now existing towns in that picturesque county, two-thirds of the fertile undulations of Orange County and a part of the present town of Haverstraw. It is related of this area, that there was "but one house on it, or rather a hut, where a poor man lives." Notwithstanding this lone, solitary subject, Evans saw great trading and seignorial possibilities in his tract. And what did he pay for this immense stretch of territory? A very modest bribe; common report had it that he gave Fletcher £100 for the grant.8
Nicholas Bayard, of whom it is told that he was a handy go-between in arranging with the sea pirates the price that they should pay for Fletcher's protection, was another favored personage. Bayard was the recipient of a grant forty miles long and thirty broad on both sides of Schoharie Creek. Col. William Smith's prize was a grant from Fletcher of an estate fifty miles in length on Nassau—now Long Island. According to Bellomont, Smith got this land "arbitrarily and by strong hand." Smith was in collusion with Fletcher, and moreover, was chief justice of the province, "a place of great awe as well as authority." This judicial land wrester forced the town of Southampton to accept the insignificant sum of £10 for the greater part of forty miles of beach—a singularly profitable transaction for Smith, who cleared in one year £500, the proceeds of whales taken there, as he admitted to Bellomont.9 Henry Beekman, the astute and smooth founder of a rich and powerful family, was made a magnate of the first importance by a grant from Fletcher of a tract sixteen miles in length in Dutchess County, and also of another estate running twenty miles along the Hudson and eight miles inland. This estate he valued at £5,000.10 Likewise Peter Schuyler, Godfrey Dellius and their associates had conjointly secured by Fletcher's patent, a grant fifty miles long in the romantic Mohawk Valley—a grant which "the Mohawk Indians have often complained of". Upon this estate they placed a value of £25,000. This was a towering fortune for the period; in its actual command of labor, necessities, comforts and luxuries it ranked as a power of transcending importance.