Shawnee Country: The Land Before Ohio

Long before the Ohio General Assembly invented Columbus by legislative vote, this land belonged to the Shawnee, the Wyandot, the Lenape, the Miami, and others. They were not here in passing. The Shawnee had been in the Ohio River valley for generations, and they organized this territory, maintained trade networks, and fought to keep it through more than half a century of conflict with European colonial powers and then with the new American republic.

The Erie, who had lived here earlier, were gone by sixteen fifty-four, when the Iroquois Confederacy destroyed them in a series of campaigns that left almost no Erie survivors and almost no Erie-authored record. What we know of the Erie comes largely through French and Iroquois sources.

The Shawnee remained, and they fought. Tecumseh, born in the Ohio territory around seventeen sixty-eight, spent years building a pan-Indigenous confederacy that argued, correctly, that no individual nation could sign away land that belonged to all Indigenous peoples collectively. His confederacy fractured at Tippecanoe in eighteen eleven. He was killed at the Battle of the Thames in eighteen thirteen. Ohio statehood had come in eighteen oh three, ten years before his death.

The treaties that followed moved the Shawnee westward, out of Ohio, decade by decade. By the eighteen forties they were in Kansas. Today the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and the Shawnee Tribe are federally recognized. The Shawnee Nation United Remnant Band still operates in Ohio but is not federally recognized.

There is no named Shawnee historical landmark in downtown Columbus. The Ohio History Center, a few miles north of the Statehouse, holds one of the largest collections of Hopewell and Adena cultural materials in the country. Some of that belongs to nations still working to reclaim it.