History is alive

On Sunday, history came out of the history books and walked the streets of Fort Recovery.
John Winkler, a Columbus, Ohio, attorney and amateur historian who has just published a book on the 1791 defeat of U.S. Army troops known as St. Clair’s Defeat, conducted a two-hour walking tour.
As he did so, he brought the event to life.
And, simultaneously, he reminded me of how easily we take those moments in history for granted.
The Fort Site has long been the destination for school field trips, Cub Scout excursions, and family outings. For most kids, its most memorable moments involved running or rolling or sliding down the hill into what used to be the Wabash River.
Nobody rolled down the hill in my group Sunday afternoon.
Instead, we used Winkler’s words and our imaginations to try to recreate that chilly November morning.
We looked toward Ambassador Park, beyond the current path of the Wabash, site of a zillion tractor pulls, and in our mind’s eye saw a force of 1,400 Native Americans from a variety of tribes assembled along the ridge united in only one thing: Battle.
We looked around the area of the baseball diamond and imagined hapless “Kentuckians,” who mostly weren’t the seasoned frontiersmen that the government hoped for but were conscripts who had been paid to take their place. We imagined the moment when — just as the sun was beginning to light the sky in the east — it began to dawn on them that they were doomed.
We listened as Winkler spelled out the differences between a young American military that believed in firepower and Indian warriors whose tactics emphasized maximizing casualties on the other side while minimizing their own.
We listened while he explained lessons learned by commanders in the Revolutionary War that would prove absolutely useless when facing an enemy that never shot twice from the same place and refused to behave by European standards.
We listened while he talked about how many of the participants in that day’s events had lived both in the “American world” and the “Indian world” and often moved back and forth.
As we climbed the hill up from the old Wabash banks, we imagined rows of infantrymen firing their muskets into the woods below.
(Winkler explained that sometime in the 19th or early 20th century the course of the Wabash was changed to end flooding of a set of railroad tracks.)
And then, over the course of two hours, we walked the streets of downtown as the battle unfolded in Winkler’s narrative.
We might have been standing across from the IGA, but we were thinking about dragoons and poor gout-ridden Gen. St. Clair, whose joints hurt so badly he couldn’t even get properly dressed when the attack upon the camp was launched.
We might have been across the street from Brockman’s Appliances, but we were thinking about Gen. Richard Butler, whose heart was cut out and eaten by the Indian warriors. In its own way, that chilling event was a tribute to his valor.
There was a Twilight Zone feel to it at times, but it was a compelling tour.
And it was a reminder how much has happened on this earth before our arrival, how many tragedies have unfolded, how many follies have been perpetrated, and how much history has to offer.
Now it’s time to settle in on a wintry evening and read Winkler’s book.[[In-content Ad]]