Enthusiastic news of the first summer of the colony went back over the mountains to Ipswich and Rutland. "The climate is exceeding healthy," blithely carols one of the old letters, "not a man sick since we have been here. We have started twenty buffalo in a drove--deer are plenty as sheep in New England. Turkeys are innumerable. We have already planted a field of one hundred and fifty acres in corn." Another settler drips from his ecstatic, and, we trust, veracious quill, "The corn has grown nine inches in twenty-four hours for two or three days past." The garrison, very soon erected for defence and called the Campus Martius in academic quaintness, is described as the "handsomest pile of buildings this side of the Alleghanies," and as presenting an appearance of almost mediæval stateliness and strength, bastioned as it was with great blockhouses and surrounded by a stout double wall of palisades. The Fourth of July was celebrated by a great "banquet," eaten in a bowery set up on the banks of the Muskingum; its menu tickles even a jaded modern palate--venison barbecued, buffalo steaks, bear-meat, roasted pigs, "the choicest delicacy of all," and a great pike, six feet long, the largest ever caught in the river. "We kept it up till after twelve o'clock at night," succinctly observes one of the participants, "and then went home and slept until after daylight." On the fifteenth of July, a yet more memorable occasion, General St. Clair, the first Governor of the Northwest Territory, was welcomed with great ceremonies, and the Ordinance of 1787 was read with much solemnity in the midst of profound silence. In early August a pleasant little ripple of diversion was caused by the arrival of the families of the pioneers. In the latter part of the same month, Dr. Cutler made a visit to the settlement, and delivered the first sermon ever preached at Marietta. In September was opened the first Court of Common Pleas in the Territory. It was an august spectacle. The sheriff, Colonel Ebenezer Sproat, of the Massachusetts line, preceded by a military escort, marched with his drawn sword and wand of office ahead of the governor, judges, secretary and others, to the blockhouse where the court was held. As the picturesque little procession wound its way along the river banks, the friendly Indians, loitering about the new city, admired immensely the mighty form of Colonel Sproat, who, being six feet four inches tall, towered conspicuously above his companions. Ever thereafter they called him Hetuck, or Big Buckeye, and ever since then the natives of Ohio have been dubbed "Buckeyes."