Afloat on the Ohio Part 13

Meanwhile, both sides were preparing to occupy and hold the contested field. New France already had a weak chain of waterside forts and commercial stations,--the rendezvous of fur-traders, priests, travelers, and friendly Indians,--extending, with long intervening stretches of savage-haunted wilderness, through the heart of the continent, from Lower Canada to her outlying post of New Orleans. It is not necessary here to enter into the details of the ensuing French and Indian War, the story of which Parkman has told us so well.

Suffice it briefly to mention a few only of its features, so far as they affect the Ohio itself.

The Iroquois, although concluding with the English this treaty of Lancaster, "on which, as a corner-stone, lay the claim of the colonists to the West," were by this time, as the result of wily French diplomacy, growing suspicious of their English protectors; at the same time, having on several occasions been severely punished by the French, they were less rancorous in their opposition to New France. For this reason, just as the English were getting ready to make good their claim to the Ohio by actual colonization, the Iroquois began to let in the French at the back door. In 1749, Galissoniere, then governor of New France, dispatched to the great valley a party of soldiers under Celoron de Bienville, with directions to conduct a thorough exploration, to bury at the mouths of princ.i.p.al streams lead plates graven with the French claim,--a custom of those days,--and to drive out English traders, Celoron proceeded over the Lake Chautauqua route, from Lake Erie to the Alleghany River, and thence down the Ohio to the Miami, returning to Lake Erie over the old Maumee portage.

English traders, who could not be driven out, were found swarming into the country, and his report was discouraging. The French realized that they could not maintain connection between New Orleans and their settlements on the St. Lawrence, if driven from the Ohio valley. The governor sent home a plea for the s.h.i.+pment of ten thousand French peasants to settle the region; but the government at Paris was just then as indifferent to New France as was King George to his colonies, and the settlers were not sent.

Meanwhile, the English were not idle. The first settlement they made west of the mountains, was on New River, a branch of the Kanawha (1748); in the same season, several adventurous Virginians hunted and made land-claims in Kentucky and Tennessee. Before the close of the following year (1749), there had been formed, for fur-trading and colonizing purposes, the Ohio Company, composed of wealthy Virginians, among whom were two brothers of Was.h.i.+ngton. King George granted the company five hundred thousand acres, south of and along the Ohio River, on which they were to plant a hundred families and build and maintain a fort. As a base of supplies, they built a fortified trading-house at Will's Creek (now c.u.mberland, Md.), near the head of the Potomac, and developed a trail ("Nemacolin's Path"), sixty miles long, across the Laurel Hills to the mouth of Redstone Creek, on the Monongahela, where was built another stockade (1752).

Christopher Gist, a famous backwoodsman, was sent (1750), the year after Celoron's expedition, to explore the country as far down as the falls of the Ohio, and select lands for the new company. Gist's favorable report greatly stimulated interest in the Western country.

In his travels, he met many Scotch-Irish fur-traders who had pa.s.sed into the West through the mountain valleys of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas. His negotiations with the natives were of great value to the English cause.

It was early seen, by English and French alike, that an immense advantage would accrue to the nation first in possession of what is now the site of Pittsburg, the meeting-place of the Monongahela and Alleghany rivers to form the Ohio--the "Forks of the Ohio," as it was then called. In the spring of 1753, a French force occupied the new fifteen-mile portage route between Presque Isle (Erie, Pa.) and French Creek, a tributary of the Alleghany. On the banks of French Creek they built Fort Le Boeuf, a stout log-stockade. It had been planned to erect another fort at the Forks of the Ohio, one hundred and twenty miles below; but disease in the camp prevented the completion of the scheme.

What followed is familiar to all who have taken any interest whatever in Western history. In November, Governor Dinwiddie, of Virginia, sent one of his major-generals, young George Was.h.i.+ngton, with Gist as a companion, to remonstrate with the French at Le Boeuf for occupying land "so notoriously known to be the property of the Crown of Great Britain." The French politely turned the messengers back. In the following April (1754), Was.h.i.+ngton set out with a small command, by the way of Will's Creek, to forcibly occupy the Forks. His advance party were building a fort there, when the French appeared and easily drove them off. Then followed Was.h.i.+ngton's defeat at Great Meadows (July 4). The French were now supreme at their new Fort Duquesne.

The following year, General Braddock set out from Virginia, also by Nemacolin's Path; but, on that fateful ninth of July, fell in the slaughter-pen which had been set for him at Turtle Creek by the Indians of the Upper Lakes, under the leaders.h.i.+p of a French fur-trader from far-off Wisconsin.

From the time of Braddock's defeat until the close of the war, French traders, with savage allies, poured the vials of their wrath upon the encroaching settlements of the English backwoodsmen. Nemacolin's Path, now known as Braddock's Road, made for the Indians of the Ohio an easy pathway to the English borders of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland. In the parallel valleys of the Alleghanies was waged a partisan warfare, which in bitterness has probably not had its equal in all the long history of the efforts of expanding civilization to beat down the encircling walls of barbarism. In 1758, Canada was attacked by several English expeditions, the most of which were successful. One of these was headed by General John Forbes, and directed against Fort Duquesne. After a remarkable forest march, overcoming mighty obstacles, Forbes arrived at his destination to find that the French had blown up the fortifications, some of the troops retreating to Lake Erie and others to rehabilitate Fort Ma.s.sac on the Lower Ohio.

Thus England gained possession of the valley. New France had been cut in twain. The English Fort Pitt commanded the Forks of the Ohio, and French rule in America was now doomed. The fall of Quebec soon followed (1759), then of Montreal (1760); and in 1763 was signed the Treaty of Paris, by which England obtained possession of all the territory east of the Mississippi River, except the city of New Orleans and a small outlying district. In order to please the savages of the interior, and to cultivate the fur-trade,--perhaps also, to act as a check upon the westward growth of the too-ambitious coast colonies,--King George III. took early occasion to command his "loving subjects" in America not to purchase or settle lands beyond the mountains, "without our especial leave and license." It is needless to say that this injunction was not obeyed. The expansion of the English colonies in America was irresistible; the Great West was theirs, and they proceeded in due time to occupy it.

Long before the close of the French and Indian War, English colonists--whom we will now, for convenience, call Americans--had made agricultural settlements in the Ohio basin. As early as 1752, we have seen, the Redstone fort was built. In 1753, the French forces, on retiring from Great Meadows, burned several log cabins on the Monongahela. The interesting story of the colonizing of the Redstone district, at the western end of Braddock's Road, has been outlined in Chapter I. of the text; and it has been shown, in the course of the narrative of the pilgrimage, how other districts were slowly settled in the face of savage opposition. Although driven back in numerous Indian wars, these American borderers had come to the Ohio valley to stay.

We have seen the early attempt of the Ohio Company to settle the valley. Its agents blazed the way, but the French and Indian War, and the Revolution soon following, tended to discourage the aspirations of the adventurers, and the organization finally lapsed. Western land speculators were as active in those days as now, and Was.h.i.+ngton was chief among them. We find him first interested in the valley, through broad acres acquired on land-grants issued for military services in the French and Indian War; Revolutionary bounty claims made him a still larger landholder on Western waters; and, to the close of the century, he was actively interested in schemes to develop the region.

We are not in the habit of so regarding him, but both by frequent personal presence in the Ohio valley, and extensive interests at stake there, the Father of his Country was the most conspicuous of Western pioneers. Dearly did Was.h.i.+ngton love the West, which he knew so well; when the Revolutionary cause looked dark, and it seemed possible that England might seize the coast settlements, he is said to have cried, "We will retire beyond the mountains, and be free!" and in his declining years he seemed to regret that he was too old to join his former comrades of the camp, in their colony at Marietta.

As early as 1754, Franklin, in his famous Albany Plan of Union for the colonies, had a device for establis.h.i.+ng new states in the West, upon lands purchased from the Indians. In 1773, he displayed interest in the Walpole plan for another colony,--variously called Pittsylvania, Vandalia, and New Barataria--with its proposed capital at the mouth of the Great Kanawha. There were, too, several other Western colonial schemes,--among them the Henderson colony of Transylvania, between the c.u.mberland and the Tennessee, the seat of which was Boonesborough.

Readers of Roosevelt well know its brief but brilliant career, intimately connected with the development of Tennessee and Kentucky.

But the most of these hopeful enterprises came to grief with the political secession of the colonies; and when the coast States ceded their Western land-claims to the new general government, and the Ordinance of 1787 provided for the organization of the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio, there was no room for further enterprises of this character.[A]

The story of the Ohio is the story of the West. With the close of the Revolution, came a rush of travel down the great river. It was more or less checked by border warfare, which lasted until 1794; but in that year, Anthony Wayne, at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, broke the backbone of savagery east of the Mississippi; the Tec.u.mseh uprising (1812-13) came too late seriously to affect the dwellers on the Ohio.

There were two great over-mountain highways thither, one of them being Braddock's Road, with Redstone (now Brownsville, Pa.) and Pittsburg as its termini; the other was Boone's old trail, or c.u.mberland Gap. With the latter, this sketch has naught to do.

By the close of the Revolution, Pittsburg--in Gist's day, but a squalid Indian village, and a fording-place--was still only "a distant out-post, merely a foothold in the Far West." By 1785, there were a thousand people there, chiefly engaged in the fur-trade and in forwarding emigrants and goods to the rapidly-growing settlements on the middle and lower reaches of the river. The population had doubled by 1803. By 1812 there was to be seen here just the sort of bustling, vicious frontier town, with battlement-fronts and ragged streets, which Buffalo and then Detroit became in after years. Cincinnati and Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City, had still later, each in turn, their share of this experience; and, not many years ago, Bismarck, Omaha, and Leadville. From Philadelphia and Baltimore and Richmond, there were running to Pittsburg or Redstone regular lines of stages for the better cla.s.s of pa.s.sengers; freight wagons laden with immense bales of goods were to be seen in great caravans, which frequently were "stalled" in the mud of the mountain roads; emigrants from all parts of the Eastern States, and many countries of Europe, often toiled painfully on foot over these execrable highways, with their bundles on their backs, or following scrawny cattle harnessed to makes.h.i.+ft vehicles; and now and then came a well-to-do equestrian with his pack-horses,--generally an Englishman,--who was out to see the country, and upon his return to write a book about it.

At Pittsburg, and points on the Alleghany, Youghiogheny, and Monongahela, were boat-building yards which turned out to order a curious medley of craft--arks, flat- and keel-boats, barges, pirogues, and schooners of every design conceivable to fertile brain. Upon these, travelers took pa.s.sage for the then Far West, down the swift-rolling Ohio. There have descended to us a swarm of published journals by English and Americans alike, giving pictures, more or less graphic, of the men and manners of the frontier; none is without interest, even if in its pages the priggish author but unconsciously shows himself, and fails to hold the mirror up to the rest of nature.

With the introduction of steamboats,--the first was in 1811, but they were slow to gain headway against popular prejudice,--the old river life, with its picturesque but rowdy boatmen, its unwieldy flats and keels and arks, began to pa.s.s away, and water traffic to approach the prosaic stage; the crossing of the mountains by the railway did away with the boisterous freighters, the stages, and the coaching-taverns; and when, at last, the river became paralleled by the iron way, the glory of the steamboat epoch itself faded, riverside towns adjusted themselves to the new highways of commerce, new centers arose, and "side-tracked" ports fell into decay.

[Footnote A: See Turner's "Western State-Making in the Revolutionary Era," in _Amer. Hist. Rev._, Vol. I.; also, Alden's "New Governments West of the Alleghanies," _Bull. Univ. Wis._, Hist. Series, Vol. II.]

APPENDIX B.

Selected list of Journals of previous travelers down the Ohio.

_Gist, Christopher._ Gist's Journals; with historical, geographical, and ethnological notes, and biographies of his contemporaries, by William M. Darlington. Pittsburg, 1893.

Gist's trip down the valley, from October, 1750, to May, 1751, was on horseback, as far as the site of Frankfort, Ky. On his second trip into Kentucky, from November, 1751, to March 11, 1752, he touched the river at few points.

_Gordon, Harry._ Extracts from the Journal of Captain Harry Gordon, chief engineer in the Western department in North America, who was sent from Fort Pitt, on the River Ohio, down the said river, etc., to Illinois, in 1766.

Published in Pownall's "Topographical Description of North America," Appendix, p. 2.

_Was.h.i.+ngton, George._ Journal of a tour to the Ohio River. [Writings, ed. by Ford, vol. II. New York, 1889.]

The trip lasted from October 5 to December 1, 1770. The party went in boats from Fort Pitt, as far down as the mouth of the Great Kanawha. This journal is the best on the subject, written in the eighteenth century.

_Pownall, T._ A topographical description of such parts of North America as are contained in the [annexed] map of the Middle British Colonies, etc. London, 1776.

Contains "Extracts from Capt. Harry Gordon's Journal,"

"Extracts from Mr. Lewis Evans' Journal" of 1743, and "Christopher Gist's Journal" of 1750-51.

_Hutchins, Thomas._ Topographical description of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina, comprehending the Rivers Ohio, Kenhawa, Sioto, Cherokee, Wabash, Illinois, Mississippi, etc.

London, 1778.

_St. John, M._ Lettres d'un cultivateur Americain. Paris, 1787, 3 vols.

Vol. 3 contains an account of the author's boat trip down the river, in 1784.

_De Vigni, Antoine F. S._ Relation of his voyage down the Ohio River from Pittsburg to the Falls, in 1788.

Graphic and animated account by a French physician who came out with the Scioto Company's immigrants to Gallipolis. Given in "Proc. Amer. Antiq. Soc.", Vol. XI., pp. 369-380.

_May, John._ Journal and letters [to the Ohio country, 1788-89], Cincinnati, 1873.

One of the best, for economic views. May was a Boston merchant.

_Forman, Samuel S._ Narrative of a journey down the Ohio and Mississippi in 1789-90. With a memoir and ill.u.s.trative notes, by Lyman C. Draper. Cincinnati, 1888.

A lively and appreciative account. Touches social life at the garrisons, _en route_.

_Ellicott, Andrew._ Journal of the late commissioner on behalf of the United States during part of the year 1796, the years 1797, 1798, 1799, and part of the year 1800: for determining the boundary between the United States and Spain. Philadelphia, 1803.

His trip down the river was in 1796.

_Baily, Francis._ Journal of a tour in unsettled parts of North America, in 1796 and 1797. London, 1856.

The author's river voyage was in 1796.

_Harris, Thaddeus Mason._ Journal of a tour into the territory northwest of the Alleghany Mountains; made in the spring of the year 1803. Boston, 1805.

A valuable work. The author traveled on a flatboat.

_Michaux, F. A._ Travels to the west of the Alleghany Mountains.

London (2nd ed.), 1805.

Excellent, for economic conditions. The expedition was made in 1802.