PRAISE FOR A SORROW IN OUR HEART
“One of those rare books pulling the reader so effectively into another world that the realities
of life in the here and now appear alien when one emerges reluctantly from the pages.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“It is hard to imagine an author better qualified to write a definitive biography of Tecumseh
than Allan W. Eckert.… Eckert’s astounding breadth of knowledge is on full display.”
—The Plain Dealer, Cleveland
“Only someone with Eckert’s skill and background could have reached back through two
centuries of tangled historical records to give us such an intimate account of Tecumseh’s life.
… [A] rich and probing epic.”
—Detroit Free Press
“If by some magic Tecumseh could have chosen his own biographer, he surely would have
named Allan Eckert.”
—Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
THE NARRATIVES OF AMERICA SERIES
“Vigorous, engrossing.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Swiftly paced with a dramatic flair.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Crackling … vibrant.”
—Detroit Free Press
ALSO BY ALLAN W. ECKERT
A Time of Terror • Bayou Backwaters
Blue Jacket: War Chief of the Shawnees
The Conquerors • The Court-Martial of Daniel Boone
The Crossbreed • The Dark Green Tunnel
The Dreaming Tree • Earth Treasures (4 volumes)
The Frontiersmen • Gateway to Empire • The Great Auk
The HAB Theory • In Search of a Whale
Incident at Hawk’s Hill • Johnny Logan: Shawnee Spy
The King Snake • The Owls of North America
Savage Journey • The Scarlet Mansion
The Silent Sky • Song of the Wild
A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh
That Dark and Bloody River: Chronicles of the Ohio River Valley
Tecumseh! (Outdoor Drama) • Twilight of Empire
The Wading Birds of North America • The Wand
Whatizzit? • Wild Season
Wilderness Empire • The Wilderness War
Chronicles of the Ohio River Valley
THAT DARK AND BLOODY RIVER
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition / December 1995
Bantam trade paperback edition / October 1996
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1995 by Allan W. Eckert.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-17112.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79046-0
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark,
consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U S. Patent and Trademark O ce and
in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.
v3.1
To my friend and blood-brother,
fellow historian, screenwriter, and
knifemaker extraordinaire,
PHILLIP W. HOFFMAN—Walking Hawk
of Westlake Village, California,
this book is dedicated
with
appreciation and affection
Our system is to live in perpetual peace with the Indians, to cultivate an a ectionate attachment for them by everything just and
liberal which we can do for them within the bounds of reason and by giving them e ectual protection against the wrongs from our
own people. When they withdraw themselves to the culture of a small piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them are the
extensive forests and will be willing to pare them o
in exchange for necessaries for their farms and families. To promote this, we
shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and in uential individuals among them in debt, because we observe when
these debts go beyond what the individual can pay, they become willing to lop them o
by a cession of lands. But should any tribe
refuse the proffered hand and take up the hatchet, it will be driven across the Mississippi and the whole of its lands confiscated.
— PRESIDENT THOMAS JEFFERSON
Excerpt from a letter written to
Indiana Territory governor
William Henry Harrison
Maps
The Ohio River Valley
The Five Major Portages: Great Lakes to Mississippi River, 1688
The Shawnee Village of Chalahgawtha
Talgayeeta’s Village at Yellow Creek, 1774
Planned March of Dunmore and Lewis Against the Scioto Villages, Autumn 1774
The Battle of Point Pleasant
The Upper Ohio River Settlements and Notable Tributaries
The Principal Kentucky Settlements
Brady’s Ambush and Leap Over the Cuyahoga River
The Upper Sandusky Villages and Battle of Sandusky, June 1782
The Blue Licks Ambush
Partitioning of Ohio
St. Clair’s Battleground
Greenville Treaty Line
The Upper Ohio River Settlements and Notable Tributaries
Author’s Note
In writing a history of the Ohio River and the struggle for dominance in the great Ohio River
Valley, it has been the author’s aim to present as much fresh material as possible: accounts of
the people and events heretofore bypassed or only lightly touched upon in his other historical
works in which the Ohio River played a signi cant role. As a result, in this work much more
will be found about the lives of the Wetzel family, the Zanes and the Bradys, among others,
than was possible in earlier works. The same holds true of much of the anecdotal material
that has been tapped from early documentation—the letters, diaries, journals, reports and
similar data.
By the same token, however, there are important events that could not be overlooked in
this book simply because the author discussed them in a previous work. Thus, events that
were critical in the shaping of the history of the Ohio River have been touched upon again
here, such as the Battle of Point Pleasant, the expeditions of Henry Bouquet, Edward Hand,
George Rogers Clark, Josiah Harmar, Arthur St. Clair, Anthony Wayne and others. Where this
occurs, an e ort has been made to depict the event from another viewpoint than previously
done, incorporating new, expanded, or corrective material where possible. If not possible,
then the event, in some cases, is portrayed with less detail than before and reference is made
in the Ampli cation Notes to a more detailed account that appears in one of the author’s
previous works. The goal in all cases has been to present the events, if at all possible, from
the perspective of characters who were previously less fully developed.
Quite often there are several—or even many—accounts of the same event in the historical
record, and with dismaying frequency those accounts di er considerably one from another.
Deciding which to select, of such accounts, as the most accurate portrayal of the event
involved is often very di cult; the actual participants who wrote about it then or later not
infrequently had their own personal biases that may have led them to incorrectly or unfairly
state what occurred. Where discrepancies do occur in the historical record, greater reliance
has been placed upon those written by observers or participants who have established a
reputation for accuracy, though sometimes a divergent account will be interesting or
intriguing enough that it is discussed in the Amplification Notes section.
This book is written in the form that the author chooses to call narrative history, in which
the reader may, as with a good novel, feel himself drawn into the current of events and
identify closely with the characters. It is designed to utilize all the better elements of the
novel form, for excitement, pace and continuity, yet at the same time strives to remain a
reliable, accurate depiction of the history it embraces. In this respect the author uses
considerably more dialogue than one normally associates with strictly historical works. Such
dialogue is a form of painstakingly reconstituted dialogue that lies hidden in abundance in
historical material. It is normally written as straight historical commentary, without direct
quotes, but in it are couched the keywords that legitimately allow such information, if the
effort is made, to be returned to vibrant and meaningful dialogue that remains accurate to the
intent and direction of what is occurring at any given time.
That the reader may better understand what is meant by keywords that point to hidden
dialogue, it is necessary to show here only a brief paragraph as it actually appears in an
original account. The following paragraph appears in the great body of work (close to ve
hundred volumes of material) called the Draper Papers, housed in the Archives of the
Wisconsin Historical Society Library at Madison. The paragraph, dealing with the
frontiersman Capt. Samuel Brady, appears on pages 298–99 of volume 2 of the thirty-threevolume series designated S, under the general title of Draper’s Notes. By paying close
attention to those phrases the author has specifically italicized, the reader can easily see how
the keywords show a hidden conversation that virtually cries out to be brought back from
straight text to lively and accurate dialogue.
Brady, Francis McQuire, & their party went to the block house. Thomas Wells &
another went ahead a short distance, to see. They discovered two young Indians,
nearly grown, climbing trees. — these discovered the whites & made their escape.
The Indian camp altogether numbered 10 Indians, the two young fellows, & two
squaws. At the rst alarm both of the squaws ran o , but one soon came back &
surrendered herself. Joseph Edgington shot her — for which Brady blamed him;
thought it unkind & discreditable to make war upon women. Someone volunteered the
remark that Edgington, when he shot, supposed he was shooting a warrior. The thing was
dropped, that being deemed a good excuse. This was after the a air or attack was
over; but Edgington privately declared he would kill any & every thing in the shape of an
Indian whenever he could get the chance, from the size of his st to any old gray-headed
Indian, be they he or she.
Obviously there is not only hidden dialogue in such a passage, but hidden emotions,
thoughts and physical actions as well. These, of course, are the bits and pieces that, when
properly and accurately reconstituted, form the esh and blood that bring to life the bare
bones of history.
The many Ampli cation Notes keyed to the text become quite important to the reader in
helping to better understand motivations, geographical locations pinpointed to modern sites,
character expansion and enlarged explanation of data touched upon. It is for this reason that
the author recommends the reading of the notes where they are numerically indicated in the
text; they are not vital to understanding, but they are a definite help.
—Allan W. Eckert
Bellefontaine, Ohio
May 1995
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Maps
Author’s Note
Prologue
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Epilogue
Amplification Notes
Principal Sources
Source Codes
Bibliography
About the Author
Prologue
[Setting the Stage: 700
.–June 1768]
B.C
Among the major eastern rivers of the United States, from the great
Mississippi eastward, none resisted discovery and exploration longer than
the Ohio; nor did any other become the scene of such prolonged violence and bloodshed in its
conquest as that which occurred along the Ohio’s thousand-mile course before emptying into
the midsection of the Mississippi.
The Ohio is a stream that has been known by many names over the years. The Shawnees
called it Spaylaywitheepi, while the Miami tribe’s designation for it was Causisseppione. The
Iroquois referred to it as Oligensipen, meaning “the beautiful river,” and the Delawares called
it Kitonosipi. The Spanish had two names for it, alternately—the Dono and the Albacha—and
the Dutch, on their map of 1708, called it Cubach. One distant tribe, possibly the Cherokee,
called it Saboqungo; others referred to it as the Alliwegisipi or the Ouabouskigou. The
French, from their very rst contact, designated it as the Iroquois had, as “the beautiful
river”—La Belle Rivière. The present name, Ohio, most likely derives from the Wyandot
name for it—Oheeza; along this same line, a map published in 1710 rather mysteriously listed
it as the O-o. Finally, the following year another map came very close to today’s usage,
calling it the Ochio. In whatever language, it was—by literal translation of most of the names
—a river of great beauty.
It was also a river of death.
The rst humans known to have existed in the Ohio River Valley were the Adena and
Hopewell cultures, the Adenas preceding the Hopewells by a few centuries or more (perhaps
as early as 700 B.C.) and erecting their distinctive conical burial mounds along the entire
course of the river and its tributaries from the present Wheeling, West Virginia, area down
into and including the Mississippi River Valley. The Hopewells followed in about 400 B.C. with
mysterious e gy mounds extending throughout the same region, perhaps most pronounced in
present southern Ohio and southern Wisconsin. The two cultures appear to have coexisted for
about 800 years, until around A.D. 400. Some accounts claim the Adena Culture continued
perhaps 100 years or more after the Hopewells mysteriously vanished, but by the end of the
sixth century, both cultures had disappeared, leaving behind only tantalizing remnants of
their tenure buried in the amazing mounds they had created.
Exactly when the more modern tribes began inhabiting the Ohio Valley is unknown, but the
rst of whom we have de nite knowledge is the Cahokia Culture in the southern Illinois
country, whose realm extended from the Mississippi River eastward to the Vermilion and
Embarras rivers, perhaps including the lower Wabash down to the Ohio. This culture reached
its peak in A.D. 1045 and then began a slow decline until by 1565 it had ended, although a few
remnant branches remained and regrouped into tribes and subtribes called Illinois, Peoria,
Mascouten, Vermilion and Kickapoo.
At this time, living on one of the major Ohio River tributaries, the Great Kanawha River,
was a little-known and little-understood culture called the Xualae. These were apparently a
relatively docile people whose culture peaked in 1526 and remained at that level for a
century and a half until 1671, when they were exterminated by war parties of Cherokees
from the south.
By this time the Miami tribe—along with their subtribes called Weas, Piankeshaws, Eel
Rivers, Ouiatenons and Mississinewas—had risen in power and in uence, lling the area
from the mouth of the Chicago River southward and eastward throughout the northeastern
portion of Illinois, southern Michigan and most of present Indiana and Ohio.
It was a time of ux, with various tribes almost constantly warring with one another. What
were loose territorial boundaries one year might be altogether changed the next. Among the
only northern tribes strong enough to establish reasonable permanency in location were the
Miamis and the ve principal tribes of present upper New York State: Seneca, Cayuga,
Onondaga, Oneida and Mohawk. Strong though they were, the Miamis were essentially
nonbelligerent, unlike their New York counterparts, who lusted for battle, conquest and new
territory. For a long while the two fought each other, with neither side gaining an advantage
until they nally lapsed into an uneasy neutrality. At length, however, the New York tribes
resumed making raids into Miami territory, this time so successfully that they established a
few villages along the Iroquois and Kankakee rivers of the Illinois country and in the valley
of the Great Kanawha River of present West Virginia. These villages were basically advance
posts for their incursions against enemy tribes—particularly the Miamis and Cherokees, using
the Ohio River as their launching site and highway. It seemed only a matter of time before a
huge onslaught by these tribes from the east would engage the Miamis, if not the Cherokees
as well, in a life-or-death struggle.
Enter then, at some early indeterminate date, the Shawnees—a nomadic tribe of absolutely
ferocious mercenary Indians who, according to their own traditions, migrated an incalculable
time before from their original Asian homeland; a tribe that purportedly crossed the Bering
Strait to Alaska in skin boats (and on the backs of turtles and whales, so tradition goes) and
then gradually moved southeastward across the continent. They eagerly attacked, fought and
—evidently without exception—defeated every tribe they encountered that o ered the least
resistance. At length they arrived in the country of the Miami Indians, who were then still the
most powerful stationary tribe east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio, but who were
still fighting off incursions of the Five Nations of upper New York State.
Methodically, mercilessly, the loose coalition of New York tribes had not only defeated
many surrounding tribes and subjected their people to the most diabolical tortures, they also
deliberately exterminated some, such as the Erie tribe in 1648 and the Neutrals during the
following year. Other tribes were simply defeated and driven out, including the heretofore
powerful Hurons. That tribe, longtime inhabitants of the Niagara area and greatly revered by
the other tribes, under the duress imposed upon them by the Five Nations, meekly migrated
to the Michigan country in 1650. Soon afterward those same Hurons divided themselves to
form yet another tribe, the Wyandots. The parent Hurons remained in Michigan, but the
newly formed Wyandots planted fresh roots in the soil of the Ohio country just south of Lake
Erie.
Recognizing the power of the Shawnees, the Miamis made peace with them and o ered
them Ohio country land to live upon temporarily in the largely uninhabited valleys of such
major Ohio River tributaries as the Scioto and Muskingum rivers. This was to be in exchange
for the Shawnees using their erce skills against the New York tribes if and when they
attempted further invasion of the Ohio country or navigated the Ohio River en route to strike
the southern tribes. The Shawnees agreed with alacrity, and the result was a series of pitched
battles with individual war parties of one or another of the New York tribes. Without
exception the Shawnees emerged victorious, which encouraged the Miamis to evict the New
York bands that had rooted themselves along the Iroquois and Kankakee. The Five Nations of
New York, unaccustomed to being thwarted, much less defeated, dubbed the Shawnees with
the disparaging name Ontoagannha, meaning People of Unintelligible Speech, but namecalling did not alter the fact that they had more than met their match. Within only a few
short years, the tribes, in their own languages, had begun calling the beautiful Ohio River by
another name: the River of Blood.
To combat this new menace, the Five Nations of New York met in a great council at a
centrally located village called Onondaga and, after considerable discussion, formally
established themselves into a highly democratic and tightly knit confederation in which the
good of one was the good of all. Now, an attack against any band of the Five Nations would
be taken as an act of war against the entire confederation. They named their strong new
alliance the Mengwe, or Iroquois League.1 It did indeed make them all the more powerful in
respect to neighboring (and even distant) tribes, but the Shawnees were neither awed nor
overcome by their formally confederated foes. They continued to emerge victorious in
virtually all encounters, including an intense war in the valley of the Susquehanna River in
1607.
The struggle might have continued to escalate but for an unexpected intervention. The
Iroquois suddenly found themselves busy ghting o a new threat—the incursion of a
persistent group of whites who had ascended the St. Lawrence River. They called themselves
Frenchmen, and most unfortunately for them, before they fully understood the implications
of what they were doing, these whites made the mistake of allying themselves to several
tribes who were mortal enemies of the Iroquois. They provided these enemies of the Iroquois
with goods and weaponry that nearly enabled them to demolish their great and powerful
enemy—until the Iroquois themselves were able to become similarly armed and the
pendulum swung back even more in favor of the Iroquois League.2 The result was that the
Iroquois now considered the French as adversaries.
So far as the mercenary Shawnees were concerned, however, once again with a challenge
more or less overcome, their nomadic instincts came to the fore, and gradually the tribe split
apart into its ve basic septs or clans and migrated elsewhere.3 The larger faction moved
southward, ghting and defeating the southern tribes they encountered, including even the
proud Cherokees and Creeks. Part of that faction settled in Cherokee territory along a broad,
winding river in present Tennessee that the Cherokees called Pelisipi but that was soon being
called the Shawanoe River, in honor of the nomadic warrior tribe.
The other portion of this Shawnee contingent continued southeastward, nally settling
down again at the mouth of a great black river that emptied into the Gulf of Mexico and that
they promptly named after themselves—calling it the Shawanee, which, over the years,
evolved to be called the Suwannee River.4 It was here, at the village located practically on
the broad Gulf beach at the mouth of the Suwannee that a boy was born and named
Chiungalla—Black Fish. He was destined to become the principal chief of the Shawnee tribe’s
Chalahgawtha sept.
Back in the Ohio country, a smaller but still signi cant faction of the tribe moved eastward
and took up residence among a docile tribe, the Susquehannocks, who lived along a major
Pennsylvania river named after themselves, the Susquehanna. Here this faction of Shawnees
lived in peace, not only with the Susquehannocks but with a neighboring tribe far to the east
along the Delaware River. That tribe was the Lenni Lenape who, in a vain e ort to try to live
in harmony with the growing number of white colonists called the British, even changed their
tribal name in honor of the Virginia colonial governor, Lord De La Warr, and were henceforth
called the Delaware tribe. These Delawares were a powerful tribe—so strong that in
precolumbian times they had evicted the Cherokees from the Pennsylvania area as
punishment for their treacherous attack on an ally of the Delawares—but even the Delawares
had been cowed by the much more powerful Iroquois League. Now, however, with their
erce new Shawnee friends to back them up, some of their erstwhile courage returned, and
they became much less deferential to the Five Nations. This infuriated the League, but it was
a matter that, for the time being, they ignored as they concentrated on their problems with
the French.
The nal contingent of Shawnees still in the Ohio country left there under their war chief,
Opeththa, in 1683 and journeyed to the Illinois River. Here they established themselves not
far from present Starved Rock, where La Salle had only the previous year erected Fort St.
Louis. They had no trouble with him and his men but were not comfortable with his presence
there. All too soon, with the Ohio River Valley clear of Shawnees, the Iroquois once again
began to use the river as a principal route for incursions against other tribes and for bringing
the spoils of their raids back to their own villages, though in a more limited manner than
before.
All the tribes were having troubles to some degree with this new breed of pale-faced
humans that had entered their country. Their problems were aggravated by the fact that the
whites were themselves divided into factions called French, English, Spanish, Dutch,
Portuguese and Swedes and that they constantly bickered and fought over what they
seemingly wanted and valued more than anything else, territory to claim as their own.
America’s easternmost tribes had initially welcomed the newcomers and aided them where
possible, but they had soon discovered that if they aided one white group, this would place
them in opposition to another, and somehow, no matter which side they chose, it was always
Indian land that was lost and passed into possession of the whites.
War between Indians and whites had broken out on several occasions, but the primitive
weaponry of the tribes deeper in the interior could not withstand the onslaught of modern
weaponry. What Indians were not killed in the resultant warfare were quickly whittled away
or sometimes even exterminated by epidemics of the dreadful diseases that the whites
brought with them and for which the tribes had built up no immunity—measles, whooping
cough, smallpox, chicken pox, typhoid fever and cholera. The worst of the earlier plagues to
hit the tribes occurred during 1616–17 and wiped out tens of thousands of Indians all along
the Atlantic coast.5
In spite of these disasters, some of the tribesmen continued to ght for their territory, but
they were quickly overwhelmed and taken into captivity, placed aboard ships and sold as
slaves in the West Indies. At the same time the whites were bringing to America their own
slaves whose skins were black. The rst shipments of these unfortunates were brought to
Jamestown for sale by the Dutch in 1619. Within two decades the British realized what a
lucrative trade slavery was, so they ousted the Dutch slave traders and, in 1639, established
their own Royal African Company to make massive raids on the native villages of the Dark
Continent and bring the chained captives to America to satisfy the ever-growing demand for
slave labor.6 In all such matters, the human cruelty in icted on people of either red skin or
black was of precious little concern to the imperious British.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, virtually all major rivers owing into the
Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico had become reasonably well explored, if not settled. Yet with
the exception of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, all these streams had their origins east
of the Alleghenies, that mountain chain extending from southern Canada and New England all
the way down to northern Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.
The Spanish, having established themselves in Florida shortly after its discovery by Juan
Ponce de León in 1513, went on to explore, conquer and colonize Latin America, but an
o shoot expedition under Hernando de Soto landed at Tampa Bay in 1540 and began to
explore to the north and west. The following year he discovered the Mississippi River and
ascended it to Arkansas. Some biographers have claimed he went as far upstream as the
mouth of the Ohio; if true, this would make him the rst white man to view that great
stream.
Within 50 years of their rst landing in America, the adventurous French had explored and
established themselves to conquer, claim and proselytize not only in the St. Lawrence Valley
but in the farthest reaches of all ve of the Great Lakes and beyond. By 1632 the black-robed
Jesuits were already winning converts among tribes well west of Lake Superior, more than a
century before most British colonists were even aware of the existence of the Ohio River,
apart from vague, uncon rmed rumors of a great stream system existing somewhere beyond
the crest of the Alleghenies—a mysterious river that was said to ow through a land
inhabited by savage tribes. In 1658 Pierre Radisson found the upper Mississippi River in the
wilderness of present Minnesota and Wisconsin, almost a century before the British colonists
began plying the waters of the Ohio.
Louis Joliet and Jacques Marquette noted the mouth of the Ohio in 1673 as they passed
down the Mississippi from Wisconsin to Arkansas—and again as they returned upstream—but
they paid it scant heed and went up the Illinois River instead, leaving their paddle marks on
history’s pages in the area of Chicago, Milwaukee, Green Bay and other Lake Michigan
locales. Inconclusive evidence indicates that Robert Cavalier de La Salle may have brie y
touched upon the Ohio River in the vicinity of the low rapids called the Falls of the Ohio in
late 1669, but if he did see the Ohio, he did not linger.7
French explorers and traders undoubtedly traversed the Ohio in increasing numbers during
the next half-century, since they established trading posts on such major Ohio River
tributaries as the Beaver, Kanawha, Scioto, Great Miami and Wabash rivers, yet they made
extraordinarily little mention of the Ohio itself, until the rst map depicting its location was
drawn by the French geographer Franquelin in 1688. It was a fairly accurate map, considering
what little was known about the Ohio River, and it was better, in fact, than a few maps that
were published some years later.8
The most signal accomplishment of the Franquelin map was to bring the English colonists
to the uncomfortable realization that while they had been occupied with their own concerns
in the relatively narrow strip of land between the Atlantic and the Alleghenies, the French
were energetically—and with alarming rapidity—laying claim to a vast empire beyond those
mountains: everything north and west of the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes, as well as the
entire Mississippi River Valley. Already they were establishing a line of forts and posts to
protect these claims from Quebec to the mouth of the Mississippi. Fort Frontenac was
situated at the mouth of Lake Ontario, Fort Niagara at the mouth of the Niagara River, Fort
Pontchartrain on the Detroit River, Fort Michilimackinac at the Straits of Mackinac, Fort La
Baye at the head of Green Bay and, on the Mississippi, Fort de Chartres. These six forts
encompassed a vast territory about which almost nothing was known, but all of which the
French felt was in their possession.9 It was a territory the French were determined to exploit
to the utmost, and to this end they gradually bisected the region and established subsidiary
trading posts on five major portage routes leading southwestward from the Great Lakes to the
Mississippi.
The rst, easiest and by far most frequently used route started at Green Bay, ascended the
Fox River of Wisconsin, passed through Lake Winnebago and continued up the Fox to a threemile portage at its headwaters that connected to the Wisconsin River, which in turn owed
into the Mississippi.10 The second was at the head of Lake Michigan, at the marshy area the
Indians called Checagou, up the river of the same name to its di cult portage through the
shallow, extensive Mud Lake, connecting with the Fox River of the Illinois country; that river
in turn merges with the Kankakee River to form the Illinois River and subsequently empties
into the Mississippi.11 The third route was also at the head of Lake Michigan but some 30
miles farther southeast, up Salt Creek some 14 miles to a tough portage over four or ve
miles of sandy ground to the headwaters of Crooked Creek and down that winding stream to
the Kankakee, encountering it some 100 miles upstream from the Illinois.12 The fourth route
was a passage used by La Salle and the Franciscan priest Louis Hennepin, encountered some
40 miles northeast of the Indiana route, on the eastern side of Lake Michigan—from the
mouth of the St. Joseph River upstream about 50 miles and then on a somewhat easier
portage southwestward over hard ground for ve miles to the headwaters of the Kankakee
and thence downstream some 150 miles to the Illinois and, eventually, the Mississippi.13
The fth route was accessible from the western end of Lake Erie, where an ascent of about
100 miles up the Maumee was made extremely di cult by the 15-mile-long Maumee Rapids,
involving an arduous portage that discouraged all but the most hardy, to where the river is
formed by the con uence of the St. Marys River and another river called St. Joseph, then
continuing up the St. Marys about ve miles to the start of a portage path that went
westward across a moderate portage to the headwaters of Lost Creek, down that stream to
the Little River, and then downstream to where it joins the upper Wabash River; then
westward on the Wabash to the French post of Ouiatenon, where the stream turns southward,
ows past the French trading center called Post St. Vincent, and reaches the Ohio River some
140 miles upstream from its mouth at the Mississippi.14
As part of the program of building a string of forts to guard its communication between
Quebec and New Orleans, the French, in 1711, built a small fort on the Illinois bank of the
Ohio River 40 miles upstream from the Mississippi, ostensibly as a headquarters for
missionaries and to protect river-traveling French traders from raiding Cherokees descending
the Shawanoe River. This was the first military installation ever built on the Ohio River.15
Now there were murmurings that a much easier (though far more dangerous) route was
being investigated by these enterprising Frenchmen. This passage would take them from the
eastern end of Lake Erie to a direct connection with the Allegheny, and from that point some
150 miles downstream to where it merges with the Monongahela River to form the Ohio
River, 1,000 miles above its mouth at the Mississippi.16
The French were claiming all this encompassed territory and cared not at all that their
claim included lands granted through charter by the British Crown to English colonists. That
the territory involved was inhabited by native tribes of dangerous warriors—Shawnee,
Delaware, Wyandot, Miami, Seneca, Potawatomi, Ottawa, Chippewa, Menominee, Sac, Fox,
Winnebago, Illinois, Kickapoo and their various subsidiary tribes—was largely considered
little more than an annoyance that would be attended to in due time.
Because of their propensity for close intermingling with the natives and often for
intermarrying with their women, the French by and large got along well with the tribes,
except for the Five Nations of the Iroquois League. There were occasional are-ups between
them, but these rarely lasted long, mainly because the Indians realized that, having been
suddenly projected out of the Stone Age and into an era of modern weaponry that included
steel knives, tomahawks, rearms, fabrics, paints, blankets, liquor and other desirable
commodities, they had quickly become dependent upon the trade goods brought to them by
the French.
Suddenly, to the consternation of the French, competition for the incredibly lucrative
Indian trade reared its head as some of the more enterprising British traders made their way
to the tribes with goods that were both better in quality and far less expensive for the Indians
to obtain in trade. The French realized at once that it was time to establish in more de nite
terms their claims to the trans-Allegheny west.
The search by English colonists for access to the Ohio River basin was haphazard and
lackadaisical at rst. Among the rst of the British to embark on the quest was Ralph Lane,
governor of Walter Raleigh’s ill-fated Roanoke Colony. He followed the Roanoke River
upstream in 1586 in the belief that it would lead him to the great Western Sea, which was
believed to lie just beyond the mountains, but the river played out as a navigable stream
within 100 miles, and Lane and his party turned back.17 The next attempt was by Capts.
Christopher Newport and John Smith who, in 1606, explored up the James River to the falls,
but they too were disheartened by the labors involved in portaging and turned back hardly
before beginning to ascend the eastern slope of the Alleghenies.18 The following year,
Newport tried the James River ascent again and managed to get 40 miles farther upstream
than before, but once again the di culties discouraged him and he returned. Several other
exploring parties later followed both the James and the Roanoke rivers practically to their
headwaters, but none passed over the crest of the Alleghenies. That feat was not
accomplished until nearly half a century after Newport’s trip, when, in 1654, a hardy pioneer
named Abraham Wood, resident near the Falls of the Appomattox, ascended the Roanoke
with a party of men under commission from Gov. Sir William Berkeley and succeeded where
Lane, Newport, Smith and others before him had failed.19 He crossed the Blue Ridge and
Allegheny divide into the Ohio drainage and discovered a river that was rst named Wood’s
River after him but soon became known as the New River; this is the same stream as the
Great Kanawha but is still known by the name of New River above the mouth of the Gauley
River. Wood hadn’t followed it very far downstream when he encountered hostile Indians—
most likely a Cherokee war party on a raid against the Xualaes—and fled for his life.
Twelve years later, in 1666, another party under Henry Batte, also commissioned by Sir
William Berkeley, followed the route Wood had taken and got much farther downstream on
the New and Kanawha River, past the low Falls of the Kanawha to the mouth of a creek
where there was a large salt spring only about 60 miles upstream from where the Kanawha
empties into the Ohio River.20 They found some vacant Indian shelters at the spring, in which
they left a number of trinkets as gifts. However, unnerved by such abundance of Indian sign,
they made an immediate about-face and hastily retreated to their own side of the mountains.
Three years later another explorer commissioned by Berkeley, Dr. John Lederer, a German
physician, followed the Rapidan River upstream and reached the crest of the Blue Ridge in
northern Virginia.21 He did not go far beyond that crest, and though he was not actually in
the Ohio River drainage as he supposed, he encountered no streams and soon turned back
toward home. Berkeley, disappointed at the failure, sent him on the same route the following
year, this time with a larger party including Indian guides, but once again, having achieved
the Blue Ridge summit, Lederer simply turned around and went home.
It was during the following year, 1671, that the Cherokees wiped out the Xualae tribe and
took possession of the Kanawha, only to be ousted themselves the ensuing year by an
Iroquois war party. That same year, 1672, may have been when Robert Sieur de Cavalier de
La Salle ascended the Maumee from Lake Erie, portaged to the Wabash and followed it down
to the Ohio River. There he traveled upstream on the Ohio some 240 miles to the Falls of the
Ohio before retracing his canoe route back up the Wabash.
The Franciscan priest Louis Hennepin reported that in 1677 he was on the headwaters of
the Allegheny about 150 miles above where that stream joins the Monongahela to form the
Ohio River, but the statement is in doubt because of Hennepin’s propensity for selfaggrandizement by falsifying his reports.
During the next decade, certain bold British traders made their way to the Monongahela
and followed it to where it merges with the Allegheny. No record has been found that any of
them descended the Ohio, although logic indicates that some of them must have. It is known
that a large party of these traders did ascend the Allegheny, portaged up to Lake Erie and
greatly alarmed the French when they were sighted in their ten canoes lled with trade goods
on that lake in 1686. The French trade agent Denonville wrote about it to Seignelay in
Quebec, saying:
I consider it a matter of importance to preclude the English from this trade, as they
doubtless would entirely ruin ours … by the cheaper bargains they would give the Indians.
In 1690 an emissary from the upper Susquehanna Delawares visited the Shawnees living on
the Illinois under war chief Opeththa and invited them to come to the Pennsylvania country
to help discourage the rapidly encroaching British colonists. Weary of living on the Illinois,
Opeththa agreed, but on the way he and his people stopped for a time with the Miamis at
their principal village of Pickawillany on the upper Great Miami River.22 Here they were
invited by the Miami principal chief, Unemakemi, to return to the Scioto Valley and make
their home there again, and to encourage others of their tribe to do so as well. Opeththa said
he would consider it and perhaps in a few years take him up on it. In the meanwhile he
would stay in the Scioto Valley only a short time before continuing to the Susquehanna to aid
the Delawares, as he had promised.
Arriving at the Susquehanna in 1692, Opeththa was appalled at the number of whites that
were ooding into the fertile valleys from the east, and he realized at once that if they were
not stopped and turned back quickly, there might be no turning them back at all. He
immediately sent word to his fellow Shawnees in the south, still living on the rivers that bore
their tribal name, both in the Tennessee country and Florida, asking them to come to the
Susquehanna as soon as they could to participate in the looming struggle. It took a while, but
by 1694 many of the southern Shawnees had abandoned their villages and were again on
their way north.
This migration suited the southern tribes very well, as they had never entirely overcome
their fear of the Shawnees. To hurry the warriors on their way and resume dominance in
their own lands, they had formed a confederation much as the Iroquois had done years before
and demanded that the Shawnees leave. The confederation included a number of tribes that
had previously warred savagely against one another—the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw,
Natchez, Choctaw and others. Had these southern tribes not done this, the no-longer-welcome
Shawnees would probably have left the south sooner in response to Opeththa’s call, but
wishing to avoid any semblance of eeing before an enemy, they lingered for almost two
years longer and only then began leaving at their leisure.
Despite the added strength their arrival gave to the Indians in the valley of the
Susquehanna, the in ux of whites continued. Farther south, in northern Virginia, more and
more traders were making their way up the Potomac to a major trading point that had been
established at the mouth of Will’s Creek, less than 25 miles east of the Allegheny divide.23 By
following an Indian path known as the Nemacolin Trail, they soon crossed that divide and
continued following the trail as it angled to the northwest and nally terminated at an
ancient earthworks studded with reddish rocks. The place was promptly dubbed Redstone Old
Fort. Here they found themselves on the shore of a very substantial river—the Monongahela
— owing northward toward its con uence with the Allegheny to form the Ohio, only a bit
over 50 miles downstream. At that point, the entire Ohio River Valley was open to them.24
In March 1700, William Murray encouraged westward expansion, and his urgings
undoubtedly had e ect: A brief, tantalizing tidbit in the historical record, annoyingly without
names or details, indicates that British traders in that same year began plying the waters of
the Ohio—the first authentically recorded instance.
Among those hardy souls who took Murray’s advice was an individual named Ebenezer
Zane, who had come to Pennsylvania with William Penn in 1681 when the Colony of
Pennsylvania was established by charter from King Charles II. The following year he had
been with Penn when the site of Philadelphia was purchased from the Indians. Ebenezer
Zane, like Penn, was a Quaker, but he did not entirely agree with his fellow Quakers’ strong
contention that Europeans were only guests of the native inhabitants and, as such, should in
all matters treat them gently and with kindness, regardless of what provocation there might
be to do otherwise.
The Quaker elders had forbidden all their followers from participating in any act that
would separate the Indians from anything that was rightfully theirs or from engaging in acts
that might injure the Indians in any way. Zane did not endear himself to the Quaker elders
when he attended, with Penn, the Kensington Treaty—or Great Elm Treaty, as some called it
—on April 23, 1701, to purchase a tract of the great forested lands stretching north and west
from the site of Philadelphia—a treaty that years later, because of an ambiguity, greatly
defrauded the Delawares. Were that not enough, Ebenezer Zane was nally ostracized by his
Quaker brethren when he married without the sanction of the Society of Friends. Infuriated
and wanting nothing more to do with them, he moved out of the land now called Penn’s
Woods—Pennsylvania—and into Virginia, following the South Branch of the Potomac
upstream to the site of present Moore eld, where he started carving a new settlement out of
the wilderness. It was there, several years later, that his son was born and named William
Andrew.
In 1699 and 1700 another notable Frenchman passed the mouth of the Ohio River with
very little comment about it. This was Pierre LeSeuer, who had been exploring on the upper
Mississippi in the Minnesota country for more than a decade. He left there in 1699, oated
down to the mouth of the Mississippi where he remained for some months and then paddled
all the way back to Minnesota. Though he noted in his journal passing the mouth of the Ohio
in mid-July, he seemed singularly unimpressed.
In 1710 the Tuscarora tribe in the Carolinas, harassed by the Shawnees and southern tribes,
appealed to the Iroquois League to be allowed to move to their country and be taken in as a
member of the League. The Five Nations met and discussed the matter for nearly two years.
At the end of that time, as much because it would irritate the Shawnees as for any other
reason, they agreed to accept them—but with provisos: The Tuscaroras would be on a tenyear probation in the League and could be ejected during that period at any time, with or
without cause; even after full and nal acceptance in 1722, they would bear the status of
“children” of (and therefore subservient to) the Oneidas, who sponsored them; nally, while
they would be allowed to send delegates to the tribal councils and express their views just as
any other delegates could, they would have no power to vote in any League matters until and
after their full acceptance. The Tuscaroras agreed to the terms without hesitation, and
henceforth the Iroquois League was known as the Six Nations rather than the Five Nations.
Meanwhile, British traders continued penetrating deeper into the unknown territory that
would eventually become Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. In 1715 a hardy group of them paddled
up the Wabash and convinced the Ouiatenons that it would be to their advantage to allow a
small British trading post to be built in their village on the Wabash. Dazzled by the array of
goods the traders brought, the Ouiatenons were delighted. Not so the French traders already
on hand who, only a few months earlier, had built their own trading post at the village under
the direction of Jean Baptiste Bissot, variously calling it Gatanois, the Miami Post and the
Ouiatenon Post. The intrusion of these British traders greatly angered the French traders, and
they endeavored to convince the Ouiatenons to leave and resettle on the St. Joseph River of
the Maumee, which would e ectively take them out of reach of the British traders. The
Ouiatenons adamantly refused, and the frustrated French traders found themselves helpless to
do anything except send runners with reports of all this to Detroit, Niagara and Montreal.
In 1716, 46 years after the failure of the last expedition sent by Gov. Berkeley to explore
beyond the crest of the Blue Ridge, the new Virginia governor, Alexander Spotswood, became
determined to succeed in a like endeavor and planned to insure that success by personally
leading the exploratory party up the Rapidan. He did so, reached the crest and went through
a gap and well into a great valley beyond, coming to the shore of a large northward- owing
river.25 Convinced that he had discovered a major tributary of the Ohio River if not the
actual headwaters of that fabled stream, he nevertheless solemnly named it the Euphrates.
The explorers killed and roasted an elk and a bu alo, feasted well, red a salute with their
muskets and drank a toast to the King. Then, leaving a party of rangers behind to explore,
Spotswood returned home. The name Euphrates did not stick, however, because the name the
Indians had already given that stream was too well entrenched and more euphonious. They
called it the Shenandoah, and instead of being a tributary of the Ohio, it angles northeastward
and eventually empties into the upper Potomac, which itself runs into Chesapeake Bay, an
arm of the Atlantic.26
By 1723, even the staid Governor of Pennsylvania, John Keith, had joined Gov. Spotswood
in his sharp concern occasioned by the French presence and claims west of the Alleghenies.
Both governors wanted increased expansion westward and advocated giving every individual
the right to claim as much as 400 acres on the frontier, provided he lived upon it. Settlers
immediately began flocking into the land.
All this became too much for the long-beleaguered Delawares. Even with the help of the
Shawnees and some bands of Wyandots, they were unable to check the white tide moving in
on them, and so in 1724 they began moving away and settling considerably farther west upon
the Allegheny and Beaver rivers in far western Pennsylvania and on the Muskingum River in
the Ohio country. The Shawnees went with them, some settling with them, others in di erent
places. With warm Miami approval, they reestablished their numerous former villages on the
Muskingum, Scioto, Little Miami, Great Miami and Mad rivers and some new ones as well. In
1725 they established a substantial village French traders named Chiniqué, located on a broad
bottom of the right bank of the Ohio 22 miles below the Forks.27 Here for the rst time they
used skills learned from the whites and built substantial log cabins instead of the usual imsy
wegiwas, constructed of interwoven branches covered with skins. Almost at once, ignoring
the name presently being used, the British traders dubbed the place Logstown, and the name
stuck.28
Moving farther down the Ohio, the Shawnees established a new village on the Ohio side of
the river several miles above the mouth of the Kanawha, calling the place Conedogwinit,
which the traders called the Upper Shawnee Town. The Lower Shawnee Town—a much larger
and more substantial village built by the Chalahgawtha sept of the Shawnees, was located on
a broad at bottom on the downstream side of the mouth of the Scioto River. They named
the village after themselves—Chalahgawtha—although it was more familiarly known by the
name of Sinioto. Nevertheless, the traders persisted in calling it the Lower Shawnee Town.
The principal village of the tribe, however, called Wapatomica, was established at the Forks
of the Muskingum, where that river is formed by the con uence of the Walhonding from the
west and the Tuscarawas from the east. Wapatomica was situated on the point of land formed
at the downstream side of the mouth of the Walhonding. Directly across the Muskingum from
it, on the point of land formed at the downstream side of the Tuscarawas, was the new
principal village of the Delawares, Goschachgunk.29
Slowly but surely the British settlers inched westward. In 1726 a Welshman named Morgan
Morgan crossed over the Blue Ridge in Virginia and gained the distinction of being the rst
British colonist to erect a permanent residence west of the Allegheny Divide and in the Ohio
River drainage.
In 1727 some of the Shawnees returning from the south found, in the valley of the
Greenbrier tributary of the Kanawha, a Shawnee village that had been established here some
20 years earlier, and they were met by the villagers with great joy. Among those greeting the
Shawnees arriving from the south was a young man of about 18 who had been born in the
Greenbrier village less than two years after its establishment; a young man who was destined
to become the tribe’s principal chief. He was named Hokolesqua—Cornstalk. The Greenbrier
location was not, however, quite to the liking of the newly arrived group of Shawnees, and