"We went up to see the ball-room, which was across the whole front of the house, with many windows and a handsome carved marble mantel at each end, and deep closets on both sides of these fire-places.

"Like Queen Elizabeth, Mrs. Cruger would seem to have kept all her fine clothes. The whole walls were hung thick with dresses of silk and satin and velvet pelisses trimmed with fur; braided riding-habits; mantles of damasked black silk; band-boxes piled from floor to ceiling full of wonderful bonnets, some of tremendous size, fine large leghorn straw, costing from fifty to one hundred dollars; also veils that would reach to the knee of fine old English lace; gold and silver ruching; and fine embroidered cashmere turbans, a perfect museum of fashion from 1800 to 1840."

To another visitor Mrs. Cruger explained that it had long been her custom to put aside each year two gowns made in the fashion of that year.

In her old age she liked to be alone. Frequently she would send every one from the house that she might bathe at night. Once her physician urged her to keep her maid near her. "Why?" she asked; "because I am afraid? afraid of what? of death? Death will not come to me for twenty years yet." She was then ninety years old, and she lived to be nearly one hundred and two. She is buried, by the side of her two husbands, in Old Stone Church Cemetery on the hill above Elm Grove. A rough monument carries inscriptions to the memory of the three pioneers whose lives, as has been pointed out by a local historian, "covered the Indian War, the Colonial Period, the War of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Civil War."

LXXXVIII

THE CASTLE AT FORT NIAGARA, NEW YORK

THE OLDEST BUILDING IN THE NORTHERN UNITED STATES,
WEST OF THE MOHAWK

"The story of Fort Niagara is peculiarly the story of the fur trade and the strife for commercial monopoly," Frank H. Severance of the Buffalo Historical Society said in an address delivered at the fort in 1896; "and it is, too, in considerable measure, the story of our neighbor, the magnificent colony of Canada.... It is a story replete with incidents of battle and siege, of Indian cruelty, of patriot captivity, of white men's duplicity, of famine, disease, and death,—of all the varied forms of misery and wretchedness of a frontier post, which we in days of ease are wont to call picturesque and romantic. It is a story without a dull page, and it is two and a half centuries long.... I cannot better tell the story ... then to symbolize Fort Niagara as a beaver skin, held by an Indian, a Frenchman, an Englishman, and a Dutchman, each of the last three trying to pull it away from the others (the poor Dutchman early bowled over in the scuffle), and each European equally eager to placate the Indian with fine words, with prayers, or with brandy, or to stick a knife into his white brother's back."

The story begins in 1669, with the first efforts of the French to secure possession of the Niagara country. It includes also the romance of the building of the Griffon, the first vessel on the Great Lakes, and the episode of the early fortification of the late seventeenth century. But it was not until 1726, the year of the building of the stone castle near the mouth of the Niagara River, that the fort had its real beginning. The French felt compelled to build the fort because the activity of the English was interfering with their own fur trade with the Indians, and their plan to build Fort Oswego would increase the difficulty. No time was to be lost; Governor Joncaire felt that he could not wait for the approval of the authorities at home. To these latter he sent word that he must build a fortress, and he asked for an appropriation; to the Indians he declared that he wished to have a mere trading station. His real purpose was indicated when he wrote to France that the building "will not have the appearance of a fort, so that no offence will be given to the Iroquois, who have been unwilling to allow any there, but it will answer the purpose of a fort just as well."

The first step was the construction of two barques for use on Lake Ontario, to carry stone and timber for the building, and later, to cruise on the lake and intercept traders bound for Oswego.