WAYNE COUNTY OHIO - "Arise Wild Land" by Lindsey Williams [Page 3] *************************************************************************** OHGENWEB NOTICE: All distribution rights to this electronic data are reserved by the submitter. Reproduction or re-presentation of copyrighted material will require the permission of the copyright owner. *************************************************************************** File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Beverly bevwayne@gte.net April 18, 1999 *************************************************************************** This information is from a copy of "Arise Wild Land" by Lindsey Williams, as related to Rittman and Sterling. Lindsey Williams was the newspaper editor/owner of the Rittman paper and he was President of the Historical Society there as well. All proceeds from the book went to the Historical Society. The publisher is Atkinson Printing in Wooster Oh. *************************************************************************** CHAPTER 1 Encompassing Forest In the beginning there was wilderness -- an encompassing forest of chestnut, maple, pine and oak broken only by streams and swamps. According to dim memory, the wild land was inhabited by the Eriechronon tribe of Indians, better known in history simply as Erie. Their name meant "panther cat" for the fierce animal that roamed their hunting grounds and served as their totem. The great lake which was their northern boundary still bears the proud designation. During the warm months the Erie feasted on perch, wall-eye and bass which crowded lake waters. However, the weather then was colder than today. Lake Erie in winter regularly was locked in thick ice. Heavy snow spawned by the lake immobilized both man and beast. The Indians in winter moved south of the east-west continental divide (approximately Highway 18) which diverted much of the snow. The woods and swamps of Wayne County provided protection from storms and a plentiful supply of wild game. It was only in this season that voracious mosquitos, black flies and poisonous snakes which infested the swamps were dormant. One of the very early Indian camps was atop a hill now part of Rittman. The site was close to the River Styx swamp, afforded a full-circle ovservation of the countryside, had several springs of drinking water and gave easy access to a salt-lick frequented by deer. We know that Indians lived here as early as 2500 B. C. because they left an assortment of stone age tools as evidence. Galen Gish, a descendent of the first white man to possess the hill, found a cache of these implements a few years ago while digging a trench in Pioneer Cemetery. Curiously these Indian artifacts had been buried as a group 30 inches into hard clay and were associated with white, limey earth. The find includes arrowheads, spear points, awl, hide scraper, arrow straightener, hand-held choppers known as "celts" and a hollow tube believed to have been used for magic. Roger Towe, chairman of the Wayne County Historical Society archeology committee, has indentified the Gish Hill find as relics of the Archaic Indian Period. The white soil and intrusive deposit suggests that more recent Indians, possibly Erie, found the worked stone while making camp and buried them with ritual ashes to pacify the spirits of ancient owners. The Erie were decimated and scattered about 1650 by the warring Iroquois of northern New York state. Into this void moved the Lenape Indians of Pennsylvania as they were displaced by American colonists. The Lenape are better known as the Delaware, an English name given the principal river along which they were the living. The Lenape-Delaware successfully petitioned the Iroquois for permission to move into the former Erie lands. It was an arrangement later described shamefully by the Delaware as "putting on the petticoat." Thus when white settlers reached northern Ohio it was sparsely populated by a few Wyandots of the Iroquois Nation and by immigrant, related bands of Delaware, Chippewa and Shawnee.