when they came together, it was like cattle that had pastured in a garlic field. A man of the name of Beets mistaking some poisonous herb for a leek, eat it, and died in consequence. Judge of my feelings at this epoch, with two hundred families about me, and not a morsel of bread.

In The Pioneers, James Fenimore Cooper imagined his father’s feelings and assigned them to Marmaduke Temple: “I had hundreds at that dreadful time, daily looking up to me for bread. The sufferings of their families, and the gloomy prospect before them, had paralysed the enterprise and efforts of my settlers; hunger drove them to the woods for food, but despair sent them, at night, enfeebled and wan, to a sleepless pillow.”²⁶

Nonetheless, poor families kept arriving from New England, seeking land and food. In May, Cooper explained to his friend (and fellow land speculator) Henry Drinker, “The Vast Multitudes of People that Come Dayly to this Country have Causd a Scarcity of Provitions allmost to Famine….Henry, I have had 30 in a Day Seaking Lands of me but [who] Could not Look out much in the woods for want of Something to Subsist upon.” Ironically, William Cooper had been all too successful at drawing large numbers of new settlers to the Otsego frontier.²⁷

Divine providence combined with government aid and William Cooper’s ingenuity to save Otsego from the famine. Schools of herrings ascended the Susquehanna, filling Otsego Lake: an unusual visitation. Under Cooper’s direction, the settlers wove twigs into a crude seine net to drag through the river and lake, capturing thousands of fish. Then he supervised the salting and distribution of the fish to all the starving families. Noting the hunger prevailing all along the frontier, Gov. George Clinton urged the New York legislature to act on June 4. In mid-July the legislature appropriated funds for distribution to four counties. The supervisors of Montgomery County received £170, which they allocated among the county’s nine townships on July 28. Otsego Township received the largest single appropriation (£30) despite ranking seventh in population: evidence that it was the hungriest community in the county.²⁸

The famine lifted as the settlers harvested a good crop in September of 1789 and a still better one in 1790. In July of 1790 Cooper expressed relief: “The Crops here away are much Better than hath been Ever known. My Settelment will have thousands of Bushells.” That summer it became clear that the settlement would survive and prosper. Confident that famine would not return, Cooper moved his family to Cooperstown that fall. As the famine receded, settlers flocked to Otsego in growing numbers. In September of 1791 Cooper marvelled, “The intollorable thorofare of People that Dayly beset me here, not in Serch, but Demanding Lands, Renders it impossible for me to Leave Cooperstown on Any Buisiness what Ever.” After 1789 particular families and small neighborhoods occasionally suffered for want of food, but there was not another general famine in the Otsego country.²⁹

POLICY   

William Cooper learned that the key to a successful development was to hasten a settlement through its difficult early stage by drawing onto the land a concentrated population able to assist one another in building an economic and social infrastructure. He explained,

The reason is plain; the first difficulties are the greatest, and it is only by combination and cooperation that they can be surmounted. The more the settlers are in number, the more hands can be brought to effect those works which cannot be executed by a few; such are the making of roads and bridges…which are impossible to individuals, but which numbers render practicable and easy.

Settlers who came to farm could not afford to be unsocial individualists; they came as families, and they succeeded in overcoming their hardships by establishing social bonds with their neighbors. Cooper explained, “He who comes to better his condition, by embarking in such an enterprize, would find it no relief from his present poverty, to be doomed to a life of savage solitude; he will still desire the society of his species, and the ordinary comforts of life; he will look for some religious institution, some school for his children. There must be mechanics to build houses, and erect mills.” Every newly cleared and planted acre benefited not merely one family but everyone in the neighborhood. Every expansion of fields and herds increased the local supply of food while subtracting from the forest that harbored the wild predators that afflicted their livestock and crops. Settlers usually worked as distinct family groups on their own property, but because all the families labored in the same way to the same ends, they advanced a common cause. Cooper observed, “Each man prospers in proportion as he contributes to the advantage of his neighbor.”³⁰

Depending on how well they fared, the first few settlers to a locale would either set in motion or curtail a chain of migration by relatives and kin. Cooper explained: “Such a one may have friends and connexions, who may want courage to face the first difficulties, or venture on untried ways, but whom he hopes to draw after him by example. It is of great importance to promote the success of such a person, and he will be justly entitled to kindness and support. His task will be to smooth the way for others.” The successful first settler benefited the developer by drawing along behind a widening network of friends and relatives. The unsuccessful settler moved elsewhere, taking away his potential cluster of followers.³¹

Once a critical mass of settlers had been drawn to the land, they would overwhelm the forest and terminate the initial critical stage of hardships. Then William Cooper could readily attract a steady stream of more cautious and prosperous families by advertising, “Mills, roads, bridges, schools and other conveniences, are already established, in all the different quarters of the county; so that all the most obvious objections and difficulties attending a new settlement are surmounted. Provisions are plenty and cheap.” Thereafter, development would become easy and self-sustaining. But to bring on that happy day, the landlord first had to receive and encourage families who could endure life without that infrastructure, who could build it from scratch. Only the sustained exercise of hard labor by a growing population could pull a settlement through to prosperity.³²

The frontier developer confronted a paradox: the early hardships could only be overcome by the labor of growing numbers of settlers, but those hardships deterred the prosperous farm folk who preferred to wait until a settlement became more comfortable. Landlords longed to attract wealthy investors or prosperous farmers who could pay cash for wilderness land, but few such men ventured to new settlements. Cooper insisted that the solution to the paradox was to make the most of the poor men who were willing to take on the hardships of early settlement: “We must not despise the offer of the poor man. He can never be insignificant, who is willing to add his labour to the common stock: for the interest of every individual, from the richest landholder to the poorest settler, conspires and contributes to the great primary object, to cause the Wilderness to bloom and fructify.” By laboring, enduring, and growing in number, the first settlers rendered a neighborhood safer and more attractive to later comers with more money and respectability.³³

Cooper shrewdly encouraged an enthusiasm and optimism calculated to spur and sustain the exertions of the early settlers:

So, in rural phrase, may we compare the poor settler to the creature of draft. Un-sustained, over-loaded, and oppressed, he yields no profit; well treated, in good heart, and gently driven, his labour is lighter, and his profit more. It is no[t] otherwise with man. He can bear so much, and no more; if forced beyond that, his spirits will finally sink under oppression; whereas, by timely aids, encouraging words from a landlord, who has his confidence, and whom he feels to be his friend, he will perform wonders, and exceed his own hopes.

Cooper identified four keys to attracting and inspiring the critical mass of early settlers: freehold title, credit sales at a modest price, opening all lands to settlement, and, above all, the active presence of an encouraging but vigilant landlord. “A moderate price, long credit, a deed in fee, and a friendly landlord are infallible inducements to a numerous settlement,” he wrote.³⁴

First, Cooper realized that a hill country landlord who sought rapid settlement by Yankees had to sell them freehold title. His advertisements promised, “The industrious farmer need never fear a haughty or griping landlord, since upon the premises here…he is the happy master of his own soil.” Cooper’s need rapidly to sell and settle Otsego converged with the Yankee desire for freehold farms. Cooper disagreed with the many other landlords who would sell freeholds only to the most prosperous settlers, restricting the poor majority to leaseholds for fear that they could never pay the value of the principal. He explained,

The poor man, and his class is the most numerous, will generally undertake about one hundred acres. The best mode of dealing with him, is to grant him the fee simple by deed, and secure the purchase money by a mortgage on the land conveyed to him. He then feels himself, if I may use the phrase, as a man upon record. His views extend themselves to his posterity, and he contemplates with pleasure their settlement on the estate he has created; a sentiment ever grateful to the heart of man. His spirit is enlivened; his industry is quickened; every new object he attains brings a new ray of hope and courage: he builds himself a barn and a better habitation; plants his fruit-trees, and lays out his garden….He no longer feels the weight of debt, for having the fee, he can sell at an improved value, nor is he bound to remain against his will.

By selling freeholds, Cooper energized the Yankee skills at clearing the forest and making new farms.³⁵

In contrast, leaseholds kept men poor and disagreeable, to the detriment of their landlord. “Gloomy apprehensions…seize upon [the tenant’s] mind; the bright view of independence is clouded; his habits of thought become sullen and cheerless, and he is unable to soar above the idea of perpetual poverty,” Cooper remarked. Because the tenant usually maximized his exactions from the land and minimized his improvements, most tenant farms in New York were notorious for their ramshackle buildings, slovenly fields, impoverished soil, and mounting arrears in rent. In 1804 William Cooper assured his friend Gouverneur Morris that settlers prospered where they could buy freehold title but stagnated where tenancy prevailed. “If you would Honor Us with a visit in Otsego, you would see the diference between two Extensive Pattents settled on the two Plans. One is a nest of Beggars and Thieves—the other [has] Every Mark of Welth about it. You will say my Plan is best for the Landlord, [the farmer], and the State.”³⁶

Second, Cooper sold land at a modest price on a relatively long credit: ten years, versus the three to five years preferred by many other landlords. In 1789 he exhorted a partner in land speculation, “Let this be the wach word: Strike wile the iron is hot: take Settelers while we Can git them for be Assured there is more Land than People—and he that Sells his Land for 10 [shillings per acre] and gits it improved is better off than he that talks of 20 [shillings] and Leaves it unimproved.” Because it took about five years for a settler to derive an agricultural surplus from a new farm, a high price or a short credit would only discourage and depress his efforts. The settler would seek mere subsistence and eventually flee if he could not improve the value of his lands faster than the 7 percent annual interest accumulating on his principal. Cooper warned other speculators: “I have seen some that will take Lands on any termes and in the End Doe nothing for themselves, or the Proprietor but spend their time in Guning, Fishing &c and for a small Consideration sell their Possestion and Away for a new Place. Those the Better Sort Call Squatters.” The squatters minimized the labor they invested in the land while maximizing what they extracted; they meant to move on once they had exhausted the soil and timber and before the landlord could collect any payment.³⁷

Third, Cooper argued that the truly canny landlord offered all of his land, even the best lots, for sale on credit at a standard price to the first comers. Naturally, the first settlers snatched up the prime lots at the modest price. But in time, as the settlement matured, later comers and the maturing sons of the first settlers would pay enhanced prices for the rougher lands. Cooper condemned the landlords who reserved valuable tracts from settlement for appreciation and future sale. Every empty lot without a settler was a deadweight on the settlement, a debit from the pool of labor needed to break the forest, and a source of resentment.³⁸

A reassuring, resident landlord was Cooper’s fourth and consummate key to maximizing the settlers’ improving labor. Active and enthusiastic at visiting and encouraging his settlers, Cooper nurtured “that confidence which alone could animate and invigorate a difficult enterprise.” In 1789 he insisted that the successful developer was “Continually among the People” acting “as a Soul to the Settelments to incorrage, Contrive, Salve over Littel matters and in short Oppose Every thing that Opposes the Progress of the Settelment. This is what hath Put my Settelment forward so rappidly.”³⁹

A landlord’s work was not done once settlers contracted to buy land. He could not simply and safely sit back, waiting for the payments to roll in on schedule. The passive speculator received little or nothing as settlers kept their money or paid their more attentive and insistent creditors, especially storekeepers. The vigilant and diligent landlord applied varying but regular doses of encouragement, suggestion, and pressure to induce payments. In Otsego, Cooper succeeded by living on his patent and by taking pains to visit his settlers and to know their circumstances. He remarked, “As to the perplexity of recovering moneys from new Settlements is to me well known as well by Experiance as common reason—nothing but time and a residence among the Settelers will make them tollorably Productive.”⁴⁰

The canny developer guided the process by which frontier farms changed hands from the first penurious settlers to the more prosperous latecomers. Operating within a constant flux of local properties, Cooper had to be attentive for opportunities to collect his debts. He also had to be watchful lest a cunning settler skip town before paying but after stripping his land of its value in timber and topsoil. Many early settlers entered land contracts with a speculator simply to gain legal possession of land that they did not intend to pay for in full. Instead, their strategy was to build up sweat equity by improving the land with buildings, fences, and clearings in order eventually to sell out at an advance to a more prosperous latecomer who would also assume responsibility for paying the landlord. Settlers routinely sent Cooper notes directing him to deed their farms to a certain newcomer “upon such terms as you would have conveyed it to me had I not have sold it to him.” Upon selling out, the farm builder moved on to repeat his work elsewhere on the frontier. Although the original farm-makers rarely paid either on schedule or in full, they served the developer’s long-term interest, so long as they were hard at work adding value to the land.⁴¹

In selling land Cooper facilitated with encouragement, rather than complicated with restrictions, the natural process of settlement. Cooper insisted that he succeeded by avoiding the egregious errors of more meddlesome and restrictive landlords who inadvertently prolonged the difficult early stage of settlement. In contrast to many other landlords, he imposed no special covenants or restrictions on his deeds. Cooper played the limited but important role of encouraging, rather than hindering, the latent enterprise of the settlers. By “the simple measure of letting things take their own course, I find my interest and that of the whole community promoted.”⁴²

CIRCULATION   

In The Pioneers Judge Marmaduke Temple insists that economic interest drives human behavior. He characteristically reacts to conflict and responds to problems by trying to create a market. In the novel’s opening scene, he disputes with Natty Bumppo and Oliver Edwards over who owns the freshly killed deer lying in the snow at their feet. Determined to obtain the carcass as a trophy, Temple tries to mollify Natty and Oliver with cash: “Shall we toss up this dollar for the honour, and you keep the silver if you lose—what say you friend?…But you’ll sell me the venison; and the deuce is in it, but I make a good story about its death.” Natty defiantly rejects the offer, for he knows that the intrusion of the market into the forest is the source of his troubles rather than their solution. Belatedly discovering that his shot had, in fact, wounded Oliver, Temple immediately improves his offer: “All shall be done at my expence, and thou shalt live with me until thy wound is healed….But I buy your deer—here, this bill will pay thee, both for thy shot and my own.” In a subsequent scene, when Temple feels distressed by thousands of wounded pigeons left on the ground by his mindless settlers, he creates a market for their mercy killing by offering a price of “sixpence per hundred for the pigeons’ heads only.” The “expedient produced the desired effect, for every urchin on the ground went industriously to work to wring the necks of the wounded birds.”⁴³

Like William Cooper in history, Judge Temple in The Pioneers anticipates a future landscape thick with people and their structures and busy with their commercial activity. It pains him to see potential value laid waste for want of a market. Temple concludes that the “wastefulness of the settlers, with the noble trees of this country, is shocking,” because they let rot logs that “would have sold in the Philadelphia market for twenty dollars.” Richard Jones retorts, “How is the poor devil to get his logs to the Philadelphia market, pray?” This was precisely the question that Cooper wrestled with as a frontier landlord. By integrating his settlements into the transatlantic market he meant to maximize the value of every labor and every natural resource in Otsego. Like Temple, Cooper sought to turn nature into commodities.⁴⁴

Persuading settlers to sign purchase agreements for land was but the first and easiest challenge confronting William Cooper as a speculator. Next and far more difficult was to collect annual payments of the 7 percent interest and, within ten years, the value of the principal. Cooper’s prospects depended on his ability to draw money from the settlers. “I have often compared the dealer in land to a ship,” he remarked, “Money is the element he swims in; without money, he is aground.” To keep Cooper afloat, his settlers needed to produce a marketable surplus from their land, not merely subsist on it. They had to cull from the forest and their fields some products in demand elsewhere, commodities that could be converted into money at some external market where cash could be had. Cooperstown had to become a successful market center surrounded by farms that produced commodities as well as family subsistence. “Where there is much people there will be trade; and where there is trade there will be money; and where there is money the landlord will succeed; but he should be ever in the midst of the settlers, aiding and promoting every beneficial enterprize,” he explained. If in selling land Cooper pursued a laissez-faire policy, he was far more active in drawing his settlements into the transatlantic economy.⁴⁵

Commerce did not come to a settlement after subsistence had been achieved. On the contrary, it took a few years of intense labor for new settlers to approximate household sufficiency from their new homesteads. Consequently, at first they had to depend on the market for some of their provisions, obtained by selling commodities that could be immediately culled from the forest: lumber, ginseng, animal skins, and potash. In the course of a few years, new settlers exhausted the wilderness bounty and developed the capacity of their farms to produce both a family subsistence and a surplus in grains and livestock for sale beyond the region. Instead of passing from a subsistence to a commercial economy, frontier inhabitants gradually shifted their production from one set of commodities culled from the forest to another set derived from the new fields and pastures that steadily replaced the wilderness. From the start a new settlement needed market connections.⁴⁶

Most settlers migrated to the frontier to better their position in a market society, not to drop out of it. Cooper’s advertisements reassured potential settlers that they could raise large crops and profitably transport them to an accessible market. He stressed that his patent lay within 90 miles of Albany’s market; that potash alone would pay the cost to clear their land; that an Otsego acre routinely yielded 25 bushels of wheat, which sold for 7 shillings apiece—a yield of £ 8.15.0 per acre. In The Pioneers James Fenimore Cooper remembered, “The numberless sleighs that passed through the village, loaded with wheat and barrels of pot-ashes…hastening to the common market at Albany, that served as so many snares, to induce migrants to enter those wild mountains in search of competence and happiness.” The pursuit of market opportunity and a family competence were reciprocal (rather than antithetical) so long as the settlers were independent producers rather than dependents obliged to sell their labor for wages or to rent land as tenants. No escape from a commercialized culture, the frontier settlement was the cutting edge of a market society.⁴⁷

Cooper understood that enhanced commerce was the key to the settlers’ immediate subsistence, as well as to their (and his) long-term prosperity. In A Guide in the Wilderness, he explained his commercial strategy for relieving the poverty and hunger of his settlers during the late 1780s:

I resided among them, and saw too clearly how bad their condition was. I erected a storehouse, 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 [maple] 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 labouring 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 [maple] 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.

The potash and maple sugar paid for the provisions brought to Otsego by Cooper to relieve his hungry settlers. By easing frontier hardships and assuring newcomers of store goods and food, commerce accelerated the settlement of upstate New York.⁴⁸

Subscribing to an analogy commonplace in late-eighteenth-century America, Cooper likened human society to a body of diverse but interdependent parts, in which commerce was the circulating lifeblood that sustained the whole. No settlement could survive without the invigorating circulation of commerce. Envisioning Otsego as a body with commerce as its bloodstream, Cooper thought of commodities as the blood cells, of roads and rivers as arteries, and of Cooperstown as the heart, pumping out produce and pumping back cash and consumer goods. “The labour of two or three hundred industrious men concentrated, is like money collected into a bank; when scattered in distant quarters its effects amount to little; when brought together it resembles the heart, from, and to which circulation flows, whilst it gives life and health to the remotest parts.” By drawing artisans, storekeepers, and professionals together, a village provided a market, encouraging the settler-farmers in the surrounding countryside. Cooper explained, “There should be a mutual dependence between the farmer and the villager; the farmer relying upon the villager for the purchase of his produce, and the villager upon the farmer for the sale of the articles of his trade.” Above all, the landlord would benefit. Pumped by the village, commercial growth promised to facilitate land payments from the old settlers and to inflate the land prices that Cooper could charge newcomers. Informed by this analogy, Cooper encouraged the local production of commodities that could be sold externally, improved the transportation corridors for the commodities bound to external market, and developed a store in Cooperstown to serve as a local market for Otsego’s hinterland and as a conduit for trade with the wider world.⁴⁹

Rare mineral ores, particularly gold and silver, were the ideal frontier commodities, because they required little skill to harvest and had an especially high value per weight and volume. Consequently, Cooper took a special interest in rumored ores and mines, an interest greatly disproportionate to the actual prospects of finding rare minerals in upstate New York. That fascination with hidden minerals and treasures shines in his rhetoric rife with graphic images of jewels, diamonds, and mines. Because Cooper had recently struggled up from poverty, his imagination was rich with pictures of tangible but secreted wealth, just within reach. Driven by wishful thinking, he recurrently collected speciments of purported ores—copper, iron, and silver—for eager dispatch to experts in the cities. Alas, all of Cooper’s samples proved of little or no value.⁵⁰

Recalling his father, James Fenimore Cooper invested Marmaduke Temple with an inordinate fascination for purported mines. Ordinarily cautious and levelheaded, Temple becomes animated and credulous upon hearing rumors of valuable ores (“one of his infirmities,” the novelist remarks). Richard Jones captures Temple’s eager attention by reminding him, “You know there are mines in these mountains; I have often heard you say that you believed in their existence…and have seen specimens of the ore, sir.” Then Jones accuses Natty Bumppo and Oliver Edwards of covertly working a secret silver mine on Temple’s land: “They are smelting, ‘duke, they are smelting, and as they grow rich you grow poor.” Nothing could have more alarmed Marmaduke Temple (or William Cooper), who knew what it was to be poor.⁵¹

For want of any mines, cattle constituted the best early commodity for the new settlements in the Otsego hills. Hardy beasts, they could endure the cold and find sustenance in the forests during the years before settlers could build substantial barns and clear enough land to provide summer pastures. Compared with pigs or sheep, cattle were better able to defend themselves against the wolves, bears, and panthers lurking in the forest. Able to fend and forage for themselves in the warm months, cattle required little attention, an important consideration where labor was so scarce and under such strain in the rigorous regimen of initial settlement. Best of all, when driven by a few men, cattle could walk themselves long distances over rough, mirey roads to get to market.⁵²

Beginning in 1788, William Cooper organized annual autumn cattle drives. Taking the cattle on consignment from the settlers, he had the animals driven south to public auction in Burlington, New Jersey. After deducting his costs, Cooper credited each settler with the value his cattle obtained at the auction; that value reduced the settler’s debt, either for land or for merchandise from Cooper’s store. Cooper brought down eighty-three oxen in 1789 and over a hundred a year later. His success enthused Tench Coxe, who was planning the sale and development of his own similarly situated lands in the hills of northern Pennsylvania. “Your eighty-three head of black Cattle are really a pretty collection of rents and interest, and are very encouraging to our labors in the North.” During the seven-year period from 1788 to 1794, cattle made up three-fifths of the value that William Cooper collected from settlers in payment for land.⁵³

To render more of Otsego’s resources profitable as commodities in external markets, Cooper meant to improve one or both of the region’s two potential transportation corridors. The first passed north over the hills to the Mohawk River and east to Albany, a total distance of about 80 miles from Cooperstown. The second corridor proceeded south down the Susquehanna River approximately 375 miles, either to the Pennsylvania trading towns of Harrisburg, Lancaster, Middleburg, and Columbia (all with good road connections to Philadelphia) or all the way to Chesapeake Bay near Baltimore. In the late 1780s Otsego’s economic orientation—either east or south—hinged upon which corridor could be improved to become preeminent. Although within the political jurisdiction of New York, Otsego might, by virtue of the Susquehanna, develop as an economic satellite of Pennsylvania.⁵⁴

As a newcomer to New York with older and better connections to the merchants of Philadelphia and Burlington, Cooper initially looked southward for capital and for markets. Because he initially thought of the Susquehanna as Otsego’s chief outlet to market, he laid out Cooperstown on a north-south axis beside the river. To improve transport in the shallow river, Cooper proposed constructing at Cooperstown a dam to build up a head of water for periodic release in surges to render the upper river navigable for boats during the low-water summer months. In March 1789 Cooper and Craig obtained needed capital by recruiting three leading Philadelphia merchants—Henry Drinker, Tench Francis, and Tench Coxe—as partners in their projected “Water Works.” In addition to anticipating profits from the tolls charged on each boat benefiting from a surge, the Philadelphians hoped to draw commerce to their city from a new and promising quarter. However, the New York state legislators refused to pass the necessary enabling legislation for fear of assisting Philadelphia and Baltimore in their commercial rivalry with Albany and New York City for the hinterland produce.⁵⁵

Although frustrated in his Susquehanna plan, Cooper found that the New York state legislature favored his secondary scheme: to improve the northern road linking Cooperstown with the Mohawk valley and Albany. For, as Gov. George Clinton explained, it was New York State’s interest and policy “to facilitate the means of communication” with frontier settlements “as well to strengthen the bands of society, as to prevent the produce of those fertile districts from being diverted to other markets.” Despite his own close ties to Philadelphia, Cooper readily warned Albany’s merchants and New York’s state legislators that they must counteract “the manuvers of the merchants of Philadelphia who have been active to secure the trade of this Western Country to their city.” He sought a better northern road by appealing to the jealousy in New York of Pennsylvania, which had stymied his Susquehanna scheme. Enlisting support from Albany’s leading merchants, in March 1790 Cooper secured a £400 appropriation from the state legislature to construct an improved road from Canajoharie, on the Mohawk, over the hills to Cooperstown. In June the state government awarded the construction contract to William Cooper and two partners, who subcontracted to settlers the actual work of felling trees, removing stumps, bridging the streams, and “Causwaying where Wet Land appeareth” at the rate of £20.0.0 per mile. Upon completing his assigned section, a settler received payment in cash or in credit from Cooper’s store. At the end of the year the road was complete, “passable for loaded carriages,” and “much travelled.”⁵⁶

STORE   

To bring commerce closer to the settlers, Cooper constructed a store and a warehouse in Cooperstown in the summer and fall of 1789. He boasted that the new store was “thirty by Seventeen [feet] with Proper Shelves on three sides, Counters, Desk, Counting house, &c.” Opening for business in late January, the store was the first established in the Otsego country. The store’s diverse array of West Indian produce and British-made cloth, clothing, housewares, and tools displayed the complexity of the transatlantic economy and its capacity to penetrate deep into the North American forest in rapid pursuit of new settlers. Cooper could launch a store, well stocked with an array of consumer goods, because he enjoyed a generous line of credit with at least thirteen wholesale mercantile firms: six based in New York City, four in Albany, and three in Philadelphia. In 1790 and 1791 these thirteen suppliers provided Cooper’s store with goods worth £6,509. Such a substantial credit manifests both the ambitious scope of Cooper’s store and the confidence of leading merchants in his capacity and prospects.⁵⁷

Busy with his extensive land speculations, Cooper entrusted most of the day-to-day management of the new store to a partner, Richard R. Smith, who received a third of its profits. He was the son of Richard Smith, a weighty Friend in Burlington who had formerly led the Burlington Company and who owned thousands of acres in his own right in the Otego valley. In the summer of 1789, Richard R. Smith was a bright and well-educated young man who had yet to marry or settle on a career four years after graduating from Princeton. Cooper liked Smith’s genial, worldly personality and the idea of patronizing a young member of the preeminent family in Burlington; impressing the Smiths was Cooper’s early standard of success. On February 11, Cooper informed Henry Drinker, “Nothing Could have ben so hapy with me in buisiness as my taking Richard [R.] Smith with me. He Sutes me Exactly and Pleases the People.” At the end of the year, Cooper increased Smith’s share in the profits to one-half.⁵⁸

The new store proved extraordinarily popular, attracting a throng of customers in the winter of 1790. On February 11, a tired but exhilarated William Cooper wrote a letter at the end of a typically long and busy day in his new store: “The trade of this Place is Greate….The Store (tho Larg) is full of Customers Every Day and many of them Come from 40 to 100 Miles to trade, and go away Pleased with Our prices.” Consequently, he could “Seldom eate Dinner for Want of Time.” Cooper understood that his new store was a powerful selling point for attracting settlers to buy his lands. Access to a store with a generous credit policy was especially important to poor families without the means to provide their own year-round subsistence. His newspaper advertisements reassured “Poor Men” that he had established a store in Cooperstown “for the reception of country produce” to “obviate the difficulties of settling a new country.”⁵⁹

Cooper and Smith generously extended credit to local settlers. It is a striking measure of the store’s inclusiveness that 315 settlers had accounts in 1790, more than the total number of households in Otsego (302). Linking the names in the store book with the heads of households named on the 1790 Federal Census return for Otsego Township and adjoining Canajoharie Township indicates that nearly two-thirds of the heads of households who dwelled within a dozen miles of the store had credit accounts, as well as half of those dwelling on the margins of the township. According to the 1788 tax list for Otsego (then called Old England District), the creditworthy were men of ordinary means. In fact, the average assessment of the account customers (30 pence) was slightly less than that of those residents without store credit (35 pence).⁶⁰

Although modest means did not bar credit, the female gender did. Almost all of the credit customers were men. Only 4 of the 315 store accounts belonged to women—a bit more than 1 percent. Women rarely appeared in the store book because its chief purpose was for legal documentation to prod lagging debtors. By law only heads of households were liable for debts and men headed almost all of the households in Otsego Township (298 of 302, according to the 1790 census). Because a married woman could not be sued, her husband was liable for her debts. Therefore, when a woman did come to the store, Cooper and Smith usually recorded her debit or credit to the name of her husband or father, thereby obscuring women’s economic activities as producers and consumers.⁶¹

Cooper’s store promoted and assisted the local enterprises of the most entrepreneurial settlers, especially their production of potash: the potassium salts refined by boiling and baking wood ashes. Used to manufacture soap, saltpeter, dyes, bleach, glass, and some drugs, potash was in great and growing demand in Great Britain’s expanding factories. By turning abundant but bulky hardwood trees into a compact and valuable commodity, potash manufacture was ideal for New York’s frontier conditions: the settlers produced bushels of ashes as they cut down and burned off the forest to make pastures, meadows, and grain fields. Indeed, by offering good prices for ashes, storekeepers invited settlers to accelerate their clearing and burning. James Wadsworth, a land speculator in western New York, explained:

Many times when a new settler was under the necessity of raising money, or stood in need of store trade, he would go into the forest, chop down maple and elm trees, roll them together, and bum them, for the ashes alone, without reference to clearing. The proceeds of ashes have supplied many a log cabin in this region with the common necessaries of life, in the absence of which there would have been destitution.

An acre of hardwood land ordinarily yielded 60 to 100 bushels of ashes; in 1790 each bushel was worth 6 pence at William Cooper’s store; therefore, a settler could earn at least £1.6.0 and as much as £2.10.0 per acre ($3.25 to $6.25) from potash—a considerable subsidy toward the $7.50 cost to have an acre cleared by hired labor. A settler’s son recalled that “ashes were silver and gold to the young or poor farmer.”⁶²

Cooper’s store played a pivotal role in the rapid expansion of potash production in Otsego. Obtaining potash kettles on credit from Henry Drinker’s Atsion Ironworks in New Jersey, Cooper entrusted them on credit to settlers who promised to pay in potash. He also honored the receipts issued by the local potash makers to the settlers who supplied them with ashes. For example, on February 9, 1790, Darius Warren of the Pierstown settlement came into Cooper’s store with a receipt issued by Solomon Pier for 40 bushels of ashes. Cooper accepted the receipt and allowed Warren a credit of 6 pence per bushel (£1.0.0 for his 40 bushels) toward store goods. Cooper simultaneously debited Pier that amount. In effect, Cooper loaned Pier the store goods necessary to buy Warren’s ashes. In 1790 Cooper granted store credit to 133 settlers for delivering ashes to twelve local potasheries. A potash maker needed to procure from Cooper and Smith an entry like this of December 7, 1791: “This Day agreed with Israel Foster & Joell Coe to Carrey on A Perle ash work on the Otego Creek for Us and to Draw Orders on Our Store.” The system enabled Otsego’s poorly capitalized potasheries to buy ashes from the settlers. And it permitted the cash-poor settlers to obtain consumer goods. Because the receipts could change hands to settle other debts or make other bargains before ending up in Cooper’s strongbox, they also functioned as a badly needed medium of exchange in the cash-short settlements. Cooper accumulated a growing pile of receipts and recorded mounting debits beside the names of Otsego’s potash makers. To cancel the debts and earn a profit, he counted on eventual payment in potash from the makers.⁶³

Cooper shipped the potash to market in Albany and New York City. Sale there started the reverse flow of credit upstream through Albany toward Cooper and the Otsego potash makers. The Albany and New York City merchants credited Cooper on their books, permitting him to draw more store goods from their warehouses and even to obtain some cash. Cooper could then credit each maker with any surplus over and above his debits for ashes, barrels, transportation, and official inspection. After the annual balancing of accounts, the makers with a surplus had the option of receiving cash or banking it as store credit toward future purchases.⁶⁴

Through Cooper’s road and store, the Otsego frontier was tied to, rather than disconnected from, the transatlantic market. Britain’s industrial revolution, the rapid commercialization and urbanization of Albany and New York City, and the extensive development of the New York frontier were all interdependent, all linked through the potash and wheat trades. Otsego’s trees fell and burned in ever greater numbers to provide the potash demanded by Britain’s growing factories. The settlers also killed the trees to make grain fields whose wheat fed European factory workers as well as the local farmers. And, from Cooper’s store, the settlers obtained an array of English manufactures and West Indian produce. Instead of escaping from commerce, settlers extended it. William Cooper succeeded as a landlord by promoting Otsego’s integration into the world market.

SUCCESS   

From his Manor House on Cooperstown’s main street, Cooper could see and hear the growing numbers, increasing commerce, and rising buildings brought to Otsego by improved access to external markets. From a single family in early 1786, Cooperstown had grown by 1790 into a village of thirty-five inhabitants (two of them enslaved Blacks), comprising eight households dwelling in seven houses. A third of the inhabitants belonged to one household: William Cooper’s. The Manor House was crowded with his wife, children, servants, and a lodger: his store partner Richard R. Smith. In 1791 the new store, the improved road to Albany, and the legislative formation of Otsego County with Cooperstown as its shire town combined to accelerate development. New tradesmen and professionals arrived from New England and eastern New York, hoping to make a profitable niche by tapping the expanding commerce of a promising frontier village. William Cooper’s ledger book for 1791 identifies sixteen tradesmen resident in or near the village: three carpenters, three masons, two tailors, two tanners, and one innkeeper, blacksmith, hatter, miller, cooper, and potter. The first lawyer, Abraham C. Ten Broeck, and first doctor, Charles Powers, also arrived that year.⁶⁵

New buildings sprouted among the stumps, especially around the juncture of Second and West Streets, a block west of the Manor House. Frame houses and stores steadily replaced log cabins, which were usually moved back from the streets and converted to sheds and stables. In September 1791 Cooper boasted, “Cooperstown grows fast. Scarce a week [passes] without a Raising of a House, Some very Large and Spacious, say 40 feet Square, 2 Storys high, &c.” During the day the village was alive with shouting men, clattering hammers, creaking wheels, and droning saws. “Thirty carpenters are imployed every day in building houses in this town which together with the great Number of teems hauling brick, stone, lime, sand, timber, &c. and the trade, travelers, and Boats makes a Constant din or Noise,” Cooper explained, in celebration rather than complaint. A sawmill, a gristmill, and two fulling mills were in operation, powered by falls in Oaks Creek and the Susquehanna River. A bridge of hewn timber spanned the sixty-foot-wide river near its beginning as the outlet for Lake Otsego. Cooper even anticipated establishing linen, wool, and rope manufactories. Delighted by the progress, he assured his friend Henry Drinker that Cooperstown was

on a full Carier to be a very considerable Manufacturing and trading place, to the accomplishing of which I am so deeply interested that thee must excuse my so frequently unlading my mind to thee. How supremely pleasing it is to see this Country, that in the year 1787 was uninhabited, now Plentifully peopled [with] Roads, Bridges, Mills, Stores, Schools, in short Every Convenience that reasonable men could wish for, at hand.

By April 1795 the village had fifty houses, of which a quarter were “respectable two-story” dwellings. Thirty more buildings went up during the ensuing six months. In addition to the occupations present in 1791, by mid-decade Cooperstown had added a clock maker, brick maker, druggist, painter, brewer, baker, and saddler. The professionals consisted of five lawyers, three doctors, a schoolmaster, and a newspaper and book publisher. By 1796 Cooperstown boasted four stores and three inns where there had been only one of each in 1791.⁶⁶

In the late 1780s and early 1790s, William Cooper’s success in so rapidly selling and settling Otsego made him a national, even an international, celebrity. Virtually uninhabited at the end of the war, the Otsego country surged in population to about 2,700 by 1790 and to 21,343 by 1800. The newcomers dramatically remade the landscape, pocking the forest with clearings, barns, houses, fences, roads, and bridges. It seemed that Cooper had mastered the art of developing new settlements—highly valued knowledge at a time when so many capitalists had plunged into land speculation and competed for settlers. Curious travelers and aspiring land speculators, both European and American, ventured to bustling Cooperstown to consult Cooper and learn his methods. Flattered by the attention, he was a genial and expansive host. In 1791 Jan Lincklaen, an agent for Dutch investors, obtained a letter of introduction from Alexander Hamilton that he might meet the famed William Cooper. Traveling to Cooperstown, Lincklaen and a companion “brushed off the mud” and “went to see Mr. Cooper.” Lincklaen reported, “We found him both frank & sincere, a man of attainments & of a very sound judgment.” In 1793 Simon Desjardins, the representative of a French land company, made a similar pilgrimage to Cooperstown to find inspiration for his own plans. He recounted:

The location of this city and environs, in a circumference of ten miles, was in 1786, all covered with woods. If Coopers-town, built within this period, and which owes its origin to only one man (Cooper), is already famous for its commerce and manufactures, what ought we not to expect from the cities founded by a company whose means and interests are much more powerful than those of a private individual?

In 1786 Cooper had begun with little capital and no prior experience upon lands that had defied the prior efforts of wealthier and more powerful speculators. Five years later he was celebrated far and wide as the preeminent expert in the sale and settlement of frontier land.⁶⁷

As his fame spread Cooper was in great and growing demand as a land agent employed by wealthy and prestigious speculators who owned tracts in central New York but resided in New York City, Albany, Burlington, Philadelphia, or London. Surely, they reasoned and he confirmed, William Cooper could sell, settle, and collect money from their lands faster than anyone else. It was “rare,” Cooper boasted, “that a Stage arives from New York without one or more Applycations to me to Undertake the Sail and Settelment of Lands.” In return for supervising surveys, sales, and collections of annual interest, Cooper charged a 5 percent commission on the value of the principal. His agencies within Otsego County included most of the 69,000-acre Otego Patent; the 14,000-acre Colden Patent; and a 14,200-acre tract within the Morris Patent. Cooper represented such prominent men as Antoine Rene Charles M. de la Forest, the consul general of France posted in New York City; James Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont, a wealthy French émigré, financier, and speculator; and the eminent New York lawyers Cadwallader David Colden and Josiah Ogden Hoffman. Cooper must have been especially delighted to receive the agency for the lands south of the Susquehanna (now in Delaware County) belonging to William Temple Franklin, the prestigious but alienated son of William Franklin. By employing Cooper, William Temple Franklin further antagonized his father, who continued to seethe at having lost the Otsego Patent to Cooper and Craig in 1786.⁶⁸

Cooper also aggressively expanded his own portfolio of frontier lands, usually in partnerships that brought both needed capital and prestigious contacts. His new holdings stretched beyond Otsego into the counties farther north, west, and south. Over the course of the 1790s, Cooper and various partners acquired the Arthurborough Patent, 41,000 acres located north of the Mohawk River in the Adirondacks; 27,345 acres in Clinton County, near Lake Champlain; 9,442 acres within the Otego Patent south of Cooperstown; 10,200 acres in the Military Tract of the Finger Lakes Region to the west; 27,000 acres in Tioga County; and the Hillington Patent— 16,000 acres located beside Butternuts Creek in southwestern Otsego County. During the 1790s no other New Yorker had his hand in more frontier land speculations within that state than did William Cooper.⁶⁹

Cooper’s increasingly complicated and extended partnerships were driven as much by his longing to enmesh his interest with those of prestigious and powerful men as by his desire for new profits. William Cooper’s partners and patrons included the preeminent lawyers in New York City: Josiah Ogden Hoffman, Richard Harison, and Col. Robert Troup. Cooper also found partners among the merchant princes of Albany and New York City: Leonard Gansevoort, Stephen Lush, Philip S. Van Rensselaer, Gerret Van Schaick, and Abraham Van Peters. Many of Cooper’s deals involved Goldsborough Banyar—Albany’s oldest and canniest speculator—or Stephen Van Rensselaer, the wealthiest and most prestigious landlord in the state. Cooper’s partners in the Hillington purchase were Miers, Samuel, and Thomas Fisher, brothers and wealthy Philadelphia Quakers. The partnerships afforded Cooper cherished opportunities to dazzle gentlemen with his expertise at speculation and settlement. He offered his inside knowledge of land and settlers to urban investors with superior capital and political connections but without frontier experience.⁷⁰

As Cooper spun ever wider webs of partnership and accumulated acreage (and mounting debts), he lusted for yet more. He could not conceal his envy when, in the summer of 1791, he learned of the vast tracts of New York frontier land recently obtained by two other ambitious speculators: Alexander Macomb of New York City and Robert Morris of Philadelphia. Macomb and his partners had purchased 3,635,000 acres in northern New York from the state government for a mere eight pence per acre. For the same price, Robert Morris had acquired 1,000,000 acres in the Genesee country of western New York from two Massachusetts speculators. It bothered Cooper that others had acquired, and might develop, more frontier land than he had. “McComb and R. Morris has Skipped over Us all and in fact Done too much for any one American family….This is Doing Buisiness at such [a] Monstrous rate that the Very thoughts of it flashes Over the mind Like Extravigant ideas,” Cooper marveled. Determined to be the state’s leading speculator and developer, Cooper offered to buy Macomb’s entire tract. Predicting an implausible profit of £1,500,000 in ten years, he cast about for fifty partners with the necessary capital. Although Macomb and his partners declined to sell, the proposal reveals the colossal growth in Cooper’s ambitions. Just six years after having acquired his first lands in New York, Cooper was angling to become the preeminent landlord in the state and the favored partner of its wealthiest capitalists.⁷¹

To be sought after and flattered by wealthy men from prominent families was a heady experience for Cooper. Recalling that he had been a mere storekeeper ten years before and a penurious wheelwright when the Revolutionary War began, Cooper reveled in his new friends and associates. His conversation and correspondence effused an expansive self-assurance, manifesting the importance he placed on the approval won from the great men of the seaport centers. In 1790 Dr. Benjamin Rush, a leading man in Philadelphia, observed, “William Cooper dined with me this day. His conversation is full of enterprise and amusing anecdotes of the first Settlers in our New Country.” Cooper delighted in calling the great men “my Friends.”⁷²

It especially pleased Cooper to receive a letter from Isaac Smith, a man of old prestige but slipping fortunes back home in New Jersey. Smith begged his “good Friend” to take in and patronize his son Charles. “I commit him to your Friendship and Direction with Pleasure and Confidence, and beg you to teach him the Way to gain Property, for you know how;—I do not, either by Precept or Example.” Cooper could consider himself a success when the old gentry had to concede his superior wealth and expertise, and were even willing to entrust their sons to his management. Beating the odds and confounding his rivals, Cooper had won fame and fortune as one of the new republic’s premier frontier speculators and developers.⁷³