Ohio was, in the 18th century, the American West, and it changed flags, at least on paper, many times while whites argued with words and guns over its ownership, disregarding, of course, the fact that many Indian tribes called the land west of the Appalachians and north of the Ohio River home and believed the land could not be owned but was granted them for their careful use by the Great Spirit, Moneto. Ohio was claimed by both England and France but for a short time was, on British Crown documents, a part of Canada under a parliamentary act that was one of several acts designed to punish the intractable colonists.
The acts were Britain’s response to the damage inflicted by the Boston Tea Party, when Massachusetts men thinly disguised as Indians on Dec. 16, 1773, broke open and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston harbor in a response to Britain’s granting of a tea monopoly to the East India Co. Those laws became known as the Intolerable or Coercive Acts. Read the rest of this entry »