In fact the white man’s principal interest for many years was to barter for furs. The Dutch, and soon afterwards the English, bid for the trade from their settlements on the Hudson, and the French did the same from their forts on the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. Thus there was much letter writing and much fighting among the colonists, while each side tried to make friends of the Indians and get the whole of the fur trade. The result was that either in war or in trade the white men and the savages were always going up and down the Mohawk valley, which thus was a well-traveled path long before there were turnpike roads, canals, or steam cars. When Van Curler made his journey into the Indian country, he did not reach the Mohawk river at once on leaving Fort Orange, but traveled for about sixteen miles across a sandy and half-barren stretch of scrubby pine woods. He came down to the river where its rich bottom lands spread out widely and where several large islands are inclosed by parts of the stream. South and east of these flats are the sand barrens, and on the west are high hills through which, by a deep, narrow gap, the Mohawk flows. The Indians called this place “Schonowe,” or “gateway.” It was well named, for entering by this gate one can go to the foot of the Rocky mountains without climbing any heights. A few years before his death Van Curler led a small band of colonists from Fort Orange, bought the “great flats” from the Mohawk Indians, and founded a town, calling it Schenectady, which is the old Indian name changed in its spelling. No easy time did these settlers have, for theirs was for many years the frontier town and they never knew when hostile savages might come down upon them to burn their houses and take their scalps. In 1690, twenty-eight years after the town was founded, a company of French and Indians from Montreal surprised Schenectady in the night, burned most of the houses, and killed about sixty of the people, taking others captive. But Dutchmen rarely give up an undertaking, and they soon rebuilt their town. It was an important place, for here was the end of the “carry” over the pine barrens from the Hudson, and here began the navigation of the river, which for a hundred years was the best means of carrying supplies up the valley and into central New York. The traveler of to-day on the New York Central Railway sees on Van Curler’s “great flats” the flourishing city of Schenectady, with its shops and houses, its college, and its vast factories for the manufacture of locomotives and electrical supplies. [Illustration: FIG. 7. SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON See Fort Johnson, Fig. 9]