“A vivid panorama of the transitional years when Ohio evolved from a raw frontier territory to an established province of an ever-expanding nation.” —Booklist Nowhere on the American frontier was the clash of cultures more violent than on the Ohio frontier. First settled by migrating Native Americans about 1720 and later by white settlers, Ohio became the crucible which set indigenous and military policy throughout the region. There, Shawnees, Wyandots, and Delawares, among others, fought to preserve their land claims. A land of opportunity, refuge, and violence for both Native Americans and whites, Ohio served as the political, economic, and social foundation for the settlement of the Old Northwest. “Finally, after nearly twenty-five years, a high-quality general history of the frontier period of the state of Ohio . . . [A] dynamic account . . . that should delight both Transappalachian frontier scholars and interested amateurs.” —History “This exhaustively researched and well-written book provides a comprehensive history of Ohio from 1720 to 1830.” —Journal of the Early Republic

In 1826 thirty-year-old Anna Briggs Bentley, her husband, and their six children left their close Quaker community and the worn-out tobacco farms of Sandy Spring, Maryland, for frontier Ohio. Along the way, Anna sent back home the first of scores of letters she wrote her mother and sisters over the next fifty years as she strove to keep herself and her children in their memories. With Anna's natural talent for storytelling and her unique, female perspective, the letters provide a sustained and vivid account of everyday domestic life on the Ohio frontier. She writes of carving a farm out of the forest, bearing many children, darning and patching the family clothes, standing her ground in religious controversy, nursing wounds and fevers, and burying beloved family and friends. Emily Foster presents these revealing letters of a pioneer woman in a framework of insightful commentary and historical context, with genealogical appendices.

75 Chilling Stories of the Ohio Frontier. Forgotten stories of bravery and heroism. Daniel Boone's Daughters Captured by Indians The Bravery of Elizabeth Zane The Mass Execution of the Residents of Greenbrier County, West Virginia The Bravery of George Baker Saves His Wife and Three Children From the Tomahawk. Mass Murder of the Peaceful Indian Village of Bulltown Wholesale Murder of Innocent Indians Results in Deadly Reprisals. The Revolution Disrupts the Fragile Peace With The Shawnee Resulting in Renewed Attacks on the Kentucky Frontier Hamilton the "Hair Buyer" Sends Out War Parties to the Kentucky Frontier Settlements The attack on Fort Henry in Present Day Wheeling, West Virginia. 1777 the"Bloody Year" Kentucky Under Siege General Clark's Diary of Hostilities in Kentucky Horror Ensues at the Cunningham Cabin The Grigby Farm Plundered. Wife and Small Child Tomahawked and Scalped The Slaying of Mr. Coon's Daughter 33 Men Hold Off 380 Indians at Fort Henry, West Virginia Relief of Fort Henry: The Terrible Carnage is Revealed. Captain Foreman's Relief Army for Wheeling is Annihilated Butchery on the Cheat River and the Escape of Mrs. Morgan Simon Kenton Taken Prisoner in Brown County, Ohio The Capture of the Little Johnson Brothers and Their Killing and Escape From Their Captors. The Kidnapping of the Anderson Brothers 70 Men Slaughtered Under Major Rodgers at Kentucky's Licking River Murders on Raccoon Creek, Pennsylvania The Murder of Thomas Campbell and Baby The Cold Blooded Murder of John Van Meters Wife, Infant, and Fifteen-Year-Old Daughter. The Second Siege of Fort Henry, West Virginia Fight to the Death with a Giant Home Invasion in Harrison County, W.V. Carnage on an Ohio River Keel Boat Mrs. Cunningham Watches Her Four Children Murdered and Scalped Before Being Taken Captive. The Capture and Harrowing Rescue of John Wetzel Tecumseh, Witnesses the Burning of a Captive The Horrific Story of the Murder and Torture of the Moore Family Carnage on Hacker's Creek West Virginia Four Children Murdered, Scalped and Bodies Placed to Form a Cross. Poor Woman Who is Tomahawked and Scalped Lives Long Enough to Give Birth to a Healthy Child Tragedy of the Killing of Amos Wood and his Son (Kentucky) The Glass Farm Tyranny The Purdy Family Butchered in Their Cabin Indian Retaliation the Moravian Massacre - The First Actor in the Tragedy, The Last Victim of Vengeance Tales from Harrison County, West Virginia Neil Washburn's First Scalp The Mystery Indian Girl Warning The Execution of the Crow Sisters Early Cincinnati Ohio, A Dangerous Place A Tomahawk For the Brave Teen Boys Murder Their Captors and the Mystery of the Bag of Gold Capture and Escape of Moses Hewitt Adventures of Neil Washburn Ambushed, with Death Cheated by Mother's Milk The Escape and Rescue of "Hannah the Witch."

The first American frontier lay just beyond the Appalachian Mountains and along the Gulf Coast. Here, successive groups of pioneers built new societies and developed new institutions to cope with life in the wilderness. In this thorough revision of his classic account, Malcolm J. Rohrbough tells the dramatic story of these men and women from the first Kentucky settlements to the closing of the frontier. Rohrbough divides his narrative into major time periods designed to establish categories of description and analysis, presenting case studies that focus on the county, the town, the community, and the family, as well as politics and urbanization. He also addresses Spanish, French, and Native American traditions and the anomalous presence of African slaves in the making of this story.

Recounts the arrival in Ohio of Iroquois-speaking Indians, the entry of white fur traders and missionaries, the slaughter and expulsion of the Indians, and settlement by New Englanders and others.

Conflict invariably characterizes the period following any revolution, and post-revolutionary America was no exception. After the unity inspired by opposition to a common enemy dissipates, revolutionary movements generally splinter into different groups that compete with each other for the right to shape the values and structures of the new society. The Frontier Republic examines the form these conflicts took in the settlement of the Ohio Country, as thousands of Americans streamed onto the lands west of the Appalachians. These settlers had experienced revolution and migration: now the process of creating new communities and a new state in the Northwest Territory forced them to deliberate on, and define, what these upheavals had accomplished. At issue was the very nature of human society and the role of government in it. Jeffersonian Republican ideals of individual liberty and local sovereignty were at odds with the Federalist vision of a well-ordered society and political control on the national level. Disagreements arose over such topics as rights of squatters, establishment of authority of the national government, the statehood movement, and the location of the new state's capital. The effects of the Panic of 1819 and the need for internal improvements changed the early focus on individualism to an understanding of Ohio's place in an interdependent society. Although this first generation of settlers failed to resolve their disputes completely, they ensured that the ideological foundation of nineteenth-century Ohio would be a synthesis of their conflicting revolutionary visions of the future of the United States.

Most history concentrates on the broad sweep of events, battles and political decisions, economic advance or decline, landmark issues and events, and the people who lived and made these events tend to be lost in the big picture. Cayton's lively new history of the frontier period in Indiana puts the focus on people, on how they lived, how they viewed their world, and what motivated them. Here are the stories of Jean-Baptiste Bissot, Sieur de Vincennes; George Croghan, the ultimate frontier entrepreneur; the world as seen by George Rogers Clark; Josiah Hamar and John Francis Hamtramck; Little Turtle; Anna Tuthill Symmes Harrison and William Henry Harrison; Tenskwatawa; Jonathan Jennings; Calvin Fletcher; and many others. Focusing his account on these and other representative individuals, Cayton retells the story of Indiana's settlement in a human and compelling narrative which makes the experience of exploration and settlement real and exciting. Here is a book that will appeal to the general reader and scholar alike while going a long way to reinfusing our understanding of history and the historical process with the breath of life itself.

Bringing immigrants onstage as central players in the drama of rural capitalist transformation, Anne Kelly Knowles traces a community of Welsh immigrants to Jackson and Gallia counties in southern Ohio. After reconstructing the gradual process of community-building, Knowles focuses on the pivotal moment when the immigrants became involved with the industrialization of their new region as workers and investors in Welsh-owned charcoal iron companies. Setting the southern Ohio Welsh in the context of Welsh immigration as a whole from 1795 to 1850, Knowles explores how these strict Calvinists responded to the moral dilemmas posed by leaving their native land and experiencing economic success in the United States. Knowles draws on a wide variety of sources, including obituaries and community histories, to reconstruct the personal histories of over 1,700 immigrants. The resulting account will find appreciative readers not only among historical geographers, but also among American economic historians and historians of religion.