This road in Jackson Township, Shelby County, Ohio, follows the Greenville Treaty line to the east.

And here’s looking the other way, toward Fort Loramie. The Greenville Treaty of 1795 left lots of marks like this on the landscape. Most of them make excellent bicycle routes. They are quiet roads with little traffic. I stopped for several photos like this on my ride to Fort Loramie on August 30.

I’ve been looking for similar marks on the landscape in Iowa, in preparation for some riding there this summer. My wife is from Iowa, and it has been a few years since we’ve gone back for a visit. I’ve started to mark my maps with places in Iowa where we can say, “Black Hawk Slept Here.” But so far I have not found a single place where property lines or highways seem to follow one of the old treaty boundaries. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any such places, but the county atlases I’ve looked at so far give no sign of any. (If you click on the map above, you’ll go to the web site from which I got it.)

I’ve visited quite a few treaty boundaries in Ohio and Indiana, and I see there are some in Illinois, too. There are county atlases for Michigan that show treaty boundaries, and I’ve also seen them marked on USGS maps for Michigan. But in Iowa, not a trace.

Some treaty boundaries were never surveyed, so those would not be expected to have left a trace. I don’t happen to know which Iowa boundaries, if any, were ever surveyed.

(From August 30.) The road stops at the Greenville Treaty line. I spent a good part of the day following parts of the line to Fort Loramie, where the line turns north toward Fort Recovery. These were all parts of the line I had never seen before. I did skip a few places where it left marks on the landscape, though, so as to save some for another time.

googlemap

The Greenville line is shown as a thin, violet line. My route for the day is the blue line. I came from the north until I met the line, and then followed it to Fort Recovery where there were public roads that let me do it. The red line is from a few weeks later, when I followed some of it again, in the reverse direction.

Late last December I learned that roadside memorials like the one shown here are somewhat controversial. I weighed in on the topic here and here, saying I encountered them often but didn’t have a photo of one. But just tonight I found out that I do. This one is almost a mile south of where I took the photo in the last post. (I see nothing wrong with stopping every mile to take a photo.)

There is even a wikipedia article about roadside memorials. It has links to more articles about the controversy.

I’m on the side of letting them be. They are a part of life that is not standardized, bureaucratized, and regulated. At least in Ohio, people just put them up. They don’t ask anybody’s permission. They don’t fill out any paperwork. They just do it. In some other states there are attempts to regulate them.

In some extreme cases there can be safety issues. But I suspect that for some people, there is simply an urge to reach out and regulate that which isn’t yet regulated.

The urge to regulate is not just a feature of modern society. Back in the winter of 1996-1997 before this project of bicycling to history sites took shape, I was spending evenings in the library looking for reminiscences about the Black Hawk war in Michigan. I encountered two anecdotes that I wish I could find again. But at the time they weren’t what I was looking for, so I didn’t record anything about them. I’ve gone back many times, checking and re-reading many of the materials I thought I had looked at back then, but without being able to find them.

One of them was someone’s recollection of a young and vigorous Winfield Scott at the Dearborn armory, shirt-sleeves rolled up, selecting weapons and equipment by lantern-light for the troops that were on their way to fight Black Hawk. The author noted the contrast with the image of “Old Fuss and Feathers,” as Scott came to be known later in life.

The other is about the urge to regulate. It was about an early township meeting in Jackson County, Michigan. Someone at the meeting wanted to enact an ordinance to prohibit the selling of whiskey to Indians. When it was pointed out to him that that meant the Indians would take their business elsewhere, he then wanted to enact an ordinance requiring people doing business with Indians to have whiskey available for sale. That episode epitomizes the urge to regulate. But I have not been able to find the anecdote again, despite much searching. I don’t know if the name of the person was given, but if it was, I’d look hard for more information about him and some way to make a Sunday afternoon bicycle ride out of it.

Back to the photo. The land on the right side of the road is Section 4 of Township 7S, Range 7E. That on the left is Section 5. A Shelby County history says this about the settlement of Jackson Township, of which this land is a part:

So far as we have been able to ascertain, but one family, that of James McCormick, came here as early as 1831, from Greene County, and entered land in section 34. The year 1832 shows no accessions, so far as we can learn, while the following year it appears Andrew Nogle came from Fairfield County and occupied land in section 30. Again, the year 1834 only shows the arrival of Thomas Cathcart, who came here in March from Montgomery County and entered land in the northwest corner of section 33. The next year it appears David Snider came from Montgomery County, and William Johnston, who settled in section 20. In 1837 John W. Knight entered land in section 17, Jeptha M. Davis in section 4…

The land across the road, on the right, was the land purchased by this Jeptha M. Davis. (I looked it up online at the GLO land patent database.) The land patent certificate says he was from Clark County. In checking the records for Section 5, the section where the memorial is placed, I learned that the land directly in front of the camera was also purchased by a man from Clark County, a James Elliott. It looks like that purchase was made a couple of years after Davis’s.

It could very well be that Elliott and Davis had also been neighbors back in Clark County.

In the last post I wondered why some of the land patents for some of the places just outside the Wapakoneta Reservation were issued a couple of years after those for the lands inside.

The above photo is of some more of those lands outside. It was taken as I rode south from the old boundary towards the Auglaize-Shelby county line, which is where the road in the photo ends. I had to jog to the east to go south into Shelby county.

This scene is in Jackson County Township, about a mile south of the county line.

In re-reading some of the history of Shelby County, I came to realize I should not have been surprised by the sequence of Issue Dates on the land patents. This part of Shelby County, just north of the Greenville Treaty Line, was not settled until the 1830s. Settlement proceeded mostly from the south to the north, and this was north — about the last part of Shelby county to be settled.

In a way that seems strange. Settlement of southern Michigan was well underway by that time — the very best lands were already taken, and there was a fairly sizeable population by the time the Black Hawk war broke out in 1832. Much of Ohio had been settled a generation earlier. Not far from here were places that already had settlers by the time of the War of 1812. But this part of Ohio around Wapakoneta did not get settled until the 1830s — relatively late in Ohio settlement history.

So it’s not the case that the land around the reservation had all been sold and settled, after which pressure was put on the Shawnee people to sell out and leave. Something like that is what happened to the Wyandot reserve around Upper Sandusky, but it was not the pattern that was followed here.

Why that is, I haven’t yet learned. Did it have to do with geography and the suitability of the land for farming? Or were there political considerations that kept this land off the market until the early 1830s? For now I’ll have to put it in the “wish I knew” category.

After having done a late ride to this site the evening before, I rode here again the next morning. It was a bit out of my way and added extra miles for the ride to Piqua. I sort of regretted this detour by the end of the day. But it worked out OK in the end.

The road here follows the south boundary of the Wapakoneta Reservation. The land on the other side of the road had been ceded to the United States in the 1817 Treaty of St Mary’s. The land on the near side was a reservation that was “owned” by Shawnee people until 1832.

Both sides of the road are in Section 20, Clay Township, Auglaize County. Tonight I went to the Land Patent database at www.glorecords.blm.gov to see who the original purchasers were. I specified Auglaize County, Township 6 South, Range 7 East, Section 20. The result is shown above.

I didn’t find anything particularly interesting about any of the persons listed. The name Helmlenger is still shown as a landowner in the 1880 atlas, except it’s spelled Helminger there (as well as in the 1905 county history).

One point that surprised me a little is the Issue Dates on the patents. The lands that were purchased at the Lima land office were the lands outside the reservation. I would have expected those purchases to have been made well before those inside the reservation. But the patents for those lands were actually issued a couple of years later.

I don’t know the explanation, but one possibility is that the lands outside the reservation actually were purchased earlier, but that the General Land Office took a lot longer to process them than it did the ones from the Wapakoneta Reservation. It’s hard to say.

There are many times when I’ve wished the data on the purchase dates were easily available. This is one, though it’s not a matter of any great significance.

The driveway shown in this photo is part of the old boundary of the Wapakoneta reserve. The land on the far side was in the reserve, which existed from 1817 to 1832.

Before the War of 1812, before this reserve existed, the Shawnee leader Black Hoof was caught between the United States and the Shawnee brothers, Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, who opposed the United States. He threw in his lot with the U.S.

According to R. David Edmunds

Black Hoof’s people reaffirmed their loyalty to the United States, increased their acreage of corn and potatoes, and sent repeated petitions to the Quakers asking for missionaries to return and ‘assist us as soon as possible’ so that Shawnee children could become educated and both Indians and whites ‘will be more united until we all land in heaven together.’

(This is from “The Loyal Shawnees and the War of 1812,” by R. David Edmunds. It’s a chapter in the book, “The Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814″, edited by David Curtis Skaggs and Larry L. Nelson (2001). Some of the information might have been from Indian agent John Johnston, but I’m not sure about that. (Johnston’s place was the destination for my ride that day.) )

After the war the Shawnees were made to cede more land, and Black Hoof got this Wapakoneta Reserve.

At Wapakoneta Black Hoof’s people continued to walk a path of accommodation. But they still selected what they needed and rejected what they could not accept. They raised cattle and pigs to help offset the decline in hunting off their reservations. The Quakers established another reservation at Wapakoneta and sent missionary Henry Harvey, who later wrote a history of the Shawnees. The Quakers also opened a school. But, John Johnston wrote, they did not yet try to instruct the Shawnees in the principles of Christianity, believing that they were ‘not yet sufficiently acquainted with the arts of civilized life.’ They remained ‘bitterly opposed to Christianity,’ arguing that God had given Shawnees their own religion, just as he had given white people theirs.”

(This quote is from Colin G. Calloway’s book, “The Shawnees and the war for America.” (2007). Page 157).