The libel suits extended over the period from 1838 to 1844. Cooper acted almost wholly as his own lawyer, and argued his own cases in court. He was pitted against leaders of the bar in the greatest State in the Union. He had become personally unpopular, and was engaged in an unpopular cause. He won his verdicts from reluctant juries, but, in nearly every case, he won. The libel law of the State of New York was made, to a great extent, by the Fenimore Cooper cases. To complete the story, the final disposition of Three-Mile Point, the innocuous cause of all this controversy, must here be anticipated. In 1899 Simon Uhlman, a wealthy hop merchant, purchased a summer home on the lakeside nearest to Three-Mile Point, and, desiring to acquire this tongue of land for his own use, made inquiries of Samuel M. Shaw, the veteran editor of the _Freeman's Journal_, to ascertain from whom the purchase might be made. Shaw learned from G. Pomeroy Keese that under the terms of Judge Cooper's will, the Point was then owned by William Cooper of Baltimore, and hastily arranged for the purchase at a moderate price, not for Uhlman, but for the village of Cooperstown. Thus Uhlman lost a desirable water front, and William Cooper a big price for his land, but the citizens of Cooperstown gained a playground, the denial of which to their forebears had nearly caused a riot. Uhlman afterward sold his place, Uncas Lodge, to Adolphus Busch of St. Louis. Cooper's reputation as an author suffered from his success as a litigant in an unpopular cause, and his prosecution of the libel suits injured the sale of his books, not only then, but for some years after his death. In 1844, just after Cooper had reduced the newspapers of the State to silence, Edward Everett Hale visited Cooperstown, and says that when he tried to buy a copy of _The Pioneers_ at a local bookseller's the dealer coolly declared that he had never heard of the book.[113]