Wapakoneta: In the Beginning - The Early History of the Shawnee Village That Became the Birthplace of Neil Armstrong

By Ken Elchert

This is the first book to tell the fascinating history of the region in western Ohio which became the city of Wapakoneta before it was settled by white settlers and became the birthplace of Neil Armstrong. It covers the time period from 300 million years ago when this site was on the equator to 1832 and 1833 when the Shawnee Indians who lived there were removed to the Indian lands west of the Mississippi River.

The book talks about the great river that flowed through that area before the mile-thick glaciers terraformed the landscape to what we see today. It then proceeds to provide the details of the earliest maps of the area made by the first explorers of European descent into the Ohio Country as well as the earliest French and British trading posts and forts in the Ohio Country. This includes information never published before about Fort Au Glaize built along the Auglaize River in 1748 in Wapakoneta.

It also provides details of the Ohio Indians focusing on the Shawnees and tracing their movements in Ohio up to the time they were placed on reservations. The Wapakoneta Shawnee Reserve was the site of two Shawnee council houses which are highlighted in the book.

Shawnees whose interesting exploits are covered include Black Hoof, Tecumseh and his brother, The Prophet, Logan and Blue Jacket. The book also provides some details of the lives of Francis Duchouquet, their interpreter, and John Johnston, their government agent.

To place all the events in perspective, 19 chronologies and timelines are provided. Throughout, the book reveals interesting and surprising connections between Neil Armstrong and the people, places and events in this very early history. The book is supplemented with 78 figures, 47 tables and 10 appendices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662485824

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Wapakoneta

In the Beginning - The Early History of the Shawnee Village That Became the Birthplace of Neil Armstrong

Ken Elchert

Copyright © 2022 Ken Elchert

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-6624-8593-0 (hc)

ISBN 978-1-6624-8582-4 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Introduction

1.0

2.0

3.0

Appendix A

Address of Black Hoof to President Thomas Jefferson

Appendix B

The Government's Response to Black Hoof's Address

Appendix C

Names of Shawnee Who Lived at Wapakoneta

Appendix D

A Story of the Shawanoes by George Bluejacket

Appendix E

Shawnee Words and Names

Appendix F

Treaty of Wapaghkonnetta

Appendix G

John Armstrong, Signer of the Treaty of Wapaghkonnetta

Appendix H

Letters Written in Preparation for the 1832 Removal of the Ohio Indians

Appendix I

Integrated Chronology

Appendix J

Conversions Between Measurement Units

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

About the Author

"You know the same God who made you

made us and all things, why cannot we

enjoy the good of this Land as well as

our Brothers—our hearts are always

sorry to think they do not know better."

—Chief Black Hoof, from his address to

President Thomas Jefferson, 1802

"We shall not cease from exploration

and the end of all our exploring

will be to arrive where we started

and know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

when the last of earth left to discover

is that which was the beginning…"

—T. S. Eliot, from Little Gidding

originally published in 1942 after

the Battle of Britain

"History is a sequence of random events

and unpredictable choices, which is why

the future is so difficult to foresee."

—Neil Armstrong

Introduction

Wapakoneta, Ohio, is best known today as the birthplace of Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the surface of the moon. But few people know that the maternal grandparents' home in which he was born in 1930 was on land, which was part of the Wapaghkonetta Shawnee Reservation a century before. In fact, the day he was born was just three days shy of the ninety-ninth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Wapaghkonnetta in which the Wapakoneta Shawnee ceded their reservation to the United States. The focus of the book, therefore, is on Wapakoneta and the Shawnee.

It's been said that a historian's job in a nutshell is to find all the pieces and put them all together to form a picture. That's a lot easier said than done. The picture of human history is multidimensional, having dimensions that jigsaw puzzle pieces don't have. Historical events involve social interactions and political motives, and the written records are often inaccurate and biased which distorts the true picture. That's why many times, it's crucial to have physical evidence from the archaeological record available to verify or change the written record. The fundament dimension of history that is missing in jigsaw puzzles is time. In order to present a complete historical picture, it's important to incorporate this dimension. Historical events happen at particular places in space, but in order to get an understanding of their importance and how they fit into the bigger picture, they need to be placed into context of other events. That's accomplished by including events that took place around the same time as the events being covered for the subject of the historical investigation. I have attempted to do this by including many chronologies and timelines to help the reader understand the historical context in which the events took place.

This is a compendium of history written to document events in and around the site of Wapakoneta before the Shawnee were removed from Ohio in 1832 and 1833 and before the town was platted in 1833. So it covers a location and period of time that presents big challenges for a historian. First, the location of the site of Wapakoneta in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was in the American frontier where the natives had been isolated from the European Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and Industrial Age. Second, none of the local natives had a written language, so even after the first contact with the French was made sometime in the first half of the eighteenth century, they left no written record until a century later—at the end of the period of time covered by this book. Therefore, the record we have is missing an important side. We have some of the French, British, and American sides but virtually nothing from the side of the Native Americans who are one of the keys to this history. Third, since the first European contact was made by the French, all of the written record up until 1751 is in French. And most of the historical books in English about this period weren't written until the middle of the nineteenth century—after all the Native Americans were removed from Ohio. Fourth, there is very little of the physical evidence of the people of this time period that still exists. There is no trace of the structures they built in and around Wapakoneta. Most of the physical evidence of their presence that exists consists of flints from flintlock rifles, shards of French chinaware, stone tools and weapons, and some skeletal remains. So the archaeological record is extremely limited.

The book is the result of research I conducted for a historical marker project I undertook, starting in September 2020, to commemorate Fort Au Glaize and the first Shawnee council house in Wapakoneta. The historical marker project, in turn, was the result of my longtime interest in the history of Wapakoneta, especially of the Indians who lived there due to the stone tools and arrowheads I used to find in the surrounding fields. I lived in Wapakoneta for over sixteen years after my parents moved there from Upper Sandusky at the end of May 1957. I first heard about Fort Au Glaize around 1964 and used to search for artifacts from the fort at the site purported to have been its location in until about 1972. During the summer from about 1968 to 1971, I worked for the Auglaize County engineer, Clayton Skip Stimmel. In the summer of 1971, while working in the engineer's office in the county courthouse in Wapakoneta, I found an aerial photograph of the Fort Au Glaize site in which could be seen a faint square outline in the soil. Thinking that it might have been due to discoloration of the soil from the fort's timbers, I traced the outline on paper. I came across the paper on which I had drawn the outline in 2019. Soon afterward, I discovered the 1819 survey of the Wapakoneta Shawnee Reserve on the Library of Congress website, which included a map by the surveyor, John Fulton. The survey map showed not only the location of Fort Au Glaize but also the first Shawnee council house at Wapakoneta. It was a great revelation to find that the council house was located right next to the fort. This revelation renewed my interest and led to the historical marker project and ultimately to this book.

This book has four sections. Section 1 covers prehistoric times as well as river routes and portages of the eighteenth century. Section 2 deals with the French and British in the mid-seventeenth to late-eighteenth century. Since England was united to Scotland to become Great Britain with the Act of Union in 1707, I refer to the English as British after that year in this book. Section 3 pertains to the Indians in the Ohio Country from the late-seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries and the colonial and American settlers starting in the late-eighteenth century. Section 4 consists of ten appendices, the first eight of which supplement Section 3 with documents pertaining to the Shawnee. The ninth appendix (Appendix I) is an integrated chronology which contains numerous events of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries to help place the events in Sections 2 and 3 in context of other events which occurred during that period. The last appendix (Appendix J) provides conversions between measurement units.

I have included lots of new discoveries in the book as well as other information which has not been documented before and have taken great care to make this book as factual and error-free as possible. Of course, any errors that remain are solely mine. It is my hope that the readers will find the information interesting as well as educational and that it will become a useful resource for future historians.

1.0

Oceans, Seas, Glaciers, Swamps, and Rivers

1.1 Over the eons

Wapakoneta today is set in a rural area amidst fields of soybeans, corn, and wheat. This setting has not changed significantly for over 175 years. But that's an extremely short time span on the geological clock. Over the four and a half eons since the earth formed, the site of Wapakoneta in Auglaize County in the central region of western Ohio has seen dramatic changes.

Three hundred million years ago, the land of Wapakoneta was on the equator and part of a supercontinent named Pangaea, which contained virtually all of the earth's landmass surrounded by the Panthalassa Ocean. This was the beginning of the Permian Period of the Paleozoic Era in which insects, amphibians, and the precursors of mammals thrived. About two hundred million years ago, Pangaea started to break up. The landmass that would become North America began breaking from what is now North Africa, eventually causing the Atlantic Ocean to be born about 180 million years ago. This event occurred in the Jurassic Period of the Mesozoic Era. It was a time of dinosaurs and the diversification of mammals. From about one hundred million to sixty-six million years ago, the Wapakoneta site was on a big island named Appalachia. This was the Cretaceous Period of the Mesozoic Era. The climate was warm, which resulted in high sea levels that caused shallow inland seas to form. The land that would become North and South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida was covered by one of these warm shallow seas which surrounded the land where the future City of Wapakoneta would be located.

1.2 The Pleistocene Epoch

Two and a half million years ago, at the beginning of the Pleistocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period, the region had a different landscape than it has today. Lake Erie and the Ohio River did not yet exist but the first humans, Homo habilis, were walking the earth in Africa and making stone tools. It was the Stone Age.

1.2.1 Before the Glaciers

1.2.1 Before the glaciers: Thanks to geologic mapping of the bedrock underlying the area's surface based on the drillings of oil, gas, and water wells, we know that there is a four-hundred-foot (122-meter) deep valley that is buried under the farmland of Auglaize County. There was a mighty river comparable to today's Ohio River that flowed through this valley. The river is called the Teays (pronounced taze) River, although it was the ancestor of West Virginia's Kanawha River Valley. Its head waters were in present-day North Carolina and Virginia, and it traversed what is now West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. As shown in Figure 1-1, this river flowed near the locations of present-day Ohio towns of Anna, Kettlersville, New Knoxville, and Saint Mary's. It flowed just east of the location of the Neil Armstrong Airport and 460 feet (140 meters) under the site of Grand Lake Saint Mary's, Ohio's largest inland lake. One of the major tributaries of the Teays River was Wapakoneta Creek, shown in Figure 1-2. How it got its name is obvious: it flowed through what is now the City of Wapakoneta. Today, automobile traffic flows on Interstate 75 four hundred feet (120 meters) over the valley floor where the waters of Wapakoneta Creek once flowed.

The days of the Teays River were numbered, though, for the earth was cooling and the winter snows were not melting. Instead, continent-sized ice sheets and glaciers were forming to the north and would soon be moving southward toward the Wapakoneta site. The Ice Age had begun.

Figure 1-1 Location of the Teays River and Wapakoneta Creek in Auglaize County

Waynesfield; Uniopolis; Jackson Center; Indian Lake

Figure 1-2 Approximate location of Wapakoneta Creek

Uniopolis

1.2.2 Ice Sheets and Glaciers

1.2.2 Ice sheets and glaciers: Despite its name, the Ice Age had relatively long periods in which Ohio's environment was similar to that of today. However, there were also dramatic climate changes. Over one hundred thousand years ago, the global temperature fell as much as fifteen degrees Fahrenheit. These climatic fluctuations caused huge glaciers to form and advance southward and retreat northward in cycles. There were at least twenty of these cycles, four of which were major advances of glaciers into what is now the United States. These were the Nebraskan advance about a million years ago, the Kansan advance from about six hundred thousand to 450,000 years ago, the Illinoian advance from two hundred thousand to 150,000 years ago, and the Wisconsinan advance from seventy-five thousand to eleven thousand years ago. The earliest advances, the Nebraskan and Kansan, are now referred to as Pre-Illinoian. It was these earliest advances that destroyed the Teays River and Wapakoneta Creek over two million years ago by filling in the valleys with glacial till.

Based on research by J. Russell Boulding, I've determined that Neil Armstrong's birthplace may have been right at the edge of the EPI-2 (Early Pre-Illinoian-2) glacier over four hundred thousand years ago. As shown in Figure 1-3, the edge of this glacier was roughly parallel to US Route 33, south of Wapakoneta, which means that the Wapakoneta site would have been under this glacier.

The last major advance of a glacier into Ohio occurred during the Wisconsinan glaciation. The glacier entered Ohio during its maximum glaciation, about twenty-four thousand years ago. For over five thousand years, two-thirds of Ohio including the Wapakoneta site lay under as much as four thousand feet (1220 meters) of ice. This glacier started its northward retreat about eighteen thousand years ago. As it retreated, it temporarily stalled, readvanced, and deposited rubble which created what is known as end moraines that provided a natural demarcation of the location of the receding edge of the glacier. It also left behind numerous ponds and lakes formed by the glacial meltwater. Two end moraines formed by the Miami lobe of the Wisconsinan glacier around seventeen thousand years ago run across most of the length of Auglaize County. At the west end of the county, they run roughly east-west but then turn northeast-southwest before they continue in Allen and Hardin counties. The southern one is named the Saint John's end moraine, after the village of Saint John's which lies on the moraine. The other one is named the Wabash end moraine for the Wabash River, which follows it for a fairly long distance. As illustrated in Figure 1-4, the Auglaize River, from where it enters Auglaize County to the mouth of Pusheta Creek, marks the southern boundary of the Wabash end moraine. Thus, all of Wapakoneta north of the river lies on this moraine.

One of the large ponds the glacier left behind was located in the eastern part of today's Wapakoneta. It had a surface area of about two square miles—a little less than 10 percent of the present size of Grand Lake Saint Mary's. Since it probably was not very deep, it would be best categorized as a pond. Today, as shown in Figure 1-5, the Armstrong Air and Space Museum is located near its center, and Bellefontaine Street runs directly over it. Since it's an unnamed pond, I believe it would be very appropriately called the Wapakoneta Pond just as the preglacial creek that ran through the Wapakoneta site has been named Wapakoneta Creek.

Figure 1-3 Approximate EPI-2 glacial boundary in Auglaize County

Waynesfield; Uniopolis; Jackson Center; Indian Lake

Figure 1-4 Wisconsinan end moraines in Auglaize County

Waynesfield; Uniopolis; Jackson Center; Indian Lake

Figure 1-5 Location of the glacial pond at the Wapakoneta site

Uniopolis

1.3 The Holocene Epoch

The area around Wapakoneta became habitable sometime after seventeen thousand years ago. The last glacier in Ohio was gone from the state by fourteen thousand years ago. In its wake, it left behind the Great lakes and the Ohio River. The fauna included large mammals, including mastodons and the giant beaver, over three times the size of beavers today. They were hunted by Paleo-Indians who were succeeded by the Glacial Kame Culture who lived in Ohio from about ten thousand to one thousand five hundred years ago. Artifacts made by the Glacial Kame Culture have been found near Wapakoneta, throughout Auglaize County, and at sites to the east in Hardin County near Roundhead and Ridgeway, Ohio.

1.3.1 The Great Black Swamp

1.3.1 The Great Black Swamp: Besides Lake Erie, the Wisconsinan glacier also left behind a glacial lake called Lake Maumee, which was located in what is now northwestern Ohio just southwest of Lake Erie. This lake evolved into a region of wetlands, swamp forests of huge hardwood trees and grasslands known as the Great Black Swamp. It had many large trees such as giant oak, hickory, maple, beech, linden trees, and tulip poplars. It was also a breeding area for black flies and mosquitoes which spread malaria. Lima, Ohio, which was located near the Great Black Swamp about twelve miles (19.5 kilometers) north of Wapakoneta, may have been named after the capital of Peru because it was a source of the anti-malaria drug, quinine. The swamp was about 120 miles (193 kilometers) long and thirty to forty miles (forty-eight to sixty-four kilometers) wide, contained about 1,500 square miles (3,885 square kilometers), and covered all or part of the following twelve present-day Ohio counties: Allen, Defiance, Hancock, Henry, Lucas, Ottawa, Paulding, Putnam, Sandusky, Seneca, Van Wert, and Wood. It also covered a portion of northeastern Indiana, east of Fort Wayne.

As shown in Figure 1-6, the Auglaize and Maumee rivers ran through the Great Black Swamp, and the Saint Mary's River skirted its southern edge as it meandered along the Fort Wayne glacial moraine on its way to meeting the Saint Joseph River to form the Maumee River at Fort Wayne. During the nineteenth century, the European and American settlers drained the Great Black Swamp to turn it into farmland around towns such as Van Wert, Defiance, Napoleon, Bowling Green, Fostoria, and Fremont. Draining the Black Swamp was a two-edged sword though. On the one hand, it made it possible to use the rich soil to grow lots of crops—corn, beans, wheat, etc. But on the other hand, it has created problems with toxic runoff polluting the rivers and Lake Erie. It's a typical recurring problem, whereby the solution to one problem causes another problem that requires rethinking the solution to the first problem. Although maps do not generally show the southwestern part of present-day Auglaize County as being in the Great Black Swamp, it was swampland. Because of this, transportation using wheeled vehicles was not possible during most of the year until the Muchinippi Creek was used to drain the area.

Figure 1-6 The Great Black Swamp before the 19th century

Findlay; Fort Wayne, Moraine

1.3.2 The Ohio Divide

1.3.2 The Ohio Divide: The Ohio Divide, shown in Figure 1-7, is part of the Saint Lawrence Continental River Divide, which involves the drainage basins of the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River. Water in rivers north of the Ohio Divide flows into Lake Erie, whereas water in rivers south of the Ohio Divide flows into the Ohio River. The Lake Erie Rivershed drains about 25 percent of Ohio, and the Ohio River watershed drains the remaining 75 percent. This divide made it necessary to portage between the northern rivers and southern rivers in Ohio when traveling by river between Lake Erie and the Ohio River.

Figure 1-7 The Ohio Divide

Olentangy; Licking

1.3.3 Ohio Rivers

1.3.3 Ohio rivers: The three major rivers in Ohio that flow northward into Lake Erie are the Maumee River (called Miami du Lac by the French and Miami of the Lake by the British), the Sandusky River, and the Cuyahoga River. The Maumee River was a river that figured prominently in the years before and immediately after Wapakoneta was founded. It provided the natural route to Lake Erie, which allowed the transport of goods to and from Detroit. The Shawnee and other Ohio tribes lived along the Maumee River from around 1780 to 1794.

The five major rivers in Ohio that flow southward into the Ohio River, the largest tributary of the Mississippi River, are the Great Miami River, Little Miami River, Scioto River, Hocking River, and Muskingum River. These rivers drain about 75 percent of the State of Ohio. It was along these rivers and their tributaries that the Shawnee tribe built their villages in the Ohio Country from 1734 to 1786.

1.3.3.1 Rivers of Auglaize County

1.3.3.1 Rivers of Auglaize County: Auglaize County has two rivers that flow through it and help drain the farmland of the county—the Saint Mary's River and Auglaize River. Both of these rivers are major tributaries of the Maumee River and are therefore part of the Lake Erie drainage basin, and they both flowed into the Great Black Swamp. Before the Miami and Erie Canal was completed in 1845, nearly all supplies to this region came along these two rivers. The source of the Scioto River is located in the far eastern part of Auglaize County, but it doesn't become a real river until somewhere between the Auglaize County line and the village of Roundhead, Ohio, in Hardin County.

1.3.3.1.1 Saint Mary's River

1.3.3.1.1 Saint Mary's River: The Saint Mary's River was named Ca-ko-the-ke sepe or Kokothikithiipi (Kettle River) by the Shawnee. Its headwaters are in the town of Saint Mary's and flows northward and northwesterly for ninety-nine miles (159 kilometers) to its mouth in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where it joins the Saint Joseph River to form the Maumee River. In Auglaize County, it flows through Saint Mary's, Noble, and Salem townships. James Girty (1743–1817) built a trading post on the Saint Mary's River at what is now Saint Mary's, Ohio, about ten miles (sixteen kilometers) west of Wapakoneta.

1.3.3.1.1.1 Forts Along the Saint Mary's River

1.3.3.1.1.1 Forts Along the Saint Mary's River: There have been at least seven forts built along the Saint Mary's River, the locations of which are listed in Table 1-1 and illustrated in Figure 1-8.

The French built at least three forts at the Miami Indian village of Kekionga (Blackberry Bush) near the mouth of the Saint Mary's River at present-day Fort Wayne, Indiana. In 1697, they built Fort Miami. This fort was replaced in 1722 by Fort Saint Philippe des Miamis (a.k.a. Fort Miami), which contained a trading post for commerce with the Native Americans. However, Huron Indians who were allied with the British