"Old Put" The Patriot   By: Frederick A. Ober (1849-1913)

THE PATRIOT

BY

FREDERICK A. OBER

AUTHOR OF CRUSOE'S ISLAND, THE STORIED WEST INDIES, PUERTO RICO AND ITS RESOURCES, ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

1904

Copyright, 1904, by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

Published, September, 1904

CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE

I. Birthplace and Youth 1

II. "Old Wolf Putnam" 11

III. First Taste of War 25

IV. A Partizan Fighter 39

V. The Adventurous Soldier 53

VI. Fighting on the Frontier 65

VII. Strategy and Woodcraft 79

VIII. A Prisoner and in Peril 92

IX. A Campaign in Cuba 106

X. Tavern Keeper and Oracle 120

XI. On the Side of His Country 134

XII. At the Battle of Bunker Hill 150

XIII. Holding the Enemy at Bay 171

XIV. In Command at New York 184

XV. Washington's Chief Reliance 198

XVI. Defending the Hudson Highlands 212

XVII. Last Years in the Service 226

XVIII. The Disabled Veteran 243

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

"Old Put" escaping from the British at Horseneck Frontispiece

The Wolf Den at Pomfret, Connecticut 18

Fort near Havana where the Colonials landed 112

Israel Putnam 188 From a painting by Trumbull.

Statue to General Putnam at Brooklyn, Connecticut 254

"OLD PUT," THE PATRIOT

CHAPTER I

BIRTHPLACE AND YOUTH

This is the life story of one who was born on a farm, and died on a farm, yet who achieved a world wide fame through his military exploits. It has been told many times, it will be told for centuries yet to come; for the world loves a man of high emprise, and such was Israel Putnam, the hero of this story.

He was born January 7, 1718, in Danvers, then known as Salem Village, Province of Massachusetts Bay, in New England. His father's Christian name was Joseph, his mother's Elizabeth, and Israel (as he was called at baptism, after his maternal grandfather, Israel Porter) was the great grandson of his first American ancestor, John Putnam, who had come from England, where the original name of the family was Puttenham. He had settled at Salem more than eighty years before, and his son, Thomas, built, in 1648, the house in which Israel was born in 1718. On the death of Thomas it had become the property of Joseph, who first occupied it in 1690, after his marriage to Elizabeth Porter.

Here the young couple passed through the perilous "witchcraft times," during the worst period of which, in 1692 (it is a tradition in the family), Joseph Putnam kept a loaded musket at his bedside every night and his swiftest horse saddled in the stable, ready for a fight or a flight in case the witch hunters should come to carry him off to jail. They had accused his sister, who saved her life only by fleeing to the wilderness and remaining in hiding until the insane furor was over. He and his wife survived that gloomy period, and in the ancestral homestead lived happily for more than thirty years, raising a "baker's dozen" of children, of whom Israel was the eleventh.