Customer Reviews

The Tuscarawas Valley in Indian Days 1750-1797: Original Journals and Old Maps

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From a book such as this I want two things: first, to get to know the historical characters personally and intimately, to achieve empathy with their world view and their values sufficient even to feel that I could engage and interact with them; and second, to find surprises in their use of the English language.

By prudently selecting and meticulously editing the journals included therein and by preferring narratives to inventories, Booth has satisfied what I wanted. (As for the hermeneutics and reconciliation of geography, maps and written descriptions ... well, ok, I'm glad he belabored that material but I'm gladder still that he grouped it such that I could skip over it. It's pretty dry.)

The journal keepers do reveal themselves. They are like us and they are decidedly not like us. The boy who recognizes, matter of factly, his mother's scalp on an Indian's belt ... the Indians who did not kill prisoners except by prolonged torture ... the criminal Indian tracked down by revenge minded tribesmen meekly submitting to execution ... the white man observing captive (from childhood) white women who exhibited the behavior and mannerisms of Indian women and then made the truly giant leap, thinking that perhaps Indian children if raised by white families might grow up to be just like the whites ... the Moravians who cast lots for decision making and interpreted the outcomes as divine intervention. These are just a few.

Having read a history of the OED (The Meaning of Everything by S. Winchester) just before this book, I was on the lookout for surprises (maybe not to another, but to me). From the 1760-1780 time period I wasn't expecting to read the missionaries' complaints about the Indians "boozing." I should have expected to read that lines of march were often "Indian file," but I guess I thought that was a dime novel affectation. It isn't. Then there was the diarist who wrote that provisions could not be had "for love or money." And there are other treats to be had, if you relish this sort of thing.

This is one of those books that should be more than read; it should be savored. When you finish it, snip out the pages and boil them in a kettle and make yourself a tea from it. That is how much you will like this book.

This beautiful book is filled with many wonderful maps as well as early western journals desribing the first explorations of the Ohio Country by white settlers and their encounters with the many native tribes that called Ohio home in the mid to late 18th century. Including such important accounts as Christopher Gist, who was the first white man to chronicle his explorations of the Ohio wilderness, John Heckewelder and David Zeisberger, the famous Moravian missionaries who founded a number of Christian Indian towns in eastern Ohio and who help support the American cause during the Revolution in the west, Col. Henry Bouquet, the leader of a military expedition into Ohio in 1764 to help put down Pontiac's Rebellion, as well as many others whose explorations and contact with the Indians proved valuable to posterity. Early maps are compared with modern versions to try to locate a number of vanished Indian villages in a way never done before, thus providing a new perspective on the locations of modern roads and cities to their old Indian counterparts, particularly in the areas around modern Coshocton at the Forks of the Muskingum River. This area was also the site of the ill-fated Fort Laurens, the first American military installation in the Ohio Country. This is a wonderful reference book and is highly recommended to anyone with an interst in Ohio or frontier history.

I am in awe of what this author has done. He's collected journal entries from a variety of sources--explorers, military leaders, ministers--who describe their experiences with Native Americans in the Tuscawarus River Valley during the 1700s. The author also adds many maps--some old and some new--that show the locations of Indian villages. I learned more about Native American culture from this book than any other source I've read. I got my money's worth from this book.

Great book, especially if you are from the area the book deals with. You can learn much information about the history of this area of Ohio.