OHIO STATEWIDE FILES - "The Struggle with the Indians 1763-1783" ----------------------------------------------------------------------- USGENWEB NOTICE: These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or presentation by other organization or persons. Persons or organizations desiring to use this material, must obtain the written consent of the contributor, or the legal representative of the submitter, and contact the listed USGenWeb archivist with proof of this consent. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Karin King 105542.2642@compuserve.com September 14, 1998 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ From "A History of Ohio" by Eugene H. Roseboom and Francis P. Weisenburger copyright 1953 by The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society Page 27 Chaper III "The Struggle with the Indians 1763-1783" Pontiac's Conspiracy and Bouquet's Expedition The elimination of the French was by no means the end of Englands problems in America. In fact, the difficulties with the Indians and with her own colonists following the Seven Years' War made the burdens of empire seem greater than its benefits. The relations of mother country and colonists belong to the story of American independence, but the Indian problem is peculiarly a part of Ohio's history. Indian policy was concerned primarily with two fundamental factors: trade and lands. The white trader was eager to profit from the former; the pioneer and the land speculator were protecting the Indians from white rapacity and of maintaining peaceful relations, no small task when the elimination of the French danger permitted the trader and the land-hungry to swarm into the Ohio Valley regardless of the rights of the Indian. The agents of the government were well chosen for their work. Sir william Johnson, at the head of the Northern Department (including the Northwestern Indians), had the confidence of the Iroquois and for years had skillfully managed Indian affairs in New York. His deputy, more directly concerned with the Ohio Valley, was the erstwhile trader, George Croghan, who more than any other man knew how to deal with the Western Indians and to retain their friendship. But the efforts of these agents proved unavailing in quieting the Indians. Despite conferences and presents, the tribes became more and more restless and suspicious, and in 1763 Pontiac's great uprising resulted. A number of factors explain this outbreak. A throng of unscrupulous traders, disregarding licenses and attempts at restriction, cheated the Indians and aroused their hatred. The British commander-in-chief, General Jeffrey Amherst, unappreciative of the difficulties involved, restricted sales of ammunition and enforced upon the Indian agents a policy of economy that greatly reduced the amounts of presents and contributed to Indian unrest. The contrast between this attitude and the attitude of the English when the war was going on was not lost upon the Indian. French traders added to the unrest by spreading false rumors and engaging in intrigues, while in the background there was growing among the Ohio Valley Indians the feeling that their lands would be seized next. Only a leader was needed to organize the tribesmen, and the Ottawa chieftain, Pontiac, supplied this need. Simultaneous surprise attacks upon the scattered British posts in the West proved so successful that nine forts were captured, while only three held out through the summer of 1763. The post on Sandusky Bay, the only British fort on Ohio soil, was the first to fall. The garrison of fifteen men was wiped out and the officer in command taken prisoner. But the key to the Ohio Valley, Fort Pitt, resisted until relieved by Colonel Henry Bouquet in August. Detroit likewise resisted a long siege, and the failure of the Indians to take these two strongholds led to the collapse of the conspiracy. British authority had now to be restored in the Northwest and the abandoned posts reoccupied. To overawe the still rebellious tribes, two expeditions were sent west in 1764: one under Colonel John Bradstreet to Detroit, following the southern shore of lake Erie; the other under Colonel Henry Bouquet, marching into Ohio from Fort Pitt. Conferences were to be held with the Indians, English prisoners were to be surrendered, and peace treaties were to be signed. Bradstreet accepted the assurances of the Wyandots, Ottawas, and other northern Ohio Indians and inflicted no punishment upon them. Disregarding orders from General Thomas Gage, now British commander-in-chief in North America, Bradstreet did not march to attack the Scioto Valley Indians, but returned to Niagara. Regardless of the peaceful attitude of the Indians around Detroit, the Ohio tribes remained unpacified. Their pacification was accomplished, however, by Bouquet's expedition in the fall of 1764. Bouquet was a Swiss soldier of fortune who had spent many years in the British service and who had learned by experience how to deal with the Indians. Refusing to negotiate at Fort Pitt, he marched with fifteen hundred men into eastern Ohio to the Tuscarawas-Muskingum Valley, where he established headquarters on the site of the present city of Coshoction. Overawed by his presence in the heart of the Indian country, the Ohio tribes came to his camp to offer their submission. More than two hundred white prisoners were released - some after years of captivity- and promises were made that others would be brought to Fort Pitt the following spring, when a formal treaty would be signed. Bouquet, assured that the Ohio Indians were really desirous of peace, returned to Fort Pitt after an absence of only two months. The more difficult task of pacifying the tribes of the Illinois country was left to George Croghan. Diplomacy instead of force was necessary here, for it was impossible to send a large British army so far into the interior. Under circumstances of great hazard to himself and his companions, Croghan won over the tribesmen, including the redoubtable Pontiac himself, to an acceptance of English rule. By the close of the summer of 1765, the Western Indians had given their submission, and an English garrison was established in the Illinois Country. Once more the boats of the traders were passing unmolested down the Ohio River. (Subheading) British Policy and Western Land Projects, 1763-1774 Closely related to the Indian problem was the question of the disposal of the great interior region west of the Alleghenies. To permit the Colonies with sea-to-sea claims to exercise jurisdiction here would invite confusion and trouble not only among the Colonies themselves, because of overlapping claims, but also in their relations with the Indians, for the eager frontiersmen had little regard for the rights of the aborigines. An imperial control of some sort seemed necessary. But the imperial authorities were faced with the same problem - whether or not to permit settlement in the interior, and, if they permitted it, how to regulate it in order to avoid Indian troubles. The British government, controlled for the most part by selfish politicians, was hardly in a position to adopt a consistent, statesmanlike policy; but to its credit, in the years following Pontiac's Conspiracy, it succeeded in avoiding Indian wars and in preventing a rush of settlers into the Ohio Valley to seize Indian lands. The Royal Proclamation Line of 1763 was established to confine settlement east of the Alleghenies. The government recognized the need of an Indian boundary beyond which settlers could not proceed without government authorization, and designated the mountains because there was no time to fix a definite line in agreement with the Indians and have it surveyed. Already pioneers and land speculators were pushing into the interior, and Pontiac's Conspiracy had broken out. The establishment of such a line would not prevent future cessions of land by the Indians to the British government and the properly regulated colonizing of such lands, but it did attempt to restrain settlement until the government could control it. The fur trade also needed to be protected, and presently two Indian districts were created west of the mountains to safeguard the Indians from unscrupulous speculators and traders. The leading land speculators regarded the policy of the Proclamation as only temporary and made plans to secure the most desirable lands as soon as the region should be opened. The frontiersmen paid little attention to the line, squatting on Indian lands as before. Believing that the west would soon be opened to settlement, some of the speculators organized companies to secure large tracts from the Crown. Several of these projects were launched in the 1760's, but only one came near to success. This was the Walpole Company, better known as the Vandalia Project, from the name it proposed to give its new colony. It originated with a group of trading merchants who wanted a land grant to recompense them for losses suffered from Indian depredations. Thomas Walpole, a London banker, and a number of prominent Englishmen were stockholders, as well as George Croghan, Governor William Franklin of New Jersey, Sir William Johnson, and other colonial capitalists. Benjamin Franklin acted as lobbyist for the company with the British government. It petitioned for a grant south of the Ohio, west of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and as far west as the Kentucky River, an area including approximately the present state of West Virginia and the eastern part of Kentucky. The project was pressed especially after the Iroquois, by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, surrendered their claims to a vast tract south of the Ohio and as far west as the Tennessee. But the British government had to give its consent - and this was less easy to obtain. Rival speculators and companies wanted grants and protested to the British ministers, though some were bought off with shares in the reorganized company. The old Ohio Land Company still had hopes of being revived, and the Virginia soldiers, who had been promised land bounties, had expected them to be located in this area. Virginia naturally objected to this disregard of her charter claims. But skillful lobbying overcame all objections, and it seemed in 1773 as if the new colony would soon be an actuality. Apparently the charter was about to be granted. If Vandalia had been colonized, Ohio would soon have had settlers, for the Ohio River boundary would not have bothered the frontiersmen; but delays and obstructions prevented any action until the Revolution broke out and ended British control. One of the leading speculators of the Virginia group was George Washington, who had long been interested in Western lands. Through his agent, Captain William Crawford, he selected a number of tracts in the Ohio Valley and had them surveyed, although final title could only be obtained when Virginia's right to the Ohio Valley was recognized by the Crown. In 1770 Washington made a trip to Fort Pitt and then down the Ohio to the mouth of the Great Kanawha, looking for desirable land. On this journey he encountered a rival speculator, George Croghan, who attempted to sell the Virginian a part of his own holdings. Only his demand for cash prevented the sale. Croghan's titles depended on the sucess of the Vandalia scheme and of royal confirmation of some Indian purchases. Washington never lost interest in the west, and in the trying years following the Revolution advocated a scheme for connecting the headwaters of the Potomac and the Ohio to furnish an Eastern outlet for Western goods. In his will he listed tracts of land in sections that now are parts of Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia, totaling more than 41,000 acres. The last significant measure of the British government applying to the West was the Quebec Act of 1774. It was designed primarily to give to Canada a permanent government without a representative assembly, and a satisfactory legal system - a measure quite suited to the French population; but it extended the boundaries of the Province of Quebec to the Ohio River on the south and to the Mississippi on the west. Since the French villages in the Illinois region contained the only permanent residents in this area, excepting the Indians, and since the preservation of the fur trade was an object of the act, the measure did not seem unreasonable. Yet it disregarded the Western land claims of several seaboard Colonies, already irritated by British commercial restrictions, and seemed to the frontiersmen to guarantee Indian possession of the lands north of the Ohio. It also created resentment because of the privileged position it gave to the Roman Catholic Church, though this was suited to the religious desires of the French. The measure would have aroused less opposition had it not been enacted at the time when Parliament was passing laws to punish Boston and Massachusetts for the "Boston Tea Party." Though the Quebec Act had no connection with these coercive acts, it was associated with them in the popular mind and was later mentioned in the Declaration of Independence as an act of Brtish tyranny. Its significance in Ohio history is slight. Acts of Parliament could not be enforced in the colonies in 1775. (SUBTITLE) Lord Dunmore's War Despite the evident desire of the British government to proceed cautiously in securing land cessions and permitting settlement, the Ohio Indians were becoming increasingly concerned over the appearance of hunters, surveyors, and occasional squatters west of the Indian boundary. They were further incensed at the action of the Iroquois nations in 1768 at Fort Stanwix, when the region south of the Ohio River was ceded to the Crown with no regard for the claims of the Ohio tribes, particularly the Shawnees. This ill feeling was fanned into a flame by a number of irritating incidents of both sides and came to a climax in the spring of 1774. Alarmed at rumors of Indian depredations, Dr. John Connolly, agent at Fort Pitt for Virginia's Governor Lord Dunmore, issued a proclamation calling on the frontiersmen to arm in their own defense, as war was at hand. Settlers on the exposed frontier began to flee to the settlements for safety, and killings by both frontiersmen and Indians occured frequently. One of the overt acts was furnished by a group of surveyors and frontiersmen who gathered at the mouth of Wheeling Creek and determined to begin hostilities. Captain Michael Cresap was chosen leader, though he was not responsible for the acts of violence that followed, popularly called "Cresap's War." The first bloodshed came when two Indians in a canoe on the Ohio were fired upon and killed. Other killings speedily followed, making war inevitable. The most atrocious act was the cold-- blooded murder of a number of unarmed Mingo Indians at "Baker's Cabin." some fifteen miles above the present site of Steubenville on the Virginia side of the river. A villainous character by the name of Greathouse was the leader of the whites. The Indians were made drunk and then killed. Among them was a sister of the Mingo chief, Logan, and perhaps other relatives. Logan, holding Cresap responsible, went on the warpath, and the frontier was soon aflame. The Indians of the Ohio Country, however, did not present a united front. The Shawnees furnished the backbone of their resistance, being aided by Mingoes, Wyandots, and scattered groups from other tribes. Owing to the influence of the Moravian missionaires, the majority of the Delawares held aloof. The more distant Northwestern tribes and the Iroquis were not involved in the war. On the other hand, Virginia alone of the English Colonies was responsible for the war. Claiming the region around Fort Pitt, and controlling that frontier village despite Pennsylvania's claims, (Fort Pitt was no longer a British post, since the troops had been removed in 1772) the Old Dominion, under its aggessive Royal Governor, Lord Dunmore, an active land speculator, set about to crush the Ohio tribes and establish its title to the great Northwest. Pennsylvania adopted a policy of neutrality, while the hostile tribes on their part attempted to distinguish between Virginians and residents of the Quaker colony. The trading interests of the latter made them less objectionable than the Virginia speculators and home-seekers. On June 10, 1774, Lord Dunmore called out the militia of the western counties, and the war was on. The governor sent out Colonel Angus McDonald to raid the Shawnee towns, but the expedition did little but stir up the Indians to a greater fighting pitch. The more important work was left to Dunmore himself, who assembled a force of militia at Fort Pitt, and Colonel Andrew Lewis, who called out the frontiersmen of the southwestern counties. The original plan was for a junction of the two forces at the mouth of the Big Kanawha, but Dunmore, coming down the Ohio from Fort Pitt, preceeded only as far as the Hocking, and then marched up that valley toward the Shawnee villages on the Pickaway Plains, where he expected Lewis to join him. The latter, with some eleven hundred back-woodsmen, followed the Kanawha to the Ohio, and on October 6 encamped at Point Pleasant at the the junction of the two rivers. Here, in the early morning of October 10, he was attacked by more than a thousand warriors, mostly Shawnees, under the leadership of the crafty and skillful Cornstalk. They had crossed the Ohio the night before, unobserved by Lewis's scouts, and were within two miles of the sleeping Virginia troops when they were discovered by hunters. A desperate battle ensued between Indians and Lewis's frontiersmen with the result in doubt until late in the day, when the braves began to retire. That night they retreated across the Ohio and returned to the Shawnee towns. One-fifth of Lewis's forces were killed or wounded, while the number of Indian casualties was smaller; but the failure of the attack of the Indians and their withdrawal gave the Virginians a hard-earned victory. The battle of Point Pleasant has sometimes been called the first engagement of the American Revolution, but this is hardly the case. Great Britain was in no way involved, as the Indians were fighting on their own initiative to defend their lands against the aggressions of the frontiersmen. Nor were the latter conscious of upholding the American cause against the mother country, particularly since a royal governor had called them to arms. It was rather the beginning of another chapter in the long struggle of the Indians to protect their lands against the unceasing pressure of the colonist. Not until Wayne's victory in 1794 was the contes for the Northwest terminated. However, Point Pleasant was long celebrated in frontier annals for the heroic deeds of the participants. Stories and ballads recited around the fireplaces of log cabins made the battle take on an epic character to the generation that listened to the firside chronicles, the spirit of which is exemplified by the following verse: Like thunder from heaven our rifles did roar, Till twelve of the clock, or perhaps something more, And during this time the Shawnees did fly, Whilst many a brave man on the ground there did lie. The news of Point Pleasant reached Dunmore as he was marching toward the Shawnee towns, and was soon followed by overtures for peace from Cornstalk. Eight miles from the chief Indian village, the governor established Camp Charlotte, in what is present Pickaway County, and here terms were agreed upon. The Indians were to restore prisoners and property and to regard the Ohio River as their boundary line. More definite terms were to be arranged at Fort Pitt the following spring. While the negotiations were under way, Colonel Lewis approached Camp Charlotte with his victorious army. Doubting his ability to control the frontiermen in the presence of their hated enemy, Dunmore ordered them to march back to Point Pleasant, as the war was over. Only with considerable reluctance did they finally agree to do this: destroying the Shawnee villages would have been far more to their taste. A group of Mingoes refusing to join in the negotiations were punished by an expedition sent against their villages (on the present side of Columbus), which were destroyed. Logan, the Mingo chief, had not opposed peace, though he did not take part in the discussions. He had not fought at Point Pleasant, for he was at the time leading a raid on the Virginia frontier. Now, his vengeance satisfied, he recounted his mistreatment at the hands of the whites in a famous speech to Dunmore's envoy that, if not written down and translated exactly as he gave it, at least expresses admirably in its English version the sense of injustice and the burden of sorrow that weighed upon him. His pathetic eloquence has immortalized him as his deeds as a warrior could never have done. Before their withdrawal from Ohio soil, the officers of Dunmore's army passed a resolution expressing their sympathy for the American cause, then represented by the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia. This resolution was accompanied by an expression of confidence in their commander, Lord Dunmore - a fact that seems to prove clearly without foundation the stories later circulated to the effect that Dunmore provoked the war in the interests of Great Britain to keep the frontiersmen occupied. It was even charged that he had tried to accomplish the destruction of Lewis's force by giving him no aid at Point Pleasant, but there are no indications in any of Dunmore's private letters that he was guilty of such duplicity, nor were such charges made at that time. On the contrary, all the evidence points to his sincerity and zeal in upholding the rights of the Province of Virginia. The apersions cast upon him later by frontiersmen and frontier writers were doubtless inspired by their dislike of the governor resulting from his actions in support of the British government in the first year fo the Revolution. His course then made them suspect him of motives that could not have been present earlier. The results of Dunmore's War were important. It kept the Ohio tribes quiet during the first two years of the Revolution and gave the little Kentucky settlements an opportunity to become established without molestation. It furnished military experience for many officers and soldiers who later took part in the Revolution: for example, Andrew Lewis, Daniel Morgan, George Rogers Clark, Isaac Shelby and William Crawford. It strengthened Virginia's claim to the trans-Allegheny region, for she alone had been responsible for the war and its successful outcome. Her paper claims could now be reenforced by an argument based upon conquest. The Quebec Act was seemingly made a dead letter to the frontiersmen. (Subtitle) OHIO DURING THE REVOLUTION The struggle for the Ohio Country during the American Revolution was essentially a renewal of the conflict between Indian and frontiersman that had begun with the French and Indian War, had been reopened for a time by Pontiac in 1763, and after some years of quiet, had entered upon a new phase in Dunmore's War, when the Ohio Indians seemed in imminent danger from the westward advance of the whites. Whether the Revolution had come or not, further wars were inevitable if the Indians were to be dispossessed of their lands. The outbreak of hostilities between mother country and Colonies merely hastened the renewal of the old struggle. This time, British encouragement and assisstance made the area of conflict more widespread and the results more doubtful than they had been in 1763 and in 1774. At first, the Ohio Indians, still smarting from their defeat at Point Pleasant, were reluctant to go on the warpath at the behest of British authorities. Indeed, the Indians seemed bewildered at the rapid turn of events in 1775. The very tribes that had been punished by Dunmore the year before were now being urged by his agent, Connolly, to attack the frontier settlers. Connolly's efforts were nullified, however, by the formation of a committee of public safey at Pittsburgh that took control of the region and asked Congress for action to quiet the Indians. Both Virginia and Congress appointed commissioners to complete the preliminary treaty, made by Dunmore the year before, and a great gathering of tribes was held at Pittsburgh in September 1775. The outcome was a treaty in insure the friendship of the Indians and to secure their neutrality in the war. Thus, the immediate danger of Indian attack was removed, the settlement of Kentucky was allowed to proceed peacefully, and the West could send its riflemen to join the army of Washington, then encircling the British forces in Boston. The fall of 1775 also saw the capture of Dunmore's agent, Connolly, who was planning to arouse the Indians, and with the aid of British troops in the Northwest and in Canada, to seize Pittsburgh and invade Virginia from the west. He was arrested in Maryland on his way west, and his plan came to nothing. A more spectacular undertaking on the American side in 1776 was the exploit of Captain George Gibson, a young Virginian, who, with Lieutenant William Linn and fifteen men, went down the Mississippi to New Orleans to secure powder. After some difficulties with the Spanish authorities that were ironed out by Oliver Pollock, an American merchant, Gibson succeeded in his mission and sent ninety-eight barrels, with forty-three men to convey them, up the Mississippi and the Ohio. The expedition arrived at Wheeling on May 2, 1777, narrowly escaping capture at the falls of the Ohio at the hands of a band of Indians sent by the unfriendly Spanish officials at St. Louis. The value of this precious cargo to the American cause can hardly be overestimated. It was becoming increasingly evident in 1776 that the Indians would soon be involved in the war, and Washington himself suggested that they be enlisted in the American cause. Congress authorized the commander-in-chief to engage two thousand Indians and to offer rewards for prisoners, but this decree was counteracted by two factors that gave the British authorities an advantage in bidding for their support. One was the work of British officials, particularly Sir Henry Hamilton, in command at Detroit, in offering every inducement to win the Western tribes. Congress, with its limited means could not outbid the British. A second factor weighing heavily against the Americans was the natural hostility between frontiersman and Indian that produced the inevitable crop of irritating incidents leading directly to war. The depredations of a band of hostile Mingoes, known as "Pluggy's Band," created consternation along the frontier in the fall of 1776 and made open war seem imminent, though Colonel George Morgan, Indiana agent at Pittsburgh, was making every effort to preserve peace between the various tribes and the frontiersmen. The principal overt act, as in Dunmore's War, was furnished by lawless frontiersmen. Cornstalk, coming to Fort Randolph (Point Pleasant) in the spring of 1777 to warn the commander that the Shawnees were about to go on the warpath, was murdered in cold blood with his son and two companions in the confines of the fort by militiamen. The soldiers had been infuriated at the killing of a young Virginia volunteer my some marauding braves across the Kanawha and had vented their rage on the highminded Shawnee chief. This act of despicable treachery was followed by a general rising of the Ohio tribes, excepting the Delawares, against the frontier. Both Congress and Governor Patrick Henry of Virginia attempted to make amends to the Shawnees, but the damage could not be repaired. The story of the next six years is one of bloodshed and horror, of war in its cruelest form, with Americans vying with Indians in acts of atrocity. Ohio was as yet unsettled but was crossed by bands of hostile braves, on their way to attack the Kentucky settlements or the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontiers, and by retaliatory expeditions of Americans intent on punishing the tribesmen by scattering their bands and destroying their Ohio villages. No important battles were fought on Ohio soil, but a number of bloody minor engagements and acts of individual prowess, peculiar to frontier warfare, made these years take on an almost legendary character to the succeeding generations. The names of Daniel Boone, the Poe brothers, George Rogers Clark, Simon Kenton, and William Crawford, among the American heroes, and of "Hair- Buyer" Hamilton and the three renegades, Alexander McKee, Matthew Elliott, and Simon Girty, on the British side, speak for themselves. The year 1777 inaugurated the period of raids on frontier settlements in Kentucky and on the upper Ohio, and was marked by an unsuccessful attack of Fort Henry (now Wheeling) by a band of two or three hundred Indians and some Detroit rangers in September. The little band of defenders offered such desperate resistance that the besiegers soon withdrew in discouragement. The siege was immortalized in frontier annals by Major Samuel McCullough's reputed descent on horseback down the priecipitous slope some three hundred feet high to escape the Indians who had intercepted him as he was about to enter the port. The year 1778 is famous in the history of the Revolution for the exploits of George Rogers Clark in the Northwest. His capture of Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes in the Illinois Country with one hundred and fifty men constitutes the most important accomplishment in the West during the war. The frontier rejoiced especially at the capture of Sir Henry Hamilton, the hated "Hair-Buyer," at Vincennes in February 1779. In Kentucky, Boonesborough underwent a ten-day siege late in the summer of 1778, but the resistance of Boone, Kenton, and their followers was too much for the four hundred and fifty assailants, mostly Indians with a few French Canadians. In the same year, two attempts were made to invade the Ohio Indian country. General Edward Hand in February led five hundred men from Fort Pitt into eastern Ohio against the Indians on the Mahoning with the ultimate intention of moving against Sandusky. But only a few women and children and one man had been captured when heavy rains and melting snows put an end to the campaign. Soon afterward Alexander McKee, Matthew Elliott, and Simon Girty fled from Fort Pitt to Detroit, where as partisan leaders, they rendered valuable aid to the British cause. In the fall General Lachlan McIntosh, General Hand's successor at Pittsburh, prepared to attack Detroit, and established Fort Laurens on the Tuscarawas River in what is present Tuscarawas County. Lacking supplies enough to preceed further, he retired, leaving at the fort a garrison of one hundred and fifty men under Colonel John Gibson. Here in February 1779 Simon Girty and Captain Henry Bird began a siege with a force of Indians and a few British soldiers that ended when both sides became nearly exhausted from lack of food. But the post was too exposed a position to make it worthwhile to risk its garrison, and in August 1779 it was evacuated, after being in almost constant danger of Indian attack from the time of its establishment. It was the first American fort on Ohio soil. On the Kentucky front, in the early summer of 1779, occurred an offensive thrust of nearly three hundred frontier volunteers under Colonel John Bowman against the Shawnee center on the Little Miami near the present site of Xenia. Though outnumbering the Indians three to one, the expedition accomplished little beyond the destruction of huts and crops and the acquisition of plunder. It did, however, prevent an intended invasion of Kentucky, and caused some alarm in Detroit lest the Indians, in discouragement, should abandon the British cause. In the same summer, George Rogers Clark's plan to attack Detroit, though not carried out for lack of men and supplies, produced a near-panic in that place. The year 1780 was marked by a raid upon Kentucky by British and Indians and a retaliatory expedition against the Ohio Indians by Clark. The first, planned by Major Arent S. De Peyster, in command at Detroit, as part of a general offensive in the West, was aimed at the newly established but important town of Louisville. However, fearing that the post might prove too difficult to take, the motley array of Indians, Canadians, and British soldiers turned to attack the weaker Kentucky settlements. Two of these were easily captured, but the problem of supplies, the heavy rains, and the unruly actions of his Indian allies led the commander, Captain Henry Bird, to order a retreat. The immediate effect was a retaliatory expedition led by George Rogers Clark. With nearly a thousand backwoodsmen from all parts of Kentucky, the hero of Vincennes pushed up the Little Miami in August, arriving at the Indian center of Old Chillicothe (near Xenia) in time to see the buring huts of the Shawnees, who had abandoned their towns and fled some twelve miles to their capital near the present site of Springfield. Clark pursued them and fought a successful engagement (the Battle of Piqua) with a remnant of the tribesmen, though most of the Indians, alarmed at the size of this frontier army, had fled into the forest. The town was soon in flames and the crops around it destroyed by the avenging frontiersmen Clark's force then returned to the Ohio and dispersed. The blow was a severe one to the Shawnees, and for the rest of the year the Kentuckians enjoyed a temporary respite from the horrors of Indian warfare. Again in 1781 the Americans took the offensive and planned two expeditions into the Indian country. The first of these expeditions, in April, was directed against the Delaware center of Goschochgung (Coshocton). Led by Colonel Andrew Brodhead, commander of the forces at Pittsburgh, three hundred regulars and volunteers proceeded into eastern Ohio and surprised the Indian towns. Brodhead had been warned by the Moravian missionaries that the Delawares were about to abandon their neutrality, and decided to strike first. (A band of the Delawares, led by their chief, Captain Pipe, had aided the British from the first, but the majority, influenced by the Moravians, had held aloof.) The expedition was quite successful, seizing the Indian towns without a shot being fired. Fifteen warriers were killed in cold blood for their supposedly wicked deeds, and a number of others were murdered on the march back by the undisciplined militiamen. The power of the Delawares was broken in eastern Ohio, and they withdrew to the Scioto-Sandusky region. Far more important was the plan of George Rogers Clark to capture Detroit. Only through possession of this key point could Americans hope to end the Indian danger in the Northwest. But misfortune dogged Clark's steps from the outset. Though both Washington and Governor Jefferson of Virginia approved, they could render little aid, military or financial. Colonel Brodhead at Fort Pitt would not cooperate, and finally Clark was forced to start down the Ohio with less than one-fifth of the two thousand men deemed necessary for the success of the enterprise. He had expected reenforcements to overtake him before he reached Louisville, but only 107 militia under Colonel Archibald Lochry set out to join him. These, short of ammunition and supplies, were unable to catch up with the main expedition and were cut off by a superior force of Indians on August 24 a few miles below the mouth of the Great Miami. Forty-two were killed and the rest captured. In the face of this disaster, Clark could not hope to attack Detroit, and the plan was abandoned. While the war was drawing to a close on the seaboard with the capture of Carnwallis at Yorktown in the fall of 1781, it continued its bloody course for another year in the Northwest. The chief events centered around the misfortunes of the Moravian missionaries and their Indian converts. From the days of the French and Indian War, the Moravian Brethren, a German Protestant sect of simple, Quakerlike tenets, had been interested in the problem of Christianizing the Indians. As early as 1761 Rev. Christian Frederick Post had tried to establish a mission among the Delawares on the Muskingum, but the times were too unsettled to permit its success. Work with the Delawares in Pennsylvania was encouraging but encountered the suspisions of the frontiersmen, who thoroughly distrusted the Indian as a neighbor. The best opportunities seemed to be offered by the Delawares on the Tuscarawas, in eastern Ohio, and here in 1772 was begun the mission of Schoenbrunn (Beautiful Spring) by David Zeisberger and John Heckewelder. Soon other little villages were established, (Schoenbrunn and Gnadenhutten - 1772- were abandoned, and Lichtenau - near Coshocton- became the mission center in 1776. The latter was abandoned in 1779-1780, New Schoenbrunn - 1779 - and Salem -1780- were established, and Gnadenhutten was reoccupied - 1779) and in them were congregated several missionaries and their families and the converted Indians, many of them from Pennsylvania, who were taught the virtues of the Christian way of life and the duty of nonresistance to the use of force. The Revolution brought the dangers of war to the Moravians, whose villages lay on one of the principal warpaths between the hostile centers of Detroit and Pittsburgh. War parties from both sides stopped for refreshment at the missions and received the same friendly treatment. The influence of Zeisberger and Heckewelder was important in keeping most of the Delawares neutral until 1781, and it was due to missionary warnings that Colonel Brodhead was able to attack and destroy the towns of the hostile tribesmen before they could carry out their plans against the Americans. But in return the Moravians gained only the ill will of the frontier militia, who were with difficulty restrained by Colonel Brodhead from plundering the mission towns. The unruly soldiers could not understand neutrality and pacifism and only remembered that bands of marauding savages had rested with and received food from the Moravians. The American commander urged the missionaries and their Indians to withdraw behind the American lines, but they would not abandon their beloved villages. On their part the British Indians were irritated at the refusal of the Moravian converts to take part in the war, and tried to embroil them. The first blow came in the fall of 1781. A band of Indians frm Sandusky and Detroit with a few British rangers came to the towns on theTuscarawas, and , after much plundering, forced the Christian Indians and their Moravian teachers to go with them to the Sandusky region. Here the hapless converts erected a few huts- "Captives' Town" - and faced a winter of starvation, as their savage hosts had abandoned them to their fate. However, the missionaries themselves were summoned to Detroit, where they had to undergo an examination before the commandant, De Peyster. The latter declard himself well satisfied that the Moravians were innocent of wrongdoing and permitted them to return to "Captives' Towns." A more serious blow now befell the Christian Delawares. Facing starvation in their new quarters, they were permitted by their Wyandot masters in February to send one hundred and fifty of their number back to the Tuscarawas to gather the corn left in the fields at the time of their forced departure. Here, with a few others who had remained at their old homes, they were found by a company of ninety volunteer militia from the Pittsburgh area, mostly frontier ruffians, led by a certain Captain David Williamson. Aroused at recent Indian raids and atrocities, and refusing to believe that the Moravian converts were not party to them, the militiamen took matters into their own hands and decided to wipe out the village. No resistance was offered, and the Indians were disarmed and imprisoned in two cabins at Gnadenhutten while their captors debated their fate. Only eighteen of the ninety voted for mercy, the rest favoring immediate execution. The captives, informed of their decision, were allowed to spend the night in singing and praying, and next morning were led out by twos and murdered in cold blood. Sixty-two adults and thirty-four children perished, two boys miraculously escaping. Having disposed of the Indians at Gnadenhutten and Salem in this fashion, the blood-thirsty frontiersmen proceeded to Schoenbrunn to complete their work, but the inhabitants had been warned in time and had fled. The killers then gathered together the plunder and returned to the neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where public opinion seems to have been divided as to the justice of the deed. Posterity has had but one opinion on this question, namely, that their action stands out as one of the most atrocious massacres in the annals of warfare. Prisoners have been killed in cold blood on numerous occasions in Indian wars, but the murder by a band of frontiersmen, supposedly Christians, of a group of noncombatant neutrals who had been taught to regard nonresistance as a Christian virtue is almost without parallel. This massacre, in March 1782, began a year of such horrors that it has been called the 'bloody year.' Regardless of what had hapened in the East, the war was not yet over in the West. The most important offensive operation was an expediton of four hundred and eighty mounted volunteers, mostly Pennsylvania borderers, including many of Moravian massacre infamy, against the Wyandot center of Sandusky (near the site of Upper Sandusky) in May and June 1782. A company of Detroit rangers under Captain William Caldwell and some Lake Indians came to the aid of the Ohio tribesmen, and a battle was fought near the Wyandot town. The first day (June 4) there was no decisive result, and the struggle continued in desultory fashion another day; but reenforcements of Shawnees and Canadians alarmed the Americans, who decided to retreat that night. The retreat speedily became a disorderly flight that was not checked until the deserted Wyandot town was reached next morning. A successful stand against their pursuers that afternoon (the Battle of the Olentangy) saved the little army and enabled it to retire without further interference. But among the fifty missing was the unfortunate commader of the expedition, Colonel William Crawford. Elected to the position by popular vote, he had attempted the impossible in trying to conduct a successful campaign with undisciplined frontier volunteers in the heart of the Indian country. Separated from his command and captured by the Delawares, he was burned to death with horrible tortures. The Moravians were being avenged. Success in defeating Crawford's expedition encouraged the Indians, and a raid against Bryan's Station in Kentucky followed in August. Defeated in trying to take the place, and fearful of the arrival of relief from other settlements, the Indians and rangers under Captain Caldwell withdrew. A body of Kentuckians, overtaking the enemy, was led into an ambush at the Blue Licks on the Licking River on August 19, and the worst disaster of the Revolution in the West followed. Sixty-six Americans were killed and four were captured. The last British offensive came in September, when Fort Henry was besieged by Captain Andrew Bradt with nearly three hundred Indians and rangers. The garrison of eighteen men, besides women and boys, resisted so bravely that the siege was abandoned in three days. The attack was made memorable by the exploit of Betty Zane, sister of the commanding officer, who at the risk of her life ran from the fort to a fortified cabin near by and returned with a badly needed supply of powder for the garrison. Even before the siege of Fort Henry, orders from his superiors came to De Peyster at Detroit to act only on the defensive, and no more raids were organized against the frontier. But the Kentuckians, aroused by the defeat at Blue Licks, struck one more retaliatory blow at the Indians. George Rogers Clark, taking the field for the last time, in November led 1,050 mounted riflemen up the Miami Valley against the Shawnee towns. One detachment went as far as Loramie's (or Lorimier's) Store, a British trading post at the head of the Miami. No resistance was offered by the fleeing tribesmen, whose towns were burned and whose supplies were destroyed by the avenging Kentuckians. This raid, made in November 1782, marked the close of the Revolution in the West. General Irvine had planned to assist Clark by leading an expedition from Fort Pitt against the Sandusky towns, but as his troops were assembling, orders came for him not to proceed, as Sir Guy Carleton, the British commander at New York, had put an end to the Indian War. The story of the peace negotiations lies outside the field of Ohio history, but it is of interest to know that the obtaining of American title to the vast region west of the Alleghenies was largely due to the insistence of the commissioners, John Jay and John Adams upon this point, in opposition to the French proposal that the Northwest remain in British hands. By disregarding French advice and breaking their own instruction, they made terms with the British commissioners that made the Mississippi and the Great Lakes the western and northern boundaries. Diplomacy rather than conquest won the Northwest, for most of Ohio and the important Detroit area were under British-Indian control despite Clarks' conquest of the Illinois Country. But the British government, headed by the liberal-minded Lord Shelburne, was desirous of winning the United States away from the French and anxious to retain the commerce of the states as before the war, and made concessions that were not pleasing to France and her ally, Spain, whose hopes on confining the new nation to the area east of the mountains were thereby shattered. Thus Ohio became part of the United States of America, though whether title to the Ohio Country was vested in Congress or in certain claimant states remained to be settled, while the sullen tribesmen for years to come were to dispute actual possession with the land-hungry frontiersmen. THE END