e for an American, contented themselves with stealing the
Frenchmen's cattle.

When the colonists found that the Scioto Company could not give them
titles to the farms they had bought with their money or their toil, they
began to stray away from the settlement. Some went down the rivers to
New Orleans, others wandered off elsewhere, perhaps to St. Louis, or to
the French towns in Indiana and Illinois; and when Congress at last came
to their relief with a grant of twenty-four thousand acres, there were
left at Gallipolis only ninety-two persons, out of the original five
hundred colonists, to profit by the nation's generosity. In 1807 few or
none of them remained on the spot where they had fondly hoped to make
peaceful and happy homes for themselves and their children. It was a sad
ending to a romantic story, the most romantic of all the Ohio stories
that I know, but we must not blame those who deceived the colonists (not
quite wittingly, it seems) for all their woes and disasters. These were
partly owing to themselves. The New Englanders who settled at Marietta
did not find eighty comfortable cabins waiting for them, and they did
not hire hunters to provide their food, or begin by giving balls. The
able and educated men among the French colonists seem to have cowered
under their disasters like the rest; and some were incurable dreamers.
One of the best of them used afterwards to tell how he was descending
the Ohio with two philosophers who believed so firmly in the natural
innocence and goodness of men, that they invited some Indians aboard
their boat and were at once tomahawked. Their skeptical companion shot
two of the savages and then jumped into the river, where he swam for his
life, diving at the flash of their guns, till he got safe to the farther
shore.

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 call