They were the men, and the offspring of the men, whose sturdy strokes, supplemented by their more delicate and elaborate strokes, had turned New England from a wilderness into fertile fields and flourishing towns, but who were not permitted to reap the fruits of their past endeavors in their old homes. Debts had accrued against them while they had been helping fight the battles of their country in the War for Independence, and their creditors would not accept in settlement the worthless Continental currency with which their country had paid them for their services and sacrifices. In many instances they found their homesteads taken from them and turned over to lawyers and other professional men who had abstained from encouragement of bloodshed by staying out of the army in the "times that tried men's souls." The returning soldiers were disgusted and amazed by what looked to them like a less tolerable condition than that which they had opposed of late with powder and ball. Within a very few years all this feeling culminated in a rebellion against the government—and particularly the judicial branch of the government—of the state of Massachusetts, led by one Daniel Shays, who had attained the rank of captain in the Continental forces in active service.
When this uprising was suppressed, as in less than a year it was, an exodus of the dissatisfied classes began and continued as people could get ready for their passage over the Hudson and into the wilderness of what was then the Far West, reaching by way of the Mohawk Valley even to Lake Erie itself, and up the eastern shore of Lake Ontario to the St. Lawrence. Washington Irving was evidently familiar with the appearance of such migrations from early boyhood, and gives a lively picture in his Knickerbocker's History of New York (though somewhat distorted for purposes of burlesque entertainment), of the way in which the Yankees moved westward, accompanied by their families, and with all their belongings packed away in covered wagons drawn by jaded horses or toiling oxen.
The History was published in 1809, when Irving was twenty-six years old; but it is not probable that he had observed among the immigrant wagons passing his father's house, the young ship-carpenter, Zattu Cushing, who attained his majority in 1791, and soon after left his native home at Plymouth, Mass., reaching the neighborhood of Ballston Spa, New York, before 1795, the year of his marriage there to Miss Rachel Buckingham.
It seems most likely that the trip from Plymouth to the headwaters of the Hudson was entirely by water; the young man's relations with seafaring, together with the frequency of coastwise voyages from the eastern ports of the old Bay State, would naturally have led him to prefer that route. From the time of his marriage until 1799 neither tradition nor record points out the character or direction of his movements. In the last-mentioned year he is said to have been superintending the construction of a ship, the "Good Intent," at the island opposite Erie, Pennsylvania, although his residence at the same time was in the town of Paris, a few miles south of Utica, New York. On his return home from Erie he took back a team of horses, perhaps the fruit of his ship-building on the lake. The horses claim a a place in history on account of the escape of one of them in the neighborhood of Dunkirk, and the camping-out of the owner, while searching for it, on the site of the village of Fredonia, his home in subsequent years.
The Cushing Family in Western New York
It was not until 1805 that the young man finally settled at Fredonia, bringing with him his wife and five children, of whom Milton Buckingham, born in 1800, was to become the father of perhaps the most conspicuously daring trio of sons of one mother of any—not excepting the Roman Horatii or Judean Maccabees—whose exploits have been noted in the pages of history. For, in the days of early champions, personal strength and dexterity counted for so much in battle that it did not appear very extraordinary for Walter Scott's "Fitz-James" to set his back against a rock and defy a whole tribe of armed Highlanders to a close contest. The more modern fighting man can not see the death that he hears whistling and humming about his head in the vicious flight of bullets; or, tearing the atmosphere apart by means of shell that burst into whirring fragments of cast-iron, destroying everything they touch, whether animate or inanimate. He has to be ready for his fate, which may be handed out to him at any instant without the possibility of resistance or escape.
The journey from Oneida County was made in the early winter by ox-sleighs, and must have taken several days, perhaps running into weeks, as the route led the emigrants to Dunkirk by way of Buffalo and the frozen waters along the Erie shore. While spending one night on the ice, a little way off shore, a thaw came on, in company with a strong east wind, and the party had some difficulty in reaching land. Fredonia is only three or four miles inland from the port of Dunkirk, and the family soon found themselves domiciled in the log hut which in those days almost always served as the temporary shelter, at least, of the first occupant of a tract of land in the backwoods of New York.
The Cushings were evidently well-thought-of by their neighbors, so the former ship-carpenter soon received the appointment of associate judge of the Niagara County court. It may seem rather odd at present that this position should have been conferred upon a layman; but the experience at their old homes of the emigrating New Englanders had been such that they retained strong prejudices against regularly-trained members of the learned professions. They were quite generally inclined to prefer the illiterate exhortations of revivalist ministers to the teachings of such clergymen as were accounted orthodox in the Eastern states; to consider home-bred lawyers as more likely to strive for the triumph of justice than those who had devoted their lives to the study of technicalities; and even in respect to medical practitioners, the self-taught empiric was as likely to achieve a financial success among them as would be the graduate of a long-established medical school.