The Pioneers

by David McCullough

  For all that so many of the prominent travelers found fault with, there was also more than a little they did like and for which they openly expressed approval.

  Dickens was astonished and delighted to find Cincinnati “beautiful . . . cheerful, thriving, and animated. I have not often seen a place that commends itself so favorably and pleasantly to a stranger at first glance as this does.” He found Cincinnatians “intelligent, courteous, and agreeable,” and, “with good reason,” were proud of their city. He was amazed to learn that the population had reached 50,000, and that the city was rightly famous for its free schools.

  By the time of his visit, in 1842, Cincinnati had become a great center for meatpacking, breweries, distilleries, boat works, soap plants, shoe and beet factories. The population would steadily increase, due in substantial part to the thousands of immigrants arriving every year as a consequence, in good part, of the potato famine in Ireland and revolutions in Germany.

  From his hotel window Dickens watched a temperance parade pass by and was “particularly pleased” to see the Irishmen in the march.

  [They] formed a distinct society among themselves, and mustered very strong with their green scarves; carrying their national Harp, and their portrait of Father Mathew, high above the people’s heads. They looked as jolly and good-humored as ever; and working [here] the hardest for their living and doing any kind of sturdy labor that came in their way, were the most independent fellows there, I thought.

  Dickens was also pleasantly surprised during his visit that no man sat down until the ladies were seated or omitted any small act of politeness that would contribute to their comfort. “Nor did I ever once, on any occasion, anywhere, during my rambles in America, see a woman exposed to the slightest act of rudeness, incivility, or even inattention.”

  Harriet Martineau, too, thought the manners of Americans the best she ever saw and showed to their greatest advantage “as to the gentlemen in traveling.”

  The presence of music in one form or other, and that of the fiddle in particular, was another part of American life at all levels with much appeal to many of the travelers, a number of whom were glad to join in.

  A well-traveled Englishman named Fortescue Cuming, who happened also to play the violin, was a notable early example. He crossed Ohio in 1807, and on a night spent in a farmhouse near Chillicothe had to sit and listen to the farmer’s sons as they “scraped away without mercy” on “two shocking bad violins, one of which was of their own manufacture.”

  But the next day, in threatening weather, he stopped at the home of an immigrant Irishman, whose daughter had married a young shoemaker named Irons. Cuming decided to linger to have his shoes mended and,

  found a dozen of stout young fellows who had been at work repairing the road, and were now sheltering themselves from the increasing storm, and listening to some indifferent music made by their host on a tolerably good violin. I proposed taking the violin while he repaired my shoes. He consented and sat down to work, and in a few minutes I had all the lads jigging it on the floor merrily. Irons himself, as soon as he had repaired the shoes, jumping up and joining them.

  If there was a reality of American life that Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and others found most disgraceful and unacceptable, it was the removal of the native tribes to more remote reservations to the west, brought on by the members of Congress. “If the American character may be judged by their conduct in this matter,” wrote Mrs. Trollope, “they are most lamentably deficient of every feeling of honor and integrity.” It was “impossible for any mind of common honesty not to be revolted by the contradictions in their principles and practice.”

  Dickens encountered firsthand one of the last phases of the “removal.” It occurred in northeastern Ohio, still mostly wilderness, as he and his wife were heading by stagecoach toward Niagara and ultimately home to England. At Upper Sandusky, a Wyandot village on Lake Erie, they stopped for the night.

  Upper Sandusky was one of about sixteen locations where the tribes of Ohio—more than 2,000 Shawnee, Seneca, Delaware, Ottawa, and Wyandots—had been forced to remove, as a result of the Removal Bill enacted in 1830.

  At breakfast the morning after his arrival, Dickens listened to the federal agent for the Wyandots, Colonel John Johnston, deliver “a moving account of their strong attachment to the familiar scenes of their infancy, and in particular to the burial places of their kindred; and of their great reluctance to leave them.”

  “We met some of these poor Indians afterwards, riding on shaggy ponies,” Dickens continued. They looked to him like gypsies.

  Later that summer the Wyandots departed for Cincinnati, where they were to go by steamboat to reservations farther west. They were the last of the natives to leave Ohio.

  Only the Indian names were to remain—names like Chippewa and Chillicothe, and Cuyahoga, Ottawa, Muskingum, Sandusky, Scioto, and Seneca, as well as the name of the state and the great river.

  II.

  In the spring of 1839, Samuel and Rhoda Hildreth decided that for them the time had come for travel in the opposite direction—back east to their home ground.

  Twenty-four years had passed since Samuel had made his surprise appearance at his parents’ doorstep in Massachusetts, while for Rhoda it had been more than forty years since she had said goodbye to her Massachusetts home at age ten. Both were now in their fifties. Their children were nearly all grown.

  Their son George, now twenty-seven, had become a doctor and, still single, lived at home and worked as a partner with his father, and so he would look after the practice in his father’s absence.

  Samuel and Rhoda would travel by a system of transportation unimaginable until then—by private carriage, river steamboat, canal boat, railroad car, and one oceangoing steamboat, covering in all some 1,700 miles round-trip. The day of their departure by private carriage was Monday, May 6, and, as usual, Samuel was to keep a journal the whole way.

  Because he was to speak at a gathering in Cleveland, the convention of the Physicians Society of Ohio, of which he was the president, they headed north, overland by carriage to Zanesville, instead of taking the usual route back upstream on the Ohio. At Zanesville they would stop overnight with their son Charles, who like his father and grandfather and brother had also become a doctor.

  The route to Zanesville was highly picturesque and much changed. The countryside had become well-cultivated, whereas only a few years past it had been covered with dense forest. Samuel remembered riding twelve miles or more without seeing a clearing or cabin. Now from an elevated ridge the view reached as much as twenty miles to the horizon.

  From Zanesville they moved on by steamboat on the Muskingum to a tiny town called Dresden and there “shipped on board” a canal boat to Cleveland. The cost of passage, he dutifully recorded, was 5 cents a mile, or $7.50 total to Cleveland.

  Cleveland was dazzling. If ever evidence was needed of Ohio’s transformation, he felt, here it was, with its 8,000 or 10,000 inhabitants and buildings equal in splendor to those of any other city of its size in America, its wharves swarming with life, and the bustle of an active seaport.

  “In the short space of 55 years,” he wrote, “the gloom and silence of the wilderness has given place to civilization, with the arts of agriculture and commerce which follow in its train.”

  No fewer than fifty steamboats now navigated Lake Erie, he was told, and the lake itself he thought spectacular.

  To a person unacquainted with the grandeur of the sea, the first view of the lake has a sublime and imposing appearance. The wind blew strongly from the north-east and heavy surf was breaking on the shore with all the tumult of the ocean. The white foam of the curling water, glancing on the sunbeams, were seen as far as the eye could reach.

  The lake was subject to sudden storms, he went on to explain, the calm, placid surface of a morning could turn into “angry billows” by midday and navigation was considered more dangerous even than in storms on the Atlantic Ocean.

  T
he next day being a Sunday, they attended church and “rested from our labors.” The day after was taken up touring the city and the day following, May 14, Samuel delivered his talk at the Medical Convention at Council Hall, to a gathering of approximately fifty Ohio physicians.

  His subject was the diseases of Ohio and the history of medicine in the early settlements. As a naturalist he also took particular pleasure in describing how, in 1788, the Ohio Company established one of the first settlements, “one dense, continuous forest covered the whole region” and went on to recall the variety of giant trees.

  It was, in its way, his hymn to the vanished wonder of the wilderness and to the natives for whom it had so long been their kingdom. He described:

  On the bottoms, or alluviums, and on the north sides of rich hills, the beech, sugar maple, ash, and elm, were the prevailing growth; while the sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) lined the borders of the rivers, where its roots could be refreshed by the running water. Along these streams the red man pushed his light canoe, rejoicing in the wild freedom of the forest, and happily unconscious of the approaching fate which threatened his race, and was soon to banish all but his name from the face of the earth.

  At nine the following morning the travelers were on their way again on board the steamboat Erie heading east on the lake to Buffalo at an amazing 14 miles per hour. “Arrived at the harbor of Erie at 7 P.M. . . . We left Erie at 9 P.M. and arrived at Buffalo at 5 o’clock the next morning.” Later in the morning they went by rail to the village of Niagara. “As we approached the falls,” Hildreth wrote, “the noise of ‘many waters’ was heard in awful majesty.” The spectacle of the falls was all that had been said of them.

  On Friday, May 17, another short train ride to Lockport, New York, where they changed to a canal boat on the Erie Canal which, overnight, carried them to Rochester. After another overnight on the canal, they arrived at Syracuse on May 19, four days after departing Cleveland. It being another Sunday, they again rested and attended church.

  On reaching Utica by a canal the next day, they boarded a train to Albany, traveling part of the way at an unimaginable 30 miles an hour, “or a mile in two minutes, a little like flying,” Hildreth wrote.

  Then, it was on to New York, on board another steamboat down the Hudson River, past West Point, the view of which was “very grand,” past the majestic Palisades, landing at the city about 6 P.M., having run the distance of 160 miles in eleven hours, as Hildreth also noted with amazement.

  The U.S. Hotel, where they stayed, was an immense seven stories high. But the continual noise and confusion of the streets were also “very striking and annoying to strangers,” and “especially to those from the back woods.”

  The next morning, Friday, May 24, “a very pleasant day,” as Hildreth noted in his journal, they took passage on a steamboat named Splendid for New Haven, Connecticut.

  For Hildreth the stop at New Haven figured as one of the highlights of his life: The chance to visit Yale, by then the largest university in the country and one with a curriculum that included geology, chemistry, theology, art, and medicine—all that so mattered to him—meant worlds. Even more important he would, at last, meet Benjamin Silliman. If he, Hildreth, ranked among the pioneers in American science at the time, Silliman, “The Path Finder,” was the most prominent and influential scientific American during the first half of the nineteenth century.

  Important, too, to Hildreth, was the part Silliman had played in establishing the Medical Institution at Yale, at a time when only five medical schools existed in the United States.

  In addition to the articles Hildreth had been writing for the American Journal of Science, the first of the kind, a successful publication that Silliman had started in 1818, the two of them had been carrying on active correspondence for some time, Hildreth reporting on the shells he had found by the Ohio River, or on the abundance of Isabella and Catawba grapes he was growing with great results.

  In 1835, after six years of intensive research and field management, Hildreth had written a major paper for the Journal on bituminous coal deposits in the valley of the Ohio. It was a subject certain to appeal to Silliman, the first to teach geology at Yale or anywhere else in America, and who had since become the leader of American geology.

  The article was abundantly illustrated with a map, numerous drawings of plants and shells, and views of interesting scenery.

  In 1836 another treatise appeared in the Journal, this titled, “Ten Days in Ohio; from the Diary of a Naturalist,” which placed him among the nation’s foremost geologists. He put forth a highly important theory, his belief that it had taken a “vast period of time to hollow out the local valley between the hills, in which the Ohio now meanders, and to deposit that vast bed of alluvial earth which constitutes its present fertile and rich bottoms.” In fact, as would be acknowledged by later-day geological scholars, Samuel Hildreth was the first American geologist to “recognize the enormous amount of sub-aerial [on the surface of the earth] erosion that had taken place throughout the region and that the Ohio River had carved out its own channel.” Among those of his own time who immediately grasped the importance of what he had written, and told him so, was Benjamin Silliman.

  When the steamboat Splendid docked at New Haven that same day the town of New Haven struck him immediately as one of the most beautiful he had ever seen, in its setting and the “classic neatness” of its buildings, but most of all its broad avenues lined with “noble elms.” No town in America, he decided, was so beautifully provided with shade trees.

  He wrote of the three “imposing” churches near the center of the common and of the college buildings extending along the whole length of the back side of the common.

  At age sixty, Benjamin Silliman was just four years older than Hildreth, and as would be said, “richly endowed by nature physically as he was mentally . . . a man of striking appearance,” tall, well-proportioned, handsome, and courteous. In his years at Yale he put science on an equal to the arts, something no one had yet done, but also maintained an active interest in the arts.

  Professor Silliman greeted the Hildreths at their lodgings and to start things off he took them on a stroll through the lovely, historic Grove Street Cemetery, just off the campus. (“Death loses half its terrors” Hildreth wrote, “when we reflect that our bodies are to be laid quietly in such a beautiful spot.”)

  That evening was spent with Silliman, his wife, two daughters, and a son at their handsome home on Hillhouse Avenue, a street of many handsome homes. It was there that Hildreth found Silliman to be the most affable and good-humored of men. Also part of the family, much to Hildreth’s surprise and delight, was the celebrated painter John Trumbull, who was Mrs. Silliman’s uncle, then eighty-six and living with the family.

  A few years earlier, finding himself “without ready means of support,” Trumbull had offered to give Yale his collection of his work, if Yale would grant him an annual income of $1,000 for the rest of his life. Silliman then succeeded in raising the money to build a Trumbull gallery on campus designed by Trumbull, the first art gallery on any campus in the country.

  Hildreth found Trumbull “very interesting” and enjoyed looking at a number of Trumbull paintings that decorated the Silliman parlor. He also spent a good part of the evening enraptured with Silliman’s rare books on natural history. Seldom if ever had Hildreth been surrounded by so much that so intensely interested him. Silliman’s private library filled a “very large” separate building attached to the house and was to Hildreth a perfect wonder.

  When the Sillimans invited the Hildreths to spend the rest of their time in New Haven as their guests, the Hildreths happily accepted.

  Most of the next day was spent touring the Yale campus, starting with the Trumbull Gallery, where, among the many Trumbull masterpieces were his Declaration of Independence, Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, and General Washington at the Battle of Trenton, as well as numerous miniature portraits, including one of Ru
fus Putnam.

  For Hildreth, who in his professional life had cared for so many veterans of the Revolution, and was himself an accomplished artist, to be seeing all this as he stood beside Trumbull himself could only have been an experience like no other.

  Further, he was greatly moved by the conditions Trumbull had insisted on in making the gift to Yale. “All the avails of the exhibitions of this gallery,” Hildreth noted in his journal, “go to the support of indigent students in the college, so that the labors of his pencil will continue to bless and to charm mankind for ages after his death.”

  From the gallery, the group moved on to the great Gibbs Cabinet of minerals, the gift to Yale by a Colonel George Gibbs, who had collected some 10,000 species in Europe. Hildreth had not a doubt that he was looking at a collection “superior to that of any other in America.”

  Before the tour ended, it also included a stop to see a display of the anatomical collection at the medical college, and another of “exceedingly rare and beautiful” birds sent from China by a missionary.

  What Rhoda Hildreth thought of all this, and whether she stayed with the group the whole tour, unfortunately remains unknown. No letter or travel journal in her hand has survived.

  The day following, Sunday, May 26, they attended church at the chapel of the college, where about 350 students were present, or most of the student body. That evening, as Hildreth was proud to record, he went with Silliman to pay his respects to the remarkable Noah Webster, the great lexicographer who had demanded there be an American language and who ranked high among Hildreth’s heroes, and lived nearby the Yale campus. “He is now 84 years old,” Hildreth wrote in amazement, “but active in body and nearly as brilliant in mind as he ever was. I consider this man as first in American literature, and as having done more for the enduring fame of the country in letters, than any other person.”