Buffalo to Cleveland
439 M. BUFFALO, Pop. 506,775.
(Train 51 arrives 5:30; No. 3, passes 7:15; No. 41, 11:45; No. 25, 11:51; No. 19, 3:55. Eastbound: No. 6 passes 11:31; No. 26, 12:27; No. 16, 4:35; No. 22, 7:15.)
French trappers and Jesuit missionaries were the first white men to visit the site of Buffalo, and near here, on the east bank of the Niagara River at the mouth of Cayuga Creek, La Salle in 1679 built the "Griffin," with which he sailed up the Great Lakes to Green Bay, Wis. He also built Ft. Conti at the mouth of the river, but this was burned in the following year. Seven years later the marquis of Denonville in behalf of the French built here another fort, the predecessor of the various fortifications in this locality which were subsequently called Ft. Niagara.
Port of Buffalo on Lake Erie, 1815
Although the neighborhood was the scene of various operations during the War of Independence, not a single white settler was living on the site of the present city when the federal constitution was adopted in 1787, and the town was not laid out till after the second presidency of Washington. In 1801 Joseph Ellicott, sometimes called the "Father of Buffalo," plotted the site for a town, calling it New Amsterdam but the name of Buffalo Creek or Buffalo proved more popular. Ellicott was the agent of a group of Dutch capitalists called the Holland Land Co., who purchased a large tract of land for speculative purposes in the neighborhood of Buffalo (1792).
At an early period (1784) the present site of the city of Buffalo had come to be known as the "Buffalo Creek region," either from the herds of buffalo or bison, which, according to Indian tradition, had frequented the salt licks of the creek, or more probably for some Indian chief.
During the War of 1812 Buffalo was a frontier town, and, owing to its position on Lake Erie, very close to an important theater of operations. The first gun of the war is said to have been fired on Aug. 13, by a battery at Black Rock, then a rival, now a suburb of Buffalo, and shortly afterwards British soldiers from the Canadian garrison at Ft. Erie (directly across the Niagara River from Buffalo) made a raid into Buffalo harbour and captured the schooner "Connecticut." The Americans replied with a brilliant exploit in which Lieut. Jesse D. Elliott (1782-1845) crossed the river and captured the "Detroit" and the "Caledonia" under the guns of Ft. Erie.