Coming Together

In 1994, having lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico for more than 22 years and having become thoroughly steeped in the Native American lore of the area, I was not a bit surprised when I began to find myself coming full circle back to my Midwest beginnings. The Indians of the Southwest believe that life is like a dance, moving in and out but always coming back to connect the circle.

In the spring of 1993 I had begun having a repetitive dream. This dream always centered on the city of Cincinnati, Ohio. The implied message of all these colorful and plotless dreams was that I should travel to Cincinnati and that for some yet unexplained reason I just needed to be there. If I had been involved in the New Age Movement, as many in Santa Fe are, I would have viewed such a happening with great seriousness, but as a transplanted mid-westerner through and through I found that the dreams became something of an uneasy joke to laugh about with family and friends.

To make these dreams even more inexplicable and perplexing was the fact that I came to the Southwest from northern Ohio, and although I had visited Cincinnati many times, nothing in those visits compelled me to move south to that location while an Ohio resident. In fact, all my thoughts and aspirations had pulled me west away from Ohio and Indiana, my joint home states.

Perhaps, I thought, spending so much of my time the previous ten years researching my midwestern ancestors had stimulated these senseless nighttime wanderings.

About this same time many elements of my genealogical research began to come together. As I dug deeper and deeper into my family history in the area surrounding Lima, Ohio, I discovered that my family’s history did not include just land-seeking Europeans willing to use any means to attain their goal and totally disregarding the rights of Native Americans, but that I had ancestors who had lived side by side with the Indians of northern Ohio for a good part of our early history.

On a research trip to Ohio in the summer of 1993, I came across an entry in an old Allen County, Ohio, history volume relating to one of my great-great-grandfathers, Edward Hartshorn, and his son, Elmore. Edward Hartshorn was an attorney and a judge living in Allen County in the early 1830s.

The story was of an incident that took place when the Shawnee Indian Chief Pe-Aitch-Ta (also called PHT) had been accused of stealing by a white neighbor named Billy Lippincott. Chief Pe-Aitch-Ta called Lippincott a liar to his face, saying, “Ah, Billy Lippincott, you be one big lie.” Constable Elmore Hartshorn brought Pe-Aitch-Ta to a Justice, most probably his father Edward. The Justice dismissed the case based on PHT’s testimony.

Our family’s story could not be told, I realized, without making every effort to define the role we had played in the settlement of the Northwest Territory and especially in the northwest corner of Ohio where all our ancestors ultimately chose to settle.

Once the circle begins to close, I soon found out, events in one’s life seem to magically fall in place until at some point you are no longer surprised by connections but, indeed, begin to expect them.

When I related the new discovery of my ancestor Hartshorn and the Shawnee Indian Chief to a Pueblo Indian friend, he suggested that I might enjoy reading a book that he had just finished on the life of Tecumseh, the great Shawnee warrior. The book entitled Panther  in the Sky was written by a well-known Midwest author, James Alexander Thom, who has written numerous fictional but carefully researched accounts of Indian men and women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Once I began reading Thom’s books, I found myself fascinated by his subject matter and writing style, and I set about reading all his books which concern not only the lives of Native American men and women but also the settlement of the near and far west. All in some ways were related to the story that I eventually wanted to tell about my family and their early days in the new western frontier.

The Pedigree Chart in Coming Together contains references to 51 surnames in the Kunz/Lause bloodline:  Allcott, Areson, Atkinson, Clawson, Cord, Cronauer, Curtis, DeLong, Devon, Elforde, Fairfax, Feinholtz, Franzoni, Gaskill, Giesker, Goody, Grothaus, Hamilton, Hartshorn, Hause, Henseler, Heyer, Hilliard, Himmelsbach, Hire Johnson, Kunz, Lause, Leibrecht, Lippincott, Loy, Lutzler, Marz, McHenry, Moreo, Morio, Naab, Naabin, Neely, Oldham, Orrels, Pohlman, Reihs, Rohrbaugh, Rossell, Scheibin, Schneider, Seibel, Shattuck, Shreve, Southwick, Voegler, Weere.