St. Clair and Wayne 361 



ness; yet near by was the proof that ages ago the 

 wilderness had been tenanted, for close at hand were 

 huge embankments, marking the site of a town of 

 the long-vanished mound-builders. Giant trees 

 grew on the mounds; all vestiges of the builders 

 had vanished, and the solemn forest had closed 

 above every remembrance of their fate. 



The day of the landing of these new pilgrims was 

 a day big with fate not only for the Northwest but 

 for the Nation. It marked the beginning of the 

 orderly and national conquest of the lands that now 

 form the heart of the Republic. It marked the ad 

 vent among the pioneers of a new element, which 

 was to leave the impress of its strong personality 

 deeply graven on the institutions and the people of 

 the great States north of the Ohio ; an element which 

 in the end turned their development in the direc 

 tion toward which the parent stock inclined in its 

 home on the North Atlantic seaboard. The new 

 settlers were almost all soldiers of the Revolutionary 

 armies; they were hard-working, orderly men of 

 trained courage and of keen intellect. An outside 

 observer speaks of them as being the best informed, 

 the most courteous and industrious, and the most 

 law-abiding of all the settlers who had come to the 

 frontier, while their leaders were men of a higher 

 type than was elsewhere to be found in the West. 16 



and these honest soldiers and yeomen, with much self-com 

 placency, gave to portions of their little raw town such ludi 

 crously inappropriate names as the Campus Martius and Via 

 Sacra. 



14 "Denny's Military Journal," May 28 and June 15, 1789. 

 VOL. VII. 16 



