312
��Town and City Histories.
��[May,
��of any sort on Cleveland. The book referred to is entitled Early History of Cleveland, with Biographical Notices of the Pioneers and Survivors ; its author was Colonel Charles Whittlesey. As is the case in almost all such histo- ries, the biographical notices form a very considerable portion of the book, and, as usual, its value is diminished in an exactly equivalent degree ; for the biographies of Western pioneers are fully as tedious and valueless as the catalogue of ships in the second book of Homer. And, oh ! the garrulity of the biographers, the minuteness of detail, the petty inci- dents, the host of dates ! With these we are inflicted because some adven- turous Yankee happened, by sheer luck, to build the first shanty on what became the site of a great city, or chanced there to be a pioneer victim of the " shakes " or the jaundice !
Whittlesey's book contains four hun- dred and eighty-seven pages. Of these he uses up seventy-six before he gets a civilized man in what became Cuyahoga County, and fifty more before he gets any actual settlers to the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. The history of the next thirteen or fourteen years, down to the War of 1812, fills the mass of the book, details being here given that really have historical value. The last forty pages are devoted to the history of the two or three following decades. Nothing is told us about the actual development of a great city, — the haps and mishaps, the successes and failures, in short, the growth, of the community.
This same Colonel Whittlesey, in a volume entitled Fugitive Essays, pub- lished a sketch of the history of Cleve- land covering the same ground more concisely, and also giving a few extra
��details about the history between 18 12 and 1840.
These constituted the sum total of works solely devoted to Cleveland which were accessible to a writer in the East. The Ohio Historical Col- lections, by Henry Howe, a series of sketches of the counties, cities, and towns of the State, added a litde to the meagre stock of information. For further knowledge, the public must be thankful that the argus-eyed tourist has not left the place unnoticed, and that the mathematically-inclined gazetteer has told us from time to time the number of Cleveland's churches, banks, and city councilmen, and other equally important facts !
Take another lake city — Buffalo. The growth of this city has been rapid. Its sudden rise to the dignity of a metropolis was largely due to that most interesting of the many important in- ternal improvements of the first half of the centur}^ — the Erie Canal. With the development of Buffalo was identi- fied the rise of lake navigation and the grain elevator. Its population has been increased by the addition of a large foreign element, which has had its due influence on manners, morals, and pub- lic life. It appears from the report of the board of health for 1879, that, in 1878, of the children born in Buffalo, nineteen hundred and seventy-five were of German descent ; of all other de- scents, two thousand and fifty-six, — a difference of only eighty-one. The city has indeed been thoroughly German- ized, if we may coin the word.
Here are things of which we would know more. Yet what do we find about them ? Save in meagre or verbose pamphlets, nothing. To be sure, there was a book written which claimed to be about Buffalo, but a microscopic
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