Wolves and Flax

Simeon and Katharine Prior were married 10 months before the end of the American Revolution and for twenty years they made a life in New England, where their ancestors had lived since 1634. And then in 1802, Simeon having heard about the land beyond the Ohio during his service in the American Revolution, suddenly traded his land for a track of wilderness identified only as lot 25 in the Connecticut Western Reserve. He along with Katharine and their ten children spent more than forty days traveling to their new home on America's western frontier.

The Prior Family established their settlement in 1802. And then almost nobody else settled in this remote location of the Cuyahoga Valley wilderness, directly adjacent to Indian territory, until after the Treaty of Fort Industry was signed. between the United States and the Indian nations of Wyandot (Huron), Ottawa, Ojibwe (Chippewa), Munsee, Lenape (Delaware), Potawatomi, and Shawnee on July 4, 1805. Significant numbers of settlers did not arrive until after the War of 1812.

For the Priors, this meant their isolation at the edge of the frontier continued for ten years after their arrival. Simeon's musings about what lead him and Katharine to move their family into what they knew to be harm's way is poignant: "What of the many chances against us and should we survive the perils of the boisterous lake and the distressing sickness usually attendant in a new settlement, we might fall before the tomahawk and scalping knife, for well I knew that many a settlement was established in blood."

Going further back in this family's history, it is sobering to think about what has transpired in the 385 years since these first pioneer families arrived on the shores of what is now the United States.

The New World that the first colonists and their offspring found was a fundamentally difficult and generally violent place all the way up until after the Spanish-American War of 1898, when the American military finally began to focus outside of its borders. Bloody conflicts large and small on American soil between rival colonial powers, rival colonies, communities, neighbors, and indigenous peoples all shaped the colonial era and the first hundred years of United States history. To paint this span of time with a single brush that portrays in simplistic terms what happened or how people thought and behaved is astonishingly deceptive. What is amazing is that anyone survived at all. But survive they did.