Fort Washington and Cincinnati (pages 55-64)
(page 55, par. 1) Fort Washington presented its rough hewn wooden walls Roberts, Robert B. Encyclopedia of Historic Forts – Military, Pioneer, and Trading Posts of the United States, p. 649.
(page 55, pars. 1-2) General Josiah Harmar (1753 – 1813) See article by Wiley Sword in: Garraty, John A., and Mark C. Carnes, eds. 1999. ANB, article by Wiley Sword. Harmar began the Revolutionary war as a lieutenant of the First Pennsylvania Regiment on the 1775 Quebec campaign and ended it as adjutant to Nathaniel Greene during the Southern campaign. Staying on active duty following the war. He was the ranking officer of the small residual army, promoted to brigadier general in 1787. In 1784 he married Sarah Jenkins in his native Philadelphia and then moved wet to assume leadership of the army on the frontier.
(page 55, par. 3) Judge John Cleve Symmes (1742-1814) Though Symmes lived in the vicinity of Fort Washington, he and his family did not interact directly with the Forman pioneers. His influence on the region and western settlement loomed large. His corrupt dealings contrasted with the orderly approach to land acquisition, surveying, and settlement of the Ohio Land Company’s Marietta. Symmes style of questionable dealings were unfortunately more typical of private land ventures of that era.
Calloway in The Victory With No Name at p. 57, summarizes Symmes’ schemes. Northwest Territorial Governor Arthur St. Clair opined about his troublesome constituents’ advertising land for settlement that he did not in fact own: “It could never enter my head that any person, much less one invested with a respectable public character, had published a falsehood, was persisting in it, and availing himself of the peculiar advantages flowing from it.” In his own defense, John Symmes labeled the charges “vexacious.”
His youngest of three daughters Anna Tuthill Symmes was then resident with her father in Ohio. She met and married William Henry Harrison and went on to become First Lady of the United States. Her father used his connections to get advantage in obtaining his land grant and perhaps as a shield against later aggrieved businessman and political. He had been a delegate to the Continental Congress and a judge in New Jersey. He took as his second spouse the daughter of that state’s Governor Livingston in 1794. For Symmes’ contributions to Cincinnati and regional history see: Hurley, Daniel, and Paul A. Tenkotte, Cincinnati: The Queen City, pp. 10-12; and entry by Joshua L. McKaughan in ANB.
(page 57, par. 3, line 3) The Falls appeared “very tremendous at first site” Butricke quote on the Falls. Ensign George Butricke, wrote a letter on Sept 15, 1768, to a friend. Samuel Prescott Hildreath, “History of an Early Voyage on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, etc.,” in American Pioneer, 1 (1842): pg 101. From Dorothy Rush, “Early Accounts of Travel to the Falls of the Ohio: A Bibliography with selected quotations, 1765-1833”, The Filson Historical Society History Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 2, April 1994, p. 244: “this spot being the carrying place for the merchandise intended for the country.”
(page 58, par. 1, line 1) advent of flintlock muskets ramping up the efficiency of Native hunting Silverman, David J. Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America, p. 86. Indians preferred hunting for deer and other skins with firearms rather than traditional bow and arrow. The number of deer a Native hunter could kill in one month equaled the number “formerly with bow and arrow in twelve moons.”
(page 59, par. 2, line 7) “these falls are by no means dangerous” Smyth, John Ferdinand Dalziel Tour in the United States of America, 1784, Vol. 1, p. 358, as quoted in Dorothy Rush, “Early Accounts of Travel to the Falls of the Ohio: A Bibliography with selected quotations, 1765-1833”, The Filson Historical Society History Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 2, April 1994, pg 237.
(page 59, par. 2, line 11) The tortuous channels” offered three “chutes” For a compendium of early accounts of the Falls of the Ohio, several of which I quote here, see: Dorothy Rush, “Early Accounts of Travel to the Falls of the Ohio, Op. cit. I am indebted to Paul Oligies of the Falls of the Ohio Interpretive Center and State Park, Clarkesville, IN for his compilation of such accounts and placing them in context for me; see: https://www.fallsoftheohio.org/falls-rapids-eyewitnesses-by-paul-olliges/ last accessed April 25, 2021. More accounts are in Thomas Rodney, A Journey Through the West – Journey from Delaware to the Mississippi Territory. Rodney wrote in 1803 on the Falls, fossils found there, and greeting Lewis and Clarke as the Corps of Discovery made its way west. Another in: Samuel P. Hildreath, “History of an Early Voyage on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers” Op. cit., p. 89-145. Hildreath described the “three chutes.” The Portland Museum in Louisville displays a large, three-dimensional topographical model of the 18th century Falls of the Ohio, as pioneers would have encountered them. Starting in the 19th c. navigational improvements and a 1927 dam have modified the river extensively.
(page 59, par 6 to page 60, par. 1) They may have wondered at the petrified plant and animal life Chroniclers of the time variously described “rockworms” Thomas Rodney, Ibid, p. 125; “petrified wasp’s nest with the young in it” Epsy, John. “Memorandums of a Tour in Ohio and Kentucky and Indiana Territory in 1805’” pp. 11-12. One such observer remarked:
“the substance of these appeared more like iron than anything else…but fast to the rock so that I could not get [at] any of them.”
He was at a loss to explain the “rockworms.” Another gentleman embellished what he could not explain. Among the petrified ancient plant life, animal bones, buffalo horns:
“I discovered and brought to my lodgings a completely-formed petrified wasp’s nest, with the young in it, as natural as when alive.”
(page 60, par. 3, line 14) “river of dark dreams” Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. I am alluding to the title of this recent scholarly work detailing the antebellum Delta South from several perspectives. It includes economics and the lived experiences of slaves trafficked on the Mississippi River.
(page 60, par. 5) a town of 200 souls Kleber, John E., The Encyclopedia of Louisville, p. 714. By 1800 the population of Louisville had almost doubled to 395. Other contemporary descriptions of Louisville in 1790 proclaim that “all the wealth of the western country must pass through her hands” Rodney, Op. cit.; that it is “the carrying place for the merchandise intended for the country.” Hildreth, Op. cit.;and boasts “houses of two stories, elegant and well painted” J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, as quoted by Yater, Op. cit., p. 25. It contained the ruins of Fort Nelson, abandoned as Indian raids became less likely in the center of the tiny town. See: Dawson, Nelson. “A Note on Fort Nelson.” Journal of Kentucky Studies 1985, Vol. 2:225-227.
(page 61, par. 1 line 1) James Patten’s cabin Secured land at the northeast corner of Eighth and main Street, where he built a cabin attached to a large hollow sycamore tree, the hollow trunk serving as a room in the house. Later he erected to town’s first stone house on this lot. The stone was secured from corn island shoal. On the roof of his cabin home, Patten had erected a kind of coppola with a clear view of the Falls of the Ohio. From the cupola he would watch flatboats and keelboats as they ‘crossed’ the Falls. See: Kleber, John E, ed. The Encyclopedia of Louisville. Op. cit., p. 695; and William S. Muir, ‘Captain James Patton of Augusta County, Virginia, and Louisville, Kentucky: Ancestors and Descendants” Register of Kentucky Historical Society 1944, Vol. 42, pp. 227-254.
(page 61, par. 2) “[Louisville] is rather unhealthy” Erkuries Beatty Diary for September 2, 1787, as quoted in: Yater, George H. Two Hundred Years at the Fall of the Ohio:, Op. cit., p. 24.; and “Graveyard of the West” Yater, p. 24.
(page 61, par. 3, line 4) “took an empty house in the village” Forman and Draper, Op. cit., pp. 35-42.
(page 61, par. 3, line 8) “remarkably fortunate” that the party found shelter Although by 1790 most larger scale military conflicts and raids occurred in the Northwest Territory Indian country, whose southern boundary was the Ohio River, the continuing threat of Indian raids retarded the settlement and growth of Louisville and all of Jefferson County into the early 1790s. Lexington, 75 miles inland and south, did not experience this drag on its growth during the same timeframe.
Ezekiel and Samuel S. Forman readily were able to find temporary accommodations for themselves and their temporary store. Some properties were left vacant. Their owners, like Mr. Rhea of Tennessee, may have preferred to let their Louisville properties out at low or trifling cost rather than leave them vacant, prone to vandalism and careless squatters. Samuel S. judged that the large pioneer group was “was remarkably fortunate in this respect, both here and at Pittsburgh” to have found shelter for themselves, the African Americans, their supplies, their remaining two horses, and a retail store in Louisville – all in the dead of winter, without prior notice, and on an indeterminately short-term basis. The length of their stay would be for as long as la Belle Rivière insisted on draping herself in sheets of ice.
(page 61, par. 5) “Mr. and Mrs. Ashby” A David Ashby appears in the 1790 Federal Census for Jefferson County, Kentucky. Lyman Draper noted that a David Ashby appeared on the Jefferson County tax list of May 13, 1789. I am unable to discover details concerning the Ashby couple and their apparently comfortable lives as Jefferson County plantation owners.
(page 62, par. 3) Cato Watts Brief account in: Kleber, John E., Op. Cit., pp. 14-15.
(page 62, par. 4) enslaved Bob, brought into Jefferson County by the Floyd family of Virginia Yater, George H., Op. cit., pp. 13-14.
(page 63, par. 1) The spectacle of a community barbeque on Corn Island Yater, George H., Ibid, p. 28 for description of the Corn Island frolic as extracted from Erkuries Beatty Diary for April 19, 1787. The same visitor described the Louisville women as “rich enough dressed but tawdry.”
(page 63, par. 3) General James Wilkinson (1757-1825) An inveterate plotter and self-serving double dealer, later Secretary of War, he posthumously earned the dubious distinction of being the highest ranking American secretly working for a foreign power. Wilkinson has inspired several compelling biographies, among them: Linklater, Andro. An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson; entry by Paul David Nelson in ANB; and the older books by Hay, Thomas Robson, and M.R. Werner. The Admirable Trumpeter; and Jacobs, James Ripley. Tarnished Warrior: Major-General James Wilkinson. Hay included a still useful critical bibliography of all the then-known writings by and about Wilkinson). Remarkably, Wilkinson’s intrigues were suspected during his lifetime and while he held office, see from 1809 Clark, Daniel Proofs of the corruption of Gen. James Wilkinson and of his Connexion[sic] with Aaron Burr. Andrew Ellicott, who cxame to Natchez in 1797 on assignment to survey the Southern border with Spain, suspected Wilkinson as being in cahoots with the Spanish. See Bush, Robert D. Surveying the Early Republic., pp. 161-163; and some years later while Wilkinson was still ranking general of the U.S. Army, Clark, Daniel. Proofs of the corruption of Gen. James Wilkinson.
Wilkinson wrote a multi-volume autobiography in 1816, which is remarkable for its obfuscation concerning his treasonous, self-aggrandizing dealings with the Spanish: Wilkinson, James. Memoirs of My Own Times.
Monsieur Tradiveau…first to trade down-river to New Orleans according to Yater, George H., Op. cit., p. 19. Wilkinson expanded and tried unsuccessfully to monopolize it.
Another such pretext for a celebration was supplied by a Mr. Dandridge, a nephew of First Lady Martha Washington, who “received much attention” when he was staying with the French businessman and vineyard owner Monsieur Bartholomew Lacassangue.
Ezekiel was then negotiating a business arrangement with Lacassangue to purchase tobacco intended for sale to the Spanish in New Orleans. They recalled passing the Frenchmen’s vineyard at Cassania, which the Lacassangue immodestly named after himself, on the Indian side of the river, viewed as their boats had approached the Falls.
James Wilkinson, the controversial Revolutionary War general, also happened to be in town and planned to attend the reception. Wilkinson was just then a civilian; He had relocated from Virginia to Kentucky in 1784, making his mark by trading Kentucky produce with the Spanish in New Orleans. Wilkinson busied himself displacing the aging and frequently inebriated George Rogers Clarke for popularity among many settlers, businessmen, and plantation owners.
(page 64, par. 3, line 3) Thomas Marsh Forman (1758-1845) Fairchild, Helen L. Three Revolutionary Soldiers: David Forman, Jonathan Forman, and Jonathan Marsh Forman