th. Myself, with Joseph Brant, his wife and Child, and
another Young Mohawk named James, went down in the new Canoe
to our upper Corner.... This River ... is full of Logs and
Trees, and short, crooked Turns, and the Navigation for Canoes
and Batteaux requires dexterity."

The household which Smith visited at the foot of Otsego Lake was an
interesting one, and had some remarkable connections. There was not only
"the fat old trader, and Indian-agent, Colonel George Croghan," but
also his Indian wife, daughter of the Mohawk chief Nichos, or Nickas, of
Canajoharie. Catherine,[33] the Colonel's little daughter, then ten
years old, helped her Indian mother with the household tasks, or danced
in her play about the cabin door, little dreaming that she was afterward
to become the third wife of Joseph Brant, the famous chieftain who had
just guided Richard Smith down the Susquehanna.

Croghan's elder daughter, Susannah, who had married Captain Augustine
Prevost, was the child of Croghan's first wife, a white woman. Capt. and
Mrs. Prevost lived at the head of Otsego Lake, in a house where
Swanswick now stands. Before the coming of Prevost, a settlement had
been made here as early as 1762,[34] the earliest permanent settlement
on Otsego Lake. Captain Augustine Prevost, or Major Prevost, as he
afterward became, was born at Geneva, Switzerland, in 1744, and died at
the age of 77 years, at Greenville, N. Y., where the Prevost mansion
still stands. He was twice married, and had twenty-two children. Prevost
was beloved as a bosom friend and companion by Joseph Brant, and their
intimacy was interrupted, much to the Mohawk's sorrow, only when Prevost
was ordered to join his regiment in Jamaica in 1772. This friendship
with Croghan's son-in-law seems to have brought the famous Mohawk
chieftain as a frequent visitor to Otsego Lake, and may account for his
attachment and subsequent marriage to Croghan's younger daughter. Thus
is completed the circle of intimates that gathered at Croghan's hut, on
the present site of Cooperstown, in 1769--the Irish trader; his Indian
squaw; the British officer and his wife; the young half-Indian girl; and
the Mohawk warrior whose name was to become a terror to settlers
throughout the Susquehanna Valley--the same who afterward was received
at court in London, who dined with Fox, Burke, and Sheridan, was
lionized by Boswell, and had his portrait painted by Romney.[35]

Croghan's attempted