History Knox
Local historian Mark Sebastian Jordan authors a column each Saturday reflecting on Knox County's past.
BLADENSBURG — One of what must be the last recorded encounters with American Indians in this area is buried in a little-known account about the Wakatomika Creek valley, compiled in 1966 by Dwight W. Horn.
This 32-page typewritten document was scanned and shared with me by a reader of this column, for which we can all be grateful. I believe there may only be a few copies of this document preserved in the Bladensburg area, but it doesn’t seem to be more widely known.
The booklet talks a lot about old mills of the area, of which photographs are scarce, so I don’t know how much I’ll ultimately be able to pull from the document. But it is a great source with information not found elsewhere.
One such valuable story is a glimpse at what must be one of the very last sightings of natives in Knox County, in approximately 1839, more than 30 years after the formation of Knox County.
The only other story that I know are some of the undated references to Chief Jelloway’s last years in the region, of which I’ve written previously.
The story that Mr. Horn relays is second-hand from a man named Coleman Cummins, and was apparently collected at a picnic at Front Royal School in the 1930s. According to the 1896 atlas, that one-room school stood on the south side of Front Royal Road, northeast of Bladensburg.
Coleman said the story came to him from his uncle, Joshua Earlywine, who was born at a farm on Front Royal Road in 1833. Horn identifies the farmhouse in question as belonging to James C. Reiger at the time of writing, though the 1877 and 1896 Knox County atlases both show Joshua Earlywine’s farm, as indicated on the attached map with a blue circle.
Earlywine must have spoken to his nephew in the late 1800s, for his death is recorded in genealogical records as having taken place in 1899. Earlywine notes that when he was a boy in the late 1830s, there were a few summers when a small group of Indians would come and camp on a little gravelly knoll just northwest of the bridge over South Run on Vanwinkle Road.
According to the account:
… there would be a half dozen or so tepees, a few kids and two or three mongrel dogs. Josh said his father would go down and visit with the Indians a night or two while they were there and he would take him along. He said the dogs would let the camp know there was company coming and when they would arrive, what looked to Josh like a big Indian would come out of his tepee and invite them into camp.
He said sometimes they would stay until midnight. There were two or three older men in the group who said that they had hunted, fished and camped this territory years before when they were young men and they just liked to come back and camp and fish for a couple of weeks and look and think about the changes that had taken place.
Cummins said that his uncle told him that when the Indians left, they would always head north from there. The boy’s father looked forward to seeing the Indians every summer, but one summer they failed to return and no one around there ever saw or heard from them again.
More than just an interesting moment from an early settler’s youth, it is a compactly tragic tale.
The older Indians of the group were describing a time back in the 1700s, before white settlers occupied the region, when it was a prime hunting and fishing spot for semi-nomadic natives.
They still had access for a number of years after the formation of the state of Ohio and Knox County. But it’s no coincidence that they stopped coming in the 1840s, for it was at this time that the federal government decreed that all remaining natives would be forced to choose:
To continue a traditional, nomadic life, they would have to move to reservations in the west; if they chose to remain, they would be required to abandon their ancient ways and live as the white settlers.
The Vanwinkle Road Indians were seen no more in Knox County. We don’t even know any of their names. We don’t know their tribal affiliation, either.
By this period, the native populations were fragmented and mixed with refugees from various tribes. The fact that Earlywine did specifically remember that the Indians headed north when they left might suggest that their base camp was on the Wyandot Indian reservation in Upper Sandusky.
The last Wyandots left that reservation in 1843 for a new reservation in Kansas, which would certainly account for the failure of the natives to ever return again.
It’s sad to know that these people were pushed out of their homeland. At least these summer visits offered them some consolation and a chance to say goodbye to their hunting grounds before they were forced to leave forever.