id: that in Cooper's boyhood
there lived in Cooperstown a hunter named Shipman whom Cooper himself
in the _Chronicles of Cooperstown_, published in 1838, described as "the
Leather-Stocking of the region." Furthermore,--whether owing to any
private information from Fenimore Cooper cannot now be ascertained,--the
tradition from his time to the present day, in spite of the author's
vague disclaimer, persistently clings to Shipman as the original of
Leather-Stocking.

Strangely enough, the matter in dispute has not been the identity of
Shipman with Leather-Stocking, but the identity of Shipman himself. Who
was Shipman? This is the question that has stirred controversy; and two
ghosts have arisen from the past, each claiming to be the Shipman whom
Cooper idealized, re-christened, and made immortal.

Cooper gave to his hero the name of Nathaniel Bumppo. It has been
claimed that Cooper borrowed not only the character but the Christian
name of Nathaniel Shipman, a famous hunter and trapper, who came to
Otsego Lake at the time of the Revolutionary War, and made his home in a
cave on the border of the lake until about 1805.

According to the discoverers of this original of Leather-Stocking,
Nathaniel Shipman was a close friend of the Mohican Indians, and fought
with them against the French and the Canadian Indians. In the years
immediately preceding the American Revolution Shipman was a well known
settler of Hoosick, northeast of Albany and near the border of Vermont,
where he had built him a cabin on the banks of the Walloomsac. He was
well disposed toward the English, and one of his closest friends was an
officer in the British army. When the Revolutionary War began, while
Shipman's heart was with the movement for independence, his friendship
for the English was such that he determined to be strictly neutral,
helping neither one side nor the other. There is nothing to show that he
was not genuinely neutral. But his patriot neighbors were intolerant of
such neutrality. Anyone who was not for them was against them. Shipman
was put down as a Tory, and his neighbors treated him to a coat of tar
and feathers.

Soon after this event Nathaniel Shipman disappeared from Hoosick, and
not even his own family knew whither he had gone.

In process of time Shipman's daughter married a John Ryan of Hoosick.
Ryan served in the Legislature from 1803 to 1806, and at that time
became acquainted with Judge William Cooper, founder of Coopersto