Timeline
The major currents of the storehouse, from the ice to the living river — the manuscript's arc braided with the bloodline of the two novels. Pick a thread to follow it across the whole span.
What the Ice Leftdeep time
- c. 14,000 years ago
The ice draws back
Glacial Lake Maumee drains the wrong way and leaves a flat lakebed and a run of sand beach-ridges — the dry lines the first trails, and later the first roads, would follow.
Read → - before history
The Great Black Swamp
A million drowned acres of elm-and-ash forest fill the old lakebed; the peoples live on the high ground at its rim and hunt its edges.
- before history
The great animal economy
Passenger pigeons in clouds, beaver in every run, the spring walleye up the rapids — the valley’s first wealth, and the fur that would draw every empire to it.
The Portage Nationsbefore the maps
- for centuries
Kekionga and the carrying-place
At the head of the Maumee, where the St. Joseph and St. Marys meet, the Miami hold the continental portage — the gate between the Great Lakes and the Gulf — and take its toll.
- in the naming of the country
The names on the water
The nations write nothing down — but the names they lay on the water and the rock outlast the towns: Wabash, ’it shines white’; Maumee, ’the downstream people’; Kekionga, ’the blackberry patch.’ The map of the valley is quietly a dictionary of a language its readers can no longer hear.
The store →
The Newcomers1670s–1780s
- 1670s–1760s
The French corridor
Up the rivière aux Miamis come the coureurs de bois, the Jesuits, and the fur trade — the first newcomers, and, the book argues, the ledger’s one kind season.
Read → - 1763–1783
The British, then the Republic
Pontiac’s war, then the Revolution: the flag over the forts changes, but the war for the valley never ends. The Treaty of Paris gives away land no one at the table owned.
The Confederacy Wars1784–1795
- 1784
A boy is taken
Twelve-year-old William Wells is carried out of the Kentucky stations and adopted into the Miami at Kekionga — the first crossing.
Apekonit → - 1786
The first Shawnee words
At Fort Finney, during the treaty that strips the Shawnee of their lands, an army officer takes down 404 words of the language — the earliest substantial record of the tongue, made at the very moment of its dispossession.
The store → - 1790
Harmar’s defeat
The confederacy lets an American army blunder deep among the cornfields, then cuts it to pieces and sends it reeling south.
- 1790–91
The seam
Wells marries Wanangapeth — Sweet Breeze — daughter of the war chief Little Turtle: the marriage that stitches two armies together.
Apekonit → - 1791
St. Clair’s defeat
On a frozen bottom at the head of the Wabash the nations destroy a second army — the worst defeat the U.S. Army has ever suffered.
- Aug 1794
Fallen Timbers
Wayne’s Legion breaks the confederacy in an hour among the storm-thrown trees; the British shut the gate of Fort Miami in the faces of the men who trusted them.
Read → - 1795
The Treaty of Greenville
The line is drawn — two-thirds of Ohio ceded, small reserved squares kept, the seeds of every fort and courthouse to come. Little Turtle asks for his crossed son-in-law back.
The Two Fires1795–1813
- 1798
The language written down
In a Philadelphia winter Wells interprets while Little Turtle gives ’the true primitive words’ for a Miami vocabulary — the same eastern season that produced the chief’s portrait, later burned. The record loses the face and keeps the tongue.
Apekonit → - 1800
Amehkoonsihkwa born
A last daughter, Mary ’Polly,’ is born to Wells and Sweet Breeze at Fort Wayne — the child whose life the second novel follows.
Amehkoonsihkwa → - 1805
The fevers
Sweet Breeze dies of the fevers along the rivers; the seam’s anchor is cut, and Mary keeps of her mother only two songs and the weight of a hand.
Apekonit → - 1808–11
The Prophet and Tecumseh
A movement rises to unmake every crossing — to put down the newcomers’ cloth and deeds and God — and gathers the young men at Prophetstown.
Read → - Nov 1811
Tippecanoe
Harrison marches on the Prophet’s town and burns it, a Kentucky regiment of Wells’s own brother in the line.
- July 1812
Little Turtle dies
The mind of the confederacy dies at Fort Wayne — in the government’s house, or a lodge in his own yard; the record cannot agree, and holds both.
- Aug 15, 1812
The Sand Hills
Wells rides to bring his niece off from Fort Dearborn, blacks his face in the Miami way, and dies on the Chicago lake shore — every allegiance spent at once.
Apekonit → - 1813
Fort Meigs and the Thames
The valley’s second war: the sieges of Fort Meigs and Dudley’s Defeat on the rapids; Tecumseh falls at the Thames, and the confederacy’s last hope with him.
Read →
The Line and the Leaving1817–1846
- 1817–18
The homeland written down
At the Maumee Rapids and St. Mary’s treaties the country is entered as real estate; sections are carved for chiefs and mixed families — one granted to the daughter of Wells.
- 1821 / 1826
Onto the battlefield
Mary marries the Yankee merchant James Wolcott and, in 1826, the household rafts down to Maumee — a white mansion rising on the ground where her grandfather’s world was broken.
Amehkoonsihkwa → - 1835
The Toledo War
Ohio and Michigan nearly come to blows over the Strip and the mouth of the Maumee; the near-bloodless war decides which state Toledo belongs to.
Read → - 1837
The Lost Sister
Frances Slocum — Maconaquah — the white child taken in 1778, is found on the Mississinewa after fifty-nine years, and refuses to be rescued back.
Amehkoonsihkwa → - 1838
Buttonwood
The last valley bands are gathered on an island above the ruined fort and driven west — eight hundred souls, past Mary Wolcott’s own veranda.
- 1846
The Miami removal
The Myaamia not excepted by name are put on canal boats at Peru and drawn over their own portage at Kekionga toward Kansas — carried out of their homeland as freight.
Apekonit → - 1840s
The words carried west
After removal, fuller vocabularies of the Shawnee and Miami are gathered a thousand miles from the valley, in Kansas — the language surviving, on paper, because its people were driven off the ground that named everything.
The store →
The Filling Land1830s–1900
- 1830s–40s
The canal and the draining
The Miami & Erie Canal opens the valley; the Great Black Swamp is ditched and drained, and settlement floods the land the water once turned back.
- Feb 1843
The song
Mary Wells Wolcott dies at Maumee the winter the last nation leaves Ohio, teaching a child her mother’s name before the end.
Amehkoonsihkwa → - 1888–1900s
The Glass City
On the drained swamp Toledo becomes a city of furnaces and glassworks — Libbey and the others, the industrial river at its height.
Read → - 1894
The petition
An old man — Mary’s son, William Wells Wolcott — petitions to be written back into the nation his family was struck from: the first paper to name the whole line true.
Amehkoonsihkwa →
The Modern River1900–now
- 1900–1970s
The Rust City
Steel and glass and the ledger coming home to the mill towns — the dispossessors’ own children ground in their turn.
Read → - 2014
The water crisis
A toxic algal bloom on Lake Erie shuts off Toledo’s tap for a weekend — the drained swamp’s phosphorus coming back up the pipe.
Read → - today
The language wakened
The Myaamia language, written down in 1798 and put to sleep by removal, is woken from the old word-lists; a photograph of Amehkoonsihkwa is kept in the nation’s own archive, her descendants Miami citizens.
The store → - today
The swamp comes back
Wetlands are re-flooded at the lake’s edge and the river runs on — having claimed nothing, and outlasted everyone certain it was theirs.
A first pass, kept to the major plotlines. The full record behind every entry is in the research store.