The Boards and the Staff of the Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County reprint these extracts in the hope that they will be interesting and informative to students of local history. Grammar, spelling, and punctuation have been changed to conform to current usage.
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
June, 1873
To the Editors of the GAZETTE:
The following extracts from the journal of Captain John Cooke of the Fourth Sublegion of General Wayne’s army will be of interest to your antiquary (if Fort Wayne is old enough to boast of antiquities), since it contains the earliest market quotations of your city, notices of the first sermons preached there, etc.
Captain Cooke was a son of Colonel William Cooke, Twelfth Pennsylvania Regiment of the Continental Establishment; he entered the legal profession, which he later abandoned for that of arms. He afterward lived and died at Northumberland Town, Pennsylvania.
His son, Jacob Cooke, Esq., is the possessor of this journal, which is written in a very scholarly hand and with great observance of details, most of which I have omitted as of no interest to the general reader. In the summer of 1792, Captain Cooke returned with General Wayne; with a party of officers on furlough to Philadelphia, he was personally introduced by General Wayne to General Washington. His fellow-officers accompanied him to a fashionable boarding school in Philadelphia. There, in his battle-stained clothes, he married his cousin, Jennie Cooke of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
John B. Linn
September 17, 1794
At 6:00 a.m. the army marched thirteen or fourteen miles to the Miami villages. We halted more than two hours near the ground where a part of Harmar’s army was defeated and directly opposite the point formed by the St. Joseph and the St. Mary’s rivers, until the ground was reconnoitered. It was late when the army crossed and encamped; our tents were not all pitched before dark.
September 18, 1794