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 CHAPTER V

N a morning of one of those summer days which come as a surprise in March, I left the Ohio and Little Kanawha railway train at the little station of Roxbury, Ohio, and crossed the broad Muskingum into the southern extremity of the valley, which, because of its splendid dimensions, was named "Big Bottom" by the earliest pioneers.

Here, on the second "rise" from the river, upon what is now the Obadiah Brokaw farm, one of the colonies of the Ohio Company settled late in the black year 1791. I came now to decide for myself a question as to the location of the historic "Big Bottom Blockhouse," where the terrible massacre of January 2, 1791, opened the Indian war which ravaged the West until 1795.

I found Mr. Brokaw buried in a great