USA > Ohio > History of Ohio, covering the periods of Indian, French and British dominion, the territory Northwest, and the hundred years of statehood > Part 14
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St. Clair was a native of Scotland (1734), who came to America with Amherst's army. After 1763 he commanded Fort Ligonier in western Pennsylvania, where he was granted lands. He warmly supported Pennsylvania in the troubles with Virginia, and Dunmore asked in vain for his dismissal from office. A colonel of the conti- nentals at the beginning of the Revolution, he was promoted to briga- dier in 1776, and. later to major-general. He participated in the battles of Trenton and Princeton, and was in command of Ticon- deroga at the opening of Burgoyne's campaign. His evaenation of this post brought him under popular eensure, but the court-martial acquitted him of the charges of eowardiee and incapacity. It hap- pened that the troops he withdrew from probable loss were of use in the subsequent capture of Burgoyne, and Congress ratified the ver- diet of the court-martial. After the war he was elected to Congress, and made president of that body. He was a man of superior ability, and of upright character. Though democratie in manner, and popu- lar on that account with the western people, he held tenaciously to his opinions and was jealous of his authority and prerogative. As leader of the majority in the constitutional convention of Pennsyl- vania in 1783 he had advocated the appointment of higher judges for
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life, exclusion of foreigners from suffrage for a considerable time, and a property qualification for all voters, and opposed enforced rota- tion in office. Consequently he was obnoxious already to the "fierce democracy" of Thomas Jefferson, though national politics did not seriously affect the Ohio country for the next ten years.
Governor St. Clair landed at Marietta, July 9, 1788, greeted by a salute from the guns of the fort, and after Colonel Sargent arrived on the 15th, with the commissions, an assembly of the inhabitants was called, and the government of the Northwest Territory inaugu- rated. The governor was also commander of militia, and had the appointment of magistrates and other civil officers as well as mili- tary. He and the judges were the law-making power, subject to the approval of Congress, until the territory had 5,000 free male inhabi- tants, when a house of representatives could be elected by the peo- ple. This body should then nominate ten persons, of whom Congress should select five as a legislative council, who, with the governor, would constitute an upper house of legislature.
The governor and judges were authorized, not to make new experi- ments in legislation, but to adopt and publish such laws of the orig- inal states as were necessary and best suited to the circumstances of the district. The governor and judges soon disagreed about the con- struction of this provision, the judges holding that they had the power to select parts of laws, and even to enact new laws based upon the spirit of existing state laws, while St. Clair was for a stricter con- struction. But he gave way, and legislation went on without much regard to the ordinance. Congress never directly approved any of these laws, and Judge Burnet says their constitutionality was always doubted by the early bar of Ohio. But as the judges were also the lawmakers, there was nothing to do but accept their work .*
The first law of the Territory was adopted July 25, 1788, provid- ing for militia service of the male inhabitants, and weekly drills. In all ten chapters of laws were promulgated at Marietta. In 1790 a few laws of local interest were enacted at Vincennes and Cincinnati, and after that there was no legislation until the adoption of the Max- well code in 1795. That the governor and judges, in the enactment of laws from 1788 to 1795, while exceeding their authority, says Judge Chase, did not abuse it, may be inferred from the fact that all, except two laws that had been previously repealed, were confirmed by the first territorial legislature. All these laws, as well as the temporary government provided by the ordinance were superseded and annulled by the adoption of the State Constitution. The supreme court of the United States has expressed the opinion that the ordinance as a whole was superseded by the adoption of the con- stitution of the United States; which, if correct, limits the effective
* Marietta address by F. F. Oldham.
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life of the ordinance between July 15, 1788, and March 4, 1789. The principles of government enunciated in it survive, however, in that constitution and in the constitutions of the states formed from the Territory and the constitutions of many other states modeled upon them.
One of the duties of the governor was to lay out counties for the establishment of judicial authority, and he accordingly established the county of Washington, including all Ohio east of the Scioto and the Cuyahoga and south of the Indian line. In all this vast area there was no town save Marietta, and no other settlements except the scattered inhabitants along the upper Ohio. Courts of common pleas and quarter sessions were created for the county. Rufus Put- nam and Benjamin Tupper were appointed judges of the court of common pleas, and on September 2d Col. Ebenezer Sproat, high sher- iff, with drawn sword marched at the head of a procession including the officers of the garrison, the governor and territorial judges, up the path cut through the forest to the strong house built upon Cam- pus Martius, where Dr. Cutler invoked the blessing of Almighty God, and the opening of the first court was proclaimed. On the 9th the judges of the court of quarter sessions, exercising many of the present functions of county commissioners, were also formally installed.
While the settlers were busy clearing fields and building log houses they were visited, August 27th, by the advance guard of another col- ony, led by John Cleves Symmes, who stopped for a few days to per- form his duties as a lawmaker for the territory. Symmes was a man of forty-four years, a native of Long Island, who had been a colonel of militia in the Revolution, and rendered public service as lieuten- ant-governor of New Jersey, judge of the supreme court of that state, and member of the council and of Congress. He was bound for the Miami valley, naturally a more inviting field for settlement than the Muskingum, but avoided on account of the Indian hostilities. So frequent were the forays of Kentuckians, Shawanees and Wyandots through its beautiful valleys and among its verdant hills that it became known as the "Miami slanghter house," and future events were to confirm the aptness of the title. Is late as March, 1788, while Putnam and his colony were coming down the Ohio, a consid- erable party of explorers, including Samuel Purviance of Baltimore, and some French mineralogists and botanists, were nearly all killed or captured by the Indians at the mouth of the Great Miami.
But before this the forays of the Kentnekians had drawn one Ben- jamin Stites, a New Jersey trader of a speculative turn of mind, into the Miami valley, and, enthusiastie over the possibilities of that rich country, he returned to New Jersey to enlist in his scheme John Cleves Symmes, Gen. Jonathan Dayton, Elias Boudinot, Dr. Wither- spoon, and other worthies of that day. An association resembling the Ohio company was formed, Congress was asked ( August, 1787)
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for a grant on the same terms given Putnam and his associates in the previous month, of the lands between the two Miamis, as far back as the north line of the proposed purchase of the Ohio company. Symmes encountered the same delay that had discouraged Cutler, but being of an enthusiastic nature, he seems to have taken it for granted that his enterprise would be approved, and began disposing of the country in November by covenanting to deed Stites 10,000 aeres of the best lands in the valley. This he followed with a glow- ing prospectus, inviting settlers to seleet lands, and avail themselves of the low price, two-thirds of a dollar an acre, before it was raised on May 1, 1788, to one dollar. On his own behalf he reserved the nearest entire township to the mouth of the Great Miami, as well as fraetional townships about it, as the site of a proposed eity. There was a rush for the land bargains, and Matthias Denman, of New Jor- sey, also with a town in view, took up an entire seetion opposite the mouth of Lieking river.
Stites and a party of settlers landed November 18, 1788, just below the Little Miami, and founded a town ealled Columbia. Sym- mes and party were on the way, but waited at Limestone (Maysville, Ky.) for a military eseort, and Denman, without a following, went to Lexington, Ky., and formed a partnership with the founder of that eity, Col. Robert Patterson, a Pennsylvanian who had visited Ohio as an officer in the Indian campaigns, and John Filson, a Pen- sylvania sehoolmaster who had become a Kentucky surveyor and the first of Kentucky historians. In the deal between these three, Den- man received £20 in Virginia currency and the Kentnekians each a third interest in the seetion opposite the mouth of Lieking, where the partners proposed to found a town and call it Losantiville. This was as tasteful and appropriate as the names Thomas Jefferson had proposed for the northwestern states, but less severely elassieal .* Free lots being offered as an indueement to immediate settlement, a large company of Kentuckians followed Patterson and Filson to the eity site, where they met Denman, Symmes and Israel Ludlow, chief surveyor of the Miami company, September 22, 1788. A plat had been made by Filson, and the city of Cineinnati then had its dedi- cation. But the survey and location of lots could not be made until Ludlow had ascertained if this section were within twenty miles of the mouth of the Great Miami.
Symmes, in his headlong course as a promoter, had been brought to a sudden cheek by the fact that the treasury board did not favor his application for such a great river front, and in view of his nnau- thorized procedure, was disposed to have nothing to do with the
* The combination of Latin and French is supposed to represent l'os anti ville, and, reversed, it might be interpreted: "town opposite the mouth." Perhaps Villantios had a sound that suggested the reversal.
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project. Through the intereession of General Dayton and Daniel Marsh, representing Symmes' associates, the board was brought to consent to the sale of a twenty-mile front, eastward from the month of the Great Miami, and running back far enough to contain one million acres, and this traet was not formally contraeted for until three weeks after the preliminary location of Cincinnati# (October 15, 1788).
While awaiting the survey, a large part of the adventurers, as they called themselves in that day, made an excursion into the interior to view the promised land and encountered an encampment of Indians, from which they turned back. The historian, Filson, becoming separated from the party, probably was killed by the Shawanees, as he was never again heard from. The adventurers all returned to Kentucky or the east. Ludlow became the successor of Filson in the partnership. Symmes went to Limestone, and waited for the con- elsion of a new treaty with the Indians to insure peace. This desired treaty was concluded by Governor St. Clair at Fort Harmar, January 9, 1789, reaffirming the bonnds set by the treaty of Fort McIntosh, as the fruit of conquest .? The Iroquois chief, Joseph Brant, approached the council place, but did not participate, and it afterward appeared that the Indians present were unauthorized to bind their tribes to cede any lands northwest of the Ohio. Romance has it that Brant was met in the forests by his former acquaintance, the governor's daughter, Louisa St. Clair, whose horsemanship and skill with the rifle was the admiration of the frontier.
After his treaty the governor went to New York, to witness the inauguration of General Washington as the first president of the United States, and remaining there several months, took part in devising additional legislation for the Northwest territory and a pol- icy toward the Indians. Instructions were given him to avoid war as long as possible and to visit the Indians of the Wabash and Illi- nois.
Meanwhile, about Christmas, 1788, or New Year's, 1789, Patter- son and Ludlow and a small party returned to Losantiville, and began laying ont town lots, and the first settlers of that city gathered to
* The matter was finally settled by a patent to Symmes and his associates September 30, 1794, for the land between the two Miamies, and far enough inland to include 311,682 acres, from which sections sixteen and twenty-nine were reserved for the support of education and religion, and eight. eleven and twenty-six for disposal by Congress, also the Fort Washington reserva- tion, and one complete township for a college. The latter was finally selected in Butler county, though not quite complete, and is the site of Oxford.
+On the day after the signing of the treaty James Mitchell Varnum died, at the age of forty years. Three years later Gen. Benjamin Tupper died at Marietta, June, 1792.
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select their property .* A great flood followed, and delayed Symmes and his party until late in January. Then, on coming down the river to Fort Finney, the country about it was found under water. The disgusted military officer abandoned the fort to go to Louisville, but Symmes landed upon the nearest dry spot and began a town, which was given his name. With the advent of pioneer recruits, North Bend was established, a few miles up the river. Which of the various locations should be the center of development was in doubt until Symmes' appeal for military protection led to the placing of an army post. Ensign Luce and eighteen men built a stockade at North Bend and occupied it several months, but there was an Indian attack in the spring of 1789 that stampeded the inhabitants. Then Major Doughty came down with a larger force and in the summer of 1789 selected Losantiville as the best position and built a stockade that he called Fort Washington.i Gen. Josiah Harmar, com- manding the regular army of the United States, which was composed of his regiment of infantry and Major Doughty's battalion of artil- lery, occupied this fort with the main part of his command, Decem- ber 29, 1789, and Governor St. Clair, stopping there on his way to the Wabash and Mississippi, established, January 2, 1790, a new county, which Symmes named in honor of Alexander Hamilton. The name of the town St. Clair changed to commemorate the title of the new military order, the Cincinnati. This county included the country between the Miamis back to the Standing Stone forks of the larger river. Cincinnati, as the seat of an unsettled county, began, in a squalid and barren fashion, its history as the metropolis of the Ohio valley. In 1792 (February 11th) Governor St. Clair extended the county jurisdiction to include all west of the Scioto and a line north from the lower Shawanee town to Sandusky bay, and
*"On the 24th of December, 1788," says Symmes, in one of his letters, they left Maysville "to form a station and lay a town opposite the Licking." The river was filled with ice "from shore to shore," but "perseverance triumph- ing over difficulty, they landed safe on a most delightful high bank of the Ohio, where they founded the town of Losantiville, which populates consid- erably." James H. Perkins, in his Annals of the West, points out that the day of the settlement is unknown. "Some, supposing it would take about two days to make the voyage, have dated the being of the Queen City of the west from December 26th. This is but guesswork, however, for as the river was full of ice, it might have taken ten days to have gone the sixty- five miles from Maysville to Licking. But, in the case in chancery, to which we have referred, we have the evidence of Patterson and Ludlow that they landed opposite the Licking 'in the month of January, 1789;' while William McMillan testifies that he 'was one of those who formed the settlement of Cincinnati on the 28th day of December, 1788.'"
¡ The story was told by Judge Jacob Burnet that the commanding officer became "enamored with a beautiful, black-eyed female," at North Bend, whom her husband took to Cincinnati, whereupon the officer decided that the latter was the best strategic position. "This anecdote was communi- cated by Judge Symmes," said Burnet, "and is unquestionably authentic;" but Judge Symmes was much offended at the officer.
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east of a line from Standing Stone forks of the Great Miami to Lake Huron, ineluding all eastern Michigan.
In the same period ( 1788) a land company was formed to buy the Western Reserve of Connectieut, and Samuel Holden Parsons, the manager of this enterprise, under protection of the military, located land at the Salt Springs ( Mahoning county), and a tract at the site of the city of Cleveland, but while returning from a talk with the Indians about opening the land, in November, 1789, Parsons was drowned in Big Beaver river, and settlement in the northeast was postponed.
In 1789 also, be it remembered, the erank for the first saw mill in Ohio was shipped from the foundry at New Haven, Conn., to the Ohio company, and brought by paekhorses to the Yonghiogheny river, and thenee down the Ohio and up the Muskingum to Wolf Creek.
While St. Clair was in the west, another important settlement was made on the Ohio. This was the result of the operations in France of Joel Barlow, agent of the Duer-Cutler projeet of colonization of the Seioto valley. Barlow found the countrymen of La Salle ready for a colonization project on La Belle Riviere, and had no difficulty in forming a company, ealled the Society of Scioto, which agreed to take three million aeres at six livres per aere. He wrote hopefully to Duer of being able to send him the money necessary to make a pay- ment on the land, and seeure a title to it. In rousing the French people to the importance of the enterprise Barlow used a descriptive pamphlet and map which did not seriously exaggerate the attractions of the land, except in stating that the Ohio company tract was cleared and settled. Soon the French colonists were coming over, and Gen- eral Putnam sent Major Burnham to New England to enlist a com- pany to elear a place for them and build houses at a temporary place below the month of the Kanawha, ealled Gallipolis, which was con- sidered the proper elassieism for Frenchtown. The Frenchmen, reaching Alexandria, Va., in April, 1790, and the following months, were discouraged by the Virginians, but being reassured by Colonel Duer, who had reason to think all was well, pushed on over the moun- tains, guided by Capt. Isaac Guion, at Duer's personal expense. Several hundred of them were at Gallipolis in October, 1790. Count de Barth and the Marquis Marnesia stopped at Marietta, awaiting the survey at the mouth of the Seioto, where they proposed to estab- lish a eity. But the American projectors of the speeulation soon began to tremble at the failure to receive money from France, and meanwhile there were events in the Ohio country that stopped the progress of settlement.
It is estimated that there were in 1790 something over four thou- sand settlers northwest of the Ohio, ineluding those on the Wabash, but more settled south of the river. In twelve months the lookouts at Fort Harmar counted eight or nine hundred boats going down
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the Ohio, carrying twenty thousand settlers, with horses, eows, sheep and wagons, nearly all bound for Kentucky. The hostility of the Indians maintained the Ohio river as a barrier to settlement, and Great Britain retained military possession of Oswego, Fort Erie, Detroit and Mackinac. The only posts of the United States in the Territory were Fort Steuben (site of Steubenville), Forts Harmar and Washington, and Fort Knox at Vineennes.
George Washington, president of a Union taking some steps toward becoming a nation, determined to use all his power to gain posses- sion of the Northwest, and toward the elose of 1789 instructed St. Clair to draw upon Virginia and Pennsylvania for militia to rein- force the ludierously small army that the jealousies of the states had allowed the federal government. General Harmar sent an expedi- tion into the Seioto country in April, 1790, to break up a band of Cherokees who had posted themselves on the Ohio to plunder pass- ing boats.
St. Clair, in the west, sent to the Indians on the Wabash his inju- dieions formula of peace or war, as the red men preferred, and his ambassador was turned back with defiance. At the head of the Maumee, the center of Indian rule, Gamelin found that no treaty would be made without British approval. St. Clair was then recalled to Ohio by the renewal of hostilities in the valley. Return- ing to Fort Washington, the governor met General Harmar, July 11th, and a campaign was planned with the object of reducing the Indians to quiet. There were to be two columns, advancing in the middle of September, one up the Wabash, and the other, led by Gen- eral Harmar, north from Fort Washington. Requisition was made upon Kentucky and Pennsylvania for fifteen hundred militia, to reinforce Harmar's regulars, and St. Clair was busy from Kentucky to New York, in the work of organization. The result was that less than 1,500 men were collected in all, of whom 320 were regulars, and four companies of mounted riflemen, three battalions of Ken- tuckians and one of Pennsylvanians. The militia, of which a good part was badly armed and equipped, were under the command of Col. John Hardin, and this officer led the advance guard of the expedi- tion, which marehed out from Fort Washington, September 26th.
The British had been advised by letter that the campaign was aimed only at hostile Indians, and not against the English troops. There was talk of war between England and Spain, and it was not desired to hinder the British, if they contemplated a march against the Spanish on the Mississippi river. The Indians, receiving exag- gerated reports of Harmar's strength, made no opposition to his advanee, and after proceeding through the Great Miami valley and the headwater-country of the Wabash, Colonel Hardin, by a foreed mareh, stole upon Kekionga, at the head of the Maumee, October
I-9
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15th, hoping to surprise the red men and the Indian traders and get mueh booty. But the three hundred huts were deserted and the storehouses empty. On the march an Indian was seldom seen, though the horses of the soldiers were continually disappearing. The first Indian killed was entieed into an ambush by setting a horse as decoy, and when the red man fell wounded he was mercilessly despatched." The Maumee village and 20,000 bushels of eorn were burned, and Colonel Hardin took a party up the St. Joseph to destroy two Delaware towns. This was an opportunity for which Little Turtle,; the great Maumee war chief, had been waiting, and Hardin was driven baek in rout, leaving twenty-two regulars and several vol- unteers killed on the field. Meanwhile, burning the Maumee village, Harmar moved down the river to a Shawanee village called Chilli- eothe, and destroyed it.
Further down the Maumee, at the rapids, was a considerable set- tlement of Indians and British, ineluding Brant and Alexander MeKee, where the red men were supplied with elothing and military supplies, but Harmar had promised not to molest the British posts, and on October 21st he started with his army on the return mareh to Fort Washington. At the elose of a short day's mareh, Hardin gained permission to redeem himself hy another attempt at the Mau- mees. With three hundred and forty militia and sixty regulars he returned to the ruins of the Maumee village, hoping to find some of the Indians returned. His wish was gratified, but he was again badly defeated, losing ten offieers and a large number of men. Then, with total casualties of 183 killed and 31 wounded, General Harmar continued his march southward. At Old Chillicothe, there was a mutiny among the volunteers, and when the troops got baek to Fort Washington, weary from carrying their baggage, all the horses hay- ing been stolen or killed by the Indians, the Kentnekians were clam- orous in complaint against the leader of the eampaign, who had alluded to the eonduet of the militia as shameful and cowardly.
Following this sueeess, the red men, encouraged by McKee and Simon Girty, continued their hostilities along the Ohio. In Janu- ary, 1791, the Ohio company settlement at Big Bottom, forty miles
* Says the narrative of one of the volunteers, the Indian's head was cut off and put on a pole near General Harmar's tent, to remind the latter of a promise of a dozen of wine for the first head brought in.
¿ Little Turtle's Indian name is given in the histories as Meechee Konahk- wah. The latter word has some resemblance to the Indian for turtle, but the first means Big. There was a Big Turtle, as mentioned in a previous chapter, and the names may be confused.
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