CINCINNATI
ALWAYS A STRATEGIC POINT
By MILTON E. AILES
ON the day before Christmas, 1788, twenty-six adventurous men, in deerskin hunting shirts and leggins, with tomahawk, powder-horn and scalping knife at their belts, embarked at Limestone on the Ohio River in rude barges of their own construction, and fighting their way through dangerous floes, proceeded on a journey which was to prove memorable in the annals of American colonization.
These pilgrims were well aware of the perils and tragedies awaiting them, for their mission was to build them homes and found a city on the edge of the rich Miami Valley, through which mixed tribes of raging Shawnees, Senecas, Iroquois and Miamis roamed, determined to halt the threatening advance of the hated paleface.
The Indian braves realized that a crucial moment in their history had come. Their allies, the British, had gone down in defeat before the Thirteen Fires. Henceforth the tribes must look to their own councils, and rely upon their own strength, and they swore grimly that the Ohio should run with blood, and that the advent of every western pioneer should bring an additional scalp for the grewsome decoration of their lodges.
But these hardy voyagers, now celebrating a frugal Christmas as they steered their course down the swollen and half-frozen Ohio, were not to be turned aside by impending conflict with savage tribes. To meet grave danger like brave men was for them no new experience; they had passed through seven years of revolution; they had stood the trying tests of honorable hardships, and were now making their way to found a community which was to develop within a few generations into one of the greatest inland cities of the world. Four days they fought their way through floating masses of débris and ice, finally finding their haven in Sycamore Inlet, opposite the mouth of the Licking River. To-day the traveller, smoking meditatively in a Pullman, will cover the same distance before he has occasion to light a fresh cigar.
In a grove of sycamores, osiers and water maples they struck their flint and built their fires. There was no theatrical assertion of dominion, nor is it on record that sacred rites were invoked to consecrate the struggle for civilization that was to centre round this far outpost of the Republic, and yet their first performance was one of the most dramatic incidents in western history; for, knowing that savage armies lurked in the dim woods that overhung the terraces above them, these twenty-six hardy Anglo-Saxons dismantled the crafts that had carried them into the far wilderness, and converted the planks and timbers of their barges into cabins. There was to be no retreat. In the name of the new Democracy, they established the primitive beginnings of a great city in the very centre of the famous Indian path over which for unnumbered centuries naked aborigines from the Great Lakes to the Kentucky hunting grounds had hurried to battle or the chase.
The new settlement thus became a bold and significant challenge to the red man, and in its fate was involved the future of the West and of the nation. The earthquake of war, which the founding of Cincinnati invited, was not long delayed, and when it came it startled Washington from his incomparable composure, and shook the Republic to its foundations.
From the moment of its inception, Cincinnati was the most important point on the Ohio River. Other settlements, it is true, at the start hoped to outstrip Cincinnati in population. There was Marietta, founded two months before, which had a more romantic birth. And there was North Bend, which enjoyed the personal backing of John Cleves Symmes, the famous pioneer who superintended the first development of the Miami Valley, and from whom Denman, Patterson and Filson, the promoters of the settlement that subsequently became Cincinnati, purchased the site of that city. These and other settlements along the river were, for a time, pointed to with pride by their founders as the coming commercial centres. Cincinnati, moreover, began life with an impossible name. Filson, a fantastic pedagogue who had drifted into Kentucky, combining a smattering of tongues with an unbridled imagination, compounded the name "Losantiville," which means when interpreted, "the village opposite the mouth of the Licking." Historians, in malign humor, seem to rejoice in the sudden translation of this picturesque polyglot and town-site boomer, remarking with a certain gleeful unanimity of phrase that "shortly after naming the settlement he was scalped by the Indians."