[TYLER-DAVIDSON FOUNTAIN.]

The offer of free lots to original settlers did not give Cincinnati pre-eminence, for similar lures were held out by other aspiring communities along the Ohio; nor will it be seriously contended that the location there of Fort Washington, although this made the spot the headquarters of the American army in the Northwest, gave Cincinnati a superior start, for the sense of security expected because of the presence of the United States garrison was not abiding. General Harmar marched to defeat in 1790 from this pioneer fort and arsenal, and the victorious savages pursued him until their cries of exultation terrified the little hamlet clustered about the military station.

Then came St. Clair, bold and assertive. Heroes of the Revolution had founded the town. The fort had been named in honor of the great General and President, and as both town and fort represented the extension into the West of that democratic strength of arms which had humbled the most powerful kingdom of Europe, this new settlement from which civilization was to radiate into the western valleys should be dignified with the name of the order that held together in fraternal bond the grizzled survivors of the great war. And so Losantiville, the dream of a bizarre scholar, became Cincinnati.

In the name of that order and city, St. Clair went to war. But sickness laid him low, and he was carried to the field of battle wrapped in flannels. Managing the forces against him was Thayendanegea, the celebrated Mohawk, or Joseph Brandt, as the English called him, as astute as Tecumseh and as fearless. Thayendanegea had been secretary to Sir Guy Johnson. He had learned the tactics of civilized armies, and with masterful native cunning he planned to annihilate the forces of St. Clair. Nearly fifteen hundred officers and men marched away from Cincinnati to crush the semi-savage captain who had directed the massacres of Minisink and Wyoming, and back to Cincinnati in rout and dishonor, their guns and blankets abandoned, rushed in unspeakable terror a pitiful five hundred. Before sundown on the day of that battle, November 4, 1791, nearly a thousand scalps of white men dangled from the wigwams of the armies of Thayendanegea.

Other communities along the Ohio looked with envy upon the federal ramparts at Cincinnati, but the protection afforded by the garrison was at first more fanciful than real. The pioneer clergymen of the town ventured to Sabbath services cautiously, rifle in hand, peering down the dim aisles hewn through dense woods of linden and birch that led to a clearing, in the midst of which some charred stump served as a pulpit; or, as congregations grew, a log-built chapel housed the earnest worshippers. And by the law of Cincinnati and the territory every communicant was required to go to the altar with loaded firearms, that savages, taking advantage of the hour of prayer to attack the town, might be repulsed. Even when pews were built to give regularity to worship, the brethren were commanded to sit at the outer end, with their rifles in readiness.

If Fort Washington had not been built or had been located elsewhere, Cincinnati would have still become the metropolis of the Ohio. Here water highways crossed. And as it marked the path over which the red men had passed for ages, so now it became the intersecting point of civilized adventure. Out of the shadows of the Licking in their pirogues Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark had hurried across the Ohio to watch hostile campfires from the Cincinnati hills, and thence had descended upon the barbarians to avenge crimes committed in Kentucky. The long beaches at the Cincinnati site afforded safe landing, while the settlement, secure upon the higher ground and the succession of terraces beyond, could not be engulfed by the periodical river floods. North and south the rivers that mingled their waters here furnished natural pathways to vast and fertile valleys.

Here, too, a vanished race once had had a city or perhaps a capital, for Cincinnati is built upon extensive prehistoric ruins of the Mound Builders. It was a walled city with great gates, pyramids and sacrificial altars, and over these surviving memorials of a people whose origin and destiny are alike a mystery grew, when Cincinnati was founded, oak, beech, sycamore and cedar, whose concentric rings revealed that hundreds of years had elapsed since the disappearance of the race which had reared these shrines and tombs and city walls. Among the prehistoric pottery, the polished pipes of catlinite and stone axes such as a race of troglodytes might have swung to brain abhorrent monsters of forgotten periods, they will show you in the artistic Cincinnati Museum in Eden Park, the famed Cincinnati Tablet exhumed from a tumulus near Fifth and Mound streets in that city. Some antiquarians believe the sculptured stone to be an astronomical calendar or a table of measurement and calculation. Some have imagined it to be a sacred relic from the tomb of kings. Nearby, in the same museum, you see records lucidly deciphered from the second Theban dynasty, and carved inscriptions, intelligently translated, from the balustrade of the temple of Athene, but scholarship is dumb and imagination is the only interpreter of these strange mementos of a race which found in the site of Cincinnati a natural spot for the building of a large and fortified city.

Although the star of empire may have been destined at all hazards to pause over Cincinnati until the tenth census of the United States should show that the center of the nation's population had moved westward to that city, there was grave alarm in the settlement when the soldiers of St. Clair arrived in confusion and defeat.

[ENTRANCE TO SPRING GROVE CEMETERY.]

Generations have thrilled over the story of the officer on horseback, who, bearing important news, hurried to the President, tossed his bridle reins to an orderly and leaped up the steps of Washington's reception room only to find that the Chief Executive was dining with distinguished visitors and could not be disturbed. The officer was so importunate and so impressive that the secretary was impelled to grant him audience. The grave President listened without visible emotion to the whispered message from Cincinnati, the officer departed, and Washington returned to the banquet table. Not one of his guests could guess that beneath the calm exterior the far-seeing statesman was experiencing one of the most tragic moments of his career. It was not merely that a trusted general had minimized warning and had met defeat, for Washington had devoted a long life to warfare against both savage and civilized foes, and he was not to be easily moved by the uncertain fortune of battles. But he knew that the defeat which the soldiers of Cincinnati had encountered now threatened the destiny of the country. The East and West were not yet riveted by steel rails into coherent union. Beyond the Alleghanies there were projects of a protectorate under France or Spain, or both, and bolder dreams of a Kentucky republic. With few connecting links with the East, what could hold the western empire, since the federal government had displayed inability to protect the pioneers? Washington's guests departed unaware that their illustrious host who had entertained them with consummate decorum had during those hours felt the nation slipping beneath his feet. But when they had gone the pent spirit of the great leader, in one of the few instances of his lifetime, found expression in tumultuous grief and rage. He voiced in advance the storm of public protest, indignation and fear that broke out when the dismal tidings from Cincinnati became known. And when Congress learned that Washington favored the creation of an army of five thousand to avenge the defeat of Harmar and St. Clair, there was little in the resourceful vocabulary of political abuse spared the President. Anti-expansionists called him an imperialist bent on converting the Republic into an empire. Why send an army to inevitable slaughter beyond mountain frontiers in a vain struggle for the wilderness of the Indians when the colonies then possessed more domain than the citizens of the Republic would ever be able to use?