The Westward Movement. Various
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to be self-governing States.
THE BEGINNINGS OF OHIO.
The first community to be built up in the Northwest Territory was Ohio. In 1788 a party of forty-eight New Englanders, the Pilgrim Fathers of Ohio, landed at the mouth of the Muskingum in a bullet-proof barge which bore the historic name of Mayflower. It was well that the barge was bullet-proof, for white men passing down the Ohio in boats were in constant danger of being shot by Indians lurking along the shore. The Mayflower party went ashore opposite Fort Harmar, where there was a regiment of soldiers. In the winning of Ohio, soldiers and settlers went hand in hand, for everywhere through the Northwest there were Indians, and every acre of land won by the ax and plow had to be guarded and defended by the rifle.
Under the protection of the soldiers, the New Englanders began to fell trees and build houses, and to lay the foundation of Marietta, the oldest of Ohio towns and a place that in the history of the West holds a rank similar to that held by Jamestown and Plymouth in the history of the East. At Marietta the wheels of territorial government for the Northwest Territory were set in motion (July, 1788). General Arthur St. Clair, who had climbed the rock of Quebec with Wolfe, and who was a warm friend of Washington, had come out as governor of the Territory.
Cincinnati was founded about the same time as Marietta. In December, 1788, twenty-six settlers landed at the foot of what is now Sycamore Street in Cincinnati, and began to build a town which they called Losantiville, but which afterward received its present name. Other settlements on the Ohio quickly followed those of Marietta and Cincinnati. The towns of Gallipolis, Portsmouth, Manchester, and South Bend all appeared within a few years after the founding of Marietta.
The Ohio settlers had to meet the Indians at every step, and as the white men became more numerous the red men became more troublesome. In 1791 Governor St. Clair was compelled to march against the Indians, but near the place where the city of Fort Wayne now stands he suffered a terrible defeat. General Anthony Wayne—"Mad Anthony"—the hero of Stony Point, was next sent against the red warriors, and at Fallen Timbers (in 1794) he met them and dealt them a blow that broke their power completely in Ohio and drove them from the country.
With the Indians out of the way, the settlement of Ohio could go on much faster. Towns began to be built farther up the streams and farther inland. In 1795 Dayton and Chillicothe were founded, and the next year General Moses Cleveland, with a few companions, founded, at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, a town to which he gave his name. In 1800 the original Northwest Territory was divided, and the eastern portion—the portion that is now Ohio—was set off as the Territory Northwest of the Ohio, and was given a territorial government of its own. The population of this new Territory was more than 40,000, and its people were already beginning to think of statehood.
Marietta, Ohio, in 1790.
THE SETTLEMENT OF THE WEST
By Emerson Hough
I. THE PATHWAY OF THE WATERS
It is pleasant to dwell upon the independent character of Western life, and to go back to the glories of that land and day when a man who had a rifle and a saddle-blanket was sure of a living, and need ask neither advice nor permission of any living soul. These days, vivid, adventurous, heroic, will have no counterpart upon the earth again. These early Americans, who raged and roared across the West, how unspeakably swift was the play in which they had their part!
No fiction can ever surpass in vividness the vast, heroic drama of the West. The clang of steel, the shoutings of the captains, the stimulus of wild adventure—of these things, certainly, there has been no lack. There has been close about us for two hundred years the sweeping action of a story keyed higher than any fiction, more unbelievably bold, more incredibly keen in spirit.
WHAT WAS THAT WEST?
Historian, artist, novelist, poet, must all in some measure fail to answer this demand, for each generation buries its own dead, and each epoch, to be understood, must be seen in connection with its own living causes and effects and interwoven surroundings. Yet it is pleasant sometimes to seek among causes, and I conceive that a certain interest may attach to a quest which goes further than a mere summons on the spurred and booted Western dead to rise. Let us ask, What was the West? What caused its growth and its changes? What was the Western man, and why did his character become what it was? What future is there for the West to-day? We shall find that the answers to these questions run wider than the West, and, indeed, wider than America.
One of the old-time
long-haired
men of the West.
We are all, here—Easterner and Westerner, dweller of the Old World or the New, bond or free, of to-day or of yesterday—but the result of that mandate which bade mankind to increase and multiply, which bade mankind to take possession of the earth. We have each of us taken over temporarily that portion of earth and its fullness which was allotted or which was made possible to him by that Providence to which both belong. We have each of us done this along the lines of the least possible resistance, for this is the law of organic life.
The West was sown by a race of giants, and reaped by a race far different and in a day dissimilar. Though the day of rifle and ax, of linsey-woolsey and hand-ground meal, went before the time of trolley-cars and self-binder, of purple and fine linen, it must be observed that in the one day or the other the same causes were at work, and back of all these causes were the original law and the original mandate. The Iliad of the West is only the story of a mighty pilgrimage.
WHAT, THEN, WAS THE FIRST TRANSPORTATION OF THE WEST?
When the Spaniard held the mouth of the Great River, the Frenchman the upper sources, the American only the thin line of coast whose West was the Alleghanies, how then did the West-bound travel, these folk who established half a dozen homes for every generation?
The answer would seem easy. They traveled in the easiest way they could. It was a day of raft and boat, of saddle-horse and pack-horse, of ax and rifle, and little other luggage. Mankind followed the pathways of the waters.
THE RECORD OF THE AVERAGE LINE OF WEST-BOUND TRAVEL.
Bishop Berkeley, prophetic soul, wrote his line, "Westward the course of empire takes its way." The public has always edited it to read that it is the "star of empire" which "takes its way" to the West. If one will read this poem in connection with a government census map, he will not fail to see how excellent is the amendment. Excellent census map, which holds between its covers the greatest poem, the greatest drama ever written! Excellent census map, which marks the center of population of America with a literal star, and which, at the curtain of each act, the lapse of each ten years, advances this star with the progress of the drama, westward, westward!
WHY THIS AVERAGE LINE TOOK THE COURSE IT DID.
The first step of this star of empire (that concluded in 1800) barely removed it from its initial point upon the Chesapeake. The direction was toward the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania. The government at Washington, young as it was, knew that the Ohio River, reached from the North by a dozen trails from the Great Lakes, and running out into that West which even then was coveted by three nations, was of itself a priceless possession. It was a military reason which first set moving the Pennsylvania hotbed of immigrants. The restless tide of humanity spread from that point according to principles as old as the world. Having a world before them from which to choose their homes, the men of that time sought out those homes along the easiest lines. The first thrust of the outbound population was not along the parallels