The above snippet from the Royce Indian cession map of Ohio shows the approximate route I took on that day in 2005 just before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. I started at Rockford, on the St. Mary’s River, and rode to Stony Creek near Degraff, where Tenkswatawa and Tecumseh had gathered their group of dissidents for a time.
There are two circles along the route, one showing where I found those two treatyline road segments in the previous article, and one north of Wapakoneta, where the photo below was taken.
I was riding from Buckland to Wapakoneta, along the east side of the Auglaize River, when I came across this barn. I wondered if the owner knew how appropriate it was that it was a white barn. (It seems that white is the predominant color for barns in all the parts of Ohio where I’ve been.)
When I see a name like Wapakoneta in a place where people of one of the Algonquian languages lived, I assume it means white-something-or-other. Well, I’ve encountered words with that prefix that don’t exactly mean white, but it’s still a good bet. And I’m guessing that the farm is called Wapa Farm because it’s just outside of Wapakoneta.
(But no, the word for white people doesn’t start with wap-. It depends on which white people, but the usual one for Americans means long knives or big knives. It has nothing to do with skin color.)
[...] in January I had written about the Wapa Farm near Wapakoneta. In that post I wondered if the word for Wapakoneta meant white-something-or-other. Judging by some [...]