Here it seems proper to digress for a moment as to the Scioto Company—or more particularly to discuss the fact that in those days not all public men were heroes, and some were not even honest. Then, as now, the forward-looking forces of progress had to contend with selfishness, politics, chicanery and downright dishonesty.
It has been before pointed out that when Cutler was negotiating with Congress for purchase of Ohio Company lands, a group had approached him with a proposal to make another purchase at the same time for another company, and that he used this larger purchase to secure passage of the Ordinance of 1787. This other company was the Scioto Company, whose membership is not known beyond a small group. Its negotiations with the Ohio Company were carried on by one man, a public official. Cutler and Putnam did not permit the Ohio Company of Associates to become entangled with this other company—beyond the fact that the two purchases were to be made at the same time.
The Scioto Company was to purchase some 3,500,000 acres in the valley of the Scioto River. They sent Joel Barlow, a fair poet perhaps, but of questionable business sagacity, to France to dispose of these lands to fear-worn French. Barlow employed one William Playfair to sell the lands, and it was in the booklet the latter prepared that the fantastic statements as to candles, custard, etc., appeared. The sale was highly successful. Middle-class French in such jeopardy between the revolutionists and the aristocracy, hastened to emigrate to the new land of dreams. What became of the moneys they paid for their new homes has never been proved. Someone absconded and when they landed at Alexandria, Virginia, they learned that the Scioto Company had never acquired title to the lands sold to them.
One interesting incident of this skullduggery is worth mention. Among the French settlers was François D’Hebecourt, a close boyhood friend of Napoleon Bonaparte. Bonaparte had originally considered joining the party, but remained behind to follow if his friend’s reports substantiated the claims made. In case the new country did come up to expectations, he was to follow D’Hebecourt, and establish a new empire somewhere in western America. Of course, D’Hebecourt’s reports of the villainy of the Scioto Company, the hovels they found for homes and the ensuing famine which the French settlers endured changed Bonaparte’s intentions, and he remained in France to leave his mark later on all Europe.
There are two very interesting suppositions suggested. Suppose the Scioto Company had kept its word, what might have been the subsequent history of the world? And suppose, as is altogether possible, that Bonaparte’s revulsion at the treatment of his countrymen had influenced him 13 years later in selling Louisiana Territory to the United States. The portent of such possibilities has no direct connection with our story, except to show what small affairs of men may affect all history and the millions of people who live afterward, and, an indication that the world is not worse, morally or ethically, now than it was then.
SPINNING
Drawn by Lloyd Hune, Marietta, Ohio
Through the intervention of President George Washington, Colonel William Duer of the Scioto Company agreed to transport the emigrants to their lands, opposite the mouth of the Big Kanawha. In the meantime, surveyors discovered that this village site lay within the Ohio Company Purchase, and not, as supposed, within the Scioto Purchase. Duer contracted with Putnam to erect buildings for the settlers. Accordingly, Major John Burnham, with 40 men, erected four rows of 20 cabins each, with blockhouses at the corners and a small breastwork in front. To these crude dwellings came the artisans, lawyers, jewelers, physicians, and servants, the exiled nobility of France. They were so ignorant of pioneer ways that some were killed beneath the fall of the trees they chopped down. When the Ohio Company adjusted its affairs in December, 1795, the French settlers paid for their land a second time by buying it for a dollar and a quarter per acre. At a later time the United States government granted these unfortunate French a tract of land near Portsmouth, Ohio, but few of them ever moved there.
During the Indian war these citizens of Gallipolis were not molested by the warriors, who still had friendly feelings toward their former French allies in Canada. The other settlers, however, were not so fortunate in escaping Indian hostility. On May 1, 1789, only four months after the Treaty of Fort Harmar, Captain Zebulon King was killed and scalped by two Indians at Belpre. In August two boys were killed two miles up the Little Kanawha River in Virginia. Murders occurred with increasing frequency along the frontier. Settlers in Virginia, Kentucky, and the Ohio settlements called for protection. In 1790, Washington sent Harmar northward from Cincinnati with an expedition to punish the Indians in the Miami country, and compel obedience to the treaties of Fort McIntosh and Fort Harmar, but the warriors defeated his army so severely that they became bolder than ever in their revengeful attacks.