were no classes. They were so helpless without one another that people
were kindlier and friendlier as well as freer then than now, and they
made the most of the corn huskings and quilting bees that brought old
and young together in harmless frolics. The greatest frolic of all was
a wedding; the guests gathered from twenty miles around, and the frolic
did not end with the dancing at night. Next day came the _infair_ at the
house of the bridegroom, and all set off together. When they were within
a mile or two, they raced for the bottle which was always waiting for
them at the house, and the guest whose horse was fleetest brought it
back, and made all drink from it, beginning with the bride and groom.
Religion soon tempered the ruder pleasures of the backwoods, but the
dancing ceased before the drinking. Camp meetings were frolics of a
soberer sort, where whole neighborhoods gathered and dwelt in tents for
days in the beautiful autumn weather, and spent the nights in prayer and
song. Little log churches were built at the crossroads, and these served
the purpose of schoolhouses on week days. But there was more religion
than learning in the backwoods, and the preacher came before the
teacher.
He was often a very rude, unlearned man himself, and the teacher was
sometimes a rude man, harsh and severe, when he was learned. Often he
was a Scotch-Irishman, whose race gave schoolmasters to the West before
New England began to send her lettered legions to the frontier.
Such a teacher was Francis Glass, who was born in Dublin in 1790, and
came to Ohio in 1817, to teach the children of the backwoods. One of
these afterwards remembered a log-cabin schoolhouse where Glass taught,
in the twilight let through the windows of oiled paper. The seats were
of hewn blocks, so heavy that the boys could not upset them; in the
midst was a great stove; and against the wall stood the teacher’s desk,
of un-planed plank. But as Glass used to say to his pupils, “The temple
of the Delphian god was originally a laurel hut, and the muses deign to
dwell accordingly in very rustic abodes.” His labors in the school were
not suffered to keep him from higher aims: he wrote a life of Washington
in Latin, which was used for a time as a text-book in the Ohio schools.
In the early days all books were costly, and they were even fewer than
they were costly; but those who longed for them got them somehow, and
many a boy who studied them by the cabin fire became afterwards a great
statesman, a great lawyer, or a great preacher. In fact, almost every
distinguished Ohioan of the past generations seems to have begun life in
a log cabin, and to have found his way out of the dark of ignorance by
the light of its great hearth fire. Their stories are such as kindle the
fancy and touch the heart; but now they are tales that are told.
Among the stories of life in the backwoods, none are more affecting than
those of lost children. In the forests which hemmed in the homes and
fields of the settlers, the little ones often strayed away, or in their
bewilderment failed to find a path back to the cabin they had left among
the stumps of the clearing, or the leafless trunks of the deadening.
In 1804, two children, Lydia and Matilda Osborn, eleven and seven years
old, went to fetch the cows from their pasture a mile from their home in
Williamsburg, Clermont County. Lydia, the elder of the sisters, left
the younger in a certain spot while she tried to head off the wandering
cows. It is supposed that she failed, and came back to get Matilda. Then
it is supposed that, after searching for her, Lydia gave up in despair
and started homeward, but found that she no longer knew the way. In
the meantime the cows had left their pasture, and the younger girl had
followed the sound of their bells and got safely back to the village.
Night came, but no Lydia, and now the neighborhood turned out and helped
the hopeless father to search for the lost child. They carried torches,
and rang bells, and blew horns, and fired guns, so that she might see
and hear and come to them, and before them all, day and night, ran the
father calling, “Lydia, Lydia.” Five hundred men, a thousand men at
last, joined in the quest, and on the fifteenth morning, they found
in the heart of the woods a tiny hut, such as a child might build, of
sticks and moss, with a bed of leaves inside; a path which led from it
to a blackberry patch near by was beaten hard by the little feet of the
wanderer. The rough backwoodsmen broke into tears when the father came
up and at sight of the poor shelter called out, “Oh, Lydia, Lydia, my
dear child, are you yet alive?”
[Illustration: Lost in the woods 172]
They never found her. A mile or two from the hut they found her bonnet,
and a few miles further on an Indian camp. They could only guess that
the Indians had carried her away, and go back to their homes without
her. The father never gave up, but as long as he lived he searched for
her among the Indians. It was thought afterwards that the very means,
the lights and the noises, used to attract the child, might have
frightened her from her rescuers; for a strange craze would come upon
lost people after a time, and they would hide from those who were
looking for them. Others became hopelessly bewildered, and it is told of
a pioneer, Samuel Davy, who was lost near Galion, that he wandered about
till he reached a log cabin in a clearing. There he asked of the woman
at the door if she knew where Samuel Davy lived. She laughed and bade
him come in and see. Then he knew that it was his own wife speaking to
him from his own threshold.
Whenever a lost child could not be found, the Indians were naturally
suspected of stealing it; and this was probably the fate of a little one
whom her mother lifted over the fence into the dooryard of her cabin,
near Galion, and then went back to her work of making sugar in the
woods. When she came home at nightfall, the child was not there, and
no search afterwards availed to find her, though the whole neighborhood
searched the woods for days and nights. It was known only that a party
of Indians had lately camped near, and that they might have taken the
child and brought it up as their own; but the mother never heard of her
again.
Galion is rather famous for lost people, but at least one of them was
found again. This was a little girl of the name of Bashford, who was
sent to bring home the cows. In trying to return she became confused,
and she wisely decided to keep with the cattle. When they lay down for
the night, she sheltered herself against the warm back of a motherly
old cow, and then followed them about in the morning till the neighbors
found her.
She was none the worse for the night’s adventure except for her
fright at the howling of the wolves, and from the pain of her slightly
frost-bitten feet. But the fate of a little boy who wandered from home
in Williams County was of a singular pathos. He was found dead after a
three-days search, when the poor little body, which was half clad, was
still warm. It was supposed that he had undressed each night when he lay
down to sleep, as he was used to do at home, and that the third night he
had been so chilled by the October cold that he could not put on all
his clothes again, and so strayed feebly about till he lay down and died
just before rescue came.
Encounters with wolves and bears were not so common as these animals
were, by any means; but now and then the settlers came in conflict with
them. In Crawford County so lately as 1826, a young man named Enoch
Baker, in coming home from rather a late call on a young lady, fought
a running fight with wolves, which left him only when he reached the
clearing where his father’s cabin stood; then they fell back into the
woods. Daniel Cloe, a boy of the same neighborhood, was attacked by a
pack of eleven wolves one morning before daybreak, but was saved by his
bulldog, which seized the foremost wolf by the throat, and gave the boy
time to climb a tree.
A brother of this boy found his dogs one morning in ferocious clamor
about some animal which they seemed afraid to grapple with. He came up
and found that it was a bear. He had no gun, but he caught up a club,
and when he had contrived to catch the bear by one of his hind legs,
and to throw him over, he beat him about the head with his bludgeon and
killed him.
This was pretty well for a boy of sixteen, but the reader must not award
the palm to him without first knowing the adventure of John Gillett of
Williams County, who clambered down a hollow tree to get some bear cubs.
While he was securing them, the opening overhead was darkened by the
body of the mother bear. There was only one thing to do, and Gillett
drove his knife into the haunch of the bear, which scrambled out in
surprise and terror, and pulled him and the cubs out with her. She did
not stay to look after her family, and Gillett took the cubs to the
next town, and got five dollars apiece for them. As he told this story
himself, I suppose it must have been true.
There are some stories of wolves and bears in Ashtabula County which are
by no means bad. Not the worst of these is told of Elijah Thompson, who
was hunting in the woods near Geneva, when a pack of seven wolves fell
upon his dog. He clubbed his rifle and beat them off; then when the last
had slunk away, he gathered up his wounded dog under his arm, and walked
away with the barrel, which was all that was left of his rifle, on his
shoulder.
Bears were very common, and very fond of pork. One night two ladies who
were alone in their cabin, were alarmed by wild appeals from the pigpen,
and found it invaded by a bear. They tried to frighten the intruder away
with firebrands, but failed. Then they loaded the family rifle, which
they had heard the men folks say took two fingers of powder. They
therefore poured in the powder to the depth of six inches, and drove
home the bullet. One held a light while the other pulled the trigger.
Both were knocked down by the recoil of the gun, which flew into the
bushes. What became of the bear was never known; but it was probably
blown to atoms.
Other pioneer women were effective with firearms, and Mrs. Sarah Thorp
of Ashtabula County was one of these. The family fell short of food
in their first year in the backwoods, and in June, 1799, the husband
started to Pennsylvania, twenty miles away, to get supplies. Before he
could return, his wife and little girls had begun to live upon roots and
the few grains of wheat which she found in the straw of her bed. When
these were all gone, and she was in despair, a wild turkey one day
alighted near the cabin. She found that there was barely powder enough
left in the house for the lightest charge; but she loaded her husband’s
rifle and crept on her hands and knees from bush to bush and log to log,
till she was close upon the bird, wallowing in the loose plowed earth.
Then she fired and killed it, and her children were saved.
Starvation was one of the horrors which often threatened the newcomers
in the wilderness, as it had often beset its improvident red children.
In the first year of the settlement at Conneaut, James Kingsbury was
forced to leave his family and go some distance into New York state.
He fell sick, and was unable to return before winter set in. Then he
hurried homeward as fast as he could with a sack of flour on horseback.
His horse became disabled, and then he carried the flour on his
shoulders. He reached home one day at nightfall, and found his older
children starving; his wife, wasted with famine, lay on the floor, and
near her the little one born in his absence, already dead for want of
the nourishment which the poor mother could not give it.
XVII. THE FIRST GREAT SETTLEMENTS.
General Rufus Putnam, a brave officer of the Revolutionary war, was the
first to call the attention of the Eastern States to the rich territory
opened to settlement west of the Ohio by the peace with Great Britain,
and he was one of the earliest band of pioneers which landed on the
shores of the Muskingum. In 1787 Rev. Manasseh Cutler of Ipswich,
Massachusetts, published a description of the Ohio country, which left
little to the liveliest imagination. If anything was naturally lacking
for the wants of man in a land abounding in wild fruits, “herds of deer,
elk, buffalo, and bear,” and flocks of “turkeys, geese, ducks, swans,
teal, pheasants, partridges, etc.,... in greater plenty than the tame
poultry are in any part of the old settlements of America,” and in
rivers “stored with fish, especially catfish, the largest, and of a
delicious flavor,” which “weighs from thirty to eighty pounds,” it could
be easily supplied by art. “The advantages of every climate,” Dr.
Cutler told his readers, “are here blended together,” and the rich soil,
everywhere underlain with valuable minerals, and covered with timber
waiting to be built into ships and floated down the rivers to the
sea, would produce not only “wheat, rye, Indian corn, buckwheat, oats,
barley, flax, hemp, tobacco,” but even “indigo, silk, wine, and cotton.”
It is no wonder that the Ohio Company found the New Englanders eager
to come out and possess this goodly heritage, and that the first band
should have started from Dr. Cutler’s own village. At dawn, on the
30th of December, 1787, they paraded before his church and parsonage,
twenty-two men with their families. After listening to a short speech
from him, they fired a salute, and set off, as the lettering on their
leading wagon made known, “For the Ohio Country.” It was eight weeks
before they reached the headwaters of the Beautiful River, and began to
build boats to float down its current to the mouth of the Muskingum.
In the meantime, on the 1st of January, 1788, another company left
Hartford, Connecticut, and in four weeks joined the first. They could
not embark on their voyage together until April 2d, but in five days
they arrived at Fort Harmar, beside the Muskingum, and were at their
journey’s end. They did not find the shores waving with indigo, silk,
and cotton, but they saw that the soil could produce almost any
crop, and the weather was so mild and lovely that they must have been
confirmed in their belief of all that Dr. Cutler had told them of the
climate. Captain Pipe, the Delaware chief who had brought Crawford to
his death of cruel torment a few years before, was encamped for trade
near the military post, and with seventy other Indians he welcomed the
newcomers to the Muskingum, where they wisely built a stockade as soon
as they could for defense against their red friends. They settled down
at once to hew their fields out of the forest, and the very next year
they had a school for their children. Bathsheba Rouse taught this first
Ohio school, and Ohio women may well be proud that she taught it a whole
year before a man taught the next Ohio school. The settlers called their
town Adelphia, but soon changed its name to Marietta, which they made up
from the name of the French queen Marie Antoinette, though Marietta was
a common enough name in Italian before their invention of it.
They built mills on the streams, and in the streams, where the current
turned their wheels, and after a first summer of rejoicing they quieted
down to the serious business of clearing farms, having ague, and saving
their scalps from the hospitable Delawares and their allies. The very
year after their arrival the wonderful climate behaved so ungratefully
that the corn crop was cut off by an early frost; and something like a
famine followed; but still the year of the settlement was one of high
hopes and sober jollity. The pioneers celebrated the Fourth of July,
1788, with a grand banquet of “venison barbecued, buffalo steaks, bear
meat, wild fowl, and a little _pork_, as the choicest luxury of all;”
and at least “one fish, a great pike, weighing one hundred pounds, and
over six feet long,” which could easily be “the largest ever taken by
white men in the waters of the Muskingum.” Several of the Indians, who
were always ready for eating and drinking, took part in the celebration,
and the settlers saw with pleasure that they did not like the sound of
the cannon. They all “kept it up till after twelve o’clock at night, and
then went home and slept till daylight.”
The Marietta people knew how to enjoy themselves, but they had not
come to Ohio for pastime, and they were soon all hard at work improving
themselves as well as their lands. They not only had the first school
in Ohio, but the first Sunday school. They had a public library in 1796,
and preaching in the blockhouse from the beginning. It was ordered
that every one should keep the Sabbath by going to church, and all men
between eighteen and forty should do four days of military duty every
year, as well as “entertain emigrants, visit the sick, clothe the
naked, feed the hungry, attend funerals, cabin raisings, log rollings,
huskings; have their latchstrings always out.” Perhaps the reader has
heard before this of having the latchstring out, but has not known just
what the phrase meant. The log cabin door in those days was fastened
with a wooden latch on the inside, which could be lifted on the outside
by a leathern string passed through a small hole in the door above it.
When the string was pulled in, the door was locked; but the free-hearted
man always left his latchstring out, so that every comer could enter and
share his fireside with him.
The good people of Marietta had soon occasion for all the kindness
enjoined by their laws in befriending a hapless colony of Frenchmen,
whom certain speculators known as the Scioto Company had lured from
their homes in the Old World, and then abandoned to their fate in the
heart of the Western wilderness, where they had been promised that they
were to find “a climate wholesome and delightful, frost even in winter
almost entirely unknown, a river called, by way of eminence, the
_beautiful_ and abounding in excellent fish of a vast size; noble
forests consisting of trees that spontaneously produce sugar, and a
plant that yields ready-made candles; venison in plenty, the pursuit of
which is uninterrupted by wolves, foxes, lions, or tigers; no taxes to
pay, no military services to be performed.”
Some of the adventurers who came to Ohio on these flattering terms were
destitute people who agreed to work three years for the company and were
then, each to receive from it in reward for their labors fifty acres of
land, a house, and a cow. But others were people of means, who joyfully
sold their property in the French cities and came out to found new homes
in the Western woods, with money in their hands, but with no knowledge
of woodcraft, or farming, and able neither to hunt, chop, plow, sow, or
reap for themselves. They were often artisans, masters of trades
utterly useless in that wild country, for what were carvers and gilders,
cloak-makers, wigmakers and hairdressers to do on the banks of the Ohio
in 1790? Some ten or twelve peasants came with the rest, but they were
helpless too in the strange conditions, and if it had not been for the
settlers at Marietta, they would all have fared miserably indeed.
The Scioto Company had so far provided for them as to agree with
the Ohio Company for the erection of a little town or village where
Gallipolis now stands; and when the first boats arrived with the
strangely assorted company, they found a space cut out of the forest,
and in the clearing eighty log cabins standing upon four streets
fronting the river, with a square inclosed by a high stockade and
fortified with blockhouses, where they might take shelter from the
Indians. The cabins forming this square were of a better sort than those
on the streets, and there was one meant to serve for a council chamber,
where the newcomers promptly began to give balls. They arrived late
in October, and there was nothing for them to do but to wait for the
spring, even if they had known how to farm, and in the meanwhile they
had as good a time as they could. They did not yet know that the Scioto
Company, which failed to pay the Marietta people for building their
village, had no power to give them titles to their land, and they
hopefully spent their money in hiring American hunters to supply them
with game. They seem to have been rather a light-hearted crew, in
spite of their misfortunes and sufferings, and they not only amused
themselves, but they amused their neighbors by their gay unfitness for
the backwoods. If they went to fell a tree, half a dozen of them set
to work on it with their axes at once, and when they had chopped it all
round, they pulled it down with a rope, to the great danger of their
lives and limbs. When they began to make gardens in the spring they
followed the rules laid down in some books on gardening which they
had brought with them from France, and they planted the seeds of such
vegetables as they were used to at home. In a climate where “frost even
in winter was almost unknown,” the Ohio River froze solidly over the
year after they came, and the hunters brought in little or none of the
promised venison, though certainly not molested in the chase “by tigers,
lions, or foxes.” The colonists were in danger of starving, and many of
them were already sick of the fevers bred by the past summer’s sun on
the swamp lands about them. It was one of their few advantages that
the Indians did not trouble them much, but after killing one of them
in mistake for an American, contented themselves with stealing the
Frenchmen’s cattle.
When the colonists found that the Scioto Company could not give them
titles to the farms they had bought with their money or their toil, they
began to stray away from the settlement. Some went down the rivers to
New Orleans, others wandered off elsewhere, perhaps to St. Louis, or to
the French towns in Indiana and Illinois; and when Congress at last came
to their relief with a grant of twenty-four thousand acres, there were
left at Gallipolis only ninety-two persons, out of the original five
hundred colonists, to profit by the nation’s generosity. In 1807 few or
none of them remained on the spot where they had fondly hoped to make
peaceful and happy homes for themselves and their children. It was a sad
ending to a romantic story, the most romantic of all the Ohio stories
that I know, but we must not blame those who deceived the colonists (not
quite wittingly, it seems) for all their woes and disasters. These were
partly owing to themselves. The New Englanders who settled at Marietta
did not find eighty comfortable cabins waiting for them, and they did
not hire hunters to provide their food, or begin by giving balls. The
able and educated men among the French colonists seem to have cowered
under their disasters like the rest; and some were incurable dreamers.
One of the best of them used afterwards to tell how he was descending
the Ohio with two philosophers who believed so firmly in the natural
innocence and goodness of men, that they invited some Indians aboard
their boat and were at once tomahawked. Their skeptical companion shot
two of the savages and then jumped into the river, where he swam for his
life, diving at the flash of their guns, till he got safe to the farther
shore.