Historic Towns of the Western States Part 9

Savage yells had not ceased to echo in its surrounding woods before music began to charm in Cincinnati. Even before Wayne came to silence the exultant war-cries of the tribes, Thomas Kennedy, in whose honor a street in Covington is named, used to entertain the frontier society with his fiddle, and a Mr. McLean, a butcher, took time to train the voices of the primitive colony. The Rev. Daniel Doty, who visited Cincinnati at an early day, was shocked at the singing and fiddling and dancing in the log cabins, as if the people "feared not G.o.d nor regarded Indians." Music, since directed in large measure by the German element in the city, has by its Chorus, its musical groves, its Saengerbund, Haydn Society, and other clubs, imparted distinction to Cincinnati and made it the Vienna of the American continent.

It is not surprising that the pioneer butcher of the city found time from his chopping blocks to strike the tuning-fork, for Cincinnati, even after the location there of Fort Washington, was many times on the verge of starvation, and would have starved but for the timely help of frontier hunters under the noted Colonel Wallace, who brought the meat of buffalo, bear and deer to the stricken settlement. To-day the city dines well. In truth, it is famed for its good cheer and its bohemian independence.

Cincinnati is a city of homes and churches, and singularly free from the crime that prowls in the slums of other cities. Therefore some of its citizens take pride that the city is credited with being one of the greatest whiskey markets in America, that forty-three breweries and storage vaults are in demand, and that the city annually turns out 49,000,000 packs of playing-cards, making it the largest center of this industry in the world.

In many industries Cincinnati leads. The wealth of cities throughout the continent is locked in banks and vaults manufactured in Cincinnati. The cowboys on the plains and the hors.e.m.e.n on city paddocks sit in saddles fashioned in Cincinnati. Cigars by the millions in this country are packed in boxes manufactured in Cincinnati. It produces more schoolbooks than any other city, and is near the head of the list in turning out religious publications.

On the 22d of February, 1794, a canoe left Cincinnati with a federal mailbag consigned to Pittsburg. This marked the beginning of regular service with the East. In early days, a Cincinnati merchant seeking to buy goods in New York consumed sixty days in making the journey to the metropolis. To-day he may lunch in the Queen City, take a train and lunch the following noon in Manhattan. Long before the advent of railways, Cincinnati became a center of travel and distribution. As early as 1801, a full-rigged brig took on a cargo at Cincinnati and set sail for the West Indies. Not long after, and many years before Fulton turned his attention to Western waters, citizens of Cincinnati met at Yeatman's Tavern to consider a "contrivance for transporting boats against the current by the power of steam or elastic vapor," but without tangible results; and, in fact, when the first steamboat did paddle noisily past the city the circ.u.mstance was dignified with only a four-line notice in the Cincinnati press.

Before long, however, the steamboat revolutionized river travel, and thenceforth Cincinnati leaped by bounds from a village to a great city, and every recurrent trip of these harbingers of vast commerce seemed to find a new suburb springing into bustling life on the Cincinnati uplands.

[Ill.u.s.tration CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, CINCINNATI.]

The fact that this city was originally included and still remains in the New Orleans customs district shows its accessibility to ocean traffic. Its superiority in water communication is shown by a computation made by the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce regarding the relative cost of transporting freight from points of origin to all parts of the United States. The comparisons per 100 pounds are as follows: From Cincinnati, 81 cents; Chicago, 84 cents; St. Louis, 88 cents; Minneapolis, $1.22. A similar computation applicable to a radius of 600 miles from the point of origin gives the following averages per 100 pounds: From Cincinnati, 66 cents; Chicago, 73 cents; St. Louis, 75 cents; Minneapolis, $1.11.

While growing into greatness, Cincinnati did not forget, in the critical times of the Civil War, its honorable history as the former outpost of the Republic. Its trade was largely with the South, but sternly its citizens decided that arguments in favor of trade interests smacked of treason, and with stoic heroism closed the city to rebellion. And when Lew Wallace, fortifying Cincinnati to antic.i.p.ate attack, called for volunteers, the whole community responded, and from the Ohio valleys came the sharp-shooting "squirrel hunters" in procession seemingly endless to defend the city.

[Ill.u.s.tration SUSPENSION BRIDGE.]

Since then the growth of Cincinnati has been in keeping with the development of the nation. It does not hope, as Harriet Martineau suggested during her visit here, ever to become the home of the country's capital, but it rejoices in being the great city nearest the American centre of population. Its library of a quarter of a million volumes and its Historical Society cherish the splendid stories of its past and the acc.u.mulating data of its current achievements. Its artists and citizens delight in dignifying that record in bronze and marble in the environing parks and city squares.

The visitor to Cincinnati, on a clear afternoon, should take pa.s.sage on an incline road, rise to the heights of Eden Park, and traversing that high plateau, whose natural beauty and landscape gardening earn for it its name, find his way to the water tower. An elevator lifts him five hundred feet to the observatory platform, where with field-gla.s.ses he may behold the splendid panorama of Cincinnati. Far below, spanning the river over which "a crazy craft with sails and paddles" once ferried the people, he sees five ma.s.sive structures of steel and stone, including the famous suspension bridge, begun in the early part of the Civil War, and by its completion during the stress of that conflict testifying eloquently to the faith of its citizens that strife was not to sever the nation, and that these mammoth girders of steel would const.i.tute an important tie in the inevitable reunion of North and South. It was of this structure that James Parton wrote in 1867, that the whole population of Cincinnati might get upon it without danger of being let down into the water. The five superb bridges in their capacity and security afford marked contrast to the earlier attempts to span the river which floods swept away, including the arched structure which went down in the torrent of 1832, accompanied on its seaward flight by a tumbling Methodist church which the roaring Muskingum had added to the universal baptism.

Not all of the life that now courses through Cincinnati's streets could crowd upon its bridges, for the people of the cities and villages across on the Kentucky sh.o.r.e belong in every commercial and social sense to Cincinnati, and swell its population to the half-million mark. In fact, within a radius which the vision from this tower almost sweeps, there are a dozen ambitious and wealthy Ohio cities, founded by the st.u.r.dy men of the Revolution who went forth from Cincinnati and still tributary to the parent town.

The traveler is surveying sacred ground. Mount Auburn beside him marks the site where fell a captain serving under George Rogers Clark, one of the first of the many brave soldiers of the American Revolution to mingle their dust with Ohio soil, which thus enriched has produced many Presidents and renowned statesmen almost without number.

Leading away from the city the observer on the tower sees the Miami and Erie Ca.n.a.l, which, connecting Cincinnati with Toledo and furnishing a highway by which boats could pa.s.s from New Orleans via the Queen City through various inland waters, finally reaching the harbor of New York, made Cincinnati as early as 1830 a half-way house for continental traffic.

The ca.n.a.l recalls that on the tow-path the barefooted Garfield began his career.

While glancing at the surrounding reservoirs from which water is forced to this tower for the supply of the terrace-built city, the traveler may recall the story of the eccentric wanderer, the celebrated Cincinnati "water witch" who with hazel or willow crook went about from hamlet to hamlet indicating hidden springs and at whose direction, in truth, the Queen City dug its first well.

[Ill.u.s.tration RESERVOIR, EDEN PARK.]

Descending now, the traveler may view the observatory which John Quincy Adams dedicated to science, or move with the crowds flocking to the Zoo or to the groves where free concerts are given, or he may find his inspiration in roaming through the haunts that still treasure the memory of U.S. Grant, or visit the site of taverns that entertained Webster and Andrew Jackson, who paused here on his way to Washington, and that extended frequent hospitality to Henry Clay, stopping here while journeying to or from the national capital.

Pa.s.sing over the suspension bridge, the traveler may let the sun go down upon his itinerary as he stands upon the bank of the Licking, made memorable by the vigilant canoe cruises of Daniel Boone. Near by is the cottage home of the Grants. Pa.s.sing a Shawnee effigy in front of a tobacconist's stand, the visitor sees the illumination of the city beginning to twinkle against the shadowy background. The multi-colored lights of myriad street-cars flash over bridges and up the steep streets of the hill-built metropolis. The headlights of locomotives on nineteen railroads, representing over twenty thousand miles of track, gleam in and out of the city. It is a moving picture, a perpetual memorial and celebration of the valiant labors of those paladins of pioneer conquest who on that Christmas week, 113 years ago, struck their flint and started their fires in the primeval woods, kindling thereby a light which though flaring at times before the whirlwinds of savage war, and all but quenched with baptisms of fraternal bloodshed, now burns with a steadiness and brilliancy that shall last as long as time.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

DETROIT

THE QUEEN CITY

"Here, beside the broad, blue river builded, I am Queen City of the Lakes."

BY SILAS FARMER

A stream of crystal clearness, wide and swiftly flowing, the waters of silver and blue alive with fins and scales, a course dotted with islands large and small, wild ducks in myriads diving and dining along sh.o.r.es bordered with pond lilies and flags, stretches of yellow sand and bluffs of yellow clay peopled with buffalo, bear and deer, with wide leagues of gra.s.sy pastures and pleasing vistas beyond, walnuts, oaks and maples sentinelling the scene, and skies and sunsets of unrivalled azure and gold adding the final touch of beauty--such was Nature's invitation to the first visitors to the Detroit.

The earliest of the French travellers to this region was the Sieur Joliet, who came in 1670, and was followed the same year by the Sulpician priests, Galinee and Dollier. Eight years later La Salle in _Le Griffon_, the first sail-vessel on the Great Lakes, pa.s.sed through the "strait of Lake Erie,"

and July 24, 1701, Cadillac and his company landed at the present site of Detroit to establish a fort and permanent settlement.

The desire to escape from Roman or Protestant oppression which led to the founding of Baltimore and Plymouth had no place in the thought of those who colonized Acadia and the West. True, there had been one or two feeble efforts to found French Protestant colonies in America. The great Coligny sent a Huguenot colony to Florida more than fifty years before the _Mayflower_ arrived at Plymouth Rock. The Spaniards, however, fell upon and hanged these colonists, their placards stating that it was done, "not because they were Frenchmen, but because they were heretics." Under Cardinal Richelieu, all Protestant emigration to America was discouraged for fear the emigrants would unite with the English or make converts of the Indians. The conversion of the Indians to the Romish faith was always specially designated among the objects of French enterprise in America. The charter of the "Hundred a.s.sociates" of April 29, 1627, expressly stated that it was granted for the primary purpose of converting to the Catholic faith the Indians, usually designated as "worshippers of Baal." All these motives played their part in the founding of Detroit, but not quite so important a part as the commercial motive.

[Ill.u.s.tration CADILLAC SQUARE, SHOWING CITY HALL AND MAJESTIC BUILDING.]

Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac, the founder and commandant, was no mere adventurer. In courage, in scholarship, in mental grasp and in general ac.u.men he deserves a place with the founders of Baltimore and Philadelphia.

The confessedly fict.i.tious description of his personal appearance and the one-sided a.n.a.lysis of his character by Gayarre were founded on incomplete knowledge. As an officer of the French marine, Cadillac fearlessly crossed the Atlantic again and again as though it were but an inland ferry. On the coast of America he explored the harbors and islands of New England and noted at length their peculiarities and advantages. As a soldier and knight of the Order of St. Louis, he penetrated into the wildest of western wilds, served as commandant at Mackinaw, Detroit and Mobile, repeatedly defeated the Indians at these posts, and compelled them to sue for peace. He had the scholar's habit of writing detailed memoirs of the places he established or was commanded to inspect. He wielded a pen as sharp as his sharp sword. The opponents of his plans had need to fear its point. He spared no words. "A traveller cannot afford to stop," he said, "for every dog that barks." And ill.u.s.trating the fact that many of the French lived so much among the Indians that they became like Indians themselves, he sententiously said, "With wolves one learns to howl."

He denounced frauds boldly. Count Frontenac spoke highly of his "valor, wisdom, experience and good conduct." It was no ordinary man to whom a wife could by word and deed alike bear witness as Cadillac's wife bore witness to her husband. After they had been married for fourteen years, and when the colony was less than two years old, in company with Madame Touty, in an open canoe with Indians and woodsmen for an escort, she made the journey of a thousand miles from Quebec to Detroit in the fall of the year when fierce winds and rough waves and heavy rains might be expected. When one of the Quebec ladies reminded her in advance, "At Detroit you will die of _ennui_," she replied, "A woman who loves her husband as she should has no stronger attraction than his company wherever he may be; everything else should be indifferent to her."

The American cities that equal us in age and population are few indeed. Two hundred years are behind us, and three hundred thousand people fill our homes. Our people are and ever have been of many types. In the early days _coureurs des bois_, bluff, hearty, reckless, and Indians, the squaw trudging along bent double under her basket of bead-work, the unburdened brave stalking proudly, noiselessly along, frequented the place. Dutch traders from the Mohawk coasting along the Lakes early brought negro slaves from Albany.[3] In our social life the Gallic spirit remains to soften and harmonize. The dash of gorgeous coloring which the almost continuous existence here of a military post has given, the distinction and grace which the early arrival of some of old Virginia's n.o.blest children has lent, the intellectual vigor which Puritan New England has contributed, and the solidity and conservatism furnished by the presence of the many wealthy landed proprietors have all shared in the making of a social life as rich as it is attractive.

[Ill.u.s.tration THE DETROIT RIVER FROM "WINDMILL POINT," 1838. FROM A PENCIL DRAWING.]

After the first settlers came strange sights. Round-towered and red-painted windmills began to dot the banks of the Detroit, and all "along sh.o.r.e"

narrow farms, a city block in width and fifty times as long, stretched from the river rearward to meadows and woods. The canoe and the pirogue were always in the stream, and in them the French girls were as much at home as mermaids in the sea. The fort was the centre of every interest. It was a log stockade enclosing a plot of ground three or four hundred feet square, and lay south of what is now Jefferson Avenue, occupying at least the western half of the block between Griswold and Shelby streets. Within it commandant and soldiers were gathered, the church was located, justice administered and goods were kept on sale.

A large influx of immigrants, especially in 1749 and 1754, caused the extension of the stockade, but at no time were grants of farms made within several hundred feet of the fort. The intervening s.p.a.ce was in large part used as a "common field," and year after year oats and onions were produced where only paving-stones could now be raised. Eventually of course the houses overflowed the stockade, stretching towards the farms, but for a long time the owners of farms on either side resisted any encroachment of streets or people, and for many years the city could grow only northwards.

The French farms that hemmed in the city possessed many advantages. Even when included within the city they, for many years, practically escaped taxation because undivided into lots. Indeed, until a comparatively recent period there was no taxation of real estate and really no need for any; for whenever the city needed money it sold a lot. This reckless style of living continued till 1834, the extraordinary expenses connected with the cholera season of that year making larger taxation needful.

In this connection it is well to recall an unusual state of affairs that placed many lots at the disposal of the city. In the year 1778, during the Revolutionary War, the English, to protect them against the Americans, erected a large fort where the new Post-office is located, in the block bounded by Shelby, Wayne, Lafayette and Fort streets. At the close of the war this fort, with its grounds, pa.s.sed into the possession of the United States. In 1826 Congress gave this property, worth to-day more than a score of millions, to the city whose expenses had before been paid by fees derived from various licensed persons and pursuits. Upon the reception of this property the city fathers deemed it necessary to level and grade the old fort and its appurtenances and to lay out streets thereon. The cost of the work was paid by the issuing of city "shinplasters" which could soon be bought for sixty cents on the dollar. The lots laid out within the limits of the old cantonment were sold at nominal prices, the purchasers paying for them in the depreciated city bills. The result was that the net proceeds to the city from the sale of this extensive domain amounted to only $15,000, and even this was not permanently invested, and no vestige of the funds remains. In contrast to the dissipation by the city of valuable property is the wisdom displayed by individual holders whose property later became worth millions. If the city officers of that day had possessed foresight as well as power, they might have so conserved the city's possessions as to have made Detroit an Utopia. All the public schools and other civic buildings and appurtenances could have been built and paid for, and the city government could to-day be carried on without taxation, or at least with only a t.i.the of the amount that is now required to be paid.

[Ill.u.s.tration WEST GRAND CIRCUS PARK.]

It was during the decades of 1820-1840 that the tide of emigration from East to West reached its height. It began in 1825, on the completion of the Erie Ca.n.a.l, and was greatly increased by the larger number of steamboats on the Lakes that immediately followed. The opening in 1854 of the first railroad from the East to the West, the Great Western of Canada, made it possible to go still faster and with greater ease, and during the whole period Detroit gained largely in population. The introduction of street-cars in 1863 afforded opportunity for easy access to outlying regions, and since then the city limits have been several times extended, until now they embrace an area of not far from thirty square miles, with a river frontage of seven miles.

Contemporaneously with the rush of settlers to the State and city between 1830 and 1840, came what is known as the "flush times of 1837." Emigration to the West had become almost a stampede, both steam and sail vessels were crowded to their utmost, and knowing the dearness of Eastern lands and the cheapness at which Western lands could be purchased, nearly every person came prepared to buy and did buy lands for settlement or speculation. So great was the rush that all careful preliminaries were dispensed with, and if only a t.i.tle could be shown, anything that "lay outdoors" could be disposed of. Town sites were a favorite form of investment, and the supply kept pace with the demand. Surveyors and draftsmen were soon busy day and night representing imaginary cities on paper. On these plans, literally like "Jonah's gourd," there sprang up in a night, stores, dwellings and court-houses, indeed, all the appurtenances of an old established town. The era of "wildcat" banks had just begun and the princ.i.p.al security of their bills was the land covered by these imaginary towns. Theoretically, twenty per cent. of the bills issued by the too easily organized banks were to be secured by specie deposits. Actually, not five per cent. was so deposited.

The same coin--in some cases in the same boxes--was exhibited by a score of different banks, and in some instances "coin boxes" were filled with iron and other subst.i.tutes for specie. These frauds were winked at by bank commissioners, who should have inspected the contents of the boxes. There was thus a trinity of imaginings,--imaginary towns, imaginary banks and imaginary inspection. When the bubbles burst there were left in some places towns and houses without a single inhabitant, and certain of these houses contained room after room in which the walls were literally papered with bank bills in sheets that had never been cut apart or signed.

The most important local event was the fire of June 11, 1805, which destroyed every house in the city save one. The memory of the fire is preserved in the present seal of the city, the mottoes, _Resurget Cineribus_, "She has risen from the ashes," and _Speramus Meliora_, "We hope for better things," representing both prophecy and fulfilment. Out of the fire grew an entirely new plan of the town, new lot alignments and a.s.signments, and a new form of government. The former streets, twelve feet wide, grew into broad avenues, and the years have added areas and improvements which in any city would be marks of prosperity and beauty.

The form of government which the fire introduced was, however, its unique result. The beginnings of the strange methods of government that obtained are found in the organization of the Ohio Company, and in that notable doc.u.ment, the Ordinance of 1787. Under the latter, Congress was to appoint a governor whose term was for three years, unless sooner revoked, who was required to possess in freehold an estate of one thousand acres in the territory; a secretary for the term of four years, unless revoked, who was required to have five hundred acres of land; and three judges, any two of whom const.i.tuted a court to have common-law jurisdiction, and each of whom was required to own five hundred acres of land.

The governor and judges were appointed January 11, 1805. Judges Woodward and Bates arrived at Detroit June 12th, and found the town wiped out by the fire of the previous day. A few stone chimneys and, near the fire line, several antique pear trees alone remained. Governor Hull arrived on the evening of July 1st. The date of the arrival of Judge Griffin is unknown.

In many respects the Governor and judges were well fitted to enter upon and complete the laying out of a new Detroit. Judge Woodward came from Alexandria, Va., and understood and admired the plan of Washington, then new. He manifestly desired and determined that Detroit should be modelled after that "City of Magnificent Distances." Sections of his plan as drawn by A.F. Hull, the son of the Governor, could be laid upon the plan of Washington and matched to a line.

[Ill.u.s.tration WAYNE COUNTY BUILDING, FACING CADILLAC SQUARE.]

There was much delay in adopting the plan; but after summering and wintering as best they could, however, among their friends outside, the inhabitants were gratified with the news that April 21, 1806, Congress had authorized the Governor and judges to lay out a new town, build a court-house and jail, dispose of ten thousand acres near, give former owners and householders lots, convey lots to others and in general settle all details therewith connected. It was not, however, until September 6, 1806, or four months after the date of the act, that the Governor and judges held their first meeting. Interminable slowness seems to have been their purpose; plans and counter-plans, change and repeated change in surveys, their method. Lots were numbered and renumbered, streets laid out on paper, obliterated and then laid out anew in new directions and locations. Decisions were bandied about and referred from one person or authority to another, and questions of ownership of lots, like a shuttlec.o.c.k, were tossed to and fro. Plans were prepared, approved, used and then discarded. Every new difficulty and scheme seemed to give rise to new and radically different lot outlines and numbers. Lots were capriciously granted and as capriciously withdrawn. Without bond or books of account, without method other than the method of not leaving any record of what moneys were received or how expended, they did as they pleased. As a result, for a year and a half after the fire there was not a single house erected, and up to May, 1807, deeds had been given for only nineteen lots.

Meantime, the debris of the fire covered the site of the ancient village, the blackened stone chimneys standing as monuments of the disaster and of the incompetency or worse of those in authority.