The Pioneers

by David McCullough

  “It is said that the people in the western country universally wish Putnam may take command, and I believe were it to be decided by Congress he would have a generous vote,” Cutler also noted. The problem was Putnam. “He does not wish for it.”

  As Putnam made clear in a letter to Secretary of War Knox, he had “not the remotest wish” to enter again into military service. His private affairs and family situation forbade it, not to say his advanced age.

  The decision was finally made by Washington in mid-April 1792. The man in command this time was to be Anthony Wayne—General “Mad Anthony” Wayne—who had a reputation for the tenacity and aggressiveness needed to lead an army and was anything but mad.

  One anecdote about Putnam’s health problems at this time that he loved to tell concerned the return trip he made back up the Ohio that September, after concluding a treaty of peace with the Wabash and Illinois Indians.

  While on his barge rowed by U.S. soldiers, he suffered an attack of severe fever and ague. A doctor also on board “debarred” him from all food and drink. When they put ashore to camp for the night and the others treated themselves to a banquet of bear meat, venison, and turkey, “the very fumes of which were a feast,” Putnam lay as peaceably as his cravings would allow. But when at last the rest of the party was asleep, he crept to the camp kettle and feasted on what remained of the bear meat and venison and, as he later loved to report, he experienced no more of the fever and ague.

  The cloud of fear that had hung over Marietta and its neighboring settlements ever since the Big Bottom massacre had begun to clear to a degree. Word had come down the Ohio from Pittsburgh of the new army being recruited and properly trained under General Wayne to settle the threat of Indian attacks once and for all—an army said to number 8,000 men. By early spring 1793 the army was on its way, and if numbering closer to 2,000, it was there to be seen passing by on flatboats down river to Fort Washington at Cincinnati.

  Difficult as they had been, the years of confinement at Campus Martius had given rise to a very different way of life, and, to the surprise of many, what evolved had proven quite enjoyable. To enliven the off-hours within the stockade a variety of games and sporting events—foot races, boxing matches—had become a mainstay in which old and young engaged. Dancing was another diversion practiced by the youth, and encouraged by their elders as affording healthy exercise in which females could take part. No distinctions of family or official positions were then made. All activities were open to everyone. As would be written:

  They were united in bonds of friendship like one great family, bound and held together in a common brotherhood by the perils which surrounded them. In after years, when each household lived separate in their own domicil, they looked back on these days with satisfaction and pleasure, as a period in their lives when the best affections of the heart were called forth and practiced towards each other.

  The absence of a single violin in the garrison to enliven events was made up for by an elderly man, a sailor in his youth, known as “Uncle Sam,” who “with the aid of the enlivening beverage,” could sing all night, often tiring out the dancers sooner than they him. When, before daylight, he became a bit drowsy, a few kind words and another dram set him going again.

  Some worried this change in the settlement’s way of life would have long-range, detrimental effect. But they were a decided minority.

  One year later came word from the northwest corner of Ohio on the lower Maumee River that on August 20, 1794, General Wayne and his army had won an overwhelming victory over some 2,000 native warriors again led by Blue Jacket at the battle of Fallen Timbers. Unlike the forces under General Arthur St. Clair, Wayne’s troops, foot soldiers and cavalry, fought with great discipline and fury, and though the Indians, too, fought with great bravery, they were quickly routed.

  Wayne’s losses were minor, 33 killed, about 100 wounded, while the losses by Blue Jacket’s warriors were twice that.

  The victory, as Rufus Putnam said, was decisive. Its importance could “scarcely be over-estimated.” It ended more than four years of bitter frontier fighting.

  At Marietta, the cloud of fear lifted at last. The settlers could come out of their blockhouses and return to their farms or trades at their pleasure. The entire community could get on with much that needed doing.

  In another year, on August 3, 1795, American officials and scores of Indian representatives signed the Treaty of Greenville, establishing a treaty line above which, north and west of the line, the Indians were confined. As the noted Ohio historian George W. Knepper was to write, “Compared to any previous effort to separate Indian and white in Ohio, the Treaty of Greenville was effective, though at the Indians’ expense. It opened the way in eastern and southern Ohio for a renewed flood of settlers anxious to clear and cultivate lands that had never known the axe and the plow.”

  PART II

  1795–1814

   CHAPTER FIVE

  A New Era Commences

  Thus we left the scene of my early life, and started on this then hazardous journey and perilous enterprise. We had with us our four children.

  —EPHRAIM CUTLER, JUNE 15, 1795

  I.

  Young Ephraim Cutler and his father were much alike in a number of ways. Both were vigorous, affable, well-intentioned. Both were devoted family men with a strong allegiance to their Puritan values. At approximately six feet in height, Ephraim stood a bit taller than his father, and was, as said in the family, more strongly built and quite handsome, with dark gray eyes.

  But Ephraim’s childhood had been altogether different from that of the other Cutler children and he was different as a result. He had been named for a younger brother of his father’s who had been thrown from a horse and killed the year before Ephraim was born. At age three, on a visit to the Cutler grandparents at their farm in Killingly, Connecticut, they had, as he later wrote, “earnestly entreated that I should remain with them, and in some measure supply the place of the son of whom they had been so unexpectedly bereaved.” And so he had been left to their care, and there he was to stay.

  Only once, when his father was ordained, was he taken by his grandfather to visit Ipswich Hamlet. His parents came to see him, but he did not go again to Massachusetts to see them until he was sixteen. Instead, he grew up knowing firsthand the ceaseless hard work of a farm.

  If he harbored any resentment that he had been passed off to his grandparents, and thus denied the childhood provided his brothers and sisters by their parents, he is not known ever to have said as much.

  Though it had been his grandfather’s intention that he be educated at Yale as his father had, the troubled economic state of the country following the Revolution made that “impracticable.” He had, as he said, “a strong propensity to read” and thus gained a good understanding of history and geography quite early.

  By age sixteen, because of his grandfather’s advancing age, he had had to take charge of the whole business of the farm, which included cutting and hauling wood, driving sheep and cattle to market, and once, driving a rafter of turkeys about twenty-four miles to Providence.

  The Cutler farm was spread across a high hilltop with a sweeping view of the western horizon and memorable skies at sunset. What influence, if any, the presence of such a panorama may have had on the attraction of the west to both Manasseh and Ephraim no one can say for certain, but it could have been considerable.

  At the urging of the pastor of the church in Killingly, the Reverend Elisha Atkins, Ephraim studied on his own mathematics and surveying, which were to prove important to him. But he knew that was not enough. “It has always been to me a source of regret,” he later wrote, “that I was deprived of a liberal education.” Try as he would, he could never master proper spelling or punctuation, a deficiency his father was to call to his attention all too often.

  In 1787, the year of his father’s success with the Northwest Ordinance and the year his younger brother Jervis set off with the first pioneers to leave for Ohi
o, Ephraim, “before I had attained my twentieth year,” as he said, married Leah Atwood of Killingly and in the years that followed, with a young family to support, he struggled to succeed with several enterprises that failed and felt himself ever more ready to join the move west.

  Jervis, meanwhile, had given up in an attempt at farming near Marietta, sold his land, returned home to New England, and was married in 1794. He wished to go back to Ohio he told Ephraim—“I should esteem it one of the greatest pleasures of my life,” he wrote—but his wife feared the dangers and privations of pioneer life.

  Reports on the situation in Ohio, while rarely providing much in detail or with consistent accuracy, were in reasonably good supply in the Philadelphia, New York, and Boston newspapers. Most likely Ephraim turned to the Massachusetts Spy for the latest word from beyond the mountains in accounts datelined Pittsburgh. And by the end of August 1794, like everyone in the east, he knew of General Wayne’s victory.

  On the 15th of June, 1795, all necessary arrangements completed, Ephraim and his wife said goodbye to old friends and departed for Ohio.

  Leah had been in poor health and many who pressed around her on parting expressed their fears that she might not survive the journey. She answered cheerfully, saying she had committed herself to God and should not “suffer herself to be disheartened,” and especially since several physicians had advised a change of climate.

  With them were their four children, ages seven through one, two horses, and one cow to provide an abundance of milk on the way. Their “conveyance” was a wagon drawn by a yoke of oxen. Also traveling with them were a number of Putnams of all ages—part of the family of the famous, highly colorful Revolutionary War general, Israel Putnam—with two large wagons, four oxen, four horses, and three cows.

  Ephraim, of course, knew a great deal about Ohio and a number of those with whom his father had long been associated, and Rufus Putnam in particular. But he did not yet know Rufus Putnam or anyone else at Marietta. Nor did he have any clear idea of what he might do once there, or what opportunities might arise.

  The journey as far as the mountains of western Pennsylvania went without difficulty. Beyond there, the road was no better than it had long been and the struggle mile after mile was no less than ever.

  On reaching the Monongahela River, Ephraim had a boat built and on this the party proceeded past Pittsburgh and onto the Ohio where the current carried them steadily on downstream at about three miles per hour.

  Somewhere short of Beaver Creek, tragedy struck. The Cutlers’ youngest child, one-year-old Hezekiah, took ill and died. A halt was made at a single cabin by the shore where the owner had already buried some of his family and there Hezekiah was laid to rest.

  “Again we moved on in the usual slow way, the river very low,” Ephraim wrote. “Below Wheeling we saw but few openings on the banks . . . no one living for fifty miles.” For all that had been written and said about the thousands pouring into Virginia and Kentucky no sign of that was to be seen. All was an unbroken wilderness.

  Then, after leaving Wheeling, the Cutlers’ oldest child, Mary, age seven, became violently ill with bilious fever and she, too, quickly died.

  She had been her father’s favorite and her death a blow such as he had never known. “To add to our distress,” he wrote, “we had no alternative but to commit her to the earth in the dreary wilderness.” Nothing could be worse, he recorded.

  Their sufferings were by no means over. Farther on, Leah Cutler, while stepping down a plank to get onshore, slipped and fell and suffered two broken ribs. About the same time Ephraim was struck by an attack of dysentery and “much weakened” before landing at Marietta, the morning of September 18, fully three months after leaving home. As he would write, it was a bleak beginning:

  We had landed sick among strangers, with no well-known friend to meet us with kindly greeting, and myself destined to be confined to a bed from which, for a time, there seemed little hope that I should ever rise in health. Such was our introduction to pioneer life.

  Where or with whom the Cutlers stayed their first days after landing is not clear, but their response to the setting as it had so often been for so many others was one of wholehearted approval. “There is probably no more beautiful and pleasant location to be found on the banks of the Ohio River,” wrote Ephraim, who cited as well a number of “principal inhabitants” whom he had already met, including Rufus Putnam, Ebenezer Sproat, Paul Fearing, and Dr. Jabez True.

  He also went on to describe how the years of Indian troubles and the ways of those confined to garrison life had brought a change in the established way of life, how as he was told, it had “broken up former fixed habits of industry, and led to a fondness for sports and social meetings where drinking was practiced, and hours spent in jovial conviviality.” But there appeared to be little need for excessive concern. Those New Englanders who first settled there had come with habits of industry, respect for order, and strict subordination to law, and clearly that outlook still prevailed. Indeed, it would be difficult, Ephraim had already concluded, to collect a more intelligent and refined society than could be found at Marietta.

  Ephraim made his first visit to Waterford, twenty miles up the Muskingum, soon after recovering his health. Several of the Waterford settlers who were also from Killingly came with a canoe and took him back up the Muskingum. Once there, he decided Waterford was the place to locate.

  One particularly generous man, a Revolutionary War veteran, Captain Daniel Davis, offered Ephraim and his family half of his home—which Ephraim estimated to be the best log house in that part of the wilderness—in which to spend the winter.

  Waterford by then consisted of thirty-two families spread along the east side of the Muskingum and once settled, the Cutler family found themselves, even with the onset of winter, far more comfortable than they had been at Marietta.

  To Ephraim’s great surprise the weather proved quite mild. His team of horses “found employment” plowing unfrozen ground through the entire season. In addition Rufus Putnam hired him to work surveying some 50,000 acres of land there at Waterford, mostly east of the river, and the $100 he received in payment proved “a great relief to me in my then needy circumstances.”

  That spring he moved his family into an empty cabin near Fort Frye and purchased four acres of rich bottomland. On his own he managed to clear it of its giant beech and poplar trees, which to a green-hand, as he acknowledged, was a severe labor as the condition of his hands bore witness.

  The corn he planted produced a fine crop and that summer he built a cabin. By fall he and the family had moved in.

  That the son of Manasseh Cutler had come to Ohio and brought his family with him, and that he so clearly had come to stay, did much to lift the spirits of the earliest of the settlers. Now, before the year was out, he received a thick packet which on opening was found to contain three commissions from Governor St. Clair—one as captain of the militia, another as justice of the peace, and another as judge of the first Court of Common Pleas. His astonishment was “overwhelming.”

  He felt himself inadequate to fulfill the duties involved and until Dean Tyler—the same scholarly Harvard graduate who had been of help to Ichabod Nye when he first arrived—observed that though it was most likely the appointments had been made owing mainly to his father’s character, he ought not hesitate in accepting them.

  And so he did.

  When he left New England to head west, Ephraim had expected that most likely he would make farming his way of life and was encouraged to do so by his father. The more he saw now of the lands to the north of Marietta, the more convinced he became that his initial plan had been the right one and again he was encouraged by his father.

  “I have earnestly wished you to have a good farm, to establish if possible a good landed interest in preference to trade, or any other object,” Manasseh Cutler advised in a long letter,

  for there is nothing in this country that will render a man so completely independent a
nd secure against the difficulties which arise from the changes which the times, the state of the country, and other contingencies may occasion, and which are and always will be taking place in the world.

  “Human life is short and uncertain,” he continued, “the sooner such a work is undertaken the better.”

  In 1797, two years after his arrival, Ephraim purchased 600 acres some twenty miles into the wilderness northwest of Marietta. By selling 100 acres each to two other men, along with a gift to each of an additional 100 acres, he set out with them to commence a new settlement. But not until early 1799, because of various “circumstances,” did the clearing of land get under way. With one acre cleared, a log cabin went up, and on May 7, Cutler, his wife and children, who by then numbered three, made the twenty-mile trek through the forest with loaded packhorses to take up residence in their new home.

  With the help of the two other men, who with their families had established their own cabins, Ephraim set about preparing more ground for planting.

  The timber was large, principally beech and sugar-tree, all of which we cut down and piled, and burned the most of it [he would later recall]. Four acres were cleared ready to plant by the fifteenth of June. . . . From this patch of ground I raised that year one hundred and fifty bushels of corn that ripened well.

  The wilderness to the north and west was a favorite hunting ground of the natives, which in the hunting season they still occupied in large numbers. “They sometimes visited us,” Ephraim wrote, “but did us little injury, except stealing two horses.”

  Buffalo and elk were still to be seen. Deer and bears were “abundant,” wild turkey “innumerable.” Wolves and panthers also “infested” the woods. From the Cutler cabin to those of the other pioneer families was a mile or two.

  On June 17, 1799, the day after finishing the planting, Ephraim made his way back through the woods to Marietta to attend court. Starting then he was to be called away to serve as a judge four times a year and had to spend two weeks or more each time.