from his dog warned him of danger. He instantly _treed_, or jumped
behind a tree, and then saw an Indian treed behind a neighboring oak.
They both fired; the Indian missed, but Wetzel's bullet had broken the
savage's arm. They rushed at each other with their drawn hunting knives,
and fell in a fearful struggle. Wetzel unhurt was no match for the
wounded Indian, who sat astride of him with his knife lifted when
Wetzel's dog sprung at his throat. Wetzel now flung him off, and while
the dog held him helpless, easily dispatched him. Another story is of
the usual ghastliness relieved by a touch of the comic. Colonel Robert
Elliott was shot by the Indians near the northern line of Hamilton
County. One of them sprang upon him to scalp him, but at a touch the
poor man's wig came off in his hand. He lifted it and was heard to say
with an oath, "Lie!" while he stared at his trophy in bewilderment.
One of the later captives of the Indians was a boy of eleven named O.
M. Spencer, who was seized near Cincinnati in 1792, and carried to a
Shawnee village on the Maumee, where he was taken into a family. His
case is peculiarly interesting because Washington himself asked his
release through the British governor of Canada; and he was at last
returned to his friends by canoe to Detroit, by sailing vessel to
Erie, by land to Albany, by water to New York, and by land through
Pennsylvania to Cincinnati. He was two years in getting back to his
friends. .
The next settlement in Ohio, and the first within the Virginia Military
District, was at Massie's Station, now Manchester, where Colonel
Nathaniel Massie, with thirty families, arrived in 1790. They at once
made themselves safe in an inclosure of strong pickets, fortified with
blockhouses, and as the woods and rivers abounded in game and fish, they
began to lead a life of as much comfort as people could enjoy who were
surrounded by a wilderness, with the lurking danger of captivity and
death on every hand.
Six years later, Colonel Massie laid out the town of Chillicothe,
which became the first capital of Ohio, and in the same year, 1796,
the earliest settlers from Connecticut landed at Conneaut in Ashtabula
County. They were led by Moses Cleaveland, a lawyer of Canterbury,
Connecticut, a man of substance and ability, and they had come from
Buffalo, some by land and some by water, but they arrived within a few
hours of one another. It was the Fourth of July, and Cleaveland wrote
in his j
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