INTRODUCTION
THE diversified character of the subject matter in this book, dealing, as it does, with two sets of family names, makes anything like literary unity impossible. There were two grandfathers, one an Indian fighter and one an Indian sympathizer, who life histories are here written for the interest of their descendents. While not renowned in a national sense, for statesmanship or generalship, they certainly had, each of them, a share in shaping the history of the Great Northwest. One, with indomitable courage, pursued through campaign after campaign in Kentucky, Ohio and Illinois the aboriginal race that blocked the way of civilization; the other, by his careful judgment, saved the United States the wasting of both money and blood, and foresaw future conditions with unerring vision. [p.1]
In the preparation of this book, the Patterson and Johnston memoirs, as found in personal narrative and correspondence, have been supplemented and verified by wills and court records and by such historical and genealogical literature as the Libraries, both East and West, could furnish. The only absolutely reliable source of biographical material is personal narrative, and the Patterson family may be congratulated that it possesses in comparative completeness the actual story of each grandfather.
The material from which the four chapters relating to the Johnstons are compiled comes largely from a paper read by John Johnston in his old age before the Ohio Historical Society in Cincinnati, in which he relates the circumstances of his journey to America and of his public service; and from the recollections of his daughter, Julia Johnston Patterson, transcribed at her dictation shortly before her death, at the instance of her son, John Henry Patterson, for the benefit of his children. Colonel Johnston was a contributor to Cist’s Miscellany, published in Cincinnati in 1830, and his papers therein found are full of valuable records of his experience of early Ohio days. He contributed also to Howe’s History of Ohio, of deserved local renown. His communications to the War Department as found in the Ohio Archives have yielded much of interest relating to his attempts to solve the Indian problem in Ohio from 1818 to 1842.
The chapters relating to the Pattersons are from widely scattered memoranda. Col. Robert Patterson in 1816 wrote a sketch of his life for his son-in-law, Rev. Dr. James Welsh, who intended preserving in proper form the record of so remarkable a career. Had he done so, this book, it is needless to say, would have been a rich storehouse of experience. But Dr. Welsh moved to Indiana and the work stopped, leaving only fragments of narrative such as Patterson’s [p. 2] journey up the Ohio River when he was wounded by the Indians; his part in George Rogers Clark’s Illinois Campaign; the Dunmore War’ the Logan and Bowman Miami Campaigns, and the purchase and founding of Cincinnati.
No one now living knows what became of the original life sketch. Some ten years later, when Robert Patterson was confined to his home with the beginning of what was his last illness, he re-wrote the sketch in part. It is from portions of the first sketch copied in and old memorandum book owned by John Patterson of Shaker Village (a cousin who wished to add it to his own memories), and from copies made of the second sketch by Harriet Nisbet and Dr. Huggins, that the most intimate of these chapters are written. Culbertson Patterson, son of Shaker John Patterson, kept the old book and in the early forties Henry L. Brown borrowed and made copies, adding thereto the narrative of his mother, Catherine Patterson Brown. All of these papers are now in the possession of her grandson, Ashley Brown, and have been largely used in the compilation of this volume.
Pennsylvania Historical Notes, Western Annals and Biographical Sketches show how Robert Patterson served on the danger line for twenty-five years, with loaded rifle in ready reach night and day for instant service. The brothers John, Francis and William are found enrolled in the Pennsylvania and Virginia reserves for the entire period of the Revolution, William at the age of sixty participating in the battle of the Cowpens under Colonel Morgan; Francis aged sixty-two, and John, sixty-five, being in emergency camps.
Evidence of the services of the elder Pattersons and their sons in Colonial and Revolutionary times, was gathered by Robert Patterson on the advice of his friend and attorney, Henry Clay, and, with additional evidence, was filed by Mr. Clay in the War Office at Washington is support [p. 3] of Colonel Patterson’s appeal for a grant of land. Kenton, Boone and others made similar efforts for the recognition of their services and achievements. This influenced Congressional action in passing an enabling measure in April, 1806.
At the outbreak of the War of 1812 a pension was granted Colonel Patterson of three hundred dollars a year, but this having been allowed only from date of application, he at once filed a claim for arrears, involving a repetition of the tedious work of gathering evidence, as the original claim and papers had been destroyed by the British in the burning of Washington in 1814.
To secure additional evidence as to his services in the years 1770 to 1775, Colonel Patterson encouraged one of his sons, Robert L. or Jefferson, in 1824 or ’25, to visit among relatives in Virginia and Pennsylvania, calling also on such army associates as he might direct, to secure the desired testimony. Statements were gotten from Colonel Shepherd, who lived near Wheeling; Col. Joseph Tarance (Torrence or Lawrence), of near Connellstown, Pa., and from others in Bedford and Lancaster counties. The sworn statements of Gen. George Rogers Clark, Simon Kenton and others as to Robert Patterson’s services in the Dunmore expedition to the Pickaway Plains were sent to Mr. McClain in the fall of 1826 with certified copy of portions of young Patterson’s diary on the trip, and are now to be found among the old records at Washington.
Ashley Brown says: -
“Harriet Nisbet and Doctor Huggins agreed in understanding that it was in 1825 or ’26 that one of the Colonel’s sons, presumably Jefferson, made the horseback trip for evidence in support of the pension claim filed by Senator McClain in 1828, and that journey ‘covered several months, crossing through Zanesville to Wheeling, up the Ohio River to Pittsburg, thence to Ligonier and Bedford, spending much time around his grandfather Patterson’s old home farm at head of the Big Cove, fifteen or twenty miles southeast of Bedford. Carrying letters from Captain [p. 4] Nisbet he called upon General William Young, one and a half miles out of Chambersburg, Mrs. Young and Captain Nisbet being first cousins. He met many of his mother’s relatives in Franklin County, Pa., then crossing Maryland, forded the Potomac into Virginia to visit among descendants of his grand-uncle, William Patterson.’
“Returning via Lancaster County, he visited the Patterson relatives on ‘Sweet Arrow’ farm. The information gathered on this trip the Colonel transmitted to his daughter, Catherine Patterson Brown, and his cousin, John (Shaker) Patterson, and it forms the basis of the early story of the Pattersons.
“In preparing this application for arrears and the affidavits necessary, the Colonel was assisted by his son-in-law, Rev. James Welsh, who, beginning in 1816, did the necessary corresponding until his removal from Dayton. He collected and compiled the facts of early Patterson history, beginning with preparations for leaving Ireland, the landing of John and Robert at or near New London, Connecticut, slow journey South, final settlement in Pennsylvania, then the scattering of the family as the boys and girls grew up.
“Many of these valuable papers have been destroyed, but those that remained after the death of Colonel Patterson and of James Welsh came into the possession of Catherine Patterson Brown, who added to them by recording many reminiscences which she had heard her father narrate, and also her own recollection of the home in Lexington, the moving to Dayton in 1804, and the family life at Rubicon Farm.”
Mrs. Julia J. Patterson remembered that the pension was allowed, and the treasury draft for something over eighteen hundred dollars was received by the executors of Colonel Patterson’s will and distributed among the heirs.
The late Dr. R. D. Huggins, of West Alexandria, into whose hands as executor under the will of Dr. Robert Patterson Nisbet, and who also possessed the Patterson papers left by William Nisbet, had been reared in the Nisbet family, practiced medicine with Dr. Nisbet, and was very familiar with Patterson history. He also contributes interesting details.
William Nisbet, above referred to, was a boy friend and [p. 5] neighbor of Robert Patterson in Pennsylvania, the executor of his will and father of Elizabeth Patterson’s husband. His associations with the Patterson family reached back to the years at Sweet Arrow Farm in Lancaster County and at the Bedford Spring home under Cove Mountain. He told of Robert’s boyhood and marriage and the trip West; his son Captain Nisbet wrote the story down, and it was preserved by Harriet Nisbet. These also are among the Henry L. Brown papers.
Copies of many papers which were destroyed by fire in Washington were lent by the late Jefferson Patterson to Lyman C. Draper of Madison, and are preserved in the Wisconsin Historical Society Library and have been carefully examined. Among them the memoranda left by Jefferson Patterson, of his father’s statement of the family names and number of children in the different branches, being compared with records of the Pattersons in County Donegal, Ireland, help to fix the descent from families on the other side.
The Court House records at Lexington, Kentucky, yielded much information in regard to the land which Robert Patterson pre-empted, his father’s will, and various straightenings-out of family relationships.
Litigation was the bread of life to those early settlers, and the records and old letters are full of it. Robert Patterson sometimes had six lawsuits on his hands at once, lasting from two to twenty years. The cases were almost without exception disputes about land boundaries. Upon a correct title to his land depended all the fortune a settler had, and his prospects for his children. A row of blazed trees marked the first claim, and if the claimant’s blazed trees ran across the defendant’s blazed trees, that meant a lawsuit. The Court Houses of every State in the Middle West contain volumes of the proceedings in equity [p. 6] of the early courts, and all on the all-important, ever-debatable land question.
It was from depositions made by Robert Patterson that facts were learned of the deponent’s life in Kentucky from 1775 to 1804, such as his pre-emption of land for himself and his father, the date of the removal of his father and step-mother and their younger children to the frontier, and the death of his father in 1801. The lawsuit between Francis Patterson and John Bradford, “the Benjamin Franklin of the West,” as he is called in the histories, and the depositions are recorded in the old Lexington Court House.
The best sources of original information to the historian are old family letters. As they are the most valuable, so they are the most difficult to deal with, and require large patience and research. The Pattersons were wise in their painstaking preservation of family correspondence. Nine bulky scrap-books were furnished to the writer to use as seemed best in the compilation of this history. It seemed a gold mine at first sight; but investigation was discouraging. In the first place, everything had been kept; not only old letters, but party invitations, wedding cards, bills of lading, recipes for eye water, notices of stray cows, receipts for pew rent, newspaper clippings that had little to do with the Pattersons above ground or below, and directions how to keep moths out of woolens. These were fastened in by pins that clung fast to the pages with rust forty years old.
Some of the old letters would make a purist weep. A legislative friend writes to Robert Patterson from Virginia that “The Assembly are still setting.” Other correspondents write of “shuggar trees,” “Divine grase” and a “cegg of butter.” They inclined to spell general and gentleman with a “j” and journey with a “g.” Proper names suffered the same uncertainty. Daniel Boone spelled his name [p. 7] as often without as with the final “e.” Kentucky school boys who are now old men know that there used to be a tree near Jonesboro which bore the inscription cut with a jack-knife –“D. Boon cilled bar here.” The name of the state was Kantucke, Kaintucke, Cantucky or Caintukky, indifferently. “Battertart” turns out to be Boutetourte and “Dady” was Governor Shelby’s way of alluding to his father. Orthography was an independent process, owing no allegiance to any school or method. The best one could say of the pioneers in this respect was that they shot straighter than they spelled, which, after all, was the fundamental necessity in those days.
The pioneers made their own ink. The wonder is that it yields up anything after one hundred and twenty-five years. Paper was scarce and high priced. A sheet had to hold all it could and leave place for the sealing wax to tear its way through the third page. We search up and down these cramped and closely written pages to find some details of every-day life that would serve to rehabilitate for their descendants the lives of these forefathers and foremothers. We begin at the top left-hand corner and find “Respected Sir” squeezed in a space an inch long. The signature tells us that this is a brother writing to a brother; a son to a father. Surely we shall find here some family affairs; some incidents in these lives that to us are surrounded by a sort of halo. We dig out word by word all down the first page,--and the second,--and the third, to find, --what? Why, their views on Eternal Punishment or the Trinity. The state of Infant Damnation occupies a large part of many of these early letters. Perhaps after three pages of close-writ theological dialectics we may find interpolated as an afterthought, “On Sunday morning last my dear Rebecca (or Catherine or Margaret, as the case might have been) presented me with a fine son.” [p. 8] This does not prove that these men were hard hearted or indifferent to household affection. On the contrary, they were devoted to their wives and babies; but whether it was the fact that custom forbade much expression of emotion, or that the arrival of another son in a Patterson family was of such frequent occurrence, it did certainly seem that what was happening to the new-comer on earth was of less moment than his destiny in the great Beyond.
No apology seems necessary for introducing so largely into this book the narratives word for word as they flowed from the quill pens of the old people who wrote them. If the writers sometimes rambled or told things twice, we still assume that their homely diction gives a dignity to the story which the language of a mere historian could never do. And it must be remembered that the audience on the other side of the foot-lights is not the general reading public (literary critics with sharpened pencils on the front row), but an audience of loving grandchildren unto the fourth and fifth generation, to whom every personal touch is precious,--the ego of the buried yet living dead.
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The published sources of information in regard to the Patterson and Johnston families were found in the following: Pioneer Biography, McBride; Life Among the Indians, J. B. Finley; American Archives; History of the Presbyterian Church in Kentucky, Davidson; The Filson Society Publications; The Choir Invisible, James Lane Allen; Bradford’s Notes on Kentucky; American Ancestry; Archaeologia Americana; Historical Sketch of the Shawanee Indians, Eggleston; Life and Times of Lewis Cass; Reminiscences of Bishop Philander Chase; Magazine of American History; Collins’ History of Kentucky; Ranck’s History of Lexington, Kentucky; American Pioneers, Vol. II; Cincin- [p. 9] nati, by Charles Cist; Cist’s Miscellany; Land Owners of Great Britain; New Statistical Account of Scotland; Genealogical Account of the Family of Johnstons; Historical Families of Dumfriesshire and the Border Wars; Pennsylvania Magazine; Cincinnati’s Beginning; Romance of Western History; Cyclopedia of American Biography; Magazine of Western History; Munsell’s Genealogical Record; Roosevelt’s Winning of the West; Lyman C. Draper’s Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society Library; Virginia State Papers; Lexington, Ky., Court Records.
Thanks are due to Col. R. T. Durrett of Louisville, Ky., for the generous use of his library; to A. A. Thomas, Esq., of Dayton; to Miss Electra C. Doren, of the Dayton Public Library; to Mr. W. H. Polk, of Lexington, Ky.; to Mr. G. M. Whicher, of New York, and to Mr. Frederic K. Conover, of Madison, Wis., for valuable advice and assistance in the preparation of the book.
Dayton, Ohio, January, 1902. C. R. C.
