At last, late in May, he started in a crowded flat-boat down the Ohio, and was enchanted with the wild and beautiful scenery.  He was equally pleased with the settlement at the mouth of the Muskingum; and he was speedily on good terms with the officers of the fort, who dined and wined him to his heart’s content.  There were rumors of savage warfare from below; but around Marietta the Indians were friendly.  May and his people set to work to clear land and put up buildings; and they lived sumptuously, for game swarmed.  The hunters supplied them with quantities of deer and wild turkeys, and occasionally elk and buffalo were also killed; while quantities of fish could be caught without effort, and the gardens and fields yielded plenty of vegetables.  On July 4th the members of the Ohio Company entertained the officers from Fort Harmar, and the ladies of the garrison, at an abundant dinner, and drank thirteen toasts,—­to the United States, to Congress, to Washington, to the King of France, to the new Constitution, to the Society of the Cincinnati, and various others.

Colonel May built him a fine “mansion house,” thirty-six feet by eighteen, and fifteen feet high, with a good cellar underneath, and in the windows panes of glass he had brought all the way from Boston.  He continued to enjoy the life in all its phases, from hunting in the woods to watching the sun rise, and making friends with the robins, which, in the wilderness, always followed the settlements.  In August he went up the river, without adventure, and returned to his home. [Footnote:  Journal and Letters of Colonel John May; one of the many valuable historical publications of Robert Clarke & Co., of Cincinnati.  VOL III—­18]

    Contrasts with Travels of Early Explorers.

Such a trip as either of these was a mere holiday picnic.  It offers as striking a contrast as well could be offered to the wild and lonely journeyings of the stark wilderness-hunters and Indian fighters, who first went west of the mountains.  General Rufus Putnam and his associates did a deed the consequences of which were of vital importance.  They showed that they possessed the highest attributes of good citizenship—­resolution and sagacity, stern morality, and the capacity to govern others as well as themselves.  But they performed no pioneer feat of any note as such, and they were not called upon to display a tithe of the reckless daring and iron endurance of hardship which characterized the conquerors of the Illinois and the founders of Kentucky and Tennessee.  This is in no sense a reflection upon them.  They did not need to give proof of a courage they had shown time and again in bloody battles against the best troops of Europe.  In this particular enterprise, in which they showed so many admirable qualities, they had little chance to show the quality of adventurous bravery.  They drifted comfortably down stream, from the log fort whence they started, past many settlers’ houses, until they came to the post of a small Federal garrison, where they built their town.  Such a trip is not to be mentioned in the same breath with the long wanderings of Clark and Boone and Robertson, when they went forth unassisted to subdue the savage and make tame the shaggy wilderness.