Historic Shrines of America Part 40

A cabin was provided for the women of the party, and an awning was stretched. The men propelled the boat with ten oars.

On April 1 the voyage to the Ohio was begun, and on April 7 the party reached the mouth of the Muskingum. The barge was moored to the bank, opposite Fort Harmar. Thus came the Ma.s.sachusetts pioneers to the town of which Was.h.i.+ngton wrote later: "No colony in America was ever settled under such favorable auspices as that which has just commenced at Muskingum. Information, property, and strength will be its characteristics. I know many of the settlers personally, and there never were men better calculated to promote the welfare of such a community."

Here the pioneers laid out the town of Marietta among the famous Indian mounds, naming it in honor of Marie Antoinette of France. The greatest mound of all was made the central feature of Marie Antoinette Square. This mound is thirty feet high, while the circular base is 375 feet in circ.u.mference. It is surrounded by a moat fifteen feet wide and five feet deep. Beyond the moat is a parapet twenty feet thick and 385 feet in circ.u.mference. This square was leased to General Putnam for twelve years, on condition that he "surround the whole square with mulberry trees with an elm at each corner." The base of the mound was to be encircled with weeping willows, and evergreens were to be placed on the mound. The parapet was to be surrounded with trees, the square was to be seeded down to gra.s.s, and the whole was to be enclosed with a post and rail fence. This effort to create a park at the very beginning was an unusual feature of this pioneer experience.

An enclosure of logs, with a log fort at each corner, was built for protection against the Indians. Between the corner forts were the cabins occupied by the various families. The forts and the enclosure were named the Campus Martius. One of the early houses built within this stockade became the home of General Putnam.

Marie Antoinette Square soon became known as Mound Square. General Putnam turned over his lease to the town, which set the property aside as a cemetery. Many of the settlers had died during two epidemics of smallpox, and there was need of a cemetery nearer the town than the ground set aside at the beginning.

It is claimed that more officers of the Revolution have been buried in the Mound Cemetery than in any other cemetery in the country. There were twelve colonels, twelve majors, and twenty-two captains among the Marietta pioneers. When General Lafayette was in Marietta in 1825, the list was read to him, and he said: "I knew them all. I saw them at Brandywine, Yorktown, and Rhode Island. They were the bravest of the brave."

Over Putnam's grave is the following inscription:

Gen. Rufus Putnam A Revolutionary Officer And the leader of the Colony which made the First settlement in the Territory of the Northwest.

Born April 9, 1738 Died May 4, 1824.

The house occupied by "the Father of Ohio," as he has been called, is preserved as a historical monument. In 1917 the Daughters of the American Revolution and Marietta succeeded in persuading the Ohio Legislature to pa.s.s a bill making provision for its repair and care.

Lx.x.xVII

MONUMENT PLACE, ELM GROVE, WEST VIRGINIA

THE PLANTATION HOME OF TWO MAKERS OF HISTORY

At Shepherdstown, the oldest town in what is now West Virginia, Moses Shepherd was born on November 11, 1763. His grandfather had founded the town.

When Moses was about seven years old his father, Colonel Shepherd, removed his large family to his plantation between Big Wheeling and Little Creek, which is now included within the limits of Elm Grove. On the banks of the creek he built Fort Shepherd, that the settlers for miles around might have a place of refuge from the Indians. Of this fort Colonel Shepherd was in command till it was destroyed by the Indians in 1777. The family was hastily removed to Fort Henry, nearer the present site of Wheeling. There they were hard pressed by the Indians. Moses, along with other children, a.s.sisted in the defence by moulding bullets and carrying ammunition.

Word went out to the neighboring strongholds of the endangered settlers at Fort Henry. Captain John Boggs, then at Catfish Camp (now Was.h.i.+ngton, Pennsylvania), hurried to the a.s.sistance of Colonel Shepherd with forty armed men. With him was his daughter, Lydia, who took her place with Moses and the other young people as an a.s.sistant to the defenders.

She was there when Molly Scott made her sally from the fort in search of shot, and she saw the heroine bring it in in her ap.r.o.n. She witnessed also the attempt of Major Samuel McColloch to enter the fort at the head of a squad of men which he had brought from Fort Van Meter, a few miles away. With joy she saw the men enter the gate of the fort, and her heart was in her mouth when she saw that McColloch, who was her cousin, was unable to follow because the Indians had managed to get between him and the gate. At last the gate was closed, lest the Indians gain entrance, and the gallant Major was left to his fate.

The Indians thought they could capture him easily. They hemmed him on Wheeling Hill, on three sides. On the fourth side was a rocky precipice almost sheer, covered with growth of trees and bushes. But the savages were not to have such an easy victory after all, for Major McColloch urged his horse over the brow of the steep hill, and, to the astonishment of all, slipped, slid, and fell to the bottom, where the way across the creek and to safety was comparatively easy.

The Indians were finally driven away, but not until Moses Shepherd had made the acquaintance of Lydia Boggs, his companion in service at the fort. They were married later. In 1798, after the death of Colonel David Shepherd, Colonel Moses Shepherd took her to the palatial new home built on the site of the second Fort Shepherd, near the banks of Wheeling Creek. This house, which was called at first the Shepherd Mansion or the Stone House, later became known as the Monument Place.

The story of the third name, which still persists, is interesting.

When, during Jefferson's administration, certain farsighted statesmen advocated the building of a National Highway which should connect Was.h.i.+ngton with Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, Colonel Shepherd became one of the earnest and influential advocates of the road. He was a friend of Henry Clay, to whose indefatigable advocacy of the road was due much of the success of the venture. Clay was frequently a guest of the Shepherds, and in the stately stone house he talked with them about the difficulties, progress, and final triumph.

When the road was an accomplished fact Colonel and Mrs. Shepherd caused to be built on the lawn a stone monument dedicated to their friend, in appreciation of his service. The monument, whose inscriptions have become illegible, is in plain sight from the c.u.mberland Road, or, as it came to be called, the National Road, just before it makes a sharp turn to cross the st.u.r.dy stone bridge over Little Wheeling Creek. Possibly this was one of the bridges Colonel Shepherd constructed. At any rate he was a contractor for a section of the road, and several bridges were erected by him.

Along the c.u.mberland Road, which was the great highway between the East and the West, travelled home-seekers outward bound and business men and politicians to whom Was.h.i.+ngton beckoned irresistibly. Among the regular travellers at this and later periods were Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, General Houston, James K. Polk, and others who made it a point never to pa.s.s the Shepherd Mansion without stopping.

One of the early politicians who frequented the house, attracted there by Mrs. Shepherd, said: "She had a powerful intellect in her younger days. Many of our caucuses were held in her drawing-room. She could keep a secret better than most women, but her love of sarcasm and intrigue kept her from being very effective."

Mrs. Shepherd, in fun, had criticisms to offer of some of her visitors. Once she spoke of Burton, Clay, and Webster as "those young men, promising, but crude, crude."

She was accustomed to go every winter with her husband to Was.h.i.+ngton, where she would spend a few months during the season. They always travelled in a coach and four and they lived in great style at the Capital. There she was sought for her beauty, for her eccentricities, and her familiarity with private political life.

Colonel Shepherd died in 1832. In 1833 Mrs. Shepherd married General Daniel Cruger, a New York Congressman, who spent the last years of his life in West Virginia.

After the General's death in 1843 Mrs. Cruger lived at Monument Place, receiving visitors as of old, and increasing in the eccentricities that kept any one from being her warm admirer. Always she proved herself an unusual woman. "If fate had placed her in the compressed centre of a court, instead of in the inconsequent hurly-burly of a republic, she would have made for herself a great place in history,"

Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis once wrote of her.

She was still managing a large plantation during the Civil War, when a visitor dropped in to see her who has left the following picture of what she saw:

"We saw a well-built house of dressed stone, very large and solid, with the usual detached kitchen and long row of 'negro quarters.' ...

"Mrs. Cruger's age was told by the skin of face and hands, which were like crumpled parchment, but the lips were firm and the eyes, deep set in wrinkled lids, were still dark and keen. She was then one hundred years old.

"We went up to see the ball-room, which was across the whole front of the house, with many windows and a handsome carved marble mantel at each end, and deep closets on both sides of these fire-places.

"Like Queen Elizabeth, Mrs. Cruger would seem to have kept all her fine clothes. The whole walls were hung thick with dresses of silk and satin and velvet pelisses trimmed with fur; braided riding-habits; mantles of damasked black silk; band-boxes piled from floor to ceiling full of wonderful bonnets, some of tremendous size, fine large leghorn straw, costing from fifty to one hundred dollars; also veils that would reach to the knee of fine old English lace; gold and silver ruching; and fine embroidered cashmere turbans, a perfect museum of fas.h.i.+on from 1800 to 1840."

To another visitor Mrs. Cruger explained that it had long been her custom to put aside each year two gowns made in the fas.h.i.+on of that year.

In her old age she liked to be alone. Frequently she would send every one from the house that she might bathe at night. Once her physician urged her to keep her maid near her. "Why?" she asked; "because I am afraid? afraid of what? of death? Death will not come to me for twenty years yet." She was then ninety years old, and she lived to be nearly one hundred and two. She is buried, by the side of her two husbands, in Old Stone Church Cemetery on the hill above Elm Grove. A rough monument carries inscriptions to the memory of the three pioneers whose lives, as has been pointed out by a local historian, "covered the Indian War, the Colonial Period, the War of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Civil War."

Lx.x.xVIII

THE CASTLE AT FORT NIAGARA, NEW YORK

THE OLDEST BUILDING IN THE NORTHERN UNITED STATES, WEST OF THE MOHAWK

"The story of Fort Niagara is peculiarly the story of the fur trade and the strife for commercial monopoly," Frank H. Severance of the Buffalo Historical Society said in an address delivered at the fort in 1896; "and it is, too, in considerable measure, the story of our neighbor, the magnificent colony of Canada.... It is a story replete with incidents of battle and siege, of Indian cruelty, of patriot captivity, of white men's duplicity, of famine, disease, and death,--of all the varied forms of misery and wretchedness of a frontier post, which we in days of ease are wont to call picturesque and romantic. It is a story without a dull page, and it is two and a half centuries long.... I cannot better tell the story ... then to symbolize Fort Niagara as a beaver skin, held by an Indian, a Frenchman, an Englishman, and a Dutchman, each of the last three trying to pull it away from the others (the poor Dutchman early bowled over in the scuffle), and each European equally eager to placate the Indian with fine words, with prayers, or with brandy, or to stick a knife into his white brother's back."

The story begins in 1669, with the first efforts of the French to secure possession of the Niagara country. It includes also the romance of the building of the _Griffon_, the first vessel on the Great Lakes, and the episode of the early fortification of the late seventeenth century. But it was not until 1726, the year of the building of the stone castle near the mouth of the Niagara River, that the fort had its real beginning. The French felt compelled to build the fort because the activity of the English was interfering with their own fur trade with the Indians, and their plan to build Fort Oswego would increase the difficulty. No time was to be lost; Governor Joncaire felt that he could not wait for the approval of the authorities at home. To these latter he sent word that he must build a fortress, and he asked for an appropriation; to the Indians he declared that he wished to have a mere trading station. His real purpose was indicated when he wrote to France that the building "will not have the appearance of a fort, so that no offence will be given to the Iroquois, who have been unwilling to allow any there, but it will answer the purpose of a fort just as well."

The first step was the construction of two barques for use on Lake Ontario, to carry stone and timber for the building, and later, to cruise on the lake and intercept traders bound for Oswego.

After the construction of the barques had been begun, the consent of the five Iroquois nations was secured. Longueuil promised them that it would be to them "a House of Peace" down to the third generation and farther. To Gaspard Chaussegros de Lery, engineer, was committed the building of the structure. He determined to make it fireproof.

"Instead of wooden part.i.tions I have built heavy walls, and paved all the floors with flat stone," he wrote in a report sent to France. The loft was paved with flat stones "on a floor full of good oak joists, upon which cannon may be placed above the structure."

The trade with the Indians at the completed stone house on the Niagara increased. So did the activities of the English. Governor Burnet of New York craftily persuaded the Onondaga Indians that their interests had been endangered by the building of the French fort, since it penned them up from their chief hunting-place, and was therefore contrary to the Treaty of Utrecht; they agreed with him that the Iroquois had no right to the territory, which was really the property of the Senecas, and they asked the Governor to appeal to King George to protect them in their right.

Therefore the suggestion was made that they "submit and give up all their hunting country to the King," and sign a deed for it.

Accordingly Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga sachems deeded to the English a sixty-mile strip along the south sh.o.r.e of Lake Ontario, which included the Niagara frontier, the Niagara River being the western boundary.

"From this time on the 'stone house' was on British soil; but it was yet to take the new owner a generation to dispossess the obnoxious tenant," Frank H. Severance writes in "An Old Frontier of France."

The story of the next thirty years is a story of plots and counter-plots, of expeditions threatened and actual, of disappointing campaigns, of imprisonment and cruelty and death. More than once Indians promised the English that the house at Niagara should be razed. Spies reported that the defences at the castle were in bad shape; "'tis certain that, should the English once attack it, 'tis theirs," one report ran. "I am informed that the fort is so dilapidated that 'tis impossible to put a pin in it without causing it to crumble; stanchions have been obliged to be set up against it to support it." Another report disclosed that if the cannon were fired the walls would crumble.

But the French were not ready to give up. They felt that Fort Niagara was the key to the Ohio Valley, which they wished to control. They strengthened the defences of the fort. The defeat of Braddock at Fort Du Quesne and the strange decision of General s.h.i.+rley to stop at Oswego instead of continuing with his force to Niagara, gave the French a new lease of life.

In 1759 came the end of French rule. General Prideaux's expedition from New York began the siege of the fort early in July, and after several weeks it capitulated. Until 1796 the English flag floated above the "castle." The commander of this post, like the commanders of six other forts, refused on various pretexts to surrender to America, in spite of the terms of the treaty of 1783. Attempts were made to secure possession, but none of them were successful, and it was not until 1794 that Great Britain agreed to evacuate Niagara and the other forts still held, "on or before the 1st of June, 1796."

Seventeen years later, in 1813, the British flag again replaced the Stars and Stripes over the historic building, but the fort was restored to the United States in 1815. Since that time it has been a part of the army post that has been more important because of its history than for any other reason.