eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Nowhere on the American frontier was the clash of cultures more violent than on the Ohio frontier. First settled by migrating Native Americans about 1720 and later by white settlers, Ohio became the crucible which set indigenous and military policy throughout the region. There, Shawnees, Wyandots, and Delawares, among others, fought to preserve their land claims. A land of opportunity, refuge, and violence for both Native Americans and whites, Ohio served as the political, economic, and social foundation for the settlement of the Old Northwest.
“Finally, after nearly twenty-five years, a high-quality general history of the frontier period of the state of Ohio . . . [A] dynamic account . . . that should delight both Transappalachian frontier scholars and interested amateurs.” —History
“This exhaustively researched and well-written book provides a comprehensive history of Ohio from 1720 to 1830.” —Journal of the Early Republic
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253027672 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | A History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 441 |
| Sales rank: | 274,395 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
R. Douglas Hurt is the editor of Agricultural History and Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Agricultural History and Rural Studies at Iowa State University. He has written and edited more than a dozen books.
Read an Excerpt
The Ohio Frontier
Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720â"1830
By R. Douglas Hurt
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 1996 R. Douglas HurtAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02767-2
CHAPTER 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 country- side 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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Ohio Frontier by R. Douglas Hurt. Copyright © 1996 R. Douglas Hurt. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface
The First Settlers
Clash of Cultures
Revolution in the Ohio Country
The Road to Hell
Fallen Timbers
Ohio Fever
Early Settlements
Farm Country
The Frontier People
The Religious Frontier
Confederacy and War
Farmers: First and Last
Settled Community
Biographical Essay
Index
Related Subjects
Customer Reviews
Explore More Items
