A Guide in the Wilderness or the History of the First Settlements in the Western Counties of New York with Useful Instructions to Future Settlers in a Series of Letters, Addressed by Judge Cooper, of Cooperstown, to William Sampson, Barrister, of New York

ix, 50 pp. ABOUT WILLIAM COOPER: Cooper, William (02 December 1754–22 December 1809), land developer and politician, was born in Byberry (now part of Philadelphia), Pennsylvania, the son of James Cooper and Hannah Hibbs, farmers. Only modestly schooled, in 1774 young Cooper eloped with Elizabeth Fenimore, daughter of the well-to-do Quaker Richard Fenimore of Rancocas, New Jersey. They had twelve children, of whom seven lived to adulthood. As a Quaker, Cooper took no part in the War for Independence. Instead, this self-confident, poor young man sought his fortune in Burlington, New Jersey, briefly as a wheelwright, storekeeper, and tavern owner, then in land speculation and settlement promotion. His dream soon fixed on lands, no longer threatened by Indians, around Lake Otsego at the headwaters of the Susquehanna River in central New York State, where, in 1786, he founded Cooperstown. These lands had been prematurely opened in the 1760s by the celebrated Indian agent, but failed land speculator, George Croghan. In 1786, by questionable legal means, Cooper acquired title to 29,000 acres, which he quickly and profitably resold to farmers. Thus auspiciously began Cooper’s extraordinary career as land proprietor and agent. Cooper’s success owed as much to his pioneering, comparatively equitable, and shrewd business principles, set forth in his Guide to the Wilderness (1810), as to his aggressive land grabs and fortunate investment timing. He lived among those to whom he sold property, a civic entrepreneur at home among common people. He insisted on experiencing what his purchasers experienced and worked to establish churches, a seminary, jail, courthouse, newspaper, waterworks, roads, and bridges. He sold off and did not reserve for himself the choicest properties. To attract settlers, many of them poor, Cooper, unlike many New York landholders who rented to tenant farmers, sold small tracts outright on ten years’ credit, taking mortgages for security. To hold settlers, he accepted payments in kind in bad years and marketed settlers’ surplus produce, often with great difficulty. “Thus,” he wrote in his Guide, “by the adoption of a rational plan, it appears that the interest[s] of all parties are made to coincide. The settler sleeps in security, from the certainty of his possession, and the landlord is safe in the mortgages he holds, and the state profits by the success of each, in the increase of its wealth and population.” Cooper also represented other American and European speculators, managing and selling their lands. He boasted that, where many others had failed, he had settled as many as 40,000 people on “more acres than any man in America,” amounting probably to 750,000 in all. ABOUT WILLIAM SAMPSON: Sampson, William (27 January 1764–28 December 1836), New York lawyer and legal reformer, was born in Londonderry, Ireland, the son of Rev. Arthur Sampson, a Church of Ireland clergyman, and Anne Wilson. After a spartan childhood, during which he was raised by a maiden aunt, he joined the Irish Volunteers and read law at Trinity College, Dublin. He then fulfilled the requirements of the London Inns of Court and was admitted to the Irish bar. In 1790 he returned to Belfast and married Grace Clarke, by whom he had three children. Although, as he wrote later in his Memoirs, his personal interest “lay decidedly with the court party, rather than the people,” from 1792 he became a regular contributor to the Belfast United Irish newspaper, the Northern Star, and a pamphleteer with a gift for satire. Sampson later claimed he was a reformer, not a revolutionary, and that he was never privy to United Irish secrets, knowing nothing about links with the French until he read of them in the newspapers. Certainly he played an open role in politics until 1798, mainly as defense counsel in the trials of many Defenders and United Irishmen in the North. But his friend Valentine Lawless, Lord Cloncurry, recalled how in 1796, on their return from dinner with the Duke of Leinster, Sampson “illustrated the reckless character of his zeal” by scattering political pamphlets in the camp of the Kildare militia. His claim not to have been sworn into the United Irishmen is difficult to believe. Following the arrest of the United Irish Executive in March 1798, Sampson, dressed in women’s clothes, fled to Whitehaven in England with his servant-cum-chaperone. Legend has it he was arrested after being seen shaving in his petticoats. Taken back to Dublin, he was imprisoned for many months but was never brought to trial. Because of ill health and the influence of friends, Sampson was not sent to Fort George in Scotland with the other United Irish leaders but was allowed in November 1798 to emigrate to Portugal. From there he was forcibly removed to France, where he spent four disillusioned years writing the first part of his memoirs before going to Hamburg. From there, hoping to obtain permission to return to Ireland from the new Foxite ministry, he returned to England but was arrested. On 12 May 1806 he sailed, at government expense, to New York. Like his friend Thomas Addis Emmet (1764–1827), Sampson received privileged treatment from the New York bar and obtained a license to practice law within one month of his arrival. By assiduously enlarging his social contacts, and by sheer determination, he advanced his career and gained a reputation as an eloquent counsel and an accurate court reporter. He finally persuaded his wife and children to leave Ireland and settle with him in New York in 1810. - American National Biography