Ohio History Journal
BIRTHPLACE OF
LITTLE TURTLE.
CALVIN YOUNG, GREENVILLE.
The village where Little Turtle was born
in 1752 was lo-
cated on the north tributary of the Eel
River, twenty miles north-
west of Ft. Wayne, Indiana, in Whitney
County. This north
tributary is known today as the Blue
River Branch, near its
junction at Blue Lake, to which it
furnished an outlet only a
short distance away. It stood on the
west side of the river
on a high sandy point of land,
surrounded on three sides by a
great bend in the river. A wide prairie
marsh skirted those high
lands north and south, but on the east
the high banks neared each
other, making it an easy ford to the
north bank of the lake only
a few hundred yards to the eastward. The
Blue Lake con-
tained possibly five hundred acres.
Near the foot of the hill, immediate to
the south, a fine
spring of water bubbled forth underneath
the shade of a beau-
tiful grove of barren oak trees. A short
distance south of the
spring nestling in the middle of the
prairie was a small lake
containing four or five acres, and so
very deep that the water
looked a dark blue. It was called by the
Indians "Devil's Lake",
from the fact that something mysterious
had appeared in or near
it entirely unknown to Indian lore
during a dusky Summer
evening, at which the Indians became
terribly frightened and
ran all the way to Ft. Wayne then a
frontier outpost.
Along about 1863, and for a number of
years later, the writer
has been on this peculiar ancient
village site many times, where
Little Turtle was born, and which was
his home nearly all his
life. Along the river banks were Indian
trails, worn several
inches deep, which not only spoke of
primitive, but also of recent
times, as it was a flourishing village
in 1812, and, possibly, was
not entirely deserted until 1846, at
which time the Indians were
all removed to the West.
It seemed that Nature had provided here
with a lavish hand
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