GENERAL RUFUS PUTMAN

The story of the coming of the pioneers is a twice-told tale to the student of our nation's history. In the disheartening gray dawn of a December morning, 1787, the first little band paraded before Manasseh Cutler's own church at Ipswich, and, after the firing of a salute, started "for the Ohio country," as their leading wagon proclaimed. Another joined this at Danvers, and yet another, pushing on from famous old Rutland, started from Hartford, Ct., led by the beloved and always inspiring General Putnam. The toilsome journey overland, along an old Indian trail through Connecticut and Pennsylvania, at that season of the year white with winter, ended at last at the Ohio River. Here, at Sumrill's ferry, out of timber that still sang of the forests, was built the Mayflower, her bows raking like a galley, her burthen fifty tons—a humble enough namesake of the famous Pilgrim vessel. As the pioneers went onward down the river, the snow, which at first lay heavy in the hollows of the hills, melted into thin patches here and there, until, when they reached Fort Harmar, at the fair mouth of the Muskingum, April bourgeoned into unexpected beauty about them. It was a golden augury for the little town, to which its soldier founders gave the name of Marietta, in grateful remembrance of the sympathy of Marie Antoinette for the colonies during the weary period of their Revolution, a name which still keeps her citizens lovers of that ill-fated Queen of France.

[OLD BLOCKHOUSE, MARIETTA.]

Enthusiastic news of the first summer of the colony went back over the mountains to Ipswich and Rutland. "The climate is exceeding healthy," blithely carols one of the old letters, "not a man sick since we have been here. We have started twenty buffalo in a drove—deer are plenty as sheep in New England. Turkeys are innumerable. We have already planted a field of one hundred and fifty acres in corn." Another settler drips from his ecstatic, and, we trust, veracious quill, "The corn has grown nine inches in twenty-four hours for two or three days past." The garrison, very soon erected for defence and called the Campus Martius in academic quaintness, is described as the "handsomest pile of buildings this side of the Alleghanies," and as presenting an appearance of almost mediæval stateliness and strength, bastioned as it was with great blockhouses and surrounded by a stout double wall of palisades. The Fourth of July was celebrated by a great "banquet," eaten in a bowery set up on the banks of the Muskingum; its menu tickles even a jaded modern palate—venison barbecued, buffalo steaks, bear-meat, roasted pigs, "the choicest delicacy of all," and a great pike, six feet long, the largest ever caught in the river. "We kept it up till after twelve o'clock at night," succinctly observes one of the participants, "and then went home and slept until after daylight." On the fifteenth of July, a yet more memorable occasion, General St. Clair, the first Governor of the Northwest Territory, was welcomed with great ceremonies, and the Ordinance of 1787 was read with much solemnity in the midst of profound silence. In early August a pleasant little ripple of diversion was caused by the arrival of the families of the pioneers. In the latter part of the same month, Dr. Cutler made a visit to the settlement, and delivered the first sermon ever preached at Marietta. In September was opened the first Court of Common Pleas in the Territory. It was an august spectacle. The sheriff, Colonel Ebenezer Sproat, of the Massachusetts line, preceded by a military escort, marched with his drawn sword and wand of office ahead of the governor, judges, secretary and others, to the blockhouse where the court was held. As the picturesque little procession wound its way along the river banks, the friendly Indians, loitering about the new city, admired immensely the mighty form of Colonel Sproat, who, being six feet four inches tall, towered conspicuously above his companions. Ever thereafter they called him Hetuck, or Big Buckeye, and ever since then the natives of Ohio have been dubbed "Buckeyes."

Great provisions were made for good order in the settlement; almost before the seeds of New England harvests had germinated in the virgin soil, Marietta had her pillory, whipping post and stocks for the discipline of evil-doers, instruments of torture which lingered as late as 1812. Every man was ordered to "entertain emigrants, visit the sick, feed the hungry, attend funerals, cabin-raising's, log-rollings, huskings and to keep his latch-string always out." Once during the fruitful summer the settlers assembled to attend a funeral, for the first death in the colony occurred in August, when little Nabby Cushing, daughter of Major Cushing, passed away. She was buried tenderly in the alien soil, where, in an unmarked grave, she is slumbering still. Although many years have come and gone between, a vague pity stirs to-day at the thought of that little pioneer baby, whose feet so soon grew weary in the vast wilderness.

The hospitality of the latch-strings was put to the test two years later, when a hapless colony of Frenchmen took shelter in the town, lured into the wilderness by the unscrupulous agent of a land company, with the promise that they should find a land where there were no taxes to pay, no military services to be performed, where frost, even in winter, was entirely unknown and where candles grew ready-made on the bushes and sugar dripped spontaneously from the trees. They were a curious crew: carvers, gilders, wig-makers and hair-dressers from Paris, even a Viscount of broken-down fortunes and a young Marquis, with a few peasants as helpless as themselves in the new conditions,—hardly a mother's son of them able to plough or reap or chop for himself, and many a man without a sou in his pocket. The major part of them drifted down the river that winter to what is now Gallipolis, the City of the Gauls, where they at once began to give balls in the cabins which the Marietta settlers helped them build, and proceeded to spend what little money they had in hiring American hunters to bring them game! A few became citizens of Marietta, notably Monsieur Thiery, a Parisian baker and confectioner, who quickly adapted himself to the new life, and made toothsome little sweet-cakes and bread for the settlement,—there is a tradition that while Louis Philippe was whiling away his exile in the United States, he visited Marietta, where he had the pleasure of eating a fair wheaten loaf of his countryman's baking, and Monsieur Cookie, bred to no trade, very short and very stout, who wore at all times and in all seasons a very tall steeple-crowned hat which once saved his life, when the Indians, catching sight of it bobbing up and down in the paw-paw bushes, fired at it in a vain attempt to hit the head within.

After the sober jollity of the first summer, the Marietta colonists experienced the hardships which every early settlement knows. They had their "sick years, their times of famine and their Indian wars." The sick years played a sad havoc in their numbers by dreadful scourges of epidemic diseases. The famous starving-time came in the spring and summer of 1790. A black frost falling out of due season ruined their crops, and the Indians, already beginning their hostilities, had driven from the forest every startled wild thing within their reach. It was a period that tried the Puritan mettle, for the solace of religion may prove vain if the stomach be empty. The only food was nettle-tops and the tender shoots of the pigeon-berry, boiled with a little corn pounded on the hominy block. Occasionally a hunter, faring far afield, brought in a bit of bear-meat or a wild turkey, which made a feast at least fitting if not full. The heroic matrons sipped spice-bush tea, unsweetened, in lieu of a more stimulating beverage. Many a heart turned back in homesick longing to where the blue haze curled comfortably from New England kitchens, but hope returned with the early squashes. The new corn crop was abundant, and from that day to this, whatever may have been their vicissitudes of fortune, the citizens of Marietta have never again been reduced to a starvation diet.

A much graver calamity, coming not long after, was the Indian wars, which were not to end for five long, weary years. During this time the town was strained to its generous capacity to receive under the shelter of the Campus Martius the men, women and children from remoter settlements. The settlers worked in the fields like the Israelites at the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem,—every man with his weapon in his hand. On the puncheon cabin-floors, mothers rocked their babies in the first cradles of Ohio, while often, on some far-off hill, they could see savage warriors brandishing their blood-stained hatchets in defiance at the fort.

The news of the defeat of General St. Clair's expedition caused consternation, and threatened for a time to break up the settlement. So disastrous was the defeat that when in 1793 Mad Anthony Wayne camped on the General's battlefield, his soldiers could not lie down to sleep for the bones of the unfortunate army. Humiliated by his misfortune and its implied disgrace, the Governor soon left his Marietta home. The colonists mourned with his loss that of his daughter Louisa, so brave, so lovely, so brilliant, that it seems no mere legend that the great Indian chief, Brandt, was madly in love with her.

In the grim terror of the times, an amusing incident now and then comes like a lilt of girlish laughter. Once the signal gun gave the alarm that the Indians were besieging the town. The night was dark and the confusion indescribable. Men rushed to their posts and the women and children scuttled to the central blockhouse. Colonel Sproat led the way with a box of valuable papers; next came a woman with her bed and children, and tumbling after her, old Mr. Moulton, with his leathern apron full of goldsmith's tools and tobacco. His daughter Anna carried the china tea-pot. Lyddy brought the great Bible. When all were in the frightened cry was raised that Mrs. Moulton was missing—that she had been scalped by the Indians. "Oh, no," said Lyddy calmly, "she'll be here in a minute. She stopped to put things a little to rights; she said she would not leave the house looking so." And in a few moments the old lady scuttled in, bearing the looking-glass—a triumph of New England housewifery!