The Ohio Memory Scrapbook contains an assortment of materials relating to American Indians in Ohio, both the prehistoric cultures (approximately 13,000 B.C. to A.D. 1500) that occupied Ohio prior to European settlement and the historic tribes. Stone tools, spear points, and pottery dating from 6,000 B.C. to A.D. 500 are evidence of the prehistoric Archaic and Woodland cultures. Conflict between European settlers and American Indians is reflected in letters and documents written by General Anthony Wayne, a narrative describing General Arthur St. Clair's 1791 defeat, and documents related to the Treaty of Greenville (1795), which drew a new line for white settlement in Ohio and southern Indiana. Trade goods, such as a Wilson flintlock gun, represent the historic period. Missionary activity among the Indians is well documented, particularly in what is now Wyandot County, where Reverend James Finley converted many Wyandots to Christianity. Related items include a copy of the Lord's Prayer written in the Wyandot language and Finley's memoir Life Among the Indians (1856).

Background

American Indians played an important role in shaping the history of both Ohio and the nation. Ohio was a leading center of trade and commerce for American Indians during the prehistoric era (a period for which there are no surviving written records) and the battleground of the frontier during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Ohio can lay claim to many of the most influential early Indian leaders, including Tecumseh, Little Turtle, and Blue Jacket, as well as their adversaries, such as William Henry Harrison. The state was an important staging point for the conflict between frontier settlers and the local inhabitants. Ohio's native peoples played a vital role in shaping the policy of the U.S. government toward the settlement of the lands west of the Allegheny Mountains and the treatment of indigenous peoples, and they left their mark in the place names, landscape, and culture of Ohio.

Prehistoric Cultures

Ohio had a particularly rich and thriving community of American Indians during the prehistoric era beginning with Paleoindian nomadic hunters who arrived in the area around 15,000 years ago at the end of the Ice Age. The subsequent Archaic cultures (8000-500 B.C.) continued a hunting and gathering lifestyle, although the environment in which they lived had changed, with hardwood forests and modern game animals replacing the Ice Age species.

Beginning around 800 B.C., some American Indian groups began to cultivate crops such as squash and sunflowers and, since they were beginning to settle down near their gardens, started to make pottery for food storage and cooking. Archaeologists refer to these groups as the Woodland cultures; they continued to occupy much of Ohio until at least A.D. 1200. The Adena people constituted one Early Woodland (800 B.C.-A.D. 100) group. They are particularly well known for the conical burial mounds that they constructed throughout central and southern Ohio (their name comes from the estate of Thomas Worthington in Chillicothe, called Adena, on which was located a mound where archaeologists first found evidence of their culture). The Middle Woodland Hopewell Indians (100 B.C.-A.D. 500) continued to build burial mounds. However, they also constructed large earthen enclosures in geometric shapes (circles, squares, and octagons) to mark the places where the people gathered periodically to participate in many social and ceremonial events. Some of these sites were quite large-the Newark Earthworks complex spread over an area 4 square miles in extent. The Hopewell people also maintained a vast trade network extending as far as the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming, the Florida coast, the Appalachian Mountains, and northern Lake Superior. For reasons that archaeologists are still trying to fathom, the Late Woodland Indians (A.D. 500-1200) discontinued building mounds and earthworks. However, they lived in larger settlements than those of the earlier Woodland people, perhaps in part because they began to cultivate corn, along with their other crops.