Blood on the Ohio

Frontier Tales of Terror

By: Fritz Zimmerman

Narrated by: David Webb

Accounts of murders, torture, and massacres of colonists and Native Americans were reported in early historical journals. Heinous stories, that will bring a renewed understanding of the terrible costs of western expansion; a cost paid in full by the Natives and those that thought it just to take their lands.

At the beginning of the year 1754, a few colonists' cabins began to appear on the western side of the Allegheny mountains. The British western expansion gave rise to the French and Indian War. The conflict was begun over French and British claims over the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers called the Forks of the Ohio. From 1775 to 1783, during the American Revolution, resources and manpower were unavailable to the beleaguered settlers. Another 10 years would pass before the Native Americans relinquished their lands.

Native Americans and colonists were engaged in a war of extermination that included women and children. Numerous atrocities were being committed by both parties. Somber tales that few have heard, but reveal the heavy price in blood that both parties paid for those lands of the Ohio River.

©2016 Fritz Zimmerman (P)2017 Fritz Zimmerman

Familiar locations.

The narrator talked too fast. I had to go back many times to catch the story.

I hope you've never been to Ohio

The story is rather one-sided, but that's not that unusual given the time period, and the extant record (how many natives could write English in the 18th century?). But the thing that killed me is that the reader has literally no idea how to pronounce the names of locations in Ohio. Surely, he could have found this out before recording. I mean, he utterly botches even easy ones like Steubenville (the accent is not on "ben"), and he is utterly hopeless for Portage (a real English word, he pronounces like it's French); Scioto and Chillicothe are practically unrecognizable. If you are familiar with these names, it is maddening to hear them mispronounced over and over and over again, and it detracts from the narrative (such as it is).