War Along the Wabash: The Ohio Indian Confederacy's Destruction of the US Army, 1792

By Steven P Locke

On November 4, 1791, a coalition of warriors determined to set the Ohio River as a permanent boundary between tribal lands and white settlements faced an army led by Arthur St. Clair—the resulting horrific struggle ended in the greatest defeat of an American army at the hands of Native Americans.

The road to the battle of the Wabash began when Arthur St. Clair was appointed to lead an army into the heart of the Ohio Indian Confederacy while building a string of fortifications along the way. He would face difficulties in recruiting, training, feeding, and arming volunteer soldiers. From the moment St. Clair’s shattered force began its retreat from the Wabash the men blamed the officers, and the officers in turn blamed their men. For over two centuries most historians have blamed either the officer corps, enlisted soldiers, an entangled logistical supply line, poor communications, or equipment. The destruction of the army resulted in a stunned Congress authorizing a regular army in 1792.

This book, the result of 30 years’ research, puts the battle into the context of the last quarter of the 18th century, exploring how the central importance of land ownership to Europeans arriving in North America resulted in unrelenting demographic pressure on indigenous tribes, as well as the enormous obstacles standing in the way of the fledgling American Republic in paying off its enormous war debts.

This is the story of how a small band of determined indigenous peoples defended their homeland, destroyed an invading American army, and forced a fundamental shift in the way in which the United States waged war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Casemate
• Release date: Apr 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781636242699

Steven P Locke

Steven P. Locke is a retired curator of history for the Ohio Historical Society. He served in the US Army National Guard, then taught history in the Granville, Ohio, Exempted School District. He studied at both undergraduate and graduate level at the Ohio State University.

Book preview

On November 4, 1791, a coalition of indigenous warriors, determined to set the Ohio River as a permanent boundary between their lands and white settlements, destroyed an American army led by Major General Arthur St. Clair.

The road to the battle of the Wabash began when St. Clair was appointed to lead an army into the heart of the Ohio Indian Confederacy, building a string of fortifications along the way. He would face difficulties in recruiting, training, feeding, and arming volunteer soldiers. From the moment the remnants of the shattered force began its retreat from the Wabash, the men would blame the officers for the catastrophe, and the officers in turn blamed their men. For over two centuries most historians have blamed either the officer corps, enlisted soldiers, an entangled logistical supply line, poor communications, or equipment.

The destruction of St. Clair’s army resulted in a stunned Congress authorizing a regular army—the Legion of the United States—in 1792. In 1776, it had taken the might of the British Empire with its fleets of ships, professional regular army, and Hessian allies to effect such a change. In 1791 the drastic decision was brought about by the prowess of the Ohio Indian Confederacy: a coalition of disaffected warriors supplied by the British that was unable to sustain 1,000 men in the field for more than two weeks.

The result of 30 years’ research, this book puts the battle into the context of the last quarter of the 18th century, exploring how the central importance of land ownership to Europeans arriving in North America resulted in unrelenting demographic pressure on indigenous tribes, as well as the enormous obstacles standing in the way of the fledgling American Republic in paying off its enormous war debts. This is the story of how a small band of determined indigenous peoples defended their homeland, destroyed an invading American army, and forced a fundamental shift in the way in which the United States waged war.

WAR ALONG THE WABASH

For Linda Locke, my best friend.

WAR ALONG

THE WABASH

The Ohio Indian Confederacy’s

Destruction of the U.S. Army, 1791

STEVEN P. LOCKE

Published in the United States of America and Great Britain in 2023 by

CASEMATE PUBLISHERS

1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083, USA

and

The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JE, UK

Copyright © 2023 Steven P. Locke

Hardcover Edition: ISBN 978-1-63624-268-2

Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-63624-269-9

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Front cover image: Life and Death by Robert Griffing and publisher Paramount Press.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part 1

1The American World in 1791

2The Post-War War

3Land

4Eastern Woodland Indians

5Arthur St. Clair

6Futile Attempts at Control

7Indian Warfare

8The Ohio Indian Confederacy

9The Annihilation of Native Culture: Alcohol, Demographics, and Disease

10Buckongahelas, Little Turtle and Blue Jacket

Part 2

1Assembling an Army

2The Road to the Wabash

3October

4November

5The Eve of Battle

6The Blackest Day: The Battle of the Wabash, November 4, 1791

7Retreat!

8Aftermath

9Winners and Losers

Bibliography

Endnotes

Index

Acknowledgements

It is remarkable how much time, effort, and help are required in writing a book. First and foremost I want to thank the team at Casemate; their commitment to the project, attention to detail, and support was remarkable. My editor, Alison Griffiths, was incredibly knowledgeable and patient throughout the process. I benefited immensely from the scholarship of biographers and professional historians who have covered the time-period, the principal characters involved in the campaign, and the battle of the Wabash itself. Though I learned much from every book listed in the bibliography, several studies in particular were central to this project.

The works of Professor Colin G. Calloway provided an immense amount of insight and detail on the world of Eastern Woodland Indians, and his book on the battle of the Wabash—The Victory With No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army—was both timely and incredibly helpful to my understanding the campaign; in particular from the side of the Ohio Indian Confederacy. Likewise, the works of historian John Ferling were especially helpful in illuminating the antecedents to the campaign. A leading historian of the American Revolution, Dr. Ferling’s books on the War of Independence were indispensable to this project.

Professor Richard White penned one of the most important and influential books I read during my research: The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. I read and re-read it both during the research phase and after I had started writing. It is a remarkable achievement. Professor Daniel K. Richter’s works—The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Expansion and Facing East From Indian Country: A Native History of Early America—were critical in explaining the customs, manners, religion, and societal structure of America’s native peoples. Professor Alan Taylor’s The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution, was invaluable in its analysis of the importance of land to natives and newcomers alike, and the differing ways each viewed it through their cultural prisms. Conrad Richter’s The Awakening Land trilogy—The Trees, The Fields, and The Town—are beautifully written and incredibly well-researched. Richter’s depiction of the Ohio Valley frontier during the late 18th century truly brings that hard and isolated world to life. Historian Jeff Danby, author of Men of Armor, was kind enough to not only read the manuscript, offering helpful commentary, but to write a blurb for the dustjacket; for which I am truly thankful.

Dr. Larry Nelson was an incredible resource. Besides being an expert in the field and on the battle of the Wabash, his book—A Man of Distinction Among Them: Alexander McKee and the Ohio Country Frontier, 1754–1799—was enormously helpful, not only in bringing Alexander McKee to life, but in elucidating British national interests in the Ohio country. As site manager at Fort Recovery, and curator of history at the Ohio Historical Society, Dr. Nelson walked St. Clair’s battlefield with me in the 1990s and was kind enough to read the entire manuscript, providing instructive criticism, suggestions, and insights. His generosity made War Along the Wabash a much better book than it otherwise would have been. Speaking of walking the battlefield, historian and author John Winkler spent an entire day at Fort Recovery, Ohio, walking me step-by-step across the battlefield. I took extensive notes and John was incredibly patient in answering my questions; explaining the way in which the clash on the Wabash unfolded. Mr. Winkler’s book, Wabash: 1791, St. Clair’s Defeat, of which he was kind enough to sign my copy, is a remarkable achievement and crucial to my understanding of the battle. March to Massacre: A History of the First Seven Years of the United States Army 1784–1791, by William H. Guthman, also proved to be an invaluable resource in detailing the history of the St. Clair campaign.

My former colleague at the Ohio Historical Society, Sean Pickard, likewise read the manuscript and provided numerous suggestions and constructive criticism, for which I am grateful. None of the historians noted above, or their works, are in any way responsible for my oversights, interpretations, or mistakes. On a personal note, my sister, Laura Locke, was always encouraging and interested in the project and how I was progressing. Lieutenant-Colonel Doug Schumick, USMC (Retired) and his wife Diana, were kind enough to host my wife Linda and myself whenever we journeyed to Fort Recovery to tramp the battlefield. A Marine combat veteran, and student of history, Doug frequently sent articles and histories that augmented my research. He passed away in July 2020 before this book was finished but played a large role in keeping my spirits up during the long years working on War Along the Wabash. Fred Klopfer, a friend since high school, read excerpts and listened patiently about the battle of the Wabash for nine long years. Drew Mohle—historian, businessman, and enthusiast—was a blessing to me throughout the writing of this book. From start to finish, my daughters—Emily and Ruby Locke—were always encouraging, cheering, and a source of inspiration. Finally, I want to thank Linda Joan Locke, my wife and best friend. No way this book would have been written without Linda. Not only did my long-suffering wife accompany me to numerous historical sites, but she listened attentively to each chapter as they came to fruition, offering insights and criticisms that improved the manuscript. Indeed, Linda became so immersed in the project that she drew the battle maps for the book and is equally responsible for seeing War Along the Wabash come to life.

Introduction

This is a book about a battle that took place in western Ohio over two centuries ago between the United States and the Ohio Indian Confederacy; my interest in the battle began in 1987 when I was hired to teach Ohio history and geography in the Granville, Ohio Exempted School District. To prepare I read the assigned textbooks, together with Conrad Richter’s The Trees, The Fields, and The Town. When I read Allan Eckert’s series on the Northwest frontier—The Frontiersmen, The Conquerors, Wilderness Empire, etc.—I felt confident his lurid depictions of frontier violence would capture the attention of my students; and I routinely read excerpts of his work in class.

Eckert’s depiction of St. Clair’s defeat stuck with me, and I began reading further about the battle. It was such an overwhelming catastrophe yet when I mentioned it to family or friends it was unusual for anyone to have the faintest idea of what I was talking about. Likewise, histories of American military disasters, which, for example, cover Custer’s 1876 defeat at the Little Big Horn in minute detail, rarely, if ever, mention the battle of the Wabash.

Later, as a curator for the Ohio Historical Society, I had the opportunity to study the battle in earnest. After retiring it became an obsession and I decided to write an account of the campaign. The result is War Along the Wabash: The Ohio Indian Confederacy’s Destruction of the U.S. Army, 1791, a two-part book. Part 1 is an effort to bring the reader back in time to the last quarter of the 18th century: a look at how people worked and lived, the central importance of land ownership to Europeans arriving in North America, the vast distances involved in travel, and that at the time communication and transportation were synonymous. The way Eastern Woodland Indians lived and waged war; the unrelenting demographic pressure on the tribes that created the conflict; as well as the enormous obstacles standing in the way of the fledgling American Republic in establishing effective government and paying off its onerous war debts.

Part 2 focuses on the campaign: the coalition of warriors determined to set the Ohio River as a permanent boundary between tribal lands and white settlements. The appointment of Arthur St. Clair in 1791 to lead an army into the heart of the confederacy while building a string of fortifications along the way. The day-to-day difficulties in recruiting, training, feeding, and arming volunteer soldiers, and the horrific struggle along the banks of the Wabash River on November 4, 1791.

Finally, throughout the writing of this work, I wanted not only to describe what had taken place, but to explain why it happened; to shed some light on who, or what, was responsible for the greatest defeat of an American army at the hands of Indians in U.S. history. From the moment St. Clair’s shattered force began its retreat from the Wabash the men blamed the officers, and the officers in turn blamed their men. For over two centuries most historians have blamed the enlisted soldiers, a long logistical supply line, poor communications, and poor equipment; all of which contributed to the defeat, but none alone were decisive. What I discovered was that a numerically inferior and less heavily armed force of native warriors defeated St. Clair’s army because they were more highly trained, more skilled, more disciplined, better led, and employed more appropriate tactics than did the Americans. This book is that story. It is a heartbreaking tale, as is all history, but one worth telling; one I hope the reader finds worth his/her time.

Part 1

CHAPTER ONE

The American World in 1791

The United States in 1791 was a country without a social safety net. Just 15 years prior it was known as British North America, albeit with a rebellious population. This new republic, whose first president under the federal constitution had been in office less than three years in 1791, was heavily indebted. The Herculean effort it had taken to free itself from its mother country—the Whore of Babylon as it was known amongst diehard veterans—was enormously expensive in both treasure and lives. It had been a long war, seemingly interminable to participants on both sides: an eight-and-a-half-year struggle, protracted, brutal, and desperate.

The conflict of 1775–83 took place before the advent of the telegraph and daguerreotype: its gruesome battles and the appalling conditions endured by American captives confined aboard British prison ships, for example, were not photographed for posterity. To Americans of 1791, however, those memories were recent experiences. The bitter hostility and vehemence with which combatants on both sides had waged the war lingered still; it had been an ugly affair.

The British press routinely derided Americans as being backward, wicked, bigots of the worst kind, and treasonous. Colonial newspapers responded in kind, calling King George III a tyrant, oppressor, and madman, whose brutish soldiers—the lobsterbacks—were immoral mercenaries who behaved in the most base and barbarous manner imaginable.

From its outset the contest had been waged in earnest. British war policy was designed to give the Empire a tactical advantage in North America, but it also incensed, hardened, and permanently embittered the Americans it sought to subdue. In June 1775, for example, His Majesty’s Government took a step that struck at the very heart of colonial fears. The North Ministry in London advised its American Secretary, the Earl of Dartmouth, to instruct New York’s Superintendent of Indian affairs to "lose no time in taking such steps as may induce [the Iroquois] to take up the hatchet against His Majesty’s rebellious subjects."¹ For colonial Englishmen this was an unforgivable betrayal from a government it had long looked to for protection against the tribes.

The Iroquois and Tories wasted little time taking up the hatchet. The predictable results of such encouragement were an escalating cycle of violence; episodes like the 1778 massacres at Wyoming and Cherry Valley, New York, where war waged without mercy resulted in hundreds of disarmed patriot prisoners—including women and children—being murdered. The American response was the 1779 Sullivan campaign in which over 40 Iroquois villages were burnt to the ground, along with the crops the tribes depended upon to survive. Three years later, in 1782, New England militiamen intercepted eight large parcels from the Senecas en route to Colonel Frederick Haldimand, Governor of Canada. The enclosed letter read: Teoga, January 3, 1782. May it please your excellency, At the request of the Senneka Chiefs, I send herewith … eight packs of scalps, cured, dried, hooped and painted … The first package contained the scalps of 105 congress soldiers and … farmers killed in their houses. Packages two, three, and four included 98, 97, and 102 farmers’ scalps. The sixth and seventh parcels were filled with the scalps of children: 193 boys and 211 girls, respectively.²

From the onset of hostilities the British Royal Navy took to burning and shelling American coastal towns. As early as October 17, 1775, for instance, while Congress debated whether to build a navy, Falmouth, Massachusetts (Portland, Maine) was bombarded by a four-ship British squadron that shelled the town for eight straight hours.

According to Professor John Ferling, round shot, bombs, incendiary shells, and shrapnel were lobbed into the defenseless city. Falmouth’s homes, businesses, its wharves, and 11 vessels were sunk or destroyed. Afterwards, General Washington informed Congress that the British attack was an Outrage exceeding in Barbarity & Cruelty every hostile Act practiced among civilized nations.

The following month, November 1775, Virginia’s Royal Governor John Murray, Lord Dunmore, issued a proclamation that struck as much fear into southern colonists as the mother country’s appeal to American Indians had to those on the frontiers. He promised freedom to all rebel-held slaves who were able and willing to bear arms and assist his Majesty’s Troops in putting down the American rebellion.³ Southerners took to calling Dunmore a monster and labeled his proclamation diabolical. Virginian George Washington, who already despised Dunmore, was so incensed by the proclamation that he noted if one of our bullets a[i]med for him, the world would be happily rid of a monster.⁴

By the end of 1775, with the struggle less than a year old, Great Britain was waging total war on the North American colonies. The Royal Navy had blockaded American ports and razed coastal cities to the ground, while Parliament had passed the American Prohibitory Bill—the Capture Bill—which called for a naval blockade of each colony, the seizure of American goods on the high seas, and the impressment of American sailors into the Royal Navy. American Indian attacks were to be incited against Britain’s nominal subjects, and a slave rebellion encouraged by offers of freedom to those held in bondage.

In New York, Colonel John Butler, a loyalist, formed Butler’s Rangers, and worked with Joseph Brant and his Mohawks to attack rebel patrols and vulnerable American settlements. Butler’s loyalists and Brant’s Mohawks summarily hung captured revolutionaries, tortured them piteously, or left them bound to trees to die of starvation. If all this were not enough, the British planned to unleash foreign mercenaries (Hessians) to wage war on the wayward colonists.

The Americans responded in kind. Their British overseers were derided in American newspapers for being Haughty Philistines, Prideful, Insolent, and Rapacious. General Richard Henry Lee spoke bitterly of British crimes and the barbarous spoilation of the American colonies.⁵ On April 23, 1776, three months prior to the Continental Congresses’ formal break with the mother country, Virginia’s 16-member Committee-of-Safety declared its independence from Great Britain, concluding that their former trading partner and benefactor was determined to enforce their arbitrary mandates by fire and sword … encouraging our savage neighbours [Indians], and our more savage domesticks [slaves], to spill the blood of our wives and children.

In the Continental Congresses’ Declaration of Independence, King George III was assailed by his former subjects for waging war against us … [and] transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries, to compleat the works of death, desolation & tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages.

In January 1777, Thomas Nelson of Baltimore wrote in disgust to Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson, Could we but get a good regular army we should soon clear the continent of these damned invaders … They play the very Devil with the girls and even old women to satisfy their libidinous appetites. There is scarcely a virgin to be found in the part of the country that they have passed through.⁶ In June 1778, when General William Howe withdrew his British army from Philadelphia, the rebels returned with a vengeance. The leader of the Constitutionalists, Joseph Reed, immediately issued Acts of attainder against nearly 500 Philadelphians suspected of helping the redcoats. Those in the rebel crosshairs soon faced trial and confiscation of their property. Unsurprisingly the choicest, most valuable estates appropriated from suspected Tories ended up in the hands of the Constitutionalists.

During the bitter partisan war in South Carolina in the summer of 1781, General Lee summarily executed his Tory captives, and described the struggle as War at its worst. General Nathaniel Greene, the American commander in the south, sympathized with Lee’s decision to take no quarter, remarking [W]e have great reason to hate them, and vengeance would dictate universal slaughter, but nevertheless worked to stem the vicious cycle, realizing that unhesitatingly killing Tory captives would be a fatal practice. As newly commissioned British Brigadier-General Benedict Arnold raided the interior in 1781, and the British Navy shelled and burned American coastal towns, several delegates of Congress debated setting London, England ablaze; preferably by torching Buckingham Palace to start the conflagration. (Nothing ever came of it.)

The American War of Independence, therefore, had given its belligerents great reason(s) to hate one another.⁷ In 1791, less than a decade after formal hostilities were concluded with the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the United States was a land still scarred by the conflict, and with deep divisions amongst its populace.

The most striking division was the presence of roughly 700,000 slaves—mostly concentrated in the south—out of a total population of approximately 4,000,000 Americans, according to the 1790 census. Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s first secretary of state under the federal constitution, put 30 of his Monticello slaves on the auction block in 1791 to keep his creditors at bay.

In both the north and the south it was an agricultural land but one where a substantial portion of the workforce was engaged in seafaring commerce along the Atlantic coast: whaling, sewing sails, hewing masts, caulking ships, and transporting raw materials like tobacco, timber, furs, rice, and indigo to foreign ports.

North America in 1791 was a world of candle wax and flames that flickered within lamps fueled with whale spermaceti and lard. Daily routine and the rhythms of life were determined by the arc of the sun. Farmers, for example, transported their vegetables, milk, and cheese to local markets at night or early in the mornings; that being the only way to keep the produce cool and prevent it from wilting. Americans drank rainwater collected from roof cisterns when no wells or free-flowing springs were accessible, supplementing their liquid intake with hard cider, madeira, and distilled spirits. As Benjamin Franklin wryly noted, If God had intended man to drink water, He would not have made him with an elbow capable of raising a wine glass.

Corn and its byproducts, as historian Nicholas P. Hardeman has detailed, were ubiquitous. In fact, maize was the only crop grown in all 13 states as well as in the Northwest Territory. It stored easily, fed both people and livestock, and could be reduced in weight when distilled to liquor. Corn cribs and hominy blocks dotted the landscape, while in the winter months farmhouses were banked with stalks from the corn harvest to keep the wind, rain, and snow at bay. Hog and hominy made up the basic diet, especially on the frontier, where salt pork was served alongside daily helpings of corn mush mixed with molasses, maple syrup, and bear oil. Likewise, cornbread was standard fare; fried in a skillet or baked in a Dutch oven over an open fire in a hearth, as most American homes lacked stoves. Shucked corncobs were put to a myriad of uses in 1791 America. Women used dry cobs as fire starters, made dolls for their children, or used them as hair curlers and as scrubbing brushes to wash pots and pans.

Men soaked the corncobs in pine pitch and used them as torches, scratched their backs with cobs attached to small branches, used half-cobs as stoppers for their whiskey jugs, bobbers for fishing, makeshift handles for farm tools and as a not-so-soft toilet paper. In American towns and cities, men, women, and children daily smoked tobacco from corncob pipes.

Chamber pots were found in most homes and outhouses just beyond. As historian John Ferling has noted, the towns and cities where those homes were concentrated were cramped. Limited to walking or riding an animal, wagon or cart, Americans needed to be able to work, visit local markets, and attend church services on foot in their little hamlets. The villages were crowded with wagons, carts, horses, and signs suspended over the streets. The roads were also used by pigs, ducks, dogs, and chickens that moved freely about town. Typical villages contained a church, courthouse, cemetery, two or three shops, a tavern, and no more than 20 to 40 homes.

Every American city with a population of at least 6,000 residents was located on the Atlantic seaboard, though there were few big cities. According to the 1790 census, New York City was the new nation’s most populous with 33,131 residents. Philadelphia, the nation’s temporary capital since December 1790, not including its surrounding townships, had a population of 28,522 citizens. Boston, Massachusetts, though listed as a town in the 1790 census, was the third most populous American metropolis with 18,320 Bostonians.

The vast majority of Americans did not reside in cities, which were associated with vice, crime, and periodic cholera, smallpox, and yellow fever pandemics. John Adams referred to their putrid streets, and insisted that escaping them was vital to one’s survival. Such Excursions are very necessary to preserve our Health, amidst the suffocating Heats of the City.⁸ In both town and countryside windmills were prominent features of the American landscape. Mills were, in fact, one of the first structures erected alongside whatever watercourse the hamlet had sprung up by, and busily ground tobacco, plaster, paper paste, wheat, mustard, flour, sawed timber, and crushed corn. Farmers spent long days lambing, calving, baling hay, planting, and harvesting crops; while their counterparts—the artisans and craftsmen in America’s infant industries—worked forges, made iron nails and rods, produced glass, lenses, paper, ink, metal kettles of copper and brass, and built mechanical clocks.

For artisans and farmers alike, manual labor was the order of the day and survival precarious. Nathaniel Greene, for example, who had risen to the rank of major-general during the Revolutionary War, was well connected and had fought alongside Washington in the Continental Army, would write to Henry Knox in 1786, My family is in distress and I am overwhelmed with difficulties; and God knows when and where they will end. I work hard and live poor, but I fear all this will not extricate me.

America in 1791 was a noisy place wherever its new citizens congregated. Carpenters, shoemakers, weavers, and coopers wielded their tools six days a week. Surveyors called out landlines, while traders, cordwainers, shopkeepers, apothecaries, glaziers, broom makers, and printing presses clamored from sunup to sundown.

By 1791 land had become more expensive in the east, approximately $75 an acre on average, but was plentiful and much cheaper to the westward. Labor was scarce in the United States and therefore commanded high wages by European standards. Men worked six days a week: 12-hour shifts with an hour for breakfast, and two for lunch/supper—the big meal of the day. Unskilled laborers earned on average $0.75 a day, while an experienced sailmaker might make as much as $1.75 during the same nine hours on the job. At harvest time farm laborers, in addition to their hourly wage, were awarded a daily half-pint of rum. Skilled artisans commanded over $200 annually, but a successful lawyer could earn as much as $500 a year.

Despite the American Revolution’s noble ideals, the United States was, like the country it broke from, a stratified society in 1791. As historian John Ferling has noted, binding contracts outlining indentured apprenticeships resulted in a substantial number of American workers being entirely beholden to their employers. Those bound by such stringent agreements were legally restricted from much of American life: forbidden while in service to marry, gamble, patronize local taverns or leave their places of work without permission. Below the indentured servants on the social ladder was America’s population of nearly 700,000 slaves, the majority of whom lived in Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

Approximately half of the American population—whether they resided in a city, town, farm, or on the frontier—was illiterate. Not surprisingly, according to historian Gordon Wood, it was a world where writing competently was such a rare skill that anyone who could do it well immediately acquired importance.⁹ For those who could read and write, or those who wanted to learn, Noah Webster’s American Spelling Book, Containing an easy Standard of Pronunciation, had appeared in 1789.

Despite a 50-50 chance whether anyone who came into possession of a letter could actually read it, correspondence was often written in private code or cipher. Unguarded missives were frequently opened and, if found interesting, forwarded to the nearest newspaper, and published for all to read. Inkwells, goose feather, and quill pens were found in nearly every business establishment. The ink, made of lamp-black and varnish, was once again being imported now that the war was over; Americans had learned during the lean years of the struggle to make a substitute from vinegar and soot.

Most American households spun their own yarn, wove their own cloth, and dressed in wool, linen, or leather. The average height of white, native-born American males was five feet, seven inches tall. Life expectancy for men was 34.5 years, and 36.5 years for women. Of America’s roughly 4,000,000 residents, 90 percent lived along the eastern seaboard. Only some 230,000 American settlers had moved beyond the Appalachian Mountains, an area referred to in the settled eastern states as being located out of the world—a 900,000-square-mile wilderness organized on paper as the Northwest Territory.

It was a world of wood-smoke, tobacco mills, and high mortality rates. Martha Washington, the nation’s first first lady, for example, would lose her first husband, all four of her children, six of seven siblings, and her second husband before her own death in 1802.

Women less prosperous and well-known to history than the first lady made their way in the world by teaching school, boiling and wash-boarding dirty clothes and bed linens, making hats, running stores, and working as servants and embroiderers. As 90 percent of Americans listed themselves as farmers in the 1790 census, young women living in the countryside were frequently apprenticed to neighbors to exchange knowledge on how best to run a household. The ability of women to brew beer, cook, bake, sew, mend torn clothing, make candles and soap, weave rugs on a loom, preserve vegetables, and master the various herbal remedies necessary to run a home was critical for survival.

In the 1790s travel and communication were synonymous, and slow for everyone: men and women, rich and poor. For instance, when George Washington traveled from Monticello to Federal City, despite an official escort and a team of superb horses, it took the president of the United States almost five full days to cover 120 miles.

It required a minimum of six weeks to cross the Atlantic Ocean from Europe, and once in the United States it was considered easier to travel 1,000 miles by water than 100 over land—even in the heavily settled coastal states. Beyond the Appalachians, out of the world, Americans moved even slower: on horseback and foot via narrow Indian trails, or in canoes and keelboats along the interior’s various waterways; though that too was slow-going and dictated by the seasons. In the Ohio Valley overhanging trees and driftwood clogged streams and tributaries, and even a river the size of the fast-flowing Ohio would freeze in places as early as November. When the rains came in the spring, nearly all the rivers swelled their banks and made traveling hazardous for the unwary.

Unlike the immense territory for which it was responsible, the federal government was tiny in 1791. The State Department ran everything except the military, treasury, and adjutant-general’s office, with a staff of five and a budget of approximately $8,000 a year. The Treasury Department, by contrast, had a staff of 70 assigned to collect the all-important taxes. The War Department was also slight, and both unnecessary and dangerous in the eyes of many representatives and senators. Speaking of the people’s representatives, both senators and congressmen earned just $6 a day; nothing when not in session.

Early in 1791 a presidential proclamation laid out the boundaries of the nation’s new capital and appointed commissioners to oversee the construction work. Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a French-born engineer, was assigned as its architect. On September 18, 1791, the commissioners overseeing the work decided to name the area the District of Columbia, the city itself—Washington.

The United States of 1791, like the rest of the world in that era, was a hard unforgiving place. Stealing an ox, for instance, resulted in 39 lashes to a thief’s bare back, while stealing a fellow-citizen’s horse was punishable by death. The lands bordering the United States were equally hostile. Indeed, the new republic was literally surrounded by foreign enemies. Fierce Indian warriors lurked in the woodland forests to the west. The Spanish were entrenched in New Orleans and St. Louis, as well as in Florida. The haughty British were ever-present in Canada, and off the east coast where the Royal Navy patrolled the Atlantic Ocean. Additionally, in the northwest the English had stubbornly refused to abandon the forts stipulated for evacuation in the Treaty of Paris. The United States in 1791, therefore, was a newfound political entity, an infant republic that was vulnerable both within and beyond its borders. A country where hard, manual labor was necessary to survival and in which the careless, incautious, and imprudent did not long survive.

CHAPTER TWO

The Post-War War

In 1791 the United States was at odds with two formidable enemies: first, the British, with whom a smoldering, undeclared conflict bubbled just beneath the surface; a contentious struggle that finally flared into open hostilities in 1812 and would not resolve itself until the Treaty of Ghent in 1815. Second, an open, armed struggle with the Ohio Indian Confederacy of the Northwest Territory in which the United States had lost the opening battle of the contest.

One of the principal reasons the North American colonists had gone to war with Great Britain in 1775 was the mother country’s insufferable policy of keeping its colonial subjects from settling beyond the Appalachian Mountains. With victory, the people of the United States began to flood across that barrier, much to the consternation of the region’s native inhabitants.

Aware of the trans-Appalachian Indians’ opposition to encroachment on tribal lands, the United States informed the various tribes that the area in which they lived was now—by right of conquest—American territory. Operating under guidelines set forth in the 1783 Congressional Indian Affairs Committee Report—the American government’s starting point in dealing with the tribes of the interior—it was taken as read that the Indians could not be restrained from acts of hostility and wanton devastation but were determined to join their arms to those of Great Britain, and therefore should be compelled to retire beyond the lakes.¹

This is an illuminating passage for several reasons. First, the Americans understood from the beginning that the British, despite their formal surrender of the Northwest Territory, were still hostile to the United States. If not openly, at least through their proxies: the Miami, Seneca-Cayuga, Shawnee, Wyandot, Ottawa, and Delaware, as well as four of the six tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy.

The British were playing a double game. They had signed the Treaty of Paris and ceded vast territories to the United States—but only on paper. His Majesty’s Government recognized the inherent weakness of the new republic, did not expect it to survive, and determined not only to retain control of the Canadian fur trade, but to create a buffer state inhabited by Indians hostile to the United States. Arguing that American merchants had not repaid their debts to British creditors, and that the United States had failed to comply with treaty provisions calling for the restitution of property to displaced Tories, the British refused to evacuate Fort Detroit. They also clung to Forts Michilimackinac, Oswego, and Niagara, despite the Treaty of Paris’s requirement that they abandon those posts. Rather, they assured the frustrated Americans that they would evacuate the forts with all convenient speed. (It took them 13 years.)

The government of the United States recognized the danger of a continued British presence in the interior but was too weak to do anything about it. Former major-general, and newly appointed governor of the Northwest Territory, Arthur St. Clair, having assumed responsibilities as governor in 1788, wrote to Secretary of War Henry Knox: Every arrangement of military posts for the protection of the frontiers is exceedingly defective compared with the importance of Niagara and Detroit … until the United States are in possession of said posts … no solid peace can be effected with the Indians.²

Likewise, Major John F. Hamtramck of the First American Regiment had remarked as early as 1783 that nothing can establish a peace with the Indians as long as the British keep possession of the upper forts, for they certainly are daily sowing the seed of discord betwixt the measures of our government and the Indians.³

Besides refusing to evacuate the western forts, Britain declined to make restitution for runaway slaves, neglected to send a British minister to the United States, refused to allow American vessels to trade within the British Empire, and had not dealt honestly with its Indian allies. Had the British abided by the treaty they had signed, the tribes of the Ohio country would have had no choice but to seek accommodation with the new American government. They did not. To the contrary, the British continued to supply them with trade goods, arms, and ammunition; while Crown agents like Alexander McKee, Matthew Elliot, and Simon Girty urged the tribes to wage war against the Americans by raiding settlements in Kentucky and attacking exposed outposts along the Ohio River.

Governor-General of British Canada Colonel Frederick Haldimand, rather than admitting to his war-time Indian allies that the British would no longer fight alongside them, opted instead to let the tribes believe that at some point they would. American Indian Commissioner Ephraim Douglass reported as much as early as September 1783, when he submitted a report on a British meeting with several Ohio country tribes at Sandusky. The British, Douglass noted, promised to metaphorically remove the tomahawk from their Indian allies, but did not place it out of sight or far from the Indians, but [had laid] it down carefully by their side, that they might have it convenient to use in defense of their rights and property.⁴

Second, having dealt with the Dutch, Spanish, French, and British governments—among others—during the Revolutionary War, and numerous other European countries in the eight years following hostilities, the Americans assumed their newly acquired Indian subjects could be managed in similar fashion. The tribes of the interior would recognize, as had the British, the American right of conquest to all lands between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River.

It didn’t work out that way. Indeed, Britain’s Indian allies had been denied a seat at the conference table during the negotiations of the Treaty of Paris. Nor had they been defeated by the Americans during the war, and therefore did not recognize any American right to their lands. Eventually acknowledging this irreconcilable difference, the Americans concluded that it would be necessary to either purchase or compel the Indians to cede territory. The sooner the better, for war was already raging in the Ohio Valley.

Armed conflict, in fact, was being waged up and down both banks of the Ohio River, and fiercely because of the unchecked American invasion of tribal lands. The signing of the Treaty of Paris is analogous to a starter’s pistol being fired at the start of a race as Americans scrambled for cheap land to settle in the western territories. Between 1783 and 1788, an estimated 50,000 settlers crossed the Appalachians into the Ohio Valley. America’s political and military leadership clearly understood, even at this stage, that demographics—in relation to native peoples who stood in the nation’s way—was destiny.

For instance, on September 7, 1783, George Washington wrote his friend, James Duane, that:

The settlement of the Western Country, and making a peace with the Indians, are so analogous, that there can be no definition of the one, without involving consideration of the other … The Indians will ever retreat as our settlements advance upon them, and they will be as ready to sell, as we are to buy. That is the cheapest, as well as the least distressing way of dealing with them.⁵

A year later in 1784, Washington’s comrade-in-arms, General Philip Schuyler, observed that the flood of settlers would hunt and clear the forests of both woodland creatures and the trees themselves. As a result, the Indians who presently made those forests their home would dwindle comparatively to nothing, as all Savages have done who … live in the vicinity of civilized people, and thus leave us the country without the expense of a purchase, trifling as that will probably be.⁶

Henry Knox, the Continental Army’s chief of artillery and the nation’s first secretary of war, understood that as Americans moved westward, they would utterly transform the landscape by building tanneries, sawmills, churches, schools, roads, houses, barns, corn cribs, and roadside inns. This process would simply overwhelm the natives currently residing there: As the settlements of the whites shall approach near to the Indian boundaries established by treaties, the game will be diminished, and the lands being valuable to the Indians only as hunting grounds, they will be willing to sell further tracts for small considerations.⁷

By war’s end in 1783 demography was increasingly determining the fate of North America’s native peoples. In 1784 in the State of New York, for example, just 6,000 Iroquois clung to their tribal lands while 240,000 white Americans already resided in the same State. Generals Washington’s, Schuyler’s, and Knox’s predictions about the long-term prospects for Eastern Woodland Indians residing in the path of the new nation’s expansion were already proving prescient. At the same time, however, the Americans were far too sanguine about the tribes living beyond the Appalachians. In the west the Indians were more numerous than their eastern brethren, well supplied by the British from the disputed forts, out of reach of large American armies, and absolutely determined to prevent the Americans from settling north of the Ohio River.

Despite this unbending opposition, by the spring of 1785 more than 2,200 families had settled north of the Ohio, most of whom had no legal claim to do so; neither from the tribes of the Ohio country, nor the American government who claimed title to the lands. As a result of these incursions the confederated tribes began to raid the interlopers’ settlements; killing squatters, torturing those who survived initial ambushes, and attacking boats moving up and down the Ohio River.

The confederacy was spearheaded by the Miami and Shawnee tribes and by 1786, despite the U.S. Government’s desire to purchase their lands or compel them to move further westward, raids by warriors beyond Pittsburgh were incessant. Kentucky County Lieutenant John May wrote in the spring of 1786 that, Scarcely a week has passed … without some person being murdered. All the Indians on and about the Wabash are for war, and news is just received … that there are several hundred of them at this time out at war.⁸

In the Ohio country it had devolved to the point that nearly every time Indians and Scotch-Irish settlers came into contact, they simply murdered one another. In April 1786, an Indian war party killed Colonel William Christian, a Revolutionary War officer, in Kentucky. His wife was sister to Patrick Henry, the governor of Virginia. Governor Henry, as might be expected, immediately ordered a massive retaliatory campaign against the Indian villages he deemed complicit to avenge his brother-in-law.

In the autumn of the same year, September 1786, a Cherokee war party arrived at Wakatomica (a Shawnee town on the upper Muskingum River) with four female captives. The Cherokees took two of