The Story of Cooperstown | Page 9

Lord.]
[Footnote 2: Notes on the Iroquois, Henry R. Schoolcraft, Chap. vi.]
[Footnote 3: Major J. W. Powell, The Forum, January, 1890.]
[Footnote 4: Lewis H. Morgan's map, 1851, in the League of the
Iroquois.]
[Footnote 5: From Fernleigh garden, near the river, 1895.]
[Footnote 6: These opinions are quoted from a communication kindly
written by Willard E. Yager, of Oneonta.]
[Footnote 7: Ote-sa-ga was probably derived, by transposition very
common in like case, from the first map name of Ostega (Ostaga),
1770-1775. Dr. Beauchamp sought to derive this from "otsta," a word
for which Schoolcraft was his authority, and which was supposed to be
Oneida for "rock," the Mohawk form "otsteara." But Schoolcraft, as

Beauchamp himself elsewhere shows (Indian Names, p. 6), sometimes
took liberties with original Indian forms of words. The Mohawk word
for "rock" is "ostenra"; the Oneida would be "ostela." The first with the
locative terminal "ga," gives "ostenraga"; the second, "ostelaga." Both
are far removed from "Ostaga." Ostaga is more naturally derived from
the Mohawk "otsata," or "osata," both which forms occur in Bruyas.
Otsataga, by elision, readily becomes Otstaga, and again Ostaga. The
change is even simpler with Osataga. The meaning of Ostaga, thus
explained, would be "place of cloud," by extension "place of storm"--in
contrast, perhaps, with the little lakes, which were waiontha, "calm."
(Bruyas, 64).--Willard E. Yager.]
[Footnote 8: League of the Iroquois, Lewis H. Morgan, Lloyd's Ed.,
Vol. I, p. 93.]
[Footnote 9: Yager.]
[Footnote 10: The Old New York Frontier, Francis W. Halsey, 16.
League of the Iroquois, II. 227.]
[Footnote 11: League of the Iroquois, I. 87.]
[Footnote 12: do., I. 249-251.]
[Footnote 13: The Old New York Frontier, 150.]
[Footnote 14: The Old New York Frontier, 75, 160.]
[Footnote 15: Address at the Cooperstown Centennial.]
CHAPTER II
THE COMING OF THE WHITE MEN
Within six years after Hendrik Hudson sailed up the river which bears
his name, and some five years before the Pilgrim fathers landed at
Plymouth, the first white men looked upon Otsego Lake, and saw the
wooded shore upon which Cooperstown now stands. It was in 1614, or

in the year following, that two Dutchmen set out from Fort Orange
(Albany) to explore the fur country, and crossing from the Mohawk to
Otsego Lake, proceeded down the Susquehanna.[16] From this time,
first under the Dutch, then under English rule, traders came frequently
to the foot of Otsego Lake. Soon after the traders, Christian
missionaries ventured into the wilderness, ministering at first chiefly to
the Indians. Later came the first settlers.
That the influence of traders was not always helpful to Christian
missionaries is illustrated by an incident in the missionary journey of
the Rev. Gideon Hawley, a Presbyterian divine, who, with some
zealous companions, came from New England to preach to the Indians
of the Susquehanna in 1753. They reached the river at a point where
was a small Indian settlement near the present village of Colliers,
seventeen miles below Cooperstown. Here they were joined by a trader
named George Winedecker, who had come down from Otsego Lake
with a boat-load of goods, including rum, to supply the Indian villages
down the river. During the night the red men, full of Winedecker's rum,
became embroiled in a murderous orgy. The missionaries were
awakened by the howling of the Indians over their dead, and in the
morning saw Indian women skulking in the bushes, hiding guns and
hatchets, for fear of the intoxicated Indians who were drinking deeper.
"Here, in one party, were missionaries with the Bible and a trader with
the rum--the two gifts of the white man to the Indian."[17]
Susquehanna lands were first conveyed to white men by the Indians in
1684 as a part of a treaty of alliance with the English, although the
Indians retained the right to live and hunt on the river. The granting of
land titles by the Provincial government began not long afterward.[18]
The first recorded patent on Otsego Lake was obtained in 1740 by John
J. Petrie at the northern end. John Groesbeck, an officer of the court of
chancery, acquired in 1741 a patent lying northeast of the lake,
including what afterward became the Clarke property and the site of
Hyde Hall. Nearly the whole east side of the lake, with the present
Lakelands tract just east of the Susquehanna at its source, was covered
by the patent which Godfrey Miller obtained in 1761, and upon which,
according to the journal of Richard Smith, twelve persons were resident

eight years later.[19]
Early in the eighteenth century it is probable that traders were from
time to time resident at the foot of Otsego, but the first attempt toward
a permanent settlement on the present site of Cooperstown was made
by John Christopher Hartwick in 1761. In that year Hartwick