The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830

1.

THE FIRST SETTLERS

In 1843, the July sun fell heavy on the Wyandots, and the dust rose in a haze from beneath the horses’ hooves and wagon wheels as they moved slowly south toward Cincinnati and the waiting steamboats that would take them from Ohio forever. The Wyandots had once been a powerful people, but since the Treaty of Fort Meigs, which they had signed on September 29, 1817, they had been confined to reservation lands in northwestern Ohio. In 1832, political pressure by whites to gain access to those rich lands resulted in a new treaty that extinguished all title to their lands except for a Grand Reserve of 146,316 acres near Upper Sandusky to be shared with the Senecas and Shawnees. Still, whites cast a covetous eye on these Indian lands, and they continued to pressure the state and federal governments to reach a new accommodation with the Indians that would further alienate the lands. Congress did not turn a deaf ear, and on April 23, 1836, the federal government struck a new treaty that further reduced the lands to 109,144 acres in a tract twelve by fourteen miles.

The land cession in 1836, however, did not satisfy the insatiable hunger for Indian lands in Ohio, and Native American contact with white civilization often proved intimidating, humiliating, and demoralizing. By 1839, only the Wyandots remained, and they did not have the political power to resist white encroachments much longer. In March 1840, the Wyandots were comforted when the federal government appointed John Johnston to negotiate with them for the cession of their remaining lands. Johnston had considerable experience working as an Indian agent for the federal government in Ohio, and he had gained a reputation for honesty and trustworthiness. With his help, they might make the best of a bad situation. Although delays occurred, Johnston and the Wyandots signed a treaty at Upper Sandusky on March 17, 1842.

In the Wyandot Treaty of 1842, the tribe agreed to terminate all title to their Ohio lands in exchange for 148,000 acres west of the Mississippi River, a perpetual annuity of $17,500 annually, and $10,000 to pay for removal to their new home as well as financial support for a school. The federal government also agreed to pay for the improvements that the Wyandots had made on their lands as well as to assume the tribal debt, which amounted to $23,860. During the course of the next year, the Wyandots made plans for removal and disposal of their property. When they congregated on Sunday, July 9, for their trek south to Cincinnati and the awaiting steamboats that would take them to present-day Kansas, however, Subagent Purdy McElvain told them they still had saved too much. During the next two days they looked on heartbroken as the agent sold many of their personal belongings at public auction. By Wednesday everything was ready, and 674 men, women, and children, 120 wagons, 300 horses, and a contingent of buggies headed south. About 50 Wyandots remained behind because they were too ill to travel, but some of the sick were loaded on the wagons to make do as best they could during the long journey ahead.

The Wyandots moved slowly south toward the river without a fight or any resistance. McElvain said they showed only perfect resignation. Charles Dickens, traveling though western Ohio on his way from St. Louis to New York, saw the Wyandots on the road and likened them to the meaner sort of gipsies. Had he seen them in England, Dickens remarked, he would have thought them to be a wandering and restless people. No matter who saw the Wyandots or how they judged them, all agreed that the sight was a melancholy one, and a far cry from the days when these Huron people were known as the Iroquois of the West, and when they controlled the northern half of Ohio with a ferocity that few tribes challenged. Now, in July 1843, their council fires had been cold for a long time.

When the Wyandots passed through Logan on Thursday after a day on the trail, the local editor remarked, Most of them are noble looking fellows, stout of limb, athletic and agile; devoted in their attachments to their squaws and families and brave and generous to a fault. Among the squaws are some really beautiful women. He did not note, as did another editor from Cincinnati, that many in the entourage were white men with Wyandot wives and white women with Indian husbands as well as a host of mixed-bloods. That observer believed that the Wyandots as a people would have disappeared in the process of amalgamation within a decade if they had been allowed to remain in Ohio. Some of the young women wore the fashions of white belles and had their forms shaped into civilized proportions with tightly cinched corsets. During the two days that it took the Wyandots to pass through Logan, they conducted themselves with decorum. Only one drunken Indian marred the event for the curious onlookers, who felt more or less sympathy for them and who came from the surrounding countryside to see history in the making. Indeed, they realized that the Wyandots no longer belonged to Ohio and that their mutual ties through history were now broken.

When the Wyandots passed through Xenia on Sunday morning, an observer noted that they were all decently dressed, mostly in the clothes of white civilization. Half of them allegedly practiced Christianity, and on that Sabbath, few could look upon them without praying that the Great Spirit would guide and protect them on their journey, and carefully preserve them as a people in the far, far west. When they reached Cincinnati on Wednesday the 19th, one hardened newspaperman thought that they looked like sheep among wolves. By then, several Wyandots were drunk, and as they camped on the landing while waiting to board the steamboats the next day, one drowned. After seven days of the trail, the Wyandots were now a sorry specimen of the Noble Indian. With few exceptions, they were tired and dirty and greasy—an observation that reflected a prejudice that would not die. The weariness on their faces now betrayed their inner feelings and revealed the canker of secret grief. On Thursday, July 20, they all boarded the steamboats with their few possessions, and the paddle wheels of the Nodaway and Republic churned white wakes down the Ohio River. Soon they were out of sight. The last remnant of Ohio’s Indian people were gone.

During the long struggle to control and settle the Ohio country—a conflict fraught with violence, cruelty, and hardship on all sides—the Native Americans became the symbol of that frontier. Although the Ohio frontier had ended at least a decade before the removal of the Wyandots, these Native Americans had remained a visible symbol of a bygone age. But now, in the summer of 1843, Indian Ohio ceased to exist. Thereafter, the Ohio frontier lived only in memory and history.

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The Native Americans who migrated to the Ohio country during the early eighteenth century found a land of rugged hills, dense forest, and open prairies. Above all, however, the forest dominated the landscape, and it spread with both grandeur and foreboding across Ohio like a heavy green blanket. Where the foothills of the Appalachians formed the southeastern third of Ohio, a forest of red and white oak (many six feet or more in diameter and fifty to sixty feet in height), sugar maple, hickory, black walnut, sycamore, hemlock, cedar, beech, and buckeye trees covered the rolling landscape. In this unglaciated region, steep hills, narrow ravines, and sluggish streams provided an unsurpassed area for hunting and fishing to sustain Indian families. Later these lands proved less than desirable, with the exception of the rich soils in the river valleys, for white settlers who wanted to use the land for farming.

The glaciated till plains that spread to the west also had a forest cover consisting primarily of beech, elm, cherry, and ash. Along the river bottoms natural meadows occasionally opened, where deer, elk, and bison grazed on a luxuriant cover of bluegrass, white clover, and wild rye. The soils in the till plains proved the richest and most productive. Not long after the close of the frontier period, when the Indians no longer hunted over this area, it became the eastern edge of the Corn Belt. In the glaciated western and north-central portions of Ohio, the latter area known as the Lake Plains, prairies that extended several miles occasionally provided a welcome relief from the forest’s canopy, and sunlight enabled the grass to grow as high as a horse’s back. In the northwestern corner, the Great Black Swamp that spread 40 miles wide and 120 miles long loomed as a barrier to settlement either Indian or white. It became inhabitable only after drainage in the late nineteenth century, well after the close of the frontier. Across these Ohio lands approximately thirty-eight inches of precipitation fall annually, and the growing season ranges from 120 to 200 days, climatic features that became more important to the white immigrants who followed the Indians into Ohio.

Retreating glaciers created a visually imperceptible continental divide that runs roughly from east to west approximately thirty to fifty miles south of Lake Erie. The northern-flowing waters, such as the Maumee, Auglaize, St. Joseph, Tiffin, Grand, Portage, Sandusky, Vermillion, Black, and Cuyahoga, run north into Lake Erie and the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River system, while the southern-flowing rivers, such as the Tuscarawas, Kokosing, Licking, Muskingum, Scioto, Hocking, Olentangy, Great Miami, Killbuck, and Whitewoman’s, drain into the Ohio-Mississippi river valleys. Lake Erie and the Ohio River provided transportation for both Indians and whites, and both cultures viewed these waters as their own.

Although the white-tailed deer was the most numerous and important animal to both Indian and white immigrants, black bears, wolves, and pumas also roamed the countryside. Wild turkeys, grouse, quail, Canadian geese, ducks, passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets, and gray squirrels lived in abundance in the forests and river valleys, while catfish, muskellunge, walleye, perch, sturgeon, and bass thrived in the river and streams. Deer provided the most important food source for the Indians who migrated into Ohio, and skins quickly became a commodity for trade with whites. The Indians also used the black bear for meat and cooking grease and its hide for trade, but white immigrants who came later would consider the black bears and timber wolves to be animals worthy only of extermination, because the former raided pig pens, while the latter played havoc with flocks of sheep.

Similarly, where the Indians would gain limited control of their environment by maintaining natural meadows in the forest, along river valleys, or on the open prairies by using fire to kill woody plants that would choke the grass and prevent cultivation, white settlers would use both fire and ax to remove the trees in great blocks from the landscape in order to use the land for commercial agriculture rather than for hunting and subsistence farming. With the arrival of white settlers, bounties would be paid for wolf and panther scalps, and on some occasions for those of the Native Americans. Many boys, both Indians and white, sharpened their rifle skills on squirrels that scolded from above or too carelessly peeked over a hickory branch. While the Native Americans considered deer, bears, wolves, passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets, and other animals and birds part of the environment, where nature struck a balance between all living things, white settlers saw them as a menace to agriculture and sought to eliminate many of the native birds and animals as quickly as possible. Although the Native Americans used the environment and changed it (notably with the use of fire to clear land and to drive game), white settlers changed it for all time by essentially destroying the forest, tilling the land, and driving many animals and birds either away or to extinction. The Native Americans and whites who migrated into Ohio, then, used the environment for their own purposes. Neither kept Ohio’s environment in an entirely natural state, but after the arrival of white settlers, it would never look as it did when the Native Americans first moved into the Ohio country.

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Nearly two centuries passed between the first European contact with the Ohio country and the close of the frontier soon after the end of the War of 1812. During that time, the Native Americans left an indelible mark on the history of Ohio, which they stamped with both peace and war. Until the mid-seventeenth century, however, the Ohio country remained a vast no man’s land, occasionally marked by mysterious monuments of ancient peoples whose civilizations had disappeared long before. Few Native Americans hunted in Ohio, although the Iroquois considered it their land by right of conquest. The contest for the control of Ohio and the clash of cultures that it wrought did not come until the 1730s, when the Wyandots, Shawnees, and Delawares moved into the region and claimed it as their own, while both France and Great Britain cast their own designs upon it. Until that conflict began, few Europeans ventured into the Ohio country, and their knowledge of the Native American inhabitants depended on reports given to them by other Indians.

Apparently, at the time of French contact and development of the fur trade in present-day Canada and New York, a Native American people lived along the southern shore of Lake Erie, perhaps as far west as the Cuyahoga River and present-day Cleveland. Known as the Erie, they were an Iroquoian-speaking people who lived in forty villages and fortified towns. Most of the population of approximately twelve thousand lived between present-day Erie and Buffalo, but a few settlements extended west into the Ohio country. The French first learned about the Erie, or Eriehronon as they were called by the Huron, in 1623. A decade later, the French referred to them as la Nation du Chat, the Cat Nation, more appropriately translated as the Raccoon Nation. Indeed, it was from these masked bandits that the Erie secured much of their food and the skins for their robes and blankets, which they fringed with the animals’ ringed tails.

About 1575, Hiawatha forged the Iroquois Confederation in central New York. Known as the League of Five Nations, based on the membership of the Mohawks, Onondagas, Cayugas, Oneidas, and Senecas, the Iroquois, who numbered between twenty and thirty thousand, became dependent on trade with the French during the early seventeenth century. As with other Native Americans who would learn the advantages of iron axes and knives, brass cooking pots, wool blankets, guns, black powder, and lead, their wants became insatiable, and the French proved willing traders for a price. At first the French, and later the English and Dutch, wanted so little in return for the goods that made Indian life easier and more secure—beaver skins. The streams and lakes had plentiful beaver populations, and the trapping and hunting of these animals that provided fashionable pelts for hatmakers in Europe proved relatively easy. Quickly, beaver became the first cash crop of North America and beaver skins the monetary medium of exchange. The Iroquois, however, took too many beaver, and their home country became trapped out by the 1640s. Consequently, the Iroquois sought control of the fur trade that originated deep in the interior of Canada and the Ohio country.

Iroquois pressure to gain control of the fur country to the west culminated with the Beaver Wars or the Wars of the Iroquois, which began in 1649. With speed and brutal force, the Iroquois destroyed the Huron, the Tobacco Nation, the Neutral Nation, and the Attiwandaron, who resisted their control along the Niagara River and north of Lakes Erie and Ontario and east of Lake Huron in an area known as the Ontario Peninsula. By 1654, this area had become the Iroquois preserve for hunting beaver, deer, bear, and elk. Then, with a diplomatic guile that surely impressed the Machiavellian French at Montreal, they established themselves as the power brokers and chief suppliers of the fur trade and welcomed the black-robed Jesuits to their villages. Only the Erie stood in the way of their gaining complete control of the fur trade from the Great Lakes region.

The Five Nations did not take the Erie lightly. The Cat Nation had experienced leaders and a well-organized tribe. Most important, they had defeated the Iroquois in the past. The Dutch considered them to be better fighters than the Iroquois and called them satanas or devils. Yet the Erie suffered from a monumental disadvantage that resulted from the fur trade and the long contact of the Iroquois with European civilization. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Erie essentially remained a Stone Age people and isolated from the European technology dispensed at Montreal. They fought primarily with bows and arrows, while the Iroquois had guns, which they acquired from the British and Dutch.

During the spring of 1654, the Iroquois moved to consolidate their control of the fur trade along Lake Erie. In May they informed the French at Montreal that the Erie had recently burned a Seneca village, killed members of an Onondaga war party returning from the west, and captured an Onondaga chief. The Iroquois could not let these challenges pass unanswered, and they told the French that while they would no longer wage war against them, they would fight the Erie. Besides, they noted, their young men were too warlike to abandon that pursuit, and they planned to wage a war against the Erie that summer. Prophetically, they told the French: The earth is trembling yonder and here all is quiet. Although the French recognized this ingenious explanation to gain control of the fur trade in the Ohio country, they were delighted that the Iroquois professed peace with them and intended to deliver the goods, that is furs, to Montreal. Although the Erie sent a party of thirty emissaries on a peace mission to the Seneca, their hosts executed all but five in retaliation for a recent killing of a Seneca by an Erie. With encouragement from the French, the Iroquois sent nearly eighteen hundred warriors west in August with their faces painted red and black for war.

Although the Erie villages fell to the Iroquois war parties, the Cat Nation did not crumble easily or immediately. As they fled west, one Jesuit reported that they fight like Frenchmen, bravely sustaining the first discharge of the Iroquois, who are armed with our muskets, and then falling upon them with a hailstorm of poisoned arrows, which they discharge eight or ten times before a musket can be reloaded. Soon, however, the Iroquois destroyed the major towns, but sporadic fighting continued for the next two years as the Iroquois sought and destroyed the remote villages to the west. By the spring of 1656, the war had ended. Most of the Erie had been killed in battle or tortured to death as captives. The Five Nations absorbed those who remained into their tribes, and the Erie disappeared as a nation during the early 1680s.

Although the Erie had never occupied more than a portion of northeastern Ohio before contact with European civilization, after the Iroquois defeated them, Ohio came under the nominal control of the Five Nations. Yet the Iroquois did not establish villages south of Lake Erie before 1700, in part because the Andaste people who lived south and east of Lake Erie prevented them from doing so. By the 1680s, the territory along the southern shore of Lake Erie served only as a commonly used warpath for the Iroquois going west to strike the Miami, Illinois, and other tribes and for the Illinois and Miami warriors raiding eastward. Although the Iroquois sent hunting parties into the region, one Frenchman wrote that it was very dangerous to stop there. The war road, then, prevented steady use or settlement of the Ohio country by any Native Americans. Essentially, Ohio remained unoccupied. Still, the Iroquois claimed this ambiguous empire by the right of the conqueror, and they attempted to hold it by military force until the early eighteenth century, when it became a refuge and a homeland for other tribes who fled both the Iroquois and French and British encroachment and domination.

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Between the late 1730s and the early 1750s, the Shawnees, Wy-andots, and Delawares moved into the Ohio country and claimed it as their own. Of these three cultural groups, the Shawnees personified the Native Americans on the Ohio frontier and exemplified their aggressiveness and bravery as well as their reserve and reasonableness. They did so primarily because they fought the longest and because the actions and fate of their leaders, such as Cornstalk and Tecumseh, became common knowledge among Ohio’s frontier people. The Iroquois called them Ontouagannaha, a people who spoke an unintelligible language, while the Shawnees referred to themselves as sa wanna, which meant person of the South. Linked linguistically to the Algonquian, the Shawnees may have originated in the Ohio country from the Fort Ancient culture. Or they may have migrated into Ohio from the northeastern Great Lakes region, perhaps driven by the Iroquois before European contact. Whatever its origin, Shawnee culture was centered in the Cumberland River valley by the mid-seventeenth century.

By 1692, the Shawnees had established settlements in Pennsylvania along the Delaware and Susquehanna river valleys, where they lived peacefully near the Quakers. When William Penn, who had tried to follow a humanitarian policy by treating the Indians fairly in matters of land acquisition and human relationships, died in 1718, Shawnee relations with the colonial government began to deteriorate. In 1736, Pennsylvania granted the Iroquois hegemony over all other tribes in the colony because of their military power and successful brokerage as middlemen in the fur trade between the western tribes and the English and Dutch. Pennsylvania authorities intended to use the Iroquois to control the other tribes in the colony in order to forge a military force that would deter French expansion in the Ohio country. The Pennsylvanians believed that the nation that achieved the strongest Indian alliance would have the balance of power tipped in its favor. For them, the Iroquois provided more than a counterbalance in the contest for empire. At the same time that the Iroquois prevented French encroachments, the League of Five Nations would also keep the peace and ensure cooperation among the tribes by creating a Covenant Chain or chain of friendship in which each tribe would provide the essential links.

The Shawnees and later the Delawares, however, thought less about peaceful cooperation with the Iroquois than about their festering grievances against them that demanded resolution, either by fight or by flight. Increased population growth and pressure for Indian lands along the Delaware and Susquehanna rivers gave another push to the Shawnees, while French overtures pulled them west to trade on more favorable terms than with the British. In 1728, the Marquis de Beauharnois, governor of New France, reported: It would promote in considerable degree the prosperity and security of the Colony, could these Indians settle between Lake Erie and the Ohio River. He did not need to add that in doing so, they would help France secure its claim to the Ohio country.

Pennsylvania’s action merely followed the policy of New York, which in 1701 recognized the Iroquois claim to the Ohio country, subject to ultimate British sovereignty, and promised protection of this hunting ground from seizure by the French. The Shawnees, however, had suffered the wrath of Iroquois war parties in Ohio and the Illinois country after the defeat of the Erie. Consequently, when the Iroquois began to consolidate their control over the tribes in Pennsylvania during the 1720s, the Shawnees began to move west, perhaps crossing the Ohio River by 1730. Although the government of Pennsylvania tried to lure the Shawnees back near the settlements where it could more easily regulate the fur trade and keep a watchful eye and shield them from French influence, it failed. When the Iroquois also ordered the Shawnees to return to the colony, they too met rejection.

Although the Iroquois had a long arm that could reach into the Ohio country, it was not well muscled. In fact, the Iroquois, who by now had become known as the Six Nations after the Tuscaroras joined the league during the early eighteenth century, had limited influence in the Ohio country. The Covenant Chain among the tribes had become little more than a series of temporary agreements. Moreover, the Iroquois could not unite on many matters of policy, which further weakened their diplomatic and military effectiveness in the western country. By the early 1730s, the Ohio country was less an Iroquois empire than a refuge from the Six Nations for a host of tribes, none of whom claimed the right to use Ohio exclusively as their own. Tanacharison, a Seneca headman, called it the country in between.

While the Iroquois theoretically exercised control over the Ohio country, and while some tribes such as the Senecas and Cayugas held specific land claims based on use and occupation in northeastern Ohio, the region had little order except that which the Shawnees and other migrating tribes gave it. In 1732 the Iroquois finally ordered the Shawnees out of Pennsylvania and back toward Ohio, the place from whence you came, because they would not join an alliance to curb colonial expansion. But the Iroquois had little power to enforce their will in the West, and the Shawnees were leaving anyway. On the Ohio frontier, distance became the great equalizer of military power. Soon the Shawnees developed their own economic network with traders from Pennsylvania and Virginia, some, such as George Croghan, operating from Pennsylvania as far west as the shore of Lake Erie and the Maumee and Miami river valleys.

By 1738, the Shawnees had founded a town at the mouth of the Scioto. This settlement began the regathering of the tribe and the creation of a quasi-Shawnee republic which by late 1747 had kindled its own council fire and, thereby, symbolically and literally cast off all claims of the Six Nations to manage its affairs. When the French party, under Pierre-Joseph de Céloron de Blainville, visited this Lower Shawnee Town in late August 1749, they found it a pleasant location of about sixty houses and partially inhabited by Iroquois, Delawares, and Miamis and others from nearly all the nations of the Upper County, who had been drawn there by the lavish markets of the English. Although the Shawnees had been pro-French at the time of their settlement in Ohio, they were now entirely devoted to the English.

Céloron ordered the five English traders at Lower Shawnee Town to leave, and they agreed, but those traders still remained when the French continued down the Ohio River. Céloron wisely recognized that he did not have sufficient power to seize their goods, and, given their protection by the Shawnees, an attack would have brought discredit on the French. Father Bonnecamps, a priest traveling with Céloron’s party, noted that la belle riviere, or beautiful river, as the French called the Ohio, was little known to the French and, unfortunately, too well known to the English, who relied on a crowd of savages, such as these Shawnees, for protection. By the mid-eighteenth century, then, the Shawnees were well established at the junction of the Ohio and Scioto rivers, where they had become great Friends to the English.

In the winter of 1752–53, a flood destroyed Lower Shawnee Town, and the residents moved out of the river bottom to higher ground and rebuilt the village on the site of present-day Portsmouth. The Shawnees established other towns along the Ohio and Muskingum rivers, the village of Wakatomica on the site of present-day Dresden being the most important on the latter river. When they abandoned Lower Shawnee Town, they also moved up the Scioto River valley to establish the town of Chillicothe, also known as Upper Shawnee Town, on the plains about fifteen miles south of Circleville. This town became one of five villages so named in Ohio, including one near present-day Chillicothe. Unlike white settlers, the Indians did not give every town a unique name. Rather, they associated their villages with some quality or feature. The Chillicothe towns, for example, simply meant that the Shawnees of the Chillicothe division lived there. By the mid-1760s, the Shawnees had migrated westward and established towns on the Little Miami and Mad rivers. At Old Chillicothe, located on the Little Miami River near modern-day Xenia, Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton would one day be held prisoner. A dozen miles to the north, the Shawnees also founded another Chillicothe town near Pickawill-any, on a site previously occupied by the Miamis. The village was the probable birthplace of Tecumseh in 1768. About 1780, the Shawnees renamed it Piqua. Wherever the Shawnees went, however, the English traders operating out of Pennsylvania quickly followed with the intent of tying them to the British Empire and preventing an alliance with the French.

Other Native Americans settled in northern Ohio about the same time that the Shawnees migrated to the Scioto and Muskingum river valleys. The people whom the British called Wyandot and whom the French knew as the Tionontati or Petun (Tobacco) Hurons had been driven west from southern Ontario to the Upper Great Lakes by the Iroquois during the mid-seventeenth century. In 1701, when Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac built Fort Pontchartrain and established the nucleus of the French outpost at Detroit, he intended to gain the support of the Wyandots and the other tribes who lived in the region to help keep the British out of the Ohio Valley. Not long after the Wyandots settled near Detroit, they began hunting south of Lake Erie in the Sandusky and Maumee river valleys for both food and furs to trade at Detroit. From their winter camps in northwestern Ohio, the Wyandots also ranged southward to the upper branches of the Scioto and the western reaches of the Muskingum rivers. Perhaps as early as 1738, a band of Wyandots under the leadership of Nicholas Orontony settled near present-day Castalia, a few miles below modern Sandusky.

The British did not concede the Ohio country to French territorial claims and control of the fur trade. To lure the Wyandots away from French influence at Detroit, the British sent traders from Pennsylvania, and by 1747 they had built a blockhouse at the Wyandots’ settlement at Sandusky to facilitate trade, provide protection, and help ensure their claims to the region. Still, the relationship of the Wyandots to the French and British remained fluid, and they skillfully drifted toward one or the other as their needs or circumstances dictated. In 1747, for example, they moved closer to the British camp when five French traders returning from hunting and trapping along the Cuyahoga River in northeastern Ohio, a region known as the White River country, were killed and their furs stolen along Sandusky Bay. Although the French never learned the identity of the Indians, they assumed the Sandusky Wyandots had made the attack. In late August of that year, Nicholas, probably encouraged by the British, also planned to attack Detroit and, with the help of other tribes in the area, drive the French from the Great Lakes region. But when the French learned of this plot, the conspiracy failed and the Wyandots withdrew.

During the winter of 1747–48, British traders visited the Wyandots twice and perhaps, together with the hostility of the French, persuaded them to move closer to them on the Cuyahoga River. Or perhaps the Wyandots grew weary of the French, because they complained in 1748 to Conrad Weiser, a German-born agent for Pennsylvania, that they were tired of their hard Usage by the French, and because the French took their young men to war yet charged them dear prices for their trade goods. Indeed, the French officers and traders gained a notorious reputation for speculation and corruption by trying to gain exorbitant profits from the fur trade. Whatever the reason for their removal from Sandusky, Nicholas had burned his village by March 1748 and moved his people, including 119 warriors and more than 300 women, children, and old men, to the mouth of the Cuyahoga.

In November 1750, George Croghan reported to the governor of Pennsylvania that the Wyandots were Steady and well attached to the English interest. Given the work of the Pennsylvania traders to win their friendship, he believed the French would make but a poor hand of those Indians. Croghan, who was usually right in his assessment of Indian affairs, missed his mark this time. During the French and Indian War, which began only a few years later, the Wyandots fought with the French against the British, but their loyalty shifted back to the British during the American Revolution. In the War of 1812, the Sandusky Wyandots would side with the Americans, while those near Detroit gave their allegiance to Tecum-seh and his Indian confederacy.

By December 1750, the Wyandots under Nicholas had moved south along the Tuscarawas and down the Muskingum rivers, where they established a town, known as Conchake to the French or Muskingum to the English, near the present site of Coshocton. At that time Christopher Gist, an agent for the Ohio Company of Virginia, who scouted in Ohio to find good lands, reported that the town consisted of a hundred families. He also discovered that George Croghan already had built a trading post for the Wyandots and that he and Nicholas flew English Colours above their houses to signify a safe haven for other English traders operating out of Pennsylvania. The Wyandots stayed at Conchake until 1753, when most of them returned to the Sandusky Bay area. The last Wyandots moved back north two years later. In early January 1751, a trader reported that the Wyandots had told him that the French claimed all the rivers that drained into Lake Erie but that the tributaries of the Ohio belonged to them and their Brothers the English, and that the French had no Business there.

The Delawares became the third major Native American people to migrate to the Ohio country. These Algonquian-speaking Indians called themselves Lenni Lenape, which means common people. The Dutch, Swedes, and English discovered the Lenape in the Delaware River valley when they began colonization during the mid-seventeenth century. The origin of these people remains a mystery. Perhaps, as tribal tradition contends, they migrated from west of the Mississippi River; or perhaps they descended from the Paleo-Indians who lived along the Atlantic seaboard. In any event, when the English settlers named the Delaware Bay in honor of Thomas West, Lord de la Warr, whom the Crown appointed governor of Virginia in 1610, the river that emptied into it and the Native Americans who lived along it in time also became known as Delaware.

The Delawares were a peaceful people who maintained a loose association and lived in semi-permanent villages in present-day Pennsylvania, southwestern New York, western New Jersey, and northern Delaware. They did not form a Delaware Nation or recognize an authoritarian chief or ruler who spoke for them. Instead, they submitted to the domination of the Iroquois, who represented the Delawares on all diplomatic matters with whites and prohibited them from making war or peace with either whites or Indians without their permission. The Iroquois also spoke of them as women. Although the Delawares greatly resented this humiliation, the Iroquois were too powerful to resist. After Pennsylvania took most of the Delawares’ land during the 1740s by purchasing it from the Iroquois, they began to move into western Pennsylvania and the Ohio country. There, the French supplied them with guns and provisions and urged them to attack the white settlers on the Pennsylvania frontier. By the 1750s, the Delawares had allied with the Shawnees, and their war parties asserted tribal independence from the Six Nations. Few frontiersmen considered the Delawares to be effeminate fighters. Indeed, the Delaware war parties operating from the Ohio country became the most feared on the frontier. With great confidence they told the Six Nations: We are men and are determined not to be ruled any longer by you as Women, and we are determined to cut off all the English, except those that may make their Escape from us in Ships.

Although the Wyandots claimed all land immediately west of the Ohio River and north to Lake Erie as well as the right to light all intertribal council fires, they had granted the Shawnees permission to hunt in that region, and they now came to the aid of the Delawares by permitting them to settle in eastern Ohio. They may have done so based on Native American cultural tradition that allowed the temporary loan of hunting lands during time of need by others. Or the Wyandots may have used the dispossessed Delawares to create a buffer between them and the already relentlessly westering frontiersmen. By 1750, the Delawares had established major villages along the Tuscarawas. There, an abundance of elk browsed in the river valley. In mid-January 1751, Christopher Gist reported several small Delaware towns in south-central Ohio, including Hockhock-ing or French Margaret’s Town at present-day Lancaster, and Maguck, located on the Pickaway Plains near modern Circleville, all of which contained only a few families.

The Delawares established other towns in eastern and southern Ohio. In 1752, Shingas, chief of the Turkey division, whom Pennsylvania frontiersmen called Shingas the Terrible, established a village known as Shingas Town at the mouth of the Big Sandy Creek on the Tuscarawas near present-day Bolivar. In 1764, after tribal authority had passed to his brother King Beaver, it became known as Beaver’s Town. At that same time, Netawatwees or New Comer, chief of the Turtle division, who founded a town on the Cuyahoga River near present-day Cuyahoga Falls in 1759, established Newcomer’s Town east of Coshocton. He called it Gekelmukpechunk, which means still water, but it soon became Newcomerstown to the white traders and settlers and the largest Delaware town on the Tuscarawas River. In 1771 it had a hundred dwellings, including the Great Council house; by the American Revolution approximately seven hundred Delawares lived there. At that time, the Delawares also had villages on the Mahoning River near Warren and Youngs-town as well as on the Kokosing, Walhonding, and Cuyahoga rivers and their branches. When the Wyandots abandoned Conchake, the Delawares occupied that site, and Coshocton became the tribal center. By 1765, Delaware villages were so common that British Brigadier General Henry Bouquet referred to the Upper Muskingum region as the Country of the Delawares, and George Croghan estimated that three thousand Delawares lived between the Ohio and Lake Erie. With an estimated fighting force of five hundred men, and reported to be firmly attached to the English Interest, they too pledged that they would not hear the Voice of any other Nation except their Brothers the English.

The Christian Delawares were the last major group of Native Americans to settle in Ohio. These Indians were under the influence of the church of the Unity of the Brethren, commonly known as the Moravians. In the summer of 1772, David Zeisberger and John Heckewelder led a group of Delawares from Friedensstadt, Pennsylvania, to the Tuscarawas River, where other Delawares under the leadership of Beaver had settled earlier. Zeisberger selected a site about two miles southeast of present-day New Philadelphia for their settlement, and he called it Schoenbrunn, which means beautiful spring. The Delawares called it Welhik-Tupeek. The Moravians, whom the Delawares called Blackcoats, and who, in turn, referred to the Indians as Brown Brethren, had been invited to Ohio along with the praying Indians by Netawatwees, the first among equals of the Delaware chiefs, to strengthen the tribal force at one location, both Christians and nativists (that is, those who observed traditional religious practices) alike. Earlier, in 1761, the Moravians had sent the Reverend Christian Frederick Post to the Muskingum River country to spread the Gospel in the wilderness.

Although Post and his assistant John Heckewelder, who joined him the next year, failed to establish a mission among the Delawares and fled back to Pennsylvania in fear for their lives, the Moravians did not give up. In 1771, David Zeisberger met a more favorable reception when the Moravians tried again, unmindful of the political and military realities that Netawatwees attempted to balance. Nor did they understand that Netawatwees had invited them in order to use their spiritual powers secretly to end an epidemic that had taken Delaware lives and which the tribe blamed on sorcery or witchcraft. If things went right, Netawatwees reasoned, both the health and the power of the Delawares would soon be improved. Although the disease that swept among them evidently ran its course, the Delawares would soon blame these Christians for the terrible bloodshed that followed.

The Moravians and their Delaware converts quickly began building sixty log cabins and a church as well as tilling the rich soil and clearing pastures along the Tuscarawas River. The Moravians required their charges to observe Christian rituals and to work in the fields or at a craft. When the Moravians baptized an Indian, he or she gave up his or her native name and adopted a new one, preferably of biblical origin. They also stressed the sanctity of monogamous marriages, obedience to the missionaries, and the importance of Sunday as a day of rest. The Christian Delawares could not go hunting without permission, nor could they paint their faces, wear a scalp lock, shave their heads, or make war. The Moravians required all Delaware converts to settle near Schoenbrunn to avoid the distractions of the nativists and any lapse of their commitment to Christianity and their new way of life. Delaware children also went to school and learned the English language. Systematically, the Moravians worked to remake the economic, social, and political structure of Delaware society.

Despite the cultural challenges from associating with the Moravians, many Delawares were receptive to living like their relatives who had joined the Black Coats. As the Delaware converts increased, the mission at Schoenbrunn could not meet their religious, educational, and economic needs. As a result, in 1772 the Moravians founded the sister towns of Gnadenhutten, or Tents of Grace, about ten miles downstream, and the village of Lichtenau, or Meadow of Light, below Coshocton four years later. These new villages were also located on the east side of the Tuscarawas to maintain a separation of at least ten miles between the missions and nativist towns. By so doing, the Moravians hoped to keep their converts from the trader’s whiskey which flowed too easily and frequently in the nativist villages as well as from traditional religious practices. The Moravians preferred for their converts to sing hymns in the mission villages rather than war chants with the nativists at the other towns. Moreover, some Delaware leaders such as Kill-buck, Netawatwees’s eldest son, resented the presence of the Moravians and argued that each convert to the Moravian pacifists depleted the ability of the Delawares to defend themselves from an attack by Indians or whites. The Christian Delawares, then, who settled with the Moravians, divided the Delaware nation rather than united it. That division would have terrible consequences for both the Christian and nativist Delawares.

In addition to the Shawnees, Wyandots, and Delawares, several other tribes also settled in Ohio. And as many eastern tribes were forced to move west because of population pressures that ruined their food supply or by colonial government policy, several other tribes moved into the region from the west. As a result, Ohio no longer remained a great uninhabited hunting land. In 1747, a pro-English Miami of Algonquian heritage, whose traditional name, Twaatwaa, imitated the alarm cry of the crane, founded Picka-willany or Twigthwees Town on the west bank of the Great Miami River at the mouth of Loramie Creek, near present-day Piqua. Pickawillany was the largest of the Miami towns in Ohio, with approximately four hundred families in 1751. Gist reported: They are accounted the most powerful People to the westward of the English settlements. Although the Miamis had been in the French Interest, they too grew tired of their price gouging and had become well affected to the English traders. In 1750, they warned the French and their Indian allies to stay out of Miami hunting grounds or they would be taken prisoner. At that time several traders from Pennsylvania lived among them, while others operated in the general vicinity and conducted business with the Shawnees, Delawares, Ottawas, and Iroquois who also hunted in western Ohio. At midcentury, a small group of Miamis also occupied a village, known as Le Baril’s [The Barrel’s] Town, at the mouth of the Little Miami River. The Miamis did not stay long in Ohio, however, and about 1752 they moved back to northeastern Indiana, near present-day Fort Wayne.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the Six Nations tribes in Ohio were known as Mingos. Along with the Loups, Moraignans, Ottawas, Abenakis of St. Francis, and Ojibwas (Chippewas), they had established villages, with a total population of about twenty-five hundred, in the Cuyahoga River region of northeastern Ohio. The hunting remained good in that area in contrast to the depleted lands to the east. The French at Detroit quickly made contact with these tribes to keep them from British influence. In 1743, a French trader brought about two hundred packs of furs to Detroit from the Cuyahoga region, but only the Senecas proved friendly to the French and warned the British to stay away. And when Louis-bourg on Cape Breton Island fell to the British in June 1745 during King George’s War, the British temporarily strangled the supply of French trade goods to the interior. As a result, the Ohio tribes became increasingly pro-British.

Many Indian villages nestled along the streams and rivers in Ohio during the frontier period. Communication between the villages became frequent, but intertribal contact was not always friendly. From George W. Knepper, Ohio aud Its People (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989), with permission of the Kent State University Press.

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Despite these new settlements and economic and diplomatic linkages with the British and French, the Shawnees, Wyandots, and Delawares depended on agriculture and hunting for their daily living. These new settlers were the first farmers in the Ohio country. They cultivated a variety of crops with skill and followed a well-developed system of land tenure. Although the Indian women had the responsibility for raising the crops, among the Wyandots and Shawnees the men participated to a greater extent in the farming process than they did among many other tribes. They cleared the trees and brush from the fields by cutting and burning. The women, however, still had the task of clearing the land between the tree stumps and grubbing the roots from the ground. Women also cultivated and harvested the traditional crops of corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, and tobacco. Among the Ohio tribes, corn served as the primary crop, and the women gave careful attention to it. Before planting time in the spring, they selected the best seeds and soaked them for several days in warm water or greased them with deer brains or tallow to soften the seed and enhance germination. The women planted several kernels in holes spaced about three feet apart. As the corn grew, they hoed up the soil around the stalks during cultivation to give the plants support. After the corn sprouted a few inches, they planted beans in the hills and pumpkins between the rows. This intercropping enabled each crop to be mutually supporting. The