Now that Canada was conquered and the French armies withdrawn from Ticonderoga and Crown Point, all the country lying between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut, commonly called the Wilderness, was open to settlement.

In 1696, long before the granting of French seigniories on Lake Champlain, Godfrey Dellius, a Dutch clergyman of Albany, had purchased of the Mohawks, who claimed all this territory, an immense tract, extending from Saratoga along both sides of the Hudson River and Wood Creek, and on the east side of Lake Champlain, twenty miles north of Crown Point. The purchase was confirmed by New York, but three years later was repealed, "as an extravagant favor to one subject."

In 1732 Colonel John Henry Lydius purchased of the Mohawks a large tract of land situated on "the Otter Creek, which emptieth itself into Lake Champlain in North America, easterly from and near Crown Point." The deed was confirmed by Governor Shirley of Massachusetts in 1744. This tract embraced nearly the whole of the present counties of Addison and Rutland. It was divided into townships, and most of it sold by Lydius to a great number of purchasers,[25] some of whom settled upon it. The township of Durham was originally settled under this grant, but the settlers, finding the title imperfect, applied for and obtained letters patent under New York.[26]

The French colony at Point À Chevalure vanished with the shadow of the banner of France. The young forest soon repossessed the fields where almost the only trace of husbandry was the rank growth of foreign weeds. House walls were crumbling about cold hearthstones and smokeless chimneys, and thresholds untrodden but by the nightly prowling beast or the foot of the curious hunter. There was no remembrance of the housewife's hand but the self-sown lilies and marigolds that mingled their strange bloom with native asters and goldenrods above the graves of forsaken homes. From where the sluggish waters of the narrow channel are first stirred by Wood Creek, to where the waves of Champlain break on Canadian shores, there was not one settlement on its eastern border, nor any inhabitant save where some trapper had built his cabin in the solitude of the woods, and dwelt hermit-like for a time while he plied his lonely craft.

The Wilderness had not long rested in the silence of peace when it was invaded by a throng of pioneers, who came to wrest its soil from the ancient domination of the forest, and upon it to build their homes. Farmers and sons of farmers, while serving in the colonial armies, had noted during their painful marches through it what goodly soil slept in the shadow of this wilderness; keen-eyed rangers, chosen from hunters and trappers for their skill in woodcraft, when on their perilous errands had penetrated its depths wherever led an Indian trail or wound a stream to float a canoe, and knew what it held for men of their craft, and each had planned, when peace should come, to return to the land that gave such promise of fruitful fields or the easier garner of peltry. Lumbermen, too, knew its wealth of great pines; and speculators were casting greedy eyes upon the region, and plotting for its acquisition.

As the soldiers who guarded its posts, or crossed and recrossed the savage wilderness, were of New England origin, it naturally followed that most of the actual settlers came from the same provinces. Thus, from the very first, each little community of hardy and industrious pioneers was clearly stamped with the New England character. Such inspiration, such love of home, as glows in the hearts of all mountaineers, they drew from the grand companionship of the stern and steadfast mountains, the Crouching Lion, Mansfield, Ascutney, whose heavenward-reaching peaks shone white with snow when winter reigned, or summer came or lingered in the valleys,—landmarks enduring as the world, that stand while nations are born and flourish and pass away.

Sometimes the pioneer left his family in the older settlements while he, with a neighbor or two, or often alone, went into the wilderness to make the beginning of a new home. A pitch was located, and the herculean task of making a clearing begun, the apparently hopeless warfare of one puny hand against a countless army of giants that towered above him. Yet one by one the great trees toppled and fell before his valiant strokes. The trunks of some were built into a log-house, with a puncheon floor and roof of bark; more were rolled into heaps and burned, and the first patch of cleared soil was planted with corn or sown with wheat. After weeks and months of this toil and hardship and loneliness, perhaps not once broken by the sight of a fellow-being, when the tasseled corn and the nodding wheat hid the blackened stumps of the scant clearing, the giants still hemmed him in, their lofty heads the horizon of his little world, the bounds of his briefly sunlit sky. When his crops were housed, and the woods were gaudy with a thousand autumnal tints to where the glory of the deciduous trees was bounded by the dark wall of "black growth" on the mountains whose peaks were white with snow, he shouldered axe and gun and went southward, following the army of crows that raised a clamor of amazement at this intrusion on their immemorial domain. While the little clearing slept under the snow, and the silent cabin made the wintry loneliness of the forest more lonely, he spent a winter of content among old friends and neighbors, and in the spring set forth on horseback, or with an ox-team, with wife and children or newly wedded bride, and scant outfit of household stuff, to take permanent possession of the new home, where, if the burden of loneliness was lightened, the weariness of toil, privation, and anxiety was not lessened. Nature was the only neighbor of the new-comers, kind or unkind, according to her impartial mood to all her children, now a friend and consoler, with sunshine and timely shower, flowers and birdsong and hymns of wind-swept pines, now relentless, assailing with storm and bitter stress of cold. Miles of weary forest path marked only by blazed trees, or miles of toilsome waterway, lay between them and their kind, or help or sympathy in whatever trouble might befall them. Such consolation as religion might give must be sought at the fountain-head of all religion, since church and gospel ministrations were left behind.

The old warpaths became the ways of peace, and on lake and river, that before had borne none but warlike craft, now fared the settler's boat, laden with his family and household goods, skirting the quiet shore or up the slow current of a stream, through intervales whose fat soil as yet nourished only a luxuriant verdure of the forest. From afar the eternal roar of a cataract boomed in swelling thunder along the green walls of the lane of waters, foretelling the approaching toil of a portage. But no foeman lurked behind the green thicket, and the voyagers were startled by no sound more alarming than the sudden uprising of innumerable waterfowl, the plunge of an otter disturbed in his sport, or the mellow cadence of the great owl's solemn note.

The granting of lands, which had been interrupted by the war, was again begun by the governor of New Hampshire, Benning Wentworth, and in different parts of the region surveyors were busy running the lines of townships and lots. There was a flavor of discovery and adventure in their weary toil that gave it zest, as, with no guide but the compass, they were led through sombre depths of the primeval forest, where the footsteps of civilized man had never before fallen, and set the bounds of ownership where had never been sign of possession but the mark of the patient beaver's tooth, bark frayed by the claw of the bear, the antler of the moose, and the brands of the brief camp-fire of the savage. At night they bivouacked where with the fading of daylight their labors ended, prepared their rude supper by the fire that summoned a host of weird and grotesque shadows to surround them, and slept to the grewsome serenade of the wolf's long howl and the panther's scream.The conditions of the grants or charters were, that every grantee should plant and cultivate five acres within five years for every fifty acres granted; that all white and other pine trees fit for masting the royal navy should be reserved for that use, and none felled without royal license; that after ten years a yearly rent of one shilling for each hundred acres, also for a town lot of one acre, which was set to each proprietor, a yearly tribute of one ear of Indian corn, both to be paid on Christmas Day. In each township that he granted, the thrifty governor had five hundred acres set apart to himself, still known as the governor's lot, and marked on the old township maps, drawn on the backs of the charters, with the initials "B. W." In each township one share of two hundred acres was set apart for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, one for a glebe for the Church of England, one for the first settled minister, and one for a school in said town.

The isolated townships constituted little commonwealths, with governments of their own, every inhabitant and freeholder having liberty to vote in the town-meetings, and the three or five selectmen being invested with the chief authority.

Naturally the proprietors to whom the township was granted were the most potent factors in its welfare and government, and, if actual settlers, took the most prominent part in its affairs.

Frequently they offered bounties for the building of gristmills and sawmills, and the forty dollars bounty offered induced the building of such mills, that in their turn failed not to attract settlers; for it was not unusual for pioneers to go twenty miles on foot with a grist to the nearest mill, or to make as tedious journeys for a load of boards, the more tedious that all the environing forest was full of unattainable lumber.

Many of the towns now most populous and important were then uninhabited and unnamed. Bennington, the first township granted by New Hampshire, had its hamlet, its principal building, the Green Mountain Tavern, conspicuous for its sign, a stuffed catamount. Here the fathers of the unborn State often sat in council, moistening their dry deliberations with copious mugs of flip served by their confrÈre, landlord Stephen Fay. Brattleboro, within whose limits Fort Dummer was built and the first permanent settlement made, although it boasted the only store in the State, was of less importance; while Westminster, with its court-house and jail, assumed more. But at Vergennes, then known as the First Falls of Otter Creek, where the beavers had scarcely quit building their lodges on the driftwood that choked the head of the fall, there lived only Donald McIntosh, the stout old soldier of the Pretender's futile array and of Wolfe's victorious army, and half a dozen other settlers, whose cabins clustered about the frequently harried mills. Where now is the beautiful city of Burlington, the unbroken forest sloped to the placid shores of Petowbowk; and the Winooski, from its torrential source to where its slow current crawls through the broad intervales to the lake, turned no mills, and, but for its one block-house and the infrequent cabins of adventurous pioneers, was as wild as when its devious course was but the warpath of the Waubanakee. Thence to Canada stretched the Wilderness, its solitude as supreme as when, a century and a half before, the French explorer first beheld its snow-clad mountain peaks.

Oftener than human voice, the sonorous call of the moose, the wolf's long howl, the panther's cry, awoke its echoes, and the thud of the axe was a stranger sound than the rarest voice of nature. The eagle, swinging in majestic survey of the region, beheld far beneath him to the southward, here and there, a clustering hamlet and settlements creeping slowly upon his domain; here and there a mill, where a stream had been stayed in its idle straying; and here and there on the green bosom of the forest the unhealed wound of a new clearing, the bark roof of a settler's cabin, and the hazy upward drift of its chimney smoke; then to the northward, as far as his telescopic vision ranged, no break in the variegated verdure but the silver gleam of lake and stream, or the rugged barrenness of mountain tops.

Although the settlement of the newly opened region did not progress with anything like the marvelous rapidity that has marked the occupation of new Territories and States in later times, yet it was remarkable, in consideration of the tedious journeys that must be made to the new pitch, with slow ox-cart or sled, or on horseback, where, if there were roads at all, they were of the worst, or they were made by weary oar or waft of unstable wind. Furthermore, there was but comparatively slight overflow of population from the older provinces, or influx of immigration to American shores.

The settlers in the Wilderness soon found their peaceable possession obstructed by an obstacle which they had scarcely foreseen,—not by the harassments of a foreign or savage foe, which now seemed hardly possible, nor by the inert and active forces of nature that had always to be taken into account, but by the jealous rivalry and greed of two provincial governments, both claiming the same territory, and both deriving their authority from the same royal source.

This controversy between New Hampshire and New York, concerning their respective boundaries, began with the first English settlement of the region, and continued till after the close of the Revolution. It constitutes the most unique feature of the history of the commonwealth; and though it retarded its settlement, and afterward for years its admission into the Union, it was the real cause of its becoming an independent State. For undoubtedly, if the claims of either province had been undisputed by the other, the region would have quietly taken its place as part of that, and have had no individual existence. But the aggressions which the people were compelled to resist schooled them to a spirit of independence that most naturally led them to establish a separate government.

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