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Editorial by Ralph Johnson
The Blade (Toledo, OH)
07-30-95
Some dissident voices are being heard above the chorus of praise for the archaeological field work that has resolved a 201-year-old puzzle: the location of the Battle of Fallen Timbers, fought on a muggy August day in 1794.
This is not surprising. The forces of the new American republic had suffered disastrous losses on two expeditions in 1791 and 1792 to pacify -- really, punish -- the American Indian confederacy that was fighting to preserve its agriculture-based society in northwest Ohio. That brief clash on Aug. 20, 1794, put an end to those hopes.
Professionals and volunteers under the direction of Prof. G. Michael Pratt of Heidelberg College in May surveyed a partly wooded tract of farm land at the intersection of I-475 and Route 24.
They unearthed hundreds of artifacts -- musket balls, collar buttons, a nearly intact bayonet, and other items -- suggesting that a major portion of the battle was fought in a soybean field that thousands of motorists pass by every day. The parcel, owned by the city of Toledo, is adjacent to a tract on which a developer is attempting to put together a regional mall.
SOME correspondents to The Blade's Readers' Forum object to the idea of establishing a national battlefield park at that location, although it is clearly the course that ought to be followed. One said the Indians should be able to establish a casino at the site if they wish. Another writer, of aboriginal ancestry, said the archaeologists were the people who dug up the bones of their ancestors.
It is true that Indian casinos are established on existing reservations without regard to state gambling laws. Some people see poetic justice in this -- getting something back from the white expropriators of the land. But the Fallen Timbers site is not reservation land.
In May's archaeological survey there was no effort to dig for human remains; the artifacts were recovered within a few inches of the surface.
The issue is whether political correctness is to dictate the reading, writing, and research of historical issues. The answer to that is "no." Americans revere the battlefields and monuments of the Civil War, even though one of the two sides in that conflict was fighting to preserve human slavery.
GENERALS William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan are seen as heroes of that war. However, General Sherman made the most famous scorched-earth march in American history, through Georgia, to break the back of the Confederacy.
In a sense, that was what General Anthony Wayne did, too. Whether he knew it or not, he was part of the process of conquest of the American frontier that went on until 1890 when American Indian resistance to this country's westward march came to an end. Everybody who has discussed the Fallen Timbers battle in any historic context recognizes that fact plainly.
Last August, the bicentennial of Fallen Timbers, would have been the appropriate time to establish a national park or monument, but we didn't know then what we know now (although Professor Pratt says the evidence of the location is supported by contemporary journals.)
The long frontier war between the Ohio Indians and the advancing Europeans was no small affair. The result of Fallen Timbers was the Treaty of Greenville, the bicentennial of which is being observed this summer. General Wayne was the peace commissioner, and it was he who buried the hatchet symbolically with the renowned Little Turtle and other Indian chiefs.
FALLEN Timbers was not a sacred place. It was consecrated by the deaths of fighting men on both sides, although the number of slain was rather low as battles go. It was not an Indian cemetery nor the site of any Indian village. The National Park Service recognizes American Indian concerns in matters of this sort, but the service, although strapped for funds, favors an investigation of the possibilities of turning this site into a national battlefield park.
The Park Service doesn't rewrite history, and we should not try to, either.
How about a walk down the vision trail? Why not build a visitors' center dedicated to the Ohio Indian war of 1790-1795? It should also be a museum of the eastern Woodland Indians' culture in this region -- and no question about it, there was an established culture here long before the whites came.
There should also be a section devoted to the machinations of the British who tried to keep the Americans out and establish an Indian buffer zone between Canada and the Ohio River. If anybody played the Indians false, it was the British authorities in Detroit who seemed to promise support and then holed up after the Fallen Timbers battle in their fort downriver from the center of Maumee.
Such a museum should employ the latest technological advances, holographs, and virtual reality. Before that, there could be walking trails and interpretive signs.
ALL THIS may fall on deaf ears among folks who insist these days that everybody should be hyphenated, just as if this were Yugoslavia.
However, this country, like many others, has a history of technically advanced people expropriating land occupied for centuries by an aboriginal people. We don't applaud it, but we accept that it happened.
Few people speak of General Wayne's "glorious" victory, but it was a decisive one. The battlefield of Fallen Timbers can become, along with Fort Miamisburg and Fort Meigs, a center of historical understanding and a major tourist attraction.
That's history we should know, and it's history that can be put to good use both as an economic development tool and a way to enrich the culture of our region.
NOTICE: This article, which may be copyrighted, is reprinted with specific permission granted to Heidelberg College. Further reprint rights must be secured from the publisher.
Heidelberg College / Office of College Relations
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