years on the east side of the mountains, removed his converts and his mission family, now including as his assistant Heckewelder, whose name has become famous in missionary annals-the whole numbering twenty-eight souls-to the west of the mountains, where they pitched their tents in the valley of the Tuscarawas on the Muskingum, in the present State of Ohio, and here they enshrined the gracious system taught by them in the name which they gave one of the settlements—“ Gnadenhätten”—Tents of Grace.

At this village was perpetrated in the year 1782 an atrocity unequaled in our history. These peaceful Christians were suspected of entertaining their heathen brethren who committed murders in the frontier settlements, which indeed they had done, for they could not avoid showing hospitality to those who claimed it. But they had persuaded many a party to return without executing their purposes. They neither went to war nor encouraged others to do so. But the feeling on the frontier had become too intense to be allayed without blood. A mounted party of ninety men, chiefly from the Monongahela valley, commanded by Colonel David Williamson, reached the mission settlements on the 6th of March, 1782. They found the people in alarm and getting ready for removal to Sandusky, whither Zeisberger and a portion of his Indians had already gone. Col. Williamson's party allayed their fears, declaring that they would convey them to a place of safety. On this pretense they got possession of their arms; spent the night in the same houses with them; talked with them of their common religious belief; and the Indians rejoiced and praised God for this assurance of safety. But the next day they were undeceived, brought together bound from other points to Gnadenhütten, placed together in two houses, the men in one, the women in the other; a vote was taken as to what should be done with them, resulting in a decision to tomahawk and scalp them all. The night of the 7th was given them to prepare for death, and what a night! Called upon in the morning to know how soon they would be ready, they replied: "We are ready now; we have committed ourselves to God, who has given us the assurance that he will receive us;" and in these two houses, called by the murderers "Slaughterhouses," ninety persons-twenty-nine men, twenty-seven women and thirty-four children-were dispatched. The names are given in Zeisberger's journal and his recent biographer has transmitted them to

us-an honor of which they were not less worthy than were the early martyrs of the Christian Church of such transmission.

This very valley of the Tuscarawas had been the theatre, eight years before Zeisberger's arrival in it in 1764, of the most touching scene of its kind which the American wilderness ever witnessed. The State of Pennsylvania had fitted out an expedition under the command of Colonel Henry Bouquet against the Indians of Ohio. Encamped in this valley, Col. Bouquet treated with the various tribes. and refused all terms until the prisoners whom they had taken should have been returned. Over 200 of these were brought to the camp, whose captivities varied in length from a few weeks to nearly an average life time. Friends had accompanied the expedition to recognize and claim their lost. Recognitions and failures to recognize; hopes realized and hopes extinguished; the language and the love of civilized life exchanged for the language and the love of the savage, and leading some to escape from the very sight of their friends; reciprocal affections formed between the captors and their captives, leading the former to follow the expedition the whole way of its return, supplying the wants of their adopted and now surrendered captives, enjoying their daily recognition, and finally bidding them their last farewell-these made up the scene.

Let the reader conceive the Catholic missions with little settlements of French traders gathered around them-Detroit as the chief point in the passage of the lakes from Quebec to the Mississippi being the largest, and Mackinaw on the Island of that name, Kaskaskia and Prairie des Roches on the Mississippi, and Vincennes on the Wabash, being the others most worthy of mention; then let him add to these Zeisberger's mission settlement on the Muskingum, and he will have a sufficiently full view of the ante-Revolutionary population of the North-western territory. Some finer lines might be drawn to complete the picture, if it were indeed necessary. But every one knows what the Indians were. Besides the French traders and farmers who were stationary in the settlements, were the missionaries, who often followed the Indians in their wanderings and shared their toils and their scanty and ill-prepared fare, and a nondescript class called "courreurs des bois," who formed the link of connection between the wild Indians and the French settlements. These last let themselves down to a life little above that of the savages, at least while with the latter, and did not rise essentially above

it on their return to the settlements; even the Jesuit missionary, in his efforts to raise the wild men, was drawn down more than half way towards their low life, and the settled residents of the stations were far from escaping the same deterioration. Relations were formed by traders with Indian women, some of which became permanent and gave rise to families, and once within the memory of the living, when a disposition was shown to enquire into these irregularities in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, it is said that not a few escaped this inquisition by calling in the services of clergymen. Such was the population of the North-west before the opening of the war of the Revolution, and it was so, not merely because people did not choose to settle in this region; for George III., not long after the treaty of Paris in 1763, prohibited the granting of titles to any lands lying west of the sources of the rivers running towards the Atlantic, and during the Revolution itself, the State of Virginia forbade settlements north of the Ohio.

Here the reader may represent by a pause those years of active struggle in support of the momentous declaration made in Philadelphia on the 4th of July, 1776, until the last echoes of Yorktown die upon his ears; nay, until the stern men, impoverished and stimulated by the war, should have had time to organize new enterprises and find openings for them.

It is pertinent to ask just here, who owned this region? As king George III. closed it against settlement as above stated, he must have claimed it, as a similar act of Virginia claimed it in 1779. But previous to this latter date, in 1778, this State had also fitted out an expedition for the military occupation of the North-west, for the command of which Lieutenant-Colonel George Rogers Clark bore a commission signed by Patrick Henry as Governor. Colonel Clark, supplying the lack of other resources by shrewdness and daring, effected in a marvelous manner the capture of Kaskaskia and other points on the Mississippi, and Vincennes on the Wabash, which carried with them the whole region. The eccentricities of the commander and the marvels of his success would have been lost in the littleness of the whole movement, but for one great fact. England, in settling terms with the new nation, claimed to the Ohio river, and the Count de Vergennes was disposed to admit this claim, but the occupation of the territory by Colonel Clark was the decisive argument, and made this vast and now already immensely

wealthy section a possession of the United States and not of Great Britain.

The war of the Revolution had but just opened when the growing difficulty of meeting its expenses awakened the profoundest apprehensions. The confederation was the extreme of weakness; it had no resources of its own, and no power to enforce the contributions of the colonies. Some of these claimed immense tracts of wild land; few of them, however, had much, some had more, and these last felt most deeply the disadvantages of their position. Not a few contended that these wild lands did not belong to the colonies which claimed them, and it was even suggested that the destitute colonies might justly seize their respective shares. Maryland, for instance, compared its own position with that of Virginia, which latter, as was alleged, could support its government by the sale of its lands without taxing its citizens, and thus call in from the neighboring States settlers, who would be moved by a desire to escape the burden of taxation. Congress appealed to the favored colonies for cessions of these lands, and the utterances of discontent from the less favored ones, the general fear of internecine strifes, enforced the appeal, and the patriotism of the more favored yielded.

Virginia's claim embraced nearly the whole of the North-western Territory; that of Connecticut was next in extent; the claims of New York and Massachusetts were insignificant. Virginia made an offer of cession in 1781, reserving, as military bounty lands, about 3,500,000 acres between the Miami and Scioto rivers. The offer was accepted by Congress in 1783, and the cession was complete. Connecticut made an early offer, perhaps the earliest, but it was not satisfactory to Congress, and the cession was not completed until 1800, though the land, except the so-called "Reserve," amounting to more than 3,500,000 acres, was conveyed in 1786. The embarrassments growing out of conflicting jurisdictions had become such in 1800 that the government was surrendered entirely to Congress. The insignificant claims of New York and Massachusetts were ceded immediately after Virginia had set the example.

The Congressional act providing a government for the Northwest is a marked event in our annals; another, of no less moment, immediately followed. Without going much into the antecedents of this legislation, it will suffice to remark that the first-named act was an attempt at the solution of a new problem in our governmental

experiment. By that loose confederation which had been held together by the common peril, the war had been carried gloriously through; a few statesmen, of whom Patrick Henry was chief, sought to perpetuate this; but the current was in the opposite direction. A large territory external to the individual States had been acquired, and a precedent had been established by which this might be indefinitely extended. This must be governed, and for its government, an act already referred to was passed on the 13th of July, 1787. This was the very first acquisition of territory, whether we speak of the right of jurisdiction or that of soil, by the confederation, and the provision for its government was made while the convention which formed the constitution was in session, and but a few weeks before the completion of its work. Indeed the necessity of making provision for the government of this common territory, had in it more than had the federal constitution itself of the seeds of that centralization which has since developed itself so marvelously, gradually casting the individual States into the shade, and making of the country one of the world's greatest powers, instead of an aggregation of petty, independent, disconnected and jealous States.

This

In the 3d section of this act is found the clause, "Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government, schools and the means of education shall be forever encouraged." clause is happily illustrated by an act passed but fourteen days later, July 27, 1787, by which the sale of about 2,000,000 of land in south-eastern Ohio to a New England colony, was provided for, making within the tract to be sold the following reservations:

Two entire townships of good land for a university.

Lot number 16 in every township for schools.

Lot number 29 in each township for the purposes of religion. Lots 8, 11 and 26 in each township to be reserved for the future disposition of Congress.

A similar grant on similar conditions was made to John Cleves Symmes, in 1794.

Subsequent events will reveal the power which lay behind this legislation. The war had impoverished many, and at the same time, begotten in them a spirit of heroic adventure, as well as a restlessness which sought new enterprises. The unexplored North-west offered a field for this. The office of Surveyor of this region was offered to