Weston Township (part 1 of 15)

Weston Township

Weston Village - Its Growth, Industries, Etc. - Settlements [from Dr. Spencer's Sketch of Early Settlement] - Corporation and Officials - Post Office - Schools - Churches - The Western Gas Co. - Banks - Fires - Societies, Associations, Opera House, Etc 426-433

Miscellaneous Introduction

CIVILIZATION, fitfully and slowly, spread her far-reaching mantle over the Maumee Country. She wavered and hesitated. More than once she advanced. More than once she retired in confusion and dismay. The obstacles were many and serious. Few inhabited lands have presented greater. To the vast stretches of swamp, inaccessible forests, and a dangerous miasmatic climate, was added the implacable hatred of savage tribes and bands - made desperate and revengeful by real or imaginary wrongs - who had retreated here, before the westward march of the hardy white Pioneers.

by many and devious forms of assault. The desert, the glade, the morass and the fertile valley are, alike, witnesses to the magic of her touch. She goes forth, now in the mailed armor of the Crusader; anon in the humble garb of the prayerful missionary - an Apollyon to destroy, or an Angel to save; a tyrant to command and enslave, or a fair goddess to woo to the ways of freedom and greatness. Her march, from the remotest date in history, when Babylon was in its infancy, down to the last Indian treaty in America, or the latest discovery in the "Dark Continent," is marked by the devastation of war and the civilizing influences of the peaceful missionary.

So she at last came to the Maumee Country. In one hand, the olive branch of peace, in the other, the sword of the conqueror. That August day on the Maumee, 1794, comes to us through the mist of a century, like a phantom tableau, historic and tragic.

Civilization and Barbarism stood beside that peaceful river, front to front, in battle array. Gen. Anthony Wayne, by his presence, said: "Civilization sends this army; I am her agent; this flag I carry is her symbol. Accept peace or flee for your lives." In heroic spirit and defiant words, Barbarism answered: "There can be no peace till you leave our land. We are here to stay your further advance, or perish in the trial." The tableau was dissolved - the tragedy* began. Before the sun had set, the emblem of the new race waved triumphant over that bloody field. The victor's cannon peals proclaimed the permanent occupation of the land by the white men.

But this is a single, though important, incident, of the many which go to make up the story of our occupation of the Maumee Country. The time; the means; who our predecessors were; whence they came; where they went, and why we were nearly three decades later than some other portions of Ohio in making a beginning - all these things will present themselves as we gradually unroll the scroll and examine the impress each event has left, more or less indelibly, upon the records.

Prior to Wayne's campaign, little is known of the Maumee Country. Its history can be written on a single page. We, are not old. Whatever distinction the American is entitled to for reclaiming this land, we cannot boast of the antiquity of our civilization, or its institutions. That dreamy charm or spell, upon which Oriental countries, and even Europeans, pride themselves so much, is denied us. We do not need it. The world measures now by events, not by hoary antiquity. The feeling of our newness is more strongly impressed when we recall the fact that in the spring of 1788 there was only one white settlement in the present limits of Ohio, and the Maumee Country, even thirty years later, had but few white men in its boundaries.

But let us take the lighted lamp of history, and start along the dusky aisles of the past, back as far as the last quarter of the seventeenth century, say 1680 - sixty years after New England was settled. The light grows dim; we are treading on the shore of the pre-historic past. The shadowy outlines of unrecorded centuries are just beyond us. We can go no further. The past is a sealed book, and History, herself, like a sleeper waking from a half-forgotten dream.

Let us glance hastily at the landscape and map out, from the boundless waste, as nearly as we can, the speck or place where Wood County is to be staked out by bounds. We can define it. It lies on the south side of the Maumee along the Rapids. What is it ? A wilderness of swamp, forest and plain; dreary, desolate. There are no signs of human habitation except the rude hunting camps of some nomadic savages. The face of the country bears no marks, save what has been written on it by Nature's working forces. The red men, occasionally seen, have many conflicting legends, told in as many different tongues, but none of these claim more than a migratory residence in the Maumee Country. No tribe here claims ancestral graves. The/ have taken refuge in this fine hunting ground, perhaps from some more powerful tribe, and remain here only till they can escape to some more secure asylum beyond reach of their persecutors. Stripped of all romance and glamour, and trimmed down to reality, such was about the condition of this country when the whites first saw it.

These briefly outlined facts, with many other things in the same connection, will be more fully dwelt upon in the succeeding chapters. Wood County, chaotic, un-named. and undefined in boundary limits, will, for the present, be treated of under the more general name - "Maumee Country," of which she is a good-sized fractional part.

Historical Chapter

HE territory now known as Wood county, from the beginning of French exploration to 1713, formed a part of the original province of Quebec; from 1713 to 1764, it was a part of Louisiana; from 1764 to 1769, under the British Parliament Statute, it belonged to Quebec province; from 1769 to 1778, under authority of the Virginia Legislature, it was attached to Botetourt county, Va. , and from 1778 to 1787 it formed a part of Illinois county, Va. [Virginia's ownership during this time was more nominal than real, as the history of that time clearly indicates.] When the Territory northwest of the Ohio was established in 1787, Wood county was its wildest and most inhospitable part. The Ottawas, Wyandots and other tribes claimed it as their hunting grounds.

Wood county is bounded on the north by Lucas county, on the east by Ottawa, Sandusky and Seneca counties, on the south by Hancock county, and on the west by Henry county. The area, as stated by local authorities, is 382.845* acres, distributed through Congressional Townships 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 N., in Ranges 9, 10, 11 and 12 east of the principal meridian. The county seat, which is near the geographical center, is in Latitude 41 degrees, 24 minutes, 30 seconds N. , and Longitude 6 degrees, 44 minutes west of the Washington meridian. The population, according to the Census of 1890, was 44,395, or one inhabitant to each tract of 8,623 acres, or 74.23 inhabitants to each square mile. t The altitude at Bowling Green is 167 feet above the level of Lake Erie, or 739.9 feet above sea

* The area is variously estimated. In one report it is given as 398.- 720 acres; in the " Hundred Year Book," 389.266 acres; in another report, 386.640 acres; in ** Ohio Statistics." 385,970 acres; and by Surveyors Wood, Davis and Spafford. at about 382.845 acres.

1 The total vote November 3. 1896, was 14 070, which on a basis of one vote to every five inhabitants (the usual estimate) would make the population to-day 70 350. which, no doubt, is an over-estimate as there are so many single men in the oil fields of the county. The population in 1896 might fairly be estimated at from 60,000 to 65,000. - EniTOR.

level; at the Foot of the Rapids of the Maumee, 634.9 feet above sea level; at Bloomdale, 193 feet above lake level; at North Baltimore, 177 feet; at Weston, 164 feet; at Bairdstown, i84feet; and at the north line of Section 17, Middleton township, 91 feet above lake level.

Rivers and Streams. - The Maumee river flows along the northwestern borders of Grand Rapids, Washington, Middleton, Perrysburg and Ross townships, abolishing section lines, and making a natural boundary between the counties of Lucas and Wood, excepting 7J miles of the north line of Ross township. In early years, as early as 1671, it was called by the French, Miami du Lac. It is a river, which, could it speak, might tell of a thousand battles between the tribes, and of other sanguinary engagements between the Americans and their Indo-British enemies. The original name was suggested to the French by that of the tribe found near its head in the Fort Wayne neighborhood, just as they called the two rivers, flowing into the Ohio, " Big Miami " and "Little Miami of the Ohio." In after years, when the militia, under Wayne and Harrison, visited the valley, they caught the sound "Omee" or "Maumee" from Indians and English traders, and this rendering of the name has been attached to it down to the present day, notwithstanding the strong effort made, in 1855, to change it to "Grand Rapids River." The Portage river, Toussaint creek, Beaver creek and Tontogany creek, and their feeders, were the natural drains of the county, but since 1853 many artificial channels, known as "ditches," have been made, and the creeks named cleaned and deepened to form parts of the drainage system.

Ditches. - There are many old settlers of forty years ago who remember the ante-ditch period, and who may compare the county of that time with the present county, and tell of what good has been accomplished by the millions of dollars, drawn from the land owners, by special taxation, and expended in draining their territory. The

In December, 1853, the following named citizens were paid for their services in surveying and appraising swamp lands and laying out ditches on the same: S. Jefferson, surveyor, $96.25; Thomas Garrett, $72.25; John Russell, $74.75; L. L. Loomis, $36; Joseph Wagoner, $2 5 ; Lewis Goss, $24; Peter St. Clair, $22; and other small sums. The Act of the Legislature, approved September

28, 1850, providing for the drainage and reclamation of waste lands, was observed by the commissioners in 1853, and in December of that year they fixed the prices of such land at from $ t . 50 an acre to $3, and in one instance - the N. E. \ of Sec.

29, T. 4, R. 9 - at $4 an acre. On the same date they authorized the construction of twenty-six ditches - eight in Center township, three in Webster, seven in Portage, four in Milton, three in Montgomery and one in Middleton - together with clearing out Johnson's creek, Swail run, West Branch of Rocky Ford, and Bull creek. S. Jefferson and S. H. Bell were the surveyors on this work. Advertisement was made in The Pcrrysburg Journal and The Northwestern Democrat , and on January 25, 1854, Asa W. Douglass was. awarded the contract on Ditches 1, 2, 3. 4, 5, 7, 8. 9, 12 and 13 for $3,938, exclusive of $ 1 1.85 for finishing Ditch 24. William S. Hopper, Samuel Huffman, Daniel Shoffstall, John Mercer, John W. Woodbury, R. M. Shaver, Dean & Emmons, Jonathan S. Wheaton, Sylvanus Moorehouse, S. Swigert, William Johnston and Solomon Shoffstall, were the contractors on the other ditches, doing the work at from 20 cents to $2 a rod.

The Act, entitled "An Act to more effectually provide for locating, establishing and constructing ditches, drains and water-courses in townships, and to repeal certain Acts therein named," was passed April 18, 1874. This Act repealed that of May 6, 1868, and a former repealing Act of April 18. 1870, as well as the Act of March 13, 1872, without prejudice to rights acquired or liabilities incurred under the old acts mentioned. Prior to the Act of March 13, 1872, there were no less than 3,000 miles of main or county drains, and 2,000 miles of side or township drains. Of this mileage 371! miles were in Wood county. N. H. Callard, of Perrysburg, in a paper on this subject, says: "It will be remembered by the older classes of citizens that the conditions in nearly three-fourths of the area of Wood county was literally, during a considerable part of the year, either wholly or partially covered by water. To all intents and purposes it was a

' black swamp. ' The change in its physical conditions have been almost phenomenal in their results. There are now 664 public highways intersecting the 389,600 acres which comprises the county of Wood. In collateral line with these roads are ditches which in most instances are of large capacity and carry off large bodies of water to their outlet in the river. The Jackson cut-off is but nine miles long, but in its depth, width and capacity it constitutes a veritable canal, and in a wet season would float a canal boat. Its construction cost $iro,ooo and effectually drains some 30,000 acres of what were very wet lands, but now are some of the most productive. The Toussaint ditch is 22 miles in length, the Rocky Ford 17 miles. Each branch of the Portage river has been cleared from obstructions, and made very effective for purposes of drainage. These items, important as they are, represent in part only the thorough and effective work which has been accomplished by Wood county in the line of drainage."

The sum of $1 , 500,000 was expended on roads and ditches from the fall of 1874 until the fall of 1881, or during Mr. S. Case's term as auditor. Messrs. Donaldson, Ames and Wood were the county surveyors; while W. R. Gillis was surveyor for the cut-off. This large sum is but a fraction of the total expended in making this county productive and habitable. The record of the work fills very many journals and account books, so that here, in addition to the beginnings of the ditch system, it may only be written that there are 896 ditches in this county.

Zoology. - For years after the organization of Wood county, it continued to be a great preserve for large game. The bear, wolf, red-deer, fox, panther, wild- cat and lynx were regular inhabitants of the wilderness, and, as told in the pioneer chapter, were killed here even after the war. The wild turkey, prairie chicken, snipe, woodcock, quail, partridge, wild duck, wild goose, and all the birds belonging to this latitude were inhabitants of this forest. The rivers and streams were full of fish and, altogether, the district was the paradise of the hunter, even after the forest gave echo to the road and railroad builders, ditch excavators, lumbermen and farmers. What it was in the days of Indian occupation, before Nature's destroyer came to improve Nature, is only told in legends. Pontiac and Tecumseh looked upon it as the greatest of hunting grounds and the Iroquois, before them, battled for its possession. It is now given up to agriculture and oil and gas development, with the sites of old Indian camps to prosperous towns and pleas- ant villages; white hunters, amateurs in their way, come to find a little sport, but not one of the aborigines, who revelled in Nature's lavishness here, comes back to behold the change.

Forest Trees. - Of the 382,845 acres, forming the area of Wood county, 337.760 acres were covered with timber in 1853. In 1870, the forest covered 267,946 acres. The native trees, of the first order, included white elm, sycamore, cottonwood, black ash, white ash, hickory, burr oak and red oak; of the second order, white oak, beech, sugar maple, poplar, linn, soft maple, walnut and butternut; and, of the third order, yellow oak, pin oak, sassafras, red-elm, gum, mulberry, iron-wood and buckeye. All the shrubs and flowering plants, common to northern Ohio, grew here in profusion until the modern improver removed them as he did the forest. Large and small fruits find a favorite soil and climate here, while shade and ornamental trees, shrubs and flowers may grow to perfection within her boundaries.

Sanitation. - The sanitary condition of the county was known to be so bad, that few had the courage to locate here. In 1850, the Census enumerators found only 9, 1 57 persons within its boundaries, and but few of that small number escaped the fever and ague and other diseases common among inhabitants of low or swampy ground. The pestilence* of 1854 drove the people to a realization of the dangers which surrounded them, and the drainage of the territory was undertaken immediately - a great work which has been continued down to this day.

In 1837, there appeared in the Maumee City Express nine doggerel verses which, while intended to be funny, helped to retard settlement. After describing the potatoes, fish, animals of the chase, birds, corn, whisky, girls, boys and the ague, the poet closes with the following lines -

Other poets, too, had written so much on the unhealthy character of the Maumee Valley, that it was resolved, at a meeting held November 7, 1855, to call the river "Grand Rapids River, " and to give the bay and the valley the same name. It is worthy of note that Wood county took the initiative, in carrying out the resolution, by changing the name of the old town of Gilead to Grand Rapids. Though the residents.of Maumee changed the name of their town to South Toledo, the new name was merged into the old, so that Grand Rapids town is the only survivor of the effort to induce a new nomenclature.

The improvements known as ditches abolished the necessity of seeking a change of name; for not only have they contributed to render the soil of Wood county as fertile as that of any other division of the State, but also to render it as healthful as any county between the Alleghany range and the Rocky mountains.

Geology

The clays, gravels and sands of Wood county are too well known to require any description here. They belong to what is commonly called the Drift, and form the basis on which the agriculturist builds up his fortune and, in turn, builds up the country. Geologists maintain that the territory now embraced in this county, with large areas adjacent, was submerged until the beach was formed on the line which extends from the Sandusky river, at Tiffin, westward to Defiance. Like their knowledge of the oil reservoirs, much of all they say is speculation; for all known about this planet on which we live is to all that is not known about it, as one grain of oil sand is to all the grains of oil sand in the Ohio field.

On the rocks forming the crust or crown of the earth, in this section of Ohio, the quarryman and drill let in some light, and released from depths far below sea level specimens of sand and clay and rock to instruct us all. Of such Prof. Edward Orton has often written, and from his paper on the geology of this county the following descriptions of the strata are taken:

"The Redded Rocks* - Leaving the unconsolidated materials that cover the surface of the county at present, let us inquire as to the rocks that make its ancient and real foundation. The strata that are exposed within its limits belong to two separate divisions of the geological scale. It is impossible to lay down on the map the exact boundaries of these divisions, because of the cover of drift already described. In but few instances can the bedded rocks be traced continuously from farm to farm, or from section to section; but advantage must be taken of every exposure, and the topography of the country can sometimes be used as a guide to the continuity of the underlying rock. The rock exposures are found in knolls and ridges and in banks and beds of the water courses, large and small, across the county. The two divisions already referred to as constituting the surface rocks of the county are named herewith, beginning with the lowest or oldest.

portant element in the rocky floor of Wood county. It occupies considerable areas in the central and southeastern portions of the county. Outcrops are found in Center, Liberty, Plain, Middleton, Webster, Troy, Freedom, Montgomery, Perry, Bloom, Henry and Portage townships.

" The Lower Helderberg Limestone is next above the Niagara limestone. It is found in all the townships named above, and in the remaining townships of the county as well. Both the Niagara and the Lower Helderberg belong to the Upper Silurian division of the general geological scale. Each of these formations will be briefly characterized, beginning with the lowest or oldest.

"The Niagara limestone is one of the best known formations of the continent. It gets its name from the famous cataract, where a magnificent section of it is disclosed. Its lithological character in Wood county is not in all respects the same as at the Falls. At the latter place the rock is a fairly pure carbonate of lime, while in Wood county, as everywhere else in Ohio, it is a magnesian or dolomitic limestone, nearly half of its substance being carbonate of magnesia. But the continuity of the stratum from the Falls to northern Ohio is established beyond question. It is altogether probable that the change from a calcareous to a magnesian composition is gradual, but as the formation is deeply covered by strata of later age across the intervening region, this point cannot be established by observation. In Wood county it is in the main a light-colored and porous rock, not more than twenty feet of which are seen in any single natural section. The Bowling Green quarries can be taken as fairly representative o( the entire formation in the county. The upper beds are buff or cream-colored. the lowest are gray or light blue. But the difference in color depends largely on the degree of weathering to which the rocks have been exposed. In composition, the rock, like all the stratum in northern Ohio, is a remarkably pure dolomite, as is shown in the following analysis made for the State Geological Survey: Carbonate of lime, 53 98; carbonate of magnesia, 43 .25; alumina and oxide of iron, .40; and silica, 1.53. The analysis was made from the Bowling Green stone

The character of the lime produced by burning this stone is well known and highly approved. It is technically known as mild, or cool lime. There is no purer dolomite in the world than that which some portions of the Niagara limestone of northern Ohio yield. Opinions differ widely and radically as to the relative values of the limes made from these dolomites and from the true limestones of the Upper Helderberg group, as shown in some portions of the Marblehead and Kelley's Island district. The Niagara limestone of Wood county occurs sometimes in rather massive beds, but generally it is quarried in thin and uneven layers. It is not well adapted to use as a building stone nor as road metal, but in the absence of better materials it is turned to some small account in both these ways. The stratum has been proved to have a considerable thickness in the county, though, as already stated, its outcrops do not exceed twenty to thirty feet. The record of deep wells show that the total thickness of the formation is not less than 250 to 300 feet. It reaches these figures in its outcrops in northern Ohio. Like all the other members of the geological scale of the State, this stratum had its origin in an ancient extension of the Gulf of Mexico to the line of the Great Lakes. Its most characteristic development is in western New York. But it can be traced from this center far to the northward, westward and southward. A peculiar phase of it is found in Ontario (Canada), in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin, where, as already described, it occurs as a magnesian limestone. This composition of the stone seems to indicate that it was formed in an enclosed or isolated portion of the sea basin. Where the waters of the ocean had full sweep, true limestones were formed such as are found in New York, in southern Indiana and to the southward. This formation, as it occurs in Wood county, is rich in fossils, which occur, however, in almost ever^ case, as internal casts. Several forms that are new to science have been obtained from the Risingsun quarries. Directly below the Niagara limestone, a bed of fine-grained shale or clay is always found. It is known in Wood county only through the records of the oil wells. In them it attracts universal attention from the fact that it is almost generally found safe to set the casings of the oil wells in this bed. It is known by the drillers as the " break " in the limestone. It ranges in thickness from five to thirty feet. This stratum is known j in the scale as the Niagara shale. It is widely extended and vies in importance with the overlying beds. It reaches a thickness of 100 feet in Highland and Adams counties. It is only the uppermost division of this great Niagara formation that appears at the surface in Wood county.

The Lower Helderberg limestone is the next and only formation above the Niagara limestone which is found in the surface rocks of the county. Of this surface it constitutes a far larger part than the other element. Like the Niagara formation, it is also a predominantly dolomitic or magnesian limestone, having apparently originated under much the same general conditions as those assigned to the latter. It differs from the Niagara in its bedding and its other physical characteristics. It is destitute of, or at least poorly supplied with fossils. It has been found by the drillers to be several hundred feet thick (500 to 700); but entire sections of it are not found in the county. Its beds are generally thin, seldom exceeding six or eight inches, but as they are tolerably even and regular they furnish somewhat better building stone than the Niagara. There are, however, several phases of the formation in the county. In the upper part there is a remarkable band of conglomerate, the pebbles of which sometimes rise almost to the size of bowlders. The pebbles are themselves fragments of the same formation, but were broken loose from their native beds, and water-worn before being re-cemented here. This phase appears only in the more northerly exposures of the limestone, and it will no doubt prove to be one of our best guides in tracing the stratigraphy of the formation.

On the geological map of the county, in Volume II, "Geology of Ohio," a band of the Salina formation is shown in Wood county, intervening between the Niagara and Lower Helderberg areas. This representation was based on a theory and not on observed facts. The Gypsum beds of Ottawa county are now known to be about the middle of the Lower Helderberg series, and not at its base, as was then believed. No considerable deposits of gypsum have been reported in the well records of recent years; but it would occasion no surprise to come upon such beds at any time, in future explorations. Another feature shown on the map above named must be corrected. A formation locally known as the Grand Rapids sandstone, and found on the western side of the county, is referred to the Oriskany horizon. For this reference there is no good reason in the light of present knowledge. The Grand Rapids sandstone, so-called, is a magnesian limestone of average quality. It contains less than two percent of total impurities, only | 1.25 percent, being referable to sand. Under proper conditions this "sandstone " can be burned into fair lime, the popular impression to the contrary notwithstanding. It occurs in a massive bed fourteen feet thick, which can be easily split into courses of convenient size. It is light colored, and, while holding quarry water, it can be cut easily. It is strong and durable, and in fact can be counted a first-class building stone. It is exposed, however, only in the bed of the Maumee river at low water, in the vicinity of Grand Rapids, and it cannot therefore enter the market under favorable conditions. To be worked with proper advantage, it would be necessary to open quarries on the east bank of the river. The stripping would be excessive, and it would doubtless be found necessary to keep pumps running constantly to keep the quarries free from water. The timehas not yet come for going to such expense in quarrying building stone in Ohio. Small balls of chert are occasionally found in the so-called sandstone. They carry obscure fossils, but none of the latter have been observed that establish or suggest the Devonian age of the beds.

The direct economic products of the surface rocks are, as has been shown, magnesian limestone of the highest excellence, and building stone of not more than medium quality at best, the quarries of Grand Rapids alone being excepted. The many local quarries reduce, however, the cost of stone for cellars and ordinary foundations, to a considerable extent, and in this respect they render good service. In some districts, the granite bowlders of the drift are abundant enough to allow of their being utilized in foundations and walls. With skillful work on the part of the stone-mason they leave nothing to be desired in such uses, so far as appearance and durability are concerned.

Ten years ago a chapter on the geology of Wood county would have stopped at this point. There would have been nothing to add with reference to the economic geology of the county, but every reader now knows that what has already been told is absolutely insignificant in comparison with what remains to be told, viz. : the production of oil and gas from certain of the foundation rocks of the county. The only factors of mineral wealth that would now come to mind in connection with the economic geology of I the county would be the last named substances. [Prof. Orton's theory of the origin of petroleum is given in the chapter on the Gas and Oil fields of Wood county.]

Chapter Ii

French Occupation - How and When they came - The Indian Tribes - Destruction and Eviction by the blood-thirsty Iroqjjois. League - Ohio almost an Uninhabited Wilderness - Why the French first located North of the Lakes - French at Detroit, 1701 - Ottawas and Wyandots settle about Detroit - Later remove to the Maumee - French and Indian War - French displaced by English - Treaty of 1768.

IN the far-away time when this narrative begins, three great nations of Europe were rivals for supremacy on this continent. Spain had made claim to Florida and the country west of it; England had planted some settlements north along the Atlantic coast to Maine; further north France held dominion, including the islands about the mouth of the St. Lawrence. That great river, navigable hundreds of miles, proved of inestimable value to France in the race. By the chance fortune of securing that open highway to the far interior she outsped her rivals in the westward march. Seven years before the Pilgrims came to the New England coast, Samuel Champlain had unfurled the banner of France on the shore of Lake Huron, more than one thousand miles inland. Through the far-reaching affluents of that great artery of the continent, the hardy voyageur penetrated the depths of the remote wilderness and learned of the boundless resources of the great West, long before English explorers ventured across the Alleghanies. As early as the year 1608 Champlain brought out a colony of his countrymen to the site of Quebec, and began the groundwork of permanent occupancy. This work the French continued in America with unabated zeal for a period of about one hundred and fifty years; it was a work thrillingly interesting in its historical details, and singularly eventful upon the' destinies of mankind in its outcome. With their settlements established on the outlet of the Great Lakes, it was not a matter of chance or accident that the French became the discoverers of that part of Ohio adjacent to Lake Erie. The same watery highway, that carried the onrolling floods of the Maumee down through the St. Lawrence to the sea, guided the adventurous explorers back to their source. Thus it happens that the French are our earliest historians.

Beyond the Atlantic, in the musty archives of France, we will have to look for most of the scattered fragments of what is recorded of the Maumee Country during the rule of that nation here.

That period extends from its discovery, about the year 1679, until the English displaced the French in 1763. The history is but little and mostly relates to a race of people who, like the elk and buffalo, which furnished their subsistence, has long since passed from our borders - a race whose wandering life and deeds of savagery are of little interest save to the historian and antiquary. Though the Indian has gone, and his place is filled by another people, working out their destiny along new lines, it is just to give him some space, small though it be, in our story.

In the Marine and Colonial departments, at Paris, in shape of reports, maps and correspondence of officers in America, and in the jrchives of the Church, among the reports of the Jesuit missionaries, laboring among the North American savages, is to be found the earliest recorded history of our Indian predecessors. There, on time-stained, moth-eaten pages, in faded parchment covers, is told the melancholy story of some of the vanished nations who once roamed and hunted in the wilderness about Lake Erie - nations that perished under the deadly blows of their own races in an exterminating conflict, . which was only a tragic part of the wide-spread revolution, begun before the discovery of their country by European adventurers, and fully as disastrous to the aborigines as the after complications of the survivors with the white men.

From such scanty data as the Frenchmen have left us, let us draw a hasty sketch of the Indian situation as it was at that time. In that broad domain of territory teeming with natural advantages, capable of sustaining an empire greater than any dreamed of by Charlemagne, lying north of the latitude of the Ohio river and stretching from the Atlantic ocean to the Father of Waters, were two generic branches of the red races, differing in language and some minor points - the Iroquois and Algonquin. These were again divided into numerous cognate tribes, with some dissimilar traits, but with a general re- semblance. Within the territory south of Lake Ontario, and between the Mohawk and Genesee rivers, was a cluster of beautiful lakes, since made classic ground by the genius of Cooper. That charming country was the seat of the Iroquois League, the most remarkable and unique confederacy mentioned in Indian history, embracing five tribes - the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas. Their perfect union, unbroken to the last, and their favored location, gave them supremacy among the tribes. Parkman speaks of the Iroquois as the "Indian of Indians." De Witt Clinton calls them the "Romans of the New World." They were certainly like the Romans in one respect: they were remorseless, blood-thirsty conquerors. They held all the tribes, from the treeless plains of the Mississippi to the wooded slopes of the Atlantic under the spell of their prowess. The secret of their confederation and the term of its existence are involved in the uncertainty of mythical tradition. Their fighting strength, at the advent of the white man, was estimated at about four thousand warriors.

This confederacy, sometimes called the Five Nations, and after the year 1715, when they were joined by the Tuscaroras of the south, the Six Nations, was the Iroquois proper. Around them, however, were allied nations of the same linguistic stock. To the southwest, on the Susquehanna, were the warlike Andastees; south of Lake Erie the powerful tribe of Eries; on the north shore of the same lake, the Neutral Nation, so called by the missionaries, their territory extending into New York; in the peninsula north, formed by Lakes Erie, Huron and Ontario, were the numerous clans of the Hurons - sometimes called the Huron-Iroquois, as they were of the same stock - numbering, at one time, twelve thousand souls. These were named Hurons by the Jesuits, after the lake on the shores of which they had their homes; but at a later date, after the great catastrophe that partially destroyed and scattered the tribe, the principal band took the name of Wyandots. As, later on, the Wyandots figure in the history of the Maumee Country, it is desired to make this genealogy clear. Northeast of the Hurons, near the Ottawa river, of Canada, was the tribe of Ottawas, of the Algonquin family, well known in later years on the Maumee.

There is some obscurity in the French maps and accounts, of that time, regarding the west end of Lake Erie, as no missions had been established south of the lake. There is evidence, however, tending to show that the Neutrals, as they were called, had fortified villages on the Sandusky river, whither they had fled for safety shortly before their final destruction. But other authorities claim that it was the Eries who suffered annihilation on the Sandusky. There is pretty conclusive evidence, too, that the Miamis used the hunting grounds of the Lower Maumee at an early day. This tribe had its chief seat on the heads of the Maumee and Wabash rivers, and its clans claimed portions of Indiana, Ohio and southern Michigan. The French named the river " Miamidu-Lac, " probably after some tribe in the vicinity. La Salle met a war party of the Miamis, at the Kankakee portage, as early as 1681, on their way to fight the Illinois.* The Miamis were among the few who did not suffer seriously by the Iroquois, though more than once they had to flee to the farther shore of Lake Michigan to escape the deadly blows of the insatiate New York conquerors. Their central village, Ke-ki-on-gay, was established, at an early date, on the site where Fort Wayne now stands, and subsequently they were among the most hostile tribes the Americans had to deal with.

Contiguous to, and almost surrounding the territory of the Iroquois, was the vast domain of the Algonquins. To draw lines of comparison between these two families is difficult. They were so related by conquest, absorption and location, as at times to baffle analysis.

All, however, were savages, differing but little in character, and similar in habits, customs and superstitions, where climatic conditions did not interfere. The Iroquois was the highest type of North- American savagery; daring, politic and ambitious; a fair exemplification of the best estate attainable outside of the pale of civilization. That these people, left undisturbed, would have developed a civilization for themselves no one believes who has studied them well. They were as fixed in their habits, laws and customs as the migrating birds of passage. Their lives were a series of impulses and their most important actions were incited by omens or the meaningless mummeries of conjuring "Medicine Men." They studied the signs of the woods that they might follow the game and track, or evade an enemy; but the open book of Nature had never suggested to them an invention or an art. In religion they were no better. "The religious belief of an Indian," says Parkman, "is a cloudy bewilderment where we seek in vain for system or coherence." The primitive Indian was as much a savage in his religion as in his physical life; he was, says the same author, "divided between fetish worship and that next degree of religious development which consists in the worship of deities embodied in the human form. His conception of their attributes was such as might have been expected. His gods were no whit better than himself. Even when he borrows from Christianity the idea of a Supreme and Universal Spirit, his tendency is to reduce Him to a local habitation and a bodily shape; and this tendency disappears only in tribes that have long been in contact with civilized white men. The primitive Indian, yielding his untutored homage to One All-pervading and Omnicient Spirit is a dream of poets, rhetoricians and sentimentalists."

Both peoples - Algonquins and Iroquois - produced warriors of distinction and chieftains whose statecraft evidenced a considerable degree of sagacity. In this respect the Algonquins did not suffer by comparison. Powhattan and King Phillip were Algonquins, as later were Pontiac, Tecumseh, Little Turtle and Black Hawk.

Of the habits, customs and superstitions of those people who were our predecessors, much can be said; of their previous history but little, and that based on no better authority than legends and unreliable tradition. The Indians, as first found by the whites, are nearly as great an enigma as their predecessors, the legendary Mound-Builders, whose history can only be traced in the works that have outlived them. They were in possession - so far as their nomadic habits could make a possession. That much is certain; nearly as certain is the probability of their ultimate extinction.

The revengeful cruelties and homicidal fury exhibited in their incessant wars upon each other, as depicted by the early French discoverers, is calculated to somewhat dispel one's belief in the stories so often told in prose and song, of the primitive happiness of the Indian race. Possibly some of that happiness has existed in the brain of the sentimentalists, rather than in the reality, the result of undigested theories and uneducated sympathies.

Champlain's settlement found friendly neighbors in the hordes of Algonquins. The warriors besought the French to join them in a war expedition against their enemies, the Iroquois, to i the south of the St. Lawrence. Here transpired an incident, which, though it seemed trivial in \ itself at the time, ultimately had much to do in ! shaping French history in America. Champlain [ acceded to the request, and taking a couple of his [ soldiers joined the war party. Firearms were then unknown in the woods of America, and when the proud Iroquois, in the first onset of battle, witnessed the blaze and crash of the muskets and saw three of their leading chiefs go down with ghastly death wounds, they were dumbfounded and fled panic-stricken, hotly pursued by the exultant red allies of the French. Champlain had made a mistake - a mistake that sorely troubled the French for more than a hundred years afterward. That act helped to engender Iroquois hostility, which, fed by other causes, contributed in no small degree to the failure of the French colonial project in America.

A little later on French explorers dared not venture to the west by way of the St. Lawrence and lakes, but turned northward instead, and the rising settlements lived in dread of their ferocious neighbors to the south. In this unfortunate condition of affairs, the reader finds the principal explanation for the French pioneers turning to the inhospitable region to the north of the Great Lakes, instead of to the nearer and more desirable country further south. For this cause, doubtless, the Maumee Country was not discovered until more than seventy years after the settlement at Quebec was made. Mackinac, Green Bay, the "Soo" and Mission La Pointe, north of the lakes, are more than a quarter of a century older than Detroit. There was a cause for this. Iroquois hostility drove the French northward. Their usual route was by the Ottawa river, of Canada, thence by the north shore of Huron, Mackinac, and so on to Lake Superior. Along this route were the missionary stations, the centers of the early colonial history.

Thus far we have dwelt upon the maps and history of the country, presumably as the French first found it. Now let us make a revise of the history and map of this same country with the changes of half a century. At the beginning of 1670 the land of the Hurons is a solitude. The Moloch of havoc had been there. Iroquois tomahawks spread desolation through all the borders. The missions and missionaries were gone. The survivors of the. once populous Indian cantons were scattered bands of fugitives. After destroying the Hurons the Five League despoilers fell upon che Neutral Nation with ruthless fury, and the wilderness north of Lake Erie became a solitude. South of the lake the Eries, after a heroic resistance, shared the same fate, and their name only lives in the blue waters beside which they perished. Little is known of them - the missionaries, it is thought, never dwelt among them. The Andastees, too, after a savage and protracted struggle, which crippled and nearly baffled their conquerors, were exterminated. Thus, one after the other, four great nations perished at the hands of their savage brethren. The present State of Ohio became a vassal canton of the Iroquois, and, it might be added, was almost a solitude. The population, thus displaced, made what has been deemed by some to have been the first occupation. All that can be truthfully said, however, is that they were the first occupants of whom the white men knew anything.

The French colonists had been friends and allies of the Hurons, as well, and for that reason had not escaped unscathed. The revengeful Confederacy, obtaining guns from the Dutch and English, whose settlements were beginning to dot the Hudson and Mohawk, made frequent merciless raids, spreading desolation along the whole line of the St. Lawrence settlements, until the colony tottered upon the verge of ruin. Montreal was captured; its inhabitants butchered or carried away captives, and the blood-smeared victors yelled their exultant war-whoops under the very walls of Quebec.

Let us refer again to the same map. Far away, on the south shore of Lake Superior, near Chequamigon bay, are the fragments of the once proud, but now expatriated, Hurons. Near them were the Ottawas - associates in exile. They, too, had to flee before the fury of the conquerors. These tribes for more than twenty years, like the Israelites of old, wanderers in the vast wilderness, had at last squatted there, near some kindred clans of the Chippewas. The faithful Jesuits had been with them in their wanderings. The Mission La Pointe* was established; but Father Marquette, who established the church of Sault Ste. Marie in April, 1668, and who was at La Points in 1669, wrote very discouragingly of the progress he was making among the heathen hordes. In his report he says, concerning the Ottawas: "They were far removed from the

Kingdom of God, and addicted, beyond all other tribes, to foulness, incantations and sacrifices to evil spirits." It was not long, however, until a quarrel with the Sioux, who were west of them, caused the Hurons - or Wyandots as they will hereafter be called - and Ottawas to flee southward; the former settling about Mackinaw, and the latter on some islands below the straits, and still later, about Little Traverse bay. These locations they held for nearly a century, and again grew numerous and strong. Here we will leave them for the present.

It will be of interest at this point to know where the maps of that time, 1670, located some other tribes, with whom history brings us in con- tact, in later years. The Chippewas were on Lake Superior; the Sacs, Winnebagoes and Menominees, in Wisconsin; the Kaskaskias and other Illinois tribes on the Illinois river; the Pottawatamies on the south end of Lake Michigan, about the River St. Joseph; the Miamis along the Ohio and Indiana State line; add the Delawares (vassals of the Iroquois), in central Pennsylvania. The wandering Shawanees are not easily located, but at that time were probably about the mouth of the Cumberland river. With the exception of the Miamis none of these tribes then claimed a home in what is now Ohio. The reader should note this fact, as a century later at least six tribes claimed ownership in Ohio soil. These tribes, mostly Algonquins, had generally been allies of, and were friendly to, the French, and more or less hostile to their old enemies, the Iroquois.

The French, taught by bitter lessons, had long been anxious to make peace with the Iroquois, not only for the protection of their colonies on the St. Lawrence, but in the interest of discoveries to the south and the vast fur trade with the nations. Long and incessant warfare, too, had told upon the power of the Five Nations. They had received some heavy blows from the French troops, inducing a more pacific state of mind. A sort of truce was at last patched up between them and the French, and the latter ventured to make some explorations south of the Lakes. It was about this time that Robert Cavalier La Salle - incomparable among the early pioneer explorersof the West - began his American career. Through his inspiring genius and tireless energy, civilized men first began to learn the vast extent and future possibilities of the Mississippi Valley.

In the year 1670, he discovered the Ohio river, and was among the first Europeans who trod Ohio soil. Two of his associates. Fathers Gallinee and Dolliers, on a canQe trip to the outlet of Lake Superior in the same year, passed up Lake Erie, stopping one night on Pt. Pelee island. They were the pioneer white men who traveled along the west end of Lake Erie and through the straits of Detroit, so far as is known. This was sixty-two years after settlement was made on the St. Lawrence.

In 1671, at the Sault ("Soo"), the French, in the presence of a large concourse of Indians, and with much pomp and display, took formal possession of all the Northwest, both discovered and undiscovered, in the name of the King of France. In the following year (1672) the old soldier, Count Frontenac, came out to Canada as

Governor. In enterprise and ability, and in the support he commanded from the King, he far exceeded any of his predecessors. His vigorous administration of colonial affairs, and his soldierly skill, combined with the genius of La Salle, advanced the French scheme of empire as it had never been before. Under adventurous and fearless leaders, the Mississippi, with many of its eastern tributaries, including the Ohio, was explored. Seven years later, 1679, at Niagara, La Salle launched the "Griffin," of forty-five tons burthen, mounting a small armament of light cannon. This pioneer sailing craft on the Great Lakes, with her gaudy pennants, flapping sails and booming cannon, was the wonder of all Indian beholders; the trip of the great "canoe" up Lakes Erie and Huron, her passage of the straits of Detroit and Mackinac, and on to the south end of Lake Michigan, was in the nature of a triumphal voyage. But the career of the "Griffin" was short. La Salle sent her on the return trip loaded with furs, but she never reached her destination, having possibly foundered in a storm.

In this same year ( 1679) Frontenac sent out a number of trading and exploring parties, to different parts of the West. It was doubtless one of these that discovered the canoe route from Lake Erie to the Ohio, by way of the Maumee and Wabash rivers, which in an ordinary stage of water could be traversed with a canoe by a "portage," or land carry, of only about nine miles between the sources of the two rivers. This, in a country where there were neither horses nor mules, was an important discovery, and this route was much used in both war and peace in after years. Outside of this discovery, however, there are existing proofs that the French were on the Maumee in 1679 and 1680, but there is no evidence that white men had been here before that time. In his interesting volume, "History of the Maumee Valley," Knapp states, on the authority of A. J. Goodman, at one time secretary of the Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Historical Society, based on data from records at Montreal, Quebec and elsewhere, that the French, in 1680, built a stockade, and for several years kept a trading post on the north bank of the Maumee, at a point nearly opposite where Perrysburg now is. This post, it is claimed, was afterward abandoned for the more desirable location at Ft. Wayne. There is room, however, for wellfounded doubt as to there having been a fort on the Maumee as early as 1680. The French at that time felt no security, anywhere south of Lake Erie, from the roving murderous bands of Iroquois. This is shown in the fact that they had no permanent military post at the more important location on the Detroit, uptil subsequent to the great Montreal treaty, twenty-one years later, 1701. The further fact that there were no Indians at the time on the Lower Maumee, worth mentioning, takes away the probability or need of a trading post. There was nobody here to trade with, unless the Miamis should make an occasional visit from the Fort Wayne country. That a French exploring and trading party was on the Maumee at or about the time mentioned seems certain; that such party had a fortified winter encampment here, 1679-80, waiting for the breaking up of the ice, is more than possible, but that there was an established trading post here prior to the one at Detroit, hardly seems probable.

At a grand council held at Montreal in 1701, at which were present representatives of the Iroquois and nearly all the tribes north of the Ohio, including those about the Great Lakes, the French made a treaty which greatly facilitated their schemes of aggrandizement and trade. Though she had been compelled to take third choice in America, none will deny, in the light of later revelations, that France had put her preemption squarely down on the cream of the Continent. From the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, four thousand miles, she claimed sway. Her great concern now was to make her claim good. In this interest her ministers and resident officials were aggressive and zealous. In 1701, the same year of the great Montreal council, a military and trading post, called Fort Ponchartrain, was established at Detroit. From this date and place Wood county catches the first shadowy rays of the slowly approaching civilization. Detroit, by its central and favorable location on the great water route between the east and northwest, became at once the most important post in the western country, and continued so until the close of the war of 1812. Beside being the chief center of military and governmental authority for a large extent of country, it was a great fur-trading emporium. No city west of the Alleghanies has filled so important a place in the history of the North and West as Detroit. It has been the scene of two surrenders, twelve massacres, two scores of battles, and has changed flags five times. Detroit was one hundred years old when Cleveland was laid off in town lots. Naturally the Maumee Country lying so near by, and the river which was the traveled route to the Ohio, became tributary to Detroit.

beaver, otter, coon, mink and muskrat, swarmed through all the region, and only waited the hunter and trader to develop a profitable business, sure of a quick return and not dependent, like husbandry, upon the slow process of clearing the forest, or affected by drouth, freshets, or frosts. Detroit, in addition to being a principal official and military station, continued to be the great trading center, for the forest rangers and forest products, of the Maumee Country for more than a hundred years after its founding.

The French, as soon as they were established, commenced their usual policy of conciliating the tribes - allaying feuds and jealousies and protecting the weak against the strong. They encouraged the Indians to settle about the posts and engage in hunting and trapping instead of following the warpath. Among the tribes who thus settled about Detroit were the Ottawas and Wyandots, whom we left located near Mackinaw. A little later some of the Pottawatamie bands came from Lake Michigan. By the middle of the cen- ' tury (1750) the Ottawas had taken possession of the Maumee hunting grounds, and about the time the English displaced the French, from 1760 to 1765, had their principal villages on the Maumee river, mostly on the north bank, because of the drier and more healthful conditions to be found there at that time. Wood county soil was never the permanent abode of the Indians so far as known - only a temporary resort for hunting. The Ottawas were our immediate predecessors, but shared their hunting grounds with their old friends, the Wyandots, who had their principal seat on the Sandusky river. Mingled with these, were bands of other tribes, who had become broken and dispersed, and either were not strong enough to seek another location, or for other causes, preferred to remain here.

This settlement here of these Indians, as just noticed, is termed by some writers, "the second occupation," as distinguished from the people, evicted or destroyed by the Iroquois, about one hundred years before. Many persons, even * among the better informed, have fallen into the common error of supposing that there was a numerous Indian population here, or indeed all over Ohio, when the first white men came, or that the Indians that we displaced later had been here from a remote time. This was not the case. When the French founded Detroit, 1701, this part of the Maumee Country was virtually unpeopled. The French were the means of bringing the Indians here, to procure furs, and Wood county became a sort of game preserve for Ottawa and Wyandot hunters, who had scarcely ;

Let us now refer to the last map made by the French. It is dated about 1760. It will be remembered that on the map of 1680 only the Miamis were located on Ohio soil - at the Indiana-State line. Now we find, by this later map, the best part of the Ottawas on the Maumee ; at Sandusky, the Wyandots; at the head of the Maumee, the Miamis; on the Ohio river, above the Muskingum, the Delawares, lafe vassals of the Iroquois, from eastern Pennsylvania; between the Scioto and Muskingum, the Shawnees, and near them a band of Wyandots.

To secure their territorial claims, keep peace among the tribes, and to protect the fur trade, which had become a source of vast revenue, the French had scattered forts and trading posts around quite liberally. Those nearest to the present boundaries of Wood county were at Sandusky, Detroit and Fort Wayne, but there were fortifications at Mackinaw, Green Bay, the lower end of Lake Michigan, and on the Wabash and Illinois rivers. There were forts at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, and on Lake Erie, at Presque Isle, now Erie, and posts at La Boeuf and Venango, on the head waters of the Allegheny river. These were the outward signs of her supremacy, and by these France made her claim of ownership. Discovery and occupancy were considered valid claims in those days of vast and easy colonial aggrandizement.

The French plan of colonization in North America was faulty, and its realization fell far short of the expectations of its projectors; but it had some elements of strength which their English neighbors had neglected, or had not the means of employing. The French assiduously cultivated the friendship of the Indian tribes with whom they became associated, and notwithstanding the charges of fickleness and, treachery, made by many writers against the red men, they were singularly constant to the French, both in power and adversity. The French maintained close social relations with their red allies; made them handsome gifts; hunted with them, traded with them, and frequently inter-married with them. The coureur des bois had much in common with his Indian companion. He was restless and brave; pliant in disposition; caring nothing for land or work; wanting only an empire for France and a good time for himself.

sacrificing labor of the untiring missionaries - such as Mesnard, Marquette, and others. "Religious enthusiasm," says Bancroft, "colonized New England, and religious enthusiasm founded Montreal, made a conquest of the wilderness about the upper lakes and explored the Mississippi." But there was a great gulf between the facile temperament of the proselyting Jesuit and the stern, unyielding one of the Puritan. The former patiently moulded all adverse circumstances to his purpose, and followed the Apostle Paul's doctrine of conformity to the various phases of human character. The latter, long taught to look only for direction and assistance from God, was cold, formal and arbitrary in his teachings. The gorgeous rites and ceremonies of the Catholic Church were well suited to the imaginativeforest neophytes, whose simple minds could but illy understand the written creed and catechism of the white race.

The creed of the Puritan was dogmatic and appealed more to the reasoning faculties, in which latter attributes the red men were deficient. In these divergent methods of dealing with the native races we must look chiefly for the marked ascendancy which the French obtained over the original occupants of the country.

We will now turn, briefly, to the English whom we left along the Atlantic coast. Their settlement was about contemporaneous with the French at Quebec. They had not been idle. They had increased rapidly in population, and extended their settlements far into the interior. Their plan of colonization differed radically from the French, and hardly considered commercial intercourse with the Indians as one of its factors. They were toilers rather than traders; farmers, who sought out the best lands they could find, for agricultural purposes. They formed compact settlements for religious and social convenience, and for protection against the savages. The Indians did not always look with favor upon the land-grasping encroachments of their English neighbors; and to these differences was soon to be added an embroglio with their French rivals. In their eagerness to occupy the rich valleys to the west, some daring speculators, from London and Virginia, known as the Ohio Company, obtained a grant from the Crown of six million acres of land southeast of the Ohio river, in what is now West Virginia and Pennsylvania, on which they intended to settle a large colony. Surveyors, among them George Washington, and land agents were at work, extending the bounds of English domain westward very rapidly. Already they were within the limits claimed by the French, and the jealousy of the latter was raised to fire heat. The most bitter feelings of rivalry were engendered, and each sought to checkmate the movements of the other. The English claimed by purchase from the Iroquois and their charter from the English king, which document, in the parlance of the time, modestly read from "sea to sea." The French based their claim upon discovery and possession. Neither would back down. Diplomacy was vainly resorted to; raids and murders were rife. Colonial officials, Gaul and Anglo-Saxon, vowed to stand for their respective rights, and the savages, watching the portentous clouds of war, stood in the background, painted and ready for the carnival of blood.

The storm broke, in 1756, at the head of the Ohio, and what is known as the French and Indian war, the bloodiest in Colonial history, was inaugurated. Each of the great rivals put forth their best efforts to secure the aid of their savage allies, but the French were by far the most successful in the diabolic and infamous scheme. The western tribes were nearly all under their influence. The nations of the Iroquois League remained neutral, or joined the English; the Cherokees and some other bands on their southwestern border also joined them. Soon the whole line of settlements was startled by the appalling whoop of the swarthy warriors. The tomahawk and torch answered the tearful plea for mercy; old age and helpless infancy shared the same horrible fate. In details of savage atrocity that war has few, if any, parallels in war's dread annals. The contest raged with varying fortune until the fall of 1759, when the roar of cannon on the rocky heights of Quebec made proclamation that the supremacy of race, in North America, was at final issue. The Anglo-Saxon was triumphant, and the future destiny of this country was irrevocably fixed in that line. Some desultory fighting, the surrender of Montreal, and the peace treaty of 1763 followed. France ceded all her possessions east of the Mississippi river to England. Thus passed away the rule of France. Wood county, for almost a century under her dominion as a part of the Diocese of Quebec, now passed under the control of England.

Chapter Iii

Twenty Years' Occupation by the English - 1768 to 1788 - Pontiac's War - Pontiac's Retirement to the Maumee - Angry Interviews with Captain Morris - "The English are Liars" - Interesting Description of the Maumee Country at that early Date by the English Sub-Commissioner, George Croghan - England displaced in Authority by the United States, 1788.

THE downfall of the French was a sad disappointment to their Indian allies in the West. They did not exactly understand why, because the French had been beaten, the English had any right to come and take possession of the Indian's territory, and become his master in authority and occupy all the forts and posts. The unfavorable turn events had taken might well have caused the tribes to reflect a little, and see that they had made a great mistake in joining in a fight and decimating their ranks in a contest between two nations, both of which fought for the same object, namely, to possess the country, not to help the Indian to retain it. The French colonists, too, in the settlements about the posts, were illy suited with the new order of things. They tvere loyal to the obnoxious flag of Britain only in appearance, and no doubt prejudiced the Indians against their masters, the English. About Detroit the Indians had become numerous. Toward the English they kept up an exterior appearance of friendship, but underneath was a discontented, sullen, revengeful feeling. In this temper, and at this time (1763), almost before peace had been concluded between the English and French, in Paris, a most dangerous, remarkable and widespread conspiracy was formed and partly carried into execution by the savages. It was as diabolical in its scope as it was original and bold in conception. It was planned and headed by the Ottawa chief, Pontiac, whose tribe was about Detroit or on the Maumee. This unlettered savage combined in his make-up the cunning, far-reaching diplomacy of a Talleyrand, with the courage and skill in leadership of a Hannibal. His design was nothing less than the capture by stratagem and treachery of all the English posts from Niagara to Mackinac. The garrisons and the English settlers on the border were to be massacred, and the whole frontier made as desolate as the torch and scalping knife could make it.

knowledge (^f Indian character, so worked upon the superstitions, prejudices and fears of the Indians as to bring most of the tribes heartily into his deep-laid plot. He had picked his warriors and planned all the details. When the blow came, which was arranged to be made simultaneously along the border, nine posts, including Mackinac, fell. Detroit escaped only by a hair's breadth. An Indian woman betrayed the danger to the commandant, and he had the wisdom to profit by the warning in time. The crack of doom or the flash of a meteor could not have come more sudden or unexpected ; nor could the dread thunders of an earthquake have caused greater consternation among the frontier people. Again the whole border was thrown into wild panic. The horrors of the French and Indian war, just closed, were held in vivid remembrance by the startled colonists. Men flew to arms, and women and children deserted their homes and hastened to the interior towns and settlements. Thousands of homes on the Virginia and Pennsylvania border were abandoned, and hundreds of settlers were massacred and made captives.

Pontiac's rage knew no bounds when his own part of the programme failed, that of capturing Detroit. He at once laid siege to the fort, doubtless with the expectation of starving out the garrison. What is most remarkable in Indian warfare, he held his warriors to the work, and kept up the siege with more or less vigor for about ten months, when reinforcements arrived for the fort and drove him off. Disappointed and chagrined, he retired to the Ottawa village on the Maumee with his warriors, from which he soon heard of the total collapse of his audacious plans, under the telling blows of the border men and the English soldiers.

While he was here, and a treaty, at Presque Isle (Erie), which he declined to take part in, was in progress (1764), or had been arranged, an incident occurred, illustrative of Pontiac's hostile feeling toward the English. Bradstreet's army lay encamped on the field near Detroit at the time. Capt. Morris, with a few Iroquois and Canadian attendants had been detailed to go on any embassy to the country of the Illinois in 1764. Ascending the Maumee in a canoe, he soon approached the camp of Pontiac, who had now virtually given up his great contest, and sullenly withdrawn to the banks of this river with his chosen warriors. While yet at some distance, Morris and his party were met by about two hundred Indians, who treated him with great violence and rudeness, while they offered a friendly welcome to the Iroquois and Canadians. Attended by this clamorous escort, they all mov^ed together toward the camp. At its outskirts stood Pontiac himself. He met the embassador with a scowling brow, and refused to offer his hand. "The English are liars," was his first salutation. He then displayed a letter addressed to himself, and purporting to have been written by the king of France, containing as Morris declares, the grossest calumnies which the most ingenious malice could devise, to incense the Indians against the English. The old falsehood was not forgotten. "Your French father," said the writer, "is neither dead nor asleep; he is already on his way, with sixty great ships, to revenge himself on the English, and drive them out of America." The letter was written by a French officer, or, more probably, a French fur trader, who, for his own profit, wished to inflame the passions of the Indians, and thus bar the way against English competitors. Pontiac's warriors plundered the whole party of everything except their arms, their clothing and their canoes, and then suffered them to depart. This war is known in history as " Pontiac's Conspiracy," and may properly be said to be the termination of the French and Indian war. In startling, tragic details, it surpassed the most ingeniously contrived, harrowing tales of fiction.

Pontiac's name stands among the first in the history of the Indian race in genius and leadership. His proud spirit would not become fully reconciled to English rule. With a few followers he finally left the Maumee and went to the Illinois Country where, in the year 1769, he was assassinated by a drunken Indian of the Kaskaskia tribe. A French officer at Fort St. Louis, who had known the great chief, sent across the Mississippi for the body, which was buried where the great city of St. Louis now stands. ' ' Neither mound nor tablet," says Parkman, "marks the burial place of Pontiac. For a mausoleum, a city has risen above the forest hero, and the race whom he hated with such burning rancor trample with unceasing footsteps over his forgotten grave."

We have felt it due to the story of the Maumee Country to say this much of the part Pontiac and his followers took in this savage drama of the border, as this was his home at that time. Misguided savage that he was, Pontiac, though not an actor here, may safely be ranked, in history, the equal of any of the great chiefs, white or red, whose genius in war made the Maumee historic.

The peace treaty following this uprising - the closing chapter of the French and Indian war - was held at Presque Isle (Erie), in August of 1 764, and was followed by the repair and garrisoning of all the posts. Gradually confidence became restored in the stability of the peace, and at once, with redoubled energy, the settlers began the work of rebuilding their blasted homes on the frontier. New life and enterprise, long restrained, was noticeable everywhere. Shrewd agents and surveyors were busy hunting out the best lands. Adventurous explorers, like Boone, McBride, Findlay and others, had penetrated to the wilds of Kentucky. In Western Virginia and Pennsylvania the settlers, no longer menaced by the French, had advanced beyond the mountains, and the smoke of their cabins was seen far out on the waters of the Ohio. In the meantime, while this great advance was being made southeast of the Ohio, the country northwest of it, and about the Great Lakes, the late domain occupied by the French and Indians, showed but little gain. A few English traders and their employes were gathered about the posts to profit by the fur trade; that told it all.

The exact situation in the Maumee Country and at Detroit at that time, 1765, is given in the journal notes of the English Sub-Commissioner, George Croghan, who made an official trip to the West that year, down the Ohio from Fort Pitt to the mouth of the Wabash, thence up that river and by the usual route to Detroit, stopping at Post Miami, now Fort Wayne, to visit a band of the Miami tribe there, which he speaks of as the Twightwees, a name they sometimes went by. On August 1 , he says: "Within a mile of the Twightwee Village, I was met by the Chiefs of that nation (Miamis), who received us very kindly. The most part of these Indians knew me, and conducted me to their village, where they immediately hoisted an English flag that I had formerly given them at Fort Pitt. The next day they held a council, after which they gave me up the English prisoners they had, then made several speeches, in all of which they expressed the great pleasure it gave them, to see the unhappy differences which embroiled the several nations in a war with their brethren (the English) were now so near a happy conclusion, and that peace was established in their country. The Twightwee Village is situated on both sides of a river, called St. Joseph. This river, where it falls into the Miami ( Maumee) river, about a quarter of a mile from this place, is one hundred yards wide, on the east side of which stands a stockade fort, somewhat ruinous. The Indian village consists of about forty or fifty cabins, besides nine or ten French houses - a runaway colony from Detroit. During the late Indian war, they were concerned in it, and being afraid of punishment, came to this post, where ever since they have spirited up the Indians against the English. All the French residing here are a lazy, indolent people, fond of breeding mischief, and spiriting up the Indians against the English, and should by no means be suffered to remain here. The country is pleasant, the soil rich and well watered. After several conferences with the Indians, and their delivering me up all the English prisoners they had, on the 6th of August, we set out for Detroit, down the Miami ( Maumee ) river in a canoe. This river heads about ten miles from hence. The river is not navigable till you come to the place where the St. Joseph joins it, and makes a considerably large stream. Nevertheless we found a great deal of difficulty in getting our canoes over shoals, as the water at this season was very low. The banks of the river are high, and the country overgrown with lofty timber of various kinds; and the land is level and the woods clear. About nine miles from the Miamis of Twightwee, we came to where the large river, that heads in a large lick, falls into the Miami river. This they call the forks. The Ottawas claim this country, and hunt here, where game is very plenty. From hence we proceeded to the Ottawa Village [Providence, Lucas County.] This nation formerly lived at Detroit, but is now settled here, on account of the richness of the country, where game is always found to be in plenty. Here we were obliged to get out of our canoes and drag them eighteen miles, on account of the rifts which interrupted the rtavigation. At the end of these rifts, we came to a village of the Wyandots, who received us very kindly, and thence we proceeded to the mouth of this river, where it falls into Lake Erie. From the Miamis to the lake it is computed one hundred and eighty miles, and from the entrance of the river into the lake, to Detroit, is sixty miles - that is forty-two miles up the lake, and eighteen miles up the Detroit river to the garrison of that name.

" On the'i7th, in the morning, we arrived at the fort, which is a large stockade, inclosing about eighty houses. It stands on the west side of the river, on a high bank, commands a very pleasant prospect for nine miles above and nine miles below the fort. The country is thickly settled with French. Their plantations are generally laid out about three or four acres in breadth on the river, and eighty acres in depth. The soil is good, producing plenty of grain. All the people here are generally poor wretches, and consist of three or four hundred French families, a lazy, idle people, depending chiefly on the savages for subsistence. Though the land, with little labor, produces plenty of grain, they scarcely raise as much as will supply their wants, in imitation of the Indians, whose manners and customs they have entirely adopted, and cannot subsist without them."

4 4 Before the late war, there were three Indian nations at this place: The Pottawatamies, whose village was on the west side of the river, about one mile below the fort; the Ottawas, on the east side, about three miles above the fort; the Wyandots, whose village lays on the east side, about two miles below the fort. The former two nations have removed to a considerable distance, and the latter still remain where they were, and are remarkable for their good sense and hospitality. " This extract taken from Butler's History of Kentucky, doubtless gives the earliest contemporaneous account of the Maumee Country in English print; at least it affords data from which to make more definite investigation. The writer, though slightly in error in the matter of distances, gives a good general description of the Maumee and of Detroit, as he saw it at that time. He tells who our predecessors in occupation were then, 1765, and aids somewhat in fixing the dates of their coming. He locates the chief seat of the Ottawas at the head of the Maumee Rapids, where it was yet, in part, when the settlement of Wood county began, fifty years later; also that there was a Wyandot village at the lower end of the Rapids, probably at old Fort Miami. The Wyandots, however, as noted in Chapter II, never became other than temporary residents here.

The English of Detroit, as well as the other posts, found, like the French had, that it was greatly to their interest to maintain peace among the tribes. War was troublesome, dangerous and expensive; besides it interfered greatly' with the profits of the fur traders, which were

Vain hope ! War came. It was Scarcely ten years from the close of the Indian war when mutterings of discontent came from the far East. England's Colonies grew tired of the burdensome exactions of the parental government, and rebelled. Soon the rattle of musketry from Concord and Lexington told that the tide of battle was up, 1775. Those same brave Colonists, who learned the trade of soldiers, fighting French and Indians, now had to turn their guns against the Mother Country. And, shame to her great name, England followed the infamous practice she had but so recently condemned in the French, and employed the savages to aid her in attempting to subjugate her former subjects. They helped her, especially her old friends, the Iroquois, but she failed ingloriously. In 1783, England surrendered up all her possessions south of Canada to her late Colonists, who had established a new government, styled, "The United States of America. " The destiny of the Maumee Country is henceforth linked with the fortunes of the New Government.

When England succeeded France in 1763, the British flag was hung out at Detroit; the French traders were ousted, and the Maumee coon and beaver skins were sold in the English language for English goods, instead of French. That was all the change the English made in behalf of the Maumee Country. But a beginning had been made. France had marked out the way. She had demonstrated, too, that this country was not without some commercial importance, both in its products ahd location. Indeed so valuable and desirable did it prove to England that she violated her treaty of 1783 and held possession of Detroit, and this part of the Northwest Territory, until 1796, thirteen years after the treaty. This she did on a pretext that some Virginia debtors of England, or her subjects, had refused to pay their obligations. [Virginia, and perhaps one or two other States, refused to abide by that part of the treaty relating to the payment of debts, because the British had, on their retirement, carried away a number of Negro slaves belonging to Americans. This, England made the pretext for holding Mackinaw, Detroit, etc.]

This is not the worst she did in the meantime. She fostered and harbored agents and fur traders who, for their own selfish gain, cospnired with the savages, lately in the employ of the British army, to keep up a predatory warfare on American settlers, to drive them back and forever prevent them from coming north of the Ohio. In furtherance of this purpose, the English advanced their outposts in 1794 to the banks of the Maumee, where they constructed and garrisoned Fort Miami, on the old site of the French stockade. The evil effect of this incendiary action of the British, on the Indians, cannot be measured. It encouraged them to continued hostility against the Americans, or " thirteen fires," as they called the Thirteen Colonies. Detroit, more than before, became headquarters for all the Northwestern tribes. Here they came to trade - to buy whisky, guns and blankets, and to nurse all their grievances, real or imaginary, against the whites, ever since England displaced the French; or, we might add, of nearly two hundred years against the white race. Now all these long slumbering animosities burned anew, and, under the artful machinations of the English traders and agents, the Indians were made to believe that all their sorrows were caused by the people of the " thirteen fires," and revenge was called for. In this work of vengeance and repression they were taught tt> believe their " Great Father," the King of England, would help them.

The pell-mell rush of settlers, across the mountains and down the Ohio, to the attractive soil of western Virginia and Kentucky, only added fuel to the burning jealousy of the savages, and confirmed and aided the mischievious stories of the traders. Here then began to assemble, in council, all the dissatisfied, hostile elements of the various tribes; even bands of the Six Nations from New York, under the lead of the Mohawk, Brant, came. They had sold out most of their lands there, and were now panting to take the warpath, or to again get a scarlet blanket each, for signing a new treaty, ceding something they probably never owned. This incongruous fusion embraced some of the most warlike tribes and greatest chiefs of that warlike period. They had laid aside for the while their petty tribal feuds, and made common cause against the " thirteen fires. " There were the proud Miamis of the Wabash with their associates, the Piank-a-shaws, and Weeas, all great fighters, led by Little Turtle; the fierce, implacable Shawnees, the Gypsies of the wilderness, headed by their savage chief, Blue Jacket; Roundhead and King Crane, with the irrepressible Wyandots, whose warriors often died in battle, but never surrendered. From the far-off Mississippi came bands of Sauks and Winnebagoes; the stoical Delawares, with the migratory, treacherous Pottawat,amies, and the Chippewas, the Menominees, and bands and fragments of other broken tribes, were there. The heartless rene- gade, Simon Girty, with Capt. Pipe, Buckongehelas, Top-in-e-Bay, De-un-quot, Wen-no-way, Moluntha, Not-e-no, Lolloway, Cik-a-tom-i-co, Stoneater, Turkey-foot, Oquenoxy, Charloe, Whiteyes, Pukeshaw, Wawatum, Myera, or Walkin-the-Water, Standingstone, Bright Horn, Tecumseh (then a young warrior), Ottokee, Blackhoof, Winnemac, and other chiefs of less prowess in battle, were leaders. They all had wrongs of long standing against the white race. The vials of their long-slumbering hatred - all their grievances against the intruding Europeans for generations past - were now goading them into madness. The Maumee Country, from the source of the river to Lake Erie, became the rendezvous and hotbed of secret plotters in hostile intrigue against the Americans. The dense forests and ague-breeding swamps afforded secure refuge from pursuit. From these shadowy wastes issued forth stealthy war parties, with murderous design, to glut their fury on the defenseless border settlers, until the very name, Maumee, like the fabled Styx, was dreaded, even by the hardy frontiersmen. No such combination of savage elements for a desperate purpose, led by experienced, sagacious chiefs, had ever before confronted the white men in America.

Men high in authority in the New Government believed that British officials were covertly conniving at and approving this action of the tribes, in the hope that opportunity would offer to reclaim to England a large slice of the lost territory. Many circumstances justified this belief. Whatever England's motive was, her action was very unjust, and fettered the progress of the Maumee Country by the continued hostility of the Indian tribes, and no language is strong enough to condemn the infamous course pursued by her agents and traders.

Chapter Iv

Troubles ok the New Government - Indians dispute its right to settle on Lands north ok the Ohio - Treaty with the Iroquois, or Six Nations, 1784, at Fort Stanwix, N. Y. - Savage Aggregation of discontented Tribes and Noted Warriors about Detroit - English Traders help to kan the Discontent - United States makes a Second Treaty at Ft. McIntosh, 1785, and a Third at Ft. Finney, 1786 - U. S. Government plants its first Settlement in the Northwest Territory at Marietta, 1788 - Rapid Influx ok Settlers - Indians still Object - Fourth Treaty, Ft. Harmar, 1789 - Massacre at Big Bottom, 1791 - Defeat of Gen. Harmar - Gen. St. Clair leads a new Army toward the Maumee, and is routed with great Loss - Gen. Anthony Wayne defeats the Tribes on the Maumee, 1794 - Treaty of Greenville, 1795.

THESE were some of the vexatious problems that confronted the New Government at the very outset. In the meantime persevering efforts had been going on to clear up the claims of some of the tribes.

The first and most greedy of the claimants were the Iroquois. They had. as previously mentioned, been practically at one time masters of the country to Lake Michigan on the west, and south into Tennessee. In fact they went on war expeditions wherever they could hear of any tribe to fight with, and nearly all the tribes in the territory mentioned held title at one time or another by Iroquois sufferance. They had latterly, however, probably under old treaties with the French, confined themselves mostly to New York, Pennsylvania and that part of Ohio south of Lake Erie, but east of the Cuyahoga (Cleveland). Hardly a treaty was made, or sale of land, but they were on hand to claim some spoils. Hardly a battle was fought but some of their tribes were represented among the hostiles. They were not, however, in high favor with the Americans because of their joining the British in the Revolution, and under Brant. Cornplanter and Butler (not Richard) committing some horrible atrocities in the Mohawk and Cherry Valleys. The Americans finally got after them before the war closed, and inflicted savage punishment, devastating their villages and decimating their tribes fearfully. So enraged were the New York people at the close of the Revolution that they proposed driving them out, and did drive off the Mohawks to Canada; but Gen. Washington and others urged more liberal treatment. At the final wind up of the Indian wars the Senecas, and some other bands of the Six Nations, were allotted lands on the Sandusky river, not far from where Tiffin is. Others remained in New York and in Canada, and some went west.

First Treaty. - At a treaty at Fort Stanwix (now Rome, N. Y.), October, 1784, the Six Nations (Iroquois) ceded to the Americans all their claims to land west of Pennsylvania. This was the first Indian treaty made by the United States. It would seem to have disposed of the claims of the Iroquois to lands in the West; but not so. There is scarcely a subsequent battle, or treaty, that has not had representatives of some tribe of the Six Nations in it.

The United States thus early adopted the just policy of procuring the Indian title to land before offering it for sale, or encouraging settlers to go upon it. This, notwithstanding they had already acquired the title of both England and France. Two of the chief causes of all the trouble the government has had with the Indians are, first, the lawless intrusion of some of the border settlers on lands claimed by the Indians before the government authorized settlement there. Second, the nomadic tenure of some of the tribes and the consequent indefiniteness of boundaries; notably the Shawnees, which made it difficult to fix their claims to any certain territory, for they were in one location one year and somewhere else the next. Again, if a tribe were fixed on a location by treaty, it would sometimes occur that another tribe would find, at a later day, that they had prior squatter rights on the lands. This was the case, for instance, with the Delawares and Wyandots against the Shawnees. The latter claimed title to lands previously ceded to the government by the former .tribes. When we add to this the mischief-making efforts of renegade white men, living among the tribes, and the evil influence of English traders and agents, whose selfish interests it was to keep back settlements, we can readily see why the Kentucky and Virginia border, and the territory now embraced in Ohio, was a bloody battle ground for years, in spite of the humane efforts of Washington and other leading men in the government.

Second Treaty. - Below Pittsburg, on the Ohio, opposite the mouth of the Beaver, was Ft. McIntosh; there, in 1785, the United States made its second treaty, and for the same land it had just got by treaty from the Iroquois. There the Delawares, Chippewas, Ottawas and Wyandots, ceded their claims to all lands east and south of the Cuyahoga river, defined in the treaty line as beginning at the mouth of said river (now Cleveland), up said river (south) to the Portage path, across on said path to the head waters of the Muskingum to Ft. Laurens (now Bolivar, Tuscarawas county), thence west to Loramie's ford (Shelby county), on the Miami; thence, by the Portage path, to the head waters of the Maumee (St. Mary's branch), and down the Maumee to Lake Erie, and along its south shore, back to the mouth of the Cuyahoga. All north and west of this line should belong to the Indians, except some reservations made by the government. All east and south of that line, about two-thirds of the present State of Ohio, the government was to have peaceable possession of. It will be noticed that no treaty mention is made, thus far, with the quarrelsome Shawnees. They held squatter rights on a fine location along the Scioto, about old Chilicothe, and north to Mad river, which the Delaware and Wyandots refused to recognize, and claimed the right to sell the land, and did cede it to the United States. Here was an opening for trouble.

Third Treaty. - The government met the Shawnees, in treaty, at Ft. Finney, at the mouth of the Miami, January, 1786, and besides money and presents given, they were allotted, and agreed to accept, land at the head of the Mad river (Little Miami), and north, between the Delawares and Miamis, central in what is now Auglaize county. This was the third Indian treaty the United States had made in as many years: First, with the Iroquois at Ft. Stanwix for their claim on lands north of the Ohio, 1784; second, the treaty with the western tribes at Ft. McIntosh, 1785; and third, at Ft. Finney, with the Shawnees, in 1786. It is well to be thus particular, respecting these treaties, for two reasons: It is of interest to the owners and occupants of the soil to-day, and in all subsequent years, to know just how the title to our homes was acquired. We hold our title deeds from the President of the United States, the head officer of our government, and seldom stop to inquire how the government acquired the title. Again it is a satisfaction to know that, instead of resorting to force to expel the Indians, pacific measures were invariably taken by the government and treaties held, from time to time, with these native claimants, to secure title to land, for which the government had already waged an eight-years' war with another claimant. It should also be noted