Chapter 1: Kingdom of Gold

Gold is the symbol of adventure — the unresting urge that stirs men’s souls. Francois de Orlenna, who crossed the South American continent from ocean to ocean in 1540, wrote: “Having eaten our boots and saddles, boiled with a few wild herbs, we set out to reach the Kingdom of Gold.” The name Orlenna should be set down as a synonym for optimist. Our gratitude must forever enshrine heroes who ignore hardship and “set out for the Kingdom of Gold.”

In 1679, Rene Robert Cavalier Sieur de la Salle passed by a vast area of Great Lakes land. He considered it French territory. He went down the Mississippi, probably exploring part of the Ohio river on his way.

The fertile land, afterward known as the Western Reserve, which failed to halt La Salle, became the goal of others as brave but less erratic than the harsh French explorer, who met death at the hands of his own embittered followers. La Salle never reigned in his Golden Kingdom.

The strip of land, now the site of Cleveland and its environs, along the shore of Lake Erie at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, was a part of the section first held by the French, who laid lead plates along the Ohio River to mark the southern limits of their claim. It was secured for England by British arms and diplomacy in 1763.

The “merry monarch,” Charles II, followed the policy of granting tracts of land to companies for development. Thus, Connecticut colony received a marvelously generous grant extending westward to the Pacific. The royal ignorance of geography, being as great as the country was extensive, caused no end of controversy.

The Revolutionary War, winning America for the colonists on the ideal of equality of men and nations, brought the grants to an issue among the states. Washington and Jefferson saw in them a peril to the new nation dedicated to liberty and justice.

The claims of Connecticut were presented with such finesse and skill that the state obtained a tract of land four times the size of Rhode Island, consisting of three million acres. The enthusiasts were intent on forming a state and it New Connecticut. However, the name Western Reserve persisted.

This territory in which Cleveland is located was secured by the colonial capitalists of the Connecticut Land Company for thirty cents an acre. The fact that when promoters surveyed the land they found it two hundred thousand acres short has a bit of poetic justice about it. This shortage brought the price of the land actually to forty cents an acre. The purchase price of all the Western Reserve was less than the cost of a single great hostelry and its location on Euclid Avenue today.

The Connecticut Land Company determined, in accordance with its charter, to divide “the Promised Land” into small lots. In May, 1796, Moses Cleaveland, a Yale man, was selected as their agent and general field superintendent. And this appointment initiated a movement to the Western Reserve, which is of deep interest to us, intensified by the circumstance that it became in truth the “land of our fathers.”

A score of years prior to the advent of Moses Cleaveland, one of those intrepid doers-of-good, a Moravian missionary, John Heckewelder, saw in the site of the city of Cleveland great commercial possibilities. Heckewelder, being a great geographer, based his conclusions on the happy meeting of river and lake.

Twenty years later, standing on the same brown earth, Moses Cleaveland visualized exactly what John Heckewelder had dreamed — that ships would point out of the Cuyahoga into, Erie, as surely as the fish go up stream in the glad springtime.

Moses Cleaveland, soldier, scholar, surveyor and sage, left Connecticut with a entourage of fifty men. There were in the party civil engineers, an astronomer, a mathematician, a commissary and helpers — lads with joy bubbling in their hearts and romance written in their bronzed faces.

They were a land crew who believed in the ancient saying, “A passage perilous maketh a port pleasant.”

And they did have a perilous journey, reaching Buffalo in June, two months after Cleaveland’s commission was given to him. Here Red Jacket and Joseph Brant demanded that they halt and sit council to consider Indian rights and wrongs — principally the later. Moses Cleaveland satisfied the rights and mollified the wrongs with a gift of five hundred dollars, tow beef cattle, and a copious supply of whiskey. Of the two principal parties to this transaction, one had a city named for him and the other a tavern — The Red Jacket Inn at Buffalo, long since demolished.

The Indians agreed at the council never under any provocation to disturb the white settlers in the Western Reserve. The pipe-of-peace proved mightier than the blunderbuss, for the agreement was never violated.

The surveying expedition celebrated Independence Day, July 4 1796, at Conneaut, Ohio. The future state of New Connecticut was toasted in oratory such as was heard under Chaldean skies. Moses Cleaveland was gratified at the soldierly discipline of his boys. He held council with Chief Cato of the Massasauga Indians and presents were exchanged.

Sailing westward from Conneaut, Cleaveland touched at the mouth of a minor stream. It goes on forever, reminding us of the surveyor’s disappointment, as Chagrin River.

Anxiously skirting the shore, fresh with summer foliage, Cleaveland watched for the mouth of the Cuyahoga. The boat slipped into the river on the morning of July 22, 1796. A landing was made under the east bluff of the river — a short distance north of the present Superior viaduct.

Cleaveland, worn by travel and wearied to depression, was not certain that this would be the future capital site. He returned to Conneaut to consult the men whom he had left behind. At Conneaut he sat himself before a table with a quill, plenty of ink and blotting sand and unburdened himself to the Connecticut Land Company. He proclaimed the land excellent, the water clear, the clay banks high, the top of the land level and covered with chestnut, oak, walnut, ash and sugar maple, and but few hemlocks. The shore west of the Cuyahoga, he reported to be a steep bank ten miles long.

The master surveyor then expressed himself tersely regarding his woes. He wrote: “Those who are meanly envying the compensation and sitting at their ease, and see their prosperity increasing at the increasing at the loss of others, I wish might experience the hardships for one month; if not satisfied, their grumbling would give me no pain. It is impossible to determine upon a place for the capital.” He demanded more time for examination of the land and water-ways. He reported his men in good health and spirits though without “sauce or vegetables.”

Moses Cleaveland then went back to the mouth of the Cuyahoga and reconsidered his judgment. He determined that, after all, he knew no better site for the capital of the new state.

He made a town plan, a central square from which the streets extended. He put his official O.K. on the map and the town was called Cleaveland. Years later, a news writer left out the “a” and the revised spelling was accepted.

Moses Cleaveland was just three months on the Western Reserve. He just left under a fire of criticism for expending fourteen thousand dollars without completing the work. The Company sent a preacher, Reverend Seth Hart, to finish the survey. It is said that the dominie buried a man and married a couple, but made no changes in the plans of the founder of the city of Cleveland.

Moses Cleaveland did not re-visit the city of his founding. He made for it a very modest prediction when he said, “The child is now born that may live to see the place as large as Old Windham.” Old Windham, Connecticut, now has a citizenry of fifteen thousand people. New England breezes blow about the granite monuments reverently erected over Cleaveland’s grave in Canterbury, Connecticut, in 1906, one hundred years after his death, by the people of Cleveland.

Cleveland was deliberately planned and built. It was not the growth of a chance acorn the miscellaneous collection of huts about a fort or a trading post, where settlers tarried, lacking the courage to go on.

No other city in the New World stands as laid out by its founder and bearing his name.

From this point, Cleveland’s golden story is a chronicle of hearts that hoped, minds that planned and hands that toiled to make the city of Moses Cleaveland’s founding “great and glorious.”