History of Anthony Shane

Anthony Shane, born Antoine Chene sometime between 1760 and 1770 to a French Canadian father and Ottawa Indian mother, grew up among the Shawnee on their lands in Ohio, hunting and fishing the St. Marys River and knowing tribal leaders including Tecumseh. He fought alongside his kinsmen and the British against military expeditions of the 1790s, but after the British abandoned the tribes in 1794 he came to work with Indian leaders of that era and later for the U.S. Government as an interpreter, messenger, scout, advisor, and leader of Indian scouts during the War of 1812. In April 1813, during the British siege of Fort Meigs under William Henry Harrison, he barely escaped a scalping, and at the Battle of Thames on October 5, 1813, where Tecumseh was killed, he helped identify the mutilated body for the army. In 1814, for his service during the War of 1812, he received a grant of 320 acres on the south bank of the St. Marys River at the 2nd Crossing, land known as Shane’s Grant, and there he plotted Shanesville on June 23, 1820. Shanesville was incorporated on June 5, 1866, became known as Shanes Crossing, and in 1890 the U.S. Postal Service decreed that the town would be called Rockford. In 1817 he again served as an interpreter at the Fort Meigs Treaty, in which the Ohio tribes ceded much of their land in Northwest Ohio, and for that work he received a 640 acre reservation across the river from his earlier grant. In the 1820s he supervised road construction on present-day State Route 118, and he and his wife Lamateshe lived on Shane’s Reservation north of the river and farmed the ground. Though people of mixed ancestry often suffered racial prejudice in that period, he was admired by the community and described as the best known man in the area, and Lamateshe also was well regarded. In 1828 he left for Kansas as part of another government relocation of the Shawnee, sold the reservation to Colonel William Botts Hedges, who had once leased land to John Chapman, known as Johnny Appleseed, for planting apple seeds, then made his home on the Kansas River and later at Fort Leavenworth, where he died in 1834 in his 60s.

Rockford, Ohio · United States