life of the community naturally organizes itself for worthiest purposes,
and clubs which represent the life that is simply worthy and of which the
purposes are not the highest. Clubs of women and clubs of men, clubs social
and clubs professional, clubs literary and clubs commercial, clubs
anthropological and clubs sociological, clubs chemical and clubs
engineering, clubs collegiate and clubs pedagogical, clubs athletic and
clubs æsthetic, clubs piscatorial and clubs ecclesiastical, clubs
architectural and clubs of free-traders, clubs for municipal improvement
and clubs for no improvement of any kind--they all and many others are
found in this very pleasant city.
And underneath all these associations and organizations it is easy to
discover the growth of a distinctly civic spirit, also manifest in special
movements and conditions. The endeavor to build in one group buildings so
important as a county court-house, a city hall, a public library and others
reveals the willingness to surrender individual advantages to the public
weal. The attempt to deal largely and justly with all municipal franchises
proves the presence of a desire to serve all as well as each. The Municipal
Association, an organization of a few gentlemen of high purpose and of
patience as well as of great influence, has, in recommending or in refusing
to recommend certain candidates for office, promoted the growth of a public
sense out of which it has itself sprung. The determination that the public
schools shall not be used for partisan purposes is perhaps as strong an
illustration as could be given of the presence and potency of the civic
spirit of Cleveland.
[Illustration PERRY'S MONUMENT, WADE PARK, CLEVELAND.]
In the three great professions are found noble members. In this triple
service is manifest a high tableland of general excellence rather than a
level broken by high and distinct peaks of individual conspicuousness. The
highest relative standing belongs, I judge, to the members of the medical
profession. This prominence may be the result of the presence for more than
fifty years of a medical school which has numbered among its faculty some
great investigators and teachers. But not a few of those who are examples
of highest service have been unwilling, it must be said, to remain in
Cleveland. As the Atlantic draws down the level of the Great Lakes, so the
territory of the Atlantic draws away some (not all) of the more eminent
members of the great professions. The supply however never becomes
exhausted, nor does it deteriorate.
[Illustration]
[Illustration CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON.]
But the most eminent of Cleveland's people belong to the literary or
political class rather than to the strictly professional. The earliest of
the writers who spread Cleveland's fame and his own was Artemus Ward. It
was a short career enough which Artemus Ward had, and its Cleveland part
covered only two years, but while it lasted it bore one of Cleveland's
daily papers round the world on the wings of his wit. One cannot forget
that here lived and wrote John Hay, beloved as among the best of men as
well as honored as the most efficient of Secretaries of State. James Ford
Rhodes here fitted himself while engaged in business to begin his career as
a fascinating writer of later American history. Constance Fenimore Woolson
was a Cleveland child, although not born here, and the Great Lakes are the
scenes of her stories. Mrs. Sarah Knowles Bolton, writer of useful and
pleasing biographies and other books, divides her residence between Boston
and Cleveland. Charles W. Chesnutt, too, is esteemed not only for his
sketches but also for a distinct charm of character. Cleveland would like
to claim that rare poet and great soul, Edward Rowland Sill, for his home
was only a few miles away, and in Cleveland he died, in 1887. One should
not decline to say that books written by college professors may not only be
the material for literature but also literature itself. Such books, written
in Cleveland, are neither few nor barren.
The eminence in politics of the Cleveland man belongs rather to the present
than to the past. If one should name the gentlemen who have served the city
in the national Congress the names would to most prove to be without
significance. The name of Senator Payne--and he had been long associated
with the life of the city--one recalls, but no name has the meaning of the
name of Wade or of Giddings, who came from the little town of Jefferson, a
few miles east of Cleveland, or of Sherman, who came from the south. Hayes,
Garfield and McKinley might be called citizens of the Greater Cleveland. At
the present time, however, in both the Senate and the House the city is not
without able and significant representation.
[Illustration GARFIELD MEMORIAL, CLEVELAND.]
Like a piece of music the chapter returns upon itself. It began with the
argument that Cleveland is so pleasant. From the breakwater which the
Government builds to keep Cleveland great and to make it greater, along the
avenues of residence or of trade, even through its smoky and sooty
atmosphere,--sign of prosperity,--out mile after mile to the city of the
dead where the well-beloved Garfield sleeps in nobly wrought sepulchre, in
all and through all, Cleveland is pleasant. Pleasant to live in, pleasant
to work in, I know, and pleasant to go to heaven from, I hope, is
Cleveland.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Letters of Asa Gray_, i., 72.
[2] This section, known as the Western Reserve, lying between parallels
forty-one and forty-two, and a line one hundred and twenty miles west of
the western line of Pennsylvania and parallel with it, was "reserved" to
Connecticut when she ceded to the United States certain territory which she
had received from the grant of Charles II. Of this territory Connecticut
granted one half million of acres to such of her soldiers as had suffered
from the British during the Revolution. The larger, if not the entire, part
of the balance passed into the control of a private-public corporation,
known as the Connecticut Land Company.
[Illustration]
CINCINNATI
ALWAYS A STRATEGIC POINT
BY MILTON E. AILES
On the day before Christmas, 1788, twenty-six adventurous men, in deerskin
hunting shirts and leggins, with tomahawk, powder-horn and scalping knife
at their belts, embarked at Limestone on the Ohio River in rude barges of
their own construction, and fighting their way through dangerous floes,
proceeded on a journey which was to prove memorable in the annals of
American colonization.
These pilgrims were well aware of the perils and tragedies awaiting them,
for their mission was to build them homes and found a city on the edge of
the rich Miami Valley, through which mixed tribes of raging Shawnees,
Senecas, Iroquois and Miamis roamed, determined to halt the threatening
advance of the hated paleface.
The Indian braves realized that a crucial moment in their history had come.
Their allies, the British, had gone down in defeat before the Thirteen
Fires. Henceforth the tribes must look to their own councils, and rely upon
their own strength, and they swore grimly that the Ohio should run with
blood, and that the advent of every western pioneer should bring an
additional scalp for the grewsome decoration of their lodges.
But these hardy voyagers, now celebrating a frugal Christmas as they
steered their course down the swollen and half-frozen Ohio, were not to be
turned aside by impending conflict with savage tribes. To meet grave danger
like brave men was for them no new experience; they had passed through
seven years of revolution; they had stood the trying tests of honorable
hardships, and were now making their way to found a community which was to
develop within a few generations into one of the greatest inland cities of
the world. Four days they fought their way through floating masses of
débris and ice, finally finding their haven in Sycamore Inlet, opposite
the mouth of the Licking River. To-day the traveller, smoking meditatively
in a Pullman, will cover the same distance before he has occasion to light
a fresh cigar.
In a grove of sycamores, osiers and water maples they struck their flint
and built their fires. There was no theatrical assertion of dominion, nor
is it on record that sacred rites were invoked to consecrate the struggle
for civilization that was to centre round this far outpost of the Republic,
and yet their first performance was one of the most dramatic incidents in
western history; for, knowing that savage armies lurked in the dim woods
that overhung the terraces above them, these twenty-six hardy Anglo-Saxons
dismantled the crafts that had carried them into the far wilderness, and
converted the planks and timbers of their barges into cabins. There was to
be no retreat. In the name of the new Democracy, they established the
primitive beginnings of a great city in the very centre of the famous
Indian path over which for unnumbered centuries naked aborigines from the
Great Lakes to the Kentucky hunting grounds had hurried to battle or the
chase.
The new settlement thus became a bold and significant challenge to the red
man, and in its fate was involved the future of the West and of the nation.
The earthquake of war, which the founding of Cincinnati invited, was not
long delayed, and when it came it startled Washington from his incomparable
composure, and shook the Republic to its foundations.
From the moment of its inception, Cincinnati was the most important point
on the Ohio River. Other settlements, it is true, at the start hoped to
outstrip Cincinnati in population. There was Marietta, founded two months
before, which had a more romantic birth. And there was North Bend, which
enjoyed the personal backing of John Cleves Symmes, the famous pioneer who
superintended the first development of the Miami Valley, and from whom
Denman, Patterson and Filson, the promoters of the settlement that
subsequently became Cincinnati, purchased the site of that city. These and
other settlements along the river were, for a time, pointed to with pride
by their founders as the coming commercial centres. Cincinnati, moreover,
began life with an impossible name. Filson, a fantastic pedagogue who had
drifted into Kentucky, combining a smattering of tongues with an unbridled
imagination, compounded the name "Losantiville," which means when
interpreted, "the village opposite the mouth of the Licking." Historians,
in malign humor, seem to rejoice in the sudden translation of this
picturesque polyglot and town-site boomer, remarking with a certain gleeful
unanimity of phrase that "shortly after naming the settlement he was
scalped by the Indians."
[Illustration TYLER-DAVIDSON FOUNTAIN.]
The offer of free lots to original settlers did not give Cincinnati
pre-eminence, for similar lures were held out by other aspiring communities
along the Ohio; nor will it be seriously contended that the location there
of Fort Washington, although this made the spot the headquarters of the
American army in the Northwest, gave Cincinnati a superior start, for the
sense of security expected because of the presence of the United States
garrison was not abiding. General Harmar marched to defeat in 1790 from
this pioneer fort and arsenal, and the victorious savages pursued him until
their cries of exultation terrified the little hamlet clustered about the
military station.
Then came St. Clair, bold and assertive. Heroes of the Revolution had
founded the town. The fort had been named in honor of the great General and
President, and as both town and fort represented the extension into the
West of that democratic strength of arms which had humbled the most
powerful kingdom of Europe, this new settlement from which civilization was
to radiate into the western valleys should be dignified with the name of
the order that held together in fraternal bond the grizzled survivors of
the great war. And so Losantiville, the dream of a bizarre scholar, became
Cincinnati.
In the name of that order and city, St. Clair went to war. But sickness
laid him low, and he was carried to the field of battle wrapped in
flannels. Managing the forces against him was Thayendanegea, the celebrated
Mohawk, or Joseph Brandt, as the English called him, as astute as Tecumseh
and as fearless. Thayendanegea had been secretary to Sir Guy Johnson. He
had learned the tactics of civilized armies, and with masterful native
cunning he planned to annihilate the forces of St. Clair. Nearly fifteen
hundred officers and men marched away from Cincinnati to crush the
semi-savage captain who had directed the massacres of Minisink and Wyoming,
and back to Cincinnati in rout and dishonor, their guns and blankets
abandoned, rushed in unspeakable terror a pitiful five hundred. Before
sundown on the day of that battle, November 4, 1791, nearly a thousand
scalps of white men dangled from the wigwams of the armies of
Thayendanegea.
Other communities along the Ohio looked with envy upon the federal ramparts
at Cincinnati, but the protection afforded by the garrison was at first
more fanciful than real. The pioneer clergymen of the town ventured to
Sabbath services cautiously, rifle in hand, peering down the dim aisles
hewn through dense woods of linden and birch that led to a clearing, in the
midst of which some charred stump served as a pulpit; or, as congregations
grew, a log-built chapel housed the earnest worshippers. And by the law of
Cincinnati and the territory every communicant was required to go to the
altar with loaded firearms, that savages, taking advantage of the hour of
prayer to attack the town, might be repulsed. Even when pews were built to
give regularity to worship, the brethren were commanded to sit at the outer
end, with their rifles in readiness.
If Fort Washington had not been built or had been located elsewhere,
Cincinnati would have still become the metropolis of the Ohio. Here water
highways crossed. And as it marked the path over which the red men had
passed for ages, so now it became the intersecting point of civilized
adventure. Out of the shadows of the Licking in their pirogues Daniel Boone
and George Rogers Clark had hurried across the Ohio to watch hostile
campfires from the Cincinnati hills, and thence had descended upon the
barbarians to avenge crimes committed in Kentucky. The long beaches at the
Cincinnati site afforded safe landing, while the settlement, secure upon
the higher ground and the succession of terraces beyond, could not be
engulfed by the periodical river floods. North and south the rivers that
mingled their waters here furnished natural pathways to vast and fertile
valleys.
Here, too, a vanished race once had had a city or perhaps a capital, for
Cincinnati is built upon extensive prehistoric ruins of the Mound
Builders. It was a walled city with great gates, pyramids and sacrificial
altars, and over these surviving memorials of a people whose origin and
destiny are alike a mystery grew, when Cincinnati was founded, oak, beech,
sycamore and cedar, whose concentric rings revealed that hundreds of years
had elapsed since the disappearance of the race which had reared these
shrines and tombs and city walls. Among the prehistoric pottery, the
polished pipes of catlinite and stone axes such as a race of troglodytes
might have swung to brain abhorrent monsters of forgotten periods, they
will show you in the artistic Cincinnati Museum in Eden Park, the famed
Cincinnati Tablet exhumed from a tumulus near Fifth and Mound streets in
that city. Some antiquarians believe the sculptured stone to be an
astronomical calendar or a table of measurement and calculation. Some have
imagined it to be a sacred relic from the tomb of kings. Nearby, in the
same museum, you see records lucidly deciphered from the second Theban
dynasty, and carved inscriptions, intelligently translated, from the
balustrade of the temple of Athene, but scholarship is dumb and imagination
is the only interpreter of these strange mementos of a race which found in
the site of Cincinnati a natural spot for the building of a large and
fortified city.
Although the star of empire may have been destined at all hazards to pause
over Cincinnati until the tenth census of the United States should show
that the center of the nation's population had moved westward to that city,
there was grave alarm in the settlement when the soldiers of St. Clair
arrived in confusion and defeat.
[Illustration ENTRANCE TO SPRING GROVE CEMETERY.]
Generations have thrilled over the story of the officer on horseback, who,
bearing important news, hurried to the President, tossed his bridle reins
to an orderly and leaped up the steps of Washington's reception room only
to find that the Chief Executive was dining with distinguished visitors and
could not be disturbed. The officer was so importunate and so impressive
that the secretary was impelled to grant him audience. The grave President
listened without visible emotion to the whispered message from Cincinnati,
the officer departed, and Washington returned to the banquet table. Not one
of his guests could guess that beneath the calm exterior the far-seeing
statesman was experiencing one of the most tragic moments of his career. It
was not merely that a trusted general had minimized warning and had met
defeat, for Washington had devoted a long life to warfare against both
savage and civilized foes, and he was not to be easily moved by the
uncertain fortune of battles. But he knew that the defeat which the
soldiers of Cincinnati had encountered now threatened the destiny of the
country. The East and West were not yet riveted by steel rails into
coherent union. Beyond the Alleghanies there were projects of a
protectorate under France or Spain, or both, and bolder dreams of a
Kentucky republic. With few connecting links with the East, what could hold
the western empire, since the federal government had displayed inability to
protect the pioneers? Washington's guests departed unaware that their
illustrious host who had entertained them with consummate decorum had
during those hours felt the nation slipping beneath his feet. But when they
had gone the pent spirit of the great leader, in one of the few instances
of his lifetime, found expression in tumultuous grief and rage. He voiced
in advance the storm of public protest, indignation and fear that broke out
when the dismal tidings from Cincinnati became known. And when Congress
learned that Washington favored the creation of an army of five thousand to
avenge the defeat of Harmar and St. Clair, there was little in the
resourceful vocabulary of political abuse spared the President.
Anti-expansionists called him an imperialist bent on converting the
Republic into an empire. Why send an army to inevitable slaughter beyond
mountain frontiers in a vain struggle for the wilderness of the Indians
when the colonies then possessed more domain than the citizens of the
Republic would ever be able to use?
Fortunately the anti-expansionists, while mordant and powerful, could not
prevail, and the war measures became law. Anthony Wayne, whose daring
during the Revolution had won for him the admiring sobriquet of "Mad," then
took command and hastened to Cincinnati but none too soon. The Six Nations
with Little Turtle as their spokesman had followed up their victories by
demands that Cincinnati, the capital of the Northwest, should be abandoned
and that the Ohio should mark the perpetual boundary between the white man
and the red. British arms bristled behind this native ultimatum, and at the
rapids of the Maumee, as if to stay Wayne's advance, British forces built a
fort and garrisoned it with three companies. The fears of Washington seemed
about to be realized.
[Illustration RACE STREET, CINCINNATI.]
But at the battle of Fallen Timbers "Mad Anthony" scattered the allied
tribes like forest leaves. Nearly half a hundred mighty chiefs fell in that
historic engagement, and in their defeat the Indians christened their
conquerer "Big Thunder" and for years trembled when they heard his name.
Cincinnati and Ohio were saved to the Republic.
Wayne in his campaign and in his no less notable treaties was brilliantly
seconded by a young man who, unannounced and unwelcomed, landed at
Cincinnati on the day the broken columns of St. Clair fell back upon the
fort. The generals there looked upon his smooth cheeks and his boyish frame
with soldierly disdain, one remarking that he would as readily send his
sister to the front as entrust this beardless neophyte with the
responsibilities of border warfare. This youth, in whose veins flowed the
blood of one of Cromwell's generals, was to shame his flippant critics, for
he was to win a lieutenancy at the battle of Fallen Timbers, and rising
steadily in the service of his country was to become a western Napoleon,
avenging the disasters of the River Basin and Detroit, defeating the
powerful Tecumseh at Tippecanoe, laying firm and broad the foundations of
northwestern statehood, serving in the Senate of the United States, and
finally going in triumph to the White House. Cincinnati has fostered many
famous sons, but none greater than William Henry Harrison.
To many new communities the first settlers have gone with the hope of
returning with fortunes to their former homes. Cincinnati was founded and
developed by men and women who came to stay. Harrison identified himself
with the West at the start by marrying the daughter of John Cleves Symmes,
the Miami pioneer, and to the Harrison homestead near Cincinnati, which for
a quarter of a century had been an American mecca, the body of the famous
General was borne for burial.
From the start, self-reliance has been a prevailing characteristic of
Cincinnati. Its isolation in the days of the canoe, the barge and the
pack-horse, developed its originality. A copy of the _Centinel of the
Northwest Territory_, published in 1794, graphically illustrates its
remoteness at that period, for news from Marietta had been eight days in
arriving, Lexington dispatches were twenty-one days old, fifty-six days had
been consumed in getting the latest information from New York, and European
news antedated the day of issue four months and a half. It was natural
among such conditions that the city should look to itself as the centre of
interest, and hence at an early day the journals of Cincinnati, instead of
canvassing distant localities for belated sensations, were encouraging
local writers to entertain the public. It was the press of Cincinnati that
first gave the poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary to the world, and they repaid
it by conferring immortality in the world of letters upon the blue Miami,
where they spent the simple years of their girlhood. And thither, because
of the fame their singing had won them, traveled Horace Greeley and other
celebrities of the day to do these gifted sisters homage. In Cincinnati was
born Gen. Wm. H. Lytle, author of _Antony and Cleopatra_, and it was the
journalism of that city that gave inspiration to his pen. Here, too, was
directed the early genius of Wm. D. Howells, Rutherford B. Hayes, Salmon P.
Chase, and other men who have dignified literature or public life.
[Illustration CITY HALL, CINCINNATI.]
Savage yells had not ceased to echo in its surrounding woods before music
began to charm in Cincinnati. Even before Wayne came to silence the
exultant war-cries of the tribes, Thomas Kennedy, in whose honor a street
in Covington is named, used to entertain the frontier society with his
fiddle, and a Mr. McLean, a butcher, took time to train the voices of the
primitive colony. The Rev. Daniel Doty, who visited Cincinnati at an early
day, was shocked at the singing and fiddling and dancing in the log cabins,
as if the people "feared not God nor regarded Indians." Music, since
directed in large measure by the German element in the city, has by its
Chorus, its musical groves, its Saengerbund, Haydn Society, and other
clubs, imparted distinction to Cincinnati and made it the Vienna of the
American continent.