Within six years after Hendrik Hudson sailed up the river which bears
his name, and some five years before the Pilgrim fathers landed at
Plymouth, the first white men looked upon Otsego Lake, and saw the
wooded shore upon which Cooperstown now stands. It was in 1614, or in
the year following, that two Dutchmen set out from Fort Orange (Albany)
to explore the fur country, and crossing from the Mohawk to Otsego Lake,
proceeded down the Susquehanna.[16] From this time, first under the
Dutch, then under English rule, traders came frequently to the foot of
Otsego Lake. Soon after the traders, Christian missionaries ventured
into the wilderness, ministering at first chiefly to the Indians. Later
came the first settlers.

That the influence of traders was not always helpful to Christian
missionaries is illustrated by an incident in the missionary journey of
the Rev. Gideon Hawley, a Presbyterian divine, who, with some zealous
companions, came from New England to preach to the Indians of the
Susquehanna in 1753. They reached the river at a point where was a
small Indian settlement near the present village of Colliers, seventeen
miles below Cooperstown. Here they were joined by a trader named George
Winedecker, who had come down from Otsego Lake with a boat-load of
goods, including rum, to supply the Indian villages down the river.
During the night the red men, full of Winedecker's rum, became embroiled
in a murderous orgy. The missionaries were awakened by the howling of
the Indians over their dead, and in the morning saw Indian women
skulking in the bushes, hiding guns and hatchets, for fear of the
intoxicated Indians who were drinking deeper. "Here, in one party, were
missionaries with the Bible and a trader with the rum--the two gifts of
the white man to the Indian."[17]

Susquehanna lands were first conveyed to white men by the Indians in