Home / Ruttenber, E.M. Footprints of the Red Men: Indian Geographical Names in the Valley of Hudson's River, the Valley of the Mohawk, and on the Delaware. Published in the Proceedings of the New York State Historical Association, Vol. VI. 1906. / Passage

Footprints of the Red Men: Indian Geographical Names

Ruttenber, E.M. Footprints of the Red Men: Indian Geographical Names in the Valley of Hudson's River, the Valley of the Mohawk, and on the Delaware. Published in the Proceedings of the New York State Historical Association, Vol. VI. 1906. 307 words

He wrote that he left Fort Orange in company with Jeronimus la Crock, William Thomasson, and five Mohawks as guides and bearers, "between nine and ten o'clock in the morning," December 12, 1634, and after walking "mostly northwest about eight miles" (Dutch), stopped "at half-past twelve in the evening" (p. m.) "at a little 'hunters' cabin near the stream that runs into their land, of the name of Vyoge." His hours' travel and his miles' travel to this poii)t were either loosely stated in his manuscript or were mis-

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read by the translator/ A Dutch mile is one and one-quarter hours' walk and the equivalent of three and one-half English miles and a fraction over. Van Curler no doubt estimated his miles by this standard and not as correct measurements of rough Indian paths. He certainly did not walk eight Dutch miles in three hours. Twenty-four Englis'h miles w'ould have taken him to a point northwest of the later Schenectady stockade, which, in 1690, was counted as twenty-four English miles from Fort Orange by the road as then traveled. The "little hunters' cabin" at which he stopped and which he located "near the Vyoge," he explained in his notes of his second day's travel, as "one hour's walk" from the place where he crossed the stream, which would have taken him to a crossing^lace west of Schenectady, noted in a French- Itinerary of 1757 as about one and one-quarter leagues west of the then fort at that settlement, and, presumably, by the canal survey of 1792, as at the first rift west of the beginning of deep water one and one-half miles (English) east of the rift referred to, from which point fhe survey gave the distance "to the deep water at or above the mouth of Schohare creek" as twenty-five miles.