30 HISTORY OF Day after day passes ; night after night they await in anxious expectation, but in vain, for a cessation of its severity, to enable them to go to the Mohawk for provisions and aid. Their situation at last became terrible in the extreme, star- vation stared them in its most hideous form ; and the grim spectre, death, seemed already to have impressed his signet upon his victims. In this extremity a kind providence sent them succor in the person of a friendly Indian, who kindly volunteered to go to the Mohawk for provisions, travelling by the aid of snow shoes, and returning with the provisions upon his back. This faithful child of the forest did not desert them until spring dawned upon their unpleasant situation; his unerring aim supplied them with venison and other wild game, and he frequently visited the Mohawk settlement to procure a fresh supply of meal and flour. The following year, 1741, the Kev. Samuel Dunlop, who had been prevailed upon by the generous proprietor of the patent to settle in Cherry Valley, induced several families among his acquaintances and friends to locate there also. Among these are the names of David Ramsay, William Gait, James Campbell, and William Dickson, from Londonderry in New Hampshire, to which place they had emigrated from the north of Ireland, some years previously. These pioneers were peculiarly calculated to become the founders of a flourishing settlement — energetic, hardy, inured to toil, and susceptible of endurance. But in their new homes they experienced many privations unlooked for and unprepared for, the story of which deterred many others from following them, and hence, during the ten subsequent years only one or two families came into the valley, and the little germ of a settlement struggled on alone. In 1754, the enterprising family of Harpers emigrated from Windsor, a town in Connecticut, and purchased a small tract of land in the Valley suitable for the pursuit of agricul-
