from blue ash

It’s 7:00 in the evening and I’m sitting here at the kitchen table listening to the best rendition of Katy Perry EVER coming from the basement. Ben’s on drums, Jason’s on guitar, and their pal… I forget his name, but he’s awesome… is on vocals. I’ll never listen to Katy Perry the same way again, but I do have to be honest: I’m glad the music’s cranked up. It helps cover the essence of “Garage Band.” Sarah promised me it would be a treat, and she was spot-on, though “treat” may be too polite a word.

Mandy and I didn’t get to talk on the phone yesterday.

Thus it’s been over 36 hours since I’ve heard her voice.

It makes me miss her all the more. I’m lame, I know.

I’ve spent much of the evening studying the Adena and Hopewell cultures of “primitive” America in the centuries preceding Columbus and the “Columbian Exchange” (an exchange which also brought diphtheria, typhus, and the much-feared smallpox; it was practically an epidemiological Christmas). We Europeans were quite literally harbingers of death, and the vast civilizations that swept across South America, Mesoamerica, and North America were virtually wiped out in the greatest tragedy that has ever touched the human species (one in every five human beings was killed in this period of successive waves of disease that many popular histories tend to ignore). Their civilizations didn’t look like ours, but that makes them no less advanced (it’s a mark of arrogance when we measure “civilization” against our own civilizations). It may be surprising to those of us who see native Americans as primitive, backwards, and culturally inept savages to know that they built cities that rivaled, both in size and grandeur, their contemporaries of London and even Paris. North American pre-Columbian civilizations remain my biggest fascination, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy studying the Mayans, the Incas, or the Triple Alliance Aztecs. Those are all fascinating stories in their own right. Nevertheless, my interest remains primarily with the natives who populated the area where I live now. It’s a wonderful exercise of the imagination to drive up Interstate 75 and imagine the world without modern entrapments, a world filled with native American peoples and their own civilizations, a world buried under European boot-prints. More often than not I take drives down Route 50 or Route 52, the Ohio River glistening out my side window, and I imagine Indian canoes patrolling the riverbanks, the natives splotched in paint, gripping their tomahawks, war clubs, and muskets (though such imaginations necessarily take place long after the Adena and Hopewell). I’ve made it a goal to visit several nearby native American sites before moving up to Wisconsin; and once I get to Wisconsin, a whole new world of native American sites will be opened up to me. The Ohio Country, after all, stretched all the way from the backwoods of Pennsylvania to the Mississippi River (bordered by the Ohio River to the south and the Great Lakes to the north), and thus it encompassed much of Wisconsin. Mandy will no doubt grow weary of my attempts to drag her out to Indian mounds (of which Wisconsin has plethora).

The town of Blue Ash (from which I now write) was named after the blue ash logs used to build Carpenter’s Run Baptist Church back in 1791. Following victory in the American Revolution, the United States Congress declared that since the natives of the Ohio country had been allied with the British, as the vanquished they had no right to hold onto their lands. A coy plan was devised by George Washington, who himself had claimed much Indian land, to dupe the natives out of their homelands. The plan was put into effect, and through much manipulation and deceit, the natives essentially signed off their land at Fort Finney (the fort’s gone, replaced with a manufacturing plant at the Miami River’s headwaters). Realizing they had been played as fools, the Indians weren’t keen on the idea of just shrugging their shoulders and marching west. The Shawnee in particular, who lived in the lands bordering the Ohio River, once again took up tomahawk and musket against the Americans, and a bloodletting ensued. Losantiville (modern-day Cincinnati) was founded in 1789, and that same year one of the biggest military forts west of the Alleghenies—Fort Washington—was built in the area of modern-day downtown. From this fort, raids against the Indians were launched, and the fort acted as a bulwark of white presence. The fort emboldened settlers to push deeper into the interior of the Ohio, and Blue Ash was settled by a handful of families in 1791. They weren’t without problems from the Shawnee, and more than once settlers abandoned their cabins and decided it was safer to reside near Fort Washington. The Indians were ruthless, killing entire families, even infants. What we often forget is that the white settlers were, by and large, far more ruthless. But the laurels of victory include the right to disparage your enemy and paint yourself up in whatever light you want. And so the high school history textbooks tell a convoluted story.

Cincinnati’s beautiful now, of course (for the most part). But let’s not forget the city grounds were once drenched in blood, and there’s a very good reason why the Ohio River was once known, by both whites and Indians alike, as “the River of Blood.”

History lesson over (and joy spread throughout the land).

Tomorrow, I just found out, is Darwin Day!

So in honor of that day, enjoy this: