50 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS Blue water there was, then, clear and sweet, rippling and sparkling in the sun, white manes flashing when the north winds drove their white horses in toward the shore. The forest was green and black. Bright green of the hardwoods, oak, ash, maple, birch and wild cherry; deep blue green of the conifers, cedar, spruce, and balsam, trimming themselves for the summer with fringes of lighter greens. Tall white pines raised their heads to the sun—fat they were about the middle, strong and old. The cedars and birches were fat, then, too, and of goodly age. The great oaks, however, in these parts were predominant. Such slender saplings of second growth as fill our wood lots of today were not even looked at by the pioneer, except as he needed tent poles, fishing rods or baby stuff of that sort. There were plenty of trees with good food on them, too : Black walnut, hickory, chestnut, beech. There were hazel and wild berry bushes—elderberry, blackberry, red and black raspberry, with wild strawberries carpeting many a sunny glade. There was michtam, the sugar-tree, in great numbers. There were bees and wild honey. There were grapes. Peppermint, wintergreen and other healing simples were under foot. The forest seemed bright and friendly enough where it touched the water; but it was dark within. All of it was dangerous. Much of it was impenetrable. Along the main important routes were Indian trails. The Indian trail was not a road in any sense the white man knows—not even like those abandoned and grown-over lumber roads once cut wide enough for wood-sled and team which in many parts of the country go by that name. Sometimes it was a way through underbrush cleared just enough to make it possible for a man afoot or ahorse to walk without constant cutting. But in a stretch of woodland where the trees had grown high enough to keep the sun from the forest floor, so that the spaces between the trees were fairly clear, it all looked alike and it was the easiest thing in the world to lose one's way. Occasional blazes, often many years old; pieces of down timber placed to point in a certain direction, THE CURTAIN RISES - 51 but looking like any piece of down timber fallen that way; sometimes a stone moved from its place but looking like any stone upturned by a falling tree—these were all that marked the trail. It took keen woodsmanship to follow day by day without ever missing a marker. Five minutes of absentmindedness, of yielding to the hypnotic effect of mile after mile at the same pace, and the trail would be lost. Finding it again might be a matter of hours or days. If it were days, and provisions were short, it might be a matter of journey's end in the forest. Stars and compasses? Yes, but metals and currents in the earth deflect compasses, as our Connecticut surveyors realized often, to their concern; thick forest growth hides stars. Hardy and alert the traveler had to be. Watching for trail marks had to become as much a matter of mental habit as watching traffic is to today the motorist's. The skies were blue in 1796. There was no soot to gather on a foggy day into a heavy cloud, or to cover the face of the waters under a slow south wind. The river was clear, clean and beautiful. Heavy rains browned it with washed down silt, then as now, but this soon settled and left it green again. The weather was much the same as now, but it felt different. The sun shone with as much energy, but it was taken up by woods and water so the heat of summer was easier to bear. There were no buildings and pavements to soak it up and reflect it back again with the added misery of noise and dust. The winds of winter blew no more fiercely then than now, but the shelter was less tight and life was closer to the outdoor world. Winters were harder to endure and summers less so. Wild life was not only abundant. It was prolific and overflowing and almost as unafraid as it still is in some parts of Africa. When the passenger pigeons migrated they covered the sky for hours in a thick ceiling which darkened the day. Fish teemed in lake and river. The busy beaver built his dams undisturbed in countless little streams. Deer had 52 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS only one real enemy, the timber wolves. What the Indians had taken from around these parts was negligible. Innumerable fur-bearing and feathered folk were the Clevelanders of the end of the eighteenth century. Indians came and went but they did not live here. It was a good place to fish and to tarry awhile in the summer; the knoll on the west side of the Cuyahoga mouth was a pleasant meeting-ground on which to celebrate a good catch ; so was the knoll shaded by mammoth oak trees on the west side of the mouth of Rocky River. But after the celebration the red men moved on, east, west or south, as the spirit or the season moved. The Indians were not the resident but the tourist population of that day. And so arises a question which is always interesting and so far still unanswered. Who were the first. Clevelanders? Who were the first Ohioans? For 1796 was only yesterday and life stretches back for many a hundred thousand years. * * * * * What the founder thought, as he stood there, looking, no one can know, except that this was a good site for a town, to be, some day, larger than Old Windham. What he did were the immediately practical things needing to be done. Camp was made, and a week spent in exploring the possibilities of the country round. On August fifth, two weeks after the day of landing here, he was back at Port Independence, on the Conneaut River. Having looked over the shores and river mouths going out and back, he decided definitely at this time to set the main colony at the mouth of the Cuyahoga. In the next six weeks stores were brought out here, two cabins were erected, one a store house to hold the supplies and the other a shelter to accommodate the surveyors as they came and went out again. "These rude structures," we are told, "were located a short distance south of St. Clair Street, west of Union Lane, at a spring on the side hill." Later in the season a cabin was put up on Lot 53, on the east side of THE CURTAIN RISES - 53 what is now West Sixth Street, for the use of Job Stiles and his wife, who were to stay the winter. There was nothing left of various casual shelters put up at different times on the east side of the river. On the west side stood a dilapidated old storehouse, once used to hold flour sent from Pittsburgh to Detroit. During these six weeks, while the surveying parties are working their way west and south from their fixed starting point at the northwest corner of Pennsylvania, while the Cleaveland party is making all things ready for the settlement at the mouth of the Cuyahoga, there is time for a little meditation on those unknown Clevelanders long gone, leaving so little trace. CHAPTER IV UNKNOWN CLEVELANDERS History is one subject in which one cannot begin at the beginning, because no one knows anything about the beginning. The writer must establish a zero point and go on from there. On the earlier side of his zero point he can only guess or relate the guesses of others. He can give his readers at best a sort of cross word puzzle with more than half the definitions of the words torn off. In any history of Cleveland, 1796 seems to be the zero point. We may step backward from that as far as we can go into the twilight of known facts or reasonable deductions, but darkness soon envelops the past as it does the future. Hold the lantern high as we may, we can see only a little way beyond it. Looking backward from 1796, one sees first the Indian tribes. Woven in and along with them for three centuries, in the fabric made by their comings and goings, one sees, like the occasional bright nubbins in a tweed, scattered Spanish searchers and French coureurs des bois. Whether any earlier Europeans got into the interior of the continent is doubtful. The sea-dogs of the early Icelandic and Norse days perhaps touched the coasts of Atlantic and Arctic oceans in numbers greater than any one has guessed. Maybe the first hardy sailors of Greece and the islands of the Aegean, perhaps Phoenicians who ventured beyond the Pillars of Hercules found the Atlantic shore. It is more reasonable to believe that stray ships have touched here from time to time than that they have not. There are records of many Japanese and Chinese vessels reaching the Pacific coast. Forty-one Japanese junks, for example, were cast upon it between 1782 - 54 - THE CURTAIN RISES - 55 and 1875. These, of course, had prevailing westerlies behind them, which worked against the landing of Atlantic seamen. There are strange legends in many lands which might seem to indicate that sometimes a ship got over here and back again. But the latter would be rare luck. Getting to a far country on the outbound voyage, stocked with necessaries from home, is one thing. Getting home, after a long, long sail, from a wilderness, is something else. Granting this remote chance, touching upon a seacoast is one thing, stocking with fresh water, fruit and fish, repairing the ship and getting its sailors into some kind of condition and making off again as speedily as may be, is another and very much more difficult thing. Penetrating a wilderness interior is another matter. The former may be a serious, a desperate business; the latter is more than that; it is out of the realm of the possible without some sort of plan, preparation or previous woods experience. The salt, who knew how to manage his ship in any gale, might be the first to find himself helpless in a nightmare prison of tree trunks, of poison vines, of wolves, of rattlers and of wildcats. So before the days of New Spain and New France one may safely discount any idea of European travel through Cuyahoga County. But long ere Columbus was born at Genoa to dream of maps and caravels and the shorter route to India, long ere Leif Ericson had left his mark, even long ere tales had come back and had been handed down to Plato about a great country in the sea, there were dwellers in these lands. Before the Indians as our early explorers knew them, came the Mound Builders. Along with these—or earlier, or later, who knows?—came the constructors of the fortifications found in many places in northern Ohio. Before this came the great glacier. As to whether man lived here before the last glacial period not even the archeologists have been able to learn much. Perhaps because digging is slow and expensive work and no one knows where to begin. But if it be true that the land was once covered with ice which retreated northwards, leaving Ohio fertile beyond most dreams of fecund farms, it may well be true that there were 56 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS previous periods of temperate climate and men and cities which now are dust, leaving not so much as an arrowhead intact. "And millions in those solitudes, since first The flight of years began, have laid them down In their last sleep." Or perhaps those old ones are buried at depths not guessed at, some day to be discovered by a turn of sun or of fate, and found as possible to study as Tiahuantico; as Troy yielding its secrets to the spade of Schliemann ; as Caligula's ship giving up its story to Mussolini's diving gangs. Some of the finds at great depths seem plainly to point to the existence of paleolithic man in this part of the country. Says G. F. Wright : "We may say it is not so startling a statement as it once was to speak of man as belonging to the glacial period. And with the recent discoveries, we may begin to speak of our own State as one of the earliest portions of the globe to become inhabited. Ages before the Mound Builders erected their complicated and stately structures in the valleys of the Licking, the Scioto, the Miami and the Ohio, man in a more primitive state had hunted and fished with rude implements in some portions at least of the southern part of the State. "To have lived in such a time, and to have successfully overcome the hardships of that climate and the fierceness of the animal life, must have called for an amount of physical energy and practical skill which few of this generation possess. "Let us not therefore speak of such a people as inferior. They must have had all the native powers of humanity fully developed, and are worthy ancestors of succeeding races." Up to this point, however, "Pete," the Dinichthys found in the shale of the Rocky River Gorge is the most interesting treasure. He can be seen in the Museum of Natural History. This is an agnostic age, and people of 1932 are in, perforce, an agnostic position. No one knows that men did live here before the glacier, and no one can know that they did not. The feeble light of the lantern only makes blacker the THE CURTAIN RISES - 57 darkness along that path. The inquirer must turn back, unsatisfied, towards our day. This is known : There were people in Ohio who built mounds in which are human bones, weapons and pottery, copper implements and woven cloth. There were people who built fortifications requiring some—although primitive—knowledge of physics, geometry and astronomy, as well as the rudiments of military science. Whether these two sets of people were the same is not known. Whether either or both were the ancestors of the Indians found here by the first European explorers is not known. But it is certain that there must have been a good many of them, because there are about ten thousand of those mounds in Ohio alone, and many more in adjoining states. The quality of the objects found in them shows more advanced ability as the archeologists move southward. Between the many fortifications and few mounds of northern Ohio and the 'mounds showing remains of more highly developed man which are so very numerous in southern Ohio, there is a sort of neutral belt through the central part of the state in which very few remains of any sort are found. As to the physical structure of the people themselves there is great difference of opinion among the authorities. Caleb Atwater says: "The skeletons found in our mounds never belonged to a people like our Indians. The latter are a tall, rather slender, straight-limbed people; the former were short and thick. They were rarely over five feet high, and few indeed were six. Their foreheads were low, cheek bones rather high; their faces were rather short and broad; their eyes were very large; and they had broad chins." This may be true of the Mound Builders whose skeletons Mr. Atwater examined. It may also be true that some Indians are "a tall, rather slender, straight-limbed people." The Iroquois have rather that reputation. But anyone who has had much occasion to observe the Saugeen Indians of Ontario will find in this description of the Mound Builders 58 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS a very close picture of the Indian friends who make the baskets of today. Gerard Fowke says: "The skeletons of Mound Builders show that, as a race, there was no practical difference between them and any other people living an outdoor life, with plenty of coarse but nutritious food. Physically, they differed very little from our pioneers. The shortest skeleton of a male I have ever found in a mound was about five feet in length; the longest was six feet four inches. Owing to the displacement of bones exact measurements are seldom possible ; but there need be no error of more than an inch in most cases. The bones sometimes show the effects of rheumatism, tubercular trouble, or fractures. "There were, of course, many abnormal features of physical structure among them ; it would be strange if they were the only people on earth free from such visitations. But owing to the hardships and exposure incident at times to their manner of living, not many of the weak, sickly or deformed would survive childhood." This also is known : In the sense in which the Mayan builders of Guatemala and Yucatan show civilization ; in the sense in which the Incan and pre-Incan people of Peru were civilized; in the sense in which the constructors of Tiahuantico in Bolivia were civilized, Ohio shows no evidence of civilization. A fairly high degree of culture is shown in the artistry of the weapons, cloth, ornaments and pots. But there is nothing to indicate such knowledge of organization as is referred to in the use of the word "Civilization." The status of these people was somewhat more advanced than that of the Indians of the historic period, but not a great deal more. The contrast between North and South America in this respect is very great. A. H. Verrill, in "Old Civilization of the New World," says : "Everywhere, throughout Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and even on the borders of Brazil and Chile, are scattered the ruins and remains of civilized people of whom nothing definitely is known. Over an area of more than one million square THE CURTAIN RISES - 59 miles there is scarcely a square mile that does not contain evidences of once having been inhabited by races who reached a high state of culture, and many of whom performed almost incredible feats of engineering. Everywhere, among the Andean ranges and upon the deserts, are the ruins of temples, palaces, great cities, immense walls, massive fortresses, as well as hundreds of thousands of graves and tombs containing millions of mummies. "There are ruins and remains beyond calculation which have never been examined ; there are as many more which have never been seen by white men and by few of the native Indians. No doubt, somewhere, in these ruins of long-vanished civilizations, in some crumbling palace or temple, or hidden in some tomb, is material that, when found, will solve the mysteries surrounding these forgotten people." If there is any connection between the northern and southern people, perhaps some of the Ohio mystery may give way at the same time. But while the tomb and temple which hold the secrets remain hidden, or the evidence now possessed resists interpretation, the student is as badly off for exact knowledge as before. Mr. Verrill says also: "One of the most remarkable features of many of the prehistoric American civilizations is the fact that, judged by our present knowledge, they appear to have had no beginning and no logical ending. Hence there is nothing with which to compare them when trying to place their age. There are no super-imposed remains and no earlier, evolutionary or more primitive remains of the same races. Such abrupt beginnings and endings are the usual rather than the unusual thing. It is the case with our Mound Builders, with the Cooles of Panama, with the Manabis of Equador, the Tiahuanacans of Bolivia, the pre-Incan civilization of Peru, and even with the Mayas." He feels very certain, however, that most of the peoples lived quite long ago, the civilization of the Incas, youngest of them, having been at least a thousand years old when it was overthrown and destroyed by Pizarro. He says about development : 60 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS "We cannot well include the Mound Builders, the Cliff Dwellers or the Pueblos among the ancient civilizations of America, although the former were probably the most ancient, highly cultured race in North America, while the Pueblos came very close to possessing a civilization." Gerard Fowke, in his "Archeological History of Ohio," says of the number of mounds : "In the neighborhood of every stream in the southern half of the state, except some of those flowing through rough or swampy country, the surface is so dotted with them that signals could be transmitted from one to another for a hundred miles or more. There is scarcely a point along the Scioto below Circleville or on either the Miami in the lower half of its course, or in the valley of any tributary to those streams, where one may not be within a few minutes' ride of some permanent evidence of aboriginal habitation. The same is true of the Cuyahoga and some other rivers belonging to the Lake Erie basin. On the summits of steep hills; in bottom lands subject to overflow; on every terrace bordering a stream ; on plateaus and uplands; wherever there is cultivable or naturally drained land, a good point of observation, an ample supply of water, a convenient topography for trails —the Mound Builder has left his mark. Even in places where it would seem a nomad would not care to go, except as led by the excitement or necessities of the chase, and then for as brief a time as possible, such evidence is not lacking of prehistoric residence, or at least sojourning." It will doubtless interest today's Clevelander to know that the present main office of the Cleveland Trust Company on Euclid Avenue at East Ninth Street, is built on the site of one of these ancient mounds. Also that out of one near Collinwood was taken, among other objects, a large pottery tube with a flattened pottery ball in it, which seems to be a musical instrument. "It is called a horn," says "Reed's Archaeology," "and by blowing in it, a sound can be produced, audible at a long distance. The fact that a louder sound is produced when the ball is in the tube, and the mouth of the tube elevated, favors the idea that it was designed as a horn." THE CURTAIN RISES - 61 Pottery tubes were used by early peoples for many purposes—drinking, blood-sucking, blowing, smoking and for looking at distant objects on a bright day, but this one seems to have led an ancient Cleveland battle-line or perhaps an early Boy Scout Band. One of the early fortification earthworks in Cuyahoga County was still visible in 1867, situated, says Whittlesey, "on the right of the road to Newburgh, on land heretofore owned by the late H. A. Ackley." "The position thus protected against an assault is a very strong one, where the attacking party should not have projectiles of long range. "On three sides of this promontory, the land is abrupt and slippery. It is very difficult of ascent, even without artificial obstructions. Across the ravine, on all sides, the land is upon a level with the enclosed space. The depth of the gully is from fifty to seventy feet. About eighty rods to the east, upon the level plain, is a mound ten feet high and sixty feet in diameter. At the west end of the inner wall is a place for a gateway or passage to the interior. "The height of the embankment across the neck is two feet, the enclosed area contains about five acres. Perpetual springs of water issue from the sides of the ravine, at the surface of the blue clay, as they do in Cleveland." Whittlesey refers also to an earthwork about six miles from the lake, on the eastern bluffs of the Cuyahoga River, and another one two miles farther up the river on the same side, and a "much stronger and more elaborate fortified position in Northfield, Summit County, on the river bluffs, two miles west of the center." Some authorities harp upon the fact that the Mound Builders "could not dig a well." But Whittlesey says early settlers of Northfield maintain that this fort had pits which held water, and were stoned around like wells. So some of these early people seem, at least, to have understood cisterns. And it is not quite safe to say about any prehistoric people that they "could not" do this or that, because there are many ways of doing things, some of which are outside of our experi- 62 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS ence. All one can say is "There is no evidence as yet that they ever did this or that." P. P. Cherry, author of "The Western Reserve and Early Ohio," believes that the fortifications were the work of the Erie Indians, and that the succession of them up the Cuyahoga Valley proves that "slowly and sadly the Eries fell back from the beloved shores of the great lake, but stubbornly contesting every foot of soil." "Just when the exodus from the lake shore began, no one knows, but it was by way of the Cuyahoga and Rocky River valleys. Whole decades must have been employed to build the defensive works of the lonely, crooked Cuyahoga alone." Which is an interesting theory, more sentimental than conclusive. One legend is from the book of Mormon. C. W. Clark, in the Ohio Archeological and Historical Society Publications, writes that the Book tells of a group of people "who came to this continent in boats or barges shortly after the building of the tower of Babel. This division traversed southern Europe, crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and landed at or near the Peninsula of Yucatan. On account of wars among them, this civilization became extinct about 600 B. C., but during the time of their sojourn they built many cities and travelled in a northerly direction, and this northern travel may account for one class of mounds, a few of which we find in Ohio, and large numbers in the state of Wisconsin." "The second colony of which the Book relates left Jerusalem about the year 600 B. C. and originated with Lehi and his four sons. These people crossed the desert of Arabia, and eventually, after a long voyage, arrived on this continent* on the Peruvian portion of the coast of South America." This sort of thing—and the archeological books are full of legendary lore—is not, of course, evidence. But it adds color and interest to the pattern of the whole guesswork fabric. * Writer evidently meant hemisphere.—En. THE CURTAIN RISES - 63 The more the student looks into this matter of the Mound Builders, the less he feels that he knows about them. They have proved an interesting field for study and speculation since the first white settlers dug into the mounds and gazed upon the earthworks. The reader who wishes to follow up some of these theories will find a comprehensive bibliography of the earlier works in Fowke's "Archeological History of Ohio," and books and articles of later date are numerous in the Cleveland Public Library. But when he has looked at all the pictures of objects taken from the mounds, and read a thousand pages of discussion and fancy, he is apt to fall back upon Verrill's statement that as far as we are concerned, these people seem to have had no beginning and no end. They were, and then they were not. When the man of the present gets to thinking that today is the only day, and "we are the people and wisdom shall die with us," it brings him back with a jerk to the immensity of time and growth and possibility, to realize that some of the oaks still standing in Rocky River were looking on Lake Erie when Champlain was seeking the passage to Cathay, and that long before the acorns which built those oaks were dropped, back through generations of oaks and acorns, to times before Cesar crossed the Rubicon, there were Clevelanders living in this, his little world. And if it be true that "Earth that nourished thee, shall claim Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again ; And, lost each human trace, surrendering up Thine individual being, shalt thou go To mix forever with the elements; To be a brother to the insensible rock, And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak Shall send his roots abroad and pierce thy mold"— And that "The golden sun And planets, all the infinite host of heaven, 64 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS Are shining on the sad abodes of death, Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread The globe are but a handful to the tribes That slumber in its bosom"— it is also true that the future reaches still further into the unknown than does the past. "What's the use?" the cynical sometimes ask. But everything is of use in building a universe, or even a city. Everything made of use, everything turned towards beauty may have a meaning to those unknown children's children who follow after this Cleveland into those Clevelands still unborn and still undreamed of. CHAPTER V THE GLACIER The Cleaveland party found in northern Ohio singularly fertile soil. They accepted it as it was, part of a world made about four thousand years before. There was not much speculation in those days on how things came to be. The problem was to make what they could of the world they had. This they proceeded to do. Nowadays a little more is known of what went before in the ever-lengthening history of our ancient globe. As for this little part of it, all northern Ohio was at one time covered with an ice sheet, similar to that which covers most of Greenland at the present day. While this sheet was forming, vegetation was being killed by the longer and colder winters. Slowly the ice progressed, every summer melting a little less, every winter freezing a little farther and deeper, until it was probably nearly 3,000 feet deep. The glacier adds a little length at its edges every year by this process, and a little depth—or height—over all its surface. Besides this lengthening by accretion which makes it cover ever more and more territory, the whole mass moves along. It is almost solid, like rock, but not quite. It retains to a slight degree the fluidity of the water from which it is made. It becomes like molasses in January. (The reader may remember that in Mark Twain's "A Tramp Abroad," he and his party, hearing that the Swiss glaciers moved, took passage on one for a distant scene. Next morning the surrounding country seemed exactly as it had been the night before. When they found just how many inches a year measured their glacier's progress, they abandoned it for a more conventional method of transportation). While the pressures caused by contraction and expansion - 65 - 66 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS at various points along its length caused the glacier to move ever southward, it carried with it all sorts of movable rubbish found in its path. In the summer the ice and snow melted a little on the top, and quite a distance back from the southern edge. This water flowed down, in, under and around the boulders, tree-trunks, pebbles, earth masses, bones where there were any, and down, into and through any cracks in the solid rock. Next winter this water froze, made the rock cracks bigger and broke off masses of rock where it could, adding them and the other miscellaneous objects to the solid mass of the glacier. As the summers shortened and the winters lengthened, last summer's rubbish stayed imbedded in the ice, which moved on, with almost invisible slowness, but with a terrible and resistless sureness, its few feet a year. Before the deliberate process of our earth's elliptic orbit and shifting axis had brought the sun around again to melting more than it froze, to lengthening the summers and shortening the winters, the glacier had brought a great mass of rocks and rubbish from the latitude where the shores of Lakes Superior and Huron now are found, down into Ohio. The recession of the glacier, on the other hand, is not one of movement but merely of melting every year more than the year before. One summer rubbish at the southern end is dropped in the valley where Cincinnati now hugs one edge. Next winter some of it freezes in again, but not all. Next summer begins earlier and lasts longer and more is dropped. Pools are left in the hollows, later to become lakes and rivers as the glacier recedes over the neighboring hills leaving water to drain behind it. A south wind drops a few seeds. Some of these take root and produce next year's bits of plant or bush, weed or seedling tree, in their turn. The quick-growing, sun-loving but cold-resistant plants get started first. After a few years they have provided shade in which those seeds which need shade can make a beginning, and the summers continue their lengthening course. By the time the glacier has melted back to the latitude of Lakes Superior and Huron great forests have taken a good start in the more southerly regions which it had covered. THE CURTAIN RISES - 67 People who may have been driven southward by the onward march of cold, who may have found lands suitable for the developing of civilizations down near the equator, begin to suffer, there, from heat. Some of their descendants move slowly northward again. Others disappear one knows not where. People from other continents, moving always in search of better food and less discomfort, drift in, finding life possible in the wake of the glacier, where it had been impossible to other folk as it advanced. How many times since the world began glaciers have advanced and retreated over Euclid Avenue and the Heights, and down through Ohio and into Kentucky, is one of the things that no one knows. But the archaeologists and geologists make pretty good guesses as to one glacial period, at least, before the one nearest our present time. The advance and deepening of the glacial sheet may come hard on the inhabitants who are forced to move in the face of climatic changes which interfere with their food supply and other comforts and conveniences of life, but the movement seems to be wholly beneficial to those inhabitants who come a long time after the glacier has retreated. "The bottom of a glacier" says G. F. Wright, "is a mighty rasp, or rather a combination of a plough, a rasp, a sand-paper and a pumice-stone, ploughing, scraping, scratching and polishing the surface all at the same time." It not only leaves scratched lines and grooves by which its progress may be traced, but it leaves boulders from far countries, and a depth and richness of soil not found in unglaciated areas." The most famous place for seeing the glacial grooves is Kelleys Island near Sandusky, Ohio, where some of them are as deep as two feet, though all the islands thereabouts show some glacial grooving. The grooves, boulders and quality of soil are the three things by which, says Wright, the glacier can be traced. These grooves can be found as far down as Butler and Highland counties. In the northwestern part of the state the soil which covers them is so deep that they are seldom seen, but 68 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS they are to be found when one gets down to the country rock. Boulders from the Superior and Adirondack regions are to be found as far as Boone County, Kentucky, some of these latter being copper-bearing granite, manifestly uprooted from the northwestern Superior copper mine neighborhood. These boulders are scattered all over the northwestern part of Pennsylvania also. They vary in size from mere pebbles on through "dornochs" and "hardheads" to the big fellows like that near Lancaster, Ohio, twelve by eighteen feet and six feet above ground. It is in the soil that the glacier is kindest to man. This glacial soil is called "till." Quoting Wright: "The 'till' of which we have spoken consists of the loose soil which in the glaciated region covers the bed rock. In places this is of great depth, and everywhere it has a peculiar composition. Outside of the glaciated region the soil is formed by the gradual disintegration or rotting of the rocks from their surface downwards, so that, except along streams, there is no soil but such as is derived from the rocks of the immediate vicinity. In a limestone region the soil will have come from the dissolution of limestone, in a sandstone region from disintegration of sandstone, and in a slatestone region from the weathering of that rock. But over a glaciated region the soil will be found to be composed of a variety of elements derived from various places in the direction from which the ice movement came. Thus, in Stark, Holmes, Knox, Licking and Fairfield counties the soil will be found to be composed of a mixture of granitic fragments which have been brought all the way from Canada, limestone dug out from the bed of Lake Erie, shale gathered from the counties to the north and west, and sandstone ground up from the immediate vicinity. And these materials are not in separate layers, as when deposited by water, but are as thoroughly mixed as mortar in a hod. "The only way in which materials could be thus collected in such situations and thus thoroughly mixed is by ice action. The ice of the glacial period as it moved over the rough surfaces to the north ground off the prominences and filled THE CURTAIN RISES - 69 up the gorges and hollows, and we have in this unstratified mixture, what Professor Newberry denominated the 'grist' of the glacier. The extent of this deposit in Ohio is enormous. In St. Paris, Champaign County, the till was penetrated more than 500 feet without finding the bed rock. This was doubtless in the filled-up gorge of a pre-glacial watercourse, of which there are a great many in the state. But the average depth of the till over the glaciated part of the State, as shown by the facts gathered from wells recently bored for gas, is nearly 100 feet." Besides grinding up and fertilizing the soil to this extent, the glacier was kind in leaving plenty of water. There were floods when it melted. There was much more water in most of the lakes and rivers than there is now. "The Ohio River," says Dr. Wright, "is lined by glacial terraces, which are from fifty to a hundred feet above the present high-water mark." Many other rivers in Ohio show these terraces where the water has been much higher than it is at present. Lake Erie has benches—which are the ridges on which were the first Indian trails and on which are now the big motor highways. On those west of the Cuyahoga River are Detroit Road, Center Ridge Road and Lorain Road. The continuation of such benches immediately east of the Cuyahoga shows more slightly now, but there are two or three sandy ridges south of the lake before coming to Cleveland Heights, which is the beginning of the Alleghany Plateau. Euclid Avenue follows one of them. Though much of this glacial water has disappeared, Ohio is still one of the well-watered states of the Union, and Cleveland, on its lake, with its one large river and half a dozen creeks and runs, its springs and its good rainfall, has one of the most fortunate locations in Ohio from the point of view of food and drink. The fruits which grow on the glacial benches alone make it favored above many cities. Whittlesey, Cleveland's first important geologist, says : "As that frozen age was disappearing, the more ancient and solid rocks of the Carboniferous, Devonian and Silurian 70 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS ages, on which the universal glacier rested and moved, were ground down, scoured and polished. "The surface formation on which the city stands belongs to the close of the ice period when the glacial masses were disappearing, and the waters were assuming their present level over the land. It is sometimes called 'post-tertiary,' or 'quaternary,' but more often 'northern drift.' There are in it no rocky beds, although it is frequently stratified and laminated. The waters from which, by a joint section with moving ice, it was transported and deposited, were throughout the upper lake country wholly fresh. Numerous shells have been found in it, all of which belong to fresh and none to sea water. Nearer the ocean, the shells of the drift are of marine origin. "Throughout all the region of the upper lakes, there are numberless trees, logs, sticks, branches and leaves scattered through the drift formation. It is composed of red, blue and dun-colored clay, on which rests coarse sand, gravel and boulders." The clays, he says, are very similar to those of the Superior region. The drift clays always contain alkalis, and sometimes the clay changes to "a compact hard-pan, composed of clay and fragments of rocks. There are boulders and pebbles of northern rocks throughout the whole mass." He has found places in the valleys of the upper lakes where the drift is 600 to 800 feet deep, but he thinks here it is probably nowhere more than 150 feet down to the underlying rock. The lake naturally cut into these marly clays pretty fast and—quoting Colonel Whittlesey again— "During the high water of 1838, the advance of the lake waters upon the town site was so rapid that the corporation took measures to protect it. By comparing the surveys of 1796 and 1842 there had been a general encroachment of two hundred and five feet. "In 1806 or 1807 Amos Spafford sent his hired man, with a yoke of oxen to plow a patch of ground on the margin of the lake, which must have been not far from the Marine Hospital. At noon, the man chained his team to a tree, THE CURTAIN RISES - 73 and fed them, and went home to dinner. Returning in the afternoon, his oxen were nowhere to be seen. Proceeding to the edge of the bank, the men discovered them still attached to the tree, quietly chewing their cuds, but the ground on which they stood had sunk between twenty and thirty feet, carrying with it some of the new furrows, the trees and the oxen. Thus a belt of land about twelve and one half rods in width was lost along the entire front of the city. In one hundred years this would at the same rate have amounted to twenty-seven rods. It would, in about five hundred years, have undermined the Perry monument. Before the close of a thousand years that part of the town north of Huron Street would have disappeared." The Perry monument, at Whittlesey's writing, was on the Public Square. "By means of heavy piling and stone on the lake front, the advance of the water has been wholly stopped." It was stopped in front of the smaller city of Colonel Whittlesey's day, but along the shale banks to the westward this same encroachment has been going on ever since. This land is owned privately, or by small associations of property-owners. Some of the owners were in actual danger of losing their homes, and all had lost much of their area until a recent movement was inaugurated by some of the associations to put in piers for protection. These, when properly laid, cause the sand beaches at the foot of the cliffs to widen and put a distance between the shale banks and the fury of the waters. Remains indicating the presence of man are found in large numbers in the post-glacial mounds and fortifications, and in a very few cases in the pre-glacial layers. In the northern drift itself—excepting always the top layers dating back only a few hundred years—there seem, so far, no evidences of the presence of man. That is to say, there was probably quite a long period without him. But during this time there were other animals. Whittlesey once more : "Grinders of the elephant and mastodon are common in the superficial materials, which cover the indurated rocks of the west. A grinder is said to have been found in the 74 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS blue manly clay on the West side many years since. Remains of the elephas primigenus, the mastodon, megatherium, megalonyx, the horse, beaver and some other animals characterize the drift period. They existed prior to that geological era and through it to the alluvium, in which their bones are also found. They became extinct after the earth had taken its present condition. The elephant whose bones were discovered a few years since, in digging the coal vaults of the Merchants Bank, was about twelve feet below the natural surface. Another grinder of an extinct elephant was brought to light in the grade of Champlain Street, which was about fifteen feet beneath the surface. It was secured by Dr. E. Sterling, and is now in the possession of Professor Newberry. This grinder had been worn by transportation, partially into the form of a rolled boulder; but the outlines are not wholly destroyed, and the internal structure remains easily recognizable. "Pieces of buried timber, sometimes whole trees with numerous leaves, also characterize the northern drift. Layers of this ancient vegetation extend beneath the entire city. The wells from which water was originally procured, were sunk through the sand and gravel bed to one of the impervious layers, where water is always found. It was frequently impure and even offensive, from the rotten layer which lies at the surface of the clay. There is more or less of it distributed in thin dark layers through the clay, but it has collected in larger quantities at its surface. A white cedar, twenty feet in length and six inches in diameter was taken up by the late John Wills, at the depth of eighteen feet, in grading the bank at the Marine Hospital. The roots and some of the branches remained, and its strength was not wholly gone. There were several shorter pieces of ancient driftwood, found at about the same depth, which show the wearing action of the ancient surf upon a sand beach, like pieces of floodwood upon the present shore. Among the leaves in the mucky layers are cedar, spruce and pine ; and these are the most common kinds of timber found in the drift material at other places."