She had to be a genius to do the calculations without any scientific instruments. She must have gazed into the heavens, analyzed the patterns and predicted what would happen next.
That brilliance made her dangerous.
Her name is not recorded, but the Indian woman, a member of the Wyandot tribe, remains a tragic figure more than 200 years after her death. In today’s world, she could have been a scientist … a physicist … an astronomer … a professor …
In her world, she was a pariah.
In 1806, Hinckley Township was a dense forest where only the hardiest pioneers survived. Named for Judge Samuel Hinckley of Northampton, Mass., who purchased the land in 1795, the Medina County township contained more than 25 square miles of rugged woods filled with bears, wolves, deer and other beasts.
Wyandot and Seneca Indians continued to hunt in the region after white settlers arrived. They favored an area along the Rocky River west of Hinckley Ridge and north of the Granger Township line.
In May 1806, the Indian woman told the Wyandots that a great darkness would soon fall over the Earth. How she determined this, we will never know, but the tribe reacted with dread.
Superstition blotted out reason. The Indians considered the prediction to be a dire threat and accused the woman of practicing witchcraft.
“Her prophecy caused alarm among the tribe, and a council was called,” Hinckley expert Charles Neil wrote in History of Medina County and Ohio (1881). “It was decided that she should suffer death by strangulation by having invoked the powers of the evil one.”
The men marched “the witch” through the woods and stopped at a large tree that had fallen over the river on a ledge at the big bend on the Granger line. They threw a rope over a branch, tightened a noose around her neck and hoisted her off the ground.
Was she a young woman? An old woman? Did she have children? Grandchildren? The details are not recorded in local history books. All that is known is her horrible manner of death.
“The body was left swinging to the tree, and remained there as a warning, and as a carrion for the vultures to feed upon, until it finally dropped into the river below,” Neil wrote.
A few weeks passed. Life returned to normal in the woods of Hinckley … until a great darkness fell over the Earth.
It was about 11 a.m. June 16, 1806, when the sun began to disappear. Some pioneers in the Western Reserve believed that Judgment Day had arrived.
East Coast scientists watched in fascination as the moon passed between the Earth and sun, casting a dark shadow across New England. The great solar eclipse was an unforgettable experience to those who witnessed it.
In an 1838 column in the Cincinnati Daily Evening Post, editor Ebenezer Smith Thomas (1775-1845), a native of Cambridge, Mass., recalled seeing the eclipse during a Rhode Island vacation when he was 30. He described the event as “truly and awfully sublime.”
“The birds flew about in evident distress and terror, the domestic fowls ran about in all directions cackling as in a fright,” Thomas wrote. “Horses galloped around their pastures neighing; while the horned cattle which seemed more affected than the rest, tore up the earth with their horns and feet in madness — all this uproar was followed by the silence of midnight.”
Everything became still. Fowls returned to their roosts, horses to their stalls, cattle to their mangers, Thomas said. The animal world believed that night had fallen.
Author James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), whose Indian tales included The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Deerslayer (1841), was 16 years old in Cooperstown, N.Y., when he witnessed the 1806 eclipse.
Cooper recalled people pouring into the streets at noon, families bewildered by the loss of sunlight on a cloudless day. Looking west, he saw a sparkle in the darkened sky.
“For a second I believed it to be an optical delusion, but in another instant I saw it plainly to be a star,” Cooper wrote in an 1836 memoir.
“One after another they came into view, more rapidly than in the evening twilight, until perhaps fifty stars appeared to us in a broad dark zone in the heavens, crowning the pines on the western mountains. This wonderful vision of the stars during noontide hours of the day filled the spirit with singular sensations.”
About the same time, Indians in Ohio could not believe their eyes as daylight disappeared. Members of the Hinckley tribe must have thought that the witch was exacting a dark revenge.
“When the sun was obscured, the terrified savages gathered together, and forming a circle, commenced marching around in regular order, each one firing his gun and making all the noise possible, so as to frighten away the evil spirit menacing the destruction of the world,” historian Henry Howe wrote in Historical Collections of Ohio (1891).
After roughly five minutes of total darkness, the sun gradually returned. All living creatures — human and animal — basked in the afternoon glow.
The gallows over the Rocky River stood as a grisly landmark for years in Hinckley. Long after the Indians moved west, settlers visited the old tree and recounted the story about the woman who predicted the eclipse.
Her murder is a somber reminder of just how easily darkness can engulf the light.
Copy editor Mark J. Price is the author of the book Lost Akron from The History Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com. The United States will observe a solar eclipse Aug. 21, 2017. Brace yourself.