THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER
the Susquehanna Valley, two and a half centuries had come and gone since that memorable voyage from the Port of Palos.
Those centuries, so barren of history here, had witnessed events of great pith and moment elsewhere. England had gone forward from the Wars of the Roses almost to the reign of George III. Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Dryden, and Pope are among those gifted men of genius by whom her intellectual greatness had been advanced. Her political destiny meanwhile had been broadened and deepened under Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and Cromwell. In France had lived Richelieu and Louis XIV., while under Charles V. and Philip II. a vast Spanish empire had come into existence and decayed. On the banks of the Hellespont, only forty years before the voyage of Columbus, expired the last remnant of the Empire of Rome, which embraced at one time, as Gibbon said, “the fairest part of the earth and the most civilized portion of mankind.”
On American soil we can point to little of striking renown during those generations. Near the end of them Washington had become a name associated honorably with the French War. Jonathan Edwards had astonished men in Europe, as well as here, with the vigor and subtlety of his mind. Franklin had made contributions to human knowledge of great worth and potency. But of other eminent names the records are bare. For the most part men had been born, had lived, toiled, and died absorbed in the simple pursuits of trade and domestic life.
In the province of New York the first successful men were fur traders who exchanged Dutch goods for beaver skins. During more than half a century
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