USA > Ohio > Allen County > Cairo > On the storied Ohio : an historical pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff, from Redstone to Cairo > Part 15
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about them. Writes De Nonville to Seignelay, "I consider it a matter of importance to pre- clude the English from this trade, as they doubtless would entirely ruin ours-as well by the cheaper bargains they would give the In- dians, as by attracting to themselves the French of our colony who are in the habit of resorting to the woods."
Herein lay the gist of the whole matter: The legalized monopoly granted to the great fur-trade companies of New France, with the official corruption necessary to create and per- petuate that monopoly, made the French trade an expensive business, consequently goods were dear. On the other hand, the trade of the English was untrammeled, and a lively com- petition lowered prices. The French cajoled the Indians, and fraternized with them in their camps; whereas, the English despised the sav- ages, and made little attempt to disguise their sentiments. The French, while claiming all the country west of the Alleghanies, cared little for agricultural colonization; they would keep the wilderness intact, for the fostering of wild animals, upon the trade in whose furs depended the welfare of New France-and this, too, was the policy of the savage. By
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English statesmen at home, our continental interior was also chiefly prized for its forest trade, which yielded rich returns for the mer- chant adventurers of London. The policies of the English colonists and of their general government were ever clashing. The latter looked upon the Indian trade as an entering wedge; they thought of the West as a place for growth. Close upon the heels of the path-breaking trader, went the cattle-raiser, and, following him, the agricultural settler looking for cheap, fresh, and broader lands. No edicts of the Board of Trade could repress these backwoodsmen; savages could and did beat them back for a time, but the annals of the border are lurid with the bloody struggle of the borderers for a clearing in the Western forest. The greater part of them were Scotch- Irish from Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Caro- linas-a hardy race, who knew not defeat. Steadily they pushed back the rampart of savagery, and won the Ohio valley for civiliza- ation.
The Indian early recognized the land-grab- bing temper of the English, and felt that a struggle to the death was impending. The French browbeat their savage allies, and, easily
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inflaming their passions, kept the body of them almost continually at war with the English- the Iroquois excepted, not because the latter were English-lovers, or did not understand the aim of English colonization, but because the earliest French had won their undying enmity. Amidst all this weary strife, the In- dian, a born trader who dearly loved a bar- gain, never failed to recognize that the goods of his French friends were dear, and that those of his enemies, the English, were cheap. We find frequent evidences that for a hundred years the tribesmen of the Upper Lakes car- ried on an illicit trade with the hated Eng- lish, whenever the usually-wary French were thought to be napping.
It is certain that English forest traders were upon the Ohio in the year 1700. In 1715,- the year before Governor Spotswood of Vir- ginia, "with much feasting and parade, " made his famous expedition over the Blue Ridge, - there was a complaint that traders from Car- olina had reached the villages on the Wabash, and were poaching on the French preserves. French military officers built little log stock- ades along that stream, and tried in vain to induce the Indians of the valley to remove to
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St. Joseph's River, out of the sphere of Eng- lish influence. Everywhere did French traders meet English competitors, who were not to be frightened by orders to move off the field. New France, therefore, determined to connect Canada and Louisiana by a chain of forts throughout the length of the Mississippi basin, which should not only secure untrammeled communication between these far-separated colonies, but aid in maintaining French su- premacy throughout the region. Yet in 1725 we still hear of "the English from Carolina" busily trading with the Miamis under the very shadow of the guns of Fort Ouiatanon (near Lafayette, Ind.), and the French still vainly scolding thereat. What was going on upon the Wabash, was true elsewhere in the Ohio basin, as far south as the Creek towns on the sources of the Tennessee.
About this time, Pennsylvania and Virginia began to exhibit interest in their own over- lapping claims to lands in the country north- west of the Ohio. Those colonies were now settled close to the base of the mountains, and there was heard a popular clamor for pastures new. French ownership of the over-moun- tain region was denied, and in 1728 Pennsyl-
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vania "viewed with alarm the encroachments of the French." The issue was now joined; both sides claimed the field, but, as usual, the contest was at first among the rival forest traders. In the Virginia and Pennsylvania capitals, the transmontane country was still a misty region. In 1729, Col. William Byrd, an authority on things Virginian, was able to write that nothing was then known in that colony of the sources of the Potomac, Roan- oke, and Shenandoah. That very same year, Chaussegros de Léry, chief engineer of New France, went with a detachment of troops from Lake Erie to Chautauqua Lake, and proceeded thence by Conewango Creek and Alleghany River to the Ohio, which he care- fully surveyed down to the mouth of the Great Miami. It was not until 1736 that Col. William Mayo, in laying out the boun- daries of Lord Fairfax's generous estate, dis- covered in the Alleghanies the head-spring of the Potomac, where ten years later was planted the famous "Fairfax Stone," the southwest point of the boundary between Virginia and Maryland.
Affairs moved slowly in those days. New France was corrupt and weak, and the Eng-
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lish colonists, unaided by the home govern- ment, were not strong. For many years, nothing of importance came out of this rivalry of French and English in the Ohio Valley, save the petty quarrels of fur-traders, and the occasional adventure of some Englishman taken prisoner by Indians in a border foray, and carried far into the wilderness to meet with experiences the horror of which, as preserved in their published narratives, to this day causes the blood of the reader to curdle.
Now and then, there were voluntary adven- turers into these strange lands. Such were John Howard, John Peter Salling, and two other Virginians who, the story goes, went overland (1740 or 1741) under commission of their inquisitive governor, to explore the coun- try to the Mississippi. They went down Coal and Wood's Rivers to the Ohio, which in Sal- ling's journal is called the "Alleghany." Fi- nally, a party of French, negroes, and Indians took them prisoners and carried them to New Orleans, where on meager fare they were held in prison for eighteen months. They escaped at last, and had many curious adventures by land and sea, until they reached home, from
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which they had been absent two years and three months. There are now few countries on the globe where a party of travelers could meet with adventures such as these.
At last, the plot thickened; the tragedy was hastened to a close. France now formally asserted her right to all countries drained by streams emptying into the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi. This vast empire would have extended from the comb of the Rockies on the west-discovered in 1743 by the brothers La Vérendrye-to the crest of the Appalachians on the east, thus including the western part of New York and New England. The narrow strip of the At- lantic coast alone would have been left to the domination of Great Britain. The demand made by France, if acceded to, meant the death-blow to English colonization on the American mainland; and yet it was made not without reason. French explorers, mission- aries, and fur-traders had, with great enter- prise and fortitude, swarmed over the entire region, carrying the flag, the religion, and the commerce of France into the farthest forest wilds; while the colonists of their rival, busy in solidly welding their industrial common-
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wealths, had as yet scarcely peeped over the Alleghany barrier.
It was asserted on behalf of Great Britain, that the charters of her coast colonies carried their bounds far into the West; further, that as, by the treaty of Utrecht (1713), France had acknowledged the suzerainty of the British king over the Iroquois confederacy, the Eng- lish were entitled to all lands "conquered " by those Indians, whose war-paths had extended from the Ottawa River on the north to the Carolinas on the south, and whose forays reached alike to the Mississippi and to New England. In this view was made, in 1744, the famous treaty at Lancaster, Pa., whereat the Iroquois, impelled by rum and presents, pre- tended to give to the English entire control of the Ohio Valley, under the claim that the for- mer had in various encounters conquered the Shawanese of that region and were therefore entitled to it. It is obvious that a country occasionally raided by marauding bands of savages, whose homes are far away, cannot properly be considered theirs by conquest.
Meanwhile, both sides were preparing to occupy and hold the contested field. New France already had a weak chain of water-
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side forts and commercial stations, -the ren- dezvous of fur-traders, priests, travelers, and friendly Indians, -extending, with long inter- vening stretches of savage-haunted wilderness, through the heart of the continent, from Lower Canada to her outlying post of New Orleans. It is not necessary here to enter into the de- tails of the ensuing French and Indian War, the story of which Parkman has told us so well. Suffice it briefly to mention a few only of its features, so far as they affect the Ohio itself.
The Iroquois, although concluding with the English this treaty of Lancaster, " on which, as a corner-stone, lay the claim of the colonists to the West," were by this time, as the result of wily French diplomacy, growing suspicious of their English protectors; at the same time, having on several occasions been severely punished by the French, they were less ran- corous in their opposition to New France. For this reason, just as the English were get- ting ready to make good their claim to the Ohio by actual colonization, the Iroquois began to let in the French at the back door. In 1749, Galissonière, then governor of New France, dispatched to the great valley a party
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of soldiers under Céloron de Bienville, with directions to conduct a thorough exploration, to bury at the mouths of principal streams lead plates graven with the French claim, -a custom of those days, -and to drive out Eng- lish traders. Céloron proceeded over the Lake Chautauqua route, from Lake Erie to the Alleghany River, and thence down the Ohio to the Miami, returning to Lake Erie over the old Maumee portage. English traders, who could not be driven out, were found swarm- ing into the country, and his report was dis- couraging. The French realized that they could not maintain connection between New Orleans and their settlements on the St. Law- rence, if driven from the Ohio valley. The governor sent home a plea for the shipment of ten thousand French peasants to settle the region; but the government at Paris was just then as indifferent to New France as was King George to his colonies, and the settlers were not sent.
Meanwhile, the English were not idle. The first settlement they made west of the moun- tains, was on New River, a branch of the Kanawha (1748); in the same season, several adventurous Virginians hunted and made land-
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claims in Kentucky and Tennessee. Before the close of the following year (1749), there had been formed, for fur-trading and colonizing purposes, the Ohio Company, composed of wealthy Virginians, among whom were two brothers of Washington. King George granted the company five hundred thousand acres, south of and along the Ohio River, on which they were to plant a hundred families and build and maintain a fort. As a base of sup- plies, they built a fortified trading-house at Will's Creek (now Cumberland, Md.), near the head of the Potomac, and developed a trail ("Nemacolin's Path"), sixty miles long, across the Laurel Hills to the mouth of Red- stone Creek, on the Monongahela, where was built another stockade (1752).
Christopher Gist, a famous backwoodsman, was sent (1750), the year after Céloron's ex- pedition, to explore the country as far down as the falls of the Ohio, and select lands for the new company. Gist's favorable report greatly stimulated interest in the Western country. In his travels, he met many Scotch- Irish fur-traders who had passed into the West through the mountain valleys of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas. His negotiations
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with the natives were of great value to the English cause.
It was early seen, by English and French alike, that an immense advantage would accrue to the nation first in possession of what is now the site of Pittsburg, the meeting-place of the Monongahela and Alleghany rivers to form the Ohio-the "Forks of the Ohio," as it was then called. In the spring of 1753, a French force occupied the new fifteen-mile portage route between Presque Isle (Erie, Pa.) and French Creek, a tributary of the Alleghany. On the banks of French Creek they built Fort Le Bœuf, a stout log-stockade. It had been planned to erect another fort at the Forks of the Ohio, one hundred and twenty miles be- low; but disease in the camp prevented the completion of the scheme.
What followed is familiar to all who have taken any interest whatever in Western his- tory. In November, Governor Dinwiddie, of Virginia, sent one of his major-generals, young George Washington, with Gist as a companion, to remonstrate with the French at Le Bœuf for occupying land "so notoriously known to be the property of the Crown of Great Britain." The French politely turned the messengers
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back. In the following April (1754), Wash- ington set out with a small command, by the way of Will's Creek, to forcibly occupy the Forks. His advance party were building a fort there, when the French appeared and easily drove them off. Then followed Wash- ington's defeat at Great Meadows (July 4). The French were now supreme at their new Fort Duquesne. The following year, General Braddock set out from Virginia, also by Ne- macolin's Path; but, on that fateful ninth of July, fell in the slaughter-pen which had been set for him at Turtle Creek by the Indians of the Upper Lakes, under the leadership of a French fur-trader from far-off Wisconsin.
From the time of Braddock's defeat until the close of the war, French traders, with savage allies, poured the vials of their wrath upon the encroaching settlements of the Eng- lish backwoodsmen. Nemacolin's Path, now known as Braddock's Road, made for the In- dians of the Ohio an easy pathway to the English borders of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland. In the parallel valleys of the Alleghanies was waged a partisan warfare, which in bitterness has probably not had its equal in all the long history of the efforts of
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expanding civilization to beat down the encir- cling walls of barbarism. In 1758, Canada was attacked by several English expeditions, the most of which were successful. One of these was headed by General John Forbes, and directed against Fort Duquesne. After a remarkable forest march, overcoming mighty obstacles, Forbes arrived at his destination to find that the French had blown up the fortifi- cations, some of the troops retreating to Lake Erie and others to rehabilitate Fort Massac on the Lower Ohio.
Thus England gained possession of the val- ley. New France had been cut in twain. The English Fort Pitt commanded the Forks of the Ohio, and French rule in America was now doomed. The fall of Quebec soon fol- lowed (1759), then of Montreal (1760); and in 1763 was signed the Treaty of Paris, by which England obtained possession of all the territory east of the Mississippi River, except the city of New Orleans and a small outlying district. In order to please the savages of the interior, and to cultivate the fur-trade,-per- haps also, to act as a check upon the westward growth of the too-ambitious coast colonies, - King George III. took early occasion to com-
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mand his "loving subjects" in America not to purchase or settle lands beyond the mountains, " without our especial leave and license." It is needless to say that this injunction was not obeyed. The expansion of the English col- onies in America was irresistible; the Great West was theirs, and they proceeded in due time to occupy it.
Long before the close of the French and Indian War, English colonists-whom we will now, for convenience, call Americans-had made agricultural settlements in the Ohio basin. As early as 1752, we have seen, the Redstone fort was built. In 1753, the French forces, on retiring from Great Meadows, burned several log cabins on the Monongahela. The interesting story of the colonizing of the Red- stone district, at the western end of Brad- dock's Road, has been outlined in Chapter I. of the text; and it has been shown, in the course of the narrative of the pilgrimage, how other districts were slowly settled in the face of savage opposition. Although driven back in numerous Indian wars, these American bor- derers had come to the Ohio valley to stay.
We have seen the early attempt of the Ohio Company to settle the valley. Its agents
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blazed the way, but the French and Indian War, and the Revolution soon following, tended to discourage the aspirations of the adventurers, and the organization finally lapsed. Western land speculators were as active in those days as now, and Washington was chief among them. We find him first in- terested in the valley, through broad acres acquired on land-grants issued for military services in the French and Indian War; Rev- olutionary bounty claims made him a still larger landholder on Western waters; and, to the close of the century, he was actively in- terested in schemes to develop the region. We are not in the habit of so regarding him, but both by frequent personal presence in the Ohio valley, and extensive interests at stake there, the Father of his Country was the most conspicuous of Western pioneers. Dearly did Washington love the West, which he knew so well; when the Revolutionary cause looked dark, and it seemed possible that England might seize the coast settlements, he is said to have cried, "We will retire beyond the mountains, and be free!" and in his declining years he seemed to regret that he was too old to join his former comrades of the camp, in their colony at Marietta.
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As early as 1754, Franklin, in his famous Albany Plan of Union for the colonies, had a device for establishing new states in the West, upon lands purchased from the Indians. In 1773, he displayed interest in the Walpole plan for another colony,-variously called Pittsylvania, Vandalia, and New Barataria- with its proposed capital at the mouth of the Great Kanawha. There were, too, several other Western colonial schemes, - among them the Henderson colony of Transylvania, between the Cumberland and the Tennessee, the seat of which was Boonesborough. Read- ers of Roosevelt well know its brief but bril- liant career, intimately connected with the development of Tennessee and Kentucky. But the most of these hopeful enterprises came to grief with the political secession of the colonies; and when the coast States ceded their Western land-claims to the new general government, and the Ordinance of 1787 pro- vided for the organization of the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio, there was no room for further enterprises of this character. *
* See Turner's "Western State-Making in the Revolution- ary Era," in Amer. Hist. Rev., Vol. I .; also, Alden's "New Governments West of the Alleghanies," in Bull. Univ. Wis., Hist. Series, Vol. II.
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The story of the Ohio is the story of the West. With the close of the Revolution, came a rush of travel down the great river. It was more or less checked by border warfare, which lasted until 1794; but in that year, Anthony Wayne, at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, broke the backbone of savagery east of the Mississippi; the Tecumseh upris- ing (1812-13) came too late seriously to affect the dwellers on the Ohio.
There were two great over-mountain high- ways thither, one of them being Braddock's Road, with Redstone (now Brownsville, Pa.) and Pittsburg as its termini; the other was Boone's old trail, or Cumberland Gap. With the latter, this sketch has naught to do.
By the close of the Revolution, Pittsburg- in Gist's day, but a squalid Indian village, and a fording-place-was still only " a distant out- post, merely a foothold in the Far West." By 1785, there were a thousand people there, chiefly engaged in the fur-trade and in for- warding emigrants and goods to the rapidly- growing settlements on the middle and lower reaches of the river. The population had doubled by 1803. By 1812 there was to be seen here just the sort of bustling, vicious
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frontier town, with battlement-fronts and rag- ged streets, which Buffalo and then Detroit became in after years. Cincinnati and Chi- cago, St. Louis and Kansas City, had still later, each in turn, their share of this experi- ence; and, not many years ago, Bismarck, Omaha, and Leadville. From Philadelphia and Baltimore and Richmond, there were run- ning to Pittsburg or Redstone regular lines of stages for the better class of passengers; freight wagons laden with immense bales of goods were to be seen in great caravans, which fre- quently were "stalled" in the mud of the mountain roads; emigrants from all parts of the Eastern States, and many countries of Europe, often toiled painfully on foot over these execrable highways, with their bundles on their backs, or following scrawny cattle harnessed to makeshift vehicles; and now and then came a well-to-do equestrian with his pack-horses, -generally an Englishman,-who was out to see the country, and upon his re- turn to write a book about it.
At Pittsburg, and points on the Alleghany, Youghiogheny, and Monongahela, were boat- building yards which turned out to order a curious medley of craft-arks, flat- and keel-
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boats, barges, pirogues, and schooners of every design conceivable to fertile brain. Upon these, travelers took passage for the then Far West, down the swift-rolling Ohio. There have descended to us a swarm of published journals by English and Americans alike, giv- ing pictures, more or less graphic, of the men and manners of the frontier; none is without interest, even if in its pages the priggish au- thor but unconsciously shows himself, and fails to hold the mirror up to the rest of na- ture. With the introduction of steamboats, - the first was in 1811, but they were slow to gain headway against popular prejudice, -the old river life, with its picturesque but rowdy boatmen, its unwieldy flats and keels and arks, began to pass away, and water traffic to approach the prosaic stage; the crossing of the mountains by the railway did away with the boisterous freighters, the stages, and the coaching-taverns; and when, at last, the river became paralleled by the iron way, the glory of the steamboat epoch itself faded, riverside towns adjusted themselves to the new highways of commerce, new centers arose, and "side- tracked " ports fell into decay.
APPENDIX B.
SELECTED LIST OF JOURNALS OF PREVIOUS TRAVELERS DOWN THE OHIO.
Gist, Christopher. Gist's Journals; with historical, geographical, and ethnological notes, and biographies of his contemporaries, by William M. Darlington. Pittsburg, 1893.
Gist's trip down the valley, from October, 1750, to May, 1751, was on horseback, as far as the site of Frankfort, Ky. On his second trip into Kentucky, from November, 1751, to March 11, 1752, he touched the river at few points.
Gordon, Harry. Extracts from the Journal of Captain Harry Gordon, chief engineer in the Western department in North America, who was sent from Fort Pitt, on the River Ohio, down the said river, etc., to Illinois, in 1766.
Published in Pownall's "Topographical Description of North America," Appendix, p. 2.
Washington, George. Journal of a tour to the Ohio River. [Writings, ed. by Ford, vol. II. New York, 1889.]
The trip lasted from October 5 to December 1, 1770. The
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party went in boats from Fort Pitt, as far down as the mouth of the Great Kanawha. This journal is the best on the sub- ject, written in the eighteenth century.
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