The Ohio Country was a name used in the mid to late 18th century for a region of North America west of the Appalachian Mountains and north of the upper Ohio and Allegheny Rivers extending to Lake Erie. The area encompassed all of present-day Ohio, northwestern West Virginia, Western Pennsylvania, a wedge of southeastern Indiana; this area was disputed in the 17th century by the Iroquois and other Native American tribes, by France and Great Britain in the mid-18th century. During British sovereignty, several minor "wars" including Pontiac's Rebellion and Dunmore's war were fought here. Ohio Country became part of unorganized U. S. territory in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris. It was one of the first frontier regions of the United States. Several colonial states had conflicting claims to portions of it, including Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania. In 1787, it became part of the larger organized Northwest Territory. In the 17th century, the area north of the Ohio River had been occupied by the Algonquian-speaking Shawnee and some Siouan language-speaking tribes.
Around 1660, during a conflict known as the Beaver Wars, the Iroquois seized control of the Ohio Country, driving out the Shawnee and Siouans, such as the Omaha and Ponca, who settled further northwest and west. The Iroquois conquered and absorbed the Erie, who spoke an Iroquoian language; the Ohio Country remained uninhabited for decades, was used as a hunting ground by the Iroquois. In the 1720s, a number of Native American groups began to migrate to the Ohio Country from the East, driven by pressure from encroaching colonists. By 1724, Delaware Indians had established the village of Kittanning on the Allegheny River in present-day western Pennsylvania. With them came those Shawnee who had settled in the east. Other bands of the scattered Shawnee tribe began to return to the Ohio Country in the decades that followed. A number of Seneca and other Iroquois migrated to the Ohio Country, moving away from the French and British imperial rivalries south of Lake Ontario; the Seneca were the westernmost of the Iroquois nations based in New York.
In the late 1740s and the second half of the 18th century, the British angled for control of the territory. In 1749, the British Crown, via the colonial government of Virginia, granted the Ohio Company a great deal of this territory on the condition that it be settled by British colonists. With the arrival of the Europeans, both Great Britain and France claimed the area and both sent fur traders into the area to do business with the Ohio Country Indians; the Iroquois League claimed the region by right of conquest. The rivalry between the two European nations, the Iroquois, the Ohio natives for control of the region played an important part in the French and Indian War from 1754 through 1760. After remaining neutral, the Ohio Country Indians sided with the French. Armed with supplies and guns from the French, they raided via the Kittanning Path against British settlers east of the Alleghenies. After they destroyed Fort Granville in the summer of 1756, the colonial governor John Penn ordered Lt. Colonel John Armstrong to destroy the Shawnee villages west of the Alleghenies.
The British defeated the their allies. Meanwhile, other British and colonial forces drove the French from Fort Duquesne and built Fort Pitt, the origin of the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In the 1763 Treaty of Paris, France ceded control of the entire Ohio region to Great Britain, without consulting its native allies, who still believed they had territorial claims. Colonies such as Pennsylvania and Virginia claimed some of the westward lands by their original charters. In an attempt to improve relations with the Native Americans to encourage trade and avoid conflicts with colonists, George III in his Royal Proclamation of 1763 placed the Ohio Country in what was declared an Indian Reserve, stretching from the Appalachian Mountains west to the Mississippi River and from as far north as Newfoundland to Florida; the British ordered the existing settlers either to leave or obtain special permission to stay and prohibited British colonists from settling west of the Appalachians. The area was closed to European settlement by the Royal Proclamation of 1763.
The Crown no longer recognized claims. On June 22, 1774, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act. Colonists in the Thirteen Colonies considered this one of the Intolerable Acts passed by Parliament, contributing to the American Revolution. Despite the Crown's actions, frontiersmen from the Virginia and Pennsylvania colonies began to cross the Allegheny Mountains and came into conflict with the Shawnee; the Shawnee referred to the settlers as the Long Knives. Because of the threat posed by the colonists, the Shawnee and other nations of the Ohio Country chose to side with the British against the rebel colonists during the American Revolutionary War. Americans wanted to establish control over the region. In 1778, after victories in the region by the Patriot general George Rogers Clark, the Virginia legislature organized the first American civil government in the region, they called it the Illinois County, which encompassed all of the lands lying west of the Ohio River to which Virginia had any claim.
The high-water mark of the Native American struggle to retain the region was in 1782: the Ohio Nations and the British met in a council at the Chalawgatha village along the Little Miami River to plan what was the successful rout of the Americans at the Battle of Blue Licks, south of the Ohio River, two weeks later. In 1783, following the Treaty of Paris, Great Britain ceded the area to
The Shawnee are an Algonquian-speaking ethnic group indigenous to North America. In colonial times they were a semi-migratory Native American nation inhabiting areas of the Ohio Valley, extending from what became Ohio and Kentucky eastward to West Virginia, Virginia and Western Maryland. Pushed west by European-American pressure, the Shawnee migrated to Kansas. In the 1830s some were removed from the upper Midwest to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. Other Shawnee did not remove to Oklahoma until after the Civil War. Made up of different historical and kinship groups, today there are three federally recognized Shawnee tribes, all headquartered in Oklahoma: the Absentee-Shawnee Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, Shawnee Tribe; the Shawnee language, an Algonquian language, was spoken by 200 people in 2002, including over 100 Absentee Shawnee and 12 Loyal Shawnee speakers. The language is written in the Latin script, it has a dictionary and portions of the Bible were translated into Shawnee.
Some scholars believe that the Shawnee are descendants of the people of the precontact Fort Ancient culture of the Ohio region, although this is not universally accepted. Fort Ancient culture flourished from 1000 to 1650 CE among a people who predominantly inhabited lands on both sides of the Ohio River in areas of present-day southern Ohio, northern Kentucky and western West Virginia, they were mound builders. Fort Ancient culture was once thought to have been an extension of the Mississippian culture. But, scholars now believe Fort Ancient culture developed independently and was descended from the Hopewell culture a mound builder people. Uncertainty surrounds the fate of the Fort Ancient people. Most their society, like the Mississippian culture to the south, was disrupted by waves of epidemics from new infectious diseases carried by the first Spanish explorers in the 16th century. After 1525 at Madisonville, the type site, the village's house sizes became smaller and fewer, with evidence showing the people changed from their "horticulture-centered, sedentary way of life".
There is a gap in the archaeological record between the most recent Fort Ancient sites and the oldest sites of the Shawnee. The latter were recorded by European archaeologists as occupying this area at the time of encounter. Scholars accept that similarities in material culture, art and Shawnee oral history linking them to the Fort Ancient peoples, can be used to support the connection from Fort Ancient society and development as the historical Shawnee society; the Shawnee traditionally considered the Lenape of the East Coast mid-Atlantic region, who were Algonquian speaking, as their "grandfathers." The Algonquian nations of present-day Canada regarded the US Shawnee as their southernmost branch. Along the East Coast, the Algonquian-speaking tribes were located in coastal areas, from Quebec to the Carolinas. Algonquian languages have words similar to the archaic shawano meaning "south". However, the stem šawa- does not mean "south" in Shawnee, but "moderate, warm": See Voegelin "šawa MODERATE, WARM.
Cp. šawani'it is moderating...". In one Shawnee tale, "Sawage" is the deity of the south wind. Curtin translates Sawage as ` it thaws'. Šaawaki is attested as the spirit of the South, or the South Wind, in this account, in one of Voegelin's tales, in a song collected by Voegelin. Europeans reported encountering the Shawnee over a wides geographic area. One of the earliest mentions of the Shawnee may be a 1614 Dutch map showing some Sawwanew located just east of the Delaware River. 17th-century Dutch sources place them in this general location. Accounts by French explorers in the same century located the Shawnee along the Ohio River, where the French encountered them on forays from eastern Canada and the Illinois Country. A Shawnee town might have from forty to one hundred bark-covered houses similar in construction to Iroquois longhouses; each village had a meeting house or council house sixty to ninety feet long, where public deliberations took place. According to one English legend, some Shawnee were descended from a party sent by Chief Opechancanough, ruler of the Powhatan Confederacy 1618–1644, to settle in the Shenandoah Valley.
The party was led by Sheewa-a-nee. Edward Bland, an explorer who accompanied Abraham Wood's expedition in 1650, wrote that in Opechancanough's day, there had been a falling-out between the Chawan chief and the weroance of the Powhatan, he said. The Shawnee were "driven from Kentucky in the 1670s by the Iroquois of Pennsylvania and New York, who claimed the Ohio valley as hunting ground to supply its fur trade; the colonists Batts and Fallam in 1671 reported that the Shawnee were contesting control of the Shenandoah Valley with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in that year, were losing. Sometime before 1670, a group of Shawnee migrated to the Savannah River area; the English based in Charles Town, South Carolina were contacted by these Shawnee in 1674. They forged a long-lasting alliance; the Savannah River Shawnee were known to the Carolina English as "Savannah Indians". Around the same time, other Shawnee groups migrated to Florida, Maryland and other regions south and east of the Ohio country. D'Iberville, writing in his journal in 1699, describes the Shawnee as "the single nati
Virtual International Authority File
The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. Discussion about having a common international authority started in the late 1990s. After a series of failed attempts to come up with a unique common authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities; this would present all the benefits of a common file without requiring a large investment of time and expense in the process. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library and the OCLC on August 6, 2003; the Bibliothèque nationale de France joined the project on October 5, 2007. The project transitioned to being a service of the OCLC on April 4, 2012; the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary "see" and "see also" records from the original records, refers to the original authority records.
The data are available for research and data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol; the file numbers are being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAF's clustering algorithm is run every month; as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records. Authority control Faceted Application of Subject Terminology Integrated Authority File International Standard Authority Data Number International Standard Name Identifier Wikipedia's authority control template for articles Official website VIAF at OCLC
Lord Dunmore's War
Lord Dunmore's War — or Dunmore's War — was a 1774 conflict between the Colony of Virginia and the Shawnee and Mingo American Indian nations. The Governor of Virginia during the conflict was 4th Earl of Dunmore -- Lord Dunmore, he asked the Virginia House of Burgesses to declare a state of war with the hostile Indian nations and order up an elite volunteer militia force for the campaign. The conflict resulted from escalating violence between British colonists, who in accordance with previous treaties were exploring and moving into land south of the Ohio River, American Indians, who held treaty rights to hunt there; as a result of successive attacks by Indian hunting and war bands upon the settlers, war was declared "to pacify the hostile Indian war bands." The war ended soon after Virginia's victory in the Battle of Point Pleasant on October 10, 1774. As a result of this victory, the Indians lost the right to hunt in the area and agreed to recognize the Ohio River as the boundary between Indian lands and the British colonies.
Although the Indian national chieftains signed the treaty, conflict within the Indian nations soon broke out. Some tribesmen felt the treaty sold out their claims and opposed it, others believed that another war would mean only further losses of territory to the more powerful British colonists; when war broke out between the colonials and the British government in 1776, the war parties of the Indian nations gained power. They mobilized the various Indian nations to attack the colonists during the Revolutionary War; the area south of the Ohio River had long been claimed by the Iroquois Confederacy. Although they were the most powerful Indian nation in the Northern Colonies, other tribes made claims to the area and hunted the region. Contention over the Ohio Country was one of the causes of the Seven Years' War between France and Britain, which ended with France ceding notional control over the entire area at the Treaty of Paris in 1763. When, in accordance with the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, British officials acquired the land south of the Ohio River from the Iroquois, many other Ohio Indians who had hunted in these lands refused to accede to the treaty and prepared to defend their hunting rights.
At the forefront of this resistance were the Shawnee. They were the most powerful among the anti-Iroquois Indian nations, they soon organized a large confederacy of Shawnee-Ohio Confederated Indians who were opposed to the British and the Iroquois in order to enforce their claims. British and Iroquois officials worked to isolate the Shawnee diplomatically from other Indian nations; when full-blown hostilities broke out within a few years, the Shawnee would find that they faced the Virginia militia with few allies. Following the 1768 treaty, British explorers and settlers began pouring into the region; this brought them into direct contact with Native Americans. Of the upper Ohio Valley the Allegheny River, George Washington wrote in his journal for Saturday, Nov. 17, 1770, "The Indians who are dexterous their women, in the Management of Canoes, have there Hunting Camps & Cabins all along the River for the convenience of Transporting their Skins by Water to Market." In September 1773, a obscure hunter named Daniel Boone led a group of about 50 emigrants in the first attempt by British colonists to establish a settlement in Kentucky County, Virginia.
On October 9, 1773, Boone's oldest son James, age 16, a small group of men and boys who were retrieving supplies were attacked by a band of Delawares and Cherokees. They had decided "to send a message of their opposition to settlement…" James Boone and Henry Russell, a teenage son of future Revolutionary War officer William Russell, were captured and tortured to death; the brutality of the killings shocked the settlers along the frontier, Boone's party abandoned their expedition. By December, the incident had been reported in Philadelphia newspapers; the deaths among Boone's party were among the first events in Lord Dunmore's War. For the next several years, Indian nations opposed to the treaty continued to attack settlers, ritually mutilated and tortured to death the surviving men, took the women and children into slavery. Early the next year, a field surveyor named William Preston sent a letter of report to the head engineer of the frontier fort construction, namely George Washington, which indicates his understanding of circumstances just prior to the outbreak of Dunmore's War: FINCASTLE May 27.
1774. DEAR SIRAgreeable to my Promise I directed Mr. Floyd an Assistant to Survey your Land on Cole River on his Way to the Ohio, which he did and in a few Days afterwards sent me the Plot by Mr. Thomas Hog. Mr. Spotswood Dandridge who left the Surveyors on the Ohio after Hog Parted with them, wrote me that Mr. Hog and two other Men with him had never since been heard of. I have had no Opportunity of writing to Mr. Floyd Since. Tho' I suppose he will send me the Courses by the first Person that comes up, if so I shall make out the Certificate and send it down; this I directed him to do. But I am afraid the Indians will hinder them from doing any Business of Vallue this Season as the Company being only 33 and dayly decreasing were under the greatest Apprehension of Danger when Mr. Dandridge parted with them, it has been long disputed by our Hunters whether Louisa or Cumberland Rivers was the Boundary between us and the Cherokees. I have taken the Liberty to inclose to you a Report made by some Scouts.
It is say'd the Cherrokees claim the Land to the Westward of the Louisa & between Cumberland M and the
Ross County, Ohio
Ross County is a county located in the Appalachian region of the U. S. state of Ohio. As of the 2010 census, the population was 78,064, its county seat is the first and third capital of Ohio. Established on August 20, 1798, the county is named for Federalist Senator James Ross of Pennsylvania. Ross County comprises the Chillicothe, OH Micropolitan Statistical Area, included in the Columbus-Marion-Zanesville, OH Combined Statistical Area; as of 1848, Ross County was described as having "one hundred enclosures of various sizes, five hundred mounds" by Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis in their book, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. They describe the Indian-built earthworks as ranging from five to 30 feet in size, enclosures of one to 50 acres large. According to the U. S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 693 square miles, of which 689 square miles is land and 3.8 square miles is water. Ross County is the second-largest county by land area in Ohio, after Ashtabula County, as well as the fifth-largest by total area.
Pickaway County Hocking County Vinton County Jackson County Pike County Highland County Fayette County Hopewell Culture National Historical Park As of the census of 2000, there were 73,345 people, 27,136 households, 19,185 families residing in the county. The population density was 106 people per square mile. There were 29,461 housing units at an average density of 43 per square mile; the racial makeup of the county was 91.74% White, 6.20% Black or African American, 0.31% Native American, 0.35% Asian, 0.02% Pacific Islander, 0.19% from other races, 1.20% from two or more races. 0.58% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. There were 27,136 households out of which 32.70% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 55.20% were married couples living together, 11.10% had a female householder with no husband present, 29.30% were non-families. 24.90% of all households were made up of individuals and 10.30% had someone living alone, 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.50 and the average family size was 2.97.
In the county, the population was spread out with 24.00% under the age of 18, 8.60% from 18 to 24, 31.60% from 25 to 44, 23.60% from 45 to 64, 12.20% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 37 years. For every 100 females there were 108.30 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 109.00 males. The median income for a household in the county was $37,117, the median income for a family was $43,241. Males had a median income of $35,892 versus $23,399 for females; the per capita income for the county was $17,569. About 9.10% of families and 12.00% of the population were below the poverty line, including 15.10% of those under age 18 and 10.20% of those age 65 or over. As of the 2010 United States Census, there were 78,064 people, 28,919 households, 19,782 families residing in the county; the population density was 113.3 inhabitants per square mile. There were 32,148 housing units at an average density of 46.6 per square mile. The racial makeup of the county was 90.7% white, 6.2% black or African American, 0.4% Asian, 0.3% American Indian, 0.3% from other races, 2.1% from two or more races.
Those of Hispanic or Latino origin made up 1.0% of the population. In terms of ancestry, 27.0% were German, 15.2% were Irish, 12.5% were American, 10.5% were English. Of the 28,919 households, 32.8% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 50.2% were married couples living together, 12.6% had a female householder with no husband present, 31.6% were non-families, 26.2% of all households were made up of individuals. The average household size was 2.48 and the average family size was 2.95. The median age was 39.8 years. The median income for a household in the county was $42,626 and the median income for a family was $50,081. Males had a median income of $42,721 versus $32,374 for females; the per capita income for the county was $20,595. About 13.1% of families and 17.3% of the population were below the poverty line, including 24.7% of those under age 18 and 8.2% of those age 65 or over. County officials are: County Auditor Tom Spetnagel Jr. County Board of Elections Stephen A. Madru Beth Neal Don Fuller Ron Fields Clerk of Courts Ty D. Hinton Board of Commissioners Stephen A. Neal Doug Corcoran Dwight A. Garrett Ross County Court of Common Pleas: Judge Michael M. Ater Judge Matthew Schmidt Probate and Juvenile Court Judge J. Jeffrey Benson Magistrate John Di Cesare County Coroner John Gabis County Engineer Charles R. Ortman County Prosecutor Jeffrey Marks County Recorder Kathleen "Kathy" Dunn County Treasurer Jerald A. "Jerry" Byers County Sheriff George Lavender Ross is a Republican county in Presidential and Congressional elections, although Democratic candidates perform well in the county.
The last Democrat to win a majority in the county was Lyndon Johnson in 1964, while Bill Clinton won a plurality in Ross in 1996. In 2008, Republican John McCain won 53% of the county's vote. Ross is part of Ohio's 2nd and 15th congressional districts, which are held by Republicans Brad Wenstrup and Steve Stivers, respectively. Pickaway-Ross lies in the Northern part of the county. Students from the following affiliated Ross and Pickaway county districts at the vocational school. Adena Local School District Chillicothe City School District Huntington Local School District Paint Valley Local School District Southeastern Local School District Unioto Local School District Zane Trace Local School Dist
Arthur St. Clair
Arthur St. Clair was a Scottish-American soldier and politician. Born in Thurso, Scotland, he served in the British Army during the French and Indian War before settling in Pennsylvania, where he held local office. During the American Revolutionary War, he rose to the rank of major general in the Continental Army, but lost his command after a controversial retreat from Fort Ticonderoga. After the war, he served as President of the Continental Congress, which during his term passed the Northwest Ordinance, he was made governor of the Northwest Territory in 1788, the portion that would become Ohio in 1800. In 1791, St. Clair commanded the American forces in what was the United States's worst defeat by the American Indians. Politically out-of-step with the Jefferson administration, he was replaced as governor in 1802. St. Clair was born in Thurso, Scotland. Little is known of his early life. Early biographers estimated his year of birth as 1734, but subsequent historians uncovered a birth date of March 23, 1736, which in the modern calendar system means that he was born in 1737.
His parents, unknown to early biographers, were William Sinclair, a merchant, Elizabeth Balfour. He attended the University of Edinburgh before being apprenticed to the renowned physician William Hunter. In 1757, St. Clair purchased a commission in the British Army, Royal American Regiment, came to America with Admiral Edward Boscawen's fleet for the French and Indian War, he served under General Jeffery Amherst at the capture of Louisburg, Nova Scotia on July 26, 1758. On April 17, 1759, he received a lieutenant's commission and was assigned under the command of General James Wolfe, under whom he served at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham which resulted in the capture of Quebec City. On April 16, 1762, he resigned his commission, and, in 1764, he settled in Ligonier Valley, where he purchased land and erected mills, he was the largest landowner in Western Pennsylvania. In 1770, St. Clair became a justice of the court, of quarter sessions and of common pleas, a member of the proprietary council, a justice and clerk of the orphans' court, prothonotary of Bedford and Westmoreland counties.
In 1774, the colony of Virginia took claim of the area around Pittsburgh and some residents of Western Pennsylvania took up arms to eject them. St. Clair issued an order for the arrest of the officer leading the Virginia troops. Lord Dunmore's War settled the boundary dispute. By the mid-1770s, St. Clair considered himself more of an American than a British subject. In January 1776, he accepted a commission in the Continental Army as a colonel of the 3rd Pennsylvania Regiment, he first saw service in the days of the Quebec invasion, where he saw action in the Battle of Trois-Rivières. He was appointed a brigadier general in August 1776, was sent by Gen. George Washington to help organize the New Jersey militia, he took part in George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River on the night of December 25–26, 1776, before the Battle of Trenton on the morning of December 26. Many biographers credit St. Clair with the strategy that led to Washington's capture of Princeton, New Jersey on January 3, 1777.
St. Clair was promoted to major general in February 1777. In April 1777, St. Clair was sent to defend Fort Ticonderoga, his small garrison could not resist British General John Burgoyne's larger force in the Saratoga campaign. St. Clair was forced to retreat at the Siege of Fort Ticonderoga on July 5, 1777, he played no further part in the campaign. In 1778 he was court-martialed for the loss of Ticonderoga; the court exonerated him and he returned to duty, although he was no longer given any battlefield commands. He still saw action, however, as an aide-de-camp to General Washington, who retained a high opinion of him. St. Clair was at Yorktown. St. Clair was a member of the Pennsylvania Council of Censors in 1783, was elected a delegate to the Confederation Congress, serving from November 2, 1785, until November 28, 1787. Chaos ruled the day in early 1787 with Shays's Rebellion in full force and the states refusing to settle land disputes or contribute to the now six-year-old federal government.
On February 2, 1787, the delegates gathered into a quorum and elected St. Clair to a one-year term as President of the Continental Congress. Congress enacted its most important piece of legislation, the Northwest Ordinance, during St. Clair's tenure as president. Time was running out for the Confederation Congress, however: during St. Clair's presidency, the Philadelphia Convention was drafting a new United States Constitution, which would abolish the old Congress. Under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which created the Northwest Territory, General St. Clair was appointed governor of what is now Ohio, Illinois, along with parts of Wisconsin and Minnesota, he named Cincinnati, after the Society of the Cincinnati, it was there that he established his home. As Governor, he formulated the first written laws of the territory, he sought to end Native American claims to Ohio land and clear the way for white settlement. In 1789, he succeeded in getting certain Indians to sign the Treaty of Fort Harmar, but many native leaders had not been invited to participate in the negotiations, or had refused to do so.
Rather than settling the Indians' claims, the treaty provoked them to further resistance in what is sometimes known as the "Northwest Indian War". Mutual hostilities led to a campaign by General Josiah Harmar, whose 1,500 militiamen were defeated by the Indians in October 1790. I