Sargent had grown up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the son of a wealthy merchant, and while a student at Harvard ran into trouble. As recorded in a faculty report, he had chosen to entertain two women of ill fame who were seen at his chamber early the next morning “in such circumstances as indicate a strong presumption that they were kept there the whole night.” On other occasions, the report continued, he fired pistols in the town of Cambridge “in such a manner as to endanger the lives and property of the inhabitants.” Dismissed from Harvard, Sargent was soon readmitted to the class of 1771 after his father made a substantial contribution toward the restoration of Harvard Hall.
The next four years following graduation were spent at sea on his father’s ships. He then served as an officer in Washington’s army through the Revolution, after which he returned to Gloucester to find the family fortune ruined by “the fickleness of privateering.”
In his role as secretary of the Ohio Company Sargent had received an annual salary of $750. At Marietta came another $750 a year as second in command with the title of secretary of the territory.
In little time, he began actively courting General Tupper’s twenty-two-year-old daughter, Rowena, and apparently with the full approval of her family, except for Ichabod Nye, who had by now decided Sargent was “a consummate tyrant and raskale.”
Others, though, heartily approved the match. On hearing of a pending wedding, Manasseh Cutler wrote to offer his congratulations to Sargent for choosing such an “amiable and agreeable young lady.” Matrimony, he had thought, was the only prospect that could frighten Sargent. “But true bravery rises superior to every hazard. The young lady has certainly done herself great honor in the conquest she has made.”
On February 6, 1789, at the stockade, with Rufus Putnam presiding, Rowena Tupper and Winthrop Sargent were married at what was thought to have been the first formal wedding ceremony among the settlers known to have taken place in all the Northwest Territory. But no sooner were they married, according to Ichabod Nye, than Sargent put on his true character, turning ever more “imperious and haughty.” He broke off all contact with General Tupper and the family, which was “most mortifying and trying” to the general, who doted on his daughter.
That General Tupper liked to drink was no secret, nor by any means an unusual or unacceptable indulgence on the frontier at all levels. But Sargent had no tolerance for such indulgence. Tupper was a “slave to whiskey,” Sargent informed Manasseh Cutler in a letter in which he also turned quite unkind in what he wrote about Rowena. While crediting her for her devotion to his happiness, he went on to describe her as plain, nor “so graceful or accomplished as many fine ladies of my acquaintance,” but then, he implied, what was one to do there in the backwoods with so little to choose from?
Meantime, he had built a comfortable house for her, where sadly less than a year after their marriage, on January 29, 1790, Rowena Tupper Sargent died in childbirth, as did the child.
Despite the lack of flour and the Indians driving off the game, the settlers survived. With the return of spring the gloom of the wilderness winter soon vanished. In the words of Ichabod Nye, “Spring opened with much activity.” The return of traffic on the river not only meant the return of food supplies, but the return of the tide of humanity. New emigrants kept arriving in considerable numbers, which meant more farmers to clear and prepare more land, but also an increasing supply of skilled carpenters, gunsmiths, saddlers, glassmakers, weavers, boot makers, blacksmiths, all much in need.
William Moulton alone, a blacksmith from New Hampshire, as an example, fulfilled a multitude of essential needs. As one scholar of frontier life has written:
The blacksmith was gunsmith, farrier, coppersmith, millwright, machinist, and surgeon general to all broken tools and implements. His forge was a center of social as well as industrial activity. From soft bar iron, nails as well as horse shoes were forged as needed. . . . Chains, reaping hooks, bullet molds, yoke rings, axes, bear and wolf traps, hoes, augers, bells, saws, and the metal parts of looms, spinning wheels, sausage grinders, presses and agricultural implements were a few of the items either manufactured or repaired in his shop.
Moulton served also as a goldsmith, Captain Joseph Prince a hatter, Moses Morse a sign painter whose tavern signs were all noted for featuring a black horse. It was said his road from New England to the Ohio River could be traced all the way by tavern signs he painted, thereby paying his traveling expenses.
Most importantly there were more women now to share in the endless work and hardships of life on the frontier. Pioneering demanded joint effort in just about everything. In the words of an old folk song:
Tis I can delve and plough, love,
And you can spin and sew,
And we’ll settle on the banks
Of the pleasant Ohio.
As Ichabod Nye would write, “The women put up with all these inconveniences with spirit and fortitude not often excelled by men.”
The center of pioneer life was the home, where, in the old saying, a woman’s work was never done, from first light to setting sun. There were no days off, no vacations.
Besides cooking, baking, cleaning, and the full-time role of wife and mother, there were cows to milk, gardens to tend, candles and soap to be made, butter to churn. As would be said, “Working butter with wooden paddles in the large wooden bowl, molding it, and cleaning the pails and utensils was as much a part of women’s work as washing dishes.” Butter was a major element of the frontier diet and making good butter was a skill in which women took particular pride.
Then there was yarn to spin, wool to weave, clothes to make for large families, clothes to wash, mend, and patch. And just as the man of the house had his ax, plowshare, long rifle, and those other tools necessary for the work to be faced, so, too, did the woman of the house—knives, needles, spoons, paddles, hickory brooms, spinning wheels, and most important, the bulbous, heavy iron pots to be seen in nearly every cabin that were used more for cooking than any other item and led to countless aching backs by the end of the day.
In contrast to the many surviving letters and journals by the men who came west, first-person accounts by the pioneer women are disappointingly scarce, and even they record little of the struggles and hardships faced. There was, it would seem, widespread reluctance on the part of women to subject those they loved back home to any of their troubles or fears or regrets.
One notable exception was Lucy Backus Woodbridge, who, over the years, wrote quite often to her parents and others of her family in Connecticut. But even then it was primarily to say how intensely she missed them.
She had been one of those who arrived at Marietta in the autumn of 1789. Her husband, Dudley Woodbridge, a Yale graduate, with James Backus, had been the two who established Marietta’s first general store. She was thirty-two and the mother of six children, the youngest four of whom had come west, while the older two remained in Connecticut to continue their education.
She had grown up in a family of some means and in one of the larger, more luxurious houses in the town of Norwich, and in little time in Marietta, the general store prospered. So the struggle for survival on the frontier was not for her as it was for so many. But when she wrote as she did of her longing for home and her family there, she was speaking for many another woman. When her younger brother, Elijah, who had also come west, reported the adversities of age their parents were going through, she wrote to tell them, “I never so severely felt the pain of being separated from you . . . your confinement and suffering excites sensations that are never to be expressed.”
About all she could offer in the way of her own outlook was to say she was confident her prospects there on the frontier were “much better than I had any reason to expect had I continued in New England.”
In conclusion, she said simply what so many New Englanders were raised on and was taken to heart by so many of the women there on the banks of the Ohio: “I will not afflict you with complaining.”
As things were to go, it would be nearly two years later when she could honestly report, and with apparent surprise, that she had come to like “this country.” As she wrote to a brother “I am happy to feel my attachment for this place and its inhabitants strengthen [with] the affectionate attentions I have met from my old neighbors.”
Conspicuous loafing, loafing of almost any kind was as yet unknown. Everyone worked, including children. It had to be so for survival. Come spring there were crops to be sown. Through summer and into fall, there were crops to be harvested, and always more land needed to be cleared. Winter was a struggle in itself.
The attire of women was invariably all-of-a-kind homemade, plain and simple of necessity. The male pioneer, too, dressed as called for, often as not in the same work clothes he had worn back in New England, but increasingly, as time passed, the wardrobe evolved into that of the frontiersman, consisting primarily of a long linen shirt and pantaloons produced by wives or daughters or female friends. The rest was nearly all buckskin—moccasins, leggins or gaiters (these for defense against rattlesnakes), and hunting shirt. Hats varied, but were mainly of the broad-brimmed kind.
The impression the settlement at Marietta made on those seeing it for the first time often depended on the eyes of the beholder. One of those newly arrived was overcome with disappointment, even despair, by what he saw:
On ascending the bank of the river to look at the town we had been nearly three months toiling to see, a very cheerless prospect was presented to our view. A few log huts were scattered here and there, raised only a few feet above the tall stumps of the sturdy trees that had been cut away to make room for them. Narrow footpaths meandered through the mud and water from cabin to cabin; while an occasional log across the water-courses afforded a pedestrian a passage without wetting his feet.
However, John May, who returned to Marietta that summer of 1789 after an absence of a year, saw things differently. Astonished by all the improvements, he spent the whole of one Saturday “reconnoitering” the settlement. “I find about 60 good buildings, many of which are large and handsome,” he wrote. There were at least 400 acres of corn “as good as ever was seen,” and would, he estimated, produce 20,000 bushels of grain.
On Sunday, he attended a public service to hear the new pastor, a slender young man from Massachusetts, the Reverend Daniel Story, who had been selected for the role by Manasseh Cutler, and who, May was happy to record, provided “a very good performance.”
But as May also recorded, he found himself growing weary of “the howling wilderness,” and when, on reuniting with his family back east, he was told they had no desire to settle in Ohio, he, too, gave up on the idea and did not return.
Ichabod Nye, by now, had “come to the end of his rope.” Having concluded he would “never amount to a hill of beans,” he had taken stock of the little he had left in the way of material assets—two old horses, one old watch, two barrels of flour (purchased from Dean Tyler), and some twenty-five pounds of shoe leather. These, he would write, were “all the resources which I could bring into action for the maintenance of my family.” So he had decided to make the best of his hands and took up patching and making shoes, little knowing at first how to go about it or where it might lead. In fact, as neither he nor anyone else could have imagined, it would lead to great success with Marietta’s first tannery.
Ichabod Nye, the man who had so wished he had never come west, was soon writing to a brother back home, urging him to pack up and come join him.
With all the concentrated activity, the tangible progress to be seen, there still remained the hard realities of the frontier. The life left behind back east, families and friends, was as distant, as out of reach as ever. Not only were letters from home rare, but news of any kind was still rare, still painfully slow to arrive. The news that in April on a balcony at Federal Hall in New York George Washington had taken the oath of office as the first president of the United States took more than a month reaching Marietta.
Measureless wilderness on all sides and the continuing fears and uncertainties over the native peoples so close at hand remained a constant presence. It was the great overshadowing fact of life on the frontier and was made even more unnerving by two events that summer of 1789.
In early July, a surveying party led by John Mathews working the lower part of the Ohio Company’s purchase suffered the loss of two packhorses, which apparently had strayed off into the woods, with the result that the party also suffered a serious loss of provisions. The men had to get by on meat alone, or what little there was to be found, until, after nine or ten days, they were forced to return to Marietta.
On the trip back up the Ohio they met with Generals Tupper and Parsons and a number of others coming downstream on a reconnoitering expedition and who requested that Mathews and his party turn back and complete their unfinished work. To make this possible, they sent a messenger to Marietta for provisions.
As would be said of John Mathews, his energy always increased with the difficulties of his situation. He knew that, in the frontier expression, he and his men were “in danger pretty considerable much.” He had been told many times by old scouts that anyone who ventured continually into dangerous country would, sooner or later, run into trouble. He was also well aware of the particular hostility Indians had for surveyors, knowing they were the ones preparing the way for still more white invaders.
All the same, Mathews and his party, which included a number of soldiers, returned to their assignment only to have another horse disappear. This time, however, they discovered moccasin tracks in several places. The explanation was clear.
Early the morning of August 7, as Mathews was sitting on his blanket undressed, two guns were fired by an unseen enemy. One of his men, sitting beside him, was shot through the chest. “Oh God, I am killed!” he exclaimed. At that instant a second volley was fired at a cluster of six or seven soldiers, all but one of whom were killed.
As a swarm of Indians rushed upon their victims on one side of the camp, Mathews and three others of his men fled off on the other side.
In a later account, Mathews is described as having escaped with nothing on but his hat and shirt. He and another comrade ran for their lives. Seeing Mathews’s condition, the other man offered him his coat, which Mathews managed to pull on by slipping his legs into the sleeves.
They raced on for seven or eight miles, until Mathews’s bare feet were so torn and blistered he could only walk and then in searing pain.
After reaching the banks of the Ohio, they had almost succeeded in building a raft out of old logs bound together with grape vines, when an Ohio Company boat and crew came in sight and took them on board and back to safety.
One week later, Mathews and a party of armed men returned to the scene of the calamity to recover the remains of nine dead soldiers.
He found them lying near where they fell [an old account continues]. . . . The flesh was all eaten from their bones by the wolves, except that on the palms of their hands and soles of the feet; to which parts of the human body they, as well as dogs, seem to have an instinctive aversion.
To which tribe the killers belonged was never determined for certain, but they were thought to have been Shawnees.
The second event, or incident, though far from so tragic in its consequences, nonetheless made a lasting impression among those who heard about it, and particularly on the mothers of overly adventurous children.
It involved a party of only one, Jervis Cutler, who had returned to the settlement that fall after more than a year back in western Pennsylvania teaching school. He had joined another surveying party between the Big Hockhocking River and Raccoon Creek. That he had been one of the first pioneers to land at Marietta—indeed by reputation the first to have leapt ashore—made what happened now such a surprise, and to him no less than to others.
Having “quite a relish for hunting and an expert with the rifle,” as he himself said, he had set off into the woods one morning accompanied only by a small
dog, and to his surprise soon found himself altogether lost. And so it remained until nightfall and all through the following day, as well as the day after and the day after that. Because of his skill with a rifle, he and the dog survived on one deer, a turkey, and “a little half-starved opossum.” But not for fully eight days did he finally find his way out of the woods and back with the surveyors.
Not surprisingly, the story spread far.
As serious as had been the need for food through the previous winter, concern over the problem seemed to have slipped out of mind. The spring and summer of 1789 proved ideal for growing just about everything. Turnips, cabbages, and radishes were up in gardens as early as March. The midsummer corn crop was all that could be hoped for. Beans, tomatoes, and potatoes were in abundance, and a second crop of corn was doing as well or better than the first.
Normally, Indian summer was the prime time of the year. But not this year. On the first day of October an early frost struck throughout much of the Northwest country killing most of the corn when it was not quite out of the soft succulent stage called “the milk.” Many thought that if dried out, it could make good bread. Instead, it produced sickness and vomiting. It could not even be fed to animals with safety.
Were this not enough, in November came a serious outbreak of measles in Marietta that would take the lives of a number of children.
The year had started with the death of General James Varnum. Now, in mid-November, General Samuel Parsons was killed trying to shoot the rapids in a canoe on the Beaver River, which joined the Ohio northwest of Pittsburgh. A companion in the canoe, Captain Joseph Rogers, escaped with his life.
As a soldier, patriot, lawyer, as a director of the Ohio Company and chief judge of the Western Territory, General Parsons had been a figure of considerable importance through much of his life. For the pioneers of Marietta his death was an altogether unexpected blow.
The Pioneers Page 8