When the colonists found that the Scioto Company could not give them titles to the farms they had bought with their money or their toil, they began to stray away from the settlement. Some went down the rivers to New Orleans, others wandered off elsewhere, perhaps to St. Louis, or to the French towns in Indiana and Illinois; and when Congress at last came to their relief with a grant of twenty-four thousand acres, there were left at Gallipolis only ninety-two persons, out of the original five hundred colonists, to profit by the nation’s generosity. In 1807 few or none of them remained on the spot where they had fondly hoped to make peaceful and happy homes for themselves and their children. It was a sad ending to a romantic story, the most romantic of all the Ohio stories that I know, but we must not blame those who deceived the colonists (not quite wittingly, it seems) for all their woes and disasters. These were partly owing to themselves. The New Englanders who settled at Marietta did not find eighty comfortable cabins waiting for them, and they did not hire hunters to provide their food, or begin by giving balls. The able and educated men among the French colonists seem to have cowered under their disasters like the rest; and some were incurable dreamers. One of the best of them used afterwards to tell how he was descending the Ohio with two philosophers who believed so firmly in the natural innocence and goodness of men, that they invited some Indians aboard their boat and were at once tomahawked. Their skeptical companion shot two of the savages and then jumped into the river, where he swam for his life, diving at the flash of their guns, till he got safe to the farther shore.
The Frenchmen at Gallipolis were not the stuff that the founders of great states are made of; but the New Englanders at Marietta were, and so were the New Jerseymen at Cincinnati, who followed next after them in time. These had even a harder struggle in their beginnings than the people at Marietta, for there the emigrants made their settlement under the guns of Fort Harmar, in a region loosely held by the milder Delaware tribe of the Algonquin nation; but the lands between the Great Miami and Little Miami were claimed and held by the fierce Miamis and Shawnees, and they had been so long the battle ground of the Indians and the Kentuckians that the region was called the Shawnee Slaughter House. The great warpath of the tribes ran through it from the Ohio River to Lake Erie, and the first white settlers had to build stations with blockhouses and stockades before they could begin to till the ancient fields, where from time to time immemorial the Indians had planted and gathered their harvests of corn. The first settlers arrived from New Jersey in December, 1788, some eight months after the settlement at Marietta, and in a little more than a year a fort was built at Cincinnati and garrisoned with United States troops; but in 1791 a band of five hundred Indians, led by Simon Girty, attacked Dunlap’s Station at Colerain. They were beaten off only after a stubborn fight, though the Americans were armed with the cannon which the savages so much dreaded; and before they raised the siege they burned a white prisoner near the station.