d these honest soldiers and yeomen, with much
self-complacency, gave to portions of their little raw town such
ludicrously inappropriate names as the Campus Martius and Via Sacra.] It
was laid out in the untenanted wilderness; yet near by was the proof
that ages ago the wilderness had been tenanted, for close at hand were
huge embankments, marking the site of a town of the long-vanished
mound-builders. Giant trees grew on the mounds; all vestiges of the
builders had vanished, and the solemn forest had closed above every
remembrance of their fate.

Beginning of Ohio.

The day of the landing of these new pilgrims was a day big with fate not
only for the Northwest but for the Nation. It marked the beginning of
the orderly and national conquest of the lands that now form the heart
of the Republic. It marked the advent among the pioneers of a new
element, which was to leave the impress of its strong personality deeply
graven on the institutions and the people of the great States north of
the Ohio; an element which in the end turned their development in the
direction towards which the parent stock inclined in its home on the
North Atlantic seaboard. The new settlers were almost all soldiers of
the Revolutionary armies; they were hardworking, orderly men of trained
courage and of keen intellect. An outside observer speaks of them as
being the best informed, the most courteous and industrious, and the
most law-abiding of all the settlers who had come to the frontier, while
their leaders were men of a higher type than was elsewhere to be found
in the West. [Footnote: "Denny's Military Journal," May 28 and June 15,
1789.] No better material for founding a new State existed anywhere.
With such a foundation the State was little likely to plunge into the
perilous abysses of anarchic license or of separatism and disunion.
Moreover, to plant a settlement of this kind on the edge of the
Indian-haunted wilderness showed that the founders possessed both
hardihood and resolution.

Contrast with the Deeds of the Old Pioneers.

Yet it must not be forgotten that the daring needed for the performance
of this particular deed can in no way be compared with that shown by the
real pioneers, the early explorers and Indian fighters. The very fact
that the settlement around Marietta was national in its character, that
it was the outcome of national legislation, and was undertaken under
national protection, made the work of the individua