It didn’t take long to figure out how to convert those files from my Sony GPS-CS1 to KML files that can be used in Google Earth.

Step 1. We had Christmas dinner. (I hope your Christmas was good, too.)

Step 2. I went to GPS Visualiser and used their converter, selecting Google Maps for the output.

Step 3. I went to Everytrail.com and saved the result there. (I don’t think this step was really necessary, but it was fun to do it. Note that the car portion of the trip was quite a bit faster than the bicycle part. It even shows that we stopped in Piqua for dinner on the way home. It looks like the bicycling distance for the day was about 70 miles, which sounds right but I’m too lazy to go look it up to be sure.) The result is below.

Bicycle ride from Fort Loramie to Urbana, OH at EveryTrail

Unfortunately, the html code that produces this map is rather WordPress unfriendly — extremely fragile.  [Edit: I give up.  I’ve removed the display of the map.  You can click on the link to see it at the Everytrail.com site, but it raises havoc with WordPress if I try to embed it.)
Step 4. I selected “Download KML” to save a file that can be used in Google Earth. The resulting file is here for anyone (probably just me) who wants to look at it in Google Earth.

Here is a screen shot of an aerial view from Google Earth. In the foreground is that Kingston mill site where Edward Morgan recalled Native woman coming to the mill to grind their corn. King’s Creek flows from right to left across the bottom of the image. In the distance (labelled Shawnee village ?) is the place in the Mad River valley where they may have lived and grown the corn that they brought to the mill. The Mad River flows from the upper center to the left on this image. The valley floodplain stands out as an area with larger fields and a different shade of green than the others.

In order to learn more about this village, I pulled a book off my bookshelf which I have no excuse for neglecting. It’s Helen Hornbeck Tanner’s “Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History” which was published in 1987. It’s a must-have book for anyone at all interested in the geography of this history.

Her book does not show a village at the above site, though. I’m going to go through the text once more with a fine-tooth comb, but the maps do not show a village there. They show the more well-known Wyandot village further up the Mad River in Logan County, and another Shawnee village there, but not this one. There isn’t much that Tanner missed, so it makes me think I should check my information more closely to make sure I’m interpreting it correctly.

I did find a brief mention in her book of Indians using the court system in the very early 1800s. Her book does not have footnotes; instead, each chapter has a list of references. I’m hoping that among them I can find more information about that case that was tried in the Ohio Supreme Court in 1805 that I mentioned in the article titled “Soybeans got my attention.”

Also, I see that Ken has suggested other software for me to look at. This is fun. It’s nice having some free time to work on it during the Christmas holiday.