ation by River 223L]

It was quite time. I cannot say how far they had been civilized, and for
all I know they may have been tame farmers and mechanics, but in their
moccasins and blankets, with their bows and arrows, they looked like
wild hunters; and Ohio was no longer a good hunting ground. All the
larger game had long been killed off or driven away, and the smaller
game was fast vanishing before the rifle and the shotgun. As if its
destruction by gunners singly was not rapid enough it was the custom in
somewhat earlier days for whole neighborhoods to meet together for the
wholesale slaughter of the sylvan creatures which still abounded. One of
these great hunts took place in Medina County, in 1818, when the region
was as yet very sparsely settled. The drive, as it was called, was fixed
for the 24th of December, and at sunrise, six hundred men and boys drew
up their far-spreading lines. They were armed with rifles, shotguns,
old muskets, pistols, knives, axes, hatchets, bayonets fastened to long
poles, and whatever other weapons they could lay hands on, to shoot,
strike, or stab with, and they began to draw their vast circle together
with a hideous uproar of horn, conchshells, and voices. The deer fled
inward from all sides; bear and wolf left their coverts in terror; foxes
and raccoons joined the panic rout, and the air was full of the flight
of wild turkeys. Then the slaughter began, and before it ended three
hundred deer, twenty-one bears, and seventeen wolves were killed; of the
turkeys and the smaller game no tale was kept.

Later these drives were common in the years whenever game was abundant
in any neighborhood. They were called squirrel-hunts, because the
squirrel was the unit, and larger or smaller game counted so many
squirrels, or went to make up the value of a squirrel. I knew of one
of these hunts during the late fifties in Northern Ohio, when the wild
pigeons were still in such multitude that their flight darkened the sky,
where now one of them is rarely seen.

XXI. THE FIGHT WITH SLAVERY.

Almost from the beginning Ohio was called the Yankee state by her
Southern neighbors. Burr had found her people too plodding for him, as
he said, and it would not have been strange if the older slave-holding
communities on her southern and eastern border had seen with distrust
and dislike the advance of the young free state, and had given her that
nickname partly out of envy and partly out of contempt. Thei