[Footnote: "St. Clair Papers," i., 139.
It was at the beginning of the dreadful pseudo-classic cult in our
intellectual history, and these honest soldiers and yeomen, with much
self-complacency, gave to portions of their little raw town such
ludicrously inappropriate names as the Campus Martius and Via Sacra.] It
was laid out in the untenanted wilderness; 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.
Beginning of Ohio.
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 advent 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
direction towards which the parent stock inclined in its home on the
North Atlantic seaboard.
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