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There were multiple players in the European struggle for dominance of North America - Spain, France, England, and mostly forgotten today, although with a legacy in the place names of towns and kills (creeks,) The Netherlands. The Dutch purchased Manhattan from the Indians in 1626, that famous twenty-four-dollar price tag, and gave it up to the British in 1664. The Dutch settled the Hudson Valley from New Amsterdam (today's Lower Manhattan) to Albany. North of Albany were some few scattered outposts, notably Saratoga and Schenectady, but mostly it was wilderness, the inhospitable (even to the Indians,) Adirondack Mountains, a vast no-man's land separating the dominant North American empires, the English and the French. Those two powers would engage in a hundred-year struggle for control of the continent.
With unimaginable courage, some few men dared venture into the wilderness where the dangers were abundant - wolves, snakes, and most terrifyingly, the Stone Age Indians, fighting with a savage fury to keep what had always been theirs. Men went for a myriad of reasons. For some, it was an escape from stultifying civilization, crude as it was. For others, a chance to get rich smuggling and trapping. Others went to forget, or to escape, and few had any notion of what they were actually accomplishing - the opening of a continent. One of those men, going for the aforementioned reasons, is our indomitable eighteenth-century protagonist, Ken Kuyler, the Albany-born son of Dutch immigrants.
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