In my last post I mentioned the possibility of riding to Pennsylvania’s Whiskey Rebellion country by way of the Greenville Treaty Line. The above map on the left shows that treaty line as a dashed red line. Well, maybe you have to click to get a larger version to make it out. Or you can go to this site to see higher quality images of this and others of the Charles Royce maps (Indian Land Cessions in the United States, 1899) from which it was taken.

In late August, 2005, as Hurricane Katrina was heading toward New Orleans, I did a ride to the area in the rectangle bounded by white. The right hand map shows this area in greater detail. It’s from “Ohio County Maps” published by Thomas Publications. That book of maps is an excellent resource for my type of riding. It shows all the minor county roads, and also shows the Greenville Treaty Line. There are places where modern roads follow the treaty line. I wanted to visit a couple of them.

Two small segments of treaty line roads are on either side of the Great Miami River. The small “horizontal” jog shown on the highway sign above is one of them. I was on the north side of the line. On the other side was land that the Shawnees and other Great Lakes Indians were forced to cede to the United States after the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794.

That jog was on the road in the foreground of this photo that leads to the right. The covered bridge is how I crossed the Great Miami River, from west to east. It’s not such a large river this far upstream. On the other side, I rode up the hill out of the valley, turned to the right, and then right again.

Here there was another segment of treatyline road. The ceded area was on the lefthand side. Of course, it’s all ceded now.

That wasn’t my only stop of the day. I had other places to visit further down the Great Miami. It was already late in the day when I was at the point in this photo. By the time I got to my final destination, the sky was starting to fill with clouds pushed north by the hurricane. But that was the end of the trip (a 3 day outing). We drove home, and the next day listened to the news of dikes giving way in New Orleans.

In the map above, I’ve circled the site of Fort Recovery near the western edge of Ohio. It’s where St. Clair’s defeat took place in 1791. (Harmar’s defeat took place in 1790, near Fort Wayne, Indiana.) In 1794 General Anthony Wayne defeated the Indian coalition at Fallen Timbers, in the circled area towards the top of the map. The 1795 Treaty of Greenville was signed at Greenville, at the circle south of the treaty line.

I’d like to follow the treaty line east as well as roads will allow. One nice thing about that route is it will take me to Amish country in Holmes County, which includes the town of Millersburg. Then I’d ride to Stuebenville, which has a connection to Bezaleel Wells, then west to Whiskey Rebellion country, including the area where Bezaleel Wells’ father had a distillery.

Another trip I’d like to do someday would be to the Seven Ranges, the area bounded by a blue dashed line. That’s where the Rectangular Survey System got its start. Some of the bugs in the surveying system were first worked out there. By the time the State of Ohio was surveyed into square mile sections, the technology and techniques were quite a bit better than at the beginning, but they still left lots of room for interesting misalignments that give me excuses for more bike rides and photos in Indiana and Michigan.