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The major focus of Ohio's First Peoples is the series of encounters between the Europeans and the Indians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the same time we see the transformation of Indian economies which became dependent on European goods and the all-important fur trade while the Europeans' “constant demand for land, treaties concluded through fraud . . ., dishonest trading practices, recurrent outbreaks of European-introduced diseases and basic hatred” (29) undermined Indian cultures and forced many to move westward. Many of them had already migrated from the Atlantic seaboard with the encroachments of the whites. To add to the complexity of their lives, the Indians were enmeshed in the European struggle between the British and the French, sometimes called the second hundred years' war (from 1689 to 1815). For the Indians, however, their involvement in this political and economic web ended in the French and Indian War and the Battle on the Plains of Abraham with the defeat of the French. In discussing this encounter, Professor O'Donnell made his only noticeable error in the book by placing the Plains near Montréal rather than immediately outside the city of Québec . British parsimony (especially after the exhaustive expenditures during this last “world” war) and its Indian policy of control led to Pontiac 's Rebellion and continued unrest in the Ohio country.
Indian-American relations continued to deteriorate during the fledgling United States' war for independence. The image of despair and violence that Allan Eckert evoked in That Dark and Bloody River was reiterated by O'Donnell especially in his recounting of the massacre at Gnadenhutten. The onward march of the Europeans continued during the war and especially after it. Treaties with the British, like the one at Fort Stanwix which recognized the Ohio River and the western boundary for European settlements, were treated as worthless documents as large numbers of easterners moved into the fertile lands of the Ohio River valley. O'Donnell captures the desperation of the Indians and their desire to hold on to their lands in the face of this European onslaught. Military encounters, guerrilla actions, and occasional truces masked as treaty conferences marked the closing years of the eighteenth century. The Battle of Fallen Timbers and the resultant Treaty of Greenville in 1795 were two of the most prominent, especially with the resolve of General Anthony Wayne and the Washington presidency. But even these encounters could not stop the endless advance of the Europeans and proved to be only temporary measures at best. The War of 1812 and Tecumseh's confederacy were unfortunately the last gasps of real resistance.
The last chapter of O'Donnell's book focuses on the unfamiliar, i.e. the agonizing closing of Indian presence in Ohio. The Wyandots and few other Indian communities remained in the northern region of the state after the war with Britain, but were pressured to cede more and more of their lands. During these waning years, Indian mores were once again re-directed, this time with determined efforts by Christian missionaries like the Methodist John Stuart. By 1843, all of the remaining Ohio Indians were forced west to unspecified lands beyond the state of Missouri. Following the unethical “traditions” of the past, they were also defrauded in terms of the true worth of their lands and concomitant improvements which were under-assessed. As O'Donnell states in his conclusion: “ Ohio 's first peoples had passed from the scene, leaving behind a rich legacy of place names and long-ignored artifacts.”
