After some schooling at a classical academy, William was trained to a mercantile career. When about twenty-two years old, he fell in love with a lass whom his parents refused to permit him to marry. This obstacle, like a pebble that turns the course of the rivulet that is to become a great river, shaped anew his life. The new channel for his energies was soon discovered.
His uncle, Capt. Peter Warren, R. N., who had just returned from a cruise, heard of his nephew’s unhappy experience, and made him the offer of a position promising both wealth and adventure. Land speculation was then rife; and Captain Warren, like many other naval officers, had joined in the rush for lucre by buying land in the fertile Mohawk Valley. This was in addition to land which was part of his wife’s dowry, so that his estate was large, amounting, it is said, to fifteen thousand acres. He appointed young Johnson his agent, to work his farm and sell his building-lots. The young Irishman at once responded to the proposition. He crossed the Atlantic, and promptly reported in New York.
Captain Warren, then about thirty years old, had married Susan, the oldest daughter of Stephen De Lancey; and it was probably to the old house, then thirty-eight years old, which still stands (in which Washington took farewell of his generals in 1783), that the young Irishman came. He was possessed of a fine figure, tall and strong, was full of ambition and energy, with a jovial temper, and a power of quick adaptation to his surroundings. In short, he was a typical specimen of that race in which generous impulses are usually uppermost, and one of the mighty army of Celtic immigrants who have helped to make of the American people that composite which so puzzles the insular Englishman to understand.
New York and Albany people were already getting rich by inland as well as foreign trade, and the naval officer wished to invest what cash he could spare from his salary or prize money in a mercantile venture, to be begun at first on a modest scale in a frontier store. “Dear Billy,” as his uncle addressed him in his letters, was not long in discovering that the ambition of nearly every young man was to get rich, either in the inland fur or West India trade, so as to own a manor, work it with negro slaves, and join in the pomp and social splendour for which the colony was already noted. It is more than probable that the ambition to be rich and influential was strongly reinforced during his stay on Manhattan Island.
The journey north, made according to the regular custom, was by sloop up the Hudson, past the Palisades, the Highlands, the Catskills, and the Flats, to Albany. After a few days in the only municipality north of New York—a log city with a few smart brick houses—spent in laying in supplies, the young immigrant would pass through the pine-barrens, and after a day’s journey reach the State Street gate of palisaded Schenectady.
In the house of the tapster, or innkeeper, he would probably stay all night. He would find the Street of the Martyrs (so named after the massacre of 1690), and of the Traders, together with Front, Ferry, Church, and Niskayuna Streets, lined with comfortable, one-storied, many-gabled dwellings, with here and there neat houses, all or partly of brick. Each house stood with its cosey bivalve door, shut at the bottom to keep out pigs and chickens and to keep in the babes, and open at the top to admit light and air. The scrupulously neat floors spoke of the hereditary Dutch virtue of cleanliness. On the table could be seen a wealth of plain but wholesome food, such as few farmer-folk in the old countries of Europe could boast of. The bill of fare would include the well-cured hams for which “the Dorp” was famous, all kinds of savoury products of the hog, besides every sort of bread, pie, cake, and plain pastry, baked to a shining brown in the ample ovens of stone or brick, which swelled like domes outside of the houses, at the rear of the kitchens. Savoury and toothsome were the rich “crullers” which Captain Croll, the good church-elder and garrison-commander of Rensselaerwyck, had invented during a winter-season of meat-famine. On many a house veered iron weathercocks, especially on the few brick fronts monogrammed with dates in anchors of iron; while on the new church, only four years old, but the third in the history of the growing town, glittered the cock of Saint Nicholas in gilt. It rested over a belfry which held a most melodious bell, cast at Amsterdam, in dear old “Patria,” in the rim of which, as well-founded tradition insisted, many a silver guilder, spoon, and trinket had been melted. Perhaps Johnson, like many a European and even New England militiaman, did not understand why the Dutch built their stone fortress-like churches at the intersection of two streets. Some even hinted at stupidity; but the Dutchmen, for the same reason that they loop-holed the walls, so located their chief public buildings at the centre of the village as to be able to sweep the cross streets with their gun-fire in case of an attack by French or Indians, or both.
In Schenectady, Johnson would find that many of the men were away in the Indian country, with their canoes and currency of strouds, duffels, and trinkets, trading for furs. He would soon learn that many could speak the Indian tongue, some of the younger men and girls being excellent interpreters; while he would notice that wampum-making, or “seewant,” for money, made by drilling and filing shells, was a regular and legitimate industry. Possibly the young churchman may have stayed over a Sunday, and in the large stone edifice, capable of seating over six hundred persons, heard, if he did not understand, the learned Domine Reinhart Erichzon preach. After the liturgy and psalms, read by the clerk or fore-reader, the domine, in gown and bands, ascended the wineglass-shaped pulpit to deliver his discourse.
In any event, whether Johnson’s stay was long or short in the Dorp, we should see him making exit through the north gate, and either going landward along the Mohawk, which is hardly possible, or, as is more probable, loading his goods and outfit on one of the numerous canoes always ready, and rowing or being rowed up the river. The twenty-four miles or so of distance could be easily covered, despite the rifts and possible portages, in a single day. Evening would find him, either in camp on the new estate or hospitably lodged in some log-house of the Dutch or German settlers. He was now in the heart of what the Dutch have been wont to call the Woestina, or wilderness, but which was now too much settled to be any longer so spoken of—the term beginning to be then, as it is now, restricted to a locality near Schenectady.
Warren’s Bush, or Warren’s Burg, was the name of the farm which the young Irishman was to cultivate. Warrensburg was the written name, but almost any new settlement was usually spoken of as “bush.” It lay on the south side of the Mohawk, some distance east of the point where the creek, fed by the western slopes of the Catskills, empties into the river, and was named Schoharie, from the great mass of driftwood borne down. No more fertile valleys than these, watered by the rain or melted snows of the Catskills and Adirondacks, exist. Besides the river-flats that were kept perennially fertile by nearly annual overflows and a top dressing of rich silt, the old maize-lands of the Mohawk were vast in extent, and all ready for the plough. The region west of Albany was then spoken of by the colonists as “the Mohawk country,” from the chief tribe of the Iroquois who inhabited it. Let us glance at the human environment of the new settler.
Besides a few small houses of white men, standing singly along the river, there were villages and fortified large towns of the Mohawks, called, in the common English term of the period, “castles.” The scattered lodges of the Indians were found near most of the settlements, such as Schenectady, Caughnawaga, Stone Arabia, or Fort Plain, and often their cabins were found inside the white men’s fortifications, as in Fort Hunter; but in the palisaded Indian towns, hundreds and even thousands were gathered together. All the white settlements along the Mohawk or Hudson were near the river, the uplands or clearings beyond the flats not being considered of much value. On the Hudson, besides Albany, were Half Moon and Saratoga, which latter stood, not over the wonderful ravine from which gushes the healing water of the mineral springs, but several miles to the eastward. Along the Mohawk were Schenectady, Crane’s Village, Fort Hunter, Warrensburg, a