“It was only after the peace in 1795 that immigrants began settling on both sides of the Scioto River, some having titles to their lands, such as those on the West Side, and others on the East Side who simply squatted on Congress Lands.
“In 1799, these squatters petitioned Congress, asking 'that protection might be afforded to actual Settlers,' to ensure that the lands they had improved would not 'pass into the hands and become the property of such as have undergone no toil, nor run no Risk to improve it, nor probably will ever plow, sow, or contribute to improve or to support society in that part of the world.'
“Congress refused to recognize the so-called 'tomahawk rights' of the squatters and many were ultimately forced off their improvements.”
(Andrew Feight, Ph.D. “Settling the Scioto Valley.” Scioto Historical.)
Have you ever heard of “tomahawk claims” and their relevance to the settlement of what would become the State of Ohio? Who settled this state legally? Illegally? Of course, the land had been occupied by Native Americans for centuries before the white man explored and settled the region. But, what about European discovery and citizens' claims to the land?
Before and after the Revolution, four of the new states – Virginia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York – claimed land in the Ohio Country and beyond. As settlers pushed west after America’s victory over the British new forts were constructed to protect settlers and deter potential land squatters.
White settlement of the Ohio Valley was a chaotic process. Virginia's issuance of land warrants to military veterans set off a speculative boom. Legal claims, often staked without an actual physical presence, were contested by those claiming squatters' rights.
Freelance surveyors and explorers from Virginia moved into the Kentucky country, claiming land and organizing settlements. Virginia formalized this claim in 1776 by creating the county of Kentucky. To complicate matters, some white squatters in defiance of Indian reprisals and British military policy, moved onto the north bank of the Ohio River. By the eve of the Revolution, European Americans were settled throughout the Ohio River Valley along the Indian communities, and the situation was highly unstable.
The Revolution cleared up some problems but created others. In the minds of the white American settlers, the concept of liberty that motivated independence from Great Britain also legitimized their desire for open access to western lands. Not surprisingly then, the end of the Revolution and the acquistion of the trans-Appalachian West by the new United States propelled even more waves of settlers into the Ohio River Valley.
(Amy Hill Shevitz. Jewish Communities on the Ohio River: A History. 2007.)
Fallen Timbers and the Treaty of Greenville
On August 20, 1794, near present-day Toledo, an American army commanded by General Anthony Wayne defeated an American Indian force led by Blue Jacket of the Shawnee at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. This victory, and the failure of the commandant of the British fort at modern-day Maumee, convinced American Indians living along the Maumee River to sue for peace.
In January 1795, representatives from the various tribes began meeting with Wayne at Greeneville, Ohio. The Anglo-American settlers and American Indians spent the next eight months negotiating a treaty that became known as the Treaty of Greenville.
On August 3, 1795, leaders of the Wyandot, Delaware, Shawnee, Ottawa, Miami, Eel River, Wea, Chippewa, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Piankashaw, and Kaskaskia nations formally signed the treaty. The American Indians who became signatories agreed to relinquish all claims to land south and east of a boundary that began roughly at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. It ran southward to Fort Laurens and then turned westward to Fort Loramie and Fort Recovery. It then turned southward to the Ohio River.
The Indians, however, could still hunt on the land that they ceded. The whites agreed to relinquish their claims to land north and west of the line, although the American Indians permitted the Americans to establish several trading posts in their territory
Some American Indians refused to honor the agreement. White settlers continued to move onto the contested land. Violence continued between these two peoples. American Indian leaders like Tecumseh and the Prophet would emerge in the early 1800s to carry on the American Indian struggle to regain their lost land.
Battles and treaties aside, who was entitled to the land continued to be greatly contested as an ever-increasing number of people sought their share of Ohio lands.
“Tomahawk claims,” also called “cabin rights” – were an informal process utilized by early white settlers of the Appalachian and Old Northwest (Ohio, Michigan, etc) frontiers in the mid- to late 18th century to establish priority of ownership to newly occupied land. The claimant typically girdled several trees near the head of a spring or other prominent site, then blazed the bark of one or more of them with his initials or name.
Building a cabin and raising a crop of grain of any kind, however small, led to cabin rights, which were recognized not only by custom but also by law. The laws of the colonies and states varied in their requirements of the settler. In Virginia the occupant was entitled to 400 acres of land and to a pre-emption right to 1,000 acres more adjoining, to be secured in either case by a land-office warrant, the basis of a later patent or grant from colonial or state authorities.
Land bounties had been promised by colonial officials to all those who had served in the provincial forces during the French and Indian War (1754-63), but for those who could not qualify for such bounties, the practice grew up on the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontiers of taking possession of unoccupied land without authority and establishing "tomahawk claims" which were widely respected and recognized among the earliest pioneers, and many of them were purchased cheaply by other settlers who did not want to enter into a controversy with the claimants who made them.
Some land-owners (e.g. in Virginia) voluntarily paid owners of tomahawk rights a trifle to get rid of them; others did not. The settlement-right to 400 acres was certified to and a certificate issued upon payment of ten shillings per one hundred acres. The cost of certificate was two shillings and six pence.
(Samuel T. Wiley. History of Monongalia County, West Virginia, from its Earliest Settlements to the present Time; with Numerous Biographical and Family Sketches. 1883.)
Attempts To Remove Squatters
In 1784, the Congress created by the Articles of Confederation, and in March 1785, Congress dispatched Colonel Josiah Harmar to the Ohio frontier to discourage illegal settlers or "squatters" from moving into Ohio as no land surveys had been performed yet, nor had the U.S. government started the work of selling the land.
Harmar described the evictions as a painful process as his soldiers had to force the settlers off their newly build homesteads and in his letters to Congress, Harmar asked that the land be surveyed and sold before the entire Northwest was overrun by "lawless bands whose actions are a disgrace to human nature.”
(Alan Brown. "The Role of the Army in Western Settlement Josiah Harmar's Command, 1785-1790.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Volume 93, No. 2. April 1969.)
Harmar faced great difficulty in carrying out his orders due to a lack of supplies and money to pay his men. Monetary issues plagued the government established by the Articles of Confederation throughout its brief existence.
In October 1785, Harmar ordered the construction of Fort Harmar near present-day Marietta. The stockade was located at the junction of the Ohio River and the Muskingum River. Rather than discouraging squatters, the fort encouraged illegal settlement as the migrants believed Harmar's troops would protect them from American Indian attacks.
Due to the small number of soldiers at his disposal, Harmar could not guarantee the settlers' safety. Most early settlements, like the Marietta, were built near the fort, so settlers could flee to the stockade for safety if American Indian forces attacked.
Here is an account from James Jesse Burns book Educational History of Ohio: A History of Its Progress Since the Formation of the State ...
“In the summer of 1786 numbers of men were found twenty miles north of the Ohio staking out claims and establishing tomahawk rights by burning trees. In 1787, a date of moment in American history, twelve cabins were burned and crops destroyed at Mingo bottoms. Before this, a subordinate of Harmer's brought to Fort McIntosh what now would possibly be called a 'stuffed census' of squatters along the Ohio and west of it. 'Not a bottom,' he declared, 'from Wheeling to the Scioto, but had at least one family.'
“Three hundred families were reported at the falls of the Hockhocking; as many more were on the Muskingam; fifteen settlers could be counted on the Scioto and the Miami. Ensign Armstrong reported that these were not nice, agreeable people; but what a pity it is in their rude, 'unauthorized' villages there was not some man with learning enough, and with a mind to do it, to have left for us the short and simple annuls of these poor, disagreeable, premature founders of a state.
“The doctrine of squatter sovereignty was laid very quickly before them by one of their first citizens, John Emerson, by name: and the rare document is preserved in the Journals of Congress.”
The document by Emerson states on March 12, 1785, notice was given of an election for choosing members of a conventions at the mouths of the Miami, Scioto, and Muskingum rivers for framing of a constitution to govern the inhabitants. However, the convention was never held.
(James Jesse Burns. Educational History of Ohio: A History of Its Progress Since the Formation of the State. 2017.)
Owning Ohio Land
Brave pioneers or lowly squatters? Which were these earliest settlers? Should the government have granted those adventurers a right to have title to the land they improved or should that title be provided by the government by acquisition in some other means? For those naïve enough to believe putting down roots in those primitive days was as easy as staying on the land and surviving in the frontier of Ohio, a history lesson is in order.
Since the land was uninhabited, squatters often felt that anyone had a right to it. They believed that the land should go to the first person to live on it. Many of them thought this was true even if someone else already owned the land but did not live upon it. These squatters did not purchase the land from the rightful owners who were American Indians or the English government.
In 1783, the Articles of Confederation government prohibited settlement of the land in the Ohio Country without the approval of the states that claimed ownership. The squatters ignored the Congress.
The Ordinance of 1784, the Land Ordinance of 1785, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 resulted in most of this land becoming the property of the federal government. The government hoped to sell this land to pay its numerous debts. However, a large number of squatters already occupied the land. Thus, Harmar and others faced a huge problem.
Scioto County Settlement
In the first volume of William's American Pioneer, page 56, the late George Corwin of Portsmouth (1842) gave his recollections of the first attempt to settle there. It was probably not on the present site of the town but on the west side of the old mouth of the River Scioto near where the village of Alexandria is located.
The Western Reserve Historical Society reports …
“Until the Ohio canal was constructed and an artificial cut made at Portsmouth no water discharged there from the Scioto at its ordinary stage. The site of Alexandria was very attractive, but the ground between it and Portsmouth is most of it subject to inundation. The late Robert B. McAfee of Kentucky stated to F. C. Cleveland of Alexandria , who was an engineer on the Ohio canal forty years since that there were whites on the Kentucky side of the Ohio opposite Scioto in 1773. Mr. Cleveland said there was a space of about forty acres at Alexandria which had been chopped, and when the early settlers came this space was coveted with a second growth of trees, standing among the stumps.
“This was probably the work of the parties referred to by Mr. Corwin. The four families who attempted to settle at the mouth of the Sciota in 1785, came from Redstone, Pa. 'They commenced clearing the ground to plant seeds for a crop to support their families, hoping that the red men of the forest would suffer them to remain and improve the soil.'
“The four heads of the families, – only one of whose names has been preserved went up the Scioto on a tour of exploration as far as Pee Pee Creek and encamped. Peter Patrick, one of the party, cut his initials upon a beech tree. Here they were surprised by Indians and two of them killed. Two of them escaped across the country to the mouth of the Little Scioto, just in time to meet a boat descending the Ohio for Post Vincent. This boat took the survivors from their intended home to Maysville, where the settlement was large enough to protect itself against their red enemies.
“From a letter dated Fort Mclntosh, June 1st, 1785, written by General Josiah Harmar to General Knox, Secretary at War, we take it there must have been another settlement on the Scioto, other than that referred to by Mr. Corwin. General Harmar says: 'The Shawanese make great professions of peace. The Cherokees are hostile, and have killed and scalped seven people near the mouth of the Scioto, about three hundred and seventy miles from hence.'
“In a letter to Col. Francis Johnston of Philadelphia, dated Fort Mclntosh, June 21,1785, General Harmar refers to the same event in these words : 'The nations down the river have killed and scalped several adventurers who have settled on their lands.'"
( Peggy Thompson.
“Papers Relating To the First White Settlers In Oho.” Historical
and Archaeological Tracts, Number Six. Western Reserve Historical
Society. Cleveland, Ohio. July 1871.)
“The
way, and the only way, to stop this evil is for all the red men to
unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at
first, and should be yet; for it was never divided, but belongs to
all for the use of each.”
– Tecumseh
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