It was now decided to make direct and immediate application to Congress for the purchase of lands, and General Putnam, Dr. Manasseh Cutler and General Samuel H. Parsons were appointed directors and especially charged with this business. General Parsons had previously been employed to negotiate for a private purchase, had petitioned Congress, and a committee of that body had been appointed to confer with him. “To that committee,” says Dr. Cutler, “he proposed a purchase on the Scioto River,” but as the proprietors in Massachusetts “were generally dissatisfied with the situation and lands on the Scioto, and much preferred the Muskingum,” the negotiation was suspended. The directors now employed Dr. Cutler to make a purchase upon the Muskingum. It was considered desirable that the negotiations be commenced and the purchase consummated as soon as possible, as other companies were forming, the spirit of private speculation rapidly increasing, and there was a fear that the lands which the Ohio Company wished to possess would be bought by some other organization, or perhaps some part of them by individuals. Just here the query arises: why were the New Englanders so anxious to purchase lands upon the Muskingum, rather than upon the Scioto, or elsewhere in the territory? To this question there are various answers. In the first place the greater part of the Federal territory was unfitted for settlement by the fact that it was occupied by the Indian tribes. None of these, however, had their residence in the lower Muskingum region, and it was only occasionally resorted to by them, when upon their hunting expeditions. Then, too, the people who proposed making a settlement beyond the Ohio were very naturally influenced by the proximity of well established stations upon the east and south of the river; they doubtless preferred the Virginians rather than the Kentuckians, as neighbors. The lower Scioto offered no more alluring an aspect than the lower Muskingum. The best bodies of lands on each river are fifty miles from their mouth. To penetrate so far into the interior, however, as the site of either Chillicothe or Zanesville would have been, at the time the Marietta settlement was made, was unsafe. The location of Fort Harmar, which we have seen was built in 1785–86, doubtless had its influence upon the Ohio Company. Thomas Hutchins, the United States geographer, who had formerly been geographer to the king of Great Britain, and had traveled extensively in the west, had said and written much in favor of the Muskingum country, and strongly advised Dr. Cutler to locate his purchase in this region. Other explorers and travelers had substantiated what Hutchins had said. General Butler and General Parsons, who had descended the Ohio to the Miamis, were deeply impressed with the desirableness of the tract of country now designated as southeastern Ohio, and the latter, writing on the twentieth of