Читать книгу Centennial History of Columbus and Franklin County - William Alexander Taylor - Страница 7

Rome of Ancient Legends; Columbus of Modern Days.

A large portion of the subsequent history of Rome would no doubt be lacking in interest, at least among the younger readers, were it not for the legends of the laying of the foundations of the Eternal City, mythical and credulity-testing though they may be. The story of the abandoned Romulus and Remus being suckled and reared to vigorous youthhood by a female wolf may have been mercifully invented to soften the memory of the wife of some guardian who had the two boys in charge. The narration of the just-before-dawn vigil of the two youths on the two convenient hills, "looking out for signs," and seeing diverse numbers of vultures, leading to the straining of their fraternal relations, some seven hundred years before the Christian Era, may have been an early form of the snipe hunting expeditions of, say, A. D. 1850, and down to the present day, among the youths of Columbus and outlying country.

The building of the walls of Rome by Romulus, and the contempt shown toward the architect and his work by Remus, who leaped over them and who was chased thence and founded the City of Rheims. according to his own ideas of municipal architecture, may be readily toned down to a foolish boyish quarrel of some minor detail, and the story of the Sabine women is an old-new-endless one of the selection of the loveliest. Young ladies being scarce in Rome, the boys over there no doubt challenged the Sabine youths to play a prehistoric game of baseball. Their sweethearts came out. of course, to cheer and encourage them, but when the Roman Senators shut out the Sabine Slashers in the ninth inning, with a score of 21 to O. not only the game was lost, but the girls also, and they naturally clung to the Senators ever after.

This may not be the exact narration of the events in their order, but they would naturally and perfectly furnish the historical raw material out of which the classic poets formed the finished story.

But in any event, and without regard to the accuracy of detail, they told about the first people and the first things and the original methods, without which in some form the rest of the story—called in courtesy History—would be desperately dry reading and spiritless. One must know of the beginning before one can teach the lesson of successive comparisons in the progress of events. The great things of the present are the grown-up children and grandchildren of the comparatively little things of the past. We must know something of the parent before we can properly estimate the child, as well as something about the child before we can fully analyze the matured individual, or, analyzing backward, properly estimate the progenitor. The very mysticism and glamour of the classic poets which surround the practical beginnings of Rome enhance the interest, to most readers, in the story of its subsequent progress. So also as to Columbus.

Christopher Gist, Agent of the Ohio Company.

The first white men to visit the present site of Columbus were Christopher Gist, of Maryland, and George Croghan, an English trader, piloted by one Andrew Montour, a French-Indian half breed of the Senecas, no doubt, sometime during the winter of 1750-1751. At, and preceding this period, the English colonies of the east and northeast were deeply interested in curbing, and eventually eliminating, the Canadian French influences. This was especially true with an association of Virginia and Maryland planters and English merchants, who realized the vast importance of keeping the French traders, and French influence of all kinds, out of that vast territory lying south of the present Canadian line.

These men probably never thought of what the future had in store in the shape of trade and commerce, exceeding for a single business day from nine to three all the trade then being contended for during an entire year.

A long line of English trading posts were being stretched across the practically unknown continent parallel with the 38th degree, and Mr. Gist was the active agent of this association, with -well-nigh unlimited discretionary powers.

One of these English trading posts was established at the point of the junction of the Great Miami and Loranaie creek, upon an extensive prairie, in 1749, and was named Pickawillany, English improvement on the Pickqualines, a tribe of Indians. It was to visit this post that Gist and his companions made the trip now under discussion. It was, in fact, the first point of English occupation within the present boundaries of Ohio, and here the English traders throughout the entire trading belt met and conferred between themselves and their Indian friends and allies.

On October 31, 1750, Gist set out from Old Town, on the Potomac, in Maryland, and crossed the Alleghenies, following the usual route of travel to the Ohio river that seems to have existed from time immemorial. Crossing the upper Ohio, he made his way to the then Indian village at the forks of the Muskingum, where the city of Coshocton (Goshocking, the Place of the Owls), now stands, much more pacific and inviting than its Indian name would portend.

From that point Gist and his two companions came westward, holding conferences in the Indian villages at Wacatomika, Black Hand (so named for the black print of an enormous human hand on a high rock overhanging the Pataskala river, through which a tunnel of the Columbus, Newark and Zanesville electric road is pierced), where an Indian potentate was located; thence to the present Buckeye lake, then, little more than a great sedgy morass, full of fish, which the naked Indian children waded in and caught with their hands, which they skirted, coming on to the High Bank, where they crossed by canoe ferry to the Indian town or village that occupied a portion of what is now the west side.

Here a conference was held in February, 1751. Later the three travelers went down the Scioto and the Ohio to the mouth of the Great Miami, up which they journeyed to Pickawillany, where a prolonged conference was held, under the direction of Gist, between the English traders and the tribal representatives of the Weas, Pickqualines, Miamis, Piankeshaws, and other sub-nations contiguous thereto, and a treaty, practically of alliance, was agreed upon, the French flag, which had for years floated over the chief tepee of Pickawillany, was hauled down and British sovereignty was recognized.

Under the terms of the treaty the town rapidly rose in importance, Gist recording in his journal that it was the strongest town in the western country, as well as the most important one.

But the French government in Canada was not in the dark as to the progress of events on Riviere a la Roche, or Rock River, as the Miami was called, but was kept constantly informed by their Indian and half-breed spies.

So it came about, a few years later, that, in an unexpected moment, the combined French and more northern Indians swooped down upon Pickawillany, and the "coming" emporium of the great Ohio wilderness went up in smoke and flame, and it was blotted off the map. But this part of the story belongs not to a Columbus history, but to the more comprehensive history of the state and its parent, the Northwest Territory.

Enter Mr. James Smith.

There may have been other white men at that period (between 1751 and 1760) who threaded the mazes of the then Columbus, but history fails to present another than James Smith, who was held a captive among the Indians west of the junction of the two rivers and who hunted and trapped along the rivers and their principal tributaries in this territory. Mr. Smith's personal narration is full of interest and gives one a fine insight into the character of the Indian nomads of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A complete resume of his graphic narrative appears in an appropriate chapter devoted to early reminiscences and later day historical gossip of the Buckeye capital.

In the meantime, James Smith must rest upon his laurels of being the second early comer of the white race into the future capital, illuminated with this brief description, written by him, of the then site of the present city: "From the mouth of Olentangy (applied to the Big Darby), on the east side of Scioto, up to the carrying place (in Marion county), there is a large body of first and second rate land, and tolerably well-watered. The timber is ash, agar tree, walnut, locust, oak and beech." This is no doubt the first written description of the point at and neighboring upon the lands on which the city of Columbus stands.

The First Permanent Resident.

The honor of being the first permanent resident within the present boundaries of Columbus seems to belong, without question, to Lucas Sullivant, a native of Virginia, born in 1765. He migrated to Kentucky when an orphan lad. where he learned surveying in the field, not in the schools.

As a deputy under General Richard C. Anderson, surveyor general of the Virginia Military District of Ohio. Mr. Lucas led a body of assistants into the wilderness of the Scioto valley northward, and in the summer and autumn of the year 1797 surveyed and platted, and became proprietor of the town of Franklinton, long since made an integral part of Columbus. Here he erected his house, installed his helpmeet, set up his lares and penates; here he reared his children, and here he lived until he passed into the Great Beyond at the age of fifty-eight.

Some of Sullivant's Compatriots.

Among those who came with Sullivant into Franklinton as permanent settlers the following names have been handed down by the earlier historians: Joseph Dixon, George Skidmore, William Domigan, James Marshall, three families named Dearduff, Mcllvain and Sells respectively, consisting of several persons, young and old, but not separately designated; John Lisle and family, William Fleming, Jacob Grubb, Jacob Overdier, Arthur O'Harra. Joseph Foss, John Blair, and John Dill, the latter of whom seems to have come unaccompanied from the town of York, Pennsylvania; Jeremiah Armstrong and John Brickell, and probably others whose names are forgotten. These, of course, were the first citizens, and among them Messrs. Armstrong and Brickell were the heroes of adventures which will be presented in the chapter of local historical events and gossip.

Sullivant was married in 1801 and led in the settlement of the town, of course. A little later than those aforenamed were Lyne Starling, Robert Russell. Colonel Culbertson of Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, with numerous sons, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law. unmarried sons and unmarried daughters, and withal a man of wealth and of distinction.

The First White Woman.

The first white woman born east of the Scioto river and in Columbus proper was Keziah Hamlin, who afterward married David Brooks, proprietor of "The White Horse Tavern," one of the famous early hostelries of the Ohio capital. She was born October 16, 1804 in a log cabin which stood upon what is now the site of Hosier's brewery.

At that time there lived in the vicinity a sub-tribe of Wyandots, who were on friendly terms with the scattered white settlers. They had a great fondness especially for Mother Hamlin's corn bread, and were in the habit of paying the family informal calls and helping themselves informally to whatever they might find in the larder. The only explanation they offered was to leave with Mrs. Hamlin the finest cuts and quarters of venison, so that if she and the lord of the household were left temporarily short on bread they found themselves long on meat. While this kind of exchange was one-sided, the Hamlin firm never had occasion to complain that they had been cheated.

When little Keziah came the Wyandots took great interest in the little pale face and never lost an opportunity to admire her in a sort of ecstasy of silence, punctuated with grunts of satisfaction; and the larger she grew, and when she began to toddle about on the dirt floor of the cabin, their admiration knew no bounds, and then and there the Trilby inspiration took shape and form.

One busy day, when Father Hamlin was on a journey to the mill and Mother Hamlin was busy with her household cares and duties and Baby Hamlin slept like a top in her sugar trough cradle, a delegation of Wyandots in gala attire invaded the cabin and, instead of depleting the larder, depleted the cradle and marched Indian file, the chief leading, with Keziah in his arms, and disappeared in the direction of the Indian village, in the dense forest at the bend of the Scioto, where the Harrisburg bridge now spans the river.

It would be impossible to depict the feelings of the mother. She simply endured the terrors of the situation for hours, which passed like slow-paced centuries, buoyed up only by the faint hope that the children of the forest were merely playing some good-natured prank on her. Realizing the uselessness of pursuit, nothing was left her but to cling to hope and endure and long for the return of her husband. Hours before his return (far past nightfall) the Indians returned, with their tiny captive smiling and cooing in the arms of the bronzed chieftain, and she too was resplendent in gala attire. In addition to the other gay outfitting, her feet were encased in a pair of dainty and artistically beaded buckskin moccasins.

The Wyandot manteaux and moccasin makers, for the purpose of giving the mother a happy surprise, had unceremoniously carried the child to their own town, where she could be fitted out and become a Wyandot Princess, and as such they had evidently adopted her before returning her. For many years Keziah retained the moccasins and trinkets, and told the story of that adventure to her children and her children's children. Finally the younger generations a few years ago unconsciously imbibed iconoclastic ideas, and the relics disappeared piecemeal.

Keziah Hamlin married David Brooks, who came from Massachusetts and settled in Columbus on the 19th of December, 1822. She died February 4, 1875, leaving three sons and two daughters. One of the sons, David W. Brooks, was prominent in business and banking circles in the city. Herbert Brooks, a grandson, is prominent in the same circles in the Columbus of 1909.

The First State Senator.

The first year after his arrival Culbertson was elected to the Ohio legislature, being the first member elected from the Franklin county section of Ross county in the senate of the first general assembly of the state in 1803.

The First Mill West of the River.

The first mill was located in the Franklinton section in 1797 or 1798. It was a public utility and the first instance of public ownership, hereabouts at least. All the people helped to build it and all the people helped to run it.

The contemporaneous chronicler describes it as "a kind of a hand mill upon which they (the inhabitants) generally ground their corn; some pounded it or boiled it." The latter were probably opposed to public ownership. "Occasionally," says the pioneer historian, "a trip was made to the mill at Chillicothe." One may easily conjecture why this long trip to mill, through the wilderness, was made. The housewife was expecting company, no doubt some Revolutionary hero or some grand dame, coming from the east perhaps, and she wanted fine meal to enable her to furnish her guests with tempting johnny cake, and perchance the guests were coming from "Ole Ferginia." and what would be more to their liking than the peerless crackling shortened corn dodger, heightened to the seventh gastronomic heaven with the pale ambered and divinely saccharined maple molasses! It was worth an hundred mile round trip to secure the ingredients for such a feast.