Page:History of Richland County, Ohio.djvu/231

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��HISTORY OF RICHLA:N^D COUNTY.

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��all the families in the neighborhood, and suc- ceeded in securing all in the fort except one boy, who was killed at the instant he reached the gate, which was thrown open for his in- gress.

"After the beleaguered fort was relieved by the retirement of the Indians, he sought his father's house; but was so completely metamorphosed by his Indian costume that his parents could not, for a considerable length of time, recognize him. At length his mother, recalling some peculiar spots near the pupils of his eyes, gave a scrutinizing look, and at once identified her son. She sprang forward to embrace him, and would have fainted in his arms, but he repulsed her, exclaiming that his person, as was the case with all the Indians, was covered with vermin. He retired from the house, committed his In- dian clothes to the fire he had made, purified his body as best he could, and then clothed himself in garments furnished by his father.

" On the very day of his arrival in Orange Township, in 1815, he met with Tom Lyons, a chief and one of his original captors, and a party of Indians by whom he was recognized. The Indians, who had not suspected that he had deserted, but who believed that he had been drowned in the river, evinced much "joy at the discovery of their lost ^'brother," and ever afterward offered numerous tokens of their friendship."

Following Crawford's campaign, and the cap- tivity of Mr. Fast, the next member of the white race was the renegade Thomas Glreen, who came to the site of Greentown in 1783, and estab- lished that village. He was a Tory from the bloody Wyoming Valley. There he had been associated with the cruel Mohawks in the wan- ton murder of his countrymen, and, to escape

��their vengeance, fled with Billy Montour, Gello- wa}', Armstrong, Thomas Lyons and others, to the wilds of Ohio, and founded a town among the Delawares, which, in honor of this renegade, they called Greentown. The village became well known in Northern Ohio annals, and is fully noticed elsewhere.

The rapid encroachment of the white race on the domain of the red men, and the arrogant manner of many of the borderers, coupled with British gold, stirred up the tribes of Ohio to an endeavor to exterminate the on-coming flood of emigrants. The savages persisted in their bar- barous mode of warfare, and the expeditions of Harmar. St. Clair and Wayne were the result. The former two proved disastrous to the whites, and ended in the route and almost total ruin of the armies. Their defeat caused wide-spread alarm, and effectually checked emigration to all parts of the territory. Washington selected the best man at his command, Anthony Wayne (" Mad Anthony '), and sent him to command the Western army, and subdue the savages. His campaign ended in 1794, and the peace of Green- ville, in 1795, secured comparative freedom, on all the frontiers.

Emigration began again to pour in. The survey of the public lands, practically stopped, like all o'ther advances of the whites, was now resumed, and gradually extended northwesterly. The surveyors were kept in advance of the set- tlements wherever it could be done, and land offices established for the sale of land. At the date of the survey here, Richland had not a single pioneer in its limits. Indeed, no white men, save hunters, are known to have been o-^'er her hills and vales between the date of the cam- paign of Crawford and the beginning of the survey.

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