Through the intervention of President George Washington, Colonel William Duer of the Scioto Company agreed to transport the emigrants to their lands, opposite the mouth of the Big Kanawha. In the meantime, surveyors discovered that this village site lay within the Ohio Company Purchase, and not, as supposed, within the Scioto Purchase. Duer contracted with Putnam to erect buildings for the settlers. Accordingly, Major John Burnham, with 40 men, erected four rows of 20 cabins each, with blockhouses at the corners and a small breastwork in front. To these crude dwellings came the artisans, lawyers, jewelers, physicians, and servants, the exiled nobility of France. They were so ignorant of pioneer ways that some were killed beneath the fall of the trees they chopped down. When the Ohio Company adjusted its affairs in December, 1795, the French settlers paid for their land a second time by buying it for a dollar and a quarter per acre. At a later time the United States government granted these unfortunate French a tract of land near Portsmouth, Ohio, but few of them ever moved there. During the Indian war these citizens of Gallipolis were not molested by the warriors, who still had friendly feelings toward their former French allies in Canada. The other settlers, however, were not so fortunate in escaping Indian hostility. On May 1, 1789, only four months after the Treaty of Fort Harmar, Captain Zebulon King was killed and scalped by two Indians at Belpre. In August two boys were killed two miles up the Little Kanawha River in Virginia. Murders occurred with increasing frequency along the frontier. Settlers in Virginia, Kentucky, and the Ohio settlements called for protection. In 1790, Washington sent Harmar northward from Cincinnati with an expedition to punish the Indians in the Miami country, and compel obedience to the treaties of Fort McIntosh and Fort Harmar, but the warriors defeated his army so severely that they became bolder than ever in their revengeful attacks. On Sunday, January 2, 1791, a war party of thirty Delaware and Wyandots attacked the settlers on donation lands at Big Bottom. Thirteen people, including a woman and two children, were gathered in a two-story blockhouse of beech logs. Four men were eating supper in a cabin a hundred yards above the blockhouse, and two men were preparing their meal in another cabin below the main building. A light snow covered the ground, and the ice on the Muskingum was strong enough to hold the Indians who crossed from the trail on the opposite side. While a few of their number tied the four men in the upper cabin, the main body of Indians surrounded the blockhouse. One of them pushed open the door, and his companions fired at the men around the fireplace. Then the Indians rushed in and massacred the settlers before they could reach their weapons. Twelve people were killed, five were made captives, and the two men in the lower cabin escaped to carry the news to the lower settlements.