Note 34 — Chapter XI

Michaux has here given a good account of the unfortunate French colony founded on the banks of the Ohio, nearly opposite the mouth of the Great Kanawha. The Scioto Company was an offshoot of the Ohio Company formed by Manasseh Cutler and his associates. In May, 1788, the Scioto Company employed Joel Barlow, “the patriot poet of the Revolution,” to go to Paris and sell lands for them. The buyers were, as Michaux remarks, unsuited to pioneer life; the company overcharged them, and then ensued litigation in which the settlers lost the titles to their lands. The log-houses mentioned by Michaux were built for the settlers on their arrival in October, 1790, but the severity of the climate, Indian hostilities, and frontier hardships, decimated their ranks. The present town has been built up by the energy of American and German settlers, and in 1893 but three descendants of the French settlers lived there. For further accounts, see Winsor, Westward Movement (Boston, 1897), pp. 402-407, 498; “Centennial of Gallipolis,” in Ohio Archæological and Historical Society Publications, iii; and Thwaites, On the Storied Ohio.—​Ed.