Transcriber’s Notes: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end. * * * * * [Illustration: PIONEERS.] The Squirrel Hunters of Ohio or Glimpses of Pioneer Life by N. E. JONES, M. D. [Illustration] Cincinnati. ⁂ THE ROBERT CLARKE Co ⁂ 1898 * * * * * COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY N. E. JONES. PREFACE. It required long trains of complex circumstances, and peculiar conditions for each, to give to the world a Moses, an Alexander, a Napoleon, a Washington. Still greater were the pre-arrangements and preparations for the development of the coming man of the Nineteenth Century, that he might stand pre-eminently upon the summit of American manhood. The habitation selected was the most elaborate and lovely of all the gifts of nature: A domain dedicated to freedom forever, bountifully supplied with animals, vegetables, and minerals; with lakes, rivers, and running brooks, grassy lawns and fields of flowers; making a fitting place for the best blood left of the American Revolution; descendants of Anglo-Saxon kings; knights of Norman titles and heroic deeds; supporters of William the Conqueror, whose ancestral names appear in the Doomsday Book, but more imperishably written in the law of descent and transmission. With such the new environment brought forth an improved species, christened by a sovereign state, “_The Squirrel Hunters of Ohio; or, Glimpses of Pioneer Life_,” and to whom this volume is most respectfully dedicated. N. E. JONES, M. D. INTRODUCTION. As an actor and interested witness of the marvelous changes which have occurred in the settlement and civilization of the “North-west Territory,” the author places before the reader this book, entitled, “_The Squirrel Hunters of Ohio; or, Glimpses of Pioneer Life_.” Others have faithfully recorded the wars, bloodshed, victories, defeats, dangers and deaths it cost to subjugate the savage and establish the civilized. And it is as the gleaner follows the reapers and gathers in the wayward straws, that the author hopes to interest and entertain, by picking up some of the fragments, that nothing may be lost which contributed to the elevation, pleasure, subsistence and safety of the pioneer, or added attractiveness to his home during the rise of the first state in the great empire of the North-west. It is often the little things that become the most important--things the immigrant in old age delights to recall--things that bring up associations and pleasures of former days--“the good old times,” when with dog and gun the pioneer walked the unbroken forest and made himself familiar with the alphabet of beasts, birds and trees.