tract they had bought together.

The two pioneers may have made a special trip to the Connecticut tract
before deciding to purchase; for it was not in the nature of them to
"buy a pig in a poke," as it were. And such a journey of nearly a
hundred miles, mainly through a wilderness, was no child's task in those
days. In after-years General Israel Putnam made many a longer journey,
through wilds swarming with hostile Indians, too, and thought nothing of
it; but this was the first of any account that he took very far away
from home.

What the young wife thought when the enthusiastic adventurer came back
with his story was never recorded. Neither, for that matter, was the
tale he told her, as well as his friends and neighbors, many of whom,
doubtless, would fain have dissuaded him from making what they viewed as
a rash and risky move. Details of Putnam's life at this period of his
career are lacking; but there stand the records, with their statement of
facts. They can not be gainsaid. The very fact that he, a prosperous
farmer, even then well off as to this world's goods, should make the
adventure--the first of his family in America to abandon the home acres
and seek others in the wilderness--is sufficient to attest his energy
and ambition.

Sometime in the latter part of the year 1740 the young husband of
twenty-two, with a wife under twenty and a babe only a few months old,
set out to make his fortune in the rough country adjacent to his native
State. Many of his race and family have since become pioneers in various
parts of the world, and this country owes them much for blazing out the
way in which others might follow; but young Israel Putnam was the first
of them--the pioneer of pioneers, in the great American movement.