But here, in old Rutland, it is not with Manasseh Cutler that we are concerned, but with Rufus Putnam. Rufus Putnam was the head of the Ohio Company, and the leader in the actual settlement of the new Territory. It was with Putnam that Manasseh Cutler chiefly conferred concerning the proposed Ohio colony. He left Boston for New York, on his important mission, on the evening of June 25, 1787, and on that day he records in his diary: “I conversed with General Putnam, and settled the principles on which I am to contract with Congress for lands on account of the Ohio Company.” Of Rufus Putnam, Senator Hoar said in his oration, after his tributes to Varnum, Meigs, Parsons, Tupper and the rest: [Illustration: Rufus Putnam] “But what can be said which shall be adequate to the worth of him who was the originator, inspirer, leader, and guide of the Ohio settlement from the time when he first conceived it, in the closing days of the Revolution, until Ohio took her place in the Union as a free State in the summer of 1803? Every one of that honorable body would have felt it as a personal wrong had he been told that the foremost honors of this occasion would not be given to Rufus Putnam. Lossing calls him ‘the father of Ohio.’ Burnet says, ‘He was regarded as their principal chief and leader.’ He was chosen the superintendent at the meeting of the Ohio Company in Boston, November 21, 1787, ‘to be obeyed and respected accordingly.’ The agents of the company, when they voted in 1789 ‘that the 7th of April be forever observed as a public festival,’ speak of it as ‘the day when General Putnam commenced the settlement in this country.’ Harris dedicates the documents collected in his appendix to Rufus Putnam, ‘the founder and father of the State.’ He was a man after Washington’s own pattern and after Washington’s own heart; of the blood and near kindred of Israel Putnam, the man who ‘dared to lead where any man dared to follow.’” Mr. Hoar recounts the great services of Putnam during the Revolution, beginning with his brilliant success in the fortification of Dorchester Heights: “We take no leaf from the pure chaplet of Washington’s fame when we say that the success of the first great military operation of the Revolution was due to Rufus Putnam.” But it was not Senator Hoar’s task to narrate the military services of General Putnam.[65]