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The War Department, the French Five Hundred and Humanitarian Assistance on the Frontier

Hoping to garner national revenues from the sale of lands, in 1787 the Confederation Congress sold 1.5 million acres for a million dollars to the Ohio Company, a joint stock company made up of former Continental Army officers.   But like the British crown before the Revolution, and the Confederation Congress in the 1780s, the Federalists in the 1790s never quite managed to realize their hopes of an orderly and controlled pattern of settlement in the western lands.  The problem was that most American settlers knew there was no need to pay for land when it was simply there for the taking.  So, perhaps in an effort to find less savvy purchasers, one venture, the Scioto Company,  sent the poet Joel Barlow on a mission to France to try and sell land claims to a group of French artisans anxious to escape the French Revolution. The difficulty, as it turned out, was that the Scioto Company had sold shares in land it did not actually own. In any event, it was too late for the French settlers, who had already arrived in America, (many at the port of Alexandria, Virginia)  and quite anxious to settle on lands described by Barlow as a place of “milk and honey, where fish leaped into one’s arms, grapes grew in abundance and tallow candles could be picked from trees along the Ohio River.”  As it turned out, the settlement, modern day Gallipolis, Ohio (city of the Gauls) was extremely rough country and  far from developed.  In an instance of what we might term today “humanitarian relief”  for the hapless settlers, who apparently  lacked the rudimentary skills and know-how required to tame such wilderness, the War Department dispatched Major John Burnham and a detachment of about 35 men to construct 80 log houses and a number of block houses at the settlement. Ultimately though, disease and hostile Indians killed and scattered the “French five-hundred.” By 1806, there were only a handful remaining.  The Scioto Company collapsed in 1792.  In this document,  Major Burnham, in submitting his resignation, makes  references to the “Scioto business.”