Confederated Indigenous Resistance in the 1790s Ohio River Valley

This paper focuses on the western part of the thousand-mile-long Ohio River Valley and shows how Algonquian-speaking Indians living in towns along the western tributary rivers of the Ohio frustrated U.S. imperial designs and confederated when faced with the challenge of invasion. Indigenous communities dominated the lucrative fur trade of this region. Montreal silversmiths sent their best work and fur traders their best cloth. European visitors marveled at the sturdy homes and generous hospitality at these Indian trading entrepôts. Unrelenting attacks and pillaging by Kentucky squatters led most Indigenous people to move upriver and out of harm’s way. These villages refused to come to the treaty table and their boycotting of the Fort McIntosh and Fort Harmar treaties transformed those agreements into meaningless pieces of paper. When Washington ordered Harmar to lead the U.S. army against their largest village, Miamitown, confederated Indian forces handed General Harmar a disastrous defeat. President Washington retaliated by ordering the Kentucky militia to raid the upper Wabash villages and to kidnap Indian women and children. Villages fled prior to the attack, although the Kentucky militia captured about 100 women and children. Most were left behind to tend the sick. After imprisoning the women and children at Fort Washington, the President ordered a second attack on Miamitown. Indian forces handed U.S. forces the worst defeat in army history; warriors reportedly stuffed dirt and grass into the mouths of the dead soldiers to protest the American greed for land and the capture of women and children. Washington understood the message: he pursued a peace policy that halted further attacks and acceded to women’s demands that land cessions in the Ohio River Valley cease. Pushing Indigenous people off their lands in the Old Northwest proved an arduous and expensive endeavor.