Three Rivers
Hudson~Mohawk~Schoharie
History From America's Most Famous Valleys

The Frontiersmen of New York
by Jeptha R. Simms
Albany, NY 1883

Volume II, Page 522, The Enemy at Bauders.-- Not far from Fort Paris, in Stone Arabia, resided in the Revolution, Melchert Bauder; his place has long since been known as the Michael Wick farm. One Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1781, a party of seven or eight Indians came to Bauder's house and captured his two sons, Melchert, Jr. and Leonard, aged 12 and 10 years. They had a sister Elizabeth, aged 15, who was also made a prisoner, taken into the woods and allowed to return home. The mother was at Fort Paris, one and a half miles distant, when the enemy were at her home; and the father chanced to be asleep under an apple tree back of the house and escaped notice; while George, a third son, some eight or nine years old, had gone to a brook fishing and thus escaped a journey to Canada. The enemy plundered the house and set it on fire, but it was extinguished by Mr. Bauder, with milk from the cellar. This party joined another war party,and proceeded with their prisoners by the northern route to Canada. On their way, they ate whatever they found, snakes included, but a large turtle furnished their most dainty meal. The party had not proceeded far on its return march, when the Indian claiming Melchert as his prisoner, got into a drunken frolic, was stabbed by one of his fellows and died within an hour; the boy falling to the care of another Indian. The journey was made partly by land and partly by water, and arriving in Canada, the boys were separated. The oldest boy was exchanged and came home with other prisoners, arriving on Christmas day, probably of the next season, to find his brother already at home.

A Miss Bauder, who some say was a young aunt and namesake of the one named above, is said to have been captured at another time, at a spring whither she had gone for a pail of water, was taken to Canada and never returned; nor was anything satisfactorily ascertained of her fate, until about the year 1845, when a man named McDonald from Canada, informed George Bauder, mentioned as the fishing boy of this family, that his mother (then deceased) was a Miss Bauder, who had been taken to Canada by the Indians in the Revolution, from the frontier of New York. She was, no doubt, the lost member of this Bauder family. --Ge. Peter C. Fox, George Bauder and his nephew Benjamin Bauder.