The Arrival of the Miami Indians In Ohio

Growing up in Oxford, Ohio, home of Miami University of Ohio, I'd always assume that the Miami Indians after whom the university is named were longstanding ancestral populations of the area. But, it turns out that this isn't the case. The Miami Indians started to arrive in Ohio around 1720, (in a migration noted historically by French hunters and trapper and missionaries) less than ninety years before Miami University was founded in 1809. Their migration, driven by pressures from other Indian tribes drove them there from an earliest known point of origin in Wisconsin.

The Indian tribes who preceded them in Ohio and their languages, like the indigeneous residents of large swaths of the Eastern United States in both the Midwest and the Southeast, have been lost to history.