SOUTH BLACKHOOF AND MAIN STREET

When my father Whitie got back to my home town of Wapakoneta after nearly three years of combat in the European Theater with the Seventh Army during World War II, he and two of his brothers had a place of business waiting for them. Although my grandfather, Murel Newland, was hardly a sentimental man, I think it was his way of welcoming his boys home from overseas and tacitly thanking them for their service.

Construction of the Interurban Streetcar Line on S. 

Blackhoof in the early 1900s, right in front of 

Zint's Cabin, the property where Murel Newland

would build the Teddy Bear building after 

World War II. (Courtesy Judy Kantner Bertrand)  

He bought a nice downtown location, the site of what had been known as Zint’s Cabin, an eatery across the street from Zint’s Candy Kitchen and next to what had once been the Interurban Streetcar Line station, when that local trolley line was still running. It was also across the street from the Blume Mansion, one-time home of a renowned city father and philanthropist for whom my father and mother’s high school was named. That lovely house was, by this time, a funeral home.

The site Murel bought was a good location on Blackhoof Street, a name that honored the town’s Shawnee past, and belonged to one of that Native nation’s most revered leaders. The place fronted on that thoroughfare between Main Street (which was not the town’s main street) and Auglaize Street (which was). Upon buying the property in 1945, Murel immediately tore down the building that was there and constructed a new one that would house the business that his three oldest sons would create on discharge from service.

Murel Newland

Whitie’s older brother Red had been in the Navy since well before the war. He had been something of a hero in the Pacific Theater—a Navy frogman and underwater demolition expert, part of an elite that would, a couple of decades later, become the Navy SEALs. He eventually became an instructor and rose to the rank of chief petty officer before breaking an officer’s jaw in a fight, getting busted and spending some time in the brig at Portsmouth. But he would make rank again before the end of the war. And the lieutenant commander with whom he’d had the altercation would go down with his ship in the Pacific—the same ship Red should have been on had he not been in jail.

Whitie seldom talked about the war. He dismissed his part in it when asked, but after his death in 2003, we learned that he had won four bronze stars and had a citation from the French government for his part in the Southern France invasion. Knowing how he felt about the war—and war in general—I’m sure he would gladly have given them all back if he had been alive to acknowledge that intended honor.

Their younger brother Chuck was enough younger that by the time he graduated high school and, like big brother Red, joined the Navy, the war was, fortunately, coming to an end. Their kid brother Don was way too young to be called up. He was only in his early teens when the war ended, which also made him too young to participate in the business his older brothers were starting. And by the time he would have been old enough to play a role, he had decided to answer his  calling to become a Methodist pastor.

Bob "Red" Newland

Whitie, Red and Chuck decided that the business they would start would be what was known in those days as a “sandwich shop and soda fountain”, with the king of sandwiches being the hamburger in all of its wonderful manifestations, but leading a menu that also included pork tenderloin, cube steak, baked ham, grilled cheese and fish sandwiches, plus french fries, onion rings, homemade soups (ham and bean, chicken noodle, vegetable or chili), salads (tossed, potato, egg and ham salad) and pies—both fruit and cream. But they found from the outset that one of their busiest times was going to be breakfast, so they added eggs (any style), ham, bacon, toast (white, rye, wholewheat), English muffins, cereal, juice (orange or tomato), pancakes, french toast, donuts and rolls. Plus the very best coffee in town—Continental brand, only served in fine hotels and restaurants and made strong, hot and black, all you could drink for a dime.

They decided to call the place the Teddy Bear, and had a local artist paint a big brown bear on the front of the building. The super-duper double burger “with everything” that topped the menu was dubbed the Big Bear Burger (abbreviated BBB on the guest check), and was the only sandwich on the menu with a special name, except for the later added steak sandwich that was called the Tummy Buster—Gene Greer, a regular who was something of a town wit and ordered that sandwich frequently referred to it as the “Abdomen Distender”. On one of the signs for the back-bar that Uncle Chuck had printed up at Republican Printing two doors up the street, the message read, “The Tummy Buster Steak Sandwich...Beef so tender we wonder how the cows even walked!”

Charles "Chuck" Newland with
sister-in-law Reba Mae

The Teddy Bear immediately became a popular daytime haunt for local businessmen, firefighters, cops, utility workers, lawyers and a number of professional women, downtown store employees and widows, who ate breakfast and lunch and took their coffee breaks there. But the soda fountain also made the Teddy Bear a magnet for “the school crowd”—kids who packed the place after school and sports events, attracted by a dozen flavors of ice-cream, as many flavors of fountain soda pop known as phosphates, fountain Coke, fountain root beer, malts, shakes and ice-cream sodas and floats. They ate hand-cut fried potatoes by the bushell accompanied by ketchup or mayonnaise, and those who were feeling flush might also order a burger. If they had a dime (for a single) or a quarter (for three tunes), they would also listen to their favorite pop hits on the juke box that stood next to the cigarette machine at the rear of the dining room.

The three Newland brothers couldn’t have been more surprised by the extent of their immediate success. In just a few short years, the Teddy Bear had become a Wapakoneta icon. And it would remain so for a number of years to come. In fact, people from the older generation of Wapakonetans still today remember the Teddy Bear as one of the pleasantest memories of their teens in our small town. And many a traveler on the Dixie Highway, from the days before interstate freeways—when travel still meant experiencing every town and city on your route from point A to point B—would recommend a stop at the Teddy Bear in Wapakoneta.

Norman "Whitie" Newland

People who were new in town or men who had come back after the war heard about it by word of mouth. Like this one guy who, on coming in for the first time, stood at the counter, and head cocked to one side looking at Red, who asked him, “What can I get for you?”

“Don’t I know you from somewhere? Your face looks familiar,” said the guy, who like a lot of young men of those times had a certain military presence about him, with his straight back, cropped hair and shiny shoes.
Red studied him for a second but nothing clicked. “I don’t know. Did you grow up in South Lima?”

“Nope. I’m from right around here.”

“Were you in service?” Red asked.

“Yeah, Navy.”

“Frogman?”

“Nope. Signal Corps. Did you join in forty-two?”

“No, thirty-nine...”

And on and on they went for a few minutes trying to figure out where they might previously have come into contact. Then, bingo!

“Ever put in at Hong Kong?”

 The Newland Boys at the Teddy Bear

“Oh wait!” says the guy. “Hong Kong! That’s it! I remember now. It was on the waterfront. You and another little sailor just about your same size came high-tailing it out of this waterfront dive with a whole slew of drunk Marines on your heels. I remember it because the two of you ran out to the end of this narrow pier and stood side by side with your backs to the drink where nobody could get around you. I remember thinking that was such a smart move but I figured you were both dead meat anyway with a pack of about a half-dozen Marines coming at you.”

By this point in the story, Red was remembering the incident and had started to chuckle. He said, “Well, here I am, so we must have survived.”

“Survived? I guess!” the guy said. “I’ve never seen so many jarheads hit the deck and not get back up in my life! I thought about going and lending a hand, but you two little guys sure didn’t need it.”

Red said, “The other guy’s name was Renfroe. We both did some amateur boxing before we got in and met in the ring in the Navy. We were pretty evenly matched and liked hanging out together. Renfroe was a real puncher and fast as hell on his feet. Couldn’t have been with a better guy that night.”

It was hard for me to imagine my ever gregarious and jovial uncle— whom local newspaper society columnist Helen Hardy always referred to as “the genial Bob Newland”—as being a bad-ass. But he was.

Speaking of which, Mrs. Hardy once wrote, “Winter must be here because the genial Bob Newland is wearing his muffler and gloves.” This was an inside joke for savvy Wapakonetans only and was written in the sixties when Red was already vice-president of a local bank and member of the Town Council. It’s that despite the Arctic cold of Ohio winters, Red never wore a topcoat or hat. In the middle of winter, his cold weather garb was the same as for warm: sportcoat and slacks, but with the sole addition of a wool scarf and a pair of fur-lined leather gloves.

But anyway, while the Teddy Bear was a fun place and a family restaurant where there wasn’t often any trouble, the few times that there was, I never remember anyone calling the police. The Newland Boys always took care of things themselves. Like the time three punks came in just looking for trouble. Eighteen to early twenties the three of them, they dripped “wise-guy” from the moment they ordered at the counter and then took the booth closest to the door. Their goal was clearly just to see how far they could go, what they could get away with. They were loud and lewd and murmurred vulgarities under their breath at the girls who came in and then cackled among themselves. When Whitie leaned over the counter and said, “Hey boys, knock it off,” they lowered their voices but looked his way every now and then and laughed derisively. There was nothing original about their pranks. When they thought noboby was looking, they emptied half the salt shaker into the sugar dispenser, twisted their spoon handles into creative new shapes, and one of them even snorted, hawkered up and spat into his Coke glass.

When Red took off his apron, tossed it onto the undercounter refrigeration unit and started around the counter, Whitie said, “Hold up, Bob. There are three of them. I’ll go with you.”

“No sweat,” Red said. “If I need you, I’ll call you.”

Approaching the punks’ table, Red said, “Okay, boys. Party’s over. Time to go.”

Predictably, the “alpha” of the trio made the mistake of standing up with his back to the front window, facing Red, and, also predictably, said, “Who’s gonna make us leave?”

“See anybody else, here, kid?” Red asked.

The Radio Hospital next door was in the 
building that had once housed the trolley station.
Jack, it's owner, was a Teddy Bear regular.

“You and what Army, pudge? There are three of us and only one of you.” the punk said with a smirk. Almost before it was out of his mouth, Red uppercut him so hard that his feet came off the floor, and he went up over the windowsill and through the plate glass onto the sidewalk unconscious. Red glanced out the broken window at the kid lying in the glass shards on the concrete to see if he was still breathing, and then turned back to the other two, whose mouths were hanging open in shock.

“Now,” said Red evenly, “there are only two of you. And I figure it’ll take both of you to carry his stupid ass to the doctor, so you’d better get up and get the hell outa here while you still can.” They did.

The Teddy Bear attracted, as I say, occasional patrons from all over the place, but its mainstay were the regulars. Some were fixtures who became hard and fast friends of the family. Others were quirky and aloof. One of these last ones was, for example, Mrs. S, whom my father imitated with contempt-filled relish.

Said Whitie, “Every damn day she comes in for lunch and it’s always the same story!”

And then he would proceed to tell how she would come in and stand at the counter, wrinkling her brow and studying the standing menu posted above the soda fountain as if seeing it for the first time, even though she came in every noon.

“Hello, Mrs. S. What can I make you for lunch?” Whitie would prompt her.

She would sigh, stare even harder at the menu board, and then say, inevitably, “What kind of soup do you have today?”

“Beef-noodle, vegetable, and ham and bean.”

“What, no chili con carne today?”

“No, not today, Mrs. S.”

“And then,” Whitie would tell us, “she goes like this...” and he would purse his lips and twist his entire mouth and nose to one side imitating her obvious disgust. “And, I shit you not, if I were to say, ‘Today we’ve got noodle, vegetable and chili,’ she’d be bound to say, ‘What, no ham and bean?’ Doesn’t matter which goddamn soup you don’t have, that’s the one she wants! Then she says, as if she’s doing me a big favor, ‘Well, all right (sigh), I guess I’ll have the vegetable, then.’ Then I’ll say, ‘Can I get you a hamburger with that?’ She’ll say, ‘No, I’ll have a grilled cheese.’ And if I say, ‘Can I get you a grilled cheese with that?’ She’ll say, ‘No, I’ll have the ham salad.” And if I say, ‘Can I get you a ham salad?’ She’ll say, ‘No, I’ll have the egg salad.’ And if I say, ‘Sorry Mrs. S, we’re fresh out of egg salad,’ she’ll go...” And again Whitie would purse his lips and twist his entire mouth and nose to one side imitating Mrs. S’s disdain, and say, “‘Well, all right then (sigh), I guess I’ll have a hamburger.’ And don’t even ask if she wants some dessert with that, because she’ll say, ‘Oh, I don’t know...Yes, I guess. What kind of pie do you have?’ When she’s standing right beside the goddamn pie case. So I say, ‘Apple, peach, cherry, blackberry, Boston cream and custard.’ And she goes (and Whitie sighs and does the sour-faced gesture again), and says, ‘What, no coconut cream?’ And I say, ‘No Mrs. S, not today,’ and she goes...(again the sigh and gesture), and then she sighs and says, ‘Well all right. I guess I’ll have the apple, then...’(and as I’m setting it on her tray) ‘...a la mode.’”

Another one of those problem customers was a local lawyer and former DA, who now mostly devoted his time to inheritance litigation and deed registration. By all accounts he had been a really good District Attorney in his day, but what people mostly knew him for was his eccentricity. And his miserliness. He was notorious for coming in and asking for a ten-cent cup of coffee with a cup of hot water on the side. Once he had those, he would say, “Hey Whitie, could I trouble you for some ketchup?” And once he had that, “You don’t happen to have a spare package of saltines, do you?” Then he would sit with the other notables at the “head table” next to the counter and sip his coffee before pouring the serving of ketchup into the cup of hot water, using his coffee spoon to mix himself up a mug of “soup”, into which he crumbled the crackers. It seemed to delight him to have finagaled himself a “free cup of soup”, and he still had his unlimited coffee refills to look forward to. This, he considered his lunch, all for one thin dime.

Since the Teddy Bear was where all the movers and shakers and other representatives of local society had their breakfast and lunch, it was also where several local reporters hung out from time to time when they were scrounging for a story. One of these was Mrs. P who broke a Wapakoneta glass ceiling by being the only woman to elbow her way into a seat at the big table with the male protagonists of local business and politics. She chain-smoked, ate buttered toast and guzzled black coffee while holding her own in the debates and putting the guys in their place when she reckoned they were full of crap. Most of them couldn’t wait for her to finish her breakfast and go back to work. They didn’t seem to realize she was working!

Sometimes around five, when she got off work, Mrs. P would be back with the whole P family for an early supper—her, Mr. P and a daughter who looked just like her and a son who looked just like her husband. I liked her, and so, had a soft spot for her family. But when I’d say this to Whitie, he would always say, “Well, they’re good customers, I’ll give you that. But Dan, that woman’s a pain in the ass!”    

But there were customers Whitie really liked as well, and he looked forward to their daily visits, like the world’s funniest undertaker, Charlie (who said when asked his profession that he dealt in “underground novelties”), and Charlie’s enormous sidekick Louie. Or the owner of a local rending and fertilizer company named Fred, of whom Whitie always said, “The man’s a millionaire but he’s just one of the guys—although it wouldn’t hurt him to shine his damn shoes, at least. They’re a mess!” Or Mark, the owner of the hardware store across the alley, who always parked his truck out back in the Teddy Bear lot because he and the Newland Boys were buddies. Or Mack, the president of the People’s National Bank, an even-tempered, dancing bear of a man who was always impeccably dressed and moved unperturbed through life at a glacial pace. Or like Jack, the private, quiet fellow with a nice smile who owned the Radio Hospital next door. Or Ralph, who walked with a bad limp from being kicked out of a moving boxcar by a railroad detective, as an adventurous young man riding the rails, and who worked for the gas company but was really a painter. Or Warren, who made a good living as an architect but who would rather have been a cartoonist, or an aging white-haired cop called Bill, who was blue through and through, but was also just a very nice guy who still knew what “protect and serve” meant.

Whitie takes a rare break to chat with "Pudgy"

Most came at the busiest times, the breakfast and lunch rushes. But a few liked a quieter time and would show up during the slow hours of mid-afternoon, when Whitie, Red or Chuck might have time to sit for ten minutes and have a cup of coffee with them. Among the ones who might ask Whitie to take a break and come sit for a spell was a fireman they called Pudgy who was always up for one of my dad’s stories and a piece of cherry pie. Or Kitty, the widow from across Main Street, whose stepson was not that much younger than she was and a truly famous screen-writer in Hollywood, a lovely silvered-haired woman who feigned a dark, hard, misanthropic shell, but who was really lonesome and vulnerable and had a soft spot for Whitie. Or like a guy named Kaminsk, who sold the Teddy Bear its ice cream and always took time out from his route to park his truck out back, let Whitie buy him a coffee and sit around with him “shootin’ the shit” for a little while.

Things were never the same for Whitie after his brothers left. They had both seen the writing on the wall. I-75 was by then a fact of life and a strip of chain-store eateries were forming what was to become “Hamburger Row” on the eastern edge of town at the Wapakoneta-Bellefontaine Street exit. People were going to go there, Whitie’s brothers warned. But Whitie couldn’t understand why anyone would want poor quality fast-food when the Teddy Bear menu was all about top quality and service. They might lose travelers, but not the regulars.

Me with Reba Mae at the Teddy Bear in 1969

So Whitie stayed, betting on his clientele. Red took a job with Mack at the bank, where he would later rise to the vice-presidency. Chuck went to work as, it turned out, a highly successful salesman at a local life insurance firm from which their father had retired after twenty-five years of service. Whitie brought in my mother, Reba Mae, to second him and, after buying out his two brothers, with finances tight, hoped to move on to ever better days. But it turned out that his loyalty to his customers was largely an act of unrequited love. McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s  or Colonel Sanders’ KFC, people tended to follow the jingles they’d heard on TV like children on the heels of the Pied Piper. A decade more of struggling and chronic depression and he was ready to call it quits, which is how a Wapakoneta icon, the Teddy Bear Restaurant, passed into history.

I now often have dreams in which the Teddy Bear figures prominently. More now than ever before. The building always looks like it did back then, with the white tiles and red trim on the front and the big brown bear painted above the door. It’s often night-time or dusk. I see the lights on and hope I’ll go in and find it like it always was, see Whitie and Reba Mae, my Uncle Red and Uncle Chuck, the regulars at the “front table” drinking their coffee and BS-ing, some of the girls I knew working in the back, girls that are gone now, like Cathy and Linda. Sometimes I do, but in those cases, it’s like I’m seeing it and them from some other dimension where they can’t see me. I “see” them like a camera lens, without being able to interact.

Not infrequently, however, I see the lights on and go in, only to find the Teddy Bear empty, as if suddenly abandoned, with the smell of soups and coffee in the air and burgers still cooking on the grill. I walk around the empty dining room, lights on, jukebox playing fifties hits, back into the kitchen where food is half-prepared and dishes waiting to be washed, on back into the back room, hoping to find Whitie there preparing the perfect blend of lean beef and suet to make the world’s best hamburgers, or Uncle Red sitting squeezed into a corner at the little desk, cranking totals out of a manual adding machine. But the back door and screen door are open and there’s no one in sight. The gravel parking lot is dead quiet and empty, not even the truck from the hardware store across the alley is  parked out back. And outside, it’s a different time.

Sometimes walking, sometimes in a car, sometimes even on my old Scwhinn bike, I reach the corner of South Blackhoof and Main. I look right and see the funeral home with its sober lights on, and look left and again see the façade of the Teddy Bear with its inviting front windows aglow. To my rear is downtown Wapakoneta, with cheery Saturday-night lights contrasting with the old iron Blackhoof Street bridge spanning the dark night waters of the Auglaize. But South Blackhoof and Main, in this dream world, is a frontier between what once felt secure, in childhood visions of what used to be, and the uncharted blackness of what lies ahead “across Main”.

Lately, I’ll turn and take a last look at the Teddy Bear and feel its snug safety and warmth—the place that fed my town, the mom and pop business that fed my home—and then I’ll face the uncertain darkness of the night to the south, take a deep breath, and stride, ride or pedal resignedly into it.    

HOW THE MIDWEST GOT SO WHITE...OR, WHAT WE OWE TO THE SHAWNEE

In July, I wrote a blog entry called Wapakoneta on the Warpath https://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com/2020/07/wapakoneta-on-warpath.html   in which I described how my hometown in Ohio remains at odds with its Shawnee past and with the way in which our own white immigrant ancestors came by what was, essentially, stolen land. I wrote that blog within the context of the Washington Redskins’ conclusion that it was, perhaps, time for the team to get on the right side of history and quit using an anti-Indian racial epithet as their team name, pointing out that this was also the name of my hometown’s team and that the Washington franchise’s decision had spelled a major headache for Wapakoneta school authorities and city fathers. Not for the first time, they faced strong criticism for continuing to support racial insensitivity and to excuse their behavior by claiming to “honor” the Shawnee with the patently offensive term “redskin” (which many Native Americans refer to as “the R-word”).

At the time, I quoted Wapakoneta City Schools Superintendent Aaron Rex as saying, “At Wapakoneta we have always believed that our representation of Native Americans and their history in our area has been done with a great deal of respect. Our community was once a place inhabited by many Indian tribes with the last being the Shawnee under the leadership of Chief Black Hoof. In the last few years we have redesigned our school logo and feel that it has been done keeping the idea of respect and history in mind. Wapakoneta has a great deal to be proud of, as you know. Native American history is one piece of what makes our town one of the best small towns in Ohio.”

I pointed out at the time that several of Mr. Rex’s posits were, to say the least, questionable. I said that, first, as an educator, Mr. Rex should know that “beliefs” aren’t facts. What Wapakonetans have “always believed” about our way of representing Native American culture and history is in apparent and aggressive conflict with the view of the ethnicity involved. Second, that any redesigning of the school logo has been carried out, according to the representatives of the Shawnee Tribe, without consulting the true experts on tribal culture—namely, the Shawnees themselves. And third, although Wapakoneta may indeed have attributes that it can be proud of, its history with Native Americans in general and the Shawnee Nation in particular isn’t one of them.

Professor Stephen Warren

Warren is the author of two books on the topic, The Shawnees and Their Neighbors 1795-1870 (University of Illinois Press 2005), and The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America (The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), as well as numerous related studies. He has also served as editor for several historical and anthropological studies created by Native Shawnee scholars. His research has been supported by a variety of grants from major donors including the John D. Rockefeller Library and the Mellon Sabbatical Foundation.

I’ve taken part of the title of this essay from one of Professor Warren’s premises in his research on Indian removal from the Midwest. He has asked himself the same question I have in looking at the relationship of my own white immigrant ancestors with both Native and African Americans: How did the region, and particularly my hometown—whose residents so often boast “pride in ‘our’ Native American history” and too often seek to deny our well-documented recent past as a “sundown town”—become so white? Listening to the hard facts provided by Professor Warren in answer to this multi-faceted question, it is hard not to conclude that this relationship is less than worthy of pride and should, indeed, be a source of profound shame.

Furthermore, there is clearly nothing unique about Wapakoneta in this sense. According to Professor Warren’s studies, the “whitening” of the Midwest was part of a process often blamed on the actions and inactions of the federal government, but that was, in fact, actively aided and abetted by state and local authorities throughout the region.

During his conference last week, Warren prefaced his remarks on the removal of the Ohio Shawnee by saying that it was impossible to separate Native American removal from the area from movements that gave birth to legislation aimed at excluding African Americans as well. Removal and exclusion were then, according to Warren, “twin policies.”

As an example of legislation that upheld such racist policies, Warren provided the example of Johnson v McIntosh of 1823, which, he said, “made the specious point that the Indians possessed only a right of occupancy, not ownership of the lands where they lived.” This is nothing if not perverse, since the lands where Native tribes lived had always belonged to them and were usurped by white settlers who migrated for centuries from Europe in numbers that overwhelmed the Indian population. What the legal premise of this 1823 court decision meant was that Native tribes could be ejected from their lands according to white whims, and, in principle, this remains a governing standard up to the present day with regard to reservations.

Legal norms provide, Warren indicated, the nexus between Native removal and African American exclusion. For example, he explains that, in 1804 and 1807, Ohio passed so-called “bond laws” (among the earliest legislation following statehood in 1803), which not only required blacks arriving in the state to show proof that they had been freed and were no longer slaves (in other words, that they were not the “property” of a white man), but also forced them to post a five hundred dollar bond (equivalent to about eleven thousand two hundred fifty dollars in today’s terms) in order to remain within the territory of the state.

Warren says that statutes were also passed in Ohio that prohibited blacks and Indians alike from entering into contracts, testifying in court or serving on juries. And an Ohio Supreme Court decision (Van Camp v Board of Education) basically instituted the segregation of schools in 1853. The professor explains that it wasn’t until the eighteen-eighties—well after passage of the Fourteen Amendment to the US Constitution (1868) extending the individual guarantees stated in the Bill of Rights to former slaves—that Midwestern states, including Ohio, passed laws protecting the civil rights of people of color.

While Native Americans had long been pushed from their traditional lands by white migration, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 made this official policy. Signed into law by President Andrew Jackson—who, among historical revisionists is often the sole scapegoat for what was already an ad hoc nationwide trend—this act made it legal to forcibly remove Indians from their homeland and drive them across the Mississippi into the unsettled western territories, thus clearing the way for white migrants to take over their lands without compensation.

Already by that time, the Shawnee, who were a quintessentially Ohio tribe, with many villages in the southern part of the region, had been pushed further and further north and west within the state by a white migratory movement from the south, in which, Warren explains, people from Kentucky crossed the Ohio River at Cincinnati and “filled the state from the bottom up like a glass of water.” And this is where the extraordinary importance of Wapakoneta in Shawnee history becomes evident—and what makes our white ancestors’ role in it so shameful.

By the time of the Indian Removal Act, and indeed well before, Wapakoneta had become the council house of the Shawnee Nation. In short, my home town was the headquarters of the Shawnee people. One of the main streets in Wapakoneta is named after the great chief who presided over that Native nation—namely, Black Hoof, known to his brethren as Catahecassa (1740-1831). In his online conference, Professor Warren recapped Black Hoof’s life, explaining that war had been a constant throughout his time. Black Hoof lived through three major world wars that all had definite consequences in America: the Seven Years War, the lengthy American Revolution and the War of 1812. And after each of these conflicts, he had seen the Shawnee have to start over from scratch.

Until the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, when Black Hoof was already in his mid-fifties, he was a fierce warrior in the struggle against white expansionism. That was the decisive final battle between Indians of the region (with their British allies) and white Americans in the struggle for control of the Northwest Territory, and it gave birth to the Treaty of Greenville (Ohio). The Battle of Fallen Timbers took place near what is today the city of Maumee, Ohio, coincidentally the point of confluence of the Maumee River with the Auglaize, which runs west through the heart of Wapakoneta before turning north on its journey to Great Lake Erie.

Black Hoof now only wanted peace. But, according to Warren, it was after Fallen Timbers that Piqua (Ohio) Indian Agent John Johnston told Black Hoof, “War is our trade and you cannot live quiet and take no part in it.” In an attempt ally himself and his people with their former American enemies, the Shawnee chief thus ended up serving as a scout for US troops during the War of 1812 against the British.

As such, Black Hoof participated in the Battle of Thames in Canada on the side of the Americans against the Native confederacy and their British allies. During that battle, on October 5, 1813, Tecumseh, the leader of the Indian confederacy and Black Hoof’s fellow Shawnee, was killed. This level of commitment was part of Black Hoof’s plan, as a Shawnee chief, to lend his support to peace while actively, if peacefully, resisting removal. The chief nevertheless admitted that “the war took everything from us.”

According to Warren, in the three and a half decades between the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the Removal Act of 1830, Black Hoof strove to make Wapakoneta the center of an alliance between the Shawnee and white settlers. He was a driving force behind the development of Shawnee agriculture and animal husbandry and shipped livestock between Wapakoneta and the slaughterhouses of Cincinnati on the Ohio River. He worked with Quaker missionaries who lived in the area and although they didn’t manage to Christianize the Shawnee, they worked with Black Hoof on his social and agricultural projects. With their help, it was Black Hoof who, for instance, established Wapakoneta’s first grist mill.

Tecumseh

Warren makes it clear that Wapakoneta was Black Hoof’s last stand. Now in his seventies, he vowed that he would die there. It would be, Black Hoof hoped, the permanent home of the Shawnee. Black Hoof argued that, “We’re arrived at the point beyond which we could not go.” He said that going further west was futile since, looking across the Mississippi, all he could see was white people spreading over the land as fast as they had earlier over the territories of Kentucky and Ohio.

There, in Wapakoneta, Black Hoof and his people would forge their new alliance with the white settlers. There was, clearly, no other choice, since the white invasion from Europe was so vast that it could no longer be stopped by military resistance. It was time to try and win the peace.

Professor Warren explains that three factors, in principle, undermined Black Hoof’s determination to resist removal from the Midwest. The most powerful one was the earlier mentioned Indian Removal Act of 1830, while a second one was the decision by another Shawnee tribal chief, Quatawepea, known to whites as Captain Lewis, to self-evacuate. Quatawepea was the head of a Shawnee community named for him (Lewistown) less that twenty-five miles from Wapakoneta. The third contributing factor was the return of another Shawnee leader, Tenskwatana, known to whites as “The Prophet”, from exile in Canada.

The Indian Removal Act, says Warren, basically left the Shawnee people “disabled in the law.” They were, in a very real sense, declared non-persons under federal justice. This legal erasure of the Indian was what gave the authority to Indian Removal Agent James B. Gardiner to issue a warning to Black Hoof and his people that if they didn’t abide by the removal order, they would have no legal recourse if white settlers decided to beat or kill them. Without a white witness to testify on their behalf they would have nowhere to take their complaint “no matter how many Indians were present.”

Quatawepea, a.k.a. Captain Lewis

IIn short, Warren indicates, Native Americans had no right to defend themselves or their property against white assault. And if they signed the treaties that ended up driving them from their land, they didn’t do so willingly, but by “force of law”—a white law that ruthlessly disenfranchised the Indian.

Quatawepea, after also being away with Black Hoof fighting on the American side in the Battle of Thames in 1813, returned to his home in Ohio to find that white vigilantes had burned his village and fields. Seeing the writing on the wall, Warren explains, he voluntarily left Lewistown and led a group of over one thousand three hundred Shawnees with him to join some twenty-seven tribes in a project to form an Indian state in southwest Missouri. His purpose was to find a way to be both Indian and American and to live in peace. But that project would also be stillborn.

As for The Prophet—a younger brother to Tecumseh, born in the area of Mad River, Ohio—Professor Warren indicates that he had long wanted to return to his native land from forced exile in Canada. Michigan Territorial Governor Lewis Cass offered him the chance to come back into US territory, but only if he advocated Indian removal from the Midwest. So it was that Tenskwatana came back, only to gather two hundred fifty other Shawnees and take them with him to a reservation in Kansas.

Tenskwatana, The Prophet

True to his vow, Black Hoof—aged ninety-one, having survived a lifetime of war and an assassination attempt in which he was shot in the face, and having sought to maintain an alliance of peace with white Americans—died near Wapakoneta in 1831, the same year that orders began to be executed for the definitive removal of the Shawnee from their tribal home in Wapakoneta, on the banks of the Auglaize River.

Prior to the forced removal, Warren points out, Indian populations had been thriving and growing. But post-removal demographics tell the story of the harsh consequences of a genocidal project. According to the professor’s research data—for which he quotes Jeffrey Ostler, author of Surviving Genocide—between 1822 and 1853, the Ohio Shawnee population declined from 2,183 to 1,755; from 1768 to 1857, the Ohio Seneca population dropped from 600 to 300, and from 1822 to 1859 the Ohio Miami people were reduced from 1,400 to just 466.

Listening to Professor Warren, I was not only stunned by the declining demographics spawned by forced removal of native peoples from Ohio, but also by how very few Indians there were to begin with. I couldn’t help but ask myself how hard it could have been for the white settlers in my home town—people of not so long ago, of my great-grandfather and great-great grandfather’s generations—to make peace with Native Americans who only numbered in the hundreds, and to have respected their ways and worked with wise leaders like Chief Black Hoof to share the bounty of Ohio’s privileged land? The answer can only be that Wapakoneta, the epi-center of the Shawnee universe, was part and parcel of a national attitude of conquest and domination, of homogenizing America, and particularly the eastern Midwest, to render it white by definition.

Warren says that the demographic collapse of the Shawnee and other tribes was due in large measure to the terrible rigors of a long forced march of the Indians, mostly on foot, from their homeland to frontier reservations in the Far West. But this genocidal trend was further underscored by the fact that the federal government had made no significant preparations to support the Indians once they reached those reservations. As a result, many survived the forced march only to die from hunger and disease once they arrived at their destination.

More specifically, during the removal of the Wapakoneta Shawnee, Warren indicates, the agent in charge, James Gardiner, had already run out of money by the time they reached Indianapolis, one hundred sixty miles away. He asked the Shawnee themselves to put up the money for the rest of the trip so that they were basically financing their own forced removal. But by the time they reached the Indiana-Illinois border, he had run out of money again, and left the Indians to their own devices as to how to reach the Kansas Territory.

Nor was Kansas the end of the line, Warren indicates. Two decades later, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 forced the Shawnee to leave their reservation in Kansas and to merge, along with nine other tribes, with the Cherokee Nation on their reservation land in Ottawa County, Oklahoma. Ten Native American peoples, then, were pushed and driven and dispossessed and squeezed into part of a single county in the Oklahoma Territory, in return for their resigned and peaceful adherence to the Indian Removal Act of 1830—in essence, racially “quarantined” from an ever invading, ever more greedy white population.

Adding insult to injury, says Professor Warren, Native Americans would continue to have no control even over their reservation lands. That control remained in the hands of often-corrupt Federal Indian agents who frequently “leased” Indian land to white farmers. This was all legal under the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 that ostensibly sought to instill a capitalist sense of private property in Native Americans and to break them of their tribal traditions. This was to be done by allotting a portion of reservation land to tribal leaders and heads of family. But these allotments were proportionally small and the rest of the reservation land was declared “surplus” by the government, thus, once again, allowing Native Americans, one way or another, to be robbed of their land, which ended up in white hands.

What this meant, Warren explained, was that tribes like the Ohio Shawnee, who had developed farming and animal husbandry skills, had insufficient land on which to use them, so that by the nineteen hundreds, many Native American men in Oklahoma were working dangerous, unhealthy, wage-earning jobs, like lead mining, to keep their families fed and clothed. Meanwhile, Native American children, including those of the Shawnee who lived on reservations, were removed from their parents and sent to some one hundred fifty boarding schools, which, according to Warren, employed a blend of Christian missionary and military-type training. The children were kept away from their families and were made to wear their hair in white American style, to don white American clothing, to speak English rather than their native language and to abandon their native religious beliefs. These were, basically, “re-education” centers designed to brainwash Native American children to the ways of the whites, but without permitting them access to white society.

The general idea behind removal, genocidal forced marches to reservations, the lack of funds afforded to the relocation of indigenous peoples and the manipulation of reservation lands on which Native Americans had been relocated seems clear: It was all about erasure of the American Indian. President Andrew Jackson said as much following several years of internal Indian exile that he signed into law with the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Jackson stated: “By persuasion and by force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for awhile their once terrible names.” It is hard to interpret this quote as describing anything but a deliberate policy of genocidal removal.

Nor, apparently, is the attitude a great deal different under the current administration. I’ve been following a thread on Chief Barnes’ Twitter feed in which he explains that the Shawnee have been shorted on federal funding from the Treasury allotted to Native American reservations to help them combat COVID-19. Despite taking their well-documented case to a federal court, this legal recourse has led nowhere, and the tribal council has now appealed to a higher court. Meanwhile, Native American populations are among the worst affected by the coronavirus plague.   

In his presentation to the Auglaize County Historical Society, Professor Warren told the story of Thomas Wildcat Alford, thought to be the first Shawnee to return to Ohio, a century after the execution of the Indian Removal Act. Educated at reservation boarding schools and at the historically black Hampton Institute of Virginia, Alford, grandson of the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh, was invited back in October of 1931, on the anniversary of Shawnee removal from Ohio.

More than a solemn and humble commemoration of this sad event, it appears to have been a kind of raucous celebration. The day after Alford arrived, says Warren, a headline in the Xenia Evening Gazette read: “Skeleton, Relic of the Past, Takes Ride in Auto”. It seems that to mark the grim anniversary, local white authorities could think of nothing better to do that to excavate a nearby Indian burial mound, retrieve a Native American skeleton and drive it around town in a car for all the world to see. And Thomas Wildcat Alford was specially invited to witness his Shawnee ancestor’s bones being used as a prop for a cruelly racist display. This incident was, Professor Warren says, symbolic of how Indians were expected to subscribe to the white cult of Native American erasure.

Despite the gross indignities and humiliations that “our” native Ohio Shawnee predecessors have had to suffer, they have diligently maintained their culture, their language and many of their traditions. Warren points to the constant work of Shawnees like Chief Ben Barnes, who has made a life-long study of Shawnee archeology and traditional ways. One of his projects, in collaboration with Wyandot ceramicist Richard Zane, has been to bring back authentic Shawnee pottery, so that tribal families can actually incorporate it into their everyday cooking.

Brett Barnes, Cultural Preservation

In his presentation, Professor Warren also quoted Brett Barnes, Director of Cultural Preservation for the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma. Regarding the enormous efforts of people like him and Chief Ben Barnes to retrieve, preserve and maintain Shawnee culture, he said, “I’m so proud of the fact that regardless, or despite, all efforts taken to put a stop to us observing our traditions and ceremonial ways, that we have managed to maintain it and still work and make a living, and then have to put in the extra time and effort and the ability to finance it out of our pocket to keep that going. To me, that’s something to be proud of because I’m one of those that am somewhat bitter about the relationship between Native American people and the US government. I’m proud of the fact that we can play their ballgame and beat them at their game and still say, ‘Na-na-na, we’re still maintaining this, too, and we still know who we are, and we still have it, and it’s still alive today.’ So I feel very strongly about that, and I’m proud of that.”

In Wapakoneta on the Warpath, I quoted Chief Ben Barnes—in response to a tweet by Wapakoneta City Schools Superintendent Aaron Rex seeking to downplay the controversy over the school’s inaccurate mascot and racist team name—as saying, “You said ‘Our community was once a place inhabited by many Indian tribes with the last being the Shawnee under the leadership of Chief Black Hoof.’ The office of Chief of the Wapakoneta Shawnees is now me. Ask us our opinion first. Do not presume to decide on our behalf.”

Shawnee Chief Ben Barnes

Professor Warren brought with him yet another message from Chief Barnes for Wapakoneta whites. Namely, that non-Natives should imagine having to suddenly leave the comforts of their own homes. “Imagine that after you have left, new people move in and begin to talk among themselves and create false stories about you and your homes. Some people impose their own imagined idea of you on what remains of your presence. Some even claim to be your long lost cousins and they act in your name.” The chief goes on to say that the Wapakoneta Redskins name and mascot “don’t help matters much,” adding that “they bear no resemblance whatsoever to the Shawnee people or their history.”

While many Wapakonetans, including Superintendent Rex and other city officials, have sought to convince critics that, far from racist and uncaring, their support for the use of a racial epithet for the school team name and of a school logo that bears no resemblance to their Native predecessors are indeed meant to “honor” the Shawnee, their flat rejection of the requests and arguments of the Shawnee themselves tell an opposite story—basically, that they couldn’t care less about the true history of the area and merely want to indulge their own fantasies.

Professor Warren, who knows the mind of the Shawnee perhaps better than any other white man on earth, indicates that the way to truly honor our home town’s Native past is to listen to Shawnee leaders themselves. And while this is precisely what Chief Barnes has also asked, his request has been met with deafening silence from the very town that was once the epi-center of the Shawnee culture.

If Wapakoneta wants to truly honor its Native past with more than lip-service to the Indian names that still echo in its streets, then it has to put in the work, first by recognizing that the Shawnee are not some legend from the ancient past, but a living breathing people, among whom the relatives of Chief Black Hoof still live, and then by establishing a cultural dialogue with the Shawnee leaders in order to learn and start to properly reflect the traditions and ways of the tribe. Beyond that, however, my home town would do well to start compensating for the past by being a radical voice for Native American rights and for the retrieval of Native culture, as well as to actively advocate for recognition of Shawnee historical sites and for the protection of Native American burial grounds—since, as Professor Warren points out, there is still no legal norm to prevent “relics from the past” from being dug up and driven around in a car for sport.

In short, if Wapakoneta wants to truly and legitimately honor its Native past, it needs to put aside the false pride and arrogance that render it deaf to the sensibilities of the Shawnee people and create a deep and lasting understanding with the descendants of Black Hoof. The people who know the objective facts—people like Chief Barnes, Professor Warren, and the Auglaize County Historical Society—can be of great help in taking that first important step. If not, we need to stop lying to ourselves about our role in the tragic history of our town’s aboriginal residents.