greatest political importance, and necessary for the peace and safety of the colonies, and their future growth, and it continued to engross the efforts and exhaust the means of the colonists, until their purpose was finally accomplished in 1763.

The people who settled here were entirely familiar with the hardships, dangers and horrors of Indian warfare to which they were liable in taking up their abode on this frontier. The horrible incidents which attended the massacre of the inhabitants of Schenectady, in 1690, seventeen years before, during the previous war, and of the inhabitants of Deerfield, Mass., and other places in 1704, during the war still raging, were household words throughout Connecticut, and had left an abiding imprint in the minds of the people on the border. Though the Indians, right about them here, seem to have been few in number and comparatively harmless, they knew from their own and their fathers' experience, that their position was one of extreme danger, and that at all times their scanty and hardwon possessions and their lives were liable to instant destruction, from unheralded irruptions by the more distant Indian tribes of the North and Northwest, urged on by their French instigators and allies. For the experience of the last seventy years, from the time of the Pequot War, and during the subsequent troubles with the tribes in southwestern Connecticut, and on Long Island, and during King Philip's War, had fully taught them the craft, treachery and pitiless cruelty of the savages, as well as their capacity for extensive combination among widely separated tribes.

When Major DeRouville, in 1704, with his band of civilized and uncivilized savages, committed the atrocities at Deerfield, Mass., the suspicion of the Colonists that the French had instigated the former Indian outrages became a certainty, for in this instance they openly shared in them. Their object was, as I have said, to drive the English Colonists from North America, and substitute in their place their own colonial system. For this purpose they fitted out hundreds of parties of savages to proceed to other portions of the English settlements, shoot down the settlers when at work at their crops, seize their wives and children, load them with packs of plunder from their own homes, and drive them before them into the wilderness. When no longer able to stagger under their burdens, they were murdered, and their scalps torn off, and exhibited to their masters, and for such trophies bounties were paid. The French government in Paris paid bounties for the scalps of women and children, as Connecticut did for those of wolves, and it not only fitted out other savage expeditions, but sent its own soldiers to assist in the murderous work. Detailed reports of each case were regularly made to the government at Paris by its agents in Canada which can now be read. This is true of every French and Indian war until 1763, and the fact was as well known to the settlers here in 1707, as it is to the historical investigator of to-day.

In the beginning of 1707, reports of an expedition by the French and Indians against some part of New England gave alarm to the Colony, and on the 6th of February of that year a council of war was convened at Hartford, consisting of the Governor, most of the Council, and many of the chief military officers of the colony. Suspicions were entertained that the attack would fall upon western Connecticut, and that the Indians in this vicinity intended to join the French and Indians. The Council of War determined that the then western frontier towns, Danbury, Woodbury, Waterbury and Simsbury, should be fortified with the utmost expedition. They were directed to keep scouts of faithful men to range the forests to discover the designs of the enemy, and give intelligence should they make their appearance near the frontier. At the October session in 1708, it was enacted that garrisons should be kept at those towns, and so it continued until after the close of the war in 1713.

It was in the midst of alarms and dangers such as these that the settlement of this town was begun. One of the first houses constructed here had palisades about it to serve as a fort, which lasted many years, and in 1717 soldiers were stationed here for the protection of the inhabitants, and this was repeated several times afterwards. Every man was a soldier. He was a soldier when he sat at his meals, a soldier when he stood in his door, a soldier when he went to the cornfield, a soldier by day and by night.

At the time the first settlers arrived here there was a tract of cleared land on the west side of the river called the Indian Field. It extended from where the river runs in an easterly direction south to the mouth of the little brook which runs along Fort Hill. It was not included in the original purchase from the Indians, having been reserved by them in their deed. It was, however, purchased from them in 1705, by John Mitchell, and was conveyed by him to the inhabitants of the town in 1714. This was of the greatest advantage to the first settlers. It furnished them a space of cleared ground, where each planter could at once plant his corn and other crops, without the delay of felling the trees.

It is thought also that the ground where we now stand, and Aspetuck Hill had been in a large measure cleared of trees by the Indians by burning, as was also Grassy Hill, two miles east of here. There appears also to have been some meadow land partially cleared at the mouth of the Aspetuck River.

At that time the country about here presented no such appearance as it does now. The river then flowed with a fuller tide. With the exceptions I have noted, a continuous forest overspread the whole landscape. No thickets, however, choked up the ways through it, for the underbrush was swept away every year by fires built by the Indians for that purpose. Winding footways led here and there which the Indians and wild beasts followed. The roots of the smaller grasses were destroyed by this annual burning over. A coarse long grass grew along the low banks of the river and wherever the ground was not thickly shaded by trees. After the occupation of the country by the white settlers this annual burning was prohibited. In lieu thereof, the General Court early in its history enacted that every inhabitant, with a few exceptions, should devote a certain time yearly, in the several plantations, to the cutting of brush and small trees in the more open forests for the purpose of allowing grass to grow in such places, as during the summer the cattle ranged through the forests near the plantations subsisting on what grew there. It is said that in the early settlement of this town, all meadow land was secured by clearing marshy or swampy ground and allowing it to grow up with grass from the roots and seeds already in the soil. It was one of the early difficulties in the Colony to secure grass, from want of grass seed.

The forests about here abounded with bears, wolves, foxes and catamounts, deer and moose, wild turkeys, pigeons, quail and partridges, and the waters with wild geese, ducks, herons and cranes. The river itself was alive with fish and every spring great quantities of shad and lamprey eels ascended it. Strawberries, blackberries and huckleberries were extremely abundant in their season.

The winters were usually of great severity. In 1637 the snow lay on the ground three feet deep all over New England from the third of November until the 23rd of March and on the 23rd of April it snowed for several hours in Boston, the flakes being as large as shillings. The springs were very backward, the summers extremely hot and often dry.

Upon the petition of the people in Milford, in May, 1702, the General Assembly granted them liberty to purchase from the Indians a township at Wyantonock, the Indian name of this place, and directed them to report their doings to the Assembly. The