USA > Ohio > Montgomery County > Memoirs of the Miami valley > Part 44
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The Miami river, flowing from its headspring, Indian lake, is, without question, a more natural division between Logan and Shelby counties than any surveyor's line; the country to the west of the great stream differing topographically from the eastern county to a radical degree. Shelby county, north of the river, is charac- terized by uplands which maintain a high and gently undulating level, rising rather gradually in the northwest, where Loramie reservoir occupies the highest elevation between the Ohio river and Lake Erie that is to be found on the west side of the valley. On both sides of the stream the glacial gorge is of varying breadth with occasional low flood plains, and rising tablelands, bordered by hills which rise, in many instances, to commanding height above the valley, and between which many beautiful streams have cut picturesque channels from the plateaus of the north or south.
The larger of these tributaries exhibit the winding valleys of old streams, with here and there a stretch of bottom land, and corresponding bluff ; and carry, at times, a great volume of water down their often precipitous ways. Loramie creek, the largest by far of the county, drains a well-defined valley quite as separate from the rest as is Mad river, in the east Miami valley. Meandering from its source at the extreme northern edge of Shelby county, through the basin which, by means of the State dam, forms Loramie reservoir, its course is deflected to the south and southeast, its val- ley practically determining the course of the Miami canal for a distance of twenty miles or more north of Lockington, where the old feeder connects the waters of the upper Miami with the main channel of the once important waterway. This point marked the highest level of the canal, and for the same reason that the locks were located here nearly a century ago, the Miami Conservancy commission has selected this point for the great dam, which is now under construction, as a part of the program of flood prevention
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in the Great Miami valley. A dozen or more streams water various parts of the territory, Turtle, Plum, Mosquito, Tawawa, Leather- wood, and the mile creeks-so named by Anthony Wayne, to dis- tinguish them in the maps of his trace-and many lesser rivulets, all of which have the faculty of leaping their bounds in rainy sea- sons, and helping in the havoc of spring floods farther south. The picturesque quality is not lacking in the border lands of any of these streams, which, though not ornamented, in the annals of the past, by poetic legends, certainly furnished secluded passages for the savages who made it a war path when its hunting grounds were threatened with invasion, and today still maintain a wild aspect that greets the eye like a surprise, after the well groomed farmlands of the levels.
Like a great portion of the Northwest, the entire territory of what is now Shelby county was covered, up to a century and a quarter ago, by dense forest growth, unbroken except by the natural water-courses, or by the accident of forest fires, which in this local- ity seem to have been not frequent nor disastrous. Up to the advent of the first white trader, after the middle of the eighteenth century, it is very doubtful if an Indian cornfield ever had been planted in the rich soil of Shelby county; nor is there any evidence that the forest sheltered any Indian village or community up to that time. It was not as home that the savage so bitterly and so bloodily de- fended its green retreats from white invasion. Only by hunting camps were his fires lighted, and the trails that were once so plainly marked through this territory were those which led the hunter to the lair of the wild beast, or along which he bore away the trophies of the expedition, or, in later days, lurked to guard the forest riches from the white man's depredations. For this forest was a part of that great inheritance which, according to the claims of their chief- tains, had been bequeathed to them and their children forever, by their fathers.
The claim was valid. Not only by inheritance but by right of previous possession, the land belonged to the savage, and constituted his entire substance, without which he knew not how to live. Little marvel was it that the aborigine resented the advent of the settler who came to level the forests and to market the earth under his feet. No matter how we interpret the necessity, or even the duty, of "subduing the earth" as a justification of the white man's past treat- ment of the Indians, the local tribes-Shawanees, Wyandots, Miamis and all-with equal justice regarded the local forefathers and their armed forces as ruthless Huns, bent upon selfish conquest of lands and forests that could become theirs only by the right of might.
It is contended that the Indians stole the white man's children and horses, and that their marauding bands were a menace to settlers in lands no longer under dispute, also that the white raids into the headwater forests were in the nature of reprisal for wrongs com- mitted by the Indians. But, if so, it was equally true that, long before, the Shawanees had been driven by degrees from their home in the southern country, and that seeds of hate and distrust had been sown when the same white interlopers had fraudulently "bought" the red man's ponies for bits of bright print, only large
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enough to envelope a pappoose, a shining penny or two, a string of gay glass beads, or similar baubles of no worth, imposing upon the aboriginal ignorance of values; which, as it wore away by repeated experience, left an open avenue for mischief makers of either faction among the white traders, who incited the savages to revenge and exploited the troubles to their own gains.
The French, as a people, were, admittedly, better fitted in tem- perament than the British, of that date, for the problem of civilizing the Indian. Whatever was their ultimate ambition in regard to the acquisition of their territory, the French first approached the Indian either as missionaries, geographers, or as peaceful traders, whose influence was civilizing, and to whom the Indians responded readily. In spite of later British intermeddling, and the clash of arms between brothers of red blood, the Indians were never wholly alienated from their French friends, as many of the old Indian fighters of the north- west knew and acknowledged. Only by treachery and bribes were the Indians moved from their allegiance. Butterfield is quoted as saying that "the secret spring of French activity in the border troubles was their desire to monopolize Indian trading." Which may be quite true, but no less so than that the British shared in the desire. Nor was the desire necessarily discreditable, so long as the dealings were honorable; but the perpetual play of cross purposes between the opposing factions of the white settlers, each of whom used the Indian as a tool, confused the savage sense of friend and foe, and aroused in him a spirit of fierce retaliation which recognized small difference between British or French, loyalist or colonist, and left him a prey to any element that offered reward or the opportunity to wreak vengeance for his losses.
It is a palliation of the irremediable facts of our pioneer history, that the settlers of the Ohio and Miami valleys were heirs to a con- dition created by events so far past that the later struggles were inevitable ; but those rash, futile and bloody raids of early days only fed the fires of hatred and piled up fresh Ossas of bitterness upon the Pelion of past wrongs, heaping up a mountain of resistance to level which the government was, finally, helpless except by means of regular warfare, and the subjugation, not of the earth, but of one of its greatest races.
History in Shelby county began long before its establishment as a pioneer commonwealth in 1819, a chain of events beginning about seventy-five years previous to that date having stamped the map of this part of the northwest indelibly, although these events were separated from the settlers' era by a period of time in which history is perplexingly uncommunicative.
Not long previous to 1749, an Indian chief, himself a Pianke- shaw, and head of a band of Indians known to the French as "Pic- qualinees" (or "Pickqualines"), who were the Miamis proper, had migrated from the Canadian territories of the French, with whom they had thus far been friendly, and settled at a point in the valley of the Great Miami river, which was then known by the French name of "La Riviere a la Roche" (or River of the Rocks), just below the mouth of an unexplored creek, and on the west bank of the river. Here they established a trading post which in a suspiciously short
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time became well known to the British traders in this section, who, in their familiar facility, corrupted the tribal name of the Indians to "Pickawillany," and, settling in the vicinity, began the work of alienating these French-taught aborigines from their Canadian friends. Rumors of this proceeding reaching Canada, the French governor-general despatched a small expedition, under Celoron de Bienville, to peacefully repossess the Ohio river country in the name of the king of France. Bienville's company consisted of a few soldiers and a force of Indians, the whole party numbering about two hundred and thirty-five men. A "secondary" mission of the French visitation was to induce the Piankeshaw chief, known to them as "Demoiselle" (while the British traders, having gained his treacherous confidence, had nicknamed him "Old Britain"), to return with them to Canada, to remove him from the antagonistic influence of the British, which they feared. It was too late. The wily savage put off the ambassador of the French with a smooth promise to return to Canada "in the spring," with which Bienville was obliged to be content, returning to the north by way of the portage between the Picqualinees settlement and the Indian village at the confluence of the St. Mary's and St. Joseph rivers, having burned the battered canoes, by which they had ascended the difficult "Rocky" river, and secured ponies for the overland trip .*
At Ke-ki-on-ga, Bienville met a Miami chief, Coldfoot, who told him that, while he "hoped himself deceived, he was sufficiently attached to the interests of the French to believe that Demoiselle (Old Britain) was a liar," and added that he believed himself to be the only Indian in the south who was loyal to the French. Accord- ingly, the discouraged Bienville reported to the French governor- general that "the Indians of the Ohio nations were ill-disposed toward the French and devoted to the English."
Following Bienville's visit, which occurred in 1749, the British traders, about fifty in number, built a high and stout stockade of split logs, and within it erected a council house "as a place of pro- tection for themselves and their property in case of sudden attack." Inside the stockade a well was sunk which supplied plentiful water except during the summer drouth. The whole was, in reality, a fort, although not so designated ; and it gave evidence that the situation invited an attack by the French interests. About four hundred Indian families are said to have congregated in the vicinity of the stockade, where for some time the post flourished undisturbed.
Early in 1751, Christopher Gist, an agent of the "Ohio Com- pany," an association of English merchants and Virginian planters, visited the district under a (British) royal grant, ostensibly to ex- plore the west country "as far as the falls of the Ohio."
His chief objective, however, appears to have been the Picqua- linee village, where he held a conference with "Old Britain," which was the preface to a general movement of savages toward the settle- ment, swelling the population already there, all of which was by
* The Picqualines settlement was not in Shelby county territory, but as it undoubtedly led to the later trading post of Peter Loramie, its story is insepa- rably connected with that of the northern fort.
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this time openly hostile to the French, although there is absolute lack of evidence that the French had, thus far, done them any injury.
Soon after Gist's departure, four Ottawa (or French) Indians, coming as ambassadors from the French Canadians, were met by an open defi from "Old Britain," who then caused the French flag (already a pretense) to be hauled down from the council house ; and the French commission departed unsuccessful, leaving the British traders in full sway over the disaffected Picqualinees.
In the spring of 1752, another French-Canadian expedition, sanctioned by Governor-general Duquesne and headed by Charles Langdale (a French Canadian whose wife was an Indian squaw), started from Michilimackinac, at the head of Lake Huron, proceed- ing southward, by way of the lake waters, to the mouth of the Maumee river, and up that stream to its headwaters, following the trail thence from Ke-ki-on-ga to the Picqualinee village, which they reached and surprised about nine o'clock in the morning of the twenty-first of June, 1752 when the men were away on the summer hunt and the women at work in the cornfields. Of the eight British traders who were left at the village, three were outside the stockade, in summer huts; and the other five, with a number of Indian men and boys, were within the enclosure.
Langdale's forces, about two hundred and fifty in all, were nearly all Indians, with a few blacks, himself being the only white man. In the attack, fourteen Picqualinees, including "Old Britain," and one white trader were shot before the fort was surrendered to Langdale's savages, who boiled and ate Old Britain, and also the heart of the dead white trader. They then plundered the fort and ยท took away to Canada the remaining seven traders and 3,000 pounds sterling worth of valuables, releasing all the women they had at first taken prisoner. Duquesne rewarded Langdale for this exploit with a pension of two hundred francs. The affair, however, proved not the end of trouble, but the beginning of a war which was only settled in 1763, by the Treaty of Paris, and the cession of "New France" to the British.
The story of the fight between Langdale's savages and the Picqualinees was carried to the friendly tribes in the east, and also to the governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia, by Thomas Burney and Andrew McBryer, two of the traders, who had been success- fully hidden during the fight. Governor Dinwiddie, of Virginia, was presented by the messengers with a belt of wampum, a calumet pipe, a gentle souvenir of the affray in the shape of a Canadian Indian's scalp, and a letter from the Picqualinees (which the governor char- acterized as "odd") which assured the governor that "the French king's servants had spilled the blood and eaten three of their men; while they themselves were in deep distress, having been able to revenge themselves only to the extent of killing and eating ten of the French Indians and two of their negroes." "We are your brothers," concludes the "odd" letter, which appealed to the white governor for pity. History does not state what was the governor's reply, nor his judgment in the matter, which seems, at this date, to be the proverbial case of the pot and the kettle. The entire story of the British fort at Picqualinee extends over but two years at the
RIVER SCENE BELOW WATER WORKS, SIDNEY, OHIO.
COURT HOUSE, SIDNEY, OHIO.
FROM TWO-MILE BRIDGE NEAR SIDNEY, OHIO.
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most. The white traders never returned to live at the place, and the Indians retired to a little distance west, where they continued a community life until their village was destroyed by Gen. Clarke's Kentuckians more than thirty years afterward.
In 1769, seventeen years after the Langdale raid, a French Canadian trader named Peter Loramie came up the Great Miami river from Kentucky (where his trading store had made a somewhat notorious headquarters for hostile Shawanees) and, not pausing to visit the Picqualinee village, reached the mouth of the creek which was later to bear his name, and pushed up the lesser stream about fifteen miles, where he selected a site and established himself, at- tracting a large settlement of Indians, chiefly Shawanees. He was upon intimate and friendly terms with this tribe, and their allies, and exercised over them the influence commonly possessed by the French when free from British agencies. It is not claimed that Loramie ever assisted the Indians in their warfare against the whites, but that his trading post was permitted to be a headquarters where trouble was hatched. It was, without doubt, a convenient centre of hostile councils of the Shawanees, remote and secluded, at that time, from white travel; although it afterward became a pathway.
Apart from this trading post settlement of Indians, at "Lora- mie's station," no Indian or other village is known to have existed within the borders of Shelby county previous to the year 1794. Dense forests, constituting an important part of the hunting grounds claimed by the Wyandots as the original possessors of the land, and shared by them with the Shawanees, their friends and allies, covered all the land.
Loramie's station was never a fort nor a stronghold in any sense whatever, and it passed undisturbed, so far as legend or history shows, through the entire period of the Revolution, and was in a highly flourishing condition when Ben. George Rogers Clarke started on his famous punitive expedition against the Indians of the north- west, that campaign of extermination conducted from 1783 and on, so fruitless of good, in spite of its wasteful victories.
Immediately after the destruction of the Picqualinee village, which was accomplished by the main body of troops, Gen. Clarke despatched a force by night, which surprised the Loramie settlement early the next morning, and, after scattering the inhabitants with, it is said, considerable slaughter, sacked the store and village, seizing a large quantity of available plunder and destroying what could not be carried away. The entire place, store and village, was left in ashes .* If this may be called a "battle," it was the only battle which ever occurred on the soil of Shelby county, which though often enough wet with the blood of white and red men in conflict, only witnessed hand to hand encounters between white scouts and lurk- ing savages who, in easy ambush, sought to defend their forest trails.
It was, indeed, so deadly a region that the silence of history regarding it may be accounted for easily by the fact that, except for the larger armies which passed through it, very few white men
* Peter Loramie, shortly after the destruction of his store, assembled his Shawanese friends, and left for the new southwest, then still "Spanish America."
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returned to tell the story of their encounters with the Red Terror of that day. The various graves which have been discovered in exca- vations of later years, or during the digging of the canal and feeder, exhibited, with remarkable frequency, a condition showing that the burials must have been conducted with haste, the bodies having been crowded into holes which did not resemble graves. The facts and place of Col. Hardin's tragic death in this country are known by what was, practically, accident.
Col. John Hardin, when a very young man, already trained and skilled in woodcraft, markmanship and hunting, entered the Virginia colonial militia in 1774, as an ensign, and began his career as an Indian fighter when but twenty years of age. Wounded in an Indian affray, he joined the Dunmore expedition without waiting for full recovery. When the Revolution broke out he became a lieutenant in the Morgan rifle corps, standing high in Gen. Morgan's esteem. His intrepidity and discretion caused him to be selected for many perilous enterprises, during which he very narrowly es- caped massacre at the hands of the savages or their British allies, and was defeated but once, when, during Gen. Harmar's disastrous expedition to Ke-ki-on-ga, his forces were surrounded by an ambush of Indians in the Eel river basin, at the site of "old" Heller's Corners .*
With the exception of the St. Clair expedition, which a tem- porary lameness prevented him from joining, Col. Hardin was en- gaged in every military movement from Kentucky into the Indian country until his death. The armies of Clarke, St. Clair and Harmar all had traversed the soil of the western half of Shelby county in their northern expeditions, the massacre of St. Clair's men occurring when the troops were encamped for the night near the site of Fort Recovery.
In 1792, Col. Hardin was chosen by Gen. Washington for a mission of peace to the Shawanees, a commission by no means desired by Hardin, who knew only too well the hatred in which he was held by the Indians for his hostile activities. However, he accepted the dangerous duty, and had proceeded with his two or three companions to a point within the Shelby county territory, at or very near to the spot where the village of Hardin centres. Here they were met and engaged in fight by a small party of Indians. Accounts of the fate of the party differ in some respects, one his- torian relating that a part of the white men escaped to tell the story, while Col. Hardin was murdered for his horse and accoutrements; while another writer states that Hardin's companions were first killed by the Indians, and Hardin himself taken prisoner, being slain during the night, after which, the savages, upon discovering the papers which he carried, became apprehensive and reported to their chiefs; who, realizing that the documents contained matters of advantage to the tribes, themselves sent word to Kentucky of their "fatal error" of judgment.
* Hardin was threatened with court-martial after this defeat, but was after- ward exonerated from responsibility for the massacre of his men.
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Peace, however, was no longer under consideration by the time the wanton massacre of its envoys became known, and the truth only added fuel to the flames. Col. Hardin was still a young man, of increasing value to the army, and at the height of military popu- larity. When the word confirming the story of his cruel death arrived, he had just been officially promoted to the rank of brigadier- general in recognition of his worth. Affairs on the frontier assumed the character of a dangerous deadlock which required the military genius of Anthony Wayne to break.
Wayne's "Legion," augmented along the way until it reached a desirable number, came down the Ohio river as far as Fort Wash- ington and from there the march northward was begun. With careful consideration of every step in regard to sources of supply and reserve, the legion was pushed up the valley of the Great Miami, and a stronghold established at every strategic point along the "Trace," the first thought of the wary fighter "who never slept" being to guard against a surprise attack like that which had over- come Gen. St. Clair. Fort Greenville was built November, 1793, and Fort Recovery was located and probably begun before the army settled into winter quarters. It was finished in early summer, 1794, and while the troops, who, after a severe course of training, were engaged in completing it, they were repeatedly attacked (but not surprised) by the savages under Little Turtle. Unable to find the wary general off guard, the Indians were compelled to retreat, after severe losses, and the completed fort was named "Recovery" in commemoration of the fact that here, where the Indians had achieved their greatest victory over the whites under St. Clair, they had, in turn, been utterly routed and dispersed.
After finishing Fort Recovery, Wayne returned to Greenville and took a practically straight course northward, building a fort at the site of the old Picqualinee village, which was christened "Fort Piqua," and another at the site of Peter Loramie's store, which received the name "Fort Loramie." These he left, like the previous forts, stocked and garrisoned for reserve and the protection of such settlers as had thus far ventured into the wilderness, while he moved on to the goal of the Maumee valley, toward which the savages were gathering from southern scenes of defeat.
Fort Loramie, named by Gen. Wayne, in the practical way he had, of stamping each locality with a name that was characteristic of it or of its history, was not the only object by which the French trader's memory was perpetuated ; for Wayne also gave the name of Loramie to the creek, in the maps of the march. The fort, indeed, was but a temporary affair, while the beautiful creek "flows on forever."
During the year which followed its construction, before the final surrender of the Indians and the signing of the Treaty of Green- ville, Fort Loramie, garrisoned and ready, remained watchful but quiet. It was never the subject of concerted attack, though its pres- ence there doubtless prevented attack at other points, by warning hostile Indians against a gathering in the vicinity. Trouble was never far distant, in this country, even after the Greenville treaty was in effect, until the close of the War of 1812. Settlement began,
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