ed 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.

[Illustration: Marrieta, Ohio 186]

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 events of this
emigration were not so poetic as those of the New Englanders who settled
on the Muskingum, but they resulted in the foundation of our greatest
city; and if the first school in Ohio was at Marietta, the first church
was built at Cincinnati. The hamlet opposite the mouth of the Licking
was first known as Losantiville, a name made up of Greek and Latin words
describing its situation, but this was soon changed to Cincinnati. 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.

The past of the place is not so rich in legend as that of much humbler
localities, but there is at least one Indian story which will bear
telling over again. It concerns Jacob Wetzel, the brother of the famous
Lewis Wetzel, who was one day returning from a hunt well within the
bounds of the present city, and had sat down on a log to rest, when a
growl