that the tide of
German settlement, which finally sought Pennsylvania and the up-country
of the South, might flow into New York. In 1710, Governor Hunter
purchased a tract in Livingston's manor and located nearly fifteen
hundred Palatines on it to produce naval stores.[82:1] But the attempt
soon failed; the Germans applied to the Indians on Schoharie Creek, a
branch of the Mohawk, for a grant of land and migrated there, only to
find that the governor had already granted the land. Again were the
villages broken up, some remaining and some moving farther up the
Mohawk, where they and accessions to their number established the
frontier settlements about Palatine Bridge, in the region where, in the
Revolution, Herkimer led these German frontiersmen to stem the British
attack in the battle of Oriskany. They constituted the most effective
military defense of Mohawk Valley. Still another portion took their way
across to the waters of the Susquehanna, and at Tulpehockon Creek began
an important center of German settlement in the Great Valley of
Pennsylvania.[82:2]

The most important aspect of the history of the movement into the
frontier of New York at this period, therefore, was the evidence which
it afforded that in the competition for settlement between colonies
possessing a vast area of vacant land, those which imposed feudal
tenures and undemocratic restraints, and which exploited settlers, were
certain to lose.

The manorial practice gave a bad name to New York as a region for
settlement, which not even the actual opportunities in certain parts of
the colony could counteract. The diplomacy of New York governors during
this period of the Old West, in securing a protectorate over the Six
Nations and a consequent claim to their territory, and in holding them
aloof from France, constituted the most effective contribution of that
colony to the movement of American expansion. When lands of these tribes
were obtained after Sullivan's expedition in the Revolution (in which
New England soldiers played a prominent part), it was by the New England
inundation into this interior that they were colonized. And it was under
conditions like those prevailing in the later years of the expansion of
settlements in New England itself, that this settlement of interior and
western New York was effected.

The result was, that New York became divided into two distinct peoples:
the dwellers along Hudson Valley, and the Yankee pioneers of the