(RETURN TO THE TITLE PAGE)

50 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES strong men worn few ceased from the staggering strife. Thus, they fell at last, not for a fault done by them, but because of a far away ancestral share in harm that set the children's teeth on edge. Compared with other events in the drama of man, the scene most replete with interest for a benevolent mind is the conflict for freedom in America. As in the progress of the fossil odd so in man's culminating struggle, there has been a place, for all, and nothing useless. The mythic Mound Builders played an early and a leading part on the ever tragic stage, where the fittest is to survive. After more pondering than may seem profitable, and though many may deride an opinion more easily doubted than refuted, as an inference both reasonable and sufficient, I venture this conclusion. The Southern or Toltecan or Mexican Indians of Asiatic origin coming early and ever seeking an easier life in more fruitful climes, found and with long cultivation domesticated the tropical corn plant upon which they grew numerous and ceased to be nomads. But, then as now, when people came to be many and game scarce, band after band impelled by need or lured by traveler's tales, turned back to northern plains teeming with game, nowhere, by all after accounts, so fine and so plentiful as that which grazed the blue grass of the Silurian Island. The bands trailing back to the north only took the skill of their day, and, hidden in the lodges of the wilderness, never learned the larger art of their race in Mexico, that afterward caused the conquering Spaniard to become a fiend of avarice. With the humble skill of the Stone Age and a strange taste in heaping curious forms of earth, they also brought their tropic corn and made it to be all but native along the Ohio. Waxing rich in what was taken with toil they became the envied prey of the tribes gathering in and bursting from the north. Then the mighty forts were arched about the northern part of the Blue Limestone, in front of their choicest and most endangered land, both to guard their homes and save their templed groves and mounded graves. In spite of all that, the fierce northman from beyond the Lakes enacted the Fall of Rome along the Ohio and wrested its rule from care encumbered men who trusted in vows and walls instead of shorter spears. CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 51 If this be true, and nothing proposed seems more likely, then the memory of the much suffering and sad fated planters and fort makers is redeemed from the reproach of wasted effort. For their golden gift, their brave bequest, the proudest plant, the goodliest grain of the New World, the kingly corn, easy and quick to raise, and also easy and long to keep, has done more than its kings to prosper the world. Having accomplished their sublimely simple destiny of planting corn on the Ohio, and having no nobler part to play, the Mound Builders vanished amid the deep dismay of dire defeat. While reflecting on their awful extirpation, gratitude should be mingled with the sympathy due to the little offending and much enduring race. As charity covers a multitude of sins, so their great respect for the dead who must have been loved exceedingly, palliates whatever else was wrong. In holding the country long with no harmful effect and in leaving it with a lasting blessing, they only met the frequent fate of suffering most for doing best. To him seeking oracles and hoping answers to make us less forlorn, History answers : The thorns are many but the flower is fair. The evolution of perfection is painful. Every change to larger plans—from moss to blue grass—from trilobites to Indians—from Indians to railroads—has involved the forced supplanting of something weak by something stronger. Measured by the standards of some unhappy because their greed is greater than their mead, the want or plenty of a tribal feast equally shared by all should be the ideal of impartial fortune. But those harping about the happy long ago or those mooning about a reign of earthly fraternity will learn nothing from those oldest memorials to prove that mankind is lapsing from innocence or approaching a promise of safety from human passions. The race with time no longer beckoning with a blunted scythe but armed with urgent lightnings gives scant chance to saunter by the ancient mounds and linger for harmless tales of when the world was very young. All Such curious lore, however entertaining, can be, at best, but speculative and inconclusive. Still, there is a grave pleasure in the study of the rare and broken proofs of a perished people. As, we climb the mounds or walk over the lines of earthy walls that cost them utmost toil we can but wonder whether they were 52 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES prompted by war or worship. As we look upon the rude memorials of their plundered graves we gather new lessons on the transient nature of all our schemes. As we chance upon the shapely flints that tipped their darts, we can but guess whether their last swift flight was forced by hunger or vengeance. We poise their axes with a subtle thought that they were far fitter to destroy than to prolong life. We stand by cabinets containing more of their weapons and utensils than a tribe possessed, and we muse with compassion for the pitiful beings that depended upon such meager mechanism in the cruel strife with their relentless fate. But thus musing we kindle with admiration for their brave defiance of the doom that made them die fighting for the beautiful land they could not hold. From such somber reflection we gladly turn for the far more pleasant purpose of telling the story of the courageous people of our own blood who deserve to he remembered for the good they did. CHAPTER III. DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION. A Tale of Trial and Triumph—The Wrongs of the Indians—They Did Not Inhabit Ohio—The Right of Discovery—Our Right to the Land Founded on War—The Missionaries—English Enterprise--Algonquin and Iroquois Rivalry—The Sparse Indian Population—The Ohio Valley the Most Vacant of All—The French Incur Iroquois Hatred—The Strategic Importance of the Iroquois—The Shawnees—Virginians Find Waters Flowing to the South Sea—LaSalle Claims the Mississippi Valley for the French—The Shawnees Migrate to Ohio—The Peaceful Delawares Grow Brave in Eastern Ohio—The Miamis and Wyandots Enter Northwestern Ohio—The French Build Forts Along the Lakes and down the Mississippi—The Fur Trade—The French and English prepare to Fight for No Man's Land Along the Ohio—The First Ohio Land Company—Enter, George Washington — Celoron's Expedition Passes Old Clermont, August 29, 1749—Pickawillany—Christopher Gist Searches for Good Land—Nothing Finer Found than the Miami Region—The French Destroy Pickawillany and War Begins—The End of Peaceful Exploration. After the admiration inspired by a study of the geological preparation of an exquisitely balanced home for man, and after the wonder at the troubled possession and woeful failure of an insufficient people, the Story of the White Race in the Land of the Blue Lime Stone is a noble tale of trial and triumph. But the outset of the story in many, perhaps most, minds confronts an error that must be refuted, because no explanation including a mistake can be satisfactory. In school days which can never be ours again and yet are claimed forever, because "time their impression deeper makes;" the "Wrongs of the Indians" was an ever popular subject for essay, declamation or debate. Whether deplored as inevitable or de- 54 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES fended as necessary, the wrongs were a condition conceded for argument and impressed by many iterations until civilization was defamed by the decision that the Red Men had been cruelly driven from their heritage. However well this opinion fitted in Mexico or Peru, it does not apply in the Ohio Valley. For, after the Mound Builders were driven thence or perished there, only few came to see the desolation and none to stay. Not many intrusive graves or burials later than the first construction have been found in the mounds which would be well chosen for the casualties of transient bands. No extensive traces of a subsequent occupation have been noted; and the explorers found no tribes whose coming is unknown. While certain that man ceased to inhabit the once populous valley, the questions why and how long have no sufficient answer. The fewness and the smallness of the northern tribes may have hindered a wider scattering, but that does not explain why any, however few, after the way was open, should prefer the harshness of the Laurentian Basin to the genial Valley called Beautiful. Or, perhaps, their superstition may have taken the plagues of the southern people as a warning to stay from the land accursed. There is reason to assume that all this had happened much before the Columbian era. Thus the Ohio flowed the centuries by through a land lulled with its murmur in a slumbering rest, at last to be broken amid the din of the world's utmost need. The much bruited phrase, "Spheres of influence," under which the Great Powers are masking their commercial plans, alias schemes of conquest, is only a smoother wording for the frank but brutal "Right of Discovery" which was brought into use when the partition of America began to multiply the strife of the world. With the hazards of navigation at that time scarcely more certain than the throwing of dice, it was the luck of the French to seize the St. Lawrence, and the fortune of the English to get the Chesapeake and a lonely landing on a rock-bound coast between: Then, the natural but much disturbed rights of the Indians, including a tribal life, the liberty of the wilderness, and the pursuit of game, was rudely superseded by the Right of Discovery invented to justify the cupidity of the artful. While a lofty purpose to spread CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 55 the Gospel to the uttermost isles of the sea was proclaimed with much pious promise, the kings meditated that each should govern all that their subjects might have the fortune to find and the strength to hold. As those subjects had no choice but abject submission to the royal will, no better terms could be expected for the heathen, except that, instead of consenting to severe laws and conforming to a strange religion, they could and did go farther back into the hilly lands and study strategy. With such a convenient and self-satisfying pretense as the frequently self-asserted act of discovery, the claims were always vast and vague enough for any change or chance. In fact, the chance for contention was ready at the start. A messenger posting warily over long deserted paths with budgets of warning for those in a difficult region, however conscious of scenes glowing with pleasing hues or charming with waving lines or thrilled with tuneful birds or rippling waters, has no leisure for plucking bloom, no time for admiring the shadow flecked plain or the forest plumed hills, or the cloud tumbled sky, and no quiet for heeding the harmony wooing him from haste. Instead he must search the festooning vine and the adorning moss for the scar toward the cliff where the way bends by a lightning blasted oak near the thicket hidden pass to the famous victory. And so one fain to tell a pretty tale of happy people ,must go by battlefields or miss the way while hunting facts to gloss the truth. In more than half the years since the war for Ohio began our countrymen have stood in blazing lines of battle for what is now the enjoyment of all. The statement will have doubt and wonder from some and regret from all. A few pale blooded people with no practical remedy will assume philanthropy by execrating the awful atrocity of war. If peace is light then strife is the shadow of life, and, until noon which is not yet, the shadow will go before. Because the omission would be more shameful to the living than harmful to the dead, the heroic struggles of the forefathers in battle with barbarism should be studied by all who delight to ponder the paths of progress. Whatever may have been learned or guessed about the prehistoric population, the people found by the earliest explorers were subject to violent change and lived in a state but little short of constant war which involved tribes in confederacies 56 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES and fostered hereditary feuds. For a large authentic information about this we are indebted more than to all others, to the missionaries, who in devotion to their faith were the bravest of the brave. And none had more need for great hearts, for they went forth as sheep among wolves. If they were not always wise, being human, they were not always harmless. None, as their Master had warned, ever more surely brought not peace but a sword. With the zeal of _martyrs, they had the tact of diplomacy, the skill of command, the polish of schools, the gift of tongues and all the arts of persuasion. All this availed not when they and their converts became the wretched captives of hostile tribes to whom conversion seemed a racial treason, and the best qualities of the missionaries a sorcery to be punished with added hate to the utmost vindictive torture. Despite the danger of the errand, those bearing the Gospel gained and with practiced pens preserved a clearer knowledge of the tribes than could have been obtained by the sword alone. While the grandeur of the Discovery lifts the name of Columbus above the waves of oblivion until man shall cease to think, the glory of first beholding the American Continent with scientific eyes belongs to the English sailors captained by John Cabot. Quick to see the dawn of a mighty change, and feeling that the noblest prize within grasp had been lost by accident, the English determined to challenge the fortune which seemed never to tire in favoring Spain. After four centuries, that determination has made their language the chief speech of the world. But for a hundred years, the demons of disaster thwarted every scheme to get a standing in the New World ; except that the brilliant but sad fated Sir Walter Raleigh added Virginia to the maps, whence, a long heroic struggle and the Norman name of Clermont. The French were earlier to win, and for a while more successful in extending their claims, and might have been entirely so, but for what seemed a tribal brawl. On that wild and seemingly aimless strife along the middle and upper St. Lawrence, not only the fate of the English in America was hinged, but also there, as well as on the battlefields of Europe, the destiny of the Anglo Saxon. Experience gradually revealed that tribal affairs of the Appalachian and the St. Lawrence regions in- CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 57 cluding the Great Lakes were dominated by two powerful confederacies. Of these the larger and more indefinite northward and westward was the Algonquin. The other confederacy was the Iroquois, who once held the region north of Lake Erie and between Lakes Huron and Ontario, whence they concentrated their power about the Lake Region of New York, and kept their Canadian lands for a game park. Their canoes with equal ease for the equal delight of hunting or warring could descend the Hudson, the Delaware, the Susquehanna or the Aleghenny, as they often called the Ohio, from Chautauqua to Cairo. The coast was theirs from the Chesapeake to the bays of Maine, whenever they chose to taste its luxuries. Unmolested by any but haughtily spurning all, their warrior-hunters, probably never exceeding twenty-five hundred, roamed to pass a winter in Tennessee or a summer on Hudson's Bay. With imperial strength from the union of five tribes as one, their dictate to neighboring bands was obedience or extirpation. The metaphors of their eloquence show that few have loved the pleasure of pathless woods, the rapture of lonely shores, and the silence of solitudes as did the Iroquois. Out of this passion for seclusion they prohibited encroachment on the vacant wilderness to which they had no more right than their spears could enforce. The fear of those spears reached far. On the east none ventured without permission into the forbidden lands once populous with the Mound Builders. On the south the Cherokees came down the Tennessee to the Muscle Shoals with some hunting but no staying farther north. From there the country was claimed to the mouth of the Ohio by the Chickasaws who lived along the Yazoo. The Illinois only weakly held four or five towns northward from the Kaskaskia. On the north, the Miamis, in front of the Chippewas who were at war with the Sioux, were forbidden to come nearer than the Maumee, the Miami of the North. Evidently, the time was not far off when much war would have been waged for the Beautiful Valley by the eager bands of the Northwest, already powerful in numbers and distant security. The not to be imagined fury that might have been was supplanted by the White Peril. In all of the country east of the Mississippi, the total Indian population at that time is fairly estimated at one hundred and eighty thousand souls. 58 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES Of these less than one-tenth were west of the Appalachian ranges and north of the Tennessee. The most vacant space of all, much within which no tribe fixed a wigwam, is now generally outline by Pittsburgh, Nashville, Peoria and Toledo. Unconscious of the wrath to be, perhaps unable to choose' otherwise, Samuel Champlain, the French Governor, with several muskets and a retinue of Canadian Indians, passing southward for farther conquest, in the summer of 1609, by the lovely lake that perpetuates his name, encountered, ambushed and defeated a band of Iroquois. Among the slain were some killed by bullets, about whose death there was awful wonder. The combined consternation for the prodigy, grief for the victims and rage at the defeat inspired a never forgotten hatred. Thenceforth the French and their friends were enemies; and when-the English came fighting their foe, the Iroquois called them brothers. For two hundred years with scanty peaceful moons they were the constant and efficient allies of the British. Their strategic position between Canada and the coveted coast made them decisive in the Franco-English conflict for America. Until the French were vanquished, the never lacking lines of the Five Nations stopped marches that would have forced the English into the sea. As it was, many a sudden and horrible visitation was suffered by the Puritan settlements from elusive Canadian bands; but it is significant that none reached the coast or tarried long. While less exploited, the strategic influence of the Iroquois on the west was scarcely less effectual. Unable to capture an ice-free port on the east side, the French eventually decided upon a chain of forts from Canada, through the Mississippi Valley to Louisiana and the ever open Gulf. Since none but a water way could be then, instead of the natural and shortest plan with the least possible portage from the St. Lawrence to the nearby sources of the Ohio, and thence with its flow, they were compelled by Iroquois violence to accept the labor at Niagara and the risk of the Lakes and to go by the Wabash or more safely by the Illinois. Thus but for those puffs of smoke that transformed the schemes of fate, in those woods so long ago, where is now the summer garden of the leisure class, the names from Florida to Plymouth Rock might have had Parisian phrase. And thus CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 59 because of Iroquois wrath two hundred leagues afar, the flowers of Old Clermont blushed unseen, while the centuries of less fortunate climes drifted in blood away. The idea intended is not the utter absence of human life from the country, but this : the occupation was so nomadic that such trace does not exist as fixes the position of other tribes with the certainty which obtains attention. The little that was learned was soon displaced or rearranged. In 1656, while the European world was wondering that Cromwell's mighty power as Lord Protector had averted the Massacre of the Waldenses, the almost equally proud and valiant tribe of Eries occupying the southern watershed of the Lake named from them was literally extirpated by the Iroquois. Some early, indefinite notice was taken of a wandering tribe thought to be the Shawnees, who in 166o were living on the Cumberland in middle Tennessee, whence they went to the highlands of South Carolina and then northward until permitted in 1698 to live on the Susquehanna. Then they came to Ohio and made an all eclipsing Indian record. The tantalizing dream of the early explorers was gold and jewels through a short passage to the great South Sea and the fabled wealth of India and far Cathay. In "A Perfect Description of Virginia," published in London in 1649, much confidence is placed in the statement of the Indians, that rivers beyond the mountains were flowing to a great sea beneath the setting sun : and the chief question was the width of the land to be crossed. On September 17, 1671, a party duly authorized by Governor Berkeley of Virginia, after wandering by a very high and steep mountain came to a Fall that made a great noise in the course of a river, that seemed to run westward about certain pleasant mountains. They fired guns, made marks and proclaimed the authority of King Charles II over all the lands thereby watered. This may well be regarded as one of the most important acts within the reign of that merry profligate ; for the spot was the Great Falls of the Kanawha ; and the event is remarkable as the earliest exploration by the English of the waters of the Ohio and the Mississippi, where the race is now seemingly supreme. In about the same days, La Salle, famous among French 60 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES explorers, was drawn to Canada by the fur trade and then lured by the fascinating fables into a search for a way to the South Sea. From a Shawnee prisoner among the Iroquois he heard the story of a great river flowing though an Indian paradise during a journey of two moons to a salty sea. With legal authority for the quest, he boated down an ever widening river with an ever expanding hope, until the Falls of the Ohio were reached, where in 1671 he was deserted by his faithless companions and forced to retreat through the unknown forest to Canada. But undismayed through other perilous voyages in canoes, he perceived something of the vast future, so that on April 9, 1682, he raised a cross and set the arms of France at the mouth of the Mississippi, which he claimed for Louis XIV unto the remotest sources of all its tributaries. In passing the mouth of the Ohio, La Salle noted that the river (including the Allegheny) was fifteen hundred miles in length, and that it was used by the Iroquois in warring excursions against the southern Indians. This is most ancient proof of a still more ancient strife. Such excursions also warned the French from the Ohio and kept them westward from the Wabash. The many long past years since then call me to take notice of a few of the bolder scenes along the path, whereby progress reached our land. The retreating Red Men came first and, to some extent but not much, re-peopled the valleys full of bones. Notwithstanding the cruel strife in every direction, there is reason to believe that the Indian population has, not largely, but surely, increased during historic observation. The tribes displaced by the coast-dotting colonies were not exterminated : When farther resistance became in vain, they simply went back into the wilderness with added facilities for an easier life. For they were quick to gain guns and use iron 'tools instead of stone. The earliest accounts mention their pathetic eagerness to possess a scrap of metal or a bit of glass, while a knife or hatchet was an envied fortune. Least disturbed of all, because of their political position, and supplied with more than others, the Iroquois stoutly asserted their old claims and firmly held their conquest on Lake Erie. When the retiring movement began to crowd the Shawnees on the Susquehanna, that much molested tribe was permitted CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 61 to migrate in 1728 to the mid Muskingum and thence spread across the Scioto to the lands about Xenia on the Little Miami. In this region, they were joined by scattered bands of their dialect from as far as Florida, where some are fain to hear a charming tone of their sweeter words in the name of Suwanee River made tender for ages to come by the melody of "The Old Folks At Home." If this be doubted, we are certain that early maps showed the course of the "Shawnee" River until the name was changed to honor the Duke of "Cumberland," "The Martial Boy" of twenty-five years, who disgraced his victory at Culloden by an infamous massacre made more atrocious by pretended refinement. The instance stands as one of many American misnomers. The Shawnees thus located formed the front edge of the long Conflict for the Ohio. The gathering of the families of that tribe for the bold defiance of their fate may somewhere and sometime have equal but surely no superior comparison in dramatic quality. Eighty to fifty years ago, a much quoted lesson in school books was Penn's vaunted Treaty with the Peaceful Delawares, whereby much cheap land was easily got. The equations of history not stated in that lesson teach a sadder conclusion for friend and foe alike, not to be reached without a study of the Massacre at Gnadenhutten and some attention to Crawford's Defeat. A full account also must be taken of the awful payment of blood exacted at the Massacre of Wyoming by the Iroquois whose grandfathers Penn had neglected to conciliate. Dejected by the arrogance of the masterful Iroquois, parted from their hunting lands by a siren song that no longer thrilled, and unwilling to take a pitiful wage from English scorn by tilling the fields or clearing the groves through which they had strolled at will, the sorrowful Delawares soon followed the Shawnees to the Muskingum. In that region of beauty exceeding even an Indian's dream of his Happy Land, they and their brothers, the Monsis, began to remember the former glory of their common race, and determined that none should again be braver. Many years ago, so many that there can be no more, so their legends ran, the Len-ni-Len-a-pe came from the west beyond the mountains, across the land of big rivers and more mountains, 62 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES finding much game and growing stronger than anyone is now. They came by people living in places with great walls, who gave them food and helped them over deep waters. But when some not across were slain, they turned back and left none alive. Then they came on to the sea, where none can go farther. This by some is thought to be a tradition about the Mound Builders. While the Delawares were gaining, a few smaller tribes came to Eastern Ohio, like the Tuscarora to the Tuscarawas and those who gave their name to the Mingo Plains. As some were forced from the east by white colonization, so others were crowded in from the northwest by the migrations of their own race. The Miamis came to the upper branches of the Great Miami and left their place on the Maumee to the Wyandots with the Ottawas farther east. With transient exception, Southern Ohio and Kentucky were unoccupied. In 1729 the French surveyed the Ohio River down to the mouth of the Great Miami. The two score years before and nearly as many after were busily used in building forts to connect and protect the provinces on the Lakes and by the Gulf. Nor was this done without reason and profit. Candid reflection must admit that the English were more offensive to the Indians than the French, who gleefully shared their sports and dangers, asked but simple deference to the showy ceremonials of the Church, and sought hardly more than the mutual advantage of trading posts. The colder policy of the English destroyed the forests, drove the game away, and threatened all with the withering witchery of the surveyor's compass and chain. Compensation for the bitter disappointment of the searchers for fine metals and precious stones was found in the fashion that demanded the pretty coats of the furry denizens of the wilderness, which the Indians were soon taught to gather and barter for beads and baubles, for firearms and firewater, with a profit to the French so far beyond the dreams of avarice that they cared for no other forms of wealth in America. To aid the fur traffic, trading stations were fixed along the trails extending to and from the main forts. These stations or guarded block houses constituted as many small forts. The white traders in charge, amounting to many hundreds of men, CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 63 were among the most alert, daring or reckless, who made light where the cowardly would have quailed. As yet, few or none went by the Ohio. For this no man's land, two of the most civilized nations stumbled on into a conflict shocking even to remember, yet replete with noble results. In geographic ignorance the royal charters of the English were made to extend from sea to sea. Finding no better pretext, the English sought to strengthen their claims to the unknown land beyond by pretending to believe the arrogant claims of the Iroquois to a mythical conquest. Upon those claims, treaties flattering to savage pride were easily made ; and each treaty became the base of another more special, which are all, in length and breadth, an excuse for force. When the French and English kings wanted a rest in the long war, their gorgeous ceremonials included no attention to American questions that could be postponed. By the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Louis XIV conceded to the English his claims to the country of the Iroquois, the south side of the upper St. Lawrence, but how far west was not stated. Yet, he maintained authority over the St. Lawrence and Mississippi. After another generation of furious strife, the Treaty of Aix La Chapelle in 1748, still strongly reasserted these indefinite claims. Knowing that one must yield, both nations began preparations for a struggle to a finish. We are prone to say that we are making history faster than happened to the forefathers. However, elated with present scenes, one must often stand abashed as he explores the majestic ruins of bygone ambitions. Providence, not satisfied with casting the Indian aside, also decreed that the awful strife girdling the globe with havoc should force France from the leading part on the theatre of human action. But the grand old monarchy blindly staggering from the stage pushed down the main props of England's swelling glory, tore away the ragged robes of Spanish pride, gave impetus to the rights of man, and, falling crushed the rule of the Latin, for two thousand years the alternate guardian and spoiler of mankind. While England gained the sea and thereby ruled the shores from Labrador to India's Coral Strand, her exiled,- ignored and estranged sons were founding a firmer and grander continental empire for her speech and liberties. As the grandeur 64 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES of their achievement becomes more imposing, the character of their individual efforts becomes more heroic. The heroism of the Ohio Border is more conspicuous because it was maintained in spite of many humiliations stretching from Brad-dock's fearful defeat to Hull's shameful surrender. Those who began and continued and won the great fight for Ohio, from Lieutenant Colonel Washington's first battle in the Alleghenies to the men from Old Clermont who shared in the victories about Lake Erie were a part of one of the most prodigious and impetuous scenes in the drama of man, which thwarted the schemes of the old world and created a new world of opportunity in America—so great a task it was to plant civilization on the Ohio. As the world smiles on him who finds sermons in stones and good in everything, so evil chances to him who evil thinks. While the optimist rejoices to believe that the peopling of the wilderness had the approval of Providence, the pessimist scoffs at a generous motive and contends that the origin was greed with a mania for grabbing land. Alarmed by the rumors and then tidings that the French forts were coming nearer and growing stronger, the English began to ask what they should do to be safe. Having prospered exceedingly, the planters in Virginia began to cast longing looks over the western mountains beyond which were plains fabled to be more fertile than their own teeming valleys. Their charter from the crown promised protection over the land across the continent until the sun should sink from sight into the ocean that was far beyond the knowledge of man. They knew little and cared less for the overlapping or underlying claims of Louis the Grand for the trade in furs. The Americans, as they were beginning to call themselves, were not unmindful of such profits, but they chiefly purposed farms and flocks and homes for a countless posterity. In 1748 this longing for larger estates found expression in an enterprise that was named the Ohio Company. The plan was endorsed by the Duke of Bedford, backed by wealthy merchants in London, overseen by Governor Dinwiddie, and farther composed of prominent Virginians among whom Were three of the Lee family, George Mason, with Lawrence and Augustine Washington, older brothers of George Washington, a large sedate boy of sixteen who was studying CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 65 surveying as the most suitable accomplishment for one who was to inherit much land. Few have noted and none sufficiently how the growth of George Washington was promoted by the Ohio idea. By the death of Lawrence Washington, in 1752, the youthful George became his executor in the Ohio Company and the possessor of the estate forever famous as Mount Vernon. The undertaking was the talk of the time and the cause of a great stir in the courts at London and Paris. George If gladly granted five hundred thousand acres on the south side of the Ohio between the Monongahela and the Kanawha, or such part thereof as might be chosen anywhere on the farther shore, conditioned upon a settlement and a fort for its defense. Apparently, no king ever asserted so great claim at so slight a cost, but his satisfaction did not equal the resentment of the Court of France, which forthwith gave orders that sent Celoron de Bienville with two hundred officers, soldiers and boatmen, in twenty-three canoes from Lake Erie by portage to Lake Chautauqua and thence into the Ohio, reading royal proclamation with blare of trumpet, display of banners and parade of arms, to witness the carving of inscriptions and the burial of leaden tablets, declaring the royal power of France over the Ohio, "alias the Beautiful River," and all the branches thereof, and the adjacent lands, to their sources. On August 22 Celoron found a Shawnee village, at the mouth of the Scioto, and with them a party of English traders who were warned to leave the country. Four days later the French, without using force against the traders, went down the river and, passing by the hills of Old Clermont probably on August 29, 1749, arrived at the mouth of the Great Miami, where, on August 31, the elaborate ceremonies of proclaiming possession were performed for the sixth time. Three of the six buried tablets have been found, but that by the eastern bank of the Miami remains a hidden mark of a long past dominion. Having declared their claims down to the Wabash, and after boating thirteen weary days up the Great Miami, the French reached the mouth of Loramie's creek where four hundred Miami Indians, under Chief "Old Britain," had lately come from the north and started the town of Pickawillany. While bartering for ponies for an overland trip to Canada and while transferring from his 66 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES battered canoes, Celoron vainly sought to regain the favor of the Miamis and "Old Britain," so called because he sided with the English traders who gave a quart of powder where the French gave a pint. From that picturesque expedition, Celoron returned to Montreal, November 10, and reported in effect that the Ohio trade was lost unless the Ohio river was opened for freight. And so the defense of the Ohio was included in a scheme that comprised sixty forts between Quebec and New Orleans. While the French acted by and with the authority of their king, the English proceeded with less pomp but equal determination. Daring and fortitude were absolute requisites ; yet much, perhaps all, was to depend upon the ability and integrity of their agent. After careful forethought, Christopher Gist, a surveyor and a son of a surveyor, a careful, capable, judicious and notable man, was chosen to go westward of the Great Mountains with a company suitably supplied, and there search for a large quantity of good level land. The Ohio Company made no pretense of pleasing the Indians or anybody who chose to be vagrants. The land when found was to be used for planting. On October 31, 175o, Gist and his party plunged into the wilderness from a spot on the Potomac river now marked by the city of Cumberland. He kept a journal, of which the queer phrasing and quaint spelling have been faithfully printed. Out of the semi-official account many strange scenes can be reviewed. He found Indians nearby, of whom, some asked that the bringing of liquor should cease. He soon found it dangerous to let a compass be seen. There was a village, Logstown, some fourteen miles below the Forks of the Ohio. On December 14, he came to the mouth of Sandy creek on the Tuscarawas river, where the English colors were flying over Muskingum, a town of several hundred Indians and many white traders, whom their superintendent, George Croghan, had warned there for refuge from the French. January 14, 1751, was spent at Goshocking, now called Coshocton. Six days later he came to Maguck, a town in Pickaway county. One week later he was at the house of the great chief of the Delawares, Windaughalah, who ordered his negro man to feed the horses well. This is the earliest mention of black slavery north of the Ohio. Later on the negro people were much CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 67 sought, and such captives were safer than the pale faced among the Indians. On January 29, Gist reached Shanoah Town, so named by him, at the mouth of the Scioto. where Celoron had been fifteen months before. Large rewards had been offered there by French traders for the scalps of English traders, but the Shawnees remained well disposed. As yet no choice had been noted. The land on the Muskingum was fine, but not broad enough. From Shanoah, Gist rode about one hundred and seventy-five miles through the present counties of Scioto, Adams, Highland, Fayette, Madison, Clarke, Champaign and Logan, noting, "except the first 20 M," a fine, rich, level land, well watered and timbered, full of beautiful natural meadows covered with wild rye, blue grass and clover, abounding with turkeys, deer, elks and most sorts of game, particularly buffaloes. "In short," to quote exactly, "it wants nothing but cultivation to make it a most delightful country." On February 17, he rode into Pickawillany, "with English colors before us." The town consisted of about four hundred families protected by a palisade, within which fifty to sixty white traders had built cabins and gained mutual protection. On March 3, he went southeastward down the Little Miami, of which he wrote : "I had fine traveling through rich land and beautiful meadows in which I could sometimes see forty or fifty buffaloes feeding at once. The river continued to run through the middle of a fine meadow, about a mile wide, very clear like an old field, and not a bush in it; I could see the buffaloes above two miles off." But fearing to meet French Indians, he rode away through a land still rich, level and well timbered with oak, walnut, ash, locust and sugar trees, passing through Greene, Warren, and Clinton counties in a circuitous course to Shanoah Town, whence he returned through Kentucky and West Virginia on May 17, 1751, to his home. From six and a half months' exploration he reported that nothing could be more desirable to the company than the Miami country. But for the shadow of coming events, this concise report of primeval promise and beauty might have been followed by a quick settlement. Instead the great longing created by this first, and for many years only description, had to wait the turn of many battles, before Virginia was finally permitted to give the land chosen from all by 68 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES Gist to her valiant sons as a reward for matchless service in Freedom's cause. The French plan for holding trade included a stockade at the Forks of the Maumee, where now is the city of Fort Wayne, which they called Fort Miami. This fort was plundered late in 1547 by some of the Miami Indians. If the traders did not provoke the affray, they were soon involved in the angry consequence. The Miamis about Pickawillany grew so prosperous through English favor, that they were chosen to illustrate French vengeance. Accordingly, Charles Langdale, a resident of Michilimackinac, gathered two hundred and fifty Chippewas and Ottawas for the purpose, and conducted them in canoes to Detroit. Thence they paddled to and up the Maumee, and, made the portage, down the Miami to Pickawillany, where they came so suddenly and unexpectedly, early on June 1752, that little resistance could be made. For the warriors were absent on their summer hunt and only the chief and twenty men and boys with eight white traders could be counted for the defense. Of these, three traders were caught outside. When one white and fourteen Indians had been killed, the rest, including many women and children, surrendered with a promise of life or a threat of death. Fifteen thousand dollars worth of goods were captured and the fort and every cabin were burnt. To make their gloating complete the heart of the trader was broiled and eaten, and the body of the chief, "Old Britain," was boiled and eaten—not because of hunger, but to make them more courageous. Not to be outdone, the Miami braves recalled from their hunt retaliated by eating ten Frenchmen and two of their negroes. Such were some who hindered Ohio. Their peculiar pursuit of happiness has been magnified by theoretical peace people into a perpetual right to stop progress. Our forefathers thought and fougfit otherwise. The results of the expedition were hightly approved by Duquesne, the French Governor General, who named Langdale for a pension of $50 a year, a fortune, then. That the expedition covering more than a thousand miles was made in canoes through two lakes and three rivers seems fabulous. Yet, the proof is official, and the incident shows what was possible against the Mound Builders, and what was often done against the pioneers. While those canoes were CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 69 paddled south, Captain William Trent was even more painfully trailing west from Virginia with a pack train bringing presents to the Indians, as promised by Gist, to confirm the peace desired by all. Instead he found Pickawillany in ashes, and the warriors mourning for their captured women and children. That ended all peaceful exploration, for, in the words of Bancroft : "Thus in Western Ohio began the contest that was to scatter death broadcast through the world." CHAPTER IV. UNDER TWO FLAGS. The Destruction of Pickawillany an Example. of Extensive Indian Strategy—The Strategy of the Indian Defense of Ohio—The Loneliness of the Land—A Blundering War with Dazzling Results—The Showy French—The Miserly King George II—The Iroquois Consent to a Fort at the Fork of the Ohio—The French Begin to Fortify the Ohio—Major George Washington Sent to Protest—Jumonville's Party Killed or Captured—The Seven Years' War Begun—The French Seize the Ohio—The Big Trail—Braddock's Defeat—Washington Commander-in-Chief for Virginia—New England Resolves to Capture Canada—Virginia Resolves to Hold All to the Lakes and Mississippi—Forbes' Expedition—Major Grant's Defeat—The Fork of the Ohio Retaken—The French Flag Goes West, by and Beyond Old Clermont—The Naming of Pittsburgh—Rogers' Mounted Rangers—A Continental Empire Changes Masters—The Indian Is Promised Protection Against Greed for Game Land—Washington's Leadership in Gaining Ohio. The French had surveyed the Ohio, located the tributary Waters and declared the magnificent extent of their flow. The English were about to publish the surpassing excellence and glorious promise of the land. Because of the fur market made by more than fifty white traders resorting there with alluring art, Pickawillany had quickly grown to be the largest Indian town in the Ohio Valley. As the first and most prominent object of French hatred, the destruction of the town was a most significant and dramatic start for the war that more than any other changed the maps of the world. But the campaign against Pickawillany has a special interest as the first example— often repeated in Ohio—of an extensive Indian strategy. In a probable explanation of the cordon of prehistoric forts across the lower Miami and Scioto section, I have mentioned that the lines of attack from the 72 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES north beyond the Lakes were centered by the chasm and at the strait we call Niagara and Detroit. These points are now, to be considered with more particular attention to their relation with modern affairs. No writer as yet has ventured a treatise on the strategy of the Indian Defense of Ohio, probably because it has not been the fashion to admit that there was any method in that long chase of death and fierce struggle for life between the. aggressive settlers and the defensive tribes. But there was a persistence of action and a recurrence of incident that reveals a continuity of cause and purpose, just as certain and controlling as the necessities of the generalship that swayed the eastern armies of the Civil War back and forth between Washington and Richmond, until the flanking force of the Northwest could be marched to the sea. To enhance the contrast between present felicity and former destitution, essayists and orators of all degrees have combined to teach that the ancient wilderness was 'trackless and planless : and so it was to those who were unmindful of its mysteries. But for those who knew the secret lore of the wild there were paths that joined into trails for hunting and trading that became ways of war as surely as the railroad systems of our day control the movement of armies ; or, as surely as sea-power decides the fate of nations. The movements from the northeast either followed the Ohio or went by the Muskingum toward Chattanooga, or Crow's Nest, the council place of the south, to which the way was called the Southern Trail. The bands from the northwest came by Detroit over the Miami Trail through the portage from the Maumee, or from the Sandusky to the Scioto Trail. Those going southwest went by the Wabash Trail, and those going directly south extended the Miami Trail up and beyond the Licking toward the Gap of the Cumberland or to Chattanooga. All of these met or intersected the Big Trail which gathered from the paths along the Chesapeake Basin and went with the Potomac and Monongahela by the Fork of the Ohio, across the Tuscarawas and the Sanduscan Plains to Detroit, where the fierce and unknown forces of the Northwest held council that the White Man should never plant corn in Ohio. The reader who has not considered these trails will soon 73 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES perceive their woeful consequence to those who rocked the cradles of our civilization. From the unbroken security of Detroit, the ferocious fury could be equally hurled over the familiar yet obscure trails, with secrecy and safety, into a blazing line of wrath from the Blue Grass of Kentucky to the Yadkin and the Shenandoah and on to the Catskills near the Hudson. Through this seven hundred miles of border curving about Detroit, the Indians were screened by a constant dread of their untimely coming. Yet, while replete with thrilling action, no feature of their story is more surprising to most readers than the loneliness of the land before the adventuring vanguards of progress a hundred and fifty years ago. From Logsto wn to Shanoah Town or, as now known, from Pittsburgh to Portsmouth, and as far beyond, no wigwams stood within many miles on the Ohio side. Between middle Ohio and middle Tennessee as now known, probably not a thousand people stopped long enough to raise corn. And even these few were soon to leave a vaster vacancy; for, because a flood in 1765 overswept the bark and skin covered log huts they had learned to build, the Shawnee and Delaware families about the mouth of the Scioto withdrew to the then far seclusion of the plains above Chillicothe, and left the Ohio to rage with none to hear. For the lonely land both were to lose, the corrupt courts of the uncomprehending Georges and the voluptuous Louis stumbled into a blundering war with dazzling results. After the destruction of Pickawillany, the stronger French traders ventured more and the English less. Fearing from eastern experience that the English still purposed farms and towns, the Indians were won by the French promise of camps and hunting; and all argument was clinched by a liberal distribution of gifts, which, as has happened since and before, fixed their vote. Looking from the south, the front and flanks of the disputed land were being arranged for special local advantages that the contrivers were not to enjoy. Troops were brought from the forts on the Mississippi to strengthen the garrisons on the Wabash. The defenses of the St. Lawrence Basin received battalions from France to seize and hold the Ohio. The nations over the lakes were incited by the prospect of booty and scalps easy to take, when the White 74 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES Father—the paltry Louis—should give the token for them to join their Ohio brothers in a war that should sweep the English planters into the sea. The miserly, narrow-minded and mean spirited German prince, who poorly played the part of British king and cared more for an acre of Hanover than for all America, reluctantly permitted his ministry to retaliate by sending thirty small cannon and eighty barrels of powder for two forts in the Ohio country. Upon the advice and with the consent of his allies, the Iroquois, one of these forts was to be at the Forks to resist French aggression upon their claims to the West. In stern protest against more than a century of awful incursions from beyond the St. Lawrence, New England designed nothing short of the capture of Canada. The Virginians resolved to maintain their claim westward to the Mississippi and northward to Lake Erie. In this wise, the stage was set for the Seven Years War and for its inevitable sequel, the American Revolution, and all its consequence, which could not have been, if the Ohio Valley had been mastered by another tongue. In comparison with all other eras, this something more than a century and a half must long hold the place of highest historical interest. Whatever else may be wanting, it is good to live where was once the verge of the heroic action, and there behold the distant lines, struggling for the rights of man, come near and press around and on, while they call our own and of our own growth to step from our midst to point the way and order the march to a matchless union of national strength and personal liberty. The expected disappoints and the unexpected happens. Not a tyrant of them all would have believed that Washington's fame would dim their own. None who measure Grant by the fullness of his glory can guess the gentle grace of his life in the land of Old Clermont. As from peak to peak so must our story reach to one, stretch to the other and then incline to pleasant vales. Already, the unexpected by all and yet the greater than all was beginning to happen and mingle with the calculated course of events. In 1752 Celoron became commandant at Detroit With orders to drive the English from the Ohio Valley. In 1753 Duquesne came out from Montreal with some fifteen hun- 75 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES dred Canadians and Indians and built forts at Presque Isle, La Bouef creek and Venango. In the meantime and more important, George Washington had grown quite tall and more composed, so much so, that he had been appointed Adjutant on the Governor's staff, where he learned all the ins and outs of the imperilled Ohio Company of which his chief was the largest shareholder. Impelled by deepest concern both public and private, Governor Dinwiddie secretly purchased powder and gathered stores for war. But he openly beguiled the time with negotiations, in which his athletic young Adjutant, Major Washington, with seven others and the veteran Christopher Gist as guide, was started, October 31, 1753, through the winter wilderness to warn the intruding French from the chartered bounds of Virginia, and incidentally for the far more important service of spying the location and strength of their forts and forces. After this delicate and dangerous duty had passed with mutual punctilio and no satisfaction for either side, the return was made through the rigors of the Allegheny January of 1734, in which Gist saved the life of the young leader and all but lost his own. Major Washington's Journal and Report of imminent war, because of which the Fork of the Ohio should be fortified, was published by the Lords of Trade, who echoed British sentiment, thus aroused, by order to the Royal Governors of the Colonies to meet at Albany in conference for their general safety. This conference was the first hint or suggestion of the American Union, which thus had its origin in the necessities for the Ohio campaign. Made decisive by the report of his Adjutant, on January 16, that the Ohio grant would soon be forever lost, Governor Dinwiddie hurried two hundred men through the mountain snow. Of these Virginia Volunteers, a party of forty under Captain Trent reached the Forks of the Ohio, and, on February 17, 1754, planted the first post in a stockade on the site of Pittsburgh. Before the fort was done, the French came in strength, forced its surrender on April, 17, and gave it the name of Fort Duquesne. All the travel between Wills Creek or Cumberland on the Potomac and the Forks of the Ohio, a distance of one hundred and thirty miles, whether by Indians or with Gist as guide was over the Big Trail which had be- 76 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES come a trace for pack trains. Over this trace, Washington, now Lieutenant Colonel, hastened west with the first seventy volunteers to aid Trent's men, but met them retreating to Cumberland. With no orders for such a contingency, the boy Colonel, for he was barely twenty-two, marched on to defend the Company's store house at the mouth of Red Stone on the Monongahela. Hearing of the French advance through friendly Indians, Washington halted short to the east to construct a breast work. While his men were so engaged, he went forward with a small force that encountered Jumonville's party of whom all were killed or captured but one. Washington's command. "Fire," on May 28, 1754, kindled the anger of nations into open war, for which his name was heard in France with utmost abhorrence. It was different twenty-five years later ; but then, he so skillfully opposed a much larger force, that after a severe battle on July 3, he was granted the honor of retiring from Fort Necessity with all his arms and stores. On the fourth of July, 1754, the Bourbon banner waved alone in the Ohio Valley, but not long. On February 20, 1755, Major General Edward Braddock arrived in Virginia from England with the pick of the English army. During the spring and early summer, he chopped and widened and smoothed the Big Trail into a way for artillery and wagon trains, that was known as Braddock's Road for fifty years to come. Lest the reader may think the story is long to hear or going far from the purpose, if he can trace a lineage to the early people of Old Clermont, I can but ask for a glance ahead along the way worn by our fathers toward the setting sun over their land of hope. For the chances are many to few that those who wagoned from the east came over the Big Trail. By 1802 the travel was so great that the necessity of improvement during the next twenty years involved an outlay of nearly $7,000,000 on what was henceforth to be called The National Road. Though obsoleted by railroads,, this, the greatest of our historic highways, is returning to vogue as the pleasure path of the automobile, from the charms of the Chesapeake, by the beauty of Ohio, to the westerrt wonderland. That "Touring Europe" will yield to such alluring travel at home is less than prophecy, and the meanest of CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 77 the trip will not be the part from "Chillycothia on Sciota" over John Donnel's Trace through Brown and Clermont counties, to "Cincinnata." Therefore, we may continue the way, assured that our steps are on classic ground that should be made more familiar. The ninth of July, 1755, made "Braddock's Defeat" at the end of his marching one of the woeful landmarks of English and American history. Seven hundred and seventy-seven out of eighteen hundred men engaged fell before the hidden fire of a foe mostly gathered from Ohio. Compensation for the humiliation can be found in the education of Colonel George. Washington, who there learned the discipline and tactics of larger forces, and also noted that the British army was not invincible. In vexation over the retreat it was his lot to conduct, he wrote his mother that, if in his power to avoid, he would not again go to the Ohio ; but on the same day, August 14, 1755, he was chosen Commander in Chief of the Defense of Virginia. The duty could not be declined until Ohio was rescued. On September 8, 1756, John Armstrong with three hundred Pennsylvanians destroyed Kittaning, the Delaware town forty-five miles up the Allegheny. Except this, the years 1756 and 1757 passed in a constant defense against incessant raids from the West. In 1758 Washington in command of "a really fine corps of nineteen hundred Virginians" was combined with Armstrong's corps of twenty-seven hundred Pennsylvanians, and fourteen hundred regulars, all under the British veteran, General Forbes. Notwithstanding the great force and preparation intended to conquer, and the extreme caution of Forbes, who advanced an average of a mile a day, the all important strategic point on the Ohio was not to be won without another costly sacrifice of life. On September 14 Major Grant with eight hundred Highlanders and Virginians in attempting to deceive the enemy was caught in an ambuscade, with the loss of himself and two hundred and ninety-five men. The command of the advance was given to Washington, without whose daring energy and the confidence of his men, the campaign must have failed. Finding no chance to waylay his vigilant approach, the Indians about Fort Duquesne disappeared in the silent forest, and the garrison of five hundred French in the night of November 24 78 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES destroyed all that fire would burn and boated down the Ohio, bearing the lily flags of France forever away for a short stay in the forts far beyond the banks of Old Clermont where, there was none to. note that the death march of a long line Of kings was going by. For the next generation was to see the royal blood of France flow from the guillotine, because of misfortunes that lost America. On the following day, November 25, 1758, when the banners of England floated over the Ohio, the name of the spot was changed to Pittsburgh, in honor of him who had quickly changed defeat into victory and given England a new era of glory. The repossession of Fort Pitt gave much but not complete relief to the Ohio frontier of Virginia and Pennsylvania. The flag of France that waved them on drooped lower at Quebec, September 13, 1759, and finally fell at Montreal, September 8, 176o. On September 13, just four days after, Major Robert Rogers was detached from the besiegers of Montreal, with two hundred picked rangers equipped for distant forest service, to seize the French trading stations and to proclaim that a continental empire had changed masters. On December 23 he left the British flag over Detroit which was for many years to be the base of supplies for a savage war against the pioneers of the Ohio Valley. From there he went by the Big Trail to the village on the "Maskongam" where Gist found Croghan ten years before, and there, as elsewhere, British protection was promised against the settlers' greed for game land. Then the party, of which a moving picture would be worth a fortune, passed on a week later to Fort Pitt. The proffered friendship of Rogers and his romantic rangers did not inspire general confidence in the untutored mind, and chief among the skeptic statesmen of the woods was Pontiac, whose story forms two of Parkman's most fascinating volumes. In popular estimation in the middle, if not in all the colonies, Washington was the American hero of the French and Indian War. As the consummation of his military ambition, the recapture of Fort Pitt permitted him to resign his commission, and, just one week later, on January 6, 1759; to marry the lady of his choice, and retire to the ideal country life at Mount Vernon. The event had been waiting for the CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 79 expiration of his military duties. Those duties covered a continuous service of a little more than five years of most exacting attention and of the most exciting danger, all of utmost importance to the future of Ohio—a name in his thoughts only second to Virginia. This service was also the school that made him easily first in training for the Revolution. Yet, this just cause for local pride in a large share of his glory has received such scant notice that the present mention is apt to cause more surprise than appreciation. With neither tint nor glow from the after splendor of his achievement, his leadership in gaining Ohio for Anglo Saxon culture, measured by results, only lacks the mystery making haze of time for a comparison with the epic tasks of classic heroes. Because of knightly poise with youthful grace, he was the herald to challenge the French foray upon his people's promised land. And, because of intrepid caution, tranquil courage, surpassing discernment, inflexible purpose and resolute decision, he was the leader in forcing France from the Ohio Valley. For this he deserves to be kept in special memory by all who inherit the good thereof. All this was accomplished before he was twen ty-eight years old. After the repulsion at the slaughter of Braddock's army, when the world seemed too little for the cost, his love for Ohio wavered no more. Fortune in heaping his reward permitted him in the sunset of life to commit the defense of the Beautiful Land to one who had marched with him, nearly forty years before, to the ruins of Fort Duquesne. as a boy only thirteen years old, with the soon to be brilliant name of Anthony Wayne. CHAPTER V. UNDER BRITISH COLORS. Political Results of the French and Indian War—The Spectre of Independence Haunts the British Mind—Repressive Policy—The English Crown Takes the Place of the French—Settlers Forbidden to Go West of the Mountain Crest-Pontiac's Conspiracy—The Battle of Bushy Run—Bouquet's Expedition—The Treaty of Fort Stanwix Made the Ohio a Boundary Between the Races—The Odious Act of Quebec—The Ohio Valley a Hunting Ground for Savage Pleasure—Rebellion Rampant along the Mountains before it was Whispered on the Coast—Washington again Goes West on the Big Trail—Dunmore's War—The Battle of Point Pleasant, the First Battle of the Revolution—The Shawnees —Cornstalk—Daniel Boone—First Surveying on the Ohio—Colonel Bowman's Expedition—George Rogers Clark—Clark's Conquest—The American Revolution as Told Is Mainly an Eastern Tale—The Western Side of the Revolution—Clark's Expedition in 1780—The Strife Along the Eastern Ohio—Fort Laurens—Official Report of British Governor De Peyster — The Avowed British Policy Was War on the Inhabitants of the West and South —The Massacre of Wyoming—The Massacre of Colonel Lochry's Command—The Massacre of Gnadenhutten-Crawford's Defeat—The Siege of Bryant's Station and the Battle of Blue Licks—The Last British Battle Flag Seen-from Clermont—The Last Siege of Fort Henry, the Last Battle of the American Revolution—General Clark's Retaliating Expedition in 1782—What Might Have Been With Modern Inventions—The Motives of France and Spain in Making Peace—Franklin's Success in Treaty Making— Thirty-two Years Between Gist's Exploration and Independence. Although the fury of the war in America ceased with the French surrender in 1760, peace was not declared in Europe 82 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES till February To, 1763. This, instead of bringing satisfaction. produced a sudden and violent revulsion of feeling among the Indians, in Great Britain, and in the colonies. The Indians long accustomed to the fraternal companionship of the French were enraged at the aggressive arrogance of the victors who claimed their hunting lands and fishing waters. They knew no distinction and understood no difference between the Great English Father beyond the sea and his greedy children near at hand. This Indian patriotism found quick and terrible and all but successful expression in the famous Conspiracy. of Pontiac. The spirit and aptitude for war displayed by the Americans alarmed the thoughtful among the British with visions of rebellion, whenever the growth of the Colonies should prompt them to defy the distant crown. To lay the specter of independence that was haunting the stage of English politics was no a chief concern with those who managed the conscience of the King, in his great love for his American subjects. In the wisdom of their council a plan was devised that, bade the colonies to stop growing and be clamped in their present too sufficient limits. A military government was assumed and imposed over the conquest from France, and the agents of that government were ordered to take the place of French rule with the least possible friction, so that the new Dominion should be a restraint, and not a succor for the English speaking turbulents to the south. The Indians were to be changed into allies of the crown by a practical concession of all they asked. That alliance was consummated and controlled the Indian vote for a hundred years—always favorable to the English government—always hostile to the settlers. Trading posts were to be maintained at points convenient for the various tribes. The fur trade was to be conducted on a scale to reach the remotest wilds, just as before except the profits were to be collected in London instead of Paris. Above and beyond all, no settlements were to be made on any streams, flowing west or north beyond the Alleghanies. The boundless realms of the Ohio and the Lakes were to be a hunt: ing ground for savage pleasure. Proclamation to this effect was made on October 31, 1761, by Colonel Henry Bouquet of the Royal army, who was Commander and virtual Mili- CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 83 tary Governor at Fort Pitt. Such was the contumelius reward of the. Motherland for the loyal service of the Colonies in humbling her enemies as never before or since. It was the most arrogant among the many proud periods of England's conquering chase for power. What Europe calls the Seven Years War added Great to the name of Frederic and founded the German Empire. It placed Plassey on the roll of decisive battles, gained India from the East, and half of North America from the West. It planted the earth with English garrisons and posts of trade, circled the seas with English homes and spotted their waves with English sails. But it brought dismay to the people in the Colonies, for, in the blood purchased conquest, not a soldier of them all could lawfully hunt a deer or make a home. The subsequent resistance to British tyranny by the patriots of the seaboard is common fame. The spirit of the Boston Tea Party and the protests against the Stamp Act were trifles light as air in comparison with the scornful wrath of the Virginians who were hindered thus from their hard won rights beyond the Alleghanies or across the Ohio. The lowlanders opposed taxation without representation from principle with no large sense of great personal loss. But those who gazed westward from the hills were looking for a stolen treasure that was to be recovered upon the first occasion. The crown had ordered Bouquet to proclaim more than man could enforce. His warning was scorned. Rebellion was rampant in the mountains, and Revolution began on the streams of the Ohio before it was whispered on the Concord. The westward course of the settlers was forced back upon the mountains by Pontiac's War which overwhelmed all but those in Detroit and Fort Pitt. Colonel Bouquet hastened westward in the summer of 1763 with five hundred men to the rescue of Fort Pitt. On August 5, he won the Battle of Bushy Run only twenty-five miles away, but the victory cost the loss of nearly every third man. In 1764 General Bradstreet reached Detroit by sail with three thousand men. In October of the same year, Colonel Bouquet came out from Fort Pitt with fifteen hundred men over the Big Trail to the Muskingum Trail and thence down to Coshocton, where the over awed Indians promised peace which was probably 84 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES kept by the great chiefs. Pontiac's confederacy of nine thousand warriors dissolved before such arrays, and he, the most notable Indian of that day, ceased to prophesy that their French brothers were waiting on ships for the Great Father—the gaudy and detestable Louis—to bring them again to their own. The less responsible warriors remembered the profitable pilferings and did not forget and could not forego the fell fury of the fierce foray. Therefore the trails from the east were the woeful ways for captive trains from plundered homes. But still, the advance guards of the white race came fighting down the westward flowing streams ; for neither the King's command nor the whoops of war could hold them from answering the call of the wild that lured them into the forest, some to wealth and station, and some to hapless grief or fiery death. Some betterment was expected for the western settlers in 1768 by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix now known as Rome, New York. For six thousand dollars, the Iroquois relinquished their claim between the crest of the Alleghany Mountains and the Ohio river in width, and between the Allegheny and Tennessee rivers in length. The difference between the scope of country and the amount paid reveals not the ignorance of the Iroquois but the vanity of the claim. The Treaty stipulated that the Ohio should be the boundary between the races, and left other tribal claims unsettled. Every public effort toward an occupation of the region was thwarted. The King would not abate his repressive policy. Petition and re monstrance availed nothing. The King had proclaimed that westward settlement was pernicious. The land between the mountains and the rivers was to be a neutral zone that neither of the hostile races should ass. Therefore, Long live the King! With little boding of the tempest and no conception of its fiery, the issue raised by a stupid tyrant was referred by a cringing ministry to the servile parliament of 1774, which presumed a final and triumphant settlement on June 22, by passing the Act of Quebec. Of all the hateful legislation of that venal Parliament noted beyond all others for insolent disregard of colonial rights, none was more odious than the Act of Quebec, which robbed the Conquest from France of CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 85 every semblance of liberty, and instituted every form of royal prerogative and imperial absolutism. Then, to cut under and forever end the charter claims of several colonies and of Virginia in particular, the Province of Quebec was enlarged and defined to include all that the French had claimed and fought for north and west of the Ohio and Allegheny rivers. Every vote for the Act, and that was nearly all, ignored or scorned every westward claim of the English colonists. This, with the neutral zone extending to the mountain crest, was to be ruled by a military force responsible only to the King. The Indians in possession, for the good of the fur trade, by implication, became a forest ranging police with full power to easily, speedily, secretly and legally deal with every unlicensed intruder. The game laws protecting the royal parks of Great Britain were to be enforced against the Virginia poachers on the lands promised them for the service that won it all. The peril of the border was not greater when the French were victorious. The nefarious iniquity of the cunning scheme that was to gather and smother the aspiring Colonies between shores controlled by invincible fleets and the mountains held by scalping cannibals armed with British steel and powder is beyond present belief. The upshot of the attempted coercion is found in the Declaration of Independence wherein the King is charged with this as chief among his many tyrannies. The question was not so vital in New England, but where water flowed to the Ohio, a wrath grew that three generations did not efface. The descendants of some such Virginians within memory amid the intelligence of even Brown and Clermont counties, protested that their children should not study English grammar because of the hated name. Before the machinery for enforcing the Act of Quebec could be set in action, the long American conflict for human rights that began at the landing of the Pilgrims was again wrapped in smoking battle. Undaunted settlers had appeared on the western slopes as far as the banks of the Ohio in spite of Bouquet's proclamation. The three Zane brothers came to the site of Wheeling with others and built stockaded cabins. The name of Zane has had much fine mention in Ohio. March 5, 1770, was made memorable by the Boston Massacre by which Americans on the coast learned the personal peril of their 86 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES liberties. On October 21, 1770, Colonel George Washington, Colonel George Croghan, Colonel William Crawford, Dr. Craik, Joseph Nicholson, Robert Bell, William Harrison and Charles Morgan reached Logstown on a visit to Ohio. A good deal of United States History can be learned by a thorough investigation of these names. Aside from the social satisfaction in the little noted fact, the incident is valuable in proof that after eleven years, Washington rode again through the scenes of his western campaign, with leisure to study the experience, shortly before assuming the great responsibilities of guiding the Revolution. We may be sure that he noted and remembered the fatal facility for attack from the northwest through the Big Trail by which the havoc of thousands of warriors from Detroit and beyond could be made decisive. The war party in Great Britain relied on this savage alliance for the suppression of rebellion as only second to their naval advantage on the coast side. In anticipating the rebellion meditated by the boldest, and in recounting the anxieties endured, the thoughtful student, while shuddering at the loss, will thrill with suspense at the question, why the British with such ample chance did not inflict still greater harm. A fatalist may say the end was the result of infinite balancings. The explanation is found in a maze of incidents that astonished and perplexed contemporary opinion, and still puzzle and baffle inquiry. Out of the confusion that involved Lord Dunmore, the royal Governor of Virginia, in a suspicion of avaricious duplicity to both King and people ; that cursed the name of John Conolly, the commander at Fort Pitt, with malicious treachery ; that soiled the memory of Michael Cressap with an indefinite agency in a fiendish massacre ; that gave Logan, the Mingo, first reputation among Indian orators ; that brought Simon Girty into the pale of humanity ; that charged Colonel John Gibson with literary imposture ; that introduced the names of Daniel Morgan, George Rogers Clark and Andrew Lewis to American admiration—out of all this and out of the strange negotiations at Camp Charlotte near Chillicothe, Ohio, where three thousand conquering Virginians grew suspicious of Dunmore ; and from a cloud of other obscuring details, these facts remain clear : the Battle of Point Pleasant, on October 10, 1774, began CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 87 the American Revolution, nullified the Act 'of Quebec, and broke the power of the Indians to the northwest at the outset of the war in which they were to have played so great a part. Whatever Dunmore's purpose might have been, he could hardly have done more for America and yet keep his breath in England. The Virginians clamored for pledges against raids to come. The exaction of hostages would have been annulled by the King. As it was, the crafty and rapacious Scotchman kept his immense grants in the neutral zone and made the promise of peace depend upon Shawnee pride. That personal promise was so kept that none could win them to war in the east, until the crisis was past. In those days their towns were Wakatomika on the Muskingum, the Pick away Plains by the Scioto, and near Xenia, Piqua and Bellefontaine on the Miamis. In August, 1774, Colonel Angus McDonald with four hundred men from West Virginia destroyed Wakatomika. Dunmore with the central division marched for the Scioto. The left or southern division under General Andrew Lewis to the number of eleven hundred canoed down the Kanawha and camped at its mouth on the northern bank. The men were the bravest of Virginia. Against them came an equal number of Indians equally armed to fight for their homes. Each army was worthy of their foe's best steel. Of all men, the stock of Virginia is proud of a reputation for courage under fire. Of all Indians, the battle record of the Shawnees is the most conspicuous for fierce action, stubborn resistance and a long roll of victory. Out of much wandering they held together and disdained other Indians. From position and hatred, they were long the first in opposition against the whites, of whom they killed, so they boasted, ten times more than any other tribe. Although seldom exceeding five hundred warriors, they showed "the mettle of their pasture," and were the "Ohio Men" of their date. The Shawnees were the backbone of the forces that defeated Braddock in 1775, that overwhelmed Major Grant's Highlanders in 1758, that plucked every fourth man from Colonel Bouquet in 1763, that made Kentucky ."The Dark and Bloody Ground," that annihilated Major David Roger's command by the mouth of the Licking in 1779, that destroyed Colonel Lochry's force nearby in 1781, and thwarted General Clark's campaign against Detroit, that 88 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES disastrously defeated the chivalry of Kentucky in the Battle of Blue Licks in 1782, that defeated General Harmar in two battles in 1790, that destroyed General St. Clair in 1791 that yielded for a time after General Wayne's terrific victory in 1794, that rose again under Tecumseh against General Harrison at Tippecanoe, and again to their final overthrow by the same General at the Battle of the Thames. Notwithstanding-all their heroic defense, who is there to mourn for the Shawnees ? Not one. To dispute the courage of their dauntless resistance, is to lessen the name of their conquerors. These, the Spartans of Ohio, mostly recruited from the Xenia and Chillicothe towns now or formerly in the congressional or judicial districts embracing Brown and Clermont counties were. led to the mouth of the Kanawha and formed in the main division by their chief, Cornstalk, one of the greatest of Indian Generals. He commanded the most invincible and devoted Indian army that had ever gathered in America. Two young white hunters looking for deer came upon the Indians, at day break, moving into line for attack from where they had crossed the Ohio during the night. One was killed. but the other fled with the alarm. Three hundred men rushed to a skirmish line while the main line made ready. At sun rise the Indians opened fire for one of the most picturesque of battles, on a perfect day, and over a field of noble grandeur. Both lines of battle stretched from the Kanawha across to the Ohio, not more than twenty yards apart, and often nearer. "in an equal weight of action from wing to wing," from morning till near the close of day. Through all, Cornstalk's mighty voice was heard shouting, "Be strong! Be strong!" When the battle could not be won, his line withdrew their dead which were sunk in the rivers before they retreated to the Ohio forest, while the night covered the first battle and one of the three great victories of the Revolution. For, without Point Pleasant, Saratoga and Yorktown would have little fame or none. When Cornstalk vainly tried to rally the warriors for an attack on Dunmore's still larger division, from which their large loss at Point Pleasant may be inferred, he turned, struck his tomahawk with all his strength into the war post, and said : "I will go and make peace," to which the chiefs said: "Yes, yes." And they kept their word to Dunmore well into CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 89 the third year, in spite of all blandishment. It is a pleasant record that the Shawnees, during that peace in 1775 and 1776, traded with other tribes for prisoners that were thereby restored to their friends. In 1777 the British agents found much trouble in forming a confederation of the tribes for invasion, because of the peaceful or rather neutral policy of the Shawnees and Delawares who still remembered Point Pleasant. Their occupation of Central Ohio gave them much strategic importance. Peace was strongly advised by the older men and most of all by their Sachem, Moluntha, who will have other mention in these pages in a most dramatic scene with General William Lytle. In that summer, Cornstalk, finding the younger faction becoming more popular than the peaceful or conservative, went to Point P1 sant, now a settlement, to warn the Americans of the gathering storm. Instead of a grateful reception, he was made a prisoner and held as a hostage. A few days later he and his son, Elenipsico, and Red Hawk, a Delaware chief, on the same mission, were basely assassinated. Then, "Revenge," for that awful crime became the Shawnee watchword and reply. The liberal patriotism of the vicinity has perpetuated the memory of Cornstalk by a splendid monument on the scene of his great battle and near the place of his murder. It also marks a turning point in American history. The battle brought much benefit to the Sons of Liberty but the murders were a great victory for the British. The Shawnees took Cornstalk's tomahawk from the peace post and rushed to a war that would have been ruinous to the Americans three years sooner. It came too late to thwart their liberty. Before the banded tribes could take the trail Saratoga was won and France came back to take a sweet revenge upon the British King. The brutally senseless murder of Cornstalk and the two young chiefs left the conservatives with neither argument nor disposition to hinder the schemes that hurried all factions into a war in which they could gain nothing and must lose all. It must not be understood that there was a semblance of modern security in the about to be broken peace that had been rife with the constant collision of the innate strife of races. But there was much difference between the occasional incursions of gangs 90 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES that stole and killed and ran away, and the overwhelming hordes that filled the whole region with days of lurking fear and the nights with boding vigils. A most pitiful result was a fiercer opposition in a new direction not guilty of Cornstalk's tragic death. On May 1, 1769, Daniel Boone and five others started from the banks of the Yadkin in North Carolina "in quest of Ken-tuck ee" where they were to find a tract of the richest land and finest game in the world—so they had heard. They hunted and wandered "with great success for a year," except that John Stewart was killed by Indians strolling like themselves. Boone returned to the Yadkin with stories of a marvelous land. Won by his descriptions, about eighty men, women and children started with him in September, 1773, for the newly discovered paradise, but they were forced back by a larger party of Indians with the loss of four killed and five wounded. In spite of the King's order forbidding settlements west of the mountain crest, Lord Dunmore permitted bounty lands to be located during 1772 along the Kanawha and the Ohio. In 1773, Thomas Bullitt, the three McAffee brothers, James Douglass and others went down the Ohio, the first English, not traders, to make the trip. In August Bullitt laid off a town site by the Falls of the Ohio, and also marked off several fine tracts for Dunmore whose craving for choice lands exceeded his fear of the King so far away. In June, 1774, James Harrod built the first cabin in Kentucky, but he and Boone were drawn away to the Battle of Point Pleasant. After Dunmore's peace, Boone returned with others and by June 14, 1775, the palisade at Boonesborough was occupied as the first white man's fort in Kentucky. Either because of Dunmore's peace or the inattention of the Indians, the building of these forts was not greatly hindered till 1776, and then by scattered bands rather than by a combined attack. But in 1777 the severity of the raids became very oppressive. Boonesborough alone was besieged twice in April and once in July, each time by a large force. In February, 1778, Boone and twenty-six men were captured at one time. This calamity had compensation, for during his captivity, a grand council of the confederated tribes was held at "Old Chillicothe," near Xenia. This council determined on an immense invasion, 91 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES which, after much discussion, was directed against Kentucky. Boone moved from place to place by his captors heard the plans, and saw the hundreds of war decked braves in their gathering at the Old Town, as the place by Xenia is yet called. Impelled personal hope and fear for his people, Boone made a marvelous escape by the most direct course, which could not have differed much from the old Xenia Road through Clermont county by Williamsburg, almost due south about one hundred and fifty miles to Boonesborough. Stopping only to give warning, and planning to delay and divide the attention of the invaders, Boone and nineteen companions 'lasted away and made a most daring raid on the Indians living along Paint creek and towards the Scioto. This expedition judged by the direct course and by subsequent movements must have trailed to and fro by or near Ripley. From this service, rash, dangerous, never repeated and yet curiously significant of the men, Boone's party returned to share the greatest of all the many perils of their settlement. On August 8, 1778, the awful horde of four hundred warriors, with the Shawnees in front seeking vengeance for the pacific Cornstalk, under a British flag that had been carried down the Little Miami along the western edge of Clermont, began the memorable but comparatively fruitless nine days' siege of Boonesborough. Yet, eighty-one scalps and thirty-four prisoners were reported at Detroit for bloody booty. In July, 1779, the Kentuckians retaliated for the first time in full force with a march, under Colonel John Bowman, up and down the trial along the Little Miami, against the Xenia towns, with results that were disappointing if not humiliating. The meager success was probably due to the caution against ambuscades. For Bowman and several subordinates had been selected for the duty because of recent conspicuous service in another enterprise, that for risk, courage, skill and results has no superior in authentic romance. History tells of few men who have seen and served their country's need more completely than the First Great General of the Northwest. George Rogers Clark, a native of Albemarle, Virginia, with a slight acquaintance with books, became a surveyor. In his twenty-second year he was with a company on the .Kanawha who were fired upon before the 92 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES Battle of Point Pleasant. Six months later he was a fellow scout with Michael Cressap, Simon Kenton and Simon Girty for Dunmore's army. In 1775 he appeared among the Virginians in Kentucky, and earnestly advised an effort for civil recognition. He was chosen a delegate for that purpose in 1777, and as such he insisted on the institution of the county of Kentucky, and urged supplies for its defense. He further urged that the surest defense of their settlements would be found in attack, of which, the proper object was the French-English forts in Illinois. The plan of the young hunter, big as a giant and quick as a panther, with a mind to match, captured the imagination of Governor Patrick Henry and Congressman Thomas Jefferson. Through their influence a force of three hundred and fifty men with five hundred pounds of powder was alotted for the purpose. After long and vexatious delay, during which Clark mortgaged his property beyond its value, two hundred men were recruited, whom he led on foot to Pittsburgh in January, 1778, and then by boats to the Falls of the Ohio. Some weeks were spent in drilling and in building a fort for a base at Louisville, manned by those unwilling to go farther. In the midst of the total eclipse of June 24, 1778, his boats started down the Ohio to Fort Massac by the mouth of the Cumberland. Then they began the marvelous marching to and fro across Southern Illinois, amid which Fort Kaskaskia was captured and the Stars and Stripes planted on the Mississippi on July 4, 1778. That is one of the most significant of many notable events coincident with Independence Day. In the remote distance from other thrilling action and with little more than rumors with tardy confirmation no large notice was gained at that time. Now, a writer thoughtful of the philosophy of events will place that achievement in comparison with the restoration of the Flag of the Union over Vicksburg by Grant on July 4, 1863, by which the Father of Waters was again permitted to flow unvexed to the sea. For, without the Conquest made by Clark, the Americans had no title that would have gained the least attention from the aroused jealousies of France and Spain who were our allies in the war that promised to lessen the importance of England, but our steady opponents CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 93 in the Treaty for anything that would strengthen the Americans against the remaining Spanish and recent French pos sessions beyond the Mississippi or along the Gulf. Without the title of conquest and the occupation of the forts, the same powerful doctrine of "in statu quo" that prevailed over the manifest reluctance of our own allies would have been invincible for the crown of England and would have made the current of the Ohio as firmly British as the tides of the St. Lawrence. Even at that day of reckoning for the past and in forecasting things to be, France deprecated the continental energy that attained her Louisiana Territory twenty years later ; and Spain contemned the aggressive nationality that has eventually driven her flag from America. Other forts were surprised and captured in quick succession, and on August i the American flag was raised at Old Vincennes. When the news came to Detroit, Governor Hamilton was planning a vast expedition to capture Fort Pitt. Instead, he hastened to retrieve the losses in the Southwest, and on December 16, easily regained Vincennes, where, because of floods and the trouble of wintering such a host, he went into fort and dismissed the Indians to their homes. In reporting this situation, Clark now in his twenty-sixth year wrote : "I must take Hamilton or he will take me." On February 24, 1779, Clark and his one hundred and thirty ragged heroes, after an attack for which history has no parallel, took Hamilton and seventy-nine British soldiers from the fort and sent them prisoners to Virginia, while the American flag was raised to fall no more, to this day, at Old Vincennes. In these days, February 6, 1778, when Clark's star was dawning, France acknowledged our independence and started her fleets and armies to make it good. Thereupon, Clinton, the British commander in chief, collected and concentrated for the defense of New York Bay. Washington then gathered the continentals in the Highlands nearby, while the brunt of the war shattered the South and shocked the West. The American Revolution, the dawn of a regenerated race, and the natal date of an era that gladdens earth with brighter hopes than bards had sung or prophets dared to dream, has alike become the sage's boldest theme and the school boy's. 94 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES choicest tale. But it is mainly a tale of Lexington and Boston Harbor, of Valley Forge and Jersey raids, of Independence Hall and West Point's gloomy fame, of Palmetto Pine and Cowpen's mountain strife, of Saratoga Plain and Yorktown Heights, of Andre's doom and the glory gained by the Youth from France, of the gallant Wayne and the graver Greene, and of the deeds of Washington, the matchless hero of the world. It is a story told by those who grew in the living presence of their past, and who had not seen or learned and did not apprehend the greatness elsewhere wrought—by those who had the leisure of art denied to men of restless action—by those whose rhetoric had small room and scanty grace for what unto them seemed an endless slaughter without plan or philosophy—by those so absorbed in the contemplation of the grandeur of the eastern battle that there was no comprehension of the wrath on the western frontier that gathered in a raging line of fire from the Allegheny to the Tennessee, that all but drove the patriot pioneers from fair Kentucky and Old Vincennes and beautiful Ohio and all the boundless plains to the west, without which the Atlantic side would have been a "Pent up Utica." With leisure to perceive and wealth to encourage, the time has passed for such incompletion of the story of our freedom, and the day has come to form a better perspective of our historic relations. When that is rightly done, the student shall learn without doubt and the people will know without question, that saving the East and keeping the West were equally important, and that neither may rejoice without the other. The campaign that extended the control of Virginia and the Republic to the Mississippi justly ranks with any American achievement. The reality of the heroic incidents so far transcends the fancies of fiction that the reader ceases to wonder more. But Clark purposed more. "With three hundred good men I should have attempted it," were the words in his report to Governor Patrick Henry concerning the capture of Detroit, after taking Vincennes. The bold project was postponed until a promised battalion should come. Louisville under his command became to the western pant of the border what Fort Pitt was on the eastern end. But his care did not hinder the destruction of Major Rogers and his CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 95 command of nearly a hundred men in the thickets above Newport across from Eastern Avenue in Cincinnati, in a single hour of an October afternoon of 1779. In 1780 De Peyster, the successor of Hamilton as Governor at Detroit, fitted out two thousand warriors to raid the American settlements. Of these some six hundred under the British Captain Byrd came down the Miami Trail in May with six small pieces of cannon with which they forced the surrender of Ruddle's and then of Martin's Stations, in Kentucky which was utterly defenseless against artillery, and doomed if the foe had kept on ; but after capturing or killing over three hundred and forty people, they stopped, and, glutted with gore. hurried back to the pleasures of the torture scenes. Clark, now a full commissioned general at the age of twenty-eight, returned a counter blow with nine hundred and ninety-eight men who marched in four parallel and equal columns with the pack train in the center and all at such distance apart that, at command, the inner lines could wheel to front and rear and quickly form a hollow square fully protected against surprise by scouts on every side. With such precaution Clark's men feared no ambush. The march was timed to be in August in order to completely ruin the growing crop of corn and vegetables. The fields and towns wherever found were laid waste, so that hunting for food instead of war for pastime occupied the Shawnee mind for many moons to come. The strife along the eastern Ohio was equally horrifying. The first blow of the savage alliance following the ever to be regretted murder of Cornstalk was felt in the siege of Fort Henry or Wheeling under Colonel Ebenezer Zane, on August 31, 1777, by a force of three hundred Indians and a company of white rangers with fife and drum under a British flag from Detroit, over the Big Trail. The restraining influence of the Shawnee failure at Point Pleasant can be measured by the long delay of this attack. In the light of a history that now includes the final conquest of the American Indians after four hundred years of strife, the Battle of Point Pleasant stands forth as the largest, the most decisive, and the most nearly approaching the conditions of scientific war of all in the long list of Indian strife. The outcome of that British attack on Wheeling was the action 96 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES of Congress for protection by a force under General McIntosh on the Ohio and by Fort Laurens on the Tuscarawas, to guard the Big Trail and to be a base for a movement on Detroit. Such opposition made the enemy wary in that direction, while elsewhere meditating upon Burgoyne's Surrender and French intervention. After that, however great the discouragements of the patriots, the modern mind gives little speculation to the possibilities of defeat. As the clouds of war went by and the eastern prospect grew brighter, the west darkened; and the story of Fort Laurens is a record of disappointment for those who hoped much from the project. General McIntosh accomplished the structure with much difficulty because of insufficient strength and deficient supplies. The garrison left under Colonel Gibson—the same who had served with Dunmore— was harassed with constant attack or lurking danger for every one that left the gates or sought their protection. The scanty stores spoiled and failed when most needed. The distance beyond the weak line of settlements was too great. It appears, at least, that the post was abandoned without orders. The walls left by the builders were not disturbed because the British hoped to use them in their own plans. The power of the Continentals was not equal to an expedition against Detroit, where the trouble was to vex another generation. But the boldness that planted Fort Laurens as the northwestern corner of the Revolution, proves the overwhelming peril from the dreaded Northwest. After Fort Laurens was deserted, the capture of Fort Pitt was still more greatly desired at Detroit ; yet no great force was soon sent that way. But the sum of the pillage and butchering by small bands was prodigious. The condition nay be better presented by quoting British authority. Before, luring, and after the Revolution, the British thoroughly understood their strategic advantage at Detroit. In his Report )f the Campaign for 1780, Governor and Colonel De Peyster wrote : "It would be endless and difficult to enumerate the )arties continually employed on the back settlements"—of he rebels. "From the Illinois Country to the frontier of New York there has been a continual succession of attack. the perpetual terror and losses of the inhabitants will, I hope, operate powerfully in our favor." CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 97 No American writer, and many have tried, has as yet portrayed the atrocity of the savage side of the British war on the American "Inhabitants" with such convincing accuracy as has been frankly avowed in these fifty, terse, official words, evidently intended to fix the attention. of his superiors upon the faithful diligence of the writer, who is said to have been an accomplished gentleman—after the style. of King George's American service. This report and the debates in Parliament furnish clinching British proof that the ministry purposed to execute the King's order even to the utter extermination of all the American settlements west of the Alleghany crest. Their entire action proves that this was the intended course of their expected victory. That throttling purpose long pursued made the magical natural beauty of the Miamis a frightful battle ground. The heroism of the first settlers cannot be appreciated by a reader at any time failing to remember or comprehend that the Indian atrocities were not hindered but approved, frequently ordered, rewarded, and always supported by the agents of the crown. The pleasure would be great if only good could be told of all who opposed the tryant King. But, alas for human weakness, we must note brands of shame on pages that should have been pictured with honest pride. Memory shrinks from recalling the barbarities following if not consequent upon the cruel assassination of Cornstalk. The consummation of the British-Indian League aided by that foul murder included the six nations about the lakes in New York. On the night of July 3, 1778, only a few hours before Clark captured Kaskaskia without blood, five hundred or more Iroquois commanded by a British Colonel and under a British flag, burned a thousand homes and made the Massacre of Wyoming. From that on, the British policy in America was a punitive war of marauding expeditions against the most defenseless of the West and South. The western campaigns of 1781 were equally offensive and indecisive. Encouraged by the results of the expedition against the Shawnee towns, and hoping to accomplish his chief ambition, General Clark hurried to urge the Virginians and Pennsylvanians to undertake the capture of Detroit and so stop the dreaded incursions upon their western border. His plans were again 98 - CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES accepted by Governor Jefferson and approved by General Washington. He was commissioned, on January 22, 1781, to command an "Expedition westward from the Ohio." But all his genius to persuade and to command could not obtain an adequate force. While waiting for more men, some already enlisted began to doubt their dangerous service and to desert. His boats were therefore started down the Ohio, and orders were sent to Colonel Archibald Lochry to, hurry after with one hundred and twenty-five full equipped Pennsylvanians who, on July 25, had started from Westmoreland county. Events proved that their voyage was closely watched by a large force of Indians on both sides of the Ohio from above and through the Miami region. Having safely passed the mouth of the Great Miami and thinking the danger escaped, vigilance was relaxed in an evil hour on August 24; and, a few miles above what is Aurora, Ind., by a creek with the misspelled name of Laughry, they were trapped in an ambuscade from which only eight returned to claim pay for their peril. The slaughter of Lochry's command defeated Clark's plans; and Detroit unharmed continued to be the market for scalps regardless of age or sex. On October 18, 1781, Lord Cornwallis surrendered the army that had devastated the South. That event at Yorktown made Washington first in America. The Revolutionary War was over in the East, but not in the West. There, the merciless, pitiless, continuous, hideous barbarity went on to the blind, outrageous wickedness that shrouds the name of Gnadenhutten with the most revolting crime that blackens the pages of American History. In a study of that theme for another work, it was my special duty to consider every obtainable page from both public and private collections concerning-that darkest blot on Beautiful Ohio. The inevitable conclusion exhausts the available language of denunciation. From all the many incidents in the going of the Indian, the peaceful Delawares are still occasionally mentioned as a fine example of benevolent land grabbing. In one sense the plan of vaunting fine motives while driving good bargains was better, because it was safer. The. Delawares were thereby as certainly dispossessed as ever happened to the most vengeful scalp hunters. After the tribe had CLERMONT AND BROWN COUNTIES - 99 eased to be attractive to those who bought, or sold, them out, they became the special object of conversion by the Moravian people who had become sympathetic with the unfortunate, through much persecution of their own. After the wilder people of the tribe had gone to the secure solitudes of the Muskingum Valley, they were visited in 1761 by Reverend Frederick Post, whom they permitted to build a small house on the east bank of the Tuscarawas River, just within the southern limit of Stark county. Post then went east for a helper, and returned with John Heckewelder, then nineteen years old. On April II, 1762, arm in arm and singing a hymn, they entered that house which was the first Christian home in Ohio. That effort was swept away by Pontiac's War. Nine years later Heckewelder returned as the assistant of David Zeisberger in locating two hundred and four migrating converted Delawares and Mohicans, of whom some were the survivors of the Massacre of Gnadenhutten, in Pennsylvania. On May 3, 1772, by consent of the wild Indians, they began to clear the land about Schoenbrunn, the "Beautiful Spring," and to build sixty houses after the Moray ian pattern, of timbers hewed on four sides to a square to fit closely together, with shingle roofs, with glass windows, with cupboards, with doors and floors, and with stone chimneys. Without saw mills, the boards were laboriously made from straight rifted logs with wedges, frows and drawing knives. The two streets were laid broad in the form of a T. Facing the stem and built in the same style stood the chapel, over which, on August 26, the first church bell used in Ohio was raised. On September 19, that first church house in Ohio was dedicated ; and in that room during the winter of 1772 and 1773 the essentials of education were taught to Indians both young and old by John Heckewelder, the first of all the noble hosts of Ohio school teachers. The present and future sequence of that auspicious event staggers the imagination ; but out of all wondering one fact stands clear. There should be small toleration for the Ohio teacher whose lessons on patriotism begin and remain so far from home that he or she can not perceive the worth of such historic association and make it a part of our State pride. On September 18, 1772, another band led