Episode Details

In this episode, we explore ohio as the american blueprint. So imagine you're just standing in a quiet field in the middle of the Midwest, right? You're digging into the earth and you suddenly unearth this massive, beautiful ceremonial blade. Oh, wow. OK. Yeah. And you brush away the dirt and you realize it's made of pure obsidian. But here's the catch. You are standing in the middle of Ohio. And that specific type of volcanic glass, it came all the way from Yellowstone National Park. Which is what, thousands of miles away? Exactly. Moved entirely on foot. Thousands of years before the invention of the wheel in North America. That is the real Ohio. It really completely shatters that modern assumption we all have, doesn't it? I mean, we tend to use Ohio as this demographic shorthand today. Oh, totally. A flyover state. Right. Just a flat piece of geography that we only really check in on during election deeply destabilized territory. Yes. And reading further into the source, it seems like that brutal reshaping during the Beaver Wars and subsequently the French and Indian War is exactly what created a vacuum. It made Ohio the prime deeply contested target for a brand new nation looking to expand westward. Precisely. After the American Revolution, the newly formed United States had a massive problem. They had absolutely no money. Right, they were broke. But they had thousands of heavily armed veterans who needed to be paid for their service in the war. So the government's solution was to pay them in land. Specifically, land in the Ohio country organized under the Northwest Ordinance. Which brings us to Rufus Putnam. a guy known as the Father of Ohio. He was George Washington's chief military engineer during the Revolutionary War. A brilliant engineer. Yeah, the text points out he was a genius