Judge Jacob Burnet, in his "Notes on the Northwest Territory," tells us that "the early adventurers to the Northwest Territory were generally men who had spent the prime of their lives in the War of Independence. Many of them had exhausted their fortunes in maintaining the desperate struggle, and retired to the wilderness to conceal their poverty and avoid companions mortifying to their pride while struggling to maintain their families and improve their condition. Some of them were young men, descended form Revolutionary patriots, who had fallen in the contest or become too feeble to endure the fatigue of settling a wilderness. Others were adventurous spirits to whom any change might be for the better, and who, anticipating a successful result, united in the enterprise. Such a colony as this left New England in 1787 for the purpose of occupying the grant made to Sargent, Cutler & Co., on the Muskingum River.

Elsewhere, speaking of the social status at Cincinnati and the garrison there, Fort Washington, during the latter part of the eighteenth century, he says: "Idleness, drinking and gambling prevailed in the army," owing to the fact that they had "been several years in the wilderness, cut off from all society but their own, and no amusements but such as their own ingenuity could invent. Libraries were not to be found; men of literary minds or polished manners were rarely met with, and they had long been deprived of the advantage of modes, accomplished female society. Thus situated … the bottle, the dice box and the card table were among the expedients resorted to. Such were the habits of the army when they began to associate with the inhabitants of Cincinnati and of the western settlements generally" (Ibid, pp. 36).