Francis Whiting Halsey

“ The confidence of the Germans in their machine had a foundation that was solid and absolute. It was on the spiritual side that they were wrong. They miscalculated Belgium, misread Great Britain, underrated France and the United States and blundered in their estimate of the ability of Austria to hold Russia. On the material side they were substantially right, for if preparedness for war had been the final condition of victory they would have been masters of Europe and indeed, of the world, in six months. ”

“ The Empire State, as you love to call it, was once laced by our trails from Albany to Buffalo – trails that we had trod for centuries – trails worn so deep by the feet of the Iroquois that they became your roads of travel, as your possessions gradually eat into those of my people. Your roads still traverse those same lines of communication which bound one part of the Long House to the other. ”

“ Hence the war, to the Entente Allies, became a struggle to destroy a fabric of imperial domination, supported by the menace of a great military machine. Shortness of sight, narrowness of vision; failure to understand the unconquerable forces that would be raised up among other nations in opposition; failure to see the effects produced on other minds, even on neutral minds not trained by German methods, multiplied from month to month, until the new imperialism found itself face to face with a world in arms. ”

“ The city of New York vomits out its inhabitants by thousands daily as if it had itself got the cholera and was throwing the disturbed contents of its prodigious stomach over the whole country. The steamboats puff and the coaches groan under their heavy loads. When the stage driver winds his melodious horn as he comes round the hill all the good old ladies and some of the men run to the door to see if the cholera is coming. ”

“ They brought not only skill with the axe, but certain arts and refinements in domestic life before unknown to the frontier, and with those arts a spirit of enterprise and invention, with an initiatory energy which carried their own fortunes far and which, more perhaps than all other human forces, have made the central and western parts of New York State what they now are.
Owing to delays in concluding the Treaty of Peace, the tide of immigration from New England did not set in until the spring and summer of 1784. ”

“ What he wants most is not peace, but a chance to pit his force against the force of some one else, or against some new thing. Man was not originally a working animal; it was civilization that imposed work upon him. But when you work a man too hard he will quit work, and go to war or to a football game. Man emerged from his primeval state through work and pain; he struggled up, fought his way and went through a never-ceasing experience of pain and battle. He was still what he always had been, not so much a mere working animal as an animal given to fighting. ”

“ The Iroquois, in their best days, were the noblest and most interesting of all Indians who have lived on this continent north of Mexico. They were truly the men whom a name they bore described, a word signifying men who surpassed all others. They alone founded political institutions and gained political supremacy. With European civilization unknown to them, they had given birth to self-government in America. ”

“ Page 99 LAST of the great acts of Sir William Johnson's life was the negotiation of the treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768. By the terms of this treaty a vast territory south and east of the Ohio, Susquehanna, and Unadilla rivers was first opened to settlement. After Pontiac’s War, discontent had arisen among the Indians from many causes. For one thing, they disliked the white man’s inordinate "thirst for land," and a council was called, not only to renew the ancient covenant chain between the Indians and the English, but to establish a scientific frontier. ”

“ Ralph Wheelock does not appear to have possessed much knowledge of human nature. During this time his relations with Mr. Kirkland ceased to be cordial. Joseph Brant used to delight in telling a story of his school-days at Lebanon, in which Ralph did not figure as precisely the hero. With Brant in the school was an Indian boy named William Johnson, a natural son of Sir William. Ralph Wheelock one day told William to saddle a horse for him. William refused to do it on the ground that he “was not a menial, but a gentleman’s son.” "Do you know what a gentleman is.?" ”

“ Sir William said in reply that it would be "highly improper to attempt any settlement in their country as they (the Indians) are greatly disgusted at the great thirst which we all seem to show for their lands, and therefore I must give it as my opinion that any settlement on the Susquehanna may prove fatal to those who should attempt to establish themselves thereon, as the Indians have all declared, not only their greatest aversion thereto, but have all threatened to prevent such settle-ment." ”

“ For the most part men had been born, had lived, toiled, and died absorbed in the simple pursuits of trade and domestic life.
In the province of New York the first successful men were fur traders who exchanged Dutch goods for beaver skins. During more than half a century after Hudson’s arrival these Dutchmen did scarcely anything more. Villages grew up on Manhattan Island and in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys. The trader’s boat penetrated down the head-waters of the Susquehanna. But wherever villages were founded, they were not so much permanent settlements as trading-posts. ”

“ When I look about me at these hills where I used to could count sometimes twenty smokes, curling over the tree tops from the Delaware camps, it raises mournful thoughts to think that not a red skin is left of them all, unless it be a drunken vagabond from the Oneidas, or them Yankee Indians who, they say, be moving up from the sea shore. ”

“ In a short time adventurous young men set out on journeys to the interior. Dongan, in 1686, requested the Indians to see that "neither French nor English go and live at the Susquehanna River, nor hunt nor trade amongst the brethren without my pass and seal." Should any be found without such passports, he desired the Indians to "bring them to Albany and deliver them at the Town House, where care shall be taken for punishing them." He would not make exception in cases of white men married to squaws, "they being only spies upon the brethren." ”