History of the Shawnee
Early History
First image: The Serpent Mound in Peebles, Ohio was constructed by the Fort Ancient Culture. Today, the Eastern Shawnee Tribe works to preserve the site. Serpent Mound (aerial view). Timothy A. Price and Nicole I. Courtesy of Wikimedia. GNU Free Documentation License and CC 3.0. Second image: Map showing supposed positions of Indian Tribes about 1600. C. C. Baldwin. Appears in History of the City of Toledo and Lucas County, 1888, page 46. Flickr. Public Domain.
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Before the 1600s, groups of Shawnee people lived across the mid-Southern United States, in Kentucky, West Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Southern Ohio. They engaged in agriculture as well as nomadic hunting. The Shawnee belongs to the same language family, Algonquian, as the Delaware. Some historians believe that the Shawnee are descended from the Fort Ancient culture, who lived in Ohio hundreds of years before European contact.1Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 10.
In the 1600s, the Shawnee were largely situated along the Cumberland River Valley, but the Iroquois Nation pushed them into Delaware and Pennsylvania alongside the Lenape. The Iroquois pushed out many Indigenous tribes during a conflict known as the Beaver Wars, as beaver was very lucrative in trade with white settlers. White settlers and the Iroquois Nation, who had been given total control over the other Indigenous nations in Pennsylvania by the colonial government, pushed the Shawnee out in the 1700s. Meanwhile, the French offered better trading opportunities out west.2Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 10-11. In the early 1700s, some Shawnee people went to live with the Delaware in the Susquehanna valley.3 Weslager, The Delaware Indian Westward Migration, 16.
The Shawnee have many cultural traditions that the Shawnee Cultural Center preserves today. Below is a video introducing viewers to common Shawnee words:
The Shawnee in Ohio
Starting in the early 1700s, the Shawnee moved back into Ohio for the first time in a century.4McConnell, A Country Between, 14-15; Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 10-11. The Iroquois and the Pennsylvanian government could not force them to come back east. The Shawnee settled on the Scioto, Ohio, and Muskingum Rivers, where they farmed, hunted, and traded.5Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 12-13. More Shawnee groups moved to these villages in the aftermath of Lord Dunmore’s War in 1774.6 Weslager, The Delaware Indians: a History, 254. The Shawnee may have also utilized trading sites to the north, such as those in Wooster. Important settlements included several towns named Chillicothe, including one near present-day Circleville, Ohio.7Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 13. American forces destroyed Shawnee villages and crops along the Miami River during the American Revolution.8Hurt, The Ohio Frontier, 93. After the Revolution, fighting between white settlers and the Shawnee would continue.9 Miller, “‘Foolish Young Men’ and the Contested Ohio Country, 1783-1795”, in Beatty-Medina and Rinehart, Contested Territories, 38.
The Shawnee hoped to remain in their homelands in Ohio, but after Tecumseh, a Shawnee leader, staged a pan-Indigenous resistance to American expansion during the War of 1812, this seemed like less of a possibility.