USA > Ohio > History of Ohio, covering the periods of Indian, French and British dominion, the territory Northwest, and the hundred years of statehood > Part 3
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* Rev. John G. E. Heckewelder, in his "History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations."
+D. G. Brinton, "The American Race."
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CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF OHIO.
with pious faithfulness the hero god Michabo who taught them laws and gave them maize and tobacco, and some time would come again. These Indians were those known in later years as the Delawares, the Illinois, the Manmees," the Mohegans, the Manhattans, the Pian- keshaws, the Pottawotamies, the Shawanees and numerous other tribes. All were one family in the likeness of their language, though they often had their family quarrels, and they bear in history the name given them by the French from one of their most unworthy tribes, the Algonquins.
The Mengwe made their homes along the lower great lakes and the St. Lawrence river, never reaching the coast, and thus they came to be wholly surrounded by the Lenape. They were a fiercer people, and models of physical development .; Though the Lenape regarded them as inferior, and called them cannibals, they held themselves superior to all races, and certainly gave some proof of superiority in their history. The women among them had more than ordinary respect, at least in ancient times, and were represented by a speaker in all councils. In the Wendat tribe the women of each gens elected the chief, who represented it in the tribal council. The "long house" was a distinctive feature of Mengwe life-large communal log houses, fortified with palisades, and so strong that the white pioneers did not err in calling them castles. Included in this stock of people were the Mohawks, Oneidas, Senecas,. Cayugas, Eries, Cherokees, Wyandots, Tuscaroras and others, these being the names commonly given them in history. The Washash (Osage), it is believed, they left beyond the Mississippi in the migration. But the Cherokees among the Mengwe and the Shawanees among the Lenape are people difficult to classify .¿
The language of both races was copious, admirably constructed,
* The Indian name of this nation was something like Omaumeeg, and is said to have meant people of the peninsula. The French name which came into general use was Miami, pronounced Me-ah-me, though the English sometimes used Omee. The names of the river that both bore the French name, Miami, as late as 1835. have now heen given different spellings, Mau- mee and Miami, and different pronunciations. But the Indians were never known, at least not in early times, as My-am-ies. Consequently the spelling Maumee is used in this work.
¿ Physically the stock is unsurpassed by any in the world. It stands on record that the five companies of Iroquois of New York and Canada during the civil war stood first on the list among all recruits of our army for height, vigor and corporeal symmetry .- D. G. Brinton, "The American Race."
# The word Shawanee, as a name for an Indian people, evidently origin- ated with the Delawares, in whose tongue "Shawan" means South. It means simply "Southern people" and probably is not the name the Shawanees applied to themselves in their own language. The Cherokees were a South- ern people from colonial times, though a few were found along the Ohio. The Shawanees were for a time, at least, Southern, and introduced into Ohio geography such words as Wakatomica and Chillicothe, that are sugges- tive of Chocktaw and Creek names.
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THE ANCIENT DOMAIN.
flexible and generally melodious. That of the Lenape was the more guttural, the sounds represented by ch or g in printed words closely approximrating the German ch. They also had delicately sounded nasal vowels resembling the French. Onondaga, for instance, was pronounced something like O-nong-dah-gah. The dictionaries and grammars of the languages that have been published demonstrate the remarkable richness of the tongues in words and their inflection and combination. The clans of the Lenni Lenape (called Delawares by the English) were known among the Indians by their totems, the Turtle, Turkey and Wolf, the Turtle being the highest in honor, while among the Mengwe there were the clans and totems of Turtle, Wolf, Bear, Deer, Beaver, Hawk, Crane and Snipe, each having separate towns. There were no Indian kings. The government was in the hands of the elected chief and the council of old and worthy men. The chief was the keeper of the wampum, used for tribal nego- tiations, and he was authorized to control the clan or tribe as far as his diplomacy could carry him, but no orders or attempts at forcible discipline would be tolerated. He could not make war or peace, or levy taxes, and was required to hunt for his living the same as any warrior. There was no limit of lands; all belonged to all. There were scarcely any penal laws, but unless some atonement were made murder could be avenged by the friends of the victim. The most generous hospitality was the rule, and when anyone needed a neces- sity of life, there was no harm in taking it without asking. Said James Smith, who passed some years as a forcibly adopted Indian among the Ohioans at a later day: "They are not oppressed or perplexed with expensive litigation ; they are not injured by legal robbery. They have no splendid villains that make themselves grand and great on other people's labor. They have neither Church nor State created as money making machines."
In war they were very skillful. Such maneuvers as marching for- ward in line (not in file) a mile long through the woods, forming a circle or semi-circle to surround an enemy, or a hollow square from which to face out and repel attack, they could perform to perfection, and they closely obeyed their leaders. They won famous battles, wholly or almost unaided by Europeans, against white troops in his- toric times, and could teach strategy to white commanders as well as the highest statecraft .*
Of another side of their character Gen. William Henry Harrison has left an interesting suggestion. "By many," he said, "they are supposed to be stoics, who willingly encounter privations. The very reverse is the fact; for if they belong to either of the classes of phil- osophers that prevailed in the declining years of Rome, it is to that
* The Iroquois advised the union of the American colonies, when the colonists, like inferior Indians, were too jealous of each other to consent to it.
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CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF OHIO.
of the Epicureans. For no Indian will forego an enjoyment or suf- fer an inconvenience if he ean avoid it. Even the gratification of some strong passion he is ever ready to postpone, when its accom- plishment is attended with unlooked for danger, or unexpected hard- ship." Another qualified to speak said of the Shawanees, popu- larly known as ferocious and discontented: "They are the most cheerful and merry people that ever I saw. The eares of life, which are such an enemy to us, seem not to have yet entered their mind. It appears as if some drollery was their chief study; consequently both men and women in laughing exceed any nation that ever came under my notice."# "They are also the most deceitful in human shape," said the Rev. David Jones, referring partienlarly, it seems, to their diplomaey. For all he charges them with in particular is that "when they imagine anything in their own mind about you, they would say some one told them so, and all this eunning to find out your thoughts about them." They were "perfect traiteurs," as the French observed in Florida, meaning treators or negotiators. If diplomacy could have kept out the Europeans the red men would still hold the Ohio valley.
There were, of course, darker sides of the picture, of which enough will appear in the course of this history. The women did not enjoy too much honor, and there were some rites that remind one of the ancient people of the Mediterranean whose civilization is admired. Their marriages were made with as little ceremony as among the ancient Hebrews, and often were temporary. The warriors were cruel, perhaps more so than Europeans of their day, and possibly there were more horrible atrocities on the borders of the colonies than occurred during the Thirty Years' war in Germany, or in the Irish wars, or in the Netherlands. Captives were sometimes burned at the stake, and once in awhile portions of them were eaten, as a sort of religions rite. But, originally at least, eaptive women were treated honorably.
Volney, the once famous French philosopher, who studied the Indian after he had suffered much from conquest and the strong drink of the whiter race, remarked: "I have often been struck with the analogy subsisting between the Indians of North America and the nations so much extolled of ancient Greece and Italy. In the personages of Homer's Iliad I find the manners and discourse of the Iroquois and Delawares." After he had visited the Maumees and talked with Little Turtle, he remarked that Thucydides, in describ- ing the Greeks at the period of the Trojan war, very closely pietured the mode of life of the western Indians.
The red men were superstitious, or religious, as one may choose to call them. They believed in two supernatural powers, the Kee-
* Rev. David Jones, a missionary in 1772.
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THE ANCIENT DOMAIN.
chee manitoo, or good spirit, and matchee manitoo, or satan, like the ancient Persians, though the Ahura Mazda of the latter was the good god. To the good spirit they made prayers and offerings of baked meats, which, however, all shared in eating, having no priests with special privileges. The matchee manitoo was perhaps more the object of concern, but he could be driven away and his evil influence averted by the shaking of gourd rattles or by the smoke of tobacco, thrown upon a fire. The eagles and owls, to the old Ohioans, were the watchers by day and night for the Carreyagaroona, or heavenly inhabitants, and their appearance required a smudge of tobacco as a token that the red man was not forgetful. The Iroquois had a notion that they were all formerly animals under the earth, and in their emergence the ground hog had been left behind. They would not eat that animal therefore, for fear of devouring a relative. The rattle- snake was "grandfather," and must be let alone, or all its race would rise against the red men. When a bear, sorely wounded, would cry in almost human fashion, the Indian hunter would stand and talk to him in seorn, upbraiding him for weakness, and exhorting him to bear misfortune bravely.
Their most common remedy for illness was as far advanced as the practice of those people today who have found that cleanliness is often preferable to drugs. The Turkish bath was common in Ohio hundreds of years ago. The Indian would take it in a little tent of hides over some hot stones, and if he could stand a tobacco smudge in addition to the hot air, the bath gained the merit of a religious cere- mony.
Such were the ancient people of the Ohio valley in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. About the year 1459 the great- est event affecting their history, after the conquest of the Allegawi, occurred, namely, the confederation of the five Mengwe tribes known to us as Mohawks, Oneidas, Senecas, Cayugas, and Onondagas, under the leadership of the great chieftain and statesman, Ayoun-wat-ha, familiar in romance as Hiawatha. This confederacy was founded to maintain quiet among those tribes, and was called the Kayanerenh- kowa, or "great peace," whence the French, "Iroquois," or Eroke people. Their nation, from Lake Champlain toward Lake Erie, including the upper waters of the Ohio, they called the Kanon- sionni,# or Long House, with the Sonontowa (Senecas) as door- keepers on the west. This "great peace," while it held the five tribes in firm alliance, did not forbid war with their neighbors, the Lenapes, or other tribes of the Mengwe family.
A wonderful happening in 1335 was the appearance of Cartier and his Frenchmen in the St. Lawrence river, as high as Hochelaga (Montreal). It was the advance guard of the new era, in which the
* The People of the Long House, by E. M Chadwick.
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CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF OHIO.
Iroquois confederation should be conspienous for more than two cen- turies and then pass away, with all the Indian power. Cartier was. met in friendliness by the Indians and told of a great river that could be followed for three moons to the southward from Hochelaga. This, Cartier reported as a probable route to Cathay, for which all the explorers of America were hunting. But it was not until 1608 that the first permanent settlement was made, by Champlain at Quebec. Champlain at the outset made friends with a tribe inhab- iting that region, which the French called "good Iroquois," Chario- gorois or Hurons .* They were a powerful people, of the Mengwe family, but at war with their cousins, the Iroquois of the confedera- tion. While the little island settlement of the French was but a year old Champlain consented, with fatal effect upon French domin- ion in America, to join in an expedition of Hurons and Adirondacks against the Iroquois, and the arquebuses of the French routed the red men of the confederacy at Ticonderoga. But it was only two months later that Hendrick Hudson sailed up the river that bears his name, and in a few years a great trading station was established at the place that the Delawares came to know as Manahachtanienk (Manhattan), meaning "the island where we all got drunk." The Iroquois speedily made a covenant chain, a treaty of lasting peace, with the Dutch, and obtained the European firearms, in the use of which they soon became masters. But even when equipped with bow and arrow alone they made an effectual barrier to French progress to the southwest. Because of the hostility he provoked, Champlain turned to the Ottawa river and visited Georgian bay. Within a quarter century after the unfortunate battle of Ticonderoga Nicollet discovered Lake Michigan, and as late as 1648 the French knew more of the far western lake of Winnebago than they did of Lake Erie, or even the falls of Onyagaro (Niagara), of which they heard tales from the Indians. It was not for want of enterprise that the French submitted to this restriction. In 1615 Champlain invaded the Iro- quois country and laid siege in a medieval manner to the walled capital, Onondaga, but was repulsed and compelled to retreat. Then in 1629 the English captured Quebec, and for a little while Canada and the right of exploring the unknown rivers and lakes of the inter- ior were granted to a favorite of Charles I. But Charles had a elaim against the king of France for promised but unpaid dower, and when his father-in-law had settled this, the English charter was annulled. Meanwhile the Puritans had made their settlement among the Lenape of Massachusetts, and Jamestown had been estab- lished in Virginia, both with grants from the English monarch
* This was a nickname for the Wendats or Wyandots, also called Tionta- ties, or tobacco Indians, or Petuns, from an obsolete French name for tobacco derived from Brazil.
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THE ANCIENT DOMAIN.
reaching to the western seas, though no one but the Spanish had an adequate conception of the vast territory that lay between the Atlan- tic and Pacific.
The Christian religion, as taught by the Franciscan fathers, was brought to the Indians about Niagara in 1626, but the adventurous priest, Joseph de la Roche Daillon, barely escaped with his life. After Quebec was restored to the French in 1632 came the Jesuits, who had some success in instructing the Hurons, but none with the Iroquois. Some Jesnit fathers visited Sault St. Marie in 1642, and on their return were taken by the Iroquois and savagely tortured. Father Joques, the only survivor, was carried across New York state before his release.
With the advent of the French and Dutch the Indians found they could obtain wampum, clothing, guns and ammunition and many trinkets dear to both warriors and women, as well as the "firewater" that might serve even better than their ancient besum (herb drink) in fortifying themselves for hunting or fighting excursions, all in exchange for beaver skins and other peltry. The Iroquois held a position commanding the channel of trade both with Dutch and French. The French had humiliated them in war; the Dutch had sought their friendship and encouraged them to control the trade. It was natural therefore that they should seek to cut off the French trade and possess for themselves the hunting grounds of all the adja- cent regions. Thus the fur trade became a controlling motive in the polities of the northwest and continued so until the war of 1812. Its first effect was that the Iroquois launched upon a great career of conquest. In 1643 they attacked the Attiwondaronks, called the "neutral nation" by the French, living north and south of Niagara, and these were driven out or absorbed in the victorious tribes. Within a few years the Huron towns in upper Canada, though strong enough to be called palisaded castles, were stormed and captured, the inhabitants driven far to the west, and the country made desolate and empty of people. The last great battle, according to the Huron tradition as told to General Harrison, was fought in canoes on Lake Erie, in which nearly all the warriors of both nations perished. The story of this campaign was told in Europe, and divided atten- tion with the ghastly details of the massacre of fifty thousand Eng- lish in Ireland.
About 1654 the Iroquois, flushed with success, turned their arms against the nation possessing at that time the rich hunting grounds of Ohio. These were also kindred to the Iroquois, but this was immaterial to the conquerors. The Ohioans were called Riquehron- nons (Rick-ebr-rons) by the Jesuit fathers, "or those of the Cat nation," probably from their totem. Part of the original French name survives in Erie (pronounced by the French airy). Rick-
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CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF OHIO.
ahickons, the English of Virginia called them, when several hundred Eries fled to that region in 1655. They were good enough fighters to repulse the attacks of the English and Pomukies, but were power- less before the Iroquois. Eastern Ohio, it seems, was swept clear of them by the invincible New York confederates, and given over to solitude as a game reserve of the conquerors. But two great Indian powers remained to the westward, the Twigtwees or Maumees and the Chigtaghicks or Illinois.
Peace was made for a few years with the French, and the Jesuits established a mission at Onondaga, but the fathers were soon com- pelled to retire, and devote themselves to Wisconsin, following the paths of the fur traders. Jesuit supremacy and French influence were inseparable after 1632, and the Iroquois refused both. Their attitude must have been influenced somewhat by their friends, the Protestants of New York. The Dutch came to America from a country for many years the battle-ground of religious wars, and the English who succeeded them in 1664 were no less hostile to the power of Rome. It is not an unwarranted statement, though rather start- ling, that the Iroquois were the outposts of Protestantism. Nor were they, at that time, allies of which to be ashamed. In the tre- mendous struggle that had distressed Europe for a century there were participants whom the Iroquois could not surpass in ferocity and cruelty. It may be doubted if women and children were safer in any war cursed region of Europe at that day than they would have been on the Indian border .*
On account of the hostilities mentioned, the French map makers did not know of Lake Erie as distinct from HIuron for many years. It first appears as a separate lake in the map of Creuxins, published in 1660, doubtless by reason of the traeing of the north coast and the discovery of the Riviere De Troit, or strait, by the fur traders.
The French made some headway against the Iroquois after this, and Remy de Courcelles invaded their "long house" in 1665, and chastised the Mohawks. This was followed by important advances in exploration. Robert Cavelier, who also bore the title of de la Salle, a seion of an old and wealthy family at Rouen, France, ambi- tious to establish a trading house and explore the interior, determined to put to proof the Indian stories of a great river in the interior that he imagined might empty in the Vermilion sea (gulf of California) and afford a short route to India. Some Sulpitian fathers at Mon- treal decided to carry the gospel to the dwellers along the great river at the same time, and the two joined in an expedition of eight eanoes
* The religious influence was more apparent in later periods, when the New Yorkers were shocked by the story that the Jesuits, seeking the favor of the Iroquois, assured them that the king of France was the eldest son of Jesus, probably a misunderstanding of the anxious efforts of the French to establish the superior claims of his Christian Majesty.
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" THE ANCIENT DOMAIN.
that set out from La Salle's post near Montreal, in July, 1669. They were about to seek the headwaters of the great river that had its sources partly in the Iroquois country, but the Sulpitians were either dissuaded by the Senecas with stories of hostile Shawanees above the Ohio falls or by the representations of Louis Joliet, who met then on his return from the copper district of Lake Superior. The party separated, the missionaries going to Long Point, on Lake Erie, and paddling their canoes thence, in the stormy waters of Lake Erie, to Point Pelee and Detroit, a place they were the first historie charac- ters, save Joliet (possibly), to visit. This is the first recorded use of Lake Erie as a ronte to the west.
As for La Salle, his doings in the next two years are matters of warm dispute among historians. The Jesnit fathers, with whom he became hostile, do not give him credit for great discoveries after- ward elaimed by and for him. An eminent authority* dismisses his career at this period with the words: "La Salle, by way of Lake Erie, reached the Illinois, or some other affluent of the Mississippi, but made no report and made no claim, having failed to reach the main river." With the dispute regarding the comparative honors of Marquette, Joliet, and La Salle, as discoverers of the Mississippi, we have little to do here. Each of them saw a river which had been known to the Spanish for more than a century. But it is of inter- est in connection with the history of Ohio to know if La Salle in this disputed period navigated the river from which the State obtains its name. It was not then definitely known as the O-hee-o, for the Iroquois gave that name also to the Mississippi, and possibly to other great rivers, and the Lenape called it Alleghany. The authorities for claiming that LaSalle was the first European to visit it are, first, his memorial to Count Frontenac, governor of Canada, in 1677, in which he deelares: "In the year 1667 and following he made divers voyages, with much expense, in which he was the first to reach the countries south of the lakes, and discovered among others the great river of Ohio; he followed it to a narrow place where it fell from a great height into vast marshes, after having been reinforced by another very large river from the north." This is construed to mean discovery of the river now called Ohio, as far south as the falls at Louisville.
The other authority is an anonymous history of La Salle, pub- lished at Paris in 1679, which relates that the explorer, with an Indian guide, navigated the Ohio until he "found a sault [falls or rapids ] which fell toward west in a low country, marshy, all cov- ered with old souches [stumps or trunks], of which some are vet sur pied [standing or alive]." In 1670, by the same authority, he coasted Lake Erie (on the Ohio side, doubtless) and on to Lake
* John G. Shea, "The Catholic Church in Colonial Days."
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CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF OHIO.
Michigan, and descended a river to a great stream, apparently the Mississippi, which he followed until sure that it emptied into the gulf of Mexico and not, as he fondly hoped, into the gulf of Califor- nia. Joliet observed the mouth of the Ohio when with Marquette on the Mississippi, and in 1670 he made a map showing the Ohio unmis- takably, though not correctly. Along its course is inscribed : "River by which the Sieur de la Salle descended in setting ont from Lake Erie to go into Mexico." Another map of Joliet's, four years later, shows an exactly similar trace of the Ohio, with the inscription, "Route de M. de la Salle pour aller dans le Mexique." It is charged, however, that this trace and inscription have been added by another hand to the original chart. A curious feature of both maps is that the great northward bend of the Ohio, where it receives the Miami, is made to approach closely to Lake Erie. The Maumee is also shown, apparently as far as Fort Wayne, and dotted lines indi- cate that the portage there is directly from the Manmee to the Ohio. This seems to reinforce the opinion of Gen. J. S. Clark, that La Salle went down the Wabash instead of the Ohio, and saw the falls and marshy country at Logansport instead of Louisville. But in that case the tracing of the upper Ohio, to its sonree in two rivers, must be explained. This error regarding the close approach at the Mau- mee portage was accepted for a long time, and when it was known that the Ohio did not flow so far north, Hennepin, the companion of LaSalle in later voyages, mapped the lake far enough southward to maintain a similar distance. Thus it was delineated as late as 1697, on a Hennepin map which (significantly) does not show the Wa- bash .*
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