Portage County, Ohio: History
The name "Portage" comes from an old Native American path called "Portage Path", which ran between the Cuyahoga and Tuscarawas rivers, where travelers portaged their canoes. The location of the trail today is within the boundaries of neighboring Summit County.
As of 1600, the area was likely almost entirely home to the Whittlesey culture, a presumably Algonquian people who lived along the southern shore of Lake Erie, to the west of the Erie Nation. They were a mixed culture people that exhibited signs of picking up traits from both Fort Ancients and Iroquoians. The Erie may have also held a bit of the area, but this is unclear. During the Beaver Wars, approximately 1632–1701, the Whittlesey and Erie were already at war when the Erie decided to also declare war on the Iroquois for the atrocities being committed against allied tribes in Canada. The Erie lost around 1650 and the Whittlesey were likely similarly subjugated afterwards, as the Iroquois conquered all the way to the shores of Lake Michigan by the 1670s.
The Iroquois placed a vassal tribe of captured Huron in the area who became known as the Wyandot, while they conquered further west. Later, the French made it to the Mississippi River and volunteered to aid the Natives in that region to push the Iroquois back to New York. By the end of the Beaver Wars, the Wyandot had broken free of Iroquois control and reabsorbed surviving Hurons taking refuge all over the Great Lakes, but set aside the area roughly between the Cuyahoga River, the Mahoning River and the Ohio-Pennsylvania border as a collective hunting ground, to be enjoyed by all the tribes of the region. The Lenape had a village around modern day Youngstown, possibly established during the 1690s, from which they and the Seneca and Shawnee from further south staged ventures into the region. Up in Ashtabula County, the Ottawas, or Mississaugas, from the western end of Lake Erie were allowed to maintain a village at Conneaut. Ashtabula itself seems to come from the Algonquian name for the area and roughly translates to "Place with Enough for everyone." The Lenape later lost rights to the eastern extremes of their territory between the Potomac River and the Mahoning River by a government proclamation in 1763, but sources say they began relocating into Tuscarawas and Holmes counties in 1758 in preparation for such an event.
The region continued being used as such until around 1785, when the newly formed United States tried issuing a treaty stripping the vast majority of what is now Ohio from Native control and began offering subsidies for people to move into the region, sparking the Northwest Indian War from 1785–1795. In the aftermath, the government issued the Treaty of Greenville, which stripped even more land from the Natives than originally planned and opened up northeast Ohio for white settlement for the first time. Most Natives did not leave and mixed tribal communities still existed all over the state for some time afterwards, with permanent Ottawa, Seneca, and Wyandot villages still existing in what is now Portage and Geauga counties. All written accounts of Natives seems to have ceased sometime around the War of 1812, which coincided with the Shawnee War (1811–1813). The local government had its own land arrangements with the Natives for a time. …