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THE INDIAN SIDE
63

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