Western Reserve Waterways and the Rise of Merchant Capitalism

Abstract

All settlers who came to Ohio’s Western Reserve recognized quite early the geographic and economic importance of Lake Erie and the rivers that flowed into that lake. Even the Native Americans located their village sites or forts near Lake Erie or on bluffs overlooking the Astabula, Grand, Chagrin, and Cuyahoga rivers. These woodland Indians, once called The Nation du Chat or Cat Nation by the French Jesuits, were a transition people whose culture survived from A.D. 1200-1657. They grew corn and squash in fields near their villages, fished in the lake and nearby streams, and hunted animals in the forests. Devastated by disease and/ or Iroquois war clubs, the Iroquoian (Erie) or Algonquian (Kickapoo) peoples of the southern shore of Lake Erie were gone by the time Moses Cleaveland arrived with his surveying party in 1796.