CHAPTER I.

Brief reminiscences of scenes from 1809 to 1817--Events preliminary to a
knowledge of western life--Embarkation on the source of the Alleghany
River--Descent to Pittsburgh--Valley of the Monongahela; its coal and
iron--Descent of the Ohio in an ark--Scenes and incidents by the way--
Cincinnati--Some personal incidents which happened there.

Late in the autumn of 1809, being then in my seventeenth year, I quitted
the village of Hamilton, Albany County (a county in which my family had
lived from an early part of the reign of George II.), and, after a
pleasant drive of half a day through the PINE PLAINS, accompanied by
some friends, reached the city of Schenectady, and from thence took the
western stage line, up the Valley of the Mohawk, to the village of
Utica, where we arrived, I think, on the third day, the roads being
heavy. The next day I proceeded to Vernon, the site of a busy and
thriving village, where my father had recently engaged in the
superintendency of extensive manufacturing operations. I was here within
a few miles of Oneida Castle, then the residence of the ancient Oneida
tribe of Iroquois. There was, also, in this town, a remnant of the old
Mohigans, who, under the name of Stockbridges, had, soon after the
Revolutionary War, removed from the Valley of the Housatonic, in
Massachusetts, to Oneida. Throngs of both tribes were daily in the
village, and I was thus first brought to notice their manners and
customs; not dreaming, however, that it was to be my lot to pass so many
of the subsequent years of my life as an observer of the Indian race.

Early in the spring of 1810, I accompanied Mr. Alexander Bryan Johnson,
of Utica, a gentleman of wealth, intelligence, and enterprise, to the