Ohio Country Research Articles

The Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians (review)

Reviewed by: The Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians David Wallace Adams The Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians. By Amy Schutt. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 250 pp. Cloth $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8122-3993-5.) In this splendidly researched and carefully crafted study, Amy Schutt sketches the history of the much-abused Delaware Indians from the early 1600s, when they lived in the Delaware and Hudson River valleys, to the middle of the nineteenth century, when the remnants of this once-influential native group were scattered to the four winds. According to Schutt, early Delaware cultural life revolved around four features: living in localized small communities; membership in complex overlapping kin groups; selection of respected leaders, or sachems; and the performance of integrative rituals. All four sustaining elements were put to the test in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Delaware confronted multiple challenges to their existence on the troubled and often violent Indian-white frontier. The threats came in many forms: catastrophic epidemics, war, confusing treaty agreements, factionalism, and unreliable allies (mainly the Iroquois). But mostly it was frontier settlers' insatiable appetite for Indian land that pushed the Delaware ever westward. By the mid-1700s several communities were located in the Ohio country under the religious tutelage of Morovian missionaries. Despite these migrations, Schutt argues that the Delaware maintained a keen, if evolving, sense of themselves as a people and continued to exert great political influence among their Indian neighbors. In the face of political and demographic realities on the Pennsylvania and Ohio frontiers, the Delaware increasingly emphasized several elements in their cultural toolkit: a willingness to absorb remnants of neighboring tribes, skill at building alliances, and a gift for mediating conflicts and peace-making. These adaptive strategies served them well until the American Revolution, when dissension among allies, tribal factionalism, and frontier Indian-hating overwhelmed them. In March 1782 a Pennsylvania militia marched to the Morovian towns [End Page 150] of Gnadenhütten and Salem, imprisoned the mostly Christian occupants, and then proceeded to massacre some ninety Indians, including thirty-five children. Twelve years later, the Delaware were allied with the Shawnee, Miami, Wyandots, and other groups where they were handily defeated at the battle of Fallen Timbers. After the War of 1812, they were pushed across the Mississippi. Early in the study Schutt writes that her original intent was to tell the story of the Delaware focusing on the themes of identity and ethnogenesis. She soon concluded, however, that the remoteness and inconclusiveness of her sources made such an endeavor problematic if not impossible. After considering both the complexity of crosscurrents impinging on the Delaware and the range of political and cultural adaptions adopted, one can appreciate the author's dilemma. (The reader cannot help but wonder, for example, how the successive influences of the Delawares' traditional belief in spirit beings, the visions of the legendary Delaware prophet called Neolin, and the Christian missionaries—all discussed by Schutt—interacted and figured over time in the tribes' spiritual outlook.) Schutt's decision to view the Delaware experience through the lens of adaptive survival, principally their skill at negotiating agreements, was a much more manageable inquiry. The result is an exceptionally fine study, one indispensable for understanding both Delaware history and the dynamics of the Pennsylvania-Ohio frontier. [End Page 151] David Wallace Adams Cleveland State University Copyright © 2008 The Kent State University Press

The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795-1870 (review)

The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795-1870. By Stephen Warren. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Pp. 232. Cloth, $35.00.)The Shawnees figured prominently in the history of the early republic and are most famous for the resistance they offered to white settlers in the Ohio country between 1774 and 1815. war chiefs Cornstalk, Blue Jacket, and Tecumseh led an intergenerational pan-Indian movement that dealt the United States some of its most crushing defeats in its wars against Native Americans. Although they were small in number (a population of only about 3,000 in 1780), the Shawnees were arguably the most important challengers to U.S. power on the trans-Appalachian frontier.But what happened after the War of 1812 broke the pan-Indian resistance they had inspired? Historians have generally turned their attention away from the Shawnees after the death of Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames in 1813. No equivalent of the Cherokees' familiar Trail of Tears narrative exists in American historical consciousness for the Shawnees during and after the era of Indian removal. In many ways, they are the prototype of the textbook Indian: tragic figures who heroically defended their homelands before being steamrolled by the irresistible force of westward expansion.This book reconstructs the experience from the time of their departure from Ohio to their removal to modern Oklahoma in the 1870s. Shifting the focus away from armed resistance, Stephen Warren writes instead about divisions caused within communities by differing strategies for dealing with new white and Indian neighbors. While elements of tragedy remain, this is a story told in more measured tones about the persistence of identity in the face of overwhelming pressures to abandon it from within and without.The Shawnees' traditional identity was rooted in the multiethnic Indian communities of the eighteenth-century Ohio country. The divided themselves into five distinct kinship groups based on lineage: the Kispokotha, Maykujay, Thawegila, Piqua, and Chillicothe. While the groups shared a common culture and often intermixed and cooperated with one another, each had its own hereditary chiefs and dominated its own villages, which were also populated by other Algonquian-speaking Indians such as Delawares, Miamis, and Kickapoos. Like other Ohio Indians, the Shawnees lived in a world of decentralized, autonomous villages with constandy shifting ethnic compositions. Between 1780 and 1820, about two-thirds of the population carried this cultural and political system with them into the eastern Missouri region, where they migrated to avoid the wars and social ills then plaguing their homelands. These migrants became the Western Shawnee, a group relatively unknown (72) to modern historians more concerned with the militant minority that stayed behind under the leadership of Tecumseh. Another significant group, the Loyal Shawnee (so called because of their peaceful stance toward the United States), also stayed in Ohio during this era, led by the accommodationist chief Black Hoof.Voluntary migrations during the Revolutionary era did not end factionalism. During the 1820s and 1830s, U.S. Indian agents worked with client chiefs and religious missionaries to push those Indians remaining in the Old Northwest onto reservation lands established for them across the Mississippi. Government agents disliked multiethnic Indian communities; they were too volatile and decentralized to be managed effectively from above. Efforts to create a single, geographically fixed tribe originated with government agents who were using the reservation and annuity system to dispossess and segregate Indians from the rest of American society. …

The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early American Republic

The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early American Republic

The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early Republic

The Journal of American CultureVolume 29, Issue 1 p. 99-99 The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early Republic Ray B. Browne, Ray B. Browne Ray & Pat Browne Popular Culture LibrarySearch for more papers by this author Ray B. Browne, Ray B. Browne Ray & Pat Browne Popular Culture LibrarySearch for more papers by this author First published: 10 February 2006 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1542-734X.2006.00311.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume29, Issue1March 2006Pages 99-99 RelatedInformation

Andrew R. L. Cayton and Stuart D. Hobbs editors.The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early American Republic.:The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early American Republic.

Andrew R. L. Cayton and Stuart D. Hobbs editors.<i>The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early American Republic.</i>:The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early American Republic.

ANDREW R. L. CAYTON and STUART D. HOBBS, editors. The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early American Republic. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 225. Cloth $34.95, paper $19.95

ANDREW R. L. CAYTON and STUART D. HOBBS, editors. The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early American Republic. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 225. Cloth $34.95, paper $19.95

Shaping the Territory

William Wood's flyleaf map for New Englands Prospect (London, 1634) was the first map to describe the coastline from Narragansett Bay to New Hampshire in some detail. By giving shape to the territory, it served practical purposes; though it did not allow precise navigation, it provided a semblance of location, so that European newcomers could obtain some idea of where they were. The map also shaped the territory figuratively. Despite Wood's clear description of dispersed agricultural settlement, the map has forever linked in historians' minds particular points-the location of meetinghouses-with surrounding spacestowns and villages on the New England landscape. The result has been a fundamental misunderstanding of colonial historical geography. We still cling to the notion that early New Englanders lived in nucleated villages.' And we do so, even as methods of survey and cartographic representation prove otherwise, thanks to dramatic improvements in their descriptive techniques over the passing centuries. By the middle of the eighteenth century, American surveyors such as George Washington mapped with much improved scientific accuracy, compared to Wood's generation. Enterprising Virginians interested in inland resources pondered these maps to determine the most efficient routes to the Ohio Country. They quickly decided that the town of Alexandria, perched on the Potomac River, offered a shorter route, by water and with a few comparatively easy portages, to the mouth of the Cuyahoga River at Lake Erie, site of present-day Cleveland, than did any other eastern seaboard city.2 Surely, they reasoned, Alexandria would rise into the great entrep6t of the eastern seaboard. Speculators were destined to disappointment; rival cities-New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore-captured the western trade thanks to transportation improvements that overcame the disadvantage of location. Nonetheless,

The Gillett Brothers and the Mid Nineteenth Century Black Powder Mill, Portage County, Ohio: An Entrepreneurship Presaging the Industrial Era

Pioneers who settled in the Ohio country in the beginning of the 19th century were faced with many challenges in addition to survival. Among them was a need to discover and exploit the natural resources of the land. The availability of explosive powder became an important ingredient for economic development. The availability of water for power and transportation encouraged some entrepreneurs to invest in the powder mill industry with the hope of wealth. This article addresses an investigation and discovery of an almost forgotten black powder mill in northeast Ohio which has now become a historic resource for the community.

American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500-1850

American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal 1500-1850. Edited by Peter C. Mancall and James H. Merrell. (New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xiv, 594. Illustrations. $90.00.) Instructors in seminars or other advanced courses in Indian history, to say nothing of specialists in other fields suddenly faced with the need to become experts on ethnohistory, will find their coursepack conveniently done for them in this collection of twenty-five classic articles. scope actually goes beyond European contact, since Neil Salisbury's essay, The Indians' Old World, brilliantly describes the many oscillations in material culture, economic practice, and socio-political structure that Indians had initiated or undergone before contact with Europeans occurred. James Axtell's effort-in a much-reprinted article on what colonial history might have been like without Indians (Colonial America Without the Indians: Counterfactual Reflections, Journal of American History, 63 [March 1987], 981-86)-to encourage the inclusion of ethnohistory in mainstream media appears to have succeeded. present volume, unlike others, leaves that article out in favor of Axtell's striking analysis of the successful methods of Indian assimilation of white adoptees into their societies. Yet most of the articles in this volume come from mainstream publications: the Journal of American History, Journal of Women's History, Canadian Historical Review, Southern California Quarterly, and, above all, from the publication nearest Axtell's home university, the William and Mary Quarterly. Indian-oriented publications such as Ethnohistory, the American Indian Quarterly, and the American Indian Cultural and Research Journal are respectably but less fully represented. Chapters from books (including a festschrift for Oscar Handlin) come about equally from those devoted to ethnohistory and more general collections. In the colonial era, at least, historians of the American Indian appear to be swimming with the tide in the main stream. articles tend to focus on geographical areas currently inside the United States and British colonies, although other areas are represented as well. One contribution deals with Spanish Florida and two with Spanish California; Cornelis J. Jaenens addresses French Canadian themes, Helen Hornbeck Tanner discusses the multiethnic Ohio country, and Raymond Hansen and Daniel H. Usner examine areas of French influence. Nearly all emphasize native experience more fully than European policy or the adventures of white frontierspeople, and most follow Usner's lead in defining frontier in terms of intercultural exchange rather than linear boundaries. Richard White's masterful analysis of Lakota imperialism constitutes his direct contribution to the collection. Yet his notion of the middle ground where exchange involves relatively egalitarian trade, labor, and marital relations in a context where each group tries-not always successfully-to employ practices congenial to the other, informs several essays (The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815[1991]). Perhaps the most amusing example of this genre is Timothy J. Shannon's Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrik, Sir William Johnson, and Indian Fashion. Both Usner, writing of the lower Mississippi Valley, and Tanner, writing of the Ohio country's Glaize in 1792, stress the varieties of nationality and ethnicity involved in intercultural exchange. …

A Man of Distinction among Them: Alexander McKee and the Ohio Country Frontier, 1754-1799

A Man of Distinction Among Them: Alexander McKee and the Ohio Country Frontier, 1754-1799. By Larry L. Nelson. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1999. Pp. xv, 262. Illustrations, maps. $35.00.) On the surface, Larry L. Nelson's account of British Indian agent Alexander McKee seems part of very old historiography: biographies of relatively low-level government officials on the frontier. One of the more recent, and more effective, of such works is Reginald Horsman's more-than-three-- decades-old study, Matthew Elliott: British Indian Agent (1964). But appearances can be deceiving. With A Man of Distinction Among Them, Nelson reworks this approach by situating his subject within framework established by the most up-to-date scholarship, not only on the upper Ohio Valley and British Indian policy, but also on cultural mediation and frontier interactions. In particular, he relies heavily upon Richard White's influential analysis of the middle ground to understand the world in which McKee acted (The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 [1991]). For Nelson, Alexander McKee was the classic cultural mediator. Nelson presents him as the mixed-race child of an Irish immigrant fur trader and Shawnee woman (it seems probable that she was white captive who had been raised by the Shawnees). Born around 1735 on the western Pennsylvania frontier, McKee grew up at time and place when the barriers of race, culture, and nation were permeable. In the late 1760s, he married Shawnee (though, like his mother, she appears to have been white adoptee). McKee maintained dual existence, with homes and stores in both native villages and white settlements until at least the late 1770s. Unlike most cultural mediators, however, McKee was, Nelson argues, not marginal man whose standing in each of the cultures in which he operated was always tenuous (xiii). Instead, he was highly respected in both worlds. With the outbreak of war in the upper Ohio Valley in the mid-1750s, McKee began to serve the British government as an interpreter and envoy. Over the next four decades, he rose through the ranks of the British Indian department, acting as agent, commissary, and, for the final years of his life, deputy superintendant and inspector general. At the same time, he engaged in the fur trade, speculated in land, and operated store. These activities placed him at the center of Anglo-Indian relations during the Seven Years War, Pontiac's Rebellion, Dunmore's War, the American Revolution, and the continuing war between the Ohio Indians and the United States that persisted until the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the Treaty of Greenville. In Nelson's appraisal, McKee was a figure throughout these decades (x). It is in elaborating McKee's pivotal role in these events that Nelson suggests the promise and reveals the shortcomings of this book. For much of his service, McKee was critical-if not the only-conduit between the British government and some native villages and groups. …

A Man of Distinction among Them: Alexander McKee and British-Indian Affairs along the Ohio Country Frontier, 1754-1799

A Man of Distinction among Them: Alexander McKee and British-Indian Affairs along the Ohio Country Frontier, 1754-1799

A Man of Distinction among Them: Alexander McKee and British-Indian Affairs along the Ohio Country Frontier, 1754-1799

A Man of Distinction among Them: Alexander McKee and British-Indian Affairs along the Ohio Country Frontier, 1754-1799

Indian Policy in the Age of Jefferson

Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans. By Anthony F. C. Wallace. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv, 394. Documents, illustrations, maps. $29.95) Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State. By Laurence M. Hauptman. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998. Pp. xix, 304. Illustrations, maps, tables. $34.95.) Seeds of Empire: The Revolutionary Conquest of the Iroquois. By Max Mintz. The World of War. (New York: New York University Press, 1999. Pp. xi, 232. Illustrations, maps. $28.95.) The Iroquois in the War of 1812. By Carl Benn. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Pp. xiii, 272. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $21.95.) A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816. By Claudio Saunt. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv, 298. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $17.95.) Playing Indian. By Philip J. Deloria. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Pp. 249. Illustrations. Cloth, $30.00; paper, $13.95.) The British Museum Encyclopedia of Native North America. By Rayna Green with Melanie Fernandez. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Pp. ix, 213. Illustrations. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $27.95.) Thomas Jefferson has received a series of bad raps recently for his racial policies, and Anthony F. C. Wallace's critique of his various contributions to Indian removal does nothing to revive what is left of Jefferson's reputation as a disinterested inquirer and philanthropist. Analogizing segregation, removal, and the assumptions underlying them to more recent essays in ethnic cleansing, Wallace argues that Jefferson, though an occasional scholarly admirer of Indian character, language, and mounds, could be a real shape-shifter when it came to policy. In the end, he played his part in one of the great tragedies of recent world history . . . the dispossession and decimation of the First (viii). Jefferson was born into a family and a class of land speculators interested in acquiring claims in the Ohio Country. His bellicose remarks when the Cherokees attacked the Wataugans in 1776 nearly matched his agreement with George Rogers Clark in 1780 that the Shawnees ought to be exterminated. Once he became president, Jefferson prodded agents like Benjamin Hawkins in Georgia and William Henry Harrison in Indiana to acquire land by persuasion, bribery, and intimidation at prices that would not burden the taxpayer. His commitment to laissez-faire and low-priced government reduced the military protection the United States offered Indians whose treaties guaranteed them against intrusion. His purchase of Louisiana offered, as he saw it, an opportunity to extend the segregation several tribal hunting bands had already sought west of the Mississippi to the whole of the Indians east of the river. To be fair, he also proposed to move several thousand white Louisianans east to make the separation complete. American politics and St. Louis fur traders prevented that effort; Indian opposition temporarily frustrated removal. Yet Jefferson continued to press Harrison to an 1809 treaty that drove the followers of nativist prophet Tenskwatawa and his warrior brother Tecumseh to a course that landed them on the British, or in this case, the losing side in the War of 1812. Jefferson's philanthropic alternative was civilization, the policy that gifts of farm animals, tools, and education would transform native Americans into make-believe white men who would need less land and make more acceptable neighbors than the hunters they supposedly were. Although he pressed the American Philosophical Society into the study of Indian languages and even became convinced that Indian antiquities were the real thing, Jefferson's observations of living Indian communities were scant and careless. From childhood through the presidency, he met traveling Indian leaders, but his own travels never took him west of Staunton, Virginia. …

Empire, Land, and the Construction of Racism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800

Over the last fifteen years, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Ohio Country and western Great Lakes have come into focus as scholars probe the interactions of the Indians, French, and British who lived, traded, farmed, and explored the region. No longer on the far side of the historian's frontier, the Ohio Country, one book at a time, is ceasing to be much of any frontier at all. As scholars uncover and air a wealth of information that twenty years ago was, for most historians, quite unimaginable in its richness, the challenge remains of finding the language and analytic tools to explain its meaning. It is why Richard White's middle ground, as a concept to explain diverse multi-ethnic relationships, proved so immediately attractive and has entrenched itself in the language we use.1 Historians have been less successful in connecting the trans-Appalachian West to the history of the seaboard colonies, which for so long have dominated our understanding of early modern North America. We can find examples of the middle ground of cultural accommodation from Nova Scotia to Florida, but we are just now tackling the problem of conceptualizing the linkages among the Ohio Country, the Atlantic seaboard and St. Lawrence colonies, European imperial states, and the post-1776 United States. It is this challenge that Eric Hinderaker takes on in Elusive Empires. Hinderaker defines his organizing concept, as processes [more] than structures, and more as creations of the people immediately engaged than of policy directives (p. xi). Three models of empire, in his rendering, competed for dominance in the Ohio Valley: empires of commerce, empires of land, and an empire of liberty, with the last being the most successful and the most racially exclusive. While Hinderaker acknowledges that these three imperial types are not mutually exclusive, he uses commerce, land, and liberty as economic, political, and ideological systems that Europeans and

The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities.

Prologue 1. Corn wars and civil wars: the Revolution comes to Indian country 2. Odanak: Abenaki ambiguity in the north 3. Stockbridge: the New England patriots 4. Oquaga: dissension and destruction on the Susquehanna 5. Fort Niagara: the politics of hunger in a refugee community 6. Maquachake: the perils of neutrality in the Ohio country 7. Chota: Cherokee beloved town in a world at war 8. Tchoukafala: the continuing: Chickasaw struggle for independence 9. Cuscowilla: Seminole loyalism and Seminole genesis 10. The peace that brought no peace Epilogue: a world without Indians?

Captain Hendrick Aupaumut: The Dilemmas of an Intercultural Broker

The life of Captain Hendrick Aupaumut (1757-1830), a Stockbridge Mohican sachem, diplomat, and historian, illustrates the limited victories and painful dilemmas of a culture broker in the American Northeast. During the 1790s Aupaumut undertook four missions to the Ohio country to broker a peace between the United States and the native villages confederated in opposition to the Anglo-American advance. Ostensibly Aupaumut represented the United States, but he acted primarily to revitalize Mohican autonomy and influence as the « front door » between the Anglo-Americans and the Algonquian people to the West

Review: The Log House in East Tennessee by John Morgan; Log Construction of the Ohio Country, 1750-1850 by Donald A. Hutslar

Review: The Log House in East Tennessee by John Morgan; Log Construction of the Ohio Country, 1750-1850 by Donald A. Hutslar

Log Construction in the Ohio Country, 1750-1850

Log Construction in the Ohio Country, 1750-1850

A Country between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724-1774.

The Ohio Country in the eighteenth century was a zone of international strife, and the Delawares, Shawnees, Iroquois, and other natives who had taken refuge there were caught between the territorial ambitions of the French and British. A Country Between is unique in assuming the perspective of the Indians who struggled to maintain their autonomy in a geographical tinderbox.

Chestnut Grove: An Early 19th-Century Lime Burning Industry in the Connecticut Western Reserve

Information is limited regarding the development of early industries along Lake Erie's northeastern shore of the Connecticut Western Reserve. With the opening of the Ohio Country, farmers and pioneer industrialists found the virgin land abundant with natural resources and ready to be exploited. Evidence derived from a rescue excavation of a stone structure at the outlet of the Cowles Creek together with documents established the presence of a lime burning industry. Early settlers found a plentiful wood supply located on the mainland which provided the necessary fuel for burning limestone mined on Cunningham (Kelleys) Island and permitted the construction of shops for use on Lake Erie. Some of the ships that were constructed locally were used to transport lime for the industry. The Sandusky Bay Islands eventually became a rich source of limestone for the expanding American consumer market.