BEING A FULL AND COMPLETE CIVIL, POLITICAL AND MILITARY HISTORY OF FROM ITS EARLIEST SETTLEMENT TO THE PRESENT TIME; COMPRISING A GENERAL AND CONDENSED HISTORY OF OHIO, INDIANA, MICHIGAN, ILLINOIS, A COMPLETE ENCYCLOPÆDIA OF THE GREAT NORTHWEST. BY PROF. CHARLES R. TUTTLE Author of "History of Wisconsin," "History of Indiana." "History of Michigan," "History AND REV. A. C. PENNOCK, For over thirty years a resident of the Northwest. SOLD ONLY BY SUBSCRIPTION. MADISON, WIS.: PUBLISHED BY THE INTER-STATE BOOK COMPANY. 1876. 465 23 465,58 HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY Apr. 10,1923 CHARLES ELLIOT] PERKINS W Entered according to Act of Congress in the year eighteen hundred and seventy-six, BY CHARLES R. TUTTLE, in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. MADISON, WIS.: MANUFACTURED BY INTRODUCTORY. THE CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF THE NORTHWEST will stand or fall by its own merits, owing nothing save the incentive to an early completion to the great event of this era, the exposition in Fairmount Park, which will shortly challenge the attention of the whole world to the record of one hundred years of national growth under free institutions. When ascending the mountains, it is sometimes well to pause for a moment to realize the height that has been attained; so we invite our fellow citizens to consider what has been done, as well generally as particularly since the year 1776. One century ago the steam engine had not been applied to traveling; now it is the agent by which millions of our fellow citizens follow their avocations daily, in every part of the union. The Watt and Boulton works in London had been established nearly ten years for the manufacture of steam engines, but the first idea of making steam available for traveling was due to our countryman, John Fitch, who had ascertained during his captivity among Indian tribes the vast area of this continent which could be reached by river navigation, and wisely divined the important influence that steam could exert in developing our re sources. The country which stood upon the threshold of its greatness when he petitioned congress for assistance to complete his boat in 1785, had then a population of barely four millions; it has now fully forty millions of people included under its general government, enjoying the privileges of freedom in every essential, and it follows almost inevitably that the nation in its entirety has a history at once momentous and instructive, which during this centennial period may be studied with advantage. The Centennial Northwest is a contribution toward that great desideratum, and it deals in a Catholic spirit with all the incidents of our development as a great and free people, within the limits specified, from the days when the Indian was first dispos sessed of his hold upon the hunting grounds once entirely enjoyed by the tribes, through all the vicissitudes of an incipient civilization to the present day, when steam travels our roads as well as our rivers with a completeness and dispatch of which neither Fitch nor Fulton dreamed, besides discharging ten thousand functions which seem marvelous even to the accustomed observer in our centennial year. The ground over which the historian travels in the great northwest may be said to be virgin soil, and in that respect much fresh |