Ohio History Journal

Big Bottom and Its History.           17   ADDRESS OF C. L. MARTZOLFF. It is said that a minister's text is but a peg upon which to hang his sermon. If I were a minister the peg upon which I

would hang this speech would be found among the jewels of the wonderful mines of King Solomon - The Book of Proverbs. "Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set." Man has ever been a monument builder, When the Israelites fought with the hosts of Amalek, when the hands of Moses were stayed by Aaron and Hur until the going down of the sun and the Amalekites had been put to the sword, then it was that Moses builded an altar as a memorial of the

great victory. When David the warrior king sent forth his mighty Joab to wage war upon the Edomites, he celebrated his success by a mon- ument of triumph, an inscribed tablet carved on the rocks of Edom after the manner of eastern kings. But centuries before the Hebrews built their rude memori- als among the hills of Palestine, the monarchs of the Orient had erected upon the banks of the Euphrates and the Nile, monu- ments to commemorate their achievements in war, or to extol the glories of royalty. We are told that at the portals of the sculptured palaces of Nineveh, there were colossal figures of men and beasts carved from white alabaster; that within the interior stretching for miles and miles, the builder of the palace ranged the illustrated record of his exploits. There cut in the walls were represented vast pro- cessions of warriors, and satraps, and eunuchs, and tributary kings winding and winding through the corridors until the mind grows dizzy with the regal splendor and the heart grows sick at the vanity of kings. To-day the antiquarian digs down beneath the accumulated dust of the centuries and from the broken pieces of pottery and the ruined columns he reads its history. Vol. XV- 2.

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18       Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

We cross the borders of Asia and along the banks of the

Nile we tread the soil of the Pharaohs. We look about us and

see the wonderful pyramids erected by Egyptian kings to glorify

their names while living and to cover their poor carcasses when

dead. We can still see the millions of tribes wearing away their

lives to satisfy the caprice of princes. Here in this land of plenty,

capable of sustaining in comfort its entire population, amid all

this wealth there is hunger and misery and woe among the people,

that those above them may live in luxury. Even yet to-day the

Egyptian peasant knows only to suffer and to die.

A Roman Titus may build an Arch of Triumph to commem-

orate the destruction of Jerusalem. He may show upon it how

he led the Hebrews captive bearing upon their shoulders the

golden candlestick, the trumpet of Jubilee and other treasures

from the Temple on Mount Zion.

A Napoleon in imitation of the Roman Caesars, builds two

triumphal arches to celebrate his victories and to proclaim his

mighty genius. But such is the irony of fate that at the foot of

the grandest of these arches in 1814 the allied armies met to re-

joice over the downfall of its builder; and here again in 1871 the

victorious arms of Prussia emphasized their victory over the last

of the Napoleons.

Fortunate is he whose words have become flesh and dwell

among men. No need for him to erect marble tablet or obelisk

to tell the world what he hath wrought. But deep in the souls

of men is it inscribed in letters of fire that shine out with no

uncertain light in their daily lives.

To the "Father of his Country" there needed not be built

a monument of his works. The patriots at Bunker Hill need not

the shaft to tell men that they fought and died there. The

heroes of Gettysburg, where they wore the Blue or the Gray,

need neither tablet-nor cenotaph to show that they bled there. Far

more imperishable than marble or bronze is kept the testimony

of their patriotism among the sons of men.

In olden times kings erected monuments in their own honor.

All this has changed. We now erect in honor of others. It is

the people who live afterward, who have inherited the patrimony

and who appreciate that heritage, that now erect memorials and

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Big Bottom and Its History.             19

 

preserve the "landmarks of their fathers." We do not erect

monuments to the departed simply to show what they did, but

rather what we are doing with the memories and inheritance

which they left us. We erect monuments not so much to show

the character of the patriotism of the past, but rather the quality

of our own. The monuments we erect typify our aspiration and

our labor.

As long as people erect monuments in honor of the deeds of

their fathers so long is that people tolerably safe from drifting

into the shallows of anarchy and personal and class aggrandize-

ment, where many nations and people in times past have been

wrecked and gone to ruin and decay and their wrecks are strewn

along time's fretful stream.

Monuments are the expression of the thoughts of the peo-

ple. They show what the people are thinking about. When peo-

ple complain about setting up memorials in honor of their fathers,

or when they cease to erect them, it is a premonition that they

believe in no longer and appreciate no more the sacrifices and

labors of their sires. It means that they are ready to cut away

from old moorings and venture upon new seas, with neither com-

pass nor chart.

While it was justified to no little extent, such was the con-

dition in France in the Revolution of ¹⁷⁸9. A spirit of iconoclasm

and anarchy swept over that fair land caring nothing for

their historic heroes and kings because they represented to

them tyranny and oppression. And yet in that boiling sea of

rebellion the memory of men that had been an honor to France

was allowed to go down into the universal maelstrom.

But here in America it is different. Here monuments are

the free, voluntary declaration of a free people. Here monu-

ments tell us who our heroes are. And if you would know the

character of a people, learn the character of its heroes.

It is certainly a matter of congratulation that in this age of

extreme commercialism, when the hero, or rather the heroine

of most men is the Goddess of Liberty stamped on the dollar

and the portraits of our national heroes have no better place in

our lives than to adorn our bank notes, that men and women are

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20        Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

yet to be found who do not want to "remove the landmarks of

the fathers," but are willing to preserve and remark them.

The erection of this monument is not only appropriate but

opportune. We erect memorials to our national military heroes

and to our presidents and statesmen. And why not to the Amer-

ican pioneer? While we build to commemorate the achievements

of the battlefield, why not, too, to the heroes of the forest ? When

we send up a shaft to mark the site where men fell when fighting

under the impelling stress of battle, why not to the men who laid

down the axe to take up the rifle and defend wife and little ones?

Heroes of the war there may be, but every man who came to

the woods of Ohio to make for himself and his children a home

is no less a hero. To this man there was not the shrill voice of

the fife, nor the rattle of the drum to call him to arms. There

was not the sight of flying colors to beckon him to do and dare.

There were no comrades keeping step to the martial music nor

officers to tell him what to do. But instead he fought in the king-

dom of the woods. In the days of the reign of the axe, he walked

his domain as a knight errant of old. In this kingdom of the forest

he stood the king.

The heroes of a thousand battlefields do not appeal to me as

do these heroes of the forest. The chronicles of a Caesar or a

Napoleon telling us how men strive for the vain bauble of an

imperial diadem, do not mean to me so much as do the simple

annals of the poor, where we learn how brave men and women

fought with the forces of untamed nature, wild animals and

wilder men, in order that they might become kings and queens

whose palace is the home.

The men and women, therefore, who went to their death

here, amid the cries of the blood-curdling war whoop, are rep-

resentative of that noble army of pioneers that came to the woods

of Ohio, not for adventure, but for the best of God-given insti-

tutions - home. They are types of that migrating instinct that

has been the genius of progress in the Anglo-Saxon-Teutonic

race, from the time when from its home in Asia it spread its suc-

cessive ways over Low Europe and established the world powers

in modern history. Then beyond the Atlantic, Puritan and Cava-

lier separately established the genesis of a new nation. Then from

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Big Bottom and Its History.             21   the rocky fortresses of the Appalachians, Puritan and Cavalier looked down together upon the fair valley of the Ohio. To them it was as the revelation to the prophet on Pisgah - the Promised Land. They were permitted to enter. But to hold it they fought with stubborn tenacity. Every foot was contested. But forward went this army across the prairies of Indiana and Illinois until the smoke curled from the settler's cabin on the banks of the Father of Waters. Then pressing on it swept across the western plains. The Rocky Mountains were no barrier and on their west- ern slopes and in the valleys of sunny California and where "rolls the Oregon" went the pathfinders of civilization. And now through the portals of the Golden Gate we send forth our ships to that new old land in which the world seeking Genoese dreamed lay his El Dorado. To this hero of the forest - hunter, scout, pathfinder, trail- maker, home-maker - we dedicate to-day this monument as a memorial to his sacrifices and services and bravery, with the firm and confident hope that the new generations now reaping the fruition of that toil will husband the splendid inheritance left us by such men as fell beneath the tomahawk of the ruthless savage on the banks of the Muskingum on that winter evening over a century ago. ADDRESS OF E. O. RANDALL. This is a red letter day for the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society. For many years it has been the custodian

of Fort Ancient, the most extensive and majestic earth enclosure of the Mound Builders in this country and for a somewhat less time has been the owner of Serpent Mound, the most mysterious religious relic left by that vanished and wonder-exciting race. Through the praiseworthy sentiment and generous disposition of Mr. Brokaw the Society becomes the proud possessor of this historic ground, the site of one of the most memorable events in the pioneer period of our state. The story of the birth of the

American Republic and its sturdy strife for independent exis-

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