History of Marietta and Washington County, Ohio, and representative citizens, Part 3

Author: Andrews, Martin Register, 1842-; Hathaway, Seymour J
Publication date: 1902
Publisher: Chicago : Biographical Pub. Co.
Number of Pages: 1490

USA > Ohio > Washington County > Marietta > History of Marietta and Washington County, Ohio, and representative citizens > Part 3

Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).

Though both came from beyond the same ocean the Iroquois found that there was a great difference between the founders of "New England" and the founders of "New France." The former settled down quietly, bought land. cleared it and raised crops. They treated the Indian very respectfully-paying little atten- tion to him or his land. The French, however, were different. There was no end to their running about. Their arrival was scarcely noised abroad before they were seen hurry- ing up the inland rivers on missions of various import.

And so the Iroquois came to hate the French, especially after their first encounter with them on the shores of Lake Champlain, when the white captain fired off a horrid arque- buse which killed two chieftains and wounded another, and liked to have scared the whole Indian army to death. This hatred was ang- mented as the French made friends with the Algonquin tribes of the lower St. Lawrence who, having fled from before the Iroquois war- riors like dust before the wind. now. in re- venge, piloted the French up the Ottawa and showed them a way to enter the Great Lakes of the Iroquois by the back door. Georgian Bay! Once acquainted with the five Great Great Lakes, the French were even less satis- fied than before, and down into the hunting grounds of the Iroquois they plunged in search of a great river and a sea which would lead to China. Already they had named the portage arotind one of the St. Lawrence Rapids "La Chine," believing that the river led "to China"

-- a country of which the farthest western na- tions, the herce Chippewas and Dacotahs, even. had never heard!

As the 18th century grew okdler the Ire - quois became too busy with affairs of war and diplomacy an l trade to come each year to their western hunting grounds and guard them with the ancient jealousy. Situated as they were between the French and English settlements, they found a neutral role difficult to maintain and they became fitfully allied now with the _ \1- hany, now with the Quebec governments, as each struggled to gain possession of the great Northern fur trade which was under the domi - nating influence of the Six Nations, who con- trolled the Ottawa, St. Lawrence and all the New York rivers.

THE STORY OF THE DELAWARES. SILAWANESE AND WYANDOTS.

The hunting grounds of the Iroquois were too delightful a land to remain long inoccu1- pied. Had Providence willed that these for- ests in and west of the AAppalachian mount system should have continued to be unoccupied until the white man came to possess it, many of the darkest pages of American history could never have been written But the very reverse of this happened. Not only was it filled with Indians, but there came to it from far distant homes, as if chosen by fate, three of the most desperate Indian nations on the continent, each having been made ready, seemingly, by long years of oppression and tyranny, for the bloody work of holding this West from the white man. The three nations found by the first explorers in the abandoned hunting grounds of the Iroquois had been fugitives on the face of the earth for half a century, bandied about between the stronger confederacies like out- casts, denied refuge everywhere, pursued. per- secuted, half destroyed. The story of any one of them is the story of the other two-a sad. desperate tale at the best.

These nations were the Shawanese. Dela- wares and Wyandots. The centers of popula-

HISTORY OF MARIETTA AND WASHINGTON COUNTY,

tion which they formed were on the Scioto. Muskingum and Sandusky rivers, respectively. And, with the fierce Miamis and the remnants of the Iroquois, these tribes fought the longest and most successful war ever waged by the i relations between them and the French were red race in the history of the continent. From most cordial. The year of this memorable Wyandot hegira is given as 1701, which, for- tunately, corresponds with the founding of De- troit. their lairs on the Alleghany. Scioto and Mus- kingum, they defied the white man for half a century, triumphing terribly at Braddock's defeat and St. Clair's, the greatest victories over the white man ever achieved by the red.

The first of these nations to enter the old hunting ground of the Iroquois was the Wyan- dot. Their home was about Sandusky Bay, and along the shores of the Sandusky River. Originally the Wyandots dwelt on the upper St. Lawrence, and were neighbors of the Seneca tribe of the Six Nations. As the re- sult of a quarrel over a maiden. as legend has it. but more likely as the result of Iroquois corquest, the Wyandots were driven from their homes, vanishing westward into the land of the Hurons, who lived by the lake which bore their name. Here the brave Jesuit missionaries found them, where they were known as the "Tobacco Nation." The confederation of the Iroquois as the Six Nations sounded the doom of the Hurons, and with the Senecas at the head of the confederacy, only ruin stared the fugitive Wyandots in the face. By the be- ginning of the 18th century they had again fled westward, hopelessly seeking a new refuge. Some of the nation continued journeying even beyond the Sioux and Dacotahs to the "Back- hone of the World," as they called the Rocky Mountains. There, tradition states, they found wanderers like themselves, who spoke a familiar language-Wyandots who had come hither long before to escape the revengeful Senecas! But the majority of the nation built great rafts and set afloat on the Detroit River. This was a reckless alternative to choose, but it brought the persecuted nation to their long- sought place of refuge. As they passed the Lesent site of Detroit, they saw with amaze- intent an array of white tents and soldiers dressed in white keeping watch. The Wyan-

dots had found the French building De Troit, and fear of the Senecas vanished. On the shores of neighboring Sandusky Bay on Lake Erie the Wyandots built their fires, and the

When "Mad Anthony" Wayne was wag- ing his last campaign against the Western In- dians in 1794. he once summoned to him a knowing frontiersman and asked him if he could not capture an Indian in order to get some information concerning the enemy.

"Can you not capture one near Sandusky?" asked the General, as the man hesitated.

"No. not Sandusky," was the ready reply. "And why not at Sandusky?"

"There are only Wyandots at Sandusky." "Well, why won't a Wyandot do?" insisted the irrepressible Wayne.

"Because, sir." replied the woodsman "a Wyandot is never captured alive.

The story is typical of the Wyandots throughout all their history for a century-for it lacked but five years of a century when they signed the treaty at Greenville after General Wayne's campaign. Allied in the beginning. as we have seen, to the French, the Wyandots fought sturdily for their cause until New France was abandoned. Under Pontiac they joined in the plot to drive out the English from the West and win back the land for France. In turn they became attached to British inter- ests at the breaking out of the Revolutionary War, and they were as true to the very last to them as they had been formerly to the French. Through their aid England managed to retain forts Sandusky, Miami and Detroit for 20 years after the close of the Revolution, despite the solemn pledges given in the treaty of Paris.

The Wyandots came from the far North. The second nation to enter the Alleghany for- ests was the Shawanese, who came from the far Sonth. The Shawanese were the only

AND REPRESENTATIVE CITIZENS.

American Indians who had even so much as a tradition of having come to this continent from across the ocean. Like that of the savage Wyandots, the history of the Shawanese before they settled down on the swift Scioto is a cheerless tale. Too proud to join one of the great Southern confederacies, if. indeed the opportunity was ever extended to them, they sifted northward through the forests from Florida until they settled between the Cumber- land and Tennessee rivers. Here the earliest geographers found them and classified them as the connecting branch between the Agon- quins of New England and the far Northwest, so different were they from their Southern neighbors. They remained but a short time by the Cumberland, for the Iroquois swept down upon them with a fury never exceeded by the Cherokees or Mobilians, and the fugi- tives scattered like leaves eastward toward the Alleghanies. By permission of the govern- ment of Pennsylvania, 70 families, perhaps 300 souls, settled down upon the Susquehanna at the beginning of the 18th century. By 1730 the number of Indian warriors in Pennsylvania was placed at 700, one-half of whom were said to be Shawanese. This would indicate a total population of perhaps 1.500 Shawanese. With the approach of the settlements of the white man and the opening of the bloody French and Indian War, they left, the Susque- hanna and pushed straight westward to the Scioto River valley beyond the Ohio.

The Shawanese have well been called the "Bedouins of the American Indians." The main body of the nation migrated from Florida to the Cumberland and Susquehanna and Scioto rivers. Fragmentary portions of the nation wandered elsewhere. Cadwallader Cob- den said in 1745 that one tribe of the Shaw- anese "had gone quite down to New Spain." When La Salle wished guides from Lake On- tario to the Gulf of Mexico in 1684. Shawan- ese were supplied him. it being as remarkable that they were Shawanese so far north ( though they may have been prisoners among the Iroquois) as it was that they were ac

quainted with the Gulf of Mexico. In the Black Forest the Shawanese gained another and a well earned reputation-of being the fiereest, most uncompromising Indian nation with which the white man ever dealt. They were for the half century which the Black Forest was their home and the Wyandots their allies, ever first for war and last for peace. U'nder their two terrible well-known chieftains, Cornstalk and Tecumseh. they were allied both with the French and with the British in the vain attempt to hold back the tide of civilization from the river valleys of the Cen- tral West. Missionary work among them proved a failure. They made treaties but to break them. Not an acre of all the land which lay south of them, Kentucky, but was drenched Is blood they spilt. Incited by such hell- hounds as the Girty boys, there was no limit to which the Shawanese could not be pushed. and for it all they had been trained by instinct and tradition through numberless years of des perate ill-fortune.

The Wyandots and the Shawanese same from the North and South. The third nation which made the hunting grounds of the lfo- quois its homeland came from the Eastern sea- board. The legendary history of the Lenni- Lenapes cannot be equaled, in point of ro- mance in Indian history. Tradition states that they lived at a very early period west of the Mississippi River. Uniting with their neigh-

bors, the Iroquois, the two nations began an eastward conquest which ended in driving the giant Alleghans, the Wound-Builders, from the alluvial valleys of the Scioto, Miami, Muskin- gum. Wabash, Kaskaskia. Cahokia and 11li- nois, where their mounds and ring forts were found, and dividing between them the Atlantic seaboard. the Iroquois taking the north and the Lenni-Lenapes settling in the valley of the Delaware, where they took the name of Delawares. But not long after this division had been effected. the spirit of jealousy arose. The Iroquois receiving arms from the Dutch who founded New Amsterdam ( New York ). became expert in the accomplishments of war.

HISTORY OF MARIETTA AND WASHINGTON COUNTY,

The Delawares adapted themselves to peaceful modes of living, and their laden maize fields brought them rich returns for their labors. With the confederation of the Iroquois tribes into the Six Nations, the doom of the Dela- wares was sealed. By treachery or by main force the upstart "uncles" from the North fell to quarreling with their Southern "nephews." Seeing that nothing but ruin stared them in the face the Delawares began selling their land to the Dutch, the friends of their "Good Mig- non" Penn. "How came you to take upon yourselves to sell land?" was the infuriated cry of the Iroquois, who sent by their orator, Cawassatiego, their ultimatum to the weak- ened Delawares. "You sell land in the dark. Did you ever tell us you sokl land to them? * We find you are none of our blood. Therefore we charge you to remove instantly. We assign you two places to go, either to U'go- man or Shamokin: Go!"

kingum, where the poet had Evangeline visit them in her search for Gabriel. And still the massacre of Gnadenbrutten is told to wonder- ing children in Delaware wigwams which dot the Ozark Mountains as they once dotted the Alleghany valleys.

The total number of Indians in the hunt- ing ground of the Iroquois would be difficult to estimate. During the Revolutionary War, when the Central West was filled with an hun- dred fugitive tribes, a United States Commis- sioner reported the number of Indian war- riors affiliated with the Iroquois as 3,100, divided as follows: Wyandots 300, Mingoes 600, Senecas 650, Mohawks 100, Cuyahogas 220, Onondagas 230, Oneidas and Tuscarawas 400, Ottawas 600 ; the other nations were given as follows: Chippewas 5,000, Pottawatomies 400; scattering. 800. Considering the Indian family as consisting of four persons, the total Indian population of the Central West would be 40.000, probably a very liberal estimate.

Dismayed, disgraced. the Delawares re- tired from the green maize fields which they loved and fell back, a crowd of disordered fugi- NOTES. tives, into the Alleghany forests. Sifting through the forests, crowding the Shawanese On the Plan of the . Incient Eurthecorks. before them, they at last crossed the Alleghany General Putnam has left very explicit notes about the plan of the ancient works as he found them in 1788. He says, "There are at least three kinds of works at Marietta as described on the plan, and designed for very different purposes. The walls A B C D and E F G H ( the two large quadrangles covering the greater part of the high ground and lying be- tween Putnam and Montgomery streets ) were evidently erected for defense, and whoever views the figures 1. 2. &c., which are as level on top as a mosaic pavement, will not hesitate to pronounce that on them once stood some spacious buildings, and whoever considers the other figures, although he may be at a loss with respect to their use, he will have no dif- ficulty in believing they were for purposes very different from either of the other kinds of work. Thus far, everyone who has viewed them, and, I will venture to say, whoever shall and settled down on the upper Muskingum about 1740. Here they lived for half a cen- tury, fighting with Villiers and Pontiac and Little Turtle. IIere they were visited by armiies and by missionaries who did noble work among them. The Delawares later fought against the armies of Harmar. St. Clair and Wayne, after they abandoned the valley which was first their home, and then sank hopelessly into the general rout of the broken tribes moving westward after the battles of Fallen Timbers and Tippecanoe. On the Kansas River and its tributaries the remnant of the once powerful Lenni-Lenapes range today over a territory of a million acres, still dreaming, it is said. of a time when they will again as- sume their historie position at the head of the Indian family. A great mass of tradition lives with them of their castern conquest, the homes on the Delaware, Alleghany and Mus- ' view them, will be of one opinion, but with re-

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PLAN OF THE ANCIENT EARTHWORKS ON THE PRESENT SITE OF MARIETTA.

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.IND REPRESENTATIVE CITIZENS.

spect to other matters everyone has his conject- ures and I will give you mine.

"The chasms or openings in the walls by many are supposed to be intended for gate- ways, and no doubt but that they served partly for that purpose ; but I think it highly probable that both these and the openings at the angles were supplied with wooden works, probably with something like bastions or projecting towers for the lodgment of the troops assigned for the defense of the place as well as the better to flank the curtains. It is observable in the square A B C D that from one opening to another the distance is no more than from 14 to 20 perches, the half of which distance must be the necessary flight of an arrow in order for a complete flank fire.

"As to the antiquity of these works they exceed all calculations, the size of trees grow-

ing on them being the same as on the other land.

Referenties.

"A B C D is the remains of an an- cient wall or rampart of earth whose base is from 25 to 36 feet, and its height from four to eight feet. Figs. 5 and 6 are two parallel walls of earth distant from each other, from center to center, 14 perches, at e and f their perpendicular height is 21 feet and base 42 feet : at g and h their height is eight feet. This height was taken on the inside or between the two walls. On the outside they are nowhere more than five feet high.

"E F G H are walls or banks of earth. Their height and base were not taken by measure but they appear to be about 20 feet base and from three to five feet high."

CHAPTER II.

THREE FLAGS IN THE WEST

FRENCH EXPLORATIONS AND ESTABLISHMENT OF FRONTIER FORTS-ARMS OF THE KING OF FRANCE-FRENCH AND ENGLISH CHARACTER CONTRASTED-FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR-PONTIAC'S REBELLION-THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR IN THE WEST-MASSACRE OF GNADENHUTTEN .- NOTE.

FRENCH EXPLORATIONS AND ESTABLISHMENT OF FRONTIER FORTS.

In the year 1540, Jacques Cartier raised a white cross crowned with the fleur de lis of France upon an improvised altar of crossed canoe paddles at Quebec, bearing the inscrip- tion "Franciscus primus, Dei gratia, Franco- rum Rex Regnat," and formally took posses- sion of a new continent. Two centuries later, in the dawn of early morning, British sol- i diers wrested from the betrayed Montcalm the mist-enshrouded height where that emblazoned cross had stood and New France fell-"amid the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin."

All the American Indians soon found, as the Iroquois had, that nothing would do but these newly-come Frenchmen must run about over all the country. Each river must be as- cended, the portages traversed and lakes crossed. Every hint of further rivers and lakes resulted forthwith in a thousand ques- tions if not in the immediate formation of an exploring expedition.

And yet there was method in the madness of this running about. In the first place log forts were founded at various points, and when the world came to know even a fraction

as much as the French did about the West, it found that these forts were situated at the most strategic points on the continent. For instance, there was Fort Frontenac, near the narrowing of Lake Ontario into the St. Law- rence. This fort commanded that river. Then there was Fort Niagara, which commanded the route to Lake Erie. There was Fort De- troit, which commanded all access from Lake Erie to lakes Huron, Michigan and Superior. There were forts La Boeuf, Venango and Du- quesne to hold the Ohio, Fort Sandusky to hold the Sandusky River, Fort Miami at the head of the rapids on the Miami-of-the-Lakes to hold that river, and the portage to the Wa- bash, and Vincennes and Kaskaskia in the Illi- nois country.

The Indians did not object to these forts, because they found that they were really no forts at all, but rather depots and warehouses for the great fur trade, where their stacks of beautiful otter and sable and beaver skins could be exchanged for such splendid colored ribbons and tinkling bells and powder and lead and whiskey! Each fort became a trading post where the Indians gathered frequently for en- tertainments of various character.

Fancy if you can the emparadising dreams which must have filled the head of many a Gov-

AND REPRESENT. ITICE CITIZENS.

ernor of New France, as he surveyed with heaving breast the vast domains of the Missis- sippi Valley, comprising four million square miles of delectable land, and fancied the mighty empire it would some day sustain-outrivaling the dreams of a "Grand Monarque." Picture, if you can, the great hopes of the builder of Quebec who could see the infant city holding in fee all the great system of lakes besides whose sea-outlet it stood-the Gibraltar of the new continent. Fancy the assemblies of notables which met when a returned Jesuit or forgot- ten coureur de bois came hurrying down the Ottawa in his canoe and reported the finding of a mighty river, yet unchronicled, filled with thousands of beaver and otter; a new bright gem in the Bourbon crown.

And so, we may suppose, such assemblies referred mockingly to the stolid Englishmen living along the Atlantic seaboard to the South. How the French must have scorned England's conception of America! Long af- ter the French had passed from Quebec to the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, the English had a boat built at home which could be taken apart on the upper waters of the James River, carried across the mountains on wagons to be put together on the shores of the Pacific Sea! How the French must have laughed when they heard of this; we can imagine them drinking hilari- ously to the portable boat stranded in the . Alle- ghany forests three thousand miles from its destination !

And so it was that the wily emissaries of the Bourbon throne incorporated the fast-fill- ing hunting grounds of the Iroquois with New France. It was an easily acquired country since they brought nothing into it that was not wanted, and took nothing away-but furs! Though of these furs they were mighty partic- ular respecting the number and the quality, and especially that traders from the English settlements over the mountains should not come and get them.

But it turned out that the English not only came, but even claimed for themselves the Ohio country which lay beyond the Alleghany

mountains! If Cabot and Drake discovered the continent, did they not discover its inter- jor as truly as its seaboard? Moreover, the English had by treaty acquired certain rights from the Iroquois which held good, they main- tained, wherever the Iroquois had carried their irresistible conquests from Labrador to the Everglades of Florida. And who could then say that this did not hold good beyond the .Al- leghanies, where the Iroquois for so long had been the acknowledged masters?

Thus it was that slowly, naturally and with the certainty of doom itself, there drew on the terrible war which decided whether the destiny of the new continent should be placed in the hands of a Teuton or a Gaelic civiliza- tion-whether Providence should hold the de- scendants of the founders of Jamestown or of Quebec responsible for its mighty part in the history of human affairs. This war has re- ceived the vague name of the French and In- (lian War. By this is meant the war Eng- land and her colonists in America fought against the French and Indians.

It is remarkable enough that this war, which was to settle so much, began from a spark struck in the West. The explanation of this is found in the fact that a great expanse of forest separated the English settlements on the Atlantic seaboard and the great line of French settlements, 3.000 leagues in length, which stretched from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. The nearest points of contact were in Virginia and Penn- sylvania, for here the rivalry of French and English traders had been most intense.

Virginians found it a very acceptable part to play-this trying the test case with France to decide who was the real master of the land over the mountains. In 1749 a company of Viriginian gentlemen received from the King of England a royal charter granting them pos- session of 200,000 acres of the Black Forest between the Monongahela and Kanawha rivers.

The astonishment and anger of the French on the St. Lawrence knew no bounds! Im- mediately the French governor Galissoniere

HISTORY OF MARIETTA AND WASHINGTON COUNTY,

set on foot plans which would result in the withdrawal of the English colonists.

Looking back through the years, it may seem very strange that the governors of New France never anticipated a clash with England on the Ohio and prepared for it. but it appears, that, of all the West, Lake Erie and the Ohio River were the least knowon to the French. This can be understood from the following romantic story of French exploration :

On a wild October day, Cartier who raised the altar at Quebec and claimed the new con- tinent stood on Mount Royale, looking wist- fully westward. Behind him lay the old world throbbing with an intuition of a north- west passage to China and India. Before him shimmered two waterways in the sun. As we know them now the southern was the St. Lawrence, the western the Ottawa.

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History of Marietta and Washington County, Ohio, and representative citizens, Part 3

Author: Andrews, Martin Register, 1842-; Hathaway, Seymour J Publication date: 1902 Publisher: Chicago : Biographical Pub. Co. Number of Pages: 1490

Author: Andrews, Martin Register, 1842-; Hathaway, Seymour J
Publication date: 1902
Publisher: Chicago : Biographical Pub. Co.
Number of Pages: 1490