George Washington's Western AdventureBy Joel Achenbach, The Washington Post, June 6, 2004
On the thirteenth of September, 1784, coming down from the mountains into the valley of the Youghiogheny, George Washington arrived at the gristmill. His gristmill. He had never seen it. Years earlier, before the Revolution, he'd been told that his mill was the finest west of the Alleghenies. But now that he was finally free from his duties as commander in chief, and could make the long journey to inspect the mill personally, he saw to his dismay that it harnessed the might of a feeble stream! The millrace was essentially dry. Perhaps the masters of the place were expecting some other source of power to come along, something more sophisticated than water.
The surrounding land boasted some patches of rich soil, but the level tracts were interrupted by gullies, depressions, rocky outcroppings -- "broken" terrain. He owned 1,644 acres of rolling backwoods turf inhabited by people living in extremely modest dwellings. It would someday be named Perrypolis, but for now the residents called this place "Washington's Bottom." What an honor.
"I do not find the Land in general equal to my expectation of it," Washington wrote in his diary. "The Mill was quite destitute of Water . . . In a word, little rent, or good is to be expected."
Washington knew who was to blame for the mill disaster: Gilbert Simpson, the mill operator, whom Washington had once described as a man of "extreame stupidity."
When the general finished dealing with Simpson, he knew he'd have to cope with a second, even more irritating problem. A group of people had journeyed to Washington's Bottom to discuss his allegation that they were squatting on his land. They were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who belonged to a sect called Seceders. They lived on Washington's land -- or what Washington claimed was his land -- about half a day's ride to the north, on Millers Run, southwest of Pittsburgh.
Pennsylvania had been founded by Quakers, but these Scotch-Irish were a different breed -- rougher, more belligerent and ready to tromp into every remote mountain hollow of the Appalachians to hack out a new life. They did not come to the mill to give the general a parade. The great man threatened to take away their farms. When they had arrived in this part of western Pennsylvania in the early 1770s -- it was then considered part of the sprawling colony of Virginia -- they had found a trackless forest. They had hacked down trees, burned and grubbed the stumps, built fences, log cabins and barns, and found a way to survive in a world that still knew the howl of the wolf. They had endured the constant risk of Indian attacks, and, indeed, one of their members, Thomas Bigger, had narrowly escaped a massacre that claimed the lives of three families a dozen miles to the west, near Raccoon Creek. And now, years later, they'd gotten word of a visitor, at best an absentee landlord, but perhaps more properly a man with no right to their farms whatsoever.
What bad luck for the Seceders: They had squatted on the wrong man's land. Worse, he was a details freak. George Washington kept track of every shilling he was due, every acre he owned. He had an extraordinary gift for seeing the big picture of America, of perceiving the possibility that on this continent a new and powerful nation might spring into being, something to rival the great powers of Europe -- but he also paid attention to the vexing minutiae of his considerable landholdings. The 52-year-old war hero doubled as an accountant.
The Seceders had several things going for them. In Pennsylvania there was a general presumption that settlers who improved land had priority over an absentee landlord with only a paper title. The Seceders had heard that Washington had a bogus title and that the original surveyor of the land, William Crawford, lacked proper credentials. When they began clearing land and burning stumps, the Seceders had assumed they'd found their place in the world, beyond the machinations of moneymen far to the east. They would grow their corn and wheat, raise their cows and pigs, hunt wild game and worry only about the weather and the threat of Indians, wolves and panthers. That was the plan.
And then the grave, frowning, humorless George Washington himself came riding in. Who could have imagined?
Washington saw himself as the victim, not as a feudal lord showing up to slap around some lowlifes. He felt abused. These people had taken advantage of him. He hadn't been around for the last decade because he'd been busy winning freedom for the nation. He insisted that, although he owned tens of thousands of acres in the West, he was not a land speculator or "monopolizer":
"Indeed, comparatively speaking I possess very little land on the Western Waters," he wrote to his attorney. "To attempt therefore to deprive me of the little I have, is, considering the circumstances under which I have been" -- fighting for liberty! -- "and the inability of attending to my own affairs, not only unjust, but pitifully mean."
The historian Archer Hulbert, in Washington and the West (1905), noted that the general had more than just the Millers Run tract on his mind. He feared that a loss of this one parcel would have a cascading effect, and that he might lose all of his tens of thousands of land in the remote backcountry. Being lenient "would certainly result in the establishment of a precedent that would be ruinous to him; and if Washington could not keep his land, how would the less influential and less powerful fare?" He would fight this battle on behalf of all absentee landlords.
This dispute was, in miniature, the conflict of the continent: Who owned the land? How was that ownership established? Would the laws of the East hold sway in the distant forests of the West? Was the game stacked against the common man, the pioneer, the tribesman? Would ordinary Americans own their own farms or pay rent to far-off aristocrats? Would order triumph, or chaos?
What kind of country was this going to be?
THIS WAS BOTH a business trip for Washington and a chance to scout the terrain of his young nation. In the closing days of the war, he had declared his intention to make a grand tour of the new United States, to take its measure from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi to the Deep South. It was, after all, the fourth-largest country in the world by size, yet much of it was scarcely mapped.
Pressed for time, constrained by his duties at Mount Vernon, Washington had dramatically scaled back his ambitions. The new plan: Ride up the valley of the Potomac, across the mountains, through forests so dark they had names like "the Shades of Death," to the frontier of the nation, and then keep going by canoe down the Ohio River for hundreds of miles, far beyond the outer reaches of what people of his society called civilization.
Washington loved the backcountry and had seen more of it than almost anyone of his generation. He'd slept many times under the stars. He'd spent years as a surveyor, tromping through remote valleys and across swollen rivers, learning the way of the woods, sharing the pipe with Indian chiefs, and imposing imaginary lines on the wilderness. He and Thomas Jefferson had corresponded at great length in recent months about the western country, but while Jefferson was content to remain at Monticello -- in his entire life he never traveled farther west than the Shenandoah Valley -- Washington always had the urge to see things directly, to rub that western soil between his thumb and fingers.
Washington also knew better than anyone how hard it was to get anywhere. The few roads that existed were muddy trenches choked with stumps. In the entire country there was not a single bridge over a major river. The Appalachian Mountains stood like walls between the East and the West. The country was spread out and disconnected to a potentially disastrous degree. Washington feared that the West -- the rapidly settling Ohio country -- would become a breakaway republic.
But he thought there was a solution: He could help create the Potomac Route to the West. The river could become the premier commercial artery for the young republic. It would bind the settlers in the Ohio country to the markets of the Atlantic Seaboard. But without improvements in the river and the creation of a good portage road over the mountains, the centrifugal forces of the Revolution might rip the country apart. There might even be a civil war -- West against East.
THE SECEDERS were part of a great migration of people into the West. For decades, European Americans and African Americans had been pooling on the eastern side of the Appalachians, constrained first by the Indians and the French, then by the British proclamation that the western waters would be reserved to the Indians. But the Revolution opened the floodgates. The powers of attraction of the West, which so many times had yanked Washington from the comforts of his Mount Vernon estate, had an even more powerful effect on landless people.
There was a presumption underlying this westward movement, a belief that the continental interior was in some fundamental way unoccupied, that although the Indians had lived there for millennia and knew every trail and stream, every spring and salt lick, and had built villages and raised crops and interred their dead in ceremonial mounds, they still did not own these ancestral lands. The native Americans didn't have any use for the concept of private property and found bizarre the European belief in imaginary lines that enclosed the natural world. So it was all up for grabs.
The Scotch-Irish, Germans and French were in the vanguard of the western assault, along with Finns and Swedes. In addition to families, there were many lone wolves, usually young men fleeing the backbreaking labor of the indigo and rice fields of the Deep South or recently released from debtors' prison. For many Americans, the dangers and deprivations of the West, the terror of Indian raids, the shortage of staples and ordinary comforts, were still a step up in life.
Voyagers to the West had to supply all their own needs as they migrated. For food they would hunt deer, bear, wild turkey and perhaps the occasional squirrel, raccoon or groundhog. At the end of their journey through the forest would be nothing as coherent as a village or town, just a patch of woods along a river or stream. Many a family made a clearing in the forest and, using nothing but an axe, built a cabin, complete with wooden hinges, wooden pins, wooden chinking (held in place by clay or mud), even a wooden chimney. Packed clay served well enough for a floor.
Peace, as a rule, did not follow the settlers as they infiltrated the domain of the Indian. When the frontiersmen weren't killing Indians, they were inventing ways of maiming one another. Eye-gouging became something of a sport, and the countryside had an unusually large number of one-eyed men. The historian Leland Baldwin reported that a "fair fight" meant the use of fists and nothing more, but the "rough and tumble" was the more common form of frontier combat, one in which "the endeavor of each man was to maim and disfigure the other by gouging out his eyes, biting off his lips, nose, or ears, or kicking him in the groin." These people did not follow Washington's maxims for gentlemanly behavior.
Whiskey cost three cents a glass. Wagoneers would dance to a fiddler, drink all night and never repair to their room, since they had no room, only a claim to a few square feet on the barroom floor. They smoked a crude cigar that emitted a mephitic stench and cost four for a penny. That such twists of tobacco were smoked by drivers of Conestoga wagons gave the cigars their enduring name: stogies.
When George Washington moved among frontier folk, he didn't mix. He passed over these people like a dark nimbus cloud. To be George Washington required an adherence to certain principles, behaviors and beliefs that could properly be described as elitist, and that elitism wasn't superficial, it came from the marrow. Whatever he found common in himself he tried to purge. He once referred to ordinary farmers as "the grazing multitude." Apparently, he did not subscribe to the Jeffersonian dictum that yeoman farmers were God's chosen people.
And now the general had to meet face to face with these squatters. In his diary, one can sense a steady reddening of Washington's visage. They "came here to set forth their pretensions to it; & enquire into my right," he wrote. They attempted to "discover all the flaws they could in my Deed."
WASHINGTON'S TESTY ENCOUNTER with the squatters destroyed his western momentum. He wanted to go home. The Grand Tour of America had already been downsized into a mere business trip to his western properties, and now even that was turning into a bust.
He'd been thinking of turning back even before he'd run into the Seceders. He had been told that the Indians were in arms, and had recently killed a number of white settlers who had encroached on Indian lands north of the Ohio. Washington didn't want to push his luck. Discretion is different from cowardice. Later he wrote in a letter that it was "better to return, than to make a bad matter worse by hazardous abuse from the Savages of the Country." Thomas Freeman, his land agent, subsequently informed him that the Indians knew Washington was headed to his western lands, and they were preparing to greet him with an ambush. "The Indians by what means I can't say had Intelligence of your Journey and Laid wait for you," Freeman informed the general.
George Washington did not want to go to the West if the Indians were in arms. He rode south again, back toward Gilbert Simpson's, and along the way received assurances from some of the local gentry that they would hunt up proof of his ownership of the Millers Run land. The next day, he rode south to Beeson's Town (now Uniontown, Pa.), where he found himself a good lawyer. In fact, he found a great one: Thomas Smith, a Scotsman who had emigrated to America and had become one of the leading land lawyers in the state, a kind of traveling salesman of legal services. In a single year, by Smith's calculation, he'd ridden 4,000 miles on horseback, all over the craggy Pennsylvania terrain. He had seen a lot of different characters in his day, and when George Washington came calling, Smith had to use all his legal and psychological skill to guide the case toward a positive outcome.
Washington was almost too eager to sue. Had it not violated his maxims on personal deportment, he would have been literally hopping mad. But Smith quickly detected the lack of documentation behind Washington's claim. This would not be an easy case.
The general told Smith he would return to western Pennsylvania to testify against the squatters. But he knew it would be no minor matter to make yet another trip over the mountains. Events might easily detain him elsewhere. This was only the second time since 1758 that he had managed to venture to the West. He might never see this part of the world again.
In a couple of weeks, after a detour through a remote section of the backcountry, Washington reached Mount Vernon and resumed his life as a plantation owner and generator of grand ideas. He vigorously pursued his Potomac project and became president of the Patowmack Company, a venture designed to improve navigation in the river and turn it into a commercial artery. His Potomac scheme absorbed him, but he took time out to prosecute his case against the Seceders. They were still rooted on his land at Millers Run, still growing crops and raising livestock and acting as though they weren't the lowlife squatters that Washington knew them to be.
The lawsuit dragged on for two years. After Washington's western trek in 1784, he regularly corresponded with Smith. The general might have been a master of delegation in certain arenas of combat, but in this lawsuit he intended to lead the charge personally. Not even Cornwallis had faced such rage.
Smith wrote back with gentle words to cool the litigious ardor of his client. Any move that seemed designed to punish the squatters might backfire, Smith informed Washington. Juries in similar cases had sided with the defendants. To bring trespassing suits against the squatters "may produce a bad effect, in the minds of the Jury who are to try the Ejectments -- their modes of thinking may lead them to believe the Defendants rather unfortunate, then blamable, and that as these double actions will well nigh ruin most of them; will not the jury be willing to lay hold of every point however trifling which may make against your title or in favour of the Defendants."
Washington replied in the tone of a man recognizing that he had momentarily lost control of his passion (a maxim violation). He didn't intend, he said, for Smith to file additional suits for trespassing, but rather believed they might be pursued after the main ejectment cases had been settled. But now that he had heard about other cases that had not gone well, he wrote, he would leave such suits entirely to Smith's discretion.
"I never should have thought of this mode of punishment, had I not viewed the Defendants as willful and obstinate sinners -- persevering after timely & repeated admonition, in a design to injure me," Washington wrote, and then added, incredibly, "but I am not at all tenacious of this matter."
PENNSYLVANIA SUPREME COURT Justice Thomas McKean, riding circuit in the western part of the state, presided over the trial in Washington, Pa., in October 1786. Because the record of the trial is extremely sparse, it is impossible to know if anyone involved asked for a change of venue to a community that had not been named after the plaintiff.
A flamboyant Pittsburgher represented the Seceders: Hugh Henry Brackenridge, the leading literary figure west of the mountains, a title for which, admittedly, there were few rival claimants. Brackenridge started the first newspaper in the West, having contrived, with a partner, to haul a printing press over the Alleghenies. He also wrote plays, pamphlets and a novel titled Modern Chivalry. He would someday be a savvy advocate of restraint during the Whiskey Rebellion, which would incite the wrath of then-President Washington. But that was in the future: There was no such thing yet as a U.S. president. For now, Brackenridge was a local lawyer taking on a case against a retired war hero.
Washington said he wanted to travel to western Pennsylvania for the trial, but he pleaded illness. Possibly he couldn't stomach another encounter with the western rabble.
Smith, Washington's attorney, took the case to trial with great anxiety. He'd never been more agitated, he later told Washington. He was a successful man, elected to public offices, but to represent such a client was clearly the pinnacle of his career. It could not have been a palliative to his nerves to be reminded with each letter from Mount Vernon precisely how much the client cared about the suit. Failure was not an option.
The jury learned about the complex history of the land, the shifting jurisdictions, the missing paperwork, etc. Smith won an important ruling from the judge, who barred any evidence about improvements to the land. The trial began the afternoon of October 24, 1786, and lasted through the next day and until 11 in the morning of the 26th. There is no record of how long the jury deliberated, but Smith perceived that the jury wanted badly to give verdicts in favor of James Scott. "We had very strong prejudices artfully fomented to encounter," he told Washington. Yet even as Smith steeled himself for defeat, the jury came back with a verdict in favor of the general.
It is not entirely clear why a jury with natural sympathies for settlers sided with an absentee landlord, even one as famous as Washington. There were limited means in America for turning anyone into what would later be called a celebrity, and Washington himself hadn't appeared; the jury had to render a verdict in favor of someone far away and against James Scott, who was right there in the courtroom. Perhaps Smith, a lawyer of considerable talents, destined to be on the state Supreme Court, had managed to show beyond any doubt that the general had legitimate title to the land and had been unable to pay more attention to it because of his service to the country. Or perhaps the verdict was just another example of the Washington magic. Bullets couldn't hit him, and squatters couldn't defy him.
Smith persuaded Justice McKean to consolidate the other 12 cases, and that trial was quickly and efficiently concluded with yet another verdict in Washington's favor.
"You have now thirteen plantations -- some of them well improved," Smith informed the general, and then delicately raised the possibility that now would be a good time to back off and show these frontier families some mercy. "[They] are now reduced to Indigence; they have put in crops this season which are now in the ground they wish to be permitted to take the grain away. To give this hint may be Improper in me -- to say more would be presumptuous."
Smith advised Washington to employ an agent to take possession of the land immediately, because the squatters were likely to burn down all the houses and barns and even the fences. Washington turned to John Cannon, a major landowner, and asked him if he would handle the matter, ideally by demanding rent from the Seceders. Washington, softening a bit, indicated that he didn't want back rent from the past 12 years.
But the Seceders wanted nothing to do with Washington. They would not be his tenants. They would own their own land. The Mount Pleasant Township Warrantee Map, compiled from early plats, shows a kind of splatter effect from the explosive visit of Washington in 1784. Several of the Seceders obtained warrants for land adjacent to or near Washington's land. They pulled out their axes once again, hacked down trees, burned the stumps, broke the ground. For years, settlers had been pulling up stakes and moving toward deeper wilderness to start anew, and perhaps, as they scouted nearby land to settle, they could pretend they were another band of restless Americans. But just as surely a few of them thought of George Washington as they swung their axes at the oaks and pines and hemlocks of the Pennsylvania forest.
Joel Achenbach is a Post staff writer. This article is adapted from his new book, The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West (Simon & Schuster).
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