This Cleveland of Ours PART ONE SECTION I PROLOGUE: BEFORE MOSES WHAT THE WORLD WAS DOING George Washington, in the presidential mansion at Philadelphia, weary of strife and criticism, was looking forward eagerly to the peace of Mount Vernon, while a national campaign raged which was to be the last in which presidential electors were chosen unpledged. Thomas Jefferson had just written from Monticello to a foreign friend : "It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these (political and financial) heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England." The Directory governing the new French republic was incensed because its "sister republic" would not join in the war against England, and it began to look as if America would have to fight France. England, under William Pitt, was caught in a financial panic and suspended gold payments that could not be resumed for 20 years. A Corsican artillery officer, placed in command of the - 3 - 4 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS Army of the Alps, married a widow named Josephine and started over the snowy mountains to Italy, telling his soldiers: "You are ill-fed and almost naked; the government owes much, but can do nothing for you; I shall now lead you where you will find honor, glory and riches." A boy named Daniel Webster was studying at Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. The White House at Washington was under construction. France and Spain were signing a treaty of alliance, aimed at England, by which either power, if it engaged in a war of its own, could claim from the other 15 warships and 24,000 soldiers. Kosciuszko, nearing the end of his imprisonment after a lost battle for Polish freedom fought by farmers armed with scythes, saw his country torn to pieces for the third time and divided among Prussia, Russia and Austria. The thousand pounds left to the city of Boston by Benjamin Franklin, to be used for philanthropic purposes a century later, had been bearing interest for six years. An English country gentleman, member of Parliament for a Sussex riding, who voted unwaveringly with the Whig party, "secured from all risk of aberration from the social conventions by a happy inaccessibility to ideas," was the father of a fair-faced four-year-old boy named Percy Bysshe Shelley. Immanuel Kant, in his seventy-second year, was teaching metaphysics, logic, ethics, cosmography and geography at the University of Koenigsberg. Goethe had just formed a fertile friendship with Schiller, and an irritating young radical named Beethoven was upsetting old-fashioned ideas of music. John Keats was lying in a cradle in a humble home near the Swan and Hoop, in London, where his father was head ostler. Robert Burns, near death at Dumfries, Scotland, from fever contracted by exposure after a party at the Globe PROLOGUE: BEFORE MOSES - 5 Tavern, was pleading with relatives to save him from going to prison for debt. Keen-Lung, aged Manchu emperor, having abdicated in favor of his fifteenth son, Kea-Ling, the latter in spite of remonstrances from the British embassy continued, to govern China on terms unsatisfactory to the British East India Company. Alessandro Volta, at the University of Pavia, following up Benjamin Franklin's electrical discoveries, was inventing the primitive battery known as the "voltaic pile" and establishing his name as a unit of electromotive force. William Murdock, distilling coal in an iron retort and conducting the gas through copper tubes, used it to light his home in Cornwall, England. Richard Trevithick in England and Oliver Evans in America were raising the pressure of Watt's steam engine, and Trevithick had begun to think about a steam carriage to run on rails. The population of the United States was nearly 5,000,000. Virginia was the most populous state. Boston had 15,000 people, Philadelphia about 35,000, Manhattan Island about 40,000. II THE WAITING CONTINENT We may picture General Washington, in that summer of 1796, as he puts his presidential affairs in order and prepares to retire to the peace of Mount Vernon, leaning wearily back in his chair, closing his eyes and, as his gray head nods a little, seeing something like this : A realm of more than three million square miles, set between two great oceans, uninhabited save for a few red men scattered through it and a fringe of white settlements along the eastern coast. Those whites protected by the broad Atlantic from European meddling, yet with access to all the world by the universal sea. Protected likewise against what slight perils remain in the rear. A little nation already grown rich from its agriculture, its fisheries, its timber and its coastwise and foreign trade, with the West Indies next door as great a source of wealth as the fabled Indies of the East. A nation so eager for land and space that, a hundred years before, the inhabitants of Washington's own state, no more numerous than a single parish in London, held plantations as extensive as all England. This nation of immigrants taking up again the endless Aryan trek westward, pouring through the mountain breaches into the interior by routes the gray dreamer himself knows well—the Hudson and Mohawk, the Potomac and Ohio, the Appalachian Valley and Cumberland Gap, and the easier exit of northern Georgia. Colonists creeping along the shores of the Great Lakes, those dim interior seas. Colonists floating down the Ohio. Colonists penetrating the forests of Kentucky and Tennessee. Many lines of emigrants pressing .to the Mississippi and finding that mighty river not a barrier, - 6 - PROLOGUE: BEFORE MOSES - 7 but a route to new lands. Long lines of canoes paddling up the rivers of the Northwest. Streams of covered wagons creeping over the plains, camping at night with their cottonwood fires by the half-dried streams. Trails through foothills and big mountains and deserts—the Oregon Trail, and the California and Santa Fe. Prospectors and miners by the thousand, discovering mineral riches. Farmers by the hundred thousand, discovering greater though less glamorous wealth. Hunters and trappers. Surveyors. Timber men hewing down forests. And at last the scattered army debouching on another great ocean, facing Asia, and stopping not even there, but seeking stepping-stones across. A land dominating a continent as no Old World land could dominate. A land cleft in the middle by a vast trough from the Arctic to the Gulf, with one exit eastward midway. The Father of Waters himself, with his tributary streams, reaching out arms that will bear big river craft for fifteen thousand miles. The well known mountain range flanking the eastern sea, then two thousand miles of rolling prairie and rising plain, then the granite backbone of the continent. After that, desert, mountains again, and the Pacific. A land of infinite variety, possessing all the climates under which mankind has flourished, with the climate most favorable for the white race predominating. Northern cold tempered by southern winds, and southern heat by northern winds. The mountain ranges flanked with forests, ripe for the axe, and cleft with streams for transportation and mechanical power. The plains covered with bison and capable of feeding countless herds of cattle. The prairies ready for the plow. The most forbidding mountains offering limitless mineral riches. Wild game everywhere for the hunting. Timberlands apparently inexhaustible, full of fur-bearing animals. Good stone enough to build all the cities of the world forever. North of the Ohio River, rich glacial drift soil ; south of it, fertile limestone. Vast areas free from forest growth. On the Gulf slope, a fertile silt richer than the familiar Atlantic plain. 8 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS Southern flats and pine woods where people can be "poor, satisfied and healthy." Prairies with deep, black soil. Rich silt along the Mississippi tributaries. Abundant rainfall east of the Rockies, well distributed through the year. Long summers for crops to grow. Fisheries in the Northwest and South, as in the Northeast and the Great Lakes. Incredible iron deposits awaiting discovery in Minnesota, Michigan and Alabama. Incalculable black fuel buried in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Alabama, Colorado, Montana and the Dakotas. Seas of liquid fuel in the underground pools of Pennsylvania, California, Oklahoma and Texas, and in the shales of Colorado. Gaseous fuel, too, hidden in the rocks against the time of need. Gold to be quarried, worth many billions, and half as much value in silver. Copper in the Superior region more plentiful than anywhere else in the world. Lead in Illinois and Wisconsin. Mercury in the western mountains. Against the time of aluminum, destined perhaps to replace steel and other familiar metals as they diminish, a limitless supply of beauxite ; the very clay is metal. There is, too, latent in the running streams, the power of more than 30,000,000 horses, usable continuously forever, to provide under perfect control the strange power that Franklin has drawn from the storm cloud with his kite. And when the more familiar sources of energy fail, there are waiting the powers of wind, tide and sunlight. Everywhere sun, air, woods, watercourses and virgin earth and the wealth beneath—and no one using them. No one, that is, except a quarter-million natives, of tribes and races already decadent and doomed to disappear. No insuperable natural obstacles. We may fancy General Washington, the engineer, farmer, woodsman, industrialist, economist and statesman, sighing at the waste. His pioneer blood stirs. If he were only young again I The "Falls of the Far West" of his youth were those of the James River. The human problem of conquest, he sees, is the easiest in history. No forts or garrisons hinder, between the Lakes PROLOGUE: BEFORE MOSES - 9 and the Gulf. The nomadic French have left little trace, easily obliterated by English settlers. Acquisition of the first political barrier, Louisiana, is inevitable; it is waiting to fall into the young nation's lap. The Spaniards in the lower Mississippi Valley cannot keep their control of the mouth of that vital waterway; they can be swept aside by a nation as determined as the river itself to reach the sea. Florida is ready for adoption. Texas and California will be ready in due time. The mouth of the Columbia has just been discovered, and the destiny of the Northwest is certain. Beyond lies Alaska, a bridge to Asia. The ocean will prevail as "the only absolute boundary" for an energetic and ambitious people. Fronting on three seas, east, west and south, his country will dominate the western hemisphere—not by force, but in spirit. The spirit—that is the thing. The dream rises above the material and political, into the realm of the ideal. He senses the soul of his people-to-be, and how they will arrive at unity after long indifference and strife. Here, he sees, are space and opportunity for a new race, the first real Americans. In the Old World men have lived in isolated areas, separated by natural boundaries, making many nations of many minds. Here in North America lies a natural environment for three nations at most, possibly one. The topography is simple, the whole area an organic unit. The occupants of this area themselves must unify, regardless of diverse origins and aims. Their destiny is fixed. Free land, "the most American of American conditions," is in itself a great solvent. And it is a law of human nature that pioneers are fused on frontiers. In this great westward trek, society will become more truly democratic, citizens more independent and resourceful, yet more friendly and helpful. Society can start again from scratch, with its feet solidly on the ground and its head in the sky. Here all colonies and races will merge. Old-world ideas and methods will be modified. A real democracy will arise, worthy of the Revolution. It will realize the spirit of Jefferson's Declaration, while held within bounds by Washington's 10 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS Constitution. A democracy fulfilling the ideal of St. Paul, "bond, yet free." The sunken gray head lifts, the eyes open in surprise at the familiar surroundings. The face softens. "It has been worth the struggle," he murmurs. "Such a country is worth fathering." He pulls a cord, summoning his secretary. III THE PRESSURE OF POPULATION "Hardly anything in history," says Alexander Johnson, "is more impressive than the mustering of Englishmen on the Atlantic Coast of North America, their organization of natural and simple governments and their preparations for the final march of 3,000 miles westward." The American colonists were land-hungry from the beginning. They were also space-hungry, chafing in geographical confinement as they did in political and spiritual bonds. It might seem absurd that a little nation, spread for a thousand miles between the open Atlantic and the Appalachians, living in small and scattered communities surrounded by forests, should feel cramped for space. Town was separated from town by days of travel with horse or ship. Roads were poor, often non-existent. Important cities were connected only by one or two regular stages a week. Even New England was still mostly woods. In 1790 there were only four cities in America having as many as 10,000 inhabitants : Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Baltimore. The rivers flowing from the mountains to the sea were the main highways, and along them were only occasional farms. But the Aryans were on their last march. They wearied of rubbing elbows. They needed air. They had regained their ancient bent for adventure. And they had an insatiable love for land. Population, too, had been growing with amazing rapidity. Those transplanted Englishmen were a prolific race. Benjamin Franklin estimated the total immigration from Europe, from the first settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts to 1750, at about 80,000. Those immigrants had nearly all come before Cromwell's time. The struggle of people against - 11 - 12 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS king in the mother country checked immigration, and it never gathered strength again until after our Revolution. Those 80,000 had multiplied to 1,600,000 by 1760. And such was the impetus of reproduction of this sturdy stock in a favored land that it was not even checked by the Revolutionary war, but grew with such phenomenal rapidity that the first authentic census, in 1790, showed nearly 4,000,000 inhabitants. The same vigor that shows in rapid multiplication sends people pioneering. Scarcely had the ink dried on the treaty granting the young nation's independence when waves of emigration were washing against the Appalachian barrier, seeking outlets toward the West. The migrants were not interested any more, as many of the first English pioneers had been, in oriental trade. They knew by now that it must be a long portage from their river-heads to China. They had little of the eternal ruthless Spanish lust for gold. They sought trade with the Indians, game, furs, adventure for its own sake, but most of all they sought homes for the rearing of new families of pioneers. The Hudson River made the main break in the mountain barrier. Through it passed the northern migrants, moving up the Mohawk toward the Great Lakes. Farther south, uneasy spirits converged at the Cumberland Gap and poured through, lured by the Ohio Valley, to spread fan-wise in western Pennsylvania and western Virginia. Others filtered through at minor passes everywhere. The Cumberland Valley overflowed and spilled its surplus population westward and southwestward into Kentucky and Tennessee. Southern Ohio was occupied, with settlements at Marietta and Cincinnati. Here was a movement which, by the year 1800, when Cleaveland was destined to have a population of seven people, gave Ohio 45,000, Tennessee 106,000 and Kentucky 221,000. The nation was on its way. The term "West" was coming into use, its meaning ever changing with new horizons but its spirit ever the same. There was limitless land for conquest. There were limitless resources, which belonged not to any crown, not to any state, not even to the new Federal government, people felt, but to them. PROLOGUE : BEFORE MOSES - 13 The Indians were negligible. They could be conciliated, bought off or brushed aside. But two great nations at first had stood in the way, and but for courage, statesmanship and blind luck would have prevented the great conquest. France, after one hundred and fifty years of colonization, had held Canada and the mid-continent, with a string of forts reaching along the great waterways from Quebec to New Orleans. New France had 100,000 people, perhaps 7,500 of them in the Mississippi Valley. That had been, save to New England and New York, a distant menace. The French were trappers and traders, rather than agriculturists. The British-American settlers could out-settle them. But the French were ambitious for empire and jealous of territory. So, when the Ohio Company was formed in 1749, with a vague and erroneous grant from Virginia of a large acreage in western Pennsylvania, and Virginian surveyors came to stake out the property, two national streams collided. The French began a string of forts to reach from Presque Isle on Lake Erie to the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela, and thence down the Ohio, to save for themselves the whole big, rich territory westward to the Mississippi. Wherefore in 1754 a young man named George Washington, whose family had an interest in the land company, was sent to prevent the completion of Fort Du Quesne on the present site of Pittsburgh. Washington was obliged to surrender, and that ended the first campaign. But the French and Indian war had begun. The next year came Braddock, with Washington as his aide, only to be defeated in turn. The French rallied their powerful friends, the Iroquois, and opened hostilities on a wide front. It was a little war, as we see it now, but with big stakes. Mother England rallied to her daughter's defense. For a time the war, under Montcalm, went against them. The French held their lines. Then, with Pitt at the helm in England, the tide turned. A wide offensive was launched. Western New York was cleared of French. The key fort was taken, and Du Quesne became Pittsburgh in honor of the 14 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS prime minister. Other forts of the long line fell. Finally Wolfe stormed and took Quebec, and while George II lay dying Canada became British. When peace was signed three years later by George III, with whom our colonies themselves were soon to have so much trouble, the French Empire in America had vanished and the westward path was cleared—all except for Spain. She had entered the war as an ally of France, and thereby lost Florida. Spain still held the mouth of the Mississippi and the vast area westward to the Pacific. But that problem was solved later, opening the way in due time for the pioneers to complete their march. That little war was the making of the American colonies. It gave them military training and a sense of moral unity, preparing them for their Revolution and independence. It cleared the way for their unlimited expansion westward to the Cuyahoga and beyond. Incidentally it saved the coal and oil of western Pennsylvania for American industry and laid the foundations of "The American Ruhr," of which Cleveland is the heart—as busy and rich a strip of territory as there is on earth. IV THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY If the French and Indian war had developed a sort of moral unity in the American colonies, there was as yet little evidence of economic unity, and none whatever of political unity. When Great Britain, aiming to bind the colonies more firmly to her by economic pressure, aroused their armed resistance, they fought mainly as individual states, acting together only as they were compelled by military necessity. When they won the Revolution, more by tiring out British hope of suppressing it than by military victory, their bonds were tightened somewhat by the common struggle, but still there was virtually no Federal government. It looked for a few years as if the union would fall to pieces. Yet all the time there was gathering a cohesive force destined to save the new nation. It was a public domain to feed the growing hunger for new land. Royal grants had assigned western territory, in the beginning, with a lavish hand and a cheerful disregard of geography. Virginia had been given the continental interior north of 36 degrees 30 minutes of latitude, and west to the Pacific; and so had New York. Massachusetts and Connecticut had grants cutting through the same territory, and certain other colonies had claims. In the course of time the claimants had become reconciled to accepting the Mississippi as a western boundary. All the claims were doubtful, and rendered more so by the proclamation of the British govern-men in 1763, restricting colonization to the eastern flank of the Alleghanies. The obvious plan was to keep the whole area west of the mountains as a British domain, in order to curb the coast colonies. Early in the Revolution that plan was destroyed - 15 - 16 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS by a bold Virginian enterprise. Under the leadership of George Rogers Clark, in 1778-79, a force of backwoodsmen crossed the Ohio River, seized all the territory northward to Detroit and thereby won control of a large area farther west. Obviously the Colonies, if they gained their independence, would have a rich patrimony for their children. Interest in that patrimony grew as the Revolution dragged on. Rivalry for its possession for a time threatened the slender bonds uniting the Colonies. The Articles of Confederation, formulated in 1777, were held unsigned for years by small colonies without legal rights, fearing that the states with clear charter rights would divide the territory between them. Finally New York and Virginia generously yielded their claims, and eventually the Articles were accepted by every colony, on the basis of a public domain owned by all in common. The peace treaty signed by Great Britain at the close of the war recognized this status, ceding to the States as a whole the entire area between the Alleghanies on the east and the Mississippi on the west, from the Great Lakes southward to the latitude of the northern boundary of Florida. Thus the new nation was left with only two neighbors, Britain on the north and Spain on the west and south. Here had been something worth fighting for. Here now was something worth cooperating for. With such a common stake, there was, a new and powerful incentive to economic and political unity. This domain made the Colonies a great nation. A curious thing it was, too. Congress, originally not authorized to hold or govern territory, became the owner of 430,000 square miles, a realm as large as France, Spain and Portugal combined. Already land companies were organizing and pioneers were swarming over the mountains. It was a big and novel problem for the feeble government operating under those Articles of Confederation. "The manner in which Congress dealt with it," says one historian, "has made the United States the country it is." By the ordinance of 1787 "The Northwest Territory" was PROLOGUE : BEFORE MOSES - 17 created, comprising the area bounded by Pennsylvania, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers. Out of it were to be carved states similar in character and powers to the original states. When any of them attained a population of 5,000, it was to be given territorial status, with a semi-independent government. With 60,000 population it would become a full-fledged member of the Union. Here was something new in the world. It may be just as well that the first plan, under the chairmanship of Thomas Jefferson, was not carried out in detail. There would have been seventeen states, bearing such mellifluous names as Pelisipia, Assenisipia, Sylvania, Metropotamia and Polypotamia. The final plan, eliminating poetical fancies but retaining Jefferson's wise requirement that the territory should be forever barred to slavery, provided for the creation of five states with such names as they should choose for themselves. Thus came into existence, later on, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, of which Ohio was born first. Human rills flowing down those western mountain slopes became streams. Settlers poured into southern Ohio as they had been pouring for years into Kentucky and Tennessee. The open spaces south of the Ohio, though not embraced in the Ordinance of 1787, were soon erected into states by the process therein laid down. There was still an obstacle to the winning of this near West. Spain held New Orleans and the mouth of the Mississippi. The rivers were the great highways. Railroads were undreamed of. The Erie Canal, reaching tidewater from the Great Lakes, was a mere fancy. No American yet imagined a seaway down the St. Lawrence bearing traffic from the Great Lakes. There was no traffic there to carry. But traffic was developing rapidly along the Ohio and Mississippi, and the obvious outlet for the rich interior of the continent was through Spanish territory to the Gulf of Mexico. Without that, it was futile to populate the great valleys. The Spaniards had maintained that, the lower Mississippi, up to the Yazoo, was a Spanish stream, and allowed no Amer- 18 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS ican boat to pass. The mid-continent was bottled up. But western settlers insisted, and diplomacy won. In return for recognition of a small Spanish territorial claim, the United States government in 1795 made a treaty with Spain whereby the latter opened the Mississippi to general navigation. The stimulus of this stroke was felt all the way from Georgia to Massachusetts. Our present concern is with expansion plans in Connecticut. V THE WESTERN RESERVE When Connecticut, the last of the states owning western land, reluctantly ceded her claims to the Federal government, she shrewdly kept title to a choice section fronting on the southern shore of Lake Erie. This was done for two reasons. It looked like good business, at a time of growing interest in real estate. And then, Connecticut had always resented the loss of territory formerly claimed by her in Pennsylvania. She chose a section as close to that state as possible. Thus was born the "Connecticut Western Reserve," a little New England beyond the Alleghanies. It was a block of land extending one hundred and twenty miles west of the Pennsylvania line (about to the present site of Sandusky) and lying north of the forty-first parallel (a line a few miles south of Akron and Youngstown). Its northerly limit was, in theory, two minutes north of the forty-second parallel, and its area was estimated at more than 4,000,000 acres. Eventually about 1,200,000 acres were found to consist of Lake Erie water, because of an unexpected southerly dip of the lake shore. But there was enough left for one of the most remarkable real estate developments on record. The Connecticut government immediately put this property on the market and disposed of it in three lots. First it authorized a committee to sell the part lying between the Pennsylvania boundary on the east, and the Cuyahoga River and the portage path between the Cuyahoga and the Tuscarawas on the west, at 50 cents an acre. There were to be townships laid out six miles square, with five hundred acres reserved from every township for the support of schools and a similar portion for the support of churches. But only one sale was made under this plan. It was an unsurveyed plot - 19 - 20 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS of 24,000 acres, known as the "Salt Spring Tract" near the Mahoning River, sold in 1788 to General Samuel H. Parsons of Middleton, Connecticut. It may seem strange that a buyer with so great an area to choose from, including more than one hundred miles of frontage of the Great Lakes, should have chosen such a parcel centering around a salt spring. But salt was important. The Indians had resorted to that spring for ages, and for decades afterward it was the chief source of salt for northeastern Ohio. Moreover, the area was readily accessible by water from the forks of the Ohio River at Fort Pitt, which was the main gateway to the West. It was easier to get over the mountains than it was to penetrate the swamps and lakes that led through western New York to Lake Erie. The same consideration, along with the navigability of the Ohio River, led, in that same year, to the settlement of Ohio's first city, Marietta, and the rapid development of southern Ohio when northern Ohio was still an almost empty wilderness. The second transfer from the Reserve was not a sale, but a debt payment, which Connecticut had in mind when she withheld the area from the Federal domain. Many citizens of that state had suffered during the Revolution from British military depredations. It was easier to repay them in land than in money. Half a million acres were set aside for such use in 1792. The benefaction had its influence in hastening the development of the region. The lands thus bestowed were long known as the "Sufferers' Lands," or the "Fire-lands," because so many of their owners had lost their property through its burning by the British. It was perhaps an example of Connecticut business acumen that the state chose for this purpose the extreme western end of the Reserve, embracing the present counties of Erie and Huron, keeping the nearer portion for more profitable use. The rest of the property was disposed of in 1795 to a syndicate called the Connecticut Land Company. SECTION II CURTAIN RISES THE Chapter I. The Connecticut Land Company Chapter II. Enter Moses Chapter III. The Scene Chapter IV. Unknown Clevelanders Chapter V. The Glacier Chapter VI. Here Come The Indians ! Chapter VII. Early Explorers and Settlers Chapter VIII. The Heckewelder Description Chapter IX. Exit Moses SECTION II THE CURTAIN RISES CHAPTER I THE CONNECTICUT LAND COMPANY It all goes back to tacking. Henry the Eighth was not merely a fat old autocrat who had six wives and fought with the Pope. He was something more. He founded "The Office of the Admiralty and Marine Affairs." He was tremendously interested in ships and shipping and how to improve the ships themselves and the ways of doing business with them. He spent a great deal of time on the docks. He talked with sailors, ship owners and ship builders. When Fletcher of Rye, in 1539, invented fore-and-aft sails which enabled a vessel to beat up into the wind, instead of having to run before it, and thus developed the art of tacking, navigation itself became entirely changed. Henry committed the English Navy to sailing instead of rowing—he developed for the first time a navy, instead of a floating army. He worked out a new type of vessel himself. He went in for scientific gunnery and broadsides for sailing ships. Now ships could sail the world around, and they had a round world to do it on. The caravels of Columbus had square sails—and it took them about three months to get from Genoa to San Salvador. But after them came the cutters—with their sweet, sharp lines and their speed and their sails laughing at the wind. With them came a great development of the joint stock company. Doubtless the Phoenicians had stock companies, and every trading people before them. That form of financial coopera- - 23 - 24 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS tion was old when the Elizabethan age was young, say the Chronicles of America, but it developed enormously during the time of Elizabeth. It took more gold than one man could spare to outfit a ship sailing out on a great and joyous venture. Several men, dropping their chinking guineas into a pot, could outfit the ship—or the fleet—or the colony—and share in the returns. The favorite number of members was sixteen. If the ships never came in, or came in drooping, their crews gaunt and some of them missing, why that was the fortune of the game. These were days of high spirits and gambling with big stakes in the chances of a whole new world. The Virginia Plantation, says the Chronicles, was "remote and risky enough" to appeal to an ever greater number of the speculating public. Lord Bacon himself wrote the prospectus for the New Foundland Fisheries. "The Hudson's Bay Company of Gentlemen Adventurers" was another of the early ones. After these gay days came quieter and more serious times, with many strange happenings in new world and old. Through them all, on moved the joint stock company. So what more natural when the American Revolution had gained its own country for its own people, and the State of Connecticut had gotten hold of its new tract in the western wilderness, that a stock company be formed to forward that great real estate project and plant a colony in those wilds and on those western waters? Wherefore, around a table in Hartford town sits a group of men planning a purchase, a survey, a colony and future great returns. They will make the purchase and the survey, they will start and encourage the colony, and, like all real estate investors, they will wait a long time for the returns. Some will be discouraged by the long wait, and will lose. A few will hang on and be rewarded for their persistence as well as their foresight. Some will go themselves to make something of their land by individual endeavor. Others have put money into a speculation, and will let it ride as Fate decrees. For Cleveland did not start by any accident of pioneering