Cincinnatians have mostly forgotten that the Ohio Valley was the western frontier and that Native Americans lived here first and didn’t leave voluntarily.

When the early settlers built their first churches – the Columbia Baptist Church and a Presbyterian Church at Fourth and Vine – every man in attendance was required to bring his loaded musket and sentries were posted to watch for attack.

On 1 June 1791, Benjamin Van Cleve and two other Cincinnati residents were attacked while clearing an out-lot just south of where Music Hall is now located on Elm Street. Alerted by their barking dog, the settlers raced back toward the cabins on the banks of the Ohio River. In his “Extracts from the History of Cincinnati,” A.E. Jones tells the grisly tale

“Two of them made their escape, but Van Cleve, who had passed them in the race, and at the time was three hundred yards or more in advance, was intercepted at a fallen tree top, by an Indian who sprang on him from behind the ambuscade. Van Cleve was seen to throw the savage and the Indian to plunge a knife twice or thrice into the side of his antagonist, but, perceiving the approach of the whites, he hastily stripped off the scalp and made his escape to his party in the rear. When the two fugitives got up, Van Cleve was entirely lifeless.”

On another occasion, a sergeant, a corporal and another young man left Cincinnati to deliver a cow to Dunlap Station on the Great Miami River. Before leaving town, the sergeant stopped by a blacksmith’s shop to pay part of his bill.

“You had better pay me more,” the blacksmith said, “The Indians will get the rest.”

The sergeant waved off the warning, but A.E. Jones reports:

“In the course of two hours afterward he had a bullet put through him, his scalp taken, and the residue of his money carried off.”

Dunlap Station, out on the very northwest boundary of Colerain Township, was one of a series of outposts circling Cincinnati on the fringes of settlement. Among them were White’s Station in Carthage and Covalt’s Station in Terrace Park.

One of the most gruesome incidents of early Cincinnati took place at Dunlap Station. Shawnee warriors had kidnapped some settlers from that area, so a few soldiers were dispatched from Fort Washington in Cincinnati to beef up defenses. On 10 January 1791, about 500 Native Americans surrounded the station and demanded its surrender. The garrison refused, and after a day of intermittent gunfire, the Indians brought out Abner Hunt, one of the kidnapped men. According to Greve’s “Centennial History of Cincinnati”:

“He was brought to a place in full view of the station, where he was stripped entirely naked, and fastened to a log with his hands and feet outstretched, and pinioned to the ground. A pile of dead limbs was placed upon his body and set on fire, while a horrid dance, accompanied with whooping and yelling, was kept up for hours. The screams of Hunt were plainly heard by the garrison in the midst of the yelling of the Indians, and continued for a long time, growing fainter and fainter toward daylight, when they ceased, as life had probably expired.”

A larger troop from Fort Washington arrived later that day to break the siege.

White’s Station near Carthage was attacked on 19 October 1793 by a band of 40 warriors. Dogs around the station began barking and the settlers, thinking they had treed a raccoon, went out to look. They were interrupted by a war whoop and gunfire. A settler named Andrew Goebel was cut down by a dozen musket balls. Two children were killed in the attack. Only one attacker, the chief, managed to leap into the stockade, where he was shot to death. The settlers flayed his corpse and made razor strops from his skin. According to Jones, one of these strops remained, in 1888, in the possession of one of the families involved.

At this early date, powdered wigs were still in fashion. This accessory figures into a report by A.E. Jones about an attack upon Colonel Robert Elliott, a contractor engaged in supplying General Anthony Wayne’s army. One day, business took him to Fort Hamilton in Butler County, a dangerous trip through territory controlled by indigenous warriors.

“He was a very large man, weighing, it is said, more than three hundred pounds and wore a large wig. When some four miles from Fort Hamilton, on what is now the Winton Road, he was shot and killed by a party of Indians. His servant fled back to Hamilton, followed by the Colonel’s horse. One of the Indians, said to have been a chief, ran to scalp him. Seizing the hair, and about to apply the scalping knife, the wig came off; he looked at it with astonishment for a moment, and exclaimed, ‘Damn lie!’”

In 1792, a 10-year-old boy named Oliver Spencer was kidnapped by Indians while walking home to Columbia from an Independence Day celebration at Fort Washington. An adult companion was killed and scalped, but Spencer was enslaved for most of a year by his captors until he was ransomed and returned to his family. He later became a prominent banker and wrote a book about his captivity.

Although the attacks described so far featured muskets and gunpowder, some Native Americans preferred bow and arrow. After centuries of experimentation, these so-called primitive weapons were formidable, indeed. Jones describes the brutal power of a flint-tipped projectile:

“These were the last instances in which a savage rifle was fired within the present limits of Cincinnati, later depredations being connected with the bow and arrow, which enabled them to destroy cattle while prowling through the streets by night, which frequently occurred, without creating an alarm. On one of these visits they shot an arrow with a stone head into an ox with such force that it went entirely through the carcass.”

In the spring of 1794, a caravan transporting military supplies was attacked on what is now Hamilton Avenue. A posse was quickly pulled together and charged after the Indians, who escaped. According to Greve:

“They found, however, lying in the run, the body of the man who was killed. He had been tomahawked and scalped. This body was buried near the spot. As late as 1857, while building a bridge over Bloody Run, Solomon Burkhalter came upon the remains of the man buried there 63 years before. The body was reinterred deeper in the earth beneath the abutment of the bridge.”

It should be noted that, while the pioneering immigrants are somewhat reticent with details, it is obvious that they engaged in atrocities and brutal attacks as well.