SUNRISE IN THE FOOTHILLS OF THE CATSKILL MOUNTAINS

ON NOVEMBER 21, 1829, CARLETON WATKINS was born to John Maurice and Julia Anne Watkins in Milfordville, New York, a tiny town in the tight hills west of the Catskill Mountains.

The lesson Carleton would take from his mother's family was to go west, so Carleton's story must start with them. Julia's father, John McDonald, was a classic example of his type, a Scots-Irish Presbyterian whose family had settled the first western frontier in the late 1700s. He seems to have arrived in Milfordville around the turn of the nineteenth century, though exactly how and from where the McDonalds came is somewhat fuzzy. According to one local oral history, the McDonalds were descended from the famed Scottish MacDonald clan that was nearly wiped out by Robert Campbell at the Massacre of Glencoe in 1692. Many of the remaining MacDonalds then emigrated to Nova Scotia. It was said that John McDonald's forefathers were among those MacDonalds, and that they subsequently traveled west, into the Catskills. That may or may not be true. At the turn of the eighteenth century, Milfordville was the frontier, and civic record keeping is rarely a priority of frontier towns.

Eventually several McDonalds worked their way west to an empty, nameless place in central New York State. They built a sawmill and a bridge that forded the Susquehanna River. As a result, the place became known as Milfordville. Julia's father, John, would inherit this mill and much land. John McDonald expanded the family's holdings to include a hotel and tavern and apparently a second mill, this one a gristmill that was also used for the production of whiskey. Milfordville grew from a name to a town around John McDonald's holdings, which assured both his prosperity and the stability of the town. John McDonald was a manifestation of one of the young republic's early themes: individual opportunity lay in new land, and the new land was always to the west of the settled East. Think of McDonald as the real-life embodiment of Marmaduke Temple, the frontier town builder in The Pioneers, James Fenimore Cooper's classic 1823 novel of early American westering that was set in these same foothills of the Catskills. Temple's town is usually considered an analogue for Cooperstown, but it could just as easily be another town a stop or two down the Susquehanna, such as Milfordville.

Milfordville's McDonalds began to intersect with Milfordville's Watkinses around 1800: It is likely that one of John McDonald's brothers was one William Ellis McDonald. William married Lydia Burgett Watkins, a woman who had four children with her first husband and then more with William. One of those children was named John M. Watkins.

It is not clear where John Watkins was born, but he grew into the sort of solid citizen on whom communities depend. He arrived in Milfordville by 1821, when he was fifteen. He had been an orphan since the age of ten. John cut timber in the mountains around Milfordville until, wanting to better himself, he found work in town as a carpenter's apprentice. He built houses for the leading men of the village, men who must have recommended his work to the other leading men of the village, because before long most of them lived in John Watkins houses. John thanked them by building Milfordville's first house of worship, a Presbyterian church. Years later, John would express his continuing commitment to this place by painting the church and then by building it a bell tower. He would become one of the region's most respected hotel- and tavernkeepers. John was well enough regarded by the menfolk of Oneonta, as Milfordville became known after 1832, that they elected him a sergeant in the town's militia. He was well enough regarded by the militia captain, John McDonald, that McDonald gave to John the hand of his eldest daughter, Julia. For John Watkins, marrying Julia was an excellent career move. McDonald was far and away Milfordville's leading citizen, the town's postmaster, its biggest landowner, and surely its wealthiest man.

There is no record of how John McDonald's daughter Julia met John Watkins. While family records are imprecise, John and Julia were almost certainly either cousins or cousins by marriage. It seems that John McDonald was willing to give Julia's hand to a local orphan of lesser social status because he was, in fact, a McDonald.

John Watkins would have realized that marrying Julia ensured that he would play a role in the town's future. Not long after, the townsfolk confirmed John McDonald's decision: the town's militia voted McDonald's son-in-law into McDonald's old captaincy. As a result of the intertwined history of Milfordville and the McDonald family, when Julia Watkins gave birth to Carleton, the couple's first child, John would not have been just concerned about the troubled economic state of the town and its prospects for the future, he would have been expected to play a role in trying to improve them. He would, but first: Carleton.

A child remembers moments of freedom and wonder. Carleton's earliest memory was the night the sky snowed fire.

It started with a ruckus outside four-year-old Carleton's window, where hundreds of Oneontans were rapidly gathering in the street. In a way, this was no accident: the hotel and tavern that John Watkins ran for or inherited from his father-in-law was located on Oneonta's most commercial block, between the river and the highway that ran through town. Whenever something big was happening, like the Fourth of July, militia drills, or a political rally, Oneontans came here. Oneontans could find this stretch of Chestnut Street in the dark, which was exactly what they had done this night.

Carleton ran out of his father's house and into the street. Everyone was looking at the same place: up the narrow valley of the Susquehanna, toward where Charlotte Creek fed into the river, creating a gentle V that broke up the weathered foothills of the Catskill Mountains. They were staring at the constellation Leo and at the lion's mane, which was where the stars seemed to come from as they streaked across the sky. That was where Carleton looked...