Historic Highways of America (Vol. 9)

the present Pittsburg may be termed English territory. While England now nominally came into possession of all of this portion of New France, the lands on either side of the Ohio River below Pittsb

ho camped and hunted there. These dependents of the Iroquois contested the treaty stoutly and not until 1774 did the Shawanese even pretend to agree to its stipulations. This agreement was secured by what is known as Dunmore's War and was the direct result of General Andrew Lewis's bloody victory over the allied Indians at the mouth of the Great Kanawha River, October 10, 1774. It is not less than significant that this decisiv

on the brink of which civilization paused for many critical years. The northern bank of the Ohio was, through many years, known as the "Indian Side;" and while western Virginia and Kentucky were counting their tens of thousands, the "Indian Side" was forbidden territory. The Ohio River was the western boundary of the colonies

he United States now began on Lake Erie, ascended the Cuyahoga, descended the Tuscarawas to the site of Fort Laurens, ran west to the portage between the Miami and St. Mary Rivers; ascending the Maumee to Lake Erie it followed the lake shore to the starting

legally became a part of the

rnment in order to create a fund to pay the war debt. A geographer and surveyors were appointed to survey and plat seven ranges of townships westward

ystem was extended to the land lying north of the Ohio; the land was to be properly surveyed and sold. The Ohio River at once became the western projection of Mason and Dixon's Line. In some such way as Chevalier has suggested, the Ohio River became a division fence between Roundhead and Cavalier. South of the river, lands were taken up by southerners in the old Virginia way; north of the river the New England system

ky had passed up the Scioto and the Miamis, In all these campaigns the soldiery was largely made up of the border settlers of western Pennsylvania and Virginia, and they somehow conceived the notion that they were as much entitled as any one to the splendid lands from which they had driven the Indians. Heretofore the states and the Government had done everything in reason to encourage the western movement and protect it. No one perhaps realized that the Ohio River was to be considered, in any sense, a boundary line. Yet the United States recognized the Indian right and took such means as w

tling the lands not within the limits of any particular State being forbid by the United States, in Congress assembled, the commander will employ such force as he may judge necessary in driving off persons attempti

hio River had been "staked out" and more or less "improved" by this time. Washington alone, through his agents Crawford and Freeman, had secured not less than sixty thousand acres on the Ohio and Little and Great Kanawha before this time. Other far-sig

ile bottoms on the Indian Side and the splendid stretches of land in the valleys of the Muskingum, Hocking, Scioto, and Miami Rivers. They and their children had conquered that land; under a score of fierce leaders they had flung themselves upon the upper Muskingum and

number of "intruders" was placed at fifteen hundred. "From Wheeling to that place [Miami]," he wrote, "there is scarcely one bottom on the river but has one or more families living thereon." These settlers "were equal to self-government," writes William Henry Smith, "and, if undisturbed, would soon have laid the foundations of a State on the Ohio."[39] Indeed, a call was issued by these pioneers March 12, 1785, for an election of memb

nstitution, and that from the confederation of the whole United States, Congress is not empowered to forbid them, neither is Congress empowered from that confederation

immense" and that nothing could prevent the lands being occupied in the old Virginia way "unless Congress enters into immediate measures." Congress took the cue and resolved that if troops stationed at Pittsburg could not enforce its commands, a new garrison must be established on the lower Ohio. Accordingly Colonel Harmar was ordered to take post on the north side of the Ohio between the Muskingum and the Miami Rivers, where he could successfully keep the front ranks of the immigration army from crossing the river, a

eacher and skilled diplomat; he came as the authorized agent of an Ohio Company of Associates which had been formed by Revolutionary veterans under the leadership of General Rufus Putnam in Boston in 1786 with special reference to the western land bounties promised by Congress in 1776 to faithful soldiers. The Ordinance organized from the lands ceded to the government by the s

n and a half acres. This was not satisfactory to the delegates in Congress. It was a mere clearing in all that vast stretch of territory between the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes. It was, therefore, on a momentous mission of reconciliation that Dr. Cutler hurried to New York. The "Territory Northwest of the River Oh

endous speculation, unhappy in its results but compromising in no way the Ohio Company or its agent, and by shrewdly, though without dissimulation, announcing his determination to obtain lands from the individual states if Congress would not now come to terms, Dr. Cutler won a signal victory. The fame

Ohio of the Ohio Company's vanguard of settlers. These forty-eight "Pilgrims of Ohio," under the leadership of the noble Putnam, reached the Youghiogheny by way of the Old Glade Road through Pennsylvania in the midwinter of 1787-88. On the seventh of the following April they landed at the mouth of the Muskingum. Here, across the Muskingum from Fort Harmar, they built their pioneer castle, around which grew up Marietta-named in honor of Marie Antoinette, whom its founders, old Revolutionary veterans,

to their lands two hundred miles away. In point of daring no pioneer movement in America, save only the founding of Boonesborough, Kentucky, was more plucky than the founding of what is now Cincinnati. In December, Losantiville (Cincinnati) was settled, opposite the mouth of the Licking River. The Symmes company also settled Columbia, at the mouth of the Little Miami, and Nort

s after its founding, could only number, garrison and all, an equal number of hundreds. The founders of Cincinnati, like those of Marietta, were of the best of colonial and revolutionary stock; but, because of the contaminations of the rough frontier, their settlements became what Pittsburg was throughout its early history. General Richard Butler, had he lived, might well have written Governor St. Clair at Cincinnati in 1800 the same words he penned General Irvine

d Little Miami for bounty lands when she ceded her county of Illinois to the Government in 1784. Therefore in 1790 Congress passed a law "directing the Secretary of War to make return to the Governor of Virginia of the names of the Virginia officers and men entitled to bounty-lands, and the amount in acres due them." The same act authorized the agents of the said troops to locate and survey for their use, between the two rivers, apparently in the wretched Virginia fashion, such a number of acres of land as, together with the number already located on the waters of the Cumberland, w

he pioneer movement into the Ohio Valley but, after the treaty of Greenville (1795), the movement was renewed with a rush. The Virginia Military District now (1796) began f

h the Ohio Company in its first contract, the additional lands taken by Colonel Duer came again into the possession of the United States and were known as Congress Lands. This

son and Clarksville, Indiana. By 1800 there are forty-five thousand inhabitants in the entire Northwest Territory, of which probably twenty-five thousand are in the Ohio Valley. Kentucky contains a population of over two hundred thousand; not such a large fraction are on the Ohio however, as is true in the Northwest Territory. The question of conquest is past, though still

for large

he Ohio River and