50 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO much of the good work of the veteran Croghan. However, the French from the time of Celeron's trip left no stone unturned to win back the Indians from the British. George Croghan, a neglected historical character, in an entirely different manner and way, is as much the first historical character of consequence in West Central Ohio as Daniel Boone was in Kentucky, Croghan the trader knew the Ohio Country like a book and much of Kentucky twenty-five years before Boone's time. Boone is much more the picturesque type whereas Croghan was more of the type as he was of the blood strain of Sir William Johnson, a man whom Croghan might have equalled or surpassed but for the Revolution. CHAPTER III CROGHAN AND GIST GROGAN, THE INDIAN TRADER AND LAND SPECULATOR-OTHER TRADERSPICKAWILLANY-GROGAN'S INFLUENCE-GISTS MISSION TO WEST CENTRAL OHIO-HIS RECORDS. Croghan, the Indian trader and later land speculator is the real pioneer of the English speaking peoples in West Central Ohio. It is no disparagement to Daniel Boone to point out certain comparative facts. It is merely that Boone's biographers have taken in too much territory in calling him the Columbus of the Land. Croghan, an Irishman of Church of England faith, was born in Dublin, Ireland, date uncertain. He came to America in 1741 and soon entered the Pennsylvanian fur trade. This had reached dimensions and penetrated beyond the knowledge of the scholarship of the day. If Virginia sought lands, Pennsylvania sought equally to maintain the unsettled West. The fur traders were mostly illiterate but cunning men who maintained silence concerning their profitable business. How soon the English traders tapped the wealth in furs beyond the mountains is not known. It probably was long before Croghan's time. But by 1725 the French had limited the British traders along the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, and their excursions there had almost ceased. Fort Ouiatenon was built by the French in 1720 on the Wabash at the head of navigation for large canoes. - 51 - 52 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO Fort Vincennes followed on the lower Wabash in 1731. As a result the Maumee, Wabash line marked the limits of British trading around 1750 although daring traders like Croghan could and did penetrate further. The fur traders were in general a disreputable lot and were pronounced by competent judges as the scourings of the frontier, almost as savage as their customers and living in general on a similar plane when among the Indians. Croghan was rated higher than the average trader, although pronounced illiterate by Col. Henry Bouquet, he could read and write. Nothing is known of his white wife although he had at least one child by a Mohawk squaw. He achieved a high position on the border and at one time was chief lieutenant to Sir William Johnson in the latter's management of the British Crown's Indian affairs. Many prominent men of the border were connected with Croghan by blood or marriage ties. William Trent was his brother-in-law; Thomas Smallwood, his cousin, the rather infamous Dr. John Connolly was his nephew, and he was kin to William Powell and Daniel Clark. His Mohawk daughter married Chief Joseph Brant. George Croghan who defended Fort Stephenson so heroically in the War of 1812 was his nephew. Croghan in his western trade generally followed the route up the Juniata to the Conemaugh river which was the preferred route, 1740 to 1750. Wagons did not penetrate farther than the mountains and the time from the Susquehanna to the Ohio was fourteen days. Pack trains were the favorite system of fur transportation, being about twenty horses in charge of two men, the horses belled so that they could be gathered in from pasturing. Some twenty to thirty per cent was added to goods for the western freight charge. The firms of Shippen and Lawrence and Levy, Franks and Simon were the chief factors in the trade. HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 53 The wood in a primeval condition was largely open and pack horses could if pressed make five miles an hour through the unimpeded aisles of the forest. Mainly they followed the Indian trails which linked the towns of the savages. Croghan had a tanyard and was licensed as a trader as early as 1744 and by 1746 was listed as the trader to Lake Erie. He is said to have drawn the Indians over the lake to trade with him by paying better prices. The French were handicapped in their trading by the St. Lawrence route being frozen much of the year and had been held out of the territory of West Central Ohio until about 1700 due to the Iroquois guarding the south shore of the lake. How much Croghan was involved in the Indian plot of 1747 which was directed against the French and centered round Sandusky Bay is not known. As a result of the sharp reprisals of the French, it may be that his shift southward to the Great Miami is explainable. Pickawillany was soon known as the George Croghan village and became the center of his western operations. From this point on the Great Miami between the present Piqua and Loramie, Croghan radiated out his pack trains and his packmen were scouring Kentucky twenty years before Boone had entered that country. His men even reached the Cherokees in the Carolinas and went down 150 miles below the present Louisville by 1753. The outbreak of the French and Indian war ruined Croghan for the time being. Some historians have maintained that Charles Langlaide's attack on Fort Pickawillany in 1752 was the first battle of that war. If so Croghan's activities were the spark that touched off this great conflict that swept the world, as the Seven Years War. The fur trade of Pennsylvania as led by Croghan with its seat in the heart of West Central Ohio may have been as potent a factor in provoking that far reaching contest as were the equally irritating intrusions of the Ohio Company and the military operations of Washington, further east. 54 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO Incidentally the latter brought about the immediate ruin of Croghan by seizing his pack train horses to obtain transportation in the Great Meadows campaign. With the rancor that distinguished Virginian and Pennsylvanian relations at this time, Washington denounced Croghan for his failure to furnish flour to the Virginian troops. The connection of Croghan with the Braddock campaign, his later services with the British government, his colossal land speculations and his death in 1782 practically penniless are outside the scope of this work. While Croghan was planting his trading post in every Indian village, the Ohio Company was in process of formation in Virginia with the Washingtons, the Lees and Governor Dinwiddie as its backers and Thomas Hanbury, a Quaker, as its lobbyist in England. The emissary sent by these speculators to spy out the land was of a different type than Croghan and has achieved more and earlier historical notice both by reason of his connections with the Washingtons and also in that he kept a journal which has been a boon to later writers. He was Christopher Gist. He but merely penetrated to Fort Pickawillany and in a way just reached where Croghan started his operations yet for many years Gist was esteemed the first English speaking man to penetrate what is now West Central Ohio. Just why the Ohio Company with its grant mostly south of the Ohio and on its head waters should be so interested in far away Pickawillany is not easily apparent. It may be that the leaders of the Ohio Company being far sighted—and far reaching men, looked to further holdings westward and with the jealousy of rival nations toward each other sought to ascertain and undermine the Pennsylvanian hold in the West. They covered their survey under the instructions to Gist to note the soil, the rivers and the mountains and the attitude of the Indians. HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 55 Gist was a wise choice. He was of good family, a surveyor, a native of Maryland and resident of North Carolina. His wife was a Howard, his mother, a Murray and his grandmother, Edith Cromwell. His family had been long over and he was experienced in woodcraft. Gist received, his instructions September 11, 1750, and set out from Col. Thomas Cresap's at Old Shawnee town on the Potomac on October 31. One suspects the play of inter-colonial politics carefully covered when Gist enters Logtown, below the present Pittsburgh on November 25 only to find that George Croghan and Andrew Montour had preceded him ten days out of Pennsylvania with "An embassy to the Indians." Significantly enough the inhabitants of Logtown seemed imbued with the idea Gist sought to form a settlement on the Indian lands and warned him he would never return if such were the case. Whether this was a deft touch of Croghan's can only be surmised but it expresses the difference between the two colonies which Pennsylvania always sought to emphasize to the Indians, namely, that she wanted furs and furs only while Virginia coveted land. Such a supposition, wherever it originated, was a serious obstacle for Gist. Diplomatically, he quieted the matter by claiming he was bearing a message from the King of England to the Indians. Under the cover of the king's coat a Pennsylvanian or trouble maker would scarce dare to fumble too roughly. Gist now began to enquire for Andrew Montour, seeking his aid as interpreter. By degrees he worked westward through Columbiana County toward Carroll County and Tuscarawas County to the forks of the Muskingum where at a Wyandot town he found the British flag flying above the King's House and the house of George Croghan. Here he met the news that a number of traders had been captured by the French and carried to a fort on Lake Erie and 56 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO Croghan had called in the remainder of the traders under his employ for consultation. If there had been covert hostility on Croghan's part toward Gist's mission, here was a more dangerous threat and Gist was to become a prospective ally. On December 18, Gist, Croghan and Montour met and Gist reported them as interested (as they no doubt were) and in hearty accord with his mission (which is something to be doubted). Gist, being a devout Church of England man, asked the Indians to religious services on Christmas Day, to which the Indians gave courteous and grave attention and on the next day put to death a woman captive who had deserted the tribe. She was taken outside the town and turned loose. "When she attempted to run away, the Persons appointed for that Purpose pursued her & struck her on the Ear, on the right Side of her head, which beat her flat on her face on the ground. They then stuck her several Times through the Back, thrust a Dart to the Heart, scalped her & threw the Scalp in the Air, and another cut off her head." The body lay until evening when Barney Curran, an interpreter, buried her with Indian help. By such alternate scenes of religion and fiendishness did Virginian influence march toward its future setting. Gist's alleged harmless mission was contrasted by the Indians with the proud march of Celeron the previous year, much to Gist favor, so that he proceeded with little danger. His next important stop was at Lower Shawnee town at the mouth of the Scioto. At this time the Shawnees, recently arrived from the south, had sought entrance to Ohio after long wanderings and were admitted as guests of the Wyandots who were head of the Ohio tribes. Since these same Shawnees were making their penetration into Ohio at about the same time as the English and Americans, and all three were to come in conflict in West Central Ohio at a later date, some notice of these Ishmaelites of the woods is pertinent. HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 57 Gist records that he had passed the last Delaware town to the west on the Sciota in Sciota County, so the Shawnees seem to have barely obtained a toe hold across the Ohio River at this time. Their village was built on both sides of the Ohio, but as showing their drift about one hundred houses stood on the north shore as compared with forty on the south bank. On January 30, 1751, Gist and Croghan met the Shawnees in council. To those who conceive of the Ohio Indian as employing but temporary small huts or wigwams it may be illuminating to know that Gist records the council house as ninety feet long and roofed with bark, building it would seem large as biggest modern Buckeye barns. As an interesting commentary on Shawnee morals and their solution of the urge for affinities, for variety, and the eternal triangle, Gist records the events of an Indian festival held at Shawnee town while he was there: "In the evening a proper official made proclamation that all Indian marriages were dissolved, and a public feast was to be held for three succeeding days after, in which the women, as their custom was, were again to choose their husbands. "The next morning early the Indians breakfasted and after spent the day in dancing until evening, when a plentiful feast was prepared; after feasting, they spent the night in dancing. "The same way they passed the next two days until evening, the men dancing by themselves and then the women in turns around the fires and dancing in their manner in the form of the figure 8, and about sixty or seventy of them at a time. The women, the whole time they danced sung a song in their language, the chorus of which was: " I am not afraid of my husband, I will choose what man I please.' "The third day in the evening, the men, being about one hundred in number, danced in a long string, following one aother, 58 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO sometimes at length, at other times in a figure 8 quite round the fort, and in and out of the long house, where they held their councils, the women standing together as the men danced by them; and, as any woman liked a man passing by, she stepped in and joined in the dance, taking hold of the man's stroud, whom she chose, and then continued in the dance until the rest of the women stepped in and made their choice in the same manner, after which the dance ended and they all retired to consummate." This is an interesting sidelight on why the Indian line of descent was always traced through the mother as is common with savages. Gist's journey from Lower Shawnee to Pickawillany took him through the present Fayette, Madison, Clark and Champaign counties, up Mad River to the later site of the Mac-a-chack towns at West Liberty. From there he struck across the Pickawillany at the mouth of the Loraimie Creek where he arrived February 17, 1751. Contrary to the general belief that this section was unbroken gloomy forest, Gist says it was "Full of beautiful natural meadows, covered with wild Rye, Blue Grass and Clover and abounds with Turkeys, Deer, Elk and most sorts of game, particularly buffaloe, thirty or forty of which are frequently seen feeding in one meadow. Pickawillany turned out to be a town of 400 families, constantly increasing in size and counted one of the most important towns of the continent, with its inhabitants Twighttwees believed to be the most powerful people west of the English settlements and much superior to the Six Nations." In this Gist was mistaken of course, but he must have visited the Miamis at the height of their power and the blow soon to be struck by Langlade and the French must have sadly reduced the Miamis to the shrunken numbers encountered a generation later HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 59 by the Americans, a blow which prepared the way for the crafty Shawnees to throw the Miamis up toward the lakes. Gist had come into Pickawillany to the continuous roar of firearms, this salute lasting a quarter of an hour, the British flag flying and the king, at Gist called Old Britain, inviting the visitors to his own house. Andrew Montour acting as interpreter for Gist and Croghan, or rather Gist, for Croghan probably preferred to let Gist take the responsibility for his message since Croghan was persona grata at Pickawillany and had no doubt had the fort erected there the year before. After the council at which Montour conveyed messages from the Wyandots and Delawares who asked the Miamis to be friendly to the English traders and travellers, the party examined the fort. This was built of split logs surrounding a well for emergency use. There were a number of log store houses where the fur trade was conducted, the Indians taking powder, guns, lead, knives, flints, cooking utensils, shirts, strouds, hatchets, needles, rings, rum, wearing apparel and paying several hundred per cent advance over the Philadelphia prices. Gist recommended some repairs for the fort such as lining the structure with logs. February 19-22 was spent in palaver Croghan handing out presents to the assembled outside tribes of the Miamis. February 23, great excitement prevailed in Pickawillany. Word had come the French were coming in force. This turned out to be four French Indians coming to council, and asking for a reply as to Old Britain attitude toward the French. Both parties, the English and the French were assembled in the council house and Old Britain could no longer play one against the other. After the French presents of two kegs of brandy had been accepted, Old Britain delivered his answer : "We have made a 60 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO road for our brothers, the English." The French Indian is said to have wept with chagrin. For this answer we must look to Croghan's influence since Gist and the Ohio Company had no contacts and no influence to bring to bear. The French Indians were Ottawas come to request the Miamis keep the promise made to Celeron that they would return nearer the French. The Miami answer, elaborated some days later, amounted to a declaration of war and defiance of the French. They sent back a string of black wampum. A treaty of peace and alliance was signed with the English and Gist started home March 2, 1751. Gist's party separated at Piqua on Mad River, Clark County. CHAPTER IV DESTRUCTION OF PICKAWILLANY CHARLES LANGLADE-SAVAGERY OF THE ATTACK-SOME ESCAPES-THE LAST OF PICKAWILLANY. The Miamis were soon to feel the heavy hand of the French. The emissaries carried the message from the Miamis back where it was relayed to the governor-general of Canada. Moreover, the Miamis were sheltering French army deserters. It was claimed the Miamis had put fifteen French traders to death. To Charles Langlade was delegated the French vengeance. He struck Pickawillany of June 21, 1752. The gates were open, the warriors absent on the chase, the squaws hoeing corn in the bottoms. Some ten or more English traders were in the town busy with their trading. The hot sun that makes corn "Crack" with growing was well up on this the longest day of the year—and for many a Miami the last day of the year or any year. A woman hoeing corn looked up; 250 dark forms had burst from the green wall of the woods and were leaping down upon her. She screamed; bent backs straightened, dark eyes dilated with horror, hoes fell from benumbed hands and the Indian squaws started like roused hares for the walls. The tomahawks behind gained, caught up, drank blood and dashed on and the screams stilled behind them. It was nine o'clock. Old Britain was taking his comfort. His town was growing; his policy had borne fine fruit. He had a - 61 - 62 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO fort, an English flag and eight traders. At 9:01 a. m., Langlade and his braves bounded in on all sides. Before Old Britain could utter a startled "Wah" the muskets crashed and Old Britain and thirteen Miamis fell. Five traders and some fifteen Miami men and boys rushed for the fort and closed the gates. Three traders caught by the surprise flung themselves into a trading house and barred the door. Thomas Burney and Andrew McBryer, two traders, were hurried into hiding by Miami friends. Langlade's men burst into the remaining storehouses and from their walls poured their fire into the fort. Vainly the traders in the fort called on the three in the storehouse to fire into Langlade's warriors. Apparently they dare not. The three traders were taken. The seige dragged through the afternoon. Water in the well inside the fort failed. A parley started. The Miamis agreed to surrender the traders provided they were not hurt. The beseigers were to release their Miami prisoners, and leave. The gates of the fort opened for the traders to emerge. The French Indians leaped upon a wounded trader, stabbed him, tore off his scalp, ripped out his heart and ate it. Burney and McBryer from their hiding place witnessed the spectacle. With the Englishmen as a fillip, the next course served was Old Britain. He was boiled and eaten. Two of his men were served as side dishes. This was a left-handed compliment for the Indian imagined the virtues of the eaten to pass into the eater. Lang-lade took 3,000 pounds of stores as booty, burned the trading post and left. Pickawillany was ruined. The Miamis were crippled to the extent the Shawnees in another ten years would drive them back to where the French had invited them. The Miamis appealed in vain to the English but not until they had killed and eaten ten Frenchmen and two of the Frenchmen's negroes. One can imagine the chefs asking "Will you have the white meat or the dark meat?" HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 63 Pickawillany had fallen never to be rebuilt. Also the British prestige, so carefully reared by Croghan, had fallen in the Ohio Country. But each of the contesting nations while wearing the habiliments of peace rushed reinforcements to America. The English, the French, the Virginians and the Pennsylvanians had come to Pickawillany, played their parts. The first act was over and the curtain, a pall of black smoke, had been pulled across the scene. When it rose again it would rise on young Washington going to the French forts with Dinwiddie's ultimatum. Pennsylvania had lost the Ohio Country. Virginia would try her hand. Would the lure of land be more potent than the profits of furs. When all was over, the white man with more justice than commonly used to the Indian would write around the site of Pickawillany the words "Miami County." While France acted, the English talked. Gist, Croghan, Montour and William Trent, brother-in-law of Croghan, had gathered the Indians together at Logstown on the Ohio below the juncture of the Alleghany and Monongahela and were in council when Pickawillany was being destroyed. They had cajoled from the Indians the reaffirmation of the lands granted at the Lancaster, Pa., treaty of 1744. All seemed well. Trent started for Pickawillany to carry presents to the Miamis and bind them to the treaty. At Lower Shawnee Town he met McBryer and Burney, the two traders whom the Miamis had concealed from the French. Hearing the melancholy end of Pickawillany, which must have deeply concerned him personally since he and Croghan had their stores there and used it for their trading base, he pushed on and came to the burned town July 12, 1752. Trent picked up the wife and son of Old Britain and carried them to Shawnee Town, later to Logstown where the wife threw herself on the mercies of the English and Six Nations, Delawares and Shawnees, saying "I am now left a poor lonely woman with one son whom I recommend to the care of the English, Six Nations, Delawares and Shawnees." 64 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO Two events, one of national and world significance and one local to West Central Ohio now flowed from the destruction of Pickawillany. Justin Winsor, author of "Critical History of the United States," said: "By this attack the valleys of the Maumee and Miamis were delivered from the presence of the pestilent English. . . . the legend on Evan's later map says it was this success which prompted the French to undertake their ambitious scheme of establishing armed posts throughout the Ohio Valley and so finally provoked the armed outbreak under Washington." The other and more local result was that the Shawnees, having the wife and son of Old Britain as beggars at their door, were now reversing positions and became the protectors rather than the wards of the Miamis. This burning of Pickawillany opened the door for the later moving in of the Shawnees and the retirement of the Miamis to the Maumee. The whole incident was a fatal blow to English prestige in the Ohio Valley. When De Villers captured Washington at Fort Necessity in July, 1754, the Ohio Indians, considering the French claim established, joined hands with French and Croghan and Trent were ruined. History is never a record of fact but of impressions. When sunlight passes through glass it is refracted by every imperfection and if the glass be colored likewise is the light that comes forth. Historians are colored by their political and social affiliations, reflect their local settings and like those glasses which distort the countenance into roly-polies or into cadaverous hatchets, so does each historian in a measure distort and color his facts. Pickawillany has suffered at the hands of the two main schools, the first and larger one which ignored or slights inconspicuous but nevertheless significant events and the second which seizing a neglected fact, animated by local pride or pride of opinion, exaggerates the fact to compensate for the slightings it has received. HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 65 Viewed as coldly and critically as possible from this human standpoint, Pickawillany does not seem to rate as the first battle of the Seven Years War, but as a preliminary happening of significance, much as the Jamieson Raid rates to the Boer War, the battle of Alamance to the Revolution, John Brown's Raid to the Civil war. Such are the preliminary bouts or semi-main bouts which precede the battle of the Century in ring parlance and the Seven Years War was the Battle of its century. CHAPTER V PHYSICAL FEATURES—PRIMITIVE CONDITIONS AVERAGE ELEVATION AFEET-CLIMATE-SOILS-FOREST-FLOODS -DROUTHS. With the curtain down upon the prologue of the Seven Year's War and the Miamis crushed and humiliated, we turn between scenes to regard this land of West Central Ohio. A low table land averaging more than 1,000 feet elevation, covered with one of the world's greatest hardwood forests, lying squarely astride the fortieth parallel, in general a gently rolling country, whose appearance of occasional hills is deceptive. Such are generally but the eroded contours of the tableland dropping down into valleys. It is a land that rides astride the divide between the St. Lawrence and Mississippi river systems, yet so gentle in the line of demarkation that the traveller can cross the divide unaware, a line marked rather by climate than topography. In spring the southern boundaries of West Central Ohio are rather sharply marked by the growth of grass and the blossoming of fruit, the river counties of the Ohio being several weeks in advance of the central part of the state while on a cold, raw day, descending southward from the Lakes, one can often notice a real difference in temperature, verdure and atmosphere once the divide near Bellefontaine is passed. In general West Central Ohio slopes all ways from a point in Logan County, the high point of the state, 1,550 feet high, called - 67 - 68 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO Campbell's Hill. But the descent is gentle running about ten feet to the mile and is contradicted by a thousands swells, contours and minor divides between the watercourses. It is as though a handkerchief were dropped upon the grass showing the faint pucker where it was held and then rumpled by every thrust of the unequal grass shoots beneath. It is a land of much sameness yet to the discerning eye of infinite variety. There is a distinct difference between the high rolling contours of Logan County and the flat cornlands of Fayette and Clinton or the deep valley where the Little Miami plows its way through Warren. Between the southern border of these twenty-two counties where they begin to break like the eaves of a house into the hill country of the Ohio and the comb of the roof in Logan County there runs the gentle slope of the roof. On the north side of the divide it is much the same only the slope to the lakes is more gentle and there is no breaking up of the tableland into a hill country. This uniformity with variety prevails in the climate and even in the original forests. The land was not an absolutely unbroken forest rolling from hilltop to bottom. This it did predominantly but here and there as in Madison County came the oak openings, park like places much like the great glades of the Yoh in Pennsylvania. In other places, notably Champaign County, were prairies of some miles extent. These might come from the Indians burning off the timber to create grass land to attract game, yet there was something in the soil which took kindly to grasses. Here and there in swampy, wide bottoms grew dense the evergreen, a haunt of rattlesnake, filled with treacherous quick sands and in sucking morasses. Such are the cedar swamps in Champaign County to this day. There was a difference between the vegetation of the high, thin, gravelly points and the deep alluvial soil of the bottoms. Each of the many soils had its favorite trees and shrubs, dependent upon natural drainage and constituents of the soils. The HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 69 forest roughly divided into two general classes; east of a line from Bellefontaine to Laurel Hill the wood was predominantly oaks and west of that line occurred the beeches. West Central Ohio has and had a uniformity that tempts one to making broad and sweeping assertions. But there existed and exists a variety which rises to challenge each general statement. Looked at from afar and at long range the land was a low tableland covered with an unbroken deciduous forest divided into the Oaks and the Beech. Viewed closely the table land disappeared or rather became an infinite variety of smaller planes and slopes, grooved and channelled by water courses whose edges had the semblance of one-sided hills. The land on close inspection did not appear a plain in places and did so appear in other points. The phrase "Unbroken forest" was challenged by the oak opening, the prairie, the word "Deciduous" by occasional clumps or clusters of evergreen, rather scattered and infrequent, and the "Beech" contained many oaks, hickories, elms, sugar maples, ash, etc. The "Oak" had a variety of hardwood trees save beech which was almost totally absent. Even the assertion of the early settlers that the "Oak" was better land than the "Beech" was true only on the average and not in totality for there were thin oak lands and fat beech stretches. It was a land without great rivers and no natural lakes, yet small ponds abounded in some sections and the rivers in time of freshet attained enormous and terrific torrents. Again in drouth they would dwindle to mere trickles. It was a land of climatic extremes ranging from 110 degrees above zero to forty-four degrees below. A land where weather cycles ran in recurrent phases hundreds of years apart. There were cycles of rain and cycles of drought, of heat and cold, and there were smaller and more frequent weather cycles in each of the greater and more time embracing ones. 70 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO It has been the fashion to speak of the forest as a weather regulator which absorbed rain, held it like a sponge and released it in a slow steady trickle which fed full the streams the year round. Again that snow lay late under the foliage, protected from thawing winds, that the steady evaporation from the reservoir of the watered wood modified the heat, that the rampart of the wood prevented great devastating sweeps of wind and sudden changes of temperature. All these things were in general true but there were exceptions. The highest water in the Ohio of which there is mention came before the white settlements, at the site of Cincinnati. The cold winter of 1780 seems unmatched though unmeasured save in bursted trees, dead buffalo, turkeys frozen in the trees, rivers congealed into solid ice with waters emerging to flow and freeze into creeping glaciers. Col. James Smith in his captivity among the Ohio Indians in 1755-59 speaks of a great drouth that dried up the streams and of the flight of the game. CHAPTER VI INDIAN TRIBES AND THEIR CHARACTERISTICS DIFFERENT TYPES OF INDIANS-THEIR CUSTOMS AND HABITS-INDIAN RELICS -INDIAN TRAILS. The Indian who came to range this land in historical times was not the Indian of current fiction, or the war bonneted, steeda-stride savage of the movies. When the white encountered the Ohio Indian he was concerned with different ideas than perpetuating a romantic ideal of the savage. The original white settler was an illiterate man, half savage from a succession of border wars and wilderness living. It remained for the more sophisticated and detached writers of a later time to seize upon the Indian as literary material. The Indian of the plains has fixed the American conception of the Red Man. The Indians in reality differed among themselves as much as Caesar says the Gauls did. Literally the Indians differed in language, custom and laws as much as the nations of Europe do from each other. The common idea of an Indian is a war bonneted savage astride a pony, living in skin tepees, a hunter, a nomad, tactiturn, cruel, sly, rather cowardly, given to the gloomy side of life, a being without humor or jollity, capable of high heroics or fiendish and revolting practices. Or again there is the "Noble red man" school with its high flown language and preposterous sentiments about Indian princesses, mawkish lament over extreme cases, a viewpoint abounding in pathos and mock heroics. - 71 - 72 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO The wood Indian of West Central Ohio differed from the plain Indian in many ways. He was not exactly a nomad, not wholly a hunter, not particularly a horseman. He was not as vile in his handling of captive women as the plains Indian. The probability of a captive being adopted was greater among the woods Indians. He had advanced to a higher plane of development in that he was become half agricultural in his manner of living. The wood Indian did not wear to war the preposterous war bonnets depicted in the movies. Nor for that matter did the plains Indian. It is as silly to show a band of Indians all war bon-netted from crown to heel as to show the soldiers of the Revolution all arrayed like Washington and his staff, or to show an American army all privates in the uniforms of major generals. The war bonnet had a significance. Every feather represented a coup or brave deed, much as a medal on the breast does for an American soldier. The unblooded brave dare not appear in the accouterments of the experienced warrior. The wood Indian did not carry this form of insignia as far as the plain Indian. Elaborate war bonnets would have been folly in the bush and briars. The wood Indian did not ride to war horseback as a general thing, although in later historical times he possessed and used horses but never as depicted by Ripley in a feature called "Believe It or Not," which has wide newspaper circulation and which showed the Iroquois dashing along on horseback, with tossing war bonnets and brandished rifles looking suspiciously like repeating rifles. The Iroquois and Ohio Indians leaned rather to the shaven crown and few feathers, the handy scalp lock waving as a challenge to hand to hand fighting, the Indian's flag as it were. The paint and its application had its special significance; the war whoops of the various tribes and their accouterments were as individual as those of the various modern armies and were as readily grasped by each Indian when they met. HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 73 The Ohio Indian lived rather in a cross between a brush tepee and a cabin. Sometimes he used log cabins similar to the whites. His council houses might have the dimensions of a modern big barn save in height. The Indian women had learned among the forests that hunting was a precarious dependence. The wood Indian could not follow the buffalo as did the plains Indian. He had neither the horses nor the abundance of game such as provided the plain Indian with a livelihood. Whether the wood Indian squaws inherited the corn culture from the mound building Indians where it had been developed in a perhaps more peaceful era or whether it had developed among them from sheer necessity is a mooted question. The mound building Indian has left his remains but no records save the silent ones of weapons, burial customs, community kitchens and store houses and the like. We know from these Ohio was once filled with a people who lived in a low form of the Stone Age cultures. The thousands of earthen works such as burial mounds, watch towers, etc., attest the numbers and long period of occupation of these peoples. Their basketry, weaving, stone chipping and storing of food attest they had progressed out of the lower forms of savagery. When conquerors absorb captives into their social body, some of the arts and customs of the conquered are acquired. Ruder, more warlike Indian tribes thrusting into the Hopewell culture of the people of West Central Ohio may have ended that particular culture and yet acquired some of the agricultural knowledge of the mound building people along with the squaws who were its repository. Whether the southern Creeks and their kindred tribes were these dispossessed Ohio tribes or whether they vanished in toto or were partially absorbed can not be known. Certain conditions governed the partial fixation of the Ohio tribes in particular localities. The habitat of the wood Indian 74 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO was of a more durable quality than the plain Indian. His requirements agriculturally called for cleared land for his corn. His village wants were: good spring water, natural drainage, fertile corn land. These requirements were best met on the river slopes. Hence we find the principle West Central Ohio Indian villages all located where such requirements were found. Old Chillicothe, Piqua on Mad River, the Mac-a-chack towns and Wapatomica all hold strong flowing springs, are located on the hills bordering the river and above and adjacent to fine black loams. Moreover the rivers afforded natural roads. It can be seen that essentials to Indian living dictated their village locations and made them semi-permanent. Every county in West Central Ohio had Indian village sites but most of them save on the head waters of the Sciota and the Auglaize where conditions were similar to the Miamis and Mad River, were rather transcient locations. No estimation can be made as to the density of Indian population at any one time save in the era immediately preceding the advent of the whites. It is not likely that in Revolutionary times Ohio held more than 10,000 to 15,000 Indians. The evidences of greater densities at earlier times may be based on accumulated remains. Arrowheads show the Indians ranged the country of West Central Ohio for a long period. In the boyhood of the writer, a fad for collecting arrowheads had a short run among the village boys of Dialton, Clark County. In the space of two weeks each of a half dozen boys was boasting six or more arrowheads. These had been collected over a territory not to exceed two to four square miles. A century of flood, soil erosion, accumulation of humus still left exposed to the human eye these arrowheads. Consider that the arrowhead required toil and effort to shape and it appears positive that the Indian retrieved it whenever possible. It would be re-possessed if sunk into game killed or the line of flight would be known if miss occurred. Such arrow- HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 75 heads as remained were those lost under exceptional and unusual circumstances. Even the victors in Indian battles would collect arrowheads and the eye of the Indian boy ranging the wood was keener than that of his white successor. From these circumstances one gauges the enormous number of arrows shot in this territory. The arrowhead made by flaking certain types of stone with a buck's prong, was a regular article of Indian commerce. In some flint quarries such as in Eastern Ohio, the stone was broken into workable sizes by building fires over the strata and then dashing cold water on the heated layers. Arrowheads formed of strata as far distant as the Rocky Mountains have been picked up in West Central Ohio, showing the extent of the commerce in arrowheads or the wide range either of war parties or individually wandering Indians. Too much emphasis has been laid upon Indian trails in many histories. The shift of the tribes occasioned by inter-tribal wars or from the ceaseless pressure of the whites precluded any long possession of any particular spot by one tribe. Nor was the Indian population dense enough or the commerce and relations between the tribes sufficient to create and preserve definite and clearly marked trails save in a few instances. What passes for Indian trails and are so pointed out today where traces are still visible in woodland or pasture, is the wild game trail trodden deep in the soil and utilized by the Indian for various reasons as a hunting or war trail. The cow is the prize engineer. She lays out a track of the easiest gradients and gets over the land with the least effort. Many of our present pikes parallel for long distances these original game trails. To get the best conception of how Indian and later white men's roads began in West Central Ohio, go to a cow pasture in rag weed time and observe the paths trodden by the cattle through the weeds from the water to the shade. Notice how the barefooted farmer boy going after the cattle, to protect 76 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO his feet and walk easily, follows these paths and how the cattle come winding down them to the barn. Magnify this, substitute the wood for the weeds and the buffalo for the cattle and we have the origins of these trails. The Indian, like the farm boy followed them for convenience, because his game was found along them and lastly because they were the natural roads conforming to the contours of the land and generally took him where he wanted to go in the easiest, most comfortable fashion. It was the heavy hoof of the buffalo and not the soft, moccassined foot of the Indian that trod down the deep and wide trails which wound along the hills and divides. The infrequent passing of the trader's pack train and the Indian runner did little to engrave these wide and deep traces in the landscape. Indian trails did exist between the various towns and running down into Kentucky and to the Virginian border settlements were established routes but these were rather routes than clearly marker trails save in a few instances. It has been mentioned that these trails generally followed the water sheds and divides. The buffalo ranged in small herds of possibly a score to a hundred. The vegetation of the wood did not feed great bodies as did the grasses of the plains. These buffalo ranged as far east as Lake Champlain and existed east of the Mississippi until 1800. Neither the buffalo nor the Indian loved cold water any more than the white man. Much of West Central Ohio was a waterlogged land. This came about from its glacial formation. The rounded hills, uneven contours of the sky line, its great deposits of gravel and sand, the Canadian granite boulders called "Niggerheads," and the marks of ice on rock surfaces all betray the origin of the land. This glaciation had as profound an effect upon the Indian as upon the later white man. Practically all of the twenty-two counties in West Central Ohio lie in glaciated territory. In fact HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 77 the boundaries of these counties on the south approximate to the terminal moraine. To understand what governed the Indian's life or rather permitted him to do certain things and forbade others, we must turn to the formation of this land. The original shallow inland sea which came down from the mouth of the St. Lawrence and drained into the Gulf of Mexico had, many millions of years ago, been washed full from the silt and erosion of the Applachain mountains, then much higher than today. The strata of clays, and soils laid down upon each other deep under the surface of West Central Ohio mark this period of long erosion and washing. The filling of the shallow sea and its upthrust by earth forces produced a tableland which rain and frost weathered down into such rugged, broken country as one sees along the Ohio River. Then came the glaciers planing the hills down level with the valleys and dropping over all the great loads of frozen materials scooped out of the valleys where now lie the Great Lakes. This ice borne, foreign material might lie deep in some portions of the ice cap and but little in others. When the glaciers melted for the last time and dropped its burden like a weary old man slipping his load from tired shoulders there fell upon the washed in stratas of millions of years ago the super-imposed gravels, sands and fine clays borne by the glaciers. Where they dropped great loads are hills and where the load was lighter are ponds and depressions. Then came the fresh weathering and the present landscape. This flatness together with the impervious clays dropped on some portions held the water. The Indian lived in a land which expanded and contracted startlingly so far as he was concerned. Alice in Wonderland after a drink from the magic bottle grew "Littler and littler." After a rain the land shrank and water dominated much of the scene. 78 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO In the heat and blaze of summer the Indian had much of the land to range over. In the fall rains and in the winter, the land was a dreary water filled endless stretch with here and there islands of dry land lifting out of the general submergence. It was late in spring before the waters left the woods. Only the ridges were bare and dry. Along these wound the game trails and later the Indian trails. Even in fierce summer heat, much of the wide valley lands of the Miamis were boggy. As late as fifty years after the white settlements many of these valleys were impassable and the settlers on one side made long detours to reach the opposite side. A flood today re-enacts for a brief time the same condition which was then almost perpetual. Out of these conditions came Indian habits of life. The squaw found by bitter experience that a hunter brought little game from a water filled wood or one ice bound or snow buried. The game shifted before these variations of the weather. Self preservation, maternal love all urged and drove the squaw to find means to supplement the hunter's fare. Hence came her hoe, her cornfield and squashes, beans, her dishes of succotash and hominy, of honey and dried berries. Writers have written of the degraded and debased condition of the squaws, how the Indian man disdained labor and forced it on the woman. The viewpoint is wrong in that it confuses the hardships of the savage lot with that of the woman who lived under it. The whole life of the savage was in many ways debased if poverty, famine, hardship, uncertainty, privation and meager existence constitute debasement. Necessity dictated a division of the duties. Long hours exposed to bitter weather in the water soaked or ice bound or snow buried wood brought back the hunter exhausted and with need of days for recuperation. Hunting often took the male afar. Schoolcraft has estimated it took many square miles of hunting ground to supply one family with game. The squaw chained to HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 79 the camp by the children had opportunity for agriculture which the hunter lacked. By degrees it became a fixed habit and the hunters' or warriors' days in camp were like those of the men back from the Western Front in the World War, days of rest, relaxation and restoration of energy. No men in any age or land have ever succeeded or apparently desired to hold their women much below the racial level. Woman is endowed with certain sexual weapons which hold the balance of power fairly level between the sexes. A cutting tongue is just as effective in a wigwam as in a mansion. The scold, virago, termagant was as well known to the Indian as the white man. Nor was the Indian life devoid of amusement. Games abounded, festivals and feasts signalized many events of the year. The Indian could relax. His reticent and taciturn air was for the white and for ceremonial occasions. Our hill country whites are equally indrawn in the presence of "Furriners." Indian life held uproarious mirth, jollity, chatter, story telling and levity. It is true that people who spend much time in solitude as did the hunters and warriors do acquire habits of repression and habitual taciturnity. Yet the Indian life was a communal one which called for intercourse and that means conversation and sociability. CHAPTER VII INDIAN CUSTOMS DISCIPLINE-HARDSHIPS-FORTITUDE-DANIEL BOONE'S EXPERIENCE- FOOD -DRESS-MARRIAGE. An ounce of fact is worth a pound of surmise or conjecture. We have the testimony of Col. James Smith who while held captive by Eastern Ohio Indians, penetrated West Central Ohio and Kentucky while a captive. Nor did the customs of the wood Indians toward their women differ markedly since they all were subjected to the same pressure of circumstance. On the three questions of temperature extremes, starvation times for the hunter and status of the Indian woman, Smith has left testimony. As quoted by McClung: "Smith had an adopted brother, Tontileaugo, who had married a Wyandot squaw. She was endowed by a deceased husband with several children. Tontileaugo applied the strappado, a whip made of buffalo hide to one of his stepsons for some breach of conduct. "The discipline was quite moderate but the lad shouted very loudly and soon brought out his Wyandot mother. She instantly took her child's part with great animation. It was in vain that the husband explained the offence and urged the moderation with which he had inflicted the punishment. All would not do. " 'The child,' she said, 'was no slave to be beaten and scourged with a whip. His father had been a warrior and a Wyandot and his child was entitled to honorable usage. If he had offended - 81 - 82 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO his step father, there was cold water to be had; let him be ducked until he was brought to reason and she would not utter a word of complaint; but a buffalo tug was no weapon with which the son of a warrior ought to be struck. His father's spirit was frowning in the skies at the degradation of his child.' "Tontileaugo listened with great calmness to this indignant remonstrance; and, having lit his pipe, strolled off, in order to give his squaw an opportunity of becoming cool. The offence, however had been of too serious a nature, and his squaw, shortly after his departure, having caught a horse, and taking her children with her, rode off to the Wyandot village about forty miles distant. In the afternoon Tontileaugo returned to his wigwam and found no one there. He appeared much troubled at his squaw's refractory conduct, uttered some deep interjections, but finally did as most husbands are compelled to do, followed her to make peace." Now as to the hardships of hunting. With Tontileaugo gone, the hunting fell upon Smith, the old chief was down with the "rheumatiz." It turned bitter cold. The snow froze hard, Smith's footsteps frightened the game. The family starved. Again we quote to show the state of the hunter coming empty handed from the wood: "One evening Smith entered the hut, faint and weary after a hunt of two days during which he had eaten nothing. "The old chief, a little boy and Smith composed the family since Tontileaugo and his squaw had left. Smith was moody and sat by the fire in silence. The chief asked mildly and calmly what success had been had. Smith answered they must starve since the deer fled before him and it was too far to an Indian village to get food. "The old man remained silent for a moment and then in the same mild tone asked if he was hungry. Smith replied that the keen appetite seemed gone but that he was sick and dizzy and scarce able to walk." HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 83 "As all had been on short rations for a week and like Smith without food for two days the next act of the old chief shows the importance of the hunter in the Indian life. He, the chief, told Smith the boy had found the bones of a wildcat and fox which the buzzards had picked and the lad had made a soup which had been saved for Smith. Smith attacked it as would a wolf. The little boy looked hungrily in the kettle which Smith had scraped clean, then went silently to bed while the chief produced his pipe. After Smith had smoked and felt refreshed the chief lectured him gently, saying he had perceived Smith like all hungry people was in no mood to reason. "You are now refreshed and can listen patiently to the words of your elder brother. I was once young like you but am now old. I have seen sixty snows fall and have often been in worse condition from want of food than we are now, yet I have always been supplied at the very time when I was ready to despair. Brother, you have been brought up among the whites and have not had the same opportunities of seeing how wonderfully Owaneeyo provides for his children in the woods. He sometimes let them be in great want to teach them that they are dependent upon him but he never permits them absolutely to perish. Rest assured that your brother is telling you no lie, but be satisfied that he will do as I have told you. Go now, sleep soundly; rise early in the morning and go out to hunt. Be strong, be diligent; do your best and trust to Owaneeyo for the rest." There is more of Indian religion, of fortitude, of self denial, wisdom, faith, patience and tactful management in this anecdote than in a tome of description of Indian ways. The Indian version of "I have lived long, yet have I never seen the righteous forsaken or his seed begging bread" powerfully affected Smith at the time but the next day hunting was no better and he struck out for Pennsylvania. After travelling about eight miles he ran into buffalo, killed one, thought of the old man and starving boy and returned laden with meat. 84 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO While the old man allowed the boy to eat it half cooked he ordered Smith to let his own portion be done enough and then cautioned the boy to abstain and take but a bit of broth. Daniel Boone while a captive at Chillicothe in Greene County, related how the Indians encountered similar starving time in late winter were without food, first ate their dogs, and then lived off the bark of a tree which proved so constipating as to kill those who did not take a physic which after the starving time was applied by cooking the entrails of a deer and drinking the broth. Boone could not keep it down and they held him and douched him liberally, telling him afterward he would have died otherwise. Add to these privations plagues of insects rising from the swamps, rattlesnake infested fens and the lot of the Indian can be seen to be a miserable one. Avery, a trader antecedent to Croghan's time, has told of the horror felt by the Indians for the thousands of rattlers which swarmed the land. The black ash was accounted a charm against the rattler and the Indian marked a circle around his bed with a black ash branch and claimed that when his body was annointed with its sap, he could handle rattlers with impunity, the snakes seeming to be drugged by the smell. Indians claimed the rattler would turn aside to avoid the black ash in any form. Such was this land of West Central Ohio where the Miamis lived under conditions kindred to the above. Where its ten thousand square miles expanded in the drouth of summer to almost the full range of the land and contracted in fall rains to but a fraction thereof. Hard as was the land the Miamis loved it, the Shawnee coveted it and they and the Mingoes and Delawares edged in around the borders, north, east and south. And as wasps disturbed dart afar to sting and stab the passerby so did these harass with jealous, watchful rage the ever nearing border of white settlement. A wise yielding to necessity dictated the division of labor. The hunter needed to recuperate his strength after long hours HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 85 and days in the cold, wet woods. Often he had to hunt afar for game was uncertain. He could not at one and the same time be miles away ranging the wood and be in his cornfields. The squaws, tied to one place by the children, could utilize their spare time in agriculture. The fat days when the corn was ripe was the hunter's yearly vacation. He lay about lolling lazily or went on the war path. His squaw had provided an interim for his rest but most of the time the hunter worked arduously. How much of a gamble he was up against will be told later. Indian customs among the Ohio tribes are rather fully described by Heckewelder, Moravian missionary, as observed in 1762, among the Delawares on the Tuscarawas. "Their principal food was game, fish, corn, potatoes, beans, pumpkins, cucumbers, squashes, melons, cabbage, turnips, fruits, nuts, berries and roots of plants. They ate two meals a day. The hunters and fishermen never went out in the middle of the day unless it was cloudy, and it being the custom to go on an empty stomach as a stimulant to exertion in shooting game or catching fish. "They made a pottage of corn, dry pumpkins, beans and chestnuts, well boiled and sweetened with maple sugar or molasses. They also made a good dish of pounded corn and chestnuts, shell-barks and hickory nut kernels, boiled, covering the pots with large pumpkin, cabbage or other leaves. "They made excellent preserves from cranberries and crab apples with sap maple sugar. "Their bread is of two kinds; one made of green and the other of dry corn. If dry, it is sifted after pounding, kneaded, shaped into cakes six inches in diameter, one inch thick, and baked on clean ashes, of dry oak barks. If green, it is mashed, put in green corn blades, filled in with a ladle, well wrapped up and baked in ashes. 86 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO "They made warrior's bread by parching corn, sifting it, pounding into flour, and mixing sugar. A tablespoonful with cold or boiling water is a meal, as it swells in the stomach, and if more than two tablespoonfuls are taken, it is dangerous. Its lightness enables the warrior to go on long journeys and carry his bread with him. Their meat is eaten boiled in pots, or roasted on wooden spits or on coals." Mitchener's quotations from Heckewelder's description of the Delawares might not fit the Miami and Shawnee Indians in all particulars since each tribe had its own little set of customs and habits but the same conditions of life faced all the wood Indians of Ohio and in food, dress, housing they must have reacted much the same way and since no records of these matters have come down to us concerning the Miamis and Shawnees in the detail that Heckewelder supplies for the Delawares, we continue to quote further: "The Indians make beaver and raccoon-skin blankets. Also frocks, skirts, petticoats, leggings and shoes of deer, bear and other skins. If cold, the fur is placed next to the body; if warm, outside. "With the large rib bones of the elk and buffalo they shave the hair off such skins as they dressed, which was done as clean as with a knife. They also made blankets of feathers of the turkey and the goose, which the women arranged, interwoven together with thread or twine made from the rind of the wild hemp or nettles. The dress of the men consisted of blankets, plain or ruffled shirt, leggings and moccasins (Moxens). The women made petticoats of cloth, red, blue or black, when it can be had of traders; they adorn with ribbons, beads, silver broaches, arm spangles, round buckles, little thimble like bells around the ankles to make a noise and attract attention. They paint with vermillion, but not so as to offend their husbands. The loose women and prostitutes paint their faces deeply scarlet. HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 87 "The men paint their thighs, legs, breasts and faces, and to appear well, spend sometimes a whole day decorating themselves for a night frolic. They pluck out their beards and hair on the head, except a tuft on the crown, with tweezers made of muscle shells, or brass wire. The Indians would all be bearded like white men were it not for their pulling out custom. (There seems, however, a general impression that the Indian was by nature inclined to a scantier growth of hair on the face than white men.) Indian courting—"An aged Indian, who for many years had spent much of his time among the whites, speaking of marriage to Heckewelder, said: 'Indian, when he see industrious squaw, which he like, he go to him (they had no feminine gender in their vocabulary) place his two fore fingers close aside each other—make him look like one, look squaw in face, see him smile, which is all, and he say "Yes"; so he take him home. No danger he be cross, no, no. Squaw know too well what Indian do if he (she) cross. Throw him (her) away, and take another; squaw have to eat meat—no husband, no meat. Squaw do everything to please husband; he do same to please squaw; live happy." Notice that this account by Heckewelder of domestic felicity due to necessity differs markedly with James Smith's account of the Wyandot squaw. However the Wyandots were Iroquian and the Delawares Algonquin and the Huron-Iroquois women seem to have participated in tribal government and exercised the powers of the matriarchy more than many other Indian tribes. It serves to show that too hard and fast opinions concerning Indian customs should not be formed for the same custom might not always apply. As the Shawnees and Miamis were Algonquin, the customs of the Delawares were probably nearer to Indian standards in West Central Ohio than were the Wyandot ones. Mitchener quoting Heckewelder speaking of Indian marriages says: "An Indian takes a wife on trial. He builds a house, and provides provisions. She agrees to cook and raise corn and vege- 88 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO tables, while he hunts and fishes. If both perform these duties, they are man and wife, if not, they separate. The woman's labor is light in the house. She has but one pot to clean and no scrubbing to do, and but little to wash and that not often. They cut wood, till the ground, sow and reap, pound the corn, bake bread in the ashes, and cook the meat or fish in the pot. "If on a journey the wife carries the baggage and Heckewelder says he never heard of a wife complaining, for she says a husband must avoid hard labor and the stiffening of the muscles if he expects to be an expert hunter, so as to provide her meat to eat and furs to wear. The Indian loves to see his wife well clothed and hence he gives her all the skins he takes. The more he does for her the more he is esteemed in the community. In selling her furs, if she finds anything at the trader's store which she thinks would please the husband, she buys it for him, even if it takes all she has to pay therefor." "If one think the lot of the Indian squaw was bitter, unillumed by love and romance, that the Indian was a total brute, regarding his squaw as a beast of burden, let him read Heckewelder on Indian kindness to wives: "I have known a man to go forty or fifty miles for a mess of cranberries to satisfy his wife's longing. In the year 1762 I was witness to a remarkable instance of the disposition of the Indians to indulge their wives. There was a famine in the land and a sick Indian woman expressed a great desire for a mess of Indian corn. Her husband having heard that a trader at Upper Sandusky had a little, set off on horseback for that place, one hundred miles distant and returned with as much corn as filled the crown of his hat, for which he gave his horse in exchange, and came back on foot, bringing his saddle back with him." We think this simple, unadorned deed shames the chanticleer jousting of the knight for his lady, the mawkish carolling of the troubador, the scented compliments of the cavaliers, and the bow- HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 89 ings and scrappings of bewigged, beruffled gentlemen whispering sweet seductions. Every Indian was apparently his own court of domestic relations. Nothing is more intriguing and illuminative than to see an eternal problem worked out in an alien setting. Mitchener quotes Heckewelder on quarrels with wives as follows, perhaps paraphrasing Heckewelder's language: "It is very seldom that a man condescends to quarrel with his wife, or abuse her though she has given him just cause. In such a case, the man, without replying, or saying a single word, will take his gun and go into the woods and remain there a week, or perhaps a fortnight living on the meat he has killed, before he returns home again; well knowing he cannot inflict a greater punishment on his wife, for her conduct to him than by absenting himself for a while—for she is not only kept in suspense, uncertain whether he will return again, but is soon reported as a bad and quarrelsome woman. When he at length does return she endeavors to let him see by her attentions that she has repented, though neither speak to each other a single word on the subject of what has passed." It might appear that this conjugal procedure worked rather an unjust hardship upon the children who suffered for their mother's fault but Indians in a pinch were privileged to hie themselves to other lodges where the best was brought forth and they could eat all without protest from their involuntary hosts. Thus the Indian community carried its poor and unfortunate, the widowed and the fatherless. Nevertheless human nature has ways of inflicting stings and castigation upon the leech and parasite. Hence the husbandless squaw was permitted to pick a promising hunter from among the captives so that the tribe might be spared the burden of feeding her. Many a backwoodsman had his choice between being a gigolo and being a crackling. She brought him life and he brought her meat. CHAPTER VIII FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR PERIOD LANGLADE-GIST AND GROGAN-THE GIRTY'S-KITANNING-JOHN WARD. "1755; Georgius Secundus was still alive; Snuffy old drone from the German hive. That was the year Lisbon town Saw the earth open and gulp her down And Braddock's army was done so brown !" In the above, Holmes wrote excellent history and abominable poetry. West Central Ohio is concerned with Braddock's defeat only in an indirect fashion. Historical characters woven in the skein of her history were at Braddock's defeat drawn together and knotted into a bloody rosette which France was to wear on her gown of triumph. Charles Langlade, who had written his name in blood at Pickawillany, was there with his Pottawatomies and the Ottawas. Pontiac first tasted triumph over the English on that sanguinary field. Black Hoof brought his Shawnees up from the Ohio River. On the English side Christopher Gist and George Croghan were again gathered together and were in the forefront of the battle, at its very beginnings. Some historians have claimed Daniel Boone was a wagoner, that Col. William Crawford commanded a company. George Washington was aide-de-camp to Braddock. All these in time were to touch the destinies of West Central Ohio as they had done so previously. - 91 - 92 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO Contrecouer, who was second in command when Celeron de Bienville came to Pickawillany, was in command of Fort Duquesne and gave the assent to Beajeu's daring attack on Braddock. The French had been busy after Pickawillany and had aligned the Ohio Indians with their cause chiefly due to the parsimony of the Quaker element in the Pennsylvanian assembly and the lack of tact of Colonel Innes at Fort Cumberland, coupled with dalliance of British officers with the Indian women. The Ohio Indian was not lacking in discernment and perceived the Virgian hunger for land menaced him more than French trading activities. There is little evidence that the Miamis were active with the French at this time. They still smarted from the destruction of Pickawillany. But the Shawnees who had menaced Celeron in 1749 were now active and aggressively for the French. Due to Braddock's defeat all contact of the English colonies with West Central Ohio was terminated from 1755 to 1760. The war was carried into the confines of Pennsylvania and Virginia by the Ohio savages who were definitely upon the aggressive. One event occurred during this period which was to have a bearing upon future West Central Ohio history. There lived in Pennsylvania an Irish trader of low sort named Simon Girty. He had married an English woman by whom he had four sons, Thomas, Simon, James and George. Girty corresponded to the modern bootlegger in that he carried on illegal liquor traffic with the Indians and was a squatter. Simon Girty, Jr., the future renegade, was born in 1741, probably at Chamber's Mill, then Lancaster, now Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. James was born in 1743, George in 1745, and Thomas, the eldest, who does not figure in border history, was born in 1739. Chamber's Mill is five miles above Harrisburg where Fishing Creek flows into the Susquehanna. HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 93 Simon Girty, the father, had begun as pack horse driver for the Indian traders and branched out for himself at some time previous to his marriage to Mary Newton about 1737. However, Girty the father was rather careless about taking out a license to trade with the Indians. In 1749 the senior Girty emigrated to Sherman's Creek, in what is now Perry County, Pennsylvania, and squatted on Indian land. Here as has been stated he was evicted May 22, 1750. Girty was bound to a hundred pounds to answer for his trespass and later returned to Chambers where he was killed by the Fish the latter part of 1751. John Turner killed the Fish and married Mary Girty, a woman of good reputation, in 1753. The Indian lands being by now open for sale, John Turner took the family back to Sherman's Creek, the former location of the Girty's. Here a son, John Turner, was born. John Turner served as a lieutenant in the border wars and was third in command at Fort Granville, at Oldtown on the banks of the Juniata, near the present Lewistown, Mifflin County. The settlers having taken refuge there from Sherman Valley in July, 1756, when the French and Indians were ravaging the frontier. These latter appeared before Fort Granville, July 22, 1756. They challenged the garrison to battle but Captain Edward Ward refused due to the weakness of his force. The Indians hung about the vicinity unknown to Ward who on July 30 marched out a force to guard the gathering of the harvest in Sherman Valley. The twenty-three soldiers left in the fort were soon assailed by the Indians who used a deep ravine running into the Juniata to approach the stockade and set it on fire. Through the burned opening they shot Lieutenant Armstrong and the command devolved upon Lieut. John Turner. Quarter being offered, Turner opened the gates. The Girty family thus became prisoners. The Indians who had taken the Girty's prisoners were largely from Kitanning, a Delaware town on the site of the present city 94 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO of that name. Turner is traditionally alleged to have packed 100 pounds of salt all the way to Kitanning where he met his doom at the stake, tradition again alleging that it was for the death of the Fish he was punished. "They tied him to a black post; danced about him; made a great fire; and, having heated gun barrels hot, ran them through his body; having tormented him for three hours, they scalped him alive, and at last held up a boy with a hatchet in his hand to give him the finishing stroke." Mary Newton Girty Turner sat on a log with her baby in her arms and had to witness the scene. So it is said did Simon, then fifteen, James, thirteen, George, eleven, and Thomas, seventeen. One visions the writhing man, the smoldering ring of fire, the leaping demons obscuring fitfully the scene, the capering huge shadows, the crouched woman, the convulsively clasped baby and huddled in a horror-stricken group, the four boys getting minds and hearts seared with scars burned by hellfire and bearing twisted souls into eternity. One other scene through which Simon, James and George Girty passed in all probability at this time took place after the mother was separated from them. The whites attacked Kitanning and rescued Thomas among others but the three younger boys were hurried into the wilderness. Later when the whites retreated the three boys were brought back to Kitanning where in the words of Consul Butterfield, "History of the Girtys," page 14: "There," say two eye witnesses, "We had the mournful opportunity of witnessing the cruel end of an English woman, who had attempted to flee out of her captivity . . . Having been recaptured . . . she was put to death in an unheard of way. First they scalped her; next they laid burning splinters of wood, here and there, upon her body, and then they cut off her ears and fingers, forcing them into her mouth so she had to swallow them. Amidst such torments, this woman lived from nine o'clock in HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 95 the morning until toward sunset, when a French officer took compassion upon her and put her out of her misery. An English soldier, on the contrary, named John—who escaped from prison at Lancaster and joined the French, had a piece of flesh cut from her body and ate it. When she was dead the Indians chopped her in two, through the middle and let her lie until the dogs came and devoured her. Three days later an Englishman was brought in . . . His torments, however, continued only about three hours but his screams were frightful to listen to. It rained that day very hard so that the Indians could not keep up the fire. Hence they began to discharge gunpowder into his body. At last amid his worst pains when the poor man called for a drink of water, they brought him melted lead and poured it down his throat. . . . He died on the instant." These horrible occurrences are related in justice to the Girty boys who at an impressionable age were schooled in horror and cruelty which in time they were to transplant to West Central Ohio. They remained among the Indians until by the treaty of Easton, Pennsylvania, and others the Shawnees, Delawares and Senecas gave up their captives. In the three intervening years the Girty boys had come to youth verging on manhood among a ceaseless repetition of such scenes. Another captive associated with West Central Ohio history was John Ward, captured by the Shawnees in 1758, when but three years of age. The life of John Ward offers that fascinating combination of a small portion of attested facts and suggestive surmises which appeals rather to the historical novelist than the historian. Reared in savagery he married a Shawnee woman and had several children. At different times he was engaged in battle with his brothers among the whites, possibly with his own father at Point Pleasant, where the father was killed. Again in 1792, with a younger brother, Charles Ward, later deputy sheriff at Maysville, Kentucky, when young Ward followed Simon Ken- 96 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO ton on an Indian punitive expedition. This encounter took place upon the Miamis and belong with West Central Ohio history. Charles Ward during the attack on the Indian camp had taken a bead on a young Indian girl not knowing her sex, when at the point of firing her open bosom proclaimed her sex. She was his brother John's daughter, a child of fifteen. John Ward in 1778 joined with Simon and James Girty in their first war trail against the whites and was at Wapatomica when Simon Girty saved Simon Kenton. In 1793 Ward perished in a battle between the Shawnees and the whites under his brother Captain James Ward and Simon Kenton. The intermingling of the whites and Indians by the seizure of white women, the intermarriage of white captive boys with Indian girls has woven some tangled threads in pioneer families which in many instances, family pride has preferred to keep sub rosa. It is almost impossible to ascertain any details of the treatment of white women among the Indians save as concerns their tortures. Delicacy, reserve, family and racial pride, prudery have all joined hands to suppress the details. Some three or four hundred family tragedies of this sort are hinted at in the figures of the rescued captives brought into Bouquet in 1764. They concern West Central Ohio since the Indians who perpetrated them were to later move into the territory and many of the captives touched the territory in their captivity or later resided there as white Indians, renegades, or came as settlers. Isaac Zane and William Wells are other instances of intermarried captives. CHAPTER IX FORMATIVE PERIOD OF HISTORICAL CHARACTERS KENTON-WASHINGTON-HANCOCK AND ADAMS-SIMON GIRTY-INDIAN CHIEFS. Just as the undevout astronomer is mad so the man who watches the Muse of history as the good Woman of the Scriptures, bringing her goods from afar, must have his mind awed by contemplating the intricate working out of a great plan and purpose. People are gathered from the far ends of the earth, brought together, married and bring forth children who in turn are flung together and apart, working side by side or at cross purposes until there emerges from the fast flying loom of the years the patterns of a nation's destiny. Who gifted with Asmodean ability to peer down through housetops in 1755 could have conceived from what he saw there under the workings out of Western destinies. Sitting on the tall heights of events up-piled by the after years, one sees a Scot girl in Farquier County, Virginia, bending over a log cradle singing to an auburn haired baby tracing the lineaments of Irish Mark Kenton, gone perhaps with Braddock's men. Toddling about in Albemarle County is a two-year-old red head, not born in a humble cabin as was the Kenton child, but fathered on broad acres in a home intermediate between the Tidewater tobacco aristocracy and the but of the squatter. Red hair and shining black eyes, a queer combination, second son of second cousins, second son of a fifteen year old wife, blood that - 97 - 98 - HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO blended the plebian Clerks broadly pronounced Clarks with the cavalier Byrds filtered in through Ann Rogers. Dashing energy and towering ambition all the masterfulness of the aristocrat bedded with middle class soundness. A father who worked with his own hands amid his few slaves, a mother who was breeding a muster roll for the future American army, quietly building the Clark name across a continent, graving it deep and indelibly on the scroll of American history. Over the fence, across the way, is another farm, Shadwell, where is still another red head, aged eleven, a tall gangling lad, fond of the fiddle, horses and books, scion of still broader acres. The Clarks had 400 acres but the Jeffersons had 2,000. Tom Jefferson was also result of a strange mixture, a Tory Randolph for a mother, one of the Tidewater ruling caste, but the father a Whig, a burgess, a busy body in politics, land questions and all that concerned the county. So on opposite sides of the fence toddled and rode the sword and pen of Virginia, the two fathers of the West, the governor and the conqueror to be, the one the extended mailed fist of the other's brain. Pat Henry, another raw boned youth, dwadled in a store in another part of Virginia, a poor clerk, a failure at books. On that first week in July, 1755, George Washington was forcing his fever shaken body into the saddle, padding his attenuated bones with a pillow, vowing he would be in at the death when the French fox was dug out of Duquesne. Boone, a backwoods wagoner and blacksmith, was tapping out a melody perchance when the high headed young aide of Braddock galloped by, William Crawford herded his company along Braddock's Road past Boone, Dan Morgan, a nineteen-year-old combination of Hercules and Adonis cracked his whip proudly over his new possessions, a team of horses he had wrung from fortune's lap by the labor of his bare hands. If a sore look clouded his face it was not sorer than his back, striped like the future flag with red and blue where HISTORY OF WEST CENTRAL OHIO - 99 the English cat-o-nine tails had beaten him to a jelly and thereby ordained that two British armies were to be beaten likewise. John Hancock and John Adams were students at Harvard with no thought of a king's price on their heads. Benjamin Franklin, his majesty's postmaster-general, was dryly assuring Doctor Bond it would be well to await the capture of Duquesne before raining money to celebrate the victory. Simon Girty, a fourteen-year-old boy, was trudging into Sherman Creek bottom an orphan, returning to the spot from whence George Croghan, Conrad Weiser and Secretary Peters had chased his father and mother five years before. It is fascinating to look back to a given day and time and see the characters in destiny's drama so widely scattered, so oblivious to fate, so unknown to each other and to see the invisible strings held in the Eternal Hands, gently pulling these mannikins together to play their parts on the same stage while the audience in the box seats of eternity bends over this play "Of hopes and fears." Does destiny choose its men or do men choose their destiny? None can answer. Already the compasses of these lives pointed at times in their mutual vibration to a common point, West Central Ohio. Pat Henry was to speak and the spirit of liberty sprang up ashamed from its slothful couch. Jefferson wrote and the whole world started, rubbed its rheumy eyes and read. On either side of the sundering mountains Washington and Clark acted on the words of Henry and Jefferson and the nation came forth, a man child that stood like the Colossus of Rhoades astride not seas but mountains, a leg planted firmly by the sea and another planted deeply in the granary of the world, united above mountain barriers by a common purpose, a new ideal of liberty, by kindred customs, laws and language. "King" Hancock, drafted because he had money, looks, ruffles, laces, velvet and ships, sober Adams grinding at the law, canny Franklin, shrewd to twist a French court to his purpose, these