The Pioneers

by David McCullough

  On an elevated plain just to the north of Campus Martius was a prominent, mysterious, and much talked about feature of the landscape that defied ready explanation except that it was the work of some ancient, vanished people. Spread across more than ninety acres was a variety of earthworks in direct lines, in squares and elevated mounds, including one dominant, conical burial mound thirty feet high. Rufus Putnam, who made careful maps of the area, called the entire system of earthworks the “Ancient Works.” The conical mound was known as the “Great Mound.”

  Accounts of such earthworks were already exciting eastern scholars. Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale, thought they proved the descent of the Indians from the Canaanites expelled from Palestine by Joshua. Benjamin Franklin speculated such mounds might have been constructed by Hernando de Soto in his wanderings.

  Three years earlier, in the winter of 1785, during his travels along the Ohio Valley, General Samuel Parsons had written to Ezra Stiles about what he took to be the remains of an ancient fortification at the mouth of the Muskingum, and that the size of the trees growing on top left little doubt that it had been abandoned long before America was discovered by Europeans. Not only was there a giant white oak more than three feet in diameter on top of the conical mound, but it appeared to have sprung from the remains of an earlier tree in the same place. So fascinated was Stiles with what Parsons had to report that he passed the letter on to Thomas Jefferson.

  Jefferson, who was long fascinated by Indian lore, was intensely interested in the mounds, but remained open-minded. “It is too early to form theories on those antiquities,” he wrote. “We must wait with patience till more facts are collected.”

  Rufus Putnam, who had studied every feature of the site, found “those works so perfect as to put it beyond all doubt that they are the remains of a work erected at an amazing expense perhaps some thousand years since, by a people who had very considerable knowledge of fortifications.” They were besides, he decided, people of “ingenuity, industry, and elegance.”

  He was in awe of the achievements of these ancient builders, noting that the gradual ascent to the tops of the two largest mounds, “Quadranaou” and “Capitolium” as they were called by the newcomers, were like a beautiful flight of steps in the yard of the governor’s house in Massachusetts. Nor was the gravel walk of the Boston Mall more regular than what was called “the covered way,” a walkway that he had measured to be 231 feet wide, which led from the Muskingum to the great mound, Quadranaou, and was framed by parallel earthen walls rising some twenty-six feet.

  What Putnam and the others did not know at the time was that the ancient ruins were as old as the ruins of Rome. As later archaeologists would determine, the whole complex was the work of what was known as the Ohio Hopewell culture and that the Great Mound was built between 100 BC, when the Hopewell began to occupy southern Ohio, and AD 500, making it more than 2,000 years old.

  At home in New England concern over the fate of the pioneers grew steadily. There had been little at all in the way of communication. Only rumors were plentiful and fearsome more often than not, and ever-increasing worries among families and friends. Manasseh Cutler had not had a word from Rufus Putnam, nor from Jervis, since they set off for the Ohio country.

  “It has . . . been currently reported here,” Cutler wrote to Putnam on April 21, “that you and your whole party were cut off going down the river by the Indians and not one escaped to tell the doleful tale. Terrible stories are spread respecting the hostility and number of the Indians. Wish we may be favored with an account of the matter from you.”

  Nearly a month later, there was still no word. “Have not received a line from you since you left New England,” Cutler wrote again to Putnam on May 15. All the same, Cutler assured him, the “spark for emigration” to the western country had “kindled into a blaze,” and numbers of families were preparing for the exodus.

  In a long letter dated May 16, 1788, that did get through to a friend back in Massachusetts named Isaiah Thomas, a publisher, Putnam gave a full description of the state of affairs there on the Ohio, and with the understanding that the letter could be published, which it was in the popular paper called the Massachusetts Spy.

  All was going as hoped, Putnam wrote. “That part of the purchase I have been over, far exceeds my expectations.” He had never seen soil so rich, trees of such size or so numerous. He described the views, the water supply, the favorable climate.

  He reported, too, that “In laying out our city we have preserved some of the [ancient] works from becoming private property, by including them within lots or squares appropriated to public uses.” It was a decision that can be rightly seen as a pioneering step in historic preservation.

  Finally, concerning the natives, Putnam could say only that a treaty was being planned. He had met with Captain Pipe and told him he and other settlers hoped they could all live in friendship and that they would be glad to see them at all times. However, in a letter to Manasseh Cutler written the same day, Putnam did not rule out the possibility of an Indian attack. “At present, we do not think ourselves perfectly secure from them.” Yes, the Delawares and Wyandots appeared very friendly, but he judged the Mingos, Shawnees, and Cherokees residing by the waters of the Scioto to be “a set of thievish murdering rascals.”

  Another letter that appeared back east at about the same time, this by an unidentified settler, expressed utmost wonder and joy, as though the promised land had indeed been reached at last.

  This country, for fertility of soil and pleasantness of situation, not only exceeds my expectations, but exceeds any part of America, or Europe, I ever was in. The climate is exceedingly healthy; not a man sick since we have been here. We have started [startled] twenty buffaloes in a drove. Deer are as plenty as sheep [are] with you. Beaver and otter are abundant. I have known one man to catch twenty or thirty of them in two or three nights. Turkeys are innumerable; they come within a few rods of us in the fields. We have already planted a field of one hundred and fifty acres in corn.

  Every now and then back home an occasional expression of doubt would appear concerning the “mania for Ohio immigration,” as in a letter published that spring in the Massachusetts Gazette:

  The delusive tales that have been told concerning the fertility of the western country have infatuated many of our citizens to such a degree that some of them have been led to harbor the idea that all the luxuries of life are to be had there in greatest abundance, without money and without price, and that with very little labor the fruits of the earth will yield most spontaneously. Inhabitants of Massachusetts, be not led away by such fairy tales, imbibe not such chimerical notions. Ever since our first parents were banished from the Garden of Eden, and God cursed the ground for Adam’s sin, it is a fixed decree that man shall, “Earn his bread by the sweat of the brow.” Ohio or no Ohio, this is a serious truth. . . . Stay at home, fellow citizens and till your farms, be industrious, and your labors will be crowned with success. Be not dupes to Ohio Quixotism.

  But “Ohio Fever” was by no means limited to Massachusetts or even New England. As strong as any endorsements were those from George Washington. “No colony in America was ever settled under such favorable auspices as that which has just commenced at Muskingum,” he wrote in one letter. “I know many of the settlers, personally, and there never were men better calculated to promote the welfare of such a community.”

  To the Marquis de Lafayette he wrote, “A spirit of immigration to the western country is very predominant. . . . Many of your military acquaintances, such as Generals Parsons, Varnum and Putnam, Colonels Tupper, Sproat . . . with many more, propose settling there. From such beginnings much may be expected.”

  New settlers kept arriving. Dr. Jabez True was the first physician to land at the Point, Paul Fearing, the first attorney. Both were still in their twenties. Another young man, James Backus from Connecticut, was notable for his affluence, as made evident by the extensive quantity of clothing and other “necessities” h
e had brought along for his venture “into the woods.

  Three shirts, two pair worsted stockings . . . one pair check trousers, one pair leather breeches, one pair Indian stockings, one pair shoes, one pair moccasins . . . twenty-six sheets of paper of fine quality, vial of ink, one case of instruments, one waistcoat, one silk handkerchief . . . two hatchets, one tomahawk, two Indian blankets . . . ten gallons whiskey . . . one red cedar box containing a needle, a small file, a leather wrapper with thread and needles.

  During his first year in the new settlement he was to spend most of his time building a frame house and “socializing” at teas and dinners with friends.

  Mary Owen, the first woman to join the settlement, arrived with her husband, James Owen. She was a nurse accompanying one of the directors of the Ohio Company, General James Varnum, who was suffering from a lung complaint.

  Samuel Parsons, too, came down the Ohio on a barge carrying Josiah Harmar, Winthrop Sargent, and some twenty-five others “pretty close crowded” on board, along with two cows, two calves, seven hogs, nine dogs, in addition to eight tons of baggage.

  More followed week after week to the point that the adventurers on the scene numbered nearly 100. And still more were expected. “Every prospect as to the goodness of our lands and the facility of producing the means of living, equal my most sanguine hopes,” reported Samuel Parsons to his wife back in Connecticut. He planned to begin work on a house the next day.

  The land was as good as to be found anywhere in the universe, asserted another of those who arrived on the same barge with Parsons. He was John May of Boston and soon clearing land and, as a man of means, had a crew working with him. “All hands clearing land . . . all busy . . . still clearing land,” he wrote repeatedly in his diary.

  From the moment he had stepped ashore John May appears to have taken heart from nearly everything he saw. The location “answers the best description I have ever heard of it, the situation delightfully agreeable, well calculated for an elegant city.” He was charmed by the Mound and, like so many, amazed by the abundance and variety of food to be had. “I dare say not a market in the world can produce a greater plenty than we shall have this fall.”

  At the end of May, a young army officer named Ebenezer Denny, newly assigned to Fort Harmar, wrote in his diary with much admiration about the newly established pioneers and how much they had accomplished in only two months time.

  These men from New England, many of whom were of the first respectability, old Revolutionary officers, had erected and were now living in huts immediately opposite us. A considerable number of industrious farmers had purchased shares in the [Ohio] company, and more or less arrive every week. A spacious city is laid out here. . . . About half a mile up the Muskingum, upon very commanding ground, the site of a very ancient and very extraordinary fortification, was erected a place of arms and security, called Campus Martius. Building put up of hewn timber, two stories high, forming an oblong square, with strong block-houses in each angle, leaving a considerable area [within]; here their stores, etc., were lodged, and some families perhaps more timid than others, reside, but generally both men and women appear enterprising.

  “Those people,” he further wrote, “appear the most happy folks in the world; greatly satisfied with their new purchase. But they certainly are the best informed, most courteous and civil to strangers of any people I have yet met with.”

  But as the weeks passed, John May, like numbers of others, began discovering not all was perfection in the promised land by the Ohio. “Myriads of gnats” were eating him alive. Not only did they “bite surprisingly, but got down one’s throat.” After eight backbreaking days clearing land, he was “inflamed” with poison ivy. “Thunder and lightning all night, little sleep for me.” Worst of all, his dog was shot at and injured so severely by a young settler that May had him killed and buried. “I tried to catch the fellow but he ran too nimble for me.”

  At night came the howling of wolves and “caterwauling” of panthers in the forests. Night and day there was the pungent, almost ceaseless smell of smoke in the air, from the fires that were kept going in the clearings, burning up giant heaps of brush and tree limbs.

  One night Captain Pipe and the Delawares had “hellish Pow-wows” across the Muskingum that went on well into the morning. Tired as he was, John May could not get to sleep. “I have no doubt in my mind that Psalmody had its origin in heaven,” he wrote, “and my faith is as strong that the music of these savages was first taught in hell.”

  Word came from the Virginia side of the Ohio that the settlement was about to be attacked by three strong parties of Chippewas, but that proved false. “At Boston,” observed May, “we are alarmed with fires and inundations—here the Indians answer the same purpose—wherever we go we must expect to meet with trouble.”

  Even before the onset of summer, several of the pioneers had had enough. “A number of poor devils—5 in all took their departure homeward this morning,” wrote May on June 15. “They came from home brainless and moneyless, and have returned the same, though not without my blessing in full.”

  The weather turned hot. The Ohio was running low, “sluggishly.” All the same, the Muskingum “trips on as nimble as sprightly as a miss in her teens,” May wrote. Early one Sunday morning, he plunged into the Muskingum for the first time. “It looked so tempting I could not refrain, and felt myself much refreshed.”

  On July 2, Ohio Company directors and agents gathered in General Putnam’s tent for the first such meeting held west of the Allegheny Mountains and passed a resolution officially naming the settlement.

  Skeptics back in Massachusetts had begun calling it “Putnam’s Paradise.” Manasseh Cutler had suggested it be named “Adelphia,” for brotherhood. Those on the scene had been calling it Muskingum. Now it was officially to become Marietta, in tribute to Queen Marie Antoinette of France, who, the former officers in the Continental Army felt, had done more than anyone, including Benjamin Franklin, to persuade the King of France to lend support to the American cause with both financial and military help. As was said about the decision on the name, it was “a natural gush of feeling in the hearts of these old officers, to remember with gratitude their kind benefactress, and to perpetuate her name by connecting it with their infant city.”

  As for the name of the surrounding county, there seems to have been no need for discussion. It would be Washington County.

  Despite periodic showers, the “infant city’s” first celebration of July 4 took place under a sixty-foot-long green bower built for the occasion beside the Muskingum.

  Some 150 people attended. Judge Joseph Varnum delivered a most flowery oration in which he complimented those gathered for their courage, “to explore . . . the Paradise of America” and declared “hope no longer flutters upon the wings of uncertainty.” Then followed a spread of food and drink in ample quantity—wild meat, turkeys and other wild fowl, and a variety of fish, including, as none present would forget, a giant, 100-pound pike caught just downstream at the mouth of the Muskingum.

  A seemingly limitless supply of punch and wine was at hand and patriotic toasts were raised one after another—to the United States, to Congress, the King of France, the new Federal Constitution, Captain Pipe, the wives at home back east—thirteen toasts in all.

  “Pleased with our entertainment,” recorded John May, “we did not separate till 12 o’clock.” The next morning he was up at five and like everyone else back at work.

  On July 9, General Arthur St. Clair, who had been president of the Congress at the time of the passage of the Northwest Ordinance, arrived at Fort Harmar to a national salute of thirteen guns, one for each state, and on July 15, on the other side of the Muskingum, in the same green bower where the Fourth of July celebration was held, St. Clair, with appropriate ceremony, became the first governor of the Northwest Territory, and thus civil government was now officially established.

  While serving as the president of Congress, St. Clair had shown only lukewarm
interest in the Northwest Territory, but as would later be written, “a change came over him when it was proposed to make him governor of the territory, and his warmest interest and endeavors were enlisted.”

  II.

  In mid-August the Reverend Manasseh Cutler appeared on the scene, having traveled the full distance from Ipswich Hamlet, 751 miles in just twenty-nine days, a new record. Expecting to be absent from home and his pastoral duties for at least three months, he had relinquished his salary before setting off.

  He had traveled as far as the Allegheny Mountains riding in a high-wheeled sulky, then by horseback over the mountains, then by barge down the Ohio. There had been rain and fog aplenty, “excessively” bad roads, steep, “anxious” ascents and descents, and barely tolerable roadside taverns. But it was summer the whole way, nothing like what Rufus Putnam and his party had experienced.

  On his voyage down the “very romantic” Ohio, Cutler had the pleasure of the company of General Benjamin Tupper, his wife, their five children, and two grandchildren, as well as four other families, making thirty-six migrants heading for Marietta, including fourteen children.

  They were the first group of families to arrive at the settlement and the fathers were all veterans of the Revolution, men whose experience, as they knew, had prepared them for the tasks ahead in a way nothing else could have. As another notable veteran, Joseph Barker, who was to follow later, would write, they had had “a second education in the Army of the Revolution, where they heard the precept of wisdom and saw the example of bravery and fortitude. They had been disciplined to obey, and learned the advantage of subordination to law and good order in promoting the prosperity and happiness of themselves and the rest of mankind.”