The Mysterious Village

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In January of 1812, news of Indian depredations on the frontier prompted Spafford to write Reuben Attwater, Acting Governor of the Michigan Territory at Detroit, asking for arms to be issued to the community’s militia company.  Reports circulating throughout the region claimed that Indians were burning houses, killing cattle, and attacking settlers. Unfortunately, the rumors proved all too true.  The Indians murdered two young men twenty miles east of Sandusky on April 4, 1812; and twelve days later, they killed three others near Fort Defiance.  When local settlers brought their bodies into Port Miami on April 19, most Port Miami citizens were ready to flee the settlement for fear of massacre.

The end of Port Miami came quickly after war was declared by the United States on Great Britain on June 18, 1812, and the fall of Detroit to the British and Indians of Upper Canada on August 16, 1812.  Five days later, early on the morning of August 21, Lieutenant John Caris and an eleven man detachment of the Ohio volunteer militia decided to evacuate Port Miami for Lower Sandusky (Ohio).  He advised the residents there to take what provisions they needed from the stockade and flee south to settlements in the interior of Ohio.  About noon, a British and Indian detachment from Fort Malden, Canada, lead by Captain Peter Latouche Chambers of the British 41st Regiment of Foot, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh (pictured right), and the native leader Roundhead with his band of Wyandots arrived at Port Miami by horseback from Frenchtown to accept the surrender of the militia garrison and citizens there.  Lieutenant Benoit Bender and several Canadien boatmen would arrive on the gunboat Chippewa later that afternoon for logistical support of Chambers and Tecumseh’s party.  Almost immediately, the Indians began to plunder and burn the houses and outbuildings.

With little time left to escape, Spafford gathered his family and three other American families and headed for the river, where they launched a large barge that had descended the river with supplies from Fort Wayne the year before. Raising a square sail made from a bed blanket, they rowed downriver, aided by a substantial breeze. As they passed old Fort Miamis about two miles downstream, they saw flames rising from the homes they had just deserted.  Spafford and his party continued downriver to the bay and made their way eastward on Lake Erie, following the shoreline, but keeping a good distance from the shore, beyond the range of rifle shot.  Sallie Wilkinson carried six silver spoons, the only property she was able to save from her home. The families descended the Huron River (Ohio) and arrived safely at the Quaker settlement at Milan.

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The Daniel Purdy family, who lived on the flats below where Fort Meigs would later be built, watched as the Wyandots, who arrived first, drove off 16 head of their cattle and looted their neighbors’ vacant houses.  Quickly loading their wagons, the Purdys fled to Urbana, Ohio, staying the first night at a house eight or ten miles south of the Rapids.  By following Hull’s Trace, the military road cut through the swamp by Hull’s army earlier in June, they arrived two weeks later at Urbana, tired and exhausted, but relieved to be alive and safe.  Other settlers at Port Miami hid in the woods and watched as the Indians plundered and destroyed their homes, then fled south to Urbana when it was safe to do so.

When Chambers arrived two hours later, he was stunned to see the destruction of the settlement in progress.  The Indians had taken horses and mules, shot and killed cattle and hogs, driven off other livestock intended to be taken back to Malden short on food stocks, and pillaged and burned 26 of 30 houses in the settlement.  Tecumseh himself had set fire to the American blockhouse there.  Chambers found only a few sick and helpless American militia there, who could not make the trip by horseback with Caris.  Angered by what the Indians had done, Chambers lashed out at British Indian Department officials for failing to prevent the widespread destruction caused by the Indians.  When Amable Bellair, an American Canadien and resident of Port Miami, entered one of the buildings, Chambers damned him and pushed him out of the door, telling Lewis Bond, the first port collector from 1805-1809, to take and hang Bellair as he was a “damned rascal” responsible for bringing the Indians to the village.  Charles Askin, of the Essex County Militia of Upper Canada, quickly seized Bellair and took his pistols from him, when a few Wyandots interceded asking Chambers to release Bellair, who consented fearing trouble with the Indians and a lack of personnel to guard Bellair.  Upon receipt of his pistols, Bellair quickly fled the settlement.

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The British loaded 77 barrels of pork, 18 barrels of flour, 9 barrels of whiskey, 2 barrels of salt, a musket bayonet, a cartridge box, and some soap and candles into the gunboat and five additional canoes found abandoned for the trip back to Malden. The British found no arms or ammunition – but Chambers suspected these items were hidden somewhere within the settlement, perhaps in one or more buildings destroyed by the fire.  After nightfall, the Indians began to plunder the boats, murdering one of Bender’s Canadien boatmen, and shooting another.  After restoring order, the expedition left the destroyed settlement at midnight, with Chambers and the Indians returning first to Frenchtown by horseback, and the gunboat Chippewa and canoes with Bender and his boatmen sailing down the Maumee River and crossing Lake Erie to Malden with the confiscated supplies.

On September 1, 1812, Procter, and a cadre of senior officers including Thomas B. St. George and Robert Nichol, Matthew Elliott, Captain Matthew C. Dixon (Royal Engineer), and a large Indian force arrived at the Rapids as part of a generalized reconnaissance along both the Maumee and Sandusky Rivers. Lewis Bond claimed that while at the Rapids, the Indians desecrated the grave of his wife who had died in 1806. According to Bond, they defaced her tombstone and tore the wooden picketing down around it.  Later that month, a British expedition commanded by Major Adam C. Muir returning from Fort Wayne stopped at the Rapids.  Frustrated by their inability to capture roaming cattle and hogs, they destroyed three of the four buildings remaining of the now abandoned Port Miami.  The only house left unharmed was that of Jean-Baptiste Beaugrand.  And thus, the door closed on the short-lived history of Port Miami. The hogs and dogs inherited the abandoned and destroyed settlement, and Port Miami became lost to history.

Photo image, bottom right: Painting by Benson John Lossing (1813 – 1891). A colored version of Lossing's portrait of Tecumseh. No fully authenticated of Tecumseh exists; Lossing had not met the Native Indian leader and assumed that he was a British general. Based on a pencil sketch by Pierre le Dru, Lossing replaced Tecumseh's native costume with a British uniform and painted this portrait. Wikimedia Commons

All other photo images provided courtesy David M. Stothers and Patrick M. Tucker

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David Stothers is a Professor of Anthropology (retired) from the University of Toledo, in Toledo, Ohio, USA.  He has a Ph. D. in anthropology from Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, Ohio) in 1974, a M.A. from the University of Toronto (Canada) in 1971, and a B.A from McMaster University (Canada) in 1969. He has worked on archaeological sites of the Eskimo in the sub-arctic Yukon and Neutral Iroquois sites in Ontario, Canada.  Since 1973, Stothers has concentrated his archaeological investigations on the western basin of Lake Erie (southeast Michigan, northwest Ohio, and north-central Ohio) that run the gamut from prehistoric (Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Woodland, and Upper Mississippian time periods), protohistoric, and historic sites.  He has published extensively on archaeology of the region, and mentored many graduate students who have written theses on archaeological sites of the region.

 

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Patrick Tucker is an avocational archaeologist with extensive experience on prehistoric and historic archaeological sites in central Texas, the midwestern U.S., and the lower Great Lakes. He has an M.A. Ed. (1981) and B.A. (1973) in anthropology and education from the University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, USA.  A former contract archaeologist, Tucker has spent the last fifteen years working with David Stothers to analyze the material culture and document historical sites excavated by the University of Toledo, Laboratory of Archaeology, to restore them to their historical context and archaeological significance.  He has several published articles and special publications on history and historical archaeology of the western Lake Erie region.

http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/september-2011/article/the-mysterious-village

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