I had a zillion things to blog about, but instead of doing that tonight I finished tracing all of my Ohio bicycle rides from this past August and September onto a Google map that I had started some time back.

Why trace, you might ask? Why not import my GPS waypoints into the Google map? There are two reasons:

1. It’s just too time consuming that way to import. On my rides I stop a lot, and especially at those places the GPS creates a whole bunch of points in the general vicinity that need to get cleaned up. It’s faster just to trace the route by hand, referring to the GPS data in another window to help me remember just which roads I took.

2. Tracing my route, road by road and turn by turn, helps me to re-live the rides. Doing it brought to my memory things I had started to forget. I have my photos to help me, but there are also things I never photographed. I’ve now captured them for a little while longer.

Here is a link to the full google map, which might be easier to use than trying to use the little window above. Just in case anyone cares. Maybe it will help someone find good places to ride. I can’t recommend against any of the roads I took, but so many of the roads in this part of Ohio are good for riding — a lot more than those I’ve tried personally.

I still have lots of blog entries and photos to post, and most of those aren’t shown yet, or even written.

I enjoy point-to-point touring, but I also enjoy this kind of riding in which I recross and revisit old routes and get to know a particular area well.

In an article from last September 25 I told about the quick bike ride I did after we arrived in Fort Loramie that evening. It was a warmup for four days of riding. I took advantage of the opportunity to see a small segment of the Greenville Treaty Line I had not yet seen.

This photo shows the end of a segment of road that follows the line, just before the road turns away from it. What I look for in places like this are signs of the treaty line continuing past the road — perhaps in the form of field boundaries or fence rows. Alas, there are none in this photo. At the end there is a corn field that pays no attention to the boundary.

googlemap

I’ve drawn a segment of the treaty line in pink on this google map. It’s the segment that runs from Fort Recovery to Fort Loramie. The satellite imagery that Google uses isn’t particularly good for this part of Ohio, but it’s good enough that if you click on the Satellite view and then follow the line to the east-southeast, you can see a few places where there do appear to be field boundaries that follow it. Whether any of these can be seen from the public road is doubtful. None of them is near a place where a public road crosses the line. Still, it would be something to look for on a future ride.

There is one additional place on my bike ride where the treaty line left a mark on the landscape, though. It’s along State Road 364, where there is an inflection in the road. It’s also a point where the boundaries of three Ohio counties (Darke, Mercer, and Shelby) meet. Unfortunately it was too dark for a photo by the time I got there.

(Sept. 26, cont.) This is just an old barn, less than a mile east of the esker. I like the color effect that soybeans give to the landscape when they start to dry.

I looked on the old maps and county histories to see if there was anything interesting about the people who lived here. The 1874 atlas doesn’t even show a farmstead at this location. The owner of this land is shown as E.F. Lemen. The surname Lemen also appears elsewhere on the township map, and it appears in the county history as the holder of various township offices, but I didn’t find anything other than that.

googlemap

The barn can be seen on this map, under one of the yellow pushpins.

While checking the Champaign county history for information about Lemen, I found a mention of an incident that I’ve been trying to learn more about, with not much success:

At the first session of the Supreme Court, held in 1805, the Judges were Samuel Huntington, Chief Justice, and William Sprigg and Daniel Symmes, Associate Judges. The first case tried was the State against Isaac Bracken, Archibald Dowden and Robert Rennick, for assault on an Indian named Kanawa Tuckow. The defendants pleading “not guilty,” and taking issue “for plea, put themselves upon God and their country.” The jury was composed of William McDonald, Sampson Talbott, Justus Jones, George Croft and others, and the accused were defended by Joshua Collett, who afterward was one of the Judges of the Supreme Court.

These incidents where Native peoples tried to use the American court systems have usually received attention from academics, but I haven’t been able to find much more on the Internet about this one. Another account that mostly repeats the same information says it was a case of murder, not just assault. But I haven’t learned a thing about Kanawa Tuckow — whether he was Shawnee or what. Indian names are often garbled when transcribed into written English, so I’m not surprised that a search for Kanawa Tuckow didn’t yield anything. But Bracken, Dowden, and Rennick haven’t left much trace on the Internet, either — especially the first two of these men. There is some information about Rennick in a 1922 history of Clark county — he was postmaster in Springfield at the time of the court case, and continued in that office until 1824.

I’m guessing the incident took place somewhere near the Mad River between Dayton and Springfield, but I don’t have nearly enough information to make a bike ride out of it. I suppose the court records exist somewhere. But I’m still hoping to find that someone else has gone to the trouble to check out the story and has written about it. Anyone who sees this and can tell me more about it, please do so!