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Northwest Indian War
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The Northwest Indian War (1785–1795), also known as Little Turtle's War and by various other names, was a war fought between the United States and a large confederation of 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.
land east of the Mississippi River and south of the Great Lakes had been fought over for centuries before the United States government was even formed and got involved.
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The Northwest Indian War (1785–1795), also known as Little Turtle's War and by various other names, was a war fought between the United States and a large confederation of 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.
Background
Beaver Wars
The land east of the Mississippi River and south of the Great Lakes had been fought over for centuries before the United States government was even formed and got involved. French explorer Samuel Champlain in 1608 had sided with the Wyandot (Huron) Indians living along the St. Lawrence River against the Iroquois Indians living in upper New York state. The result was the bitter enmity of the Iroquois against the French, which resulted in the Iroquois siding with the Dutch traders coming up the Hudson River in about 1626. The Dutch eventually traded the Iroquois furs for firearms and hatchets and knives, which the Iroquois used to nearly eliminate the Hurons and all of the Indians west of their territories in the Northwest Territory or Ohio country in the Beaver Wars starting in the 1650s. The enemies of the Iroquois were weakened with European disease and faced with fierce enemies armed with steel knives, steel hatchets, and muskets; the wars were of extreme brutality, considered among the bloodiest conflicts in the history of North America. The resultant enlargement of Iroquois territory and tribes paying tribute to them realigned the tribal geography of eastern North America, destroying several large tribal confederacies (including the Wyandot (Huron), Neutrals, Eries, and Susquehannocks) and pushing several other eastern tribes west to or across the Mississippi River. The Ohio country was virtually emptied of native people, as Indian refugees fled west to escape Iroquois warriors who eventually returned to their homes, leaving much of the Northwest territory, Kentucky territory and Ohio Territory with decimated tribes and empty villages behind them. Subsequently in about 1655, the Iroquois became trading partners with the British who took over the New Netherlands territory from the Dutch. After about 1700, tribes began straggling back into the Northwest Territory but seldom as coherent tribes, often as conglomerations of several tribes paying tribute to the Iroquois.
French and British occupation
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, both Britain and France claimed ownership of the Ohio Country along with the Iroquois Confederacy. By the mid-1700s, both nations had sent merchants and fur traders into the area to trade with local Indians, and violence quickly erupted. This was finally resolved in the French and Indian War, in which France relinquished any claims on the area with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763.
The British still faced numerous Indian tribes living there, including those in the Great Lakes region: the Ottawas, Ojibwas, Pottawatomis, and Hurons; those from eastern Illinois Country, which included the Miami, Wea, Kickapoo, Mascouten, and Piankashaw; and those from the Ohio Country: the Delawares (Lenape), Shawnee, Mingo, and Wyandot, among others. The tribes were not happy with British settlers moving into the area. This unhappiness erupted in Pontiac's Rebellion of 1763-66, where the Indians burned several forts. They also killed and drove many settlers out of the Northwest Territory. The British had to send troops to reinforce Fort Pitt. The Indians were defeated in the minor Battle of Bushy Run. In the end the war fizzled with almost nothing resolved.
Great Britain officially closed the area of the Northwest Territories to European settlement by the Proclamation of 1763, which arose as part of the British desire to have peaceful relations with the Shawnee and other tribes in the region. On June 22, 1774, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act, which annexed this region to the province of Quebec. The act was referred to as one of the Intolerable Acts leading to the American Revolution.
American Revolution
During the American Revolution, four tribes in the Iroquois Confederation sided with the British. They fought in the Battle of Oriskany, aided the British in the Battle of Saratoga, and committed the Wyoming Valley massacre in Pennsylvania and the Cherry Valley Massacre in New York as well as numerous other attacks throughout New York and Pennsylvania. As the British concentrated on the southern United States in 1779, General George Washington finally had an opportunity to do something about the Iroquois actions; he instructed General John Sullivan and about 5,000 men to attack and destroy Iroquois villages in upper New York. He succeeded after defeating the Iroquois in the Battle of Newtown in destroying over 40 Iroquois villages and all their associated crops in the fall of 1779. His army destroyed over 10 more in other parts of New York. Most of the Iroquois retreated to Canada where they spent a cold and hungry winter. Their power in the United States was severely limited after this, and their claims to the Northwest Territories were voided.
In 1778, American General George Rogers Clark and 178 men captured the British forts on the Ohio River, giving the United States control of the Ohio river and a claim to all the land north of the Ohio River.
The Battle of Blue Licks was the last battle of the American Revolutionary War fought in Kentucky. On a hill next to the Licking River in what is now Robertson County, Kentucky, a force of about 50 British rangers and 300 American Indians ambushed and routed 182 Kentucky militiamen.
The Treaty of Paris (1783) gave the United States independence and control of the Northwest Territories, on paper. The territory was subject to overlapping and conflicting claims by the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Virginia. While the British Crown had suffered a major defeat at the Battle of Yorktown (1781), there had been no decisive defeat for their Indian allies in the Northwest Territories. The Indian tribes in the Old Northwest, however, were not parties to this treaty, and many of them, especially leaders such as Little Turtle and Blue Jacket, refused to recognize American claims to the area northwest of the Ohio River. Even after losing their Ohio River forts the British remained in possession of their Great Lakes forts through which they continued to supply their Indian allies with trade items and weapons in exchange for furs. This lingering British presence was not settled until the War of 1812 finally drove the British out of the Northwest Territories.
The Continental Congress sought to stabilize the dollar and pay down some of its war debt through the sale of western lands. The Land Ordinance of 1785 gave encouragement to land speculators, surveyors, and settlers who sought to gain new land from the Indians who may or may not have had a claim to it. Congress had negotiated the Treaty of Fort McIntosh in 1785 with several Indian tribes to acquire most of the eastern portion of the Ohio Country. However Connecticut settlers were already streaming into the Western Reserve which extended into part of a reservation set aside for some of the tribes.
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 passed under the Articles of Confederation gave Indians title, under U.S. law, to enjoy whatever lands they lived on, but it continued to encourage the influx of U.S. settlers north of the Ohio River. Localized ambushes and engagements between those settlers and Indians continued to rage. The failure of the 1789 Treaty of Fort Harmar to address underlying grievances between the two sides exacerbated the problems.
Formation of the confederacy
Co-operation among the Indian nations forming the Western 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 Fort 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:
In most cases, an entire "tribe" or "nation" was not involved in the war; Indian societies were not centralized, and involvement in warfare was decided on a village or even individual basis.
Nearly two hundred Cherokee from two bands of the group called Chickamauga by the Americans lived and fought with the Shawnee from the time of the Revolution through the time of the Confederacy. In addition, in at least one case, the Cherokee leader Dragging Canoe sent a contingent of warriors (in this instance under his brother The Badger) for a specific action.
Some warriors of Choctaws and Chickasaws, southern tribes traditionally antagonistic with Northwest Indians, served as scouts for the Americans.
Course of the war
Some British agents in the region, still stinging from their defeat in the Revolution, sold the Indians weapons and ammunition and encouraged the tribes to attack American settlers. 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 numerous 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.
Indian raids on both sides of the Ohio River grew increasingly dangerous. During the mid and late 1780s, white settlers south of the Ohio River in Kentucky and travelers on and north of the Ohio River suffered approximately 1,500 casualties during the ongoing hostilities, during which whites often retaliated against Indians. 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 October 1790, a force of 1,453 men under Brigadier General Josiah Harmar was assembled near present-day Fort Wayne, Indiana. Harmar committed only 400 of his men under Colonel John Hardin to attack an Indian force of some 1,100 warriors who defeated him badly. At least 129 soldiers were killed.
Washington then ordered Major General Arthur St. Clair, who served as governor of the Northwest Territory, to mount a more vigorous effort by summer 1791. After considerable trouble finding men and supplies, St. Clair was finally ready. At dawn on November 4, 1791, St. Clair's poorly trained force, accompanied by about 200 camp followers, was camped near the present-day location of Fort Recovery, Ohio, with poor defenses set up around their camp. An Indian force consisting of around 2,000 warriors led by Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, and Tecumseh, struck quickly and, surprising the Americans, soon overran their poorly prepared perimeter. The barely trained recruits panicked and were slaughtered along with many of their officers who attempted to restore some kind of order and stop the rout. The American casualty rate included 632 of 920 soldiers and officers killed (69%) and 264 wounded. Nearly all of the 200 camp followers were slaughtered, for a total of about 832—the highest casualty rate in any United States Indian war. In 1792 occurred the separate killing of Washington's emissaries Colonel John Hardin in Shelby County, Ohio and Major Alexander Truman in Ottawa, Ohio on peace missions.
After St Clair's disaster, Washington ordered General “Mad” Anthony Wayne to form a new well trained force. Wayne was given command of the new Legion of the United States late in 1793. After extensive training, his troops 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 well trained Legion advanced deeper into the territory of the Wabash Confederacy. Blue Jacket replaced Little Turtle in overall command but could not prevent the Indians' defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in August 1794.
Fleeing from the battlefield to regroup at the British-held Fort Miami (Ohio), 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 in its French Revolution.
Two treaties in 1795 sealed the new state of affairs between the Indians and the United States. The Treaty of Greenville required the tribes to cede most of Ohio and a slice of Indiana to the U.S.; to recognize the U.S., rather than Britain, as the ruling power in the Old Northwest; and to give ten chiefs to the U.S. as hostages until all white prisoners were returned in guarantee. Jay's Treaty, which had already been signed, provided for the British withdrawal from the western forts.
Legacy
The 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 or ignoring 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. 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 (St. Clair's Defeat) was the most overwhelming slaughter ever achieved by American Indians against the United States Army.
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 a 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 Indian communities, these wars were part 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 resumed a generation later with Tecumseh's War (1811) and the War of 1812 (hence the term Sixty Years' War) and came to an end in the era of Indian removals.
Key figures
United States
- George Washington, President of the United States
- Henry Knox, Secretary of War
- Josiah Harmar, general
- Arthur St. Clair, governor of the Northwest Territory, major general
- Anthony Wayne, major general
- Timothy Pickering, diplomat, secretary of war, secretary of state
- John Hardin, Colonel - killed on a peace mission at what would later become Hardin, Shelby County, Ohio.
- Alexander Truman, Major - killed on a peace mission at what later became Ottawa, Ohio.
Indian Confederacy
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