nts came with the rest, but they were
helpless too in the strange conditions, and if it had not been for the
settlers at Marietta, they would all have fared miserably indeed.

The Scioto Company had so far provided for them as to agree with
the Ohio Company for the erection of a little town or village where
Gallipolis now stands; and when the first boats arrived with the
strangely assorted company, they found a space cut out of the forest,
and in the clearing eighty log cabins standing upon four streets
fronting the river, with a square inclosed by a high stockade and
fortified with blockhouses, where they might take shelter from the
Indians. The cabins forming this square were of a better sort than those
on the streets, and there was one meant to serve for a council chamber,
where the newcomers promptly began to give balls. They arrived late
in October, and there was nothing for them to do but to wait for the
spring, even if they had known how to farm, and in the meanwhile they
had as good a time as they could. They did not yet know that the Scioto
Company, which failed to pay the Marietta people for building their
village, had no power to give them titles to their land, and they
hopefully spent their money in hiring American hunters to supply them
with game. They seem to have been rather a light-hearted crew, in
spite of their misfortunes and sufferings, and they not only amused
themselves, but they amused their neighbors by their gay unfitness for
the backwoods. If they went to fell a tree, half a dozen of them set
to work on it with their axes at once, and when they had chopped it all
round, they pulled it down with a rope, to the great danger of their
lives and limbs. When they began to make gardens in the spring they
followed the rules laid down in some books on gardening which they
had brought with them from France, and they planted the seeds of such
vegetables as they were used to at home. In a climate where "frost even
in winter was almost unknown," the Ohio River froze solidly over the
year after they came, and the hunters brought in little or none of the
promised venison, though certainly not molested in the chase "by tigers,
lions, or foxes." The colonists were in danger of starving, and many of
them were already sick of the fevers bred by the past summer's sun on
the swamp lands about them. It was one of their few advantages that
the Indians did not trouble them much, but after killing one of them
in mistak