USA > Ohio > Brown County > History of Clermont and Brown Counties, Ohio, from the earliest historical times down to the present, V. 1 > Part 5
USA > Ohio > Clermont County > History of Clermont and Brown Counties, Ohio, from the earliest historical times down to the present, V. 1 > Part 5
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39
Having accomplished their sublimely simple destiny of planting corn on the Ohio, and having no nobler part to play, the Mound Builders vanished amid the deep dismay of dire de- feat. While reflecting on their awful extirpation, gratitude should be mingled with the sympathy due to the little offend- ing and much enduring race. As charity covers a multitude of sins, so their great respect for the dead who must have been loved exceedingly, palliates whatever else was wrong. In holding the country long with no harmful effect and in leav- ing it with a lasting blessing, they only met the frequent fate of suffering most for doing best. To him seeking oracles and hoping answers to make us less forlorn, History answers : The thorns are many but the flower is fair. The evolution of perfection is painful. Every change to larger plans-from moss to blue grass-from trilobites to Indians-from Indians to railroads-has involved the forced supplanting of some- thing weak by something stronger. Measured by the stand- ards of some unhappy because their greed is greater than their mead, the want or plenty of a tribal feast equally shared by all should be the ideal of impartial fortune. But those harping about the happy long ago or those mooning about a reign of earthly fraternity will learn nothing from those old- est memorials to prove that mankind is lapsing from innocence or approaching a promise of safety from human passions.
The race with time no longer beckoning with a blunted scythe but armed with urgent lightnings gives scant chance to saunter by the ancient mounds and linger for harmless tales of when the world was very young. All such curious lore, however entertaining, can be, at best, but speculative and inconclusive. Still, there is a grave pleasure in the study of the rare and broken proofs of a perished people. As we climb the mounds or walk over the lines of earthy walls that cost them utmost toil we can but wonder whether they were
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prompted by war or worship. As we look upon the rude memorials of their plundered graves we gather new lessons on the transient nature of all our schemes. As we chance upon the shapely flints that tipped their darts, we can but guess whether their last swift flight was forced by hunger or vengeance. We poise their axes with a subtle thought that they were far fitter to destroy than to prolong life. We stand by cabinets containing more of their weapons and uten- sils than a tribe possessed, and we muse with compassion for the pitiful beings that depended upon such meager mechan- ism in the cruel strife with their relentless fate. But thus musing we kindle with admiration for their brave defiance of the doom that made them die fighting for the beautiful land they could not hold. From such somber reflection we gladly turn for the far more pleasant purpose of telling the story of the courageous people of our own blood who deserve to be remembered for the good they did.
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CHAPTER III.
DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION.
A Tale of Trial and Triumph-The Wrongs of the Indians- They Did Not Inhabit Ohio-The Right of Discovery-Our Right to the Land Founded on War-The Missionaries- English Enterprise-Algonquin and Iroquois Rivalry-The Sparse Indian Population-The Ohio Valley the Most Va- cant of All-The French Incur Iroquois Hatred-The Strategic Importance of the Iroquois-The Shawnees- Virginians Find Waters Flowing to the South Sea-La- Salle Claims the Mississippi Valley for the French-The Shawnees Migrate to Ohio-The Peaceful Delawares Grow Brave in Eastern Ohio-The Miamis and Wyandots Enter Northwestern Ohio-The French Build Forts Along the Lakes and down the Mississippi-The Fur Trade-The French and English prepare to Fight for No Man's Land Along the Ohio-The First Ohio Land Company-Enter, George Washington - Celoron's Expedition Passes Old Clermont, August 29, 1749-Pickawillany-Christopher Gist Searches for Good Land-Nothing Finer Found than the Miami Region-The French Destroy Pickawillany and War Begins-The End of Peaceful Exploration.
After the admiration inspired by a study of the geological preparation of an exquisitely balanced home for man, and after the wonder at the troubled possession and woeful fail- ure of an insufficient people, the Story of the White Race in the Land of the Blue Lime Stone is a noble tale of trial and triumph.
But the outset of the story in many, perhaps most, minds confronts an error that must be refuted, because no explana- tion including'a mistake can be satisfactory. In school days which can never be ours again and yet are claimed forever, because "time their impression deeper makes," the "Wrongs of the Indians" was an ever popular subject for essay, decla- mation or debate. Whether deplored as inevitable or de-
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fended as necessary, the wrongs were a condition conceded for argument and impressed by many iterations until civili- zation was defamed by the decision that the Red Men had been cruelly driven from their heritage. However well this opinion fitted in Mexico or Peru, it does not apply in the Ohio Valley. For, after the Mound Builders were driven thence or perished there, only few came to see the desola- tion and none to stay. Not many intrusive graves or burials later than the first construction have been found in the mounds which would be well chosen for the casualties of transient bands. No extensive traces of a subsequent occupa- tion have been noted ; and the explorers found no tribes whose coming is unknown. While certain that man ceased to in- habit the once populous valley, the questions why and how long have no sufficient answer. The fewness and the small- ness of the northern tribes may have hindered a wider scat- tering, but that does not explain why any, however few, after the way was open, should prefer the harshness of the Laurentian Basin to the genial Valley called Beautiful. Or. perhaps, their superstition may have taken the plagues of the southern people as a warning to stay from the land ac- cursed. There is reason to assume that all this had happened much before the Columbian era. Thus the Ohio flowed the centuries by through a land lulled with its murmur in a slumbering rest, at last to be broken amid the din of the world's utmost need.
The much bruited phrase, "Spheres of influence," under which the Great Powers are masking their commercial plans, alias schemes of conquest, is only a smoother wording for the frank but brutal "Right of Discovery" which was brought into use when the partition of America began to multiply the strife of the world. With the hazards of navigation at that time scarcely more certain than the throwing of dice, it was the luck of the French to seize the St. Lawrence, and the fortune of the English to get the Chesapeake and a lonely landing on a rock-bound coast between. Then, the natural but much disturbed rights of the Indians, including a tribal life, the liberty of the wilderness, and the pursuit of game, was rudely superseded by the Right of Discovery invented to just- ify the cupidity of the artful. While a lofty purpose to spread
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the Gospel to the uttermost isles of the sea was proclaimed with much pious promise, the kings meditated that each should govern all that their subjects might have the fortune to find and the strength to hold. As those subjects had no choice but abject submission to the royal will, no better terms could be expected for the heathen, except that, instead of consenting to severe laws and conforming to a strange religion, they could and did go farther back into the hilly lands and study strategy. With such a convenient and self-satisfying pretense as the frequently self-asserted act of discovery, the claims were always vast and vague enough for any change or chance. In fact, the chance for contention was ready at the start.
A messenger posting warily over long deserted paths with budgets of warning for those in a difficult region, however conscious of scenes glowing with pleasing hues or charming with waving lines or thrilled with tuneful birds or rippling waters, has no leisure for plucking bloom, no time for admir- ing the shadow flecked plain or the forest plumed hills, or the cloud tumbled sky, and no quiet for heeding the harmony woo- ing him from haste. Instead he must search the festooning vine and the adorning moss for the scar toward the cliff where the way bends by a lightning blasted oak near the thicket hid- den pass to the famous victory. And so one fain to tell a pretty tale of happy people must go by battlefields or miss the way while hunting facts to gloss the truth. In more than half the years since the war for Ohio began our countrymen have stood in blazing lines of battle for what is now the en- joyment of all. The statement will have doubt and wonder from some and regret from all. A few pale blooded people with no practical remedy will assume philanthropy by execrat- ing the awful atrocity of war. If peace is light then strife is the shadow of life, and, until noon which is not yet, the shadow will go before. Because the omission would be more shame- ful to the living than harmful to the dead, the heroic struggles of the forefathers in battle with barbarism should be studied by all who delight to ponder the paths of progress.
Whatever may have been learned or guessed about the pre- historic population. the people found by the earliest explorers were subject to violent change and lived in a state but little" short of constant war which involved tribes in confederacies
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and fostered hereditary feuds. For a large authentic informa- tion about this we are indebted more than to all others, to the missionaries, who in devotion to their faith were the bravest of the brave. And none had more need for great hearts, for they went forth as sheep among wolves. If they were not always wise, being human, they were not always harmless. None, as their Master had warned, ever more surely brought not peace but a sword. With the zeal of martyrs, they had the tact of diplomacy, the skill of command, the polish of schools, the gift of tongues and all the arts of persuasion. All this availed not when they and their converts became the wretched cap- tives of hostile tribes to whom conversion seemed a racial trea- son, and the best qualities of the missionaries a sorcery to be punished with added hate to the utmost vindictive torture. Despite the danger of the errand, those bearing the Gospel gained and with practiced pens preserved a clearer knowledge of the tribes than could have been obtained by the sword alone.
While the grandeur of the Discovery lifts the name of Co- lumbus above the waves of oblivion until man shall cease to think, the glory of first beholding the American Continent ยท with scientific eyes belongs to the English sailors captained by John Cabot. Quick to see the dawn of a mighty change, and feeling that the noblest prize within grasp had been lost ' by accident, the English determined to challenge the fortune which seemed never to tire in favoring Spain. After four centuries, that determination has made their language the chief speech of the world. But for a hundred years, the de- mons of disaster thwarted every scheme to get a standing in the New World; except that the brilliant but sad fated Sir Walter Raleigh added Virginia to the maps, whence, a long heroic struggle and the Norman name of Clermont. The French were earlier to win, and for a while more successful in extending their claims, and might have been entirely so, but for what seemed a tribal brawl. On that wild and seem- ingly aimless strife along the middle and upper St. Lawrence, not only the fate of the English in America was hinged, but also there, as well as on the battlefields of Europe, the destiny of the Anglo Saxon. Experience gradually revealed that tribal affairs of the Appalachian and the St. Lawrence regions in-
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cluding the Great Lakes were dominated by two powerful con- federacies. Of these the larger and more indefinite north- ward and westward was the Algonquin.
The other confederacy was the Iroquois, who once held the region north of Lake Erie and between Lakes Huron and On- tario, whence they concentrated their power about the Lake Region of New York, and kept their Canadian lands for a game park. Their canoes with equal ease for the equal delight of hunting or warring could descend the Hudson, the Dela- ware, the Susquehanna or the Aleghenny, as they often called the Ohio, from Chautauqua to Cairo. The coast was theirs from the Chesapeake to the bays of Maine, whenever they chose to taste its luxuries. Unmolested by any but haughtily spurning all, their warrior-hunters, probably never exceeding twenty-five hundred, roamed to pass a winter in Tennessee or a summer on Hudson's Bay. With imperial strength from the union of five tribes as one, their dictate to neighboring bands was obedience or extirpation. The metaphors of their eloquence show that few have loved the pleasure of pathless woods, the rapture of lonely shores, and the silence of solitudes as did the Iroquois. Out of this passion for seclusion they pro- hibited encroachment on the vacant wilderness to which they had no more right than their spears could enforce. The fear of those spears reached far. On the east none ventured with- out permission into the forbidden lands once populous with the Mound Builders. On the south the Cherokees came down the Tennessee to the Muscle Shoals with some hunting but no staying farther north. From there the country was claimed to the mouth of the Ohio by the Chickasaws who lived along the Yazoo. The Illinois only weakly held four or five towns northward from the Kaskaskia. On the north, the Miamis, in front of the Chippewas who were at war with the Sioux, were forbidden to come nearer than the Maumee, the Miami of the North. Evidently, the time was not far off when much war would have been waged for the Beautiful Valley by the eager bands of the Northwest, already powerful in numbers and distant security. The not to be imagined fury that might have been was supplanted by the White Peril. In all of the country east of the Mississippi, the total Indian population at that time is fairly estimated at one hundred and eighty thousand souls.
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Of these less than one-tenth were west of the Appalachian ranges and north of the Tennessee. The most vacant space of all, much within which no tribe fixed a wigwam, is now generally outline by Pittsburgh, Nashville, Peoria and Toledo.
Unconscious of the wrath to be, perhaps unable to choose otherwise, Samuel Champlain, the French Governor, with sev- eral muskets and a retinue of Canadian Indians, passing south- ward for farther conquest, in the summer of 1609, by the love- ly lake that perpetuates his name, encountered, ambushed and defeated a band of Iroquois. Among the slain were some killed by bullets, about whose death there was awful won- der. The combined consternation for the prodigy, grief for the victims and rage at the defeat inspired a never forgotten hatred. Thenceforth the French and their friends were ene- mies ; and when the English came fighting their foe, the Iro- quois called them brothers. For two hundred years with scanty peaceful moons they were the constant and efficient allies of the British. Their strategic position between Canada and the coveted coast made them decisive in the Franco- English conflict for America. Until the French were van- quished, the never lacking lines of the Five Nations stopped marches that would have forced the English into the sea. As it was, many a sudden and horrible visitation was suf- fered by the Puritan settlements from elusive Canadian bands ; but it is significant that none reached the coast or tarried long. While less exploited, the strategic influence of the Iroquois on the west was scarcely less effectual. Unable to capture an ice-free port on the east side, the French even- tually decided upon a chain of forts from Canada, through the Mississippi Valley to Louisiana and the ever open Gulf. Since none but a water way could be then, instead of the natural and shortest plan with the least possible portage from the St. Lawrence to the nearby sources of the Ohio, and thence with its flow, they were compelled by Iroquois violence to accept the labor at Niagara and the risk of the Lakes and to go by the Wabash or more safely by the Illinois. Thus but for those puffs of smoke that transformed the schemes of fate, in those woods so long ago, where is now the sum- mer garden of the leisure class, the names from Florida to Plymouth Rock might have had Parisian phrase. And thus
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because of Iroquois wrath two hundred leagues afar, the flowers of Old Clermont blushed unseen, while the centuries of less fortunate climes drifted in blood away.
The idea intended is not the utter absence of human life from the country, but this: the occupation was so nomadic that such trace does not exist as fixes the position of other tribes with the certainty which obtains attention. The lit- tle that was learned was soon displaced or rearranged. In 1656, while the European world was wondering that Crom- well's mighty power as Lord Protector had averted the Mas- sacre of the Waldenses, the almost equally proud and valiant tribe of Eries occupying the southern watershed of the Lake named from them was literally extirpated by the Iroquois. Some early, indefinite notice was taken of a wandering tribe thought to be the Shawnees, who in 1660 were living on the Cumberland in middle Tennessee, whence they went to the highlands of South Carolina and then northward until per- mitted in 1698 to live on the Susquehanna. Then they came to Ohio and made an all eclipsing Indian record.
The tantalizing dream of the early explorers was gold and jewels through a short passage to the great South Sea and the fabled wealth of India and far Cathay. In "A Perfect Description of Virginia," published in London in 1649, much confidence is placed in the statement of the Indians, that rivers beyond the mountains were flowing to a great sea be- neath the setting sun: and the chief question was the width of the land to be crossed. On September 17, 1671, a party duly authorized by Governor Berkeley of Virginia, after wan- dering by a very high and steep mountain came to a Fall that made a great noise in the course of a river, that seemed to run westward about certain pleasant mountains. They fired guns, made marks and proclaimed the authority of King Charles II over all the lands thereby watered. This may well be regarded as one of the most important acts with- in the reign of that merry profligate; for the spot was the Great Falls of the Kanawha; and the event is remarkable as the earliest exploration by the English of the waters of the Ohio and the Mississippi, where the race is now seemingly supreme.
In about the same days, La Salle, famous among French
t
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explorers, was drawn to Canada by the fur trade and then lured by the fascinating fables into a search for a way to the South Sea. From a Shawnee prisoner among the Iro- quois he heard the story of a great river flowing though an Indian paradise during a journey of two moons to a salty sea. With legal authority for the, quest, he boated down an ever widening river with an ever expanding hope, until the Falls of the Ohio were reached, where in 1671 he was deserted by his faithless companions and forced to retreat through the unknown forest to Canada. But undismayed through other perilous voyages in canoes, he perceived something of the vast future, so that on April 9, 1682, he raised a cross and set the arms of France at the mouth of the Mississippi, which he claimed for Louis XIV unto the remotest sources of all its tributaries. In passing the mouth of the Ohio, La Salle noted that the river (including the Allegheny) was fifteen hun- dred miles in length, and that it was used by the Iroquois in warring excursions against the southern Indians. This is most ancient proof of a still more ancient strife. Such excur- sions also warned the French from the Ohio and kept them westward from the Wabash.
The many long past years since then call me to take notice of a few of the bolder scenes along the path, whereby progress reached our land. The retreating Red Men came first and, to some extent but not much, re-peopled the valleys full of bones. Notwithstanding the cruel strife in every direction, there is reason to believe that the Indian population has, not largely, but surely, increased during historic observation. The tribes displaced by the coast-dotting colonies were not ex- terminated: When farther resistance became in vain, they simply went back into the wilderness with added facilities for an easier life. For they were quick to gain guns and use iron tools instead of stone. The earliest accounts mention their pathetic eagerness to possess a scrap of metal or a bit of glass, while a knife or hatchet was an envied fortune. Least disturbed of all, because of their political position, and supplied with more than others, the Iroquois stoutly asserted their old claims and firmly held their conquest on Lake Erie. When the retiring movement began to crowd the Shawnees on the Susquehanna, that much molested tribe was permitted
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to migrate in 1728 to the mid Muskingum and thence spread across the Scioto to the lands about Xenia on the Little Miami. In this region, they were joined by scattered bands of their dialect from as far as Florida, where some are fain to hear a charming tone of their sweeter words in the name of Suwanee River made tender for ages to come by the melody of "The Old Folks At Home." If this be doubted, we are certain that early maps showed the course of the "Shawnee" River until the name was changed to honor the Duke of "Cumberland," "The Martial Boy" of twenty-five years, who disgraced his victory at Culloden by an infamous massacre made more atrocious by pretended refinement. The instance stands as one of many American misnomers. The Shawnees thus located formed the front edge of the long Conflict for the Ohio. The gathering of the families of that tribe for the bold defiance of their fate may somewhere and sometime have equal but surely no superior comparison in dramatic quality.
Eighty to fifty years ago, a much quoted lesson in school books was Penn's vaunted Treaty with the Peaceful Dela- wares, whereby much cheap land was easily got. The equa- tions of history not stated in that lesson teach a sadder con- clusion for friend and foe alike, not to be reached without a study of the Massacre at Gnadenhutten and some attention to Crawford's Defeat. A full account also must be taken of the awful payment of blood exacted at the Massacre of Wyoming by the Iroquois whose grandfathers Penn had neglected to conciliate. Dejected by the arrogance of the masterful Iroquois, parted from their hunting lands by a siren song that no longer thrilled, and unwilling to take a pitiful wage from English scorn by tilling the fields or clearing the groves through which they had strolled at will, the sorrowful Delawares soon followed the Shawnees to the Muskingum. In that region of beauty exceeding even an Indian's dream of his Happy Land, they and their brothers, the Monsis, be- gan to remember the former glory of their common race, and determined that none should again be braver. Many years ago, so many that there can be no more, so their legends ran, the Len-ni-Len-a-pe came from the west beyond the mountains, across the land of big rivers and more mountains,
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finding much game and growing stronger than anyone is now. They came by people living in places with great walls, who gave them food and helped them over deep waters. But when some not across were slain, they turned back and left none alive. Then they came on to the sea, where none can go farther. This by some is thought to be a tradition about the Mound Builders. While the Delawares were gaining, a few smaller tribes came to Eastern Ohio, like the Tuscarora to the Tuscarawas and those who gave their name to the Mingo Plains.
As some were forced from the east by white colonization, so others were crowded in from the northwest by the migra- tions of their own race. The Miamis came to the upper branches of the Great Miami and left their place on the Maumee to the Wyandots with the Ottawas farther east. With transient exception, Southern Ohio and Kentucky were unoccupied. In 1729 the French surveyed the Ohio River down to the mouth of the Great Miami. The two score years before and nearly as many after were busily used in build- ing forts to connect and protect the provinces on the Lakes and by the Gulf. Nor was this done without reason and profit. Candid reflection must admit that the English were more offensive to the Indians than the French, who gleefully shared their sports and dangers; asked but simple deference to the showy ceremonials of the Church, and sought hardly more than the mutual advantage of trading posts. The colder policy of the English destroyed the forests, drove the game away, and threatened all with the withering witchery of the surveyor's compass and chain.
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