Historic Highways of America/Volume 9/Chapter 2

by Archer Butler Hulbert

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CHAPTER II

THE INDIAN SIDE

THE campaign of General John Forbes in 1758, which ended French rule on the Ohio, gave the Ohio Valley to the English. From this time on, the entire sweep of territory between the Atlantic Ocean and the present Pittsburg may be termed English territory. While England now nominally came into possession of all of this portion of New France, the lands on either side of the Ohio River below Pittsburg were claimed by the Indian nations inhabiting them, and the Crown attempted, in the Proclamation of 1763, to preserve these lands for the Indians by prohibiting the migrations of the colonists. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, and the expansion of Virginia into the vast tract south of the Ohio have been recounted.^[1] It is sufficient to recall here that this treaty gave to Virginia

Captain Gordon's Map of the Ohio River (1766)

Captain Gordon's Map of the Ohio River (1766)

From original in Library of Congress

the entire southern bank of the Ohio and all the territory southward to the banks of the Tennessee. The treaty was made with the Iroquois, the conquerors of half a continent, not with the Delawares and Shawanese and Southern Nations, who camped and hunted there. These dependents of the Iroquois contested the treaty stoutly and not until 1774 did the Shawanese even pretend to agree to its stipulations. This agreement was secured by what is known as Dunmore's War and was the direct result of General Andrew Lewis's bloody victory over the allied Indians at the mouth of the Great Kanawha River, October 10, 1774. It is not less than significant that this decisive battle which assured the Old Southwest to the Americans, should have been fought practically over the burial place of Céloron's fifth leaden plate which claimed the land for France. By the time of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the entire southern shore of the Ohio had been abandoned by Indians, though for many years they continually invaded the pleasant country which was fast filling with a scattered white population.

The story of the conquest and occupation of the northern side of the Ohio River is as bitter and bloody a tale as that of the southern side. The artificial division of the Middle West into states has resulted in some very artificial historical distinctions; the Ohio River has perhaps never been considered a mighty boundary line on the brink of which civilization paused for many critical years. The northern bank of the Ohio was, through many years, known as the "Indian Side;" and while western Virginia and Kentucky were counting their tens of thousands, the "Indian Side" was forbidden territory. The Ohio River was the western boundary of the colonies and of the United States for seventeen years: from 1768 until 1785. When, in 1783, the United States by the Treaty of Paris came into possession of the territory between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi, the "men who wore hats" had not purchased an acre of land north and west of the Ohio River from its bareheaded inhabitants.

In 1785 at the Treaty of Fort McIntosh the United States secured from its actual possessors (the Iroquois claims having been satisfied at a second treaty at Fort Stanwix, October 1784) the first grant of land north of the Ohio. The western boundary line of the United States now began on Lake Erie, ascended the Cuyahoga, descended the Tuscarawas to the site of Fort Laurens, ran west to the portage between the Miami and St. Mary Rivers; ascending the Maumee to Lake Erie it followed the lake shore to the starting point. The lands south, east, and west of this line were given to the United States so far as the Indians "formerly claimed the same." This was the first of a long series of treaties each of which gave the northwest side of the Ohio River to the United States.

Thus in 1785 the Ohio Valley legally became a part of the territory of the United States.

By an ordinance immediately passed by Congress, this tract of land north of the Ohio River was ordered to be surveyed, the lots to be sold by the Government in order to create a fund to pay the war debt. A geographer and surveyors were appointed to survey and plat seven ranges of townships westward from the Pennsylvania boundary. These were to be sold by townships by commissioners of the loan office of the several states after proper advertisement.

Thus, at the stroke of a pen, the Ohio River became a division line between empires differing wholly from each other. The "Virginia Side" was peopled by southerners according to the Virginia system, which allowed a man to take and mark for himself unappropriated lands. Thus the entire southern shore of the Ohio had been occupied by Virginians, Pennsylvanians, and North Carolinians. By act of Congress the New England system was extended to the land lying north of the Ohio; the land was to be properly surveyed and sold. The Ohio River at once became the western projection of Mason and Dixon's Line. In some such way as Chevalier has suggested, the Ohio River became a division fence between Roundhead and Cavalier. South of the river, lands were taken up by southerners in the old Virginia way; north of the river the New England system obtained, as though prophesying that the dominant race was to be of New England stock. It was a momentous turning point in the history of the Central West when Congress made the New England system operative on the "Indian Side" of the Ohio, banishing at once and forever from that great area the strife and suffering caused by the thousand conflicts of overlapping "tomahawk claims" and incorrect and confusing "surveys."

But these acts of Congress were far more easily passed than enforced. In the first place, even before the land north of the Ohio was purchased by the United States, white settlers began crossing the Ohio and settling on the "Indian Side." By the year 1780 the Indian Side of the river had been quite wrested from the savages, at least from Pittsburg down to the Scioto. McIntosh had built Fort Laurens on the Tuscarawas and, with the help of others, the Delawares had been driven from the Muskingum Valley. Clark had captured Illinois and it was now a part of Virginia. Many invasions from Kentucky had passed up the Scioto and the Miamis. In all these campaigns the soldiery was largely made up of the border settlers of western Pennsylvania and Virginia, and they somehow conceived the notion that they were as much entitled as any one to the splendid lands from which they had driven the Indians. Heretofore the states and the Government had done everything in reason to encourage the western movement and protect it. No one perhaps realized that the Ohio River was to be considered, in any sense, a boundary line. Yet the United States recognized the Indian right and took such means as were possible to accomplish an utterly impossible thing. The lands on the northern side of the Ohio River were to be preserved to the Indians until purchased from them. It was even decreed that retaliatory raids of the whites should not cross the Ohio. As early as 1779 "trespassers" of a law as inherently impossible as the Proclamation of 1763, made settlements on the Indian Side of the Ohio "from the river Muskingum to Fort McIntosh, and thirty miles up some of the branches of the Ohio river."^[2] Colonel Brodhead at Fort Pitt immediately despatched Captain Clark to drive off the intruders.

The commissioners at the Fort McIntosh treaty (1785) were not blind to such possibilities, and took occasion to forward the following instructions to Colonel Harmar at Fort Pitt, January 24, 1785: "Surveying or settling the lands not within the limits of any particular State being forbid by the United States, in Congress assembled, the commander will employ such force as he may judge necessary in driving off persons attempting to settle on the lands of the United States."^[3] The task laid upon Colonel Harmar was a most unpopular and impossible one. By this time the country south of the Ohio was teeming with a great restless population.

There were, by 1785, a hundred thousand people in what we know as West Virginia and Kentucky. The first comers had fallen upon the very best lands and appropriated them. There is no doubt that all the fertile "bottoms" along the southern shore of the Ohio River had been "staked out" and more or less "improved" by this time. Washington alone, through his agents Crawford and Freeman, had secured not less than sixty thousand acres on the Ohio and Little and Great Kanawha before this time. Other far-sighted, enterprising men, like Patrick Henry, had secured other tracts of land. It must be remembered, too, that this was a day of no roads; lands lying away from the immediate river valleys could be reached and improved only with the greatest difficulty.

It is therefore no wonder that the southern shore of the Ohio was crowded at this time with a swarm of pioneers whose uncouth faces and unkempt appearance suggested plainly the labor they had endured to reach and hold the river—their goal. They looked across to the fertile bottoms on the Indian Side and the splendid stretches of land in the valleys of the Muskingum, Hocking, Scioto, and Miami Rivers. They and their children had conquered that land; under a score of fierce leaders they had flung themselves upon the upper Muskingum and driven the Delawares away to the Lakes, or upon the Scioto and sent the Shawanese scurrying up the Sandusky or Maumee. Yet there on the trees on the other side were nailed proclamations from the commanding officer at Fort Pitt warning them against settling on those lands.

Little wonder they defied the proclamation. In less than two months after Colonel Harmar had received the instructions to drive off all settlers from these lands of the United States, he sent a force under Ensign Armstrong down the river from Pittsburg. His report was most alarming;^[4] he affirmed that there were three hundred families at the falls of the Hocking and an equal number on the Muskingum; on the Miami and Scioto Rivers the number of "intruders" was placed at fifteen hundred. "From Wheeling to that place [Miami]," he wrote, "there is scarcely one bottom on the river but has one or more families living thereon." These settlers "were equal to self-government," writes William Henry Smith, "and, if undisturbed, would soon have laid the foundations of a State on the Ohio."^[5] Indeed, a call was issued by these pioneers March 12, 1785, for an election of members to a convention for the framing of a constitution for the government of a new state; elections were to be held at the mouths of the Miami, Scioto, and Muskingum Rivers and one at the house of Jonas Menzons in the present Belmont County, Ohio. The advertisement of these elections was signed by John Emerson and its final paragraph denied the right of Colonel Harmar to dispossess the settlers on the Indian Side, in the following terms:

"I do certify that all mankind, agreeable to every constitution formed in America, have an undoubted right to pass into every vacant country, and there to form their constitution, and that from the confederation of the whole United States, Congress is not empowered to forbid them, neither is Congress empowered from that confederation to make any sale of uninhabited lands to pay the public debts, which is to be by a tax levied and lifted [collected] by authority of the Legislature of each State."^[6]

On January 31, 1786, a treaty was concluded at the mouth of the Great Miami with the Shawanese. The United States received from that dangerous nation a title to the lower Ohio Valley. But the general government was by this time at its wits' end to keep the acquired territory from the restless inhabitants of its own impoverished colonies. Colonel Harmar wrote the Secretary of War now that he had, by force of arms, driven off all intruders for a distance of seventy miles below Pittsburg, but that the number beyond "was immense" and that nothing could prevent the lands being occupied in the old Virginia way "unless Congress enters into immediate measures." Congress took the cue and resolved that if troops stationed at Pittsburg could not enforce its commands, a new garrison must be established on the lower Ohio. Accordingly Colonel Harmar was ordered to take post on the north side of the Ohio between the Muskingum and the Miami Rivers, where he could successfully keep the front ranks of the immigration army from crossing the river, and where he could also protect the surveyors of the seven ranges from any insults of the Indians.^[7] Under this order Fort Harmar was erected at the mouth of the Muskingum River (Marietta, Ohio) in 1785. Fort Harmar and Fort Finney, erected at the mouth of the Miami, nominally accomplished the purposes for which they were erected; the immigration movement across the Ohio was stopped until preparations had been made for it. They were the first legal homes of Americans north of the Ohio River after the Revolutionary War.

In the meantime propositions for the government of this great region north of the Ohio River were being debated in Congress; and finally it was declared to be the "Territory Northwest of the River Ohio" by the Ordinance of 1787. This famous act had been pending three years in Congress, but was passed within twelve days of the arrival in New York of Dr. Manasseh Cutler, hero-preacher and skilled diplomat; he came as the authorized agent of an Ohio Company of Associates which had been formed by Revolutionary veterans under the leadership of General Rufus Putnam in Boston in 1786 with special reference to the western land bounties promised by Congress in 1776 to faithful soldiers. The Ordinance organized from the lands ceded to the government by the several states the magnificent territory now occupied by the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The act itself was conceived in a petition signed by these Revolutionary soldiers composing the Ohio Company of Associates, and forwarded by General Putnam to General Washington, praying that the Government redeem its worthless scrip by grants of western land.

This a grateful government was willing to do. The difficulty was that it would be hazardous to organize a territory, to be suckled and protected at great expense, unless a considerable fraction of the area thus organized should be populated and developed by worthy citizens. The Ohio Company of Associates offered to take a million and a half acres. This was not satisfactory to the delegates in Congress. It was a mere clearing in all that vast stretch of territory between the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes. It was, therefore, on a momentous mission of reconciliation that Dr. Cutler hurried to New York. The "Territory Northwest of the River Ohio" could not be erected unless the Ohio Company took a considerable part of the lands. The Ohio Company, on the other hand, could not take land without the assurance that it was to be an integral part of the United States. The Ohio Company would make the Ordinance possible; the Ordinance made the Ohio Company's purchase possible.

In order to realize the hopes of his clients, and, at the same time, satisfy the demands of the delegates at Congress, Dr. Cutler added to the grant of the Ohio Company an additional grant of three and a half million acres, taken by a Scioto Company on behalf of Colonel Duer and others. Thus by a stupendous speculation, unhappy in its results but compromising in no way the Ohio Company or its agent, and by shrewdly, though without dissimulation, announcing his determination to obtain lands from the individual states if Congress would not now come to terms, Dr. Cutler won a signal victory. The famed Ordinance was passed, corrected almost to the letter of his amendments, and Congress entered into the greatest private contract it had ever made. It was signed by Dr. Cutler and Major Winthrop Sargent for the Ohio Company and Samuel Osgood and Arthur Lee for the Treasury Department, October 27, 1787.

Speaking in general terms, therefore, the Ohio Valley from the Pennsylvania line to the mouth of the Muskingum was, in 1785–86, surveyed into the "Seven Ranges;" southwest of this, down the valley, came the Ohio Company grant of 1787. This embraced the lands from the seventh through the seventeenth range. The earnestness of these New Englanders is suggested by the immediate payment of half a million dollars down, when the contract was signed with the United States, and by the immediate arrival on the Ohio of the Ohio Company's vanguard of settlers. These forty-eight "Pilgrims of Ohio," under the leadership of the noble Putnam, reached the Youghiogheny by way of the Old Glade Road through Pennsylvania in the midwinter of 1787–88. On the seventh of the following April they landed at the mouth of the Muskingum. Here, across the Muskingum from Fort Harmar, they built their pioneer castle, around which grew up Marietta—named in honor of Marie Antoinette, whom its founders, old Revolutionary veterans, had learned to love. In July, General Arthur St. Clair, the newly-appointed governor of the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio arrived, and with imposing ceremony, the administration of the great Territory was inaugurated. Within two years five colonies had been planted by the Ohio Company, four in the Muskingum Valley and one on the Ohio, opposite the mouth of the Little Kanawha River. The "Indian Side" of the "white foaming river" had now received its first permanent quota of white settlers.^[8]

In the same year, 1787, John Cleves Symmes and associates, largely from New Jersey, entered into correspondence with Congress for the purchase of a million acres of land north of the Ohio, lying between the Little and Great Miami Rivers. This "Symmes" or "Miami" purchase was achieved, and the Marietta pioneers saw the Miami settlers passing down the Ohio late in 1788 en route to their lands two hundred miles away. In point of daring no pioneer movement in America, save only the founding of Boonesborough, Kentucky, was more plucky than the founding of what is now Cincinnati. In December, Losantiville (Cincinnati) was settled, opposite the mouth of the Licking River. The Symmes company also settled Columbia, at the mouth of the Little Miami, and North Bend (Indiana) a little to the west. Each of the three settlements vied with the others for supremacy. Judge Symmes located at North Bend, but Fort Washington was erected at Losantiville and, the name being changed to Cincinnati, that settlement became the metropolis of the Ohio River below Pittsburg; the seat of government of the Northwest Territory was moved hither in 1790.

Therefore in 1790, when the Indian War broke out, the northern bank of the Ohio was settled, in a certain sense, between the mouths of the Muskingum and Scioto and the mouths of the Little and the Great Miami. But these light spots in all the darkness of the Black Forest, as the West was familiarly called, were, after all, but one shade lighter than the surrounding wilderness. The population of the Ohio Company settlements was only a few score; Cincinnati, six years after its founding, could only number, garrison and all, an equal number of hundreds. The founders of Cincinnati, like those of Marietta, were of the best of colonial and revolutionary stock; but, because of the contaminations of the rough frontier, their settlements became what Pittsburg was throughout its early history. General Richard Butler, had he lived, might well have written Governor St. Clair at Cincinnati in 1800 the same words he penned General Irvine at Pittsburg in 1782—"am happy to find you can manage the d—ls of that country and the b—tes of the garrison." Of Pittsburg in 1782 General Irvine wrote his wife: "There never was, nor I hope will there ever be, such a wretched, villainous place as this." Of Marietta, equally disagreeable pictures were drawn by contemporaneous writers. It was a question whether or not the leaven of New England could leaven the whole lump. It did—with the help of good Virginian blood.

The next tract of land to be opened was that lying between the Ohio Company's purchase and Judge Symmes's, a six thousand square mile tract bounded on the east by the Scioto and on the west by the Little Miami. This was the Virginia Military District. The Old Dominion had voted her soldiers upon continental and state establishment bounties in western lands. The land that was granted (practically the old Henderson purchase between the Green and Tennessee Rivers) did not prove large enough. Virginia, guarding against this very contingency, had reserved the tract between the Scioto and Little Miami for bounty lands when she ceded her county of Illinois to the Government in 1784. Therefore in 1790 Congress passed a law "directing the Secretary of War to make return to the Governor of Virginia of the names of the Virginia officers and men entitled to bounty-lands, and the amount in acres due them." The same act authorized the agents of the said troops to locate and survey for their use, between the two rivers, apparently in the wretched Virginia fashion, such a number of acres of land as, together with the number already located on the waters of the Cumberland, would make the amount to which they were entitled; these locations and surveys to be recorded, together with the names of those for whom they were made, in the office of the Secretary of State. The President was then directed to issue letters patent for these lands to the persons entitled to them, for their use or the use of their heirs, assigns, or legal representatives. The Secretary of State should forward these deeds to the executive of Virginia, to be delivered to the proper persons. It will be seen that the national Government issued the deeds, but did not make the surveys.^[9]

The Indian War which raged from 1790 to 1795 was fought almost wholly north of the Ohio River basin with Fort Washington as the base of supplies.^[10] The conflict delayed the pioneer movement into the Ohio Valley but, after the treaty of Greenville (1795), the movement was renewed with a rush. The Virginia Military District now (1796) began filling with Virginians, and under good and great men such as General Nathaniel Massie and Duncan McArthur, subsequently governor of Ohio, became a power in the old Northwest.

We have intimated that the original Ohio Company purchase and the Virginia Military District adjoined; upon the utter failure of the Scioto Company, which had been a party with the Ohio Company in its first contract, the additional lands taken by Colonel Duer came again into the possession of the United States and were known as Congress Lands. This tract embraced about four thousand square miles and stretched over the twenty odd miles on the Ohio between the Ohio Company lands and those of the Virginia Military District.

Thus at the opening of the actual pioneer period, about 1800, we find both shores of the Ohio dotted with settlements. In Virginia and Kentucky there are Pittsburg, Charleston, Wheeling, Limestone (Maysville), and Louisville; and on the old-time Indian Side are Beaver (Fort McIntosh), Wellsburg, Marietta (Fort Harmar), Gallipolis, Manchester, Columbia, Cincinnati; and Madison and Clarksville, Indiana. By 1800 there are forty-five thousand inhabitants in the entire Northwest Territory, of which probably twenty-five thousand are in the Ohio Valley. Kentucky contains a population of over two hundred thousand; not such a large fraction are on the Ohio however, as is true in the Northwest Territory. The question of conquest is past, though still for a decade the British, who have sullenly withdrawn across the Detroit River, will continue to incite the Indians until Harrison shall annihilate Tecumseh's confederacy at Tippecanoe in 1811. But so far as the Ohio Valley is concerned the question is one of occupation; and now come the streams of immigration from all easterly points of the compass to this great waterway.

Putnam's Map of the Ohio River and Settlements (1804)

Putnam's Map of the Ohio River and Settlements (1804)

1. Historic Highways of America, vol. vi, ch. i.
2. The St. Clair Papers, vol. ii, p. 1.
3. Id., p. 3, note 1.
4. Id., vol. ii, p. 4, note.
5. Id., p. 5, note.
6. Id., p. 5, note. Legally John Emerson had no rights northwest of the Ohio River; but as an exponent of the American idea he had a sort of justification; see Professor Frederick J. Turner's studies, American Historical Review, vol. 1, pp. 70–87, 251–268.
7. The MS. Harmar Papers; St. Clair Papers, vol. ii, p. 7, note 1.
8. The rights to certain lands on the upper Muskingum Valley, where David Zeisberger had located the Moravian towns in 1773, were vested in the Moravian Church. Gnadenhutten, Ohio, was, technically, the first white settlement in Ohio after the French locations along the Lakes. King's Ohio, p. 119.
9. Hinsdale's Old Northwest (1888), pp. 290–292.
10. Historic Highways of America, vol. viii.