The Story of Cooperstown

by Ralph Birdsall

Man's life, in its appointed limit,
Is seventy, is eighty years;
But care and grief and anguish dim it,
However joyous it appears.
The winged moments swiftly flee,
And bear us to eternity.

The village of Hartwick is distantly connected with another religious movement which the founder of Hartwick Seminary would have viewed with the utmost abhorrence. In 1820, and for several years thereafter, first in the house of John Davison, and afterward in Jerome Clark's attic, lay an old trunk containing the closely handwritten pages of a romance entitled The Manuscript Found, by the Rev. Solomon Spaulding. This was written in 1812, in Conneaut, Ashtabula county, Ohio, where the exploration of earth mounds containing skeletons and other relics fired Spaulding's imagination, and suggested the character of his tale. It was written in Biblical style, and for the purpose of the romance was presented as a translation from hieroglyphical writing upon metal plates exhumed from a mound, to which the author had been guided by a vision. It purported to be a history of the peopling of America by the lost tribes of Israel. Spaulding frequently read the manuscript to circles of admiring friends, and afterward carried it to Pittsburgh, leaving it, in the hope of having it published, in the care of a printer named Patterson. The manuscript was finally rejected. Spaulding died, and in 1820 his widow married John Davison of Hartwick, to which place the old trunk containing her first husband's manuscript was sent.

In 1823 Joseph Smith gave out that he had been directed in a vision to a hill near Palmyra, New York, where he discovered some gold plates curiously inscribed, and containing a new revelation. This supposed revelation he published in 1830 as the "Book of Mormon."

Mormonism flourished and moved westward. In the course of time a Mormon meeting was held in Conneaut, Ohio, and out of curiosity was largely attended by the townspeople. Some readings were given from the Book of Mormon, and certain of the hearers were astonished at the similarity between Joseph Smith's book and The Manuscript Found, which Solomon Spaulding had read aloud to friends in the same town many years before. They recognized the same peculiar names, unheard of elsewhere, such as Mormon, Maroni, Lamenite, and Nephi. It was learned, it is said, that Smith had closely followed Spaulding's story, adding only his own peculiar tenets about marriage, and inventing the theory of the great spectacles by means of which he professed to have deciphered the mysterious characters.

Spaulding's friends raised a question which has never been cleared up and was at last forgotten. It was pointed out that Sidney Rigdon, who figured as a preacher and as an adviser of Smith among the first of the "Latter Day Saints," happened to have been an employé in Patterson's printing office in Pittsburgh during the very period when Spaulding's manuscript was there awaiting approval or rejection. But the matter was never brought to a definite issue, and nothing more came of it except a rather curious episode. Mrs. Davison removed from Hartwick about 1828, leaving the trunk in charge of Jerome Clark. In 1834 a man named Hurlburt sought Mrs. Davison, and said that he had been sent by a committee to procure The Manuscript Found, written by Solomon Spaulding, so as to compare it with the Mormon Bible. He presented a letter from her brother, William H. Sabine, of Onondaga Valley, upon whose farm Joseph Smith had been an employé, requesting her to lend the manuscript to Hurlburt, in order "to uproot this Mormon fraud." Hurlburt represented that he himself had been a convert to Mormonism, but had given it up, and wished to expose its wickedness. On Hurlburt's repeated promise to return the work, Mrs. Davison gave him a note addressed to Jerome Clark of Hartwick, requesting him to open the old trunk and deliver the manuscript. This was done. Hurlburt took the manuscript, and not only did he never return it, but he never replied to any of the many letters requesting its return. The Spaulding manuscript has utterly disappeared.[25]

The year 1768 brings another unique personage into the field of our local history. In that year the English met the Indians at Fort Stanwix (Rome, Oneida county) in a conference which resulted in establishing a formally acknowledged boundary between the territory of the red men and the land which the colonists had begun to make their own. The lands of the upper Susquehanna thus became, prior to the Revolution, the extreme western frontier of old New York, and Otsego Lake was included within English territory by a margin, at the west, of about twenty miles. Sir William Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, conducted the negotiations, and the securing of the Fort Stanwix deed was one of the most astute accomplishments of his long career.

An interested party to these proceedings was Sir William's deputy agent for Indian affairs, Colonel George Croghan, who had accompanied him to the conference. Nearly twenty years before, Croghan had obtained from the Indians a tract of land near Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh), in Pennsylvania. During this Fort Stanwix conference which established the new frontier Croghan succeeded in getting confirmation of the former grant, with the privilege of making an exchange for a tract of equal extent in the region now ceded to the English. Under this agreement Croghan and certain associates afterward took up 100,000 acres of land in what are now Otsego, Burlington, and New Lisbon townships, Otsego county.[26] And so it came about that in the next year, 1769, Colonel George Croghan came to the foot of Otsego Lake, built him a hut, and was the first settler on the present site of Cooperstown.

The story of the fortune and failure of Croghan, who was a remarkable and picturesque character, reads like a romance. He so far surpassed all men of his time in genius for commerce with the Indians, and in skillful marketing of Indian products, that Hanna calls him "The King of the Traders." Lavish in his expenditures, big in his ventures, he made and lost fortunes with equal facility. He alternated between the height of opulence and the verge of bankruptcy. Like Sir William Johnson, Croghan had a special aptitude for making friendships with the Indians, so that, according to his own statement, "he was in such favor and confidence with the councils of the Six Nations that he was, in the year 1746, admitted by them as a Councillor into the Onondaga Councill, which is the Supreme Councill of the Six Nations. He understands the Language of the Six Nations and of several other of the Indian nations."[27]

Long before the sojourn in Otsego, Croghan had become, during his fits of prosperity, a power in the Pennsylvania region, and probably deserved the pungently qualified praise of Hassler, who, in his Old Westmoreland, declares that "the man of most influence in this community [Fort Pitt, or Pittsburgh] was the fat old Trader and Indian-Agent, Colonel George Croghan, who lived on a pretentious plantation about four miles up the Allegheny River—an Irishman by birth and an Episcopalian by religion, when he permitted religion to trouble him."

Two documents relating to Croghan illustrate his extremes of fortune; the one a petition to protect him against imprisonment for debt, the other a complaint against him as a monopolist of the fur trade. It seems that in 1755 Croghan had been compelled by impending bankruptcy and fear of the debtor's prison to remove from settled parts of Pennsylvania, and to take refuge in the Indian country. Here he was in great danger from the French and their Indians, but wrote to the Governor of Pennsylvania that he was more afraid of imprisonment for debt than of losing his scalp. At a meeting of the Pennsylvania Assembly in November, 1755, fifteen creditors of Croghan presented a petition that Croghan and his partner, William Trent, be rendered free from debt for a space of ten years. The petition recited that there should be taken into consideration "the great knowledge of said George Croghan in Indian affairs, his extensive influence among them, and the service and public utility he may be of to this Province in these respects."[28] In accordance with this petition a bill was passed by which Croghan was freed from the danger of arrest for debt, and, although the act was vetoed by King George II three years later, Croghan evidently made profitable use of his liberty.