THE OTTAWA TRIBE IN PORT CLINTON - Linda Higgins

The Ottawa, or Odawa, originally lived on the East Coast, then migrated to Michigan, Ohio, and southern Canada. The Algonquian-language tribe took their name from the Indian word, “adawe,” meaning “traders,” because they were known as intertribal traders. They called themselves “Anishinabe,” meaning “original people” and called Manitoulin Island, Lake Huron, Michigan's Upper Peninsula and the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario, Canada, their homeland. They became part of an alliance with the Ojibwe and Potawatome, called the Council of Three Fires, sharing language, manners and customs. Together they fought the Iroquois Confederacy, the Dakotas, and the Wyandot.

Native Americans lived in this area well before the Europeans explored the Portage River or the town of Port Clinton was settled. They had migrated to northern Ohio around 1740, living in the area when the first pioneers began to settle here. The Ottawa were the largest tribe, living along the Maumee River, but hunting and fishing in the future Port Clinton, the Portage River giving them easy access from the west. There are two stone monuments in Port Clinton, one where the first Fort Sandoské stood, along the north shore of Sandusky Bay, built by the French and abandoned by 1754. A matching stone monument is downtown in Waterworks Park, representing the northern terminus of the portage from Sandusky Bay to Lake Erie. The portage was used by the Ottawa and other tribes, as well as early explorers, to save 50 miles of treacherous travel around Marblehead Peninsula.

By 1794, General Anthony Wayne had built multiple forts in the area. He and his men defeated the allied tribes at the Battle of Fallen Timbers by the end of that year, near what is now Maumee. Other defeats pushed the tribes to cede more Ohio territory. After signing the Treaty of Detroit, giving southeastern Michigan and a section of northwest Ohio to the United States, many Ottawa left for northern Michigan.

In 1831, when the Ottawa chief moved his tribe to the Maumee River area from Catawba Island, he left behind his wife and her seven or eight children because she was “not a true squaw.” This could have meant that she was mentally deficient, or of mixed blood, or perhaps she had committed a tribal infraction. Soon after this, she neglectfully exposed her children and animals to tremble weed and thus lost most of her family. The two children who were spared were living elsewhere at the time: Johnny, a sailor, lived in Port Clinton, and Betsy Mo-John worked for the Porter family on Catawba. The chief’s wife, whose name is unknown, disappeared soon after the deaths.

Betsy moved to Port Clinton and worked in a saloon. She met and married Henry Luckart, from Württemberg, Germany, in 1849. They moved into a log cabin at what is now 214 E. Perry Street.

She never had children but adopted a neighbor’s child after the mother died in childbirth. They then moved to Catawba and built a log cabin, but moved to and from Port Clinton for a few years. Betsy disappeared and Luckart died in 1874. She then married a French farmer, Henry Bonnet, and the eccentric lady was known from then on as Betsy Bonnet. She died in 1908, at 92 or 95, and is buried in the Bloomingville Cemetery in Erie County. The log cabin that she and Luckart built now sits next to Owen Gideon Wine Company and is on the National Register of Historic Places.