There is always a reason why a city is just where it is. Nothing is more controlled by law than the planting, the growth, and the decline of cities. Even the particular site is not a thing of chance, as we can see in the sites of Paris, London, Constantinople, and every other great city of the world. A town exists by supplying to the country about it the commodities which the country cannot procure for itself. In the infancy of the Ohio settlements, when it was still to be determined which of them would take the lead, the commodity most in request and hardest to be obtained was _safety_; and it was Cincinnati that was soonest able to supply this most universal object of desire. In December, 1788, fifteen or twenty men floated down the Ohio among the masses of moving ice, and, landing upon the site of Cincinnati, built cabins, and marked out a town. Matthias Denman of New Jersey had bought eight hundred acres of land there, at fifteen-pence an acre, and this party of adventurers planted themselves upon it with his assistance and in his interest. Jerseymen and Pennsylvanians were finding their way down the Ohio, and founding settlements here and there, whenever a sufficient number of pioneers could be gathered to defend themselves against the Indians. President Washington sent a few companies of troops for their protection, and the great question was where those troops should be posted. The major in command was at first disposed to establish them at North Bend; but while he was selecting a place there for his fort, he fell in with a pair of brilliant black eyes,--the property of one of the settler's wives. He paid such assiduous court to the lady, that her husband deemed it best to remove his family to another settlement, and pitched upon Cincinnati. The major then began to doubt whether, after all, North Bend _was_ the proper place for a military work, and deemed it best to examine Cincinnati first. He was delighted with Cincinnati. He removed the troops thither, built a fort, and thus rendered the neighborhood the safest spot below Pittsburg. This event was decisive: Cincinnati took the lead of the Ohio towns, and kept it. In all the history of Cincinnati, this is the only incident we have found that savors of the romantic.