The Pioneers

by David McCullough

  The next morning, May 27, they were on their way again, this time by stagecoach to Hartford, and they would keep on the move for two months, visiting relatives, sisters and brothers, old friends in Boston, museums, libraries, and historical societies. Samuel also took time to witness an operation performed at the Massachusetts Hospital and to examine the “very extensive” collections at the Boston Natural History Society.

  They traveled as far north as Portland, Maine, to visit a Hildreth sister, Harriet, and as far south in Massachusetts as Fairhaven, near New Bedford, where Rhoda Hildreth was born and raised. “My wife is highly gratified with the visit,” wrote Samuel, “and recognizes many of the scenes of her childhood.”

  On a visit to Methuen, his birthplace, they found the old family home much as he remembered it. “Examined with much interest the room in which I was born and the one where I slept when a boy, for many years. . . . Happy, happy days, never again to return.”

  By the first week of July, the time had come to start the return to Ohio. There was a stop again in New York, with still more visits to libraries and museums, then a steamboat ride on “the beautiful Delaware” to Philadelphia for some final shopping, then on by railroad to Harrisburg, then on farther by canal boat.

  To cross the Allegheny Mountains, they traveled by a contrivance that hauled the canal boat up and over the mountains, something such as they never had experienced and that fascinated Hildreth.

  Here we were drawn up an inclined plane by a stationary engine and a huge cable of hemp. This operation of drawing up is repeated five times by as many engines before reaching the summit. . . . The mountain scenery at this season of the year is fine. The chestnut is in full bloom and very abundant. . . .

  At the summit there was a stop at a tavern for dinner. Then the descent down the western slope of the range required the same number of inclined planes as the eastern side. They then boarded a train and for five hours traveled thirty-eight miles to the village of Johnstown, where travel on the canal boat resumed to Pittsburgh. From there on as usual, the journey would continue on the Ohio.

  Pittsburgh, for all its commercial and manufacturing importance, did not much appeal. “Pittsburgh is a very dirty, smoky town, especially on a rainy day. . . . The streets are filthy and badly paved.” (Pittsburgh and New York, it would appear, were the only stops on the entire journey that Hildreth found not to his liking.)

  Traveling on down the river on a steamboat called Excell was another matter. The trip on the Ohio that so charmed so many newly arrived visitors from abroad, or Americans on their first time west, had much the same effect on the Hildreths on their return to home.

  They had been away for nearly three months, longer than they ever had or ever would again, and their joy in being back could not have been greater.

  “We found the family all well, and rejoiced to see us again after so long an absence. Our hearts [were] rejoicing in the goodness of God, who has safely guided and protected us through the perils of the journey, suffering no accident or evil to befall us, from the day of our departure to the day of our return.”

  It would seem clear, too, that for all they had seen back east, all those they had met who were of such remarkable ability and accomplishment, nothing could compare to the time in New Haven. Months later Hildreth would write to Benjamin Silliman, “We often think and speak of our delightful visit at New Haven and especially of the kindness of yourself and family which has made a deep impression on our hearts.”

  By remarkable coincidence, while the Hildreths were on their eastern pilgrimage, a traveler from Boston stopped for the first time at Marietta and, much taken by what he saw, wrote one of the most enthusiastic descriptions ever of the town in a letter that appeared first in the Boston Mercantile Journal and later in the Marietta Intelligencer. He was Amasa Walker, a Boston businessman, economist, and future congressman.

  “Let no New England man ever visit the valley of the Ohio, without stopping at least one day in Marietta. It will do his heart good. He will find it a charming town, so like the beautiful valleys of his own native land, that he will feel perfectly happy and at home.

  We had no business at this place, and should not have stopped, but that Saturday night found us opposite the town, and as we do not travel on the Sabbath, we went on shore and took lodgings. This is the spot where the settlement of Ohio commenced in 1788. Here, fifty one years ago, General Rufus Putnam with his followers, landed, and began to clear and build, and now Ohio contains almost a million and a half of inhabitants!

  He explained how the town, located on the rich bottomland at the junction of the Ohio and the Muskingum, was laid out with “great regularity.” He said, “The buildings, a large proportion of which are brick, are handsome, and in finer order than any I have seen on the river,” and that there were several churches, a courthouse, and other public buildings, as were a newly erected college, the president of which was “a truly excellent man,” the Reverend Joel Harvey Linsley, lately of the Park Street Church in Boston.

  Few places offer more instructive lessons than Marietta. Here we can see what half a century will effect in the West. The Ohio and Muskingum flow on as they did when Putnam landed, but all else how changed! . . . The maturity of this place is the most striking feature. Here are found all that we witness in the old settlements on the Atlantic, the same institutions, the same architecture, and the same general habits. The order and quiet of the place are worthy of note. The Sabbath has passed as silently as in the most rural hamlet in the land of the Pilgrims. In passing around the town I have noticed none of those low grog-shops which are the curse of almost all the western towns, and I have neither seen nor heard anything like intemperance and riot.

  If the speculator on the abstract doctrine of political economy and the progress of population, wishes for a practicle illustration of what has been done, and is now doing at the west, let him visit this spot, and he will be astonished, perhaps confounded.

  He will see that already accomplished which in Europe would require centuries; society in a high state of perfection, institutions established on a firm basis, and everything moving on in harmony and prosperity. Marietta cannot, it is true, vie with Cincinnati and some other towns in population, but there is a quiet elegance and beauty in the place, that no other which I have seen in this region, can boast.

   CHAPTER TEN

  Journey’s End

  I am glad to have Pa enjoy himself in his old age.

  —JULIA CUTLER

  I.

  Life for Ephraim Cutler, now in his seventies, had eased off only somewhat. He was serving still as a judge and a trustee of Ohio University, as well as in one effort or another intended to benefit the Ohio way of life. Further, with the help of daughter Julia, he was under way writing his own story. “I have had rather an eventful life,” it began with characteristic understatement.

  Beyond all that, he was taking part with the political activists calling themselves Whigs, those in opposition to the anti-intellectual attitude of the Andrew Jackson administration, including many ministers, lawyers, doctors, and other well-educated Americans.

  Nor had the social life at the Cutler homestead diminished. If anything it seemed busier than ever. Virtually all who gathered were known to be “admirable talkers,” including most conspicuously attorney Caleb Emerson, who frequently stayed on as a guest a week or more, discussing “the old and the new” and in a way Ephraim’s daughter Julia described as “most satisfactory to themselves, and instructive and delightful to those whose privilege it was to listen.”

  When in the summer of 1843, it became known that former president John Quincy Adams was to make an unprecedented expedition to Cincinnati in November to lay the cornerstone for what may have been the first public observatory in the western hemisphere it was felt that a small committee of Marietta leaders should take part in the occasion. Those chosen for the honor were Ephraim, Joseph Barker, and Caleb Emerson. Excitement in Marietta over the approaching event
was like nothing since the visit of Lafayette.

  Following his defeat by Andrew Jackson in the presidential election of 1828, Adams, as had no president before, returned to Washington as a member of Congress, and there he served still, steadily, relentlessly. He was known as “Old Man Eloquent.” Short and plump, he had a voice that carried like no other and he spoke with marked fervor.

  On receiving the invitation to take part in the occasion at Cincinnati that fall, Adams had accepted without hesitation.

  Family and friends were gravely concerned that it was too late in the season, not to say too late in life—he was seventy-six—for such a long, difficult, possibly perilous journey. Adams saw it as a heaven-sent opportunity to take advantage of growing popular interest in astronomy and to build backing in Congress for the new Smithsonian Institution, one of his favorite causes. As he wrote in his diary, it was a duty he must fulfill in the cause of learning:

  My task is to turn this transit gust of enthusiasm for the science of astronomy at Cincinnati into a permanent and persevering national pursuit, which may extend the bounds of human knowledge and make my country instrumental in elevating the character and improving the condition of man on earth. The hand of God Himself has furnished me this opportunity to do good.

  His plan was to leave his home in Quincy, Massachusetts, on the 12th of October, accompanied by a servant, Benjamin Andrews, and traveling by railroad, lake steamer, and canals, by way of Buffalo and Cleveland, he hoped to reach Cincinnati on November 6. As it was—despite what for him was the acute monotony of rail travel (“There is no uniformity in human life more monotonous,” he noted privately), despite snow and howling winds on Lake Erie and seemingly endless days on overcrowded Ohio canal barges, during which he caught a cold—enthusiastic crowds greeted him at every stop, and on November 8 he reached Cincinnati in bright sunshine.

  A stop at Marietta was planned for his return trip by steamboat on the Ohio, and from there the Marietta dignitaries would accompany him as far as Pittsburgh, from which he would travel on to Washington by rail.

  A tremendous crowd had gathered at the Cincinnati hotel, the Henry House, where Adams was staying, on the front of which was a large balcony overlooking the street. From there, as he would record in his diary, Mayor Henry Evans Spencer delivered “a complimentary address, welcomed me to the city, and introduced me to the assembled multitude, who answered by deafening shouts of applause.”

  Adams’s answer, he was sorry to have to record, was “flat, stale, and unprofitable, without a spark of eloquence or a flash of oratory, confused, incoherent, muddy,” and yet to his amazement it was “received with new shouts of welcome.”

  The crowd then dispersed, but a continual succession of visitors beset his hotel chamber until late into the evening.

  The laying of the observatory cornerstone was to take place the next day, and though he had been working hard for some time on what was expected to be a long and important speech, he had still not finished.

  Worn down with fatigue, anxiety, and shame, as I was . . . I sat up till one in the morning, writing the address, which, from utter exhaustion, I left unfinished, and retired to a sleepless bed.

  At four o’clock, he woke again and finished what he wanted to say.

  The speech he had written was a long (nearly two hours, he figured), learned, and reverential dissertation on the history and importance of astronomy. A printed version would run to no less than sixty-three pages, but because of unexpected, adverse circumstances he delivered only about half of it.

  On departure from the hotel by carriage, followed by a parade of other carriages, military companies, and a marching band, all headed for the hilltop where the cornerstone was to be laid, rain began to fall, increasing rapidly to torrents by the time they reached the hilltop.

  A stage had been erected, from which Adams was to deliver his address, but now, he saw a whole plain “covered with an auditory of umbrellas, instead of faces.” His manuscript became so blurred by the rain it was scarcely legible.

  Cutting his talk short, he finished by saying, here would arise one day “Light House of the Skies!” Here they were gathered to lay the foundation of what they could hope would aid in the cause of science and improvement in after ages.

  The “venerable patriot,” as he was referred to in the Cincinnati press, had done his duty and on departure he left no doubt among the citizens of the city of his admiration for them, indeed of so many he had met in Ohio who were so naturally “frank, easy and unpretending in their manners, which commend them rapidly and highly to the stranger’s estimation.”

  He departed the afternoon of November 12, heading for Marietta on board a steamboat that, after all the talk and celebration over the subject of science, bore the appropriate name of Benjamin Franklin.

  Plans and preparations for the Adams visit had been going on at Marietta for months and with increasing enthusiasm. But then, on September 21, word had come that another of the outstanding much beloved early pioneers, Joseph Barker, had died at his home at Wiseman’s Bottom, at age seventy-eight.

  He had been actively involved in the life of and growth of Marietta from the time he first arrived more than half a century before, designing and constructing many of the finest buildings, building boats, and serving in numerous ways in times of crisis.

  Samuel Hildreth, one of Joseph’s numerous friends, as well as the Barker family doctor, was to write, “In hospitality, he was unsurpassed, fond of social intercourse, gifted with a ready flow of language, and a mind well-stored with historical facts, his conversation was both instructive and interesting.”

  Not the least of his achievements was the lively, colorful account of his life he had written to help Hildreth with the collection of pioneer memoirs Hildreth was at work on—an account that would later be published as a book unto itself.

  He himself, it would seem, was proudest of all of his large devoted family. He was the father of ten children, all of whom were still alive but the one boy who had drowned in the Ohio River years past, and, in addition, there was a grand total of sixty-three grandchildren.

  His wife, Elizabeth Dana Barker, had died in 1835, at the age of sixty-five.

  The day following Joseph’s death, a long line of carriages carrying family and friends, plus many more on horseback or on foot, comprised the funeral procession to Joseph Barker’s final resting place beside his wife in the Putnam Cemetery, not far from the Barker homestead.

  It was yet another rainy day, Wednesday, November 15, when at two in the afternoon, the Benjamin Franklin came into view downstream on the Ohio. Guns fired, bells rang. Former president John Quincy Adams had arrived.

  A great crowd greeted him at the Marietta wharf, notwithstanding the rain, then followed him to the already crowded Congregational Church where he was to speak.

  Deacon William Putnam, the son of Rufus Putnam, delivered a warm welcome, and Adams, without notes, stepped to the pulpit and to no one in the audience did what he said mean more than to Ephraim Cutler.

  He spoke at the very start of the long connection he and his father, John Adams, had had with the pioneers who first settled at Marietta. He recounted how his father had known and worked with the Reverend Manasseh Cutler. He told how he himself, when studying law in the town of Newburyport, Massachusetts, had visited the Reverend at his home the summer of 1788, just after his return from his own visit to Marietta. And how ever since that conversation he himself had “taken a deep interest in the whole west, and watched its progress, step by step, to its present great and flourishing condition.”

  He talked also of Rufus Putnam and others besides the Cutlers and credited much that he knew to accounts that had appeared in the Massachusetts papers at the time. “From this source,” reported a later account of his talk, “Mr. Adams drew the materials of that admirable half hour’s address, and the minuteness of his details, and the correctness of his names, dates, and other statements, proved the amazing accuracy and discipline of his memo
ry.”

  His remarks concluded, Adams left the pulpit and, one by one, the congregation was presented to him. It would have been gratifying to him, he told those clustered about, had the elements allowed them to express their welcome without exposure to such an inclement day, but that so much of “the light of human kindness” was shown him that the name of Marietta would “ever dwell upon my heart.”

  At his request, he was then taken to the Mound Cemetery, which he had first learned about from Manasseh Cutler and desired to inspect. From there he went directly to the boat, where Ephraim Cutler, Caleb Emerson, and Joseph Barker, Jr., substituting for his father, also went on board to accompany Adams to Pittsburgh.

  Ephraim could not have been more pleased. He had greatly admired Adams for a long time. As his daughter Julia recorded, he had even bought a new overcoat for the occasion.

  Ephraim and Adams had much in common. They were the same age, seventy-six, and each the son of a famous and gifted father. Both cared intensely about education and equal opportunity. Both were unequivocally against slavery. And both loved to talk, as did famously Caleb Emerson.

  The conversation among them on the boat went on well into the night and commanded the attention of all who were so fortunate as to be present, and particularly when Ephraim expressed to Adams the gratitude felt by so many in Ohio for the “wisdom and firmness” his father, John Adams, had shown in the negotiations at the Treaty of Paris in 1783 that secured the Northwest Territory for the United States.

  As Ephraim wrote later, “I saw the tears gather in his eyes,” and Caleb Emerson noted that Adams’s voice faltered in saying that “he rejoiced to find that there were some who still remembered the services of his beloved father.”

  Ephraim further noted, “I also gave Mr. Adams a concise history of the convention that formed our state constitution . . . and the consequent exclusion of slavery. He said with emphasis, ‘Slavery must and will soon have an end.’ ”