THE ARGONAUGHT'S CHOICE

     “A Sabbath morning warm but cloudy and a little rain to start the grass we hope. We find we are too early for the grass. therefore, in no hurry, as yet, have passed and went ahead of most of the teams we have seen.”  -Solomon Osterhout’s Ox Train diary entry, April 21, 1850

     C.W. prayed for salvation and the tornado obliged, veering off it’s deadly course, sparing the family shack. This inspired C.W. Hardenbergh to immediately sober up and come to Jesus. But sobriety and spontaneous belief didn’t solve his financial difficulties.  His slide down the economic and social ladder seemed to have exacerbated an existing mental illness that went, if not unnoticed, at least unchecked. C.W. became increasingly agitated, over-extended in business dealings and soon was at risk of losing what little land and money he was desperately trying to hold onto. His solution was to go deeper in debt, borrowing more money and sue his uncle over a small piece of real estate.

     By now Hardenbergh was consumed with debt, his pregnant girl friend nightmares returned and he believed his Uncle Anthony Hasbrouck was plotting against him; trying to cheat him out of a small inheritance. Then, in response Anthony Hasbrouck took his nephew to court suing him over a minor unpaid debt of $56. It was the last straw. Sound familiar? 

    C.W. couldn’t sleep and was experiencing self-described “fits,” as he wandered around Liberty, telling anyone who would listen that his uncle “ought be shot.” What I initially thought was so rare in the Jennings affair, now seems to have been all too commonplace among us aliens. Instead of hiring someone like Jack Hodges to do his dirty work, Hardenbergh bought a pistol, powder and lead shot in Liberty and formulated a deadly plan. He had  befriended a gunsmith named Lewis Smith and had him run some lead bullets of the right pistol caliber. Then, according to Quinlan he purchased a large hunting knife and continued ranting around town. It wasn’t much of a plan. 

     As his Life and Confessions describes, after attending Sunday services at the M.E. church in Liberty, C.W. Hardenbergh headed off in an increasingly frantic pace to his uncle Anthony Hasbrouck’s house, outside the village of Neversink. He walked all day. Turning right at the village of Neversink he followed along the bank of the river, until coming to the large stone Hasbrouck house. The village is now under water, but the stone Hasbrouck house is still there.

    Reaching the house just as Hasbrouck family was sitting down to a quiet Sunday dinner, Anthony Hasbrouck welcomed his nephew in to have a bite. The pleasantries didn’t last long. After some terse words across the table, C.W.  pulled his pistol from his belt and shot Hasbrouck in the belly. Then, as everyone looked on in horror, he leapt across the table and savagely stabbed his uncle. He then broke a chair; beating Hasbrouck repeatedly over the head with the chair leg, while Mrs. Hasbrouck just stood stunned, frozen in place. Finally breaking the spell, a young cousin screamed at the top of her lungs at the sight of her father being beaten to death, and ran for help. 

     Stabbed herself, Mrs. Hasbrouck was able to intercede, wound C.W. with his own knife in the process and drag her dying husband, bleeding profusely, into a downstairs bedroom. She locked the door as the stunned and expiring Anthony crawled under the bed to hide.  C.W., now with an ax in his hand, pounded on the door, trying to finish the job. Somehow the door held. Finally giving up and fleeing, as the alarmed neighbors rushed into the house, C. W. escaped to his cousin Thomas Hardenbergh’s farm down the road. According to a later published account C.W. “made no attempt to escape, but proceeded toward the village for the purpose of delivering himself up; but being unable to reach it, from weakness consequent on the loss of blood from a wound he had himself received in the course of the struggle, he went to the house of a kinsman , where he quietly awaited his arrest.”  Thomas Hardenbergh went for the law as the neighbors pulled the mortally wounded Anthony from under the bed. He groaned— “Cornelius…..” gasping for air, held up the bloody pocket knife in his trembling hand, indicting his nephew—and died.

   The Hasbrouck murder took place in 1841, over twenty years after the Jennings affair in Goshen. As obscure as the Richard Jennings murder is, the Hardenbergh/Hasbrouck affair is completely forgotten. But at the time, due to the status of both families, this sordid affair was big news. To give you some context, Jack Hodges had just died in Canandaigua, Reed and Freeman are both still incarcerated in Auburn Prison, and Henry Seward is the Governor of the State of New York. The down renters were organizing, making masks and dressing as “Indians,” as bolts of calico and tin dinner horns flew off the shelves in upstate general stores. Revolution was back in the air.