The first European settlers to reach Ohio were French.

 

The first European settlers to reach Ohio were French.

It’s a little unclear which Frenchman it was who first explored modern-day Ohio.

We know that the famed French explorer and fur trader Robert La Salle explored northeastern Ohio as early as 1669.

In 1663, France had already claimed the land as a part of the Province of New France.

France did very little to stake its claim, though. Instead, they established several trading posts and built a few forts to protect them.

mounds used as burial sites and have excavated another 1000 earth-walled enclosures, including one enormous fortification with a circumference of about 3.5 miles, enclosing about 100 acres. We now know from a great variety of items found in the mound tombs - large ceremonial blades chipped from obsidian rock formations in Yellowstone National Park; embossed breast-plates, ornaments and weapons fashioned from copper nuggets from the Great Lakes region; decorative objects cut from sheets of mica from the southern Appalachians; conch shells from the Atlantic seaboard; and ornaments made from shark and alligator teeth and shells from the Gulf of Mexico - that the Mound Builders participated in a vast trading network that linked together hundreds of Native Americans across the continent.^[3] It has also been found that Hopewell era settlements were cities by population density alone, with thousands of residents at their peak.