Chapter III: Introduction: By Reuben G. Thwaites (1)

The first two volumes of this series--those devoted to the historic towns of New England and the Middle States--dealt with communities each group of which has had for the most part a common origin, has progressed along practically parallel lines, and possesses characteristics closely akin. The volume upon the towns of the South brought closely to view the cosmopolitan character of the population which has settled our continent to the South and Southwest of the Appalachian wall. The stories of Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and St. Augustine bring into view widely-different origins, experiences, and interests along a single stretch of coast; while Mobile and New Orleans, Knoxville, Nashville, and Louisville, Vicksburg and Little Rock, are groups representing chapters in our history which appear to have but slight connection save in the view of those who have closely studied the mainsprings of American development.

The present volume represents even a wider range of historical interest. The attentive reader will, however, discover that although these towns of the far-stretching trans-Alleghany region have sprung from curiously divergent beginnings, and are apparently incongruous in composition and in aims, there really is and has been much in common among them.

In order to understand Western history, one must first have knowledge of the details of the titanic struggle for settlement in North America, made respectively by Spain, France, and England. The early decline of Spanish power north of the Red and the Arkansas, save for the later temporary holding of Louisiana; the protracted tragedy which ended on the Plains of Abraham in the Fall of New France; the Revolution of the English colonists, and its portentous results; the Louisiana Purchase of 1803; the Mexican War, the episode of California, the story of Texas, with their consequent ousting of Spain from lands north of the Rio Grande and the Gila--all these are factors bearing the closest relation to the history of the West, and consequently of many of the historic towns whose stories have been grouped within these covers.

With these episodes of national rivalry, and consequent diplomacy and war, were intimately concerned the French fur-trade outposts of Detroit, Mackinac, Vincennes, and St. Louis, links in the forted chain which bound Canada and Louisiana, and by means of which it was sought to form a barrier against the Westward growth of the English colonies; also the Spanish stations of San Francisco, Monterey, Los Angeles, and Santa Fé, which were at once political vantage points and mission seats, for the spread of Spanish power and civilization from Mexico, among the brown barbarians of the North. St. Louis experienced both French and Spanish régimes, while Mackinac, Detroit, and Vincennes were much affected by the period of English occupancy.

As settlement grew upon the Atlantic coast, the English frontier was inevitably pushed farther and farther from tidewater. The hunter followed his game westward; so the forest trader, seeking the ever-receding camps of the aborigines, and, in due course, the raiser of cattle, horses, and swine who needed fresh pastures for his herds as tillage steadily encroached upon the wild lands of the border. At first timorously occupying the valleys and foothills of the eastern slopes, hunter, trader, and grazier, each in his turn, cautiously followed buffalo traces and Indian war-paths over the crest of the great range, and hailed with glee waters descending into the mysterious West. Not less formidable than the barriers reared by nature were those interposed by the savage, who with dismay saw his hunting grounds fast dwindling under the sway of the land-grabbing English; and by the jealous machinations of the military agents and fur traders of New France, who brooked no rivalry in their commercial exploitation of the forest.

When New France fell, the English crown strictly forbade further settlement in the back country. This order was issued upon the representations of London merchants interested, as had been the merchant adventurers of France, in preserving the forest for the Indians and the fur trade; the ministry were not unmindful also that the bold and liberty-loving frontiersmen who crossed the mountains might come to consider English political control as unessential to their being.

This policy was, however, diametrically opposed to the policy of the border. The fertile fields of the West were far from the observation of London officials, the spirit of unrest and the desire for gain laughed at royal proclamations, and the trans-Alleghany movement but gathered force. By the opening of the Revolution, Kentucky and Tennessee were practically staked out; by its close, Americans were sole white masters of the West to the east of the Mississippi, save for a brief holding by the British of Detroit, Mackinac, and other upper lake posts, as security for treaty obligations as yet unfulfilled.

It had been the custom of England to grant lands for military service; the American colonies had likewise liberally rewarded their defenders in the Indian wars; Revolutionary soldiers were now given free access to the broad acres of the West, the direct result of this policy being the settlements of Marietta and Cleveland.

Water courses have ever been of the highest importance in determining the lines of continental settlement. The river St. Lawrence and the great lakes offered to the people of New France a continual invitation to explore the regions whence they flowed. It was not long before the French found that the sources of south and west-flowing waters were not far from the banks of the eastering waterways upon which they dwelt. By ascending short tributaries, and carrying their light craft along practicable paths, or portages, first used by the Indians, they could re-launch into strange and devious paths which led to all parts of the continental interior--the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Assiniboine, and their multifarious affluents and connections. Thus easily did New France spread along the St. Lawrence and the lakes, over into the Ohio and the Mississippi, and down their gliding channels to New Orleans and the sea.

In crossing the Alleghanies, the English sought the Ohio and its tributaries--the Alleghany, the Monongahela, the Cumberland, the Tennessee, the Kanawha, the Big Sandy. The Ohio was long the chief gateway to the West. Upon this royal path into the wilderness, the Ohio Company sent Christopher Gist to prospect and report; for its possession, France and England came to final blows through the action at Fort Necessity of Major Washington, than whom no man knew the Ohio better; it was an approach to Kentucky more inviting than Boone's Wilderness Road, through Cumberland Gap; Clark's flotilla came swooping down the great river to conquer Kaskaskia and Vincennes; and, the Revolution ended, Rufus Putnam and his fellow veterans from New England claimed their military land grants along this continental highway, at Marietta. Cincinnati, also, was an outpost deliberately planted upon the great pathway to the West, although otherwise differing in genesis. It was by the Great Lakes, that other principal approach to the West, that Moses Cleaveland founded the settlement of Revolutionary soldiers who were redeeming their land warrants in New Connecticut, or the Western Reserve--an incident closely connecting Ohio with colonial history.

Early in the Western experiences of the new nation, came Indian wars. These resulted in treaties whereunder the defeated tribesmen were either forbidden to enter defined areas of settlement, or were confined within specific reservations. This necessitated the construction of rude but effective frontier forts, which not unfrequently proved the nuclei of hamlets that grew into considerable towns. Sometimes these forts were essential to the direct protection of the white settlers, who, upon occasion of alarm, flew to cover within the log palisades, which were stout enough to resist a barbaric foe unpossessed of artillery; such was Fort Washington, which in time became Cincinnati.

The forest trade was long the chief and only commercial interest in the West, and at certain points garrisoned forts were necessary to serve the traders as depôts and as havens of refuge; this was the part played by Detroit, Mackinac, Chicago, St. Paul, Vincennes, and St. Louis. In the case of Des Moines, the fort was established for the protection of a group of reservation Indians who might otherwise have fallen victims to a superior savage foe.

Agricultural settlers rapidly took up lands. Battle against it as he would,--and the early history of the border is a piteous tale of man's inhumanity to man,--the dispossessed savage found this army of occupation impregnable. As the frontier moved to the westward of the Mississippi, it was accompanied by the Indians and the fur trade. Territories were erected by Congress out of the lands of the ousted Iroquois and Algonkins, and these political divisions were soon admitted to the Union as states; mines were exploited, forests were depleted, miscellaneous industries were created, and these new interests not only profoundly affected the old towns, but gave rise to a new order of cities.

Indianapolis and Madison are examples of town sites staked out in virgin forests by ambitious and imaginative speculators, and, before a house could be built, set aside by statute as capitals of their respective young commonwealths. It is not always that towns thus artificially planted have similarly thriven. Under normal conditions, a successful city is as much a matter of natural growth as a tree, whose germ has chanced to fall in favored soil. Many, perhaps most, Western towns of importance, that were planted before the days of the railroad, when waterways were highways, are upon the sites of early villages of aborigines, who made their stands at natural vantage points--at a river mouth, convenient for transportation, or close to considerable fishing grounds; at a waterfall, because here fish are plenty, and canoes must be carried around the obstruction, so that the villagers are masters of the highway; upon a portage path, because of ease in reaching and controlling divergent water systems; upon a bluff overlooking waterways, for facility of observation and control; upon a fertile river bottom, because of good corn lands. In due time, whites came to such a centre of population and established a trading post; here and there, as at Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Vincennes, and Kansas City (Westport), the post in due time developed into a garrisoned fort; and the surrounding community, at first dependent on the fur trade or the military, under modern conditions became a town of importance. Scores, possibly hundreds, of such examples might be cited; and even when some thrifty towns of the West appear at first sight to have no connection with such a past, antiquarians have not infrequently discovered evidences that substantially the same reasons which before the railway era had led civilized men to select the site, caused its previous occupancy by aborigines--sometimes at so early a day that the only remaining relics are the curious earthworks which the progenitors of our Western Indians, prompted by religious fervor, constructed anywhere from two and a half to ten centuries ago.

Minneapolis and Spokane, both of them old Indian sites, are the direct outgrowth of the superb waterpowers which have given them pre-eminence in the industrial world.

We have seen that the Great Lakes and the great rivers were the paths to the Mississippi basin in the days of the canoe, the bateau, and the pack-horse. The early movement of population over the trans-Mississippi plains and through the passes of the Rockies was by means of wagons along well-worn buffalo traces, which Indians had followed in the pursuit of game. Where rivers intersected these overland trails, ferries were instituted, their keepers doing a thriving business in helping upon their way fur traders, explorers, miners, and settlers. Such was the origin of Kansas City and Omaha, which naturally developed, with the rush of immigration, into great centres of distribution. In every quarter of our land, from the earliest colonial days, the frontier ferryman, with his tavern and trading house, has been a town builder.

The discovery of precious metals in the hills of Colorado gave life to the mining camp of Denver, which in time became the metropolis of a wide district, to which irrigation brought a wealth more enduring than gold and silver.

Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are the open doors of the Pacific Coast, and their growth is thus easily accounted for. Prophecies are current of the possible commercial supremacy of these Pacific-coast towns, as a consequence of our new interests in the Far East. It is curious, in this connection, to remember that Spain's motive in founding her California colonies, four generations ago, was, on the temporal side, the more strongly to establish herself in the Philippines.

Strangest of all stories is that of Salt Lake City, the product of religious zeal seeking a supposedly inaccessible desert as a haven from persecution. Finally, when the laborious development of the wilderness has brought rich fruitage, this hermit city finds itself a station on one of the world's most-travelled highways.

The coming of the railway, and the consequent practical abandonment of the waterway, wrought a profound change in the fortunes of the Western towns. The railway paid small heed to watercourses, save in mountainous country; it struck out upon short-cuts over the plains and prairies, almost regardless of topography. Hundreds of staid and promising river and lake towns received a staggering blow when, for various reasons,--sometimes their own failure to encourage the enterprise,--the railway passed them by and entered rival and often less pretentious communities, which now were quickened into new vigor. A more favorable situation for a bridge across the stream was often the determining factor which caused several towns upon a river to die and the fortunate one to be transformed into a metropolis. The arbitrary erection throughout the West of new paths of commerce, of new centres of distribution, during the decade and a half before the War of Secession, was of itself a revolutionary element in urban history.

Almost as profound in its effects was the practically contemporaneous dispersion through this vast territory of millions of European immigrants, who came to open farms, to practise trades, and in city and in village to carry forward, often to inaugurate, hundreds of new commercial and industrial enterprises. The new-comers brought strange habits of thought and social customs; some of the most desirable of these they engrafted upon their American neighbors, while at the same time they themselves were being consciously or unconsciously remoulded into American citizens--who, whatever may be said, will always be essentially but transplanted Englishmen modified by environment and political education.

Of the many nationalities of the European continent which have planted stakes in North America, the Germans and the Scandinavians, closely allied to our Anglo-Saxon stock, have been the most numerous and have exercised the greatest influence. Many considerable towns, like Cincinnati, Detroit, St. Louis, and Omaha, have become strongly German, with not a few of the characteristics of old Germany, such as are evinced in a general fostering of music and rational outdoor recreation. The Scandinavian element vies good-naturedly with the German, as at Madison and Chicago; while Minneapolis may be considered as the centre of Scandinavian influence, fostering sturdy democracy and tenacious enterprise.

In the large towns which have their roots planted in New France, the French element is no longer of considerable importance. The French borderer was a vivacious, fun-loving, easy-going fellow, and upon the road to modern opulence and power has long since been passed; to-day, as an urban dweller, he is not seriously reckoned with by the politician, and this is a safe guide to the relative standing of a race in any American city. The towns which we have more recently inherited from Spain still possess, in their older quarters, strong characteristics to link them with the past. Here and there, as with the French, individual Spaniards or mixed-bloods rise into prominence in our modern life--but only through the channel of Americanization, which means effacement of the old régime. Spanish traits have left permanent traces on the Southwest and the Pacific, as some French traits are a part of the lasting heritage of the Old Northwest; but Spaniards and Frenchmen as such are rapidly fading from our historic towns.

A half-century ago, few of the twenty-one Western towns whose stories are herein collected had taken upon themselves the characteristics which to-day chiefly distinguish them. We have seen that the advent of the railway was for many the starting-point upon the road to prosperity; the arrival of European immigrants, with traditions of toil and thrift, proved the turning stage for others, and strengthened all. The War of Secession shook the Republic to its foundations; but from it the North rose with fresh vigor, and rapidly developed in growth and ambition, with the ensuing commercial and industrial conditions which we encounter to-day. Nowhere has this development been quite so noticeable as in the towns of the West.

Pioneer men and women are necessarily too closely engaged in taming the wilderness to have either thought or leisure for any but the most elementary education. But now that the West is no longer the frontier, and mines, forests, fisheries, manufactures, and scientific agriculture have brought wealth and comparative leisure, there is among her people no lack of aspiration for culture. In no section of the United States are study clubs relatively more numerous, in town and country; university extension courses and the lyceum prosper everywhere; the common-school systems, capped by the fast-growing State universities with their thousands of students, are exhibiting a healthy growth along the most approved lines under the guidance of teachers of national reputation; excellent private academies and colleges are numerous in every commonwealth. Several of the towns mentioned in this volume have won wide reputation as educational centres--notably Cleveland, Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and San Francisco.

From these Western towns there issues no note of decadence. Theirs is the glowing ambition of youth. Each of our several authors is quite confident, and properly so, that his town is the handsomest, brightest, and most prosperous of all; or, if it is not, that it is soon to be. Its commerce ever widens, its industries expand in capacity and number, its railways connect it each year with some new sphere of trade; and, what is better, it is making strides, in breezy Western fashion, in the cultivation of the higher things of life, in its churches, its schools, its libraries and museums, its charities, its parks, its popular conveniences, its insistence upon moral and material municipal cleanliness. It is pleasant and profitable to trace the careers of communities such as this; to note, for instance, by what means the Indian village became a trading post, then a fort, next a hamlet, and at last comes to be pulsating with the ambitions and struggling with the multifarious problems of a great modern city. Herein is a record of urban development crowded into the span of a single human life, that in the Old World it took centuries to accomplish.

It is often flippantly asserted that America has no history; and even well-informed Americans, who have come to appreciate their national history at large, are apt to fancy that, in any event, the West has had a prosaic career, being simply an overflow or outgrowth from the East. But a perusal of these pages will surely convince the thoughtful reader that Western history is not so easily disposed of. It will be found a chronicle abounding in complexities, aglow with life and color, freighted with significance to the continent at large. The chief towns of this historic West have come down to us from many sorts of beginnings, have travelled by differing and devious paths, often encountering curious adventures by the way, until, quickened by modern resources and demands, they have each in its kind come creditably to serve mankind in some useful way.

HISTORIC TOWNS OF THE
WESTERN STATES

HISTORIC TOWNS OF THE WESTERN STATES

MARIETTA

THE PLYMOUTH OF THE WEST

BY MURIEL CAMPBELL DYAR

"The paths from the heights of Abraham led to Independence
Hall, Independence Hall led finally to Yorktown, and Yorktown
guided the footsteps of your Fathers to Marietta."--_Daniels._

At the point where the Muskingum empties into the Ohio, the River Beautiful, across whose waters the Ohio hills look tenderly away into the distances of West Virginia, there was sown, in 1788, the tiny seed for the development of the Northwest Territory. Here, on the memorable seventh of April, landed forty-eight New England pioneers; here stayed the keel of the second _Mayflower_, bearing as her burden not only the men whose names have become immortal in American history, but, more than these, the Ordinance of 1787 with its momentous articles of compact--an ordinance ranking "next to the Declaration of Independence in the establishment of Constitutional liberty in the United States." Here was founded that other Plymouth, Marietta, the brave little gateway through which the nation's civilization journeyed onward from the Atlantic seaboard to the fallow empires of the West.

No seer was needed to foreshadow the success the Marietta colony was to have. Two years before its coming, the character of the colony was presaged when there met in Boston, at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern, whose gilded sign creaked temptingly in her high salt winds, a convention called by General Rufus Putnam and General Benjamin Tupper for the formation of the Ohio Company, with the purpose of founding a new State in the territory northwest of the Ohio River. The Company was composed of high-minded men, largely officers in the late war. In their petition to Congress for the purchase of western land they stipulated, for its organization, law and order, provision for education and for the maintenance of religion and the total exclusion of slavery. For these compacts, some of the greatest statesmen in the young Republic brought to bear the power of their genius; for these, the quiet Ipswich clergyman, Manasseh Cutler, as agent of the Ohio Company, pleaded with matchless eloquence in Congress; for these, Rufus Putnam, the "Father and Founder of Ohio," gave the largess of his ability and rugged force.

"An interlude in Congress," says Mr. Bancroft, "was shaping the
character and destiny of the United States of America. Sublime
and humane and eventful as was the result, it will not take
many words to show how it was brought about. For a time wisdom
and peace and justice dwelt among men, and the great Ordinance
which alone could give continuance to the Union came in
serenity and stillness. Every man that had a share in it seemed
to be moved by an Invisible Hand to do just what was wanted of
him; all that was wrongfully undertaken fell by the wayside;
whatever was needed for the happy completion of the work
arrived opportunely and at the right moment moved into its
place."

To the forty-eight men sent into the wilderness by the Ohio Company history gives a generous and well-merited praise. They were of the same race and of the same upright faith as the brave Englishmen who in 1620 landed on the bleak, gray rock of Plymouth. All that was true and forceful in the Plymouth faith was theirs; they had the same love of law and religion, the same genius for order and a firm self-government, the same courage of conviction, the same independence of thought and action. They possessed, too, much of that ancient war-ready temper which had shorn the English King of his divine right and had created for the English people the House of Commons. Their heroism had adorned every battlefield of the Revolution; their roll included generals, majors, colonels and captains.

"No colony in America," said Washington, with that cautious,
unerring judgment of his, "was ever settled under such
favorable auspices as that about to commence at the Muskingum.
Information, property and strength will be its characteristics.
I know many of the settlers personally, and there never were
men better calculated to promote the welfare of such a
community."

"I know them all," cried the Marquis de La Fayette, his fine French voice trembling with emotion when the list of their names was read to him on his visit to Marietta. "I knew them at Brandywine, Yorktown and Rhode Island. They were the bravest of the brave." General Putnam himself was at their head, the "impress of whose character is strongly marked on the population of Marietta in their business, institutions and manners." Here were Samuel H. Parsons, the distinguished general, the able writer, the accomplished jurist; James M. Varnum, the brilliant scholar, the gallant officer; Abraham Whipple, the brave commodore, to whom belongs the glory of firing the first naval gun in the cause of American independence, an act that gave birth to the American navy. Here were Winthrop Sargent, the Secretary of the Territory, Benjamin Tupper, the hero of many battles and the devoted friend of Putnam in the forming of the Ohio Company; Return Jonathan Meigs, afterwards Governor of Ohio. Here were Nye, Buell, Cutler, Fearing, Foster, Sproat, Cushing, Goodale, Dana, True, Devol and others no less worthy and distinguished, whose names are the richest heritage of their descendants.

The story of the coming of the pioneers is a twice-told tale to the student of our nation's history. In the disheartening gray dawn of a December morning, 1787, the first little band paraded before Manasseh Cutler's own church at Ipswich, and, after the firing of a salute, started "for the Ohio country," as their leading wagon proclaimed. Another joined this at Danvers, and yet another, pushing on from famous old Rutland, started from Hartford, Ct., led by the beloved and always inspiring General Putnam. The toilsome journey overland, along an old Indian trail through Connecticut and Pennsylvania, at that season of the year white with winter, ended at last at the Ohio River. Here, at Sumrill's ferry, out of timber that still sang of the forests, was built the _Mayflower_, her bows raking like a galley, her burthen fifty tons--a humble enough namesake of the famous Pilgrim vessel. As the pioneers went onward down the river, the snow, which at first lay heavy in the hollows of the hills, melted into thin patches here and there, until, when they reached Fort Harmar, at the fair mouth of the Muskingum, April bourgeoned into unexpected beauty about them. It was a golden augury for the little town, to which its soldier founders gave the name of Marietta, in grateful remembrance of the sympathy of Marie Antoinette for the colonies during the weary period of their Revolution, a name which still keeps her citizens lovers of that ill-fated Queen of France.

Enthusiastic news of the first summer of the colony went back over the mountains to Ipswich and Rutland. "The climate is exceeding healthy," blithely carols one of the old letters, "not a man sick since we have been here. We have started twenty buffalo in a drove--deer are plenty as sheep in New England. Turkeys are innumerable. We have already planted a field of one hundred and fifty acres in corn." Another settler drips from his ecstatic, and, we trust, veracious quill, "The corn has grown nine inches in twenty-four hours for two or three days past." The garrison, very soon erected for defence and called the Campus Martius in academic quaintness, is described as the "handsomest pile of buildings this side of the Alleghanies," and as presenting an appearance of almost mediæval stateliness and strength, bastioned as it was with great blockhouses and surrounded by a stout double wall of palisades. The Fourth of July was celebrated by a great "banquet," eaten in a bowery set up on the banks of the Muskingum; its menu tickles even a jaded modern palate--venison barbecued, buffalo steaks, bear-meat, roasted pigs, "the choicest delicacy of all," and a great pike, six feet long, the largest ever caught in the river. "We kept it up till after twelve o'clock at night," succinctly observes one of the participants, "and then went home and slept until after daylight." On the fifteenth of July, a yet more memorable occasion, General St. Clair, the first Governor of the Northwest Territory, was welcomed with great ceremonies, and the Ordinance of 1787 was read with much solemnity in the midst of profound silence. In early August a pleasant little ripple of diversion was caused by the arrival of the families of the pioneers. In the latter part of the same month, Dr. Cutler made a visit to the settlement, and delivered the first sermon ever preached at Marietta. In September was opened the first Court of Common Pleas in the Territory. It was an august spectacle. The sheriff, Colonel Ebenezer Sproat, of the Massachusetts line, preceded by a military escort, marched with his drawn sword and wand of office ahead of the governor, judges, secretary and others, to the blockhouse where the court was held. As the picturesque little procession wound its way along the river banks, the friendly Indians, loitering about the new city, admired immensely the mighty form of Colonel Sproat, who, being six feet four inches tall, towered conspicuously above his companions. Ever thereafter they called him Hetuck, or Big Buckeye, and ever since then the natives of Ohio have been dubbed "Buckeyes."

Great provisions were made for good order in the settlement; almost before the seeds of New England harvests had germinated in the virgin soil, Marietta had her pillory, whipping post and stocks for the discipline of evil-doers, instruments of torture which lingered as late as 1812. Every man was ordered to "entertain emigrants, visit the sick, feed the hungry, attend funerals, cabin-raisings, log-rollings, huskings and to keep his latch-string always out." Once during the fruitful summer the settlers assembled to attend a funeral, for the first death in the colony occurred in August, when little Nabby Cushing, daughter of Major Cushing, passed away. She was buried tenderly in the alien soil, where, in an unmarked grave, she is slumbering still. Although many years have come and gone between, a vague pity stirs to-day at the thought of that little pioneer baby, whose feet so soon grew weary in the vast wilderness.

The hospitality of the latch-strings was put to the test two years later, when a hapless colony of Frenchmen took shelter in the town, lured into the wilderness by the unscrupulous agent of a land company, with the promise that they should find a land where there were no taxes to pay, no military services to be performed, where frost, even in winter, was entirely unknown and where candles grew ready-made on the bushes and sugar dripped spontaneously from the trees. They were a curious crew: carvers, gilders, wig-makers and hair-dressers from Paris, even a Viscount of broken-down fortunes and a young Marquis, with a few peasants as helpless as themselves in the new conditions,--hardly a mother's son of them able to plough or reap or chop for himself, and many a man without a sou in his pocket. The major part of them drifted down the river that winter to what is now Gallipolis, the City of the Gauls, where they at once began to give balls in the cabins which the Marietta settlers helped them build, and proceeded to spend what little money they had in hiring American hunters to bring them game! A few became citizens of Marietta, notably Monsieur Thiery, a Parisian baker and confectioner, who quickly adapted himself to the new life, and made toothsome little sweet-cakes and bread for the settlement,--there is a tradition that while Louis Philippe was whiling away his exile in the United States, he visited Marietta, where he had the pleasure of eating a fair wheaten loaf of his countryman's baking, and Monsieur Cookie, bred to no trade, very short and very stout, who wore at all times and in all seasons a very tall steeple-crowned hat which once saved his life, when the Indians, catching sight of it bobbing up and down in the paw-paw bushes, fired at it in a vain attempt to hit the head within.

After the sober jollity of the first summer, the Marietta colonists experienced the hardships which every early settlement knows. They had their "sick years, their times of famine and their Indian wars." The sick years played a sad havoc in their numbers by dreadful scourges of epidemic diseases. The famous starving-time came in the spring and summer of 1790. A black frost falling out of due season ruined their crops, and the Indians, already beginning their hostilities, had driven from the forest every startled wild thing within their reach. It was a period that tried the Puritan mettle, for the solace of religion may prove vain if the stomach be empty. The only food was nettle-tops and the tender shoots of the pigeon-berry, boiled with a little corn pounded on the hominy block. Occasionally a hunter, faring far afield, brought in a bit of bear-meat or a wild turkey, which made a feast at least fitting if not full. The heroic matrons sipped spice-bush tea, unsweetened, in lieu of a more stimulating beverage. Many a heart turned back in homesick longing to where the blue haze curled comfortably from New England kitchens, but hope returned with the early squashes. The new corn crop was abundant, and from that day to this, whatever may have been their vicissitudes of fortune, the citizens of Marietta have never again been reduced to a starvation diet.

A much graver calamity, coming not long after, was the Indian wars, which were not to end for five long, weary years. During this time the town was strained to its generous capacity to receive under the shelter of the Campus Martius the men, women and children from remoter settlements. The settlers worked in the fields like the Israelites at the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem,--every man with his weapon in his hand. On the puncheon cabin-floors, mothers rocked their babies in the first cradles of Ohio, while often, on some far-off hill, they could see savage warriors brandishing their blood-stained hatchets in defiance at the fort.

The news of the defeat of General St. Clair's expedition caused consternation, and threatened for a time to break up the settlement. So disastrous was the defeat that when in 1793 Mad Anthony Wayne camped on the General's battlefield, his soldiers could not lie down to sleep for the bones of the unfortunate army. Humiliated by his misfortune and its implied disgrace, the Governor soon left his Marietta home. The colonists mourned with his loss that of his daughter Louisa, so brave, so lovely, so brilliant, that it seems no mere legend that the great Indian chief, Brandt, was madly in love with her.

In the grim terror of the times, an amusing incident now and then comes like a lilt of girlish laughter. Once the signal gun gave the alarm that the Indians were besieging the town. The night was dark and the confusion indescribable. Men rushed to their posts and the women and children scuttled to the central blockhouse. Colonel Sproat led the way with a box of valuable papers; next came a woman with her bed and children, and tumbling after her, old Mr. Moulton, with his leathern apron full of goldsmith's tools and tobacco. His daughter Anna carried the china tea-pot. Lyddy brought the great Bible. When all were in the frightened cry was raised that Mrs. Moulton was missing--that she had been scalped by the Indians. "Oh, no," said Lyddy calmly, "she'll be here in a minute. She stopped to put things a little to rights; she said she _would not_ leave the house _looking so_." And in a few moments the old lady scuttled in, bearing the looking-glass--a triumph of New England housewifery!

A certain regularity of living was maintained in spite of the continuous fear. Every Sabbath morning church was held in a blockhouse where Psalms were droned with Puritan unction, and the sermon by Mr. Story, the scholarly Massachusetts divine, was tasted with much critical acumen by the learned backwoodsmen, many of whom were graduates of Harvard and Dartmouth. On the long Sabbath afternoons the children of the settlement studied their catechisms in the simple log cabin of Mrs. Mary Lake, the earnest woman who thus started what was perhaps the first Sunday-school in the United States. On week days they were gathered together for lessons, nor was the rod kept in less perpetual pickle because of the proximity of the Indians.

The war once over, a busy activity ensued. Mills were built, bridges made, and more comfortable houses erected. It was not strange that the sons of the old coast States, with the siren voice of the sea still in their ears, should become notable builders of ships. The great trees of the forest were masts ready for felling, and many a stately vessel slipped into the water from this inland ship-yard, to glide down the Ohio into the Mississippi, and from thence to the shining ocean beyond. The town became a centre of industry and traffic, a position which she was not long to keep, for gradually trade drifted from her, and by and by she fell asleep commercially beside her pleasant waters, to nod and dream serenely through years to come. But not only was the early Marietta noted for her industrial prosperity; she was a centre of culture as well, and her place in this regard she has never lost. As soon as a greater wealth and leisure came to the pioneer colony, there bloomed abundantly the flowers of an intellectual refinement, which was the birth-right of those heroic men and women.

It is with this gracious era, redolent of sweet old customs and stately courtesies, that there is associated the romantic, old-time tragedy of the Blennerhassetts. On the lovely island lying some twelve miles below Marietta, Harman Blennerhassett, the dreamy Irish exile, built his idyllic mansion, whose grandeur was the wonder of the West.

"A shrubbery that Shenstone might have envied," wrote Wirt,
"blooms around him. Music that might have charmed Calypso and
her nymphs, is his. An extensive library spreads its treasures
before him. A philosophical apparatus offers him all the
secrets and mysteries of nature. Peace, tranquillity, and
innocence shed their mingled delights about him. And to crown
the enchantment of the scene, a wife, who is said to be lovely
even beyond her sex, and graced with every accomplishment that
can render it irresistible, has blessed him with her love."

Here he plotted a new empire with the bad and brilliant Aaron Burr, whose hands were still red with the blood of the murdered Alexander Hamilton; and from here he fled accused of treason to his country, disgraced and ruined. Memories of the "Blennerhassett days" are many, for the great man was for several years a partner of Dudley Woodbridge, the first merchant of Marietta, and both he and his accomplished wife were familiar figures in Marietta homes. Fancy, inspired by local annals, has a charming glimpse of the loving mistress of the hospitable mansion, dashing through the woods on her spirited horse, like some brilliant tropical bird, in her habit of scarlet cloth, and white hat with the long drooping plume. A pretty story is told of her wit and beauty at the famous "Burr ball" which the fashion of Marietta once gave in honor of the crafty statesman and his daughter Theodosia. To-day, the site of the regal dwelling is marked only by an old well and some magnificent trees. "Blennerhassett's Island" is a point of attraction for pleasure-seekers, who give little enough thought to its sad story; but sometimes there journeys to it a lover of past years who looks with blurred eyes at the spot where once was enacted one of the most pathetic little tragedies in all American history.

But Marietta is not altogether a tale of yesterdays; she has as well her to-day, with its rich promise for the morrow. To-day, a stranger in the town has pointed out to him "New" and "Old" Marietta. In New Marietta, brought into existence by the discovery of vast surrounding oil-fields, there are thriving factories, modern business blocks, new hotels, improved school-buildings, electric cars; there are evidences of wealth and business prosperity, and signs of an increasing population. This commercial progress, from a civic standpoint, is undeniably a benefit, yet it must be admitted, for the time being, it gives Marietta a little the appearance of a kindly, old-style grandmother, startled from a long afternoon nap in the chimney-corner, to find her cap gone, her scanty petticoats replaced by strangely ample frills, and the caraway seeds in her limp black bag supplanted by indigestible bon-bons. In Old Marietta the scene shifts. Here is the drowsy peace of a New England village; here are wide streets shaded by avenues of splendid trees, and ancient houses, generous-portalled, serene. Here is the burring of bees in old-fashioned gardens. And is not this lingering fragrance the smell of the lotos-flower?

The glory of the old dispensation is the venerable college, whose buildings cluster picturesquely on the green lift of College Hill. Founded in the fear of God by the first scholars of Ohio, it has behind it a proud history. At its head have stood men of rich culture and ability, among whose names shines pre-eminently that of Israel Ward Andrews. In the list of its instructors have been scholars who have led it upward to all that is noblest and best. From its classes have gone out students who have taken a fitting and often distinguished place in the professions and in politics. When the call of 1861 came, the student sons of Marietta responded with a gallant patriotism and a devoted service, some among them winning the highest recognition. To-day, with its able faculty, its fine library, its well equipped class-rooms, it holds no mean place in the roll of American colleges. It pays to its past the precious thanks of a worthy present. And with happy confidence it looks forward to its future, under the guidance of its sixth and latest President, Alfred Tyler Perry, but recently called to its leadership from Hartford Theological Seminary.

In the old Mound Cemetery sleep an honored dead. In its center is the prehistoric mound, as well preserved to-day as when it was discovered by the pioneer fathers, a vast monument to the unknown fittingly encircled by the quiet dignity of this ancient Acre of God. General Putnam's grave is marked by a plain granite monument, bearing the simple inscription more touching than the loftiest eulogy:

GENERAL RUFUS PUTNAM

A Revolutionary Officer
And the leader of the
Colony which made the
First settlement in the
Territory of the North-West.
Born April 9, 1738,
Died May 4, 1824.

Not far from him are the majority of the Revolutionary heroes who came with him from New England. It is claimed that there are buried here more officers of the Revolution than in any other burying-ground in the United States. About them lie thirteen soldiers of the War of 1812, and a number of the brave men who fought in the Mexican War. Here too, are the resting-places of many early citizens of Marietta, who are as a "Choir Invisible"

"Of those immortal dead, who live again
In minds made better by their presence."

The gates are seldom open now to the silent caravans, for the graves in the cloistral grass lie close.

Many relics of bygone days make Old Marietta interesting. The streets running north and south bear yet the names given them by the early settlers, of Washington and his generals. The "Sacra Via" and the breezy "Capitolium" and "Tiber Way" bear witness to an old scholarship. "The Point" recalls the picketed Point of the Indian wars. There still stands the Ohio Company's Land Office, a wee, weather-beaten building, gray with time, probably the oldest structure in Ohio. Opposite this is the old homestead of Rufus Putnam, which stood within the Campus Martius. On the park, fronting the river, is the quaint Two Horn Church of the Congregationalists, erected in the wilderness in 1806 and now Ohio's oldest church building. On the same street where it stands is the stately old mansion of Governor Meigs, which was built two years earlier and which still holds an honored place among Marietta's beautiful homes. In families whose names mark their descent from the "forty-eight immortals" are treasured numerous heirlooms,--ancestral portraits which look from their tarnished frames pink-cheeked, confident and calm; old dresses, dim and faintly odorous; and divers warming-pans, candlesticks and Blennerhassett chairs, together with sundry bits of sprigged, delightful china.

"Age is a recommendation in four things," runs a Spanish proverb: "Old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, old books to read." To these might well be added a fifth,--old towns to love. To those who know her, Marietta is a hallowed spot. She is a tender-bosomed matron, this mother of many sons. Around her is a fair line of hills, which, whether green with the eternal promise of the spring, or wrapped in the blue smoke from autumn's invisible battlefield, or hoary with winter's snows, are changelessly beautiful. About her are broad fields, now quivering to their resurrection, now white to the harvests. Before her are the lovely, far-stretching rivers, calling to her all day long with their old, sweet notes of running water. By the bonds of her historic beauty she holds her children in a very tender thrall. In all times, and in all places, their hearts yearn unto her in the far Horatian cry: "Septimius,--_that angle of the earth laughs for me beyond all others_!"

CLEVELAND

THE PLEASANT CITY

BY CHARLES F. THWING

The first thing to be said about Cleveland is what, with the change of a pronoun, a Cambridge poet said about one of whom he wrote: "It is so pleasant." Its streets are pleasant to live in and to look upon; its parks are pleasant to stroll in or to ride in; its houses are, on the whole, pleasant to the æsthetic sense; its libraries are pleasant for their selectness though not for their bigness; its people are, above all, pleasant for their dignity, graciousness, genuineness, simplicity and appreciation. In the year 1838 the late Asa Gray spent a short time in Cleveland, and wrote from Cleveland to a friend, saying that the city would "ultimately be a very pleasant place"; he adds: "The people show some signs of civilization; they eat ice cream, which is sold in many places."[1] I wish I were able to assure my old friend and neighbor, as he now lives with the immortelles and other fadeless flowers, that he has proved to be a true prophet: Cleveland has become a "very pleasant place," and possibly I might be allowed to assure him that signs of the ice-age of modern civilization still linger.

In that relation in which men commonly use the word "pleasant," the weather, Cleveland is not pleasant. It has as much cloudy weather as almost any part of the world; and yet it has a pleasant climate. Its summers are not hot, its winters not cold. To the worker of any sort this pleasant climate of much unpleasant weather is very pleasing, for in it, as in the climate of London, one can get much work out of himself.

Cleveland is a singular creation of contraries. It is an inland town, but it builds more vessels and owns more vessels than almost any other in the United States. About a quarter of all the steel vessels, rated in tonnage, built in the United States in the last fiscal year of the Government were constructed in Cleveland, the order of precedence being Cleveland, Newport News, Chicago, and Detroit; and almost three quarters of the modern steel ships in service on the Great Lakes are owned or operated by Cleveland vesselmen. It is a city of four hundred thousand people, but it impresses both the visitor and the resident as a big village or a series of big villages. From it can be reached in a long or short night's ride, New York and Chicago, Buffalo and St. Louis, Detroit and Cincinnati; within seven hundred miles of Cleveland dwell more than half the entire population of the country, and yet Cleveland has been called provincial. Its homes are among the most palatial of the world, but the owners of not a few are more at home in New York and Paris than on Euclid Avenue. It is distinguished for its iron, steel and coal interests, but it has scholars and teachers who are known where its steel rails have never been carried. It is a city of the East, and it is also a city of the West--of the East it is the newest, of the West it is the oldest. It is often called conservative, but it is also distinguished by its sense of power and of progress. It represents in its citizens a pure New England type; but it has also gathered up folks from all over the world,--"Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, ... strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians," who read their newspapers in a dozen different languages. But, be it said, the New England, the Connecticut and Massachusetts type still dominates. The names of the families which are most representative of the things of the spirit include a large number of New England names.

This city of contraries and of contrasts is yet made a great city by only one or two simple elements. One may say that Lake Erie makes Cleveland. Were there no Lake Erie there would be no Cleveland. But Lake Erie is the occasion and not the cause. One may say that the age of steel makes Cleveland. But that this age is the age of steel is only the condition, not the cause. The cause that makes Cleveland Cleveland is that at or near Cleveland the various elements that are necessary in the manufacture of iron and steel can be most economically and efficiently assembled. The iron ores from the Lake Superior region, the coal from the Massillon, Mohoning and Pennsylvania region, the limestone from the Lake Erie islands and southern shores, can here be most profitably brought together. Cleveland is, too, by rail and by boat a good point for the distribution of the finished product as well as a good point for the bringing together of the crude material. Here ore, coal and lime meet and mingle as naturally as the heat of the sun and the life of the seed unite in the springtime. Nothing can prevent their meeting, and little can subsidies or other artificial stimulus do to promote it. From this union spring forth factories making nuts and bolts and sewing-machines and engines and the thousand products and by-products of this age and place of steel. Therefore Cleveland is Cleveland.

It may not only be said that Cleveland is herself; it should also be added that Cleveland has done some things first which are worth doing anyway, and which are especially worth doing first. As among the colleges Williams and Harvard have done not a few first things, so among the cities Cleveland may claim a certain priority. The city was, if not the first, among the first to adopt the federal system of municipal government, a system which, after ten years of usefulness, has proved to be like every other form of democratic government, good if good men are in control, and bad if bad men are in control. Cleveland was the first to adopt the proper method for the government and administration of its public schools, namely the separation of the business side of the administration from the educational, a system, too, which, like the more general plan of government, finds its efficiency in the character of the men who administer it. In Cleveland, too, was organized the great Epworth League of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Here, too, one of the first women in America to enter the medical profession was trained in the old Medical College, now a part of the Western Reserve University. Here the recondite experiments were made by Morley for determining the atomic weight of oxygen, and practical experiments by Brush for giving the best light, as well as the important experiments also made by Brush which resulted in adding "etherion" to the elements. Here, also, important facilities in the use of the public library and in the making of finest machinery, such as is used in astronomical apparatus, were first applied. One, too, should not in a commercial age be suffered to forget that in Cleveland the Standard Oil Company was born and grew to be a lusty youth.