FIRST TASTE OF WAR


Israel Putnam's adventure with the wolf gave him an unsought, and in
some respects undesirable, notoriety; but that he did not court this
notoriety is shown by the fact that for the next twelve or thirteen
years he lived quietly on his farm, attending to his duties as a
cultivator of the soil and a simple citizen. During these years he
acquired an enviable reputation as one of the best farmers in all the
region of which Pomfret was the center, and had it not been for the
lamentable struggle between the French and the English for supremacy in
North America, he might have continued as the humble and prosperous
citizen-cultivator to the end of his days. The breaking out of the
prolonged strife which is known in history as the French and Indian
War, found Putnam in possession of what in those days was considered a
competency. Having received a good start from the paternal inheritance,
he had not hidden his talents in a napkin, but had put them out to good
purpose. He erected a large and substantial dwelling about a fourth of a
mile distant from the first he had built in Pomfret, and here he lived
most happily, with his good wife Hannah, surrounded by a growing family
of healthy children.

In the year 1755, when active operations began in this war between
England and France, fought out on the soil of America, Israel Putnam was
thirty-seven years old and in the prime of life. There was no immediate
necessity for him to volunteer in defense of the frontier, where the
hostile French were gathering, for it was far distant from his home, the
forests around which were threatened by no roaming savages with
tomahawks and muskets. But his patriotic instincts were aroused by the