THE INDIAN SIDE
The campaign of General John Forbes in 1758, which ended French rule on
the Ohio, gave the Ohio Valley to the English. From this time on, the
entire sweep of territory between the Atlantic Ocean and 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 Pittsburg were claimed by the Indian
nations inhabiting them, and the Crown attempted, in the Proclamation of
1763, to preserve these lands for the Indians by prohibiting the
migrations of the colonists. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, and the
expansion of Virginia into the vast tract south of the Ohio have been
recounted.[35] It is sufficient to recall here that this treaty gave to
Virginia the entire southern bank of the Ohio and all the territory
southward to the banks of the Tennessee. The treaty was made with the
Iroquois, the conquerors of half a continent, not with the Delawares and
Shawanese and Southern Nations, who 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 decisive battle which assured the
Old Southwest to the Americans, should have been fought practically over
the burial place of Céloron's fifth leaden plate which claimed the land
for France. By the time of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the
entire southern shore of the Ohio had been abandoned by Indians, though
for many years they continually invaded the pleasant country which was
fast filling with a scattered white population.
[Illustration: CAPTAIN GORDON'S MAP OF THE OHIO RIVER (1766)
_From original in Library of Congress_]
The story of the conquest and occupation of the northern side of the
Ohio River is as bitter and bloody a tale as that of the southern side.
The artificial division of the Middle West into states has resulted in
some very artificial historical distinctions; the Ohio River has perhaps
never been considered a mighty boundary line 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 and of the United States for seventeen years:
from 1768 until 1785. When, in 1783, the United States by the Treaty of
Paris came into possession of the territory between the Alleghenies and
the Mississippi, the "men who wore hats" had not purchased an acre of
land north and west of the Ohio River from its bareheaded inhabitants.
In 1785 at the Treaty of Fort McIntosh the United States secured from
its actual possessors (the Iroquois claims having been satisfied at a
second treaty at Fort Stanwix, October 1784) the first grant of land
north of the Ohio. The western boundary line of the 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 point. The lands south, east, and west of this
line were given to the United States so far as the Indians "formerly
claimed the same." This was the first of a long series of treaties each
of which gave the northwest side of the Ohio River to the United States.
Thus in 1785 the Ohio Valley legally became a part of the territory of
the United States.
By an ordinance immediately passed by Congress, this tract of land north
of the Ohio River was ordered to be surveyed, the lots to be sold by the
Government 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 from the Pennsylvania boundary. These were to be
sold by townships by commissioners of the loan office of the several
states after proper advertisement.
Thus, at the stroke of a pen, the Ohio River became a division line
between empires differing wholly from each other. The "Virginia Side"
was peopled by southerners according to the Virginia system, which
allowed a man to take and mark for himself unappropriated lands. Thus
the entire southern shore of the Ohio had been occupied by Virginians,
Pennsylvanians, and North Carolinians. By act of Congress the New
England system 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 obtained, as though prophesying that the dominant race was to be
of New England stock. It was a momentous turning point in the history
of the Central West when Congress made the New England system operative
on the "Indian Side" of the Ohio, banishing at once and forever from
that great area the strife and suffering caused by the thousand
conflicts of overlapping "tomahawk claims" and incorrect and confusing
"surveys."
But these acts of Congress were far more easily passed than enforced. In
the first place, even before the land north of the Ohio was purchased by
the United States, white settlers began crossing the Ohio and settling
on the "Indian Side." By the year 1780 the Indian Side of the river had
been quite wrested from the savages, at least from Pittsburg down to the
Scioto. Mclntosh had built Fort Laurens on the Tuscarawas and, with the
help of others, the Delawares had been driven from the Muskingum Valley.
Clark had captured Illinois and it was now a part of Virginia. Many
invasions from Kentucky 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 were possible to
accomplish an utterly impossible thing. The lands on the northern side
of the Ohio River were to be preserved to the Indians until purchased
from them. It was even decreed that retaliatory raids of the whites
should not cross the Ohio. As early as 1779 "trespassers" of a law as
inherently impossible as the Proclamation of 1763, made settlements on
the Indian Side of the Ohio "from the river Muskingum to Fort Mclntosh,
and thirty miles up some of the branches of the Ohio river."[36] Colonel
Brodhead at Fort Pitt immediately despatched Captain Clark to drive off
the intruders.
The commissioners at the Fort Mclntosh treaty (1785) were not blind to
such possibilities, and took occasion to forward the following
instructions to Colonel Harmar at Fort Pitt, January 24, 1785:
"Surveying or settling 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 attempting to settle on the lands of the United States."[37]
The task laid upon Colonel Harmar was a most unpopular and impossible
one. By this time the country south of the Ohio was teeming with a great
restless population.
There were, by 1785, a hundred thousand people in what we know as West
Virginia and Kentucky. The first comers had fallen upon the very best
lands and appropriated them. There is no doubt that all the fertile
"bottoms" along the southern shore of the Ohio 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-sighted, enterprising men, like Patrick Henry, had
secured other tracts of land. It must be remembered, too, that this was
a day of no roads; lands lying away from the immediate river valleys
could be reached and improved only with the greatest difficulty.
It is therefore no wonder that the southern shore of the Ohio was
crowded at this time with a swarm of pioneers whose uncouth faces and
unkempt appearance suggested plainly the labor they had endured to reach
and hold the river--their goal. They looked across to the fertile
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 driven the
Delawares away to the Lakes, or upon the Scioto and sent the Shawanese
scurrying up the Sandusky or Maumee. Yet there on the trees on the other
side were nailed proclamations from the commanding officer at Fort Pitt
warning them against settling on those lands.
Little wonder they defied the proclamation. In less than two months
after Colonel Harmar had received the instructions to drive off all
settlers from these lands of the United States, he sent a force under
Ensign Armstrong down the river from Pittsburg. His report was most
alarming;[38] he affirmed that there were three hundred families at the
falls of the Hocking and an equal number on the Muskingum; on the Miami
and Scioto Rivers the 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 members to a convention for the
framing of a constitution for the government of a new state; elections
were to be held at the mouths of the Miami, Scioto, and Muskingum Rivers
and one at the house of Jonas Menzons in the present Belmont County,
Ohio. The advertisement of these elections was signed by John Emerson
and its final paragraph denied the right of Colonel Harmar to dispossess
the settlers on the Indian Side, in the following terms:
"I do certify that all mankind, agreeable to every constitution formed
in America, have an undoubted right to pass into every vacant country,
and there to form their constitution, and that from the confederation of
the whole United States, Congress is not empowered to forbid them,
neither is Congress empowered from that confederation to make any sale
of uninhabited lands to pay the public debts, which is to be by a tax
levied and lifted [collected] by authority of the Legislature of each
State."[40]
On January 31, 1786, a treaty was concluded at the mouth of the Great
Miami with the Shawanese. The United States received from that dangerous
nation a title to the lower Ohio Valley. But the general government was
by this time at its wits' end to keep the acquired territory from the
restless inhabitants of its own impoverished colonies. Colonel Harmar
wrote the Secretary of War now that he had, by force of arms, driven off
all intruders for a distance of seventy miles below Pittsburg, but that
the number beyond "was 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, and where he could also
protect the surveyors of the seven ranges from any insults of the
Indians.[41] Under this order Fort Harmar was erected at the mouth of
the Muskingum River (Marietta, Ohio) in 1785. Fort Harmar and Fort
Finney, erected at the mouth of the Miami, nominally accomplished the
purposes for which they were erected; the immigration movement across
the Ohio was stopped until preparations had been made for it. They were
the first legal homes of Americans north of the Ohio River after the
Revolutionary War.
In the meantime propositions for the government of this great region
north of the Ohio River were being debated in Congress; and finally it
was declared to be the "Territory Northwest of the River Ohio" by the
Ordinance of 1787. This famous act had been pending three years in
Congress, but was passed within twelve days of the arrival in New York
of Dr. Manasseh Cutler, hero-preacher 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
several states the magnificent territory now occupied by the states of
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The act itself was
conceived in a petition signed by these Revolutionary soldiers composing
the Ohio Company of Associates, and forwarded by General Putnam to
General Washington, praying that the Government redeem its worthless
scrip by grants of western land.
This a grateful government was willing to do. The difficulty was that it
would be hazardous to organize a territory, to be suckled and protected
at great expense, unless a considerable fraction of the area thus
organized should be populated and developed by worthy citizens. The Ohio
Company of Associates offered to take a million 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 Ohio" could not be erected unless the
Ohio Company took a considerable part of the lands. The Ohio Company, on
the other hand, could not take land without the assurance that it was to
be an integral part of the United States. The Ohio Company would make
the Ordinance possible; the Ordinance made the Ohio Company's purchase
possible.
In order to realize the hopes of his clients, and, at the same time,
satisfy the demands of the delegates at Congress, Dr. Cutler added to
the grant of the Ohio Company an additional grant of three and a half
million acres, taken by a Scioto Company on behalf of Colonel Duer and
others. Thus by a stupendous 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 famed Ordinance was passed,
corrected almost to the letter of his amendments, and Congress entered
into the greatest private contract it had ever made. It was signed by
Dr. Cutler and Major Winthrop Sargent for the Ohio Company and Samuel
Osgood and Arthur Lee for the Treasury Department, October 27, 1787.
Speaking in general terms, therefore, the Ohio Valley from the
Pennsylvania line to the mouth of the Muskingum was, in 1785-86,
surveyed into the "Seven Ranges;" southwest of this, down the valley,
came the Ohio Company grant of 1787. This embraced the lands from the
seventh through the seventeenth range. The earnestness of these New
Englanders is suggested by the immediate payment of half a million
dollars down, when the contract was signed with the United States, and
by the immediate arrival on the 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, had learned to love. In July,
General Arthur St. Clair, the newly-appointed governor of the Territory
Northwest of the River Ohio arrived, and with imposing ceremony, the
administration of the great Territory was inaugurated. Within two years
five colonies had been planted by the Ohio Company, four in the
Muskingum Valley and one on the Ohio, opposite the mouth of the Little
Kanawha River. The "Indian Side" of the "white foaming river" had now
received its first permanent quota of white settlers.[42]
In the same year, 1787, John Cleves Symmes and associates, largely from
New Jersey, entered into correspondence with Congress for the purchase
of a million acres of land north of the Ohio, lying between the Little
and Great Miami Rivers. This "Symmes" or "Miami" purchase was achieved,
and the Marietta pioneers saw the Miami settlers passing down the Ohio
late in 1788 en route 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 North Bend (Indiana) a
little to the west. Each of the three settlements vied with the others
for supremacy. Judge Symmes located at North Bend, but Fort Washington
was erected at Losantiville and, the name being changed to Cincinnati,
that settlement became the metropolis of the Ohio River below Pittsburg;
the seat of government of the Northwest Territory was moved hither in
1790.
Therefore in 1790, when the Indian War broke out, the northern bank of
the Ohio was settled, in a certain sense, between the mouths of the
Muskingum and Scioto and the mouths of the Little and the Great Miami.
But these light spots in all the darkness of the Black Forest, as the
West was familiarly called, were, after all, but one shade lighter than
the surrounding wilderness. The population of the Ohio Company
settlements was only a few score; Cincinnati, six years 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 at Pittsburg in 1782--"am
happy to find you can manage the d--ls of that country and the b--tes
of the garrison." Of Pittsburg in 1782 General Irvine wrote his wife:
"There never was, nor I hope will there ever be, such a wretched,
villainous place as this." Of Marietta, equally disagreeable pictures
were drawn by contemporaneous writers. It was a question whether or not
the leaven of New England could leaven the whole lump. It did--with the
help of good Virginian blood.
The next tract of land to be opened was that lying between the Ohio
Company's purchase and Judge Symmes's, a six thousand square mile tract
bounded on the east by the Scioto and on the west by the Little Miami.
This was the Virginia Military District. The Old Dominion had voted her
soldiers upon continental and state establishment bounties in western
lands. The land that was granted (practically the old Henderson purchase
between the Green and Tennessee Rivers) did not prove large enough.
Virginia, guarding against this very contingency, had reserved the tract
between the Scioto and 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, would make the amount
to which they were entitled; these locations and surveys to be recorded,
together with the names of those for whom they were made, in the office
of the Secretary of State. The President was then directed to issue
letters patent for these lands to the persons entitled to them, for
their use or the use of their heirs, assigns, or legal representatives.
The Secretary of State should forward these deeds to the executive of
Virginia, to be delivered to the proper persons. It will be seen that
the national Government issued the deeds, but did not make the
surveys.[43]
The Indian War which raged from 1790 to 1795 was fought almost wholly
north of the Ohio River basin with Fort Washington as the base of
supplies.[44] The conflict delayed the 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
filling with Virginians, and under good and great men such as General
Nathaniel Massie and Duncan McArthur, subsequently governor of Ohio,
became a power in the old Northwest.
We have intimated that the original Ohio Company purchase and the
Virginia Military District adjoined; upon the utter failure of the
Scioto Company, which had been a party with 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 tract embraced about four thousand square miles and
stretched over the twenty odd miles on the Ohio between the Ohio Company
lands and those of the Virginia Military District.
Thus at the opening of the actual pioneer period, about 1800, we find
both shores of the Ohio dotted with settlements. In Virginia and
Kentucky there are Pittsburg, Charleston, Wheeling, Limestone
(Maysville), and Louisville; and on the old-time Indian Side are Beaver
(Fort Mclntosh), Wellsburg, Marietta (Fort Harmar), Gallipolis,
Manchester, Columbia, Cincinnati; and Madison 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 a decade the British, who have sullenly withdrawn across the
Detroit River, will continue to incite the Indians until Harrison shall
annihilate Tecumseh's confederacy at Tippecanoe in 1811. But so far as
the Ohio Valley is concerned the question is one of occupation; and now
come the streams of immigration from all easterly points of the compass
to this great waterway.
[Illustration: PUTNAM'S MAP OF THE OHIO RIVER AND SETTLEMENTS (1804)]