Many Ohio
towns have inherited Indian names.
Especially in smaller, out of the way places, towns and villages were
often named for their Native founders or given the name, or an English equivalent. In our own area, one need travel no further
than Tontogany, Maumee, Ottawa,
or Wapakoneta to see, perhaps not an Indian town, but at least a landscape
feature with a Native name. Sometimes
the name is familiar, sometimes not.
In
Coshocton County,
there was once a village with the evocative name of White Eyes Plains. An description from 1881 reads: “A broad expanse of level country, White Eyes
plains begins in the western Part of the township [Lafayette Township] and
continues eastward eight or ten miles through Oxford township into Tuscarawas
County.” Settled by Europeans about the
year 1803, White Eyes Plains seems never to have been a town in the sense of
businesses and homes together in a compact settlement. We do know that White Eyes Plains had a post
office in 1815 to until 1892 (with a brief pause in 1854-55), when the name
changed to Isleta. For part of this time, the post office was kept
in a nearby village, Oxford Station.
Such were the vagaries of post office politics.
But
if White Eyes Plains is a flyspeck on the map, the Native leader for whom it
was named was considerably more famous.
White Eyes (c1730-1778) was a Lenape, or Delaware,
Indian leader who led a movement among his people in favor of the rebelling
American colonies. Although large swaths
of his life are unrecorded, here is a summary of what we do know.
White Eyes,
whose name was so hard for settlers to pronounce that one source dodged the
question, and rendered his name as “something like Koquethagechton,”
was unknown in the historical record until 1766. He then appeared as a messenger at the end of
the French and Indian War. That he was trusted
with this task “…suggests he may
have been well suited for interaction between Indians and whites…” White Eyes kept a tavern and trading post in
western Pennsylvania, but moved with his tribesman to the Muskingum Valley of
eastern Ohio, pushed there by white settlers around Pittsburgh. He married Rachel Doddridge, daughter of a
settler who had been killed by natives.
He set up his own town on the banks of White Eyes Creek at its mouth
with the Tuscarawas River, at the eastern end of the White Eyes Plains. In 1774, he was elected principal chief of
the Delaware Indian nation.
Also in 1774, White Eyes
was involved in Lord Dunmore’s War, a scrap between Virginia colonists and the
Shawnee that foreshadowed the American Revolution. White Eyes unsuccessfully tried to negotiate
peace between the two. After the war,
White Eyes sought to negotiate the safety of the Delaware nation with
Dunmore. When the Revolution broke out, the
Delaware nation split into factions.
Part of the tribe remained neutral in the conflict, and was led by Konieschquanoheel , or Captain
Pipe. White Eyes cast his lot with the
Americas. His ultimate goal was to
create a Delaware Indian state with representation in Congress. White Eyes addressed the Continental Congress
in April of 1775 with this aim, and in 1778 signed a treaty with the new
republic which outlined these goals.
In November of 1778, White Eyes served the
American army as negotiator in a hostile move toward Detroit. White Eyes, heading for our part of Ohio,
vanished. Army officials told the
Delaware that he died of smallpox. In
later years George Morgan, a friend of White Eyes, wrote to Congress that White
Eyes had been murdered by American militiamen, who then covered up their deed
to keep the Delaware nation within the American sphere of influence. It is now generally accepted that White Eyes
was murdered, although the details are unclear.
It is sad that so many
Native people have no monument beyond giving their names to our landcape,
especially those who tried to work with the settlers who now occupy that
land. White Eyes lived and died long
ago, but we would do well to remember him.
His story reminds us that working for a just cause does not absolve bad
actions. This keeps Indian place names
from being merely quaint.
{Sources include A. A. Graham, History of Coshocton County, Ohio (1881), and Gregory Dowd, A Spirited Resistance (1992).]
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