The premier pioneer of Niagara Falls, Judge Augustus Porter, despite some infirmities, lived to a ripe old age and left a little-known written legacy of his journey to this area.
Porter, the first Judge of Niagara County back when it included Erie County, is also well known for helping to operate the lucrative portage business, owning Goat Island, and starting the tourist industry as well as the power industry.
But he was first a surveyor and a frontiersman who walked westward from his home in New England into heavily forested New York State lands populated almost exclusively by Native Americans.
Lockport editor and historian Orasmus Turner, a contemporary of Porter's, had the opportunity to spend time with the judge in Porter's declining years. In 1849, when Porter was 80 years old, Turner sought an interview.
Porter, he wrote, "cheerfully and obligingly complied and devoted several days to a patient answering of such inquiries as were made of the early settlement of the Holland Purchase."
While the judge was wealthy and living in comparative "luxury" at that time, Turner wrote, his early days were fraught with "hardships and privations of the wilderness." Despite his accrued wealth, he lived simply, "leaving to those who have acquired wealth through a less rugged path their choice of show and ostentation."
When Porter was 74 years old, he was helping his workers remove a timber one day, fell off the timber and broke his hip, to "which casualty is to be attributed a present lameness." He was also hard of hearing in later years, which "renders the use of an ear trumpet essential in ordinary conversation."
Just previous to Turner's personal interview, Judge Porter was asked by a committee of the Young Men's Association of Buffalo to write down some remembrances. He complied with this request and Turner borrowed extensively from it in writing about Judge Porter.
Porter wrote that, in 1789, his father and a group of men purchased land in Wayne and Ontario Counties and contracted with Porter to survey their property. With a group of settlers, Porter headed west, bringing various provisions. They left Fort Stanwix and "until we arrived at Canandaigua, we found no white persons."
Geneva was then the most western white settlement and it consisted of only a half dozen families. Porter worked that summer on surveying and "in the fall I returned to my father's in Salisbury, Conn. by the water route in company with several persons from New England who, having spent the summer at the West, were returning home to spend the winter."
Porter reported an "incident" occurring in 1789. He was not involved in it, but as a surveyor of frontier lands, it must have given him pause.
He told of a surveying party in the area of Palmyra. "One night, when the party was asleep, two Indians attacked them, first firing their rifles through the open cracks of the hut and then rushing in." One surveyor was killed, but "after a brief struggle, (they) succeeded in driving the savages off without further loss."
The Indians, Porter wrote, were caught near Elmira but the county jail was too far "to transport them so great a distance through an Indian wilderness." Therefore, it was "determined summarily to execute them and this determination was carried immediately into effect."
He tells of the hardships of those times in merely obtaining enough food. "The year was one of unusual scarcity among the Indians. Indeed, they were almost reduced to starvation," he said.
The Indians went to Oliver Phelps at Geneva to obtain provisions but, Porter wrote, "the number of Indians assembled greatly exceeded his expectations."
About 2,000 Indians showed up and "the stock of provisions proving inadequate to their wants, they were driven to the necessity of devouring everything that could satisfy their hunger, consuming with voracity even the entrails of the animals that had been slaughtered."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | December 10 2002 |