And, speaking of boats and pioneers, Cutler records in his diary that on August 15, 1788, Tupper, who had been among the original party of settlers, took him down the river to see his new “mode for propelling a boat instead of oars.” This consisted of a “machine in the form of a screw with short blades, and placed in the stern of a boat, which we turned with a crank. It succeeded to admiration, and I think it a very useful discovery.” Thus, in the wilderness of Northwest Territory and 50 years before it came into general use, the screw propeller was invented and successfully demonstrated.
On April 1, 1788, the 48 pioneer settlers of the Northwest Territory launched their boats out into the Youghiogheny and pushed down that river to the Monongahela. At Pittsburgh they swung out into the current of the broad Ohio. John Mathews had been working since February 27 to collect provisions for the expedition at the mouth of Buffalo Creek (now Wellsburg, West Virginia). The horses, oxen and wagons had been sent overland to this point. After stopping the entire day of April 5 to load these provisions, and their equipment, the little flotilla floated on and arrived at the mouth of the Muskingum on the morning of April 7. The banks of the Muskingum at that time were lined with tall sycamores, which leaned out over the water, and so narrowed the mouth that the pioneers could not see it through the rain. Consequently the current carried them past the mouth of the Muskingum and below Fort Harmar. With ropes and the help of soldiers from the fort, the boats were towed back into the Muskingum. Then the pioneers rowed across and landed at noon above the upper point.
In what sense were these 48 founders of Marietta the first settlers in the Northwest Territory? Certainly they were not the first white men to live in the Ohio country. Sault Ste. Marie was planted by Marquette in 1668, 120 years before the founding of Marietta. Burke A. Hinsdale has said that the French posts—Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Vincennes, and many others—in the old Northwest contained a population of 2500 people in 1766. Wisconsin, northern Minnesota, Michigan, and Illinois had been major scenes of French exploration and settlement for a hundred years. But the French made no attempt to colonize their settlements; they preferred to keep the wilderness a vast, unbroken game preserve for trapping furs and Indian trading.
When the English secured possession of the country northwest of the Ohio River at the end of the French and Indian War, the British government angered the colonies, first by the decree of 1763 forbidding settlement, and later by ignoring the colonial charters which had granted the colonies territory “from sea to sea” and passing the Quebec Act of 1774, in which representative government was abolished.
It is not possible, a hundred and fifty years later, even if it were possible at the time, to interpret the working of the minds of the English king and council. It is a fair surmise, however, supported by considerable evidence, that the crown then saw the threat of American independence, if the American people could establish themselves in this vast and fertile empire beyond the mountains where physical geography alone would make it impossible for the mother country to hold the colonies in subjection or enforce her decrees upon them.
LANDING OF PIONEER SETTLERS IN NORTHWEST TERRITORY AT MARIETTA
As early as 1761 Frederick Post from Pennsylvania, a Moravian missionary to the Indians, built perhaps the first “American’s” house in Ohio on the Tuscarawas River. On May 3, 1772, David Zeisberger and a company of Christian Indians established Moravian villages at Schoenbrunn, Gnadenhutten, and Lichtenau (near present New Philadelphia). Clarksville, now a suburb of Jeffersonville, Indiana, had been established by George Rogers Clark in 1784. Wiseman’s Bottom, four miles above the mouth of the Muskingum, was named after a man who made a clearing as entry right to 400 acres while Virginia still claimed the land north of the Ohio. During the Revolutionary War squatters began to settle northwest of the Ohio. Since these squatters were trespassing on lands reserved by treaty for the Indians, Congress attempted to drive them out. Ensign John Armstrong reported in 1785 that “there are at the falls of the Hawk Hawkin [Hocking River] upwards of 300 families, and at the Muskingum a number equal.” The squatters even elected one William Hogland, governor. These temporary and unlawful settlements would defeat orderly settlement, and deprive the new nation of the income from sale of the lands. To prevent such illegal occupation Fort Harmar was erected on the Ohio at the mouth of the Muskingum.
Marietta was the first legal American settlement northwest of the Ohio River under the Ordinance of 1787.
The Ohio Company of Associates spoke so enthusiastically in praise of their land that other New Englanders jokingly referred to the purchase as “Putnam’s Paradise” and “Cutler’s Indian Heaven.” Aside from the fact that the land was hilly in some sections, it came up to the expectations of the settlers. In contrast to the cold weather they had experienced in Pennsylvania, the pioneers found that the trees were in leaf at the Muskingum and grass was high enough for pasturing their horses. Over the entire region stretched an almost unbroken forest of great poplar, sycamore, maple, oak, hickory, elm, and other trees. Cutler records that on his visit to Marietta he saw a hollow tree forty-one and a half feet in circumference that would hold 84 men or afford room inside for six horsemen to ride abreast. The circles counted in one tree indicated that it was at least 463 years old. In boasting of the fertility of the land one settler wrote that “the corn has grown nine inches in twenty-four hours, for two or three days past.” Buffalo and elk were found in the woods when the pioneers arrived. A hunter could kill 20 deer in one day near Marietta. Wild turkeys weighing from 16 to 30 pounds were caught in pens and clubbed to death. The woods were alive with foxes, opossum, raccoon, beaver, otter, squirrels, rabbits and other small game. Bears, panthers, wild cats, and wolves were a menace to stock. Schools of fish made so much noise with their flopping against the boats that the men could not sleep on board. The largest fish caught were a black catfish weighing 96 pounds and a pike six feet long, weighing almost a hundred pounds.