December, 1785, from Fort Finney (mouth of the Little Miami) to Captain Jonathan Hart, at Fort Harmar, said: “I have seen no place since I left you that pleases me so well for settlement as Muskingum.” General Benjamin Tupper doubtless added important testimony supporting that of Hutchins, Parsons, Butler and others. General Parsons, it has been asserted, became most strongly possessed of the belief that the Muskingum region was the best part of the territory, because one of the Zanes, who had been many years in the west, told him that the Scioto or Miami regions offered superior attractions, and he suspected that the old frontiersman artfully designed to divert attention from the Muskingum that he might have the first choice of purchase himself when the lands were put on sale. It is probable, too, that the prospect of establishing a system of communication and commerce between the Ohio and Lake Erie, by way of the Muskingum and Tuscarawas and Cuyahoga, and between the Ohio and the seaboard, by way of the Great Kanawha and the Potomac (a plan which Washington had thought feasible before the Revolutionary war), had its weight. ALFRED MATHEWS. INDIAN OCCUPATION OF OHIO. During a long period—one which, perhaps, had its beginning soon after the forced exodus of the semi-civilized, pre-historic people, and which extended down to the era of the white man’s actual knowledge—the upper Ohio valley was probably devoid of any permanent population. The river teemed with fish, and the dense, luxuriant wood abounded in game, but no Indian wigwams dotted the shores of the great stream, no camp fires gleamed along its banks, and no maize-fields covered the fertile bottom lands or lent variety to the wild vernal green. An oppressive stillness hung over the land, marked and intensified rather than broken, and only made more weird by the tossing of the water upon the shores and the soft mysterious sounds echoed from the distance through the dim aisles of the forest. Nature was lovely then as now, but with all her beauty the valley was awful in the vastness and solemnity of its solitude. Nowhere was human habitation or indication of human life.