Ohio History Journal

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under discussion; the tide was against the enactment on the ground

that the Society did not merit the State's aid. Mr. Griffin hastily summoned

the writer to the cloak-room of the House and asked a full explanation of

the situation. It was given. Mr. Griffin returned to the floor and in a

most vigorous argument and enthusiastic plea changed the prevailing senti-

ment and carried the bill through. He was the friend of the Society and

deserves the kindliest thought and most grateful memory of its members.

To the surviving wife, son Mark and daughter Ethel of Toledo

and daughter Mrs. N. Coe Stewart, of Worcester, Mass., we extend the

sympathy and well wishes of the members of the Ohio State Archaeo-

logical and Historical Society.

 

 

 

OHIO AND THE WESTERN RESERVE.

Mr. Alfred Mathews, recently made honorary member of the Ohio

State Archaeological and Historical Society, has given the public one of

the most valuable little books on Ohio history that has been issued

within recent times. The book bears the title Ohio and her Western

Reserve, with a story of three states, the states being Connecticut,

Pennsylvania and Ohio. Mr. Mathews is a tireless student of history.

He has apparently exhausted the subject of his volume. With great

detail, but always in a delightful and polished style he gives the history

of the Connecticut colony, its claim of a wide strip of territory across

Pennsylvania and the northern part of Ohio into Michigan and Indiana.

His chapter on Wyoming gives the most complete and satisfactory his-

tory of the Connecticut settlement at Wyoming, the tragic history of

that settlement, the battle and massacre of Wyoming, that we have ever

seen in print. It will be recalled that this settlement by the Connecticut

colonists at Wyoming was the first pioneer settlement of the Connecti-

cut people within the boundary of Penn's province on the Susquehanna

river, and within the territory claimed by Connecticut, and was made

largely to preempt and establish by right of possession the title of Connecti-

cut to that western extension. "It represented the first overt act of an

inter-colonial intrusion; the initial movement of that persistent, general,

systematic invasion which resulted in the settlement of Wyoming and the

establishment of a Connecticut government on Pennsylvania soil; a de-

termined effort to dismember the state and to create another, to be

carved from the territory of Pennsylvania." Wyoming was founded by

what was known as the Connecticut-Susquehanna company, which made

its settlement with about two hundred Connecticut men about a mile

above the site of Wilkesbarre in the Wyoming valley in the early spring

of 1762. As early as 1754 the company sent agents to Albany to purchase

from the Indians of the Six Nations the land in the Wyoming Valley.

This was all done under the protest of the Pennsylvanians and their

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governor Hamilton. What was known as the "Pennamite" war subse-

quently ensued. There was much incipient warfare against and perse-

cution of the Wyoming settlers until the early summer of 1778 when the

Wyoming wives besought their husbands to return from the Continental

Army of the Revolution to their Wyoming homes to protect their threat-

ened destruction. At the same time these people called upon the Con-

tinental Congress and the Pennsylvania authorities for justice and pro-

tection for the threatened settlement. But the sorm could not be stayed.

The Indian and British and Tory forces were concentrated at Tioga on

the Susquehanna some distance above Wyoming. "No more heterogen-

eous herd of murderous soldiers and savages was ever seen in America.

Its total is not far from twelve hundred fighting men. There were

four hundred British provincials with a rabble of Tories from New Jersey,

New York and Pennsylvania. There were not far from seven hundred

Indians chiefly Senecas with detachments from the Mohawks and other

tribes. This army was in almost every conceivable dress from the mar-

tial dignity of trained soldiers down to the ruffian type of the low

abandoned and depraved of the Tories. The regulars were in smart uni-

forms. Col. John Butler's Rangers in rich green; the Tories and rene-

gades in every form of backwoods rusticity and tattered motley; the

Indians half naked were in savage attire with their war-paint and bar-

barous adornment varied with martial trappings of soldiers slain in

northern battles."  This nondescript army was under the command of

Colonel John Butler a remote relative of Colonel Zebulon Butler who

was in command at Wyoming. The real leader of the Indian contingent

under Colonel John Butler was Catherine Montour a halfbreed and reputed

daughter of one of the French Governors of Canada. She had been

liberally educated, and the best society of colonial Philadelphia, Albany

and New York had petted and feted her as a romantic and engaging

young woman in whose veins coursed a mingling of cultured and savage

blood. She was now the widow of chief, known as Queen Esther, and

enjoyed the repute of a seeress. She possessed peculiar power over her

Indian race.

The forces at the Wyoming settlement and fort numbered all told

only about three hundred men, and nearly all of these, according to

the inscription of the monument erected in their honor, were "The un-

disciplined, the youthful and the aged." There were two hundred and

thirty enrolled men, many in fact minors, and the remaining seventy were

all either boys or old men. They were divided into six companies, and

mustered at Forty Fort on the west side of the river where the families

of the settlers on the east side had taken refuge. Such was the situation

on that memorable day, the third of July, 1778, when the British and

Indians having advanced intrepidly down the valley were finally met in

battle. The result was inevitable. Col. Zebulon Butler's brave three

hundred, like those of Leonidas at Thermopylae, were cut down. One

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hundred and sixty men were killed, and a hundred and forty escaped only

to be subsequently captured.  A debauch of blood followed for the

special delectation of Queen Esther who personally participated in the

battle. "That seemingly insane savage ordered a score of the prisoners

brought before her for torture. They were compelled to kneel above a

large rock, and then the fanatical fury chanting a wild song swept swiftly

around the circle and dashed out the brains of sixteen victims while

the warriors crowded closely about the scene of butchery expressing their

fierce joy with leaps and yells."  Nearly all of the three hundred men

were killed in the attack or subsequent massacre. Of the wretched people

remaining there were made that day in the valley one hundred and fifty

widows, and nearly six hundred orphans.

Mr. Mathews deals at much length upon the settlement of the

Western Reserve by the Connecticut Yankees. This phase in our state

history he entitles "Connecticut Triumphant in Ohio."  He does full

justice to the great influence of the New England character in its trans-

plantation from Connecticut to the shores of Lake Erie on the Western

Reserve. The part which the Western Reserve has played through its

distinguished characters, military, political, literary and otherwise is

fully set forth. There is a very admirable and succinct statement of the

origin and nature of the great ordinance of 1787, and the Marietta settle-

ment which immediately followed the creation of the North West Terri-

tory. Mr. Mathews also briefly states the chain of events leading to the

evolution of Ohio from the North West Territory into statehood. "Ohio

was never formally admitted as all other states since the original thirteen

have been, to the Union; and it has been a matter of much contention

as to which one of a half dozen dates is the true one from which to

compute her age." That of April 30, 1802 is not the true one, that date

was simply the one upon which Congress passed the first enabling act

paving the way for the admission of Ohio into the Union.  A better

one would be that of November 29, in the same year, when the consti-

tution was adopted by the convention at Chillicothe, or January 11, 1803,

when the first state election was held; but these and several others are

unsupportable for various reasons. On February 19, 1803, Congress passed

an act for the execution of the laws of the Union within the state of Ohio,

"and so is the nearest approach to the act of admission, from which the

existence of other states is determined. This date has been generally sanc-

tioned by historians as the true one. But the legislature first assembled

on March 1, 1803, and the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society

has officially designated that date to be the proper one of the state's

origin and it is therefore now generally so accepted." Mr. Mathews de-

votes an interesting chapter to the analysis of Ohio's ascendency in the

sisterhood of states. This he attributes mainly to its mixture of racial

forces. "It has been tritely told that New England was sown with selected

seed from Old England, but Ohio was sown with selected seed from all

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New England and all the colonies. Her uniqueness, historically speak-

ing, lies in the fact that hers was the first soil settled by the United States.

New England was peopled by the Puritans and others from Old England;

New York by Dutch and English; Pennsylvania by Quakers and Ger-

mans and Scotch-Irish; Virginia again by the English but quite differ-

ent from those of Massachusetts and Connecticut; Maryland by still

another element; and so on. Of the states not included among the

original thirteen, but admitted to the Union before Ohio: Vermont was

settled by Massachusetts and New York; Kentucky by Virginia; and Ten-

nessee by North Carolina; but Ohio was settled by all of these-by

elements from each and every state in the confederacy; in other words,

Ohio was settled by the people of the United States. Ohio was the first

territory to be representative of the entire people, colonists of English

Puritans and Cavaliers and Quakers, of Scotch-Irish and Germans. And

thus in a certain senese were not the Ohioans truly the first Americans?"

 

 

 

THE ACOLHUANS.

This is the age of the historical novel. It is being produced from the

press ad infinitum if not indeed ad nauseum but it has remained for

General John Beatty, a life and honored member of the Ohio State

Archaeological and Historical Society, to be the author of a prehistoric

novel. General Beatty's book is therefore unique as a literary feature

of the day. This volume, as confessed in the apology, purports to be

a free translation from the Norraena of the story of a man living in the

tenth century. It is the self-told narrative of the hero Ivarr Bartholds-

son, a grandson of a former king of Norway, which king spent many

years of his early life in the court of Athelstan of England. Ivarr with

his father had drifted to Greenland, whence Ivarr with an adventurous

party travels to the land of the Acolhuans who occupied the Ohio val-

ley, and were none other than the Mound Builders of that territory.

The book is thenceforth an account of the lengthy sojourn of Ivarr among

its prehistoric people, whose customs, life, habitations, government, and

social system so far as it went, are ingeniously and in imagination de-

scribed. The author takes this form to tell what is supposed to be known

about these people who left no written records. Ivarr in his wanderings

strikes the northern boundary of the present Ohio at the mouth of the

Sandusky river where was a chief settlement of the Acolhuans. The

hero and his friends assist these people in one of their campaigns against

a rival race known as the Skraelings. There is a naval encounter on the

lake in their rude boats, and a hand to hand contest with clubs and bows

and arrows on the land. Ivarr visits the various chief settlements such

as those at Chillicothe, Newark and Marietta. These Mound Building

settlements are graphically portrayed, the business and domestic life of

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