"OLD PUT"

THE PATRIOT

BY

FREDERICK A. OBER

AUTHOR OF CRUSOE'S ISLAND, THE STORIED WEST INDIES, PUERTO RICO AND ITS RESOURCES, ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

1904

Copyright, 1904, by

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

Published, September, 1904

"Old Put" escaping from the British at Horseneck

CONTENTS

• —Birthplace and Youth
• —"Old Wolf Putnam"
• —First Taste of War
• —A Partizan Fighter
• —The Adventurous Soldier
• —Fighting on the Frontier
• —Strategy and Woodcraft
• —A Prisoner and in Peril
• —A Campaign in Cuba
• —Tavern-Keeper and Oracle
• —On the Side of His Country
• —At the Battle of Bunker Hill
• —Holding the Enemy at Bay
• —In Command at New York
• —Washington's Chief Reliance
• —Defending the Hudson Highlands
• —Last Years in the Service
• —The Disabled Veteran

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"Old Put" escaping from the British at Horseneck

The Wolf Den at Pomfret, Connecticut

Fort near Havana where the Colonials landed

Israel Putnam
From a painting by Trumbull.

Statue to General Putnam at Brooklyn, Connecticut

"OLD PUT," THE PATRIOT

CHAPTER I

BIRTHPLACE AND YOUTH

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This is the life story of one who was born on a farm, and died on a farm, yet who achieved a world-wide fame through his military exploits. It has been told many times, it will be told for centuries yet to come; for the world loves a man of high emprise, and such was Israel Putnam, the hero of this story.

He was born January 7, 1718, in Danvers, then known as Salem Village, Province of Massachusetts Bay, in New England. His father's Christian name was Joseph, his mother's Elizabeth, and Israel (as he was called at baptism, after his maternal grandfather, Israel Porter) was the great-grandson of his first American ancestor, John Putnam, who had come from England, where the original name of the family was Puttenham. He had settled at Salem more than eighty years before, and his son, Thomas, built, in 1648, the house in which Israel was born in 1718. On the death of Thomas it had become the property of Joseph, who first occupied it in 1690, after his marriage to Elizabeth Porter.

Here the young couple passed through the perilous "witchcraft times," during the worst period of which, in 1692 (it is a tradition in the family), Joseph Putnam kept a loaded musket at his bedside every night and his swiftest horse saddled in the stable, ready for a fight or a flight in case the witch-hunters should come to carry him off to jail. They had accused his sister, who saved her life only by fleeing to the wilderness and remaining in hiding until the insane furor was over. He and his wife survived that gloomy period, and in the ancestral homestead lived happily for more than thirty years, raising a "baker's dozen" of children, of whom Israel was the eleventh.

On both the maternal and paternal side Israel Putnam was descended from a line of sturdy, prosperous farmers. The grandfather whose name he bore had married a daughter of William Hathorne, who came from England and settled in Salem about the year 1630, and who was an ancestor of the famous romancist Nathaniel