Measuring America by Andro Linklater

Author:Andro Linklater [Linklater, Andro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2002-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

The End of Rufus

THE PITTSBURGH GAZETTE, always a reliable guide to the economic health of the Ohio valley, reported in October 1795 that ‘The emigration to this country this fall surpasses that of any other season – and we are informed that the banks of the Monongahela are lined with people intending for the settlement on the Ohio, and Kentucky. As an instance of the increasing prosperity of this part of the state, land that two or three years ago was sold for ten shillings [$2.50] per acre, will now bring upwards of three pounds [$15].’

To investors in the Ohio Company who had bought at about twelve cents an acre in 1785, the surge of settlers pushing up land values at last brought healthy profits. For Rufus Putnam in particular it represented a triumph of planning and persistence, and in November 1796 he was rewarded by being appointed Surveyor-General of the United States, with responsibility for surveying the rest of the Northwestern Territory.

In the aftermath of the Greenville Treaty, the great fort at Marietta was torn down and its red timbers used to construct more elegant, peaceful dwellings, the finest of them housing Rufus and Persis and their children. Looking round their home today, there is nothing incongruous between the belongings they had brought from Massachusetts – the fine bow-fronted walnut desk, the splendid four-poster bed, the deep-toned cello – and the handsome building with its dark, gleaming floors and its smooth, dazzlingly white plaster walls. Civilisation had leaped across the Ohio.

Rufus was now in his late fifties, and seemingly as energetic as ever – after the treaty he personally undertook the survey of the reserves which the Moravian missionaries had persuaded the government to set aside for them and their converts among the American Indians. As the plain, two-roomed land office built at the back of his house indicates, he remained brusque and straightforward in his attitude to the business of surveying. He contracted with Israel Ludlow to run the line marking the boundary specified by the Greenville Treaty between the Western Confederacy and the American settlers. It zigzagged south-westwards from the mouth of the Cuyahoga on Lake Erie to the mouth of the Kentucky river on the Ohio. Ludlow, as might have been expected, managed to bend the line by over five hundred yards. Reporting this to Putnam, he expressed the hope that the Indians would not notice, and since both agreed that it was a risk worth taking, the mistake remained uncorrected.

In surveying terminology, the crook in Ludlow’s line was known as a jog, as though his elbow had been nudged while drawing it on the paper. The plats produced by the teams of surveyors working for Putnam were filled with jogs. He had divided the huge area north-west of the river Ohio – effectively central and western Ohio – into districts and assigned them to different survey teams, but the east – west parallels in one district rarely matched up with those of its neighbours. The north – south meridians added to Putnam’s difficulties.

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