Indians and Pioneers in Northeast Ohio around 1800; Clash of Systems

Northeast Ohio was once known as "The Connecticut Western Reserve". The area was opened to settlers from the east coast around 1800. While the United States was a brand new country then, European settlements in North America were long established. The first white settlers moved into Northeast Ohio 171 years after the Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded.

The stories that are recorded about the pioneers of Northeast Ohio were captured on paper one or two generations after the fact through interviews with the families who still remained in the area. A number of compilations of the stories were made over the years. One is Memorial to the Pioneer Women of the Western Reserve.

The book recounts the stories of the handful of local families that moved to the new counties of Northeast Ohio when the area was first opened for settlement after the Revolutionary War (but before the War of 1812). The people who moved to the area were from New England. Many of those who did make the move were from well established families in well established towns and cities in New England. When they moved to Ohio, they set out immediately to recreate their old way of life.

Consider how some simple aspect of day-to-day life gets solved: like "Where do I get some bread for toast?" For us today, hundreds, maybe thousands of people participate in solving that problem. In the pioneer days, fewer people were involved, but they set out to solve that problem in a similar way--by building a whole system to do it, rather than solving the problem directly. They cleared land to grow wheat, set up mills to grind flour, and built the roads and transportation networks to move the flour around, and built shops to sell the flour.

All this severely clashed with the way of life of the native peoples, of course. In spite of that clash, and in spite of the fear the pioneers had of the Indians, most of the stories recorded in the Memorial are about positive, happy interactions. For example:

The Memorial also records a number of murders of white settlers by Indians and vice versa. During that time, the native people were allied with the British Empire against the new country of the USA. The resulting conflicts often included horrific violence between Indians and settlers of "The Old Northwest".

Within a given society cooperation among neighbors is possible and common, but when two different peoples clash, competition and violence seems to be common. In a lot of ways, the poor relations between the natives and the white settlers was a huge missed opportunity by both sides.

For example, the haste with which the land in Northeast Ohio was developed was very unfortunate and resulted in degraded farm soil and obliterated wildlife populations. In only 30 years, every mammal bigger than a squirrel was eradicated and nearly every single tree was cut down. Similarly, obviously, the Indians could have benefited from the technology and methods of organizing society that the Europeans enjoyed.