Day 66: Ancient Life on an Ohio Creek

Photo by Karim Sakhibgareev on Unsplash

Today Gary and I drove around a county in southern Ohio where I’ve been doing research. We drove down a country road along a creek and came to a spot where Indians used to camp for thousands of years. We know it because local farmers have been finding arrowheads, axes, and other artifacts for years and experts can date some of them back more than five thousand years.

Some of the farms there have been in the same families since the first White people settled on that creek in 1801. A few of the houses and buildings have been there nearly as long. The names of roads are the same as the names of those early White settlers. They’re buried in the local cemeteries, their names on the tombstones.

Native Americans agreed by treaty in 1795 to leave this part of Ohio for White settlers, living further north and returning only seasonally for hunting and fishing. By the 1830s, White settlers wanted them to leave Ohio completely. Some Indians wanted to move west, hoping to maintain their traditional lifestyles there. Others didn’t.

Ultimately, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 - the one that led to the famous Trail of Tears across the south - led to federal removal of Indians from Ohio too. Dozens or hundreds of people died on those journeys too. The last to leave, in 1843, were the Wyandots. Having seen the perils of relying on the federal government, they arranged their own travel. Everyone survived the trip.