Howells' Stories of Ohio - one of first Girty stories?
---
"...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.
This was a surveyor, and one of those New Jersey men of education and substance who were the earliest settlers in the Symmes Purchase, as the tract between the two Miamis was called. John Cleves Symmes, a prominent citizen of Trenton, had bought the land of the government, and he came himself with his friends to make the place his home... The fort was built in 1790, and called Fort Washington; it was the strongest fort in the Northwest Territory, and to its strength Cincinnati owed her freedom from attacks by the Indians; it was of hewn timber, and was eighty feet square. At Cincinnati, Harmar and St. Clair began their march to defeat; here too the recruits for Wayne's army gathered and encamped before they began their march to victory...
One of the later captives of the Indians was a boy of eleven named O. M. Spencer, who was seized near Cincinnati in 1792, and carried to a Shawnee village on the Maumee, where he was taken into a family. His case is peculiarly interesting because Washington himself asked his release through the British governor of Canada; and he was at last returned to his friends by canoe to Detroit, by sailing vessel to Erie, by land to Albany, by water to New York, and by land through Pennsylvania to Cincinnati. He was two years in getting back to his friends..."
---
Girty brothers.
Graphic novel ordered.
