Historic Towns of the Western States Part 8

A city of comfort, Cleveland has no London's East End. I do not believe that in any other population of the world of its size can be found so few hungry stomachs or homeless bodies. Work abounds. All men work. Its rich men are workers, and, what is far more exceptional, the sons of its rich men are workers. Its wealth is of the solid sort. It represents investments which pay dividends every six months, and which represent the advancement of every commercial and manufacturing interest. But Cleveland is obliged to acknowledge that not a few of its rich men are legal citizens of New York City, ostracized from its pleasant borders by what they and others regard as the unjust tax laws of the State.

The city has not yet reached the condition in which it is understood that in case a will is probated representing a large estate which fails to give at least a considerable sum to charity or to education, the court shall set it aside on the ground that the testator was of unsound mind. Of course money is given away both by gift and by bequest, but more, on the whole, by gift than by bequest, and in large amounts, but not in amounts so large as prevail in communities of an age of two hundred and seventy-five years rather than of one hundred. The rate of increase which money may make for itself is so great, that the holder and the maker hesitate to part with such a remunerative agent. Yet the beneficence viewed in the light of decades is great. A n.o.ble school of science, a n.o.ble college and university, including professional schools, a n.o.ble foundation for an art school, are easily found among the more obvious tokens. Hospitals and orphanages, private schools, endowed churches, Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation buildings, parks and college settlements, are ready proof of private beneficence for public ends. Testimony should also be borne to the wisdom as well as the generosity which characterize the giving of this people. My pen refuses to write names, but it is free to say that to find beneficence which is, it shall not be said so little harmful, but which is so gloriously efficient, as the beneficence of some of Cleveland's n.o.blest women and men would be difficult. With the gift, before the gift, and after the gift goes the wisdom as well as the graciousness of the giver. One, too, should not neglect to say that in not a few of the great manufacturing concerns of Cleveland prevails a spirit that the employer owes to the employee something more than wages. The dividend to labor consists, in the more obvious relations, in providing rest and recreation rooms, facilities for eating the midday luncheon, and in doing what can be done in creating a.s.sociations and conditions which make for the enrichment of life and the betterment of character.

[Ill.u.s.tration LAKE IN WADE PARK, SHOWING ADELBERT COLLEGE IN THE DISTANCE.]

Of course Cleveland has societies and clubs: clubs into which the worthiest life of the community naturally organizes itself for worthiest purposes, and clubs which represent the life that is simply worthy and of which the purposes are not the highest. Clubs of women and clubs of men, clubs social and clubs professional, clubs literary and clubs commercial, clubs anthropological and clubs sociological, clubs chemical and clubs engineering, clubs collegiate and clubs pedagogical, clubs athletic and clubs aesthetic, clubs piscatorial and clubs ecclesiastical, clubs architectural and clubs of free-traders, clubs for munic.i.p.al improvement and clubs for no improvement of any kind--they all and many others are found in this very pleasant city.

And underneath all these a.s.sociations and organizations it is easy to discover the growth of a distinctly civic spirit, also manifest in special movements and conditions. The endeavor to build in one group buildings so important as a county court-house, a city hall, a public library and others reveals the willingness to surrender individual advantages to the public weal. The attempt to deal largely and justly with all munic.i.p.al franchises proves the presence of a desire to serve all as well as each. The Munic.i.p.al a.s.sociation, an organization of a few gentlemen of high purpose and of patience as well as of great influence, has, in recommending or in refusing to recommend certain candidates for office, promoted the growth of a public sense out of which it has itself sprung. The determination that the public schools shall not be used for partisan purposes is perhaps as strong an ill.u.s.tration as could be given of the presence and potency of the civic spirit of Cleveland.

[Ill.u.s.tration PERRY'S MONUMENT, WADE PARK, CLEVELAND.]

In the three great professions are found n.o.ble members. In this triple service is manifest a high tableland of general excellence rather than a level broken by high and distinct peaks of individual conspicuousness. The highest relative standing belongs, I judge, to the members of the medical profession. This prominence may be the result of the presence for more than fifty years of a medical school which has numbered among its faculty some great investigators and teachers. But not a few of those who are examples of highest service have been unwilling, it must be said, to remain in Cleveland. As the Atlantic draws down the level of the Great Lakes, so the territory of the Atlantic draws away some (not all) of the more eminent members of the great professions. The supply however never becomes exhausted, nor does it deteriorate.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON.]

But the most eminent of Cleveland's people belong to the literary or political cla.s.s rather than to the strictly professional. The earliest of the writers who spread Cleveland's fame and his own was Artemus Ward. It was a short career enough which Artemus Ward had, and its Cleveland part covered only two years, but while it lasted it bore one of Cleveland's daily papers round the world on the wings of his wit. One cannot forget that here lived and wrote John Hay, beloved as among the best of men as well as honored as the most efficient of Secretaries of State. James Ford Rhodes here fitted himself while engaged in business to begin his career as a fascinating writer of later American history. Constance Fenimore Woolson was a Cleveland child, although not born here, and the Great Lakes are the scenes of her stories. Mrs. Sarah Knowles Bolton, writer of useful and pleasing biographies and other books, divides her residence between Boston and Cleveland. Charles W. Chesnutt, too, is esteemed not only for his sketches but also for a distinct charm of character. Cleveland would like to claim that rare poet and great soul, Edward Rowland Sill, for his home was only a few miles away, and in Cleveland he died, in 1887. One should not decline to say that books written by college professors may not only be the material for literature but also literature itself. Such books, written in Cleveland, are neither few nor barren.

The eminence in politics of the Cleveland man belongs rather to the present than to the past. If one should name the gentlemen who have served the city in the national Congress the names would to most prove to be without significance. The name of Senator Payne--and he had been long a.s.sociated with the life of the city--one recalls, but no name has the meaning of the name of Wade or of Giddings, who came from the little town of Jefferson, a few miles east of Cleveland, or of Sherman, who came from the south. Hayes, Garfield and McKinley might be called citizens of the Greater Cleveland. At the present time, however, in both the Senate and the House the city is not without able and significant representation.

[Ill.u.s.tration GARFIELD MEMORIAL, CLEVELAND.]

Like a piece of music the chapter returns upon itself. It began with the argument that Cleveland is so pleasant. From the breakwater which the Government builds to keep Cleveland great and to make it greater, along the avenues of residence or of trade, even through its smoky and sooty atmosphere,--sign of prosperity,--out mile after mile to the city of the dead where the well-beloved Garfield sleeps in n.o.bly wrought sepulchre, in all and through all, Cleveland is pleasant. Pleasant to live in, pleasant to work in, I know, and pleasant to go to heaven from, I hope, is Cleveland.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Letters of Asa Gray_, i., 72.

[2] This section, known as the Western Reserve, lying between parallels forty-one and forty-two, and a line one hundred and twenty miles west of the western line of Pennsylvania and parallel with it, was "reserved" to Connecticut when she ceded to the United States certain territory which she had received from the grant of Charles II. Of this territory Connecticut granted one half million of acres to such of her soldiers as had suffered from the British during the Revolution. The larger, if not the entire, part of the balance pa.s.sed into the control of a private-public corporation, known as the Connecticut Land Company.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CINCINNATI

ALWAYS A STRATEGIC POINT

BY MILTON E. AILES

On the day before Christmas, 1788, twenty-six adventurous men, in deerskin hunting shirts and leggins, with tomahawk, powder-horn and scalping knife at their belts, embarked at Limestone on the Ohio River in rude barges of their own construction, and fighting their way through dangerous floes, proceeded on a journey which was to prove memorable in the annals of American colonization.

These pilgrims were well aware of the perils and tragedies awaiting them, for their mission was to build them homes and found a city on the edge of the rich Miami Valley, through which mixed tribes of raging Shawnees, Senecas, Iroquois and Miamis roamed, determined to halt the threatening advance of the hated paleface.

The Indian braves realized that a crucial moment in their history had come.

Their allies, the British, had gone down in defeat before the Thirteen Fires. Henceforth the tribes must look to their own councils, and rely upon their own strength, and they swore grimly that the Ohio should run with blood, and that the advent of every western pioneer should bring an additional scalp for the grewsome decoration of their lodges.

But these hardy voyagers, now celebrating a frugal Christmas as they steered their course down the swollen and half-frozen Ohio, were not to be turned aside by impending conflict with savage tribes. To meet grave danger like brave men was for them no new experience; they had pa.s.sed through seven years of revolution; they had stood the trying tests of honorable hardships, and were now making their way to found a community which was to develop within a few generations into one of the greatest inland cities of the world. Four days they fought their way through floating ma.s.ses of debris and ice, finally finding their haven in Sycamore Inlet, opposite the mouth of the Licking River. To-day the traveller, smoking meditatively in a Pullman, will cover the same distance before he has occasion to light a fresh cigar.

In a grove of sycamores, osiers and water maples they struck their flint and built their fires. There was no theatrical a.s.sertion of dominion, nor is it on record that sacred rites were invoked to consecrate the struggle for civilization that was to centre round this far outpost of the Republic, and yet their first performance was one of the most dramatic incidents in western history; for, knowing that savage armies lurked in the dim woods that overhung the terraces above them, these twenty-six hardy Anglo-Saxons dismantled the crafts that had carried them into the far wilderness, and converted the planks and timbers of their barges into cabins. There was to be no retreat. In the name of the new Democracy, they established the primitive beginnings of a great city in the very centre of the famous Indian path over which for unnumbered centuries naked aborigines from the Great Lakes to the Kentucky hunting grounds had hurried to battle or the chase.

The new settlement thus became a bold and significant challenge to the red man, and in its fate was involved the future of the West and of the nation.

The earthquake of war, which the founding of Cincinnati invited, was not long delayed, and when it came it startled Washington from his incomparable composure, and shook the Republic to its foundations.

From the moment of its inception, Cincinnati was the most important point on the Ohio River. Other settlements, it is true, at the start hoped to outstrip Cincinnati in population. There was Marietta, founded two months before, which had a more romantic birth. And there was North Bend, which enjoyed the personal backing of John Cleves Symmes, the famous pioneer who superintended the first development of the Miami Valley, and from whom Denman, Patterson and Filson, the promoters of the settlement that subsequently became Cincinnati, purchased the site of that city. These and other settlements along the river were, for a time, pointed to with pride by their founders as the coming commercial centres. Cincinnati, moreover, began life with an impossible name. Filson, a fantastic pedagogue who had drifted into Kentucky, combining a smattering of tongues with an unbridled imagination, compounded the name "Losantiville," which means when interpreted, "the village opposite the mouth of the Licking." Historians, in malign humor, seem to rejoice in the sudden translation of this picturesque polyglot and town-site boomer, remarking with a certain gleeful unanimity of phrase that "shortly after naming the settlement he was scalped by the Indians."

[Ill.u.s.tration TYLER-DAVIDSON FOUNTAIN.]

The offer of free lots to original settlers did not give Cincinnati pre-eminence, for similar lures were held out by other aspiring communities along the Ohio; nor will it be seriously contended that the location there of Fort Washington, although this made the spot the headquarters of the American army in the Northwest, gave Cincinnati a superior start, for the sense of security expected because of the presence of the United States garrison was not abiding. General Harmar marched to defeat in 1790 from this pioneer fort and a.r.s.enal, and the victorious savages pursued him until their cries of exultation terrified the little hamlet cl.u.s.tered about the military station.

Then came St. Clair, bold and a.s.sertive. Heroes of the Revolution had founded the town. The fort had been named in honor of the great General and President, and as both town and fort represented the extension into the West of that democratic strength of arms which had humbled the most powerful kingdom of Europe, this new settlement from which civilization was to radiate into the western valleys should be dignified with the name of the order that held together in fraternal bond the grizzled survivors of the great war. And so Losantiville, the dream of a bizarre scholar, became Cincinnati.

In the name of that order and city, St. Clair went to war. But sickness laid him low, and he was carried to the field of battle wrapped in flannels. Managing the forces against him was Thayendanegea, the celebrated Mohawk, or Joseph Brandt, as the English called him, as astute as Tec.u.mseh and as fearless. Thayendanegea had been secretary to Sir Guy Johnson. He had learned the tactics of civilized armies, and with masterful native cunning he planned to annihilate the forces of St. Clair. Nearly fifteen hundred officers and men marched away from Cincinnati to crush the semi-savage captain who had directed the ma.s.sacres of Minisink and Wyoming, and back to Cincinnati in rout and dishonor, their guns and blankets abandoned, rushed in unspeakable terror a pitiful five hundred. Before sundown on the day of that battle, November 4, 1791, nearly a thousand scalps of white men dangled from the wigwams of the armies of Thayendanegea.

Other communities along the Ohio looked with envy upon the federal ramparts at Cincinnati, but the protection afforded by the garrison was at first more fanciful than real. The pioneer clergymen of the town ventured to Sabbath services cautiously, rifle in hand, peering down the dim aisles hewn through dense woods of linden and birch that led to a clearing, in the midst of which some charred stump served as a pulpit; or, as congregations grew, a log-built chapel housed the earnest worshippers. And by the law of Cincinnati and the territory every communicant was required to go to the altar with loaded firearms, that savages, taking advantage of the hour of prayer to attack the town, might be repulsed. Even when pews were built to give regularity to worship, the brethren were commanded to sit at the outer end, with their rifles in readiness.

If Fort Washington had not been built or had been located elsewhere, Cincinnati would have still become the metropolis of the Ohio. Here water highways crossed. And as it marked the path over which the red men had pa.s.sed for ages, so now it became the intersecting point of civilized adventure. Out of the shadows of the Licking in their pirogues Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark had hurried across the Ohio to watch hostile campfires from the Cincinnati hills, and thence had descended upon the barbarians to avenge crimes committed in Kentucky. The long beaches at the Cincinnati site afforded safe landing, while the settlement, secure upon the higher ground and the succession of terraces beyond, could not be engulfed by the periodical river floods. North and south the rivers that mingled their waters here furnished natural pathways to vast and fertile valleys.

Here, too, a vanished race once had had a city or perhaps a capital, for Cincinnati is built upon extensive prehistoric ruins of the Mound Builders. It was a walled city with great gates, pyramids and sacrificial altars, and over these surviving memorials of a people whose origin and destiny are alike a mystery grew, when Cincinnati was founded, oak, beech, sycamore and cedar, whose concentric rings revealed that hundreds of years had elapsed since the disappearance of the race which had reared these shrines and tombs and city walls. Among the prehistoric pottery, the polished pipes of catlinite and stone axes such as a race of troglodytes might have swung to brain abhorrent monsters of forgotten periods, they will show you in the artistic Cincinnati Museum in Eden Park, the famed Cincinnati Tablet exhumed from a tumulus near Fifth and Mound streets in that city. Some antiquarians believe the sculptured stone to be an astronomical calendar or a table of measurement and calculation. Some have imagined it to be a sacred relic from the tomb of kings. Nearby, in the same museum, you see records lucidly deciphered from the second Theban dynasty, and carved inscriptions, intelligently translated, from the bal.u.s.trade of the temple of Athene, but scholarship is dumb and imagination is the only interpreter of these strange mementos of a race which found in the site of Cincinnati a natural spot for the building of a large and fortified city.

Although the star of empire may have been destined at all hazards to pause over Cincinnati until the tenth census of the United States should show that the center of the nation's population had moved westward to that city, there was grave alarm in the settlement when the soldiers of St. Clair arrived in confusion and defeat.

[Ill.u.s.tration ENTRANCE TO SPRING GROVE CEMETERY.]

Generations have thrilled over the story of the officer on horseback, who, bearing important news, hurried to the President, tossed his bridle reins to an orderly and leaped up the steps of Washington's reception room only to find that the Chief Executive was dining with distinguished visitors and could not be disturbed. The officer was so importunate and so impressive that the secretary was impelled to grant him audience. The grave President listened without visible emotion to the whispered message from Cincinnati, the officer departed, and Washington returned to the banquet table. Not one of his guests could guess that beneath the calm exterior the far-seeing statesman was experiencing one of the most tragic moments of his career. It was not merely that a trusted general had minimized warning and had met defeat, for Washington had devoted a long life to warfare against both savage and civilized foes, and he was not to be easily moved by the uncertain fortune of battles. But he knew that the defeat which the soldiers of Cincinnati had encountered now threatened the destiny of the country. The East and West were not yet riveted by steel rails into coherent union. Beyond the Alleghanies there were projects of a protectorate under France or Spain, or both, and bolder dreams of a Kentucky republic. With few connecting links with the East, what could hold the western empire, since the federal government had displayed inability to protect the pioneers? Washington's guests departed unaware that their ill.u.s.trious host who had entertained them with consummate decorum had during those hours felt the nation slipping beneath his feet. But when they had gone the pent spirit of the great leader, in one of the few instances of his lifetime, found expression in tumultuous grief and rage. He voiced in advance the storm of public protest, indignation and fear that broke out when the dismal tidings from Cincinnati became known. And when Congress learned that Washington favored the creation of an army of five thousand to avenge the defeat of Harmar and St. Clair, there was little in the resourceful vocabulary of political abuse spared the President.

Anti-expansionists called him an imperialist bent on converting the Republic into an empire. Why send an army to inevitable slaughter beyond mountain frontiers in a vain struggle for the wilderness of the Indians when the colonies then possessed more domain than the citizens of the Republic would ever be able to use?

Fortunately the anti-expansionists, while mordant and powerful, could not prevail, and the war measures became law. Anthony Wayne, whose daring during the Revolution had won for him the admiring sobriquet of "Mad," then took command and hastened to Cincinnati but none too soon. The Six Nations with Little Turtle as their spokesman had followed up their victories by demands that Cincinnati, the capital of the Northwest, should be abandoned and that the Ohio should mark the perpetual boundary between the white man and the red. British arms bristled behind this native ultimatum, and at the rapids of the Maumee, as if to stay Wayne's advance, British forces built a fort and garrisoned it with three companies. The fears of Washington seemed about to be realized.

[Ill.u.s.tration RACE STREET, CINCINNATI.]

But at the battle of Fallen Timbers "Mad Anthony" scattered the allied tribes like forest leaves. Nearly half a hundred mighty chiefs fell in that historic engagement, and in their defeat the Indians christened their conquerer "Big Thunder" and for years trembled when they heard his name.

Cincinnati and Ohio were saved to the Republic.

Wayne in his campaign and in his no less notable treaties was brilliantly seconded by a young man who, unannounced and unwelcomed, landed at Cincinnati on the day the broken columns of St. Clair fell back upon the fort. The generals there looked upon his smooth cheeks and his boyish frame with soldierly disdain, one remarking that he would as readily send his sister to the front as entrust this beardless neophyte with the responsibilities of border warfare. This youth, in whose veins flowed the blood of one of Cromwell's generals, was to shame his flippant critics, for he was to win a lieutenancy at the battle of Fallen Timbers, and rising steadily in the service of his country was to become a western Napoleon, avenging the disasters of the River Basin and Detroit, defeating the powerful Tec.u.mseh at Tippecanoe, laying firm and broad the foundations of northwestern statehood, serving in the Senate of the United States, and finally going in triumph to the White House. Cincinnati has fostered many famous sons, but none greater than William Henry Harrison.

To many new communities the first settlers have gone with the hope of returning with fortunes to their former homes. Cincinnati was founded and developed by men and women who came to stay. Harrison identified himself with the West at the start by marrying the daughter of John Cleves Symmes, the Miami pioneer, and to the Harrison homestead near Cincinnati, which for a quarter of a century had been an American mecca, the body of the famous General was borne for burial.

From the start, self-reliance has been a prevailing characteristic of Cincinnati. Its isolation in the days of the canoe, the barge and the pack-horse, developed its originality. A copy of the _Centinel of the Northwest Territory_, published in 1794, graphically ill.u.s.trates its remoteness at that period, for news from Marietta had been eight days in arriving, Lexington dispatches were twenty-one days old, fifty-six days had been consumed in getting the latest information from New York, and European news antedated the day of issue four months and a half. It was natural among such conditions that the city should look to itself as the centre of interest, and hence at an early day the journals of Cincinnati, instead of canva.s.sing distant localities for belated sensations, were encouraging local writers to entertain the public. It was the press of Cincinnati that first gave the poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary to the world, and they repaid it by conferring immortality in the world of letters upon the blue Miami, where they spent the simple years of their girlhood. And thither, because of the fame their singing had won them, traveled Horace Greeley and other celebrities of the day to do these gifted sisters homage. In Cincinnati was born Gen. Wm. H. Lytle, author of _Antony and Cleopatra_, and it was the journalism of that city that gave inspiration to his pen. Here, too, was directed the early genius of Wm. D. Howells, Rutherford B. Hayes, Salmon P.

Chase, and other men who have dignified literature or public life.

[Ill.u.s.tration CITY HALL, CINCINNATI.]