Independence Day

He told us of the Fourth of July celebration, which was held in Marietta on that first Independence Day after the settlers arrived there. They set about making a feast, and verily it must have been one. There were venison barbecues, meaning deer roasted whole, buffalo steaks broiled over the glowing coals, bear meat cooked in every manner that could be devised with the few cooking implements our people possessed, small pigs roasted whole, and, as the greatest delicacy of all, an enormous pike, more than six feet long, said to be the largest ever caught in the Ohio River.

The feast was kept up until twelve o'clock at night, and then the tired merrymakers went to their cabins and slept until late in the forenoon, as the parson said, in such a tone as if he believed they were wasting their time by thus remaining in bed after the sun had risen.

Then came, according to Parson Cutler's story, at a later date, the opening of the first court in the territory, and it must have been a wondrous spectacle. The sheriff, who, as you know, is Colonel Ebenezer

Sproat, holding a drawn sword in his hand, marched with a military escort, ahead of the governor, the judges, the secretary, and others, to Campus Martius, where the court was held.

There are Indians in plenty about Marietta, and Parson Cutler said that when these savages saw Colonel Sproat, who as you know is an unusually tall man, they at once gave him the name of Hetuck, or Big Buckeye, which was the same as if they had called him one of the huge trees of the forest.