The Pioneers

by David McCullough

  In early 1829, Ephraim Cutler’s youngest son, William, would enter Ohio University as a freshman.

  No annual event in Marietta compared to the Washington County Agricultural Fair. It was the biggest, most high-spirited community gathering of the year, with all ages, trades, professions, every walk of life in attendance, and the Agricultural Fair of the year 1829 was the biggest yet and included a speech by Ephraim Cutler that was to be long remembered and talked about.

  The day was fair but unusually cool for the time of year, as reported in the American Friend and Marietta Gazette. Attendance was full and included “a considerable number of strangers.” All seemed happy, a good sign.

  The hilarity and good feeling exhibited on such occasions cannot but be productive of beneficial effects to society. The sober, steady, and industrious citizens of our own county are so little accustomed to periods of relaxation, or holidays and we have so few of them generally as a nation, that it is no wonder that foreigners on their first arrival amongst us should view us with astonishment, as a people whose sober and grave faces were never lighted up with a smile, and whose thoughts were wholly given to business or something of more serious import.

  The fair itself included exhibits and contests aplenty. Some of the first Merino sheep ever seen west of the Alleghenies were on display. There were rugs and beautiful woolen blankets, “the snowy whiteness and handsomely ornamented corners [of which] would lose nothing in comparing with the very best of imported articles of this kind.”

  There were highly popular plowing matches contested “with great spirit and skillful exertion.” As few were to forget, one mammoth yellow squash on display weighed ninety-six pounds and measured five feet eleven inches and was twenty-four inches in circumference.

  Among the awards bestowed was one to Joseph Barker, Jr., for his apples and to Colonel Ichabod Nye for “the best sole leather.”

  Ephraim Cutler’s speech was delivered to a full gathering in the Congregational Church. The fact that there was no written history as yet of the founding of the Marietta settlement, and that most of the original pioneers had by now passed on, led him to address the subject as no one yet had. He spoke at length and with deep feeling.

  “It is said that certain epochs in the history of nations will always attract to themselves a lasting interest,” he said. “Among other things, their origin awakens a lively curiosity. From whence did they spring? At what period was their country settled? For what causes, under what circumstances, and for what objects were difficulties met and overcome?

  The toils and misfortunes incident to new settlements; the slow progress of even successful effort [he continued]; the patience, fortitude, and sagacity by which evils are overcome or diminished; the causes which quicken or retard their growth, all furnish lessons which improve the wise, correct the rash, and alarm the improvident.

  He went on to describe the veterans of the Revolution who founded the Ohio Company, talked of General Putnam, Colonel Sproat, Captain Jonathan Devol, and the others who led the way, seven of whom, as he said, were still alive. He quoted the tribute spoken by “the good Lafayette” during his visit to Marietta.

  Then, in conclusion, he said there was another subject he wished he had the powers of eloquence to enforce, and that was “the importance of cultivating the mind.” For the purpose of improved cultivation of farms, great and lasting advantages could be gained from scientific knowledge. A knowledge of geology and chemistry would enable the farmer to learn the nature of the soil he possessed.

  Forty-one years earlier, during his one visit to the new western settlement, the Reverend Manasseh Cutler had preached a powerful sermon at Campus Martius, in which he said that with the establishment of religious freedom and learning a new nation was at hand.

  Now, speaking from the Congregational pulpit, Ephraim expressed his earnest wish that “this enlightened audience will all join me in declaring that if ignorance could be banished from our land, a real millennium would commence.”

  Less than six years later would follow the founding of Marietta College, “a natural outgrowth” of the settlement. The purpose was to establish a “genuine college of the New England type.” In time to come, members of the faculty and the board of trustees included graduates of Dartmouth, Amherst, Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. Members of the Putnam and Cutler families would take part, along with Samuel Hildreth and Caleb Emerson, serving on the board and as substantial donors. Its first graduating class of 1838 numbered only four, but it was to keep growing.

   CHAPTER NINE

  The Travelers

  The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

  —SAMUEL JOHNSON

  I.

  Of the many descriptions of passage on the Ohio few would surpass that by an American named Timothy Flint. A missionary and writer from Massachusetts, he started down the river with his wife and children on a perfect fall afternoon in 1816.

  “The autumns of every part of our country are beautiful,” he wrote, “but those of the western country are pre-eminently so. Nothing resulting from beauty of sky, temperature of air, and charm of scenery, can surpass what was now above us and around us.”

  He wrote of the wide, clear sandbars that stretched for miles, the flocks of wild geese, swans, sandhill cranes, and pelicans stalking along them. The height and size of the corn was in itself alone a matter of astonishment.

  There is something, too, in the gentle and almost imperceptible motion, as you sit on the deck of the boat, and see the trees apparently moving by you, and new groups of scenery still opening upon your eye, together with the view of these ancient and magnificent forests, which the axe has not yet despoiled, the broad and beautiful river, the earth and the sky, which render such a trip at this season the very element of poetry.

  Many another expressed the same pleasure, including an increasing number of travelers from abroad who had come for the specific purpose of seeing America.

  “Our passage down the river was extremely agreeable,” reported one British writer, J. S. Buckingham, of his journey on the Ohio. “The weather was like the brightest English day in the middle of May, with a perfect calm, which made the surface of the stream like a mirror, in which were reflected the lofty hills on either side, with the occasional log cabins.”

  Much that the travelers would see and experience was not to their liking. But the great river seldom proved a disappointment.

  Harriet Martineau, another English writer, who paid a long visit to the United States, described the experience of descending the Ohio as fully equal to her expectations:

  and when we had put out into the middle of the river, we found ourselves in the way of a breeze which enabled us to sit outside, and enjoy the luxury of vision to the utmost. The sunny and shadowy hills, advancing and retiring, ribbed and crested with belts and clumps of gigantic beech; the rich bottoms always answering on the one shore to the group of hills on the other, a perfect level, smooth, rich, and green, with little settlements sprinkled over it; the shady creeks, very frequent between the hills, with sometimes a boat and figures under the trees which meet over it; these were the spectacles which succeeded each other before our untiring eyes.

  Even Frances Trollope, an aspiring English writer who was to become famous for her mockery and unabashed criticism of America and American ways, was openly moved by her first encounter with the Ohio River:

  truly does “La Belle Rivière” deserve its name; the Ohio is bright and clear; its banks are continually varied, as it flows through what is called a rolling country. . . . The primeval forest still occupies a considerable portion of the ground, and hangs in solemn grandeur from the cliffs; but it is broken by frequent settlements, where we were cheered by the sight of herds and flocks.

  “And were there occasionally a ruined abbey, or feudal castle, to mix the romance of real life with that of nature,” she decided, “the Ohio would be perfect.”
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  Frances Trollope, a short, plump, plainly dressed English woman in her forties, arrived in America in 1827 accompanied by a son and two daughters and chose to try life in Cincinnati. Pressed for a way to earn a living, she created an odd-looking public entertainment hall, or arcade—partly Greek, partly Gothic-Egyptian in architectural style—that included a theater, lecture rooms, coffeehouse, and bazaar. “Trollope’s Folly,” as it became known, continued only to lose money. Eventually she gave up and returned to England, there to write a travel book titled Domestic Manners of the Americans that appeared in 1832 and became an immense success more than a decade before the works of another of her sons, Anthony Trollope, achieved his great fame.

  As for finding fault with Americans, their ways and outlook, she had no trouble. She deplored the “reality” of slavery and the way the sins of Jefferson with slave women were “spoken about openly by all.” She discounted the sacred American phrase, “All men are born free and equal,” as no more than “mischievous sophistry.”

  J. S. Buckingham, who wrote no fewer than eight volumes on his American experience, also expressed at the start his ardent opposition to slavery. He also thought Americans ate far too much too fast and had disgusting habits in the use of tobacco—namely constant spitting.

  If the condition of the average American worker was no better than that of the average English peasant, claimed Mrs. Trollope, that of his wife and daughters was worse, so hard was the life they led. It was rare, she claimed, to see an American woman reach the age of thirty without losing “every trace” of youth and beauty. She wrote, too, of “the detestable mosquitoes” and of feeling absolutely done in by how boring Americans could be.

  “There is no charm, no grace in their conversation. I very seldom during my whole stay in the country heard a sentence elegantly turned, and correctly pronounced.” Perhaps, she thought, it was a result of how hard they worked, in the sense that “all work and no play would make Jack a dull boy.”

  Charles Dickens, when he arrived with his wife in America in 1842, had much the same reaction. “I am quite serious,” he wrote, “when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States.”

  Dickens was then not quite thirty years old, but already the author of a half dozen novels immensely popular at home—including The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. As it had been for Mrs. Trollope, his steamboat, the Messenger, did not stop at Marietta and so it was not to be part of the western American experience for him.

  He was heading for Cincinnati, and could hardly believe the company he was keeping. At mealtime, nobody said anything.

  All the passengers are very dismal, and seem to have tremendous secrets weighing on their minds. There is no conversation, no laughter, no cheerfulness, no society, except in spitting, and that is done in silent fellowship round the stove when the meal is over.

  The people were all alike. He found no diversity of character. “All down the long table there is scarcely a man who is in anything different from his neighbor.”

  J. S. Buckingham and Charles Dickens were both struck by the immense and lamentable difference between life on the northern and southern sides of the Ohio River. Buckingham saw in Kentucky “the general absence of neatness and cleanliness,” for “the great bulk of laborers were negro slaves, whose air, dress, and general appearance, sufficiently manifested their indifference to everything but their own ease, and their desire to escape from labor.”

  Dickens said succinctly, “Where slavery sits brooding . . . there is an air of ruin and decay.”

  Still another foreign traveler of note, Alexis de Tocqueville from France, who was to write one of the most brilliant studies of the American character, would conclude that if there were dark times ahead for the new country and its people, they would be brought about by the presence of slavery. “They will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality of condition.”

  Another subject of continual fascination, puzzlement, and frequent amusement among the first-time visitors was the range and oddities of local expressions and vocabulary to be heard on all sides. Words like “et” (for ate), “yourn,” “hisn,” and “hern,” for example, were part of everyday discourse, as were “dunk” (for dip), “fair to middlin” (for fair), “crick” (creek), “disremember” (uncertain), or “red up” (tidy up), “lolly gagin,” “tom cattin,” and “a chip off the old block.”

  Dickens was particularly taken by the many duties served by the word “fix.”

  You call upon a gentleman in a country town, and his help informs you that he is “fixing himself” just now . . . by which you are to understand that he is dressing. You inquire on board of a steamboat of a fellow passenger, whether breakfast will be ready soon, and he tells you he should think so, for when he was last below, they were “fixing the tables,” in other words, laying the cloth. You beg a porter to collect your luggage, and he entreats you not to be uneasy, for he’ll “fix it presently”; and if you complain of an indisposition, you are advised to have recourse to Doctor So-and-So, who will “fix you” in no time.

  Correct pronunciation or too much fuss over diction were ranked by local people in the same category as fancy dress and considered “stuck-up.” Tall tales and practical jokes were much in favor. If asked by a stranger, “Where does this road go?” the local answer might be, “Don’t go nowhere, mister, stays right here.”

  Like so many travelers, both foreign and American, Frances Trollope was astounded by the degree to which “ardent spirits” were consumed on all sides and “often to the most frightful excess.” Whiskey, rum, peach brandy, hard cider, and mint juleps, all plentiful and cheap, had long been an accepted part of frontier life, as an essential to celebrations and ordinary camaraderie, as well as relief from physical pain, injuries, toothaches. Nor were those who consumed to excess a rarity, as everyone knew.

  The Philadelphia clergyman John A. Clark wrote of “the free and unrestrained use of ardent spirits” as “fearfully prevalent” on river travel especially.

  Usually on board these western steamboats whiskey is used just as freely as water. All drink. The pilot—the engineer—the fireman—all drink. The whiskey bottle is passed around several times a day, and then the dinner table is loaded with decanters.

  The plain truth, as one early chronicler of life in Ohio country, Henry Howe, would write, was that alcoholic liquids were long considered a “necessity of life.”

  Dr. Samuel Hildreth would write of the time when his physician father owned a tavern for a while and of the large part drinking had played in the New England way of life. Cider—hard cider—he called the national beverage, and any farmer who furnished water in place of cider for his work hands was accounted a close-fisted, stingy man. While few farmers became drunkards, wrote the doctor, “. . . their red noses, blotched cheeks, and sore eyes, betrayed the constitutional effect of their favorite beverage.”

  In his research for his history of the Ohio Valley, Hildreth had come upon the journal of the young surveyor, John Mathews, Rufus Putnam’s nephew, who had been one of the original pioneers to land at Marietta in 1788, but had also taken part in an earlier surveying expedition in the valley in 1786 and in his journal provided a memorable description of the part alcohol could play on the frontier, as experienced during a night spent in one log cabin.

  Here I found a number of neighbors seated in social glee around a heap of corn. The inspiring juice of rye had enlivened their imaginations, and given their tongues such an exact balance, that they moved with the greatest alacrity, while relating scenes of boxing, wrestling, hunting, etc. At dusk of evening the corn was finished . . . many of them took such hearty draughts of the generous liquor, as quite deprived them of the use of their limbs. Some quarreled, some sang, and others laughed, while the whole displayed a scene more diverting than edifying. At ten o’clock, all that could walk went home, but left three or four around the fire, hugging the whiskey bottle, and
arguing very obstinately on religion; at which I left them and went to bed.

  Come morning, Mathews found those who had “tarried all night, still at their cups” and about eleven others came in to assist in drinking up what whiskey still remained.

  The scene Mathews witnessed and so “graphically described,” wrote Samuel Hildreth, would lead one to conclude that great as was the need for surveyors in the west was the need for those to “rebuke the vices” of the west as it was in the older settled portions of the country near the Atlantic coast.

  The fact was by then the amount of drinking in the entire country had increased markedly. Consumption of hard liquor per capita by the 1820s had reached five gallons per year, the highest ever and at that same time the temperance movement had gotten under way, a crusade against drunkenness that was taking hold everywhere, including the Ohio Valley.

  Charles Dickens found that even more distressing than the boredom of the company he had to endure on board the steamboat Messenger was the total absence of any ardent spirits. “At dinner,” he wrote, “there is nothing to drink upon the table but great jugs full of cold water.” Apparently it depended on which boat you happened to be aboard.

  The temperance movement, too, had taken hold in Marietta and vicinity and among its most earnest advocates was Ephraim Cutler. Having suffered the loss of his own alcoholic brother Charles, Ephraim well knew the extreme miseries excessive drinking could bring to a family. As his daughter Julia would write, he had banished all intoxicating drinks from his house and farm and on the Fourth of July as well, and in private and in public urged others the “propriety and necessity of total abstinence.”