Ohio’s original Native American tribes were removed from Ohio long before white people arrived.

 

Ohio’s original Native American tribes were removed from Ohio long before white people arrived.  

While Europeans may have started to colonize parts of North America as early as 1607, it wasn’t until much later that they reached as far inland as Ohio.

Until the mid-1600s, Ohio had been more or less continuously inhabited by successive groups of people sharing the same cultures.

The more well-known of these tribes included the Fort Ancient and Erie people.

Unfortunately, we know little of many of these earlier tribes as they were soon either wiped out or pushed out of the region by the Iroquois Confederacy, a neighboring confederacy of tribes from the modern-day New York Region.

Their conquest was a direct result of the newly formed fur trade between the eastern tribes and the recently arrived European settlers.

By the 1700s, the Iroquois had moved on. The move allowed the tribes from neighboring regions, Shawnee, Miami, and Wyandot, to repopulate the area.