Communities under Siege: A History of Indian Removals at Sandusky, Ohio

This paper uses the Sandusky region in northwestern Ohio to showcase the power structures and circumstances that framed several removal episodes in the Old Northwest from the late 1820s to the early 1840s.  Although no circumstances are completely alike, the obstacles faced by the Wyandot, Delaware, and Seneca Indians who lived in the area illustrate the local, state, and federal power struggles involved in the removal of Indians from the Ohio country over the course of the early nineteenth century.  The experiences of these Indian communities also demonstrate the longer history and context of Indian removal.  Too much emphasis has been placed on the Indian Removal Act of 1830 as the catalyst for the forced relocation of American Indians from their lands east of the Mississippi River.  Indeed, that legislation is more properly described as an affirmation of informal policies and attitudes that had been in place since the eighteenth century. 

            Northwestern Ohio was a prominent theater for Euroamerican and Indian interactions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Sandusky served as home to the council fires of Indian confederacies in the 1780s and the focus of both the British and Americans in the War of 1812.  And in the aftermath of the Treaty of Ghent that ended the larger conflict between the British and American forces, the Wyandot, Seneca, and Delaware residents of the Sandusky region were under increasing pressure on a rapidly diminishing share of the land.  The Delawares and Senecas moved west from 1829 to 1831, while the Wyandots resisted the pressure until 1843.  In all cases, however, the respective Indian communities faced forces that were decades, not years, in the making.