II.
Joseph Barker was twenty-four years old. Raised in New Hampshire, he was descended from a long line of weavers, saddlers, and farmers. His father, Deacon Ephraim Barker, was a highly respected “housewright” and church builder, and for years served as deacon and musician in his church in Amherst, New Hampshire.
The second of ten children, Joseph had been sent away to school until age fourteen when he was brought home again to begin work as his father’s apprentice. Thus it was that the carpenter’s trade became his own and he had become exceptionally skilled at it.
Tall and strong, he was also known for his athletic abilities, his humor, and cheerful outlook. He loved to read and in time was to show considerable skill as a writer, though, like Rufus Putnam and numerous others of the time, proper spelling was more than he could handle. He spelled canoe, “canoo,” large, “learge.” The word “excellent” he did with no “c” and only one “l,” thus it came out “exelent.” “Seldom” became “sildom,” which may have been how he pronounced it. But apparently none of this mattered much to him, or to others.
In September 1789, Joseph married nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Dana of Amherst, the daughter of Captain William and Mary Bancroft Dana. Less than two years earlier, his financial state shattered by the depreciation of the currency, Captain Dana had set off with two of his sons for the Ohio country to see about settling there. When Captain Dana returned to bring the rest of the family west, Joseph and his bride decided to go with them.
The journey proved more difficult than they had imagined. At times, crossing the Alleghenies, progress became so slow, their wagons had to be taken apart and the separate pieces carried by hand over impassable barriers of rocks and ledges.
After crossing the mountains to Sumerill’s Ferry and waiting for an unwieldy boat to be built for them, they proceeded down the Ohio. Instead of landing at Marietta, they went on to a newly established settlement of about two dozen families downstream on the Ohio side of the river called Belpre. There Captain Dana’s land was located, but on arrival they found the cabin he built the year before had, by accident, burned to the ground. As a consequence, young Joseph decided to stay for the time being at Marietta where carpenters were much in demand.
Winter had set in by then and troubles were all about. As serious as had been the shortage of food the previous winter, this one was to be worse—the “Starving Year”—and the suffering extreme. Because of the slaughter of the wild game by the Indians, the woods were still bare within a radius of twenty miles. There were other explanations as well—the clearing of the forests and the hunting by the settlers, and as Joseph Barker put it, a large majority of the emigrants had “strewed all their money” on the mountains of Pennsylvania “and in the enjoyment that they had got to the land of promise, they forgot to provide for the future.”
In fact, there were many causes of the “hungry year,” as it was also called and in many other sections of the country, including New England, most of them not readily apparent in Ohio. France had been importing unprecedented quantities of wheat and flour from the United States. Then there was the devastating effect of the insect called the Hessian fly on wheat production. Climate historians would later attribute a large part of the problem to major volcanic explosions in Iceland and Japan that blew millions of tons of particles into the upper atmosphere, thereby reducing the warming of sunlight on a good part of the globe.
What saved the settlement was generosity. To Barker it was a powerful lesson in life. “Where poverty, improvidence, and scarcity meet,” he wrote, “charity and benevolence only could give relief.”
Later, Marietta’s earliest historian, Samuel P. Hildreth, was to write, “In this great scarcity it was wonderful how little there was of selfishness, and how generally kindness and good feeling abounded. Those who had more resources, lent, or gave, to those who had less.”
One family in particular came to the rescue in a way never forgotten. Isaac and Rebecca Williams, emigrant farmers from Pennsylvania, who had settled on the Virginia side of the Ohio across from Marietta, were known and admired for their consistently abundant harvests. To those now starving Mr. Williams sold his corn at the usual price of 50 cents a bushel, instead of the then going price of $2.50. To the desperately poor, he let them have it without payment. To speculators who offered to buy all he had, he refused to sell even a bushel.
Joseph Barker, in his later reminiscences, would recount how two heads of families told Williams they had no bread and had come to get what corn they could with the little money they had.
“How many is there of you?” said Mr. Williams [in Joseph Barker’s account]. “Rising of twenty,” was the reply. “Dang it!” says the old man, “there is a heap of you but you must have half a bushel a piece,” and they had.
“Those who had cows,” wrote historian Hildreth, “divided the milk with their neighbors, especially where there were children.
Sugar, or molasses, they had little of, as they had not kettles to boil the sap of the maple. . . . The Ohio Company, with a liberality worthy of all praise, assisted many poor families with small loans of money, or the suffering would have been much greater: with this they could occasionally get provisions from boats descending the Ohio. . . .
The matrons of the colony, in a little sober “chit-chat” over a cup of spice-bush tea, without any sugar, and very little milk, concluded if they lived ever again to enjoy a supply of wholesome food for their children and selves, they would never complain of their fare, be it ever so coarse and homely.
That November came an outbreak of measles in Marietta that would take the lives of still more children. To add further to the miseries, a sick man and his family were put ashore from a boat heading downriver to Kentucky and his trouble proved to be the ever-dreaded smallpox, which had not made its appearance until then.
A town meeting was called at the stockade. A separate log cabin was quickly put up for the sick man, and nurse Mary Owen, the first woman to settle in Marietta, took up her duties, only to contract the disease herself.
When the sick man died, another town meeting was hurriedly called and more cabins went up farther off, in back of the big cornfield on the plain, where more people could be inoculated and cared for, and among them was Joseph Barker. To his wife, Elizabeth, who remained in Belpre, where it was thought to be safer, he was happy to report, “I am living in a little, clean log-cabin that is six feet wide, seven feet long, and four and a half high. We make out to sit up, but cannot stand straight.” Complaints he had none. “We lodge very well.”
Six more died of the disease. Two of the hundred or more inoculated also died. Much to the relief of the many who knew her, Mary Owen recovered to live many more years, though with evidence of what she had been through marking her face.
Joseph Barker, too, lived on.
At the start of the new year, 1790, Governor Arthur St. Clair took up residence with his family in the southwestern blockhouse of the stockade, newly finished quarters with, as carpenter Barker proudly noted, “good, smooth poplar floors, doors, casings, etc., and a brick chimney with three fireplaces below and three above.”
With the return of spring, families scoured the woods for edible weeds and herbs—nettles or purslane, which was preferred. They collected the tender shoots of pigeon berry and potatoes. Then came the earliest of the garden vegetables—peas, beans, radishes, squash—followed by what turned out to be a bumper crop of corn.
By early July the famine had ended, the settlement had survived, and for all the difficulties still to be faced the supply of food was not to be one of them ever again. Rather, there were to be continuing ample surpluses to sell.
That March, Rufus Putnam had been appointed territorial judge by President Washington, as the replacement for General Samuel Parsons, and this along with the bright prospects that returned with spring, led him to conclude it was time at long last to bring his family west to the settlement. A handsome, new, decidedly New England–looking ho
me with clapboard siding, brick fireplaces, four bedrooms, and attic was ready for them at the stockade.
In June he headed back to Rutland to lead another westward expedition, including this time his wife, two sons, and five daughters, as well as some fifteen others who had contracted “Ohio Fever,” two men hired as teamsters, two wagons, two yoke of oxen, and half a dozen cattle. One of the Rufus Putnam wagons was loaded with as many as fifty varieties of apple seeds, as one of the requirements of the Ohio Company stipulated that settlers plant an orchard of that many apple trees.
While in Massachusetts Putnam had written to Manasseh Cutler urging him to come to Marietta. “Your company is much wished for by the best people.” But Cutler, immersed in his pastoral duties, his school, his numerous intellectual pursuits, was not to return, then or ever again.
The journey of Putnam and his family took eight weeks. “At length we arrived at Marietta about nine in the morning,” remembered one of the party. “All the settlers gave us a hearty welcome.”
For Joseph Barker, family life was just getting started. His wife, Elizabeth, who was still living downriver at Belpre with her father and mother, had given birth to a son, Joseph Jr., and that spring he had moved them to be with him in Marietta. Fully employed now by Rufus Putnam, he was building pickets at the stockade where, in December 1790, he and his family moved in.
Also, as was expected of all men fit to serve, Barker had joined the Marietta militia. The territorial law made it the duty of the troops to assemble at the stockade parade ground for inspection every Sunday morning at ten. After this, with fife and drum, Generals Putnam and Tupper and Colonel “Big Buckeye” Sproat in the lead, sword drawn, would march to the place of public service in the northwest blockhouse.
As he was proud to explain, Barker had been made orderly sergeant. It was his role to keep attendance, “Call every man’s name, examine their arms and ammunition . . . note down and report delinquencies.” In case of an alarm, those who were armed among the congregation were to rush out of the meeting to face the danger.
In remarkably little time, a matter of mere months, young Barker had taken a notable place in the community as both a highly skilled worker and a dutiful citizen.
III.
Serious trouble of a different kind had been festering beneath the surface for some three years, all the way back to the agreement reached with Congress on the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, that, in addition to the Ohio Company, there would be a speculative real estate venture called the Scioto Company involving more than four million acres farther down the Ohio to the confluence of the Scioto River. In the time since the Scioto Company had come under suspicion.
For some unknown reason, William Duer, the secretary of the Board of Treasury and originator of the Scioto idea, put in place as the company’s sales agent a gentlemanly Connecticut lawyer, Joel Barlow, who was also known as a poet. Barlow went off to France to market the Scioto land and there took on a business partner named William Playfair, whom he described as “an Englishman of a bold and enterprising spirit” and “a good imagination.” As it turned out, Playfair did not play fair.
In Marietta were several people, like James Varnum, who had been angry at Manasseh Cutler, not because the Scioto Company was a mistake or an enterprise of questionable integrity, but because they had not been included, and told him so.
Deeply offended, Cutler insisted he had done nothing inappropriate and by all evidence he had not. In a heartfelt letter to Rufus Putnam dated November 18, 1788, Cutler declared, “I view my character as much dearer than my life. And the man who would deprive me of it I consider infinitely worse than a highway robber—for it is what cannot be restored especially in a matter of public trust.”
In France, Barlow and Playfair prepared a “prospectus” on the rivers Ohio and Scioto and including Cutler’s earlier pamphlet along with numerous additions and embellishments. Playfair’s “good imagination” had been put to work. Not surprisingly, no mention was made of freezing winters or starvation or smallpox or the threat posed by the native tribes. Instead, it was a climate altogether “wholesome and delightful, frost even in winter almost entirely unknown.” There was “venison in plenty, the pursuit of which is uninterrupted by wolves, foxes, lions, or tigers.” Added to that, there were “no taxes to pay, no military services to be performed.”
In 1789, France was in the early throes of revolution, and as a French geographer would write, “Nothing was talked of in every social circle, but the paradise that was opened to Frenchmen in the western wilderness; the free and happy life to be led on the blissful banks of the Ohio.”
Sales of Scioto land went fast, and in February 1790, some 600 French emigrants—men, women, and a few children—believing they owned land in the Ohio paradise, boarded five chartered ships and sailed for America. After three months at sea they landed at Alexandria, Virginia, on the 1st of May, only to discover they had been defrauded.
The Scioto Company owned no land in Ohio and had no money to pay Congress for it. William Playfair had made off with the money they invested and disappeared. Joel Barlow, it seems, had also been duped by him.
So the land belonged still to the government of the United States. The Scioto Company and William Duer had failed. Only Duer could be held accountable and when President Washington intervened to tell Duer something must be done at once, Duer arranged for Rufus Putnam to prepare to receive the emigrants on Ohio Company lands, to erect the necessary buildings, and, in addition, provide sufficient provisions for a year, which they, Duer and Putnam, were to wind up paying themselves out of their own funds.
In mid-October, after an arduous journey overland and downstream on the Ohio on six Kentucky flatboats, the French pilgrims, literally “strangers in a strange land,” arrived finally at Marietta. Some would choose to stay, the rest proceeded downstream to a point three miles below the mouth of the Kanawha River, which was to be their new home.
To the local populace, not surprisingly, they were an immense curiosity. Exhausted, out-of-sorts, they grumbled on effusively in rapid French such as never heard in Marietta. “There might have been more tongues at Babel,” commented Joseph Barker, “but they never went faster.”
Wanting no delay in the establishment of the new colony downriver, Rufus Putnam brought in a crew of forty men to make a clearing and build eighty rough log cabins in four rows, twenty to a row, and a high stockade fence with two-story blockhouses at each corner. It was, as said, a primitive little frontier village facing the river. The cabins had dirt floors only. Deep forest closed in on three sides.
Much there was still to be done and in background and working skills, the emigrants who came ashore were hardly prepared. They were French artisans, artists, craftsmen, jewelers, hatters, watchmakers, silversmiths, city people from Paris and Lyon. A few were noblemen. Hardly any had ever held an ax or a gun before, or skinned an animal.
But if they knew nothing of gardening, some had brought books on the subject from France.
Still, most were optimistic and with pride named their settlement Gallipolis, “City of Gauls,” or French Town, as Americans would refer to it. Whether it could survive remained to be seen. When it came to clearing more of the land back from the river their initial struggles to find the best way were to be long remembered by locals.
“I have seen half a dozen at work in taking down a tree,” wrote one witness, “some pulling ropes fastened to the branches, while others were cutting around it like beavers.” Several of the Frenchmen were killed when crushed by trees they were cutting down.
Though many of the French would give up and move on to settle elsewhere, far more remained, grateful for the new life, given what they had left behind, and confident, even optimistic about the future. As one wrote, “To some the surrounding woods might appear frightful deserts; to me they are the paradise of nature; no hosts of greedy priests; no seas of blood to wade through; all is quiet.”
The Scioto Company left the French settlers largely
to fend for themselves. William Duer, creator of the Scioto Company, would wind up in debtors’ prison until his death in 1797.
Meantime, significant changes had taken place in Marietta. Arthur St. Clair had decided to move the office of the territory governor farther west, down the Ohio, to a village known as Losantiville, meaning “town located opposite the mouth of the Licking,” a name St. Clair promptly changed to Cincinnati in honor of the famous Revolutionary officers’ society. There also the army had begun construction of Fort Washington, as a base of operations against the Indians.
Winthrop Sargent, too, as secretary of the territory, now chose to make his home in Cincinnati, a move he was to regret, finding the cost of living and uncultured, low moral tone of the place hard for him to bear. To compensate, it would seem, he took greater interest than ever in botany and the historic mounds of Cincinnati, and spent time with increasing correspondence with the naturalist Joseph Bartram and the Massachusetts Historical Society.
On Monday, December 20, 1790, Rufus Putnam sat down to write a long and important letter to President Washington.
“It was as late as the 5th of November before I arrived here with my family, since which I have been so busily engaged in preparing for the winter that I have not been able to attend minutely to any other subject, but in general I have observed that our crops have been very fine, that the spirit of industry and enterprise among the people is as great as ever, and the improvements and buildings which have been made are truly surprising.”
He reported also that the emigrants from France had arrived and were settling in, but it appeared they were not “calculated for the meridian of the woods.”
From there he moved on to what had become his overriding concern.
As to Indian matters we are fearful that the spring will open by a general attack on the frontiers unless prevented by Government carrying a war into the enemy’s country. It is possible that the Shawnees etc. may be for peace but I consider it very doubtful. From all the circumstances which I have been able to collect respecting the late campaign I do not believe the Indians have had sufficient drubbing to induce them to ask a peace, and every day I am more and more confirmed in this opinion by the Delawares and other Indians keeping aloof.
The Pioneers Page 9