USA > Ohio > Hamilton County > Cincinnati > Cincinnati in 1841 : its early annals and future prospects > Part 17
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No copy of the last contract with the treasury board has ever come to my hand, though I have long expected and been impatient to see it ; I conclude it was lost on the way, as se- veral of your favors have mentioned that you would speedily forward it. By this time, if I had it, I should know much better how to proceed in the business of sales, than I do at present. I therefore beg, sir, that you will be so good as to enclose me another copy of the contract. By the map of the purchase, it will be evident, that one million of acres, exclu- sive of the reserved sections, will extend near twice the dis- tance north-east into the country, that the first contract, or a continuation of the northern boundary line of the Ohio Com- pany, could have led us to. Penetrating the Indian country thus far, will not only exceed, and run over the limits drawn at the treaty by the Indian grant, or rather extinguishment, but it will carry us so far on towards Lake Erie, as to entangle us among the advanced Indian towns, and render it altogether
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impossible, for many years, either to survey, sell, or settle. But this subject I can better discuss after I see the subsisting contract. Certain it is, that the grounds whereon we stood, with regard to the geography of this purchase, have proved greatly imaginary.
By captain Henry, I transmit to you a few certificates, a statement whereof attends them. I am quite at a loss how or when the second payment is to be made, or what measures are pre-requisite on either side. By my former contract, the United States were to survey the whole contents, and furnish a map of the whole to be delivered to me ; in one month after which, the second payment was to become due. But if you receive the certificates, or they are brought into the board, according to the several contracts that I have made with pur- chasers, I am content that they should be paid to the United States, upon condition that the honorable commissioners of the board will wave their restrictions, touching the limits of the purchase, and suffer it to extend flush to the banks of both the Miamis, from their several mouths to the rear of the purchase; this prayer I think nothing unreasonable, and no more than what I hope their honors will readily comply with. I wish the just and fair thing may be done ; and it may easily be effected ; no bar can lie in the way unless that narrow bor- der of land on the Little Miami shall have been already sold; in which case, save, if possible, captain Stites's ten thousand acres. As to the residue of the strip, I do not trouble myself about the matter; for the poorest land in the whole purchase, I am told, lies bordering along not far from the Little Miami, between the Ohio and the military range.
Sir, I beg leave to mention, that there are very considerable arrears of surveying and registering fees, which I beg you will endeavor to collect in specie, and with the money purchase certificates of the brokers, or elsewhere, where they may be had on the best terms. I have been obliged to make use of specie which I have taken in payment for land, in order to
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defray the expense of surveying, and wish to have the amount, if possible, replaced, with the arrears of surveying fees that are yet due in New Jersey.
Colonel Shrieves was here a few days ago, and desired me to have his indents, when drawn, sold at the brokers, to the amount of his surveying and registering fees. If you have not received the whole of his certificates from Mr. John Phil- lips, you will please to write to him for them. If I remem- ber, colonel Shrieves told me he had paid Phillips the certifi- cates for eight sections.
The office being opened at this place, it is to be recom- mended to the purchasers of Miami lands who have dis- charged the whole of the purchase money and office fees, to forward their warrants to the office for entry, that they may be the sooner ascertained by the extract of the record which shall be forwarded to them, where their several sections are situate. Many people apply to me to purchase one, two, or three of the ten acre lots round this village, but do not choose to take the whole hundred acres for the want of wherewith to pay. I beg, therefore, that the proprietors will honor me with instructions, whether I may sell a single ten acre lot or more of them to one man, when he does not take the whole hun- dred acres. If you conclude to suffer me to sell single ten acre lots, pray set the price, or authorize me to use my own dis- cretion. Ten acre lots are wanted around Southbend as well as Northbend. At present, the price I hold the hundred acres at is two dollars per acre. I think the ten acre lots will bear ten shillings an acre, in specie, on an average, sold by themselves.
In some of my preceding sheets, I mentioned that I should send you a very correct map of the purchase as high as sur- veyed; this I had employed captain John Stites Gano, who professes to possess the double acquirement of surveyor and limner, about six or eight weeks ago, to draw ; but Mr. Gano called on me lately to inform me that he had not, nor could he finish, the map for some time, but would take the material parts and lines, with a copy of the field notes,
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with him to New York, to which city he was directly going, and would there finish the map and present it to you in my name. It is my desire that the map drawn by Mr. Gano, when finished, may be presented to the honorable the com- missioners of the treasury board, for their remarks ; and then, if you think proper, I beg, sir, that you will lay it on the table, in the office of the secretary of congress, for the perusal of his excellency the president, and the honorable members of the senate and house of representatives. But, in the mean time, while Mr. Gano is preparing this, that you may not be uninformed of the boundaries and extent of the purchase as high as the two Miamis are traversed, I forward a rough map of the whole, which I have had drawn in my office, nearly exact as to contents and meanders of the three large rivers, but in which we have not attempted to lay down the smaller streams of water, (only at their mouths,) which are interspers- ed and spread most beautifully through the purchase; this, with the hills, we had not time to attend to, and Mr. Gano is to do it, which renders it unnecessary for me. Be pleased to spread all the maps which I transmit, (Mr. Gano's and that of your own land excepted,) before the board of proprietors of the reserved townships, that every gentleman may have a just idea of the geography of the country. On this general map I have made those remarks which I intended to have made on a map of the reserved township only, which I had proposed to send.
I have inclosed, sir, some military claims of Mr. Abraham Drake, which I shall be much obliged to you to gain admis- sion for, with general Knox. Mr. Drake applied to me in Jersey, to have these admitted. I encouraged him; but he neglected at that time to hand them forward, and came out to this country early in the spring of 1788. Many other ap- plications have been made to me by military gentlemen ; but I have uniformly rejected them. I presume that there are numbers who have applied, previous to my leaving New York, almost sufficient to cover the military range; though
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that, to be sure, has more land in it than any range in the purchase.
I have inclosed you a list of the certificates paid last year at the treasury, and a list of a few certificates which I trans- mit by Mr. Henry, to be by you paid forward with others, at the second payment. You will observe, in the same list, a statement of three certificates,-one of colonel Dunham's, which I had of Mr. Elias Boudinot, which I beg you will speak to him about; it would not pass at the treasury, for want of liquidation : I beg you will see that it is either liqui- dated and paid forward, or that Mr. Boudinot takes it back and credits me the amount on my note to him for borrowed certificates ; the other two are Nourse's, and must be transfer- red at the register's office, or returned to the first proprietors, and by them credited to me, or exchanged for good ones.
Thus far had I written, when a soldier came running to my house, on the 25th of May, informing me, that Mr. Luce de- sired me to come immediately up to the block-house, which is about two hundred yards from mine, and assist him in dressing the wounded men, for that the Indians had fired on the boat. I ran up, and found one soldier by the name of Runyan, from Jersey, lying dead on the bank, and six others, two citizens, wounded. I then apprehended that Mr. John Mills and soldier Gray were mortally wounded, but Mr. Mills is now in a fair way of recovery; Gray is gone with the other wounded soldiers to the garrison at the falls, where they have a surgeon, and I have not heard from any of them since. I have already wrote to you twice since the misfortune of the 21st, and I expect that major Wyllys will deliver one or both the letters in which I have given you an account of the accident. It is now the 5th of June, and from the 21st of May to this day, we have had no further disturbance from the Indians, though our people have not been up the river to work at South- bend since that day. Indeed our village has been favored with room plenty for us since that time, as at least fifty souls fled away that day and the next, expecting every moment that the
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place would be attacked by the Indians. Colonel Shrieves has returned from Mississipi, and makes no very favorable report of colonel Morgan's conduct or country ; which, I be- lieve, you will see stated fully in the newspapers, at least col- onel Shrieves assured me that he would do it, that no more ignorant people might be deluded by Mr. Morgan. A few days before Mr. Luce was fired on, a number of prisoners- squaws and Indian boys-were brought to this place by col- onel Patterson and a party of the Lexington light horse, being sent by the authority of Kentucky to the commanding officer of the garrison here, with the request that they might be, by some means or other, forwarded to the Indian towns, or turned at liberty into the woods to find their way home or starve, which ever might happen. One of the Indians who went down last winter with colonel Morgan, happening at this juncture to return with colonel Shrieves, he was prevailed on to stop here and prepare for a trip to the Indian towns, to inform the Shaw- anese that their women and children, ten in number, were here ready for exchange, if they would come and bring in their white prisoners for the purpose. These matters I stated in a letter addressed to the Shawanese chiefs, one of whom had spent some time with me last winter; and to give a better countenance to the message, and show to demonstration that we meant to be on friendly terms with them, if they would be peaceable with us, I proposed sending a young white man along with the Indian to the towns ; several of my young citi- zens offered to go, but I thought Isaac Freeman, a young man whose father lives near Quibble Town, as proper a person as any I had; both from his approved courage and activity, and a certain manner of address which is pleasing to the Indians. But as Mr. Freeman could speak no Indian, and the Indian could speak no English, a third person became necessary to serve as an interpreter ; to supply which I sent along with them the oldest Indian boy, about fifteen years of age, who retained well his mother tongue, yet spoke very good English, which he had acquired while a prisoner in Kentucky. The three
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set out from Northbend with twenty days' provisions and a pack-horse, one rifle, and plenty of ammunition, though the Indian informed me, by one of the squaws -- who is in fact a white woman, but has lived long among the Shawanese-that they should be at the Indian towns in eight days, if they had good weather and met with no bad luck on their journey. One reason why I wished to avail myself of this opportunity of sending a white man to the Indian towns, was that I might gain some information on his return, if he lives to come back, with regard to the quality of the country between the Miamis, and above the place where any have already explored ; for this purpose I directed him to go out and come in between the two Miami rivers. And should we hereafter find it necessary to invade their country, the United States will, in this case, have a good guide to their army, who will be able to point out the most eligible way that leads to the Indian towns, and what Indians are the hostile ones. Freeman's going to the Shaw- anese will reduce to certainty whether they mean to be our friends or enemies ; and I think that putting the worst, they' will only sell him to the English traders as they do other pris- oners, for it is not probable that they will put him to death, as they had none killed in captivating of him, and especially, as we have so many of their women and children now in our power.
June the 14th. Dear sir-Though it is now more than two weeks since major Wyllys passed me on his way up the river, and was so good as to promise to use his utmost en- deavor with general Harmer for the procuring of some troops for these settlements, which I expected before this time, yet none have arrived; we have, therefore, began to build our- selves a stockade for fear of the worst. Should the Indians prove hostile, or should the Indians come in with Mr. Free- man, for their friends with us, if we remain then as defence- less as now, I fear our weakness may tempt them to make war upon us. But there is another benefit I promise myself- from a good large stockade : this is, that it will embolden many U
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a citizen to settle in this town, whose nerves would not bear the thoughts of sleeping out of a fort. Had we have had a good stockade on the 21st ultimo, I do not believe that half so many, if any, indeed, would have fled the place. This work captain Kearsey, with his forty-five men, should have done; but he did nothing. Mr. Luce has a small block-house, yet large enough for the few troops with him, but this is all, not a citizen can be admitted in case of an attack. The citizens must provide for their own defence, which is peculiarly hard on them, to be obliged to leave their corn planting and clear- ing,-late in the season as it is,-in order to make some place where they may deposit their wives and children in safety, while themselves rest from the hard labor of the day. I have enclosed to Mr. Marsh a sketch of the ten acre lots, which he will put in your hands; by it you may see where yours, as a purchaser, falls ; your lot is strong land, more fit for mowing or pasture than plowing, by reason of hills, for they are more or less hilly. One remark I have hitherto omitted, viz : it is ex- pected, that on the arrival of governor St. Clair, this purchase will be organized into a county ; it is therefore of some moment which town shall be made the county town. Losantiville, at present, bids the fairest; it is a most excellent site for a large town, and is at present the most central of any of the inhabit- ed towns ; but if Southbend might be finished and occupied, that would be exactly in the centre, and probably would take the lead of the present villages until the city can be made somewhat considerable. This is really a matter of importance to the proprietors, but can only be achieved by their exertions and encouragements. The lands back of Southbend are not very much broken, after you ascend the first hill, and will af- ford rich supplies for a county town. A few troops stationed at Southbend will effect the settlement of this new village in a very short time.
June the 15th, 1789. An express has very lately been dispatched to general Harmer from major Hamtramck, at Post Vincennes, that great hostilities are committed by the Indians
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on the Wabash, many boats are taken and numbers of people killed. The major mentions in a letter to Mr. Luce, that the Miami and Wabash Indians are determined to attack the set- tlements in this purchase in the course of the summer. This news arrived last night, We are very defenceless, and know not of any troops coming to our assistance. Captain Henry sets out in the morning, and with him goes to Louisville six- teen or eighteen men, who do not expect to be here again till fall.
I have the honor to be, with every sentiment of esteem, dear sir, your most obedient servant,
JOHN CLEVES SYMMES.
HON. CAPTAIN DAYTON.
A relic of the past.
I have just had the opportunity of making an interesting ac- quaintance. Mr. Samuel Abbey, who belonged as sergeant to the detachment of United States troops under the command of major Doughty, by whose labors Fort Washington was built, in the year 1789, arrived in this city on Saturday night, February 27th, last.
He had left Cincinnati, being discharged from the service, after Harmer's defeat, in 1790, had returned to New England where his friends resided, and never seen this place since. What his feelings were on beholding, by the light of the next morning, this queenly city, may be more readily imagined than described. He had left it a little group of log houses, and perhaps fifty souls : he returned after the lapse of fifty years, to behold it a splendid city of fifty thousand inhabit- ants. He had left a community in which he knew the face and the name of every individual : he now returned to behold such change in the population, as to find strangers all around him, and, with here and there an exception, in some four or five survivors, all his contemporaries departed from the scene of their early dangers and toils.
After finding a resting place in the city, under the roof of the son of one of his early associates, and recruiting his
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strength for a ramble over the city, on Monday morning he set out to ascertain, if possible, amidst all that had defaced the original landmarks of the town he had left, the localities of such objects as were naturally of most interest to him. Of these Fort Washington, as a thing of course, was one. After at- tempting, to no purpose, while in the neighborhood it once occupied, to determine its actual site, he made his way once more to the public landing, where, after taking an observation of the mouth of Licking and the direction of the sun, almost the only objects which his eye might rest on that he had ever seen before-" Now," said he, " I will show you the place ; " and starting up Broadway as far as Third street, he turned, and after reaching the point where that street alters its angle northwardly, and glancing a minute around him, at that exact spot he set his foot down with emphasis and observed : " Here is the very spot where stood the flag-staff."
Mr. Abbey is seventy-four years of age, of considerable vig- or, both of mind and body ; and as a link connecting the past with the present, an uncommon object of interest to those, who, while they contemplate with gratification the rapid ad- vance of our prosperity, feel deeply what a debt of respect, gratitude, and sympathy, they owe the " early pioneers."
CENSUS SKETCHES.
UNDER this head, I propose to present to the community such facts as I have ascertained from notice or enquiry, while engaged in taking the late official enumeration of persons in Cincinnati, together with the various statistics I was directed to collect. These differ in their nature from those which have been already put to press, in the first section of " Cincinnati in 1841," in these respects,-
Ist. They are the fruits of my own personal observations or scrutiny, and, with few exceptions, are now published for the first time.
2nd. They are designed to embrace those details of sub- jects, and present those individual opinions and views, which the statistical character of the earlier part of the publication forbade ; and,
3rd. The excursive and miscellaneous character of this de- partment, affords an opportunity of imparting more variety and interest to subjects, and comprehends many things, which a more formal arrangement would exclude as too unimportant to form items in these pages.
I commenced my labors, under the authority of the marshal of the district of Ohio, on the first day of June last, as direct- ed by law, and was occupied in taking the census just five months. Many things fell under my notice, which appeared . to be of sufficient interest to others for me to commit to the daily press, and as intervals of leisure permitted, I reported them, from time to time, through the columns of the Gazette, Chronicle and Journal of this city. . These articles have been
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very extensively republished in newspapers abroad, and ap- pear to have excited a degree of interest elsewhere, hardly in- ferior to that felt in them at home. Of these, such incidents and views as are not of local or temporary consequence, I have incorporated into these pages, under appropriate heads.
The growth and improvement of this city have been so rapid and so recent, as to outstrip the expectations of most persons who visit it for the first time, even of those who had formed high anticipations of its importance. There are, there- fore, few places in the United States which more favorably impress a stranger who reaches it by water-the usual ave- nue-than Cincinnati. His eye glances upon that superb quay-our public landing, a space of ten acres, nearly, and a front of almost one thousand feet-with which our eastern ci- ties have nothing of the kind to compare, in beauty and con- venience. He surveys it, along its whole front, encumbered with packages of every description and to an immense amount -the foreign imports, or the domestic produce of the valley of the Miamis-concentrating constantly at this point. The hurried arrival and departure, singly and in squads, of a whole battalion of drays ; the unremitting and active labors of hands, loading and unloading the vessels in port; the incessant ring- ing of bells, as signals to passengers or the crews of the boats ; the brief and abrupt interchange of business among the clerks on board, and those belonging to the mercantile houses of the city ; with a great variety of sights and sounds of subordinate interest, forcibly-perhaps unduly-impress the mind of a stranger, by the value set upon time, and the constant exercise of industry around him, as a fact, that he has landed at a place where business is carried on upon a large scale, and among a. people, who have neither the leisure nor the disposition to be idle.
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After attending to his baggage, and securing his lodgings and his dinner, the traveler sallies out, and, in the first place, traverses the business section of the city, and having thus far reconnoitered it, extends his rambles over the region of dwel-
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ling-houses and public buildings. If he has an intelligent guide, he is taken along the line of Broadway to Fourth, and after casting his eye eastwardly to its termination, along a row of modern palaces, he directs his steps westwardly the whole course of that delightful street, as far as he finds time, or pos- sesses habits of walking to pursue it. . He cannot fail to no- tice the broad, well paved and thoroughly ventilated streets ; the number, variety and beauty of the public buildings ; the taste and spirit which leave spaces between the private edifi- ces for borders and sidewalks, and furnish an avenue to behold the garden attractions in the rear of the houses ; the verdure of the grass plats, and fragrance of the shrubbery which dec- orate the front of the dwellings, and the exhibition of flower vases in the windows of those who have no space except the rear of their buildings to cultivate. He will then mature the first judgment he formed, and say to himself, or to his travel- ing companion,-" These people have taste to improve and spirit to enjoy, as well as industry to acquire."
But if he possess that purer feeling which combines moral associations with the triumphs of art and industry, let him ex- tend his walks to the suburbs, particularly to the north and west. There he will witness sources of enjoyment, inde- pendent of fashion or wealth. Dwellings whose occupation is within the reach of the most moderate circumstances, on which the eye can rest with delight, for it realises the convic- tion, that the domestic enjoyments are there; that neatness and order are the tutelary genii of the place ; and that in these walls dwells the middle class-every where the bone and sin- ew of society. In this district he will find, on enquiry, that almost every man owns the house he occupies, and is thereby furnished with the strongest incentive cheerfully to contribute his share to public and private improvement.
Let the stranger, of whom I have spoken, next visit our workshops, and notice the extent and variety of manufactures carried on, and he will no longer wonder at the manifestations of improvement which meet him on every side ; for he will.
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