When William Henry Harrison arrived in Ohio in 1791, he entered a plentiful land of thick forests and flowing streams, where buffalo, bear, elk, and wild turkey lived and the Ohio River provided abundant fish and clear water. Indians had lived on this land 15,000 years before its discovery by European explorers, and tribes such as the Shawnee and the Miami regarded the Ohio River as sacred and as the center of the world, while the Iroquois called it "0-Y-0," meaning "Great River." Since Harrison's time, both the land and the river have changed greatly: what was once an untamed source of food, transportation, and hardship is now controlled by locks and dams, and forest cover in Ohio has fallen from 95% to less than 30%. Buffalo disappeared as hunters came from the east and killed whole herds for meat, fur, and horns, causing losses among other plant and animal species as well. Yet traces of the earlier landscape remain here, where parts of the site have been returned to their natural state under the United States Fish and Wildlife Service's preservation strategy, the endangered Running Buffalo Clover grows in the Lawn of Congress Green Cemetery, and a nature trail to Harrison's Tomb passes through a remnant forest descended from the woods that young Ensign Harrison knew in the early part of his military career.
