In the same year, 1787, John Cleves Symmes and associates, largely from New Jersey, entered into correspondence with Congress for the purchase of a million acres of land north of the Ohio, lying between the Little and Great Miami Rivers. This "Symmes" or "Miami" purchase was achieved, and the Marietta pioneers saw the Miami settlers passing down the Ohio late in 1788 en route to their lands two hundred miles away. In point of daring no pioneer movement in America, save only the founding of Boonesborough, Kentucky, was more plucky than the founding of what is now Cincinnati. In December, Losantiville (Cincinnati) was settled, opposite the mouth of the Licking River. The Symmes company also settled Columbia, at the mouth of the Little Miami, and North Bend (Indiana) a little to the west. Each of the three settlements vied with the others for supremacy. Judge Symmes located at North Bend, but Fort Washington was erected at Losantiville and, the name being changed to Cincinnati, that settlement became the metropolis of the Ohio River below Pittsburg; the seat of government of the Northwest Territory was moved hither in 1790. Therefore in 1790, when the Indian War broke out, the northern bank of the Ohio was settled, in a certain sense, between the mouths of the Muskingum and Scioto and the mouths of the Little and the Great Miami. But these light spots in all the darkness of the Black Forest, as the West was familiarly called, were, after all, but one shade lighter than the surrounding wilderness. The population of the Ohio Company settlements was only a few score; Cincinnati, six years after its founding, could only number, garrison and all, an equal number of hundreds. The founders of Cincinnati, like those of Marietta, were of the best of colonial and revolutionary stock; but, because of the contaminations of the rough frontier, their settlements became what Pittsburg was throughout its early history. General Richard Butler, had he lived, might well have written Governor St. Clair at Cincinnati in 1800 the same words he penned General Irvine at Pittsburg in 1782--"am happy to find you can manage the d--ls of that country and the b--tes of the garrison." Of Pittsburg in 1782 General Irvine wrote his wife: "There never was, nor I hope will there ever be, such a wretched, villainous place as this." Of Marietta, equally disagreeable pictures were drawn by contemporaneous writers. It was a question whether or not the leaven of New England could leaven the whole lump. It did--with the help of good Virginian blood.