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Northwest Indian War

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Northwest Indian War
Logan's Raid – Hardin's Defeat – Harmar's Defeat – St. Clair's Defeat – Fort Recovery – Fallen Timbers

The Northwest Indian War (1785–1795), also known as Little Turtle's War and by a variety of other names, was a war fought between the United States and a large confederation of Native Americans ("Indians") for control of the Northwest Territory, which ended with a decisive U.S. victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. As a result of the war, territory including much of present-day Ohio was ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Greenville in 1795.

Contents

Background

The Treaty of Paris (1783) had given the United States government control, on paper, of all the land east of the Mississippi River and south of the Great Lakes; but the Native American nations actually living in this region were not party to the talks. And while the British Crown had suffered a major defeat at the Battle of Yorktown (1781), there had been no decisive defeat for their Native American allies in the west. The British remained in possession of the Great Lakes forts through which they continued to supply their Native American allies with trade items (including weapons).

Congress sought to stabilize the dollar and pay down its war debt through the sale of western lands under Native American occupation. The Land Ordinance of 1785 gave encouragement to land speculators, surveyors, and so on, who sought to gain Native American land—sometimes through bribery or deceit—for resale to European settlers.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 gave Native Americans title, under US law, to enjoy whatever lands had not been taken from them, but it continued to encourage the influx of US settlers beyond the Ohio. Localized engagements between those settlers and Native Americans continued to rage. The failure of the 1789 Treaty of Fort Harmar to address underlying grievances between the two sides exacerbated the problems and made widespread conflict inevitable.

Congress had negotiated the Treaty of Fort McIntosh in 1785 to acquire most of the eastern portion of the Ohio Country. However Connecticut settlers were already streaming into the Western Reserve which extended into the reservation set aside for the tribes. Conflict soon broke out between the two sides.

Formation of the confederacy

Co-operation among the Native American nations forming the Confederacy had gone back to the French colonial era and was renewed during the American Revolutionary War. The Confederacy first came together in the autumn of 1785 at the British fortress at Detroit, proclaiming that the parties to the Confederacy would deal jointly with the United States, rather than individually. This determination was renewed in 1786 at the village of the Hurons, where the Confederacy further insisted on the Ohio River as the boundary between their lands and those of the American settlers. The Hurons were the nominal "fathers" or senior guaranteeing nation of the Confederacy, but Shawnees and Miamis provided the greatest share of the fighting force.

The Confederacy included warriors from a wide variety of sources:

Note: in most cases, an entire "tribe" or "nation" was not involved in the war; Native American societies were not centralized, and involvement in warfare was decided on a village or even individual basis.

Some bands of Choctaws and Chickasaws, southern tribes traditionally unfriendly with the Indians of the Northwest, served as scouts for the Americans in the war.

Course of the war

Some British agents in the region, still stinging from their defeat in the Revolution, encouraged the tribes to attack American settlements. War parties launched a series of isolated raids in the mid-1780s, resulting in escalating bloodshed and mistrust. In the fall of 1786, General Benjamin Logan led a force of Federal soldiers and mounted Kentucky militia against several Shawnee towns along the Mad River, protected primarily by noncombatants while the warriors were raiding forts in Kentucky. Logan burned the Indian towns and food supplies, and killed or captured a considerable number of Indians, including their chief, who was soon murdered by one of Logan's men. Logan's Raid and the death of the chief angered the Shawnees, who retaliated by further escalating their attacks on the whites.

In 1790, President George Washington and Secretary of War Henry Knox ordered General Josiah Harmar to launch a major western offensive into the Shawnee and Miami Indian country in retaliation for the killing of over 1,500 civilians in Kentucky and the Ohio Country. Harmar's force burned Kekionga, the main village of the Miamis, but were ambushed by Confederates under Little Turtle and fell back in a series of fights, known as Hardin's Defeat and Harmar's Defeat.

The governor of the Northwest Territory, Arthur St. Clair, was given command of a second offensive in 1791. St Clair built a number of forts along the same general route as Harmar had taken, but at the Battle of the Wabash, the Indian confederacy ambushed the Americans and killed many hundreds of them. St Clair withdrew in defeat.

General "Mad Anthony" Wayne was given command of the new Legion of the United States late in 1793. He advanced into Indian country and built Fort Recovery on the site of St Clair's defeat. In June 1794 Little Turtle again led the attack on the Americans at Fort Recovery, but without success, and Wayne's Legion advanced deeper into the territory of the Wabash Confederacy. Blue Jacket replaced Little Turtle in overall command, but could not prevent the Native American's defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in August 1794.

Fleeing from the battlefield to regroup at the British-held Fort Miamis, Blue Jacket's forces found that the British had locked them out of the fort. The British and Americans were reaching a close rapprochement at this time to counter Jacobin France. Two treaties in 1795 sealed the new state of affairs. The Treaty of Greenville required the Confederates to cede most of Ohio and a slice of Indiana to the US; to recognize the US, rather than Britain, as the suzerain powers in the Old Northwest; and to give ten chiefs to the US as hostages until all prisoners were returned in guarantee. Jay's Treaty, which had already been signed, provided for the British withdrawal from the western forts.

Key figures

For the US

For the Indian confederacy

Naming the conflict

This war has no widely accepted name; other names include the "Old Northwest Indian War", the "Ohio War", the "Ohio Indian War", and the "War for the Ohio River Boundary". In U.S. Army records it is known as the "Miami Campaign". One historian has recently suggested naming it the "Miami Confederacy War", but other scholars have resisted naming the war after the Miamis (or Little Turtle, as was once common), arguing that this overlooks the centrality of Blue Jacket and the Ohio Country Indians in the war. Many books avoid the problem of what to call the war by describing it without putting a name to it. Likewise, the battles and expeditions of the war do not have standard names in U.S. history books, except for the Battle of Fallen Timbers.

Although this war was the first major military endeavor of the post-Revolutionary United States, and a major crisis of President George Washington's administration, it is not well known and is often overlooked in U.S. history books. For example, the Oxford Companion to American Military History (1999) has no individual entries for this war or its battles in its 900+ pages, and does not list it on its chart of U.S. military casualties, even though more Americans were killed in this war than in the Spanish-American War, which that book covers at length. Similarly, although later Indian Wars became more famous in American popular culture, the Northwest Indian War inflicted more casualties on the United States military than the wars of Geronimo, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Cochise, and Red Cloud combined. The Battle of the Wabash in this war was the most overwhelming victory ever achieved by American Indians against the United States.

Although often regarded as one of the seemingly self-contained Indian Wars that occurred throughout early American history, the Northwest Indian War was actually part of long frontier struggle in the Ohio Country that included the French and Indian War (1754–1763), Pontiac's Rebellion (1763–1764), Lord Dunmore's War (1774) and the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). Indeed, for many Native American communities, these wars were part and parcel of a single war that spanned several generations. For example, historian Francis Jennings suggested that the Northwest Indian War was, for the Delaware (Lenape) people, the end of a Forty Years' War that began soon after the Braddock Expedition in 1755. For some American Indians, the conflict would be resumed a generation later with Tecumseh's War (1811) and the War of 1812 (hence the term Sixty Years' War) and come to an end in the era of Indian Removal.

References

External links

 

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