Settler's
Landing

The Land Before the Survey

The story of Settler's Landing begins not on the east bank of the Cuyahoga but in the aftermath of the American Revolution, in the treaty rooms and legislative halls of a new nation trying to retire its war debts by selling off the continent. In 1786, Connecticut ceded its western land claims to the federal government (all of them, that is, except a narrow strip of northeastern Ohio stretching 120 miles west from the Pennsylvania border). This was the Connecticut Western Reserve, a remnant title that gave Connecticut both a legal claim to roughly 3.3 million acres of Ohio territory and a practical problem: the land had to be surveyed and sold before it could generate the revenue the state needed for its school fund.

The urgency sharpened in 1795, when the Treaty of Greenville extinguished Native American land claims east of the Cuyahoga River. For the first time, the lands of the eastern Reserve were legally, if not yet practically, open to survey and settlement. The Connecticut state government moved quickly. On September 2, 1795, approximately one month after the Treaty of Greenville was signed on August 3, 1795, the state sold the full three million acres east of the Cuyahoga to a syndicate of investors for $1.2 million. All proceeds were earmarked for the Connecticut school fund. The purchasers organized themselves as the Connecticut Land Company, with 57 individuals representing 35 investor groups, each holding shares proportional to their investment.

Now the company needed someone to go there. The Reserve was wilderness: dense mixed hardwood forest, river valleys thick with swamp, a coastline on Lake Erie largely unknown to cartographers, and a population of Native peoples who had not been consulted on any of the treaties that had stripped them of their land. The company needed a man of standing, legal authority, military bearing, and physical endurance: someone who could negotiate with Indigenous peoples, command a large work party under frontier conditions, and identify and establish the most commercially valuable settlement site in the purchase. They found him in one of their own directors.

3 Million Acres at 40 Cents Each

The Connecticut Land Company was, at its core, a real estate speculation venture organized by some of the wealthiest and most connected men in Connecticut. The 57 individual investors included merchants, lawyers, politicians, and former military officers who saw in the Western Reserve the same opportunity that had made fortunes in the Genesee Country and other frontier land purchases: buy raw land cheaply, subdivide it, and sell it to settlers at a profit. The purchase price of $1.2 million for three million acres (roughly 40 cents per acre) seemed reasonable for undeveloped wilderness accessible only by a difficult overland route or the hazardous passage of Lake Erie.

The company's Board of Directors included Moses Cleaveland, Oliver Phelps (the largest single subscriber and chief manager), Henry Champion, Samuel Johnson, Ephraim Kirby, Samuel Mather, and Roger Newberry. Cleaveland himself had invested $32,600, a substantial personal stake that gave him both a financial interest in the survey's success and a personal motivation to see the land platted quickly and attractively. He was, as the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History records, one of 36 founders of the company and one of 7 directors. When the time came to organize the first survey expedition, Cleaveland was the natural choice to lead it.

The survey had to proceed under the rules of the Land Ordinance of 1785, which required that land be surveyed before it could be sold. The company opted to divide their purchase into five-mile-square surveying townships rather than the standard six-mile townships used in the federal survey system. This smaller dimension, closer to the New England town model the investors knew, would create a grid of roughly 120 townships across the Reserve, each to be further subdivided into lots for individual sale.

The Man Who Founded It and Never Returned

Moses Cleaveland was born on January 29, 1754, in Canterbury, Connecticut, in the heart of Windham County, a detail whose irony would become apparent only after the founding. He was a Yale-educated lawyer, a veteran of the Revolutionary War who had risen from ensign to captain in the Continental Army, and a sitting member of the Connecticut General Assembly. In 1779 he had been promoted to command a company of "sappers and miners," combat engineers responsible for the construction and assault of fortifications, whose work required exactly the kind of surveying knowledge and spatial reasoning that would serve him on the Reserve.

Physically, Cleaveland cut an imposing figure. Contemporary accounts describe him as burly and powerfully built, with a swarthy complexion that one period source notes may have caused some Native peoples he encountered to mistake him for one of their own, a misapprehension that, whatever its accuracy, suggests a man whose presence commanded attention across cultural lines. He had practiced law in Canterbury for approximately 15 years before the Reserve expedition (having resigned his military commission in 1781), accumulating the social connections and professional standing that made him the company's logical choice. In 1796, he was also commissioned brigadier general of the Connecticut militia, the rank by which history most often addresses him.

He was 42 years old when he set out for the Ohio frontier. He would spend a single season in New Connecticut, less than five months total, and never return.

Old Windham, Connecticut, had a population of roughly 2,700 in 1790. Cleaveland's prediction, offered as modest ambition, proved to be one of the most profound understatements in American urban history. The city that bears his name (without the "a") would by 1920 reach 796,000 residents, making it the fifth-largest city in the United States. He died in Canterbury on November 16, 1806, ten years after his one and only visit to the town he founded, having never seen it grow beyond a handful of cabins.

Fifty People Into the Wilderness

The expedition that departed Schenectady, New York, in June 1796 was an unusually large and diverse company for a frontier survey. Moses Cleaveland led a party of roughly 50 persons (the exact count varied as men were hired and discharged along the route), which included specialists, laborers, settlers, and two women who accompanied their husbands into the wilderness.

Each of the six surveyors was supported by a crew of specialized laborers. Axmen cleared the sight lines through dense forest. Chainmen carried and managed the Gunter's chain, a 66-foot measuring instrument of 100 links, dragging it through brush, over ridges, and across swamp. Rodmen planted the graduated measuring rods at each station point, holding them plumb against terrain that made this nearly impossible. Compassmen established and maintained the magnetic bearings that oriented each survey line to the cardinal grid.

Among the party was Joseph Hodge, identified in later accounts as "Black Joe," who served as guide, navigator, and interpreter. As historian Russell H. Davis noted in his study of Black Clevelanders, Hodge "had been an important contributor to Moses Cleveland's initial founding of the future metropolis in 1796." His knowledge of the lake shore and the river systems would prove essential to the expedition's navigation, though the historical record has preserved little detail about his background or his experience on the expedition beyond his role. He is one of the very few non-white members of the party whose name survives at all.

Two married couples came with the surveyors not as employees but as settlers. Elijah and Anna Gun traveled to take charge of the supply depot Joshua Stow was establishing at Conneaut Creek. Job P. Stiles and his wife Talitha Cumi were destined for Cleveland itself, where they would be left in charge of the company's stores and become, as the historical record notes with a certain wry gravity, the first husband and wife to winter at the new settlement, and thus among the first permanent European residents of what would become the city of Cleveland. On January 23, 1797, attended by Seneca women camped nearby, Talitha gave birth to Charles Phelps Stiles — the first white child born in Cleveland.

From Schenectady to the Cuyahoga

The survey party assembled at Schenectady, New York, in late May and early June 1796 and began moving west by a combination of wagon road, river boat, and lake passage. Surveyor John Milton Holley's journal, one of the primary firsthand accounts of the expedition, records the departure from Dover, Connecticut, on April 28, tracking the party's progress through Albany, Canandaigua, and Buffalo Creek. The route was arduous even before the party reached Ohio: storms wrecked boats on Lake Ontario, the British at Fort Oswego initially refused passage, and equipment and provisions had to be redistributed repeatedly across the chain of supply depots the commissary was organizing.

The overland survey party, the teams of axmen, chainmen, and compassmen working the interior townships, had a different experience from those who traveled by lake. They hacked through roughly 55 miles of forested wilderness between the Pennsylvania border and the Cuyahoga, working under conditions that Holley and others documented without mercy: broiling heat, clouds of mosquitoes, stretches of swamp where the ground offered no firm footing, and rations that sometimes ran to boiled rattlesnake and wild berries when hunters came back to camp empty-handed. Most of the party suffered at least some bout of the dysentery, cramping, and fever that were simply the expected cost of summer work on the frontier.

Red Jacket and the Buffalo Creek Council

Before Cleaveland's party could legally and practically enter the Connecticut Reserve, they faced a direct challenge from the Iroquois Confederacy. At Buffalo Creek in western New York, representatives of the Six Nations: the renowned Seneca orator Red Jacket, the Mohawk war chief Joseph Brant, and the Seneca leader Farmer's Brother, arrived to contest the white men's right to enter land they considered theirs. The Treaty of Greenville of 1795 had not been signed by the Iroquois; they had not formally ceded the Reserve.

Holley's journal provides a detailed account of the council, including a remarkable passage in which Red Jacket articulates, directly and in front of a clergyman who happened to be present, his views on white religion and colonial dispossession: "You white people make a great parade about religion, you say you have a book of laws and rules which was given you by the Great Spirit, but is this true? Was it written by his own hand and given to you? No, it was written by your own people… Our land is taken from us, and still we don't know how to farm it." It is a passage of striking directness, set down in a Connecticut surveyor's journal, and it sits in that record unrefuted.

Cleaveland offered a present valued at £500 in New York currency in goods to the western Iroquois nations, plus two beef cattle and 100 gallons of whiskey to the eastern nations. He also agreed, under pressure from Joseph Brant, to use his influence to seek an annuity of $500 per year from the United States, with a backup promise of an additional $1,500 from the Connecticut Land Company if the federal payment was not secured. The chiefs accepted, the Mohawks shared $100 of the proceeds with the Senecas, and the council dissolved. Cleaveland's entry into the Reserve was effectively cleared.

"Port Independence": The First Celebration

The party made its first landfall inside the Connecticut Reserve at the mouth of Conneaut Creek, where the creek empties into Lake Erie near the northeast corner of modern Ohio. Here on July 4, 1796, they celebrated Independence Day with military ceremony. Captain Joseph Tinker arranged the men along the beach, and they fired a Federal salute of fifteen rounds from their muskets, followed by a sixteenth round in honor of New Connecticut. The party ate a meal of pork and beans and drank six patriotic toasts. They named the site Port Independence.

It was also at Conneaut Creek that the party encountered the Massasagoes. They had a village near the creek's mouth, and their challenge to the expedition's right to enter the land was one of the most substantive confrontations of the journey. Cleaveland described his treaty with the Six Nations, promised the Massasagoes they would not be disturbed in their possessions, and gave them wampum, silver trinkets, and whiskey valued at roughly twenty-five dollars. Chief Paqua, in turn, presented Cleaveland with a ceremonial effigy pipe carved from maple wood and inlaid with lead, now believed to be the pipe held by the Western Reserve Historical Society, one of the oldest dated artifacts connected to the founding of Cleveland. The Massasagoes, as the origins page of this archive records, did not outlast Cleaveland's passage by many years.

The next morning (July 5, 1796), Cleaveland and the water party set out along the Lake Erie shore toward the Cuyahoga. They had roughly 55 miles to travel and 18 days until the date history would record as Cleveland's birthday.

The Approach: Eighteen Days on the Lake Shore

Cleaveland and a portion of the party made the journey from Port Independence to the Cuyahoga by water, coasting along the Lake Erie shore in flat-bottomed bateaux. The lake passage was often miserable. Lake Erie in July is subject to sudden squalls, and the shallow coastline of northeastern Ohio, broken by creek mouths and extending beaches, offered little shelter. The boats were heavily laden with provisions and equipment, and the men who rowed or poled them did so in July heat under a sky that could turn violent with little warning.

Meanwhile, the overland survey teams were making their own difficult way through the interior. The field books of the surveyors record a pace of eight, ten, and sometimes twelve miles of survey line per day, which sounds substantial until you consider what a mile of survey line through unbroken Ohio forest actually required. Each station required clearing a sight line, setting up the surveying instrument, measuring the chain, recording the bearing, and marking the bearing trees with axe blazes that would serve as permanent monuments. Every measurement had to account for compass variation; as Seth Pease's field notes record, compasses in the 1790s were unreliable instruments that required constant checking against celestial observations.

On Thursday, July 21, the survey party that had been working the interior reached a corner point. Pease and Porter "fixed the quadrant for an observation of the sun at noon." The day was fair, the observation good. In the evening they again took the variation by a polar star observation. They made the latitude to be 41 degrees, 20 seconds north, and set a chestnut post on the south side of the line. The next day they would reach the Cuyahoga.

July 22, 1796: The Landing

On the morning of July 22, 1796, General Moses Cleaveland and his water party steered their bateaux off the open lake and into the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. What they found was not a clean harbor entrance but a complicated, sand-choked passage at odds with the clear geographical logic that had made the site theoretically attractive from a distance. The Cuyahoga in 1796 did not flow cleanly into Lake Erie; the river's final approach was a confusion of sandbars, shallow channels, and the silted-up remnants of an older river course that had been partially blocked by lakeside drift.

John Grabowski, the Krieger-Mueller Joint Professor of History at Case Western Reserve University and the overseer of the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, has described the river mouth in 1796 in precise terms: the Cuyahoga was flowing through its current mouth, but not forcefully. In the old channel (the one that ran parallel to Whiskey Island), there was mostly weeds, grass, and stagnant water. The river's notorious crookedness, which had given it its name, meant that its final miles drained slowly, backing up into the low ground and creating exactly the kind of standing water that breeds the malarial mosquitoes that would plague Cleveland's early settlers for decades.

What the Cuyahoga Actually Was

To understand what Cleaveland encountered on July 22, it helps to understand what the Cuyahoga River was, and was not, in 1796. The river's name is derived from the Mohawk word meaning "crooked river," and the name was apt: the Cuyahoga rises barely thirty miles east of its mouth as the crow flies, but travels nearly 85 miles to get there, making one of the most dramatic U-turns in American river geography before finally turning north toward Lake Erie. That final northward approach, from Akron through the Cuyahoga Valley and into the Flats, is the river's most important commercial reach. But the river's mouth itself, in 1796, was a problem.

The Cuyahoga's lower reach was interrupted by a substantial sandspit, a bar of lakeshore sediment that lake currents had built up across the river's exit point, forcing the water to dog-leg south along the shore before finding a weak outlet. This sandbar made it impossible for any vessel of significant draft to enter the river directly from the lake. Sailing ships, the working vessels of the Great Lakes commercial economy, drew too much water to cross it. Any viable port at the Cuyahoga's mouth would require extensive dredging and channel improvement before it could function as the commercial entryway that Cleaveland envisioned.

— John Grabowski, Krieger-Mueller Joint Professor of History, Case Western Reserve University, as quoted in Ideastream Public Media

The low ground at the river's mouth was swamp country. Because the Cuyahoga didn't run straight into Lake Erie, and because the sandbar further impeded its flow, the river's final reach created precisely the kind of stagnant, warm, shallow water that breeds Anopheles mosquitoes, the vector for the malarial parasite that would make Cleveland one of the sickest frontier settlements in the Northwest Territory. This was what met Cleaveland's party as they entered the mouth on July 22: swarms of malarial mosquitoes rising from the swamp to attack the sweaty bargemen even as they navigated the sandbar.

Above all of this, however: above the swamp, the bars, the mosquitoes, and the slow current, rose something else entirely: the eastern bluffs of the river valley. High above the low ground, the heights were covered with stands of chestnut, oak, walnut, and maple. The soil there was deep and well-drained, a sharp contrast to the malarial valley below. And from those heights, the view was strategic: Lake Erie to the north, the Cuyahoga curving below, and the whole sweep of the Reserve's forest stretching south and east.

Ascending the Bluffs

After navigating through the sandbar and making landfall on the east bank of the Cuyahoga at the foot of what is today St. Clair Avenue (the precise landing spot commemorated by Settler's Landing Park), Cleaveland and his men climbed. The bluffs above the river on the eastern side rose sharply from the valley floor, putting the party on a high ground that transformed the geography from a malarial nuisance into something recognizable as a city site. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History records that the group climbed up a hill near what is now St. Clair Avenue to reach the heights over the river valley.

What Cleaveland saw from the heights was, by any measure of 18th-century commercial geography, an exceptional site. To the west ran the Cuyahoga River, deep enough, despite the sandbar at its mouth, to serve as an artery into the interior. To the north lay Lake Erie, the great commercial highway connecting the eastern seaboard (via the New York system of rivers and portages) to the entire Great Lakes basin. The river bluffs themselves provided natural defense and drainage. The high ground was covered with mature hardwood forest on soil that, unlike the swamp below, was capable of supporting agriculture and construction. And the river (Cleaveland already understood this) represented the northern terminus of a potential water route all the way to the Ohio River, connecting New England markets to the interior of the continent.

Military historian by training, real estate speculator by profession, and general agent of a company whose 57 investors needed to see their capital returned: Cleaveland read the landscape in all three registers simultaneously. The site checked every box.

Choosing the Capital of New Connecticut

The formal decision to make the Cuyahoga mouth the capital of the Western Reserve was not made instantaneously on July 22. The Teaching Cleveland record notes that "it took several weeks for Moses Cleaveland to decide if the site would serve as the center for the survey party's work, and what some might call the capital of the Western Reserve." He made that decision in August. But what July 22 represented was the first reconnaissance: the landing, the ascent, and the initial assessment that set everything in motion.

The factors Cleaveland weighed were precisely the ones the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History summarizes in its entry: river, lake, low banks, dense forests, and high bluffs provided both protection and shipping access. He was also thinking about the future the company needed to sell, the promise of a city, not just a clearing. The planned water route connecting Lake Erie to the Ohio River via the Cuyahoga Valley was not yet built (it would be realized as the Ohio and Erie Canal in 1832), but Cleaveland understood it as a certainty of geography. A river that rose within portage distance of the Muskingum-Scioto-Ohio system was a river of continental commercial importance. He said so explicitly, in the letter that survives from July 1796.

There was also the question of naming. Cleaveland initially considered calling the settlement Cuyahoga, recognizing the river's centrality to the site's identity. His colleagues in the party persuaded him otherwise: the place should carry his name. The surveyors named the new capital city Cleaveland.

Laying Out the Town Plat

Once the decision was made, Cleaveland set his two most capable surveyors, Seth Pease and Amos Spafford, to work designing the town. Their assignment was to produce a street grid and identify the major lot divisions that would make the capital city legible to investors and settlers. They worked with the tools of 18th-century surveying: compass, chain, Jacob's staff, and field notebook. The result was a plan that consciously echoed the New England towns its planners had grown up in.

At the center of the plan was a public square: 9.5 acres of open ground reserved from sale, to serve as the civic heart of the new city, exactly as Public Square had functioned in New Haven, Hartford, and the other Connecticut towns the surveyors knew. The Western Reserve Historical Society, citing its Founder's Day account, gives the public square's dimensions as 90 acres (almost certainly a transcription error for the established figure of 9.5 to 10 acres); the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History and all other primary-source accounts agree on 9.5 acres. The square was positioned to take advantage of the high ground above the river and to give the surrounding lots direct access to both the commercial bluff-edge and the interior of the town.

The street plan that Pease and Spafford drew was largely oriented to the river and the lake. Vineyard, Union, and Mandrake streets were laid out to provide access to the upper and lower landings on the Cuyahoga. Bath Street (today's West Superior Avenue, roughly) provided a way to reach the lake shore and the river mouth. The surveyors' cabin, the party called "Pease's Hotel" with evident irony, was placed on the line between lots 202 and 203, between what would become Union Street and the river. A storehouse was sited about ten rods northwest of it, on lots 201.

The field books of the surveyors show rapid work: frequently eight, ten, sometimes twelve miles of survey line per day. Augustus Porter ran the outline of the tract to be comprised in the new town. Pease, Stoddard, and Spafford each had a hand in the interior lines, and John Milton Holley surveyed some of the one-hundred-acre outer lots. A rough map was produced during the survey itself; Seth Pease subsequently drew the formal plat map entitled "A Plan of the City of Cleaveland, 1796," which became the official record of the town's foundation and one of the most consequential documents in Cleveland's history.

The Men Who Drew the City

Seth Pease (1764–1819)

Seth Pease was 32 years old when he joined Cleaveland's expedition as astronomer and third-in-command, ranked below Cleaveland and Augustus Porter. Born in Suffield, Connecticut, and largely self-taught in mathematics and astronomy, Pease was by contemporary accounts "above medium height, slender and fair, with black, penetrating eyes. In his movements he was very active, and preserving in his designs, with a reflecting and thoughtful air. He was a very thorough mathematician." His role as astronomer was essential: the accuracy of the entire survey depended on his ability to establish true north through celestial observations, correcting the unreliable magnetic compass readings that the field teams generated.

Pease produced two foundational documents from the 1796 expedition: his detailed field notes, which the Early History of Cleveland, Ohio describes as "the official returns," and "A Plan of the City of Cleaveland, 1796," the second of two maps drawn of the new city that year (Amos Spafford drew the first). His surveyor's compass, the actual instrument used to lay out Cleveland's streets, is now a treasured artifact in the Western Reserve Historical Society's collection, along with his field notebook and one of his early maps of the Western Reserve. He returned the following year as principal surveyor of the 1797 expedition, and went on to become one of the preeminent cartographers of the early United States, later serving as the first-ever Second Assistant Postmaster General, a position created by Congress in 1810. He died in Philadelphia in 1819.

Amos Spafford (dates uncertain)

Spafford surveyed alongside Pease in September 1796 and produced the first of the two 1796 maps of Cleveland. Pease returned to Connecticut between expeditions; Spafford stayed and became one of the earliest permanent residents of the settlement and one of its leading citizens in the years that followed, serving at town meetings and in the early civic life of the village. His map, produced simultaneously with Pease's, shows a nearly identical street grid but with some minor differences in the river bluffs and the length of the sand spit at the river mouth.

Augustus Porter (1769–1849)

Principal Surveyor and Deputy Superintendent, Porter was the most senior of the survey professionals in the party, ranking directly below Cleaveland. He had spent the previous seven years surveying the Phelps and Gorham Purchase in the Genesee Country of Western New York, giving him more frontier experience than most of the party. Porter received $5 per day for his services in 1796, the highest rate paid to any surveyor in the expedition, compared to Pease's $3.50 per day the following year. He ran the outline of the capital city tract and coordinated the field work of the other surveyors. He is less visible in the primary documents than Pease, partly because he left fewer personal journals.

Cleaveland: Without the "A"

The settlement was named Cleaveland by the survey party, spelled, like the general's own name, with an "a" in the second syllable. It appears that way in the primary documents of the expedition. But Seth Pease's own official field plat of the city spells it Cleveland, without the "a," a discrepancy that Whittlesey's Early History of Cleveland, Ohio attributes to "inadvertence." This is the first recorded instance of the variant spelling, and it appears in the founding document itself.

The received account, promoted widely and repeated in nearly every general history of Cleveland, holds that the spelling changed because a newspaper, the Cleveland Advertiser, found "Cleaveland" too long for its masthead sometime around 1830–1831 and dropped the "a" to make room. This explanation has the satisfying quality of being both specific and slightly absurd, which may explain its durability. The Library of Congress's "Today in History" entry for July 22 accepts it; the Britannica does too.

The more careful historians note the ambiguity. Wikipedia's Moses Cleaveland article offers both the newspaper-masthead account and the alternative: that the survey party itself misspelled the name on their original map. Given that Pease's field plat, the most authoritative document of the founding, already spells it without the "a," the question of which came first is genuinely unresolved. Moses Cleaveland himself appears never to have objected to either spelling, and the general who founded a city in less than a month and then spent the remaining decade of his life in Canterbury may simply not have cared.

The People Who Were Already Here

Long before Moses Cleaveland's surveying party set foot on the bluffs above Lake Erie, the land was home to Indigenous peoples who had lived along its rivers and shoreline for generations. The Erie people had once inhabited the southern shores of the lake that bears their name — a confederacy of Iroquoian-speaking peoples who maintained permanent, stockaded towns and practiced agriculture — but were defeated and dispersed by war with the Iroquois Confederacy between 1653 and 1656. In the centuries that followed, the Wyandot, Lenape (Delaware), Ottawa, and Seneca peoples moved through and settled the Cuyahoga Valley, the river corridor that would one day become the beating heart of Cleveland.

The Wyandot, who had themselves broken free from Iroquois domination, treated the region between the Cuyahoga River, the Pennsylvania border, and Lake Erie as a shared communal hunting ground, frequented by themselves, the Lenape, Shawnee, and Seneca. The Ottawa maintained active communities along the Cuyahoga as late as the 1790s, and their presence along the middle river is documented on maps made between 1755 and 1778. In 1786, Moravian missionary John Heckewelder established the settlement of Pilgerruh in the Cuyahoga Valley on the site of a recently abandoned Ottawa village. When Cleaveland arrived a decade later, there were still groups living on the west side of the Cuyahoga. The land that the Connecticut Land Company had purchased on paper was neither empty nor unclaimed.

Among the most significant peoples encountered by the 1796 expedition were the Massasagoes (a band of the Mississauga), living in a village near the mouth of Conneaut Creek — the same creek where Cleaveland's party had first made landfall on July 4. Their village, by contemporary accounts, consisted of "some thirty well-built cabins," laid out with a regularity and neatness that defied any characterization of wandering bands; they were an established community, rooted in a landscape they had long called home. According to Cleaveland's primary journal, preserved by Whittlesey, Chief Paqua of the Massasagoes sent word on July 7, 1796 that he wished a formal council. The secondary source entry for Moses Cleaveland in the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History places this meeting on June 27, 1796; the discrepancy between the primary journal date and the secondary source date has not been resolved in the scholarly record. At the meeting, Paqua's son Cato, acting as orator, challenged the white men's claim to the surrounding land on behalf of his father.

Cleaveland invoked his agreement with the Iroquois chiefs at Buffalo Creek — Red Jacket, Joseph Brant, and Farmer's Brother among them — who had relinquished their claim to the land as far as the Cuyahoga River, despite never having signed the Treaty of Greenville. To the Massasagoes, Cleaveland offered wampum, silver trinkets, and whiskey valued at roughly twenty-five dollars, in exchange for safe passage to explore the Cuyahoga. Chief Paqua, in turn, presented Cleaveland with a ceremonial effigy pipe carved from maple wood, inlaid with lead — the same object described in the Port Independence section above, now held by the Western Reserve Historical Society. The exchange was brief, asymmetric, and decisive.

The Massasagoes did not long outlast Cleaveland's passage. Following the murder of a Chippewa medicine man named Menompsy in the early years of Cleveland's settlement — the first recorded murder in the new town — the Massasagoes departed their village on Conneaut Creek and never returned to Ohio. The Ottawa families on the west bank of the Cuyahoga largely removed to the Sandusky by 1797 and to the Maumee River reservation by 1813. The Wyandot held on at Upper Sandusky until 1842, when the Treaty with the Wyandot — signed under sustained pressure from the State of Ohio — required them to cede their remaining 109,000 acres and remove to land west of the Mississippi. They departed Ohio in 1843, the last Indigenous nation to do so. The 1842 Treaty with the Wyandot removed the final Indigenous community from Ohio entirely. The land Cleaveland platted had a history that stretched back thousands of years, one that was largely erased within a few decades of his arrival.

That erasure is written into the present landscape in two ways simultaneously: in the absence of any Indigenous community, and in the survival of Indigenous geography. The ridge roads that run parallel to the lake shore, preserved in several of the major east-side corridors of modern Cleveland, trace paths that Native peoples used long before Cleaveland arrived. The name Cuyahoga derives from the Mohawk word for "crooked river." Ohio itself comes from the Seneca word for "great river." The grid that Cleaveland's surveyors imposed on this land was superimposed over a human geography that already existed — a palimpsest that the modern city carries, largely unknowing, in its very bones.

Cleaveland Departs: The City He Never Saw

By October 1796, with the survey season closing and the first frosts arriving off Lake Erie, General Moses Cleaveland and most of his party gathered their instruments, their field books, and their remaining provisions, and turned east. The journey home retraced the lake shore to Buffalo Creek and then overland through upstate New York to Connecticut. Cleaveland arrived back in Canterbury having spent a total of less than five months in New Connecticut, of which only a fraction was spent at the settlement that bore his name.

He never returned. He continued his law practice in Canterbury, resumed his seat in the Connecticut General Assembly, and never made a second trip to the Ohio frontier. The city that grew slowly, under conditions of genuine hardship, in the decade after his departure was a place he knew only from reports and maps. He died in Canterbury on November 16, 1806, at the age of 52, a decade after his visit.

Left in charge of the company's stores at the new settlement were Job P. Stiles and his wife Talitha Cumi, the two settlers who had traveled out with the expedition specifically to overwinter. They were joined by a small number of others who had decided to stay, including trappers and traders who found the river mouth a useful base. The winter of 1796–1797 at Cleveland was brutal, and population figures from the era reflect it: there were only four settlers by some accounts; growth was halting, reaching only 150 inhabitants as late as 1820.

The reason was not just cold. It was the Cuyahoga's mouth. The sandbar, the stagnant backwater, the mosquitoes, and the malarial fever they carried would plague Cleveland for another generation. "I would say almost everyone that I had contact with through diaries or letters was affected by the ague within the first two years of their arrival," historian Bob Wheeler of Cleveland State University has said. Jonathan Law, a Connecticut landowner who visited in 1802, noted "a doleful cloud hanging over this settlement." The transformation of the river mouth, through federal dredging that would begin in the 1820s, deepening and straightening the channel, was the precondition for the city Cleaveland had prophesied. Without it, Cleveland would have remained exactly what it was for its first three decades: a settlement on the edge of survivability, clinging to a bluff above a sick river.

The Site in the 21st Century

The trees that stood on the bluffs when Cleaveland's party climbed them are, almost without exception, gone. But in 1946, as part of Cleveland's 150th anniversary, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History began the Moses Cleaveland Tree Project, an early exercise in citizen science that identified and tagged 150 trees alive in Greater Cleveland in 1796. The project was revived for the city's 225th anniversary in 2021. One Moses Cleaveland Tree still stands in Cuyahoga Valley National Park: an American sycamore estimated to be 350 to 400 years old, near Riverview Road in Independence. It was alive, and already large, when the bateaux came through the sandbar at the Cuyahoga's mouth.