Page:History of Delaware County (1856).djvu/74

This page needs to be proofread.

50 HISTORY OF upon a single horse^ Burrow beliind Dumond, to accompany the troops. Seeing a favorable opportunity to escape, they put spurs to the horse and rode off in an opposite direction. They were fired upon by the guard, and Dumond fell fatally wounded to the ground. He was conveyed to the house or the farm where Col. Dimniick now resides, where he died after suffering excruciating pain for three days. Burrow made his escape, threaded the forest, up Dry Brook, and over the mountains into Shandaken, travelling through the day and lodging in a tree by night. Such is the commonly received opinion in relation to the death of Dumond ; but Mrs. Yaple, however, believes that her father and Burrow mounted one of his own horses and attempted to escape before he was taken prisoner, supposing the troops to have been Butler men, and enemies of the colonies. In the fall of the same year, 1778, Peter Burgher returned with his son, a small boy, and others, to secure his crops. He had incurred the displeasure of the Indians by piloting the troops from Pakatakan, and they sought this opportunity to ambush and destroy him. He was shot, it is said, by a Seneca Indian named Abraham, while threshing buckwheat, and his little son was taken prisoner, carried to Niagara, and sold to a British officer. He afterwards returned, and was drowned while crossing the Delaware, near where his father was killed, in the neighborhood of Mill Brook. There is, near Margaretville, an ancient grave-yard, sup- posed to have been used either by the early Dutch settlers be- fore the Revolution, or by the half-breeds who preceded them , It has long been abandoned, and the spot and even the graves of many of them are overgrown with trees and underwood, and little or nothing is now known of its history save its exist- ence. Near the mouth of the Mill brook, and on the banks of the Delaware, are certain remains which bear strong resem- blance to works of art. Many suppose them to have been