How the Mekoche Were Remembered

How the Mekoche Were Remembered. . , Dehumanized in History Texts , Kentuckians remembered Logan's raid as a successful campaign that contributed to opening the Ohio territory for American settlement. Building on the ideology of continental expansion that began with the first colonial contact between Europeans and North America's Indigenous People, the term "manifest destiny" was coined in 1845, supporting the belief that American expansion westward was both justified and inevitable. That philosophy was integrated into 19th century histories of Ohio, the Miami Valley Region, and Logan County., Romanticized in Literature , White settlers like the Piatt family, which moved to Logan County from Cincinnati in 1828, heard stories of the Mekoche villages from aging local frontiersmen, including Simon Kenton, who at one point owned land in this valley. Local stories led to legends that were preserved in poems and publicity materials by the Piatts and others that echoed values and sentiments of popular literary works, such as James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, written in 1826, and The Song of Hiawatha, written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1855., "Becoming our Own Storytellers" , "When we create relationships of mutual collaboration and both sides are willing to listen to each other, a more complete truth of our Shawnee people can be told." , Chief Benjamin Barnes, Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma , Resilience through Adversity, 2017, These books, recommended by Chief Barnes, Chief Wallace, and other scholars, provide insight into the identity of the Mekoche who lived on this land: , Settling Ohio First Peoples and Beyond , The Shawnees and Their Neighbors 1795-1870 Stephen Warren , The Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma Resilience through Adversity , The Worlds the Shawnees Made Migration and Violence in Early America Stephen Warren