THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER
after Hudson's arrival these Dutchmen did scarcely anything more. Villages grew up on Manhattan Island and in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys. The trader's boat penetrated down the head-waters of the Susquehanna. But wherever villages were founded, they were not so much permanent settlements as trading-posts. Theodore Roosevelt has justly observed that while the Dutch aspired to secure large wealth for the mother-country, they were devoid of ambition to found on these shores a free Dutch nation.
As traders, the Dutch never promised to open a way to great national wealth. For the eleven years between 1624 and 1635 the beaver skins received in Holland numbered only 80,182, and the otter and other skins, 9,447, or about 8,ooo skins of all kinds per year. Albany, the fur depot for the whole interior, was described by Father Jogues, in 1644, as "a miserable little fort called Fort Orange, built of logs with four or five pieces of Breteuil cannon and as many swivels, with some twenty-five or thirty houses built of boards with thatched roofs." Except in the chimneys, "no mason's work had been used."
Scarcely more enterprise marked the first years of English rule. As late as 1695 the trade amounted to only £10,000, while in 1678 Governor Andros reported that a merchant worth $2,500 or $5,000 was "accounted a good, substantial merchant," and a planter "worth half that in movables" was a prosperous citizen. The value of all estates in the province was only $750,000. Clearly, that was a time of very small things, but they were among the fruitful beginnings of a land and people from which was to grow the greatest of all the States, and in them this frontier had an ample share.
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