The New Englanders who formed the Ohio Company were not less determined in their venture than were the North Carolinians who formed the Transylvania Company thirteen years before; and, though the founders of Marietta, Ohio, ran no such risk (it has been said) as did the founders of Boonesborough, Kentucky, we of to-day can have no just appreciation of the toil and the wearing years which these founders of the Old Northwest now faced. Yet danger and fear were no novelty to them. How fitting it was that these men, who first entered the portals of the Northwest, bearing in their hands the precious Ordinance and guided by the very star of empire, should have been in part the heroes of the two wars which saved this land from its enemies. One cannot look unmoved upon that body of travellers who met at daybreak, December 6, 1787, before Dr. Cutler's home at Ipswich, to receive his blessing before starting. Theirs was no idle ambition. No Moravian, no Jesuit with beads and rosary, ever faced the Western wilderness with a fairer purpose. In Kentucky, the Virginians had gained, and were holding with powerful grasp, the fair lands of _Ken-ta-kee_; elsewhere the Black Forest loomed dark and foreboding. Could the New Englanders do equally well? Their earnestness was a prophecy of their great success. In December the first party of carpenters and boat-builders, under Major Hatfield White, started on the westward journey, and in January 1788 the remainder of the brave vanguard, under Colonel Ebenezer Sproat and General Rufus Putnam, followed. These were the forty-eight "Founders of Ohio." The rigors of a northern winter made the long journey over Forbes's, or the Pennsylvania Road, a most exhaustive experience. This road through Lancaster, Carlisle, Shippensburg, and Bedford was from this time forward a connecting link between New England and Ohio. It was a rough gorge of a road ploughed deep by the heavy wheels of many an army wagon. Near Bedford, Pennsylvania, the road forked; the northern fork ran on to Pittsburg; the southern, struck off southwestwardly to the Youghiogheny River and the lower Ohio. This branch the New England caravan followed to Sumrill's Ferry on the Youghiogheny, the present West Newton, Pennsylvania. Here Putnam planned to build a rude flotilla and descend the Youghiogheny, Monongahela, and Ohio to Fort Harmar. The severe winter prevented immediate building of this fleet, but by April all was in readiness. The main boat was a covered galley, forty-five feet long, which was most appropriately named the "Adventure Galley." The heavy baggage was carried on a flat boat and a large canoe. Of the men who formed Putnam's company what more can be said--or what less--than what Senator Hoar has left in his eloquent centennial oration at Marietta in 1888?