Who found Ohio?

Answer 1

When the first Europeans began to arrive in North America, Native Americans participated in the fur trade. When the Iroquois confederation depleted the beaver and other game in the New York region, they launched a war known as the Beaver Wars, destroying or scattering those Indians living in Ohio. The Eries along the shore of Lake Erie were virtually eliminated by the Iroquois in the 1680s. Thereafter, the Ohio lands were claimed by the Iroquois as hunting grounds. Ohio was largely uninhabited for several decades.

However, population pressure from expanding European colonies on the Atlantic coast compelled several groups of American Indians to relocate to the Ohio Country by the 1730s. From the east, Delawares and Shawnees arrived, and Wyandots and Ottawas from the north. Miamis lived in what is now western Ohio. Mingos were those Iroquois who migrated west into the Ohio lands.

During the 18th century, the French set up a system of trading posts to control the fur trade in the region. Christopher Gist was one of the first English-speaking explorers to travel through and write about the Ohio Country. When British traders such as George Croghan started to do business in the Ohio Country, the French and their northern Indian allies drove them out, beginning with a raid on Miami Indian town of Pickawillany (modern Piqua, Ohio) in 1752. The French began the military occupation of the Ohio valley in 1753, and an attempt by the Virginian George Washington to drive them out in 1754 led to a war known in the United States as the French and Indian War. As a result of the Treaty of Paris, the French ceded control of Ohio and the old Northwest to Great Britain.
British military occupation in the region had previously contributed to the outbreak of Pontiac's Rebellion in 1763. Ohio Indians participated in that war, until an armed expedition in Ohio led by Colonel Henry Bouquet brought about a truce. Another military expedition into the Ohio Country in 1774 brought Lord Dunmore's War to a conclusion.

During the American Revolutionary War, Native Americans in the Ohio Country were divided over which side to support. For example, the Shawnee leader Blue Jacket and the Delaware leader Buckongahelas sided with the British, while Cornstalk (Shawnee) and White Eyes (Delaware) sought to remain friendly with the United States. American frontiersmen often did not differentiate between friendly and hostile Indians, however: Cornstalk was killed by American militiamen, and White Eyes may have been. Perhaps the most tragic incident of the war --- the Gnadenhutten massacre of 1782 --- took place in Ohio.

With the American victory in the Revolutionary War, the British ceded claims to Ohio and the territory in the West to the Mississippi River to the United States.

After the Northwest Ordinance, settlement of Ohio began with the founding of Marietta by the Ohio Company of Associates, which had been formed by a group of American Revolutionary War veterans. The Miami Company (also referred to as the "Symmes Purchase") in the southwestern section and the Connecticut Land Company in the Connecticut Western Reserve in present-day Northeast Ohio.

The United States created the Northwest Territory in 1787 under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The territory was not allowed to legalize slavery (although once it achieved statehood it was allowed to do so, and did not.) The states of the Midwest would be known as free states, in contradistinction to those states south of the Ohio River known as slave states, and later, as Northeastern states abolished slavery in the coming two generations, the free states would be known as Northern States. The Northwest Territory originally included areas that had previously been known as Ohio Country and Illinois Country. As Ohio prepared for statehood, Indiana Territory was created, reducing the Northwest Territory to the approximately the size of present-day Ohio plus the eastern half of Michigan's lower peninsula.

White settlement of the Northwest Territory was resisted by Native Americans in the Northwest Indian War. The natives were eventually conquered by General Anthony Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 and much of present-day Ohio was ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Greenville the next year.
As Ohio's population numbered 45,000 in December 1801, Congress determined that the population was growing rapidly and Ohio could begin the path to statehood with the assumption that it would exceed 60,000 residents by the time it would become a state. In 1802, Congress passed the Enabling Act of 1802 that outlined the process for Ohio to seek statehood. The residents convened a constitutional convention and submitted a constitution to Congress. In 1953 it was decided to make March 1, 1803 the official date of Ohio's admittance into the Union.

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Answer 2

Arthur St Clair