Lake Otsego—the "Glimmerglass"—William Cooper saw first in the autumn of 1785. "Mt. Vision" was covered with a forest growth so dense that he had to
"climb a tree in order to get a view of the lake, and while up the tree" he saw a deer come down "from the thickets and quietly drink of its waters near Otsego Rock." "Just where the Susquehanna leaves the Lake on its long journey to the sea" this famous Council Rock "still shows its chin above the water and marks the spot where Deerslayer met Chingachgook the Great Serpent of the Delawares."
Now "its lake margin belongs to a grandson of the author, who also bears his name," is a record found in Dr. Wolfe's "Literary Haunts and Homes." In the red man's tongue Otsego means "a place of friendly meeting" of Indian warriors. The author of "Deerslayer" has immortalized that
lake-country in the opening chapter of this book.
Of this visit to his future home and lands William Cooper has written: "In 1785 I visited the rough and hilly country of Otsego. I was alone, three hundred miles from home, without food of any kind. I caught trout in the brook and roasted them in the ashes. My horse fed on the grass that grew by the edge of the waters. I laid me down to sleep in my watch-coat, nothing but the wilderness about me. In this way I explored the country and formed my plans of future settlement. May, 1786, I opened a sale of forty thousand acres of land, which in sixteen days were all taken up by the poorest order of men." Here William Cooper laid out
the site of Cooperstown, which, until 1791, when it became the county-town, was at times also called "Foot-of-the-Lake." He built a store for his sturdy pioneers, giving credit for their simple needs of life, and traded settlement products for them. His tenants put up log houses, and paid rent in butter, wheat, corn, oats, maple-sugar, and finally in pork;—so much that rentals known as "pork leases" were sold like farms. Money was scarce in those days,—when one John Miller, and his father, coming to the Lakeland's point of the river, felled a pine, over which they crossed to the Cooperstown site. Its stump was marked with white paint and called the "bridge-tree" by Fenimore Cooper. His sister Nancy's grandson, Mr. George Pomeroy Keese, from whom much will appear in these pages, has all there is left of that stump.