Nicholas Stoner: Adirondack Indian Fighter

The Story of a Leatherstocking Legend from the New York Frontier

By guest author The Country Gentleman.

Oh, old Nicholas Stoner is the man whose praise we sing.
And he lived back in the eighteenth centuree-uRee-uREE
And to the naughty Indians he didn’t do a thing
In the wilds of this wild country.
Against the aborigines he fought with all his might,
For he was a soldier, scout, and trapper too,
And he conquered all the Indians that came within his sight
And he looked around for more when he was through.

– Excerpt from a 1960s Gloversville High School fight song

Leatherstocking is the moniker given to the trappers and Indian fighters who populated New York’s frontier during British colonization and the early years of the United States. The name is derived from the leather gaiters many of them wore while trekking through the wilds. James Fenimore Cooper immortalized the leatherstocking archetype in The Leatherstocking Tales (a collection of five novels), but many of the real New York frontiersmen have been lost to time. Their names persist in the recesses of dying local tradition and rusting roadside historical markers, but nowhere else. One of those dying names is Nicholas Stoner.

Early Years

Nicholas Stoner was born in the Colony of Maryland to Henry Stoner (a German immigrant) and Catheline Barnes on December 15th in either 1762 or 1763. Henry Stoner would later take his family to Manhattan, where Nicholas would learn to read and write. Sometime before the American Revolution, Henry would again move his family to the Mohawk Valley, settling in Johnstown, New York, not far from Sir William Johnson’s estate.

Military Service

In 1777, during the American War for Independence, Henry Stoner, Nicholas Stoner, and Nicholas’s younger brother John enlisted in the Continental Army under the command of Col. James Livingston. Due to their ages, Nicholas and John enlisted as fifers. Nicholas served under Gen. Benedict Arnold in the relief of Fort Stanwix, and then under Gen. Horatio Gates during the Saratoga Campaign. At the Battle of Bemis Heights, Nicholas was struck in the face by shards of bone after the man next to him took a cannonball to the head, leaving Nicholas deaf in his right ear.

In 1778, after recovering from his wounds, Nicholas returned to Col. Livingston’s regiment and participated in the Rhode Island Campaign. During a nighttime skirmish with the British, Nicholas was captured. He spent several months in captivity before being released in a prisoner exchange.

In 1780, Nicholas served as fifer for the guard detachment that escorted British Major John Andre from his prison to the gallows. Maj. Andre was hanged for his part in Gen. Benedict Arnold’s plot to hand the military base at West Point over to the British. Later that year, Col. Livingston’s regiment was consolidated into the 2nd New York Regiment, with which Nicholas would serve during the Siege of Yorktown.

By 1783, Nicholas had become part of the New York Brigade’s band and had switched from playing the fife to the clarinet. In November of that year, he marched with the Continental Army to reclaim New York City. He later played clarinet in a concert for Gen. George Washington.

In 1813, during the War of 1812, Nicholas again enlisted, this time in the 29th New York Infantry Regiment, and fought at the Battle of Plattsburgh in September 1814. Perhaps he was one of the many Revolutionary War Veterans fighting under the “Veterans Exempt Flag.”

Ever the musician, Nicholas served as the Fife Major for the 29th New York, which earned him the title of “Major” for the rest of his life.

Frontier Legend

After Yorktown, but before the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Nicholas’s father Henry mustered out and returned home to farm in the Mohawk Valley. Meanwhile, Nicholas remained in uniform and served as a guard at the King’s Ferry crossing on the Hudson River.

On a fine spring morning, a group of Indians from Canada found Henry Stoner tending to his fields. The Indians murdered Henry with a tomahawk to the crown and scalped him. By the time Nicholas returned home from the war, his father’s killers were long gone.

Following the death of his father, Nicholas settled down in Johnstown, New York, primarily working as a farmer and a trapper. Nicholas married a war widow named Anna Mason, with whom he would eventually share six children. During this time of his life, Nicholas would hold various positions in Johnstown, serving as a deputy sheriff for three years and captain of the town militia, among other things. Nicholas was known to be skilled in woodcraft. He explored miles of unmapped Adirondack territories, making it as far north as modern-day Hamilton County.

When the American War for Independence ended, many of the predominantly British-allied Iroquois fled to Canada, although they would return to the Adirondacks to hunt and trap. Americans saw the migratory Indians as a threat. Not only were the Indians competitors in the fur trade, but they posed an existential threat to Americans. Two hundred years of conflict between Colonials and aboriginals had left deep wounds in the psyche of the newly formed United States.

As the years progressed, and attacks on Americans became less frequent, the tension between the Americans and the Indians eased, with many leatherstockings, including Nicholas Stoner, partnering with Indians on hunting and trapping expeditions. Still, some lines could not be crossed. Nicholas was swift to deal out “frontier justice” to any Indian he felt had encroached on his hunting tracks, or had tampered with his traps. New York historian Jeptha Root Simms (1807–1883) accounts that on no fewer than three occasions Nicholas killed Indians for harassing his livelihood.

Nicholas Stoner’s most famous Indian fighting did not occur in the rugged ranges of the Adirondacks, but at a Johnstown tavern in 1785. Acting in his capacity as a deputy sheriff, Nicholas entered De Fonclaiere’s Tavern while making his regular rounds. A party of seven Canadian Indians, who were in Johnstown trading furs, happened to be drinking in the tavern’s kitchen, and Nicholas decided to join them. Nicholas noticed that one of the Indians was abnormally fair-skinned, and he made a remark about that Indian’s heritage, to which one of the other Indians took great offense. Never one to take an insult, especially from an Indian, Nicholas responded with his fists.

A fight ensued. Nicholas attempted to throw the offending Indian into the kitchen’s roaring fireplace, but missed and instead cast him into a pot of scalding gravy. The tavern’s proprietor ran for the sheriff and the other deputies once the fight broke out, but local writ refused to intercede, more than confident in Nicholas’s abilities. After a short bout of fists and hands, Nicholas had defeated the Indians. Beleaguered, and likely drunk, he stumbled out into a hallway that connected the kitchen to the tavern’s barroom.

While in the hall, Nicholas found an Indian passed out drunk on the floor and stopped to rip an earring out of the man’s ear.

As Nicholas entered the barroom, one of the Indians claimed to be the man who killed Nicholas’s father. Enraged, Nicholas grabbed the first weapon he could find, a red-hot andiron from the barroom fireplace, and hurled it into the neck of his father’s murderer, charring him black. Outmatched, the Indians fled the bar, and sought medical care for their grievously wounded companion. The local doctor doubted that the wounded Indian would survive.

To appease the Indians, and to ensure that no Iroquois raiding parties would be coming down from Canada, Nicholas Stoner was placed in the town’s jail.

After a few days, and the departure of the Indians, the people of Johnstown came together in what could be described as a “reverse lynching.” The townspeople descended on the local jail to free their friend and neighbor. After a round of celebration and a thwarted attempt by the local jailer to reclaim his prisoner, Nicholas Stoner returned home to his family.

Nicholas Stoner lived to be 90 years old and wandered the Mohawk Valley and the Southern Adirondacks with his rifle, traps, and coonskin hat until his death. Nicholas died November 26, 1853, and was later interred at the Prospect Hill Cemetery in Gloversville, New York.

As Jeptha Root Simms accounts in his 1857 book Trappers of New York, “[T]he prowess and fearless acts of the Johnstown warrior gave him no little celebrity along the water-courses of Canada; and many a red papoose was taught in swaddles to lisp with dread the name of Stoner.”

Sources

• Frederic B. Leach, “The Man Whose Praise We Sing,” American Heritage 16, No. 3 (April 1965).

• “Nicholas Stoner (1762–1853),” WikiTree. Accessed June 22, 2024.

• Jeptha Root Simms, Trappers of New York: or, a biography of Nicholas Stoner & Nathaniel Foster; together with anecdotes of other celebrated hunters, and some account of Sir William Johnson, and his style of living (Albany: J. Munsell, 1857).

• Philip Terrie, “Nick Stoner,” Adirondack Life Magazine (February 2017).

• “Nicholas Stoner,” U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service. Accessed June 22, 2024.