CHAPTER ONE
WOMEN WHO DARED
THE WILDERNESS
History deals meagerly with MRS. JAMES OWEN. Records show little more than that Mistress Owen was the first white woman to arrive at Marietta, Ohio’s earliest settlement, in the Spring of 1788.
Because she was the very first pioneer of her sex within the geographical limits of what became the State of Ohio, Mistress Owen was granted 100 acres of land in her own right by the Ohio Company. This seems to be all that is really authenticated about her.
Members of the Ohio Newspaper Women’s Association, by which organization this history of Ohio women is sponsored, may note here a lost opportunity. They know plenty of leading questions which, had interviews been invented in those days—or had there been any newspapers west of the Alleghenies to print them in—they could and would have put to this first woman settler.
Starting with an obvious lead—“And is it true, Mistress Owen,” the interviewer might well have asked, “Is it really a fact that the Ohio Company made you a donation of 100 acres of land all your own”?
Mrs. Owens’ assurance that, believe it or not, the great land company had, under the hand and seal of its president and secretary, General Rufus Putnam, actually given her the land— given it not to her husband for her, but to her, personally, should have made an excellent item. Especially with an account of her various hair breadth escapes from Indians thrown in.
As the interviewer warmed to her work, a more far reaching query would doubtless have occurred to her. She would have wanted to know what on earth could induce a woman to desert safety and even sanity, to leave friends, comforts, all customary ways and means of living, to jeopardize health, happiness and life itself—for a wilderness.
Women are not, by nature, adventurers. Some women are adventurous, but comparatively few. It is not likely that wanderlust, lure of the unknown, brought the first woman settler of Ohio nor the others who. came almost immediately after, to acknowledged hardship and inescapable danger.
What was it then?
Mrs. Owen could hardly have answered, had she been asked. She could, of course, have quoted “Where thou goest, I will go” and shifted responsibility to her husband.
But would this have told the whole story? Would not a woman as
