Forty rifles and one order

The story, from several sources

This account blends Rothbard’s chapter with the other sources listed below and has not yet been separated into Rothbard’s own account and the fuller story. Read Rothbard’s chapter 7 for his account.

By 1785 Congress had made the western lands its own and meant to survey them and sell them for revenue, a dollar an acre. Settlers had not waited for the surveyors. Colonel Josiah Harmar was ordered to use whatever force he judged necessary to drive them off, and on March 31 he sent Ensign John Armstrong down the Ohio from Fort McIntosh with twenty infantry and fifteen days’ food. Armstrong counted what he found: three hundred families at the falls of the Hocking, three hundred on the Muskingum, fifteen hundred people on the Miami and the Scioto, and below Wheeling hardly a river bottom without a family on it. Across from Wheeling he met forty armed men. He read them his orders, and they agreed to be gone by April 19. On March 12 the settlers had already called an election for a convention to write their own constitution, and the notice, signed by John Emerson, claimed that all mankind had a right to pass into any vacant country. Rothbard says Congress answered with troops who burned cabins, and that the settlers returned as soon as the soldiers left. Congress’s real business lay elsewhere. In 1787 it sold the Ohio Company a million and a half acres at eight to ten cents an acre, while ordinary buyers were to pay a dollar.