The People

An index to the ones the story names — real figures, briefly drawn, grouped by the world they belonged to and roughly in the order the land met them. The fuller record lives in the research store behind the site.

Saying the names

These are an English speaker’s approximations, offered because a reader should not have to skip a name to get through a sentence — not as authority. The Myaamia and Shawnee are teaching their own languages again from the mission dictionaries and word-lists, and their communities hold the true sounds; the Myaamia Center at Miami University is the place to hear them.

Myaamia — myaa-MEE-ah, the Miami’s word for themselves, worn down to Maumee. Mihšihkinaahkwa — mih-shih-kih-NAAH-kwa, the man the record calls Little Turtle (the š is a plain “sh”). The English is not a translation. The word is the Myaamia name for the painted turtle, and there is nothing in it meaning small; the first part, mihši-, is the element used to say a thing is large — the same one in Mihši-maalhsa, the Big Knives, which is what the nations called the Americans. Weyapiersenwah — way-a-peer-SEN-wah, Blue Jacket. Catahecassa — cat-a-he-CASS-a, Black Hoof. Buckongahelas — buck-on-ga-HEE-las. Tenskwatawa — tens-kwa-TA-wa, the Prophet. Tecumseh — te-KUM-seh.

Wanangapeth — wa-NAN-ga-peth, Sweet Breeze. Apekonit — a-PEH-ko-nit, the wild carrot, William Wells. Maconaquah — ma-CON-a-kwah, Frances Slocum. Amehkoonsihkwa — a-meh-KOON-sih-kwa, Mary Wells Wolcott.

And the ground: Kekionga — kee-kee-ONG-ga, from kiihkayonki, the blackberry patch. waapaahšiiki — wa-PAAH-shee-kee, it shines white, worn to Wabash. Auglaize — aw-GLAYZ. Ouiatenon — wee-AH-te-non. Roche de Bœuf — rosh-duh-BUF, the buffalo rock at Waterville.

The First Nations

• Little Turtle (Mihšihkinaahkwa) — Miami war-chief at the head of the Maumee, and the name is the record’s, not his own. He broke Harmar’s expedition in 1790 and destroyed St. Clair’s army in 1791 — still the worst defeat the United States Army has ever suffered against a Native force. He counseled peace before Fallen Timbers, was overruled, and kept the peace he had counseled to the day he died.
• Blue Jacket (Weyapiersenwah) — Shawnee war leader who took the field when Little Turtle stepped back, and commanded the confederacy at Fallen Timbers in the scarlet coat and gold epaulets of a British colonel.
• Buckongahelas — the great Delaware war-leader of the western exile; at his town on the Auglaize, between the wars, the ball players once filled the field a hundred to a side.
• Tarhe, the Crane — principal Wyandot chief of the Sandusky, wounded at Fallen Timbers; keeper, with his nation, of the grand council fire and the senior standing among the Ohio peoples, who were addressed as uncle and grandfather by the rest.
• Egushawa — the aging Ottawa war-chief, Pontiac’s successor, carried wounded from the field at Fallen Timbers.
• Pontiac — the Ottawa chief whose people camped in this valley, and who in 1763 raised the first great rising against the new British masters, laying siege to Detroit and sweeping the western posts — the earliest sounding of the idea Tecumseh would take up: the many nations striking as one.
• Cornstalk (Hokolesqua) — Shawnee sachem, who fought the Virginians to a standstill at Point Pleasant in 1774, argued afterward for peace, and was murdered under a flag of truce for his pains.
• Black Hoof (Catahecassa) — Shawnee chief who by his people’s reckoning was born in Florida before the Shawnee were driven north, and lived past a hundred at Wapakoneta — one life drawn taut across the whole tragedy, from the fall of Braddock’s army to the American removal.
• Turkey Foot — in Ottawa tradition a great chief of that nation, killed in the last of the fighting at Fallen Timbers on the boulder that carries his name, where the passing warriors long after laid their tobacco in silence. The settler record’s version of him traces to a single poem published in 1842, whose own author doubted it; the earliest account of the stone names no chief at all.
• Ottokee — the Ottawa peace chief who had owned the very ground Toledo stands on, and went west with the rest to die in Kansas.
• Tenskwatawa, the Prophet — Tecumseh’s brother, whose religious revival gathered the nations at Prophetstown, and whose defeat at Tippecanoe — fought while Tecumseh was away, against his strict order — undid much of the work in a single morning.
• Tecumseh — Shawnee, born into the war years on this ground. He spent his life trying to rebuild, across the whole frontier, the confederacy the treaties had broken apart; rode into the gauntlet at Fort Miami and stopped the murder of the prisoners with his own hands — I conquer to save — and fell at the Thames in 1813, and the northern alliance fell with him.
• Jean Baptiste de Richardville (Peshewa) — the Miami civil chief, French and Miami by blood, who worked the seam between his two peoples in three tongues, held the old portage at Kekionga as a tollgate business, and kept his family’s ground by the deed when the nation was carried west; reckoned at his death the richest Indian in the country.
• Logan (Tahgahjute) — Mingo of the Cayuga line, who held for peace until his whole family was killed at Yellow Creek in 1774, and whose lament for them is the epigraph the First Nations movement opens on.
• Winnemac — the Potawatomi who cocked a concealed pistol at Harrison’s side on the lawn at Vincennes in 1810, carried Hull’s evacuation order to Fort Dearborn two years later, and was dead himself by that November.
• Metoss — head chief of the Sacs at the siege of Fort Meigs. His son was killed beside him by American grape shot, and he went to the prisoner whose life was owed him for it, cut the bonds with his own knife, and gave the life back.
• La Demoiselle (Old Britain) — the Miami chief the French called the Dragonfly and the English called Old Britain, who took his people over to the cheaper British traders and was killed for it when Pickawillany was destroyed in 1752.

Between the two peoples

• William Wells (Apekonit) — a settler’s son carried off by the Miami at twelve and raised so wholly one of them that he became Little Turtle’s son-in-law and war companion; who then crossed over to scout for Wayne against the people who had reared him, served afterward as the Fort Wayne agent, and died at the Fort Dearborn massacre in 1812 with his face blacked in the Miami sign of a man who expects to die.
• Sweet Breeze (Wanangapeth) — Little Turtle’s daughter and Wells’s wife, the one true seam between the two armies; the record kept scarcely a line of her, though the whole Wells–Wolcott line, and much of this book, comes down through her.
• Frances Slocum (Maconaquah, the Little Bear Woman) — a Quaker child of five taken from the Susquehanna in 1778, grown wholly Miami, found by her white brothers fifty-nine years later by the scar of a hammered-off fingernail, and refusing, gently and immovably, to leave. Her proven white birth won her family an exemption of its own from the 1846 removal — the captive the paper let stay.
• Mary Wells Wolcott (Amehkoonsihkwa) — Wells’s daughter and Little Turtle’s granddaughter, carried the opposite way: schooled in Kentucky, married to a Maumee merchant, mistress of a river mansion a few steps from the field where her grandfather’s confederacy broke. The settler record kept her husband’s face in bronze and eleven words of her; her own nation kept hers.
• Stephen Ruddell (Sinnamatha) — a white boy taken captive and raised Shawnee, Tecumseh’s boyhood companion; one of the very few who left a close account of the man from the inside.
• Shepoconah (Deaf Man) — Maconaquah’s Miami husband; the village on the Mississinewa where she lived out her life and was found kept his name and not hers.
• Captain Logan (Spemica Lawba) — Shawnee raised among the Americans and Harrison’s scout out of Fort Defiance, accused of disloyalty on no evidence, who answered the charge by riding out and getting himself killed proving it false in November 1812.
• Anthony Shane — Ottawa and French interpreter, and one of the two men Drake’s whole portrait of Tecumseh rests on; granted 320 acres in 1815 and 640 more by the treaty of 1817.
• John Brickell — carried off in February 1791 and raised by a Delaware family at the Glaize until 1795. His narrative is where the starving winter at the mouth of Swan Creek is written down.
• John Stewart — a free Black itinerant who had stood once at the edge of the Ohio meaning to drown himself, walked northwest instead, came in among the Wyandot at Upper Sandusky in 1816, and founded what the Methodists count their first mission anywhere.

The French

• Augustin de La Balme — led a march toward Detroit in 1780 to break the British hold on the western posts. Little Turtle’s warriors cut him down on the Eel River — a first rehearsal, in the French tongue, of everything the valley would do to the armies that came after.
• La Salle — the explorer who meant to hold the whole Mississippi for France and was murdered by his own men in a Texas swamp; his Griffon, the first sailing ship on the upper lakes, went down with every soul aboard in 1679.
• Louis de Frontenac — governor of New France, whom valley tradition credits, on no evidence anyone has produced, with the first post at the head of this river.
• Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac — the Gascon soldier who planted Detroit on its narrows in 1701 and made it the capital of the French west.
• Pierre-Joseph Celoron de Blainville — led the 1749 expedition that buried engraved lead plates at the river mouths to claim the country for Louis XV, and closed his own journal admitting the nations were devoted entirely to the English.
• Charles Langlade — came down from Michilimackinac in June 1752 with some two hundred and fifty Ottawa and Ojibwa, staged the raid from the French fort on the Maumee portage, and destroyed Pickawillany. The lead plates had failed; the hatchet did not.

The British

• Major-General Henry Proctor — British commander at the two sieges of Fort Meigs and at the Thames. His caution and his retreat up the Thames left Tecumseh to make the last stand alone, and drew from the Shawnee, to his face, the verdict that he was a fat dog fit to be put in petticoats.
• Major William Campbell — the British commander at Fort Miami who shut the gates on the beaten warriors after Fallen Timbers, and so decided more with a bar and a hinge than the day’s fighting had.
• Alexander McKee — British Indian agent on the Maumee, who in March 1795 reproached his own government, in writing, for abandoning the people who had long fought and bled for it.
• George Ironside — British trader at the Glaize, married to a Mohawk widow’s daughter, who wrote in December 1794 that the nations had felt only the weight of Wayne’s little finger.
• Isaac Brock — the British general who took Detroit from Hull without a fight and was dead at Queenston Heights inside two months.
• Robert Barclay — a one-armed Trafalgar veteran commanding the British squadron on Lake Erie, who sailed out to meet Perry because his men were starving, and was beaten by a fleet that outweighed him two to one in metal.

The Americans

• Josiah Harmar and Arthur St. Clair — the first two American generals sent against the confederacy, and the first two broken by it, in 1790 and 1791.
• Anthony Wayne — called Mad Anthony. He drilled the Legion of the United States for two years before he moved, then won at Fallen Timbers in 1794 and dictated the Treaty of Greenville. The road his army cut through the country still carries his name, though the man himself was on this ground for a single season.
• William Henry Harrison — the governor whose treaties bought up the nations’ country faction by faction, whose army burned Prophetstown, and whose soldiers killed Tecumseh at the Thames; he held Fort Meigs through two sieges in 1813 and rode the valley’s wars all the way to a presidency that lasted a single month.
• Oliver Hazard Perry — the twenty-eight-year-old commodore who built a fleet from the standing timber at Erie and, on September 10, 1813, took the whole British squadron on Lake Erie, cutting the supply line that doomed Tecumseh a month later. Dead of yellow fever at thirty-four, on his own birthday; the town of Perrysburg, beside Fort Meigs, keeps his name.
• Colonel William Dudley — led the Kentucky charge that overran the British batteries across the river from Fort Meigs, then was cut off and destroyed in the woods behind them. The ground still carries the name of the disaster — Dudley’s Defeat — and not the name of the Shawnee who rode in and stopped the killing of its survivors.
• Peter Navarre — French-descended scout of the lower Maumee who carried Harrison’s dispatches through the drowned country when no other road was open; one of the valley’s own, in the American ranks, who lived down to the Fort Meigs reunion of 1874.
• Robert Lucas and Stevens T. Mason — the governors of Ohio and of Michigan Territory who marched militias to the Maumee in 1835, over a strip of ground and a line on a map, in a war that in the end killed no one.
• Rosa L. Segur — carried from Germany to Toledo as a child in 1840, a Toledo Blade columnist who from 1869 helped found and lead the Toledo Woman Suffrage Association, among the earliest in the country, and at seventy wrote its history. Hers is the one claim in the whole story laid not on the valley’s ground but on a voice in the governing of it.
• William Hull — general and governor of Michigan Territory, who surrendered Detroit in August 1812 without a battle, was court-martialed and sentenced to death, and was spared for what he had done in the Revolution.
• George Croghan — twenty-one years old and holding Fort Stephenson with a hundred and sixty men and one old six-pounder, he sent back word that if the British carried the place there would be nobody left inside to surrender to them, and made it good.
• Colonel Hamtramck — of the First American Regiment; detached rearward the night before St. Clair’s defeat, led a wing of the Legion at Fallen Timbers, and gave Fort Wayne its name in October 1794.
• James Wilkinson — Wayne’s second in command and, the whole time, a paid agent of Spain, who worked through the Ohio campaign to make his own commander fail and afterwards rose to be the senior officer of the army.
• William Clark and Meriwether Lewis — a lieutenant of riflemen on the left flank at Fallen Timbers, and a young officer who came up to the Legion in time for Greenville and was posted that November to the other man’s company. They met on this ground, a decade before the Corps of Discovery.
• Ebenezer Denny — the officer who sat down at Fort Finney in January 1786, at the fort of the treaty that took the land, and wrote out four hundred and four Shawnee words.
• Green Clay — the Kentucky brigadier whose twelve hundred men came down to Fort Meigs in eighteen flatboats in May 1813. Dudley’s regiment and Combs’s spies were his.
• Leslie Combs — Kentucky captain of Dudley’s spies, who carried dispatches through held country, survived the defeat, and wrote down most of what is known of it — including, fifty-eight years later, the fullest description anyone left of Tecumseh stopping the killing.
• Captain Nathan Heald — commandant of Fort Dearborn, who married William Wells’s niece in 1811 and surrendered on the beach in August 1812 on a ransom promise that was broken before nightfall.
• Daniel Dobbins — the lake master mariner, holding a sailing master’s warrant and no commission at all, who told Washington a squadron could be got out of a shore with no shipyard on it, and was sent back to do it.
• Noah Brown — the shipwright whose twenty-five carpenters walked to Presque Isle in a fortnight, while the Navy’s fifty were still four weeks on the road, and got the hulls up.
• Richard Mentor Johnson — the Kentucky colonel who spent the years after the Thames letting it be understood that he was the man who had killed Tecumseh.
• William Duer — the New York speculator and Treasury insider who held the ration contract for St. Clair’s army, took the government’s advances and did not buy the food, sold six hundred Frenchmen Ohio land he did not own, and died in a prison cell at the suit of his creditors.
• Lewis Cass and Duncan McArthur — the commissioners who sat the nations down at the foot of the rapids in 1817 and took four and a half million acres in an afternoon. Twelve years earlier Tecumseh had pointed out to McArthur the spot on the Mad River where he was born.
• Colonel John Johnston — Indian agent at Fort Wayne and then Piqua and Upper Sandusky, who grew up among the nations he was ordered at the last to remove, and called it the saddest duty of his life.
• Henry Harvey — the Ohio Quaker who kept his own record of the contested treaty council at Wapakoneta in 1831, carried it to his yearly meeting, and wrote the Friends’ history of the removal. It changed nothing, and it is why the theft stands in the record beside the dissent from it.
• D. W. H. Howard — the government agent who took the last eight hundred of seven nations off Buttonwood Island in June 1838, and who fifty years later wrote out the other column: the account of the fighting at the rock.
• Benjamin Stickney — Indian agent at Fort Wayne, commander of the Indian wing of Jackson’s army at New Orleans, grandson-in-law of the hero of Bennington, kin to Benjamin Franklin by a written request, and the man who numbered his own sons One and Two.
• Two Stickney — who put a penknife into a Michigan deputy’s thigh and slipped across the line into Ohio, and so drew the only blood of the Toledo War and went free.

The made city

• Jesup W. Scott — the tireless Connecticut booster who spent his life declaring the fever-ridden mudhole at the rapids’ foot the “future great city of the world,” and left the ground his money bought to the university that carries his name yet.
• Edward Drummond Libbey — the New England glassmaker who in 1888 moved his whole works west to Toledo for the cheap gas of the dead swamp, and made the old frog-pond landing the Glass City; the great art museum his glass money built stands open on the bluff still.
• Michael Owens — the Irish immigrant’s son who went into a glasshouse at ten as a carrying-in boy and built the machine that gathered and blew and finished a bottle of its own iron accord — putting a craft as old as Egypt, and the child labor he had come up through, out of the world in the one motion.
• Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones — the manufacturer who ran his shop by the single rule nailed to the wall, and, as an independent mayor the bosses of his own party would not renominate, was returned by the working people of Toledo again and again until he died in office in 1904 — the reform politics of the little Glass City running out across the country after him.
• Emma Ashley — first president of the Toledo Woman Suffrage Association, who chaired the meeting at Hunker’s Hall on the ninth of March, 1869, out of an abolition household.
• Moses Fleetwood Walker — catcher, and the first Black man to play in the major leagues, who caught for Toledo in 1883 and 1884, sixty-three years before Jackie Robinson, and had the color line drawn shut on him in person.
• James B. Hill — born at Fremont; patented the first successful steam traction ditcher in 1894 and built it at Findlay. Some seven hundred were shipped before 1910, and the Black Swamp went out under them.

The ones who wrote it down

This book’s oldest quarrel is over who kept the record, so the keepers belong in the cast.

• John E. Gunckel — the Toledo man whose 1902 Early History of the Maumee Valley is where this whole project started.
• Clark Waggoner — the city’s other chronicler, whose 1888 history of Toledo and Lucas County is the second spine of the made-city record, and who wrote up a printers’ strike he had himself been on the wrong end of without saying so.
• Horace S. Knapp — compiler of the 1872 history of the valley, who called himself a faithful amanuensis and declined to reconcile witnesses who flatly contradicted one another. The store follows him in that.
• Hezekiah L. Hosmer — wrote the valley’s first published history at Toledo in 1858, and already had the nations in the elegiac past tense while removed Odawa were alive in Kansas.
• Benjamin Drake — whose 1856 life of Tecumseh gathered the recollections of the men who had known him. Nearly every distinctive thing the record keeps about that face comes through him.
• Benson J. Lossing — author of the standard field-book of the War of 1812, who toured the rapids in the autumn of 1860, measured Turkey Foot Rock with Peter Navarre beside him, and carried a poem’s invented chief into permanent reference.
• Andrew Coffinberry — circuit lawyer of the northwestern counties, called the good Count for his manners and his tailoring, whose 1842 comic verse romance is the first place a chief dies on that rock.
• Comte de Volney — the French philosophe who took down a Miami vocabulary from Little Turtle in Philadelphia in 1797, with William Wells turning it into English between them.
• Francis Parkman — historian of New France, who carries Celoron’s verdict, the despair of the commandant on the Maumee, and the destruction of Pickawillany.
• Charles Dickens — who passed through Upper Sandusky in April 1842 and caught the last nation’s going in a paragraph, between complaints about the roads.

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Every figure above is drawn from the verified research store behind The River Made No Such Claim — where the full cast, with how each looked, dressed, and spoke, can be searched.