The Miami Connection

The Miami Indians once lived in the land around present-day Miamisburg. English traders in the eighteenth century heard them call themselves “twightwee,” a name derived from the alarm cry of the sandhill crane, while French missionaries called them “Miami,” from “Oumamik,” a Chippewa word meaning “the people of the peninsula,” referring to an earlier home on what is now the Door Peninsula in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Led by their chief Mishikinakwa, or Little Turtle, the Miamis struggled to keep this land Indian, but defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the Treaty of Greenville foreshadowed their removal to the Kansas Territory in 1846 and then to the Oklahoma Territory in 1867, ending their presence in most of Ohio and Indiana. On October 10, 1846, five canal boats carrying remnants of the tribe passed through this site on the Miami and Erie Canal on their way to the Ohio River, where steamboats would carry them westward out of the land. Some descendants later returned, and the name Miami still remains on the map.

Miamisburg, Ohio · United States