by
Alan Borer
When you have new neighbors, you must be careful if they
come from a different culture. They may
dress, speak, pray, and especially eat things that are not familiar to
you. This is as true today as it was 50,
100, or 200 years ago. Certainly in the
pioneer days of the Maumee Valley, two groups of people, the Native Indians and
the white European settlers, had to learn to get along with each other. Part of this effort was to learn to eat each
other’s food. And depending on the
individual dish, that took some doing.
Some of the very earliest settlers of Wood County’s
Milton Township were members of the Hutchinson family. Originating from Ohio’s Summit County
(Akron), they were numerous: James
Hutchinson, the father, three daughters, and two adult sons. Andrew Hutchinson and his wife had twelve
children. James Jr. brought his wife as
well, but the couple had no children.
Five yoke of oxen and a team of horses rounded out the party of
settlers. It took ten days for the newcomers
to travel from Summit County to Perrysburg in Wood County, in 1834. The Hutchinson brood traveled along what was then
called the Maumee and Western Reserve Pike.
Then an “almost bottomless” sea of mud, the oxen came in handy, because
if a team got stuck in the mud, the rest of the teams could pull them out!
Once
in Perrysburg, the family proceeded to Bowling Green, which had been
established and named, but not much else.
Following the (still visible) sand ridges, they slogged their way
southwest toward Milton Township, their
new home. Once arrived, the Hutchinson
family raised a log cabin, reputedly taking only 48 hours to build.
Milton
Township at that time was a total wilderness.
“Not a tree had been cut in the township, unless by hunters, and
everything was in a state of nature.”
The exception was a large Native American community. Andrew Hutchinson’s children quickly made
friends with the native children, each group learning the other’s games. Meanwhile, Andrew the father set about
clearing ground for a pioneer farm. He
was also a very active hunter, and would often sell wild game to newcomers in
exchange for farm work. Like his
children, he learned hunting skills from his native neighbors.
The
cultural exchange continued apace, and dietary exchanges were no exception. The native people enjoyed the white settler’s
hominy, in addition to their own native game such as venison, raccoon, muskrat,
and groundhog. Andrew Hutchinson noted
that the Indians owned copper kettles, each holding eight to ten raccoons, each
of which would be “skinned and quartered, then thrown in the kettle head, feet,
claws, and all.” Mixed with hominy, the
raccoons cooked down into what the Hutchinsons called “pot pie.”
Not
all the settlers enjoyed this fare.
James Hutchinson found his wife by traveling back to Summit County,
where he met a “rather fashionable young lady” willing to share the rigorous
life of a Wood County pioneer:
About the first Sunday she was
there, they went to visit their neighbors – [Native] neighbors, and of course
were invited to stay for dinner. The
young Summit county bride took a look into one of the kettles and got a full
sniff of the steaming coon pot-pie, which so sickened her that she had to be
taken off home which amused the Indians very much.[i]
We
don’t know the specifics of this story, not even the tribe to which the natives
belonged. We can guess by their
residence near the Maumee River that they were Ottawa or Wyandot. The last generation of Natives living in
Ohio, they were forced to relocate to what is now Oklahoma by 1843. Milton Township has lost almost all its
forests to clear cutting, with the bulk of the land now given over to intensive
agriculture.
Only
the Hutchinson family was given the time and space to settle down. Their land was near a now vanished hamlet
called Groff’s Corners, “on the edge of the Jackson prairie.” Andrew Hutchinson sold meat from his hunting,
and when last heard from, was 74 years old in 1883. Perhaps even then he missed the taste of
raccoon pot pie.
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