John W. Ogden, the writer of the 1881 history of Champaign County, was interested in some of the same details as I am — such as exactly where on the landscape did the events of long ago take place?

In the following section he describes the use that was made of Urbana’s “Lot No. 104″ during the War of 1812. It’s the lot that’s across the street in this photo. I took the photo at the end of my September 26, 2008 bike ride, when there was not a lot of light left in the day.

From the first settlement, and until after the close of the war, alarms of threatened Indian raids were frequent. Reports of massacres of whole families, in close proximity, added to the alarm. In the earlier times, the rumor of the approach of hostile savages would send the few settlers to the more strongly built and roomy log-houses, where they would barricade the doors and windows. On one occasion, it is reported that Zephaniah Luce, receiving information that a body of Indians in the neighborhood intended to make an attack on the place during the night, went around among the settlers, urging them to repair to the house of George Fithian, and carry with them all their guns and ammunition, and barricade it as the most secure stronghold in the place. The advice was followed, and the night was one of intense anxiety and excitement. The attack was not made, and in a day or two they returned to their deserted cabins. These alarms suggested the expediency of building a block-house, which the people erected shortly after on lot No. 104. This house was used during the war as one of the artificer’s shops for the army.

This information is from page 264. If you go to the book and read what comes before this passage, you may wonder why the settlers in Urbana needed such a thing, given the large presence of the U.S. armies in this town during the war. Ogden writes that Urbana seemed to be on the edge of the wilderness. But there were also other blockhouses out in that “wilderness”, to the north of town, in areas that were probably a lot more vulnerable to Indian attack than Urbana.

Maybe the citizens of Urbana in 1812 didn’t have the same benefit of hindsight of that time that we now have.

I learned about it while getting carried away with my efforts to learn how to use Google Earth.

This is a screen shot of what I was working on. It’s a scene of most of Salem Township in Champaign County, Ohio, which I’ve been posting about lately. The light green line is my route for the day. Salem Township is bordered in red. I’ve also imported a tracing of King’s Creek and Mad River into the map, to make the water bodies stand out better. (You probably have to click on the map to see what I’m really talking about.) The first settlement in Salem Township was along King’s Creek, which flows from right to lower left through Kingston. Near the lower left it empties into Mad River, which flows to the north along the left edge of the image, and past the area where the county history writers said there had been a Shawnee settlement (towards the upper left of the image).

Urbana, which in 1812 was considered the outer edge of civilization by Hull’s army, is just below the lower right of the image. There were pockets of agricultural settlement to the north, though, and the army marched through them, first at the point marked “Hull’s Trace 3″, and then at the one marked “Hull’s Trace 5.” (Later I’ll post an up-to-date link for those people who have Google Earth loaded on their computers.)

The information about Hull’s route is from Joshua Antrim’s 1872 history of Champaign and Logan Counties. He got some of the information from the farmer who had settled at the place marked “Hull’s Trace 5,” who in his old age passed on his recollections to Antrim.

I got to thinking, why not go ahead and mark all of the known spots of Hull’s Trace to the north, as far to the north as Antrim told about them. It was while re-reading and re-checking the information that I realized I didn’t have it quite right back on September 2.

North of West Liberty (barely visible at the top of the Google Earth image above) I thought Hull’s Army had continued to follow the Mad River where the river had turned to the east, towards Zanesville, and then had curled around behind the big ridge that begins here on the other side of the road. That would have been a longer route than it actually took, though. It’s too bad, because I like the country in this direction. There is a road along the edge of the valley that’s marked as a bicycle route.

While here, I looked across the valley and tried to imagine Hull’s army somewhere between this point and the river bottom in the distance, the main body pulling cannon carriages, and lines of scouts patrolling off to either side of the main body. It was low ground, but it isn’t likely that the British would have crossed Lake Erie or the Detroit River and brought cannons all the way down here to use against them. Congress hadn’t even officially declared war yet when Hull left Urbana. And I was guessing that the valley was broad enough to give plenty of room to maneuver in case of enemy attack.

Alas, today I learned that Hull departed from the the Mad River valley before he got into the area shown in this scene.

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.

This is a screen shot from the output of my Sony GPS, a GPS-CS1. It’s from the September 26 ride from Fort Loramie (in the upper left) to Urbana, OH (lower right).

I usually attach the device to the outside of the single pannier I carry with me, or else put it inside on days when there might be rain. At the end of the ride I throw the pannier in the back of the car and forget to turn it off, with the result that our car ride back to the motel is shown, too.

What I’d like to be able to do is edit those tracks, so I can at least omit the car ride portion, and make a regular Google map or Google Earth map out of my rides. Yes, the software uses Google maps, but it doesn’t provide any means to get the map into “My Maps” on Google, where I could then do other things with the pushpin markers and add other lines.

The device produces a log file which is very accessible on the computer. It looks to be some standard kind of file, and could be edited with a text editor. So it shouldn’t be much trouble to lop off the car ride.

Today I finally got around for looking around for information on the file format, and hopefully for tools to do further manipulations. So far I found this web page titled “Sony GPS-CS1 Review – Personal Opinion.” It identifies the data as “NMEA sentences” and gives a link to further information. That’s progress — more than I knew before.

But I’m linking it here because it also has a good summary of why this kind of GPS might be good for bicycle touring. As far as I know, it doesn’t do anything that other GPSs won’t do, and it’s lacking some features one would like. As the author, who identifies himself as arb, says:

The Sony GPS-CS1 is a very simple GPS device – it records your position everywhere you go. It has no screen display, no controls, and you can’t get it to tell you where you are right now. So why pay so much for such a seemingly less-than-useful device?

Arb then lists the reasons why — all reasons I agree with.

I think if I ever got a GPS device that -did- have a screen to tell me where I am, I’d still carry this one and use it for tagging my photos.

Usually when I’m in checkerboard country that has been surveyed into square mile sections, it isn’t hard for me to know where I am. On this particular ride, I did have some moments along the Great Miami River, where the usual section cues were missing, when I could have benefited from knowing more precisely where I was. And there are places like the Virginia Military Tract (shown in the above map to the upper right of a red line that I added to the screen shot) that are not surveyed into square mile sections. I could see where a GPS readout could be handy in that country, though on my rides up there this year the road intersections provided enough reference points for me to know where I was.

Now to go and follow up on some of those leads I found on arb’s web page.

I’m still not finished telling about the September 26 ride from Fort Loramie to Urbana, Ohio.

By the time I reached King’s Creek, shown in this photo, I had already decided to end the day’s ride at Urbana. This was the second-to-last remaining destination of my revised route plan.

There had been a mill here — actually behind where I was standing when I took the photo. During the War of 1812 two blockhouses had been erected by the mill, according to Joshua Antrim’s 1872 history of the county.

Why two of them, the author didn’t say. Usually people would not want to divide their forces. Were there two factions in the town that didn’t get along with each other well enough to join together for the common defense? In any case, the blockhouses weren’t needed for their purpose.

In telling about this, the writer of the chapter about this place (one Edward Morgan) immediately segues into a description of Indians making use of the mills. He almost seems to be implying, though he doesn’t say so directly, that they were using the mills during the war years, too.

I didn’t see anything photogenic where the mill might have been, so I settled for a photo of the old store just to the south of it.

It appears to be the store that was owned by John F. Rettberg at the time of the 1874 atlas. I’ve circled it in red. (The above screen shot from that atlas is courtesy of Historic Map Works. If you click on the image, you’ll be taken to the original Historic Map Works page from which it was taken.)

The 1881 history of Champaign County says Rettberg came to the U.S. from Germany in 1854 — which means he came well after the pioneer period that most attracts my interest.

googlemap

Kingston is in Salem Township, the same township where James McPherson is said to have lived with Shawnee people. The township boundary is shown by a violet-colored rectangle. In this map, Kingston (now called King’s Creek) is shown with a red marker. The county history writers tell us that King’s Creek is where the first European-American settlers came — beginning around 1802.

King’s Creek empties into the Mad River near the southwest corner of the township. Later on, beginning around 1809, another wave of settlers came to the floodplain on the upper part of the Mad River Valley, approximately where the yellow marker is located — where James McPherson is said to have lived.

I wish we knew more about the village where McPherson lived even before these “settlers” came. Did Shawnee people come to live by him, or did he come here to live here because that’s where some Shawnee people lived. Did they find the floodplain a good place to grow corn, like it is now? If they came to the mill at Kingston, I suppose it was because they had grain to grind.

Edward Morgan, a resident of Kingston, doesn’t have much to tell about the place where they lived but he did see Indians when they came here to Kingston. At the risk of making people cringe at the attitude shown towards a race and culture different from his, I quote here from page 250 of Antrim’s 1872 history:

To these [block] houses, which were enclosed by tall pickets, the settlers would flee in times of danger; but the Indians never disturbed them there; great numbers of them, mostly squaws, were every day to be seen coming to, and returning from the mill, with their little buckskin sacks filled with corn, and thrown across the naked backs of their bob-tailed ponies, upon which the squaws rode astride, some of them with their “pappooses” fastened to a board and strapped upon their back. On dismounting, the squaw would place the board to which the baby was tied against the wall of the mill, in an erect position, then take off and carry in her sack of corn, and immediately return and nurse her pappoose. The writer once saw an Indian squaw, in a great hurry, accidentally place her child upon the board wrong end up. The youngster soon discovered the mistake, and although a wild savage, its cries and screams precisely resembled those of a white child.

Many of the writers of county histories of the time refer to Indians by lumping them together with wild animals, so I suppose it was a revelation to him to learn that an Indian baby would cry like a white baby.

It’s tempting for me, at least, to be condescending towards Morgan’s condescending attitude toward his Shawnee neighbors, but maybe a better way to use this anecdote is to remember that there have been times when I, too, have had moments of revelation about “other” people. Some of them have come about when I’ve met people on my bicycle rides. Like the time when a guy in a pickup complete with gun rack and guns stopped — to ask if I had seen his dog, which had gotten lost. I presume there will be more such revelations to come.

(Sept. 26, cont) I was riding south on the Upper Valley Pike road, but when I saw the little settlement of Lippincott off to the side, I decided this would be the place to turn east again. That meant climbing up out of the valley and going into the wind. But I was curious as to what the slope of the valley looked like. It was not a big hill — I had climbed plenty of bigger ones earlier in the day — but it had been a long day and I was starting to feel it.

Now that I’m snowbound as far as my bicycle goes, I’ve been studying Lippincott on the map, as well as the other places I’ve been. the above is based on a Google map as shown on my GPS Image Tracker program. The blue line is the trace recorded by my GPS. The yellow push-pins are places where I stopped to take photos. I was traveling from northwest to southeast. Note that I often don’t let a mile go by without stopping for a photo. *(The white line in the lower left is one mile long.)

The mad river shows up as a dark line on this map. The east edge of the valley is very obvious on the satellite photo, once one knows it’s there. I cheated here and traced it with a white line A yellow pushpin near the white line marks the site of Lippincott.

I was using county maps to find my way, as I usually do. One interesting effect of relying on county maps is that the earth’s surface gets divided up into disconnected sections, almost like different worlds, each of which ends at the county boundary. Cross a county boundary, and the first thing to change maps, first orienting myself on the new map. In a way this leaves the old world behind and starts a new one.

When I made the turn at McPherson’s place, I didn’t realize I was so close to the some of the places I had been back on September 2, which I’ve marked with a green line. But they were in a different world, across the line in Logan County.

On that September 2 I didn’t even have a Champaign County map with me, so the south boundary of Logan County did indeed seem like the end of the world. I had started the day in Bellefontaine, and had been doing some riding in the hilly country in the Virginia Military District. A piece of the boundary of that district, known as the Ludlow line, is shown in yellow. I came to the south edge of the county to visit some sites that I now recognize as being along the edge of the Mad River valley, and then rode over to West Liberty, mainly to get a bite to eat.

To get there I rode across some very flat country (shown above) but somehow wasn’t paying attention to the fact that this was the Mad River valley, even though I had been paying very close attention to that same valley northeast of West Liberty. General Hull’s army had marched north along that valley in 1812, and I had been trying to understand how it used the terrain. But somehow I didn’t connect the valley there with this flat valley bottom here, even though Hull’s army had come through this portion of the valley, too. All I was doing was trying to stay on the map, and get something to eat without going off the edge of the world, so to speak.

Now it was nearly a month later, and I was traveling down the Mad River valley without connecting it with the places I had been on September 2. Now in the comfort of my office I see I had been only a very few miles away, even though it then seemed somewhat like a different world.

I’m not sure I’m explaining this very well, but that’s one of the things I like about getting to know a place by bicycle. Gradually, sometimes over multiple trips, I learn how the parts of the terrain are connected, and learn it in a way that I don’t get without having been there, experiencing the terrain up close and personal.

Back to Lippincott. The hill was no big deal, even in my tired and hungry state, but I was running out of water. Several miles back I had wished I had stopped in DeGraff to get water. It had occurred to me as far back as the time when I was talking to Phil about the Cross in the Pasture that maybe I should ask for water. But I hadn’t done so, and now was trying to nurse what little I had left.

By now I was looking for homes that might have someone out in the yard who I could ask. At the place marked “Water!” a man was out doing yard work. I had found what I was looking for! He took me in the house and let me fill up my bottles, and I explained that my wife was going to meet me at Mutual. I asked if he knew about Dugan’s Prairie. We talked about various roads and who knows what else, and then I took off.

But I didn’t go much father before I realized I shouldn’t try to go to Mutual, after all. It would be too dark for photos, and I was starting to get chilled, too. I called Myra and we agreed to meet in Urbana, instead.

(26 Sept., cont.) Here is another view of the upper Mad River valley. The bridge over the river is at the little hump on the road just ahead.

As best I can tell from the way it is written, it was one of the neighbors living near this place who claimed that James McPherson, the former Indian captive, was the grandfather or great-grandfather of the Civil War general of the same name. From page 510 of the 1881 history of Champaign county (much of which is also quoted in the previous post):

On the 23d of August, 1880, on a visit to an aged friend, James Black, Esq., of Salem Township, the writer found the old man in his eighty-fourth year, weak and feeble in body and mind, but strong in honesty, honor and noble feeling. With the assistance of his obliging sons, John and James, he gave the following historical incidents. His father, Capt. Alexander Black, settled on Mad River, in Salem Township, in 1809. Judge McPherson, then an Indian trader, lived on what is now known as the Samuel Black farm. This point was first settled by a Frenchman named Deshicket, in 1794 ; he was probably the first resident white settler in what is now Champaign County. In the spring preceding Wayne’s decisive battle, August 20, 1794, Deshicket resided near the Greenville treaty ground. He warned the Indians that they had better remove, if they remained where they were they would have trouble. The white woman named Molly Kiser, spoken of elsewhere in this work, resided at this place in the family of Judge McPherson, as a servant or help. Judge McPherson was grandfather or great-grandfather of Gen. McPherson, who was murdered by guerrillas during the war of the rebellion. Sometimes there were five hundred Indians or more camped around McPherson, on Mad River.

So it seems that this information came from James Black. The scene in the above photo is in the Salem Township that is spoken of here, and the 1874 atlas shows Blacks owning various pieces of property to the east (left in the photo). He said McPherson had lived on what was known as the Samuel Black farm. It’s hard to say which one was known as the Samuel Black farm in 1874. It appears that some properties were in the name of his widow, Mary. (I checked census records to verify that Samuel’s widow was named Mary.) Others were owned by James Black, probably the same man who was interviewed for the county history, or perhaps by his son of the same name.

Did he (or his interviewer) know what he was talking about when he said James McPherson, the one-time Indian captive, was the grandfather or great-grandfather of Gen. McPherson? My guess is no, he did not. I base this in large part on what I was able to find out about this Gen. James B. McPherson. A Wikipedia article about him is here. His house still stands in Clyde, Ohio, near Fremont, which is famous for being the site of a War of 1812 battle at which Black Hawk was present, and which is also the home of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library. It so happens that there is an open house at the McPherson home this coming weekend, but I don’t think we’ll be able to go. Maybe it can be a bicycling destination someday.

The curator of the Clyde museum responded to a request for information about this, and informed me that Gen. James B. McPherson’s father’s name was William, that his grandfather’s name was John, and that the family came from New York. That doesn’t match anything I’ve learned about the the James McPherson who once lived with Shawnee Indians in Salem Township. James B. McPherson was born near Clyde, in 1828. Nothing I’ve been able to find makes it likely that a descendant of James McPherson, the Red-Faced Man, would have been there raising a family in 1828.

What is known about the descendants of the James McPherson who lived with the Shawnee? According to “Shawnee Heritage,” a recent publication, he had two sons, Henry and James Jr., with his first wife, a Shawnee woman. Henry McPherson’s name pops up in various places in the old histories of the region, but not in anything connected to Fremont or Clyde, Ohio. In 1809 James McPherson married a woman who had been adopted by Ottawa people. Shawnee Heritage says nothing is known about children he may have had with his second wife. Somewhere in one of the old histories, in a place I can’t find right now, I did find the name of a child born to this second wife, but it’s not a name that leads one to General James McPherson.

So the claim that the one famous James McPhersons was a descendant of the other seems to be bogus. It’s too bad, because it would be an interesting connection between two people who are important in Ohio history. But it doesn’t seem to be true.

A few more points about James Black and his father, Alexander.

1. If Alexander Black moved there in 1809, and the land where James McPherson lived in 1809 was owned by a Black in 1874, does that mean that one of the Blacks bought the land out from under McPherson when it was put up for sale by the U.S. government? It’s hard to say, but even if he did there is not a lot of reason to feel sorry for McPherson. He did all right for himself when the U.S. government arranged for him to get a good chunk of land in one of the treaties — probably for his services in getting the Indians to cooperate.
2. According to a roster of Ohio soldiers in the War of 1812, Alexander Black was indeed captain of a militia company — one that served for all of 8 days in August 1812.
3. Two interesting names in this roster are Moses McIlvain Sr., and Moses McIlvain Jr. Moses McIlvain was a person who later got James McPherson’s job as Indian agent. The 1874 county map shows McIlvains owning land in the same neighborhood where the Blacks lived.

Speaking of people who owned land in this neighborhood, another interesting name on the 1874 map is that of Kiser. One property is labeled “J. Kiser’s heirs” and another is labeled “I. & J. Kiser”. Any connection to the Molly Kiser who also lived with the Shawnee? It would be interesting to know.

(Sept. 26, cont.) What brought me to this bridge was the following passage from the 1881 history of Champaign County, which says that James McPherson lived here.

Capt. Alexander Black, Moses McIlvain and others from Kentucky, settled on Macacheek and Mad River, in the northern part of Salem, in the spring of 1809; at that time James McPherson, called “Squalicee” by the Indians, (which means the red-faced man), was then living on Mad River, at or near the Kavanaugh farm, and there were several Indian families there at the time; among others, Capt. John Lewis. A chief had in his family a white woman, named Molly Kiser, who was taken prisoner when young, and raised with the Indians.

McPherson was said to have accompanied Simon Kenton that time in 1806 when he went to check out the encampment where Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa had gathered their followers. McPherson had married a Shawnee woman (with whom he had two children) and would have known the language. And he would have had his own information sources among the Shawnee. He would have been a good person for such an errand.

By bicycle it was about a 13 mile ride between the Shawnee encampment site and here. I don’t know how much of my route, if any, would have been the path McPherson had taken to get there.

This site is on land that in 1874 was owned by a Kavanaugh. The stream is the Mad River. Not that there is any point in getting hung up on an exact location. Another passage in the 1881 history says McPherson’s place was on the Samuel Black farm:

[In 1809] Judge McPherson, then an Indian trader, lived on what is now known as the Samuel Black farm. This point was first settled by a Frenchman named Deshicket, in 1794 ; he was probably the first resident white settler in what is now Champaign County. … The white woman named Molly Kiser, spoken of elsewhere in this work, resided at this place in the family of Judge McPherson, as a servant or help. Judge McPherson was grandfather or great-grandfather of Gen. McPherson, who was murdered by guerrillas during the war of the rebellion. Sometimes there were five hundred Indians or more camped around McPherson, on Mad River.

The Samuel Black farm may have been a little further upstream from this point, at most a mile away, I’m guessing.

I spent some time looking into the statement that this James McPherson was the grandfather or great-grandfather of Gen. James McPherson. More on that another time, but I think the short answer is no.

The above view is looking south from the river crossing. It’s hard to say what besides the river would have made this an attractive location for McPherson and a few hundred Shawnee. Did they have cornfields here, too? The Mad River forms a broad, shallow valley here, so I suppose it’s possible.

There is a line of hills off to the left (to the east). But I was able to ride south with the wind for a couple of miles before I turned east to climb up out of this valley, and head back into the wind.

(Sept 26, cont). I was on my way to Section 31 in Salem Township, where I could cross the Mad River. James McPherson was said to have lived near the river there. James McPherson is the person who had lived with the Shawnee people for some time after having been captured in 1781 in the fight known as Lochry’s Defeat.

Upper Valley Pike, the sign says. The “valley” is the Mad River valley. I wasn’t almost at the River at this point, even if this doesn’t look very much like a valley. The road doesn’t look much like a pike here either, because it seems to follow half-section lines rather than following the terrain from point A to point B. But a comparison of modern maps with the 1874 county atlas suggests that the roads have been much re-worked in this place. Even the river doesn’t seem to follow the course shown on the old maps.

The intersection is circled in red on this aerial view. The river (a small creek up here) crosses the road just to the south. To me it looks like it has been straightened and re-routed.

]]> http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/11/28/upper-valley-pike/feed/ 0 http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/11/23/soybeans-got-my-attention/ http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/11/23/soybeans-got-my-attention/#comments Sun, 23 Nov 2008 09:12:16 +0000 Spokesrider http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/11/23/soybeans-got-my-attention/

(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!