Excerpt from In the Sixties Society, and to prepare for a befitting celebration of the com ing hundredth anniversary of Oriskany. The circumstance that I had not two dollars to spare prevented my becoming a member of the Society, but in no way affected the marked success of the celebration it organized and superintended. It was at this time that I gathered the first materials for my projected work, from members of the Fonda and other fami lies. Eight years later I was in the position of having made at least as many attempts to begin this book, which I had never ceased to desire to write, and for which I had steadily collected books and other data; one of these essays ran to more than twenty thousand words, and several others were half that length, but they were all failures. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.