USA > Ohio > Montgomery County > Memoirs of the Miami valley > Part 23
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The Cincinnati, Georgetown & Portsmouth, a narrow-gauge steam road, was electrified, running through the eastern part of the valley to Georgetown. A group finally known as the Interurban Railway and Terminal company were constructing one branch to New Richmond, another to Bethel and a third to Lebanon. The Cincinnati, Milford & Loveland followed the valley of the Little Miami through the points indicated by its name. The Cincinnati & Columbus completed construction as far as Hillsboro and terminated in Norwood.
Owing to the fact that the gauge of the street car tracks in Cincinnati was six inches broader than "standard," the interurbans of standard gauge could not use the tracks for terminal purposes and were compelled to discharge their passengers outside of the city limits, while those adopting the broad gauge did not reach any other large city, hence the development of this character of enter- prise was far behind that in other parts of the country, where high speeds were obtained with luxurious equipment, in some cases in- cluding dining and sleeping cars. From Dayton north a much better type of service was furnished and schedules operated effi- ciently, connecting with points in northeastern Ohio and with the highly developed system in Indiana. However, unwise financial methods, overcapitalization, and injudicious franchise conditions contributed to bring disaster upon many of the interurban proper- ties. Receiverships have been plentiful and a number of the lines have been abandoned with applications pending for others. High prices of labor and materials, during the war, in many cases put on the finishing touches, until it is admitted that the future of this type of industry is very problematic.
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It is an interesting feature of modern economics, that what promised to be the latest and most revolutionary method of trans- portation owed its difficulties in no small degree to the reincarna- tion and modernization of the despised and neglected roads, which were the valley's first means of commercial intercourse.
The advent of the automobile brought a renewed interest in roads, first for pleasure cars and later for heavy trucks bringing the products of the farm to the markets and returning laden with sup- plies from the cities. Toll roads were displaced by free turnpikes and the formation of good roads associations forced the legislature to action. A state highway department was organized and state funds appropriated to aid the counties in the construction of laterals to the market highways, constructed out of public funds. The auto trucks, taking advantage of these conditions, cut more deeply into the already slender resources of the interurbans and added to their financial discomfiture.
In no part of the state has a livelier interest been manifested in the good roads movement than in the Ohio valley, where main market highways, built and proposed, will lead out with their glisten- ing trails of brick and concrete, to all parts of this and adjacent states, while the counties and townships with a network of second- ary and tertiary roads, will form a complete system, embracing the cities and the surrounding agricultural regions, and binding them together in a common interest.
As with the introduction of each new method of transportation, enthusiasts predicted the most extravagant and revolutionary devel- opment, so the good roads advocates and the motor truck promoters look forward to a monopoly of all but the heaviest traffic. History would suggest that disappointments may be avoided if we refrain from an overweening optimism, and the steam railroads, the water- ways and the interurbans may still play an important and specialized part in the transportation destinies of the rich, beautiful valley of the two Miamis.
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Dellecontaine, U.
THE STORY OF LOGAN COUNTY
S OMEWHAT more than a century and a quarter ago, a passenger in an airship-if one may for the moment imagine that marvel of the twentieth century to have existed then-in passing over the gentle eminence of Logan county, might have looked down upon a scene which gave no sign of human habitation save the half- hidden roofs of two or three rude council houses built of logs, intrenched within forests of oak, elm, beech, hickory, ash and maple, densely massed, except where the site of some long since sunken lake, or forest fire, had left its trace in a green plain, and feathered here and there with the smokes of sheltered camp-fires. Had he been especially observant, he might have noticed that the forest on the crest of the eminence, and along the great north and south divide, here flung its green arms higher skyward than at any point in his journey from the mountains of the east to the great "father of waters" in the west. He could not have failed to note that the great divide was cleft by the winding valleys of a half score silver ribbons of water, gathering in the south and flowing on to join the flood of some wider stream below. He should have seen, also, although engineers and geographers did not, that that greater river, fed by the well-spring of a lake lying high in the wooded slopes, and augmented by the waters of streams which tumbled down from the western slopes of the divide, was born and bred in this territory, and that the honor of its rise belongs to this county as the head of the Great Miami valley.
But the woods concealed much, and even the existence of an opulent, if savage, life could only have been suspected at that time, from such a vantage. Sheltered by the deep foliage, lay a number of gemlike lakes, stocked with fish; the forest itself was home for innumerable furred and feathered denizens, which furnished the savage with meat for his nourishment and skins for his clothing and shelter. The soil of the fertile little prairies produced his maize in plenty, and the trophies which he brought with him from the white man's civilization, in his retreat from the south and east, added to the comfort of the wild life among the Miami headwaters. Hogs roamed the woods in summer, but were fed with corn and fattened to some degree for the slaughter in winter. The white man's cattle and horses had followed the Indian, whether they would or no, and added to them, many a white captive made his unwilling home among the huddled huts and tepees of an Indian village.
Though stealthy, the life of the savage here was vivid and intense, for the Shawanoese Indians, with remnants of other tribes, had taken their last stand in these retreats, and from their forest fastnesses made vengeful sallies against the white settlers of the south, returning with plunder often blood-stained. And the set-
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tlers, in their turn, made raids of reprisal. Struggle and bloodshed were rife. The white man's hands were no less bloody than his red brother's. Renegade white men from the south, no less than lawless British from the north, aided the Indians and instigated many of their attacks, profiting thereby; nor was outlawry and a love of wild adventure quite absent from those who defended the white settlers. Between all these elements the struggle was pro- longed until justice gave way to mere revenge, and the white heralds of civilization were hardly more humane than the savages who defended the hunting grounds of their fathers. But wherever the original fault lay, the innocent suffered with the guilty, and life on the Ohio frontier was become intolerable. Settlers who returned from distant scenes of labor, or expeditions of honest emprise, to find their fields despoiled, their cattle and horses driven away, their cabins in ashes, and their families scattered, murdered or taken captive, had become desperate. The Shawanoese of the headwaters remained implacable long after the major part of the Ohio tribes had submitted to white dictation, and, strong in their pride of warriorship, avenged their accumulated wrongs upon the least occasion. With them, though less antagonistic to the settlers, were contingents of various tribes,-Wyandots, Chippewas, Dela- wares, Ottawas, Monseys, Mingoes and a solitary Cherokee. But the enraged white settler recognized little difference between one red tribe and another, it seems.
The "Wabash Expedition," undertaken by Gen. Clarke in 1786, had as a part of its design the wiping out of the headwater villages, known as "the Mad River towns," with the expectation that so decisive a step would result in the end of Indian raids from that quarter. As the army moved northward up the valley of the Miami, Col. Benjamin Logan, with a band of about seven hundred Kentuckians, ripe for revenge, was detached to proceed up Mad river valley against the Shawanoese stronghold. The entire group of villages lay within the territory of Logan county, beginning with those near the mouth of Mac-a-chack creek, from whence Pigeon Town lay about three and one-half miles to the northwest, and Wapatomica, a Mingo village (where was located the great council which once had condemned Simon Kenton to die at the stake), the headquarters of Moluntha, Great Sachem of the assem- bled tribes, about the same distance to the northeast of Mac-a- chack. North of Wapatomica lay the Wyandot village called Zane's Town, from the residence there of a white man of that name. Blue Jacket's town (the site of Bellefontaine), Reed's Town, not far from this neighborhood, and Solomon's Town, farther to the north and west (sometime the home of Tarhe the Crane), are all men- tioned among the list of towns. The principal chiefs were Blue Jacket (Weyapiersenwah), the most implacable of them all and second only to Black Hoof (Catahecassa), the successor to the murdered Cornstalk (Wiwelespea), in ability and skill as a leader of his people; Moluntha (who had married the sister of Cornstalk, a squaw of enormous size and so warlike as to be known as "the Grenadier") ; Tarhe, the Wyandot, and Buckongehalas, the Dela- ware. The forest foe may well have seemed formidable.
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THE STORY OF LOGAN COUNTY
Col. Logan spared no pains to make the success of the attack certain. Detailing Cols. Patterson and Kennedy to the left and right wings, he took command of the central division, with Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton leading the troops. From the account written many years later by Gen. William Lytle, then but a lad of sixteen, the facts of the day are briefly restated here. The Mac-a-chack towns were defended with desperate valor, the war- riors, of whom about twenty were killed, in scarcely an instance asking quarter, preferring to die rather than yield. Many prisoners were taken.
The third town was Wapatomica, which could be plainly seen as the troops approached it across a plain a mile and a half in breadth. Their expectation was to meet or overtake a larger body of Indians, which would precipitate a general engagement. Young Lytle was about to shoot at one of a flying group of savages, when the warrior held up his hand in token of surrender, at the same time ordering the others to stop. The savage who had surrendered came toward Lytle, calling his women and children to follow him, but before Lytle could reach the proffered hand, the men had rushed in and were with difficulty restrained from killing the sub- missive Indian. He was then led back to his town, which was situated on a high commanding point of land (Bald Knob), jutting well out into the prairie, where a flag, flying at the time from a sixty-foot pole, proclaimed the residence of the chief, Moluntha. Thirteen prisoners had been taken, including the chief, his three wives, and several children, among whom was a lad of noble height and bearing, about young Lytle's age. This easy victory might have remained bloodless except for the cruelty and vindictive hatred of a few of the unrulier soldiers, who took advantage of the general confusion to defy the express command of Logan that none of the prisoners be molested. Molutha himself was slain, almost immediately after Logan's departure, by Col. McGary, who in cold blood seized an axe from the Grenadier Squaw, and with it crushed in the chief's head, before a hand could prevent the deed. The desperado escaped through the crowd of men and horses and never returned. The young son, Spemica Lamba (High Horn), who with the rest of the family had witnessed the atrocity, had attached himself to young Lytle as his prisoner. Col. Logan, attracted by his beauty and intelligence, took Spemica Lamba to his own home in Kentucky, where he was given the advantage of civilized education and society during a period of nine years, per- mitting him also to assume the name of Logan. But the disgrace cast upon the whole expedition by McGary's cruelty could never be atoned for.
It appears that at nearly all points after the first towns, the warriors were all gone on the annual hunting expedition, to remote haunts of game, and the carefully planned attacks surprised only villages and food stores hastily deserted by fleeing squaws and children. These northern villages were also burned, as well as the corn stored up for winter maintenance,-with what degree of soldierly valor the citizen of today may determine for himself.
Zane's Town, the Wyandot village, where stood a block house
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built by the English, was burned the next morning, after which the detachment returned to the main body of troops. There appears, in some histories of the expedition, a reluctance to admit the destruc- tion of a town where a white man was known to live, on the ground that Logan could not have ordered an act of such wanton bad faith. However, Lytle wrote of what he was eyewitness to, and the account is further proved by the story of Jonathan Alder, a white captive in one of the villages, who related the absence of the braves at the hounting grounds, and the arrival at their village, one morn- ing, of an Indian runner who warned them of the approach of the white troops. Alder, a mere child, retreated with the women and children to a spot near the headwaters of the Scioto, where they suffered for days from want of food, there being not a man among them who was capable of hunting. After eight days they returned to find their village in ruins, their corn reduced to charcoal and the block house a heap of ashes. Driven to Hog creek for food, they starved through the winter on a diet of "raccoons, with little or no salt, no bread at all, nor hominy or sweet corn." They came back in the spring for the sugar season, and then again retired for safety to Blanchard's fork, where they continued to eke out a scanty living in exile. Yet was their spirit not subdued, and the red terror still stalked the woods of Logan county.
Blue Jacket had rallied his braves to new strongholds, and by 1794, when "Mad" Anthony Wayne began his campaign in the Maumee valley, he found a new town bearing the name of the doughty Shawanoese chieftain. With the destruction of this town, and the erection of Fort Defiance at the spot, the junction of the Maumee and Auglaize rivers, began the final act of the tragic drama of the Indian. So far as Logan county and the Miami valley were concerned, the curtain fell one year later, with the defeat of the Indians at the rapids of the Maumee, August, 1795, in the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Even then the fierce spirit of the Shawanoese was not quenched, but the wiser counsels prevailed to make them choose submission to the white terms of peace rather than annihila- tion. Nevertheless, of all the chiefs who signed the Treaty of Greenville, Little Turtle being the only one not of Logan county, which established the line beyond which the Indian might not go without the consent of the white man, not one ever broke his pledge. To their honor be it said and remembered that, bitter as the bread of peace must have lain on the red man's tongue, their loyalty never swerved even in the disturbances which hovered on the edge of settlement in the following years, when, led by the eloquent Tecumseh, seven hundred warriors, painted and feathered for the fight, offered battle at the mouth of Stony creek. The Indians of Logan allied themselves with the whites and gratefully accepted protection at their hands against their ill-advised brethren, who were persuaded to retire by the bold diplomacy of Simon Kenton.
The Dawn of Peace. Notwithstanding the location of the Greenville treaty line, which intersected the territory of Logan county from northeast to southwest, crossing Bokes Creek and Rush Creek townships, and Washington and Bloomfield, forming
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THE STORY OF LOGAN COUNTY
the northern boundary of Harrison, and approximately that of Lake, the Indians quite generally came back to their old haunts in these fertile slopes after the establishment of peace, rebuilding their former towns and taking up once more a happy life of plenty. White settlement, being slow to begin, encouraged this movement, while the presence of white settlers taught and encouraged them in a more civilized mode of living and economy. Major Galloway, who made a canvass of the district in 1800, reported that at that time all of the villages destroyed in 1786 had been rebuilt, with the exception of the Mingo village, Wapatomica, which remained deserted. Zane's Town was again a Wyandot village; Lewis Town, on the Great Miami, was a Shawnee village; Solomon's Town, now long known as the McClure farm, was then the home of Tarhe, the Wyandot chief ; Reed's Town, rather vaguely stated to be a group of cabins near the site of Bellefontaine; McKee's Town, about four miles south of the site of Bellefontaine, on McKee's creek, prob- ably the same as "Pigeon Town," where there was a trading sta- tion; Buckongehelas, the Delaware chief, had a village on the creek which bears his name. From other very early white set- tlers it is known that Blue Jacket had a town on Blue Jacket creek, his cabin being built near the famous Blue Jacket spring, which still flows, being now enclosed within the premises of the Kerr Brothers' warehouse, in Bellefontaine. (R. G. Kennedy advances the opinion that Blue Jacket's cabin was occupied as a home by John Tullis, sr., after the retirement of the chief to Wapakoneta.)
The presence of white persons was brought to light by Major Galloway, also. For the most part they were helpless to make other choice, having been brought up in captivity, and in ignorance of the whereabouts of their families. John Lewis, one of the Shaw- nees, his name adopted from British association, was found to have living at his place a white woman of advanced age, named Polly Keyser, who performed the drudgery of his establishment. She had been taken captive in childhood, from near Lexington, Kentucky, had married an Indian and was the mother of two half-breed daugh- ters. Jonathan Alder, already referred to in these pages, was another white, found living with an Indian wife and their family of half- breed children.
Alder had been stolen in early childhood from his home in Wythe county, Virginia, in the spring of 1774, being surprised by a band of Indians while hunting stray cattle with his brother, two years older. The brother was killed while attempting to escape, and Jonathan was only preserved from death by the intervention of an Indian chief named Succohanos, whose only son had died, and who saw, in this black-haired white child, an heir to his posi- tion in the tribe. He was taken to a Mingo village on Mad river, where the wife of the chief, Whinecheoh, received him tenderly, bathed and dressed him in Indian fashion, and he was adopted into the family, which consisted of three daughters who bore the English names of Mary, Hannah, and Sally. The two older girls, like their parents, were very kind to the little captive, but in their absence Sally was wont to tease him and taunt him with unpleasant names, the Indian for "ornery, lousy prisoner" being her favorite epithet.
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The homesick boy, with whom the Indian diet disagreed (or was it, as has been suggested, merely bad Indian cookery?), and who suffered severely from fever and ague, was sent to live for a time with Mary, who had married the chief, John Lewis, and the gentle treatment he received from this Indian couple called forth his life- long gratitude. The boy was here taught the arts of swimming and hunting, and when he reached a proper age was given an old British rifle, with which he became an expert shot. After the peace of 1795, he encountered new difficulty in the fact that he had forgotten the white man's language, and, in consequence, had failed to compre- hend the necessity of being present at the treaty meeting, and so did not receive his grant of land. However, he took up land in regular order, and to the two white settlers who afterward re- taught him his native tongue, he said that he was happy in that he could once more meet both red and white in equal friendliness. The Alders lived as white people, and became quite prosperous, but at length, hearing that his family were still alive, he tired of his Indian wife, and induced her to release him by relinquishing nearly all of his accumulated property, after which he returned unto his own, and Logan county knew him no more.
Quite a different story is that of Isaac Zane, the third white person found resident in 1800, and who also was brought here a captive by Indians when a little lad. Two of the Zane boys were captured at the same time, in 1763, when on their way to school near their home in Mooresfield, Virginia (Berkeley county). The inaccurate statement that the brother who shared Isaac's captivity was Ebenezer Zane, was at one time accepted as fact, but as Ebenezer was the eldest of the family and Isaac the youngest, it was probably the next older brother, Jonathan, who was his com- panion-he being eleven and Isaac nine years of age. The Indian captors were of the Wyandot tribe, and the boys were taken first to Buffalo, thence to Detroit, where they were adopted into the Wyan- dot tribe, and afterward brought to Sandusky. About two years later, their relatives, discovering their whereabouts, offered a ran- som for them. This was accepted in the case of Jonathan, but Chief Tarhe, who was without an heir to his title, refused the ransom for Isaac, desiring to keep him for his own son. And so for nine years the boy remained in Tarhe's home, recognized as the chief's adopted heir, and the playmate of the chief's daughter, Myeerah (Walk-in-the-Water). Tarhe's wife was a beautiful French-Canadian woman, and Myeerah, said also to have been very beautiful, was their only child. Isaac Zane's life in captivity had been happy. His personal attractions had made him a favorite, and he had loved the free ways of the Indians. He was deeply attached to his kind foster father and his family. Nevertheless, when the peace of 1772 released all captives, by treaty between the French and English, Isaac seized the opportunity and returned to Virginia. His relatives were by this time dispersed to other points, and he settled in Frederick county, entered the local political life, and, so the account goes, was elected to the house of Burgesses in 1773 (when, if the chronology is correct, he must have been but nineteen years of age), holding his seat for two or three years.
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Then the memory of Myeerah drew him inevitably back to the home of Tarhe on Mad river, and, relinquishing his ambitions, he returned to the scene of his happy captivity, married the playmate of his boyhood, and settled where the town which bears his name after- ward sprung up. Tarhe, after the marriage, withdrew to Solomon's Town, leaving the young people in possession of the old home.
Antrim's account of Isaac Zane's career states distinctly that he took no part in the Revolutionary war, but other authorities refer to him as "a revolutionary guide," and it is certain that he was employed by Gen. Butler as a guide in 1785, after the war was ended, and that he was known as a peacemaker and mediator between Indians and whites. For these various services to the government, he was awarded grants for two sections of land, choos- ing, as might be expected, that spot where he already lived, the present site of Zanesfield. He was defrauded of this land by a dishonest surveyor, whom he had entertained as an honored guest, and was obliged to accept in its place two sections in Champaign county, to which he did not remove, but repurchased the land where his home stood, and remained there until his death, which occurred in 1816.
James McPherson was the fourth white man definitely known to be a resident of Logan county in 1800. McPherson was a native of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and while fighting with the colonists was taken prisoner by the British and Indians at the defeat of Longhry at the mouth of Big Miami. During the years of his captivity he was employed in the British-Indian department, with Elliott and McKee. He married a white woman who was, like himself, a cap- tive. With the Indians, McPherson was on good terms, and their name for him was "Squa-la-ka-ke" (the red faced man). After the treaty of 1795 McPherson was released and re-entered the service of the United States, being appointed Indian agent for the Shawnees and Senecas at the Lewistown reservation, a position which he retained until 1830. He is said to have become temporarily very wealthy through shrewd land investments and through trading but at one time he applied, not for a pension, but for three years' back pay from the government for his services in the Revolution, which he claimed were owing him at the time of his capture by the British. His daughter, said to have been the most famous beauty of north- western Ohio, as well as the most beautifully gowned in her day, married a white settler, Daniel Workman. The McPherson farm became, many years ago, the site of the Logan county infirmary.
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