wn, and
father of the novelist. In the course of their frequent meetings Judge
Cooper told Ryan of an interesting character whom he had seen in
Cooperstown, and described the picturesque appearance and quaint sayings
of the old hunter who lived on the border of Otsego Lake. At home Ryan
told the story to his wife, who soon became convinced that the old white
hunter whom Cooper had described was none other than her father, who had
been missing for twenty-six years.

Ryan went to Otsego Lake, and, having found the hunter, learned that he
was indeed Nathaniel Shipman who had disappeared from Hoosick at the
time of the Revolutionary War. Ryan persuaded the old man to return with
him, and brought him back to live in the home which then stood some two
miles east of Hoosick Falls. In spite of the devotion of his daughter,
however, the aged hunter never felt quite at home beneath her roof, or
among the former neighbors. His heart was in the wilds, and it is said
that he made frequent visits to the place where he had passed so many
years in unrestricted freedom, where there was none to question his
sincerity or to doubt his loyalty.

Nathaniel Shipman died at the Ryan home in 1809, and his grave is in the
old burying ground on Main Street in Hoosick Falls.

The local tradition in Cooperstown does not recognize Nathaniel Shipman
of Hoosick Falls. When a movement was made in 1915 to erect at Hoosick
Falls a monument to Nathaniel Shipman as the original of
Leather-Stocking, the proposition was made the subject of scornful
comment in Cooperstown, and Nathaniel Shipman of Hoosick was referred to
as "a spurious Natty Bumppo."

Cooperstown agrees that the original of Leather-Stocking was named
Shipman. But the name of the original hunter was not Nathaniel. He was
David Shipman. His grave is not far from Cooperstown, in the Adams
burying ground between the villages of Fly Creek and Toddsville, and at
the beginning of the twentieth century was marked with a tombstone by
Otsego chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. David
Shipman's descendants live in Cooperstown at the present time. When the
Hoosick Falls claim to Leather-Stocking was first published in 1915, it
was accompanied with the statement that the facts were known to the
people of Hoosick sixty years before. Notwithstanding this the claim was
contradicted in Cooperstown by the positive statement that "for over a
century David Shipman has held the undisputed hono