The Pioneers

by David McCullough

  The situation at Sumerill’s Ferry was not at all as wished. The same severe weather, deep snows, and bitter cold experienced by Putnam’s party had greatly delayed progress. As Putnam would report to Manasseh Cutler, “No boats built, boards or planks in readiness, or person capable of building a canoe, much less a boat.” Waterpower for the sawmill had been frozen. Five workers had taken ill with smallpox through inoculation. Only with the recent thaw had the ice begun to melt to the point where the sawmill could operate.

  With the additional force of men now at hand and Putnam in charge, a “new spirit was infused into the workmen” and with Captain Devol overseeing work at the boatyard progress on the necessary “fleet” moved forward steadily.

  It took what remained of February and all of March to build a large, roofed galley, forty-five feet in length and twelve feet wide, “strongly timbered” and capable of carrying fifty tons. A smaller flatboat was also completed, in addition to three dugout canoes, and, as would be said, the burdens canoes could bear should never be underestimated.

  Ebenezer Sproat and several others set off with packhorses to round up the necessary provisions—flour, beans, pork, venison hams, bread, butter, and salt. By the second of April, all was ready. And lest there be any doubt of their seeing their journey as an extension of their heritage, the big boat, at first called the “Adventure Galley,” had been renamed the “Mayflower.” So early that afternoon the new Mayflower pushed off carrying perhaps thirty men, the others, along with a large quantity of tools, tents, and provisions, packed onto the smaller galley and canoes.

  The whole flotilla drifted away with the current northward some twenty miles to the point, at McKeesport, where the Youghiogheny merged with the larger, muddy yellow Monongahela. From there it was another twenty miles to where, at Pittsburgh, the Monongahela joined the clearer, faster-flowing Allegheny to form the Ohio. (Even three miles below the junction the waters of the Allegheny were to be distinguished from those of the Monongahela.)

  Pittsburgh at the time, a crude frontier settlement of no more than 150 log cabins and houses, was described as “an irregular poor built place” alongside old Fort Pitt inhabited by “a lazy set of beings” and where “money affairs” were at a low ebb. Its chief export was whiskey. But with its key location at the headwaters of the Ohio, Pittsburgh was the Gateway to the West and almost certain to have great promise.

  Springtime, with the water level high, was the best of seasons to travel the river. In the heat of summer, it could dry up to half its usual size. Come winter it could clog with ice for weeks on end. In fall the water nearly always returned to its proper level. Still there was no time like spring and so in that respect the expedition was under way just when it should have been.

  For thirty miles beyond Pittsburgh, the Ohio flowed not west but almost due north, past sparsely populated river settlements and the ruins of the Seneca village of Logstown, where Queen Aliquippa once held sway. Not far beyond, the river did indeed swing west until the mouth of the Beaver River, where it headed south-southwest. But then the river kept on twisting and turning. So “completely serpentine” was it that, in some places, as was said, “a person taking observations of the sun or stars, will find that he sometimes entirely changes his direction, and appears to be going back.”

  Islands and sandbars were past counting. (As later determined, there were in fact a total of ninety-eight islands.) There were besides sunken trees firmly embedded in the river bottom—“planters” as they were called—and “sawyers,” sunken trees also, but with free ends that heaved up and down with the current, as well as ordinary snags.

  For those on board the Mayflower who had long looked forward to being off at last on a shimmering, sunlit voyage on the legendary “Beautiful River,” the disappointment could only have been great. It rained day after day, soft rain, hard rain, for hours on end. “A very disagreeable time,” recorded a young surveyor with the party, John Mathews.

  On Saturday, April 5, the boats “tarried” a full day at the mouth of Buffalo Creek, to take on additional supplies and a quantity of poplar boards for building temporary huts. More heavy rain followed the next day. Nonetheless, at half past eight, with everything aboard, the expedition continued past Wheeling on the left or “Virginia side” of the river. Though still only a tiny backwoods settlement, Wheeling was growing steadily, in contrast to the northern side where there was as yet not a single legal settlement. The Virginia wilderness was already thought to have a population of more than a hundred thousand.

  Late in the afternoon that Sunday, the Putnam expedition tied up on the Virginia side of the Ohio River, at what was known as Round Bottom, a notable location of some 587 acres belonging to George Washington. The confluence of the Muskingum was by then sixty miles downstream, so, in order to arrive by daylight, the party rested there for five hours.

  By this point they had traveled 140 miles on the rain-swollen Ohio. And though the celebrated charm of the river had been greatly diminished by the weather, one important, welcome change to be seen in the passing landscape was the arrival of spring. Back at Sumerill’s Ferry and Pittsburgh the trees were still bare. Here they were in full green leaf, “delightsome,” as said by one of the young pioneers.

  “At half past nine got under way,” recorded John Mathews, “and run all night without meeting with any accident.”

  Overcast skies and still more rain followed the next morning, visibility not at all what would be desired for such an anticipated arrival. The flotilla drifted on past a long, narrow island—Kerr’s Island—that seemed to bend with the river, and at about this point Captain Devol remarked to General Putnam, “I think it is time to take an observation; we must be near the mouth of the Muskingum.”

  To make matters more difficult, the riverbanks were so overgrown with giant sycamores in full leaf that the incoming Muskingum on the north side of the river was practically concealed. As a result the party drifted on by and had to be pulled back upstream on ropes by soldiers from the garrison at Fort Harmar.

  At last, about one o’clock, Monday, April 7, the galley tied up near the Point, as it was known, latitude 39° 25' North, longitude 81° 20' West. The pilgrims aboard their Mayflower had landed at Plymouth Rock.

  As long and arduous as was so much of the journey, there had been no loss of life, nor, as plainly evident, no loss of spirit. “We arrived . . . most heartily congratulating each other on the sight of our new country,” wrote one of them. The first to leap ashore, it would be said, was young Jervis Cutler, who grabbed an ax and cut down the first tree, which, as also said, was a buckeye.

  On hand for the arrival were some seventy native men, women, and children led by a Delaware chief, Captain Pipe, neatly dressed in leggings and breechcloth and wearing large copper earrings. His name was not new to Rufus Putnam and the others. According to the widely known story of the torture and burning alive of Colonel William Crawford six years earlier, it had been Captain Pipe who painted Crawford’s face black, the ceremonial sign of what was in store for him.

  All the natives gathered at the Point seemed quite friendly. Pipe himself greeted the new arrivals as brothers. “As long as the sun and moon endured,” he declared, the Delawares, Wyandots, and Yankees shall be friends and brothers.

  Privately, Rufus Putnam thought it best to wait and see.

  The new arrivals went right to work, unloading the boats, making camp among the trees, and on a bit of open land by the Muskingum, putting up a large tent, the “marquee,” that was to be Putnam’s headquarters. “They commenced with great spirit, and there is a prospect of it becoming a flourishing place in a short time,” wrote an officer from Fort Harmar named Joseph Buell. To General Josiah Harmar it was already obvious these were “quite a different set of people” from the usual frontiersmen.

  Only days later, Ebenezer Sproat and John Mathews, with their surveyors’ chains and compasses and a crew of thirteen, set out to survey eight-acre lots Rufus Putnam had planned along what were k
nown as the bottomlands by the Ohio and the Muskingum. Each settler was to be given both a small “in-lot” within the town for a place of residence and an “out-lot” of eight acres on which to grow crops.

  With his commanding height, Sproat had caught the attention of the local Indians almost from the moment he stepped ashore and was given the name “Old Hetuck”—“Big Buckeye.”

  Six thousand acres were set apart for what in all-out optimism was called a “new city.” Rufus Putnam had overall charge of the survey and all elements of the plan, residential lots, straight streets, and public squares, all as in a compact New England town. Indeed, it was and would remain his foremost intention to create a “new New England” in the wilderness.

  The main streets were to conform to the course of the Muskingum and extend upstream a little more than a mile. They were to be ninety feet wide and crossed at right angles by others seventy feet wide. The main streets were designated by numbers, the cross streets by the names of officers of the American Revolution. One of these cross streets, a little north of the center of the plot, would be 120 feet wide, the widest, grandest of them all, and named Washington.

  The overriding, immediate tasks were clearing land and building shelter. Though accustomed as most were to hard work, few had had any experience in clearing virgin forests. Sometimes it took one man three to four weeks to chop down a single acre of hard-wooded forest, leaving the stumps in the ground. When it came to the largest of the trees, they had to be “girdled”—a ring of bark cut away around the trunk, so that the sap could not rise—and thus the tree would stand in place and slowly die. Many of the giant surviving stumps were to last for decades.

  Huge, accumulating log heaps demanded weeks of laborious attention unless the weather remained dry, which it seldom did. To keep them from rotting, the logs required constant rolling together and re-piling—heavy, dirty work.

  But persist the settlers did. In the words of an old Ohio Valley poem:

  The axe, in stalwart hands, with steadfast stroke,

  The savage echoes of the forest woke,

  And, one by one, breaking the world-old spell,

  The hardy trees, long crashing, with thunder fell.

  The site chosen for the settlement was an elevated plateau three quarters of a mile back from the Ohio on the eastern side of the Muskingum. Fort Harmar, its flags flying, stood prominently on a cleared bluff downstream on the opposite, or western side of the Muskingum, at the confluence with the Ohio.

  The fort had been built three years before, in 1785, on the orders of Josiah Harmar, not as protection against the native tribes but to protect them from the encroachment of illegal settlers, or “squatters,” on government land, crossing into Ohio from western Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky. Many of these were of Scotch-Irish descent and, as said, “not strongly attached to government either of the royal or proprietary kind.” Another characteristic was their “intense hatred of the Indians for whose treatment the extermination policy . . . was generally considered to be the proper model.” To move into the Ohio wilderness the squatters had only to cross the Ohio River.

  Of the two rivers, the Ohio and the Muskingum, the Ohio was much the larger, measuring about 400 yards from shore to shore in springtime. The natives called it “O-Y-O,” Great River. The Muskingum was roughly 200 yards across, but clearer and smoother-flowing. Muskingum, in the native tongue, meant “elk’s eye.”

  The waters of both rivers teemed with catfish weighing from three to as much as eighty pounds, buffalo fish from five to thirty pounds, sturgeon, and pike, and at the confluence of the rivers especially the fishing was ideal—all to the particular delight of the New Englanders.

  Wild turkeys and passenger pigeons were in unimaginable abundance. White-tailed deer, otter, elk, buffalo, beaver, wolves, and bear filled the forests in all directions. So plentiful were squirrels that hardly a day passed without a few hundred being killed.

  From the site of the new settlement the view, wherever visible through the trees, took in both rivers for at least three miles. In a letter to Manasseh Cutler, Rufus Putnam, never one to exaggerate, wrote that as a site for a future city it was the most beautiful he had ever seen.

  But the measureless forest, the gigantic trees of every kind—hickory, beech, sycamore, tulip, ash, buckeye, oaks six feet in diameter that reached fifty feet before breaking out in branches—were the dominating reality. Of all these it was the sycamore that seemed, in the words of one observer, the king of the forest. “Their monstrous growth, towering height, and extended branches really fill the beholder with awe.” And it was the immense task of clearing portions of open space that went on every day but Sunday, men working with “persevering industry.” Teamwork counted greatly in clearing land, as it did in facing almost every challenge to be met on the frontier. At times there could be as many as six axes chopping away in unison to bring down one single giant of the forest.

  Trees were the enemy standing in the way of progress. But clearly, too, in their immense size and variety, they spoke of rich, productive soil and could provide no end of firewood and logs for cabins and storage sheds. Yellow poplar was especially good for heavy planking. The buckeye was a favorite for making bowls, chairs, and cradles. Further, Rufus Putnam insisted, a new stockade for defense of the settlement had to be built without delay.

  However friendly had been the welcome given by Captain Pipe and his people, Putnam had reason to be cautious. During his time in New York on the route west, going over former treaties made with the native tribes, he had become quite concerned. “I was fully persuaded that the Indians would not be peaceable very long, hence the propriety of immediately erecting a cover for the immigrants who were soon expected.”

  Fort Harmar across the way was a log pentagon that enclosed within its walls about three quarters of an acre. Whatever sense of security it provided as protection against the Indians would hardly be enough as the settlement grew. This that Putnam planned was to be considerably larger and more substantial, capable of being a safe refuge for the whole settlement should there be an attack.

  Besides, the soldiers at Fort Harmar were not known for high standards of conduct. “Drunkenness and desertion” were prevalent evils, as Joseph Buell, one of the officers, recorded. The treatment of the soldiers was “excessively severe, and that flogging the men, to the extent of one and two hundred lashes, was an almost daily occurrence.

  They seem to have been selected from the most worthless and depraved remnants of the revolutionary soldiers; men too lazy and idle to engage in any laborious employments, and as their wages were only three dollars a month, no sober industrious man would engage in the service.

  As everyone knew, few were better prepared to design and build a fortification than General Putnam and the facility he created now in the wilderness was extraordinary, in that it went up in so little time, given all else that had to be done, and would serve so effectively as the bulwark of the settlement.

  Located half a mile up the Muskingum from the Point, it was to be a great square structure with outer walls 188 feet in length and would have, when completed, strong blockhouses at all four corners, each surrounded by a watchtower, and walls of yellow poplar planks four inches thick, and thirty-six residences.

  In all, it was designed to house 864 people. The front faced toward the Muskingum and in the center of the open court a well was dug to a depth of eighty feet, no small task in itself. Jonathan Devol was to supply the timber for the corner blockhouses. It was called Campus Martius (Latin for “Field of Mars”) and referred to as a stockade, not a fort.

  In addition, a good-sized timber wharf was erected on the Muskingum, opposite Fort Harmar, at which were moored the Mayflower, canoes, and a fine, new cedar barge for twelve oarsmen for General Putnam, this, too, built by Jonathan Devol.

  A substantial bridge went up over the creek—Tyber Creek—that flowed into the Muskingum in the southern part of the settlement. The bridge was fully twenty-five feet high, n
inety feet long, twenty-four feet wide, and covered with hewn planks four inches thick. It was the first bridge to be built in the Northwest Territory and was to stand for decades.

  The whole while dozens of cabins large and small, and crude huts or worse, were going up, so great was the need for shelter. One young man chose to spend the better part of a year quartered in the hollow trunk of an ancient tree.

  Jervis Cutler and another young pioneer, John Gardner, the son of a sea captain from Marblehead, Massachusetts, were clearing land together and making good progress. Gardner had come west, as did many others, in search of fortune and adventure. Then one morning, when Jervis was absent, as he sat resting on a tree stump, he was suddenly seized by a party of Shawnees who hurried him into the woods, where their horses were hidden. There they all mounted but one who walked and led the prisoner by a rope around his neck.

  That night with his hands tied behind his back, he was bound to the trunk of a sapling that had been bent to the ground. After the weary march of the second day, his captors, feeling they were beyond the fear of pursuit, eased up somewhat, shot a bear and a deer, roasted both over a fire and offered him “a plentiful repast.” They also tried to persuade him to join them, painted his face, cut off part of his hair, promised to make him “a good Shawnee,” even provide a Shawnee wife. Still they secured him as before.

  That night a light rain fell, making the thongs that bound him more pliable. By cautious and continued effort over several hours, he succeeded in releasing himself and slipped away into the dark forest. Walking all night and the following day in what he sensed was the direction of home, he slept the next night in a hollow log, then continued on the day after until finally he reached home, there to be “joyfully welcomed.”

  Though it is said that the next morning he and Jervis returned to their land clearing with renewed spirit, it is also true that John Gardner would soon depart for Marblehead and life at sea on his father’s ship, “doubtless preferring to encounter the ills he knew, than those he knew not of.”