“I wonder how she comes by her intelligence,” said Lewis, one of the Koons brothers.
“Why! The Devil brings her the intelligence, and it was none else but Satan who transformed himself, to deceive father,” Rachel explained.
“Moderation, children,” Margaret broke in. “You must not be so profane. Let us look to God for protection, and we need not fear the power of Satan.”
“I will not judge, but I can not avoid an opinion,” said Solomon. “If half the reports are true, she evidently is a witch.”
The group fell into a discussion of the evidence against the “old rib.” Solomon’s wife Nancy said that one night she had been alone in her bedchamber awaiting her husband’s arrival when someone entered the room. She assumed it was Solomon and lifted her head from the pillow; by the light of a few coals from the fire, she saw Mrs. ——standing by the bed in a nightdress. Nancy found herself pinned to the bed, rendered powerless to move, and felt a weight upon her breast. Solomon quickly dismissed his wife’s experience as a classic nightmare, but his sister Elizabeth insisted that the same thing had happened to her.
“Hark,” Margaret said, silencing the back and forth. “Father is coming home. Let us wait and see what discoveries he has made.”
As Peter entered the room, Solomon’s wife could not resist teasing her father-in-law. “Been taking abroad, eh?” she asked.
“Yes,” Peter replied with a smile playing on his face.
“Suppose we shall have a wedding soon, seeing [as] you visit Mrs. ——so frequently?” Nancy continued. She turned to Margaret. “What do you say, Mrs. K, do you not entertain fears of your husband’s becoming espoused to Mrs. ——?”
“Judging from previous visits, we might presume so,” Margaret said.
“All but the wedding,” Peter shot back. “I have peculiar objects in view, besides her personal beauty and deportment, which incite my frequent visits.”
When his audience could bear the suspense no longer, Peter explained that he had hurried to the woman’s house so that he would be the first to see her after his encounter with the deer. He had long entertained suspicions about “that crooked rib” and her ability to tell of events she had not personally witnessed or heard about. He wanted to outrun any news that might have traveled about the peculiar animal in the forest. Mrs. —— was waiting for him at the door, as if she knew he was coming.
“Well Mr. Koons,” she said, “you have been shooting at a deer this morning, and you did not get it either.”
“Yes,” Peter said, “and a tormenting deer it was too! I shall take a little further trouble in ascertaining the character of such mysterious forms.”
“Oh, you need not take that trouble,” his neighbor assured him. “The next deer you fire upon you will get.”
Peter left her home feeling a bit sheepish about the prediction. If it proved to be true, he would have game for the family—but would have been “out generaled” by the witch, his reality shifted.
About a fortnight later Peter set out again with his rifle. At a spot about 4 miles from the home of Mrs. ——, he took down a deer from an unusually long distance. He was surprised to have hit it, but he wasted no time in hanging the carcass up in the woods and made a beeline for his house, where he dropped off the rifle without a word to his family. Soon he was back at the doorstep of Mrs. ——.
“Well! Mr. Koons, you got your deer this time, eh? Did I not tell you so?”
* * *
WITH such recollections to amuse him as the days grew shorter, 22-year-old Jonathan continued south on his journey through Ohio and eventually reached Athens County. By the time of his visit Europeans had been living in the area for more than three decades. Athens County had been established in 1805 and the town of Athens—the county seat and home to Ohio University (founded 1804)—was incorporated in 1811. The first generation of settlers, erstwhile wearers of coonskin caps and tanned deer hide, now garbed themselves in linsey-woolsey or calico. These elders and grandparents had stories to tell any newcomers willing to learn from the prior generation’s hard-won experience.
As the old-timers would recall, the end of the Revolutionary War had left many American veterans, in the words of the historian Charles M. Walker, “with an abundance of liberty but no property, and their occupation gone.” In the Northeast many set their sights on the frontier west of the Alleghenies. Two veterans, Rufus Putnam and Benjamin Tupper, advertised their new firm, the Ohio Company of Associates, in the hope of raising the capital necessary to purchase western lands from the United States government. After several investors bought subscriptions and the firm completed negotiations with Congress in 1787, the Ohio Company bought 1.5 million acres in the Appalachian foothills of the future state of Ohio. The acreage lay just north of the Ohio River, with Virginia on the other side. The entrepreneurs planted their initial settlement at Marietta at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers in 1788, giving that city the distinction of being the first permanent settlement in the Northwest Territory.
To reach the frontier from the Northeast, the so-called Wilderness Yankees had to move their belongings by wagon to the headwaters of the Ohio near Pittsburgh, where flatboats or large canoes could be sent downriver. The 48 pioneers in the first group—all men—floated down the river to the mouth of the Muskingum, where they erected a fort called Campus Martius. Tall tales—both inviting and ominous—soon spread back East by word of mouth. These legends told how brandy flowed from underground springs, how cloth grew on trees, and how poisonous hoop snakes could chase the unsuspecting to their deaths. Mostly, though, the fertility of the land was an enticement that overcame the threat of animal or Indian attack—the saying went that the rich Ohio farmland “needed only to be tickled with the hoe to laugh with the harvest.”
The settlers had kept coming, not only from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania but from Virginia and Kentucky as well. By 1790 Marietta boasted 100 cabins, and a second outpost had been established farther west at Cincinnati. The Delaware, Shawnee, and other Indian tribes were not about to go quietly, however, when confronted with the loss of their hunting grounds. In response to stepped-up attacks from the native people, the federal government sent troops to drive out the estimated 15,000 Indians living in the future state of Ohio. Two US armies were roundly defeated, but a third, led by General Anthony Wayne, crushed a confederation of Indian tribes at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in western Ohio in 1794. The Indians were forced to cede all but the northwest corner of Ohio to the government in the Treaty of Greenville. Soon the unbroken forest would ring with axes as the trees were felled to make way for farmland.
In this postwar period settlers spread out from Marietta into the interior of the vast Ohio Company purchase. Meandering across southeast Ohio on a northwest to southeast diagonal was the placid river the Delaware Indians had called Hockhocking, or bottle river. The Hockhocking and its tributaries, fringed by white-barked sycamores, soon became rolling highways. In 1797 several families from Marietta ascended the Hockhocking and established the first permanent settlement in what would become Athens County. They paddled as far as the present-day town of Athens, said to be “40 miles by water from the Ohio.” Others attempting an overland route had to navigate through virgin forest where oaks, maples, and hickories towered above and raccoons and red foxes scampered below among thickets of sassafras, dogwood, witch hazel, pawpaw, and hornbeam. They quickly subdued the land. The last buffalo was captured and put in a traveling show in 1799, and bears and wolves were hunted down and scalped for bounty money. By the time Koons arrived in 1834, other towns and settlements dotted the county map. The Indians had been forced out decades before, giving way to European excavators who would uncover treasures of stone, copper, and shell that the ancestors of the exiled Native Americans had secreted in burial mounds. A nascent saltworks—soon to become the dominant industry of the county—had supplanted one of the Indians’ former haunts where Sunday Creek joined the Hockhocking.