Chapter Seven:
The Northwest Indian War
The Americans prevailed in their revolution, and Great Britain ceded the area north and west of the Ohio River and south of the Great Lakes to the new United States. But there was still money in fur, mutual distrust, and a new border to protect. Though having lost several colonies, Britain remained the most powerful country in the world, and despite the 1783 treaty continued to occupy forts in what the Americans now called their Northwest, including strategic Detroit. But the Americans were in no position to expel them and were forced to tolerate the affront, for the time being.
Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and Connecticut all claimed portions of what later became Ohio. The region was already filled with American settlers. Some had paid for land there, sometimes sold them by companies lacking actual legal title. Others merely squatted, claiming the land by right of having lived on it and, from their point of view, improved it. There were also the twice‑conquered French settlements, remnants of defunct New France, and the Shawnee, Miami and other Natives for whom the peace the Whites had made with each other mattered really not at all. Their war to save what they considered their land from ethnic European settlers continued unabated.
At the outset the United States as a strong and unified political entity as it is today did not yet exist. The federal system whereby the states took the lead and wielded real power rather than the national government was much more in ascendance prior to the Civil War. The sometimes fractious cooperation of independent states which came together to fight their British enemy functioned within a loose partnership under the Articles of Confederation, in effect only since 1781. If the frontier situation seemed chaotic it merely reflected the political realities in the cities in the East.
But during the decade of the 1780s the states began to come together to bring order to the new territory they collectively controlled. At the end of 1783, Virginia, one of the largest, richest, strongest and thus most important of the former colonies, yielded her Western claims to the new national government, setting an important precedent for the other states to follow regarding their own Western claims. Thomas Jefferson penned a stop‑gap plan for the governance of the Western territories, though this Territorial Ordinance of 1784 was never implemented.
A year later, on May 20, 1785, Congress passed the more concrete Land Ordinance of 1785, which outlined an orderly plan "for ascertaining the mode of disposing of the Lands in the Western Territory." Under it, the land would be surveyed in equal square townships beginning at the point of the right angle forming the southwestern border of the State of Pennsylvania. Each township had 36 sections. Each section cost $640. It was too expensive. The plan didn't work.
By this time the Articles of Confederation were beginning to fall apart too. Delegates from the several states met in Philadelphia in May 1787 for the purpose of revising the Articles. When they emerged in September they had done far more, offering a constitution for a completely new country for approval of the states. Heavily amended, this is the same constitution under which the United States operates to this day.
While these weighty proceedings proceeded the vestigial Congress of the Confederation produced a revised plan for the governance of the Northwest Territory, a precedent‑setting document important to the future courses of both Euclid Township and the development of the whole United States, commonly known today as the Northwest Ordinance.
The new Ordinance decreed that three states would and five states could be carved from the territory north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi, and that those states would be equal in the new nation to the former colonies in the East, establishing the terms which new states would enter the Union as the United States rolled across the continent in the 19th and 20th centuries. It established a governor, awarded him an estate of 1,000 acres and made him commander in chief of the territorial militia. It guaranteed freedom of religion, banned cruel and unusual punishment, and decreed that, "The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress." No state would own Lake Erie. The Ordinance decreed that once 60,000 free White men occupied a territory that they could petition for statehood. Also, significantly, the Ordinance prohibited slavery in the new states of the Northwest, though it still guaranteed that enslaved people who had escaped who were seized within the territory would be returned to their enslavers.
George Washington took the oath of office as the first President of the United States on the balcony of Federal Hall on April 20, 1789, in New York, then the capital of the United States. The old general had been in uniform since the French and Indian War and was well beyond familiar with military and Indian affairs. Besides Washington's personal financial interest in the Northwest, and the compensation of Virginia soldiers with land, a resolution favorable to the Americans of the problems in the Ohio Country was crucial in 1790 to the very survival of the United States. War debt threatened to drown the infant nation and one of the principal schemes for avoiding economic collapse lay in the sale of the federal lands in the old Ohio Country.
The old problem of words on paper being superseded by realities on the ground remained in command in the Northwest. The Americans concluded a problematic treaty with the Wyandot/Huron, Delawares and Ottawas at Fort McIntosh, near present-day Pittsburgh, on January 21, 1785, setting the boundary between the United States and Indian lands at the Cuyahoga River, in exchange for "goods to be distributed among the different tribes for their use and comfort." It was problematic because many other tribes in the Northwest directly affected by the agreement, particularly the powerful Shawnee and Miami tribes, did not participate in its drafting, and neither signed nor felt bound by it. Fort McIntosh was hardly a definitive agreement, and the Cuyahoga hardly a firm border.
A French guidebook first published in 1788 described the Ohio Country as a veritable agrarian paradise:
"These plains have a soil as rich as can be imagined and which with very little labor can be devoted to any species of cultivation which one wishes to give it... All parts of this country are abundantly supplied with excellent springs, and one finds everywhere both small and large creeks, on which mills may be established... In all parts the soil is deep, rich producing in abundance wheat, barley, oats, flax, hemp, tobacco, indigo, the tree that furnishes the food of the silk‑worm, the grape‑vine, cotton. The tobacco is of a quality much superior to that of Virginia, and the crops of wheat are much more abundant here than in any other part of America... Hops are also produced spontaneously in this territory, and there are also the same peaches, plums, pears, melons, and, in general, all the fruits which are produced in the temperate zone. There is no country more abounding in game than this. The stag, fallow, deer, elk, buffalo and bears fill the woods... wild turkeys, geese, ducks, swans, teal pheasants, partridges and so forth are here found in greater abundance than are domestic fowls in all the older settlements of America... The rivers are well stocked with fish of different kinds, and several of these fish are of an exquisite quality. In general they are large, the cat‑fish has an excellent flavor and weighs from twenty to eighty pounds. The country is excellent, climate temperate; grapes grow without cultivation..."
The British, who had tried to keep settlers out of the territory, had been defeated. Virginia soldiers were settling on lands awarded them in payment for their war service. Best of all it seemed free for the taking. The catch, though, was the Indians.
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Wyandot/Hurons, Ottawas and Delawares all lived in Ohio and claimed the land by modern treaty and ancient right. In the south and southwest of the Ohio Country the Shawnees' ongoing war with the Americans went on.
They all followed the lead of the Miami Nation, who led the struggle from their power base in the Wabash River Valley, in the heart of what is today the State of Indiana. Meshekunnoghquoh, known to the Americans as Little Turtle, was a prince of the Miami Nation. About 35 at the time of the Ordinance, after inheriting his title he earned the respect of the Miami warriors through battle, fighting against the Americans beside his British allies during the Revolution.
Second only to Little Turtle was the Shawnees' war leader, Weyapiersenwaw, or Blue Jacket, who may originally have been an American, although this is disputed. Legend states that a Shawnee war party captured a young Pennsylvania boy named Marmaduke van Swearingen while he and his brother drove home a herd of cows in 1769. It says that they took him to Chillicothe and dubbed him "Blue Jacket" for the blue linen shirt he wore when captured. The story holds that he promised loyalty and service to the tribe if they would set his younger brother free, that the Shawnee agreed, and that through strength, courage, loyalty and the attrition of the ongoing war against the settlers he rose in station to war leader, opposing the Americans as though he had been born to the Shawnee tribe. The tale is hard either to prove or to disprove. But as a Shawnee war chief the historic Blue Jacket fought on the side of the British in the Revolution and held the rank of brigadier general in the British army, proudly wearing the medallion of King George III. Blue Jacket had been there to oppose George Rogers Clark and his men at Chillicothe and Piqua in 1780.
Two years prior to the Northwest Ordinance the American Congress had formed and funded a militia of 700 to keep squatters off public lands, a pathetically inadequate force to police a wilderness area that would encompass more than five future states. Congress placed this force, called the 1st American Regiment, under the command of Josiah Harmar, a Pennsylvanian and reputed hard drinker who had fought under Washington early in the Revolution, and later in the Southern campaigns. The impotence of so small a force soon became apparent, and three years after the Ordinance Congress authorized a federal army of 1,216 soldiers, again under Harmar, augmented by 1,500 militiamen to police the region, to keep White settlers off recognized Indian lands and to protect Americans on lands claimed by the United States. Again, it was inadequate both to stop Americans from encroaching or to stop the Indians from attacking them.
President Washington made his desire for pacification of the region strongly known both to Harmar and to Arthur St. Clair, governor of the Northwest Territory and, under the Ordinance, commander in chief of its armed forces. (This, by the way, is the same St. Clair for whom the major avenue on the lake plain of Euclid Township would be named.) Under their commands, though, the nascent American army, today the most fearsome armed force on the planet, was in for some rough handling.
Harmar ordered and oversaw the construction of a new fort on the north side of the Ohio opposite the mouth of the Licking River—the nucleus of present-day Cincinnati—which he named Fort Washington for the boss. He mustered his army there in the summer of 1790. Harmar's frontier force was sorely undermanned, with only 320 regular soldiers and 1,133 militia, all disorganized and poorly trained. Nevertheless, on September 30 they set off into the Ohio Country toward Kekionga, the chief village of the Miami. They reached the town two weeks later and set about burning it.
Harmar sent a detachment of mounted militia out to locate and engage the Native enemy on October 19, what today would be called a search and destroy operation. The next day Little Turtle and a force of Miami found them first and ambushed the detachment, which panicked and ran, slamming into a column of infantry sent by Harmar to reinforce them, which then also panicked and ran. Harmar ordered 400 of the militia back to Kekionga to fortify their rear position. Shawnees under Blue Jacket ambushed this force, which ended in another panicked rout for the Americans. Harmar's main force disintegrated. He retreated back to the Ohio. The Indians did not pursue. In the wake of the debacle famed among military historians simply enough as "Harmar's Defeat," the general resigned his command of the Western army in March 1791. He was lucky to escape merely disgraced yet still alive.
The victory emboldened the Shawnee, who stepped up their raids on the settlements in the Northwest through the winter. The British, still illegally though openly occupying forts in U.S. territory there, attempted to broker a peace. But by this time another revolution in France was alarming the British and they were unprepared for another far‑flung American expedition at the moment with such chaos on their very doorsteps. The Indians would not commit to an agreement and Treasury Secretary and longtime Washington confidante Alexander Hamilton, serving as the American representative, refused to negotiate with Indians as equals. The American government intended not to negotiate with the Natives but rather, as they said, to "punish" them, and Governor St. Clair took command of the punitive expedition. He, and second in command Richard Butler, led 2,300 men north out of Fort Washington on October 4, 1791.
Anecdotes abound of St. Clair's arrogance, incompetence in command, and suspected cowardice in battle. It was said that, as part of the failed American campaign to take Quebec early in the Revolution in 1775, St. Clair relinquished his command after stubbing his toe on a tree root. He evacuated a heavily defended Fort Ticonderoga in 1777 when British forces approached; most commanders believed the fort could have been held had St. Clair stood fast. At a peace negotiation in 1789, St. Clair brought the wrong color wampum belts to present to the Indian representatives, inadvertently indicating a desire for war, rather than the correct and polite gifts of peace. Things to muse upon the next drive up St. Clair Avenue...
Slow‑going compounded by bad weather and massive desertions plagued the effort from the start. St. Clair failed to locate and engage the Indians through the entire month of October. Little Turtle and Blue Jacket were constantly watching, though, awaiting their opportunity to attack.
On November 3, 1791, St. Clair's force made camp on a plateau above the Wabash River near the present-day border between Indiana and Ohio. Relying on the advantage of high ground, St. Clair neglected to construct defensive works. The Indians comprehended this weakness instantly. At dawn the next morning 1,000 warriors attacked the camp from three sides.
Again the undisciplined Americans panicked. Artillery hauled into the forest to protect the force in just such an emergency had been incorrectly placed. The gunners fired, but could hit nothing. Blue Jacket's Shawnees attacked the guns, and in a move to rescue the beleaguered position Richard Butler was fatally wounded. St. Clair, suffering with gout, couldn't mount his horse.
At the end of the attack 623 American soldiers lay dead, at a cost of just 21 dead to the confederated Indians. In terms of proportion of killed to the size of the force, "St. Clair's Defeat" of November 4, 1791, remains to this day the worst loss ever for the United States Army.
The news enraged President Washington, a display of emotion notable for its extreme rarity from a man famous for his herculean self-control, and one that left an impression on his private secretary, who recorded the President's recollection of his final words to St. Clair before the campaign and his harsh assessment of the affair after:
"I wished him success and honor; you have your instructions, I said, from the Secretary of War, I had a strict eye to them; and I will add but one word—BEWARE OF A SURPRISE. I repeat it, BEWARE OF A SURPRISE—you know how the Indians fight us. He went off with that as my last solemn warning thrown into his ears. And yet!! O God, O God, [St. Clair] is worse than a murderer! How can he answer it to his country;—the blood of the slain is upon him—the curse of widows and orphans—the curse of Heaven!"
Arthur St. Clair resigned his military command, but remained Governor of the Northwest. After this second humiliating defeat Washington determined that the only way to bring the Northwest Territory under control was to crush the resisting Indians with overwhelming force.
To effect this he turned the American army over to a man they called "Mad."
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According to John Bennett, author of Blue Jacket, War Chief of the Shawnee:
"[Anthony] Wayne's reputation was for hard fighting, daring, energy, dogged courage, reckless disregard of his own personal safety, a fighter who shone at his best when the stress was greatest, cautious, watchful, unflagging, determined, sagacious, and of keen foresight, his favorite weapon the bayonet, cold steel. Gen. Wayne was the ablest drill‑master the American army had ever seen. He at once set about building a fighting machine which should be fit and ready to meet the enemy on his own ground."
Perhaps not actually mad, Wayne may have been the first American commander since George Rogers Clark sent into the Northwest who was merely competent. He assembled an army of 1,000 at Fort Pitt in the summer of 1792 and drilled them mercilessly. He continued to build his force and meticulously trained them as well. While his men became proper soldiers Wayne became a proper commander, studying Indian tactics and the territory he meant to capture. They trained for a year, and finally in the spring of 1793 Wayne moved his army forward to Fort Washington, now Cincinnati.
That summer, before this demonstration of their strength, the Americans mounted a final peace negotiation. The American position stated that the Indians, having allied themselves with the British on the losing side of the Revolution, were therefore a conquered people. The Indians didn't see it that way. They insisted all of the land beyond the Ohio River was theirs. Talks broke down. Wayne moved his army into the Ohio Country that fall into the heart of the Northwest.
A hundred miles north of Fort Washington Wayne halted his force on November 15 and started construction of a massive redoubt he named Fort Greenville, for Revolutionary War general Nathaniel Greene, thus establishing yet another Ohio city. On Christmas Day he sent a force to the site of St. Clair's Defeat. His men found the bones of the American dead on the site, their mouths stuffed with earth. They buried the fallen, and fortified the position, christening it Fort Recovery, founding yet another Ohio city. Troops located the artillery pieces abandoned by St. Clair during his rout stashed in hollow tree trunks by the Indians. Wayne used them to bolster Fort Recovery and spent the winter and spring hardening his positions. Supply problems confounded Wayne. Though secure in his forts he was unable to mount an immediate offensive and the deadly game in the wilderness continued into 1794. Wayne continued his strategy of methodically advancing and fortifying. From Fort Recovery he advanced to the St. Mary's River and there in July 1794 established Fort Adams, honoring the Vice President, at the current site of Rockford, Ohio. From Adams, Wayne advanced deeper yet, following the Auglaize River to its mouth on the Maumee, where he built yet another strong base, taunting and provoking his Indian foes by naming his bastion deep within the territory they claimed Fort Defiance, the location of Defiance, Ohio, today.
The caution, discipline and effectiveness of Wayne's force impressed Little Turtle. He became convinced that the Indians could not best this new expedition, and tried in vain to convince the allied Indian force that the war was lost.
"Twice," said [Little Turtle], "we have beaten the enemy under different commands. We cannot expect good fortune always to attend us. The Americans are now led by a chief who never sleeps. During all the time he has been marching on our villages we have been unable anywhere to surprise him. Think well of it. Something whispers to me that it would be prudent to listen to his offer of peace."
Blue Jacket, however, would not think well of it. He pushed to pursue the war. Little Turtle stayed in the fight, but gave up command of the allied force of Indians. Blue Jacket took the lead.
The Shawnee war chief selected a spot to engage the Americans just outside present-day Toledo, at the rapids of the Maumee and just a few miles from one of the illegal British Northwest outposts on the river called Fort Miamis. The place had difficult terrain strewn with the dead trunks of trees felled by a tornado which would provide the Indians cover to fight and confound Wayne's artillery and mounted troops. And should the fight turn against them they could seek refuge inside their British ally's fort.
Wayne advanced toward the ambush just as Blue Jacket had hoped. But alerted by a scout of the Indian force which lay ahead, on August 17 Wayne paused. He set his men to the task of building yet another fort, but a basic one, just for their supplies, which he deemed simply Fort Deposit. He wanted to fight the Indians light, and at Deposit he could store his supplies and go into battle unencumbered. The construction delayed the Americans three days. It was unexpected by the Indians, and proved crucial.
The Indians had the practice of fasting before battle, which they found made them more fierce, swift and agile against their enemies. When they took positions to hit the Americans they left their food behind, and while they waited and waited for Wayne to arrive they grew hungrier, and weaker.
Wayne finally appeared on the battlefield August 20, 1794. Blue Jacket hoped to draw Wayne's force into a crescent‑shaped kill zone, but his forces on his left flank moved prematurely and rushed the Americans, hitting them and their horses. As what seemed to be their habit, the Americans initially panicked and started to run, but this time they encountered Gen. Wayne behind them, who bolstered their courage by shooting a few of the deserters. He reformed his line, turned it back into the Native attackers and sped them toward the enemy in a bayonet charge. This time the Indians broke, and fled toward Fort Miamis and shelter. But the British inside were under strict orders not to become involved and perhaps provoke a new war with the Americans. The gates of the fort remained shut and the Indian warriors outside were killed and scattered.
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The defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers on August 20, 1794, did not crush the Indians, however. The coming winter did. With no organized force to oppose him, Wayne's army marauded through the Miamis' heartland in the Wabash Valley, burning Indian villages, crops in the fields and winter stores. When the snows arrived the Indians south of the Great Lakes froze and starved. Wayne's army reoccupied the Miamis' capital at Kekionga, first taken but later lost by Harmar, and on the site constructed a fortified outpost which they christened Fort Wayne, founding the Indiana city which today still bears that name. Meanwhile, in November, the Americans and the British concluded Jay's Treaty where Britain, the Indians' only potential ally, agreed to abandon their posts in the Northwest. Into December the Natives' cattle died, then their dogs. The Natives knew that they were next. In January 1795 Blue Jacket presented himself to Wayne at the fort at Greenville and sued for peace.
Native and American representatives negotiated into the following year, finally concluding an agreement on August 3, 1795. Chiefs from the Shawnee and Miami tribes made their marks on the treaty, including Blue Jacket, along with Wyandot/Hurons, Ottawas, Delawares, Chipewas, Potowatamis, Eel Rivers, Weas, Kickapoos, Piankeshaws and Kaskaskias. In addition to ending the war and exchanging prisoners the assemblage of Native leaders agreed to set the boundary between American and Indian land at the Cuyahoga, with the effect of freeing the territory which would become Euclid Township for settlement.
The Treaty of Greenville:
"The general boundary line between the lands of the United States and the lands of said Indian tribes, shall begin at the mouth of the Cayahoga river [sic], and run thence up the same to the portage, between that and the Tuscarawas branch of the Muskingum... the said Indian tribes do hereby cede and relinquish forever, all their claims to the lands lying eastwardly and southwardly of the general boundary line now described..."
For their cession the Indians received the value of $20,000 immediately and were promised an additional $9,500 yearly thereafter in "useful goods, suited to the circumstance of the Indians..." Little Turtle made his mark on the treaty last.
One who refused to sign the Greenville Treaty was a young Shawnee warrior named Tecumseh. Another present who did sign was Gen. Wayne's aide-de-camp, a young lieutenant named William Henry Harrison. Nothing was really over, and these men would meet again.
With the Northwest Indians momentarily cowed, settlers rushed into the territory with renewed vigor. But not immediately to what became Northeast Ohio. Troubles resolving little Connecticut's stubborn Western claim persisted. Plans and negotiations were already underway, however, and the next year, 1796, at last saw the birth of Euclid Township.
The information in Chapter Seven is drawn from the following sources:
Axelrod, Alan. Chronicle of the Indian Wars. Prentiss Hall, 1993.
Bennett, John. Blue Jacket, War Chief of the Shawnee and his part in Ohio's History. Ross County Historical Society Press, 1943.
Hogeland, William. Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion that Opened the West. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2017.
James, John Henry. Ohio in 1788. A.H. Smythe, 1888.
Sword, Wiley. President Washington's Indian War: The Struggle for the Old Northwest, 1790-1795. University of Oklahoma Press, 1985.
Treaty of Greenville 1795, text. The Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library website, Yale University. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/greenvil.asp