Historic Towns of the Western States Part 6

Water courses have ever been of the highest importance in determining the lines of continental settlement. The river St. Lawrence and the great lakes offered to the people of New France a continual invitation to explore the regions whence they flowed. It was not long before the French found that the sources of south and west-flowing waters were not far from the banks of the eastering waterways upon which they dwelt. By ascending short tributaries, and carrying their light craft along practicable paths, or portages, first used by the Indians, they could re-launch into strange and devious paths which led to all parts of the continental interior--the Ohio, the Mississippi, the a.s.siniboine, and their multifarious affluents and connections. Thus easily did New France spread along the St. Lawrence and the lakes, over into the Ohio and the Mississippi, and down their gliding channels to New Orleans and the sea.

In crossing the Alleghanies, the English sought the Ohio and its tributaries--the Alleghany, the Monongahela, the c.u.mberland, the Tennessee, the Kanawha, the Big Sandy. The Ohio was long the chief gateway to the West. Upon this royal path into the wilderness, the Ohio Company sent Christopher Gist to prospect and report; for its possession, France and England came to final blows through the action at Fort Necessity of Major Washington, than whom no man knew the Ohio better; it was an approach to Kentucky more inviting than Boone's Wilderness Road, through c.u.mberland Gap; Clark's flotilla came swooping down the great river to conquer Kaskaskia and Vincennes; and, the Revolution ended, Rufus Putnam and his fellow veterans from New England claimed their military land grants along this continental highway, at Marietta. Cincinnati, also, was an outpost deliberately planted upon the great pathway to the West, although otherwise differing in genesis. It was by the Great Lakes, that other princ.i.p.al approach to the West, that Moses Cleaveland founded the settlement of Revolutionary soldiers who were redeeming their land warrants in New Connecticut, or the Western Reserve--an incident closely connecting Ohio with colonial history.

Early in the Western experiences of the new nation, came Indian wars. These resulted in treaties whereunder the defeated tribesmen were either forbidden to enter defined areas of settlement, or were confined within specific reservations. This necessitated the construction of rude but effective frontier forts, which not unfrequently proved the nuclei of hamlets that grew into considerable towns. Sometimes these forts were essential to the direct protection of the white settlers, who, upon occasion of alarm, flew to cover within the log palisades, which were stout enough to resist a barbaric foe unpossessed of artillery; such was Fort Washington, which in time became Cincinnati.

The forest trade was long the chief and only commercial interest in the West, and at certain points garrisoned forts were necessary to serve the traders as depots and as havens of refuge; this was the part played by Detroit, Mackinac, Chicago, St. Paul, Vincennes, and St. Louis. In the case of Des Moines, the fort was established for the protection of a group of reservation Indians who might otherwise have fallen victims to a superior savage foe.

Agricultural settlers rapidly took up lands. Battle against it as he would,--and the early history of the border is a piteous tale of man's inhumanity to man,--the dispossessed savage found this army of occupation impregnable. As the frontier moved to the westward of the Mississippi, it was accompanied by the Indians and the fur trade. Territories were erected by Congress out of the lands of the ousted Iroquois and Algonkins, and these political divisions were soon admitted to the Union as states; mines were exploited, forests were depleted, miscellaneous industries were created, and these new interests not only profoundly affected the old towns, but gave rise to a new order of cities.

Indianapolis and Madison are examples of town sites staked out in virgin forests by ambitious and imaginative speculators, and, before a house could be built, set aside by statute as capitals of their respective young commonwealths. It is not always that towns thus artificially planted have similarly thriven. Under normal conditions, a successful city is as much a matter of natural growth as a tree, whose germ has chanced to fall in favored soil. Many, perhaps most, Western towns of importance, that were planted before the days of the railroad, when waterways were highways, are upon the sites of early villages of aborigines, who made their stands at natural vantage points--at a river mouth, convenient for transportation, or close to considerable fishing grounds; at a waterfall, because here fish are plenty, and canoes must be carried around the obstruction, so that the villagers are masters of the highway; upon a portage path, because of ease in reaching and controlling divergent water systems; upon a bluff overlooking waterways, for facility of observation and control; upon a fertile river bottom, because of good corn lands. In due time, whites came to such a centre of population and established a trading post; here and there, as at Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Vincennes, and Kansas City (Westport), the post in due time developed into a garrisoned fort; and the surrounding community, at first dependent on the fur trade or the military, under modern conditions became a town of importance. Scores, possibly hundreds, of such examples might be cited; and even when some thrifty towns of the West appear at first sight to have no connection with such a past, antiquarians have not infrequently discovered evidences that substantially the same reasons which before the railway era had led civilized men to select the site, caused its previous occupancy by aborigines--sometimes at so early a day that the only remaining relics are the curious earthworks which the progenitors of our Western Indians, prompted by religious fervor, constructed anywhere from two and a half to ten centuries ago.

Minneapolis and Spokane, both of them old Indian sites, are the direct outgrowth of the superb waterpowers which have given them pre-eminence in the industrial world.

We have seen that the Great Lakes and the great rivers were the paths to the Mississippi basin in the days of the canoe, the bateau, and the pack-horse. The early movement of population over the trans-Mississippi plains and through the pa.s.ses of the Rockies was by means of wagons along well-worn buffalo traces, which Indians had followed in the pursuit of game. Where rivers intersected these overland trails, ferries were inst.i.tuted, their keepers doing a thriving business in helping upon their way fur traders, explorers, miners, and settlers. Such was the origin of Kansas City and Omaha, which naturally developed, with the rush of immigration, into great centres of distribution. In every quarter of our land, from the earliest colonial days, the frontier ferryman, with his tavern and trading house, has been a town builder.

The discovery of precious metals in the hills of Colorado gave life to the mining camp of Denver, which in time became the metropolis of a wide district, to which irrigation brought a wealth more enduring than gold and silver.

Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are the open doors of the Pacific Coast, and their growth is thus easily accounted for. Prophecies are current of the possible commercial supremacy of these Pacific-coast towns, as a consequence of our new interests in the Far East. It is curious, in this connection, to remember that Spain's motive in founding her California colonies, four generations ago, was, on the temporal side, the more strongly to establish herself in the Philippines.

Strangest of all stories is that of Salt Lake City, the product of religious zeal seeking a supposedly inaccessible desert as a haven from persecution. Finally, when the laborious development of the wilderness has brought rich fruitage, this hermit city finds itself a station on one of the world's most-travelled highways.

The coming of the railway, and the consequent practical abandonment of the waterway, wrought a profound change in the fortunes of the Western towns.

The railway paid small heed to watercourses, save in mountainous country; it struck out upon short-cuts over the plains and prairies, almost regardless of topography. Hundreds of staid and promising river and lake towns received a staggering blow when, for various reasons,--sometimes their own failure to encourage the enterprise,--the railway pa.s.sed them by and entered rival and often less pretentious communities, which now were quickened into new vigor. A more favorable situation for a bridge across the stream was often the determining factor which caused several towns upon a river to die and the fortunate one to be transformed into a metropolis.

The arbitrary erection throughout the West of new paths of commerce, of new centres of distribution, during the decade and a half before the War of Secession, was of itself a revolutionary element in urban history.

Almost as profound in its effects was the practically contemporaneous dispersion through this vast territory of millions of European immigrants, who came to open farms, to practise trades, and in city and in village to carry forward, often to inaugurate, hundreds of new commercial and industrial enterprises. The new-comers brought strange habits of thought and social customs; some of the most desirable of these they engrafted upon their American neighbors, while at the same time they themselves were being consciously or unconsciously remoulded into American citizens--who, whatever may be said, will always be essentially but transplanted Englishmen modified by environment and political education.

Of the many nationalities of the European continent which have planted stakes in North America, the Germans and the Scandinavians, closely allied to our Anglo-Saxon stock, have been the most numerous and have exercised the greatest influence. Many considerable towns, like Cincinnati, Detroit, St. Louis, and Omaha, have become strongly German, with not a few of the characteristics of old Germany, such as are evinced in a general fostering of music and rational outdoor recreation. The Scandinavian element vies good-naturedly with the German, as at Madison and Chicago; while Minneapolis may be considered as the centre of Scandinavian influence, fostering st.u.r.dy democracy and tenacious enterprise.

In the large towns which have their roots planted in New France, the French element is no longer of considerable importance. The French borderer was a vivacious, fun-loving, easy-going fellow, and upon the road to modern opulence and power has long since been pa.s.sed; to-day, as an urban dweller, he is not seriously reckoned with by the politician, and this is a safe guide to the relative standing of a race in any American city. The towns which we have more recently inherited from Spain still possess, in their older quarters, strong characteristics to link them with the past. Here and there, as with the French, individual Spaniards or mixed-bloods rise into prominence in our modern life--but only through the channel of Americanization, which means effacement of the old regime. Spanish traits have left permanent traces on the Southwest and the Pacific, as some French traits are a part of the lasting heritage of the Old Northwest; but Spaniards and Frenchmen as such are rapidly fading from our historic towns.

A half-century ago, few of the twenty-one Western towns whose stories are herein collected had taken upon themselves the characteristics which to-day chiefly distinguish them. We have seen that the advent of the railway was for many the starting-point upon the road to prosperity; the arrival of European immigrants, with traditions of toil and thrift, proved the turning stage for others, and strengthened all. The War of Secession shook the Republic to its foundations; but from it the North rose with fresh vigor, and rapidly developed in growth and ambition, with the ensuing commercial and industrial conditions which we encounter to-day. Nowhere has this development been quite so noticeable as in the towns of the West.

Pioneer men and women are necessarily too closely engaged in taming the wilderness to have either thought or leisure for any but the most elementary education. But now that the West is no longer the frontier, and mines, forests, fisheries, manufactures, and scientific agriculture have brought wealth and comparative leisure, there is among her people no lack of aspiration for culture. In no section of the United States are study clubs relatively more numerous, in town and country; university extension courses and the lyceum prosper everywhere; the common-school systems, capped by the fast-growing State universities with their thousands of students, are exhibiting a healthy growth along the most approved lines under the guidance of teachers of national reputation; excellent private academies and colleges are numerous in every commonwealth. Several of the towns mentioned in this volume have won wide reputation as educational centres--notably Cleveland, Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and San Francisco.

From these Western towns there issues no note of decadence. Theirs is the glowing ambition of youth. Each of our several authors is quite confident, and properly so, that his town is the handsomest, brightest, and most prosperous of all; or, if it is not, that it is soon to be. Its commerce ever widens, its industries expand in capacity and number, its railways connect it each year with some new sphere of trade; and, what is better, it is making strides, in breezy Western fashion, in the cultivation of the higher things of life, in its churches, its schools, its libraries and museums, its charities, its parks, its popular conveniences, its insistence upon moral and material munic.i.p.al cleanliness. It is pleasant and profitable to trace the careers of communities such as this; to note, for instance, by what means the Indian village became a trading post, then a fort, next a hamlet, and at last comes to be pulsating with the ambitions and struggling with the multifarious problems of a great modern city.

Herein is a record of urban development crowded into the span of a single human life, that in the Old World it took centuries to accomplish.

It is often flippantly a.s.serted that America has no history; and even well-informed Americans, who have come to appreciate their national history at large, are apt to fancy that, in any event, the West has had a prosaic career, being simply an overflow or outgrowth from the East. But a perusal of these pages will surely convince the thoughtful reader that Western history is not so easily disposed of. It will be found a chronicle abounding in complexities, aglow with life and color, freighted with significance to the continent at large. The chief towns of this historic West have come down to us from many sorts of beginnings, have travelled by differing and devious paths, often encountering curious adventures by the way, until, quickened by modern resources and demands, they have each in its kind come creditably to serve mankind in some useful way.

HISTORIC TOWNS OF THE WESTERN STATES

[Ill.u.s.tration]

HISTORIC TOWNS OF THE WESTERN STATES

MARIETTA

THE PLYMOUTH OF THE WEST

BY MURIEL CAMPBELL DYAR

"The paths from the heights of Abraham led to Independence Hall, Independence Hall led finally to Yorktown, and Yorktown guided the footsteps of your Fathers to Marietta."--_Daniels._

At the point where the Muskingum empties into the Ohio, the River Beautiful, across whose waters the Ohio hills look tenderly away into the distances of West Virginia, there was sown, in 1788, the tiny seed for the development of the Northwest Territory. Here, on the memorable seventh of April, landed forty-eight New England pioneers; here stayed the keel of the second _Mayflower_, bearing as her burden not only the men whose names have become immortal in American history, but, more than these, the Ordinance of 1787 with its momentous articles of compact--an ordinance ranking "next to the Declaration of Independence in the establishment of Const.i.tutional liberty in the United States." Here was founded that other Plymouth, Marietta, the brave little gateway through which the nation's civilization journeyed onward from the Atlantic seaboard to the fallow empires of the West.

[Ill.u.s.tration MARIETTA.]

No seer was needed to foreshadow the success the Marietta colony was to have. Two years before its coming, the character of the colony was presaged when there met in Boston, at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern, whose gilded sign creaked temptingly in her high salt winds, a convention called by General Rufus Putnam and General Benjamin Tupper for the formation of the Ohio Company, with the purpose of founding a new State in the territory northwest of the Ohio River. The Company was composed of high-minded men, largely officers in the late war. In their pet.i.tion to Congress for the purchase of western land they stipulated, for its organization, law and order, provision for education and for the maintenance of religion and the total exclusion of slavery. For these compacts, some of the greatest statesmen in the young Republic brought to bear the power of their genius; for these, the quiet Ipswich clergyman, Mana.s.seh Cutler, as agent of the Ohio Company, pleaded with matchless eloquence in Congress; for these, Rufus Putnam, the "Father and Founder of Ohio," gave the largess of his ability and rugged force.

"An interlude in Congress," says Mr. Bancroft, "was shaping the character and destiny of the United States of America. Sublime and humane and eventful as was the result, it will not take many words to show how it was brought about. For a time wisdom and peace and justice dwelt among men, and the great Ordinance which alone could give continuance to the Union came in serenity and stillness. Every man that had a share in it seemed to be moved by an Invisible Hand to do just what was wanted of him; all that was wrongfully undertaken fell by the wayside; whatever was needed for the happy completion of the work arrived opportunely and at the right moment moved into its place."

To the forty-eight men sent into the wilderness by the Ohio Company history gives a generous and well-merited praise. They were of the same race and of the same upright faith as the brave Englishmen who in 1620 landed on the bleak, gray rock of Plymouth. All that was true and forceful in the Plymouth faith was theirs; they had the same love of law and religion, the same genius for order and a firm self-government, the same courage of conviction, the same independence of thought and action. They possessed, too, much of that ancient war-ready temper which had shorn the English King of his divine right and had created for the English people the House of Commons. Their heroism had adorned every battlefield of the Revolution; their roll included generals, majors, colonels and captains.

"No colony in America," said Washington, with that cautious, unerring judgment of his, "was ever settled under such favorable auspices as that about to commence at the Muskingum.

Information, property and strength will be its characteristics.

I know many of the settlers personally, and there never were men better calculated to promote the welfare of such a community."

"I know them all," cried the Marquis de La Fayette, his fine French voice trembling with emotion when the list of their names was read to him on his visit to Marietta. "I knew them at Brandywine, Yorktown and Rhode Island.

They were the bravest of the brave." General Putnam himself was at their head, the "impress of whose character is strongly marked on the population of Marietta in their business, inst.i.tutions and manners." Here were Samuel H. Parsons, the distinguished general, the able writer, the accomplished jurist; James M. Varnum, the brilliant scholar, the gallant officer; Abraham Whipple, the brave commodore, to whom belongs the glory of firing the first naval gun in the cause of American independence, an act that gave birth to the American navy. Here were Winthrop Sargent, the Secretary of the Territory, Benjamin Tupper, the hero of many battles and the devoted friend of Putnam in the forming of the Ohio Company; Return Jonathan Meigs, afterwards Governor of Ohio. Here were Nye, Buell, Cutler, Fearing, Foster, Sproat, Cushing, Goodale, Dana, True, Devol and others no less worthy and distinguished, whose names are the richest heritage of their descendants.

[Ill.u.s.tration GENERAL RUFUS PUTNAM.]

The story of the coming of the pioneers is a twice-told tale to the student of our nation's history. In the disheartening gray dawn of a December morning, 1787, the first little band paraded before Mana.s.seh Cutler's own church at Ipswich, and, after the firing of a salute, started "for the Ohio country," as their leading wagon proclaimed. Another joined this at Danvers, and yet another, pushing on from famous old Rutland, started from Hartford, Ct., led by the beloved and always inspiring General Putnam. The toilsome journey overland, along an old Indian trail through Connecticut and Pennsylvania, at that season of the year white with winter, ended at last at the Ohio River. Here, at Sumrill's ferry, out of timber that still sang of the forests, was built the _Mayflower_, her bows raking like a galley, her burthen fifty tons--a humble enough namesake of the famous Pilgrim vessel. As the pioneers went onward down the river, the snow, which at first lay heavy in the hollows of the hills, melted into thin patches here and there, until, when they reached Fort Harmar, at the fair mouth of the Muskingum, April bourgeoned into unexpected beauty about them. It was a golden augury for the little town, to which its soldier founders gave the name of Marietta, in grateful remembrance of the sympathy of Marie Antoinette for the colonies during the weary period of their Revolution, a name which still keeps her citizens lovers of that ill-fated Queen of France.

[Ill.u.s.tration OLD BLOCKHOUSE, MARIETTA.]

Enthusiastic news of the first summer of the colony went back over the mountains to Ipswich and Rutland. "The climate is exceeding healthy,"

blithely carols one of the old letters, "not a man sick since we have been here. We have started twenty buffalo in a drove--deer are plenty as sheep in New England. Turkeys are innumerable. We have already planted a field of one hundred and fifty acres in corn." Another settler drips from his ecstatic, and, we trust, veracious quill, "The corn has grown nine inches in twenty-four hours for two or three days past." The garrison, very soon erected for defence and called the Campus Martius in academic quaintness, is described as the "handsomest pile of buildings this side of the Alleghanies," and as presenting an appearance of almost mediaeval stateliness and strength, bastioned as it was with great blockhouses and surrounded by a stout double wall of palisades. The Fourth of July was celebrated by a great "banquet," eaten in a bowery set up on the banks of the Muskingum; its menu tickles even a jaded modern palate--venison barbecued, buffalo steaks, bear-meat, roasted pigs, "the choicest delicacy of all," and a great pike, six feet long, the largest ever caught in the river. "We kept it up till after twelve o'clock at night," succinctly observes one of the partic.i.p.ants, "and then went home and slept until after daylight." On the fifteenth of July, a yet more memorable occasion, General St. Clair, the first Governor of the Northwest Territory, was welcomed with great ceremonies, and the Ordinance of 1787 was read with much solemnity in the midst of profound silence. In early August a pleasant little ripple of diversion was caused by the arrival of the families of the pioneers. In the latter part of the same month, Dr. Cutler made a visit to the settlement, and delivered the first sermon ever preached at Marietta.

In September was opened the first Court of Common Pleas in the Territory.

It was an august spectacle. The sheriff, Colonel Ebenezer Sproat, of the Ma.s.sachusetts line, preceded by a military escort, marched with his drawn sword and wand of office ahead of the governor, judges, secretary and others, to the blockhouse where the court was held. As the picturesque little procession wound its way along the river banks, the friendly Indians, loitering about the new city, admired immensely the mighty form of Colonel Sproat, who, being six feet four inches tall, towered conspicuously above his companions. Ever thereafter they called him Hetuck, or Big Buckeye, and ever since then the natives of Ohio have been dubbed "Buckeyes."

Great provisions were made for good order in the settlement; almost before the seeds of New England harvests had germinated in the virgin soil, Marietta had her pillory, whipping post and stocks for the discipline of evil-doers, instruments of torture which lingered as late as 1812. Every man was ordered to "entertain emigrants, visit the sick, feed the hungry, attend funerals, cabin-raisings, log-rollings, huskings and to keep his latch-string always out." Once during the fruitful summer the settlers a.s.sembled to attend a funeral, for the first death in the colony occurred in August, when little Nabby Cushing, daughter of Major Cushing, pa.s.sed away. She was buried tenderly in the alien soil, where, in an unmarked grave, she is slumbering still. Although many years have come and gone between, a vague pity stirs to-day at the thought of that little pioneer baby, whose feet so soon grew weary in the vast wilderness.

The hospitality of the latch-strings was put to the test two years later, when a hapless colony of Frenchmen took shelter in the town, lured into the wilderness by the unscrupulous agent of a land company, with the promise that they should find a land where there were no taxes to pay, no military services to be performed, where frost, even in winter, was entirely unknown and where candles grew ready-made on the bushes and sugar dripped spontaneously from the trees. They were a curious crew: carvers, gilders, wig-makers and hair-dressers from Paris, even a Viscount of broken-down fortunes and a young Marquis, with a few peasants as helpless as themselves in the new conditions,--hardly a mother's son of them able to plough or reap or chop for himself, and many a man without a sou in his pocket. The major part of them drifted down the river that winter to what is now Gallipolis, the City of the Gauls, where they at once began to give b.a.l.l.s in the cabins which the Marietta settlers helped them build, and proceeded to spend what little money they had in hiring American hunters to bring them game! A few became citizens of Marietta, notably Monsieur Thiery, a Parisian baker and confectioner, who quickly adapted himself to the new life, and made toothsome little sweet-cakes and bread for the settlement,--there is a tradition that while Louis Philippe was whiling away his exile in the United States, he visited Marietta, where he had the pleasure of eating a fair wheaten loaf of his countryman's baking, and Monsieur Cookie, bred to no trade, very short and very stout, who wore at all times and in all seasons a very tall steeple-crowned hat which once saved his life, when the Indians, catching sight of it bobbing up and down in the paw-paw bushes, fired at it in a vain attempt to hit the head within.

After the sober jollity of the first summer, the Marietta colonists experienced the hardships which every early settlement knows. They had their "sick years, their times of famine and their Indian wars." The sick years played a sad havoc in their numbers by dreadful scourges of epidemic diseases. The famous starving-time came in the spring and summer of 1790.

A black frost falling out of due season ruined their crops, and the Indians, already beginning their hostilities, had driven from the forest every startled wild thing within their reach. It was a period that tried the Puritan mettle, for the solace of religion may prove vain if the stomach be empty. The only food was nettle-tops and the tender shoots of the pigeon-berry, boiled with a little corn pounded on the hominy block.

Occasionally a hunter, faring far afield, brought in a bit of bear-meat or a wild turkey, which made a feast at least fitting if not full. The heroic matrons sipped spice-bush tea, unsweetened, in lieu of a more stimulating beverage. Many a heart turned back in homesick longing to where the blue haze curled comfortably from New England kitchens, but hope returned with the early squashes. The new corn crop was abundant, and from that day to this, whatever may have been their vicissitudes of fortune, the citizens of Marietta have never again been reduced to a starvation diet.