Commemorative historical and biographical record of Wood County, Ohio : its past and present : early settlement and development biographies and portraits of early settlers and representative citizens, etc. V. 1, Part 3

Author: Leeson, M. A. (Michael A.) cn; J.H. Beers & Co. cn
Publication date: 1897
Publisher: Chicago : J.H. Beers & Co.
Number of Pages: 1060

USA > Ohio > Wood County > Commemorative historical and biographical record of Wood County, Ohio : its past and present : early settlement and development biographies and portraits of early settlers and representative citizens, etc. V. 1 > Part 3

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The direct economic products of the surface rocks are, as has been shown, magnesian lime- stone of the highest excellence, and building stone of not more than medium quality at best, the quarries of Grand Rapids alone being except- ed. The many local quarries reduce, however, the cost of stone for cellars and ordinary founda- tions, to a considerable extent, and in this re- spect they render good service. In some dis- tricts, the granite bowlders of the drift are abundant enough to allow of their being utilized in foundations and walls. With skillful work on the part of the stone-mason they leave nothing to be desired in such uses, so far as appearance and durability are concerned.

Ten years ago a chapter on the geology of Wood county would have stopped at this point. There would have been nothing to add with ref- erence to the economic geology of the county, but every reader now knows that what has al- ready been told is absolutely insignificant in com- parison with what remains to be told, viz .: the production of oil and gas from certain of the foundation rocks of the county. The only fac- tors of mineral wealth that would now come to mind in connection with the economic geology of the county would be the last named substances. [Prof. Orton's theory of the origin of petroleum is given in the chapter on the Gas and Oil fields

CHAPTER II.

FRENCH OCCUPATION-HOW AND WHEN THEY CAME-THE INDIAN TRIBES-DESTRUCTION AND EVICTION BY THE BLOOD-THIRSTY IROQUOIS LEAGUE-OHIO ALMOST AN UNINHABITED WIL- DERNESS-WHY THE FRENCH FIRST LOCATED NORTH OF THE LAKES-FRENCH AT DETROIT. 1701-OTTAWAS AND WYANDOTS SETTLE ABOUT DETROIT-LATER REMOVE TO THE MAUMEE -FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR-FRENCH DISPLACED BY ENGLISH-TREATY OF 1763.

N the far-away time when this narrative be- gins, three great nations of Europe were rivals for supremacy on this continent. Spain had made claim to Florida and the country west of it; England had planted some settlements north along the Atlantic coast to Maine; further north France held dominion, including the islands about the mouth of the St. Lawrence. That great river, navigable hundreds of miles, proved of inestimable value to France in the race. By the chance fortune of securing that open highway to the far interior she outsped her rivals in the westward march. Seven years before the Pil- grims came to the New England coast, Samuel Champlain had unfurled the banner of France on the shore of Lake Huron, more than one thousand miles inland. Through the far-reaching affluents of that great artery of the continent, the hardy voyageur penetrated the depthis of the remote wilderness and learned of the boundless resources of the great West, long before English explorers ventured across the Alleghanies. As early as the year 1608 Champlain brought out a colony of his countrymen to the site of Quebec, and began the groundwork of permanent occupancy. This work the French continued in America with unabated zeal for a period of about one hundred and fifty years; it was a work thrillingly interesting in its historical details, and singularly eventful upon the destinies of mankind in its outcome. With their settlements established on the outlet of the Great Lakes, it was not a matter of chance or accident that the French became the discoverers of that part of Ohio adjacent to Lake Erie. The same watery highway, that carried the onrolling floods of the Maumee down through the St. Lawrence to the sea, guided the adventurous explorers back to their source. Thus it happens that the French are our earliest historians.

Beyond the Atlantic, in the musty archives of France, we will have to look for most of the scat- tered fragments of what is recorded of the Mau- mee Country during the rule of that nation here.

That period extends from its discovery, about the year 1679, until the English displaced the French in 1763. The history is but little and mostly relates to a race of people who, like the elk and buffalo, which furnished their subsist- ence, has long since passed from our borders -- a race whose wandering life and deeds of savagery are of little interest save to the historian and anti- quary. Though the Indian has gone, and his place is filled by another people, working out their destiny along new lines, it is just to give him some space, small though it be, in our story.

In the Marine and Colonial departments, at Paris, in shape of reports, maps and correspond- ence of officers in America, and in the archives of the Church, among the reports of the Jesuit missionaries, laboring among the North American savages, is to be found the earliest recorded history of our Indian predecessors. There, on time-stained, moth-eaten pages, in faded parch- ment covers, is told the melancholy story of some of the vanished nations who once roamed and hunted in the wilderness about Lake Erie --- nations that perished under the deadly blows of their own races in an exterminating conflict. which was only a tragic part of the wide-spread revolution, begun before the discovery of their country by European adventurers, and fully as disastrous to the aborigines as the after complica- tions of the survivors with the white men.

From such scanty data as the Frenchmen have left ns, let us draw a hasty sketch of the Indian situation as it was at that time. In that broad domain of territory teeming with natural advantages, capable of sustaining an empire greater than any dreamed of by Charlemagne. lying north of the latitude of the Ohio river and stretching from the Atlantic ocean to the Father of Waters, were two generic branches of the red races, differing in language and some minor points-the Iroquois and Algonquin. These were again divided into numerons cognate tribes, with some dissimilar traits, but with a general re-

WOOD COUNTY, OHIO.

semblance. Within the territory south of Lake Ontario, and between the Mohawk and Genesee rivers, was a cluster of beautiful lakes, since made classic ground by the genius of Cooper. That charming country was the seat of the Iro- quois League, the most remarkable and unique confederacy mentioned in Indian history, embrac- ing five tribes -- the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onon- dagas, Cayugas and Senecas. Their perfect union, unbroken to the last, and their favored location, gave them supremacy among the tribes. Parkman speaks of the Iroquois as the "Indian of Indians." De Witt Clinton calls them the "Romans of the New World." They were cer- tainly like the Romans in one respect: they were remorseless, blood-thirsty conquerors. They held all the tribes, from the treeless plains of the Mississippi to the wooded slopes of the Atlantic under the spell of their prowess. The secret of their confederation and the term of its existence are involved in the uncertainty of mythical tradition. Their fighting strength, at the advent of the white man, was estimated at about four thousand warriors.

This confederacy, sometimes called the Five Nations, and after the year 1715, when they were joined by the Tuscaroras of the south, the Six Nations, was the Iroquois proper. Around them, however, were allied nations of the same linguistic stock. To the southwest, on the Sus- quehanna, were the warlike Andastees; south of Lake Erie the powerful tribe of Eries; on the north shore of the same lake, the Neutral Nation, so called by the missionaries, their territory extending into New York; in the peninsula north, formed by Lakes Erie, Huron and Ontario, were the numerous clans of the Hurons-sometimes called the Huron-Iroquois, as they were of the same stock-nunibering, at one time, twelve thousand souls. These were named Hurons by the Jesuits, after the lake on the shores of which they had their homes; but at a later date, after the great catastrophe that partially destroyed and scattered the tribe, the principal band took the name of Wyandots. As, later on, the Wyan- dots figure in the history of the Maumee Country. it is desired to make this genealogy clear. North- east of the Hurons, near the Ottawa river, of Canada, was the tribe of Ottawas, of the Algon- quin family, well known in later years on the Mamnee.

There is some obscurity in the French maps and accounts, of that time, regarding the west end of Lake Erie, as no missions had been estab- lished south of the lake. There is evidence, how- ever, tending to show that the Neutrals, as they

were called, had fortified villages on the Sandusky river, whither they had fled for safety shortly be- fore their final destruction. But other authorities claim that it was the Eries who suffered annihila- tion on the Sandusky. There is pretty conclusive evidence, too, that the Miamis used the hunting grounds of the Lower Maumee at an early day. This tribe had its chief seat on the heads of the Maumee and Wabash rivers, and its clans claimed portions of Indiana, Ohio and southern Michigan. The French named the river " Miami- du-Lac," probably after some tribe in the vicinity. La Salle met a war party of the Miamis, at the Kankakee portage, as early as 1681, on their way to fight the Illinois .* The Miamis were among the few who did not suffer seriously by the Iro- quois, though more than once they had to flee to the farther shore of Lake Michigan to escape the deadly blows of the insatiate New York conquer- ors. Their central village, Ke-ki-on-gay, was established, at an early date, on the site where Fort Wayne now stands, and subsequently they were among the most hostile tribes the Americans had to deal with.

Contiguous to, and almost surrounding the territory of the Iroquois, was the vast domain of the Algonquins. To draw lines of comparison between these two families is difficult. They were so related by conquest, absorption and loca- tion, as at times to bafile analysis.

All, however, were savages, differing but little in character, and similar in habits, customs and superstitions, where climatic conditions did not interfere. The Iroquois was the highest type of North-American savagery; daring, politic and ambitious; a fair exemplification of the best estate attainable outside of the pale of civilization. That these people, left undisturbed, would have developed a civilization for themselves no one believes who has studied them well. They were as fixed in their habits, laws and customs as the migrating birds of passage. Their lives were a series of impulses and their most important actions were incited by omens or the meaningless mnummeries of conjuring " Medicine Men." They studied the signs of the woods that they might follow the game and track, or evade an enemy; but the open book of Nature had never suggested to them an invention or an art. In religion they were no better. "The religious belief of an Indian," says Parkman, "is a cloudy bewilder- ment where we seek in vain for system or cohe- rence." The primitive Indian was as much a savage in his religion as in his physical life; he was, says the same author, "divided between

* Parkman's " Discovery of the Great West," P. : 69.

WOOD COUNTY, OHIO.

fetish worship and that next degree of religious development which consists in the worship of deities embodied in the human form. His con- ception of their attributes was such as might have been expected. His gods were no whit better than himself. Even when he borrows from Christianity the idea of a Supreme and Universal Spirit, his tendency is to reduce Him to a local habitation and a bodily shape; and this tendency disappears only in tribes that have long been in contact with civilized white men. The primitive Indian, yielding his untutored homage to One All-pervading and Omnicient Spirit is a dreanı of poets, rhetoricians and sentimentalists."

Both peoples-Algonquins and Iroquois -- produced warriors of distinction and chieftains whose statecraft evidenced a considerable degree of sagacity. In this respect the Algonquins did not suffer by comparison. Powhattan and King Phillip were Algonquins, as later were Pontiac, Tecumseh, Little Turtle and Black Hawk.

Of the habits, customs and superstitions of those people who were our predecessors, much can be said; of their previous history but little, and that based on no better authority than legends and unreliable tradition. The Indians, as first found by the whites, are nearly as great an . enigma as their predecessors, the legendary Mound-Builders, whose history can only be traced in the works that have outlived them. They were in possession-so far as their nomadic habits could make a possession. That much is certain; nearly as certain is the probability of their ultimate extinction.

The revengeful cruelties and homicidal fury exhibited in their incessant wars upon each other, as depicted by the early French discover- ers, is calculated to somewhat dispel one's belief in the stories so often told in prose and song, of the primitive happiness of the Indian race. Pos- sibly some of that happiness has existed in the brain of the sentimentalists, rather than in the reality, the result of undigested theories and uneducated sympathies.

Champlain's settlement found friendly neigh- bors in the hordes of Algonquins. The warriors besought the French to join them in a war ex- pedition against their enemies, the Iroquois, to the south of the St. Lawrence. Here transpired an incident, which, though it seemed trivial in itself at the time, ultimately had much to do in shaping French history in America. Champlain acceded to the request, and taking a couple of his soldiers joined the war party. Firearms were then unknown in the woods of America, and when the proud Iroquois, in the first onset of bat-

tle, witnessed the blaze and crash of the muskets and saw three of their leading chiefs go down with ghastly. death wounds, they were dumb- founded and fled panic-stricken, hotly pursued by the exultant red allies of the French. Cham- plain had made a mistake-a mistake that sorely troubled the French for more than a hundred years afterward. That act helped to engender Iroquois hostility, which, fed by other causes, contributed in no small degree to the failure of the French colonial project in America.

A little later on French explorers dared not venture to the west by way of the St. Lawrence and lakes, but turned northward instead, and the rising settlements lived in dread of their ferocious neighbors to the south. In this unfortunate con- dition of affairs, the reader finds the principal explanation for the French pioneers turning to the inhospitable region to the north of the Great Lakes, instead of to the nearer and more desira- ble country further south. For this cause, doubtless, the Maumee Country was not discov- ered until more than seventy years after the set- tlement at Quebec was made. Mackinac, Green Bay, the "Soo" and Mission La Pointe, north of the lakes, are more than a quarter of a century older than Detroit. There was a cause for this. Iroquois hostility drove the French northward. Their usual route was by the Ottawa river, of Canada, thence by the north shore of Huron, Mackinac, and so on to Lake Superior. Along this route were the missionary stations, the cen- ters of the early colonial history.

Thus far we have dwelt upon the maps and history of the country, presumably as the French first found it. Now let us make a revise of the history and map of this same country with the changes of half a century. At the beginning of 1670 the land of the Hurons is a solitude. The Moloch of havoc had been there. Iroquois tomahawks spread desolation through all the borders. The missions and missionaries were gone. The survivors of the once populous Indian cantons were scattered bands of fugitives. After destroying the Hurons the Five League despoilers fell upon the Neutral Nation with ruthless fury. and the wilderness north of Lake Erie became a solitude. South of the lake the Eries, after a heroic resistance, shared the same fate, and their name only lives in the blue waters beside which they perished. Little is known of them-the missionaries, it is thought, never dwelt among them. The Andastees, too, after a savage and protracted struggle, which crippled and nearly baffled their conquerors, were exterminated. Thus, one after the other, four great nations

WOOD COUNTY, OHIO.

perished at the hands of their savage ,brethren. The present State of Ohio became a vassal canton of the Iroquois, and, it might be added, was almost a solitude. The population, thus dis- placed, made what has been deemed by some to have been the first occupation. All that can be truthfully said, however, is that they were the first occupants of whom the white men knew anything.

The French colonists had been friends and allies of the Hurons, as well, and for that reason had not escaped unscathed. The revengeful Confederacy, obtaining guns from the Dutch and English, whose settlements were beginning to dot the Hudson and Mohawk, made frequent merciless raids, spreading desolation along the whole line of the St. Lawrence settlements, until the colony tottered upon the verge of ruin. Montreal was captured; its inhabitants butchered or carried away captives, and the blood-smeared victors yelled their exultant war-whoops under the very walls of Quebec.

Let us refer again to the same map. Far away, on the south shore of Lake Superior, near Chequamigon bay, are the fragments of the once proud, but now expatriated, Hurons. Near them were the Ottawas-associates in exile. They, too, had to flee before the fury of the conquerors. These tribes for more than twenty years, like the Israelites of old, wanderers in the vast wilder- ness, had at last squatted there, near some kin- dred clans of the Chippewas. The faithful Jesuits had been with them in their wanderings. The Mission La Pointe# was established; but Father Marquette, who established the church of Sault Ste. Marie in April, 1668, and who was at La Pointe in 1669, wrote very discouragingly of the progress he was making among the heathet bordes. In his report he says, concerning the Ottawas: "They were far removed from the Kingdom of God, and addicted, beyond all other tribes, to foulness, incantations and sacrifices to evil spirits." It was not long, however, until a quarrel with the Sioux, who were west of them, caused the Hurons-or Wyandots as they will hereafter be called-and Ottawas to flee south- ward; the former settling about Mackinaw, and the latter on some islands below the straits, and still later, about Little Traverse bay. These locations they held for nearly a century, and again grew numerous and strong. Here we will leave them for the present.

It will be of interest at this point to know where the maps of that time, 1670, located some other tribes, with whom history brings us in con-

tact, in later years. The Chippewas were on Lake Superior; the Sacs, Winnebagoes and Menominees, in Wisconsin: the Kaskaskias and other Illinois tribes on the Illinois river; the Pot- tawatamies on the south end of Lake Michigan. about the River St. Joseph; the Miamis along the Ohio and Indiana State line; and the Dela- wares (vassals of the Iroquois), in central Penn- sylvania. The wandering Shawanees are not easily located, but at that time were probably about the mouth of the Cumberland river. With the exception of the Miamis none of these tribes then claimed a home in what is now Ohio. The reader should note this fact, as a century later at least six tribes claimed ownership in Ohio soil. These tribes, mostly Algonquins, had generally been allies of, and were friendly to, the French, and more or less hostile to their old enemies, the Iroquois.

The French, taught by bitter lessons, had long been anxious to make peace with the Iro- quois, not only for the protection of their colonies on the St. Lawrence, but in the interest of dis- coveries to the south and the vast fur trade with the nations. Long and incessant warfare, too, had told upon the power of the Five Nations. They had received some heavy blows from the French troops, inducing a more pacific state of mind. A sort of truce was at last patched up between them and the French, and the latter ventured to make some explorations south of the Lakes. It was about this time that Robert Cav- alier La Salle-incomparable among the early pioneer explorersof the West -- began his American career. Through his inspiring genius and tireless energy, civilized men first began to learn the vast extent and future possibilities of the Mississippi Valley.

In the year 1670, he discovered the Ohio river, and was among the first Europeans who trod Ohio soil. Two of his associates, Fathers Gallinee and Dolliers, on a canoe trip to the out- let of Lake Superior in the same year, passed up Lake Erie, stopping one night on Pt. Pelee island. They were the pioneer white men who traveled along the west end of Lake Erie and through the straits of Detroit, so far as is known. This was sixty-two years after settlement was made on the St. Lawrence.

In 1671, at the Sault ( " Soo"). the French, in the presence of a large concourse of Indians, and with much pomp and display, took formal possession of all the Northwest, both discovered and undiscovered, in the name of the King of France. In the following year (1672) the old soldier, Count Frontenac, came out to Canada as

· Opposite layheld, Wisconsin.

WOOD COUNTY, OHIO.

Governor. In enterprise and ability, and in the support he commanded from the King, he far ex- ceeded any of his predecessors. His vigorous administration of colonial affairs, and his soldierly skill, combined with the genius of La Salle, ad- vanced the French scheme of empire as it had never been before. Under adventurous and fear- less leaders, the Mississippi, with many of its eastern tributaries, including the Ohio, was ex- plored. Seven years later, 1679, at Niagara, La Salle launched the "Griffin," of forty-five tons burthen, mounting a small armament of light cannon. This pioneer sailing craft on the Great Lakes, with her gaudy pennants, flapping sails and boomning cannon, was the wonder of all In- dian beholders; the trip of the great "canoe" up Lakes Erie and Huron, her passage of the straits of Detroit and Mackinac, and on to the south end of Lake Michigan, was in the nature of a tri- umphal voyage. But the career of the "Griffin" was short. La Salle sent her on the return trip loaded with furs, but she never reached her des- tination, having possibly foundered in a storm.

In this same year ( 1679) Frontenac sent out a number of trading and exploring parties, to different parts of the West. It was doubtless one of these that discovered the canoe route from Lake Erie to the Ohio, by way of the Mauniee and Wabash rivers, which in an ordinary stage of water could be traversed with a canoe by a "portage," or land 'carry, of only about nine miles between the sources of the two rivers. This, in a country where there were neither horses nor mules, was an important discovery, and this route was niuch used in both war and peace in after years. Outside of this discovery, however, there are existing proofs that the French were on the Maumee in 1679 and 1680, but there is no evi- dence that white inen had been here before that time. In his interesting volume, "History of the Maumee Valley," Knapp states, on the authority of A. T. Goodinan, at one time secre- tary of the Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Historical Society, based on data from records at Montreal, Quebec and elsewhere, that the French, in 1680, built a stockade, and for several years kept a trading post on the north bank of the Maumee, at a point nearly opposite where Per- rysburg now is. This post, it is claimed, was aft- erward abandoned for the more desirable location at Ft. Wayne. There is room, however, for well- founded doubt as to there having been a fort on the Maumee as early as 16So. The French at that time felt no security, anywhere south of Lake Erie, from the roving murderous bands of Iroquois. This is shown in the fact that they

had no permanent military post at the more im- portant location on the Detroit, until subsequent to the great Montreal treaty, twenty-one years later, 1701. The further fact that there were no Indians at the time on the Lower Maumee, worth mentioning, takes away the probability or need of a trading post. There was nobody here to trade with, unless the Miamis should make an oc- casional visit from the Fort Wayne country. That a French exploring and trading party was on the Maumee at or about the time mentioned seems certain; that such party had a fortified winter encampment here, 1679-80, waiting for the breaking up of the ice, is more than possible, but that there was an established trading post here prior to the one at Detroit, hardly seems probable.

At a grand council held at Montreal in 1701. at which were present representatives of the Iro- quois and nearly all the tribes north of the Ohio. including those about the Great Lakes, the French made a treaty which greatly facilitated their schemes of aggrandizement and trade. Though she had been compelled to take third choice in America, none will deny, in the light of later revelations, that France had put her pre- emption squarely down on the cream of the Con- tinent. From the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, four thousand miles. she claimed sway. Her great concern now was to make her claim good. In this interest her ministers and resident officials were aggressive and zealous. In 1701, the same year of the great Montreal council, a military and trading post, called Fort Ponchartrain, was established at Detroit. From this date and place Wood county catches the first shadowy rays of the slowly approaching civilization. Detroit, by its central and favorable location on the great water route between the east and northwest, became at once the most important post in the western country, and continued so until the close of the war of 1812. Beside being the chief center of military and governmental authority for a large extent of country, it was a great fur-trading en :- porium. No city west of the Alleghanies has filled so important a place in the history of the North and West as Detroit. It has been the scene of two surrenders, twelve massacres, two scores of battles, and has changed flags five times. 1), - troit was one hundred years old when Cleveland was laid off in town lots. Naturally the Matin: Country lying so near by, and the river which was the traveled route to the Ohio, became tributar: to Detroit.

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Commemorative historical and biographical record of Wood County, Ohio : its past and present : early settlement and development biographies and portraits of early settlers and representative citizens, etc. V. 1, Part 3

Author: Leeson, M. A. (Michael A.) cn; J.H. Beers & Co. cn Publication date: 1897 Publisher: Chicago : J.H. Beers & Co. Number of Pages: 1060

Author: Leeson, M. A. (Michael A.) cn; J.H. Beers & Co. cn
Publication date: 1897
Publisher: Chicago : J.H. Beers & Co.
Number of Pages: 1060