General Porter settled as a lawyer at Canandaigua in 1795, removed to Black Rock in 1810, and to Niagara Falls in 1838. In 1805, the two brothers became interested with others in the purchase from the State of New York of four lots in the Mile Strip lying both above and below the Falls. A few years later, they purchased not only the interest of their partners in these lots, but other lands at different points along this strip. In 1814, they bought of Samuel Sherwood a paper since named a _float_--an instrument given by the State authorizing the bearer to locate two hundred acres of any of the unsold or unappropriated lands belonging to the State. This float they fortunately anchored on Goat Island and the islands adjacent thereto lying "immediately above and adjoining the Great Falls." The origin of the name of Goat Island is as follows: Mr. John Stedman, who came into the country in 1760, had cleared a portion of the upper end of the island, and in the summer of 1779 he placed on it an aged and dignified male goat. The following winter was very severe, navigation to the island was impracticable, and the goat fell a victim to the intense cold. Since which the scene of his exile and death has been called Goat Island. By the terms of the Treaty of Ghent, December 24, 1814, the boundary line between Great Britain and the United States, on the Niagara frontier, was to run through the deepest water along the river-courses and through the center of the Great Lakes. As the deepest water, at this point, is in the center of the Horseshoe Fall, the islands in the river fell to the Americans. General Porter, acting as Commissioner for the United States, proposed to call the largest one Iris Island, and it was so printed on the boundary maps. But the public adhered to the old name of Goat Island. One of the early chronicles states that the island contained two hundred and fifty acres of land. At the present time there are in it less than seventy. A strip some ten rods wide by eighty rods long has been worn away from the southern side of it since 1818, when Judge Porter made the first road around it. The earliest date he found on the island was 1765, carved on a beech-tree. The earliest date cut in the rock on the main-land was 1645. Human bones and arrowheads were found on the island. The Indians went to it with their canoes, which they paddled up and down in the comparatively quiet water lying on the rocky bar which extends upward nearly a mile above the head of the island. Notwithstanding this fact, the Swedish naturalist, Kalm, who visited the place in 1750, relates a fabulous story of two Indians who, on a hunting excursion above the Falls, drank too freely from "two bottles of French brandy" which they brought from Fort Niagara; becoming drowsy, they laid themselves down in the bottom of their canoe for a nap.