Mingo camps south of the Ohio

In a 1992 study, A. Gwynn Henderson lists the “Mingo (Seneca-Iroquois)” with Shawnee, Cherokee, and Tutelo among mid-1700s groups in the Bluegrass and middle Ohio Valley, and says that after 1758 many of Kentucky’s Indians moved north but may have kept smaller communities and winter camps. Fort Stanwix (1768) did not ban use of the land south of the Ohio: the deed ceded it to the Crown, and the Six Nations asked that their warriors keep the liberty of hunting throughout the country.

Henderson says the small southern camps were moved north as settlers arrived, and by the 1770s hunting parties had become raiding parties against the stations. When Washington reached Mingo Town on the Ohio’s west bank on October 22, 1770, he counted about twenty cabins and 70 people of the Six Nations. No Kentucky camp site is documented in these sources, so “Bluegrass camps” is a general statement, not a location.