died of starvation in the woods. And skeletons, guns and other remains found by early settlers near the Connecticut and Passumpsic rivers were reported as the relics of Rogers' men. After gathering up a remnant of his force Maj. Rogers returned to Crown Point.

24. Vermont in 1760.-With the retreating army in 1759, the French settlers in the Champlain valley retired to Canada. There were then a few scattered settlements near the west bank of the Connecticut River from the Massachusetts line to Bellows Falls. These, with the dwellers in the Indian village by the Lower Falls of the Missisquoi River, constituted the population of Vermont in 1760.

CHAPTER II.

FURTHER SETTLEMENTS. CONFLICTING CLAIMS.

1. Settlement of Bennington.-The township of Bennington was granted and surveyed in 1749, but the forest remained unbroken till after the conquest of Canada. Captain Samuel Robinson, returning from Lake George to his home in Massachusetts, during the French and Indian war, passed through Bennington, encamping for the night there; and was so much pleased with the country that he found the owners, purchased a portion of their rights and, with some friends, began there, in 1761, the first permanent settlement of Western Vermont. Six families, from beyond the Connecticut River, wended their way on horseback through leafy woods and beside full streams and reached Bennington June 18. Samuel Robinson had

bought wheat at Charlemont on the Deerfield River two months before, indicating that pioneers went forward to prepare as fully as possible for the necessities of the colony. In the autumn other families came, some of them from the farthest corner of Connecticut, making up a number of thirty or forty. A mild win

ter followed, which was very favorable to the settlers, and which they regarded as a special interposition of the Supreme Ruler in their behalf. The settlement grew rapidly and others were made near it. In 1765 a road, a bridle path, had been surveyed and opened to Danby, where a few beginnings were made beside the branches of the Otter Creek by settlers from New York. Bennington with its one thousand inhabitants, its town organization, its mills, its militia company, its church and its schools was already a center of business and of social and political influence..

2. Settlement of Newbury.-The Coos Meadows, in Newbury, Vt., and Haverhill, N. H., of the present day, had been known for a long time. Stephen Williams spent several weeks in the neighborhood in the spring of 1704. The same spring Jacob Hicks planted corn there with the Indians and shortly after died of starvation. Captain Peter Powers of New Hampshire just fifty years later found the meadows cleared and covered with grass. A few families came to these meadows in 1762. They settled on opposite sides of the Connecticut River and in different towns, but constituted one neighborhood, sixty miles distant from the nearest settlement, that of Charlestown, N. H From that place they brought provisions by boat in summer and on the ice in winter till they could raise their own supplies. The irons for the first saw-mili in Newbury were brought from Concord, N. H., nearly eighty miles distant, upon a hand-sled. It was a wild country far in the woods. One Sunday, Mrs. Mary

Kent of Newbury remained at home alone while the rest of the family went to meeting. During the time three large bears came and looked in at the open door of her cabin, and then walked away. In 1765, three years after its first settlement, Newbury was a fully organized town and in connection with Haverhill had a church and a pastor. In that year there were settlements in nearly all the towns bordering the Connecticut River on the west from Massachusetts to Newbury, and in enough of the tiers beyond to fill the gaps in the line of the river towns, and a settlement had been made in Guildhall.

3. Timothy Knox.-In some of these towns the people were few. The entire population of Woodstock at this time consisted of Timothy Knox. He had been a fellowstudent in Harvard College with Elbridge Gerry who afterward signed the Declaration of Independence, who became

Governor of Massachusetts and Vice-President of the United States, whose virtues have been extolled in history and one of whose devices has been embalmed in the word gerrymander. Knox had a sweetheart who ceased to smile on him, upon which he desired "a lodge in some vast wilderness," went to Woodstock and built one where he slept,

cooked his food and stored his furs.

For three years

he was the only inhabitant of the town.

Were not the privations and dangers of such a wilderness sufficient to test the skill and force and faith of the settlers? We shall see.

4. New Hampshire Grants.-In 1765 the settlements in what is now Vermont extended from the border of Massachusetts northward in two lines; on the west to the headwaters of the Otter Creek, on the east to Guildhall. Beginnings had been made in some twenty-five townships. Wherever the population was sufficient towns had been organized. Before this date one hundred thirty-eight townships had been granted by Gov. Wentworth of New Hampshire to purchasers from the New England colonies, who constituted a large and influential portion of the citizens. The country in which these lands lay was then called the New Hampshire Grants.

5. News. To these settlers and purchasers there came interesting news from Albany in the early summer of this year, in the form of a proclamation by Lieut. Gov. Colden of New York, in which he recited an order of the King of England declaring the west bank of the Connecticut River to be the boundary be tween the provinces of New Hampshire and New York.

6. Changed Jurisdiction.-By this decision the lands granted by Gov. Wentworth west of the Connecticut River were placed under the jurisdiction of New York. But the settlers did not believe that their titles to their lands would be questioned till surveyors appeared in the valley of the Battenkill laying out for New York grantees fields just won from the forest, and for which payment had been made to the Governor of New Hampshire.

7. A Convention —A convention of settlers was held at Bennington in the early autumn of 1765. The convention was a New England notion. But with the men of Massachusetts and Connecticut came the Yorkers from Danby whose bridle path grew to a wide road as they approached the new center of democratic ideas. Samuel Robinson of Bennington was selected as an agent of the settlers to lay their case and their claims before Gov. Moore, then newly arrived in New York city.

8. Claims.-The New York Party.-The New York authorities persisted in their claims. Both parties granted that the lands in dispute originally belonged to the King of England. The New York party claimed that a grant made by the King to the Duke of York in 1664, and confirmed ten years later, of all lands between the Connecticut River and the Delaware Bay, included the lands west of the Connecticut recently granted by Governor Wentworth, and had never been set aside with respect to them; and that consequently the grants made by him were without authority and were null and void; and they required the settlers to procure new patents paying the customary fees for them upon pain of ejectment. The New York officials desired the fees. They were upholders of royal and parliamentary authority in the colonies. They thoroughly believed in the excellence of the British form of government and of the constitution of British society. They feared the democratic tendencies of New England. The leaders of this party were men of superior education and native ability whose interests and whose real belief were in harmony and who were determined to maintain the right as they understood it at all hazards.