Katie Pfouts
When preparing a talk on the Native Americans that were in Trumbull County before European and early American settlers arrived, Katie Pfouts doesn’t have much to go on.
“There’s not been a whole lot of research done on Native Americans in, specifically, the Mahoning Valley area,” said the archivist for the Trumbull County Historical Society. “It’s a very not-well-studied, not-well-known topic.”
What’s more, “We don’t have written records from the Native American tribes that were here themselves,” she said during a presentation to the Brookfield Historical Society on Nov. 13. “They didn’t have written language of what we know today. We don’t start getting these written accounts until the 1600s, and they’re not coming from Native Americans. They’re coming from a different perspective.”
That perspective is from the early settlers who wrote about their interactions with Native Americans, and some of the writers had preconceived notions of the Native Americans because of cultural or religious bias.
The Trumbull society hopes that a large archaeological collection it recently received “will shine some light on the very early people that were here, up and through the Colonial period,” she said, but the collection is largely uncatalogued and the society is not sure exactly what it has.
Until more thoughtful scholarship arises, there are some details that are clear, she said.
“The first people that came into Ohio were about 13,000 years ago,” Pfouts said. “You have people coming in and they’re not necessarily settling in Ohio. Ohio was mainly a hunting ground because of the swamp nature of Ohio back then; it just wasn’t really good to settle on. But, it had a lot of good resources, so tribes would go in and out, depending on the season, following whether it was bison or whatever, hunt them, and then go back to where their permanent settlements were located.”
The Shawnee, the Wyandot, the Delaware, the Erie and the Kaskaskia were among the main tribes who used this area for that purpose, she said.
The website native-land.ca offers an interactive map. You can type in your address and then pull up a list of the Native American tribes that were known to have been in your area.
Tribes built mounds in Brookfield, Braceville, Howland and Girard, usually for ceremonial or burial purposes, and many mounds were destroyed to create farm fields, Pfouts said.
Lois Werner, author of the book “A History of Brookfield Township, Trumbull County, Ohio,” said a 1982 archaeological study conducted by Alfred M. Lee of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History yielded no artifacts at a mound on Yankee Run. However, artifacts were found at three sites in the area of Collar Price Road and Little Yankee Run, south of Route 82, she said.
Jan Arnaut and Marilyn Yensick of the Brookfield society said they used to collect arrowheads as girls in the Golf Drive area.
Native Americans not only hunted in Trumbull County, Pfouts said. They also collected minerals such as salt, sulfur, lithia and magnesium for preserving food and making medicines at the salt springs in the Niles-Mineral Ridge area. European settlers followed Indian trails that went along the Mahoning River and through the salt springs area and also collected minerals and hunted there, she said.
“The site of the original salt springs is no longer in existence,” Pfouts said. “It was covered and buried under about 40 feet of soil to build the B&O Railroad track.”
As Europeans and early Americans settled here, they started writing about their surroundings and their encounters with Native Americans. Harriet Taylor Upton in her book “A Twentieth Century History of Trumbull County” wrote about conflicts between settlers and Native Americans in the early 1800s, including one in which a settler shot an Indian. Upton described Native Americans as drunken and abusive.
Pfouts said Upton wrote her book in the early 1900s, based on stories and attitudes that were passed down to her.
“She is writing this over 100 years after the incident has already happened,” Pfouts said. “You have stories from the early pioneers being passed down in a giant game of telephone.”
Not all early settlers viewed the Native Americans as savages. Phoebe Sutliff, whose family settled in the Bazetta area in the 1820s, wrote about two families of Native Americans who lived near her family.
“They were friendly and mother said the poor Indians were more sinned against than sinning,” Sutliff wrote. “She was good to them. The Indians would tell us what we might eat and what was poisonous.”
When the Native Americans moved on, they gave Sutliff’s family a stone about the size of a man’s head that they used to crack corn for hominy, Pfouts said. Sutliff kept it throughout her life.
It’s probably a euphemism to say the Native Americans moved on. Many were forced westward by early American settlement and federal government policy. The Delaware, who originally lived around the Delaware River in what is now Pennsylvania and New Jersey, were pushed into Ohio, and finally settled in what is now Kansas and Oklahoma.
The Trumbull society would like to be able to paint a more complete picture of the Native Americans who lived here, and, as in the Sutliff family’s case, helped the early settlers to survive the pioneer years. Speaking of the untapped treasures of the recently acquired archaeological collection, Pfouts said, “Hopefully, we’ll get a better sense of who was here, what they did and kind of go from there.”
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