served land about
Lake Erie to companies, and in 1796 General Moses Cleaveland led the way
to the site of the city that bears his name. This was the beginning of
the occupation of the Western Reserve, a district about as large as the
parent State of Connecticut, a New England colony in the Middle West,
which has maintained, even to the present time, the impress of New
England traits. Virginia and Kentucky settlers sought the Virginia
Military Bounty Lands, and the foundation of Chillicothe here, in 1796,
afforded a center for Southern settlement. The region is a modified
extension of the limestone area of Kentucky, and naturally attracted the
emigrants from the Blue Grass State. Ohio's history is deeply marked by
the interaction of the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies within
her borders.

By the opening of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon's cession
brought to the United States the vast spaces of the Louisiana Purchase
beyond the Mississippi, the pioneers had hardly more than entered the
outskirts of the forest along the Ohio and Lake Erie. But by 1810 the
government had extinguished the Indian title to the unsecured portions
of the Western Reserve, and to great tracts of Indiana, along the Ohio
and up the Wabash Valley; thus protecting the Ohio highway from the
Indians, and opening new lands to settlement. The embargo had destroyed
the trade of New England, and had weighted down her citizens with debt
and taxation; caravans of Yankee emigrant wagons, precursors of the
"prairie schooner," had already begun to cross Pennsylvania on their way
to Ohio; and they now greatly increased in number. North Carolina back
countrymen flocked to the Indiana settlements, giving the peculiar
Hoosier flavor to the State, and other Southerners followed,
outnumbering the Northern immigrants, who sought the eastern edge of
Indiana.

Tecumthe, rendered desperate by the advance into his hunting grounds,
took up the hatchet, made wide-reaching alliances among the Indians, and
turned to England for protection. The Indian war merged into the War of
1812, and the settlers strove in vain to add Canadian lands to their
empire. In the diplomatic negotiations that followed the war, England
made another attempt to erect the Old Northwest beyond the Greenville
line into a permanent Indian barrier between Canada and the United
States; but the demand was refused, and by the treaties of 1818, the
Indians were pressed still farther north.