The Western Gateway of Civilization: A Neglected Historical Spot

THE WESTERN GATEWAY OF CIVILIZATION A NEGLECTED HISTORICAL SPOT. BY B. H. ROBKRIS. You have read Moore's "Meeting of the Waters?" If not, then do so, for it is. one of that much neglected poet's most pleasing descriptive, sentimental productions; dear, I am sure, to every soul who has visited the "Sweet Vale of Avoca," at the point where the clear streams of Avon and Avoca meet, between Rashdrum and Arklow, in the County of Wick low, Ireland. It is twenty years since the writer stood upon the hill that overlooks the scene of Moore's poem, and in silence acquiesced in the charms of the spot, celebrated by the Irish poet; though, unlike the poet, the writer was alone at the time, and the added charm of friendly companionship was not there to increase the interest "that nature had shed o'er the scene;'" so that, in his case, it was nature's "soft magic of streamlet and hill" thatconstituted the vale's chief charms. The writer was reminded of this twenty-year-ago visit to the vale of Avoca, with its "meeting of the waters" as he recently stood under the shadow of Washington Heights, near Pittsburgh, and saw a mightier ' 'Meeting of the Waters" than would be possible in Ireland, since it was an American meeting of rivers, and not an Irish meeting of brooks. I refer to the meeting of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers immediately below the most westerly point of the city of

242 IMPROVEMENT ERA. Pittsburgh. The first stream comes from the south but turns westerly, on striking the height of land on which the modern city of Pittsburgh stands. The second stream flows from the northeast, but meanderingly sweeps westward on striking the opposite side of the height of land before referred to, and meeting the Monongahela they together form the Ohio, which, in the native American language, whence it comes, means "Beautiful River" — a name surely appropriate for this one of America's noblest streams. On the left bank of the Ohio, at least for some distance below Pittsbur'gh, the wooded bluffs, broken here ani there by deep-cut ravines, rise majestically from the river's brink; the right bank is less majestic in appearance, but at some points scarcely less beautiful. The point of land which overlooks this American meeting of the waters, and marks the most westerly part of the city of Pittsburgh, is one of America's most histrrical spots; and it might be added. Pittsburgh in 1795. (This point, west of a line running just east of the block house indicated, is recommended in this article to be nationalized). one of Ameirca's most neglected historical spots. Here stands the only remaining monument of British occupancy of territory

THE WESTERN GATEWAY OF CIVILIZATION. 243 within the United States, west of the Allegheny mountains. It is the little stone and brick redoubt of old Fort Pitt, built by Colonel Bouquet in 1764. It is a five-sided building, not more than eighteen by eighteen feet in diameter. It has two floors, and in each story has a square oak log running entirely round the building, " with loop hooles at intervals which commanded all the approaches to old Fort Pitt. It was during the great Indian uprising, planned by Pontiac, the noted chief of the Ottawas, that Colonel Bouquet, marching under orders from General Amherst, reached Fort Pitt and relieved it from the five days attack made upon it by a large force of Indians. The attack upon the little garrison — numbering but three hundred and thirty men —was most determined. The Indians approached the fort on the night of the 27th of July, 1764, crawling under the banks of the two rivers, the Monongahela and Allegheny, digging holes with their knives, in which they were completely sheltered from the fire of the fort. "On one side," says a reliable description of the circumstance, "the entire bank was lined with these burrows, from which the Indians shot volleys of bullets, arrows and fire-arrows into the fort. The yelling was terrific, and the women and children in the crowded barracks clung to each other in abject terror. This attack lasted five days. On the 1st of August the Indians heard the rumor of Colonel Bouquet's approach, which caused them to move on, and so the tired garrison was relieved." On the 6th of August, Bouquet encountered the Indians at Bushy Run, about twenty-five miles east of Fort Pitt. The battle raged for two days, but the English officer won a complete victory: though he lost eight officers and one hundred and fifteen men. On the 10th of August he arrived at Fort Pitt, but his force was not sufficient to warrant his pursuit of the savages further into the west at that time. It was during his stay at Fort Pitt, after his rescue of it, that he erected the Block House in question. The Colonel observed that fhe moat which surrounded the fortifications was perfectly dry when the rivers were low, so that the Indians "could crawl up the ditch and shoot any guard or soldier who might show his head above the parapet." It was to prevent this that Colonel Bouquet ordered the Block House erected. But this Pittsburgh Point is associated with events of much

244 IMPROVEMENT ERA. more importance than incidents connected with this Indian war, however thrilling the latter may be. It was here that two quite distinct civilizations met in their struggle for the possession of the interior of America. France early saw the natural strategic point of the ''Forks of the Ohio," and designed making it one of a chain of forts extending from Niagara to the Mississippi, following the Ohio. The work of building this line of forts attracted the attention of the British authorities in the American Colonies. Especially did it attract the attention of Governor Dinwiddle, of Virginia, an irascible old Scotchman, little likely to submit quietly to what he regarded as the invasion of his Sovereign's dominion. England, Block House of Old Fort Pitt. it must be remembered, laid claim to all countries conquered by the Iroquois Indians, or Five Nations, who, by the treaty of Utrecht, had been accounted British subjects. To claim Mtle to the lands over which the depredations of the Five Nations ranged, was practically to claim all the lands between the Allegheny mountains and the Mississippi, and northward to the lakes, as also between Ottawa and Lake Huron, north of the lakes, leaving nothing to France but the Province of Quebec. On the other hand France claimed the

THE WESTERN GATEWAY OF CIVILIZATION. 245 whole of the American continent except the narrow strip of sea coast eastward of the Allegheny mountains. Whatever concessions she had been forced into making by the treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Aix la Chapelle (1748) she repudiated, and planned to take possession of what she regarded as her own by the erection of the aforesaid line of forts. Seeing the territory of his king invaded by this fort building policy of the French, Governor Dinwiddie resolved to send formal protest to those actually engaged in such work, and call upon them to desist. In pursuance of this resolution he dispatched a certain young Virginian, then known to fame only as the best all-round athlete in Virginia, and a brother to Lawrence Washington, who had the distinction of having been educated in England, and who was also a stock holder in the. trading companies doing business with the Indians as far west as the Ohio. It was in December, 1753, that young George Washington, in company with' a few frontiersmen, appeared at Fort Le Boeuf and presented (governor Dinwiddle's protest against French invasion of lands "so notoriously known to belong to Great Britain." The French Commande**, St. Pierre, received the young Virginian courteously, as he was bound to do, and prepared a polite answer to Governor Dinwiddle's communication, informing him that he was but a soldier carrying out the orders of his superiors, but promised to forward his letter to the Marquis Duquesne, and await his orders. Returning from Fort Le Boeuf, Washington passed the "Forks of the Ohio," and being struck with the locality as a strategic point of great value in the struggle then pending between France and Great Britain, he recommended, on his return to Virginia, the building of a British fort there. The recommendation was acted upon and Captain William Trent, a commissioned officer in the British army, but formerly an English Imlian trader of the better class, was dispatched with a company of backwoodsmen to build the proposed Fort. Meantime , Governor Dinwiddie was exerting himself to raise the necessary troops and munitions of war to garrison the fort. He appealed to the other colonies for aid, but as the lands invaded belonged either to Virginia or to Pennsylvania— to which was then not quite certain— the other colonies were not disposed to vote money and men to defend them. Aside from the troops raised in Virginia and Pennsylvania, the utmost help Governor Dinwiddie

246 IMPROVEMENT ERA. could obtain was the promise of three or four hundred men from North Carolina, two companies from New York, and one from South Carolina. The troops from Virginia were to be commanded by Joshua Fry, with Washington second in command. Captain Trent, anxious to obtain a prominent position in the expedition then forming, withdrew from the Forks of the Ohio, leaving the Chatham. building of Fort Pitt in the hands of Ensign Ward and forty men while he hastened to Virginia to join Washington. The French, meanwhile, were close observers of these move-

THE WESTERN GATEWAY OF CIVILIZATION. 247 ments of their English enemies, and learning of the weakness of the British garrison at the "Forks of the'Ohio" they descended the Allegheny river in a force one thousand strong, landed before Fort Pitt, planted their cannon and demanded its surrender. Ensign Ward promptly complied with the demand and was permitted to withdraw with all his men. The unfinished English fort was soon demolished, and one near by, but closer to the Allegheny river than Fort Pitt, was erected by the French and named Fort Duquesne. Of the subsequent movements between the French and British for possession of the Forks of the Ohio, I cannot write in detail. It must suffice me to say, in brief, that they involved the forward movement of the Virginia troops under Washington shortly after the abandonment of Fort Pitt by Ensign Ward, and his obtaining a temporary advantage over the French in the defeat of their forces under Coulon de Jumonville (killed in the engagement) ; of his own retreat before a superior force of French and Indians to Great Meadows, where he capitulated to Coulon de Villiers; of the Braddock expedition of 1755 , rendered disastrous by the arrogance and stupidity of the British general, who insisted on fighting Indians and French frontiersmen exactly in the same form as he would have fought Prussian armies in Europe ; the awful battle in which he was so overwhelmingly defeated that the engagement took on the nature of a massacre of the English troops, was fought some eight miles east of the Forks of the Ohio. With the defeat of Braddock the efforts to take Fort Duquesne were at an end for some three years. At the close of that interval,however, another British expedition was formed for the capture of Fort Duquesne,under Brigadier General Forbes and Colonel Bouquet, a young Swiss officer in the service of the British. This expedition, though sustaining some slight reverses, drove the French to such extremities that they themselves blew up Fort Duquesne and retired from the Forks of the Ohio. On the arrival of General Forbes at that point, "he hastily built a stockade around the soldiers' huts and traders' cabins which, in honor of England's great Prime Minister and America's friend, he named 'Pittsburgh.' " Sixty days later came the royal mandate, through this same Prime Minister, to the colonial authorities and the commander in chief of His Majesty's forces in North America "To lose no time in concerting the properest and speediest

248 IMPROVEMENT ERA. means for completely restoring, if possible, the ruined Fort Duquesne to a defensible and respectable state, or for erecting another in the place of it oY sufficient strength and every way adequate to the great importance of the several objects of maintaining His Majesty s subjects in the undisputed possession of the Ohio." Soon after this royal order, came Captain Gordon, a capital engineer, with a force of artificers under the direction of General John Stanwix, who succeeded General Forbes, and Fort Pitt was erected. It is described as "a solid and substantial building, constructed at an enormous cost to the Engli.sh government." The estimation of the "enormous cost" ranges all the way from six hundred to sixty thousand English pounds. The retirement of the Fiench from the Forks of the Ohio was followed by Pontiac's assault upon all the western posts of the British, 1763, from which Fort Pitt was delivered by the timely advent upon the scene of Colonel Bouquet, as already related in the earlier paragraphs of this writing. The ill-fated forts, which fell before the assaults of the savages, in this the most general and best planned uprising of the Indians upon the intruding white race, were Forts Le Boeuf, Venango, Pre?que Isle, Miamis, St. Joseph, Oaachtanon, Sandusky an! Michillimackinac. Fort Detroit, like Fort Pitt, escaped by the narrowest margin. The garrisons of all the captured forts were either butchered upon the spot or carried off to be tortured for the vengeful and brutal amusement of the victors. The year following, 1764, when the Indians who had meanwhile rendezvoused along the Muskingum, above what is now known as Marietta, Ohio, again prepared to ravage the British frontier. General Gage— he of the Boston school-boy episode — then commander-in-chief of his Majesty's forces in the American colonies, planned two expeditions against them; one led by General Bradstreet, ordered to advance by way of the Great Lakes; . the other, led by Colonel Bouquet, to start from Fort Pitt. Both expeditions were successful. Colonel Bouquet pursued the savages to their new homes on the Muskingham, refusing to listen to parleys, until the spirit of the native tribes was subdued and they were ready to accept such terms as he chose to dictate. One of these terms was, that all of the whites held captive by the

THE WESTERN GATEWAY OF CIVILIZATION. 249 Indians should be brought in and surrendered. This was acceeded to, and some three hundred captives were broujjht to his encampment. It was a pathetic scene which attended this event. Some of the captives had been held for years by the Indians, some of them as long as nine years. Those who had been captured in their childhood had forgotten the very language of their race. One instance is related of a mother who recognized her child among the captives surrendered to Colonel Buoquet,but the child gave no sign of recognizing the mother, and in tears she complained to the colonel that the daughter she had so ofton sung to sleep in her arms had forgotten her. ''Sing the song to her that you used to sing when she was a child," said the commander. She did so, and "with a passionate flood of tears," the daughter rushed to the mother's arms. During this period, that is, after the departure of the French and before the outbreak of the American Revolution, a sharp contention arose between the colonies of Pennsylvania and Virginia for the possession of the "point at the forks of the Ohio." Maryland also insisted that she owned it, and pressed her claims to the point of bloodshed for its possession. These contentions were not finally settled until 1785, when commissioners were appointed, the western boundaries of the State of Pennsylvania were run, and it was finally determined that the "forks of the Ohio' were well within the territory of that state . "During the period of the American Revolution, Fort Pitt

250 IMPRO VEMENT ERA . played no very important part. The people upon the frontier, of which the fort was an outpost, stood in no danger from attack by the English armies. And, when early in the war it was proposed on the part of the Americans to make it a point from which to attack Fort Detroit and other British interior posts, the chiefs of the Six Nations intervened. A conference of Indian chiefs and army officers was held at Fort Pitt. Chief Guyasuta was the spokesman for the Six Nations. "Brothers," he is reported to have said, "we will not suffer either English or Americans to pass through our country. Should either attempt it, we shall forewarn them three times, and should they persist, they must take the consequences. I am appointed by the Six Nations to take care of this country, * * * * g^^^ j desire you will not think of an expedition against Detroit, for I repeat, we will not suffer an army to pass through our country." Notwithstanding this action, there was, during the years through which the Revolution continued, an intermittent and troublesome border war carried on between the Indians and the settlers, the former being encouraged in their depredations by the British . After the French were driven from the Ohio, the Pontiac rising suppressed, and the American Revolution ended. Fort Pitt lost its importance as a military post, and passed from hand to hand, until finally Mrs. Mary E. Schneley, granddaughter of General James O'Hara, presented Colonel Bouquet's little stone and brick block house of old Fort Pitt to the Daughters of the Amercan Revolution of Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, together with a plot of ground measuring one hundred by ninety feet, with a passage way leading to Pennsylvania avenue ninety by twenty feet. Thus, through the generosity of a patriotic woman, and the Daughters of the American Revolution, this historic spot is preserved to the city of Pittsburgh, to the great state of Pennsylvania and to the nation. But while one admires and commends the generosity of Mrs. Schneley, and equally applauds the patriotism of the Daughters of the American Revolution, not only for preserving this historic spot to the city, state and nation, but for many other similar actions

THE WESTERN GATEWAY OF CIVILIZATION. 251 that assert patriotic sentiment against heedless carelessness of historic monuments, and the encroachment of the spirit of unpatriotic materialism, one can but wonder at the neglect of this historic spot by the state of Pennsylvania and the United States. One marvels that long ere this Pennsylvania's powerful delegation in the National Congress has not moved for the nationalization of this point of land, either through concession by the state of Pennsylvania, or by purchase; and the erection thereon of a suitable monument to commemorate the brave deeds enacted there; and above all, to mark the progress of civilization on her westward march through our land. Here the forces of the two great European civilizations met in their conflict for the possession of the interior of America— an empire mightier in extent and resources than both states contending for its possession at that time. Here the savage tribes of the land, coming up from the Ohio valley, sought, as best they could, to beat back the hordes of white intruders. Why not, then, erect here on this spot, once the outpost of advancing civilization, a monument that would typify this triplesided conflict, and the triumph of civilization over savagery? Let it be a group monument about an ample base . On the north side a French group of soldiers and Indian allies, pressing downward along the banks of the Allegheny for possession of the Ohio forks; on the south side a group of British with their American backwoods allies in resistance of the French; on the west side, coming up from the Ohio, an Indian group asserting their claims; while above these a majestic figure of civilization, facing and pointing westward — which would place it fronting the Ohio — the way of onward marching civilization. Come, 0 National Congress, save this historic outpost in the westward march of civilization to the nation, and commemorate it in fitting manner, — in a way that shall be worthy of the large scale, the vastness, on which everything in America exists. Make it worthy of this American "meeting of the waters;" worthy of the great Ohio valley, at the head of which it will stand. Make it worthy of our country, for which nothing can be too great or too grand. Let it be a monument worthy of America. Salt Lake City, Utah.