Francis J Smith

The Great Carry Francis J Smith

There were plenty of players in the early struggle for dominance of North America - Spain, France, England, and mostly forgotten today, although with a legacy in the place names of towns and creeks, Holland. The Dutch purchased Manhattan from the Indians in 1626, that famous twenty-four-dollar price tag, and gave it up to the British in 1664. In between, the Dutch settled the Hudson Valley from New Amsterdam (today's Lower Manhattan) to Albany. North of Albany were some few scattered outposts, notably Saratoga and Schenectady, but mostly it was wilderness, a vast no-man's land separating the dominant North American empires, the English and the French. Those two European powers would engage in a hundred-year struggle for control of the continent. With unimaginable courage, some few men dared venture into the forests where the dangers were abundant - wolves, snakes, and most terrifyingly, the Stone Age Indians, fighting with a savage cruelty to keep what had been theirs since the beginning of time. Men went into the wilds for a myriad of reasons. For some, it was an escape from stultifying civilization, crude as it was. For others, it was a chance to get rich, smuggling and trapping. Others went to forget, or to escape, and few had any notion of what it was they were actually accomplishing - the opening of a continent. One of those men, going for all of the aforementioned reasons, is our indomitable eighteenth-century protagonist, Ken Kuyler, the Albany-born son of Dutch immigrants, a fearless scout in the mold of Natty Bumppo.