w he was no
more unrightfully there than the settlers who came a few years later to
take up farms under the land companies authorized by Congress. If any
other proof were wanting that these companies possessed themselves of
land which the Indians believed they had never sold, it would appear in
the fact that the first thing the settlers did was to build a stockade,
or high bullet-proof fence of logs with a strong blockhouse for a kind
of citadel, where they might gather for safety in case of attacks from
any of the wild natives of the woods about them.

The invaders were from New England, from New Jersey, from Pennsylvania,
and from Virginia, and with their coming, nearly all in the same year,
there began that mingling of the American strains which has since made
Ohio the most American state in the Union, first in war and first in
peace; which has given the nation such soldiers as Grant, Sherman,
Sheridan, McPherson; such presidents as Grant, Hayes, Garfield,
Harrison, McKinley; such statesmen and jurists as Ewing, Cor-win, Wade,
Chase, Giddings, Sherman, Waite. We have to own, in truth and honesty,
that the newcomers might be unlawfully and unrightfully in the great
territory which was destined to be the great state, but it is consoling
to realize that they were not unreasonably there. It was not reasonable
that the land should be left to savages who must each keep fifty
thousand acres of it wild for his needs as a hunter. The earth is for
those who will use it, and not for those who will waste it, and the
Indians who would not suffer themselves to be tamed could not help
wasting the land.

If the whites made any mistake, it was in allowing any man to own more
land than he could use; but this is a mistake which prevails in our own
day as it prevailed in the days of the pioneers, and they were not to
blame for being no wiser at the end of the eighteenth century than
we are at the end of the nineteenth. The states consenting to the
organization of the Northwest Territory meant that their citizens who
had fought for the independence of the nation in the Revolutionary War
should first of all have their choice of its lands, and so we find Ohio
divided up into the Virginia Military District, the Connecticut Western
Reserve, and the Bounty Lands of Pennsylvania. But large grants were
made to land companies, and the innumerable acres were juggled out of
the hands of the people into the hands of the speculators, as the public