recorder, or the commissioners of the almshouse," and, "September 27, 1824, permits were ordered printed in blank."

This was not an imaginary evil-a mere inconvenience to the keepers. It had become a great nuisance to them and to the prisoners, who still had some rights, and, if not entirely stopped, it needed to be regulated, for the visiting had become a public amusement. "The average number daily was five hundred, and in the last Easter and Whitsunday week there were over one thousand daily." * It was not true, as Holmes wrote in his "Treadmill Song,"

"They've built us up a noble wall

To keep the vulgar out,"

but the reverse. Time went on, and the defects referred to by Friend Eddy and others did not disappear-they became chronic; they were inherent, and that by an unchangeable law of the Creator when he made man, and became too serious to be ignored by the municipal authorities. In the Common Council, October 30, 1826, "Mr. Van Wyck presented a resolution-the Police Commissioners to inquire and report concerning the discontinuing the use of the treadmill in certain cases, and till a report is made, no female to be placed on the treadmill under any pretense whatever."+

Whether Mr. Van Wyck was more intelligent or courageous or humane than his associates, or not, his resolution indicates his belief in un fait accompli, and while offering to the commissioners an official tribute and time for deliberate action, he secured his object at once-absolute, immediate prohibition, and he should ever be held in grateful remembrance.

"The treadmill was in operation from the 23d of September, 1822, till November, 1824, when it was necessarily suspended in consequence of many being sick of a malignant disease called the typhus, or jail, fever, which had raged among the prisoners, and to which numbers of them fell victims, as also Dr. Wm. L. Belden and three of the keepers."‡

How long it survived after the motion of Mr. Van Wyck no record has been found. Failing to realize the expectations of its early advocates and of the public, it probably went into disuse, "unhonored and unsung," and it was so buried and forgotten that for nearly half a century it has been rarely mentioned, and would have remained so but for this recent resuscitation by Professor McMaster. It may safely be assumed that Dr. Holmes and Professor McMaster never saw a treadmill in America. The former entered Harvard College in 1825, and graduated in 1829, and Min. Com. Council, Vol. LIX., p. 15. Hardie's Picture of New York, p. 192.

*Hardie, p. 37.

during the next seven years was studying law and medicine and writing poetry. The treadmill had not been adopted in Massachusetts, and the doctor may not have visited his Dutch relatives in New York, the Wendells. The stories of the time rather amused him than awakened his sympathy. With unsparing pen he impaled his weakest victim with:

Wake up, wake up, my duck-legged man,

And stir your solid pegs,"

and the illusions of the rollicking fellows were thus set forth by one of them :

If the poet, with the generous sympathies of his later life, could have witnessed the suffering of the representatives of "that sisterhood for which he is ever ready to enter the lists with glove and lance, his clarion words would have been heard, and instead of that soulless "Treadmill Song " he would have given a stirring idyl, like Hood's "Song of the Shirt," which would have secured a permanent place in literature.

Professor McMaster had not then begun to observe the course of human affairs, and was obviously unacquainted with Holmes's song. To him the tradition of the treadmill comes down the ages, with the accumulated force of a century, an emblem of the barbarism of the people of 1783; but with an anachronism of more than a third of a century—which in history is inexcusable. A historian runs serious risk when he seizes upon a transient experiment in an unknown science, in the present century, and charges it over to the discredit of the previous century. The premises and the conclusions are alike unfortunate and misleading. It has been well said by a distinguished historical writer that "in determining what kind of men our fathers were we are to compare their laws, not with ours, but with the laws they renounced" (Dr. Leonard Bacon). The same is true of their manners and customs and their religious life.

NEW YORK CITY, NOVEMBER, 1887.

Oliver Hubbard

MINOR TOPICS

THE PROTOTYPE OF "LEATHER-STOCKING "

EDITOR OF MAGAZINE OF AMERICAN HISTORY:

From the discussion pro and con, in late numbers of your magazine, regarding the identity of a prominent character in one of Mr. Fenimore Cooper's novels, I am reminded of another competitor, not, however, representing the same personage referred to, as portrayed in the Spy. Probably a more original pattern of a sort of man once to be found outside the borders of the settlements, within the dense shadows of an American wilderness, but scarce elsewhere, was the type of the genuine, natural, and famous Leather-stocking. Mr. Cooper, with even his masterly talents, could not have written his "Leather-stocking Tales" in the city of London or Paris or New York, without his personal experience gained in a residence on the frontier at an early period, by the groves of Cooperstown, it is likely, or

'Where the wild Oswego spreads her forests round."

In Europe may be found hermits perhaps, as well as bandits, but no Leatherstockings. While Mr. Cooper claimed that "rigid adhesion to truth, an indispensable requisite in history and travels, destroys the charm of fiction," he yet allowed that "there was a constant temptation to delineate that which he had known, rather than that which he might have imagined."

I think so; and if several years' sojourn at Oswego, on Lake Ontario, by Mr. Cooper, in the early part of the present century, gained for him impressions of frontier life, he of necessity could scarce fail to picture them to some extent in his stories relating to lake and land. More than fifty years ago it was told to the writer of this paper (when he went to Oswego to live) that not a few things in Mr. Cooper's tales were apparently borrowed from facts familiar to the old residents there.

So, the captain of the Scud, whose name in the Pathfinder was "Jasper Eau Douce," was a character quite confidently believed to have been in a manner drawn from the name and skill of a Lake Ontario skipper, then also residing at the port and hamlet (at the same time as Mr. Cooper, in 1809), whose name was William Eadus. This Captain William Eadus was born, I think, in 1771, but where I have not learned. He was early on the lakes, and officiated as master certainly as far back as 1797, when he was employed by the government to transport a company of United States soldiers from Oswego to Fort Niagara. For that purpose he chartered a Canadian craft, there being no vessel owned at that time on the American side of Lake Ontario. The voyage proved to be a

rather rough one, for, after nearly reaching Niagara, the vessel was driven back and obliged to seek shelter in Kingston harbor. Afterward he had command of the schooner Fair American, one of the earliest American-built craft on the lake. He subsequently owned and sailed the schooner Island Packet, which was captured by the British, I think at Brockville, Canada, and burned, June, 1812. In spring of 1813 Captain Eadus commanded the schooner Mary, yet I believe he retired from the lake not long after the close of the war with Britain. He resided at Sodus after about 1811, when his house was burnt in a raid of the enemy upon the village in the summer of 1813. He was living in 1847, at the age of seventy

six.

It was also believed and told that Leather-stocking of the book had his counterpart in a well-known and successful woodsman and trapper of the region, whose name was Vickory. Yet he was not the individual, nor were the forests of Oswego the locality, which I set out to present: but the man to be named is, as I suppose, an almost unheard-of representative, and the locality, according to the evidence, was that in the vicinity of Mr. Cooper's earlier home of Cooperstown.

From the "Annals of Hoosick," by Hon. L. Chandler Ball, written some years since, and printed in the columns of a weekly newspaper, I give in substance briefly the chapter detailing the facts regarding the chief original, as believed, of Leather-stocking. Nathaniel Shipman, in one of the years between the close of the French War and the American Revolution, came with his family, but from whence is not known, and built his cabin on the bank of the Walloomsack, in the northeastern part of the town of Hoosick, New York, not far from the fields which a few years later were made historic by the battle of Bennington, so-called, which occurred in the present town of Hoosick.

Mr. Shipman could be called singular and retiring, talked little of himself, and so it is not learned who were his parents, nor where nor when he was born. But he was known and may be called distinguished as a hunter and trapper, and his days were mostly passed along the mountain streams which fed the Walloomsack, or in the thick woods which covered a great part of the region about. Mr. Shipman was a friend and associate of the few Indians who were still to be seen in the neighborhood, though but a handful, so to speak, of the once numerous and powerful Mohicans. This friendship had existed from the time they fought together against the French. It is told also that Mr. Shipman had a strong attachment for an officer of the British forces, which friendship also began during the war named. Possibly the fond regard for the officer may have influenced Mr. Shipman's sentiments relating to the great question then being asked and fought to decide, whether freedom or the monarch over the sea should be master. any rate, the trapper chose to remain neutral, whereupon some of his impetuous neighbors called him a Tory, and not that merely, but, with the rougher treatment, he was given a coat of tar and feathers. It is not surprising, after such impolite behavior toward an inoffensive trapper, as we suppose, that Mr. Shipman disap

At

peared altogether, and nothing could be found or heard of him, though the woods were extensively searched. As the years passed by with no tidings, he was classed as one among the dead.

A daughter of Mr. Shipman had married Mr. John Ryan, a native of Dutchess County, New York, a man of good natural abilities and some education, who, while yet quite a young man, had been appointed land agent for the heirs of Jacobus Van Cortlandt of New York, one of the original proprietors of "Hoseck Patent,” and the duties attending said office led to his settlement in the township. Mr. Ryan, when in Albany, probably while member of the Assembly, which position he held in 1803 and several years succeeding, became acquainted with Judge Cooper of Otsego County, who told him of his experience in opening and settling his large land estate there. Among other things, he spoke of an old white man that, in company with an Indian, lived in a hut or cave on the border of Otsego Lake, and who subsisted by hunting and fishing. The white man was represented as a famous hunter and a warrior in the old French War when the states were colonies, a man of simple manners and eccentric habits, and, like his Indian companion, a true son of the forest. These statements of Judge Cooper were talked of on Mr. Ryan's return to his home, and Mrs. Ryan was strongly impressed to believe that the white hunter was none other than her long-absent father. To satisfy the newly awakened interest, a journey to Cooperstown was taken by Mr. Ryan, and, reaching the cabin of the hunter, he found confirmation of Mrs. Ryan's hopeful suggestion. Earnestly persuaded by Mr. Ryan, the old man consented to return with his son-in-law to his home, where he was comfortably provided for. Once, however, his long and strong habit forced him again to take to the woods; but he was aged, and therefore unfit for the seclusion to which his ruling passion led him. After much search he was found, at beginning of a winter, on the east side of the Green Mountains, occupying a cave, well supplied, however, with bears' meat and the flesh of other animals. He refused to return to his friends then, but promised to visit them in the spring, which he did, and continued to live in Mr. Ryan's family until his death, about 1809.

It is urged that it was natural that Mr. Shipman, after the harsh treatment referred to, should retire with his Indian friend to the vicinity of Otsego Lake. Though a few of the Mohican Indians remained in Hoosick and Schaghticoke, the greater number were at the forks of the Susquehanna and among the hills of Otsego. Some other particulars may be named to confirm Mr. Shipman's identity with Leather-stocking. The name of Mr. Shipman's favorite dog was "Hector," so was that of Leather-stocking. Shipman's rifle had a barrel of uncommon length ; such also was a characteristic of that of Leather-stocking.

Mr. Azariah Eddy, of Hoosick, being in the city of New York, was shown by a friend a copy of the Pioneers, then recently published, which it was understood had been received from the author. In the volume, upon one of the flyleaves, were the names of several prominent characters in the book, with names op