THE FORKS OF THE MUSKINGUM.

The valley of the Muskingum embraces not far from one-fourth of the State of Ohio, including seventeen counties several of them beyond the average of Ohio counties in area, agricultural and mineral wealth, population and development. The stream itself, in length and breath, far exceeds any other in the State. The first permanent settlement made in the Territory-afterwards included in the State-was made at the mouth of this river, and a large part of the earlier immigrants found access to their new homes by it. Taking ark or flatboat, a pirogue at Redstone or Fort Pitt, or Wheeling, and floating down the Ohio to Marietta, they poled or were drawn by horses along the main stream or its tributaries to or quite near their new homes. The early settlers recognized it as a great artery of trade, and along its usually placid but frequently swollen and muddy waters floated many a craft well laden with corn, bacon, flour, whiskey and other products of food for pioneer life. Until the building of the Ohio Canal, fair sized steamboats plowed its waters their whole length. The State, in its ordering of internal improvements, recognized the importance of the stream and gave it its great slack water system. At this time the general government was expending many thousands of dollars at its mouth in the construction of an ice harbor for all the craft plying upon it and upon the upper Ohio. Directly upon its banks are located the thriving little cities of Marietta, McConnellsville, Zanesville and Coshocton, while its chief tributaries are graced by such flourishing and attractive places as Cambridge, New Philadelphia, Canton, Massillon, Wooster, Ashland, Mansfield, Mt. Vernon and Newark.

About one hundred and fifteen miles from its mouth the river parts (using the phraseology of the olden rather than of the modern time). The right hand branch was once best known as the Little Muskingum, but upon the maps and in the histories of the present century, it has been called the Tuscarawas. The other, a left hand branch, was until quite recent times more generally called the Whitewoman, but the Indian name Walhonding, said to mean Whitewoman, has come with passing years to be more approved and used.

This parting of the river was in very early maps a well marked locality and was designated "The Forks of the Muskingum." Few localities have had more interest for the antiquarian and the student of American history. Few have been the sites of more impressive, touching and widely important transactions. Few spots are more worthy of the interest of our American people. It was a favorite spot with the Indians. The slowly moving, gracefully curving streams, the wide valleys, the moderately elevated and handsomely moulded neighboring hills, the rich corn soil, the splendid forests, the abundant game, especially the deer (Muskin

gum is said to mean Elk's Eye, the emblem of placid beauty), all conspired to attract the red man, who, with all his faults, has never been charged with want of appreciation of natural beauty or destitution of sentiment of a somewhat poetic sort. To the hunters and trappers, and explorers and missionary priests, during the time of the French occupancy, before Ft. Duquesene became Ft. Pitt, it was a readily found and quite. familiar place. It was the location of the chief town and capital of one of the best nations of Indians known to the Fathers-the Delawares who coming from the east and already leavened by the philanthropy of Penn

and the Christianity of the Presbyterians in upper New Jersey, and of the Moravians on the banks of the Lehigh found here a home to their liking, and as we shall see barely escaped complete recognition by the Colonial Congress as a coördinate and coequal part of the colonial system of government. To this capital frequently repaired such chieftains as Logan and Cornstalk, and it was the cherished home of Netawatwees, White Eyes, Hilbuck and other famous braves. It is a locality where was witnessed one of the grandest "victories of peace" afforded by the annals of the world. It was the arena of a struggle bearing relation most clearly and powerfully to the fate of our Revolutionary War and all the subsequent glory of this great band. It was the theatre of most notable Christian heroism and successful work in the conflict between savagery and civilization.

Immediately at the forks on the right bank of the river, and not in the delta between the branches, was the Indian town of Goschachgunk, modernized and mollified into Coshocton. As described by the English speaking explorers, it was in that day a very noticeable place. From two to four score of houses built of logs and limbs and bark, were arranged in two parallel rows, making a regular street between. Prominent among these houses was the Council House, a great booth in which the big braves of the different tribes, no doubt much after the manner of later legislators, smoked their pipes and made their largely buncombe speeches. At one time seven hundred Indian warriors assembled at the town, This was probably in the spring of 1778. Usually, and as to the mass of them, the Delaware Indians were, from influences already referred to, inclined to peace, and entertained friendly feelings for the whites. Indeed, they were often taunted by the neighboring tribes as being "women," and were often remarked about as having too many captives; they making exer tions to keep as such those commonly appointed by other Indians to the tomahawk or stake. When the Revolutionary War was begun, it was a matter of the utmost importance, as can be readily seen, to secure at least the neutrality of the Indian tribes, and two treaties were made at Pittsburgh in successive years, 1775 and 1776, binding to this neutrality the Delawares and some of the immediately adjacent tribes. At the opening of the campaign of 1777, the hatchet was sent out from Detroit. the British headquarters, and was accepted by the Wyandots and Shawnees and others. The report was that it was to be sent also to the Delawares, and if they declined they would be treated as common enemies and at

tacked at once by the British and their allies. A part of the nation, namely the Wolf tribe, under the control of Captain Pipe, always the more warlike, did not fancy the neutrality. But the influence of White Eyes and others was paramount, and the hatchet was offered and refused three times during the summer. On the the ninth of March, 1778, a grand council was held. Many of the young warriors appeared in paint and with plumes. The Shawnees were hot for the fray, and showed their British muskets and the powder sent from Detroit. The ignoble trio of go-betweens and desperadoes, Alexander McKee, Matthew Elliott and Simon Girty and others, had been for months most persistent in trying to inflame the Delawares. A sergeant and twenty privates, deserters from Fort Pitt, had recently passed through the town on their way to the British Indians and Detroit. The air was full of stories, representing that the British had thoroughly vanquished the colonists along all the Atlantic coast and were driving them to the westward. Captain Pipe thought his time had now come to supplant White Eyes and his peace policy, and was leaving no stone unturned to effect this. The best the peaceful chief could do was to have the declaration of war postponed for ten days. Meanwhile, word of the crisis had been borne to the American officers at Fort Pitt. The gravity of the situation was recognized, and General Hand offered a liberal reward to any who would go to Goschackgunk in the interest of peace. Heckewelder, the Moravian missionary, and Schebosh, an Indian convert then at the fort, at length agreed to go, and riding day and night without stopping, except to feed their horses, and in constant danger from war parties that lurked in the forests, they reached Gnadenhütten on the eighth day of the ten stipulated for by White Eyes. Here Schebosh was compelled by weakness to stop, but the determined Heckewelder-hardly able to sit in his saddle with the weight of discouragement by no means lightened at what had been learned at the missionary settlement up the river, and with only a native assistant, named John Martin to accompany him-—pressed on, and at ten o'clock of the ninth day of delay of the war declaration reached Goschackgunk. The Indians met him with dark and sullen faces. Even White Eyes had seemingly yielded to the pressure, and for a time withheld any greeting. Heckewelder, holding aloft the documents he had brought from the commandant at Fort Pitt, earnestly addressed the people from his house. The aspect of affairs was at once changed. The missions from the colonists were accepted. White Eyes and his

peace policy were again in the ascendancy. Warlike preparations ceased, and Captain Pipe and his adherents left the town in great chagrin. The Delawares still stood as a wall between the British Indians and the little company of American soldiers and settlers in the West. The struggling forces on the Atlantic seaboard were subjected to no fire in the rear. Looking at the probable consequences of a different decision, may it not be rightfully claimed that a grand victory in the interests of peace and of the American colonists was won at the Forks of the Muskingum? Subsequently, indeed, chiefly by the machinations of Girty, a part of the nation was led to join the British Indians, but they were too few and it was too late to do the colonists much harm. In the later part of 1778, the rightful authorities of the nation made a complete treaty of alliance with commissioners of the United Colonies, therein providing for the carrying out of a cherished project of White Eyes-that the Delawares should be represented in the Colonial Congress, ultimately to become as a Christian Indian State, one of the United States.

Something over a mile south of Goschackgunk, and in view from the Forks," was another Indian town, occupied by Moravian Indians, and called Lichtenau, or "Pastures of Light." At the request of Netawatwees, Kilbuck and White Eyes, this town had been established in close proximity to Goschackgunk (afterwards sometimes distinguished as "the heathen town") in hope of its Christian influence thereupon. On the twelfth of April, 1776, Zeisberger and Heckewelder, at the head of eight