Integrated Learning-Living Communities

In late October, the BEES took an inaugural trip to Ohio’s newest state park, The Great Council State Park in Xenia, Ohio. Erected on the site of the Shawnee village of Old Chillicothe, the interpretive center is modeled after a Shawnee log house. Its exhibits convey the history of the interactions — peaceful trade and hostile combat — between Native Americans and settlers of European descent in the region. Of particular interest to hands-on learners is the opportunity to view and touch fish that frequent the Little Miami.

Creative BEES took the opportunity to design a ‘ribbon work’ featuring our moniker — BEES — while adding to their understanding of  the experiences of prehistoric Native Americans (Paleo and Archaic Indians and the Woodland peoples — the Adena, Hopewell and Ft. Ancient. The Shawnee founded the town in the 1770s, led by Chief Blackfish. Like the Hopewell, the people living in the town relied on the Little Miami River for transportation and sustenance.  The exhibit features a hands-on exhibit of native fish, allowing visitors to view and touch a variety of native species. Like the Ft. Ancient people, the Shawnee farmed corn, beans and squash, supplemented by melons, sunflowers and local game.

Just as Dayton was settled by migrants from Kentucky, Chillicothe experienced an influx of people from the south — some surveying, some seeking salt, some gauging the Native Americans’ military readiness.  Daniel Boone was captured in February 1778 but escaped in June. Simon Kenton was also held and forced to run the gauntlet for violating tribal mores. In 1779, General Benjamin Logan attacked, doing significant damage to the settlement and mortally wounding the chief. The Shawnee evacuated the town in 1789 before it was destroyed by General George Rogers Clark. Settlers moved in by 1797. In the wake of the Greenville Treaty, a series of treaties culminating in the removal of tribes — some by canal, others by train — between 1840 and 1845 — to Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas, and some migrated as far as Mexico and Canada in an attempt to maintain their communities.

The afternoon was devoted to hiking in the Little Miami’s Clifton Gorge, site of several mills (notably a textile mile operated by Robert Patterson during his tenure as a quartermaster in the War of 1812).  The Gorge is also the location of the famous ‘leap’ by Cornelius Darnell, part of  a scouting party led by Daniel Boone  captured by the Shawnee.  Darnell was able to escape, and with the Shawnee in hot pursuit, made a leap so daring that the Shawnee failed to follow him.

The Gorge itself — featuring layers of limestone, dolostone and shale — was created by glaciers some 15,000 years ago. With this hike, the BEES came closed to the headwaters of the Little Miami River that flows south past the Great Council interpretive center (Xenia) and by the Hopewell Earthworks (Oregonia) to contribute to the Ohio River, the very river that early Daytonians deployed to deliver their grain to New York City (by way of the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico) before the Miami-Erie Canal abbreviated the time and distance.

The BEES pursued the Little Miami as far as the Blue Hole, famously painted in 1851 by an African American landscape artist named Robert Duncanson, and on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum. But viewing the real thing, at the height of the autumn color change, provided the BEES with an opportunity to reflect on how humanity has altered the local environment. The BEES, though, left without a trace, packing out the picnic supplies brought along to sustain the expedition.