Northwest Ohio Quarterly

Compendium of articles previously published in Northwest Ohio Quarterly and Northwest Ohio History

The last place most 19th-century settlers wanted to move was the swampy, fever-ridden Toledo area. However, with the assistance of Irish and German immigrants, among others, Toledo was transformed from a village into a thriving city within 50 years. Captured here is the growth and expansion of the area through the indelible contributions of Toledo's architects. In 1850, Toledo had only 3,800 residents, but the introduction of canals and railroads quadrupled the population. Designated as the new county seat, major public buildings and hotels were built. Isaiah Rogers, one of the most famous architects in the nation, designed the Oliver House Hotel; Toledo's first architect, Frank Scott, planned many notable landscapes in the city as well as some of the most interesting houses; and designing almost every major commercial building in the city was Charles Crosby Miller. All of these, as well as David Stine and Edward Fallis, infused Toledo's pride into local landmarks of the past and present, including the Boody House, the Wheeler Opera House, the mansions of Collingwood Avenue, and the churches and breweries that complete Toledo's neighborhoods and downtown.

Born to Anglo-American parents on the Appalachian frontier, captured by the Miami Indians at the age of thirteen, and adopted into the tribe, William Wells (1770–1812) moved between two cultures all his life but was comfortable in neither. Vilified by some historians for his divided loyalties, he remains relatively unknown even though he is worthy of comparison with such famous frontiersmen as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. William Heath’s thoroughly researched book is the first biography of this man-in-the-middle. A servant of empire with deep sympathies for the people his country sought to dispossess, Wells married Chief Little Turtle’s daughter and distinguished himself as a Miami warrior, as an American spy, and as an Indian agent whose multilingual skills made him a valuable interpreter. Heath examines pioneer life in the Ohio Valley from both white and Indian perspectives, yielding rich insights into Wells’s career as well as broader events on the post-revolutionary American frontier, where Anglo-Americans pushing westward competed with the Indian nations of the Old Northwest for control of territory. Wells’s unusual career, Heath emphasizes, earned him a great deal of ill will. Because he warned the U.S. government against Tecumseh’s confederacy and the Tenskwatawa’s “religiously mad” followers, he was hated by those who supported the Shawnee leaders. Because he came to question treaties he had helped bring about, and cautioned the Indians about their harmful effects, he was distrusted by Americans. Wells is a complicated hero, and his conflicted position reflects the decline of coexistence and cooperation between two cultures.

Annotation In an accessible narrative style, O'Donnell depicts the Native Americans of the Buckeye State from the time of the Hopewell peoples to the forced removal of the Wyandots in the 1840s.