Waterways of Westward Expansion - The Ohio River and its Tributaries

by Archer Butler Hulbert

“I do certify that all mankind, agreeable to every constitution formed in America, have an undoubted right to pass into every vacant country, and there to form their constitution, and that from the confederation of the whole United States, Congress is not empowered to forbid them, neither is Congress empowered from that confederation to make any sale of uninhabited lands to pay the public debts, which is to be by a tax levied and lifted [collected] by authority of the Legislature of each State.”[40]

On January 31, 1786, a treaty was concluded at the mouth of the Great Miami with the Shawanese. The United States received from that dangerous nation a title to the lower Ohio Valley. But the general government was by this time at its wits’ end to keep the acquired territory from the restless inhabitants of its own impoverished colonies. Colonel Harmar wrote the Secretary of War now that he had, by force of arms, driven off all intruders for a distance of seventy miles below Pittsburg, but that the number beyond “was immense” and that nothing could prevent the lands being occupied in the old Virginia way “unless Congress enters into immediate measures.” Congress took the cue and resolved that if troops stationed at Pittsburg could not enforce its commands, a new garrison must be established on the lower Ohio. Accordingly Colonel Harmar was ordered to take post on the north side of the Ohio between the Muskingum and the Miami Rivers, where he could successfully keep the front ranks of the immigration army from crossing the river, and where he could also protect the surveyors of the seven ranges from any insults of the Indians.[41] Under this order Fort Harmar was erected at the mouth of the Muskingum River (Marietta, Ohio) in 1785. Fort Harmar and Fort Finney, erected at the mouth of the Miami, nominally accomplished the purposes for which they were erected; the immigration movement across the Ohio was stopped until preparations had been made for it. They were the first legal homes of Americans north of the Ohio River after the Revolutionary War.

In the meantime propositions for the government of this great region north of the Ohio River were being debated in Congress; and finally it was declared to be the “Territory Northwest of the River Ohio” by the Ordinance of 1787. This famous act had been pending three years in Congress, but was passed within twelve days of the arrival in New York of Dr. Manasseh Cutler, hero-preacher and skilled diplomat; he came as the authorized agent of an Ohio Company of Associates which had been formed by Revolutionary veterans under the leadership of General Rufus Putnam in Boston in 1786 with special reference to the western land bounties promised by Congress in 1776 to faithful soldiers. The Ordinance organized from the lands ceded to the government by the several states the magnificent territory now occupied by the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The act itself was conceived in a petition signed by these Revolutionary soldiers composing the Ohio Company of Associates, and forwarded by General Putnam to General Washington, praying that the Government redeem its worthless scrip by grants of western land.

This a grateful government was willing to do. The difficulty was that it would be hazardous to organize a territory, to be suckled and protected at great expense, unless a considerable fraction of the area thus organized should be populated and developed by worthy citizens. The Ohio Company of Associates offered to take a million and a half acres. This was not satisfactory to the delegates in Congress. It was a mere clearing in all that vast stretch of territory between the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes. It was, therefore, on a momentous mission of reconciliation that Dr. Cutler hurried to New York. The “Territory Northwest of the River Ohio” could not be erected unless the Ohio Company took a considerable part of the lands. The Ohio Company, on the other hand, could not take land without the assurance that it was to be an integral part of the United States. The Ohio Company would make the Ordinance possible; the Ordinance made the Ohio Company’s purchase possible.

In order to realize the hopes of his clients, and, at the same time, satisfy the demands of the delegates at Congress, Dr. Cutler added to the grant of the Ohio Company an additional grant of three and a half million acres, taken by a Scioto Company on behalf of Colonel Duer and others. Thus by a stupendous speculation, unhappy in its results but compromising in no way the Ohio Company or its agent, and by shrewdly, though without dissimulation, announcing his determination to obtain lands from the individual states if Congress would not now come to terms, Dr. Cutler won a signal victory. The famed Ordinance was passed, corrected almost to the letter of his amendments, and Congress entered into the greatest private contract it had ever made. It was signed by Dr. Cutler and Major Winthrop Sargent for the Ohio Company and Samuel Osgood and Arthur Lee for the Treasury Department, October 27, 1787.

Speaking in general terms, therefore, the Ohio Valley from the Pennsylvania line to the mouth of the Muskingum was, in 1785-86, surveyed into the “Seven Ranges;” southwest of this, down the valley, came the Ohio Company grant of 1787. This embraced the lands from the seventh through the seventeenth range. The earnestness of these New Englanders is suggested by the immediate payment of half a million dollars down, when the contract was signed with the United States, and by the immediate arrival on the Ohio of the Ohio Company’s vanguard of settlers. These forty-eight “Pilgrims of Ohio,” under the leadership of the noble Putnam, reached the Youghiogheny by way of the Old Glade Road through Pennsylvania in the midwinter of 1787-88. On the seventh of the following April they landed at the mouth of the Muskingum. Here, across the Muskingum from Fort Harmar, they built their pioneer castle, around which grew up Marietta—named in honor of Marie Antoinette, whom its founders, old Revolutionary veterans, had learned to love. In July, General Arthur St. Clair, the newly-appointed governor of the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio arrived, and with imposing ceremony, the administration of the great Territory was inaugurated. Within two years five colonies had been planted by the Ohio Company, four in the Muskingum Valley and one on the Ohio, opposite the mouth of the Little Kanawha River. The “Indian Side” of the “white foaming river” had now received its first permanent quota of white settlers.[42]

In the same year, 1787, John Cleves Symmes and associates, largely from New Jersey, entered into correspondence with Congress for the purchase of a million acres of land north of the Ohio, lying between the Little and Great Miami Rivers. This “Symmes” or “Miami” purchase was achieved, and the Marietta pioneers saw the Miami settlers passing down the Ohio late in 1788 en route to their lands two hundred miles away. In point of daring no pioneer movement in America, save only the founding of Boonesborough, Kentucky, was more plucky than the founding of what is now Cincinnati. In December, Losantiville (Cincinnati) was settled, opposite the mouth of the Licking River. The Symmes company also settled Columbia, at the mouth of the Little Miami, and North Bend (Indiana) a little to the west. Each of the three settlements vied with the others for supremacy. Judge Symmes located at North Bend, but Fort Washington was erected at Losantiville and, the name being changed to Cincinnati, that settlement became the metropolis of the Ohio River below Pittsburg; the seat of government of the Northwest Territory was moved hither in 1790.

Therefore in 1790, when the Indian War broke out, the northern bank of the Ohio was settled, in a certain sense, between the mouths of the Muskingum and Scioto and the mouths of the Little and the Great Miami. But these light spots in all the darkness of the Black Forest, as the West was familiarly called, were, after all, but one shade lighter than the surrounding wilderness. The population of the Ohio Company settlements was only a few score; Cincinnati, six years after its founding, could only number, garrison and all, an equal number of hundreds. The founders of Cincinnati, like those of Marietta, were of the best of colonial and revolutionary stock; but, because of the contaminations of the rough frontier, their settlements became what Pittsburg was throughout its early history. General Richard Butler, had he lived, might well have written Governor St. Clair at Cincinnati in 1800 the same words he penned General Irvine at Pittsburg in 1782—“am happy to find you can manage the d—ls of that country and the b—tes of the garrison.” Of Pittsburg in 1782 General Irvine wrote his wife: “There never was, nor I hope will there ever be, such a wretched, villainous place as this.” Of Marietta, equally disagreeable pictures were drawn by contemporaneous writers. It was a question whether or not the leaven of New England could leaven the whole lump. It did—with the help of good Virginian blood.

The next tract of land to be opened was that lying between the Ohio Company’s purchase and Judge Symmes’s, a six thousand square mile tract bounded on the east by the Scioto and on the west by the Little Miami. This was the Virginia Military District. The Old Dominion had voted her soldiers upon continental and state establishment bounties in western lands. The land that was granted (practically the old Henderson purchase between the Green and Tennessee Rivers) did not prove large enough. Virginia, guarding against this very contingency, had reserved the tract between the Scioto and Little Miami for bounty lands when she ceded her county of Illinois to the Government in 1784. Therefore in 1790 Congress passed a law “directing the Secretary of War to make return to the Governor of Virginia of the names of the Virginia officers and men entitled to bounty-lands, and the amount in acres due them.” The same act authorized the agents of the said troops to locate and survey for their use, between the two rivers, apparently in the wretched Virginia fashion, such a number of acres of land as, together with the number already located on the waters of the Cumberland, would make the amount to which they were entitled; these locations and surveys to be recorded, together with the names of those for whom they were made, in the office of the Secretary of State. The President was then directed to issue letters patent for these lands to the persons entitled to them, for their use or the use of their heirs, assigns, or legal representatives. The Secretary of State should forward these deeds to the executive of Virginia, to be delivered to the proper persons. It will be seen that the national Government issued the deeds, but did not make the surveys.[43]

The Indian War which raged from 1790 to 1795 was fought almost wholly north of the Ohio River basin with Fort Washington as the base of supplies.[44] The conflict delayed the pioneer movement into the Ohio Valley but, after the treaty of Greenville (1795), the movement was renewed with a rush. The Virginia Military District now (1796) began filling with Virginians, and under good and great men such as General Nathaniel Massie and Duncan McArthur, subsequently governor of Ohio, became a power in the old Northwest.