Where the Butterflies Lay Their Eggs: A story of Immigration, Scotland, Germany, Quakers, and Native Americans

The view of the cluster of residences of my husband's family, past some milkweed in the field.

This is where I live now. It is probably where I will live until I'm 80. Maybe until I die. My home is dead center, just over the hill from the trees. At first glance, it looks like a ridge in eastern Belmont County, but it is so much more. 

It is the site overlooking an ancient Indian settlement. It is the top of a ravine called Whiskey Run, where moonshiners took barrels down to the river for delivery. It is the hay meadow. It is the Indian path to spy on the settlers on Wheeling Island. It is a Revolutionary War land grant in the 7 Ranges. It is a pre-Civil War general's dream farm. It is near where my husband ran for help as his grandfather died of a heart attack. It is near where my husband's tractor rolled over on him and permanently deformed his clavicle. It is where coyotes chew on toy dolls they stole from someone's barn or yard. It is where the turkeys and deer feed. It is where my husband has found numerous flint and stone tools. It is a spiritual Native American ground. I am likely the very first Quaker to live here. I often feel somewhat misplaced. I also feel honored; abandoned; discontent, and some sort of content all at the same time.

My husband, Bruce, has worked this farm for most of his life, from childhood, minus about 20 years. During the time away, he was a hippie, traveling with friends, hitchhiking, helping his brother round up and brand cows in Colorado, walking barefoot in California, being a vegetarian. For most of his life, he was here, in Ohio, two high ridges in from the Ohio River; two high ridges over from Wheeling, WV.

Wheeling Island from Kirkwood Heights before 9/11, taken by me.

If one drives along this ridge until it descends into the river valley, one eventually comes to this view, looking up the river, at Wheeling Island, Martins Ferry on this side, and Wheeling, WV on the other. Bridgeport and National Road (Route 40, where it crosses the Island) is directly below. I grew up with panoramic scenes like this each morning, going to school in Bellaire, which is further south from this view. In the autumn, the river is shrouded with fog in the mornings, and the hilltops look like a wonderland above marshmallows. 

The little clip of the flat to the right is near where the Wheeling Slave Auction Block sat. The hilltop to the right of the river is likely near the vicinity of Fort Henry, the first settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains. The other side of the that hilltop is the steep cliff where McCulloch's horse took a great leap down into the Wheeling Creek valley when he had arrived to Fort Henry, and was fleeing from the Indians. He and his horse survived the leap; one of the great Ohio Valley legends. This was Lewis Wetzel's favorite stomping grounds.

I travel down this hill to Riesbecks to go grocery shopping, or when I want to go up the river to the Pittsburgh airport, or to Wheeling. 

The Allegheny's are the eastern "Great Divide," where the water runs into the Mississipi and to the Gulf of Mexico, instead of into the Atlantic Ocean. The lip you see here along the West Virginia side of the Ohio River is the trail where settlers traveled south from Pittsburgh before the Revolutionary War. Now it is the path of WV Route 2. Ohio's lip houses OH Route 7.

This picture is the setting for several books: Zane Grey's trilogy, "The Spirit of the Border," "Betty Zane," and "The Last Trail;" Allan W. Eckert's "That Dark and Bloody River;" Alan Fitzpatrick's "Wilderness War on the Ohio," John S. Cochran's "Bonnie Belmont," and Susan G. Hall's "Appalachian Ohio and the Civil War, 1862-1863." All of these books are in my library, and I've read all but the last cover-to-cover. Hall's book details the religious sects that settled this area. I have an early American family tree consisting of mostly pre-Revolutionary War families; the Quakers on my mother's side, and the Presbyterian Scots-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch German Lutherans on my father's side. I am all of this. So I belong here, whether or not I feel like I belong. I embrace it all, in its entirety - its violence; its inhumanity; its refuge for those who refused to participate in the inhumanity; what it means for the past, the present; and the future. And I don't belong. I am not a Native American; yet I live where they made their tools probably for a thousand or more years before my people arrived. 

How incredibly relevant that the seeds pictured above will grow plants that feed a butterfly species, pictured below, that will likely migrate to Mexico. 

Monarch Butterfly on Scottish Thistle, with a Praying Mantis

 My favorite song about the area, about freedom, and the dedication to insuring human rights for all people:

"Ohio" by Patty Griffin