"Some of the young men were dancing near him and cutting what he thought were some of the most ludicrous figures imaginable. They threw their heads to one shoulder and closed their eyes, then threw their heads back so hard he thought they might dislocate their neck bones. They bent forward so low he thought they might touch the ground. All the while their arms were akimbo and their feet kept time with the music.

Mononcue watched, watched some more, and finally could not hold himself back. A crestfallen Stewart saw him take his place in the circle of dancers. Mononcue started moving his feet to the beat like the others, at one with the others, lost yet found, head up, head down, in patterns that ran through the oldest, deepest parts of his soul."

Debbi Snook
The Plain Dealer
07/06/03

Ohio’s Wyandot Rest Far From Home

The big bark canoes moved south from Detroit, across the uncertain waters of Lake Erie and into the safe embrace of Sandusky Bay. But it was not safe for long, so they went south again, a five-day ride on the Sandusky River.

The forests there were full of deer and raccoons. Full of chestnuts and cranberries. Full of riverside earth so soft they could farm it by hand.

The big trees invited them to chip away the bark, carve in the faces of the living spirits of the forest. Then they could lift them off and wear them in the firelight, searching for the light within.

They were the Wyandot of Ohio, and for more than 100 years they lived and worked here and called it home.

They were Ohioans like other Ohioans. They raised crops, went to school and many converted to Christianity. They even fought for Ohio in a war. Yet today the bones of their children - and the children of their children - are 1,000 miles away.

Janith English knows why. English is principal chief of the Wyandot Nation of Kansas. And as she walks up a rare green hill in downtown Kansas City, Kan., she explains why.

To her, this hill surrounded by concrete is the ultimate refuge. It is the Wyandot cemetery.

Hundreds of Wyandots - maybe more than 1,000 - are buried there. Many of them came from Upper Sandusky, Ohio, in 1843.

English can tell you who is here. Over in the walled area is Charles B. Garrett, a veteran of the War of 1812, one of many Wyandots who fought alongside the United States against Britain. Members of the Zane family are in the row at the edge of the trees, each descended from the tribe’s beloved Chief Tarhe and the founders of Zanesville. Nearby is Henry Jacquis, who was chief of the Wyandot when they mustered strength to come here 160 years ago.

“Does it feel different to you?” English says as a breeze lifts her fine white hair off her neck.

English visited the cemetery as a child, picnicking with her family and listening to stories about her tribal ancestors. Her favorite was about Tarhe, a wise and strong leader who happened to be her great-great-great-great-great grandfather.

She loves to hear these stories. She wants them to be told again and again. Stories that have their roots in Ohio.

The crowd at Fort Greenville rumbled with translators and rustled in ceremonial hawk feathers, buckskin and cotton cloth. On an August day in 1795, more than 100 Indian chiefs gathered on Ohio’s western plains. They were the Delaware of Sandusky River, Ottawa of Maumee River, Shawnee and Miami of western Ohio and Potawatomi from southern Michigan. Their leaders were called Michikinakwa or Little Turtle, Weyapiersenwaw or Blue Jacket, and Buckongahelas.

Across the table stood men with lapels and brass buttons. They were assistants to American Maj. Gen. “Mad” Anthony Wayne, and they included William Henry Harrison.

As everyone watched, the parchment was unrolled, and Chief Tarhe took pen in hand. Eight months of negotiations had led to that moment, a moment that could for ever change how Indians would live in Ohio.

It was time for Tarhe to sign the Treaty of Greenville.

By signing, the tribes would give up two- thirds of their Ohio lands. Only the north west corner would be theirs, from the Cuyahoga River west, from Lake Erie half way south to the Ohio River. They also would share $20,000 in goods and another $10,000 every year. They still could hunt on their old lands, but they would have to let more Americans settle on the little land they had left.

If Tarhe could change things, he would. He’d push the Americans away. Far away. For good.

But he no longer believed that could hap pen. The Americans were too strong. They had beaten the British and the Indians in the Revolutionary War. Under Wayne’s command, they had won the Battle of Fallen Timbers, north of Fort Meigs, crushing the Indian resistance.

The loss was more painful because of betrayal. When the Indians ran to a British fort for help from their old friends, the tall gates were slammed shut in fear. The Americans had them pinned, and Indians fell everywhere. Many were shot while crossing back over the Maumee River.

Ten Wyandot chiefs died. The mourning Tarhe was the only leader to return to the Sandusky River.

He had to sign.

If he signed, it would be easier for the other tribes to sign. They looked up to Tarhe. His tribe, the Wyandot, were keepers of the council fire, keepers of the calumet, or peace pipe. The vigorous Shawnee leader Tecumseh - who boycotted the council - was a strong opinion-maker, but the Wyandot were the judges, the historians, the benevolent uncles of the North west Confederacy.

Tecumseh’s followers believed whites wanted to force them across the country and into the sea. They intended to stand their ground. But Tarhe’s peacemaking confederacy clung optimistically to the expanding edge of the United States.

It was a wild, wild west filled with tired refugees. Indians had been through more than a century of war, disease, poisonous liquor and disappearing land and all the comforts that went with it. Tarhe and his followers wanted to live in peace and save what was left.

He leaned his long frame over the page. His dark hair was parted in the center over an aquiline nose, long neck and 6-foot, 4-inch frame. He was taller than most Indians, and most whites. Tarhe, the Crane, they called him.

Tarhe and his warriors once saved a white woman from a band of torturing Del aware. By the time Tarhe got to her, she had been stripped, bound and painted black, the mark of death. He also protected a Christian Wyandot woman from her battering heathen husband.

Tall man, big heart, sound mind.

“Brothers!” Tarhe said to all.

“We now establish a general, permanent and lasting peace forever. Be strong, brothers, and fulfill your engagements.”

Many Indian freedoms were disappearing, but Tarhe was optimistic.

He had signed treaties before, and the words of this one were different:

“The United States will protect all the said Indian tribes in the quiet enjoyment of their lands against all citizens of the United States, and against all other white persons who intrude upon the same.”

He lifted his pen. He imagined a fence, a big, strong fence to protect his people.

The fence did not last.

In 1817, only 22 years later, a new treaty was drawn. The Treaty of Fort Meigs shrunk the fence around the Indians of Ohio. They were told they had too much land, 4 million acres too much, acres that could be sold to raise money for a struggling new nation.

Who would speak for the struggling old nation?

Tecumseh was gone, dead in the War of 1812. Tarhe, an American hero in that war, was dead of pneumonia. His successor, Duon-quot or Half King, couldn’t find an army if he tried. New diseases had wiped out many of his tribe, and liquor was killing others. Now the several hundred remaining Wyandot had to hunt the little spaces where the white man hadn’t settled. They had to relocate to a scrap of land 12 miles square around Upper Sandusky.

In return, the government would give the Indians money to live on, encouragement to farm and the word of Our Lord.

Whether they wanted it or not.

On a Sabbath day after the signing, Wyandots filled the log benches at the council house. They had come each Sunday because they were moved by John Stew art’s sermons about abstaining from alcohol and being ready for judgment day. They heard hope in this Methodist man’s words.

But that week’s sermon was unlike the others. Stewart told his audience that their Indian ways were sinful and dis pleasing to the Great Spirit. They must stop painting their faces and believing it would ward off evil. They must no longer dance and feast to honor forest spirits.

They must accept the Lord, Jesus Christ, and all his ways.

Wyandot chiefs John Hicks and Mononcue were stunned. Surely Stewart didn’t mean it.

Hicks stood.

“Cast your eyes over the world,” he said. “There are almost as many different systems of religions as there are nations. Say that is not the work of the Lord. We are willing to receive good ad vice from you, but we are not willing to have the customs of our fathers assailed and abused.”

Mononcue stood.

If God wanted Indians to have his word in a book, he would have given them one, he said. “Ours is a religion that suits us red people, and we intend to keep and preserve it sacred among us.”

Stewart pressed on, drawing faith from his own experience. He was a free black man from Virginia who once fell into alcoholism. Then he found God and a better life. If this grace had worked for him, he knew it could work for spiritually exhausted Indians.

He told the Indians that before the Son of God ascended into heaven, he asked his disciples to go and preach his word to all nations.

“Not to white people only,” he said, “but to all nations . . . white, Indian and African,” each with a share in salvation.

The traditionalist Wyandots searched their souls. Was it possible to give up the old ways? Turn their backs on what the proud, strong ancients had given them?

They would have to put aside forever their story of creation, how the wife of the ruler of the sky world plucked and ate a blossom from the sacred tree of light. How she fell to the watery lower world. How a council of turtles took some soil that fell from that tree’s roots and built her a home on one turtle’s back.

How that home was the very land they stood upon.

At a later Sunday service, a spell seemed to come over some of the Indians. They called out for mercy, falling to the floor and professing their Christianity.

Big Tree converted. He was a tribe elder who still wore the silver ear bobs of tradition, ornaments that made his lobes grow down to his shoulders. What he wanted more than anything else was to see his tribe strong again. Inside his home of meticulously fitted cornstalks, he dropped to his knees and embraced prayer. “O Homendezue,” he said in Wyandot, “tamentare, tamentare.” (Oh, Great Spirit, take pity on me, take pity on me.)

Between-the-Logs converted next. Tall, sad-eyed and warm, he had been Tarhe’s right-hand man. But he had lived with paralyzing guilt ever since he killed his wife in a blind, drunken rage. He had given up drink, but it had not made him whole. Stewart provided the missing piece: a religion with forgiveness.

Mononcue talked about it to Hicks. “I begin to feel somewhat inclined to abandon a good many of our Indian customs,” he said, “but I cannot agree to give up painting my face.” It would, he believed, make him sick.

Yet he continued to think about converting and continued to talk with Stew art at the meetings.

When the next traditional feast rolled around, Stewart received a formal invitation. The “heathens” wanted him to see, once again, exactly how good-natured a feast can be. He accepted in the spirit of diplomacy.

The aroma of cooked deer and bear were in the air, and the music began. The first dancer let out three shrieks, making Stewart jump. Driving rhythms, peals of flutes and the lusty drone of a conch-shell horn built layers of musical momentum.

Some of the young men were dancing near him and cutting what he thought were some of the most ludicrous figures imaginable. They threw their heads to one shoulder and closed their eyes, then threw their heads back so hard he thought they might dislocate their neck bones. They bent forward so low he thought they might touch the ground. All the while their arms were akimbo and their feet kept time with the music.

Mononcue watched, watched some more, and finally could not hold himself back. A crestfallen Stewart saw him take his place in the circle of dancers. Mononcue started moving his feet to the beat like the others, at one with the others, lost yet found, head up, head down, in patterns that ran through the oldest, deepest parts of his soul.

It was not easy to walk the white man’s way.