This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Demet.

There were wolves in the woods. In bears too. There had been bears and wolves in other

wild things there in the woods since who knows how long. People first came to the woods

12,000 years ago archaeologists tell us. Though they can't tell us much about who those

people were. They speak with more authority about the prehistoric people who followed.

There are several civilizations who preceded tribes like the Seneca, the Mingo, the Delaware,

and other people who can speak for themselves. People who hunted in the woods, contended

and competed with the bears and wolves for some centuries until the new set of people

arrived in 1795. We know that date exactly. When a man from Amherst, Massachusetts, a judge

named Charles Hinckley bought up 16,000 of the many hundreds of thousands of acres that

had been recently claimed by some big land speculators in what we now call Northeastern

Ohio. The judge paid 23 cents per acre. He then carved up his purchase into 100 parcels

and sold those off at a profit to other easters looking for a new life on the frontier.

By 1818, the town of Hinckley, Ohio was a moderately bustling farming community, boasting

good soil, predictable weather, and abundant water. But there were wolves in the woods.

And so there were farmers and their beds in the homes they had built at the edge of those

woods, waking in the dead of night to the bleeding of sheep and the howling of wolves,

tearing and gnashing, feasting in the blue silver moonlight, unbothered by the musket crack

and the whip of a bullet fired much too late by a man on his porch in his nightclose,

cursing at the shadows. It was like that most nights. You could lose a dozen sheep in your

sleep, one night one farmer lost 34, and then on another, the pack of wolves slipped beneath

fences, farm after farm, killing more than 100 sheep in a single night. Drag them through

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