USA > Ohio > Darke County > The history of Darke County, Ohio, containing a history of the county; its cities, towns, etc.; general and local statistics; portraits of early settlers and prominent men; > Part 21
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Ninety-three years ago, there were not within the limits of the Territory, exclusive of fifty or sixty thousand Indians, who have been swept away like the mist on the river, two thousand people, if half that number, of Caucasian lineage, and that thousand or upward have multiplied until the census of the current year, 1880, will show a product of ten millions. This transformation has taken place within three generations, and has never been equaled, save in the close of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century, when the North Pole swarmed and a new race swept down and trod out of sight the old Roman Empire, extending from Thule to the Caspian, and from Ormus to the Pillars of Hercules.
Ohio was the first-born of the ordinance of '87. and is now-if not the ". key- stone " of the arch of the Union-the " Valley of Achor and the door of hope " of the Nation (we spell the word with a big N), of which she forms so conspicuous a part.
But the writer has not undertaken to write the history of the United States, the Northwest Territory, nor the State of Ohio ; that duty must devolve upon somebody else. His only purpose is to gather up and save from utter oblivion some of the incidents, men and events. where presence and occurrence go to make a part, and a part only, of the history of the town of Greenville, and the township in which it is located.
Some events in its earlier years made it then a place of some note, while many other events of later date may not seem to deserve recital or perusal here, and would be recorded to little purpose, save that the narrator desires to give obedi- ence to the old injunction, " not to despise the day of small things."
The town of Greenville. the county seat of one of the largest and best agri- cultural counties of Ohio, like many other towns of the State, has a history, and, like many others whose history dates back to a period beyond the memory of " the
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oldest inhabitant," many events making part of the history are certain, and capa- ble of truthful and accurate narration, whilst many others are of that character that, to now relate them with a truthful regard to time and place, and actors and circumstances, is a duty that requires care and labor to discriminate between myth and truth and between fiction and fact ; and this the writer purposes to do as best he may, premising that many events of which mention will be made came to his knowledge half a century ago, from the actors in those events, who are now all passed away.
In the old Territorial days, under the administration of the first President of the United States, attempts were made to subdue the aboriginal race that occupied the Northwest Territory, and open it up for the occupancy of those who would plant and foster civilization ; and there were many such, who desired to find homes for themselves and their children after them, in the valleys of the Muskingum, Scioto, and the two Miamis.
Scarcely had a settlement been projected in the Territory by Putnam and Symmes and their associates, founders of Marietta and Cincinnati, when an expe- dition was organized and force sent against the Indians of Ohio, under the com- mand of Gen. JJosiah Harmar.
This foray, ill disciplined, ill provided for and ill commanded, in a very short time was defeated and scattered, with great loss of men and means, and the pros- pect of the Territory was darkened.
To this day. the accounts of Harmar's defeat are a puzzle and a trouble to historians, and their statements as to time and place disagree, and all are more or less right, and are also more or less wrong.
The facts, when simply and truthfully related, were, that Harmar's army was in a state of mutiny, and had separated into three bodies, each "going on its own hook," that were met and disastrously defeated by the Indians on different days and places, between the headwaters of the Maumee, Miami and Scioto, in the region of what is now Hardin and Hancock Counties. The greater number of these forces thus divided-and nominally under Harmar's command, but in fact under no command whatever-were slaughtered or captured, and those who escaped fled as best they could to Wheeling, Pittsburgh, Limestone or Cincinnati. Of these, there were enough left to tell the tale, and it was told so many different ways, that, although nearly everybody believed a part, scarcely anybody believed but a part of the then current relations of Harmar's campaign and defeat. The disaster occurred in the summer of 1789.
Maj. George Adams, then a soldier in Harmar's army, again in the serv- ice as a Captain of scouts under Wayne, and, nearly twenty years later, command- ant of the garrison at Greenville, during the negotiations preceding the execution of the treaty of 1814, of which notice will be taken, and, later in life, a Judge of the Court of Common Pleas of Darke County, was five times shot and severely wounded in one of three several defeats of Harmar. He survived, and was car- ried on a litter between two horses to Cincinnati, although on the way a grave was dug for him three evenings in succession. With his ashes in the Martin Cemetery, three miles east of Greenville, are two of the bullets of the five, which he carried in his body from 1789 until his decease in 1832.
The next movement against the Indians was set on foot in 1791. At the head of this was placed in command by President Washington, who was a great stickler for red tape and things, Gen. St. Clair, Governor of the Northwest Territory, and with him was placed, as second in command, Gen. Richard Butler. with whom he had not been on speaking terms for ten years, owing to an old feud dating back to the Massacre of Wyoming, in the days of the Revolution.
St. Clair, with an army of half-disciplined and half-provisioned men, marched north from Cincinnati, into an unknown wilderness, in October,'1791, and before he reached the Wabash, which, in the absence of correct geographical knowledge, was supposed to be the St. Mary's River, his command was in almost the same condition
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of Harmar's army, two years before; one regiment was in open mutiny, and was on the retreat, and another was sent back to reduce the refractory to subjec- tion. Late in the evening of November 3, 1791, his troops, which had been on a forced march, and on half rations, all day, lay down weary and hungry, in an improvised camp, on the bank of the river, where the town of Recovery is now located. The Indians were in force within a mile beyond the river, under the leadership of Little Turtle, the war chief of the Miamis, who, in this engagement, were re-enforced by the Wyandots, Pottawatomies and Shawnees, under their chiefs.
Before daybreak on the morning of November 4, 1791, a day long remem- bered by many mourning families, from the Monongahela to the Miami, St. Clair's force, numbering about 1,300 men, was attacked, and in less than two hours 600 men were dead and the residue routed and fleeing as fast as their famished condi- tion would permit. Many were slaughtered on the retreat, and it was no unusual thing, after the lapse of more than forty years, in clearing up the lands of Gibson Township, in which the site of the defeat is situated, to find the bleached bones of dead who fell by the wayside.
The news of St. Clair's defeat spread over the land, and the nation was excited, and, as is frequently the case in like excitements, the actual loss, great as it was, was greatly exaggerated, and blame for the disaster placed on other shoulders than where it rightly belonged.
No such disaster had befallen the whites in a conflict with the Indians, since Logan had defeated Lord Dunmore at the battle of the Point, before the Revolu- tion. A court-martial was called and deliberated ; after many days' investigation, St. Clair was acquitted of blame, and none dared to charge the disaster to those who should have been held responsible for it ; but now, after the lapse of almost a century, it is beginning to be understood that the disasters of 1789 and 1791 are to be laid at the door of Gen. Washington, then President of the United States, and Gen. Knox, his Secretary of War.
St. Clair, in his march northward, passed over the plain on which the town of Greenville now stands, had not noted its adaptability to military uses, although he had fortified a post at Fort Jefferson, five miles south of it, and in a military point of view having no characteristics of a locality that could be defended from an external enemy.
The demand of the people of Western Pennsylvania and Northwestern Vir- ginia for more lands had its effect on Congress, as well as upon the President, and measures were taken to organize another campaign against the Indians, who yet held the valleys of the Miami, Scioto and Muskingum. For the command of the force sought to be raised to clear out and subjugate all the southern part of Ohio, the President selected Gen. Anthony Wayne, a Revolutionary General, yet in the prime of life, as the commander of the force soon to be raised for the purpose of clearing the Northwest Territory of its enemies.
Wayne had before him the knowledge so dearly bought by the preceding campaigns of Harmar and St. Clair, and fully appreciated the causes of disaster in each of those campaigns, and set himself to remedy the trouble so patent to a military man, that chiefly caused the failure of those campaigns. An army was soon recruited, numbering between three and four thousand men, carefully offi- cered, and then began the business of drill and discipline.
The summer and fall of 1792, and the winter and spring of 1793, passed away, and Wayne's forces were yet under daily exercise, acquiring efficiency for the duty that would soon be required of them. Fort Washington, now inside the limits of Cincinnati ; Fort Hamilton, the present county seat of Butler County, and another fort, occupying the present site of Eaton, were built and garrisoned, and in the fall of 1793, Wayne, with the residue of his force, proceeded northward and occupied a plain on the southwest branch of the Great Miami, where he built and strongly fortified a post that was for the next two years to be his headquarters, and which he named, in honor of his old friend of the Revolution, Fort Greenville.
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Wayne's arrival on the ground on which he built Fort Greenville, and which now is wholly within the limits of the present town of Greenville. was on the 13th of October, 1793, and from that date may be said to commence the history of the town of Greenville, and with its history. it may also be said, commenced the develop- ment of the Northwest Territory. as created by the ordinance of the old Congress six years before, into the now great States of Ohio. Illinois. Indiana. Michigan and Wisconsin, occupying the center, and in a great measure controlling the action, civil and political, of the United States of America.
FORT GREENVILLE.
When Wayne first occupied Fort Greenville. in the autumn of 1793, anything like a civil government in the Northwest Territory could hardly be said to have an existence, as the little hamlets of Marietta and Cincinnati were the only places between the Ohio and Mississippi where there was any call for a Judge or Justice of the Peace, a Sheriff or a Constable. The Territory had, two years before. been parceled out by the Governor and Council into the five counties of Washington, Hamilton, Knox, St. Clair and Wayne, the boundaries whereof at this day no man knoweth, and can only infer their location by learning that the Judges of the Ter- ritory performed circuit duty and went through the forms of holding courts at Marietta. Cincinnati, Vincennes, Kaskaskia and Detroit, the seats of justice of the several counties before named.
The same fall that Wayne occupied Fort Greenville, a detachment of his army advanced northward and built and garrisoned small stockade fortresses of sutli- cient strength to withstand any force likely to be brought by his Indian foes against them at Fort Recovery, on the ground of St. Clair's defeat ; Loramie's, where the Indians and French burned out David and Alexander Loramie in 1752; at St. Mary's. on the river of the same name, which is a tributary of the Maumee, or, as it was then called, the Miami of the Lakes, and at some other points. Fort Recovery, soon after it was built, was attacked by an Indian force nearly ten times the number of its garrison, but safely withstood the attack and severely punished its assailants. In the Indian council which preceded the assault on Fort Recor- ery, occurred one of those seemingly little disagreements which engendered dis- trust, but had an influence which, as we shall see, had a subsequent effect, and tended months afterward to spread distrust in the Indian host, and bear evil fruit. Little Turtle strongly urged his allies to let the fort alone, as it was not against such places that their warriors could hope for success. His efforts were unavail- ing, and the assault was made against his counsel and judgment, and he quietly informed his own tribe, the Miamis. that they could " see just as well if they kept back out of harm's way, and let those who were desirous of butting their heads against Gibson's palisades try it on, and see what would come of it." The Miamis profited by his advice, and although appearing to aid in the effort to win the vic- tory over Gibson and his garrison, after a whole day's hard fight and when night came and an account of killed and wounded was taken. were found to have sustained little or no loss. The Wyandots. Pottawatomies and Shawnees had suffered severely. This'brought about distrust and jealousy of the Turtle and his counsel that pre- vented his advice from being heeded, when it probably might have secured as great a victory over Wayne as he had obtained over St. Clair nearly three years before.
Wayne passed the winter of 1793-94 in strengthening his position, securing supplies and getting his command in good fighting trim and order. as well as in obtaining full and thorough information of all that was going on in the Indian camps and councils. His spies. "trigged" out in their paint and grease, were everywhere from Greenville to beyond the Maumee, and took note of everything, and kept their commander thoroughly posted. Elliott and McKee were doing their best at Detroit to stimulate their allies to perseverance, and had their adherents in Wayne's headquarters at Greenville ; and one prominent individual, implicated
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by intercepted letters, was arrested and ironed and laid in the guardhouse for months, and although the evidence was insufficient to establish his complicity and treachery by proof. such as a court would require, but few in the army had any doubt of his guilt. It is not best, even at this late day, to name the man alluded to, as his descendants in the third and fourth generation occupy high social stand- ing in Western Ohio.
In June, 1794, Wayne, having learned that the Indian force was embodied and within a few miles of him, took the field with about 3,000 men, leaving still a strong garrison in Fort Greenville, and took up his line of march with care, cir- cumspection and no undne haste, to the northward, taking the route toward Lora- mie and St. Mary's. On the third night after leaving Greenville, his forces were encamped in the southeastern part of what is now Patterson Township, and the main body of the Indians were not more than two miles distant from him on the bank of Black Swamp Creek. in the same township. On that night, at a council held in the Indian camp, at which Maj. Adams, of whom mention has been pre- vionsly made in these pages, and who had so far recovered of the wounds received five years before, as to be in the service in Wayne's army, was present, disguised in full Indian rig and paint, Little Turtle strongly urged that an onslaught be made before morning. This advice was withstood by the Crane, head chief of the Wyandots, and by the Shawnee and Pottawatomie chiefs, and the head men of other tribes who were in the Indian force. The reasons given by those who opposed the Turtle's counsel were, that they desired Wayne to be farther away from his home, as they designated Fort Greenville, and that they could better engage him when they were nearer their friends, as they designated a British fort and garrison on the Maumee. which had been kept up in defiance of the stipulations of the treaty of 1783 : but the true reason of their opposition to the Turtle's advice was their distrust of him, excited the previous autumn at Recovery.
The views of the majority prevailed, and the two armies, seldom more than three or four miles apart, continned to move to the north until, on the morning of July 20, 1794, at Rouge De Bout, beyond the Maumee, in plain view of the English fort, and almost in reach of its guns, the Indians made a stand and were routed with considerable loss. and fled for snecor to the fort, but were not permit- ted to enter, as Col. Campbell. the commander, had a wholesome apprehension of what might befall him and his garrison, if he gave any cause, by manifesting an interest for the safety of his friends. Subsequently to the battle, some spicy correspondence took place between Wayne and Col. Campbell, but all that came of it was that Wayne contented himself with burning and destroying everything pertaining to the fort and its garrison outside of their stockade. After the defeat of the Indians. the commander built and garrisoned a fort named after himself. at the confluence of the St. Mary and St. Joseph Rivers, where they unite to form the Maumee, and another down the Maumee, at the junction with the Auglaize.
The Indians, finding themselves sorely pressed by Wayne, who, as Little Turtle said, slept with his eyes open, and deriving no aid or comfort from their English allies, either on the Maumee or at Detroit. soon began to think that peace, on the terms they ascertained could be had, was better than to have their braves exterminated by the unerring rifles of Wayne's scouts, who seemed to them to be everywhere, began to make overtures, as they had learned an important lesson. In the old French war, which had been terminated in 1763. before many of those who now formed their force were born. their old men remembered that they were always upheld by their French allies. but the English race. now in power in Upper Canada. and along the frontier. cared no more for the Indians than they did for their dogs, save as it would subserve their own purposes, irrespective of what of good or evil might fall to the lot of the red men.
Arrangements were made in the latter part of the spring of 1795. the chiefs, head men and warriors of a number of the tribes assembled at Fort Greenville, where. after several weeks' negotiation, the terms of a treaty were agreed upon,
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and, with all due formalities, signed by the contracting parties on the 3d day of August, 1795, and in due time was approved and confirmed, and peace restored. By this treaty, in consideration of sundry perpetual annuities to the several tribes represented at Greenville, some of which remain annually payable to this day, there was ceded to the United States almost the entire south half of the State of Ohio, and a large gore of Eastern Indiana, and a number of small tracts to be used by the United States as sites for occupation for military purposes within what yet remained as Indian Territory.
Wayne's treaty opened up for settlement, by a white population, the valleys of the Muskingum, Hockhocking, Scioto and the Little and Great Miami Rivers, and the lower tributaries, and the business of surveying the newly acquired terri- tory into ranges, townships and sections, preparatory to entry and settlement, went on with little intermission for several years, and after the withdrawal of Wayne's army and the evacuation of Greenville, Recovery, Loramie and other frontier posts by their garrisons, the surveyors employed by the Government, and their assistants, were the only white men who were at any time found within the limits of the terri- tory that in after years became the county of Darke, named after one of the brave but unfortunate officers of St. Clair's army, who met his death at Recovery in November, 1791.
Fort Greenville was evacuated by its garrison in the spring of 1796, and, later in the same year, was burned down to obtain nails and other material to be used in the construction of the buildings of the first settlers of Montgomery County, in Dayton or its vicinity.
During the occupation of Fort Greenville by Wayne's army. it was visited by M. Volney, a Frenchman of considerable note in the closing years of the last century, author of the "Ruins of Empires " and some other publications, the perusal of which afforded gratification to men who scouted the Bible as a book of fables. This man, who could not believe the narrative of the deluge as given by Moses in the book of Genesis, was stuffed by the statement of some of Wayne's younger officers, who accompanied him on his trip to Greenville, as they passed the falls of Greenville Creek, some twelve miles below the fort, that the Ohio River, in times of great floods, backed the water of the Miami River and its tributaries until the water in the creek was raised to a level with the top of the falls. This yarn he gravely related as a fact in his book of " Notes of Travel in America," published after his return to Europe, thus demonstrating the truth of the apothegm "that in credulity, the unbeliever can go ahead of men of faith."
In 1799, 1800, 1801 and 1802, Israel and Stephen Ludlow, Daniel C. Cooper, David Nelson and Benjamin Chambers, and in 1805, Fulton, McKhann and MeLene, with their assistants, engaged in the work of surveying the land for the United States, were the only white men who were at any time within Darke County, so far as any knowledge has come down to us. No doubt Indians trapped and hunted within its borders, but that rests only on conjecture, grounded on its probability.
Some time subsequent to the treaty of 1795-but the year cannot be ascer- tained, except that it was between 1796 and 1804-the Prophet, and his brother, the celebrated Tecumseh of the Shawnee tribe, emigrated from the Indian town of Upper Piqua, with a few families who adhered to them, and established a small Indian village above Greenville on the west side of Mud Creek ; the site of this village is now within the farms of William F. Bishop and Joseph Bryson, and con- tinued there until about 1811. The writer of these pages learned many years ago from the late Col. John Johnson, who, from the time of the elder Adams until the Presidency of Gen. Jackson, was agent on behalf of the United States for the Indian tribes of the Northwest Territory, that the Prophet and his adherents were driven off by his tribe, the Shawnees, on account of his and their bad character, that Black Hoof and the other Indians said that the Prophet was a bad man and a thief. This statement might well be believed without having any Indian's word for it. The writer in his time has seen and
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known several thousand Indians, but is satisfied that he never beheld half a dozen of the " noble red men " who would not 'steal whenever and wherever they could have the opportunity, anything and everything they could lay their hands on, unless it might be a ship's anchor or a pair of millstones.
The character of the Prophet and his people was not in the least improved by their translation from Piqua to the Mud Creek town; they continued to steal as long as they remained there, and had they continued there until now would still have pursued the same high calling. A Frenchman, whose name cannot now be ascertained, built and occupied as a trading-house, on a small scale, a little log cabin on the west side of the creek, opposite the site of the burned fort, about the year 1805, but could not stand it very long; in the early part of the summer of 1806, the Prophet and his Indians had stolen his entire stock, powder, lead, flints, tobacco and whisky, and the poor frog-eater was "busted" and left.
FIRST SETTLEMENTS.
We come now to the period when what may be called the first settlement of the town and township of Greenville, may be said to commence. Late in 1806, or early in 1807, Azor Scribner, leaving his wife and probably two young children near Middletown, came with a small stock of Indian goods, including tobacco and whisky, and opened out in the Frenchman's deserted cabin. He did not bring his family from Middletown until 1808, but at what time of the year is not now known, his eldest daughter yet living here, and who was born before he came here, being then too young to remember the time of year that her mother, her sister and herself were brought here by her father.
It is now well understood that the first white man who, with a wife and chil- dren, emigrated to the county and settled in Greenville Township, was Samuel Boyd, who came in 1807 and built himself a cabin about two and a half miles north by east from the site of Fort Greenville, on the bank of a branch that yet goes by the name of Boyd's Creek. Boyd was a native of Maryland, had lived in Kentucky and was probably married there before he emigrated to Ohio, and had, as far as the writer has been able to learn, made a short stop of one or two years near the Miami, in Butler County, before emigrating to the wilderness that two years afterward created the county of Darke. Boyd lost his wife about 1816, and she was the first person buried in the old graveyard below the railroad bridge ; the early settlers having previously used as a cemetery the lot on which the Catholic Church is erected. He died in 1829 or 1830 ; one of his daughters, the wife of John Carnahan, had died in 1821 or 1822, and another, the wife of Robert Martin, survived until about three years ago, and previous to her decease was for some years recognized at the "oldest inhabitant." Soon after Boyd came, Azor Scribner removed his family and, abandoning the cabin on the west side of the creek, occu- pied one of the buildings of the fort that had escaped the fire inside of the pickets. Scribner died in 1822; his widow in the early part of 1825 married a Yankee adventurer, who, in less than a year, deserted her, and the last ever heard of him he was in a Canada jail on a charge of treason, having been involved in Mckenzie's rebellion, which occurred some forty years ago.
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