American Indians have rich history

[Guest guest]

American Indians have rich history

 

By Ron Simon

News Journal

 

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MANSFIELD -- There always have been people here, according to

American Indians. People, perhaps, since the beginning of time.

 

"We keep telling the archeologists to keep digging," Roger Moore

said. A 49-year-old East Hanley Road resident and a descendent of the

eastern woodland American Indian, Moore said scientific discoveries

keep moving back dates of origin far beyond the Mound Builders and

other ancient peoples.

 

Paul Birmelin, 68, of Mansfield, an eastern woodland American Indian,

doesn't put much stock in the theory the Americas were settled by

Asians who crossed an ancient land bridge between Siberia and Alaska.

 

"Who is to say that it didn't all start here?" he asked. "Those

footsteps across that land bridge can go in two different

directions."

 

Moore is particularly interested in the ancient American Indian city

of Cahokia, found by archeologists on the Mississippi near modern St.

Louis on the Illinois side of the river.

 

"It wasn't so much a city as it was a gigantic flea market," he said.

Found there are trade items that could have only come from the Gulf

of Mexico, the Rockies or Flint Ridge in Ohio.

 

Birmelin said the Mound Builders, those ancient people whose works

remain visible to this day, didn't disappear from the Midwest. "They

just changed cultures," he said.

 

But in the 1600s, Ohio became a battleground as the Iroquois, a

confederation of tribes in upstate New York, sought to gain control

of beaver and fur trapping in Ohio. They depopulated the area in the

process.

 

Dr. Randy Buchman of Defiance College, who taught American Indian

history, once dubbed Ohio as, "the Poland of the Indian conflicts."

 

He said the Iroquois Confederation warred here with local tribes like

the Erie to deny Ohio's beaver trade to their enemies, the French.

But after 1701, Ohio, which had been partly depopulated by these

wars, began to fill again.

 

Among the first to arrive were the Wyandots, a Huron people.

 

Eagle Bear Burling of Franklin Church Road is the Ohio representative

for the Wyandot people, who now live on land grants, not

reservations, in Oklahoma and Kansas.

 

As the dominant group in this part of the country, Burling said the

Wyandot was the only tribe in Ohio to ever have a reservation, which

they were forced to leave in the 1840s. Only a few, like Burling's

ancestors, were able to remain in Ohio.

 

The Wyandot, the principal destroyers of an army sent against them in

the 1780s, lived principally along the Sandusky River, but also in

any part of Ohio they wished to camp.

 

Burling said many people came into Ohio as the Iroquois' hold

weakened. These included the Delaware from the river of that same

name, the Shawnee, Mingo and Miamis. Others included the Chippewa,

Ottowa and Munsee.

 

Some principal camps or towns in Ohio included Greenville on the

Black Fork near Perrysville, Helltown on the Clear Fork, Mohican

John's Town on the Jerome Fork and some camp sites on the upper Black

Fork between Shelby and Rome.

 

There were no such things as territorial boundaries. Moore said the

Wyandot tribe was first and others came and went at the tribe's

pleasure. He called those years in the 1700s and very early 1800s a

turbulent time for American Indians.

 

"We were not nomadic. We were simply forced into moving by war.

Usually west first by European and then American pressures," he said.

 

Moore said American Indians were a mixed group, many of them already

changed by contact with the English, French and Americans.

 

Silas Armstrong was the founder of Greentown, considered a Delaware

community. At least one American Indian from Greentown became a

prominent practicing attorney in early Mansfield.

 

Chief Killbuck of the Delaware was a one-time student at Princeton

University.

 

When the federal government decided to remove the American Indians

from Ohio, some simply disappeared into the less populated parts of

the state.

 

"Some of my ancestors who lived near Wapakoneta knew what was coming.

They moved down to Meigs County on land nobody would ever want and

eked out a living," Moore said. "Sometimes a member of the family who

could pass for white bought the land."

 

Eagle Bear Burling said Wyandots living east of a treaty line were

allowed to stay in Ohio.

 

In the main, Moore said, Ohio's remaining American Indians remained

out of sight or slowly were absorbed into the society around them.

 

Pow wows these days, real or simply commercial, have become popular.

American Indian culture seems to be re-emerging. Moore hopes one day

soon Americans will see American Indian culture for its positive

aspects and for its reality.

 

The most recent U.S. Census figures indicated there are roughly 2.5

million American Indians in the United States. In Mansfield that same

census reveals 137 people declared they are of American Indian or

Eskimo descent.

 

rsimon

 

(419) 521-7230

 

Originally published Monday, March 17, 2003