Today we are ensconced on the twentieth floor of the Cincinnati Hilton in a room overlooking the Ohio River. Tomorrow the research begins in earnest at the Cincinnati Museum Center Archives. Arthur St. Clair named Cincinnati after Cincinnatus, a Roman soldier who put down his sword and turned to farming, and after the Society of Cincinnati, of which he was a founding member. On the way here we passed Lawrenceburg, Indiana, about twenty minutes downriver from here (by car, not by riverboat, horse, or on foot,) Lawrenceburg was founded by another of my ancestors who married a granddaughter of St. Clair, the oldest daughter of his oldest daughter.
For some time we traveled along a little used stretch of I70 through rural Illinois, where we saw few out of state license plates, but as we approached Indianapolis we quickly collected a number of them, including Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
The highlight of the day, and possibly of the entire trip, was the Exotic Feline Rescue Center. Lions, Tigers, Puma, Servals, Bobcats, Lynx, and others are housed there. Most have come from roadside attractions, breeders, or homes where people thought for some reason a wild cat would make a good pet but realized they were not so domesticated. We got a tour of the wooded enclosures of about fifty cats, although the center houses over one hundred fifty cats on two hundred sixty acres. We stood within three feet of huge tigers and purring pumas as the volunteer guide talked about the history of each one. The bobcats, servals, tigers, and lynx were a little less sociable but did come to check us out because it was almost feeding time.
The founder of the center waited for us where two paths crossed because he saw our New Mexico license plate. He had lived in Chimayo, New Mexico for thirty years before coming to Indiana to start the Center, and had provided a male tiger to the Rio Grande Zoo several years ago.