The Story of Cooperstown

by Ralph Birdsall

Strangely enough, the matter in dispute has not been the identity of Shipman with Leather-Stocking, but the identity of Shipman himself. Who was Shipman? This is the question that has stirred controversy; and two ghosts have arisen from the past, each claiming to be the Shipman whom Cooper idealized, re-christened, and made immortal.

Cooper gave to his hero the name of Nathaniel Bumppo. It has been claimed that Cooper borrowed not only the character but the Christian name of Nathaniel Shipman, a famous hunter and trapper, who came to Otsego Lake at the time of the Revolutionary War, and made his home in a cave on the border of the lake until about 1805.

According to the discoverers of this original of Leather-Stocking, Nathaniel Shipman was a close friend of the Mohican Indians, and fought with them against the French and the Canadian Indians. In the years immediately preceding the American Revolution Shipman was a well known settler of Hoosick, northeast of Albany and near the border of Vermont, where he had built him a cabin on the banks of the Walloomsac. He was well disposed toward the English, and one of his closest friends was an officer in the British army. When the Revolutionary War began, while Shipman's heart was with the movement for independence, his friendship for the English was such that he determined to be strictly neutral, helping neither one side nor the other. There is nothing to show that he was not genuinely neutral. But his patriot neighbors were intolerant of such neutrality. Anyone who was not for them was against them. Shipman was put down as a Tory, and his neighbors treated him to a coat of tar and feathers.

Soon after this event Nathaniel Shipman disappeared from Hoosick, and not even his own family knew whither he had gone.

In process of time Shipman's daughter married a John Ryan of Hoosick. Ryan served in the Legislature from 1803 to 1806, and at that time became acquainted with Judge William Cooper, founder of Cooperstown, and father of the novelist. In the course of their frequent meetings Judge Cooper told Ryan of an interesting character whom he had seen in Cooperstown, and described the picturesque appearance and quaint sayings of the old hunter who lived on the border of Otsego Lake. At home Ryan told the story to his wife, who soon became convinced that the old white hunter whom Cooper had described was none other than her father, who had been missing for twenty-six years.

Ryan went to Otsego Lake, and, having found the hunter, learned that he was indeed Nathaniel Shipman who had disappeared from Hoosick at the time of the Revolutionary War. Ryan persuaded the old man to return with him, and brought him back to live in the home which then stood some two miles east of Hoosick Falls. In spite of the devotion of his daughter, however, the aged hunter never felt quite at home beneath her roof, or among the former neighbors. His heart was in the wilds, and it is said that he made frequent visits to the place where he had passed so many years in unrestricted freedom, where there was none to question his sincerity or to doubt his loyalty.

Nathaniel Shipman died at the Ryan home in 1809, and his grave is in the old burying ground on Main Street in Hoosick Falls.

The local tradition in Cooperstown does not recognize Nathaniel Shipman of Hoosick Falls. When a movement was made in 1915 to erect at Hoosick Falls a monument to Nathaniel Shipman as the original of Leather-Stocking, the proposition was made the subject of scornful comment in Cooperstown, and Nathaniel Shipman of Hoosick was referred to as "a spurious Natty Bumppo."

Cooperstown agrees that the original of Leather-Stocking was named Shipman. But the name of the original hunter was not Nathaniel. He was David Shipman. His grave is not far from Cooperstown, in the Adams burying ground between the villages of Fly Creek and Toddsville, and at the beginning of the twentieth century was marked with a tombstone by Otsego chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. David Shipman's descendants live in Cooperstown at the present time. When the Hoosick Falls claim to Leather-Stocking was first published in 1915, it was accompanied with the statement that the facts were known to the people of Hoosick sixty years before. Notwithstanding this the claim was contradicted in Cooperstown by the positive statement that "for over a century David Shipman has held the undisputed honor of being the real Leather-Stocking of Cooper's tales."

David Shipman served in the American army in the Revolutionary War, and was a member of the Fourteenth Regiment of Albany county militia under Col. John Knickerbocker and Lieut.-Col. John van Rensselaer. After the Revolution he lived just over the hills west of Cooperstown in a log cabin on the east bank of Oak's Creek, about equi-distant between Toddsville and Fly Creek village. In 1878 Aden Adams of Cooperstown, aged 81, stated that he well remembered David Shipman. As described by Adams, he was tall and slim, dressed in tanned deerskin, wore moccasins and long stockings of leather fastened at the knee, and carried a gun of great length. He was one of the most famous hunters of the whole country, and with his dogs roamed the forest in search of deer, bear, and foxes. He supplied the Cooper family at Otsego Hall with deer and bear meat, and also assisted Judge Cooper when he was surveying land about Cooperstown in the early days of the settlement. Colonel Cheney[91] says that after going west, David Shipman returned to his old home in the Fly Creek valley, and lived there for several years. His wife died, and was buried in the Adams cemetery. The ground was wet, and water partially filled the grave. Elder Bostwick, a Baptist minister from the town of Hartwick, officiated at the funeral, and upon remarking to Shipman that it was a poor place to bury the dead, the old hunter answered, "I know it, but if I live to die, I expect to be buried here myself."[92]