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Gc 977.102 C59bu 1811165
REYNOLDS HISTORICAL GENEALOGY COLLECTION
GEN
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 02279 6434
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https://archive.org/details/chapterinhistory00burt_0
Compliments of L. M. Burton
A CHAPTER
IN THE
HISTORY OF CLEVELAND
1
BY
C. M. BURTON.
DETROIT. THE WILTON-SMITH CO.
1895
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1811165
A Chapter in the
History of Cleveland.
BY
C. M. BURTON.
HET.
The Western Reserve Historical Society:
One day in the summer of 1894, I obtained information that at a certain house on the Canadian side of the Detroit river, at a place, styled by the owner " Strabane," there was a quantity of letters and documents in the possession of one of the old families. At the earliest practicable moment, I visited the place and hastily examined such papers as the possessor was willing to permit me to see. Within a few days thereafter I again visited him and obtained permission to take a few of the papers with me to copy. Among these papers I found the Indian deed referred to in the following pages, and feeling that it might be of interest to your society I wrote to your late president, Judge C. C. Baldwin, of my find. I received an immediate reply from Judge Baldwin, in which he stated that the existence of the deed had been suspected by him for many years, and that on one occasion ae had gone to Montreal to see if he could find evidence of its existence, but that my letter had given him the first cer- tain knowledge of its contents. I continued my visits to my Canadian neighbor for some time, and finally succeeded in purchasing from him all of his documents, and they are now in my possession. When my purchase was consummated, I again wrote to Judge Baldwin and he came to Detroit to make a personal examination of such of the papers as her- tained to Cleveland. He was greatly pleased with what he saw, and at his request I prepared the following paper, which
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INTRODUCTORY.
contains the substance of that portion of these documents. The papers I obtained, however, do not relate exclusively, nor even very largely, in proportion to the whole, to this subject. They are the correspondence of a man largely interested in business and political affairs, and relate to the entire northern part of Ohio, Vincennes, Detroit, Mackinac, Upper Canada, the first parliament at Niagara, the Canadian election at Detroit before Jay's Treaty and other matters, and in all respects constitute the most valuable set of private let- ters I have ever seen. There are between 3,000 and 4,000 of them, and they extend from 1760 to the date of the death of their collector, in 1818. There are letters from Vigo, at Vincennes, Arthur St. Clair, Jr., William and Angus McIntosh, John Askin, Jr., Joseph Brant, Alexander Henry, Commodore Alexander Grant, John Anderson, nearly all of the Moravian preachers, Zeisberger, Heckenvelder, Senseman and others, Wm. Henry Harrison, Gov. Wm. Hull, Judge Augustus Brevoort Woodward, Major Ancrum, General England, Arent Schuyler DePeyster, Henry Bird, Isaac Todd, James and Andrew Magill, D. W. Smith, and many Indian deeds and other official documents. This collection is of so recent an acquisition that I have not yet had time to arrange and bind it, as I propose, but I have pretty thoroughly examined it. Regarding the portion incorporated in the annexed essay, I would say that, of course, I do not possess all the corre- spondence and papers written on that subject, but I hope that what I here produce will be added to by others who possess information on the same subject, until ultimately the entire .transaction of this Indian purchase may be made a matter of written history, and that we may thus add a chap- ter to the story of Cleveland.
Respectfully yours,
C. M. BURTON.
DETROIT, February, 1895.
A CHAPTER
IN THE
HISTORY OF CLEVELAND.
Detroit, until the commencement of the present century, was the most important of all the Western posts in that great tract of territory which is comprehended under the titles of New France and Louisiana, Canada, and later under the name of the North-West Territory. It was the most important place west of Montreal, west of the Alleghanies. Cadillac, its founder, foresaw its commercial importance in 1701, and although, before coming to settle here, he had been in command of Mackinac, he knew that Detroit would soon outstrip that place in trade and population, and wrote to Pontchartrain (Minister under Louis XIV), that Michillimack- inac (as Mackinac was then called), would be so completely deserted in a few years that the Jesuit priests there would have no one to bury them when they died, but that their bodies would be food for vultures and wolves.
Cadillac and the succeeding commandants were empow- ered to sell and convey lands about the post of Detroit, and they made many transfers of farms and village lots. The number and extent of these transfers have never been fully determined. Indeed, it was supposed that there were only a very few made under French rule, but my own investigations have recently unearthed some seventy-five deeds made by Cadillac alone, and further searches now being made by me, will, I believe, disclose several hundred, and perhaps form a complete record from Cadillac's day till the English conquest
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in 1760. These early deeds were recorded by the Royal Notary, and his records were either kept as his private property, or sent to the home government in Paris to be buried in the rapidly accumulating and unassorted mass in the Foreign Department or Department of Marine.
When the British took possession of the country in 1760, the record of transfers was carried on in much the same man- ner as under French rule, except that the records were kept as the property of the public and not the private books of the notary. From 1760 until the formation of the County of Wayne in 1796, when the Western country was surrendered to the United States under the terms of Jay's treaty of 1794, these records in Detroit filled four or five volumes and were retained by the British when they retired from the post. A part of these records, but not all of them, were, a few years since, returned to Detroit and placed in the registry office, and of them I have a complete copy.
In the early part of the present century, and about the time of the destruction of the village of Detroit by the fire of 1805, the United States Commissioners on land claims opened an office in Detroit and recorded such evidences of title as the old French people brought for that purpose. There were six small volumes of these records, and some years ago I had an abstract made of them, but not a complete copy. The originals have disappeared, and I have so far been unable to
get trace of them. These books contained the transactions, not only of Detroit, but of the surrounding country, including a large share of the Western Reserve, so called, and in that connection a few words respecting the Reserve may not be out of place. The Western Reserve has occupied a very peculiar situation in the political formation of the Old North- West and of Ohio. The charter of Connecticut was granted by Charles II., King of England, in 1662, and through it Connecticut claimed to have the right to possess, not only the present State of Connecticut, but a large portion of New
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HISTORY OF CLEVELAND.
York and Pennsylvania, and she even maintained that her western boundary was the ocean, extending, as the charter reads, " From Narragansett Bay on the east, to the South Sea on the west part, with the islands thereto adjoining."
In 1781 New York released to the general government all the lands to which she had claim west of a meridian extending through the western extremity of Lake Ontario .* The west- ern boundary line was surveyed in 1790 by Andrew Ellicott.+
The western line of Pennsylvania, agreed to in 1779 was fixed in 1784 by the report of commissioners appointed to establish the boundary line between Virginia and Pennsyl- vania, and the line so fixed was confirmed by the cession of Connecticut in 1800. This served also to determine the eastern boundary of Connecticut's western possessions, and when the United States called upon her to surrender those possessions, so that the government might make provisions for the payment of the Revolutionary War debt, and furnish homes for soldiers, Connecticut made the required transfer, reserving only that portion which is now termed The Western Reserve. This deed of cession is dated September 13, 1786.§ Of the Reserve 500,000 i cres were set apart for the fire sufferers, intending by this designation to include those people, more particularly of New London, Norwalk, and Fairfield, Connecticut, who suffered from the depredations of the British during the Revolution, and the balance of the Reserve was disposed of to the Connecticut Land Co., for $1,200,000, or something more than 40 cents an acre.
The jurisdiction of the Reserve remained vested in Con- necticut, and the formation of the Territory North-West of the Ohio River by the United States in 1787, could not change the right of Connecticut to govern the Reserve by her laws, nor could the appointment of Arthur St. Clair as
*Boundaries of the United States, by Henry Gannett, United States Geological Survey, 1885. Bulletin 13, page 72. tib. 75.
tib. 80, and Hinsdale's Old Northwest, page 109,
SSee Appendix.
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Governor of the North-West Territory give him authority to control that portion of the new territory. Although the ques- tion of jurisdiction had never been raised, a hint that it might be, at any time, was thrown out by the introduction, by Mr. Livingston, on the 4th of January, 1796, in Congress, of a resolution for the appointment of a committee to investigate the title to these lands "lately claimed and sold by the State of Connecticut." Some influence was brought to bear upon Mr. Livingston, for a month later, and before any action had been taken by Congress, he withdrew the resolution with the explanation that the interests of individuals might suffer while the matter was pending before the House, and that under the circumstances he thought it better not to proceed with the resolution. Nearly three years after this, and on the last day of the year 1798, Uriah Tracy, senator from Connecticut, introduced a measure, which, after some alter- ations and a re-introduction in 1800, became a law in April of the latter year,* authorizing the President to transfer the legal title of the Reserve to the Governor of Connecticut, in order to confirm the title of the purchasers from the State, on condition that the State would relinquish all claim to jurisdiction over the Reserve to the United States. Thus for the first time, in the year 1800, the Western Reserve was a part and parcel of the Territory North-west of the Ohio River.
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. Meanwhile, however, another complication had arisen, for the proper investigation of which it will be necessary to retrace a few years of the time we have just passed over. At the close of the Revolutionary War, England was in posses- sion of Detroit, Mackinaw, and all the other Western posts, and she agreed to surrender these to our government upon the execution of the final treaty of peace in 1783. One obsta- cle after another was placed in the way of the final execution of this part of the treaty, and it was not until thirteen years had elapsed-not until 1796-that these posts were finally
*This act is to be found in Annals of Congress for 1800, page 1495.
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HISTORY OF CLEVELAND.
surrendered to our government. Upon possession being taken by the American troops, Winthrop Sargent, Secretary of the North-West Territory under Arthur St. Clair, Gov- ernor, proceeded to Detroit, and on the 15th day of August, 1796, organized the County of Wayne, which included all of the northern part of Ohio west of the Cuyahoga River, all of Michigan, and a vast extent of other territory. In the absence of the Governor from the Territory, the duties of that officer devolved upon the Secretary as acting governor, and it was in this capacity, as acting governor, that Mr. Sargent, on that August day in 1796, undertook to organize the County of Wayne. It happened, however, that on the day preceding (August 14, 1796), the Governor, who had for some time been absent from the Territory, passed from Pittsburg into the North-West Territory, and thus the proclamation of Sargent, as acting governor, was a nullity. This feature of the case, while fully understood at the time by both parties, and pointed out and commented on by the Governor at that time, was not insisted on by him as being an illegal act and has been allowed to stand until age has given it validity.
To the student who puts himself back to the time of the 'happening of these events, it appears clearly, Ist, that the Western Reserve was not a portion of the North-West Terri- tory until 1800, and 2nd, that the formation of the County of Wayne to include that portion of the Reserve west of the Cuyahoga River was invalid for two reasons, (1) because that land constituted a part of the Reserve and was not sub- ject to the government of the North-West Territory, and (2) because the person who undertook to form that county, Win- throp Sargent, was not such officer as he pretended to be (acting governor), as the Governor, Arthur St. Clair, was within the boundary lines of the North-West Territory on the day the county was formed.
Overlooking these technical objections to the legality of the newly formed government, we find Detroit the county
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seat, capital, and metropolis of this new county, which is larger in extent than the present States of Ohio and Michi- gan combined. Of this great county, Peter Audrain was appointed register, and he opened a set of books in which he recorded all the deeds and other documents that were brought to him. Mr. Audrain was not only register but he was also judge of the probate court, justice of the peace, general scrivener, an expert penman in both English and French, and his beautiful chirography, almost like print, abounds in the early records of our county. Here we find not only the deeds of Detroit and its immediate vicinity, but also of Michillimackinac, Kaskaskia, Vincennes, Sandusky, and a part of Cleveland. I say of Cleveland, for, although at this time no such place as Cleveland existed, there are here several transfers of land in the northern part of Ohio, and one, at least, covering a large part of the present city of Cleveland .* Many of these early deeds are from the Indians, for, notwithstanding that both the French and British government, and afterward the United States, refused to recognize in the Indians any right to convey their lands to individuals, the inhabitants at Detroit continually obtained deeds from them and maintained, so far as they could, that their red brethren had a good title to the lands they occupied, and the British government in a few instances held these Indian conveyances to be valid, where it was quite evident that the deed was made with the appro- bation of the entire Indian tribe that was in possession of the premises granted. During the Revolutionary War there were many such Indian grants made and recorded in Detroit, and towards the end of the war, about 1780, when it began to look pretty blue for old England, these grants began to multiply with great rapidity. Nearly every citizen of Detroit was the donee of some considerable tract given to him by the Indians for the love and affection they bore him.
Some of these parcels were pretty large. Jonathan Shieffelien, the Indian agent, obtained a conveyance of seven "These Cleveland deeds pertain to the part of thecity on the left bank of the Cuyahoga only.
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HISTORY OF CLEVELAND.
miles square (49 square miles) including the present city of Amherstburg, Canada, and at nearly the same time our com- mandant, Arent Schuyler DePeyster, got a donation of some five miles square on the River St. Clair. These grants were not recognized as valid by our government, but where the grantee was in actual possession of the soil and retained it until after Jay's Treaty took effect, the possession was recog- nized as creating in him a good title which our government confirmed. All of the lands given by the Indians were upon the large streams or on the great lakes. No lands were granted back in the country, and everything, except along the margin of the lakes and rivers, was as wild and devoid of evidences of white man's supremacy in 1796 as when LaSalle, Hennepin, Marquette, Dollier, and Dablon first visited the country.
Various schemes were proposed and attempted to be carried out by residents of Detroit, Montreal, and the Eastern States, to obtain a valid title to great tracts of this wild, and apparently worthless, land. One scheme, which came near being a success, and which also came near proving one of the greatest scandals of our early Congressional history, was the attempt to purchase the entire lower peninsula of Michigan, consisting of about 20,000,000 acres, for the insignificant sum of half a million dollars. It was expected that the pur- chasers, after having paid the five hundred thousand dollars to the government, would themselves see to the removal of the Indians and would obtain a release of their claims. Members of Congress were approached on the subject and their influence solicited upon the basis of an interest in the venture, if it passed, but Mr. William Smith, a member from South Carolina, either from honesty or temerity, from his seat in Congress made the affair public, on the 28th of Decem- ber, 1795. An investigation followed, more for the purpose, probably, of determining the members innocent than of dis- covering any guilty parties. Two men, Randall and Whitney,
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neither of them members of Congress, were imprisoned for a few days by order of the House, and the matter dropped, to be thought of again only when it was dug up for historical investigation. I examined this subject pretty thoroughly, and wrote up the results of my examination in the Inlander* in the spring of 1892, and I think the volume of the Inlander con- taining the article is in the library of your society.
One of the Detroit men interested in this proposed pur- chase was John Askin, Sr., and, as we will have something further to say regarding Mr. Askin, a short sketch of his life, from materials furnished by his grandson, Alexander Henry Askin, may be of interest. John Askin, Sr., was born at Auchnacloy, a small place in the north of Ireland, in the year 1739. He came to New York in 1758, and for some months was engaged in that city and in Albany keeping a "shop," as he termed it ; that is, in dealing in every sort of commodity for which he could find a purchaser. It is said that he was a volunteer in the British army at the first attempt to take Ticonderoga, and about this time fell in with Major Robert Rogers, whom Parkman considers as one of the most suc- cessful and intrepid leaders of the American scouts. Askin's tastes led him more to trade than war, and he subsequently formed a partnership with Rogers in trading at Albany. The venture was not a success, and Rogers, who had no real worth, except that he was a good scout, ran away, "went beyond seas," as his creditors said, and left the payment of the debts of the unfortunate venture on Askin's shoulders. Mr. Askin obtained an extension of time from his creditors and paid them in' full. He went to Michillimackinac in 1764 and engaged in the Indian trade. He intended to make Detroit his home, but the breaking out of the Revolutionary War prevented his coming here to stay. He came to Detroit to reside permanently about 1780, and carried on trade of all kinds on a large scale. When the Revolution came to an end, he could not bear the thought of becoming a citizen of the
*A monthly magazine published by the students at the University of Michigan.
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II
new republic, and in order to retain his citizenship as a British subject he removed to the eastern side of the Detroit River. He did not remove, however, until long after the new govern- ment had taken actual possession of Detroit. He did not re- move until 1802, after he had been appointed village trustee of the town of Detroit by the Legislature which met at Chillicothe in 1802, and had refused to serve in that capacity. He fore- saw the great value that would one day come to the fertile lands of the Northwest, and attempted to obtain title to as much of this territory as possible. His attempt to buy the lower peninsula of Michigan, is only one of the many land schemes in which he had an interest.
He purchased from the occupants and settlers in the vicinity of Detroit, on both sides of the river, thousands of acres in small detached parcels, and proved his rights before the land commissioners. He succeeded in maintaining his claim to some of these lands, but many of them he lost. In company with Major Ancrum, of Detroit, he purchased the interests of the Moravian Indians in their possessions at the River Huron of Lake Ste. Claire, and then obtained of the Chippewa Indians their claim, and set up title to twenty-four thousand acres of land at that spot. In company with John Askwith, John Dodemede, Patrick McNiff, William Forsith, Jr., Robert McNiff, and John Kinzie, he obtained the Indian title to nearly a million acres on the Miami River,* including the present city of Toledo and extending to, and including
the Sandusky peninsula. But the scheme that most greatly interests us at the present time is the attempt of Mr. Askin and his partners to take and hold as their private property, not only a large part of the land covered by the present city of Cleveland, but nearly all the land situated along the south shore of Lake Erie, and extending nearly to Sandusky. His entire claims in the northern part of Ohio aggregated 5,294, 120 acres, and some idea can be gained of the extent of the Terri- tory so claimed, by remembering that the entire Western
"This river is now called the Maumee.
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Reserve does not contain 3,500,000 acres. A part of this land of Askin's is included in the Reserve.
The parties in interest in the Cuyahoga Purchase, as this scheme was called, were John Askin, Sr., John Askin, Jr., merchants, Patrick McNiff, surveyor, John Askwith, notary public, Israel Ruland, silversmith, all of Detroit, and Alex- ander Henry, of Montreal, merchant. McNiff, Askwith, and Ruland were men of considerable local importance at Detroit. John Askin, Jr., lived in various places, as at Mackinac, St. Joseph, Detroit, and Amherstburg, engaged in trade and acting as an Indian interpreter ; he was well educated and his letters to his father, many of which I have, are couched in an affectionate tone and written in the studied and beauti- ful chirography of the last century that makes their reading a pleasure. Alexander Henry was a prominent merchant of Montreal, and did not, at this time, wield less power in the fur markets of the world than did our own John Jacob Astor, and indeed in many of their fur-buying and market-manipulating schemes they were partners. He is better known to us, how- ever, as the author of "Henry's Travels" and as one of the very few persons who escaped from the general massacre at Michillimackinac, as is vividly pictured by Francis Parkman in his "Conspiracy of Pontiac." There was subsequently admitted into this partnership John Dodemede and William Robertson, Askwith having died shortly after its formation.
Very nearly a complete record of this transaction has recently fallen into my hands, and from these records and the ancient, weatherbeaten, and mouse-eaten letters and docu- ments that I have collected on the same subject, I am able to give the following details regarding this matter :
Alexander Henry, John Askin, and John Askin, Jr., had been jointly interested in the purchase of other lands, in smaller tracts, from the Indians for some time, and they now associated the other partners with them in this enterprise, as they felt the need of their assistance. On the 18th of Jan-
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uary, 1796, the parties above named, Henry, the two Askins, McNiff, Askwith, and Ruland, purchased from the Indians the tract which I have referred to, and obtained a deed signed by twenty-nine of their principal chiefs .* The land is described, according to the opinion of Alexander Hamilton, hereinafter referred to, as located in Upper Canada, although the date of the conveyance places the transaction an entire year after the signing of Jay's Treaty, and the grantees named in the deed certainly knew that their new purchase fell within the newly established lines of the United States. After having obtained their deed, the efforts of all parties were turned to maintaining their title, and getting it confirmed by our gov- ernment if possible. They evidently did not, at this time, know that Connecticut had or claimed any right in the premises, as there is very little reference to that State in their correspondence.
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