We’re in Fort Loramie, Ohio, for a few days. We got here barely in time for me to get in a quick 20-mile starter ride before sundown. This photo was taken at the farthest point on the ride, where a piece of road follows the Greenville treaty line.

The ride took me to four counties: Shelby, Auglaize, Mercer, and Darke. Not bad for such a short ride!

Fort Loramie is a good place to use as a base camp. It’s an old canal town. There are no B&Bs and no chain motels, but there is a Ma ‘n Pa type motel, the Dairy King Motel. To register we walked up to the same sidewalk window where we later got an ice cream. The room is clean, spacious, and inexpensive. $140 for four nights. Sometimes one can’t go camping around here for less than that.

Winds tomorrow are forecast to be from the northeast. Too bad I don’t have any destinations picked out to the southwest, say in Randolph County, Indiana. But I need to do more study before I’m ready to ride there again. So I’ll go to the southeast, to Champaign County.

I’ve been reading “The Ohio Frontier” by R. Douglas Hurt (1996) in preparation for some riding later this summer.

I am now getting to like this book, but was disappointed by some of the first chapters. The chapter titled “Clash of cultures” was not particularly insightful on cultural issues. There was much awkward use of quotations. For example:

By 1762, the Wyandots had not made Fort Sandusky “agreeable” for the traders and the garrison. Lieutenant H.C. Pauli, who commanded, warned Bouquet at Fort Pitt that they intended to “have it burnt”.

and

At a council meeting at Pittsburgh in July 1759, George Croghan told the Ohio Indians that the British would “never taste true Satisfaction” until all captives had been returned.

I suppose Hurt was trying to add some historical flavor to his text, but it doesn’t make it read well, nor is it particularly informative. Then there was this item:

Pontiac was quite clear. He said the “Master of Life put Arms in our hands,” a variation on the Christian concept that God helps those who help themselves.

In that case the quote is useful, but a) even though the Indian religious reform movements did seem to adopt some concepts from Christianity, I doubt that those had anything to do with this particular message, and b) “God helps those…” is not a uniquely Christian concept, even though the saying has been used by Christians, usually as a way of explaining why they are NOT going to follow some Christian teaching.

It’s a minor annoyance, but the first part of the book was filled with minor annoyances.

On the plus side, Hurt often told about events in terms of their modern location. It’s just what I need for more bicycling expeditions. Now I know where Pickawillany was in 1752, for example.

The book took a big turn for the better, though, beginning with chapter 4, “The road to Hell.” There is a lot of detailed information about Harmar’s expedition in 1790 and Hardin’s defeat that I had never read before, even though I’ve read many accounts of it. Makes me want to go back and see the locations again. The same for St. Clair’s defeat in 1791. The above photo was taken at the battle site at Fort Recovery, Ohio, on July 1, 2007. I’ve already posted several articles about that day’s ride, including this one.

One of several things I learned from Hurt’s book, which I had never understood before, was that if I had been standing in 1791 in the spot where I stood for this photo in 2007, made a quarter-turn to the left to see the main direction of Indian attack, and had been able to identify the various Indian groups, I would have found that the Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe (i.e. the people of the three fires) were attacking on St. Clair’s left. The center was being attacked by Shawnees, Miamis, and Delawares. To the right would have been Wyandots and Iroquois. I like knowing about things like that.

In 1791 the spot where I took this photo was the bank of the Wabash River. St. Clair had sent the Ohio militia across the river, to set up camp there where they wouldn’t be able to desert so easily. I had known about the separation of St. Clair’s forces by the river, but had somehow not managed to link it to the problem of undisciplined militias. Hurt does a good job of explaining that throughout.

Those may seem trivial issues, but sometimes they also lead to greater understanding, too.

We’ll see how the rest of the book goes.

In my last post I mentioned the possibility of riding to Pennsylvania’s Whiskey Rebellion country by way of the Greenville Treaty Line. The above map on the left shows that treaty line as a dashed red line. Well, maybe you have to click to get a larger version to make it out. Or you can go to this site to see higher quality images of this and others of the Charles Royce maps (Indian Land Cessions in the United States, 1899) from which it was taken.

In late August, 2005, as Hurricane Katrina was heading toward New Orleans, I did a ride to the area in the rectangle bounded by white. The right hand map shows this area in greater detail. It’s from “Ohio County Maps” published by Thomas Publications. That book of maps is an excellent resource for my type of riding. It shows all the minor county roads, and also shows the Greenville Treaty Line. There are places where modern roads follow the treaty line. I wanted to visit a couple of them.

Two small segments of treaty line roads are on either side of the Great Miami River. The small “horizontal” jog shown on the highway sign above is one of them. I was on the north side of the line. On the other side was land that the Shawnees and other Great Lakes Indians were forced to cede to the United States after the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794.

That jog was on the road in the foreground of this photo that leads to the right. The covered bridge is how I crossed the Great Miami River, from west to east. It’s not such a large river this far upstream. On the other side, I rode up the hill out of the valley, turned to the right, and then right again.

Here there was another segment of treatyline road. The ceded area was on the lefthand side. Of course, it’s all ceded now.

That wasn’t my only stop of the day. I had other places to visit further down the Great Miami. It was already late in the day when I was at the point in this photo. By the time I got to my final destination, the sky was starting to fill with clouds pushed north by the hurricane. But that was the end of the trip (a 3 day outing). We drove home, and the next day listened to the news of dikes giving way in New Orleans.

In the map above, I’ve circled the site of Fort Recovery near the western edge of Ohio. It’s where St. Clair’s defeat took place in 1791. (Harmar’s defeat took place in 1790, near Fort Wayne, Indiana.) In 1794 General Anthony Wayne defeated the Indian coalition at Fallen Timbers, in the circled area towards the top of the map. The 1795 Treaty of Greenville was signed at Greenville, at the circle south of the treaty line.

I’d like to follow the treaty line east as well as roads will allow. One nice thing about that route is it will take me to Amish country in Holmes County, which includes the town of Millersburg. Then I’d ride to Stuebenville, which has a connection to Bezaleel Wells, then west to Whiskey Rebellion country, including the area where Bezaleel Wells’ father had a distillery.

Another trip I’d like to do someday would be to the Seven Ranges, the area bounded by a blue dashed line. That’s where the Rectangular Survey System got its start. Some of the bugs in the surveying system were first worked out there. By the time the State of Ohio was surveyed into square mile sections, the technology and techniques were quite a bit better than at the beginning, but they still left lots of room for interesting misalignments that give me excuses for more bike rides and photos in Indiana and Michigan.

After getting not as good a breakfast as I had hoped for at Fort Recovery, I headed east toward Fort Amanda. I stopped near the St. Mary’s River to watch the wheat harvest at a distance. It was interesting to see how the operator turned such an ungainly-looking piece of machinery with quick, tight turns to finish up an odd end of the field.

And here was an opportunity to not only ride in the general vicinity of the St. Mary’s River, but see it up close. So I dawdled here for a while, too. (This is not to mention a lengthy stop at an old cemetery just a half mile down the road. Lots of stopping to look at things.)

The roads all morning had been quiet, level, and well maintained. I was wondering why this road was called “Deep Cut Road.” I had chosen this route partly because the name intrigued me. But it was quiet and level. There had obviously been no need to cut the road through hills or anything of that sort.

The roads were so good, with wide ditches, I was thinking this could just as well be Minnesota. I was even getting just the slightest bit bored, compared with the rides I had done the previous three days. Then I came to this sign, which explained it all. I was traveling east, but an old canal from its era had cut through here, north to south,

This is a shot of the reconstructed fort, with the museum in the background. The museum may have been “professionalized” a bit since my last time here — which has its good and its bad points.

Another change was that this time I was able to find a bite to eat — at a Subway. I took my sandwich onto the battleground to eat in the shade and look at the channel of the old Wabash (behind the flowerbed) . The river here had separated some of St. Clair’s forces, which contributed to one of the worst military defeats ever suffered by the U.S. army. George Washington was hopping mad (literally) when he heard about it.

Last time here I had somehow not paid much attention to the fact that the Greenville Treaty Line passed through here, and that there was a survey marker for it. It was exactly one day after that 2000 visit that our bike ride took us across a bit of another reaty Line, which got me to thinking about how those treaties left marks on the landscape that were worth going to see.

This afternoon I was planning to visit that same treaty line. It’s a boundary of the Treaty of Fort Wayne of 1809, and it too terminates at this same marker, even though it’s not shown on the map engraved on it. This time I was planning to ride along that line wherever a present-day road marked its boundary. Last September I had done a ride along the Ten O’Clock Treaty line further to the southwest. It, too, is a line from the Treaty of 1809. But that one left fewer marks on the landscape than this portion.

I was the first visitor of the day to the museum. When I exited, there were more visitors and more bicycles parked outside. Here are some of them, with mine in the front. More people than myself were doing bicycle-history excursions that day! I seldom encounter other riders on my trips, much less other riders who are out for the historical parts. One thing I quickly became aware of was that my bike was by far the rattiest looking one of the bunch. Maybe it’s a good thing that I ride alone.

Soon after crossing the border into Ohio, I came to the edge of town and a sign that asked me to do just what I had come to do. I had ridden here once before, on a tour with Matthew seven years ago. But I wanted to see what was new in the museum, and get some photos I had not tried to take that last time, which was in my pre-digital-camera days.

I made sure to get the obligatory picture of the big obelisk in the town park — a monument to the soldiers who were killed at St. Clair’s defeat in 1791.

Here’s a web site with more information about it:

Next, some photos from the museum and battleground. I loafed around town and the museum for quite a while, even though I still had a 50-mile ride to do in the afternoon.