A couple of posts ago, Dark Rain called attention to the work of Carl Voegelin and Erminie Wheeler-Voeglin on the Shawnee language. Her post prompted me to do some googling. I must confess that, although I had run across the name Voegelin many times, I did not know that they had done such work. One of the good things about doing a blog like this is getting the kind of feedback that helps me learn more.

Learning about the Voegelins prompted me to look for more information on Shawnee color words, which led me to this. That page doesn’t say whether it’s based on Voegelin’s work or what, but it looks like the words for black and red do indeed start with “M” even though the “M” doesn’t seem to have come through into the English transcriptions of name words that I was talking about. The words are similar to the same words for those colors in other Algonquian languages. (The relationship between the word for yellow in Shawnee and in the other languages is a little harder to see, but the web page suggests how they might be related.)

Speaking of color words, here is a photo from September 1. The day before I had ridden to Fort Loramie and then to this site just north of Piqua, Ohio. On Sunday afternoon we came back to both sites by car to visit the museums. The house was the home of John Johnston, who was for some years an Indian agent in the area. Here is a Piqua web site that tells about him.

The color I’m referring is not that of the orange Alice Allis Chalmers tractor. (There was a big Heritage Festival going on over the Labor Day weekend. A tractor show was part of it.) Rather, I’m referring to the word for white.

Back in January I had written about the Wapa Farm near Wapakoneta. In that post I wondered if the word for Wapakoneta meant white-something-or-other. Judging by some of the subsequent search engine traffic to this blog, the question of the meaning of Wapakoneta had been of interest to some other person(s), too. But all I’ve ever learned since then about the meaning of the word is something John Johnston had said, as reported in the 1905 “History of Western Ohio and Auglaize County” that was written by C.W. Williamson. Here is from page 586.

There seems to be some uncertainty among authorities concerning the personage after whom the village was named. John Johnston, the Indian agent at Piqua at the time the Shawnees occupied Wapakoneta and the surrounding country, states that “it was named after an Indian chief long since dead, but who survived many years after my intercourse commenced with the Shawnees. The chief was somewhat club-footed, and the word has reference, I think to that circumstance, although its full import I never could discover.”

So much for my idea that it meant white something-or-other. Or is that the end of it? Did Johnston know what he was talking about? When I was at the museum I picked up a little book which I can’t seem to lay my hands on right now, which contained some of Johnston’s writings and a Shawnee word list (as well as a Wyandot one). I wondered what Johnston knew about the Shawnee word for white (or dawn, or light). But it was interesting to see that although Johnston provided words for the names of animals and a great many other things, he didn’t even list color words. That was a strange omission, I thought, because of the importance of those words in so many persons’ names.

That led me to wonder whether Johnston actually spoke Shawnee. He talks about his discussions with Shawnee leaders, but I’m wondering if his knowledge of the language was good enough to allow him to converse. Did he use an interpreter? I just don’t know yet.

Not that the meaning of Wapakoneta is such a huge issue, but I also have a few other questions about Johnston and his relationship with Native peoples of the Great Lakes region. So I think it will be worth my while to learn more about him.

On Saturday I rode from Wapakoneta to Fort Loramie to Piqua, this time not so much crossing the Greenville Treaty line but following it where I could.

googlemap

On the map, my route is shown in blue. The treaty line is in red. If you zoom in you can better see where there are pieces of road that follow the line.

It looked like one piece would cross I-75, but the roads dead-end on either side of the Interstate. When driving on I-75 one can see the road to the west, at least, but there is no historical marker to tell expressway drivers about it.

The treaty line makes a bend at what was called Loramie’s Store, and that was one of my major stops Saturday. It’s at a height of land between the Ohio River drainage and the Great Lakes drainage. Later, during the canal era, it was a connecting place, too. The canal is filled in now and made into a park to the right of the trees in the photo. There are old business places and homes on either side of the old canal, almost all of which are still in use and well kept up.

The red-brick building on the left is a museum that is open on Sunday afternoons during the summer. I rode through here on Saturday, then on Sunday afternoon we came by car to visit this museum and another one at Piqua, which was the end-point of Saturday’s ride.

The curator of the Fort Loramie museum, Jim Rosengarten, filled me in on a lot of new (for me, at least) information about Lorimer, the trader who gave his name to the place, and also told me more exactly where his store was. We had a great visit. I have more to say about it, but will save it for later. I’m heading off for another ride now, to parts of Logan County that I didn’t get to visit on that ride three years ago.