Some Early Notices of the Indians of Ohio - To What Race Did the Mound Builders Belong? #262573

A Paper Read before the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio. IN the latter half of the seventeenth century, after the destruction of the Eries by the Five Nations, in 1656, what is now the State of Ohio was uninhabited. The Miami Confederacy, inhabiting the southern shore of Lake Michigan, extended southeasterly to the Wabash. The Illinois Confederacy extended down the eastern shore of the Mississippi to within about eighty miles of the Ohio. Hunting parties of the Chickasaws roamed up the eastern shore of the Mississippi to about where Memphis now stands. The Cherokees occupied the slopes and valleys of the mountains about the borders of what is now East Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia. The great basin, bounded north by Lake Erie, the Miamis, and the Illinois, west by the Mississippi, east by the Alleghanies, and south by the headwaters of the streams that flow into the Gulf of Mexico, seems to have been uninhabited except by bands of Shawnees, and scarcely visited except by war parties of the Five Nations.