. They offered our
party a ride for the rest of the day, if we would row alongside and
come aboard, but I thanked them, saying their craft was too slow for
our needs; at which they laughed heartily, and "'lowed" we might be
traders, too, anxious to get in ahead of them--"but there's plenty o'
room o' th' river, for yew an' we, stranger! Well, good luck to yees!
We'll see yer down below, somewhar, I reckon!"

Just before lunch, we were at Marietta, at the mouth of the Muskingum
(171 miles), a fine stream, here two hundred and fifty yards wide. A
storied river, this Muskingum. We first definitely hear of it in 1748,
the year the original Ohio Company was formed. Celoron was here the
year following, with his little band of French soldiers and Indians,
vainly endeavoring to turn English traders out of the Ohio Valley.
Christopher Gist came, some months later; then the trader Croghan,
for "Old Wyandot Town," the Indian village at the mouth, was a noted
center in Western forest traffic. Moravian missionaries appeared in
due time, establishing on the banks of the Muskingum the ill-fated
convert villages of Schoenbrunn, Gnadenhuetten, and Salem. In 1785, Fort
Harmar was reared on the site of Wyandot Town. Lastly, in the early
spring of 1788, came, in Ohio river flatboats, that famous body of
New England veterans of the Revolution, under Gen. Rufus Putnam, and
planted Marietta--"the Plymouth Rock of the West."

We smile at these Ohio pilgrims, for dignifying the hills which girt
in the Marietta bottom, with the names of the seven on which Rome is
said to be built--for having a Campus Martius and a Sacra Via, and all
that, out here among the sycamore stumps and the wild Indians. But a
classical revival was just then vigorously affecting American thought,
and it would have been strange if these sturdy New Englanders had not
felt its influence, fresh as they were from out the shadows of Harvard
and Yale, and in the awesome presence of crowds of huge monumental
earthworks, whose age, in their day, was believed to far outdate
the foundations of the Eternal City itself. They loved learning
for learning's sake; and here, in the log-cabins of Marietta, eight
hundred miles west of their beloved Boston, among many another good
thing they did for posterity, they established the principle of public
education at public cost, as a national principle.

They were soldier colonists. Washington, out of a full heart, for he
dearly loved the Wes