Early
Indians Mined Southern Flint Beds
The first inhabitants of present day
Harrison County were the prehistoric Indians. Since there was no
written records kept by these early people, know1edge of their
existence is gained through the research and the “diggings” of trained
archaeologists.
The flint beds of Heth, Washington
and Scott townships of our county were excelled in quality for
fabricating the tools and weapons used by this prehistoric Indian
culture. There is evidence to this day of refuse thrown away as they
worked the quarries or flint beds and shaped the flint into tools and
weapons.
There is evidence of village sites,
mounds and Indian burial sites being uncovered today by the constant
eroding of the riverbanks along the Ohio.
Even though the Indians are now
extinct in the area, we adopted and are using parts of their culture.
Their crops of corn, beans, tomatoes, pumpkin and tobacco are grown
extensively by the white
man, and the Indian names for our
streams, etc. are still being used.
The Indiana Historical Society in
Indianapolis has collected and published materials on these early
Indians. Two of their publications are: “Prehistoric Antiquities of
Indiana” by Eli Lilly, 1937, and “An Introduction to the Prehistory of
Indiana” by James H. Kellar, 1973.
When the white settlers started into
this area about 1800, they found the region inhabited by later
generations of the American Indian. The Indians in general were
hostile, due to the white man encroaching on their hunting rights and
trading them inferior firearms and poor whiskey. There are no records
telling of large Indian attacks in the area, however, the early
settlers of the area organized companies for a militia that manned
blockhouses in the area where the white settlers could go for
protection.
In the fall of 1811, one unit of the
county militia served with General William Henry Harrison when the
Indians were defeated in the Battle of Tippecanoe. The last of the
treacherous attacks in the area was in September 1812, when a war party
of braves swept down on a tiny community of whites in Scott County and
murdered 24 of the white settlers. This incident was known as the
Pigeon Roost massacre.
There were enough white settlers
residing in Kentucky by 1792 that it was able to become a state. By
this time to the south of Harrison County and across the Ohio were many
established homes of the whites. The southern part of Harrison County
lay in a large bend of the Ohio, thus the state of Kentucky lay to the
east, west and south of this area.
The area to the north of the Ohio was
still Indian land. The more venturesome of Kentuckians were crossing
the Ohio, and a few whites were making clearings and building cabins by
the early 1800s. Prior to 1805, when a land office opened at Vincennes,
this portion north of the Ohio was still Indian land. Any white
settling in the area were considered squatters.
The land of south central Indiana was
purchased from the Indians by the United States in 1805. The land
survey was started immediately. The area was marked off into
congressional townships, a six-mile square divided into 36 sections of
one-mile square, each containing 640 acres. The U.S. Surveyor General
for the district employed deputy surveyors to do the actual work. The
surveying squad consisted of two chairmen, a flagman, an axeman and two
mound men. The surveying was a difficult task, tedious, and very time
consuming.
The notes of these early survey-ors
are on record in Indianapolis and Washington, D.C. Interesting side
notes tell of unusual findings, terrain, and types of timber in the
various sections. Hervy (sometimes spelled Harvey) Heth, of whom we
will hear more later, was one of these early deputy surveyors and laid
out the congressional townships from the Ohio River north through the
central part of Harrison County in 1806-1807.
Source: Harrison County's Earliest years by Frederick P. Griffin
