This name is sometimes written Magery. It is the same individual who caused the disaster at the Blue Licks in August 1782.
The treaty with the Shawnees was negotiated January 30, 1786, at Fort Finney, near the mouth of the Great Miami, by George Rogers Clark, Richard Butler, and Samuel H. Parsons, commissioners. The treaty with the Wyandots, Delawares, Chippewas, and Ottawas was negotiated at Fort McIntosh, January 21, 1785, by Clark, Butler, and Arthur Lee. These treaties were of little avail, so long as British agents like McKee, Elliott, and Simon Girty lived among the Indians and kept them in a constant ferment against the Americans.––R. G. T.
The several states which, under their colonial charters had claims to territory beyond the Ohio River,––Virginia, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts,––had (1781-84) relinquished their several claims to the newly-formed United States, and the Ordinance of 1787 had provided for this Northwest Territory an enlightened form of government which was to be the model of the constitutions of the five states into which it was ultimately to be divided. There was formed in Boston, in March, 1786, the Ohio Company of Associates, and October 17, 1787, it purchased from Congress a million and a half acres in the new territory, about the mouth of the Muskingum. Many of the shareholders were Revolutionary soldiers, and great care was taken to select only good men as colonists––oftentimes these were the best and most prosperous men of their several localities. Gen. Rufus Putnam, a cousin of Israel, and a near friend of Washington, was chosen as superintendent of the pioneers. Two parties––one rendezvousing at Danvers, Mass., and the other at Hartford, Conn.––arrived after a difficult passage through the mountains at Simrall’s Ferry (now West Newton), on the Youghiogheny, the middle of February, 1788. A company of boat-builders and other mechanics had preceded them a month, yet it was still six weeks more before the little flotilla could leave: “The Union Gally of 45 tons burden; the Adelphia ferry boat, 3 tons; & three log canoes of different sizes. No. of pioneers, 48.” The winter had been one of the severest known on the Upper Ohio, and the spring was cold, wet, and backward; so that amid many hardships it was the seventh of April before they arrived at the Muskingum and founded Marietta, named for the unfortunate Marie Antoinette, for the love of France was still strong in the breasts of Revolutionary veterans.––R. G. T.
Perhaps there never was a more strange compound derivative term than this. Being situated opposite to the mouth of Licking, the name was made expressive of its locality, by uniting the Latin word os, (the mouth) with the Greek, anti (opposite) and the French, ville, (a town,) and prefixing to this union from such different sources, the initial (L) of the river. The author of this word, must have been good at invention, and in these days of town making could find ample employment for his talent.
In 1788, John Cleves Symmes––uncle of he of “Symmes’s Hole”––the first United States judge of the Northwest Territory, purchased from congress a million acres of land on the Ohio, lying between the two Miami Rivers. Matthias Denman bought from him a square mile at the eastern end of the grant, “on a most delightful high bank” opposite the Licking, and––on a cash valuation for the land of two hundred dollars––took in with him as partners Robert Patterson and John Filson. Filson was a schoolmaster, had written the first history of Kentucky, and seems to have enjoyed much local distinction. To him was entrusted the task of inventing a name for the settlement which the partners proposed to plant here. The outcome was “Losantiville,” a pedagogical hash of Greek, Latin, and French: L, for Licking; os, Greek for mouth; anti, Latin for opposite; ville, French for city––Licking-opposite-City, or City-opposite-Licking, whichever is preferred. This was in August; the Fates work quickly, for in October poor Filson was scalped by the Indians in the neighborhood of the Big Miami, before a settler had yet been enticed to Losantiville. But the survivors knew how to “boom” a town; lots were given away by lottery to intending actual settlers, who moved thither late in December or early in January, and in a few months Judge Symmes was able to write that “it populates considerably.”