Ohio's History to Becoming a State

The history of Ohio is a very interesting subject at least for those of us who are Buckeyes. Ohio was the 17th U.S. state to join the Union, doing so on February 19th 1803, when the U.S. Congress accepted the notice from the territory's constitutional convention.

The history of Ohio began much earlier though, when the Native Americans arrived in the region. Ohio was originally inhabited by ancient American Indians. The earliest human inhabitants of what is now Ohio was the Paleo-Indian people, who lived in the area as early as 13,000 BC. They were eventually replaced by Native Americans known as the Archaic people. The Archaic period is generally subdivided into the Early, Middle and Late Archaic. Early Archaic people in Ohio are generally thought to be mobile hunters and gatherers. Middle Archaic people are less well known, because relatively few sites have been found, and those that are found are generally deeply buried in river valleys and thus not accessible.

When the first Europeans began to arrive in North America, Native Americans participated in the fur trade business. When the Iroquois confederation depleted the beaver and other game in the New York region, there was a war launched known as the Beaver Wars, which destroyed or scattered the Indians living in Ohio. The Erie's along the shore of Lake Erie were virtually eliminated by the Iroquois by the 1680s. Then the Ohio lands were claimed by the Iroquois as their hunting grounds. Ohio was largely uninhabited for several decades.
But population pressure from expanding European colonies on the Atlantic coast compelled several groups of American Indians to relocate to Ohio by the 1730s from the east, Delaware's and Shawnees arrived, and Wyandots and Ottawa's from the north. Miami's lived in what is now to Ohioans as western Ohio. Mingo's were those Iroquois who migrated west into Ohio.