Waterways of Westward Expansion - The Ohio River and its Tributaries

by Archer Butler Hulbert

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: