The Project Gutenberg EBook of Duffels, by Edward Eggleston

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: Duffels

Author: Edward Eggleston

Release Date: May 31, 2008 [EBook #25661]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DUFFELS ***

Produced by David Edwards and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from scanned images of public domain material
from the Google Print project.)

DUFFELS

By

EDWARD EGGLESTON

AUTHOR OF
THE FAITH DOCTOR, THE HOOSIER SCHOOLMASTER, ROXY, ETC.

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1893

COPYRIGHT, 1893,
BY EDWARD EGGLESTON.

_All rights reserved._

ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED
AT THE APPLETON PRESS, U.S.A.

PREFACE.

The once famous Mrs. Anne Grant--known in literature as Mrs. Grant of
Laggan--spent part of her childhood in our New York Albany, then a town
almost wholly given to traffic with the aborigines. To her we owe a
description of the setting out of the young American-Dutch trader to
ascend the Mohawk in a canoe, by laborious paddling and toilsome
carrying round rifts and falls, in order to penetrate to the dangerous
region of the tribes beyond the Six Nations. The outfit of this young
"bushloper," as such a man was called in the still earlier Dutch
period, consisted mainly of a sort of cloth suited to Indian wants. But
there were added minor articles of use and fancy to please the youth or
captivate the imagination of the women in the tribes. Combs, pocket
mirrors, hatchets, knives, jew's-harps, pigments for painting the face
blue, yellow, and vermilion, and other such things, were stored away in
the canoe, to be spread out as temptations before the eyes of some
group of savages rich in a winter's catch of furs. The cloths sold by
the traders were called duffels, probably from the place of their
origin, the town of Duffel, in the Low Countries. By degrees the word
was, I suppose, transferred to the whole stock, and a trader's duffels
included all the miscellany he carried with him. The romantic young
bushloper, eager to accumulate money enough to marry the maiden he had
selected, disappeared long ago from the water co