I just completed another short hiking trip with my brother and my oldest son. It wasn't the most spectacular hike we've gone on, or the most fun, but it has some historical significance for our family. My dad used to tell us this story when we were kids, and we always figured he was making most of it up, but we actually found an official account in the Ashland County Library that contained enough names and detail that I’m pretty sure it’s mostly true (although much of the detail had to have been recorded from the oral recitation of the protagonist, as there was no-one else to witness it). Here is a summary of that official account in my own words in the interest of brevity:

In June of 1781 Colonel George Rogers Clark led an expedition of troops to counter a party of Indians and Canadians who were advancing on the Falls of the Ohio (modern day Louisville). He called for support and a couple of units of volunteers were raised in Western Pennsylvania, and traveled down the Ohio River in boats in order to join up with Clark in Northern Kentucky. One of these volunteers was 17 year-old Christian Fast, who was my great great great (and probably a few more greats) grandfather.

The boat Christian Fast was in was part of a small group of vessels that became separated from the main body, and somewhere between the Miami and Scioto rivers had stopped on the shore to shoot, slaughter, and cook a buffalo because they were short on provisions. While they were doing this, they were attacked by a large party of Indians. They attempted to flee back to the boat but were under fire and the boat became entangled and disabled. Fast was a strong swimmer, so he jumped in the water and set out for the Kentucky side of the river. Once he reached the shore he encountered even more Indians, who motioned for him to come to them. Fast wasn’t stupid and wasn’t having any of that, so he turned around and started swimming back out into the river, hoping to catch up to one of the other boats that was trying to make its way downstream. The Indians on the Kentucky side started shooting at him, and he took a round though the fleshy part of his thigh. Nevertheless, he kept swimming and managed to reach the boat…right as its occupants surrendered to the Indians.

The prisoners were stripped, forced to carry bundles of loot on their backs, and marched through the dense forest for days, with the ultimate destination being the area of present day Upper Sandusky, a couple of hundred miles north. At one point early on into the march, the prisoners were brought out around the campfire and forced to dance. Fast was unable to dance normally because of his leg injury, so he danced on his hands. This greatly impressed his captors, and the old Indian warrior who had captured Fast took pity on him and bandaged his wound and put him on a horse. The other prisoners were also forced to run the gauntlet in every Indiana village they came to, but the warrior managed to spare Fast from having to do this.

Upon reaching Upper Sandusky, the other surviving prisoners were ultimately exchanged, but Fast was retained and adopted into the family of the old warrior who had cared for him. They cut his hair, pierced his ears and nose, and taught him how to hunt and fish in their manner. After about a year, they began pressing him to marry a young Indian Squaw. I’m not sure if all the squaws were ugly or if Fast had simply not bought into that way of life, but he managed to convince the Indians that he wasn’t yet able to provide for a wife, and needed a gun to hunt with and a cow to provide milk. The Indians agreed with this logic, and agreed to allow him to accompany the next raiding party so that he could procure these items.

In the spring, Fast went with his adopted brother as a member of the war party that attacked the fort in Wheeling, WV. After laying siege to the fort for several days, the Indians were unable to capture it (there was an interesting tidbit in the story about a wooden canon that exploded and killed a bunch of them), so several raiding parties split off in hopes of preying upon some of the smaller settlements in western Pennsylvania. This being Fast’s “hometown”, he realized that he could not allow this to happen. He managed to escape by making it appear that he had fallen into the river and drowned, and then managed to outrun the war party and warn the settlers, which gave them enough time to muster a defense at Fort Rice in Washington County, PA. The Indians were repulsed, and Fast was eventually reunited with his family. Later in life, after marrying and starting a family, Christian Fast moved to Ashland County, Ohio, where he maintained good relations with the Delaware Indians, some of whom he had known personally during his captivity, until the Delawares moved out of the area. He was one of the first of our family to settle in Ashland County, and my parents still live there today.


So what does this have to do with our hike? Shawnee State Forest outside of Portsmouth Ohio lies roughly in the area where Christian Fast was captured on the Ohio River in 1781, and would have been the area where they began their march north after being captured. There’s a 38-mile backpacking loop there, and it’s reasonable day's drive from home so we decided to hike it. We were going to do it two weeks ago, but the weather was crummy so we put it off until this weekend. The weather was only marginally better, but we decided to try anyway. My son and I drove out to my brother’s place near Columbus on Thursday night, and we got up early Friday and made it to the trailhead right after sunup. We did the loop backwards, hiking counter-clockwise.





Day 1 it drizzled a bit on and off, but otherwise the weather wasn’t too bad. They were calling for temps in the high 70s, but thankfully I don’t think it got much above high 60s. We were still sweating pretty good. The terrain is reminiscent of Appalachia…lots of rolling hills, and the trail is constantly going up or down. There were some short-ish sections of ridgewalk, which were nice as it was drier up there and had a nice breeze. When you’d get down into the valleys, though, it was humid, wet, and kind of dank. For all the wetness, though, the creeks were pretty dry and we were happy that they had cisterns at most of the established campsites where we could fill our water bottles.



The cisterns come with a cost, though. The whole area is crisscrossed with a network of Forest Service roads (which is how they get the water to the cisterns), and a lot of the trail itself is either on these roads or on “bridle trails”, which are functionally the same thing. This detracts somewhat from the wilderness feel of the hike. On the flip side, pretty much the only views you are going to get are through these logging cuts where the trees are cleared out. The roads also tend to be a bit shallower grade than some of the more rustic trail sections, so it can be a welcome break to walk them.



Our original plan was to make it to camp 4 on the first night, but the topo map showed that one being down low by a creek, and with all the moisture we’d encountered down in the valleys that didn’t seem very appealing. Camp 5 was on a ridge, and while it wasn’t very big, it was dry-ish and had a full cistern and an outhouse. We spent the night there, only got rained on a little bit, had a nice fire, and I also got to try out the lightweight hammock that my wife bought me for my birthday this year. It was nice to get off my feet for a bit. My brother had printed out the Christian Fast story, so we read it there sitting around the fire.



Day two we packed our sort of wet gear and continued north. We passed camp 4, which was basically a swamp and were glad we had opted to stay at 5 the night before. There were some gnarly hill climbs and lots of wet grass and leaves, so our shoes got soaked in short order, and the deep leaves would hide loose or slick rocks, which made the hills pretty treacherous.



There were some decent views at a few logging cuts, but overall it was a pretty rough day. We stopped at camp 3 for lunch, which was right by the road that bisects the route. We met some hikers coming the other way who had just completed the north half of the loop. They said camps 1 and 2 were both low and wet. The forecast also didn’t look good…lots of rain overnight and all day today. They had decided to bail and walk the road back to their car, and we made the decision to follow. If not for the impending rain, we’d have finished it out, but as it was it just wasn’t worth it. The trail was sketchy enough as it was, and there was a good chance somebody was going to slip and fall and break something in the rain, plus cowering in a tiny backpacking tent all night in the rain, then packing up in the rain in the morning didn't sound like a good time.



We ended up putting in about 27 miles total…we missed out on about 13 by not doing the top loop. Overall, it’s a well-marked and accessible hike within reasonable driving distance of our house, and while it lacks some of the spectacular scenery that characterized our hikes in Wyoming, Alaska, or even Dolly Sods, it does offer the opportunity to “embrace the suck.” At one point my son asked me why we were doing this, and I told him, "Because it's hard!" At least none of us had to do it with a bullet in our leg, not were we forced to run the gauntlet.

He was marched from the Ohio to Upper Sandusky with a leg wound? Tough SOB. You have some great DNA!

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Originally posted by YooperSigs:
He was marched from the Ohio to Upper Sandusky with a leg wound? Tough SOB. You have some great DNA!

Well, he got to ride a horse for some of it, but yeah, he was definitely a tough SOB! I have a different great great great grandfather a few generations closer who survived over a year in a Confederate prison camp and then the sinking of the Sultana on his way home. Our family isn't good with riverboats!

One of my ancestors, Gilbert Field (great great uncle or so), survived Andersonville but perished on the Sultana. My aunt had a letter from him that mentioned Lincoln's assassination that would have been posted between April 15th and the 26th, 1865.

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Originally posted by NOCkid:
One of my ancestors, Gilbert Field (great great uncle or so), survived Andersonville but perished on the Sultana. My aunt had a letter from him that mentioned Lincoln's assassination that would have been posted between April 15th and the 26th, 1865.

My great great great gandfather, Harrison Spafford, was in the 102nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He was captured at Athens, AL, and then interred in Cahaba Prison in Alabama. When the Sultana blew up, he couldn't swim but survived by clinging to a piece of wreckage.

That's a great story 92fs.....45 years ago I buried a telephone cable from Chillicothe to Portsmouth right though Shawnee State Forest. Rugged but beautiful country for sure and copperheads out the ass.

Gilbert was with the 23rd Ohio Infantry, not sure where he was captured. There is conflicting info regarding the Sultana wreck, he is listed as a survivor on some sites, but he in fact was killed.

I remember being impressed by his letters as his use of language was quite eloquent, especially considering he probably wasn't highly educated. He described some of the terrible conditions at Camp Sumpter.

His brother Joel survived the war and made it back home to Wellington, Ohio. Joel was with the Ohio 2nd Cav. and it appears that he fought against one of my wife's distant ancestors, John Hunt Morgan, at the battle of Buffington Island.

We saw one little snake the first morning, but thankfully no copperheads. Very little wildlife at all, actually. Deer scrapes were everywhere, but we didn't see any deer, and barely even saw any squirrels. I think most of the wildlife was smarter than us and elected to stay in out of the rain!

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I remember being impressed by his letters as his use of language was quite eloquent, especially considering he probably wasn't highly educated. He described some of the terrible conditions at Camp Sumpter

Truly horrible places...it's a wonder any of those men made it through alive. It makes the tragedy of the Sultana all that much worse that they'd come that far only to die on their way home due to the corruption and incompetence of the government they'd fought to preserve.