On my third trip to the site of the Big Bottom Massacre, I again saw no park visitors. To put this in baseball terms, I’m 0 for 3. It doesn’t seem as much a slump as status quo.
A guy did show up to cut the grass at one point, but he went about his task like a man who was running from something. He powered his mower through the grass like a driver trying to qualify for the Indy 500, raced it back onto his trailer and quickly left. No restful breaks pondering the pretty view of the Muskingum River. No cheerful hellos to the only person (me) that he has probably ever seen here. He acted like a man who had, uh, seen a ghost.
There are a few picnic tables scattered about the park and I honestly wonder if anyone has ever used them. This seems like a better place for a séance than a picnic. I mean, wouldn’t it be nice to ask the spirits of the 12 settlers who were killed here by a passing party of Delaware and Wyandot warriors what they could possibly have been thinking when settled here in the fall of 1790?
In 1790, this place was in the middle of nowhere. In 2022, it’s one mile south of tiny Stockport, which is just this side of nowhere. If Indians decided to attack me here today, I would have to hope that the one car that passed on nearby Ohio 266 every five minutes or so would come to my rescue. Those aren’t good odds.
A quick backstory (I go into more detail in The Road to Wapatomica, A modern search for the Old Northwest) for those who don’t know it: Former Revolutionary War officer Rufus Putnam and 48 Ohio Company settlers had founded Marietta, 40 miles south of here, in 1788, 22 months before. In the context of the times, Marietta’s population exploded: 137 arrivals in its first year, 153 in its second and 203 in its third. The 36 hearty souls who came here in the fall of 1790 took a look around Marietta and realized that all of the choice farm land on the Ohio and Muskingum River banks there was taken, and decided to head up the Muskingum and find a good spot of their own.
Putnam counseled against it because he didn’t think it was safe. In a comparative sense, Marietta was. Fort Harmar had been built in 1785 and it stood across the Muskingum from Marietta, and the fledgling settlement had constructed the Campus Martius fortification of its own. While two peace treaties had opened up some of the land north of the Ohio to settlement, not all of the Native American tribes had signed off on it. Going deep in the forest and throwing up a few cabins was like playing a game of Russian roulette.
The Big Bottom 36 did it, anyway. They found this rich riverfront site and started building a blockhouse, got it partially finished and then started work on their own cabins. That’s what they were doing when the weather turned viciously cold, much earlier than they expected. It froze the mud that they needed to chink between the logs of their buildings. A few days before Christmas, the Muskingum River was frozen solid.
That’s the way things were when they sat down to dinner on January 2, 1791. No sentries were posted. No pickets for another layer of protection. Their guns were stacked in the corner. They were in their cabins and in the blockhouse eating when that party of Delaware and Wyandot warriors passed on the Indian trail across the river, were surprised to find the vulnerable little settlement there, and attacked.
The Indians broke up into two parties. The smaller one entered the Choate cabin, befriended the four men who were earing there and then quickly overcame them. They tied them up and took them prisoners, four of the five taken captive.
Those in the blockhouse didn’t fare so well. Some of the Indians stuck their rifle barrels between the unchinked logs and commenced firing. Others burst through the door with guns ablaze. Isaac Meeks’ wife grabbed a nearby ax and buried in one of the attackers’ shoulders before she was shot and killed. John Stacy escaped through a window and climbed onto the roof where he was killed. All of the others inside the unfinished blockhouse were killed but Phillip Stacy, John’s 16-year-old brother, who was found hiding under some bedding, begged for his life and was taken prisoner. He died of sickness while still a prisoner along the Maumee River.
In another cabin, the Bullard brothers heard the shooting, grabbed their guns and disappeared into the forest. They reached a hunting camp four miles away and reported what had happened, and news which quickly spread to the Waterford and Wolf Creek settlements, miles away.
Back at Big Bottom, the Indians collected all of the valuables, broke up the wood floor and wood furniture, piled in on the bodies and set the blockhouse on fire. When searchers reached the spot the following day, they found a macabre site: because the blockhouse walls were constructed with green lumber, it only partially burned and some were left standing surrounding the pile of charred bodies.
They buried the bodies of all of those dead settlers right on that spot, which lies under that white obelisk that stands in the park. If you stand back from that it, you can see that the ground is raised slightly from the ground surrounding it, which conjures the image of a search party digging a little deeper and piling dirt on all of it, dead bodies, burnt lumber and all.
Standing on that spot makes me a little uneasy, even though it’s been more than 230 years since the massacre occurred. It’s easy to look around the park — no one ever settled here again — and imagine the panic and chaos that ensued that cold, dark January night. The names of the dead and captured are all listed on the base of the obelisk, although some of them are so worn that they are difficult to read. I stared at them for a few minutes, trying to make out all of the names, then I suddenly remembered that I was the only one here and beat a hasty path to my car.
This is no place for a picnic.
