Ohio's Western Reserve

A Regional Reader

Gladys Haddad, Ed., Harry F. Lupold

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781612770185
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This volume collects essays and documents from a wide selection of sources—many now out of print and difficult to locate—to provide a highly readable story of the settlement and development of the "New Connecticut" region of Ohio. Four divisions in the book logically organize the social, economic, and political study of the region: "Conquest and Settlement: Native Americans to New Englanders"; "The Pioneers: Town Building, Society, and the Emergence of an Economy"; "The Transition Years; Slavery, the Civil War, and the Reserve in National Politics, 1850-1880"; and "A Changing Legacy: Industrialism, Ethnicity, and the Age of Reform." The volume ends in 1920, when the unique features of the Western Reserve of Ohio—the architecture, the landmarks, the New England lifestyle—had largely faded into American history as a result of industrialism, urbanism, and the pressure of a changing ethnic base.

PART I

Conquest and Settlement: Native Americans to New Englanders

PHILLIP R. SHRIVER

The Beaver Wars and the Destruction of the Erie Nation

Sometime, probably in the third or fourth decade of the seventeenth century, a European first stood on the shores of Lake Erie. Whether the intrepid agent of French imperialism ever traveled among the native peoples on the south shore is a question that may never be answered. Certainly at that time there were Indians still living and hunting on the lake plains along such rivers as the Maumee, Sandusky, Huron, Vermilion, Black, Rocky, Cuyahoga, Grand, and Ashtabula in Ohio; the Elk and Walnut in Pennsylvania; and the Cattaraugus, Eighteen-mile, and Buffalo in New York. Yet when Jolliet and Pere, Casson, and Galinee explored Lake Erie in 1669, the Indians of the south shore were gone, their villages destroyed, their fires cold.

Who were the Indians who had lived here, and what had happened to them? From the Jesuit Relations of 1640 and a series of mid-seventeenth-century maps, we know their names and their approximate locations. Through extensive and continuing archaeological and anthropological investigation, we know more. South-shore Lake Erie may have had at least three groups of Indians living along it in 1640: from west to east, the Assistaeronon, or Mascouten; the Ontarraronon, or Kickapoo; and the Eriehronon, or Erie, called by the French “Nation du Chat” or “Cat Nation.”

The Assistaeronon (a Huron term meaning “People of Fire” or “Fire Nation”) have the historic tribal name of Mascouten. They were a semi-sedentary Algonquian tribe who apparently preferred areas where they might have access to both prairie and forest; they planted corn and other crops and hunted deer, bear, and, where available, buffalo. David M. Stothers and James R. Graves of the University of Toledo believe the Mascouten occupied the area between the Maumee and Sandusky valleys in northwestern Ohio, as well as the southern Lower Peninsula of Michigan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The marshlands about the western basin of Lake Erie were rich in beaver, an attraction to Indians engaged, as were nearly all the eastern tribes either directly or indirectly, in fur trade with Europeans. From 1640 to 1643, the Attiwandaron (or Neutral Nation as they were called by the French) from the area north and east of Lake Erie warred against the Mascouten and their allies, the Kickapoo, Sauk, and Fox, forcing them to retreat from the western Lake Erie basin to the area about Lake Michigan.

The Ontarraronon (a Huron word meaning “Lake People”) are known historically as the Kickapoo, a tribe of Algonquian tradition whose movements are said to have been so frequent and extensive that no particular area can be regarded as their homeland. In 1640, when they were first mentioned in the Jesuit Relations, they were living in Michigan or Ohio near the west end of Lake Erie. Stothers and Graves believe they may have occupied the Lake Erie shore between the Vermilion and Cuyahoga rivers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

In language and culture, the Kickapoo were closely related to the Sauk, Fox, and Mascouten, ties which they also shared with the Shawnee. Alternating between semipermanent villages and temporary winter camps, the Kickapoo lived in pole-framed houses sided and roofed with slabs of elm bark, and they subsisted on their own crops combined with hunting and food gathering. The attacks of the Neutral Nation against their Mascouten neighbors in the early 1640s appear also to have dislodged the Kickapoo, for the French found them in southern Wisconsin in 1665.

By the 1650s only the Erie remained near the southern shore of Lake Erie. Though it has long been speculated that they might have occupied the entire shore of the lake that still bears their name, they appear to have been concentrated between present Erie and Buffalo, with seasonal movement possibly extending as far east as the Genesee River and as far south and west as the headwaters of the Allegheny-Ohio. Their movement inland “to escape their enemies, who are farther to the West” may have reflected Neutral pressure from the northwest.

A nation of several tribes, the Erie in the 1650s were reported to have a total population of about twelve thousand (including some four thousand warriors) grouped in twenty-eight villages and twelve fortified (or palisaded) towns, though those figures were probably exaggerated. Historic contact materials have been found at Erie village sites in the vicinity of present Erie, Pennsylvania; at Ripley, New York; at two locations in the valley of the Cattaraugus Creek, New York; and at two communities in the Niagara Frontier. Other sites along Lake Erie, literally as far west as the Cuyahoga valley and designated by archaeologists as the Whittlesey Focus, were long-surmised to be associated with the Erie. The present consensus among archaeologists and anthropologists is that the Whittlesey Focus represents an Algonquian, perhaps Kickapoo, culture rather than that of the Iroquoian Erie.

French records respecting the Kickapoo and Mascouten are fragmentary; they are more extensive concerning the Erie. They begin with a report published in 1632 by the Recollect [a French Franciscan missionary] historian, Gabriel Sagard-Theodat. Sagard had spent a year (1623–24) among the Huron of the Georgian Bay area and had there learned about a people living to the south called by the Huron “Eriehronon”, “Rhiierrhonon,” or simply “Erie.” To Sagard and the French, they were “la Nation du Chat,” or the Cat Nation, named not for the bobcat, the lynx, or the panther, as many came to believe, but rather for the “wild cat” (chat sauvage), or raccoon, which still abounds in the forests along the Lake Erie shore. That the raccoon was an important source of food for the Erie is evident in an analysis of animal bones recovered from their village refuse pits. And, as Sagard reported, the raccoon was also the source of the fur from which the Eries made their robes and blankets, each fringed with the animals’ distinctive ringed tails.

While it was the gray-frocked Recollect, Brother Sagard, who was the first to publish information about the Erie, our principal understanding of them comes from the records maintained by missionaries of another order, the Society of Jesus. These black-robed zealots were militant, tough, and fearless, and the order was a force to be reckoned with, despite being few in number, at home in France as well as on the frontiers of the French Empire. Embodied in letters, journals, reports, and recommendations to their superiors, the records of the Jesuit missionaries were published nearly annually in Paris as the Jesuit Relations—ultimately totaling seventy-three volumes. Extended direct quotations in the subsequent narrative are drawn from the Relations unless otherwise noted. Unlike their Recollect predecessors in the missions of New France, whose official policy was based on the Europeanization of the Indian (even to the expectation of his speaking French), the Jesuits sought to graft Christianity onto the native culture with as little disruption as possible, leaving intact so much of Indian spiritual perception and social organization as was not incompatible with Christian doctrine or the interests of the Jesuit order.

Despite incredible hardships and obstacles, the Jesuits and their philosophy proved enormously successful. Baptisms and conversions to Christianity soared beyond anything the Recollects had experienced. Nowhere did the Jesuits have greater impact than in the area north of Lake Erie among the Huron where, led by Jean de Brebeuf, they began to serve in 1625. Yet there is no record of their ever having direct contact with the Erie villages one hundred fifty miles away, on the south side of that same lake.

That the Jesuits knew of the Erie through the Huron and other Indians is evident in their occasional references to them throughout the Jesuit Relations, beginning in 1635 with a comment by Brebeuf and concluding in 1685 with praise for one who had become a singular Christian convert. In that half century of Jesuit commentary about the Erie, there were a number of instances of direct Jesuit contact with individual Erie, including prolonged contact with a few. Thus it is in the pages of the Jesuit Relations that the dawn mists which envelop the history of Lake Erie’s aboriginal people begin to clear.

Whatever the extent of direct intercourse between the French and the Erie Nation, the European presence on the American Continent had profound consequences for all the woodland tribes. Traditional intertribal relationships and balances of power were turned topsy-turvey by the mechanisms of the fur trade. Attempts to control the hunting grounds, the transportation routes, and the favorable trading sites became a driving force in Indian diplomacy, aggravating old hatreds and creating new ones.

At stake in the newly fostered rivalry was material wealth of bonanza proportions in the eyes of the Indians: glass-beaded chokers (called “porcelain collars” by the French), iron axes and celts, blankets, rings, bracelets, clay pipes, brass kettles, liquor, and knives were all prized, but most coveted of all was the European’s gun. At first, when royal monopolies were vested in private fur companies with taxable shares guaranteed the crown, the several European powers were wary of selling guns to the Indians. Then, as independent operators discovered the comparative ease of circumventing state monopolies in the vastness of the American wilderness, the restrictions on gun sales broke down, particularly in the areas of Dutch and British influence. Only in New France, where gun sales were limited to “Christian” Indians, did restriction persist, a policy which ultimately proved calamitous. The number of guns in the hands of the Iroquois, the Indians closest to the Dutch fur-trading centers of New York and the British settlements in Connecticut and Massachusetts, rose dramatically in the 1630s and 1640s. Tribes trading with the French were much less well armed. These tribes included the Montagnard and other Algonquians north of Quebec as well as the Huron in the Lake Simcoe-Georgian Bay area, the Neutrals north of Lake Erie and on both sides of the Niagara River, and the Tionontate (or Tobacco Huron) to the east of Lake Huron.

About 1575, when the great leader Hiawatha forged the Iroquois Confederation, the Huron, also an Iroquoian people but not part of the league, were a much more numerous and powerful people than the Five Nations. But in 1636, eleven years after the Jesuit missionaries first came into their villages, an epidemic—possibly bubonic plague—decimated the Huron population. By 1639, the thirty-two villages of “Huronia” had been reduced from a total population of approximately forty thousand to half that number.

It was at this time that forest economics compelled the Iroquois to look to the north and west for more furs. Quite simply, the beaver of the New York area were all but gone. Prices paid in guns and other trade goods for beaver pelts at Albany rose dramatically compared to those paid at Quebec, Tadoussac, Three Rivers, and other French posts. The thirty-five-to-forty-foot Chippewa and Ottawa canoes from the upper lakes, laden with beaver furs and passing through Huronia (and Huron middlemen) to the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers, proved too tempting to resist. Tempting too were the cargoes of furs of the Montagnard and other Algonquians coming down from the north. A decade of Iroquois piracy ensued, culminating in the outbreak of the “Wars of the Iroquois,” an all-out attempt of the Iroquois to establish themselves as middlemen in the fur trade, in 1649. Their depredations against their fellow redmen have been aptly designated “The Beaver Wars.”

In one brief week in March 1649, the Iroquois crushed their traditional enemies, the Huron, the key link to the distant Indian nations in the French sphere, and who were already decimated by pestilence and only lightly armed by their French allies. Nine months later, the Tobacco Nation was shattered. The Neutral Nation was next. Situated between the Iroquois and the Huron, the Attiwandaron had attempted for generations to remain aloof from the quarrels of their two powerful neighbors. Though nineteen thousand in number, they proved easy victims of the imperialist Iroquois, whose pretext for attacking them was that they had refused to surrender a Huron girl. In the first months of 1651, a well-armed Iroquois army of six hundred Mohawks and Senecas attacked the Neutral towns along the Niagara and north of Lake Erie, effectively destroying the Attiwandaron as a separate people.

With three of their neighboring competitors now eliminated, the Iroquois paused to lick their wounds, assimilate replacement captives (the combined indigenous populations of the Five Nations had dropped to scarcely twelve thousand), and engage in some diplomatic maneuvering. A deputation of their “most dignified and smooth-talking” chiefs arrived at Montreal and proceeded with Machiavellian guile to brighten the chain of friendship with the French. Blandly professing ignorance of any cause for grievance between two great peoples, they urged that amity henceforward exist between them. Louis XIV’s operatives in the New World were, before all else, realists. Their all-but-ruined fur trade must be re-established immediately on some basis if New France were to survive. For the present the Iroquois looked like the only game in town, and they swallowed whatever indignation they felt at the recent devastation of their principal Indian allies and the destruction of their missions, and they embraced the perpetrators. Moreover, the Five Nations offered a fertile field to the Black Robes, whom they invited to come to their towns and establish missions. Thus it was that peace came between the French and the Iroquois, and on July 2, 1654, Father Simon Le Moyne was dispatched to the Onondaga, the “keepers of the fire” in the symbolic longhouse of the Five Nations.

The way was now clear for the Iroquois to attack their fourth neighbor, the Erie, to the west. Possibly the largest of the nations the Iroquois had determined to conquer, the Erie were well led and organized and had defeated the Iroquois in previous battles. Even the Dutch believed the Erie warriors were superior to the Iroquois, referring to them as satanas or devils. Yet direct Erie contact with Europeans was minimal to nonexistent. Guns among them were few in contrast to those possessed by the well-armed Iroquois. The bow and arrow was still the Erie warrior’s primary weapon. The preponderance of power once held by the Erie had tilted at last towards the Iroquois, thanks to the white man’s gun. And the Iroquois realized it.

The Iroquois war against the Erie began in the summer of 1654 and lasted intermittently until 1656—this in striking contrast to the single week of war required to break the Huron in 1649. Historical accounts of the Iroquois-Erie struggle depend almost entirely on the Jesuit Relations of those years and are based on the reports of Iroquois informants. Having neutralized the French through diplomacy, the Iroquois informed them at Montreal in May 1654 that “our young men will wage no more warfare with the French; but, as they are too warlike to abandon that pursuit, you are to understand that we are going to wage a war against the Ehriehronnons and this very summer we shall lead an army thither. The earth is trembling yonder, and here all is quiet.”

Though acknowledging the aggressiveness of their own young warriors in precipitating the conflict, the Iroquois spokesmen informed the French that there were ample provocations for the attack on the Erie. They told of the burning of a Seneca village by an Erie war party and of the surprise attack by another Erie force against a group of Iroquois returning from the vicinity of Lake Huron. These depredations, they claimed, were incited by vengeful Huron now living among the Erie. A cycle of events, inflamed by the inextricable admixture of tribal policy and private retribution which characterized all Indian warfare, had begun—and would end only with the extirpation of the Erie Nation.

In an effort to ward off all-out war, the Erie now sent to the Seneca a peace mission of thirty ambassadors who arrived, inopportunely, at about the same time as a report that a Seneca had been killed by an Erie in an “unexpected accident.” In retaliation, the Seneca put to death twenty-five of the Erie envoys, though five managed to escape. Returning to the Erie villages, the escapees reported the fate of their comrades, whereupon the Erie resolved to gain revenge. Two Onondaga warriors were captured, and one, a chief by the name of Annenraes, was sent as a prisoner to an Erie village from which one of the slain peace ambassadors had come. There he was turned over to the sister of the murdered ambassador, the expectation being that he would probably be adopted by the woman as replacement for her dead brother, this in keeping with a traditional practice among many American Indian tribes.

The woman was absent from the Erie village at that time, but the villagers were so confident of the likelihood of her adoption of the captive that they dressed him in fine clothing and gave a feast in his honor. To their dismay, when the woman returned, she rejected the prisoner and demanded that he be killed to avenge her brother’s death. Village leaders pleaded with her in vain to change her mind, arguing that her personal vengeance would probably involve them all in a new war. Their fears were soon realized. Just before his death, Annenraes cried out “that an entire people would be burned in his perso...