Native Ground, Middle Ground, Battle Ground: 

The River Raisin, the War of 1812, and the Course of North 

American History

Historic Resource Study of River Raisin National Battlefield Park, 

Michigan

Detail from Samuel Lewis, A correct map of the seat of war (1812). Library of Congress 

Prepared under contract to: 

Midwest Regional Office, National Park Service 

United States Department of the Interior 

By 

Mark David Spence, Ph.D. 

2019 

Cover image presents six Bodéwadmi doodem (Potawatomi clan symbols) affirming the transfer of 

land along the River Raisin to François Navarre in 1785. 

Native Ground, Middle Ground, Battle Ground: 

The River Raisin, the War of 1812, and the Course of North 

American History 

Historic Resource Study of River Raisin National Battlefield Park,

Michigan 

Recommended: 

Associate Regional Director Cultural Resources 

Midwest Region 

Concurred: 

Superintendent, River Raisin National Battlefield Park 

Midwest Region 

Approved: 

Regional Director, Midwest Region 

Date 

Date 

Date 

Table of Contents iii

Table of Contents

Signature Approval Page i 

List of Figures v 

Introduction

A Fulcrum of History and War: The River Raisin at the Crossroads 

of Empires, Native Nations, and the Early Republic 1

Chapter One 

Gmikwe’ndan Nmézibe (Remembering Sturgeon River): Environments 

and Peoples Since Time Out of Memory 11

Chapter Two

A New World in Motion, ca. 1650-1750 33

Chapter Three

Alliances, Onontio, and the Limits of Empire: 1700-1763 61

Chapter Four 

“Our Brethren the English:” Revitalization, Revolution, and the 

Persistence of War in the Ohio Valley 87

Chapter Five 

“Engagements respecting Lands:” Native Confederacies and the 

Early Republic, 1783-1795 117

Chapter Six 

“I want to live in peace on our land”: Crisis and Renewal in the 

Borderlands of Nation and Empire, 1795-1810 159

Chapter Seven 

The Coming of War and the Battles of Frenchtown 203 

Chapter Eight 

Consequences of War and Peace 247 

Chapter Nine 

Removing and Remaining 271 

Chapter Ten 

Removing, Remaking, and Remembering 297 

Cultural Resource Base Maps 329 
Table of Contents iv

Index 351 

Appendices 361 

A. River Raisin National Battlefield Park and its significance 363

relative to other NPS sites that correspond to the War of 1812 

a. Horseshoe Bend National Military Park

b. Chalmette Battlefield, Jean Lafitte NHP & Preserve

c. Boston National Historical Park: USS Constitution

d. Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine

e. Fort Mackinac National Historic Landmark

f. Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial

g. President’s Park (White House)

h. Castle Clinton National Monument (New York City)

i. National Mall and Memorial Parks: U.S. Capitol

j. Cumberland Island National Seashore

B. Consultations 369

C. Recommendations for Additional Studies 371

D. Acknowledgements 375

E. Bibliography of Battlefield-related source material literature 377

Addendum 413

A. River Raisin Battlefield Site: National Register

of Historic Places Documentation
List of Figures

v

List of Figures

Figure I.1 River Raisin National Battlefield Park, Related Historical Sites,

Population Centers, and Present-day Transportation Corridors 2

Figure I.2 Core Management Area: River Raisin National Battlefield Park,

Monroe, Michigan 3

Figure I.3 Current Land Ownership, ca 2018: River Raisin National Battlefield

Park, Monroe, Michigan 9

Figure 1.1 Glaciation and the formation of the Great Lakes 15

Figure 1.2 Shorelines of Early Lake Erie 17

Figure 1.3 Environmental Conditions, ca. 1800 19

Figure 1.4 Residence, Land Use and Migration: ca. 500-1000 and 1000-1300 CE 30

Figure 1.5 Locales of Known Archeological Features 32

Figure 2.1 Indigenous Groups in the Lower Great Lakes 39

Figure 2.2 Environments and Residential Patterns in Wendakeronon

and the Surrounding Region 42

Figure 2.3 Great Lakes Shatter Zone and Diaspora 51

Figure 2.4 Western Pays d’en Haut, ca. 1680s 55

Figure 3.1 Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, ca. 1740 67

Figure 3.2 From the Forks of the Ohio to Sandusky Bay 72

Figure 3.3 L’Amérique Septentrionale 75

Figure 3.4 Seven Years’ War in North America 84

Figure 4.1 Relative positions of Indigenous groups in the Ohio Valley

and the Great Lakes, ca. 1760s 89

Figure 4.2 “Lands Reserved for Indians” and the Proclamation Line 98

Figure 4.3 The American revolutionary War in the Ohio Valley 108

Figure 4.4 Staus Quo Post Bellum: Locations of American Indian

Towns and U.S. setlements after the 1783 Peace of Paris 113

Figure 5.1 Boundaries and Populations, mid 1780s 120

Figure 5.2 Land Cessions as Defined by the Treaty of Fort McIntosh, 1785 128

Figure 5.3 Population Centers in the Ohio River Valley, late 1780s 133

Figure 5.4 Organizing the “Northwest Territory” 135

Figure 5.5 U.S. Invasions in 1790, 1791, and 1794 145

Figure 5.6 Treaty of Greenville Land Cessions, 1795 156

Figure 6.1 Indigenous Population Centers after the Treaty of Greenville 162

Figure 6.2 “Plan of Private Claims in Michigan Territory,” 1810 173

Figure 6.3 Cadastral Survey and Long Lots on River Raisin 175

Figure 6.4 Land Cessions, Territorial and State Boundaries, ca. 1809 181

Figure 6.5 Land Cessions, Harrison’s Campaign, and the Battle of Tippecanoe 200
List of Figures

vi

Figure 7.1 Hull’s Trace and the First Theater of the War of 1812 212

Figure 7.2 Detroit River and Vicinity, 1812 214

Figure 7.3 Confederacy Attacks and Conflicts with U.S. Citizens and Military 222

Figure 7.4 Routes and Movements of U.S. Military Forces in the Fall of 1812 224

Figure 7.5 Locations of Populated Areas and Fortified Sites around

Western Lake Erie, ca. December 1812 227

Figure 7.6 First Battle of Frenchtown: Actions on January 18, 1813 229

Figure 7.7 Second Battle of Frenchtown: Early Actions on January 22, 1813 231

Figure 7.8 Second Battle of Frenchtown: Closing Actions on January 22, 1813 233

Figure 7.9 Detail from Massacre of the American Prisoners, at

French-Town, on the River Raisin ... (1813) 241

Figure 8.1 Routes and Movements of Military and Naval Forces in

the Spring and Summer of 1813 250

Figure 8.2 “A View of Co. Johnson’s Engagement with the [Indians] (Commanded by Tecumseth) near Moravian Town, October 5, 181[3]” 255

Figure 8.3 Major Campaigns in the Eastern Theater and the Chesapeake, 1814 260

Figure 8.4 Major Campaigns in the Southern Theater, 1813-14 262

Figure 9.1 Indiana State Seal, 1816 275

Figure 9.2 Nineteenth Century Land Cessions 281

Figure 9.3 Ten-sqúat-a-way, The Open Door, Known as The Prophet,

Brother of Tecumseh (1830) 283

Figure 9.4 Wyandot Reservations, ca. 1836 285

Figure 9.5 Wyandot Removal, 1843 289

Figure 9.6 “Potawatomi Leaving Logansport, Indiana, September 10, 1838” 291

Figure 10.1 Plan of the Huron Reserve (1836-1837) 299

Figure 10.2 Symbol of the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation 303

Figure 10.3 Six Points Master Plan: A Vision for the Future

Home of he Wyandot of Anderdon Nation 306

Figure 10.4 The Spread of “Michigan Fever” 313

Figure 10.5 Birds-eye View of Monro, ca. 1860s 315

Figure 10.6 “Monroe from the Battle-Ground,” ca. 1860s 316

Figure 10.7 River Raisin Paper Company, ca. 1930s 317

Figure 10.8 Gathering at Guyor’s Island, 1871 321

Figure 10.9 Abandonment, Demolition, Dedication, 2000-2011 326
Introduction

1

Introduction

A Fulcrum of History and War: The River Raisin at the Crossroads of 

Empires, Native Nations, and the Early Republic

Centered around lands on the south and north shores of the River Raisin in the 

City of Monroe, Michigan, and including non-contiguous parcels within Monroe and 

Wayne counties, the River Raisin National Battlefield Park encompasses sites directly 

associated with the battles of Frenchtown that occurred on and between January 18 and 

23, 1813.

1 These include the First (January 18) and Second (January 22) battles of 

Frenchtown, and the subsequent killing of wounded American prisoners (January 23). 

The latter actions also accompanied the destruction of Frenchtown, one of the only 

French ribbon farm settlements to be established within the territory of the United States 

after the Revolutionary War. The battles and their aftermath represent a key point in the 

War of 1812, when the British-Confederacy alliance successfully defended their hold on 

Michigan Territory and stymied a planned U.S. invasion of Upper Canada (present-day 

Ontario). As such, these events are a high-water mark for the Native Confederacy that 

had come together—in alliance with British forces—to foster the creation of a distinct 

American Indian territory to the west and southwest of lakes Erie, Huron, Michigan, and 

Superior.

The strategic importance of the events along the River Raisin were further 

magnified by their disastrous consequences for U.S. forces. In terms of the scale and 

number of combatants, the battles of Frenchtown are often referred to as the largest 

conflict to ever occur within the present boundaries of Michigan. Yet the Second Battle 

of Frenchtown is better known as the deadliest engagement for U.S. forces during the 

War of 1812. Out of a combined force of approximately 1,000 U.S. Infantry and 

Kentucky militia, more than 400 died in battle and approximately thirty badly wounded 

prisoners were killed in the aftermath. Except for thirty-three men who managed to 

escape on January 22, all the rest were taken prisoner. The number of U.S. dead from the 

battles of Frenchtown and their aftermath amounts to roughly one-fifth of all U.S. 

soldiers killed in battle during the War of 1812.2 Viewed in the United States as a 

 1 In accordance with the Battlefield’s enabling legislation, delineation of the areas relating to the battles and 

their aftermath in Wayne and Monroe counties was initiated in 2011—with final refinement occurring in 

2017. There are more than ten primary sites in the two counties that are associated with the interpretation of 

the national battlefield and its significance.

2 The casualty figures noted here are for both engagements (January 18 and 22) and the events of January 

23, 1813. The battles of Frenchtown are certainly the largest conflicts to occur within the present-state of 

Michigan since the region was first contested by European imperial powers. However, it is likely that larger 

Indigenous conflicts occurred around western Lake Erie and within present-day southeastern Michigan in 

the early 17th century. On casualties at Frenchtown in January 1813, and during the War of 1812 in general, 

see Thomas H. Palmer, The Historical Register of the United States, Part II: From the Declaration of War 

in 1812, to January 1, 1814 (Philadelphia: G. Palmer, 1814), 195; and G. Michael Pratt and William E. 

Rutter, “The Battles of the River Raisin: Clash of Cultures, Clash of Arms,” in Archaeology of 
Introduction

2

profound tragedy, with the fallen as martyrs in a war against the twin “villainy and 

tyranny” of American Indians and Great Britain, this loss inspired the spirited cry of 

“Remember the Raisin!” for U.S. forces in subsequent battles. Among these was the 

decisive U.S. victory at the Battle of the Thames (October 5, 1813) in Upper Canada, 

where British forces surrendered and the celebrated Shawnee leader Tecumseh was 

killed.3

Figure I.1: River Raisin National Battlefield Park, related historical sites, 

population centers, and present-day transportation corridors. Map is 

closely based on a National Park Service regional map of War of 1812 sites.

Because the battles of Frenchtown occurred in an inhabited area, and near a key 

British military installation (Fort Amherstburg) at the mouth of the Detroit River, the 

events are well documented in the written historical record. More recent archeological 

investigations have further corroborated the documentary record, and provide insight into 

 

Engagement: Conflict and Revolution in the United States, eds. Dana L. Pertermann and Holly Kathryn 

Norton (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2015), 44-45. 3 On villainy and tyranny, see Sonya Lawson Parrish, “A New, American Lucretia: Jane McCrea and the 

Formation of an American Republic,” Pennsylvania Literary Journal 1 (Winter 2009): 30-47.
Introduction

3

the specifics of the battles as well on the layout and functioning of the community. 

Archeologists have located the fence lines that served domestic and military functions in 

Frenchtown, the cellars of destroyed homes and outbuildings that were used during the 

battles, and clusters of dropped or fired munitions. These findings confirm and clarify the 

reported actions of combatants and residents during the events of January 1813, as well 

as reveal layers of Indigenous residence that extends back for several centuries. As the 

River Raisin National Battlefield Park develops and new properties are acquired, further 

archeological investigations will likely occur in areas that are presently covered by 

structures and buildings or used for commercial, residential, or recreational purposes.4

Figure I.2: Core Management Area: River Raisin National 

Battlefield Park, Monroe, Michigan. Source: National Park Service.

 4 For a brief overview of archeological investigations in the battlefield area, see “Michigan Archaeological 

Site File for River Raisin Battlefield, Site Number: 20MR227” (January 28, 2008); copy on file in the 

Office of the Michigan State Archeologist, Lansing, MI. These matters are discussed more fully in later 

chapters.
Introduction

4

Scope and Purpose

As noted in the park’s Purpose Statement, “River Raisin National Battlefield Park 

preserves, commemorates, and interprets the January 1813 battles of the War of 1812 and 

their aftermath.”5 The present study is directed toward interpretation, and offers a multiperspective analysis of the park’s historical significance—which is both expansive and 

singular. The larger, or expansive, significance derives from the position of Frenchtown 

within broader geographical and historical contexts that extend back to the early 17th

century. As a military event, the battles of Frenchtown and their aftermath also reflect 

generations of crisis, conflict, and accommodation for a host of confederated American 

Indian groups in their dealings with European empires and colonists. Beginning in the 

mid 18th century, these processes were further shaped by three complex and overlapping 

historical trends. One involved the rise of settler colonialism, resulting conflict with 

British colonists moving across the Allegheny and Cumberland mountains, and the 

depopulation of Native territories in the upper Ohio Valley.6 Another corresponded to 

cycles of commercial competition and war between French, British, and (following the 

American Revolution) U.S. interests around the southern Great Lakes and in the Ohio 

Valley. Lastly, a third dynamic involved the persistence of French and Métis (French and 

American Indian) communities around western Lake Erie and the Detroit River region.7

The singular, or more immediate, significance of the battles and their aftermath 

follows from these trends, but also reflects specific matters of time and place. In the first 

decade of the 19th century, Frenchtown was situated along a key travel corridor within a 

historically and culturally complex borderland of competing interests. First established in 

the mid 1780s, the settlement was primarily inhabited by French-speaking Catholic 

habitants whose mostly French and—to a lesser degree—Métis lineages reached back to 

the early colonial era in the Great Lakes region. While the habitants of Frenchtown 

 5 Foundation Document: River Raisin National Battlefield Park, Michigan (Denver: National Park Service, 

U.S. Department of the Interior, 2012), 7.

6 Patrick Wolfe, who has written extensively on settler colonialism, defines the term as “an inclusive, landcentred project that coordinates a comprehensive range of agencies, from the metropolitan centre to the 

frontier encampment, with a view to eliminating Indigenous societies ... [through] summary liquidation 

[i.e., genocide] ..., frontier homicide, the dissolution of native societies, [and other means to] ... access to 

territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element,” which is exercised through 

inherently violent means. “Settler colonialism destroys to replace.” See Patrick Wolfe, “Settler colonialism 

and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research 8.4 (2006): 389 and 393. 7 In the parlance of the 18th century, the French word métis was the equivalent of the English terms “mixed 

blood,” “half-breed,” or “half-caste.” While the English variations were often applied to, and occasionally 

adopted by, people of Anglo or Scots and Indigenous ancestry, in this study “Métis” (using the formal 

capitalization that occurs in Canada) applies almost exclusively to people and communities of French and 

Indigenous ancestry. While many Métis individuals lived entirely within Indigenous communities, others 

occupied a more liminal position between European and Indigenous worlds. Through subsequent 

generations, Métis people (often through marriage and upbringing) tended to identify with French, 

American Indian, or distinct Métis communities that occupied a central position within the fur trade. 

Regardless of the community they became associated with, Métis individuals often served as indispensable 

cultural intermediaries between European and American Indian communities. The distinct Métis 

communities that formed and remain in what is now Canada are officially regarded as Aboriginal Peoples, 

a designation they share with First Nations peoples and Inuit. In the United States, where no formal Métis 

identify is recognized and few Métis communities persist, Métis individuals generally became part of 

American Indian groups or made their way among—and eventually passed into—non-Indigenous 

communities.
Introduction

5

generally held no particular loyalties beyond their own communities, they lived within a 

narrow space that was impinged upon by powerful regional, national and global forces. 

The same was true of nearby populations that included multi-ethnic American Indian 

villages of mostly Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi) to the west and northwest, mostly Odawa 

(Ottawa) to the south, and mostly Wyandot to the north. Familiarity and long association 

fostered relatively peaceful relations between the habitants and American Indian 

communities, but their interests did not necessarily align. This became increasingly 

apparent in the decades after the 1783 Peace of Paris ended the Revolutionary War, but 

failed to resolve the older dynamics of a region the French, British, and U.S. variously 

called the Pays d’en Haut (Upper Country), Western Country, and Ohio Country.8

With the Detroit River and western Lake Erie providing an easily crossed 

boundary between British Canada and the United States, unsettled tensions over the postwar disposition of the Great Lakes area remained a live concern for various groups and 

communities in the border area and beyond. To the south, in Ohio and Kentucky, settlers, 

land speculators and political leaders were committed to finishing a decades long process 

of destroying and removing American Indian communities from present-day Ohio and 

areas to the north and west. To the southwest, west, and northwest, a growing 

confederacy of American Indian groups associated with the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh 

and Tenskwatawa was organizing to revitalize their communities and defend common 

territories against further loss. As the competing agendas of Kentuckians, British 

officials, U.S. policy makers and the Native Confederacy intensified, crisis and conflict 

became more likely. In the process, their varied and competing interests became 

increasingly focused on the area around western Lake Erie and the Detroit River—where 

the British maintained a military and commercial presence on the Detroit River, and the 

Wyandot had long hosted the Council Fire or central assembly for several Native 

alliances at the village of Big Rock (aka Brownstown). U.S. interests became centered on 

the upper Maumee River in northwestern Ohio, where government and military officials 

administered American Indian policy and worked to open trade with Indigenous and 

habitant communities to the north.9

This remarkable social geography, and the various interests and dynamics it 

represents, developed in the context of what historian David Skaggs has termed the 

“Sixty Years War for the Great Lakes.” Extending from 1754 to 1815, the “war” was 

punctuated by a series of conflicts known in the United States as the French and Indian 

War (1754-1763), Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763-1765), Lord Dunmore’s War (1774), the 

Revolutionary War (1775-1783), the Northwest Indian War (1785-1794), and the War of 

 8 For an overview of these subjects, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and 

Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), passim; 

Helen Hornbeck Tanner, ed., Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (Norman: Published for the Newberry 

Library by the University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 39-95; David C. McCauley, “The River Raisin 

Settlement, 1796-1812: A French Culture Area” (MA thesis, Eastern Michigan University, 1968); Au, 

Dennis M. Au and Joanna Brode, “The Lingering Shadow of New France: The French-Canadian 

Community of Monroe County, Michigan,” in Michigan Folklife Reader, eds. C. Kurt Dewhurst and 

Yvonne R. Lockwood (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1987), 325-28. 9 For an overview of these conditions, see the essays in David Curtis Skaggs and Larry Lee Nelson, eds. 

The Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 

2010), and Tanner, ed., Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, 48-121.
Introduction

6

1812 (1812-1815).10 As the various dates indicate, the region was not wracked by six 

decades of continuous warfare, but repeated conflict had touched every community and 

marked each generation on all sides of the war. Moreover, the treaties that followed each 

period of conflict tended to encapsulate—and thus perpetuate—the conditions that led to 

violence. This was especially true when treaties broached the issue of Native land 

cessions, and intervening years of “peace”—such as they were—invariably came with 

expectations of more conflict. The series of conflicts known as the Northwest Indian War 

is the strongest illustration of this dynamic, since it was triggered by U.S. demands for 

land cessions, and followed by the Treaty of Greenville (1795) and several other treaties 

that laid claim to most of present-day Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. As Native resistance to 

further loss of villages and land intensified in the early 1800s, however, U.S. officials, 

Trans-Appalachian settlers, British officials, and American Indian communities prepared 

for a renewal of old conflicts. War came in 1811 with the Battle of Tippecanoe in 

present-day Indiana, and the persistent dynamics of the “Sixty Years War” ultimately 

shaped the course of the War of 1812 in the western Great Lakes region.11

The River Raisin and the War of 1812

In a war that was ostensibly between Great Britain and the United States, the 

events of January 1813 make clear that the War of 1812 was very much rooted in 

generations of contest and conflict over territory that involved American Indians, 

imperial interests, settlers, and an emerging U.S. nationalism. Well-known maritime 

issues like British impressment of American sailors and restrictions on U.S. trade with 

Europe and European colonies certainly informed President James Madison’s “Special 

Message” to the Congress in June 1812. Yet the push for war was strongest in the TransAppalachian West, where political leaders and citizens actively pressed for concerted 

military action against American Indians and the invasion of Canada. Conversely, the 

British hoped to foster an independent territory for American Indians in the Great Lakes 

region that would restore pre-Revolutionary War conditions and serve as a buffer against 

further U.S. expansion. For the confederacy of American Indians that allied with the 

British, conflict with the United States related to more existential questions of territory, 

culture, and autonomy. All of these various conditions and motivations preceded, 

inspired, and left unresolved by the American Revolution—and it is for good reasons that 

U.S. citizens would later refer to the War of 1812 as the “Second War of 

Independence.”12

 10 Skaggs, “The Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814: An Overview,” in Skaggs and Nelson, 

eds. The Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 1-20. The terms used here reflect commonly used 

designations in the United States, which can differ from American Indian, First Nations, Canadian, French, 

and British conceptions of these conflicts.

11 Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 131-47; Robert M. Owens, Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: 

William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy (Norman: University of Oklahoma 

Press, 2011), 188-210; Colin G. Calloway, Crown and Calumet: British-Indian Relations, 1783-1815

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 296-312. 12 Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 129-147; and Sandy Antal, A Wampum Denied: Procter's War of 1812, 2nd 

ed. (Kingston [Ont.]: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011), 13-25; Paul A. Gilje, Free Trade and 

Sailors' Rights in the War of 1812 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1-9, 125-146; Donald 

R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 26.
Introduction

7

The battles of Frenchtown and their aftermath occurred at the epicenter of 

radiating fault lines that ran through multiple Indigenous populations and histories, 

European imperial interests, the aspirations of a young Republic in a world of powerful 

empires, the desires and expectations of settler colonists, and the abiding fidelity to place, 

community, and ancestors that defined—and still defines—Native communities. These 

were foundational issues for all concerned, and they found dramatic expression in a 

remarkable spate of violence along the River Raisin. Consequently, any effort to 

understand the battles of Frenchtown and their aftermath must first engage the various 

cross-currents that had shaped the region and much of the continent for several 

generations. Secondly, the events of January 1813 should be situated within the multiple 

perspectives and motivations of the people involved as well as the events’ significance 

within a broader period of conflict. These approaches will in turn demonstrate how the 

battles and their aftermath present a raw but comprehensive view of peoples, events, and 

historical processes that both created and resisted the early expansion of a young nation 

with continental ambitions.13

Consequences

The events of January 1813 were not simply a product or expression of historical 

processes and contexts. They had immediate consequences for participants as well as the 

habitants of Frenchtown, and represented one of the most dramatic episodes in a war that 

shaped the nation and the continent through most of the 19th century. Despite catastrophic 

losses in 1812 and 1813, U.S. forces ultimately proved victorious in the western theater 

of the War of 1812. Following Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s victory over the 

British on Lake Erie in September 1813, and the Battle of the Thames near present-day 

Moraviantown, Ontario, where a retreating army of Native Confederacy warriors and 

British soldiers were defeated in October and Tecumseh fell, the United States achieved 

all that the War Hawks hoped to gain short of acquiring portions of Canada. The British 

had been driven out of the region, the Confederacy defeated, and the program of 

aggressive land acquisition reinstated. Unlike the costly and deadly stalemate that defined 

the eastern theater of War of 1812, and resulted in Treaty of Ghent’s (1814) call for a 

return to status quo antebellum (i.e., conditions prior to the outset of war), the victory in 

 13 Models of such an historical approach include Fred Anderson and Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Dominion 

of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000 (New York: Viking, 2005), 1-53, 160-206; 

Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), passim; Daniel P. Barr, The Boundaries between Us 

Natives and Newcomers Along the Frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750-1850 (Kent, OH: Kent 

State University Press, 2006), passim; Heidi Rosemary Bohaker, “Anishinaabe Toodaims: Contexts for 

Politics, Kinship, and Identity in the Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600 to 1900,” in Gathering Places: 

Aboriginal and Fur Trade Histories, eds. Carolyn Podruchny and Laura Peers (Vancouver: University of 

British Columbia Press, 2011), 93-118; Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the 

Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), passim; Alan Taylor, The 

Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York: Vintage, 

2011), passim; and White, The Middle Ground, passim.
Introduction

8

the western theater was as complete for the U.S. side as defeat was for the Native 

Confederacy.14

Within a few years the United States concluded more than a dozen treaties with 

various American Indian groups in the Great Lakes region, which ceded vast tracts of 

land in Ohio and the present states of Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois. More treaties came 

in the late 1820s and, with the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the 

accelerating process of land cessions were coupled with the forced relocation of Native 

communities to lands west of the Mississippi River. While some groups managed to 

remain on small reservations in Michigan and Wisconsin, the majority were forced to 

move west. These coerced removals were often disorderly and poorly implemented, with 

many communities suffering exposure, severe hunger and death during the westward 

treks. In their place, growing populations of Euro-Americans, recent European 

immigrants, and some former African American slaves created what has since become 

known as the Heartland of America. Though often referred to in the United States as the 

“Forgotten War,” the War of 1812—especially in the Upper Midwest—was one of the 

most transformative in the nation’s history. To many American Indians with current and 

historical connections to the Great Lakes region, the losses that followed the events on 

the River Raisin are clearly remembered as direct precursors to the removal era.15

A number of Native leaders who fought at Frenchtown became signatories to land 

cession treaties and removal treaties, while others moved with their communities to 

Canada or managed to remain on a diminished land base in the Great Lakes region. U.S. 

veterans and officials who were associated with the conflicts around western Lake Erie 

and the Detroit River region were also involved in the process of dispossession and 

removal. Chief among these was Lewis Cass, who served as the Governor of Michigan 

Territory from 1813 to 1831 and negotiated several land cession treaties then, as the U.S. 

Secretary of War from 1831-1836, became responsible for developing and implementing 

federal programs for removing American Indian nations to the west side of the 

Mississippi River. Veterans who served in the western theater of the War of 1812, 

including a number who either fought at the River Raisin or the Thames, often acquired 

lands within ceded American territories—either through land grants they received for 

their service or by directly purchasing lands they had first admired during the campaigns 

of 1812-1813. Some of these men also participated in organizing specific land cession 

treaty councils and participated in the implementation of subsequent removals.16

 14 These matters are discussed more fully in Chapter Eight. For a brief and excellent overview, see Donald 

R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, Bicentennial Edition (Urbana: University of Illinois 

Press, 2012), 129-133, 293-298. 15 The material on these subjects is voluminous. For brief but thorough overviews, see William A. Hunter, 

“History of the Ohio Valley,” in Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15: Northeast, 592-93; 

Lyle M. Stone and Donald Chaput, “History of the Upper Great Lakes Area,” Handbook of North American 

Indians, Volume 15: Northeast, 607-609; Tanner, ed., Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, 120-167; 

Andrew R. L. Cayton, “The Meanings of the Wars for the Great Lakes,” in Sixty Years War for the Great 

Lakes, eds. Skaggs and Nelson, 373-390. 16 While there are no general studies on the activities of War of 1812 veterans in relation to land cessions 

and removal, individuals do appear in correspondence and other primary documents related to treaty 

proceedings and the implementation of subsequent removals. These are cited in Chapter Nine, but brief 

discussions can be found in Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., “State Militias and Removal,” in Encyclopedia of 
Introduction

9

Figure I.3: Current Land Ownership, ca 2017: River Raisin National Battlefield 

Park, Monroe, Michigan. Source: National Park Service.

Action and Place

One of the most dramatic features of the battles, both in their recounting by EuroAmerican participants and in all subsequent commemorations, is the level of violence and 

death that occurred. Yet it is rarely viewed as anything more than pathological or ignoble 

behavior from an incomprehensible time, and thus historically important because of its 

seeming aberration. Such matters are directly addressed in subsequent chapters, through 

 American Indian Removal, vol. 1, eds. Littlefield and James W. Parins (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2011), 

163-67; and Cayton, “The Meanings of the Wars for the Great Lakes,” in The Sixty Years War for the Great 

Lakes, 1754-1814, eds. Skaggs and Nelson, 373-90. It is also worth noting that the historical significance of 

the battles of Frenchtown and the cry of “Remember the Raisin!” are literally written into the landscape of 

southeastern Michigan. These include counties, townships, cities, landscape features, and travel corridors 

that bear the names of Indigenous villages and individuals associated with the events of January 1813, the 

names of U.S. and Kentucky militia soldiers and officers (and future politicians) who were present or 

closely associated with the battles, and major political figures like President James Monroe, U.S. 

Representative Henry Clay of Kentucky, and Michigan Territorial Governor Lewis Cass. Indigenous names 

of individuals, places and communities are recognized in the community of Macon Township, Brownstown 

Township, City of Wyandotte, and the City of Tecumseh. Kentuckians who fell at Frenchtown are 

commemorated in places, communities, roads, parks, and monuments that honor the names of Lieutenant 

Colonel John Allen, Captain Nathaniel Hart, Captain John Simpson, Captain James Meade, and many 

others. Nine counties in Kentucky were named after men who fought at the River Raisin, including the four 

named here. North Dixie Highway and Kentucky Avenue, which run through the battlefield area, are also 

named in collective honor of the Kentucky militia. U.S. military names are commemorated in the likes of 

Winchester Street, Hull Road, and Harrison Street in the City of Monroe, and are also noted on monuments 

in Michigan and Kentucky.

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ELM

DETROIT

RIVER RAISIN NATIONAL

BATTLEFIELD PARK PARCELS

MONROE COUNTY

MICHIGAN

SEGMENT 101

UNITED STATES

DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

RIVER RAISIN N.B.P.

PRESERVATION PLAN

£ 1,250 625 0 1,250 2,500 3,750 5,000 Feet

1 inch = 1,250 feet

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TRACT REGISTER

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Par cel ID N PS R IR A_ Ow ner 1 AC R E

59-01881-002 101 FT001 WHEELER, NANNIE/BRENDA HUTCHINSON 4.743

59-01904-000 101 FT002 PORT OF MONROE 32.561

59-01897-000 101 FT003 MONROE BUILDING AUTHORITY 15.344

59-00417-004 101 FT004 U A W LOCAL 723 0.816

59-00417-004 101 FT004 U A W LOCAL 723 1.602

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59-01900-006 101 FT006 HOMRICH INC 6.178

59-01892-007 101 FT007 HOMRICH INC 1.895

59-01904-003 101 FT008 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 34.09

59-01900-004 101 FT008A UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 3.888

59-01900-000 101 FT009 PORT OF MONROE 34

59-01900-008 101 FT010 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 18.6

59-01892-006 101 FT011 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 16.64

59-01892-004 101 FT012 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 3.52

59-01896-000 101 FT013 CITY OF MONROE 1.974

59-01902-000 101 FT025 RANDAZZO, LOUIS F (ETAL) 0.125

59-01902-001 101 FT026 COOPER, JOSEPH P & BETH A MCDONALD- 0.106

59-01902-002 101 FT027 ROBINSON, GARY & CATHERINE 0.106

59-01902-003 101 FT028 SHANNON, GLEN & KELLY CRISTUNAS 0.106

59-01902-004 101 FT029 LARA, JOSHUA S & PELLAR, STEPHANIE 0.095

59-01902-005 101 FT030 BRADEN, JOHNNY CARTER 0.095

59-01902-006 101 FT031 MCLAUGHLIN, JOHN & CARLA 0.106

59-01902-007 101 FT032 MONROE COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY 0.106

59-01904-001 101 FT033 PORT OF MONROE 0.562

59-01901-000 101 FT034 DUVALL, NICHOLAS J 0.109

59-01901-001 101 FT035 SASS, DAVID RICHARD 0.108

59-01901-002 101 FT036 MERRITT, JOHN & MARIA 0.104

59-01901-003 101 FT037 SHANNON, GLENN & CHRISTUNAS, KELLY 0.101

59-01901-004 101 FT038 JENKINS, GARY D 0.099

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59-01901-006 101 FT040 SHARP, GERALD L 0.086

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59-01901-008 101 FT042 GARCIA, MARIKA & CORRY STANLEY 0.083

59-01901-009 101 FT043 FOWLER, JOHN S 0.12

59-01893-000 101 FT044 BLAIR, PATRICIA L 0.095

59-01894-000 101 FT045 MONDAY, BRENDA SUE 0.174

59-01895-000 101 FT046 MONDAY, MICHAEL E & RONDA S 0.094

59-01895-005 101 FT047 NATIONSTAR MORTGAGE LLC 0.077

59-01895-006 101 FT048 BYRD, JAMES O (LE) & JACOB A 0.219

59-01895-001 101 FT049 COUNTY OF MONROE 0.124

59-01892-005 101 FT050 MUNIR, CARL 0.211

59-01789-000 101 FT051 RAFKO, LONNY & JACQUELINE 0.384

59-01790-000 101 FT052 RAFKO, LONNY & JACQUELINE 0.31

59-01792-000 101 FT053 RAFKO, LONNY & JACQUELINE 0.116

59-01792-001 101 FT054 DUVALL, GERALD D SR & ELLEN KAY 0.195

59-01793-000 101 FT055 CITY OF MONROE 0.369

59-01876-000 101 FT056 GDK 1010, LLC 0.256

59-01876-001 101 FT057 GDK 1026, LLC 0.128

59-01877-001 101 FT058 CITY OF MONROE 0.333

59-01895-007 101 FT069 MUNIR, CARL 0.351

59-01895-008 101 FT070 MUNIR, CARL 0.133

59-01890-008 101 FT071 LAST CHANCE PROPERTIES, LLC (LC) 2.75

59-01890-012 101 FT072 425 NORTH DIXIE, LLC 0.544

59-01890-011 101 FT073 MASONIC TEMPLE ASSOCIATION 1.06

59-01900-003 101 FT074 CITY OF MONROE/PORT OF MONROE 2.32

59-01881-003 101 FT075 MDOT 0.707

59-01881-000 101 FT076 WHEELER, NANNIE/BRENDA HUTCHINSON 1.821

59-01900-012 101 FT077 PORT OF MONROE 15.91

59-01900-013 101 FT078 HOMRICH INC 9.7

59-01875-000 101 FT079 CITY OF MONROE - CAPPUCCILLI PARK 0.93

ELM AVE/DE 101 FT080 CITY OF MONROE 5.68

39-00469-003 101 FT158 CITY OF MONROE - SAWYER HOUSE 1.069

29-00197-000 101 FT159 CITY OF MONROE - CEMETERY 0.66
Introduction

10

emphases on the consequences of disease epidemics, cultural imperatives, distinct 

conceptions of land and community, European wars, and the more intimate contexts of 

violent conflict between and within Indigenous communities and settler colonies in the 

Ohio Valley. In other words, this study seeks to make comprehensible one of the most 

remarked upon—and least understood—features of the battles of Frenchtown and their 

aftermath.

Appreciating the significance of the battles of Frenchtown also requires close 

attention to environmental settings. Though often overshadowed by the drama that 

occurred on the River Raisin, one of the most important riddles that might be posed about 

the events of January 1813 is a very simple “why here?” Addressing this question, which 

is essential to understanding and interpreting the battles and their aftermath, requires 

contributions from the fields of geology, environmental science, archeology, cultural 

history, ethnology, colonial history, military history, Early National history, and a host of 

other historical disciplines. The effort to address these questions, as well as the other 

subjects noted above, has resulted in a narrative that reaches back to the Pleistoscene and 

the early human history of the region, and has extended the geographic scope of this 

study far beyond western Lake Erie. Doing so provides insights into the antiquity of 

many of the alliances that composed the Native Confederacy, as well as the ancient 

connections that many of the groups that fought at the River Raisin had to each other and 

the collective homelands they defended. Consequently, it is with these ancient and 

abiding processes that this study begins.
Chapter One

11

Chapter One

Gmikwe’ndan Nmézibe (Remembering Sturgeon River):

Environments and Peoples Since Time Out of Memory

This chapter describes how ancient processes along with protohistorical developments 

shaped Native lives around western Lake Erie, and subsequently defined their later 

engagements with other Indigenous communities as well as imperial powers, settler 

communities, and national policy makers.

Kitche Manitou (The Great Spirit) beheld a vision. In this dream he saw a vast sky filled 

with stars, sun, moon, and earth. He saw an earth made of mountains and valleys, islands 

and lakes, plains and forests. He saw trees and flowers, grasses and vegetables. He saw 

walking, flying, swimming, and crawling beings. He witnessed the birth, growth, and the 

end of things. At the same time he saw other things live on. Amidst change there was 

constancy.1

Basil Johnston (Neyaashinigmiing [Chippewas of Nawash] First Nation)

The siting of Frenchtown, and thus the location of the River Raisin National 

Battlefield Park, was determined by a host of factors. Some were cultural or vaguely 

political, and included the aspirations of French-speaking habitants and their relations 

with nearby communities of Bodéwadmi (Potowatomi), Odawa (Ottawa), and Wyandot 

in the years following the American Revolution. Other factors might be described as 

economic, particularly in terms of the area’s potential for subsistence and small-scale 

commercial agriculture as well as its location within established fur trade networks. Yet 

the most basic, and in many respects most determinative, factors long predate the 

communities and concerns of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It is in the contents 

and contours of the landscape itself that the events at the center of this study are most 

deeply grounded. At base, the history of the River Raisin National Battlefield Park area 

has long been defined by three key features: a gently flowing river that drains a level 

plain; the nearby shore of Lake Erie; and a central location between two major river 

corridors (the Maumee River and Detroit River) that provide access to vast expanses of 

the continent. From long before the time when ancient farmers established communities 

around western Lake Erie to the causes and still lasting consequences of the War of 1812, 

these basic factors repeatedly made the lower River Raisin a nodal point in wider 

networks of alliance, competition, exchange, and conflict.

Along with these broad connections to regional and even international contexts, 

local environmental conditions have also contributed significantly to the area’s wider 

importance. Before extensive engineering of the river in the late 19th century, the lower 

River Raisin flowed through a diverse landscape of open oak woodlands, dense 

hardwood forests, prairies, swamps, extensive marshes, lagoons, barrier beaches and a 

 1 Basil Johnston, Ojibway Heritage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 12.
Chapter One

12

complex estuary—all over the course of just a few miles. Such diversity supported an 

array of plant and animal populations that, in turn, shaped and sustained human 

communities within the battlefield area for countless generations. Easy travel up the 

River Raisin led to more inhabited sites and a 2,776.5 km2 (1,072 mi2

) upper watershed 

that included mixed oak and pine forests, dry prairies, hardwood swamps, upland lakes, 

and the varied habitats associated with faster flowing streams—all of which further 

diversified the available resources nearer the lake shore. The river itself, which at nearly 

225 km (140 mi) is the longest in the entire Lake Erie basin, also connected western Lake 

Erie to Lake Michigan by way of portages to the Grand and St. Joseph rivers.2

By themselves, these basic environmental conditions cannot explain the course of 

human events along the lower reach of the River Raisin. Yet they do provide a key basis 

for understanding several key factors and developments: namely, how and why people 

traveled through the area or made it home for thousands of years, the reasons for the 

establishment and development of Frenchtown, why opposing forces were drawn to this 

specific locale during the War of 1812, and subsequent developments on the site over the 

past two centuries. Consequently, they deserve more than passing attention. To borrow a 

few lines from a poem written on the evening after the Second Battle of Frenchtown, the 

history of the River Raisin National Battlefield Park may not be written in the stone that 

underlies the “fatal plain” of the battlefield, in “the Flowers of the land,” or the sound of 

“Erie’s wave [o]r Raisin’s waters,” but an overview of the geology, ecology, and 

geomorphology of western Lake Erie and the surrounding region provides an essential 

preface.3

Forming the Land: Bedrock Geology

Out of nothing he made rock, water, fire, and wind. Into each one he breathed 

the breath of life. On each he bestowed with his breath a different essence and 

nature. Each substance had its own power which became its soul-spirit.

4

Far below the surface of western Lake Erie and the River Raisin watershed is an 

igneous and metamorphic basement complex of crystalline materials that formed in the 

Proterozoic Eon (4,600-541 million years ago). While little is known about the formation 

or physical structures of this complex, the bedrock layers that overlay the Proterozoic 

level are well understood and have a more direct bearing on the current and historical 

landscapes around the western Lake Erie basin. As is the case in much of the Midwest, 

 2 Kenneth E. Dodge, Fisheries Special Report 23: River Raisin Assessment (Lansing: Michigan Department 

of Natural Resources, 1998), 18-21, 34-36; Kenneth L. Cole et al, “Historical Landcover Changes in the 

Great Lakes Region,” in Perspectives on the Land Use History of North America: A Context for 

Understanding Our Changing Environment—Biological Science Report USGS/BRD/BSR-1998-0003, ed. T. 

D. Sisk (Springfield, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, Biological Resources Division, 1998), 43-50. There are 

two St. Joseph rivers near the headwaters of the River Raisin. One is more distant and flows south into the 

Maumee River. The St. Joseph River that is connected by a portage to the River Raisin is the river that 

flows southwestward to Lake Michigan.

3 William Orlando Butler, “A Night View of the Battle of the River Raisin,” in The Republican 

Compiler, ed. [B. R. Evans] (Pittsburgh: Cramer & Spear, 1818), 248-50. Butler, who was an 

ensign in the U.S. 17th Infantry Regiment that participated in the battles of Frenchtown, wrote the poem 

while a prisoner at Fort Amherstburg.

4 Johnston, Ojibway Heritage, 12.
Chapter One

13

particularly in the states of Indiana and Illinois, the bedrock beneath southeastern 

Michigan and northwestern Ohio is composed of different layers of sandstones, 

dolomites, limestones and shales that were once part of vast sea beds during the 

Paleozoic Era (540-250 million years ago) when the midcontinent of North America was 

situated between the tropical latitudes and inundated by warm shallow waters. Most of 

these bedrock materials are hundreds of feet beneath the surface, but some of the younger 

limestones are visible near the western shore of Lake Erie in the beds of shallow streams 

and rivers. This is true of the River Raisin as it passes through Monroe, just before 

reaching the Lake Erie marshes.5

The youngest layers of bedrock are shales that were laid down before the end of 

the Paleozoic, but relatively small amounts of this material is in the bedrock stratigraphy 

of western Lake Erie and the River Raisin watershed. In part, this is because movements 

in continental plates and orogenic (mountain building) processes in the western half of 

the continent gradually caused the bedrock layers beneath the lower Great Lakes to dip 

eastward along a downward sloping arc. Consequently, the older strata are tilted upward 

and thus closer to the surface in southeastern Michigan while the younger strata tend to 

be more prevalent in areas to the southeast of Lake Erie. However, this basic arrangement 

does not hold for the bed of Lake Erie, which is underlain by more ancient and much 

harder limestones as well as recent sediments that are no more than 12,000 years old. 

This geological arrangement, and the absence of shales from the stratigraphy of the lake 

basin, derives from the two processes that formed Lake Erie and the River Raisin 

watershed: downcutting and erosion associated with an ancient river system, and 

glaciation.6

For 300 million years, from the late Paleozoic Era through the Mesozoic “Age of 

Reptiles” (252-66 million years ago) and most of the Cenozoic “Age of Mammals” (66 

million years ago—present) eras, extensive river drainages cut through the areas that later 

became lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron, and Michigan. A particularly complex drainage 

system that the geologist J. W. Spencer called the Erigan River eroded a series of 

channels across what is now the western basin of Lake Erie, then cut narrower and deeper 

channels as it flowed northeast toward the ancient course of the Ottawa River. For 

millions of years, as it followed the northeastward sloping gradient of the bedrock, the 

mainstem of the Erigan carved into the upper level shales and carried away the eroded 

sediments of the ever-steepening tributaries that laced the river basin.7

 5 Charles E. Herendorf, “Paleogeology and Geomorphology of Lake Erie,” in Lake Erie Estuarine Systems:

Issues, Resources, States, and Management; NOAA Estuary-of-the-Month Seminar Series, no. 14 (1989): 

35-70; Stanley J. Bolsenga and Herdendorf, eds., Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair Handbook (Detroit: Wayne 

State University Press, 1993), 11-18, 27-41. 6 Herdendorf, The Ecology of the Coastal Marshes of Western Lake Erie: A Community Profile

(Washington, DC: National Wetlands Research Center, USFWS, 1987), 22-29; Andrew J. Mozola, Report 

of Investigation 13: Geology for Environmental Planning in Monroe County, Michigan (Detroit: Prepared 

in cooperation with the Department of Geology, Wayne State University, 1970), 4-6. 7 Joseph W. Spencer, “Discovery of the Preglacial Outlet of the Basin of Lake Erie into That of Lake 

Ontario,” American Philosophical Society Proceedings 19 (1881): 300-37; Spencer, “How the Great Lakes 

Were Built,” Popular Science Monthly 49 (June 1896): 156-72; Cunhai Gao, “Buried Bedrock Valleys and 

Glacial and Subglacial Meltwater Erosion in Southern Ontario, Canada,” Canadian Journal of Earth 
Chapter One

14

The Erigan River basin was effectively erased by Pleistocene glaciation as a series 

of glacial lobes scoured the bedrock shales that had been channeled by the older river 

system.8 The surface beneath the glacial ice was shaped into a relatively smooth and 

broad basin that neatly followed the arc of the harder bedrock layer that underlay the 

more brittle shales. The resulting topography is evident in present-day depth charts of 

Lake Erie. In the western basin, where the limestone layer is closest to the surface, the 

deepest point is 18.9 m (62 feet) below the surface but the mean average depth is just 

7.4m (24 feet); in the central basin, where the limestone layer slopes away from the 

surface, where the deepest point is 25.6 m (84 feet) and the average depth is 18.5 m (60 

feet). The shift to the eastern basin is more dramatic, where deepest point is 64 m (210 

feet) below the surface and the average depth is 24.4 m (80 feet). Because the glaciers 

that formed Lake Erie pushed well beyond the present bounds of the western lakeshore 

before receding at the end of the Pleistocene epoch (2.6 million years ago—11,700 BP, or 

years Before Present), much of southeastern Michigan and northwestern Ohio is 

remarkably level and follows the same gently sloping gradient of the adjacent lakebed.9

Glacial Geology and Geomorphology

To the sun Kitche Manitou gave the powers of light and heat. To the earth he gave 

growth and healing; to waters purity and renewal; to the wind music and the breath 

of life itself.10

The formation and contents of ancient bedrock layers help explain the level 

topography of the lower River Raisin drainage and, along with the ancient Erigan River 

basin, account for the depths and contours of Lake Erie. However, glaciation is the great 

environmental template of the Great Lakes. The movements of glaciers scoured and 

leveled vast landscapes, carved out broad lakebeds, and formed a series of terminal 

moraines where the glaciers deposited the huge amounts of sands, gravels, rocks and soils 

they had carried down from the north. As the glaciers melted, the resulting bodies of 

water received a rich mixture of aeolian (wind borne) and river borne sediments, as well 

as the materials that had accumulated within the glacier itself. Subsequent changes in lake 

levels, and their eventual reduction at the dawn of the Holocene epoch (11,700 years 

ago—Present), left behind level expanses of rich soils that previously lay at the bottom of 

the lakes. Around western Lake Erie, these lacustrine (i.e., lake formed) plains are 

rimmed by the low-lying hills of former moraines. The resulting landscape is both 

familiar and ancient, and the processes that formed it explain the river courses, soil types, 

topography, and general parameters of ecological diversity that have shaped human life 

in this area for at least 10,000 years.

The most recent glacial episode ended at the close of the Pleistocene, but the 

glacial processes that shaped the Great Lakes and the Upper Midwest began some 1.6 

million years ago when a vast mountain of ice formed in what is now central Canada. 

 

Sciences 48, no. 5 (2011): 801-18. Also see W. H. Sherzer, Geological Report on Monroe County, 

Michigan (Lansing: Robert Smith Printing Co., State Printers and Binders, 1900), 123. 8 Herdendorf, The Ecology of the Coastal Marshes of Western Lake Erie, 31-33. 9 Dodge, Fisheries Special Report 23, 27-29; Troy L. Holcombe et al, Lake-Floor Geomorphology of Lake 

Erie—Research Publication RP-3 (Boulder, CO: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 

National Geophysical Data Center, 2005), 6. “BP” signifies “Before Present.” 10 Johnston, Ojibway Heritage, 12.
Chapter One

15

Anywhere from three to four km (2 - 3.5 miles) thick, its weight pressed the earth’s crust 

downward—in a process known as glacio-isostatic depression—by as much as 100 m 

(328 feet). As the mass accumulated, the bottom layers of ice were compressed toward 

the edges and eventually bulged outward to form a growing rim of vast glaciers that 

pushed southward. This process fluctuated and repeated over hundreds of thousands of 

years, but was most pronounced during the four major episodes of glaciation that carved 

through the Great Lakes area. Each episode gave way to an interglacial period, when a 

warming climate caused the glaciers to retreat north—leaving behind a vastly altered 

landscape of scoured valleys, glacier-fed rivers, and lakes.

Figure 1.1: Glaciation and the formation of the Great Lakes. Source: Great Lakes 

Commission, Living with the Lakes: Understanding and Adapting to Great Lakes Water Level 

Changes (Detroit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1999).

The last glacial episode occurred between 105,000 and 11,700 years ago. Known 

as the Wisconsinan glaciation, it reached its greatest extent around 20,000 years ago 

when the vast Laurentide Ice Sheet (LIS) pushed as far south as the present-day courses 

of the lower Missouri and Ohio rivers.11 As the LIS moved southward, valleys and basins 

from previous glaciations were scoured more deeply while older moraines, streams, 

 11 David M. Mickelson and Patrick M. Colgan, “The Southern Laurentide Ice Sheet,” in The Quaternary 

Period in the United States, eds. A.R. Gillespie, S.C. Porter and B.F. Atwater (Amsterdam: Elsevier 

Science, 2004), 1-16.
Chapter One

16

surface vegetation and other topographic features were completely removed. Once the 

LIS reached its maximum extent and began a slow 8,000-year retreat, it did not leave an 

ice-free wasteland in its wake. The process was both too slow and too dynamic for such a 

result. Whenever the climate cooled for a few centuries, the glacial retreat would halt, 

advance southward, then retreat again as a warming trend returned. Previously carved 

valleys were broadened and deepened whenever the ice sheet expanded, while lakes, 

rivers and vast moraine fields were created during periods of retreat. One of the largest of 

these temporary advances occurred around 14,000 years ago and ultimately formed the 

present drainage basins of the Great Lakes, with terminal moraines becoming the high 

points that divided whole river systems. To the south of Lake Erie, for instance, the rivers 

that flow into the lake all have their headwaters in a long moraine that corresponds to the 

southernmost extent of the Erie Lobe and runs the breadth of north-central Ohio. 12

Blocked by ice to the north and northeast, and a chain of terminal moraines 

around the southwest, south and east, Glacial Lake Maumee (ancestral Lake Erie) filled 

with melting glacial water between 14,400 and 12,400 years ago. At its furthest extent, 

the lake filled a shallow basin at its western end that extended as far as present-day Fort 

Wayne, Indiana, where it drained southwestward into the precursor of the Wabash River. 

Over the next 7,700 years, as glaciers continued to retreat northward, lake levels and 

drainage patterns underwent dramatic changes throughout the Great Lakes Basin. The 

effects were especially pronounced in the Erie Basin, where lake levels were determined 

by two key factors: the rate of flow from the upper lake basins through the ancient Detroit 

River channel, and the level of the Niagara escarpment—which controlled the outlet to 

Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River. During temporary glacial advances, for 

instance, the upper Great Lakes drained through the southern end of Lake Michigan as 

well as into Lake Erie. During extended periods of glacial melting and retreat, however, 

the drainage of the Upper Lakes was routed through what are now Lake Nipissing and the 

Ottawa River—thus completely bypassing Lake Erie.

The latter conditions persisted for more than 5,000 years (between 10,400 and 

5,300 BP), and the Lake Erie basin contained three separate lakes that were centered in 

the eastern, central, and western basins. These shallow bodies of water were likely 

“stagnant and perhaps eutrophobic,” and the western lakeshore was as much as 125 miles 

east of its present location. The Lake Erie basin finally began to fill again around 5,300 

BP, as accelerated thinning of the northern ice sheet resulted in post-glacial rebound that 

raised the elevations of the Ottawa River and the Niagara escarpment. As the flow out of 

the Huron basin slowed at its eastern outlet, more water poured southward into the Lake 

Erie basin, which continued to fill until it reached the new elevation of the Niagara River. 

By 4,700 BP, as the process of post-glacial rebound reached its current state, Lake Erie 

filled to a level about 3-4m (10-13 feet) higher than the present shoreline. At this time the 

lake would have reached as far as Sterling Island, immediately opposite the headquarters 

of the River Raisin National Battlefield Park and the former site of Frenchtown. For some 

distance upstream from this site, the shoreline would have been marshland and the site of 

Frenchtown would have been at the head of a larger estuary. Within another 1,200 years 

(ca. 3,500 BP), as the climate became somewhat cooler and drier, Lake Erie stabilized at 

 12 Robert W. Kelley and William R Farrand, The Glacial Lakes around Michigan; Bulletin 4, Michigan 

Geological Survey Division (Lansing: [State of Michigan, Department of Conservation], 1988), 5-7.
Chapter One

17

its current surface elevation of 174 m (571 feet).13

Figure 1.2: Shorelines of Early Stage (ca. 12,000 BP) and Middle Stage (ca. 

10,000-5,300 BP) of Early Lake Erie. Source: Charles E. Herdendorf, "Research 

Overview: Holocene Development of Lake Erie," The Ohio Journal of Science eleven2:2 

(2013): 24-36.

Surficial Geology and the Environmental Template

On earth Kitche Manitou formed mountains, valleys, plains, islands, lakes, bays, 

and rivers. Everything was in its place; everything was beautiful.14

Ancient river systems, glaciation, and the consequent inundation and draining of 

lake basins all profoundly shaped the landscapes of southeastern Michigan and 

northwestern Ohio. Glacial moraines and ancient shorelines are still traceable in hilly 

areas and low-lying ridges that extend in concentric arcs around the western shore of 

Lake Erie. The headwaters of the River Raisin watershed, for instance, rise in the Irish 

Hills about 45 miles west of the River Raisin National Battlefield Park area. This upland 

region is part of an interlobate moraine that formed where two lobes of the vast 

Wisconsonian ice sheet pushed together. The combined deposition of large amounts of 

glacial debris resulted in a complex arrangement of hilly landscapes, numerous streams, 

small lakes, swamps, large exposed slabs of glacially deposited bedrock, and an 

abundance of sandy and gravely soils. The interlobate region in southeastern Michigan 

was formed by the Saginaw and Erie Lobes, and extends from the Irish Hills north to the 

Auburn Hills near Pontiac, Michigan. South of the Irish Hills and the River Raisin 

drainage, the interlobate gives way to the singular moraine formed by the Erie lobe as it 

carved the Maumee River basin. Downstream from the Irish Hills, the various tributaries 

of the River Raisin run through well-drained, moderately hilly topography composed of 

glacial till. From there, the River Raisin and its main tributaries flow through a mostly 

level landscape that is occasionally marked by bands of low sandy ridges before heading 

 13 Herdendorf, “Research Overview: Holocene Development of Lake Erie,” The Ohio Journal of Science

112:2 (2013): 24-36; Brian C. Reeder and Wendy R. Eisner, “Holocene Biogeochemical and Pollen History 

of a Lake Erie, Ohio, Coastal Wetland,” The Ohio Journal of Science 94:4 (1994): 87-93; and Kelley 

Farrand, The Glacial Lakes around Michigan, 7-16. Quotation is from Herdendorf, “Holocene 

Development of Lake Erie,” 30.

14 Johnston, Ojibway Heritage, 12.
Chapter One

18

through Monroe, Michigan. These features were formed, respectively, by the sediments 

at the bottom of shallow glacial lakes and the beaches formed at the shores of these 

earlier lakes.15

Another illustrative and extensive example of the post-glacial landscape around 

western Lake Erie is the 1,500 square-mile Black Swamp, which covered much of the 

Maumee River basin about 15 miles south of Monroe, Michigan. Following the retreat of 

the Erie Lobe and the subsequent draining of Lake Maumee, the Black Swamp became a 

vast saturated landscape of densely forested swamps, marshes, and wetlands. For 

thousands of years the Black Swamp defined residence patterns, travel networks, and 

resource gathering activities for American Indian communities. Village sites were 

common along the edges of the vast swamp where an abundance of plants, animals and 

fish were accessible throughout the year. Longstanding pathways across the swamplands 

followed glacial moraines and ancient beach zones that formed during long halts in the 

gradual retreat of Glacial Lake Maumee. These areas supported narrow bands of prairie, 

sand barrens, and oak savanna that were maintained through purposeful fires. The broad 

and gentle flowing Maumee River also provided access to an easy and widely used 

portage to the Wabash River and thence to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. During the 

War of 1812 the Black Swamp was a strategically important zone of operations for U.S., 

British, and American Indian forces, and a critical site in the actions that preceded and 

followed the battles of Frenchtown.16

The retreat of Glacial Lake Maumee, and smaller successor lakes, left a broad 

lacustrine plain that extends around the western end of Lake Erie from the Detroit River 

area to Sandusky Bay in northwestern Ohio. Bisected by numerous creeks and a handful 

of rivers, the soils of this nearly level plain are mostly composed of clays, silts and fine 

sands that were laid down at the bottoms of shallow glacial lakes. Remnants of ancient 

lakeshores and river channels are also evident in narrow and somewhat elevated bands of 

sandier deposits left behind by former beaches, deltas, and river bars. These features are 

more evident within and between the Huron River and the River Raisin basins, and 

provided relatively dry and open routes of travel near the lakeshore. Hull’s Trace 

(present-day North Dixie Highway, U.S. Turnpike Road, and West Jefferson Avenue), 

for instance, follows one of these ancient paths between Monroe and Gibraltar, 

Michigan.17 Aside from these sandier and more xeric remnants of late-glacial 

geomorphology, the loamy and clayey soils of the lacustrine plain were poorly drained 

areas dominated by elm-ash swamp and beech forest. In edge environments between the 

drier oak savanna and the nutrient rich soils of wetland areas and flood zones, however, 

 15 Randal Schaetzl, ed., Michigan Geography and Geology (New York: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2009), 

15-17; River Raisin Watershed Council, River Raisin Watershed Management Plan (2009), 24-26. 16 Jack Klotz and Jane L. Forsyth, “Late Glacial Origin of the Maumee Valley Terraces, Northwestern 

Ohio,” Ohio Journal of Science 93:5 (1993): 125-33; Lawrence G. Brewer and John L. Vankat,

“Description of Vegetation of the Oak Openings of Northwestern Ohio at the Time of Euro-American 

Settlement,” Ohio Journal of Science 104:4 (2004): 76-85; Martin Richard Kaatz, “The Black Swamp: A 

Study in Historical Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 45 (March 1955): 1-

9. European Americans applied the name “Black Swamp” in the early 19th century, before it was drained 

and cleared for agricultural use. 17 Herdendorf, “Paleogeology and Geomorphology of Lake Erie.” Lake Erie Estuarine Systems: Issues, 

Resources, States, and Management NOAA Estuary-of-the-Month Seminar Series, no. 14 (1989): 35-70; J. 

G. Cohen, Natural Community Abstract (Lansing, MI: Natural Features Inventory, 2001), 2.
Chapter One

19

horticulture and farming was successful for several centuries. This was the case along the 

lower reach of the River Raisin, which had sustained American Indian and—later—

French Canadien farmers long before forest clearing and drainage projects opened the 

entire region to wide-scale commercial agriculture in the 19th century.18

Figure 1.3: Environmental Conditions, ca. 1800. Historically, the site of 

Frenchtown was situated in the midst of forest and shrub swamp, and adjacent to prairie. 

Source: P. J. Comer and D. A. Albert, Vegetation Circa 1800 of Monroe County, 

Michigan: An Interpretation of the General Land Office Surveys [Map] (Lansing, MI: 

Michigan State Natural Features Inventory; Michigan State University Extension, 1997).

One other distinct environmental consequence of glaciation deserves mention at 

this juncture, since it bears directly on historic and present landscapes of the battlefield 

area. The lacustrine plain around western Lake Erie overlays the same limestone bedrock 

that was scoured by repeated glaciation, and was thus an extension of the same 

bathymetry (underwater topography) that still defines the lake’s shallow western basin. 

Because the eastern basin is much deeper, and prevailing winds follow the northeastward 

orientation of the lake, the western shore is particularly vulnerable to a seiche 

(pronounced saysh). Defined by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 

(NOAA) as “a standing wave oscillating in water,” this phenomenon occurs on Lake Erie 

when storms push surface waters from the western basin to the far eastern ends of the 

lake. In extreme cases, the difference in water levels between the two ends of the lake can 

be as much as five meters (15 feet). When the wind abates, the elevated water flows back 

to the west and hits the relatively flat western shore much like a powerful storm surge 

from the open ocean.19

 18 R. Peter Richards, et al, “The Lake Erie Agricultural Systems for Environmental Quality Project: An 

Introduction,” Journal of Environmental Quality 31 (Jan/Feb 2002): 6-16. 19 What Is a Seiche? National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July 14, 2014 

<http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/seiche.html> (accessed 16 January 2015); Herdendorf, The Ecology of 

the Coastal Marshes of Western Lake Erie, 45-50.
Chapter One

20

Along with seasonal flood events or large waves caused by occasional storms out 

of the northeast, seiches are a key environmental and climactic component of the marshes 

that ring the western end of Lake Erie. The inland extent of the marshes is largely defined 

by the reach of the water surge associated with a seiche, while the variability of seiches 

and flood events is reflected in the dynamic environments of these marsh areas.20 The 

core of historic Frenchtown, and the River Raisin National Battlefield Park, lies 

immediately west of an extensive marshland that still approximates the scale and inland 

reach of early 19th-century conditions. As a result, the site of Frenchtown and the 

American Indian villages that previously occupied the site were just beyond the reach of 

a seiche but still had ready access to the lake by way of the river and to the abundant 

resources of the marshes through a network of side channels. For this and several other 

reasons that will be discussed below, the site of Frenchtown was located within a kind of 

Goldilocks mean. Maps and surveyor notes from the early 19th century show that 

Frenchtown was amenable to cultivation, located on a glacial beach ridge that served as a 

key line of north-south transportation, adjacent to the river but just above the surrounding 

flood plain, surrounded by a variety of habitats that included swamps and wet prairies as 

well as oak savannas, and with ready access to both the lake and the upper watershed.21

Ancient Environments and Peoples

Then Kitche Manitou made the plant beings. These were four kinds: flowers, 

grasses, trees, and vegetables. To each he gave a spirit of life, growth, healing, 

and beauty. Each he placed where it would be the most beneficial, and lend to 

earth the greatest beauty and harmony and order.

After plants, Kitche Manitou created animal beings conferring on each special 

powers and natures. There were two-leggeds, four-leggeds, wingeds, and 

swimmers.22

At the end of the Pleistocene epoch, as humans moved into areas no longer 

covered by the edges of a vast ice sheet, an open tundra-like environment encompassed 

the western half of the Lake Erie basin and much of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. 

Continued warming through the early Holocene fostered a transition to a spruce-sedge 

parkland environment throughout the region by ~11,000 BP. Though similar to presentday environments further north, the mixture and arrangement of floral species that 

colonized the post-glacial landscape had no modern analog. The transitional forests of the 

early Holocene, for instance, had species of sedges, grasses, shrubs and trees that are now 

more common in areas to the north and south—but not found together in the regions 

where they currently predominate. On the other hand, the faunal assemblages of the 

southern Great Lakes region did not resemble any populations in present-day North 

America. While animals such as striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis), black bear (Ursus 

americanus), and raccoon (Procyon lotor) are familiar enough, they lived in an 

environment that was also populated by late Pleistocene megafuana that included Giant 

 20 Herdendorf, The Ecology of the Coastal Marshes of Western Lake Erie, 74-82, 156-58. 21 P. J. Comer and D. A. Albert, Vegetation Circa 1800 of Monroe County, Michigan: An Interpretation of 

the General Land Office Surveys [Map] (Lansing, MI: Michigan State Natural Features Inventory; 

Michigan State University Extension, 1997). 22 Johnston, Ojibway Heritage, 12-13.
Chapter One

21

Beaver (Castoroides ohioensis), Jefferson’s ground sloth (Megalonyx jeffersonni), 

mastodon (Mammut americanum), and more. Because Lake Erie remained far below 

modern levels, it is important to note that the people, plants and animals that composed 

these environments extended around the shallow body of water in the western basin and 

well into the central basin.23

Archeologists use the term “Paleoindian” in reference to the people who lived in 

North America in the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene epoch. Originally coined in 

the mid 20th century when it was assumed that the first people in the Americas came 

from Asia across the Bering Land Bridge at the close of the Ice Age, more recent 

evidence indicates that humans have been in North America as much as 20,000 and 

perhaps even 50,000 years ago.24 Paleoindian remains in use, however, and still serves as 

a broad category for three distinct periods known as Clovis (11,500-10,600 BP), Folsom 

(10,900-10,000 BP), and Plano (10,000-7,500 BP). Clovis, Folsom, and Plano sites have 

been found in most areas of the contiguous United States, and all are identified with the 

widespread production and use of particular forms of blades and spearpoints that were 

used for hunting and processing animals. The periods in which these different tools were 

made correspond to long-term climate changes, and thus the different kinds of animals on 

which they were utilized. In the Great Lakes region the dates and telltale lithic tools of 

these three periods are somewhat different from other parts of North America, but the 

general periodization—and its correspondence to climactic conditions—is still utilized.25

Given the antiquity of early Clovis-era materials, and the relatively small imprint 

that sparse human populations made on the landscape, there are very few identified sites 

that date back to Clovis-era habitation in lower Michigan and northern Ohio. The earliest 

known site in Michigan is in the northern portion of the Erie-Saginaw interlobate region, 

and dates to between 11,500 and 11,000 BP. Known as the Gainey site, it is characterized 

by the presence of parallel-sided fluted points made from lithic materials that are only 

 23 Dillon H. Carr, “Paleoindian Economic Organization in the Lower Great Lakes Region: Evaluating the 

Role of Caribou as a Critical Resource” (PhD, Michigan State University, 2012), 40-53; D. W. Phillips, 

“Climate Changes in the Great Lakes,” in Report of the First U.S.–Canada Symposium on the Impact of 

Climate Changes on the Great Lakes (Rockville, MD: National Climate Program; National Oceanic and 

Atmospheric Administration, 1989) 19-42. 24 Some controversy exists around these dates, but evidence of human DNA was found in 2007 that dates 

back some 14,300 years, which is 3,300 years before the end of the Wisconsonian glaciation. While people 

have clearly been in North America for longer than 14,000 years, those who lived in the vicinity of the 

lower Great Lakes at the end of the Pleistocene must have arrived—as did the post-glacial flora and 

fauna—from ice-free areas to the south and west. The 50,000-year date is noted in Daniel C. Schiffner, 

“The Current Debate About the Origins of the Paleoindians of America,” The Free Library, 22 December 

2003 <http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The current debate about the origins of the Paleoindians of Americaa0111897842> (accessed 17 February 2015); and “New Evidence Puts Man in North America 50,000 

Years Ago,” Science Daily, 18 November 2004 

<http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/11/041118104010.htm> (accessed 17 February 2015). On 

controversies over these dates, see Michael J. Shott, “The Midwest Context,” in National Park Service 

Archeological Program: The Earliest Americans Theme Study

<http://www.nps.gov/archeology/pubs/nhleam/E-Midwest.htm> (accessed 2 June 2015). On the discovery 

of human DNA from 14,300 BP, see Andrew Curry, “Ancient Excrement,” Archaeology 61:4 (July/August 

2008): 42-45. 25 Brian M. Fagan, Ancient North America: The Archaeology of a Continent (New York: Thames & 

Hudson, 2000), 67-69, 85-89, 101-08.
Chapter One

22

present in Ohio and Ontario. These Gainey-type points are present in other locations 

around the Great Lakes, including the Paleo Crossing site in northeastern Ohio (12,000-

11,000 BP), and are associated with a region-wide subsistence regime that focused on 

hunting caribou (Rangifer arcticus).26 Another significant archeological site in southern 

Michigan is Holcombe (11,000-10,500 BP), which is situated on a former strandline of a 

glacial lakeshore near what is now Lake St. Clair. Artifacts include small distinctive 

Holcombe type points that may have been used with an atlatl, and resemble—in their size 

and delicate manufacture—Folsom points from other parts of North America.27

While Holcombe points have been found at sites associated with caribou hunting 

in southeastern Michigan, Ohio, southern Ontario, and areas further west, it is important 

to note that projectile points and the types of fauna they kill do not define cultures. 

Likewise, they should not be construed as prima facie evidence that those who made and 

used the points were primarily hunters. New research indicates that Paleoindians, instead 

of being classic big-game hunters, were broad-spectrum foragers that utilized a wide 

array of plant, animal and mineral resources across fairly large territories. This would 

have been even more likely between 11,000-10,000 BP (the approximate dating of the 

Holcombe site), when the post-Pleistocene warming trend faltered and climate conditions 

included long droughts followed by wetter periods. Punctuated by changing temperature 

gradients and significant changes in lake shorelines, the nature of local environments 

shifted between marsh, tundra, open parkland, open spruce parkland, and spruce forest 

zones. These dramatic changes, even though they occurred over centuries, made life for 

the people living in the region less predictable across generations. Such conditions 

fostered smaller population densities and required greater mobility across larger areas to 

utilize a sufficient array of resources.28

Time Out of Memory

Last of all he made man. Though last in the order of creation, least in order of 

dependence, and weakest in bodily powers, man had the greatest gift – the 

power to dream. 29

The extent of this mobility is suggested by a recently identified archeological site 

at the bottom of Lake Huron, which—like Lake Erie—was largely exposed during the 

Early Holocene. Composed of stone cairns and blinds (ca. 9,000 BP) associated with 

drive lanes that channeled herds into the ancient lake where they were killed, this is the 

first significant Early Holocene site found beneath the Great Lakes—and affirms the 

long-held expectation that similar evidence exists in the vicinity of former shorelines 

 26 Dillon H. Carr, “Paleoindian Economic Organization in the Lower Great Lakes Region,” 216-23. Also 

see Charles E. Cleland, “Barren Ground Caribou (Rangifer arcticus) from an Early Man Site in 

Southeastern Michigan,” American Antiquity 30:3 (January 1965): 350-51. 27 John R. Halsey, ed. Retrieving Michigan's Buried Past: The Archaeology of the Great Lakes State

(Bloomfield Hills, MI: Cranbrook Institute of Science, 1999), 62, 64-68; and Cleland, “Barren Ground 

Caribou,” 350-51. 28 David A. Byers and Andrew Ugan, “Should We Expect Large Game Specialization in the Late 

Pleistocene? An Optimal Foraging Perspective on Early Paleoindian Prey Choice,” Journal of 

Archaeological Science 32, no. 11 (November 2005): 1624-40; Carr, “Paleoindian Economic Organization 

in the Lower Great Lakes Region,” 223-28. 29 Johnston, Ojibway Heritage, 12-13.
Chapter One

23

beneath Lake Erie. Moreover, it is likely that archeological evidence beneath the lower 

Great Lakes will correlate with interior sites in the interlobate hills, since new research 

suggests that caribou hunters in Lower Michigan moved seasonally within river drainages 

between interior and lakeshore sites. Small groups would congregate together near the 

lake zone to intercept the large autumn migration of caribou, then leave the tundra 

environments near the lakeshore and head up river drainages to the forested interior. 

There they would forage on a broader array of floral resources, hunt elk, moose, deer, 

bear and other animals, catch fish and fowl, and likely interact with other groups within 

the shared headwater regions of the interlobate. In this scenario of seasonal movements 

between interior and lakeshore areas, and given the vast trove of well-catalogued amateur 

finds of Paleoindian materials in the Irish Hills, the entire River Raisin drainage would 

have certainly been a key area of travel, use and temporary residence throughout this 

period.30

Caribou hunting likely ended in southern Michigan after 9,000 BP, as the onset of 

the Holocene Climate Optimum (9,000-5,000 BP)—or Altithermal—caused herds to shift 

further north. The same was also occurring with other large game animals like moose, 

while the megafauna that were once found in the interior regions were already extinct. 

The shift in animal populations coincided with marked transition from spruce dominated 

forests to a mixed hardwood forest of oak, hickory, walnut and maple as well as other 

flora that were more common in southerly environments. Human populations adjusted to 

the changes and likely increased as the range of available resources grew in geographic 

and seasonal scale. Milder and shorter winters, for instance, greatly increased the amount 

and scale of available floral resources such as late autumn tree nuts and early spring 

tubers. An increasing human population would have been accompanied by a 

commensurate decrease in seasonal mobility as the proximity of diverse resources 

increased.31

The onset and persistence of the Altithermal necessarily involved an array of 

cultural adaptations, re-organizations of social structures, and new geographic 

orientations for most communities in North America. Archeologists refer to these new 

arrangements and the environments in which they were situated as the Archaic period. In 

part distinguished from the Paleoindian period by the absence of late Pleistocene and 

early Holocene megafauna, the archeology of the Archaic period is defined by a general 

lack of large kill sites and the presence of a broader-spectrum of plant and animal 

resources in the archeological record. For North America as a whole the Archaic period 

 30 John M. O’Shea et al, “A 9,000-Year-Old Caribou Hunting Structure beneath Lake Huron,” Proceedings 

of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 119 (2014): 6911-15. Carr, “Paleoindian Economic 

Organization in the Lower Great Lakes Region,” 268-95. For a similar argument that includes direct 

reference to the River Raisin drainage, see David M. Stothers, “Resource Procurement and Band 

Territories: A Model for Lower Great Lakes Paleoindian and Early Archaic Settlement Systems,” 

Archaeology of Eastern North America, 25 (1996): 173-216. Also see Haynes, Early Settlement of North 

America, 51-53; and Stothers et al, “Archaic Perspectives in the Western Lake Erie Basin,” in Archaic 

Transitions in Ohio and Kentucky Prehistory, eds. Olaf H. Prufer, Sara E. Pedde and Richard S. Meindl 

(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), 233-39. On finds throughout the Irish Hills, see Ken Wyatt, 

“Peek Through Time: Researcher has found thousands of American Indian artifacts in Jackson County,” 

Jackson Citizen Patriot, July 23, 2011 

<http://www.mlive.com/news/jackson/index.ssf/2011/07/peek_through_time_researcher_h.html>.

31 Matthew P. Purtill, “The Ohio Archaic: A Review,” in Archaic Societies, 565
Chapter One

24

spans 7,000 years (10,000-3,000 BP) and is subdivided into Early (10,000-8,000 BP), 

Middle (8,000-4,500 BP), and Late (4,500-3,000 BP) periods.32 In southeastern Michigan 

and northwestern Ohio, as well as other regions of the continent, these periods are 

marked by environmental and cultural changes that correspond to increased sedentism 

and an orientation toward more stable riverine settings. The Archaic as a whole comes to 

an end with the development and adoption of agriculture.33

The material evidence associated with Late Paleoindian and Early Archaic sites in 

the Great Lake region is very similar, but a greater abundance of sites from the latter 

period—particularly in the Maumee Lake Plain—indicates the gradual population growth 

noted above. This increase may have resulted from more diversified environmental 

conditions that allowed established populations to grow, from the migration of larger 

communities from the south who took the place of caribou hunting groups that moved 

northward, or from some combination of these scenarios. While the source of the 

population increase cannot be clearly determined, the persistent use of the same 

residential and procurement sites from Paleaoindian through Early Archaic periods 

suggests continuity in the location and composition of some populations across many 

generations. Of course, it is also possible that the choice of the same sites by entirely 

different peoples—at different times—might simply reflect the specific advantages of 

certain locales over long periods of time. Yet even if the latter situation proved the rule, 

and Early Archaic migrants gradually but completely replaced Paleoindian residents of 

the western Lake Erie Basin, it is implausible that no information was shared, no material 

or cultural exchanges occurred, no intermarriage happened, and no blending of 

populations was allowed. Whatever explains the shifts between these and later 

archeological periods, the distinctions they mark should be understood as transitions on a 

continuum that involved related communities with shared understandings of the same 

places across long periods of time.34

 32 Much like the term “Paleoindian,” which was coined at a time when the antiquity of humans in North 

America was assumed to begin at the end of the Ice Age and described simple groupings of big game 

hunters, the term “Archaic” is equally problematic. As Thomas Emerson and Dale McElrath note, “the 

archaic label” still carries the implications of its first use in the 1930s: “to be archaic was to be 

technologically and socially primitive.” “More than anything else,” they write, “the Archaic concept 

reflects the persistence of a neo-evolutionary stage framework” in which primitive cultures give way to 

increasingly more advanced societies. In the case of the Archaic, this often means people who did not know 

how to make pottery or organize themselves into chiefdom societies—as occurred in the more recent 

Woodland period. While acknowledging the problems with the terminology, this narrative will use 

“Archaic” in its discussion of current archeological research and theory. See Thomas E. Emerson and Dale 

L. McElrath, “The Eastern Woodlands Archaic and the Tyranny of Theory,” in Archaic Societies: Diversity 

and Complexity across the Continent, eds. Emerson, McElrath and Andrew C. Fortier (Albany: State 

University of New York Press, 2009), 26.

33 Matthew P. Purtill, “The Ohio Archaic: A Review,” in Archaic Societies, 570-75; William A. Lovis, 

“Hunter-Gatherer Adaptations and Alternative Perspectives o the Michigan Archaic: Research Problems in 

Context,” in Archaic Societies, 735; and David M. Stothers et al, “Archaic Perspectives in the Western 

Lake Erie Basin,” in Archaic Transitions in Ohio and Kentucky Prehistory, eds. Olaf H. Prufer, Sara E. 

Pedde and Richard S. Meindl (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), 233-39. 34 Stothers, Abel and Schneider, “Archaic Perspectives in the Western Lake Erie Basin,” 239-42, 246-49. 

Also see J. M. Adovasio, R. Fryman, A. G. Quinn, D. C. Dirkmaat, and D. R. Pedler, “The Archaic of the 

Upper Ohio Valley: A View from Medowcroft Rockshelter,” in Archaic Transitions in Ohio and Kentucky 

Prehistory, 141-82.
Chapter One

25

Throughout the Early Archaic the entire western basin of Lake Erie was above 

water, but lake levels and shorelines remained fairly consistent. Consequently, the 

archeological sites within the lower River Raisin drainage and nearest the current 

shoreline would have been situated within a network of forested streams and rivers that 

flowed around and through what is now the western third of the lake. How and when 

these communities might have utilized lake environments, and how such use might have 

corresponded with seasonal residence and use at interior sites cannot be known without 

further research beneath modern Lake Erie. Even absent such evidence, and given the 

likelihood of eutrophic conditions in the lake during this time, it is still clear that Early 

Archaic communities relied increasingly on interior animal populations such as deer, 

bear, turkey, and various small game as well as fish and mollusks in the extensive 

drainages of the lacustrine plain.35

Through most of the Middle Archaic period the climate continued to warm and 

precipitation rates fell. This trend reached a peak around 4,800 BP, but temperate and 

xeric conditions persisted for another 1,800 years. Adaptations to these conditions are 

manifested in the archeological record, which includes “the development of new 

groundstone technology which featured woodworking tools such as axes, adzes, and 

gouges, as well as grinding implements for processing nuts and seeds.”36 Middle Archaic 

sites also present an array of harpoon tips and fishhooks made from animal bone that, 

along with stone plummets and netsinkers, indicate an increased reliance on taking fish. 

The presence of dugout canoes in the archeological record further indicates an increased 

orientation to riverine environments, and likely reflects the repeated and continued use of 

long established village sites. This is partly indicated by the amount of time in one place 

it would have required to build canoes, as well as the number of repeatedly used sites that 

were established to transport, concentrate, and distribute a larger amount of resources 

along rivers and lakes. Tools like axes and adzes, which are closely associated with this 

era, would have been used for constructing canoes as well as larger houses, storage 

baskets, large bowls, masks, and other items that are readily associated with a more 

settled pattern of residence.

37

 35 Purtill, “The Ohio Archaic: A Review,” 571-72; Lovis, “Hunter-Gatherer Adaptations and Alternative 

Perspectives on the Michigan Archaic: Research Problems in Context,” in Archaic Societies, 735; Stothers 

et al, “Archaic Perspectives in the Western Lake Erie Basin,” 234-37. 36 Charles E. Cleland, “Indians in a Changing Environment,” in The Great Lakes Forest: An Environmental 

and Social History, ed. Susan L. Flader (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) 84. 37 Brad Koldehoff and John A. Walthall, “Dalton and the Early Holocene Midcontinent: Setting the Stage,” 

in Archaic Societies, 137, 145. While no Archaic period canoes have been found in northwestern Ohio or 

Southeastern Michigan, this is likely a consequence of later environmental conditions. When Lake Erie 

rose to near, and then beyond, its current level around 4700 BP, the expected locations of former village 

sites from the Middle Archaic period were either swallowed by the lake or buried by alluvial deposition as 

the rising lake slowed and broadened the course of larger streams and rivers. However, canoes have been 

found uncovered in remnant glacial lakes within the terminal moraine created by the southern margin of the 

Erie ice lobe at sites that post-date the Middle Archaic. Unaffected by the various changes in Lake Erie’s 

shorelines, the canoes and any affiliated village sites remained in situ and near the surface for thousands of 

years. See David S. Brose and Isaac Greber, “The Ringler Archaic Dugout from Savannah Lake, Ashland 

County, Ohio: With Speculations on Trade and Transmission in the Prehistory of the Eastern United 

States,” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 7, no. 2 (1982): 245-82.
Chapter One

26

“We have always been here”38

In southeastern Michigan and northwestern Ohio, the advent of the Late Archaic 

period corresponds with two key environmental developments: the gradual cooling trend 

and commensurate rise in precipitation that marked the latter part of the Altithermal; and 

the filling of Lake Erie to levels that approximate those of the the present day. 

Characterized by many of the same tool assemblages associated with the Middle Archaic, 

and following a similar pattern of interior-to-shoreline migration that had developed 

during the Paleoindian period, Late Archaic communities followed long established 

patterns of resource procurement and seasonal population movements. Because the 

lakeshore of the Late Archaic period was at or near current conditions, these movements 

and procurement strategies are more clearly delineated in the archeological record—

particularly around Sandusky Bay, the drainages of the Maumee River, the River Raisin, 

and Stony Creek. As David Stothers has argued, “Late Archaic populations in the western 

Lake Erie Basin” would coalesce in spring and summer “into large focal settlements in 

lowland and riverine environments where abundant riparian resources such as fish, 

waterfowl, and marsh plants could support large aggregations of people. During the late 

fall and winter, populations dispersed into smaller groups or family units in order to 

exploit the sparse resources of the hinterlands.”39

Given the increased orientation toward fishing during the Middle and Late 

Archaic, and the settling of lake levels at their current position around 3,500 BP, it is 

likely that the abundant sturgeon fishery that once existed within the present-day 

boundaries of the national battlefield park was first established during the Late Archaic 

period and persisted into historic times—when the River Raisin was known to the 

Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi) as Nmézibe, or “Sturgeon River.”40 Though prodigious during 

the spring spawning season, this fishery was likely “just one of numerous small, scattered 

short term habitations and related activity areas in close proximity to” each other that 

formed a larger community focused on collective “resource procurement, material 

production, and social interaction.” As Stothers notes, such “activity areas” were often 

located near, but separate from, an established cemetery that must have served as a focal 

point for community identity across generations. This focused settlement likely had a 

territorial component that corresponded to the smaller fall and winter encampments that 

moved through interior areas of common or adjacent watersheds.41

Based on similar patterns of movement, seasonal congregations, and procurement 

 38 This phrase is common in transcripts of treaty councils around the Great Lakes and in the Ohio Valley 

from the 17th to the 19th centuries, and remains a common refrain among various Native communities 

throughout the region and across the continent.

39 Stothers, Abel and Schneider, “Archaic Perspectives in the Western Lake Erie Basin,” 242. Also see 

Jeanne Arnold, “Early Archaic Subsistence and Settlement in the River Raisin Watershed, Southeastern 

Michigan,” in The River Raisin Archaeological Survey Season 2, 1976: A Preliminary Report, eds. 

Christopher S. Peebles and James K. Krakker (Lansing: Office of the State Archeologist, Michigan 

Historical Center, 1977).

40 On historic accounts of sturgeon populations, see John McClelland Bulkley, History of Monroe County 

Michigan: A Narrative Account of Its Historical Progress, Its People, and Its Principal Interests (Chicago: 

The Lewis Publishing Company, 1913), 396.

41 Stothers, Abel and Schneider, “Archaic Perspectives in the Western Lake Erie Basin,” 242-243; 

quotation is from p. 243.
Chapter One

27

strategies, Stothers concludes that Late Archaic communities in the western Lake Erie 

Basin represent “a direct continuum with those of the Middle Archaic” –and perhaps the 

Early Archaic and Late Paleoindian. However, increasing populations and a greater 

abundance of repeatedly used interior encampments and near-shore village areas also 

indicates that Late Archaic communities operated with a greater “degree of 

intensification [and] task specificity.” On the one hand, these developments constrained 

the mobility of small bands and the collective range of their broader groups—yet the 

growth of a complex trading network around the lower Great Lakes fostered increased 

interaction and competition between distinct communities. As the gradual intensification 

of these internal and external group dynamics led to a more centralized scheduling of 

larger-scale “harvesting and storage of seasonally abundant resources,” they fostered 

greater cooperation between neighboring groups that was maintained through reciprocal 

exchanges. Consequently, “population interactions flourished and became more 

regionally integrated...[;] social networking became increasingly scheduled” or 

ritualized, and the arrangement of settlements and subsistence regimes became more 

structured.42

Within these broader contexts of population growth, increased sedentism, and 

more complex social organizations, several key developments signal a marked transition 

to what archeologists refer to as the Woodland period (3,000 BP–1200 CE; i.e., Common 

Era).43 Characterized by the use of cultigens, the production of ceramics, and further 

development of long distance trade networks, the Woodland period in eastern North 

America corresponds to a number of revolutionary shifts within American Indian 

societies that involved larger populations and increased interaction among distinct 

groups. Notable expressions of these changes during the Early Woodland Period (3,000-

2,100 BP) include larger population concentrations associated with more intensive 

farming practices in the Middle and Lower Mississippi Valley, the construction of 

mounds and mound complexes in the Ohio Valley and upper Mississippi Valley, and 

networks of exchange that incorporated copper from the upper Great Lakes, marine shells 

from the Atlantic Seaboard and the Caribbean, and lithic materials from as far west as the 

Rocky Mountains. By the Middle Woodland Period (2,100 BP-400 CE), tropical 

cultigens such as bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria), beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), squash 

(Cucurbita pepo), and corn (Zea mays) had become widely adopted across eastern North 

America and were grown along with previously domesticated plants such as sunflower 

(Helianthus annuus), sumpweed (Iva annua), goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri), 

maygrass (Phalaris caroliniana), knotweed (Polygonum erecturn), and little barley 

(Hordeurn pusillum). This period is also marked by the development of cities and large 

ceremonial centers in the middle and lower Mississippi Valley and the Southeast. In the 

late Woodland Period (400-1200 CE) the cultivation of domesticated crops increased 

throughout eastern North America as populations spread to new areas.44

 42 Ibid., 247, 252, 256, 258. 43 Common Era, or CE, is the chronological equivalent of Anno Domini and AD. 44 Frances B. King, “Changing Evidence for Prehistoric Plant Use in Pennsylvania,” in Current Northeast 

Paleoethnobotany, ed. John P. Hart (Albany: The New York State Education Department, 1999), 11-26; 

and Bruce D. Smith, “Hopewellian Farmers of Eastern North America,” in Rivers of Change: Essays on 

Early Agriculture in Eastern North America, ed. Smith (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 

201-48.
Chapter One

28

Some of these major hallmarks of the Woodland Period found expression in 

present-day Ohio and southwestern Michigan, most notably the earthworks and burial 

mounds associated with the Adena (3,000 BP-2,000 BP) and Hopewell (2,200 BP-400 

CE) cultural traditions. A number of these sites have been recorded from Lake St. Clair 

southward along the Detroit River and around western Lake Erie—including sites on the 

middle and upper River Raisin as well as a substantial burial area at the river’s mouth. 

Though most have been lost to excavations by amateur antiquarians in the late 19th

century and subsequent developments in the twentieth century, some significant sites 

remain—including the Springwells Mound on the grounds of Historic Fort Wayne in 

Detroit near the mouth of the River Rouge.45

Hallmarks of Woodland Period material culture include the wide use and 

manufacture of ceramics, the gradual development of native cultigens, and the persistent 

use of a central village with established social gathering sites and burial areas. Around 

the western end of Lake Erie, Early Woodland period communities increased in 

population and became more organized around managing and harvesting various floral 

resources as well as organizing large cooperative fishing ventures during seasonal runs of 

anadromous fish. These latter events also became associated with annual social 

gatherings and trade fairs that occurred in conjunction with spring runs of sturgeon, 

northern pike, muskellunge and other fish. Along with the processing of surplus catch for 

later use and trade, these events also became times of feasting and gift exchanges. In this 

way the rich fisheries along the lower reach of the River Raisin and nearby rivers both 

distinguished the Early Woodland communities of western Lake Erie from the large 

Hopewellian towns near the Ohio River and to the southwest, as well as provided a basis 

for important exchanges with these and other more distant groups.46

The advent of the Late Woodland period around western Lake Erie and the 

Detroit River area, as well as in most other areas of eastern North America, corresponds 

with the early incorporation of maize. While archeologists have not been able to establish 

precise dates, it is likely that the earliest use of maize in this area predates 400 CE. Even 

if this early date holds, the incorporation of maize and other exotic cultigens like squash 

and beans did not become central to the lifeways or diets of the people who lived around 

western Lake Erie for many generations. During a pronounced warming trend known as 

the Medieval Warming Period (950-1250 CE), which fostered increased maize 

production throughout eastern North America as well as caused the level of Lake Erie to 

drop by approximately two feet, residential patterns underwent a slight shift to interior 

locales.47 The central villages located at major fishing areas were gradually abandoned 

 45 David G. Anderson, “Social Landscapes of Early and Middle Woodland Peoples in the Southeast,” in 

Early and Middle Woodland Landscapes of the Southeast, eds. Edward R. Henry and Alice P. Wright 

(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 247-62; and Smith, “Hopewellian Farmers of Eastern 

North America,” 201-48. Prior to the destruction of most Woodland Period sites in Michigan, Wilbert B. 

Hinsdale catalogued and mapped archeological features and village sites that were either still visible or 

remembered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These included several ancient villages along the lower 

River Raisin and adjacent river drainages. See Hinsdale, Archaeological Atlas of Michigan (Ann Arbor: 

University of Michigan Press, 1931), 2, 3, 6, 28, 37.

46 Anderson, “Social Landscapes of Early and Middle Woodland Peoples in the Southeast,” 247-62; and 

Smith, “Hopewellian Farmers of Eastern North America,” 201-48. 47 William C. Foster, Climate and Culture Change in North America: AD 900–1600 (Austin: University of 

Texas Press, 2012), 14-86; and John P. Coakley, “Lake Levels in the Erie Basin: Driving Factors and 
Chapter One

29

for sites a mile and more upstream where increased maize cultivation was a central 

concern. The former village sites still served as large seasonal fishing encampments, but 

the upriver villages became the center of large social gatherings and trade fairs that, as 

Stothers and Abel note, “provided a periodic focus for feasting, marriage and funerals 

that reproduced the social relations [between associated communities and fostered] the 

homogenization of ideas and material culture across large areas.” After the fall harvest 

and processing of cultivated plants, various tree nuts, wild rice, and other flora and fauna, 

however, the age-old pattern of moving further upriver into smaller encampments 

persisted.48

The general trends discussed above apply to the entire area around western Lake 

Erie, from Sandusky Bay in the southeast and around to the Thames River drainage in 

present-day southwestern Ontario. Nevertheless, archeologists have clearly identified two 

distinct Woodland period cultural traditions known as the Western Basin Tradition and 

the Sandusky Tradition. In the Early and Middle Woodland period (500-1000 CE), 

communities associated with the Western Basin Tradition migrated southward from areas 

around Lake St. Clair to areas along the western shore of Lake Erie—perhaps to take 

advantage of a longer growing season as maize cultivation became more important. In the 

Middle to Late Woodland period (1000-1300 CE), during the Medieval Warming Period, 

Sandusky Tradition communities became more numerous around western Lake Erie and 

pushed northward around Lake St. Clair—where maize production increased. At the 

same time, Western Basin Tradition communities moved to the southwest, northwest, and 

northeast.49

While the material cultures of these communities are distinguishable in terms of 

ceramics, residential arrangements, structures, and particular trade goods, there is some 

disagreement among archeologists about their origins and legacies. One (primarily U.S.) 

school of thought suggests that the Western Basin Tradition is connected with Iroquoian 

cultures that were concentrated around the St. Lawrence River Valley and Lake Ontario, 

while the Sandusky Tradition was an expression of the Algonquian cultures that 

predominated in the western Great Lakes. Canadian scholars are less inclined to see the 

Western Basin Tradition as related to ancestral Iroquois, but generally agree that the 

Detroit River area and western Lake Erie was a kind of borderland between mostly 

Algonquian cultures to the southwest and mostly Iroquoian cultures to the northeast. 

Moreover, there is broad agreement that the Iroquoian communities that inhabited this 

area were ancestors of the Attiwandaron and Tionontati—who later became integrated 

with the people who today call themselves Wyandot and Wyandotte (in the United 

States) and Wendat (in Canada). Likewise, there is broad concurrence between 

archeological studies, oral histories, and ethnological reports that the Sandusky Tradition 

 

Recent Trends,” in Proceedings of the Great Lakes Paleo-Levels Workshop: The Last 4000 Years, ed. 

Coakley (Ann Arbor: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-Great Lakes Environmental 

Research Laboratory, 1999), 24-29. 48 Stothers and Abel “Early Woodland Prehistory (1000-1 BC) in the Western Lake Erie Drainage Basin,” 

in Transitions: Archaic and Early Woodland Research in the Ohio Country, eds. Martha P. Otto and Brian 

Gerald Redmond (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 79-116; quotation from p. 110. 49 Stothers and Abel, “The Early Late Woodland in the Southwestern Lake Erie Littoral Region,” in 

Northeast Subsistence-Settlement Change: AD 700-1300, eds. John F. Hart and Christina B. Rieth (Albany: 

New York State Museum, 2002), 73-96.
Chapter One

30

is ancestral to present-day Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) Thâkîwa (Sauk, or Sac), and Meskwaki 

(Fox), and perhaps some Odawa (Ottawa) communities.50

Considerable interaction must have occurred among the various communities 

around western Lake Erie, but apparently became more competitive and adversarial 

around 1300 CE as Algonquian communities associated with the Sandusky Tradition 

created larger agricultural settlements in areas that were also utilized by Iroquoian 

groups. This process became more pronounced with the onset of a prolonged cooling 

trend known as the Little Ice Age (1350-1800 CE), which prompted a marked shift in 

settlement patterns around the lower Great Lakes and throughout much of eastern North 

America. Small, scattered settlements were abandoned as affiliated communities 

concentrated in larger villages within prime agricultural areas. While this adaptation 

 50 Ibid.; Gary W. Crawford and Smith, “Migration in Prehistory: Princess Point and the Northern Iroquoian 

Case,” in Archeology of the Iroquois: Selected Readings and Research Sources, ed. Jordan E. Kerber 

(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 30-40; Dean R. Snow, “More on Migration in Prehistory: 

Accommodating New Evidence in the Northern Iroquoian Case,” Archeology of the Iroquois, 41-47; 

Ronald F. Williamson, “The Archaeological History of the Wendat to A.D. 1651: An Overview,” Ontario 

Archaeology, no. 94 (2014): 3-64; John Clarke, The Ordinary People of Essex: Environment, Culture, and 

Economy on the Frontier of Upper Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011), 63-66.
Chapter One

31

ensured better success in the midst of less certain growing conditions, it also fostered a 

larger and more distinct sense of group identity. As small seasonal villages amalgamated 

and concentrated into larger towns of between 100-500 people, residence and 

relationships still followed established lines of kinship, clan, and historic proximity. Yet 

these relations were necessarily extended to members of the town as a whole, as 

collective decisions were formulated regarding production, group protection, and large 

community ceremonies. While these towns grew in numbers and social complexity, and 

encompassed between 1-3 hectares (2.5-7.5 acres), the population of the surrounding area 

declined and the distance between settlements increased. Consequently, the growth of a 

town identity was also fostered by distance and separation –and a particular territorial 

sensibility.51

Similar demographic and social changes occurred in the Ohio River Valley, the 

lower Great Lakes, and the Saint Lawrence River Valley, and were accompanied by a 

growing focus on long distance trade networks that had been dormant since the Late 

Archaic era. Increased population growth and concentration, accompanied by intensified 

use of specific agricultural zones and increasing access to exotic goods, created 

competition for land, territory, and position within systems of exchange. As the breadth 

of exchanges and interactions increased, relations within specific communities and 

among associated groups likely strengthened through efforts to access, maintain, and 

protect collective resources. However, competition and defense—in part compounded by 

the deepening of the Little Ice Age—resulted in warfare and the construction of fortified 

towns. In western Lake Erie these dynamics resulted in the withdrawal of Iroquoian 

groups from what is now southeastern Michigan and their consolidation with related 

communities to the northeast. Warfare and fortification did not cease, however, and likely 

persisted around western Lake Erie through long distance campaigns that involved local 

Algonquian groups as well as Iroquoians to the northeast, Fort Ancients to the south, and 

others from the west.52

It would have been in this context that a substantial village site was developed on 

the River Raisin within what is now the core area of the national battlefield park. Though 

only partly excavated in July 2000, and only as part of a project to find materials relevant 

to the battles of Frenchtown, the site was identified as “a late stage Sandusky Tradition 

site” (ca. 1450-1650) that is much like others in “northwestern Ohio, southeastern 

Michigan and southwestern Ontario.” Precise dating of this site has not occurred, but its 

apparent association with accidental finds of skeletons during the construction of the 

River Raisin Paper Company in the early 20th century, as well as later finds within 

 51 Foster, Climate and Culture Change in North America, 87-106. See Stothers and Abel, “The Early Late 

Woodland in the Southwestern Lake Erie Littoral Region.” in Northeast Subsistence-Settlement Change: 

A.D. 700-1300, eds. John P. Hart and Christina B. Rieth (Albany: The University of the State of New York, 

2002), 73-96; Hart, and Bernard K. Means, "Maize and Villages: A Summary and Critical Assessment of 

Current Northeast Early Late Prehistoric Evidence," in Northeast Subsistence-Settlement Change: A.D. 

700-1300, 342-58. The low-point of the Little Ice Age occurred ca. 1610. 52 Abel, “The Context of Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric Trade Interaction in Northwestern Ohio,” paper 

presented at the Midwest Archaeological Conference, LaCrosse, WI (October 13-15); Stothers, “The 

Protohistoric Time Period in the Southwestern Lake Erie Region: European-Derived Trade Material, 

Population Movement, and Cultural Realignment,” in Cultures before Contact: The Late Prehistory of 

Ohio and Surrounding Regions, ed. Robert Genheimer (Columbus: Ohio Archaeological Council, 2000), 

52–95.
Chapter One

32

disturbed areas, suggests that the village area was extensive and long—or repeatedly—

used.53 This would not have been the first use of the site, of course, but may have been 

the most extensive. The village would have appeared like others throughout the region, 

extending over 2.6 hectares (6.5 acres) and fortified by perimeter ditches and palisades, 

with longhouses, a council house, and other structures within. Beyond would have been 

fields plots of maize and other crops, a midden and areas for processing animals and 

lithic tools, canoes on the edge of the river, and fishing weirs within. This was life on the 

River Raisin in the mid 16th century, expressing important adaptations in a period of 

demographic and climatic change yet embodying understandings of community and 

environment that had developed over thousands of years.54

Figure 1.5: Locales of Known Archeological Features, Superimposed on Maps 

of Counties in the State of Michigan, ca. 1930. Map presents the location of known 

village sites, burial grounds, and transportation routes in Monroe, Wayne, Washtenaw, and 

Lenawee Counties. The identified sites correspond to different eras and multiple use periods, 

but are representative of pre-Contact and historical patterns of residence, travel, and land 

use. Source: Slight adaptation of “Map 6” in Wilbert B. Hinsdale, Archaeological Atlas of 

Michigan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1931), 59.

 53 G. Michael Pratt and William E. Rutter, “Phase II Arechaeological Reconnaissance of the River Raisin 

Battlefield, Monroe, Michigan” (Copy on file in the Office of the Michigan State Archeologist, East 

Lansing, MI, 2002), 6, 21, 26-7; Quotations from p. 26. 54 Stothers, “The Protohistoric Time Period in the Southwestern Lake Erie Region,” 52-95.
Chapter Two

33

Chapter Two

A New World in Motion, ca. 1650-1750

This chapter describes and explains the historical developments and conditions that 

profoundly shaped Indigenous worlds in the Great Lakes/Ohio Valley region in the Colonial 

Era. The close of the chapter establishes the contours of Native communities at the dawn of a 

new era of crisis and revitalization. In doing so, it provides a basis for examining Native and 

non-American Indian actions, motives, and expectations through the late 18th and early 19th

centuries.

In the middle of the 16th century, the various communities that lived around the 

Great Lakes heard tales of small islands with broad white wings that moved over the 

surface of the water. These islands were European sailing ships that first appeared off the 

coast of present-day Newfoundland, and carried bearded men who pulled fish from the 

sea, dried the catch on the shore, and traded exotic metal wares for pelts, food, and other 

common items.1 More disturbing information came from south of the Ohio River, where 

the people lived in large towns and built temple mounds. Hundreds of strangers, some 

wearing metal and riding on animals the size of elk, attacked towns from the Gulf Coast 

to the Appalachian Mountains and across to the lower Mississippi River. Many of the 

people in the towns were enslaved and many were killed, but the strangers were driven 

away and half were killed or died before leaving the region. In their wake, though, a 

number of deadly diseases swept through whole communities.2

More of these strangers came in the ensuing decades: some from Spain in a quest 

for treasure, slaves, and souls in what is now the southeastern United States, and others 

from France seeking more pelts along the northeastern coast and among interior 

communities. From both regions, deadly new diseases erupted and some found their way 

to the Great Lakes. Distance from the initial outbreaks and infrequent exposure helped 

limit the effects of these diseases during the latter half of the 16th century—and allowed 

some Great Lakes communities to recover most of their numbers within a generation. The 

same vectors that brought disease into the interior, namely the vast web of ancient travel 

routes and exchange networks that connected the lower Great Lakes with areas to the 

south and the east, also brought new items and materials. Initially, these amounted to a 

few items of iron, copper, or glass beads that may have been used more in the context of 

ceremonial and diplomatic activities than as utilitarian items. By the end of the 16th

 1 Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the 

Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791 (Cleveland, 1896–1901), 5:119–21; Harold A. Innis, The 

Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (Toronto: University of Toronto 

Press, 1999), 9-12. 2 Robin A. Beck, Jr., “Catawba Coalescence and the Shattering of the Carolina Piedmont, 1540–1675,” in 

Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the 

American South, eds. Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 

2009), 115-22.
Chapter Two

34

century, however, the peltry trade accelerated as annual fairs developed along the lower 

St. Lawrence River. In fairly short order, European trade goods were carried through long 

established exchange networks to communities in the lower Great Lakes. At a site 

between Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe, for instance, archeologists have recovered more 

than a thousand items of European origin from a village (ca. 1585-1609) that was home 

to approximately 2200 inhabitants. These include iron knives, axes and awls, copper and 

brass ornaments, glass beads, brass tools, metal scrap, and a variety of other items that all 

arrived before any people from this area had travelled to a trade fair or a European had 

reached the vicinity of Georgian Bay.3

Making Trade

The presence of so many European goods was not exceptional, but it is indicative 

of the broader context in which the items were valued and used within Native societies. 

Just like every other material or object not produced within the village community, all of 

the European-sourced goods arrived through long established exchange networks that 

were maintained through reciprocal gift giving across extended social ties that existed 

within and between villages. Moreover, the glass beads, metal ware and textiles that came 

to North America all had direct analogs within Native communities throughout the Great 

Lakes and beyond. More easily obtained and perhaps more eye-catching, glass and 

copper beads from Europe were nevertheless used to adorn ritual objects, clothing, 

bodies, and everyday items in much the same way as processed and polished shells, 

quartzes, and Great Lakes copper. Metal ware was usually acquired in the form of pots, 

utensils, or blades, but such items were also cut and reprocessed once they arrived in a 

village. In either case, metal was used in lieu of bone, antler, stone and pottery –for 

arrowheads and lance points, as cook ware and utensils, and in tools for processing wood, 

butchering animals, cultivating crops, and building structures. In short, American Indian 

communities defined the meaning and use of European objects and materials in 

accordance with their cultural values and material wants or needs.4

Much the same was true of how the French viewed the pelts they received through 

down-the-line exchanges from the lower Great Lakes to the East Coast. Within Great 

Lakes communities, and among American Indians throughout much of North America, 

an animal like the beaver was appreciated in several different contexts: as a source of 

food, medicine, and material for warm and water-repellent cloaks, as the maker of ponds 

that sustained a variety of plants and animals, and as an ancient ancestor or doodem (Clan 

identity). For the French, a beaver—as well as a fox, mink, otter, or marten—was the 

 3 Kostalena Michelaki et al, “17th Century Huron Village Life: Insights from the Copper-Based Metals of 

the Ball Site, Southern Ontario, Canada,” Journal of Archaeological Science 40, no. 2 (2012): 1250–59. 

This village was primarily inhabited by ancestors of the Wendake, or Huron-Wendat First Nation in 

Quebec. Direct contact between these people and French traders first occurred in 1609, when the village 

was abandoned and its residents joined with other Wendat communities further west. See Bruce G. Trigger, 

The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660, 2 vols. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's 

University Press, 1976), I: 236-48; and Gary Warrick, A Population History of the Huron-Petun, A.D. 500–

1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 19, 118, and 206. 4 Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America. 

Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 43-68; Bruce M. White, Grand Portage as a 

Trading Post: Patterns of Trade at “the Great Carrying Place” (Grand Marais, MN: Grand Portage 

National Monument, National Park Service, 2005), 5-26.
Chapter Two

35

source of a pelt that could become part of a luxurious piece of clothing. Its utility, then, 

was as a lightweight commodity that could be shipped to Europe, sold, processed, and 

utilized in a manner wholly foreign to the communities from which it came.5

The differences between American Indian and French conceptions of the early fur 

trade were apparent to all participants. Jesuits were confounded by Native “religion, or 

rather their superstition,” which included the singing of prayers to beavers, elk, 

porcupine, and a host of other animals. Moreover, French traders marveled at how readily 

an American Indian would give away a trove of expensive furs in exchange for a few 

cheap trinkets and baubles. For their part, American Indians wondered about the sanity of 

people who would trade such valuable things for a few beaver pelts. An Innu 

(Montaignais) man made this perfectly clear in a gentle ribbing of a Jesuit priest: “The 

Beaver does everything perfectly well, it makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread; 

and, in short, it makes everything.”6 Yet these different perspectives, and the judgments 

they fostered, did not undermine the nascent fur trading between Europeans and 

American Indians in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Rather, the exchanges persisted 

and grew through a kind of mutual exploitation. As the historian Richard White notes, 

“diverse peoples adjust[ed] their differences through what amount[ed] to a process of 

creative, and often expedient, misunderstandings” that allowed each to value the 

exchanges on their own terms.7

The Nature of Empire

Regardless of how seamlessly American Indian communities and French traders 

incorporated new materials into their lives, these initial, small-scale exchanges occurred 

within a larger context that reached far beyond the Kingdom of France or the local 

environments and regional exchanges of the lower Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River 

Valley. In the century following the initial Spanish conquest and colonization of the 

Caribbean and adjacent areas of North, Central, and South America, Europe was wracked 

by an almost unbroken series of wars. Variously inspired by religious, political, and 

cultural divisions associated with the Protestant Reformation, these wars were fueled by 

Spain’s imperial ventures and the wealth of silver pouring into Europe from the 

Americas. By the turn of the 17th century the long spasm of war had drawn to an end in 

Western Europe, and thus provided an opportunity for the English, Dutch, and French to 

expand on their initial overseas interests. In France, for instance, the conclusion of the 

Wars of Religion (1562-1598) provided Henri IV an opportunity to further consolidate 

power within his now unified kingdom. Toward these ends he committed to 

strengthening France’s commercial interests in North America as a means to build up his 

 5 On beaver as doodem (aka totem), see Heidi Rosemary Bohaker, “Anishinaabe Toodaims: Contexts for 

Politics, Kinship, and Identity in the Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600 to 1900,” in Gathering Places: 

Aboriginal and Fur Trade Histories, eds. Carolyn Podruchny and Laura Peers (Vancouver: University of 

British Columbia Press, 2011), 93-118. On the value of peltry in the early decades of the French fur trade, 

see Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 14-16. 6 Quotations from Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 6: 203, 297. 7 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-

1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), x.
Chapter Two

36

treasury, energize domestic manufactures and trade, and counter Spain’s weakened but 

still potent economic clout.8

In turning to North America, Henri IV formally committed France to the imperial 

contest that had previously been dominated by Portugal and Spain. In doing so he joined 

with the Dutch and English in a maritime contest for access to, and control of, overseas 

resources in North America. This imperial competition was largely an extension of the 

warfare that had just ended, but now oriented toward monopolizing overseas resources 

with two basic goals in mind: strengthening the economic and political power of the state 

within its borders; and gaining financial advantage over rival nations or kingdoms in 

Europe. Known as mercantilism, this approach to overseas empire was predicated on an 

assumption that the world possessed a vast amount of resources but a relatively finite 

amount of wealth or treasure (as measured by the amount of gold or silver then 

available). Success within the mercantile framework was achieved through monopolizing 

valued resources that could then be sold to economic rivals (i.e., other kingdoms), and 

thereby impoverishing one’s rival while gaining a larger share of the world’s treasure. 

While mercantilism defined international commerce as a zero-sum game for gaining and 

controlling wealth, it also created a kind of inflationary scramble to access, monopolize 

and defend more resources. As Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton note, “early modern 

statesmen instinctively understood trade as” a kind of battle for territory and thus 

imperial ventures largely amounted to the “continuation of war by other means.”9

In the early 17th century, the region to the east of the Great Lakes became one of 

the first arenas in this relatively new imperial contest for resources. As the French 

accelerated their commercial endeavors in North America, they were soon rivaled in the 

1610s by Dutch traders on the Hudson River and in the 1620s by English Colonists on the 

coast of what is now New England. The growing popularity of hats made from felted 

beaver fur drove this competition, and obtaining beaver pelts became the primary focus 

of traders. Among Europeans, competition depended on establishing and maintaining 

exclusive access to American Indian communities that would channel the lucrative trade 

to a commercial outpost. While this required a level of cultural fluency with the protocols 

and interests of specific Native groups, such knowledge primarily operated in the service 

of mercantile principles and imperial goals. The same is true of the close alliances that 

Europeans developed with particular Native communities, even to the point of joining 

them in conflicts with their enemies. When these enemies were also the allies of another 

European power—as often proved the case—trade was not so much a matter of “war by 

other means” as it was simply war in another place.10

 8 George Colpitts, North America’s Indian Trade in European Commerce and Imagination, 1580-1850

(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), 4-9; Fred Anderson and Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Dominion of War: 

Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000 (New York: Viking, 2005), 2-9. 9 On mercantilism and imperialism more generally, see Sophus A. Reinert and Pernille Røge, 

“Introduction: The Political Economy of Empire,” in The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern 

World, eds. Reinert and Røge (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1-10. Quotation is from Anderson and 

Cayton, Dominion of War, 8. 10 Simon Middleton, “Conflict and Commerce: The Rise and Fall of New Netherland,” in History Now 12 

(June 2007) <http://www.historynow.org/past.html> (accessed 18 February 2015); Colpitts, North 

America’s Indian Trade, 8-13.
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37

This is not to suggest that European ventures in North America were nothing 

more than the working out of monolithic principles about war and commerce. In many 

respects, quite the opposite was true. Perhaps no one understood this better than Samuel 

de Champlain, who established direct trade relations with American Indian communities 

in the eastern Great Lakes in 1609 and then administered French trading ventures from 

what is now Quebec City for the better part of 25 years. The people with whom 

Champlain and his countrymen engaged were entirely responsible for acquiring and 

transporting the resources that the French coveted, controlled all the networks of trade, 

and frequently determined the place and terms of exchange with Europeans. If they 

declined to trade, opposed a colonial settlement, or rejected a diplomatic overture, 

Champlain knew that the vision of empire he served might collapse before it began. At 

the very least, this dependence required a level of tolerance and begrudging respect for 

the motives of Native leaders.11

A similar dynamic held for Jesuit missionaries who endeavored to fit their 

theology to a world where “superstitions are infinite,” as one priest put it, among people 

who also possessed “noble moral virtues ..., [especially] a great love and union, which 

they are careful to cultivate by means of their marriages, of their presents, of their feasts 

..., and their hospitality to all sorts of strangers.”12 Though not as frequently as Jesuit 

missionaries, the 100 or so habitants (French colonists) and French administrators who 

lived in Quebec City in the 1620s still had regular contact with nearby American Indian 

groups. Their meetings invariably created some new challenge or affirmed a recent lesson 

about how to adapt to—rather than change—a world that was largely defined by their 

American Indian neighbors and not themselves. The most successful adjustments came 

from the early coureurs des bois (“runners of the woods;” i.e. independent traders who 

operated without official sanction from French administrators) who developed an even 

closer affinity with Native communities through marriage or adoption, and thus became 

incorporated into the kin-based relations at the heart of Native exchange networks.13

Imperial ventures in the Americas also had a profound effect on European 

societies and worldviews. The wealth pulled out of the Americas provided the basis for 

the rise of a secular professional class of administrators and investors, and enriched the 

patrons who financed the Northern European renaissance in art, architecture, literature, 

and craftwork. Perhaps the most fundamental change was culinary and caloric, as new 

foods from the Americas enriched European diets. These included vast quantities of cod 

that fed a growing number of landless laborers, as well as corn, tomatoes, potatoes, 

beans, squash, turkey and a host of spices and peppers that diversified farming and 

cuisine. The idea of America Indians living in a fundamental state of nature also 

prompted critical new interpretations of European society and economics. As the political 

philosopher John Locke famously quipped, “in the beginning all the World was America” 

–where the natural laws that once ordered life in ancient Europe still prevailed. From this 

supposition, Locke then reasoned that early governments developed out of unstructured 

societies that were composed of free and equal individuals. Locke did not advocate a 

return to such a condition, but instead argued—in terms that would later inspire the 

 11 Calloway, New Worlds for All, 44-45; Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 1: 296-305. 12 Quotation from Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 12: 121-22. 13 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 9-12; 
Chapter Two

38

American Revolution—that legitimate government arose from such equality and did not 

derive from the divine right of kings or their minions. Moreover, he asserted that the 

ultimate purpose of government was to ensure potential equality by protecting the rights 

of property and capital. Other contemporaries of Lock used the same starting point to 

reach a different conclusion; namely, that property, capital, and law only corrupted 

humans and that the freest people in the world were the so-called “noble savages” of the 

Americas. While none of these commenters actually knew or lived with the people they 

alluded to, their comments are a further indication of the profound adjustments that 

imperialism and colonization brought to European life and thought.14

Though far from the shores of North America, and farther still from western Lake 

Erie, these historical developments were part of the broader processes that created “New 

Worlds for All”—in the Americas, in Europe, and across the globe between the 16th and 

18th centuries. They also serve as a reminder that the dynamic changes occurring in North 

America were universally complex. Europeans (let alone the French) were no more 

homogenous and static than American Indian communities, and thus the history of the 

transatlantic fur trade more closely resembles a kaleidoscope of changing conditions and 

concerns than an inexorable working out of imperial designs. Even in the earliest stages 

of the fur trade, as Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton have written, French “success 

depended on choices made by Indian leaders in America and by financiers and 

government officials in Europe, groups whose agendas and intentions could fluctuate 

with chaotic unpredictability.” This dynamic, along with dramatic population shifts, wars, 

ecological changes, technological adaptations, and a host of other variables associated 

with the fur trade, would shape the subsequent history of the lower Great Lakes through 

the War of 1812 and beyond.15

Native Ground

For nearly two centuries, from the early trading ventures of the French through 

the American Revolutionary War, western Lake Erie and the lower Great Lakes remained 

“native ground.” As Kathleen Duvall uses this term, the region was a place where 

“European colonization met neither accommodation nor resistance but incorporation. 

Rather than being colonized, [American Indians] drew ... [the agents of] European 

empires into local patterns of land and resource allocation, sustenance, goods exchange, 

gender relations, diplomacy, and warfare.”16 This is not to suggest that the experience of 

 14 Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, “The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas,” 

Journal of Economic Perspectives 24:2 (2010): 163-88; Denys Delâge and Jean-Philippe Warren, 

“Amerindians and the Horizon of Modernity, in Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in 

Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500-1700, eds. Germaine Warkentin and Podruchny (Toronto: University 

of Toronto Press, 2001), 305-18. Also see Colpitts, North America’s Indian Trade in European Commerce 

and Imagination, 13-15; and Roger Schlesinger, In the Wake of Columbus: The Impact of the New World 

on Europe, 1492-1650 (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006). On Locke in particular, see Nagamitsu Miura, 

John Locke and the Native Americans: Early English Liberalism and Its Colonial Reality (Cambridge: 

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 23-30. On the conception of the “noble savage,” see Robert 

Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New 

York: Vintage Books, 1979), 72-79. 15 See Calloway, New Worlds for All, 1-7. Quotation is from Anderson and Cayton, Dominion of War, 32. 16 Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: 

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 5.
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39

imperialism somehow met the goals and expectations of Indigenous leaders. Nor is it to 

deny that incorporating European materials into their everyday lives attached American

Indian communities to emerging commercial networks that increasingly followed abstract 

principles of supply and demand. On the contrary, European diseases weakened 

communities, trade with Europeans fostered conflict and competition over a group’s 

access to resources or its position within changing exchange networks of the fur trade, 

and the use of metal weapons and European firearms transformed old animosities into 

wars of unprecedented scale. Yet the response to all of these challenges was predicated 

on sustaining the distinct needs and concerns of American Indian communities within a 

changing world.

Figure 2.1: Indigenous groups in the lower Great Lakes, ca. 1600: The relative 

positions of the Eriehonon (A) and Wenrohronon (B) are designated by letters located around 

the northeastern end of Lake Erie. The five members of the Haudenosaunee are designated by 

numbers: 1. Onöndowága: (Seneca); 2. Guyohkohnyo (Cayuga); 3. Onoda’gega (Onondaga); 

4. Onyota’ake (Oneida); and 5. Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk). The relative positions of the 

closely related Central Algonquian groups are shown around the western end of Lake Erie.

In the first half of the 17th century, the “native ground” of the lower Great Lakes 

largely centered on two distinct but allied groups that the French called les Hurons and 

les Cheveauz-relevés. The term “Huron” derives from the French word hure (boar’s 

head), but also had a slang-equivalent with “ruffian” or “rustic.”17 The “Huron” that the 

 17 As the etymology of “Huron” implies, the term was entirely based on French perceptions and is replete 

with condescending associations. It is not used by people who collectively refer to themselves as Wyandot 

or Wendat, and is considered derogatory.
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40

French first met referred to themselves as Arendaenronnon (“People of the lying rock”), 

who were part of a larger confederacy that included the Hatinniawenten (“They are of the 

bear the country”), the Hatingeennonniahak (“Makers of cords for fishing nets”), the 

Atahontayenrat (“two white ears,” i.e., “Deer people”), and the Ataronchronon (“People 

of the clay,” i.e., wet earth in water). Located between Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe, 

the members of this confederacy referred to themselves collectively as Wendat, and in the 

early 1600s probably numbered 30,000 people residing in as many as 40 villages. Its 

constituent groups had migrated from areas to the south as well as the east and west over 

a few generations, and the confederacy as a whole maintained close relations with the 

Iroquoian groups to the south and southeast: namely, the confederacy who the Wendat 

referred to as the Attiwandaron (People whose speech is slightly different or awry) and 

the French called “la Nation neutre” (Neutrals). The largest constituent group in this 

confederacy was the Chonnonton (“Keepers of the deer”), a chiefdom of 40 villages that 

was centered on the Niagara Peninsula. Other nations within or associated with this 

confederacy included the Eriechronon (“People of the cougar”) who lived around the

southeastern end of Lake Erie, the Ataronchronon (“People of the clay, i.e., wet earth in 

water) who lived around the western end of Lake Ontario and the eastern end of Lake 

Erie, the Wenrehronon (perhaps “People of the moss-backed turtle”) who lived to the east 

of the Niagara River, and the Ongniaahraronon, who were the namesakes of the Niagara 

peninsula, river, and falls. Though not part of the Wendat or Neutral confederacies, the 

Tionontati (also Khionontatehronon, “People where there is a mountain or hill”) had 

particularly close relations within both of these groups. They lived a short distance from 

the Wendat, within the region both knew as Wendake, but remained a distinct nation that 

numbered about 10,000 within 8-10 villages.18

The Wendat and Tionontati—who were collectively known as Wendakeronon 

(People of Wendake)—lived within and near areas that had long been the homelands of 

several Algonquian-speaking peoples.19 These included Omàmiwinini (Algonkin) who 

lived along the lower Ottawa River, Nipissing who lived near the lake that bears their 

name, and the Odawa (Ottawa; aka Cheveauz-relevés, or “Standing Hairs”), who lived at 

the south end of Georgian Bay, on the Bruce Peninsula, and on Manitoulin Island.20 All 

of these groups culturally identified (and still identify) themselves as Anishinaabeg, a 

broad association that also includes Ojibwe (Ojibway, or Chippewa) and Bodéwadmi 

(Potawatomi), and tended to be more seasonally nomadic and more oriented toward a

 18 John L. Steckely, Words of the Huron (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press), passim; Trigger, 

Children of Aataentsic, 27-45, 156-76; Marian E. White, “Erie” and “Neutral and Wenro,” in Handbook of 

North American Indians, Vol. 15: Northeast, ed. Trigger (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1976) 

pp. 407-11 and 412–17; Charles Garrad, Petun to Wyandot: The Ontario Petun from the Sixteenth Century 

(Ottawa: Canadian Muesum of History and the University of Ottawa Press, 2014), 59, 221, 226-28, 322, 

409, 487, 490-91; Warrick, A Population History of the Huron-Petun, 240-41. The land feature associated 

with the term Tionontati is Blue Mountain near the southern shores of Georgian Bay.

19 For the applicability of the term Wendakaronon, at least until the 1650s, see Kathryn Magee Labelle, 

Dispersed but Not Destroyed: A History of the Seventeenth-Century Wendat People (Vancouver: UBC 

Press, 2013), 243, note 3.

20 James Morrison, Algonquin History in the Ottawa River Watershed (Ottawa: Sicani Research & 

Advisory Services, 2005), 14-22. The term Odawa is generally regarded as a derivation of atawe, the 

Anishnaabemowin (Anishinaabe language) word for “trader” or traveler.
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41

hunting economy than their Iroquoian neighbors.21 Yet compared to the more northerly 

Anishinaabeg with whom they traded, traveled, and hunted, the Weskarini (aka La Petite 

Nation, an Omàmiwinini group that lived to the northeast of present-day Ottawa) and the 

Giishkaakhang Odawa (who were located at the southern end of Georgian Bay) were 

remarkably sedentary. Both cultivated crops and lived in Iroquoian-style longhouses—

rather than the smaller bark covered wiigwahm (wigwam) used by their more northerly 

kin—and often overwintered with the Arendaeronnon and Tionontati respectively. Like 

the semi-nomadic and hunting-oriented people with whom they were related, however, 

these groups were patrilineal and thus traced kinship, clan relations, and descent through 

the father—while the Wendat and Tionontati (like other Iroquoian groups) were 

matrilineal. This marked distinction among closely associated communities would have 

complicated intermarriages, but it did not affect the strong associations that existed 

between these distinct communities.22

Wendat-Huron scholar Georges Sioui postulates that the value of these 

associations stemmed in large part from the different strengths of each party, and that 

Wyandot communities had moved to the vicinity of Georgian Bay to continue a 

symbiotic relationship with specific Anishinaabeg communities that likely reached back 

to the Late Woodland period and the rise of what archeologists call the Sandusky and 

Western Basin Traditions.23 By far the most durable connection was, and remains, 

between the Tionontati and Giishkaakhang Odawa—who later migrated to western Lake 

Erie and jointly occupied a central position within Great Lakes history through the 18th

and early 19th centuries. Though perhaps not entirely unique, their enduring association 

provides a strong example of what Sioui describes as a relationship “rooted in difference, 

where each group stood to benefit.” Such relationships, “often functioning outside the 

realm of a particular confederation framework, were some of the most prevailing systems 

of alliances within the North American context.” This was especially true for the 

Tionontati and Giishkaakhang Odawa, who were independently associated with (but not 

part of) confederacies with whom they were culturally related. The enduring strength of 

this relationship continues today, some 170 years after both groups were forced to move 

 21 Anishinaabeg (sing. Anishinaabe) is frequently translated as “human beings” or “first people,” and is 

used as a collective autononym for the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Bodéwadmi. Together, these three groups 

constitute the Nswe’mishkote’win (Council of Three Fires)—a close and many centuries-old alliance or 

confederacy. The individual groups within the Nswe’mishkote’win speak a mutually intelligible dialect of a 

common language: Anishinaabemowin. Other Anishinaabe groups include Misi-zaagiing (Mississauga), 

Nipisirinien (Nipissing), Omàmiwinini (Algonkin), and Nakawē (Western or Plains Ojibwe, aka 

Saulteaux). 22 Garrad, Petun to Wyandot, 492-93; William A. Fox, “The Odawa,” in The Archaeology of Southern 

Ontario to A.D. 1650, eds. Chris Ellis and Neil Ferris (London: Ontario Archaeological Society, 1990), 

457-74; Williamson, Archaeological History of the Wendat, passim. Giishkaakhang (or, more frequently, 

Kiskakon) means “cut tail” and is a reference to the catfish doodem; spelling is derived from Richard A. 

Rhodes, Eastern Ojibwa, Chippewa-Ottawa Dictionary (Berlin: Mouton Publishers, 1985), 155. 23 Georges E. Sioui and Labelle, “The Wendat-Algonquian Alliance: A Case Study of Circular Societies,” 

Canadian Journal of Native Studies 34, no. 1 (2014): 1-13; Gary W. Crawford and David G. Smith, 

“Migration in Prehistory: Princess Point and the Northern Iroquoian Case,” in Archeology of the Iroquois: 

Selected Readings and Research Sources, ed. Jordan E. Kerber (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 

2007), 30-40; Ronald F. Williamson, “The Archaeological History of the Wendat to A.D. 1651: An 

Overview,” Ontario Archaeology, no. 94 (2014): 3-64.
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42

to what is now eastern Kansas and then relocated to Indian Territory (present-day 

Oklahoma) where their two small reservations adjoin each other.24

Figure 2.2: Environments and Residential Locations in Wendakeronon and

Surrounding Region. Map shows the northern extension of agriculture, the southern 

extension of hunting, and intensive near shore fishing around the southern perimeter of 

Georgian Bay. Base map is from “Subsistence Patterns,” in Atlas of Great Lakes Indian 

History, ed. Helen Hornbeck Tanner (Norman: Published for the Newberry Library by 

the University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 21.

At the time of the French entry into the Great Lakes, the basic dynamics of this 

relationship could be seen in clear geographical terms. Wendake was located within a 

northern extension of the area where intensive agricultural production was possible, but 

largely surrounded by areas where game animals were abundant. While this situation 

allowed the Wendakeronon to draw on a wide range of resources, and their Anishinaabeg 

neighbors to readily trade for maize and other crops, it also placed both groups at the 

heart of several wide-ranging exchange networks that extended northward and westward 

across the Great Lakes Basin, eastward down the lower St. Lawrence River to the 

Atlantic coast, north to the game rich forests of the Canadian Shield, and south to the 

expansive agricultural areas of the Ohio Valley. Besides a close trade with Odawa and 

 24 Sioui and Labelle, “The Wendat—Algonquin Alliance,” 178. 
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43

Nipissing communities that involved the exchange of corn and other agriculture produce 

for meat, skins, pelts, and fish from more northern environs, the Wendakeronon were also 

a conduit for a host of resources from all points on the compass. These included strings of 

wampum beads and dried fish from the coast, tobacco and gourds from the south, copper 

and prized stones from the western Great Lakes, and a host of distinctive pelts and 

foodstuffs from all directions. It is no wonder that the French referred to Wendake as “the 

granary of most of the Algonquians,” since much of the produce that moved north and 

west to the Odawa and others was either grown in the region or came by way of trade 

from the south.25

Trade, Empire, and a New Kind of War

When Champlain established the Habitation de Québec (a fortified settlement and 

trade center in what is now Quebec City) in 1608, he was well aware of the central 

position the Wendakeronon and their Anishinaabeg partners held in the trade networks of 

the Ottawa River Valley and the Great Lakes Basin. His eagerness to establish relations 

with these communities was fully reciprocated in late fall when a small delegation led by 

Iroquet of the Weskarini and Ochateguin of the Arendaeronnon arrived from the Pays 

d’en Haut (i.e., Upper Country), as the French referred to the vast region upriver from 

present-day Montreal. The following summer Champlain set out to engage with the 

communities along the upper St. Lawrence, but just a few days into his journey he was 

met by 300 Weskarini and Arendaeronnon warriors. They had come to reconfirm his 

promise from the year before that he would “assist them against their enemies,” and to 

request his participation in a raid against the Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk). Champlain 

readily assented, stating that he “had no other purpose than to engage in the war...; and 

that my only desire was to fulfill what I had promised them.”26

For Champlain, the alliance was a key entre into a promising trade with the 

people of the Pays d’en Haut—where beaver were abundant and the exchange networks 

throughout and beyond the region were extensive. He viewed this military action, along 

with a promise that he would later be guided through the Pays d’en Haut, as an essential 

first step in guaranteeing the success of his new venture in North America. Though his 

perspective was different, Champlain’s motives generally fit with his new allies’ 

conception of trade and war. For American Indians throughout much of North America, 

trade was a social and material exchange that built and maintained connections within 

and between communities. Put simply, the purpose of exchange was to “satisfy the ... 

needs of each party” in a way that was mutually advantageous to both. These needs and 

advantages, in turn, were often determined by the strength and significance of the 

relationship between the two parties. A stronger party might be more generous in order to 

maintain an established relationship, or a weaker party could give more than expected in 

order to foster a future reciprocation from the other. In either case trade was relational 

 25 Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 62-64 and the Ronald F. Williamson, “The Archaeological History of 

the Wendat.” Quotation is from Labelle, Dispersed but Not Destroyed, 71. This same north-south axis of 

exchange likely accounts for the name “Petun” (tobacco) that the French used in reference to the Tionontati

–which the French mistakenly believed was grown in abundance by the “Petun Nation,” but was largely 

acquired through exchanges with groups further south.

26 Samuel de Champlain, Voyages of Samuel De Champlain, trans. Charles Pomeroy Otis, Vol. 2. (Boston: 

The Prince Society, 1878), 203.
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44

rather than transactional, and—especially in the case of tobacco, strings of wampum, 

copper beads, and other items with sacred characteristics—the exchanged items 

embodied the relationship and its obligations.27

While trade involved good relations and friendship, war entailed the opposite. 

Strangers and enemies were, by definition, people with whom mutually beneficial 

exchanges did not occur. Gift giving and diplomatic rituals could make strangers known 

or end conflicts, but absent these processes they remained people who could be shunned, 

have things taken from, or warred against. By joining in the raid against the 

Kanien’kehaka, Champlain fully affirmed his status as a friend and ally—and further 

obligated himself not to trade with the Kanien’kehaka or other enemies of his allies. In 

doing so he affirmed the age-old virtues of reciprocity and mutuality that informed the 

worldviews of his new allies. Yet Champlain’s commitment to fight against the 

Kanien’kehaka brought a new aspect to war, and marked a new era of unprecedented 

violence and destruction. 28

As noted in the previous chapter, warfare had become endemic in the lower Great 

Lakes and much of eastern North America in the 15th and 16th centuries. During this 

period a varied alliance of Chonnonton, Tionontati, Anishinaabeg, and Wendat warred 

against a loose alliance of Central Algonquian communities in what is now southeastern 

Michigan and northwestern Ohio. Around the eastern part of Lake Ontario and the St. 

Lawrence River Valley, a more easterly alliance of Wendat and Omàmiwinini (Algonkin) 

were frequently in conflict with Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk), Onyota’ake (Oneida), 

Onoda'gega (Onondaga) villages of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy).29 These 

conflicts were primarily focused on the middle reach of the St. Lawrence River Valley, 

which—as a consequence of disease epidemics and war in the mid 16th century—was a 

mostly uninhabited land. The area was also contested by Abenaki and Innu (Montagnais) 

nearer the coast, who crafted metal-tipped weapons and pushed their Kanien’kehaka, 

Onyota’ake, Onoda'gega enemies away from the developing French trade and the 

resources of the St. Lawrence. Combined with the ongoing pressure from the west, the 

Haudenosaunee were forced to retreat southward. The raid that Champlain was invited to 

join fit within this general historical context, and was intended to prevent Mohawk 

hunters and traders from ranging north.30

Like the conflicts of the preceding century and a half, this foray into 

Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) territory was expected to result in two kinds of battle: either a 

raid to obtain trophies and seize captives (usually adolescent males and young women), 

or a pitched battle that involved overt demonstrations of valor and martial skills along 

with the capture or killing of some enemy warriors. Even in the largest formal 

 27 White, Middle Ground, 8-9, 94-100; quotation is on p. 8. 28 Ibid.; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 67-69; White, Grand Portage as a Trading Post, 5-14. 

Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 351-64. 29 Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European 

Colonization (Chapel HiIl: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 14-18. The Haudenosaunee formed 

as a five-nation confederacy prior to the arrival of Europeans in North America, and comprises—from east 

to west—the Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk), Onyota’ake (Oneida), Onoda'gega (Onondaga), Guyohkohnyo

(Cayuga) and Onöndowága: (Seneca). In 1722 the Tuscarora were incorporated into the Haudenosaunee.

30 Trigger, Children of Aataentsic 22-23; James F. Pendergast, “The Confusing Identities Attributed to 

Stadacona and Hochelaga,” Journal of Canadian Studies, 32:4 (Winter 1998): 149–67.
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45

engagements, outright destruction of the enemy was not the goal—nor was it possible 

since both sides used shields and wood-plated armor that kept most injuries from being 

fatal. Rather, the strategic purpose of victory was the inverse of a good trading 

relationship: to create or perpetuate an unequal relationship that strengthened the victor 

and weakened the vanquished. Perhaps the best illustration of this outcome is the 

adoption of captives, who were taken in the midst of a battle or raid. Usually beaten, 

humiliated and consigned to a kind of traumatized limbo, they were taken back to the 

captor’s village where they were presented to a grieving family that had made known 

their desire to replace a deceased relative. If found acceptable the captive would undergo 

a ritual adoption, and then fill the place of the deceased person within their new family 

and community. In this way the victors’ social and demographic “needs” were met while 

the vanquished community was physically and emotionally diminished.31

The purposes and expected outcomes of these conflicts were profoundly altered 

with the addition of Champlain and two other French musketeers in the campaign against 

the Kanien’kehaka. After a month of travel, the mixed company of Weskarini, Innu, 

Arendaeronnon and French encountered a Kanien’kehaka war party at night in the 

vicinity of Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain. The Kanien’kehaka brought their canoes 

together on the shore and commenced to fell trees and put up a substantial barricade. Two 

canoes from Champlain’s group approached the shore, and through a formal parley all 

agreed to wait until morning to wage battle. On the morning of the battle, Champlain and 

his companions kept out of sight of the Kanien’kehaka, donned armor, loaded and 

prepared their weapons for firing, and watched “the enemy go out of their barricade ... 

with a dignity and assurance.... Our men also advanced in the same order.” Champlain 

was made to understand that three Kanien’kehaka warriors with large feather plumes 

“were the chiefs..., and that [he] should” aim at them. Just as the battle commenced, 

Champlain and his companions fired several deadly shots. This “caused great alarm 

[among the Kanien’kehaka] ... to such a degree that, seeing their chiefs dead, they lost 

courage, and took to flight, abandoning their camp and fort, and fleeing into the woods.” 

Champlain set out in pursuit, “killing still more of them.” He also noted that “Our [allies] 

also killed several of them, ... [while] fifteen or sixteen were wounded on our side with 

arrow-shots; but they were soon healed.”32

Champlain was disappointed when his new allies did not press their advantage 

against the fleeing Kanien’kehaka and exploit an easy opportunity to kill or capture most 

all of the enemy. Instead, they contented themselves with collecting the spoils of war: 

namely armor, weapons, food and other items. The number of prisoners already taken 

was more than sufficient, and their subsequent tortures would greatly atone for past 

losses. Yet the relative ease of such a victory was a new marvel, and the victors were 

eager to have the French join them again. The opportunity came the following June when 

the French, Weskarini, Arendaeronnon, and Innu gathered “to traffic in peltries”—as 

Champlain put it—near present-day Trois-Rivières. After receiving word that a group of 

100 Kanien’kehaka warriors were not far away, a force of nearly 200 was quickly 

assembled and headed south. Fortified by eleven French musketeers, the attackers 

 31 Dean R. Snow, “Iroquois-Huron Warfare,” in North American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence, 

eds. Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007), 149-59. 32 Champlain, Voyages of Samuel De Champlain 2: 100-01.
Chapter Two

46

(including some armed with swords) managed to tear down the Kanien’kehaka defense 

works and quickly routed their foes “without finding much resistance.” All were killed, 

drowned while escaping, or captured and made prisoners. The latter were tortured and 

killed, except for one man who was given to Champlain and later escaped.33

These two events shocked the Kanien’kehaka, emboldened their enemies, and 

marked a profound shift in the dynamics of trade and war in the Great Lakes region. By 

making conflict more lethal, firearms and metal weapons allowed those who possessed 

them to more thoroughly exclude enemies from exchange networks and the alliances they 

fostered. This proved especially significant as the volume of trade increased, with more 

pelts and European items moving through long-established exchange networks alongside 

the wampum, tobacco, corn, gourds, copper, hides and other items that continued to make 

up the bulk of trade materials. The need to maintain a strong position within regional 

exchange networks in a world that was both more dangerous and more abundant also had 

a pronounced inflationary effect. Stronger and weaker parties sought to appease the other 

through increasingly generous exchanges, antagonists wanting to end their estrangement 

attempted to give more gifts and feasts, and allies combined their efforts to either acquire 

or share more European weapons.34

Within this arena of accelerated trade, European goods were especially valued for 

several reasons. Some items, like axes, awls, and pots were highly sought after because 

they fit seamlessly within village life but made tasks easier and more precise. Less 

utilitarian items like beads, mirrors, and bells were also analogous to decorative and 

spiritually charged objects already found in North America, but were highly prized for 

their distinctive qualities and exotic origins. None of these items or materials were 

essential to daily life, and it could hardly be said that American Indians were dependent 

on European goods. Nevertheless, as Richard White notes, “they had integrated these 

valued goods into a series of social relationships on which the honor, power, and prestige 

of both individuals and groups depended ... [and a]cquiring sufficient European goods 

became a requirement of ... ceremonials and diplomacy.” In this regard, at least, 

American Indian communities in the Great Lakes area were increasingly dependent on 

the process of trade itself.35

Mourning and the Cycles of Violence

The central importance of exchange networks, and their intrinsic associations with 

alliances and warfare, came with a number of vulnerabilities. Once beaver were 

overhunted within a community’s or alliance’s recognized hunting area, continued 

participation in the fur trade often required the invasion or usurpation of other hunting 

areas—which in turn led to an escalation of violent conflict. More warfare required more 

guns, powder, and ammunition—which proved increasingly decisive in Native conflicts. 

 33 Ibid. 103-05; Labelle, Dispersed but Not Destroyed, 33-39. 34 Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada's “Heroic Age” Reconsidered (Montreal: McGill-Queen's 

University Press, 1985), 184-93; Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How Indians, Empires, and 

Western Migration Shaped National Identity in North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania 

Press, 2004), 48-52; Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 261-64. Also see Sioui, Huron-Wendat: The 

Heritage of the Circle (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000), 5, 84, 166, 235. 35 Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge: Harvard 

University Press, 2001), 49-53; White, Middle Ground, 104-05.
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47

Since European weapons were both prestige items and martial necessities, their relative 

scarcity only further accelerated the dynamics of the fur trade. The result was more 

competition for beaver, more conflict, and more casualties. To the French this rapidly 

growing fur trade meant greater profits, and they invested in a new trading 

infrastructure—which soon exposed the greatest vulnerability of American Indian 

communities. Beginning in the 1630s, direct trade with the French occurred in the context 

of early summer trade fairs, shortly after the arrival of ships full of trade goods, colonists, 

soldiers, administrators and priests. The concentration of people from around the Great 

Lakes region, and the arrival of newcomers direct from Europe, proved fertile ground for 

the transmission of disease epidemics that quickly spread across a wide swath of 

territory.36

In 1634, when the French established a new trading post at the settlement of 

Trois-Rivières, an unknown disease (perhaps measles) infected a group of Wendat traders 

who brought the illness back to their villages—from which it spread through the 

extensive trade networks that ran along the Ottawa River and the lower Great Lakes. In 

1636 and 1637 influenza swept through the region, both times with reportedly high 

fatalities among the Wendakeronon, Odawa, Omàmiwinini, and Nipissing. Scarlet fever 

also came in 1637, perhaps from groups further south, and then three years later smallpox 

burned through the already weakened communities. In this short period of time, 

according to the estimates of Jesuit missionaries, the combined population of the 

Wendakeronon had dropped from perhaps 30,000 to 10-12,000. Their Anishinaabeg 

allies who lived in smaller and less densely populated communities likely suffered a 

lower but still horrendous number of deaths.37

For survivors, the disease epidemics brought on a collective crisis that weakened 

community structures and raised fundamental questions about core beliefs, inherited 

traditions, and social order. In the midst of profound despair, some lashed out at Jesuit 

missionaries while others sought baptism in hopes that the ritual might restore health, 

stave off disease, or promise reunion in the afterlife with baptized relatives. Still more 

turned to or against surviving healers, clan mothers, and headmen. The specific 

demographic effects of disease also shaped the post-epidemic responses of a community. 

With high mortality rates among older men and women, many respected (and potential) 

male leaders died as did the clan mothers and matriarchs who largely determined their 

selection. The higher survival rates among younger men, on the other hand, brought a 

new generation of leaders with different priorities to the fore. William Fox suggests that 

this generational shift may have contributed to an escalation of warfare since younger 

men traditionally held leadership roles in matters related to war while their elders were 

primarily responsible for civil issues related to diplomacy and alliances. Whether or not 

the demographics of disease had this specific effect, “death and disease meant constant 

 36 Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 486-88; Labelle, Dispersed but Not Destroyed, 14-15. 37 Warrick, A Population History of the Huron-Petun, 220-227; Labelle, Dispersed but Not Destroyed, 14-

28; Witgen, An Infinity of Nations, 42-44.
Chapter Two

48

turnovers in leadership and policy, often removing the very individuals best suited to 

generate consensus.”38

The most immediate and concerted response to the onslaught of disease epidemics 

came through an intensification of the traditional mourning war complex that had long 

been common among all Iroquoian groups. Often described by Europeans as an act of 

vengeance or a kind of blood feud, a mourning war involved raids against an enemy for 

the primary purpose of acquiring captives—who would then be incorporated into the 

community to replace a deceased person. While battle deaths certainly led to calls for 

such raids, mourning wars were also inspired by death from murder, accident, or 

disease—with the latter becoming the most prevalent reason in the mid 17th century. As 

Daniel Richter notes, “the target of a mourning war was usually a people traditionally 

defined as enemies; neither they nor anyone else need necessarily be held responsible for 

the death that provoked the attack.” Rather than find and punish a specific culprit, the 

goal was to restore what had been taken and—in the process—weaken an enemy. 

“Because an individual’s death diminished the collective power of a lineage, clan, and 

village,” the call for war—as well as the fate of the captive—reflected the matriarchal 

nature of Iroquoian society. Captives were brought to a grieving woman, her female kin, 

or a clan mother who either rejected or accepted the captive. In the latter case, a 

“Requickening” ceremony was performed “in which the deceased’s name, ... social role 

and duties ... were transferred” to the captive. With the ceremony completed, the 

grieving process was ended and a void in the community was filled.39

For previous generations, mourning wars had generally involved small scale 

raiding. In the context of accelerating trade, increased competition for beaver, more 

firearms, and a wave of disease epidemics, however, the mourning war complex entered a 

deadly spiral. High mortality from unknown sicknesses caused profound and widespread 

grief which led to calls for larger and more frequent mourning wars; the growing 

importance of firearms in these conflicts fostered a scramble for beaver pelts in order to 

acquire guns and metal for weapons; competition for furs resulted in more warfare and 

death, which exacerbated the mourning war cycle even further. Born of the diseases and 

“economies of violence engendered by [European] intrusion,” as Ned Blackhawk writes, 

“such warfare and conflict brought heightened levels of trauma to the everyday lives of 

Native peoples” that would persist across generations and profoundly reshape the Great 

Lakes region.40

The first clear example of this new dynamic occurred in the early 1640s when the 

Chonnonton went to war against the people they broadly referred to as Assistaeronon

(“Fire Nation”). Living around western Lake Erie and areas to the west, the 

Assistaeronon were a loose confederacy of Central Algonquian villages—namely 

 38 Fox, “Events as Seen from the North: The Iroquois and Colonial Slavery,” in Mapping the Mississippian 

Shatter Zone, 64-65; Labelle, Dispersed but not Destroyed, 14-28 (quotation on p. 14). Also see Trigger, 

Children of Aataentsic, 499-602. 39 See Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 32-38; Labelle, “‘They are the life of the nation’: Women and 

War in Nadouek Society,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 28:1 (2008): 119-38. Quotations from 

Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” The William and Mary Quarterly 40:4 (1983): 529; 

and Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 32. 40 Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 74. Quotation is from Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: 

Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 26, 28.
Chapter Two

49

Mascouten, Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), Thâkîwa (Sauk, or Sac), Meskwaki (Fox), and 

Bodéwadmi—that had long been the enemies of the Chonnonton, Wendakeronon, and 

Odawa around Georgian Bay. In 1640 a large Chonnonton war party (perhaps with 

Tionontati and Giishkaakhang Odawa allies) embarked on a mourning war campaign and 

reportedly took 100 captives from an unrecorded village. The next year a veritable army 

of 2,000 returned to western Lake Erie and reportedly took 170. Finally, in 1643, another 

large force laid siege to the last substantial Mascouten village for ten days. Unable to lift 

the siege, the Mascouten initiated a desperate but futile battle. The village was 

completely destroyed, many of the residents were killed, and approximately 800-1,000 

women and children were taken captive. Elderly men who survived were crippled and left 

to die in the woods, while seventy captured warriors were ritually tortured to death during 

the multi-day return journey to the Chonnonton villages around the northeastern end of 

Lake Erie.41

While these three campaigns to western Lake Erie followed the basic motives of a 

mourning war, the scale of destruction and number of captives was unprecedented. A 

series of deadly epidemics certainly explains the intensity of the Chonnonton attacks, but 

so do the dynamics of the fur trade. The Chonnonton had access to firearms and metal 

weapons, and their position in Great Lakes exchange networks allowed them to impede 

communication and trade between the French and the Central Algonquians at the western 

end of Lake Erie. The result was a pronounced arms disparity that greatly favored the 

Chonnonton and accounts for the magnitude and relative ease of their victories. The 

campaigns also achieved another strategic aim by allowing the Chonnonton to extend 

their hunting territory into the beaver-rich marshes, rivers and streams of what is now 

southeastern Michigan and northwestern Ohio. On all fronts their efforts were as 

successful as they were unprecedented, and resulted in the Mascouten, Kiikaapoi, 

Thâkîwa, Meskwaki, and Bodéwadmi soon abandoning their territories to seek refuge to 

the south and west of Lake Michigan.42

The scale of these wars and the displacements they caused would have been 

unimaginable a few years earlier, but they would soon be overshadowed by larger and 

more enduring conflicts. As Dutch and then British imperial interests were added to the 

cauldron of demographic collapse, accelerating trade, and old animosities, a period 

known as the “Beaver Wars” quickly overwhelmed all that had come before. The first 

shift in this new dynamic occurred in 1628 when the Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) defeated 

the Mahican and established themselves as the central trading partner with the Dutch on 

the upper Hudson River. With direct access to a European trading partner, the 

Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) and their Haudenosaunee allies were better able to prosecute 

and defend against the spate of mourning wars that followed the epidemics of the 1630s. 

As with the Chonnonton, Haudenosaunee mourning wars coincided with efforts to 

acquire new beaver hunting territories. In the late 1630s and early 1640s, the western 

 41 Garrad, Petun to Wyandot, 59, 221, 226-28, 322, 409, 487, 490-91; Warrick, A Population History of the 

Huron-Petun, 240-41. 42 Trigger, Children of Aatenistic, 624-25; James A. Clifton, The Prairie People: Continuity and Change in 

Potawatomi Indian Culture, 1665-1965 (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), 35-39. Also 

Charles Callender, “Fox,” and “Sauk;” Callender, Richard K. Pope, and Susan M. Pope, “Kickapoo;” and 

Ives Goddard, “Mascouten,” all in Handbook of North American Indians: Northeast, 643, 648, 662, and 

668.
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50

Haudenosaunee—namely the Onöndowága: (Seneca), Guyohkohnyo (Cayuga) and 

Onoda’gega (Onondaga)—attacked Wenrohronon, Eriehonon, and Chonnonton

communities around Lake Ontario while the eastern Haudenosaunee—Kanien’kehaka 

and Onyota’ake (Oneida)—invaded the Nipissing and Omàmiwininì.43

While the spiral of disease, displacement and war affected the entire region in the 

1630s and early 1640s, the only decisive conflicts came against the Wenrohonon—who 

were killed, taken captive, or sought refuge among the Eriehonon and Chonnonton. By 

the late 1640s, however, the five nations of the Haudenosaunee began to consolidate their 

forces for larger attacks. Fortified by captives from the Wenrohonon as well as from raids 

into New England and the southern Appalachians, and emboldened by the acquisition of 

hundreds of new firearms from the Dutch (who hoped to carve into the French trade), the 

Haudenosaunee had become strong enough to challenge the Chonnonton, Wendat, 

Tionontati and their Anishanaabeg allies. In the summer of 1648 a force of several 

hundred Haudenosaunee destroyed Teanaostaiaé, a large and well-fortified 

Attigneenongnahac (“People of the Cord”) town near the western end of Lake Simcoe, 

and captured 700 people. Other villages were attacked as well, and thousands of refugees 

sought food and shelter from towns around the southern end of Georgian Bay or at the 

Jesuit Mission of Sainte-Marie. In the spring of 1649 a force of 1,000 Haudenosaunee 

warriors returned and laid waste to several Wendat towns and missions, took more 

captives, then killed surviving warriors as well as Jesuit priests. Those who escaped, as 

well as their allies and kin who had fled from other destroyed villages, pieced together a 

collection of refugee communities that were plagued by famine and disease through the 

fall and winter. Many fled to the Tiontontaté, one of the last substantial villages in the 

region, then reorganized and moved further north to Gahoendoe (an island in Georgian 

Bay) before the next onslaught came.44

With efforts to attack or repel the Haudenosaunee having failed, the Wendat and 

Tionontati now considered leaving their homeland altogether. As Kathryn Magee Labelle 

notes, this decision took time and required the organization of multiple councils and 

consultations among clan mothers to find a broad consensus. “In the end,” she writes, 

“the [Wendakeronon] directed their own removal: rather than simply reacting to 

European or Haudenosaunee decisions and events, they engaged in a series of Nativeorchestrated initiatives, influenced by traditional coalitions and kinship networks” and 

fortified by alliances with the French and Anishinaabeg. Within a year, these various 

elements ultimately sent the Wendakeronon in two directions. Members from 

communities and clans with close associations to the Jesuit missions chose to make a 

long and dangerous journey to the vicinity of Quebec City where they became the core of 

the present-day Nation huronne-wendat at Wendake. Most of the Tionontati, along with a 

number of southern Hatinniawenten and Atahontayenrat refugees with whom they were 

closely related, and Wendat “traditionalists” who rejected the Jesuits, moved 

northwestward toward the Giishkaakhang and other Odawa communities. Within three 

years this composite of Iroquoian-speaking people, who would subsequently identify 

 43 Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 60-66. 44 Labelle, Dispersed but Not Destroyed, 47-66. Also, Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 744-67.
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51

themselves as Wyandot, would move to the north end of Georgian Bay, then to Mackinac 

Island, and finally to the southern end of Green Bay.45

Figure 2.3: Great Lakes Shatter Zone and Diasporas: Map illustrates significant 

military campaigns by allied Haudenosaunee groups into the homelands and trading networks 

of (mostly French-allied) Indigenous groups to the north, northwest, and east. Though

Iroquoian and Algonquian language groupings do not necessarily represent divisions or 

distinctions between different peoples, they are illustrated here to more clearly show general 

patterns of attack and displacement. Map based on “Iroquois Mourning Wars and Dispersal,” 

in Michael Schaller et al Reading American Horizons. U.S. History in a Global Context, Vol. 1 

–to 1877 (Oxford University Press, 2013), 63; and “Huron Trade and Iroquois Disruptions, 

1640-1648” from The Canadian Atlas Online

<http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/atlas/themes.aspx?id=forgedinwar&sub=forgedinwar_nat

ive_iroquois&lang=En> (accessed February 12, 2016).

Still driven by old animosities and consumed with the need to “Requicken” the 

thousands who had been lost to disease and war, the Haudenosaunee continued their war 

campaigns in the wake of the Wendakeronon departures. The Jesuit priest Isaac Jogues, 

who was tortured and later killed in a Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) town, offered a succinct 

appraisal of Haudenosaunee strategy: “it is the design of the Iroquois to capture all the 

Hurons, if it is possible; to put the chiefs and a great part of the nation to death, and with 

the rest form one nation and one country.” Toward these ends they turned their focus on 

 45 Labelle, op. cit; Quotation on p. 47. Also Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 782-819. The term Wyandot, 

rather than Wyandotte, is used in this study for two reasons: It is the self-identifier of the Wyandot of 

Anderdon, which is the group with the longest historical association to the River Raisin area, and it is the 

name of the Iroquoian language used by the various groups that composed the Wendakeronon. The 

Wyandotte Nation is the one federally recognized group of Wendakeronon people in the United States.
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52

the Chonnonton confederacy, which had long maintained a neutral position between the 

Onöndowága: (Seneca) to the south and the Wendat to the north. By the late 1640s, 

however, this history only made the Chonnonton—along with the Eriehronon, 

Wenrohonon, and Tionontati refugees among them—the largest and nearest population to 

the Haudenosaunee; the precepts of a mourning war and the presence of the 

Haudenosuanee’s enemies among them, erased any past recognition of Chonnonton 

neutrality. Following a few inconclusive campaigns the previous year, the two principal 

towns of the Chonnonton were completely destroyed by a large force of Onöndowága: 

(Seneca) in the summer of 1653. Along with captives from other Haudenosaunee wars, 

the surviving Chonnonton composed a somewhat separate community within the Seneca 

that would eventually become known as Ökwe'öwé (Seneca-Cayuga; aka Ohio Iroquois 

or “Mingo”). Just ten years after the conquest of the Mascouten, the Chonnonton ceased 

to exist as a distinct nation.46

The ten years between the unprecedented victories of the Chonnonton around 

southwestern Lake Erie and their subsequent defeat by the Onöndowága near the opposite 

end of the lake encompasses the temporal and geographical heart of the Great Lakes 

“shatter zone.” As Robbie Ethridge defines it, the shatter zone was “created by the 

combined conditions of ... [weakened] Native polities; the introduction of Old World 

pathogens and the subsequent serial disease episodes and loss of life; the inauguration of 

a nascent capitalist economic system by Europeans through a commercial trade in animal 

skins ...; and the intensification and spread of violence and warfare through the ... 

emergence of militaristic [alliances] that caused widespread dislocation, migration, 

amalgamation, and in some cases, extinction of native peoples.”47

In geographical terms the Great Lakes shatter zone encompassed the drainage 

basins of lakes Ontario, Erie, and Huron, as well as the Ottawa River Valley, the Lower 

Peninsula of Michigan, and most of present-day Ohio. As a lived experience, however, 

the shatter zone was likely remembered as a time of shadows and horrors. Between the 

disease epidemics of the 1630s and 1640s, and the welter of conflicts in the 1640s and 

1650s, the population of the lower Great Lakes region fell by at least two-thirds. The 

combined population of the four groups that composed the Wendat, for instance, 

numbered between 20,000-30,000 in 1630, but probably no more than 10,000 a decade 

later. More would die in the ensuing years from war, famines associated with social 

collapse, displacement, crop destruction, and especially hard winters. The survivors 

carried these experiences into new lives as captives or part of refugee communities far 

from their homelands. By the mid 1650s, the shattering was complete; marked by the 

remains of destroyed or abandoned villages, weed-choked fields, and grass covered 

 46 Garrad, Thomas S. Abler and Larry K. Hancks, “On the Survival of the Neutrals,” Arch Notes 8:2 

(2003): 12-21; Marian White, “Neutral and Wenro,” William C. Sturtevant, “Oklahoma Seneca-Cayuga,” 

and William A. Hunter, “History of the Ohio Valley,” all in Handbook of North American Indians, 

Northeast, 409-410, 537, 590. Quotation is from Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 61. 47 Quotations are from Ethridge, “Introduction,” in Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone, 2; and 

Ethridge, “Creating the Shatter Zone: Indian Slave Traders and the Collapse of the Southeastern 

Chiefdoms,” in Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians, eds. Thomas 

J. Pluckhahn and Ethridge (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2006), 208.
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53

pathways, it had become the depopulated home territory for a complex diaspora of people 

who had fled to the west and south.48

The Middle Ground

Aside from the missionized Wendat who moved east, most of the refugees from 

the Great Lakes shatter zone fled west. When the Wyandot joined with the 

Giishkaakhang Odawa at Mackinac, and then both moved to Green Bay, they became the 

latest in a string of refugees that had moved into the territory of the Hoocąągra (HoChunk, aka Winnebago), and Mamaceqtaw (Menominee) on the western side of Lake 

Michigan. They were preceded by the Bodéwadmi, Thâkîwa (Sauk), Meskwaki (Fox), 

Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) and Mascouten that had come from areas between lakes Michigan 

and Erie. Along with these other groups, the Wyandot and Giishkaakhang Odawa 

endeavored to put in crops, hunt, and gather foods in a crowded landscape. The 

Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk, aka Winnebago), who spoke a Siouan language, and the 

Mamaceqtaw, who spoke a unique Central Algonquian dialect, were essentially bilingual 

with each other—but their communications with all of these newcomers likely occurred 

in some versions of the central Algonquian dialects as well as the Wyandot language--

which had become the lingua franca of the Great Lakes fur trade over the previous 

decades. While all of these groups were familiar with each other, not all of their past 

relations had been amicable. Yet the unease felt by refugees who may have been 

erstwhile competitors and enemies, and the challenges that the arrival of so many 

different people must have brought to the Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk) and Mamaceqtaw, 

were diminished by raw necessity. The imperatives of community building and 

collaboration generally outweighed the fragmented loyalties of past animosities.49

Distance from the eastern Great Lakes provided an important measure of 

protection from the Haudenosaunee, while fertile soils and an abundance of waterfowl, 

fish, and game allowed the polyglot communities around Green Bay to become more 

established. Similar developments occurred to the south along the Fox, the upper 

Wisconsin and the upper Illinois rivers where villages of Myaamia (Miami), Illiniwek 

(Illinois Confederacy), Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), and Mascouten refugees had come 

together. To the north, along Chequamegon Bay, mixed villages of Ojibwe and Odawa 

also put in crops and had ready access to excellent fishing grounds. Abundance did not 

mean stasis, however. Concerns about vulnerability to Haudenosaunee attacks from the 

east and Dakota attacks from the west, desires to access new or different trade and 

subsistence resources, or divisions within refugee communities and alliances, led to 

frequent movements through the 1650s. By the 1660s, however, the region to the west of 

Lake Michigan, from Michilimackinac to Chequamegon Bay and south to the Illinois 

River, had become a fairly stable constellation of villages composed of many peoples. 

Over the next two decades the combined population around Green Bay held at around 

10,000, while the number of people in the main village along the upper Illinois River 

 48 Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 31-32, 94, 242, 261, 361-62. 49 One exception is Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk) and Thâkîwa (Sauk). White, Middle Ground, 10-23; Clifton, 

The Prairie People, 35-36; R. David Edmunds, The Potawatomis, Keepers of the Fire (Norman: University 

of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 5-7, Matthew R. Garrett, “Kickapoo Foreign Policy, 1650-1830” (MA Thesis: 

University of Nebraska—Lincoln, 2006), 9-10; LaBelle, Dispersed but Not Destroyed, 86-88; and Trigger, 

Children of Aataentsic, 65.
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numbered around 6,000, with several thousand more in smaller villages along the river 

and nearby streams. To the north on Chequamegon Bay, where several villages of 

Anishinaabeg were joined by seasonal and semi-permanent residents that had moved 

north, the population rivaled that of the other locales.50

As Richard White notes, “this clustering of diverse peoples ... disrupted older 

notions of territory [and] geographical boundaries between refugees became difficult to 

maintain. Ethnic or local distinctions remained, but now villages of different groups 

bordered on each other or previously separate groups mingled in a single village.” 

Frequent moving might alleviate tensions, but any relief this brought had to be weighed 

against the virtue of strength in numbers when it came to the threat of a Haudenosaunee 

attack. Pushed by necessity and common interest, “these survivors of the [Great Lakes] 

shatter zone ... came to be intimate neighbors and kinspeople.”51 Crafting an alliance and 

building community among displaced peoples is no small feat, no matter the 

circumstances, but it is important to remember that the congregation of peoples to the 

west of Lake Michigan were not all strangers. The Bodéwadmi were very familiar with 

the Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk) and Mamaceqtaw, as well as with the Central Algonquians 

from the western end of Lake Erie. Even the most recent arrivals, the Wyandot and 

Giishkaakhang Odawa had become familiar with many of these groups through the 1610s 

and 1640s as the primary conduits of the fur trade with the French. Though most all were 

driven from their home villages, their arrival on the west side of Lake Michigan was not 

mere happenstance. In short, they moved toward and with people they knew.52

Unlike the groups congregated around Green Bay and further south, the Odawa 

and Ojibwe who moved to Chequamegon Bay remained within vast networks of clan and 

familial relations along the broad arc that extended across the northern Great Lakes to 

Lake Nipissing and the Ottawa River. This entire region was a homeland for diverse but 

related communities, where the landscape was scripted with aadizookaanag (sacred 

stories) that corresponded to specific sites and features. Not surprisingly, the Odawa—

along with their fellow Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe, Bodéwadmi, Mississauga, and 

Omàmiwininiwak) and Tionontati —became the primary conduit of trade between the 

western Pays d’en Haut and Montreal. As a consequence, the mostly Ojibwe, Odawa, 

and Wyandot village on Chequamegon Bay developed into the “center for all the nations” 

of the region. As the Jesuit priest Jean Claude Allouez described it, at Chequamegon

“More than fifty Villages can be counted, which comprise diverse peoples either nomadic 

or sedentary,” and included seasonal residents from as far away as the Illinois River. 

Peltry and European goods were part of this diverse trade center, as were a host of other 

materials that included maize, fish, tools, hides, canoes, garments, copper, pipestones, 

and an array of other items.53

 50 White, Middle Ground, 14, 39-47, and 94-104; Tanner, ed., Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, 30-37. 51 White, Middle Ground, 11-14. 52 Witgen, Infinity of Nations, 45-48; Garrett, “Kickapoo Foreign Policy,” 9-11; Edmunds, The 

Potawatomis, 5-6; and Clifton, The Prairie People, 45-46. 53 Trigger and Gordon M. Day, “Southern Algonquian Middlemen: Algonquin, Nipissing, and Ottawa, 

1550-1780,” in Aboriginal Ontario: Historical Perspectives on the First Nations, eds. Edward S. Rogers 

and Donald B. Smith (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1994), 74-75; D. W. Moodie, “Agriculture and the Fur 

Trade,” in Sleeper-Smith, Rethinking the Fur Trade, 98-101; White, Middle Ground, 40-49; and Witgen,

An Infinity of Nations, 65-68, Allouez quote from p. 66.
Chapter Two

55

The regular movements of Anishinaabeg groups throughout their homeland made 

them central to the development of trade within the western Pays d’en Haut, while their 

relative distance from the disease and violence of the “shatter zone” made them 

formidable defenders against attacks from the Haudenosaunee. In 1662 a combined force 

of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Nipissing warriors intercepted a “great party of” Kanien’kehaka 

(Mohawk) and Onyota’ake (Oneida), near Bawaating (Sault Sainte Marie) and, as the 

Ojibwe elder Charles Kawbawgam learned the story, “slaughtered [them] in heaps.”54

This decisive victory, along with others by the French and Abenaki further east, brought a 

period of calm in the decades-long wars that plagued the Great Lakes. As a consequence, 

trade between Montreal and the western Pays d’en Haut increased over the next several 

years and sizeable groups of Frenchmen were able to travel to the region for the first 

time.55

Figure 2.4: Western Pays d’en Haut, ca. 1680s. While there was considerable 

population movement through the second half of the 17th century, as well as various degrees 

of integration and co-location of various communities, this map illustrates the general 

location and distribution of Indigenous groups and population centers about a generation after 

the initial diaspora in the early 1650s.

 54 Bohaker, “‘Nindoodemag’: The Significance of Algonquian Kinship Networks in the Eastern Great 

Lakes Region, 1600-1701,” The William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 1 (2006): 23-52; Charles 

Kawbawgam et al, Ojibwa Narratives of Charles and Charlotte Kawbawgam and Jacques Lepique, 1893-

1895: Recorded with Notes by Homer H. Kidder, ed. Arthur P. Bourgeois (Detroit: Wayne State University 

Press, 1994), 114-15. 55 Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 99-104, White, Grand Portage, 35-43; Brett Rushforth, “‘A Little 

Flesh We Offer You’: The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France,” The William and Mary Quarterly 60, 

no. 3 (2003): 779-83. Quotation is from a speech by Sieur Saint Lusson, in Louise Phelps Kellogg, ed., 

Early Narratives of the Northwest, 1634-1699 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917), 217.
Chapter Two

56

Chequamegon served as the hub of this growing trade as well as the site where 

various groups developed, refined, and renewed their relationships. Not surprisingly, it 

also became a new focal area for French traders, officials, and priests enroute to other 

parts of the Pays d’en Haut. In the midst of these developments two related shifts 

occurred within the fur trade. First, the Wyandot, Odawa, and Ojibwe preferred to focus 

on exchanges and alliances within the Pays d’en Haut, and less on carrying the trade to 

and from Montreal. And second, a surge in the population of New France resulted in the 

hiring and assembling of voyageur convoys between the St. Lawrence River and western 

Lake Superior that carried more trade goods and more Frenchmen into the western Pays 

d’en Haut.

56

As the French entered the western Pays d’en Haut, they established themselves in 

three distinct but related ways. The earliest of these involved the development of new 

Jesuit missions, which numbered seven by 1675 and extended from Lake Superior 

southward to Kaskaskia on the Illinois River. On a visitation to the region in 1669, Father 

Claude Allouez was struck by the diversity of “all the Nations [in the main population 

centers], who maintain a constant intercourse, either in visiting or trading.” “Here,” he 

proclaimed, is “a great Field for Gospel workers.”57 Though few baptisms, and fewer 

conversions, occurred in these missions, the persistence of the Jesuits, their regular 

contact with surrounding communities, and their embodiment of French spiritual 

concerns within the larger networks of trade and alliance, brought a level of constancy to 

French and American Indian relations in the western Pays d’en Haut.

58 This was even 

truer of the coureurs de bois, who represented the inverse of the Jesuit’s mission to 

christianize and franciser (Frenchify) American Indians. Instead of proselytizing, the 

coureurs de bois became members of the communities with whom they lived, relatives of 

the families they married into, and moved easily through a multilingual world. The third 

pillar of the French presence centered on licensed trading posts that sometimes served as 

forts against potential attacks from the Dakota or Haudenosaunee. Less intimate than the 

coureurs de bois, and perhaps less constant than the Jesuits, these facilities provided a 

more formal representation of New France.

New Alliances from Old

As more French came west, the same frameworks of kinship, reciprocity, 

exchange networks, and alliances that existed prior to the disease epidemics and wars of 

the 1630s and 1640s were still central to life in the western Pays d’en Haut. Yet the shape 

and contents of those frameworks had been altered by fragmentation, relocation, and the 

passage of time. Like the Wyandot, the Central Algonquian communities were created 

from the pieces of once distinct villages. Older kinship ties—whether derived through 

descent, clan association, adoption, or marriage—allowed these new communities to 

coalesce, but new bonds could be more tenuous and thus more prone to schism. As 

Richard White notes, the same was true of some long-standing alliances that were 

 56 Claiborne A. Skinner, The Upper Country: French Enterprise in the Colonial Great Lakes, trans. Phyllis 

Aronoff and Howard Scott (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 27-29; White, Middle 

Ground, 105-08. 57 Tanner, ed. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, 36-37; Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations, 61:148. 58 Tracy Neal Leavelle, The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 9-17.
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57

reconstituted in the west. Kinship in the Pays d’en Haut held the strongest ties within 

villages and among strong allies, but in large congregations of diverse communities the 

“politics of kinship ... was not a harmonious politics. Factionalism divided the village 

councils; and because village boundaries were permeable, factions formed links with 

[nearby] outsiders.” Village leaders worked to mediate between factions, but such efforts 

invariably drew in an array of headmen from other communities and resolutions became 

more elusive.59

Creating consensus within and between communities was inherently difficult—

but the problem was often compounded by new crises that were part and parcel of life in 

the western Pays d’en Haut. For instance, high population concentrations that fostered 

discord within kin-based politics could also overtax local ecosystems to the point where 

food sources became unpredictable—and thus further encourage schisms and relocations. 

These movements would in turn make some more isolated populations vulnerable to 

attacks from the east or the west.60 The example of the Bodéwadmi (Potawotomi) leader 

Onanghisse in the late 1670s demonstrates the challenges of maintaining and forming 

alliances in these circumstances. A respected presence around Green Bay, Onanghisse 

was ideally situated within an array of potential alliances. Along with the Odawa and 

Ojibwe, the Bodéwadmi were one of the Nswe’mishkote’win (Council of Three Fires) of 

the Anishinaabeg, and Onanghisse maintained close relations with the communities 

around Chequamegon Bay. The same was true of the Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk) and 

Mamaceqtaw (Menominee), with whom the Bodéwadmi were settled, as well as the 

Central Algonquian communities on the upper Illinois River that had formerly lived near 

the Bodéwadmi prior to the attacks of Chonnonton around western Lake Erie. Yet 

Onanghisse was not able to build on these connections to form a more extensive alliance 

that also included large communities of Myaamia (Miami) and Illiniwek to the south. A 

recent disease epidemic and rumors of a new Haudenosaunee attack thwarted his plans, 

and raised concerns that a Bodéwadmi-centered alliance could undermine relations with 

the French at a time of potential crisis.61 Onanghisse apparently concurred, or recognized 

his efforts as futile, and instead advocated for strengthening connections to Onontio—as 

 59 White, Middle Ground, 40. 60 Ibid., 41-59; Witgen, An Infinity of Nations, 120-26; Garrett, “Kickapoo Foreign Policy,” 10-19; Robert 

Michael Morrissey, Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois 

Country (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 66-69. While these factors apply to all of 

the population centers, they correspond most closely to the communities around Green Bay and the upper 

Illinois River Valley.

61 Along with the Odawa and Ojibwe, the Bodéwadmi were one of the Nswe’mishkote’win (Council of 

Three Fires) of the Anishinaabeg, and Onanghisse maintained close relations with the communities around 

Chequamegon Bay. To a lesser degree, the same was true of his relations with the Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk) 

and Mamaceqtaw (Menominee) who lived in the area to which the Bodéwadmi had retreated in the 

1640s—as well as the Central Algonquian communities on the upper Illinois River. These latter groups, 

which had been driven away from western Lake Erie by the attacks of the Chonnonton, were former 

neighbors of the Bodéwadmi when all lived in their former homeland. Clifton, The Prairie People, 69-79; 

Edmunds, The Potawatomi, 10-15, 22; Morrissey, Empire by Collaboration, 83; White, Middle Ground, 

40; Donald J. Horton, “Ounanguissé,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography

<http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ounanguisse_2E.html> (accessed 15 October 2015).
Chapter Two

58

the communities of the Pays d’en Haut commonly referred to the Governor of New 

France.62

As French imperial interests grew alongside the tangle of American Indian 

relations and alliances, a place and process developed in the western Pays d’en Haut that 

Richard White has termed the Middle Ground. The “infrastructure” of the Middle Ground 

developed through the 1660s and 1670s, and consisted of the large population centers that 

formed in the wake of the shatter zone, the missions, trading posts and forts that were 

located within these centers, and a fairly steady supply of trade goods that was 

administered by sanctioned traders who also served as de facto emissaries of Onontio. 

While this infrastructure could hardly be described as colonial, the “presence of 

Frenchmen in all the major [population] centers” connected Montreal to the various 

communities of the western Pays d’en Haut. This broad presence and these connections 

allowed the French to assume the role of mediators within the sometimes-fragile 

networks of alliance and exchange that crisscrossed the region. Because the French and 

the American Indians in the Pays d’en Haut had common enemies, and a common desire 

to expand their trade relations, strengthening and maintaining alliances within the region 

served an array of mutual interests. And as the example of Onanghisse demonstrates, 

only Onontio had the breadth of resources and connections to nurture these common 

concerns.63 The Middle Ground that grew from these conditions was not a trade-pact or 

mutual defense agreement, but a network of material, cultural, political, personal, and 

diplomatic relationships that connected the population centers of the western Pays d’en 

Haut to each other and to the French. The common concerns of all participants were 

grounded in the twin pursuits of peace and trade, and the broad alliance that developed in 

the Pays d’en Haut defused potentially dangerous disagreements by replacing them with 

a patient willingness to compromise.

The central position of Onontio, both as a mediator of disputes and a common 

source of trade goods, placed him in the role of a “Father” to the various communities—

or “children”—in the region. This kin-based metaphor, which had particular relevance to 

these mostly patrilineal societies, was less about hierarchy than it was about 

responsibility. A good father gave gifts rather than orders, offered protection rather than 

harsh discipline, encouraged cooperation rather than discord, and listened rather than 

commanded obedience. Good children, for their part, were expected to participate in their

collective well-being, seek areas of compromise, and recognize the connections they all 

had to a common father. Gift giving was central to these relationships, which the French 

directed toward village leaders who in turn distributed them within their own 

communities—thus enhancing the leaders position within the community and 

strengthening a broader connection to the French. A similar dynamic occurred with men 

the French identified as “alliance chiefs” who, like Onanghisse, were leaders within 

multi-village or multi-group alliances. Along with the positions they held within their 

 62 The term Onontio was likely coined by the Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) in the 1640s, and is a translation of 

Montmagny (Great Mountain)—which was part of the then Governor of New France’s name: Charles 

Jacques Huault de Montmagny. The word in the Kanien’kehaka language is Iononténion, and refers to the 

Adirondack Mountains. It is roughly pronounced as yo-noon-TAY-nee-oon. 63 Morrissey, Empire by Collaboration, 63-84; White, Middle Ground, 34-36; 
Chapter Two

59

own villages, they also became gift-givers and conduits of exchange that fulfilled the 

expectations of good “fathers” within their own alliances.64

Based on mutual needs and interests, this system was still open to 

misunderstandings and always vulnerable to the fragile complexities of any new alliance. 

The repercussions of a killing, whether from warfare, murder, or a tragic accident, are a 

good case in point. In Algonquian and Wyandot societies, any of these killings could lead 

to demands from the deceased’s kin that a responsible party or one of their relatives be 

held accountable. If the killer belonged to a related or allied group, then the deceased 

could be "covered" or "raised" by a ritual that involved appropriate gifts. If the killer was 

neither a relative nor an ally, then vengeance could be wrought against the culprit or the 

culprit’s community. Any disagreements over such matters, especially if they involved 

groups that were former enemies or strangers, could break down an alliance and quickly 

devolve into more widespread violence.65

To stave off these outcomes, agents of Onontio often took responsibility for 

“covering” the dead through gifts and by participating in ceremonies of reconciliation. 

Even though the French made distinctions between murder, battle casualties, and 

manslaughter, and chafed at Native conceptions of guilt and punishment, it was more 

important to fulfill the role of Onontio than lay down judgment or make distinctions 

between good and bad killings. By the same token, alliance chiefs could set aside their 

views on these matters in order to facilitate the delivery of a named culprit to French 

authorities. These were not small issues, nor were they simple compromises. Touching on 

life and death, they involved fundamental notions of culpability, justice, kinship, 

reciprocity, and alliance. Yet compromise and a willingness to accommodate mutual 

misunderstandings created a “middle ground” of discourse and behavior that assuaged—

if not entirely satisfied—the needs of all parties. As Colin Calloway notes, “finding a 

modus vivendi in a maze of cultural incongruities taxed the resilience and inventiveness 

of the allies, but both persisted and engaged in endless negotiations, since the alternative 

to maintaining the middle ground alliance was a world awash in blood.” 66

The broad alliance that took shape in the western Pays d’en Haut was not, as 

some scholars have claimed, a Pax Gallica where peace prevailed and France ruled.67

The potential for schisms and factionalism within Native alliances were always present, 

and French dictums could elicit resistance and outright hostility from alliance chiefs. Yet 

on the whole, the alliance resulted in important successes. Foremost among these was 

ending the Haudenosaunee threat of invasion, and then turning the tables. In the late 

1680s and early 1690s, warriors from west of Lake Michigan attacked Haudenosaunnee 

around Lake Ontario with arms and assistance from Onontio. Soon after, Northern 

 64 Peter Cook, “Onontio Gives Birth: How the French in Canada Became Fathers to Their Indigenous 

Allies, 1645–73,” The Canadian Historical Review 96, no. 2 (June 2015): 165-193. 65 Ibid., 189-93; White, Middle Ground, 40, 77, 81-82, 91-92; Witgen, Infinity of Nations, 160, 185. 66 Cook, “Onontio Gives Birth,” 193-95; White, Middle Ground, 91-92; Witgen, Infinity of Nations, 207-

09. Quotation is from Calloway, “Native American History and the Search for Common Ground,” Reviews 

in American History 20:4 (December 1992): 448. 67 See, for example, Havard, “‘Protection’ and ‘Unequal Alliance’: The French Conception of Sovereignty 

over Indians in New France,” in French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630-1815, eds. Robert 

Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale (East Lansing and Winnipeg: Michigan State University Press and 

University of Manitoba Press, 2013), 123.
Chapter Two

60

Anishinaabeg and Wyandot as well as the Myaamia (Miami) from southwest of Lake 

Michigan pushed the Haudenosaunee south and east of Lake Ontario toward the center of 

their homeland. Bolstered by a growing number of experienced soldiers, the French 

invaded Onöndowága: (Seneca) and Onoda'gega (Onondaga) towns, and attacked 

villages in the Finger Lakes region—some 90 years after Champlain first joined in battle 

against the Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk). All of these conflicts either preceded or coincided 

with King William’s War (1688-97), which stemmed from growing tensions between 

New France and the Dominion of New England over the fur trade, but the concerns of 

imperial rivals were not relevant to the warriors from the Pays d’en Haut. The wars they 

fought against the Haudenosaunnee reached back to a time before most were even born—

and occurred in alliance with people that some of their forebears would have barely 

known. With their successes, and the alliances they had formed with other Indigenous 

groups and Onontio, they were about to piece together the shards of the Great Lakes 

shatter zone.68

 68 Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 154-60; Jeremy Black, Fighting for America: The Struggle 

for Mastery in North America, 1519-1871 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2011), 49-58.
Chapter Three

61

Chapter Three

Alliances, Onontio, and the Limits of Empire: 1700-1763

This chapter presents the historical developments and conditions that underlay what has been 

called “The Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes.”1 Because the events surrounding the War of 

1812 in the Great Lakes region represent the final years of that six-decade period, this chapter 

will establish a basis for understanding how the brief period that encompassed the battles of 

Frenchtown and associated events was connected to long-standing historical processes from 

French-Native alliances to the conditions that gave rise to the American Revolution.

Between the 1650s and 1680s, the locations and compositions of the communities 

in the western Pays d’en Haut were broadly defined by four key factors: the presence of 

powerful enemies to the east (Haudenosaunee) and the west (Dakota); ongoing relations 

with the French through trade, alliance, interaction, and intermarriage; extensive cultural 

ties and kinship networks among the Anishinaabeg (Odawa, Ojibwe, and Bodéwadmi); 

and relations within and between the mostly Algonquian speaking communities and 

confederacies around Green Bay and the Illinois River. In the last decade of the 17th

century a pronounced shift in the wars with the Haudenosaunee both affirmed and altered 

this calculus in three meaningful ways. By 1700 the Haudenosaunee had been pushed 

south of Lake Ontario in a series of multiple campaigns that involved up to 1,000 

warriors from different groups moving across great distances. The strategy and 

cooperation this involved reflected a powerful ability to organize against a distant enemy 

and demonstrated the strength and significance of this alliance.2 The success of New 

France in direct wars with the Haudenosaunee, as well as their support for and alliance 

with war parties from the west, also made the once distant French a more respected and 

more prominent power in the Pays d’en Haut.

3

The Great Peace

Suffering from a spate of disease epidemics, forced to defend their villages from a 

variety of enemies, and located between French and British power bases, the 

 

1 David Curtis Skaggs and Larry L. Nelson, eds., The Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814

(East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001.)

2 Leroy V. Eid, “The Ojibwa-Iroquois War: The War the Five Nations Did Not Win,” Ethnohistory 26, no. 

4 (1979): 297-324; David D. Plain, From Ouisconsin to Caughnawaga; or, Tales of the Great Lakes First 

Nations (Victoria, BC: Trafford Publishing, 2013), 23-29. As these sources also note, the importance and 

magnitude of these victories are still remembered by the descendants of those who fought. 3 Gilles Havard, The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701: French-Native Diplomacy in the Seventeenth 

Century, trans. Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 

2001), 79-90; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes 

Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 34; Michael J. Witgen, An Infinity of 

Nations: How Indians, Empires, and Western Migration Shaped National Identity in North America

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 246-53.
Chapter Three

62

Haudenosaunee initiated peace negotiations with the French in 1698 and 1699. British 

resistance to these overtures gave the Haudenosaunee pause, but new attacks from the 

north and west convinced the Five Nations to seek a broad agreement with the FrenchNative alliance. After a preliminary peace treaty was affirmed with the French in 1700, 

plans were made for a much larger agreement the following summer and messengers 

were sent in all directions. The result was the Great Peace of 1701, which involved more 

than 1,300 people representing 40 distinct nations from as far away as the Acadian 

Peninsula, James Bay, the upper Mississippi River, and the lower Ohio River. Most, 

however, had come from the communities of the western Pays d’en Haut. After weeks of 

negotiation, ceremony, feasting, speeches, and proclamations, an agreement was reached 

on five broad conditions: all participants agreed not to war against each other; the 

Haudenosaunee agreed to remain neutral in any future conflicts between France and 

Britain; all Native nations agreed to have Onontio mediate any disputes or conflicts that 

arose between them; the nations of the western and upper Great Lakes allowed 

Haudenosaunee to hunt in the region; and the Haudenosaunee assured safe passage to the 

nations of the Pays d’en Haut to access the British fur trade at Albany.4

An outbreak of what may have been a deadly flu virus, as well as the failure of the 

Haudenosaunee to bring prisoners for an expected exchange, nearly scuttled the treaty 

from the outset. A French refusal to reopen fur trade posts in the western Pays d’en Haut

that had been closed a few years earlier almost caused Onanghisse to withdraw the 

support of the Bodéwadmi and Thâkîwa (Sauk) for the treaty.5 Along with other doubters 

he was apparently inspired by the Wyandot leader Kondiaronk, who lobbied hard for 

acceptance of the treaty even as he lay dying from the flu. Perhaps the greatest impetus 

for affirming the Great Peace was a desire to reach a consensus on an agreement that 

would end generations of conflict and foster new opportunities for exchange. On this last 

score, at least, the Great Peace succeeded for several years. Besides the twin virtues of 

peace and exchange, particular coalitions also achieved specific goals. The 

Haudenosaunee gained neutrality between the French and the British, and thus became 

well positioned to exploit the competing solicitations of these two imperial powers. The 

French affirmed a broad alliance with the nations of the Pays d’en Haut and gained a 

buffer—in the Haudenosaunee—between New France and the British colonies. Western 

groups gained access to a new source of trade goods and were now finally able to return 

to their former homelands.

The Great Peace was also the formal culmination of the processes that shaped the 

Middle Ground; namely, the alliances that had formed in the main population centers of 

 4 Sources for this and the following three paragraphs: Daniel Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse: The 

Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North 

Carolina Press, 1992), 193-99; Witgen, An Infinity of Nations, 267-313; Gilles Havard, The Great Peace, 

111-141; Richard Weyhing, “‘Gascon Exaggerations’: The Rise of Antoine Laumet dit de Lamothe, Sieur 

de Cadillac, the Foundation of Colonial Detroit, and the Origins of the Fox Wars,” in The Upper Country: 

French Enterprise in the Colonial Great Lakes, ed. Claiborne A. Skinner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 

University Press, 2008), 77-112; James A. Clifton, The Prairie People: Continuity and Change in 

Potawatomi Indian Culture, 1665-1965 (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), 82-86; José 

António Brandã and William A. Starna, “The Treaties of 1701: A Triumph of Iroquois Diplomacy,” 

Ethnohistory 43, no. 2 (2004): 209-44. 5 The French had closed the posts over concerns about a glut in the European peltry market and the costs 

associated with gift giving and maintaining a bon marché (fair price) in a changed marketplace.
Chapter Three

63

the western Pays d’en Haut as well as with the communities of Anishinaabiwek (i.e., the 

lands and Anishinaabeg). Moreover, the stipulation that Onontio would be universally 

recognized as the mediator of all disputes, and thus the “good father” to all his 

“children,” further extended an operative metaphor of the Middle Ground to the 

Haudenosaunee and groups far to the east and north. By declaring an end to the conflicts 

that had plagued the Great Lakes region for sixty years, the Great Peace also represented 

a signature achievement of alliance and mediation. Yet these successes would soon 

extinguish the fundamental conditions that had shaped the Great Lakes region over the 

previous half century.

With an end to the wars with the Haudenosaunee, a fundamental purpose of an 

alliance was no longer operative. The same was true of the agreement to open the lower 

peninsula of present-day Michigan as an uncontested territory. Many of the same groups 

that had fled the area in the 1640s returned, and their connections with the diverse 

communities around Green Bay, Chequamegon, and the upper Illinois River became less 

important. These moves were also fostered by three French actions that immediately 

preceded and followed the Great Peace: the opening of Fort St. Joseph in 1695 among the 

Bodéwadmi who were returning to the southeastern side of Lake Michigan, the closing of 

western trading posts in 1696, and the establishment of Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit (a 

combined trading post, administrative center, and military facility) in 1701. Lastly, the 

Great Peace brought a new eastward orientation to French policy. Instead of working to 

maintain an alliance with the communities of the western Great Lakes largely based on 

mutual defense and trade, the French became increasingly focused on diplomacy with the 

Haudenosaunee and the likelihood of more war with the British. For their part, the 

peoples in the western Pays d’en Haut were ready to test the potential benefits of trading 

with the British in Albany and many began to move east and southeast of Lake Michigan.

Alliance and Discord at Fort Pontchartrain

Even before the great gathering in Montreal, a number of the communities 

centered around Green Bay had begun to move eastward. The Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi), 

who had previously resided around the St. Joseph River in present-day southwestern 

Michigan, had begun a return “toward the sites of their ancient homelands.”6 They were 

soon joined by elements of the Myaamiaki (Miami-Illinois Confederacy), who viewed 

this move as a return to Saakiiweeyonki—the place of their origin.7 The establishment of 

Fort Pontchartrain by Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, who previously served as the 

Commander at Fort de Baude (in present-day St. Ignace, Michigan), brought further 

movement to southern Michigan. Cadillac initially invited the Wyandot and Odawa to 

move down from the Straits of Mackinac to the Detroit River, as well as a community of 

Bodéwadmi from the St. Joseph area. All three groups accepted, and soon occupied a 

central position in this new focal point of the fur trade in the Great Lakes region. Cadillac 

encouraged more people to come near Fort Pontchartrain, and whole villages of 

 6 Quotation from R. David Edmunds, The Potawatomis: Keepers of the Fire (Norman: University of 

Oklahoma Press, 1978), 15; also see Michael S. Nassaney, and Terrance J. Martin, “Food and Furs at 

French Fort St. Joseph,” Le Journal (Fall, 2017), 7-8. 7 George Ironstrack, “A Myaamia Beginning,” Ascimotaatiiyankwi: A Myaamia Community Blog

<https://myaamiahistory.wordpress.com/2010/08/13/a-myaamia-beginning/> (accessed 9 October 2015); 

White, Middle Ground, 186-90.
Chapter Three

64

Myaamia, Mascouten, Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) Thâkîwa (Sauk, or Sac), and Meskwaki 

(Fox) moved to what is now southeastern Michigan. Missisaugi (Missisauga) and Ojibwe 

communities from the north end of Lake Huron also came south to the mouth of the St. 

Clair River.8

The number of people that had moved near Fort Pontchartrain soon grew to 6,000, 

with still more in what is now the border area of Michigan and Indiana. Such a rapid 

concentration of people depleted resources and strained relations between earlier and 

later arrivals. Initially, some of the alliance mechanisms of the western Pays d’en Haut

partially resolved these issues. In 1706, after a deadly clash at Fort Pontchartrain between 

Odawa who had recently come down from Michilimackinac and an array of Wyandot, 

Myaamia and French, a much larger conflict was averted by all parties assented to the 

rituals of gift giving and mediation administered by Onontio. Mobility also resolved these 

tensions, as the Odawa returned north and the Myaamia moved to the headwaters of the 

Maumee River.9

These measures proved temporary, however, and the western alliance—as 

formalized in the Great Peace—would falter badly over the next several years. In 1710 

two Meskwaki (Fox) villages moved back to southeastern Michigan where they had 

resided prior to the 1640s. In doing so, they also came in close proximity with 

communities that had recently moved to the Detroit area from Chequemegon Bay—

which renewed and further inflamed earlier tensions that had developed in the western 

Pays d’en Haut. The Meskwaki had previously vied with the Anishanaabeg and Wyandot 

around Chequamegon Bay, as well as French traders on the upper Mississippi River, for 

direct and more exclusive relations with the Dakota. They ultimately failed in this effort 

and became isolated within the western alliance, a situation that was only exacerbated 

when they moved near Detroit. In doing so they reawakened the recent tensions in the 

west, but also renewed the older history of animosity and warfare around western and 

northern Lake Erie that had involved the loose alliance of Meskwaki, Mascouten, 

Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) and Thâkîwa (Sauk, or Sac) against the ancestors of the Wyandot 

and their Anishinaabeg allies. With the French already solicitous of, and dependent upon, 

the collaboration of the first Native communities to come to Detroit—and holding their 

own resentments toward the Meskwaki—old and recent tensions soon broke in to 

violence.10

In a series of conflicts that have generally become known as the Fox Wars, the 

recently arrived Meskwaki, Mascouten, Kiikaapoi and Thâkîwa pushed for a more central 

position within the new center of trade and alliance that was located within their ancestral 

lands. In 1712 the Meskwaki and Mascouten built a fortified village very near Fort 

Pontchartrain, from which they launched a brief attack on the fort. They were 

subsequently repulsed and driven back to their village by a combined force of French, 

Wyandot, Bodéwdami, and Odawa, and then placed under siege. After nineteen days the 

 8 Clifton, The Prairie People, 85; “‘Gascon Exaggerations,’” 77-88; Helen Hornbeck Tanner, ed. Atlas of 

Great Lakes Indian History (Norman: Published for the Newberry Library by the University of Oklahoma 

Press, 1987), 39.

9 Witgen, Infinity of Nations, 285-87. 10 Brett Rushforth, “‘A Little Flesh We Offer You’: The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France,” The 

William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2003): 777-808.
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besieged villagers sought to make a nighttime escape, but were surrounded and cut down 

along the Detroit River. As many as a thousand were killed, and large numbers were 

taken captive. Those who escaped left for the upper Illinois River Valley where they 

joined with Kiikaapoi and Thâkîwa allies as well as other Meskwaki and Mascouten from 

west of Lake Michigan. Over the next several years they became embroiled in conflicts 

with the Illiniwek and other communities in the Pays d’en Haut, and sought to open trade 

relations with the Dakota in the west as well as the Haudenosaunee and British to the 

east. This latter development seemed a harbinger of Governor General Philippe de 

Rigaud de Vaudreuil’s worst fear: conflict and disarray within the alliance, coupled with 

a reduced French presence in the western Pays d’en Haut, would lead Onontio’s 

“children” to open new exchange networks with the west and connect them to a new 

British “father” in Albany.11

Onontio Falters at War, Peace, and Slavery

Driven by these fears, and vacillating between punishment and mediation as the 

appropriate expressions of Onontio’s authority, the French followed conflicting strategies 

that helped fuel intermittent war against the Meskwaki for two decades. The alliance as a 

whole, and the northern Anishinaabeg in particular, wanted to prevent both the Meskwaki 

and the French from becoming a focal point in a western trade with the Dakota—and so 

their conflicts with the Meskwaki also worked to thwart Onontio’s efforts at mediation. 

Another dimension of this warfare further undermined the French position in the western 

country. From the 1710s forward, conflicts against the Meskwaki involved the taking of 

captives who were often enslaved rather than killed or adopted. As such they were 

enemies who could be used by, rather than incorporated into, their captors’ community—

and thus each slave was a kind of laborer in a one-person prison camp. Many of these 

slaves, who were generally adolescents or young adults, also became part of exchange 

networks; not as chattel, but as gifts to confirm alliances or to complete diplomatic 

agreements. The French became a central conduit for these slaves, who were used to 

fulfill basic provisions of the Great Peace that required “covering” and “raising” 

Haudenosaunee dead from the wars of the 1690s. In this situation, as well as in relation to 

unexpected deaths, epidemics, or small conflicts within the Pays d’en Haut, slaves 

became part of what might be described as a mourning war exchange network. While 

such actions may have fulfilled Onontio’s important obligations to mediate conflicts and 

fulfill the requirements of the Great Peace, they also made the French complicit in the 

wars against the Meskwaki. This was further deepened by the continued presence of 

Meskwaki slaves among the French in Canada where they worked as laborers and house 

servants, and in the more distant imperial enterprises of Louisiana and the Caribbean.12

Because every effort to negotiate peace with the Meskwaki always came with a 

demand to return their unremitted kin, the French could not or would not reach final 

terms. Nor, for that matter, could they stave off further conflict between their allies and 

the Meskwaki. A continuance of warfare also prevented the French from re-establishing a 

substantial presence in the western Pays d’en Haut, since to do so would invite direct 

 11 Rushforth, “Slavery, the Fox Wars, and the Limits of Alliance,” The William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 

1 (2006): 66-72; Witgen, Infinity of Natons, 293-96. Quotation from p. 295. 12 Rushforth, “Slavery, the Fox Wars, and the Limits of Alliance” 73-76.
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attacks from the Meskwaki. The presence of Meskwaki slaves in New France thus 

prevented the French from negotiating peace, from further developing the western fur 

trade, and kept officials in Detroit and Montreal from seriously entertaining a new trade 

with the Dakota. While all of these conditions illustrated French weakness vis-à-vis their 

allies, so too did their remaining option: the only way to exercise French authority and 

have peace with the Meskwaki was to destroy them. Yet even in this matter the French 

effort fell short of the mark. In 1733 the Meskwaki had found refuge among the Thâkîwa 

(Sauk) near Green Bay, and the Governor of New France ordered French troops to form 

an alliance with “the Nations which Are faithful to us” and annihilate the Meskwaki. If 

any chose to surrender without resistance, they would be placed in missions or shipped 

off to the Caribbean. Neither scenario played out, however, since the Meskwaki and 

Thâkîwa repulsed the French along with their Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk), Odawa, and 

Ojibwe allies. A begrudging truce was eventually established five years later, and the 

Meskwaki and Thâkîwa moved to the Upper Mississippi River.13

Governor General Beauharnois still viewed the end of the Fox Wars in positive 

terms, since peace would bring stability to the western Pays d’en Haut, and finally allow 

the French to develop new posts in the region as well as open direct trade with the 

Dakota. Yet this hopeful scenario was illusory, at best. Beginning with the closing of the 

licensed fur trade in 1696, and its subsequent concentration at Detroit, the French 

presence in the western Pays d’en Haut was almost entirely filled by coureuer de bois

who neither embodied nor cared much for the strategic interests of French officials in 

Montreal or Paris. The Native population in this region had also shifted considerably, 

with some groups moving south to the Illinois and Wabash rivers at the same time others 

came to the Detroit area. The Anishinaabeg of the northern Great Lakes remained in 

place, but their networks of exchange and kinship moved with the Bodéwadmi, Wyandot, 

and Odawa to the Detroit area and no longer reached south into the western Pays d’en 

Haut.

14 The period of the Fox Wars corresponded with other significant changes in the 

Pays d’en Haut that moved beyond New France’s ability to understand let alone control. 

Aside from the embattled Meskwaki, populations generally stabilized among all the 

groups around Detroit as well as those to the north and west. In the 1730s a number of 

communities divided and increased their territory by establishing new villages to the 

southeast. These included some Wyandot who moved to the lower Sandusky River, 

Myaamia (Miami) who relocated to the upper Eel, Wabash, and Maumee river drainages 

near what is now the Indiana-Ohio state line, and a community of Mascouten and 

Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) who moved to the Wabash River in what is now western Indiana.15

 13 Quotation from “Beauharnois to French Minister, May 30, 1733,” in Collections of the State Historical 

Society of Wisconsin, vol. 17 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1906), 205; Rushforth, 

“Slavery, the Fox Wars, and the Limits of Alliance,” 76-80; Edmunds and Joseph L. Peyser, The Fox Wars: 

The Mesquakie Challenge to New France (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 119-56. 14 Witgen, Infinity of Nations, 296-305; Rushforth, “Slavery, the Fox Wars, and the Limits of Alliance,” 78-

80; Edmunds and Peyser, The Fox Wars, 194-201. 15 White, Middle Ground, 175-87; Robert Michael Morrissey, Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, 

and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 85-

109; Matthew R. Garrett, “Kickapoo Foreign Policy, 1650-1830” (Master’s thesis, University of Nebraska, 

2006), 26-34.
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Figure 3.1: Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, ca. 1740. Map illustrates the diverse 

arrangement of communities that returned to, or relocated within, the Ohio Valley and lower 

Great Lakes in the first half of the 18th century. Groups near and along the northwestern shore 

of Lake Michigan, as well as around Lake Superior, remained within the ancestral homelands 

they had inhabited continuously for centuries. Map is based on “The French Era, 1720-1761,” 

in Helen Hornbeck Tanner, Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (Norman: Published for the 

Newberry Library by the University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 40-41.

Other groups came from the south and east in the 1730s and 1740s. These 

included several Shawnee communities that had been displaced two generations earlier, 

lived in various parts of southeastern North America, and then gathered together in their 

ancient homeland on the middle Ohio River or moved toward the Forks of the Ohio River 

(the confluence of the Ohio, Monangahela, and Allegheny rivers). A community 

associated with the Onöndowága: (Seneca) but largely composed of people of Eriehonon 

and Chonnonton descent also made a return of sorts to their former homelands, near the 

southeastern end of Lake Erie. Known to Europeans as “Ohio Iroquois” or “Mingo” (and 
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68

now part of the Seneca-Cayuga Tribe of Oklahoma), they were separate from but subject 

to the larger Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Lastly, groups of Lunaapeew (Lenape, or 

Delaware) moved to the upper Ohio River from the Province of Pennsylvania as a result 

of pressures from new British settlements along the Appalachian front-range.16

While some of these communities were returning to former homelands, and others 

moved to create distance from French administrators, British settlers, or complications 

within an Indigenous alliance, all were drawn to the rich soils and abundant game in a 

region that had been left vacant by decades of war. Regardless of the motives, all of these 

moves extended and altered the conditions of the Pays d’en Haut within a broader 

regional context. The fur trade remained a key factor of village life, as did the 

maintenance of alliances, but Europeans had become even more peripheral. As in the 

western Pays d’en Haut, a growing number of coureuers de bois (and a few independent 

British traders) maintained connections between the region and imperial centers of trade, 

but they did so as members of the Native communities in which they had married and 

lived. In sum, the re-inhabited Ohio Valley was “a Country between;” one that provided 

opportunities for comparing and initiating favorable exchanges with British or French 

trade networks, but not subject to either. From British and French perspectives, however, 

this region was not so much a neutral buffer zone as it was a field of contest between 

these two imperial rivals—in terms of trade and war.17

“a Tryal for both”

In the fall of 1753, as the French and British empires prepared for war on the 

eastern edge of the Ohio Valley, Lt. George Washington was dispatched by Lieutenant 

Governor of Virginia Robert Dinwiddie to assess conditions in what is now western 

Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. Washington’s mission was essentially threefold: to 

evaluate the strength of French military forces and installations between Lake Erie and 

the Forks of the Ohio; to confirm the laudatory reports on the area that were recently 

submitted to the Ohio Company of Virginia (a land speculating company that had been 

established in 1748 by Dinwiddie as well as members of the Washington family); and to 

gauge the disposition of resident American Indian communities toward the British and 

the French. With all of these matters in mind, Washington held an eagerly anticipated 

meeting with Tanacharison in late November at the village of Chiningue (aka Logstown) 

on the upper Ohio River that was home to a mixed population of Ökwe'öwé (SenecaCayuga; aka, “Mingo”), Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), and Shawnee families.18

Tanacharison was both a leader among the Ökwe'öwé as well as a “Half-King”—

a sort of viceroy of the Haudenosaunee—who had concluded a treaty the previous year 

 16 Sami Lakomäki, Gathering Together: The Shawnee People through Diaspora and Nationhood (New 

Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 60-67; Amy C. Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of 

the Delaware Indians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 68-90; Michael N. 

McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724-1774 (Lincoln: University 

of Nebraska Press, 1992), 18-27. 17 McConnell, A Country Between, 2; Paul Mapp, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713–1763

(Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 283–311. 18 For an overview of this meeting and its context, see McConnell, A Country Between, 89-112. On surveys 

by Christopher Gist for the Ohio Company, see George Mercer, George Mercer Papers Relating to the 

Ohio Company of Virginia, ed. Lois Mulkearn (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1954), 7-8, 18.
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with the Colony of Virginia and the Ohio Company (Treaty of Logstown, 1752). While 

he resented the construction of French forts near Lake Erie and generally preferred to 

work with the British and Virginians, Tanacharison made it clear that he evaluated all 

parties by the same terms. Repeating a speech that he recently made to the French 

commander at Fort Le Boeuf (near the southeastern end of Lake Erie), Tanacharison told 

Washington that 

We live in a Country between, therefore the Land does not belong either to 

[the French] or the [British]; but the GREAT BEING above allow’d it to 

be a Place of residence for us; so ... I desire you to withdraw, ... for I will 

keep you at Arm’s length. I lay this down as a Tryal for both, to see which 

will have the greatest regard to it.19

This encounter between Tanacharison and Washington, which occurred in the 

months before the formal outbreak of the French and Indian War (aka, Seven Years’ 

War), touches on the array of interests that had taken shape in the Pays d’en Haut over 

the previous few decades and would largely define the wars that embroiled the Great 

Lakes and Ohio Valley for the next four decades. As Tanacharison made clear, the 

overriding concern of Native communities was to continue as independent people on the 

lands “the GREAT BEING above allow’d” for them. Consequently, their decisions about 

engaging, avoiding, or repulsing a particular imperial power would be based on which 

option best accorded with this basic concern. At times this could simply mean providing 

aid to the imperial power that was most likely to weaken the other—with the hope that 

both would be severely undermined and ultimately withdraw from the “Country 

between,” but such hopes were fleeting around the Forks of the Ohio as British and 

French forces repeatedly contested the area and, in the process, threatened or attacked 

Native towns.20

Living in a country between involved more than gauging or avoiding the concerns 

of imperial rivals. A Lunaapeew leader named Shingas, who guided Washington to Fort 

Le Boeuf after the council at Chiningue, variously engaged with French and British 

officials in 1753 and 1754. Shortly after a Pennsylvania ’s devastating attack on the 

mostly Lunaapeew town of Kithanink (Kittaning, Ohio), however, he abandoned any 

pretext of neutrality and became fully committed to war. He made his reasons known 

during a meeting with an emissary from the Governor of Pennsylvania in 1756. In a 

statement that was more a wish than a question, Shingas wondered aloud: “It is plain that 

you white people are the cause of this war; why do not you and the French fight in the old 

country, and on the sea? Why do you come to fight on our land?” Without waiting for a 

reply, he answered himself: “You [both] want to take the land from us by force, and settle 

it." The question of imperial or colonial alliances was meaningless in a war with such a 

goal, and Shingas determined instead to fight whomever posed the most imminent threat 

 19 McConnell, A Country Between: 73-76; White, Middle Ground, 239-40; Alan Axelrod, A Savage 

Empire: Trappers, Traders, Tribes, and the Wars That Made America (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 

2011), 126-45. Quotation from Axelrod, Savage Empire, 119. 20 McConnell, A Country Between: 76-80.
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to the Lunaapeew and their lands—which in the case of Kithanink meant the backwoods 

communities that had been pressing west of the Alleghenies.21

The Parameters of Alliance and Conflict

While Shingas’ interrogation and answer clearly echoes Tanacharison’s 

statement, it is important to see the different sides of the coming war in terms that are 

more complex than basic identifiers of race and nationality: of “white people,” of “French 

and Indian,” of British, Haudenosaunee, or even Lunaapeew. When Tanacharison spoke 

with Washington, he did so as a representative of the Haudenosaunee as well as a leader 

within the mixed community of Ökwe'öwé, Lunaapeew, and Shawnee that had been 

moving away from the Onöndowága (Seneca, i.e. westernmost Haudenosaunee) for at 

least a generation. As a “half-king” he represented Haudenosaunee claims of suzerainty 

over his own kin and neighbors as well as all the people and lands of the Ohio Valley—

an authority that ostensibly came to the Haudenosaunee by right of conquest during the 

wars of the 17th century. Neither the French nor any of the groups that returned to the 

area over the previous four decades recognized such a right, but the British did. This 

partly derived from a history of interaction between the British and Haudenosaunee that 

involved trade and past alliances against the French, but it also reflected a desire for 

administrative simplicity. Royal officials and colonial governors preferred to deal with a 

single recognized authority (i.e., the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee) that met at 

Onöñda’gega’ (Onondaga), rather than a myriad of interethnic villages and overlapping 

alliances. Moreover, the British considered the Haudenosaunee to be their subjects (a 

sentiment that was not mutual), and thus viewed Haudenosaunee claims to the Ohio 

Country as British rights of possession.22

As an agent of the Haudenosaunee who was directly answerable to the Grand 

Council, Tanacharison was the person George Washington most wanted to meet during 

his reconnaissance. Yet Washington’s concerns reflected the future objectives of the Ohio 

Company at least as much as they did the war preparations of the Governor or the history 

of British relations with the Haudenosaunee. With the coming war in mind, Washington 

was tasked with building on Virginia’s relationship with Tanacharison to formalize an 

alliance that would counter recent French efforts to control the Forks of the Ohio River—

which both imperial powers viewed as the gateway to the Ohio Valley and the Great 

Lakes. Just as importantly, success in these matters would in turn protect the legal, 

financial and property claims involved with the previous year’s treaty (Treaty of 

Logstown, 1752) and its cession of what is now most of the state of West Virginia.23 In 

 21 Ibid., 108-110; Matthew C. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years’ War in Virginia and 

Pennsylvania, 1754-1765 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), 22-35; quotation from Hale C. 

Sipe, The Indian Wars of Pennsylvania: An Account of the Indian Events, in Pennsylvania, of the French 

and Indian War, Pontiac’s War, Lord Dunmore's War, the Revolutionary War, and the Indian Uprising 

from 1789 to 1795 (Harrisburg: The Telegraph Press, 1929), 363. Shingas was also at the Loggstown 

meeting.

22 McConnell, “Peoples ‘In Between’: The Iroquois and the Ohio Indians, 1720-1768,” in Beyond the 

Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800, eds. Daniel K. 

Richter and James H. Merrell (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 101-04. 23 “The Treaty of Logg's Town, 1752,” Early Recognized Treaties with American Indian Nations: 

University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities

<http://earlytreaties.unl.edu/treaty.00004.html> (accessed 12 September 2015).
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71

all of these matters Washington was something of a “half-king” himself, with dual 

loyalties to the British Colony of Virginia as well as the Ohio Company. The title was 

equally relevant to both men in another way, since the term “half” more fully described 

both of their circumstances than did “king.” Washington’s close family ties to the 

Company were at least as determinative of his actions and decisions as his official 

commission, while Tanacharison always had to be cognizant of the concerns and needs of 

the people with whom he lived when exercising the interests of the Haudenosaunee. 

Indeed, his even-handed admonishment to the French and the British was likely pitched 

in a way that appealed to the divided leanings of his immediate neighbors.24

The meeting of Washington and Tanacharison embodied four broad but distinct 

interests: those of Great Britain, the Ohio Company, the Haudenosaunee, and the mixed 

community of Ökwe'öwé, Lunaapeew, and Shawnee that resided at Chiningue. For the 

Crown and Parliament, Washington’s trek to Logstown was a small episode in a 

longstanding imperial contest with France in the global system of mercantile trade. From 

the perspective of the Ohio Company, Washington’s endeavor was viewed as critical to 

advancing the interests of Virginia’s colonial elites in a grand scheme of land acquisition 

and speculation. Tanacharison, on the other hand, represented the interests of the 

Haudenosaunee (as claimants of the Ohio Valley and as a significant Indigenous 

counterweight to French and British imperial designs), as well as embodied the polyglot 

world of the “Country between” and its growing separation from the Haudenosaunee.25

Though unmentioned, other key interests that would shape the coming war 

involved people that regarded themselves as nominal subjects of their respective kings. 

These included the coureurs de bois, who were often at odds with French officials in 

Montreal. Since many were married within Native communities, and cultivated 

extensive ties through Indigenous networks of exchange, their allegiances primarily lay 

with Native kin and their communities’ alliances. While ties to New France certainly 

influenced the coureurs de bois’ ideas about British objectives, as well as their 

subsequent militia service, their actions and understandings could not be divorced from 

their livelihoods within the fur trade or the future prospects of their neighbors and kin. 

Another interest that framed the meeting at Chiningue involved the families and 

individuals that were pushing across the Alleghenies from the British colonies. 

Increasingly referred to as “Long Knives” (a general term applied by various Native 

groups to western Pennsylvanians, Virginians and, later, Kentuckians), these new people 

were a kind of British antithesis to the coureurs de bois. They resented royal authority, 

Virginia elites, and land speculators, but their greatest fears and aspersions were 

reserved for American Indians—who were almost universally regarded as lazy and 

violent, with no higher goal than to war against poor people in need of property.26

 24 McConnell, A Country Between: 81-107. 25 Ibid. 26 Susan Sleeper-Smith, “Women, Kin, and Catholicism: New Perspectives on the Fur Trade,” in 

Rethinking the Fur Trade: Cultures of Exchange in an Atlantic World, ed. Sleeper-Smith (Lincoln: 

University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 443-80; White, Middle Ground, 264-68; Jeremy Engels, “‘Equipped 

for Murder’: The Paxton Boys and ‘the Spirit of Killing All Indians’ in Pennsylvania, 1763-64,” Rhetoric 

& Public Affairs 8, no. 3 (2005): 355-82; Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War 

Transformed Early America (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), 95-124.
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72

Figure 3.2: From the Forks of the Ohio to Sandusky Bay. Along with named 

communities and the general locations of Indigenous groups, the map includes roads, 

distances, French and British trade posts, missions, and annotations about French and 

British actions in the region. The area around Logstown (“Logs T”) and the Forks of the 

Ohio River is circled in the lower center. Detail from John Mitchell, A Map of the British 

and French dominions in North America ([London]: Millar, 1755). Library of Congress.

Lastly, and in many respects the most critical dimension of the coming war, were 

the various Native communities in the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region. Most had 

long ties with the French through trade and alliance, but some groups had migrated to the 

Upper Ohio Valley in the past two decades to have better access to British traders. While 

these later moves suggested ambivalence about the French and the alliance centered on 

Detroit, they did not necessarily imply a future alliance with the British. By the same 

token, Ökwe'öwé, Lunaapeew, and Shawnee who had moved to the west side of the 

Alleghenies had a long history of relations with an array of colonial interests, from 

missionaries, fur traders, land speculators, government officials, squatters, and militias. 

The sum of these experiences did not amount to a particular affinity for a British military 

alliance, but neither did the recent construction of French forts. At some level, most every 

American Indian community in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region, distrusted the 

British and the French, resented Haudenosaunee claims on the Ohio Valley, and expected 

more violent encounters with the Long Knives. Their ultimate concern, however, was to 

ensure the future viability of their lands, communities, and longstanding alliances in an 

increasingly unpredictable and dangerous world. In this regard, at least, all shared a 

common motive. Yet distinct perspectives and experiences would lead to different actions 
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during the Seven Years’ War—and all would shape the course of this conflict as well as 

the turbulent decades that followed.27

One of the clearest examples of how deeply Native actions could affect outcomes 

occurred in the first major military campaign that followed Washington’s meeting with 

Tanacharison. It also illustrates how, under certain circumstances, the common interests 

of various groups could align (or fail to align) and lead to decisive outcomes. Backwoods 

militiamen, British officers, and British-allied American Indian groups had very different 

ideas about the conduct of warfare and the expected consequences of victory, but prior to 

and during the outbreak of war it seemed possible that some could overcome their 

differences long enough to pursue a common enemy. However, the disdain of one party 

for another, or others, could be so intransigent that disaster ensued. This proved the case 

in 1755, just weeks after British General Edward Braddock wrote to Benjamin Franklin 

that American Indians “may indeed be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia; 

but upon the king’s regular and disciplined troops, Sir, it is impossible they should make 

an impression.” This brash dismissal of colonial militias came shortly after Braddock had 

rejected the assistance of Native allies in his summer expedition against the newly 

constructed Fort Duquesne (present-day Pittsburgh). Instead of a triumphant conquest, 

Braddock was routed by the kind of force he disparaged the most: namely, a combination 

of 250 French regulars and militia along with an alliance of 650 Native warriors that had 

primarily come from the Detroit area. After an hours-long battle in which nearly twothirds of the British fighting force of 1,300 was either dead (including Braddock) or 

wounded, the advancing British were suddenly in full retreat.28

Braddock’s defeat, which was preceded by Washington’s surrender at Fort 

Duquesne the previous summer, destroyed British expectations that a fair number of 

American Indian communities might remain neutral—or even support the Crown—in the 

coming war. Even before his costly march on Fort Duquesne, however, Braddock’s 

rejection of a Lunaapeew offer to help push the French away from their village at

Kithanink (present-day Kittanning, Pennsylvania) undermined a potential alliance in the 

upper Ohio Valley. As Shingas later recalled, Braddock made it clear that Indigenous 

interests and support were irrelevant to the prosecution of war since, in the end, “no 

[Native] shou’d inherit the Land.” Shingas quickly replied that if the Lunaapeew “might 

not have Liberty To Live on the Land they wou’d not Fight for it.” Though Shingas never 

became an outright ally of the French, and held a vain hope that the British might work 

with Indigenous communities, he remained a feared war leader who defended Lunaapeew

territory against squatters in western Pennsylvania and northwestern Virginia.29

One of the most significant consequences of the early French and American 

Indian victories around Fort Duquesne occurred in the broad area between the Cuyahoga 

 27 Daniel P. Barr, “‘This Land Is Ours and Not Yours’: The Western Delawares and the Seven Years’ War 

in the Upper Ohio Valley, 1755-1758,” in The Boundaries between Us: Natives and Newcomers Along the 

Frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750-1850, ed. Barr (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2006), 

25-43. 28 Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas 1755-1763 (Cambridge 

University Press, 2002), 198-205. 29 Barr, Op. Cit.. Also, Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before 

Lewis and Clark (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 337-39; quotation on p. 339.
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Valley and the Wabash River Basin. Over the previous two generations, communities that 

were formerly consolidated in the western Pays d’en Haut had been moving into the 

region—to return to their homelands, to gain distance from the French-Native alliance at 

Detroit, or to access the more easterly British trade. These included Myaamiaki (Miami—

Illinois), Waayaahtanwa (Wea), and Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) as well as some Wyandot and 

Odawa who were variously concentrated along the lower Wabash River, the upper 

Maumee Basin, Sandusky Bay, and the upper Great Miami River. At the same time as 

these eastward migrations were occurring, communities of Shawnee, Ökwe'öwé (SenecaCayuga; aka, “Mingo”), and Western Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) moved away 

from the Haudenosaunee and encroaching settler communities. Most of the Shawnee 

returned to their ancient homeland on the north side of the Ohio, while the Ökwe'öwé and

Lunaapeew tended to congregate along the Cuyahoga and Muskingum rivers. For all of 

these groups, the region provided fertile soils, abundant game, a network of well-traveled 

river corridors, and a high degree of autonomy. As word of the French and American 

Indian victories at the Forks of the Ohio moved through the villages around the western 

Great Lakes and across the Ohio Valley, these various communities coalesced around a 

loose alliance that viewed support of the French as the best route to securing their lands 

and protecting their communities. Over the next few years the exigencies of war, alliance 

and trade would cause villages to move toward or among each other—which ultimately 

brought the western and eastern groups closer together.30

At the Center of the First World War

The Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), which was not officially declared until two 

years after Braddock’s defeat, has been called the first world war. Though connected to 

the cycle of European wars that frequently pitted France and Great Britain against each 

other, this war began in North America—then spread to Europe, the Caribbean, western 

Africa, the Indian subcontinent, the Philippine Archipelago, and all the intervening 

oceans. As the Moravian missionary Christian Post stated to Shingas and his brother 

Pisquetumen in 1758, “you know so long as the world has stood there has not been such a 

war.”31 The global context of the war and its primary focus in North America was rooted 

in the mercantilism that fueled previous wars in Europe, but directed at the specific 

overseas claims of an imperial rival. Yet the timing and the geographic origins of the 

Seven Years’ War stem from the dissolution of what Fred Anderson calls “a tri-partite

equilibrium in which the [Haudenosaunee] occupied a crucial position, both 

geographically and diplomatically, between the French and the English colonial 

empires.”32 By the 1740s, the Haudenosaunee could no longer provide a sufficient 

counterweight to British and French interests in the region between Montreal and Albany. 

Their claims over western peoples and lands had become increasingly hollow, and their 

ability to play British and French interests against each other had diminished as European

trade with the communities in the Ohio Valley increased. Instead of holding these 

 30 Tanner, Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, 39-41, 43-46; White, Middle Ground, 215-27; Dowd, A 

Spirited Resistance, 24-25; Barr, “‘A Road for Warriors:’ The Western Delawares and the Seven Years’ 

War,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 73:1 (Winter 2006): 1-36. 31 Quote from Alfred A. Cave, The French and Indian War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 158. 32 Fred Anderson, The Seven Years’ War: War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766

(New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 12.
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imperial rivals at bay, the Haudenosaunee were squeezed by both—and could offer no 

resistance. As one Haudenosaunee speaker told the British, “It’s as if you on one side and 

the french on the other will press us out of our lands.”33

Figure 3.3: L’Amérique Septentrionale This hand-tinted map depicts the territorial 

claims of Britain and France during through the first year of the Seven Years’ War. As 

depicted on this map, French territorial claims completely envelope the British colonies 

and extend nearly to the Appalachian Mountains. Cartouche (title plate) has been 

modified to fit within this portion of the whole map. Cóvens et Mortier, L'Amérique 

septentrionale (Amsterdam: Cóvens & Mortier, 1757). Source: Library of Congress.

In a sense, the Forks of the Ohio had become a fault zone between two tectonic 

plates that were pushed by imperial visions and mutual animosity. Great Britain and 

France each believed that whoever controlled the area would control access to the Ohio 

Valley, and from there would be in position to control the continent. French strategists 

viewed the Ohio Valley as a necessary piece that would connect Lower Canada (presentday Quebec and southern Ontario) and the western Pays d’en Haut with the Illinois 

Valley and the Colony of Louisiana. The loss of the Ohio Valley, on the other hand, 

could shatter connections between Montreal and Detroit with the peoples of the western 

Great Lakes—and thus destroy the fur trade economy of New France. This, in fact, was a 

primary objective of the British war effort; to

open to all his Majesty’s Subjects a Vein of Treasure, which, if rightly 

managed, may prove richer than the Mines of Mexico, the Trade with the 

 33 Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 254; William R. Nester, The First Global War: Britain, 

France, and the Fate of North America, 1756–1775 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 9-13.
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numerous Nations of Western Indians: It [would deprive] our Enemies of 

the Benefits ..., and break ... the Chain of Communication betwixt 

Canada and Louisiana.

34

For officials in London poring over Robert de Vaugondy’s recent map Amérique 

Septentrionale (1755), loss of the Ohio Valley would be catastrophic: the French would 

claim a vast arc of territory from the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Saint 

Lawrence River estuary—and thus limit Britain’s colonial venture in North America to a 

relatively narrow strip from the Appalachians to the coast. In short, the consequences of

victory or defeat were as unprecedented as the global scale of the war.35

For American Indians in the Ohio Valley and beyond, the prospects of loss or 

victory did not have grand geopolitical implications. Their territorial concerns were 

limited to the lands they inhabited, utilized and shared, and thus staving off defeat had a 

more vital and immediate significance. Victory, on the other hand, would largely amount 

to a return of pre-war conditions. Total victory, if such a thing could be accomplished, 

would result in the weakening of French and English military capacities as well as the 

return of rural settlers to their colonial centers. For those Native communities that directly 

participated in the imperial conflict between France and England, their efforts could be 

described as waging war for a return to peace. For all Native groups, whether they 

pursued neutrality, fought with or against a particular European power, attacked British 

American settlements, or had violent disagreements with each other, their choices and 

actions were directed toward protecting “the country in which the Master of Life” had 

placed them, and ensuring that they would continue to “know no masters, as they had 

none among themselves.”36

Imperial War and New Alliances on Native Ground

At the outset of the war, the Onöndowága: (Seneca), Ökwe'öwé (Mingo), 

Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), and Shawnee who lived around the Forks of the Ohio 

welcomed the arrival of the British troops. This was less a matter of support for British 

interests than it was a welcomed counterweight to French violations of previous 

agreements to militarize the region. This support also corresponded to the more localized 

interests of these particular groups rather than any connections they may have been 

developing with communities to the west. However, British declarations that they would 

replace rather than displace the French army caused Native support in the area to waver, 

while early French victories caused it to almost disappear completely. Through the rest of 

the war, the only significant Native alliances with the British came from Tsalagihi 

(Cherokee) towns in present-day eastern Tennessee and from some Kanien’kehaka 

(Mohawk) in the Mohawk River Valley. The Tsalagi alliance was intermittent and fairly 

 34 John Forbes, Pennsylvania Gazette (Philadelphia), December 14, 1758, 1; included in The Papers of 

Henry Bouquet, Vol. II, eds. Donald H. Kent, Sylvester Kirby Stevens and Autumn L. Leanord 

(Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1951), 613. Italics and capital letters in the 

original.

35 Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800 (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 1999), 78-83; Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate 

of Empire in British North America (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 66-76. 36 Quotation from Pierre Pouchot, Memoir Upon the Late War in North America, between the French and 

English, 1755-60, ed. Franklin Benjamin Hough (Roxbury, MA: W. E. Woodward, 1866), 17.
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brief, and ended when Virginia militia attacked a group returning from the north. This 

ignited a series of conflicts that soon devolved into what became known as the AngloCherokee War (1758-1761) in the Blue Ridge Mountain region. The Kanien’kehaka

alliance was more durable and based on a long association with Britain’s northern 

colonies, but it contributed to a schism within the Haudenosaunee—in which most 

communities determined to remain neutral or, like some western Onöndowága: (Seneca)

and Tuscarora, temporarily aligned with the French.37

A different array of scenarios played out to the west, where most groups that 

participated in the war did so in support of the French. This was most evident among the 

groups around Detroit, Michilimackinac, Sault St. Marie, and Green Bay where the 

strength of a century-old alliance with the French remained strongest. Within this 

common association, however, reasons for fighting against the British and their allies 

could vary between communities and individuals. They might stem from the anxious 

excitement of young men wanting to prove their mettle as warriors, a promise to raise a 

dead relative, an opportunity to acquire war prizes, loot, or prisoners, or an effort to 

strengthen the alliances that had been compromised in the past few decades by the 

attractions of British trade. In every case, however, the goal was to protect communities, 

strengthen their ties with allied groups, and weaken the British threat. Support for the 

French fit within these goals, but it did not necessarily amount to an outright allegiance to 

Onontio. As noted above, this support was tied to the desire for a return to previous 

conditions—in which these groups protected their independence while maintaining the 

mutual benefits of an old alliance.38

Circumstances were more complex in the Ohio Valley, where the movements, 

interactions, and consolidations of various communities had not amounted to a broad 

alliance. In both the eastern and the western end of the Ohio Valley, Native communities 

made difficult but well-reasoned decisions that would best ensure their grandchildren and 

great-grandchildren would still know and live in the world of their forebears. In the early 

years of the war, however, the pursuit of common goals for broadly similar reasons often 

resulted in dissimilar actions. Indeed, conditions were so fluid and the magnitude of the 

war so great that Native communities had to constantly adapt their long-term objectives 

to dynamic circumstances. For instance, the Shawnee along the Ohio River, as well as the 

Shawnee and Lunaapeew around the Forks of the Ohio and the head of the Muskingum 

River, shifted their responses to the military actions of France and Great Britain several 

times between 1754 and 1756.39

A brutal attack in 1752 by a French and American Indian force against a Myaamia 

town on the upper Wabash River, as punishment for trading with eastern Ohio Valley 

groups and the British, predisposed the Shawnee and Lunaapeew to distrust the French. 

 37 Anderson, Crucible of War, 457-71; Timothy J. Shannon, “War, Diplomacy, and Culture: The Iroquois 

Experience in the Seven Years’ War,” in Cultures in Conflict: The Seven Years’ War in North America, ed. 

Warren R. Hofstra (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 79-104. The alliance with the British also 

brought some Kanien’kehaka into conflict with their close kin who resided in Quebec, which marked a 

tragic rift within the collective identities of the Kanien’kehaka and the larger Haudenosaune confederacy. 38 White, Middle Ground, 240-45; Nester, The First Global War, 15-21. 39 This and the following paragraph draw from Sami Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 63-69; and Barr, “‘A 

Road for Warriors’,” 1-36.
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This was further confirmed by the construction of French forts to the southeast of Lake 

Erie two years later. These events made the communities around the Forks of the Ohio 

more inclined to support the British against the French, at least until the Albany Congress 

in the summer of 1754. When word reached the Ohio Valley that the Haudenosaunee had 

ceded the region to the British Colonies that were then preparing for war, most all of the 

groups in the region were aghast. In the end, a handful of Shawnee and Lunaapeew 

supported an imperial power on just one meaningful occasion—when some from the 

Forks of the Ohio offered support to Braddock (who declined), and a few fought with the 

French. From this point forward, most remained neutral in the conflict between France 

and Great Britain.

The one partial exception to this broad-based neutrality came from Shawnee 

communities on the Ohio River. In 1752 a combined force of Shawnee and French 

attacked a British post at the site of Eskippakithiki, a former Shawnee town in what is 

now central Kentucky where Shawnee continued to hunt and guard against outsiders. 

Braddock’s dramatic defeat convinced these Shawnee, as well as their kin and 

Lunaapeew allies to the north, that a nominal alliance with the French could bring 

weapons for more campaigns against new frontier settlements along the Appalachian 

Plateau. While these raids were directed against British subjects, they were part of a 

separate conflict that was not associated with the armies and allies of the French or 

British.40 Since any captives they caught were British, however, they were generally 

taken to the French at Detroit. While this did not make the Shawnee allies of the French, 

from the perspective of British officers it made them inveterate enemies of the Crown.41

Attacks against isolated settlements would persist well beyond the end date of the 

Seven Years’ War, and contributed to an ongoing cycle of violent conflict between Long 

Knives and Shawnee. For the former, the experience of chronic “Indian Wars”—after the 

French and Indian War had ended—forged an identity based on securing a “good poor 

man’s country” through sacrifice, struggle, and bloodshed. The conflicts with squatters 

brought unity to the long-dispersed Shawnee—as well as deepened their connections to 

the Lunaapeew and other groups that had migrated into the Ohio Valley. As Sami 

Lakomäki notes, “the decision of most Shawnees to defend their lands with arms marked 

a dramatic break from their century-old strategy of migration and dispersal in the face of 

an enemy invasion.” Having returned to their ancient homeland,

it was the land itself that kept the Shawnees on the Ohio and made them 

choose fighting instead of retreating. ‘The God Who made all things gave 

us this Country and brought us through this Ground,’ explained the orator 

Missiweakiwa in 1760. He underlined how intimately the Shawnees had 

come to identify with their [ancient] homelands

 40 This proved the case for a young boy from West Virginia named Adam Brown, who was adopted by a 

Wyandot family and given the name Tohunehowetu. He grew to become a leader in the Detroit area, and 

the namesake of the Wyandot village commonly known as Brownstown (aka Big Rock).

41 Lomäki, Gathering Together, 77-79; Stephen Aron, “Pigs and Hunters: ‘Rights in the Woods’ on the 

Trans-Appalachian Frontier,” in Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the 

Mississippi, 1750-1830, eds. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 

Press, 1998), 177-81.
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and renewed the connection between people and place that defined the Shawnee as a 

nation.42

Far from the Forks of the Ohio or colonial settlements, a similar dynamic but 

different scenario developed in the areas to the west and south of Lake Michigan where 

the machinations of French and British generals remained a distant concern. French 

traders and coureurs de bois with connections to Michilimackinac and Detroit resided 

throughout the region, but familiarity and kinship with these men did not necessarily 

translate into strong ties with Onontio. Significant conflict did occur, and key alliances 

were formed, but they related to regional concerns and involved no European power. In 

1753, when George Washington met with Tanacharison some 570 miles to the east, an 

alliance of western Kiikaapoi (later known as the Prairie Kickapoo) and Mascouten, 

along with Mshkodésik Bodéwadmi (Prairie Potawatomi) from the southern end of Lake 

Michigan and some Dakota, attacked the Peoria and forced them out of the upper Illinois 

Valley. In the early 1750s, eastern Kiikaapoi (later known as the Vermillion Kickapoo) 

allied with Myaamia from the Wabash River, Ojibwe from Chequamegon Bay, and 

Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk) from Green Bay, to conquer their long-time enemies the Iliniwek 

(Illinois Confederation) and take over the rich prairie lands of what is now northern 

Illinois. These conflicts were both exacerbated and ended by disease outbreaks, and likely 

followed the patterns of a mourning war. Drawing on the obligations and protocols of 

Onontio, the French helped bring an end to this intermittent warfare by the time it had 

mostly run its course, and sought to recruit allies from the winning alliances to fight in 

the war with Great Britain. Gifts, diplomatic overtures, and expectations of victory 

proved effective and a new contingent of Native allies from the west headed to Montreal 

in 1757.43

The constellations of interests in the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes reflected 

ancient associations between peoples and places, the alliances that formed during and 

after the Haudenosaunee wars of the 17th century, and the more recent migrations to the 

lower Great Lakes and into the Ohio Valley. During the Seven Years’ War they further 

adjusted to pressures and solicitations from European powers, diminished trade, war 

campaigns, and the consequences of disease epidemics. The result was a reordering of the 

old alliance with Onontio into loose confederations that corresponded to four regional 

distinctions: the Ohio Valley; the Detroit River and the area between western Lake Erie 

and southern Lake Michigan; the areas to the west and south of Lake Michigan; and 

Anishinaabewaki (the region that stretched along lakes Huron and Superior)—which 

maintained close ties to the communities around Detroit as well as to the west of Lake 

Michigan. In some respects, the rise of multiple centers within the Pays d’en Haut and 

the violent rivalry of two imperial powers ended the geographic and cultural bounds of 

what Richard White called the “Middle Ground.” Yet these developments more fully 

revealed the continuing dynamics that had always made the region a Native Ground 

rather than a territory of New France. Like the Shawnee, Myaamia, and Bodéwadmi who 

 42 Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 70-71. 43 Robert Michael Morrissey, Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial 

Illinois Country (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 178-90; Matthew R. Garrett, 

“Kickapoo Foreign Policy, 1650-1830” (Masters thesis: University of Nebraska, 2006), 35-39; Philip C. 

Bellfy, Three Fires Unity: The Anishnaabeg of the Lake Huron Borderlands (Lincoln: University of 

Nebraska Press, 2011), 29-33; Clifton, The Prairie People, 97.
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returned to their former homelands, and the Anishinaabeg who never left, the cultural 

geography that formed in the lead up to the Seven Years’ War reflected a partial 

restoration of the processes that preceded the epidemics and wars of the mid 17th century. 

The Seven Years’ War would further shape these developments, and foster new alliances 

among groups that came in closer proximity to each other. These changes would in turn 

provide the basis for subsequent Native alliances that rivaled, and in some respects 

exceeded, the old relationships with Onontio over the previous century.44

The Dependencies of War

Native alliances, with other Indigenous communities or an imperial power, were 

not immune to the transformative effects of the Seven Years’ War. This was especially 

true of those who fought with an imperial ally rather than pursued neutrality. With many 

warriors and families embarking for, returning from, and participating in various conflicts 

at different times of the year, the seasonal dynamics of village life were disrupted and 

Native allies became increasingly dependent on food, clothing and trade items. Some of 

these movements and the prizes carried home from battle took the place of former trade 

ventures, but the hardships and time away from home—as well as the deaths and injuries 

incurred—far exceeded any of the normal exertions associated with peace-time 

exchanges. The propensity of French and British officials to bestow commissions on war 

leaders also tended to undermine the balance of village politics. Civil leaders derived 

their authority through patient consensus building, and were largely responsible for 

matters related to village life, relations with other communities, and the creation or 

cultivation of peace agreements. Decisions about war were too urgent for consensus 

politics, however, and the increased authority that war leaders accrued as the Seven 

Years’ War persisted only deepened their communities’ involvement in a global conflict 

that reached far beyond their homelands. Yet these empowered leaders were also open to 

powerful threats if they did not support their French or English “Father”—who 

alternately pledged favors or destruction to gain support.45

War also created a dependency among European powers—especially the French. 

With few regular troops in North America and a relatively small militia, New France 

relied heavily on Native allies. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, who achieved the rank of 

colonel during the Seven Years’ War, largely oversaw New France’s relations with 

American Indians. While he developed a remarkable understanding of the complexities of 

Native communities and proved attentive to the compromises and careful management 

that fostered an effective alliance, he did not relish the task. “One must be the slave to 

these [people], listen to them day and night, in council and in private ...; besides which 

they are always wanting something for their equipment, arms, or toilet.” Logistics also 

proved difficult, especially if a campaign was delayed or if Native harvests had suffered 

from drought or been ruined in war. In either case, the French were required to lay off 

large staging areas for encampments as well as feed several thousand warriors and family 

members. All of this was an absolute necessity, however, since warfare in North America 

required the French to defer to Native understandings about routes, topography, strategic 

 44 Witgen makes a similar argument, with a particular emphasis on the Anishinaabeg of the northern Great 

Lakes; Witgen, Infinity of Nations, 218-19. 45 White, Middle Ground, 240-43.
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positioning, and speedy assaults. “In this sort of warfare,” Bouganville observed “it is 

necessary to adjust to their ways.”46

In the early years of the war, the French mostly fought with allies from the 

mission communities between Montreal and Quebec as well as Wyandot, Ojibwe, 

Odawa, and Bodéwadmi from the Detroit area. Following Braddock’s defeat, Ökwe'öwé 

(Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”), Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) Shawnee, and others 

in the upper Ohio Valley aligned with the French, adopted neutrality or diverted their 

attentions to attacking the settlements of the Long Knives. None of these decisions were 

simple matters of picking a winning side by determining which way the wind was 

blowing. Rather, as noted previously, each represented a chance to keep at least one 

imperial power—in this case Great Britain—and its colonial subjects away from Native 

lands. Even if the same might become necessary with the French at a later date, in the 

mean time one effective alliance was much better than two powerful enemies. Over the 

next few years, Shawnee in what is now central and southern Ohio, Myaamia (Miami) 

from the Wabash and Maumee rivers, as well as groups from the west, north and south of 

Lake Michigan, entered in force against the British and Native allies of the British. 

Together they scored some key victories, including the capture of Fort Oswego in 1756, 

which allowed New France to control Lake Ontario. Raids against colonial settlements in 

Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia also brought the war to civilian populations, and 

made it clear that contesting and undoing the formal arrangements of land speculating 

companies, as well as the claims of the Haudenosaunee and Colonial governments, was 

central to the broader war.47

Fort William Henry and the Natures of War

In the summer of 1757, 1,000 or more warriors and some of their families came 

from the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley to Montreal, where they were joined by an almost 

equal number of people from the St. Lawrence River area. All told, this force represented 

at least eighteen different Native groups that hailed from as far away as the Gaspé 

Peninsula and the upper Mississippi River. They soon assembled at Fort Carrillon near 

the southern end of Lake Champlain, along with an army of 6,000 French Regulars, 

Canadien militia, and volunteers.48 Their primary goal was Fort William Henry at the 

outlet of Lake George, which was defended by a force of 2,500 British Regulars, 

Colonial militia and volunteers.

 46 Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 32-33, 39, 44-45; Louis Antoine de Bouganville, Adventure in the 

Wilderness: The American Journals of Louis Antoine De Bougainville, 1756-1760, trans. and ed. Edward P. 

Hamilton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), 39. The Bouganville quotation includes the term 

“savages,” which in the original French was rendered as “Sauvages.” It has been replaced by the bracketed 

reference to “people.” While the most direct translation of Bouganville’s reference would be “wild people,” 

it was hardly a neutral term—since it was applied broadly to all Indigenous peoples and clearly implied a 

universal inferiority to French and European “civilization.” More significantly, the term increasingly took 

on the qualities of a derogatory expletive with strong racialized overtones. The use of the term will not be 

used in this work, except on a few occasions when the hateful virulence of the word most fully represents 

the tenor of specific historical moments.

47 Steele, Betrayals, 194-200. 48 Renamed Fort Ticonderoga by the British in 1759.
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In this and other campaigns, Native forces would collaborate with each other, 

manage their own actions, and largely remained separate from French encampments and 

positions—but their individual objectives were not that different from their French and 

Canadien allies or the British and colonial Americans they opposed. Like their nonAmerican Indian counterparts and enemies, Indigenous warriors and the kin who 

supported them in the field fought for their communities and the alliances they had 

promised to uphold. Success in battle would also bring personal honor and elevated social 

status within their communities, while service in a war came with expected, and often 

much needed, material benefits. For soldiers, militiamen, and volunteers, this could come 

in the form of salaries, bounties, excused debts, sustenance in the field, and the 

opportunity to pillage. For American Indians, debts and cash payments were not part of 

the bargain, though better access to trade was expected. The primary material benefits 

from fighting with a European army came from supplies, food, and weapons, the 

opportunity to take prisoners (to “raise” the dead in their own communities or to ransom 

for a bounty), and the chance to pillage and then distribute the proceeds to their kin. 

There were profound distinctions between Native and European ideas about the conduct 

of war, but all fought with a similar mixture of loyalty, honor, and advancement.49

By the end of July, all the elements of the French and Native alliance had arrived 

in the vicinity of Fort William Henry. Over the next few days the French built trenches, 

established artillery positions, and developed plans for a direct assault. Native forces and 

some militia patrolled supply and communication routes to and from Fort Edward, which 

lay just sixteen miles to the south, and established positions to prevent relief or escape. 

Once the siege was fully in place, French artillery opened fire on August 5. Over the next 

two days French artillery moved forward to a range of just a few hundred yards, inflicting 

heavy casualties and badly damaging the fort’s defenses. On August 8, the British 

displayed the white flag of surrender and the fighting ceased. Although the siege was 

brief and the victory lopsided, the French found it necessary to grant fairly generous 

conditions of surrender—largely because they were not in a position to hold 

approximately 2,300 prisoners and associated camp followers, and transport them by 

canoe and foot all the way to Montreal. Consequently, they agreed to administer an 

orderly withdrawal of British soldiers and colonial militiamen to Fort Edward, and 

allowed them to keep their muskets with the understanding that all would refrain from 

fighting for eighteen months. The French also promised to guard the initial withdrawal 

from the fort in the expectation that their Native allies would not wait to pillage the fort 

or harass the surrendering British—as had occurred the year before at Fort Oswego. One 

final condition of the surrender obligated the British to return all French war prisoners 

then in custody within three months.50

The siege of Fort William Henry was an important victory, and it demonstrated 

the renewed strength of the old alliance with Onontio, but it also provides important 

insights into the separate meanings that the French and Native communities ascribed to 

 49 Armstrong Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 1675-1815 (London: UCL Press, 1998), 

101-104; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 9-14. 50 This and the following paragraph are based on Nester, The First Global War, 59-62; Steele, Betrayals, 

110-115; Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years’ War in 

America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 319-322.
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the war with the British. Prior to carrying out the terms of the surrender, General LouisJoseph de Montcalm met with Native leaders to apprise them of the conditions of 

surrender and elicit their agreement to prevent attacks on the departing prisoners. Though 

no specific accounts of these meetings exist, they may have encouraged a number of 

Native leaders to move their encampments further from the fort. However, the diversity 

of communities that had come to Fort William Henry, the various languages spoken, and 

the difficult histories that some had with each other, certainly worked against a common 

agreement or understanding about the British and French plans for an orderly surrender.

Even if Montcalm’s requests were heard understood by all, and assented to by 

every leader, they were still largely unenforceable. A trusted war leader determined 

strategy and tactics, and commanded respect, but he could not dictate the actions of 

individuals after a battle—particularly if they ran so counter to the basic precepts of 

Native warfare. For Europeans, formal surrender was a ritual that transformed warriors 

into non-combatants and drew on sacred notions of honor to limit the scale and conduct 

of warfare. To France’s Native allies, surrender was a form of cowardice and there were 

no rituals to make it otherwise. Of course warfare itself was bounded by ritual, but for 

Native peoples in the mid 18th century—and for countless generations before—these 

were rituals that transformed a father, son, or spouse into a warrior who committed acts 

of violence that were not permissible in the context of domestic and village life. To return 

to what might be called a civil state, and thus end participation in direct warfare, required 

a cleansing ritual. As the British prepared to leave, however, Native fighters were still in 

a state of war with people who only sought their destruction. Worse still, most of the 

opportunities for war honors, prisoners, and plunder were about to leave with them. If 

these warriors were British or French soldiers who had risked much but denied their pay, 

they might have mutinied. Instead, most simply continued with their basic conceptions of 

war. As one Ojibwe man later protested to Governor Vaudreuil, “I make war for plunder, 

scalps, and prisoners. You are satisfied with a fort, and you let your enemy and mine live. 

I do not want to keep such bad meat for tomorrow. When I kill it, it can no longer attack 

me.”51

The events that have come to be known as the Fort William Henry Massacre 

began on the evening of the 8th, as the British garrison was transferred to the entrenched 

confines of the French camp. As this process was underway, Native warriors plundered 

the fort of tools, kettles, baggage, unsecured provisions, horses, bedding, and a host of 

other items. Lives and scalps were also taken when a number of patients who were either 

too sick or too badly wounded to leave the fort were killed in the infirmary. Alarmed by 

these developments, Montcalm sought to move the British prisoners under the cover of 

darkness rather than wait until morning. However, this activity brought crowds of 

warriors who were either confused by or displeased with this large aggregation of British 

and French soldiers preparing to march away together.52

The hasty departure was called off, and French guards were able to maintain order 

on the perimeter of the camp until early morning. As the prisoners and their guards began 

 51 Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 26-28. Quotation is from Peter A. Baskerville, 

Ontario: Image, Identity, and Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 39. 52 This and the following two paragraphs are based on Steele, Betrayals, 129-133, 144, 203-205, 312-22; 

Nester, First Global War, 59-64. Steele quotation on pp. 204-05.
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to assemble and then leave the French encampment, however, they became more 

vulnerable to harassment from growing crowds of American Indians. Weapons, clothing, 

and personal items were grasped at and snatched away from departing British soldiers 

and militiamen, while some who struggled against this treatment were grabbed and taken 

away or killed on the spot. As the more loosely organized camp followers passed, a 

number of women and children were taken as well—most likely as potential adoptees or 

sources of ransom. The tenor of this gauntlet intensified as the end of the column 

prepared to leave the French encampment. A rush of people moved into the emptied 

camp to plunder the excess baggage that had been left behind, while others turned their 

attention to the Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk), Stockbridge-Munsee, and Mahican allies of 

the British as well as the African-American soldiers, servants and slaves who were 

concentrated at the end of the British line. More easily surrounded than the groups that 

preceded them, many were taken captive. Nearly all of the American Indians who were 

with the British came from groups that were enemies of those allied with the French, and 

were almost certainly taken away for torture and death. The slaves, however, were taken 

as prisoners to be ransomed.

As the line of prisoners moved down the road, continued harassment and the 

tumult that could be heard from the rear, caused many to break from the column and run 

“away in a confused and irregular manner.” Many were quickly run down by Native 

warriors and thus began “the ‘massacre’ [which], as Ian Steele notes, “lasted for only a 

few moments, and then became a chase for prisoners. The French commanders tried to 

protect the English by bargaining, by harboring those who escaped, and even by 

confiscating them from their captors.” Of those taken during the march from the French 

encampment outside of Fort William Henry, Montcalm gathered and sent approximately 

500 to Fort Edward. Another 200 captives were eventually ransomed to the French at 

Montreal over the next several months and returned to the British. When official reports 

were finally completed, the number of people who were known to have been killed, 

captured and not returned, or otherwise unaccounted for ranged from 69 to 184 

individuals. The number was likely somewhere in between, which fairly matches the 

official tally of 130 British casualties (killed or wounded) from the three-day siege.

The victory at Fort William Henry marked a high point in the French and 

American Indian alliance during the Seven Years’ War, and the array of Native groups 

present at the siege likely surpassed anything that had occurred over the previous century. 

Yet the events that followed the siege proved a significant turning point in the alliance 

and the war. The terms of surrender, and French interference with the taking of prisoners 

and plunder, deeply confused and disappointed many in the Native alliance. Most 

departed almost immediately, including groups from the western Great Lakes who had 

come 500 miles, participated in a great victory, and had less to show for their efforts than 

they expected. These disappointments did not necessarily preclude a future alliance, but 

the likelihood was further diminished by an outbreak of smallpox that may have come 

from exposure to afflicted soldiers in the fort’s infirmary and/or from sickened 

individuals encountered in Montreal. As Native groups returned home they became 

unwitting vectors of the disease—which took an especially heavy toll on the Bodéwadmi 
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along the St. Joseph River, the Odawa at Waganakising (L’Arbe Croche), and the Ojibwe 

at Michilimackinac.53

Figure 3.4: Seven Years’ War in North America. The broad scale and diversity of 

interests that defined the war are depicted in the territorial claims of France and Great 

Britain, that location of Indigenous groups and the number of forts in the eastern Pays d’en 

Haut as well as the Haudenosaunee homeland. Map is an updated and edited version of a 

National Park Service map entitled Indian Nations and French and British Forts 1754-1760.

The End of New France

As smallpox persisted among Great Lakes communities through 1758, and many 

viewed the French and the war as the source of the disease, military alliances with New 

France’s strongest allies failed to materialize. A series of bad harvests also caused 

widespread hunger among the habitants (small farmers, as well as laborers and 

tradespeople) along the Saint Lawrence River, and undermined efforts to supply forts or 

field campaigns. As the French war effort stalled in North America, the British 

strengthened their position. Under the direction of William Pitt (who served as the Leader 

of the House of Commons and the Secretary of State), more troops and expenditures were 

devoted to North America while British allies in Europe were supported with money and 

weapons to keep the French military tied down on the Continent. Along with repairing 

strained relations with colonial governments that chafed at the perceived arrogance and 

 53 Andrew J. Blackbird, History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan: A Grammar of Their 

Language, and Personal and Family History of the Author (Ypsilanti: Ypsilantian Job Printing House, 

1887), 9-10; Helen Jaskoski, "Andrew Blackbird's Smallpox Story," in Native American Perspectives on 

Literature and History, ed. Alan R. Viele (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 25-35; Gregory 

Evans Dowd, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier (Baltimore: 

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 48-54.
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unreasonable demands of British officials, Pitt authorized new efforts to establish trade 

relations with some of New France’s Native allies. This latter effort proved successful 

with the more neutral or anti-French Ökwe'öwé (Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”),

Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), and Shawnee at the Forks of the Ohio River—who 

provided the British with much needed support during the capture of Fort Duquesne 

(renamed Fort Pitt) in October 1758. Followed by the successful siege of Fort Niagara in 

July 1759 by a combined force of British regulars, militia, and Haudenosaunee, Montreal 

was effectively cut off from the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes. By the following year 

the French capitulated, and colonists from New Hampshire to South Carolina “rejoic[ed] 

... on the Reduction of Canada ... as [proud] Briton[s].”54

The way that Britons understood the battle and its aftermath perfectly 

encapsulated their worst ideas about “Gallic [French] perfidy” and “[American Indian] 

Furies.”55 While the Kingdom of France was the perennial, indispensable enemy of Great 

Britain, in America the French represented a kind of vile depravity that must be destroyed 

or held at bay. The British colonies in America were more emphatically Protestant than 

the British Isles, and readily condemned the “popery” of the Catholic French—with their 

“idolatrous superstitions,” the “cruel and bloody zeal of [their] bigoted Priests,” and the 

Jesuit missionaries who preached “their monstrous tenets” to Indigenous communities. 

As the political writer “Philanthropos” argued in 1754, tolerating such people and their 

alliances in North America would make every British colonist an “accessory to ... 

intolerable Evils.”56

The depravity of Catholicism was also evident in the growing number of Métis 

children, which British observers viewed as proof that French men were licentious, their 

Native wives amoral and opportunistic, and the “mixed” children they produced a corrupt 

form of humanity. The military alliances between New France and Native groups were 

worse still, since they reflected an otherwise civilized nation’s pact with the Native 

“devils” that were proving a fearsome scourge to new western settlements in Britain’s 

northern and southern colonies. These characterizations were not universally felt or 

applied, but they readily explained why defeats like Fort William Henry occurred. Only

duplicity and dishonor, and an unwillingness of the French to control their Native allies, 

could overcome the fort’s noble defenders. The combination of French faults and Native 

depravities also explained the French and Indian War as a righteous campaign to gain 

possession of lands that French and American Indians claimed, and thus secure the 

continent and the future progress of humanity. This trio of land, imperial villain, and 

Native “fury” had also been used to explain smaller wars that dated back to the early 

1700s in New England and the Carolinas, and it would remain central to the spate of 

much larger wars in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region over the next two 

generations.57

 54 Anderson, Crucible of War, 457-71. Quotation from Benjamin Franklin to Lord Kames, 3 January 1760, 

in Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin Press, 2003), 91. 55 Phrases come from John Maylem, Gallic Perfidy: A Poem (Boston: The New Printing Office, 1758). 56 Philanthropos, “Catholic Cruelty and Indian Barbarity Threaten Western Frontier,” quoted in The 

Greenwood Library of American War Reporting: The French and Indian War & the Revolutionary War, 

ed. David A. Copeland (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 90.

57 Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, 121-124.
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Chapter Four

“Our Brethren the English”:1

Revitalization, Revolution, and the Persistence of War in the Ohio Valley

This chapter details the reformulation of Native alliances in the Ohio Valley and the Great 

Lakes Region after the Seven Years’ War and through the American Revolution. This was a 

dynamic and difficult period in which groups from the eastern Ohio Valley drew closer with 

groups around western Lake Erie, the upper Great Lakes, and the western Ohio Valley. Caught 

in chronic war and conflict with settler communities, a broad alliance formed and strengthened 

into the post-revolutionary period. The groups around western Lake Erie, particularly along 

the Detroit River, would translate their central position within the French-Native alliance into 

and beyond this new era. 

In the Ohio Valley, the period between the siege of Fort William Henry and the 

formal end of the Seven Years’ War (1763) was punctuated by peace initiatives as well as 

threats of renewed conflict. This uncertain environment reflected a number of key 

concerns, as well as the complex dynamics of Native communities in the region. For the 

British, early overtures of peace grew from the desire to remove potential allies of New 

France from the larger conflict. The motives of various Native leaders were more 

complex, and reflected the various experiences that particular groups had with the British, 

the French, and each other. The first successful peace agreement occurred with the Treaty 

of Easton in October 1758, and mostly involved representatives of the Haudenosaunee as 

well as Ökwe'öwé (Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”), Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), 

and Shawnee from the upper Ohio River. After the British agreed to return lands in 

Pennsylvania that had been taken in 1737 without consulting with the Grand Council at 

Onöñda'gega' (Onondaga), the Haudenosaunee renewed their formal alliance with the 

King of Great Britain. The Ökwe'öwé (Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”), Lunaapeew 

(Lenape, or Delaware), and Shawnee who balked at an alliance with the British in 1754 

and allied with the French during a British attack on Fort Duquesne in 1755, reaffirmed 

their earlier neutrality but made it clear that they favored a new British attack that would 

remove Fort Duquesne from their lands.2

The Western Lunaapeew (aka Western or Ohio Delaware) and Shawnee who 

lived along the middle Ohio River were also part of the treaty proceedings, but they 

deeply distrusted the British. The Lunaapeew leader Ackowanothio spoke for these 

communities at the treaty council, and railed against the “parcel of covetous Gentlemen 

 1 This translated phrase was repeatedly used by Teedyuscung, an orator and civil leader among the eastern 

Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), at the Treaty of Easton in 1758; Minutes of the Provincial Council of 

Pennsylvania, from the Organization to the Termination of the Proprietary Government, vol. VIII 

(Harrisburg: Theo. Fenn & Co., 1852), 47-49. 2 Amy C. Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians (Philadelphia: 

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 115-17; Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper 

Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724-1774 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 134-38.
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from Virginia, called the Ohio Company” as well as the “many ... abuses we suffered 

from our Brethren the English” for several years. Consequently, the treaty did not amount 

to an alliance with the British so much as a truce—and peace would have to be 

conditioned on the British forsaking any efforts to “take our Lands on the Ohio, or the 

West side of the Allegeny Hills.”3 While all Native leaders at the treaty council were in 

complete agreement on this last point, the western Lunaapeew and Shawnee communities 

along the Muskingum River were not represented. Their leaders still hoped the French 

could serve as a counterweight to the British, and they—along with their kin on the Ohio 

River—were still committed to future attacks against any would-be colonial settlements 

in present-day West Virginia or northeastern Kentucky.4

Many groups to the west remained connected to the French, at least until the fall 

of Quebec in November 1759, but then turned their attentions to diplomacy with the 

British. In August 1760, just a few weeks before the fall of Montreal and the French 

surrender of Canada, a large number of Wyandot, Odawa, Ojibwe, Bodéwadmi, Myaamia

(Miami), and Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) from the Detroit area and western Lake Erie as well 

as the Wabash River then travelled to Fort Pitt where they joined with Ökwe'öwé 

(Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”), Lunaapeew, Shawnee and others in a nine-day 

conference with the British. All told, the gathering of American Indians totaled more than 

1,000. No treaties were affirmed, but the British agreed to restore trade relations in the 

Ohio Country and the Great Lakes. As Colin Calloway notes, this was a matter of grave 

importance for all the Native representatives. Because war had “disrupted normal 

economic patterns, American Indian communities became increasingly dependent on 

British or French allies to provide them with food, clothing, and trade, which rendered 

the end of the war all the more catastrophic.” Along with trade, the British agent George 

Croghan also assured the various nations that their lands would be respected so long as 

they remained “faithful allies.”5

These matters were formally reiterated in the Articles of Capitulation signed by 

General Jeffrey Amherst and Governor General Marquis de Vaudreuil at Montreal in 

August 1760. Along with agreements to protect the rights, religious practices, and

property of Britain’s new French-speaking subjects, Amherst also agreed that “Indian 

allies [of New France] shall be maintained in the Lands they inhabit; if they choose to 

remain there; they shall not be disturbed on any pretense whatsoever, for having taken 

arms, and served his most Christian Majesty.”6 A few months later Croghan travelled to 

Detroit to represent the terms of the Capitulation, and received what he described as a 

positive reception. “The Indians in several speeches made me,” he wrote in his journal, 

“expressed their satisfaction at exchanging their Fathers the French for their Brethren the 

 3 Quotation from Samuel Hazard, ed., Pennsylvania Archives: Selected and Arranged from Original 

Documents, Vol. III (Philadelphia: Joseph Severns & Co, 1853), 548. Also see Richard White, The Middle 

Ground Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 1991), 251-54; Barr, “A Road for Warriors,” 10; and Richard Middleton, Pontiac's War: 

Its Causes, Course, and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2007), 8-10. 4 Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys, 110-13. 5 Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 337. 6 Quotation is from “Articles of Capitulation of Montreal, September 1760,” in Treaties with American 

Indians: An Encyclopedia of Rights, Conflicts, and Sovereignty, vol. 1, ed. Donald L. Fixico (Santa 

Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2008), 637.
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English, who they” viewed as a more reliable source of “necessaries.” The use of the 

word “Brethren” and its implication of a filial rather than a father-child relationship is 

telling, and it is the same term that Croghan and the British made sure to use when 

addressing Native leaders. With Onontio gone, it implied a trade relationship between the 

British and particular communities rather than a broad alliance that was centered on a 

common relationship with an imperial Father.7

Figure 4.1: Relative positions of Indigenous groups in the Ohio Valley and the 

Great Lakes, ca. 1760s: Because many villages and towns included people from different 

groups, specific sites do not necessarily correspond to distinct ethnic or cultural regions. In 

some cases whole villages relocated into the ancestral or historical areas of other groups, and 

sought permission to live in the area. Consequently, many of the village and town locations 

noted on this map do not directly correspond to the regional grouping in which they are 

situated. Map closely based on “Indian Villages and Tribal Distributions c. 1768” in Tanner,

ed., Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, 58-59.)

 7 Quotation is from “A Selection of George Croghan's Letters and Journals Relating to Tours into the 

Western Country—November 16, 1750—November, 1765,” in Early Western Travels, 1748-1846, vol. 1, 

ed. Ruben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1904), 104. At various times Croghan 

was a fur trader, a land speculator, a rival of George Washington in the Ohio country, a judge in Pittsburgh, 

a respected advisor among the Haudenosaunee, and the husband of Takarihoga (Catherine) who was the 

daughter of a Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) leader. In the 1750s and 1760s he served as Deputy Indian Agent 

under Sir William Johnson, the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern District. Also see 

Anderson, Crucible of War, 25-30 and passim; Parmenter, Pontiac’s War, 620-24; and Middleton, 

Pontiac’s War, 12-13.
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The councils at Easton and Detroit, as well as the meetings Croghan and other 

British officials held with American Indian communities at Michilimackinac, the western 

Ohio Valley, and the western Great Lakes, reflected a social and cultural geography that 

had developed over the previous generation and would persist into the 1780s. Not 

surprisingly the initial and long-term responses to these early British overtures 

corresponded to the location and composition of the various population centers of “the 

western nations,” as the British referred to the peoples of the Ohio Valley and the Great 

Lakes. For instance, the Bodéwadmi, Ojibwe, Odawa and Wyandot who lived around 

Detroit viewed the prospect of peaceful relations with the British in the context of their 

central position in the now ended alliance with Onontio. Though cautious, they intended 

to shape a new relationship along similar lines. The same was true of the Ökwe'öwé 

(Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”), Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) Shawnee groups that 

had moved into the Ohio Valley from the east and southeast. All had developed or 

strengthened preexisting ties with one another, and shared a resentment of French 

militarization as well as a distrust of British interests in their lands. This ambivalence was 

at the root of all these groups’ neutrality at the onset of the war, as well as the shifts that 

some communities made independently toward a French or British alliance. The end of 

the war and the possibility of peaceful relations with the British was a hopeful 

development, but none were willing to forfeit their lands to Long Hunters and squatters 

from east of the mountains. Lastly, groups from south and west of Lake Michigan hedged 

any commitments to British entreaties with the possibility of increased trade with the 

French and Spanish to the south.8

A War without France

Not long after the peoples of the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley spoke of peace 

with their new “brothers,” a series of false steps and unfulfilled expectations caused 

relations to sour. An early sign of trouble took formidable shape at the Forks of the Ohio, 

where the British transformed the ruins of Fort Duquesne into Fort Pitt between 1759 and 

1761. With French officials and troops having returned to France after the capitulation, 

the purpose of the new fort seemed to have just one purpose: to assert military authority 

over Native lands and communities. Despite British protests to the contrary, the 

construction, reconstruction, and reoccupation of another twelve forts by 1762 indicated 

otherwise. While most of these facilities also served as administrative centers and trade 

houses, the structures and the troops they housed were also intended to keep order 

between colonists and Native communities. But with so many of the latter building the 

new settlement of Pittsburgh, for instance, “order” looked like “invasion” to the 

 8 Helen Hornbeck Tanner, ed. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (Norman: Published for the Newberry 

Library by the University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 50-53; White, Middle Ground, 322-28; Sami 

Lakomäki, Gathering Together: The Shawnee People through Diaspora and Nationhood (New Haven: 

Yale University Press, 2014), 91-96; Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys, 121-30; Gregory Evans Dowd, A 

Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore; London: Johns 

Hopkins University Press, 1992), 136-43; Dowd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, & the 

British Empire (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 144-51; McConnell, A 

Country Between, 243-51.
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Ökwe'öwé (Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”) leader Gayusuta, who began advocating for 

war against the British as early as 1761.

9

The new and rebuilt forts were galling to people who were as disturbed by French 

forts in 1753 as were British colonial officials and representatives of the Ohio Company. 

At worst, they represented an instrument of future conquest; at best, they were 

administrative centers for settlers. If they functioned well as trade centers and places of 

diplomacy they might have been welcomed, but on this score they failed. The reasons are 

two-fold. Great Britain had defeated France in North America, but at great cost, and 

heavy war expenditures were still accruing from the conflicts in Europe and other parts of 

the globe. Consequently, victory in America meant new taxes for the colonies and a 

reduction in the kind of expensive gift giving that had always been central to Native 

diplomacy. Jeffrey Amherst, who served both as Major General of British forces and the 

Royal Governor of Virginia, found virtue in the diminished resources of the military’s 

Indian Department. Infuriated by the events at Fort William Henry, the General had a 

particular loathing for all Native peoples and had neither patience nor concern for their 

diplomatic protocols. To him, empires required strong governance—not negotiations and 

gifts. Moreover, as Colin Calloway notes, Amherst reasoned that “British traders entered 

Indian villages to turn a quick profit, not for exchange between allies. Dispensing with 

gifts would make trade more cost-effective.” Toward these ends, Amherst banned all gift 

giving and placed restrictions on what and how much American Indians could acquire in 

trade.10

While Amherst believed these measures would make Native communities more 

enterprising and resourceful, he was frequently warned that parsimony would prove more 

costly than diplomatic largesse. For American Indians, trade and diplomacy were not 

transactional; they were relational, and required constant renewal through reciprocation. 

Moreover, presents were expected as a kind of rent—or gift of appreciation—for residing 

on another’s lands. These were matters that Sir William Johnson, the Superintendent of 

Indian Affairs clearly understood, and he knew they were beyond Amherst’s experience 

or comprehension. Yet he sought to convey their necessity in terms that Amherst would 

understand. “A little generosity & moderation will tend more to the good of His 

Majesty’s Indian interest than the reverse, which would raise their jealousy much more 

than it is now.” Among other things, Johnson recommended that gunpowder be more 

readily available for trade, and at fair prices. Poor hunts partly stemmed from not having 

enough of this resource, which contributed to and compounded a year of hunger and 

sickness. All of this Johnson knew from traders’ reports and his own interactions with 

Native leaders, and he warned Amherst that “refusing them now will increase their 

jealousy and make them all very uneasy I am certain, this Sir, I think my duty to make 

known to you.” Amherst ignored the advice, and the continued restrictions confirmed 

what Johnson already knew and feared. Withholding gifts from people in need, building 

forts and settlements in their territory, and restricting their ability to trade for gunpowder, 

 9 Philp Ranlet, “The British, the Indians, and Smallpox: What Actually Happened at Fort Pitt in 1763?” 

Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 67, no. 3 (2000): 431-32. 10 Ibid.; William R. Nester, Haughty Conquerors: Amherst and the Great Indian Uprising of 1763

(Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2000), 9-10; Colin Calloway, Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the 

Transformation of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 64-71. Quotation from 

Calloway, Scratch of a Pen, 69.
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could lead to only one conclusion within Native communities: the British were preparing 

to conquer them and take their lands.11

These sentiments were widespread across the Ohio Valley and beyond, but they 

were felt most acutely by the communities around the Forks of the Ohio and the eastern 

end of Lake Erie—where the British had occupied or reconstructed a chain of four forts 

from Fort Presque Isle to Fort Pitt. The western Onöndowága: (Seneca), Ökwe'öwé 

(Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”), Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), and Shawnee who 

lived in this area had long familiarity with the British and were certainly the most hardpressed by new colonial settlements. Leaders in these communities were particularly 

alarmed by General Amherst’s departure from past relations with Native communities, 

and were convinced of an imminent British conquest. Not surprisingly, the seeds of a new 

war against the British came from the people in this region.12

Pan-Regional Alliance and the Master of Life

In early 1761, Guyasuta (who had escorted George Washington to Fort Duquesne 

some eight years earlier) and a western Onöndowága war leader named Tahaiadoris 

developed a complex strategy that would combine the alliances that had fought with the 

French to force the British back to the eastern side of the Alleghenies. Their plan would 

focus on four different areas and involved distinct groups. In the west, the Odawa, 

Bodéwadmi, Wyandot and Ojibwe would combine forces to take Fort Detroit, kill the 

garrison, and seize the large stores of trade goods and weapons. The Lunaapeew, 

Shawnee and Myaamia (Miami) who lived to the south and west of the Forks of the Ohio 

were to attack forts Ligonier and Bedford to cut off support to Fort Pitt. To the north, 

Ökwe'öwé and Onöndowága: (Seneca) warriors would capture forts Presque Isle, Le 

Boeuf, and Venango to seize more trade goods and weaponry as well as sever 

connections between Fort Pitt and Lake Erie. Lastly, the plan called for Onöndowága and 

other communities within the Haudenosaunee to ensure that no materials or 

communications moved through their territory from Fort Niagara, the Mohawk Valley, 

and Fort Oswego to Fort Pitt. This last element of the plan would work like a vast 

regional siege that would ultimately force the British to surrender forts Niagara and Pitt 

without a fight.13

This was a far-ranging plan intended to achieve the goals that most of the Native 

groups and alliances had fought for in the recently ended war. Its emphasis on concerted 

action in distant locales was novel, but it was made plausible by three factors: the broad 

and far ranging associations that had developed between the Native communities of the 

Ohio Valley and Great Lakes over the previous generation, the shared goals of most 

Native participants in the war, and the widespread resentment of colonial settlers and 

recent British policies. These would all acquire deeper resonance through the teachings of 

 11 Nester, Haughty Conquerors, 8-14; quotation from p. 10. 12 This section is closely based on the following sources: Dowd, War Under Heaven; David Dixon, Never 

Come to Peace Again: Pontiac's Uprising and the Fate of the British Empire in North America (Norman: 

University of Oklahoma Press, 2005); Middleton, Pontiac's War; McConnell, A Country Between; and 

Calloway, Scratch of a Pen. 13 This and the following paragraph are based on Middleton, Pontiac’s War; 34-37.
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Neolin, a Lunaapeew prophet who lived in the same cluster of multi-ethnic villages as 

Guyasuta.

Neolin came to prominence among the Lunaapeew in 1760, after a period of 

fasting and dreaming that opened him to a vision from the Master of Life (the supreme 

deity that had called all of creation into being). He was taught the reason for Native 

sufferings, and given a set of teachings that would revitalize the Lunaapeew. Loss of 

lands and generations of migration had caused the Lunaapeew and other Native groups to 

lose sight of the original gifts from the Creator. Moreover, their dependence on European 

goods had caused them to forget the lessons the First People learned about how to live in 

the world. The worst and most widespread example of these failings was manifested in 

Achgiuchsowagan (drunkenness). Instead of prayer, fasting, and ritual, people turned to 

alcohol or “spirits” to achieve an altered (but corrupted) state of consciousness that 

quickly turned to anger, violence, or an empty stupor. Because alcohol was acquired from 

Europeans, and purchased with the skins of animals that were killed for trade, it was a 

moral, cultural, and spiritual sin. The animals the creator had made to sustain his people 

were squandered in bouts of inebriation, and thus the land and its people were 

impoverished while the Europeans gained.14

Such failings could be prevented by a return to the “Good Road,” but they could 

have no lasting effect so long as white people continued to proliferate on lands that the 

Creator had made for American Indians. Indeed, their growing presence threatened to 

destroy Native peoples and the lands that sustained them, and their assortment of trade 

goods, liquor, and low morals were preventing the Lunaapeew from following the “Good 

Road” that ultimately led to a peaceful afterlife with their departed kin. To revitalize their 

communities and return to the “Good Road,” the Master of Life told Neolin that his 

people must renew older traditions, hunt for subsistence and not trade, and foreswear 

European tools, materials, and ways of living. A commitment to self-sufficiency was not 

enough, however. Native communities needed to follow prescribed prayers and rituals to 

align their actions with the rhythms and harmonies of Creation, and they needed to keep 

Europeans off of the lands that the Master of Life had prepared for them.15

Neolin’s message was not unlike those of Lunaapeew prophets in previous 

decades, and it shared many features with the teachings of a Shawnee prophet in the 

1730s. This is not to say that Neolin borrowed or repurposed messages that he may have 

heard previously. Rather, his vision and teachings shared in a common and often 

recurring process that anthropologists have termed “revitalization,” or “revitalization 

movements”—in which a community actively reinvigorates inherited traditions to guide 

 14 Alfred A. Cave, Prophets of the Great Spirit: Native American Revitalization Movements in Eastern 

North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 17-20, 23-28. Also see Middleton, Pontiac's 

War, 61-67; McConnell, A Country Between, 179, 220-22; Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys, 119-20. 15 Cave, Prophets of the Great Spirit, 37-44. The fullest written presentation of Neolin’s teachings comes 

from a speech by Obwandiyag (Pontiac) at Detroit, which was most likely transcribed and translated by 

Robert Navarre; see Journal of Pontiac’s Conspiracy, 1763, trans. R. Clyde Ford and ed. M. Agnes Burton 

(Detroit: Clarence Monroe Burton Under the Auspices of the Michigan Society of the Colonial Wars, 

1912). This publication includes a French and English version, respectively titled “Journal ou Dictation 

d’une Conspiration, Faite par les Sauvages contre les Anglais, et du Siège du Fort de Detroix par Quatre 

Nations Différentes le 7 Mai, 1763,” and “Journal of a Conspiracy, of the Indians against the English, and 

of the siege of Fort Detroit by Four Different Nations (beginning) May 7, 1763.”
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its adaptations during a period of profound change or challenge.16 The conditions of the 

present necessarily become embedded in these movements, and Neolin’s vision certainly 

reflected in the broad conditions of Native alliances, war with non-American Indians, and 

the chronic displacements of the Lunaapeew over several generations. His message, 

which was primarily directed to his fellow Lunaapeew and neighboring communities, 

would resonate far beyond the Forks of the Ohio because it corresponded to the 

experiences of so many other groups. Through the western regions, nearly every 

community shared the same travails described by Neolin, and many would find merit in 

the Master of Life’s admonishment that Native peoples should treat each other as 

relatives, foreswear war with each other, and instead “drive off” the British.17

There is no written evidence that suggests Guyasuta or Tahaiadoris were inspired 

by Neolin, but they contributed to spreading his message. In the spring and early summer 

of 1761 they circulated belts of red and black wampum calling for war, and traveled to 

communities across the Ohio Valley. They were especially interested in having a 

conference with the Odawa, Wyandot, Bedéwadmi, and Ojibwe around Detroit, but were 

politely rebuffed. Although the British occupation of Fort Detroit would prove to be the 

largest military force in the old Pays d’en Haut—it was too recent to be intrusive and still 

seemed to hold promise as an important trade center. Similar assessments occurred in the 

Ohio Valley, and responses to the entreaties of Guyasuta and Tahaiadoris were not as 

warm as they hoped. However, over the next year and half—as Amherst’s policies 

became aggravating and insulting—a number of communities began to reconsider. This 

change of view was also invigorated by messages from Louisiana that Onontio would 

return and drive the British back over the Alleghenies. War belts were again sent to the 

Detroit area in the summer of 1762, where a conference was held at the main Odawa 

village with representatives from the communities around Lake Superior, Green Bay, and 

the Wabash River. The formal decision of the council was to decline the war belt at this 

time, but to “be on their Guard and watch the motions of the English for the future.”18

Obwandiyag and the Detroit Council Fire

By the time the Lunaapeew war belt reached the Detroit River Odawa in April 

1763, much had changed. The Treaty of Paris was signed in February, and word soon 

 16 The Odawa elder Ki-je Omashkooz (Great Elk) offered a fine explanation of revitalization movements 

and their ongoing significance. “Sure. That’s exactly what I mean by ‘revitalization.’ Over time, our 

traditions have been jeopardized –both by other people and our own digressions –and we’ve lost sight of 

who we are as a community. It's our moral responsibility to correct this. We once were a very vital and 

cohesive community, but for a time we weren't. For many reasons, we didn't practice our traditional ways,

either because the government denied us the right or simply because we ourselves either forgot them or 

didn't care. But we have a lot more confidence now and are basically much stronger. We've been part of 

this place for a long, long time and neither we nor others should forget or ignore that.” Quotation in Melissa 

Pflüg, Ritual and Myth in Odawa Revitalization: Reclaiming a Sovereign Place (Norman: University of 

Oklahoma Press, 1998), 23. The literature on revitalization is extensive, but see Scott L. Pratt, “Native 

American Thought and the Origins of Pragmatism,” Ayaangwaamizin: The International Journal of 

Indigenous Philosophy 1 (Spring 1997), 55-80; and Duane Champagne, Social Change and Cultural 

Continuity Among Native Nations (Lanham: Altamira Press, 2007). 17 Cave, Prophets of the Great Spirit Native American Revitalization Movements in Eastern North America

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 28-68; Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys, 119-21. 18 Indian intelligence, Fot Pitt, January 30, 1763; quoted in Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 59.
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spread that the King had abandoned New France and—without consulting French or 

Native residents—had forfeited all territorial rights to the British. By this time Amherst’s 

policies had become more onerous, and hunger more rampant. Neolin’s teachings had 

also become more widespread, and found a particularly strong adherent in an Odawa war 

leader named Obwandiyag (Pontiac)—who likely met the prophet while enroute to Fort 

Duquesne and, later, Fort Pitt.19 At the 1763 council regarding the latest war belt, the 

leaders of the Bodéwadmi and Wyandot were receptive but Obwandiyag proved the most 

forceful. After reviewing the wide-ranging plans of Guyasuta and Tahaiadoris, he quoted 

Neolin’s vision to argue that the time had come to “drive off your lands those dogs 

clothed in red [the British] who will do you nothing but harm.” War, in short, was a 

necessary component of revitalization and Neolin’s vision gave a spiritual and 

ideological framework for aligning with others to defend, protect, and properly utilize a 

common homeland. The council ended with an agreement to attack Fort Detroit, and 

Obwandiyag sent messengers with black and red belts to his Ojibwe relatives at Saginaw 

Bay, the Odawa at Michilimackinac, and the Ojibwe on the Thames River.20

With support from the communities along the Detroit River, and positive 

responses to all of his war belts, Obwandiyag had sufficient numbers and support to take 

and hold Fort Detroit. Trusting that groups further east were well apprised of the plan 

drawn up by Guyasuta and Tahaiadoris, and not wanting to lose the element of surprise, 

Obwandiyag chose to move on the fort before sending messages about his decision to the 

eastern groups. Under the guise of requesting a meeting with the commanding officer, 

Obwandiyag planned to enter the fort on May 7 while his entourage secreted weapons 

inside the stockade. On a given signal, the garrison would be attacked and captured, and 

the trade stores looted. The French habitants were also advised to stay away from the fort 

that day, but this neighborly consideration may have undermined the plan. On the night 

of May 6 attack, however, Major Gladwin, the commanding officer, was warned of the 

scheme. The following morning Obwandiyag found the garrison under arms, his 

entourage was detained at the gate, and—though he and Gladwin pretended to engage in 

a cordial encounter—the first stage of the attack plan was foiled. With the element of 

surprise gone and a frontal assault out of the question, Obwandiyag chose to establish 

what he hoped would be a short-lived siege. As word of the siege went out, the plans of 

Guyasuta and Tahaiadoris quickly unfolded across the Ohio Valley. Within weeks, 

various combinations of Bodéwadmi, Myaamia, Wyandot, and Odawa took forts 

Sandusky, St. Joseph, and Miami—in two instances employing the same ruse that 

Obwandiyag intended to use at Detroit. On June 2, a force of Kiikaapoi, Mascouten and 

Waayaahtanwa (Wea) took Fort Ouiatenon (near present-day Lafayette, Indiana), while 

Ojibwe at Michilimackinac took the British fort there.21

 19 Obwandiyag, which is roughly pronounced as Bwon-tee-ak, refers to the blade or fluke that holds a 

canoe’s anchor in place.

20 Dowd, War Under Heaven, 87-92; Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 66-70. Quotation is from Journal of 

Pontiac’s Conspiracy, 81. 21 Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 71-76. All of the British forts taken by Indigenous warriors in 1763 originally 

served as French trading posts and military installations. Aside from the brief siege of Fort Ouiatenon, 

which ended without single shot being fired, the other engagements involved significant British casualties 

who gave way to overwhelming force.
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By the middle of June, Forts Le Boeuf, Venango, and Presque Isle all fell to 

forces that included various combinations of Onöndowága: (Seneca), Ökwe'öwé (SenecaCayuga; aka, “Mingo”), Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), Shawnee, Odawa, Ojibwe, 

and Wyandot. Only forts Detroit, Niagara, and Pitt remained in British hands, and all 

were under siege. If the planned ruse of Obwandiyag had worked, the entire west would 

have been free of the British and more warriors made available for the two sieges in the 

east. Yet even with that glitch, the original plans for the war had unfolded almost 

perfectly. Moreover, Native peoples had demonstrated to themselves that—even without 

French support—they could come together in an alliance and defeat the British military. 

And with forts destroyed and garrisons under siege, encroaching settlements could be 

attacked, their residents killed or captured to atone for Native deaths, and the fleeing 

survivors sent back to where they had come from.22

In late July, during a lull in the siege of Fort Pitt, Lunaapeew leaders Shingas and 

Agassqua (Turtle’s Heart) conveyed this confidence in a parley with the commanding 

officer Captain Ecuyer. “You yourselves are the cause of this [war]. You marched your 

armies into our country, and built forts here, though we told you, again and again, that we 

wished you to remove. My Brothers, this land is ours, and not yours.... If you leave this 

place immediately, and go home to your wives and children, no harm will come of it; but 

if you stay, you must blame yourselves alone for what may happen. Therefore we desire 

you to remove.”23 Colonel Henry Bouquet understood the reasons for Native confidence. 

British losses that summer were staggering; by fall they numbered as many as 400 

soldiers killed with many more wounded, and at least 2,000 civilians killed or captured. 

Summarizing the events of the year, he noted that the loss of so many forts and 

“continual ravages of the enemy, struck all America with consternation, and depopulated 

a great part of our frontiers .... [T]hose posts, suddenly wrested from us, which had been 

the great object of the late war, and one of the principal advantages acquired in the peace. 

Only the forts of Niagara, the Detroit, and Pitt remained in our hands, of all that had been 

purchased with so much blood and treasure.”24

The sense of resignation in Bouquet’s summary was really a prelude to fury. In 

this sentiment, as in much else, he was of one mind with General Amherst—who was 

apoplectic. “Immediate and total vengeance [must be taken] upon all Indians in every 

encounter,” Amherst steamed to a subordinate on July 3, “and that no mercy whatever be 

shown to these perfidious barbarians. They must be destroyed utterly as an example for 

any others who might hope to follow the pattern they have set.”25 With no good news on 

the horizon, and with American Indians in close proximity to the besieged forts, Amherst 

wrote Bouquet asking “could it not be contrived to send the small pox among those 

disaffected tribes of Indians? We must ... use every stratagem in our power to reduce 

them.” Bouquet agreed to “try to inoculate the bastards with some blankets” from a 

 22 McConnell, A Country Between, 180-87; Dowd, War Under Heaven, 116-19; Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 

78-83 23 Francis Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War After the Conquest of Canada, Vol. II 

(Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1896, 23-24. 24 Historical Account of Bouquet’s Expedition Against the Ohio Indians in 1764 (Cincinnati: The Robert 

Clarke Company, 1907), 6.

25 Amherst and Bouquet quoted in Nester, Haughty Conquerors, 114.
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smallpox ward, but Captain Ecuyer had already implemented the idea in late June when 

Shingas and Agassqua first came to the fort and offered to let the garrison depart.26

“Out of our regard to them,” one of Ecuyer’s officers noted in his journal for June 

24, “we gave them two Blankets and a Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital.”27

Whether this action created an epidemic is not clear, and it is worth noting that the “gift” 

did not sicken Shingas or Agassqua. Yet it is likely they gave the items to others who 

desired them, and perhaps unwittingly spread the disease. While scholars have long 

debated the plausibility of such a means of transmission, and most scientific evidence 

suggests it is very unlikely, a smallpox epidemic did spread through Native communities 

in the summer of 1763—including those that had besieged Fort Pitt. In either case, the 

episode is meaningful for the intentions it reveals and its affinity with actions that are 

now deemed “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.” Under current international 

laws, at least, the British might be charged with “intent to commit mass murder.”28

Disease and a shortage of supplies weakened Native war efforts in the fall, while 

ongoing sieges prevented people from returning to their villages to harvest, hunt, and put 

up winter stores. Through the winter the war entered stalemate, and by spring the ability 

to wage war had diminished greatly. The alliance, which came together through the 

agreements of different communities, began to unravel when some contemplated a 

separate peace. As early as February, William Johnson began preliminary peace talks 

with the Chenussio Onöndowága (Western Seneca) at Johnson Hall on his large estate in 

Johnstown, New York. By summer, some Shawnee communities withdrew from the war 

while other groups that would have been open to peace councils were forced to defend 

against two British military expeditions across the Ohio Valley. Further south and east, 

however, Shawnee and Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) raids continued against 

settlements south and east of the Ohio River. By autumn, however, the conflict known as 

Pontiac’s Rebellion was largely over, and the following summer most of the groups in the 

Ohio Valley sent representatives to a large peace conference at Johnson Hall. Only the 

Illinois country, where Obwandiyag had retreated and still found some support, remained 

outside the purview of British diplomacy. In the summer of 1766, however, Obwandiyag 

travelled to Johnson Hall and formally surrendered. The war without France was over.29

Proclamations and Boundaries

The defeat of the Native alliance could be ascribed to many things, from disease 

and the fortunes of war to the challenges of holding together a diverse alliance. Yet it also 

stemmed from a change in British military policy that came with the formal end of the 

Seven Years’ War in 1763. In Parliament and at Whitehall, Amherst’s policies were 

widely viewed as the cause of the war and he was recalled to London in August 1763. As 

 26 Ibid., 112. 27 Albert T. Volwiler, “William Trent's Journal at Fort Pitt, 1763,” The Mississippi Valley Historical 

Review 11, no. 3 (1924), 400. 28 Ranlet, “The British, the Indians, and Smallpox,” 427-41; Elizabeth A. Fenn, “Biological Warfare in 

Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst,” Journal of American History 86, no. 4 

(2000): 1552-1580; Calloway, Scratch of a Pen, 73; Nester, Haughty Conquerors, 112. On international 

law, see M. Cherif Bassiouni, Crimes Against Humanity: Historical Evolution and Contemporary 

Application (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1-7. 29 Nester, Haughty Conquerors, 239-266; Dowd, War Under Heaven, 151-158, 162-65, 217-219, 227-232.
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one contemporary critic put it, Amherst initiated “a war conducted by a spirit of murder 

rather than a brave and generous offense.”30 The change of command came with a new 

directive to use active diplomacy in concert with martial force to bring a successful end 

to the conflict. While this policy proved effective, the Crown sought to remove “all just 

Cause of Discontent, and Uneasiness” among Native groups to the west of the 

Appalachian Mountains—and thus prevent future conflict to the west of the Appalachian 

Divide. Toward these ends, a Royal Proclamation established a boundary between 

colonial settlements to the east of the mountains and Native lands to the west. To the west 

of the line all private “Purchases or Settlements” of lands were prohibited and recent 

sales were voided; no surveys of new land patents could be granted by any Colonial 

authority; only official agents of the Crown could acquire land through formal treaties 

with recognized Native leaders; and only licensed traders would be permitted to reside 

and operate within “said Territory.”31

These policies represented significant changes and, like a bright red line on a 

map, they marked a sharp divide between London’s desire to avoid expensive wars and 

organize its vast new domain in North America against the interests of colonial elites who 

sought to control the commerce and lands of these new regions as well as the desires of 

poorer colonists to gain a level of economic and social independence through the 

acquisition of land. The Proclamation Line was a response to the long-standing Native 

demand that the British stay on the east side of the Alleghenies. The abiding complaint 

against the British related to their stingy and overbearing policies was also addressed in 

the Plan for the Future Management of Indian Affairs (1764)—which restored gift giving, 

provided guidelines for a regulated trade, and an emphasis on regular diplomacy. As the 

Lords of Trade noted in a letter to Sir William Johnson, the Plan had “for its object the 

regulation of Indian Affairs both commercial and political throughout all North America, 

upon one general system, under the direction of Officers appointed by the Crown.” A key 

goal of this policy was to thwart “all local interfering of particular Provinces, which have 

been one great cause of the distracted state of Indian Affairs in general.”32

 30 “William Smith to Thomas Gage, November 23, 1763,” in John Richard Alden, General Gage in 

America: Being Principally a History of His Role in the American Revolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana 

State University Press, 1948), 89-90; quoted in Nester, Haughty Conquerors, 178. 31 “The Royal Proclamation—October 7, 1763,” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and 

Diplomacy <http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/proc1763.asp> (accessed 9 November 2015). 32 Lords of Trade to Sir William Johnson, July 10, 1764, in Documents Relative to the Colonial History of 

the State of New-York: Procured in Holland, England, and France by John Romeyn Brodhead, Esq. Vol. 7, 

ed. E. B. O'Callaghan (Albany: Weed, Parsons, 1856), 634-35.
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Figure 4.2: “Lands Reserved for the Indians” and the Proclamation Line. The 

parameters of the Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763 are clearly delineated in this map of 

the British Colonies in North America. Colonial populations, commerce, and civil governance 

were limited to a region extending from East Florida in the south to Quebec in the north—with 

the crest of the Appalachian Mountains and the St. Lawrence River serving as a general 

western boundary. The expanse between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River, and 

south of Rupert’s Land (the region chartered to the Hudson’s Bay Company) was officially 

designated “Lands Reserved for the Indians.” All subsequent dealings with Indigenous 

communities were deemed the exclusive purview of royal officials. Cantonment of His 

Majesty’s forces in N. America according to the disposition now made & to be compleated as 

soon as practicable taken from the general distribution dated at New York 29th March 1766. 

Source: Library of Congress. (Image has been enhanced to better illustrate boundaries.)

Imperial Reforms

The peace settlements and policy adjustments of the mid 1760s corresponded to 

earlier Native demands that Great Britain not indulge the claims of the Haudenosaunee 

over western lands, treat directly with the residents of the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes, 

and restrict colonial movements and ventures into the region. Yet the Royal Proclamation 

Line and the Plan for the Future Management of Indian Affairs was rooted in a unilateral 

sovereignty that was not imagined by any Native leaders. As noted in the Royal 

Proclamation of 1763, the King “declare[d] it to be our royal will and pleasure, for the 
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present as aforesaid, to reserve under our sovereignty, protection, and dominion, for the 

use of the said Indians, all the lands and territories” west of the line.33 These were matters 

of fine legal distinctions that could not have translated well into Native languages. Over 

the next few years, however, they did play out in adjustments to the Proclamation Line 

and the Plan for Management that troubled Native communities across the Ohio Valley 

and around Lake Ontario.

For a large number of colonists, however, the Proclamation and the Plan were 

immediately viewed as a betrayal. The French and Indian War was so named for a very 

simple reason: in British America, colonists fought in militias, died or were wounded, 

lost property, were captured, supplied troops, and suffered shortages in an effort to defeat 

the “Catholic French” and the “heathen Indian.”34 By the same token, the fruits of victory 

were easily defined as the removal of the French from North America and the taking of 

Native lands. Efforts to exercise the second prerogative led in part to Pontiac’s Rebellion 

against the British colonial order, and thus victory in that second conflict should have 

resulted in new lands for speculators and settlers as well as new opportunities for traders. 

Instead, the King was protecting one enemy (the Indians), acting like another (King Louis 

XV), and denying the spoils of war to his own subjects—who suffered the war’s many 

hardships. These offenses were further compounded by the new tariffs, trade regulations, 

and taxes that were put in place to pay off the massive debts incurred during the Seven 

Years’ War. These new taxes, along with an increased administrative bureaucracy to 

collect the taxes and regulate commerce, were felt throughout the colonies but especially 

among consumers and merchants along the eastern seaboard as well as planters in the 

South. Whether or not these taxes were just and necessary, or that additional regulations 

may have been needed in a disordered economy, they were widely resented as burdens 

placed on those who won a war but gained no victory.

35

Visions of the West on the Road to Revolution

While merchants and privateers along the eastern seaboard may have lumped the 

economic policies of the King’s Privy Council with the Proclamation and the Plan, their 

concerns and protests were largely restricted to matters of taxation, regulation, and 

representation. The inverse was true in the west, where a mostly subsistence-based 

economy was barely touched by any changes in economic regulations and few if any 

people felt colonial legislatures were any more representative than the Parliament in 

London. Instead, land policy was an intensely local concern that fostered profound 

resentment against the Crown. Nearly all of the civilian deaths, captivities, and property 

damages between 1754 and 1763 had occurred among these populations, and the desire 

for retribution was acute and widespread. So too was the sense that the King meant to 

cheat them out of their chance to acquire land. Like the colonists to the east who 

protested Crown policies in the 1760s and early 1770s with petitions, protests, vandalism, 

and acts of civil disobedience, squatters and settlers on the frontier actively thwarted 

royal authority by clearing forests, planting crops, building cabins, and conducting long 

 33 “The Royal Proclamation—October 7, 1763.” 34 These statements are ubiquitous in the historical record, but see Moses Coit Tyler, The Literary History 

of the American Revolution, 1763-1783 (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1897), I: 438. 35 William R. Nester, The First Global War: Britain, France, and the Fate of North America, 1756–1775

(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 243-48.
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hunts on the west side of the Proclamation Line. Within a few years tens of thousands of 

western colonists pushed beyond the Appalachians to take up new lands or reclaim those 

they had lost in the war. By the early 1770s this growing westward movement, fueled by 

resentment of the Crown and a vengeful hatred for Native adversaries, would contribute 

to a growing unrest across the colonies that pushed toward war and revolution.36

One powerful interest in the colonies shared the resentments of backwoods 

communities for the Crown, as well as the political and economic grievances that 

animated protests in Boston and New York. This was the planter class of Virginia, which 

included such luminaries as Washington, Jefferson and Madison. These men and their 

associates would have an outsized role in the American Revolution and dominated 

national politics until the 1820s, while their long-standing interests in western lands 

would persist through the War of 1812 and the Indian Removal period of the 1830s. Their 

concerns about the Proclamation Line and the Plan had little to do with moving west or 

vengeance, or even politics. Rather, they were intent on securing and augmenting their 

prewar investments in the Ohio Company and similar enterprises. To them, the 

Proclamation and Royal Plan amounted to what, in modern jurisprudence, would be 

termed an illegal taking with lost opportunity costs. In other words, the Crown took away 

their investments and any future returns they might bring. For George Washington and 

other partners in the Ohio Company, the most prudent response was to simply proceed as 

if nothing had changed—with the expectation that more surveys and preemptive deeds 

would eventually convince Whitehall to recognize their claims. In September of 1767 he 

proposed a partnership with William Crawford, who served with Washington during the 

Seven Years’ War, that would “secure [through preemptive claims] some of the most 

valuable Lands in the King’s part ... notwithstanding the Proclamation that restrains it at 

present and prohibits the Settling of them at all for I can never look upon that 

Proclamation in any other light (but this I say between ourselves) than as a temporary 

expedient to quiet the Minds of the Indians and must fall of course in a few years.”37

Washington was right, as was his sense of urgency that he and his associates 

needed to exploit “the present opportunity of hunting out good Lands & in some Measure 

Marking & distinguishing them for their own (in order to keep others from settling them) 

[or they] “will never regain it.” In response to hard lobbying from land speculators in the 

colonies and Great Britain, Sir William Johnson negotiated a huge cession of land from 

the Haudenosaunee in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768). The treaty moved the 

Proclamation line westward to encompass part of central New York, much of western 

Pennsylvania, and almost all of present-day West Virginia and Kentucky. The treaty 

council did not include any of the native groups that resided in the area, and thus reneged 

on the treaties signed at Johnson Hall in 1763. The amount of lands also exceeded the 

desires of the home office in London, but the agreement—which encompassed the land 

 36 Gregory H. Nobles, “Breaking into the Backcountry: New Approaches to the Early American Frontier,” 

William and Mary Quarterly 46:3 (October 1989): 641-70; Stephen Aron, “Daniel Boone and the Struggle 

for Independence on the Revolutionary Frontier,” in Ian Steele and Nancy Rhoden, eds., The Human 

Tradition in the American Revolution (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 139-57. 37 George Washington to William Crawford, September 21, 1767, Account Book 2; George Washington 

Papers at the Library of Congress, 1741-1799: Series 5 Financial Papers <http://memory.loc.gov/cgibin/query/r?ammem/mgw:@field(DOCID+@lit(gw020319))> (accessed 16 October 2015).
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claims that Washington had made in the 1750s and worked to secure in 1767, as well as a 

number of holdings that Johnson claimed—was authorized nonetheless.38

As the coincident interests of Johnson and Washington suggest, colonial elites and 

British officials could have similar ideas about the disposition of western lands. Yet there 

were some distinctions. For instance, royal officials in North America worried more than 

colonial elites about the possibility of another expensive war with American Indians, and 

wanted to sustain the basic principles of the Proclamation and the Royal Plan. Some 

Members of Parliament, along with officials at Whitehall, believed that American Indians 

had been wronged by the likes of General Amherst and were owed a fair degree of 

support and protection from the government against the colonists. Yet all held a common 

desire that the eventual settlement of western lands would occur through the application 

of careful surveys and fair administration of property claims to ensure orderly settlement 

and a healthy market in land sales. Consequently, they shared a particular disdain for 

backwoods squatters and settlers, who they considered a lazy and disorderly “parcel of 

banditti who will bid defiance to all authority.” These were the people who violated 

property laws, tore up surveyors’ stakes, caused wars, and thwarted peace. The feelings 

were more than mutual, and backwoods communities had their own sense of propriety 

and social order that disdained the privileges of birth and political connections. More 

importantly, they had a common vision of fighting for and securing a “good poor man’s 

country” along the western edges of colonial America. In a very real sense this vision of 

America was their declaration of independence, and a key ingredient of the American 

Revolution. 39

Credit for the “first shot” of the Revolutionary War is generally given to a 

militiaman at the Battle of Lexington in April 1775, but it may have come twelve months 

earlier when a mixed group of surveyors, squatters, and land agents pushed across the 

Ohio River and engaged in a brief battle with a group of Shawnee. This was followed a 

few days later with a tragic event known as the Yellow Creek Massacre, in which twentyone Virginians killed a group of Ökwe'öwé (Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”) who had 

stopped at a tavern on the west side of the Ohio River about forty miles from Fort Pitt. 

Six of the seven were killed, mutilated, and scalped, including a pregnant woman who 

was disemboweled and her unborn son scalped. The only survivor was a two-year old 

girl—the daughter of the pregnant woman—who was ultimately placed in the care of her 

white father. Before the Virginians departed they encountered two canoes of warriors 

coming across the river, and killed most of those in the forward canoe with a 

concentrated fusillade.40

 38 Quote from ibid. Also see William J. Campbell, Speculators in Empire: Iroquoia and the 1768 Treaty of 

Fort Stanwix (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 139-66. 39 Disparaging quotations about backcountry communities are from George Washington and various 

colonial and British officials, as cited in James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and 

the Rise of the Angloworld (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 146. The phrase “good poor man’s 

country” comes from Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone 

to Henry Clay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 3. Also see Eric Hinderaker and Peter C. 

Mancall, At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins 

University Press, 2003), 125-60; and Nobles, “Breaking the Backcountry,” 659-62. 40 Amy C. Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians (Philadelphia: 

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 144-45.
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A number of those killed at the tavern were relatives of Tocanioadorogon (aka 

Logan) who was a well-known advocate of peaceful relations between Native 

communities along the upper Ohio River and colonial Americans. The brutal killings at 

Yellow Creek inspired an alliance of Ökwe'öwé, Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), and 

Shawnee to attack settlements in Virginia as well as present-day Kentucky and West 

Virginia—which the colonists viewed as open territory in accordance with the Treaty of 

Fort Stanwix. In response, John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore and the royal governor of 

Virginia, authorized a large military campaign into the backcountry. Known as “Lord 

Dunmore’s War” (1774), the 2,000 militiamen who answered the call to arms were not 

fighting for the governor or even the colony. As Eric Hinderacker and Peter Mancall 

write, these men “had waited a decade in mounting frustration and anger while the king 

neglected their needs” in favor of land speculators and American Indians. This war was 

their rebellion.41

The brief war only lasted until late October, but it led to the Treaty of Camp 

Charlotte (1774) in which the Shawnee towns on the lower Scioto River acknowledged 

the Ohio River as the boundary between what the Crown termed the “Indian Reserve” 

and the areas claimed by Virginia in present-day West Virginia and Kentucky. While this 

new treaty seemed to resolve colonial concerns about a specific western boundary, 

Parliament’s almost simultaneous passage of the Quebec Act seemed to upend all 

expectations for lands to the north. Regarded as one of the four Intolerable Acts that so 

offended defiant colonists, the Quebec Act created a new administrative body for the 

management of the entire area from the Ohio River to the Mississippi, and northeastward 

across the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence River Basin. Fearful colonists along the 

eastern seaboard viewed this as a blueprint for removing and replacing colonial 

assemblies with royal administrators, while land speculators and would-be settlers were 

angered by the voiding of the western land claims embedded in colonial charters and their 

transfer to the vast Province of Quebec. A final insult came with the recognition of 

French civil law and the authority of the Catholic Church. Just as Lord Dunmore’s War 

seemed a belated confirmation of the victory that came with the French and Indian War, 

the Quebec Act pushed it all away. Worse still, none of this abated the continuing raids 

from Shawnee communities that were not party to the Treaty of Camp Charlotte and—

along with Tsalagihi (Cherokee) and Mvskoke (Muscogee or Creek) from the south--

continued to raid settlements located west of the Appalachians (in present-day Kentucky 

and West Virginia). To colonists in Virginia it seemed as if the world was turned upside 

down and the time had come for an armed insurrection against what Thomas Jefferson 

and many others called the twin threats of British “tyranny” and Native “treachery.”42

 41 White, Middle Ground, 358-364; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 203-23; Lakomäki, 

Gathering Together, 100-01; Hinderaker and Mancall, At the Edge of Empire, 125-60, quotation is from p. 

160.

42 Encyclopædia Britannica Online, “Quebec Act” <http://www.britannica.com/event/Quebec-Act> 

accessed November 23, 2015, Nester, The First Global War, 252-53; Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: 

Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 2007), 78-

80; Peter S. Onuf, “‘We shall all be Americans’: Thomas Jefferson and the Indians,” Indiana Magazine of 

History, 95, Issue 2 (1999): 103-14. The other three Intolerable Acts were the Boston Port Act, the 

Massachusetts Government Act, and the Administration of Justice Act.
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Revolution in the West

The Declaration of Independence is best known for the Preamble with its 

references to liberty, natural rights, and self-evident truths, but most of the document is 

devoted to cataloging the King’s “repeated injuries and usurpations” that gave rise to the 

call for independence. Most of the abuses treat with matters relating to taxation and trade 

restrictions, undermining colonial assemblies and legal systems, preparing for war against 

the colonies, and thwarting the concerns of specific colonies. Two items in the list of 

injuries do not fit this pattern, however, and both relate directly to American Indians and 

the disposition of western lands. One takes on the Quebec Act “For abolishing the free 

System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province [Quebec], establishing therein an 

Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example 

and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies.” The 

second, which is also the final item in the catalog of abuses, addresses American Indian 

wars: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring 

on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of 

warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Both of 

these matters were of particular interest to Jefferson and his fellow Virginians, but they 

deeply resonated with all colonists who looked westward to secure their futures.43

As a sustained military conflict, the Revolutionary War began in the summer of 

1776 with engagements in southeastern New York and northern New Jersey. From the 

vantage point of American Indians in the Ohio Valley and around western Lake Erie, the 

conflict seemed like a civil war that did not directly concern them. Like the outbreak of 

the Seven Years’ War, this new conflict came with the possibility that both sides might 

be weaker by the time they sued for peace—and thus Indigenous communities might gain 

simply by maintaining a distant neutrality. Within a year, however, the war had pushed 

into the territory of the Haudenosaunee and both the British and the Americans began 

actively working for the support of Native communities. These solicitations and the 

prolonged campaign in northern New York fractured the Haudenosaunee, with Tuscarora, 

Onyota’ake (Oneida) and some Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) assisting American forces and 

an alliance of Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk), Onoda’gega (Onondaga), Guyohkohnyo

(Cayuga) and Onöndowága: (Seneca) declaring for the British. Three years later, General 

Washington ordered a scorched earth campaign on the Kanien’kehaka, Onoda'gega, 

Guyohkohnyo, and Onöndowága villages in the Finger Lakes region, which led to mass 

starvation the following winter and effectively destroyed the Haudenosaunee as a potent 

diplomatic or military force.44

 43 Declaration of Independence <http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html> 

(accessed 14 October 2015). The phrase “merciless Indian Savages” is retained in this quotation because it 

is a central component of a foundational document of U.S. history, and because it encapsulates the tenor 

and methods of nation building that would develop over the next century. The clause about “domestic 

insurrections” is part of two complaints in the penultimate draft of the Declaration about Loyalist resistance 

efforts in Virginia and slave insurrections in the southern colonies. In this context, however, it could also 

relate to Native groups that acted against treaties they had not participated in. See Pauline Maier, American

Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 146. 44 Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American 

Revolution (New York: Vintage, 2007), 96-105.
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In the southern Ohio Valley, Chalahgawtha (Chillicothe) Shawnee and Ökwe'öwé 

(Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”) from villages along the Scioto River continued to raid 

into Kentucky through 1776 and into 1777. These attacks were a continuation of previous 

conflicts and were entirely independent of any concerns about the new war to the east. 

While British officials, along with the Haudenosaunee, had previously worked to stop 

these raids with the Treaty of Camp Charlotte, the onset of the Revolutionary War 

changed their views. With armies engaged in northern New York, the British sought to 

open a southern front by supporting war parties from western Lake Erie to raid into

Kentucky, West Virginia and western Pennsylvania. Local militias organized for defense 

and retaliation but, as Virginia Governor Patrick feared, the militiamen did not or could 

not distinguish between neutral and warring groups. This proved the case in November 

1777 when a militiaman killed the Mekoche Shawnee leader Colesquo (Cornstalk), his 

son, and two others who had come to Fort Randolph to foster a truce. A similar tragedy 

occurred with the Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) leader Koquethagechton (White

Eyes), who was a strong ally of the Americans until his death in 1778. By eliminating 

advocates for neutrality, particularly ones of stature, such deaths and killings only created 

more advocates for war.45

Pressed by colonial militias from the south and east, and an array of Native allies 

of the British from the north and west, maintaining neutrality in the southern Ohio Valley 

during the Revolutionary War was increasingly difficult—and mostly limited to a few 

Christianized Lunaapeew towns. However, alliance with the British was not simply a 

default position. The days of Jeffrey Amherst were long gone, and the British had taken 

on many of the responsibilities of Onontio—particularly among the groups around 

Detroit, the Sandusky River, and the western Great Lakes. British officials well 

understood the importance of reciprocity, and had professed and demonstrated a 

willingness to restrain colonists from moving on to Native lands. British traders were a 

better and more reliable source of goods than the unlicensed traders along the colonial 

frontiers—and once war had broken out the likelihood of acquiring trade goods, let alone 

powder and shot, from a colonial post was a near impossibility. More often than not, the 

British tended to support the prosecution of conflicts that corresponded to long-standing 

Native concerns rather than requesting support for large campaigns against distant 

military installations.46

With the British and their closest allies around western Lake Erie, and the 

Virginia militia to the south and west, the region in between became a “Dark and Bloody 

Ground.” While this term was erroneously thought to be a translation of what “the 

Indians [called] the fertile region, now called Kentucke,” it well applied to the Blue Grass 

region and much of the lower Ohio Valley during the Revolutionary War and after.47 By 

the mid 1770s, Shawnee had been raiding colonial encampments and settlements south of 

 45 Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 110-111; Patrick Henry, “A Proclamation,” Virginia Gazette, April 3, 

1778, p. 1. <http://research.history.org/DigitalLibrary/vagazettes/VGSinglePage.cfm?IssueIDNo=78.P.05> (accessed 23 November 2015); Roger M. Carpenter, 

“Times Are Altered with Us”: American Indians from First Contact to the New Republic (Hoboken: John 

Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2015), 250-51. White, Middle Ground, 396-400. 46 Calloway, 30-58, 158-81, 47 John Filson, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (Wilmington: James Adams, 

1784), 7. The meaning and origin of the word Kentucky is not known.
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the Ohio for at least a decade, and bands of Long Knives often retaliated in kind. These 

raids and counter-raids increased in the wake of the Fort Stanwix Treaty, but they became 

more frequent and deadly in the context of the Revolutionary War. For Americans in 

general, fighting Indians was an assertion of sovereignty that rejected British policy in the 

west and applied the Treaty of Fort Stanwix to all Native communities. For Virginians in 

particular, the war was either about land claims and speculation, or making a “good poor 

man’s country,” but in every case it was about destroying destroying and erasing the 

Native presence. For the Shawnee, this was an existential war. As Colesquo (Cornstalk) 

conveyed in a translated statement to the Continental Congress in 1776, the Shawnee 

were fighting for “our Lands, ... our heart”— their place of creation near the Ohio River, 

to which they had returned, and the lands that made them who they were. With “white 

people ... seated on our Lands ... we are jealous that you still intend to make larger 

strides .... This is what sits heavy on our Hearts and the Hearts of all Nations, and it is 

impossible for us to think as we ought whilst we are thus oppressed.” Hokoleskwa would 

subsequently press for neutrality among the Mekoche Shawnee, but his murder the next 

year unleashed pent up frustrations and it became “impossible” for his people “to think” 

of anything but war.48

Among adversaries who neither understood nor valued the claims of the other, but 

who both viewed the same landscape as an intrinsic expression of their very different 

needs and world views, small conflicts quickly spiraled into ever increasing cycles of 

violence. In the process, the nature of the violence inflicted by each side came to 

resemble the other even though the cultural contexts and motives were different. For 

instance, taking scalps was prevalent among Shawnee and Long Knives (both as proof of 

a battle kill and an intimate violation of the enemy’s body), as were indiscriminate 

attacks on families and communities. Since the Shawnee viewed the land as their 

“Heart,” all colonists west of the mountains were invaders and all could be construed as 

enemies in the context of war. For Long Knives raiding Native villages to the north of the 

Ohio River, the residents were obstacles to achieving the exclusively “American rights ... 

to life, liberty and property.” When attributed to a race of humanity rather than a specific 

group or village, these latter sentiments could result in indiscriminate massacres.49

In diplomatic or otherwise peaceful meetings with each other, American Indian 

leaders and American officials bemoaned the amount of violence and destruction that 

occurred in the borderlands of the Ohio River and elsewhere. By way of explanation, they 

blamed “foolish young men” whose ardor and lack of discipline tended toward violent 

excess. While this implied a diminished authority on the part of the speakers, these 

statements often served as excuses and apologies rather than actual analyses. In truth, 

young warriors and Long Knives often followed leaders with proven experience in battle. 

The violence that ensued certainly reflected ardor, inexperience, and even “bloodlust,” 

 48 Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native 

American Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 166. 49 Matthew A. Williamston et al, “Interpersonal Violence Between 18th Century Native Americans and 

Europeans in Ohio,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 122 (2003):113–22; Sarah E. Miller, 

“'Foolish Young Men' and the Contested Ohio Country, 1783-1795,” in Contested Territories, 34-36.

Quotation is from the “Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress, October 14, 1774,” The 

Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy

<http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/resolves.asp> (accessed 3 November 2015).
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107

but the strategic directives of the British and the Americans during the war—and the 

amount of supplies and arms that poured into the Ohio Valley—fomented the most 

destructive cycles of violence.50

Figure 4.3: The American Revolutionary War in the Ohio Valley. Map shows 

general locations of American Indian villages and colonists primarily from Virginia. The 

names of specific Indigenous groups correspond to congregations of multiple village sites, 

whild the Kentuckian/Virginian designation corresponds to clusters of homesites 

throughout northern Kentucky. Sites of conflict to the south and east of the Ohio River 

stem from raids by American Indian warriors against colonial settlements. Sites of conflict 

to the west and north of the Ohio River reflect attacks by informal militias as well as 

campaigns by organized colonial militia and regular forces in the Continental Army.

The examples of Henry Hamilton and George Rogers Clark help illustrate this 

process, as well as suggest how American Indians and Long Knives perpetrated and 

experienced this violence differently. As Lieutenant Governor and Superintendent of 

Indian Affairs at Fort Detroit in the mid 1770s, Hamilton fostered an alliance with the 

British war effort through rituals, presents and arms, and direct participation in the 

dramatic ceremonies that preceded Native war campaigns. Successful war parties were 

feted and rewarded upon their return, which likely provided some additional incentive for 

larger and more destructive victories. While such an incentive was probably negligible, 

 50 Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 21-22; “‘Foolish Young Men’,” 33-37; Rob Harper, 

“Looking the Other Way: The Gnadenhutten Massacre and the Contextual Interpretation of Violence,” 

William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2007): 633-637.
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especially among communities already engaged in ongoing conflicts with Long Knives, 

to Clark and most all Euro-Americans it seemed that Hamilton was the general of an 

army of American Indian mercenaries who paid for scalps to be carried back to Detroit.51

Hamilton did take tallies of scalps, and likely used them as a rough measure of 

battle casualties, but there is no specific evidence that he paid bounties for scalps. The 

charge of “Hair Buyer” is plausible, since the practice was common among the French 

and British during the Seven Years’ War, and “scalp bounties” were paid by some 

colonies during the Revolution. However he may have felt about these matters, or the 

epithet of “the hair-buying general,” Hamilton did worry about the scale and nature of the 

conflicts he supported. Knowing that American Indians were allied with but not fighting 

for the British regime, Hamilton clearly understood that fighting for their lands 

necessarily entailed attacking the communities that occupied them. Try as he might to 

encourage distinctions between Long Knives and what might be called civilian noncombatants, he knew that he had become an agent in a war that troubled him deeply. 

“Would to God this storm which is ready to fall on the Frontiers could be directed upon 

the guilty heads of those wretches who have raised it,” he wrote a friend in June 1777, 

“and pass by the miserable many who must feel its fatal effects.” Such regrets 

notwithstanding, that summer he supported between 1,100 and 1,200 Native warriors and 

a number of French habitant militia who engaged in near continuous assaults on Long 

Knives and Kentucky settlements.52

George Rogers Clark shared with Hamilton a sense of the distinction between 

European (or Euro-American) and American Indian warfare, but their experiences 

differed in important regards. Badly in need of men, Clark accepted the services of the 

French habitants of the Illinois Country, who made up half his army during his daring 

capture of Hamilton at Vincennes in February of 1779. However, Clark had no 

expectation of an alliance with any American Indian communities since nearly two 

decades of conflict had essentially defined all Native peoples in the region as implacable 

foes. Consequently, he had none of Hamilton’s doubts or worries about the violence 

committed by American Indians. Nor did he worry about the violent actions of his forces 

since, as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Virginia Militia, Clark participated directly in the 

campaigns he oversaw and inspired the actions of his forces. In short, his views on war 

followed a simple moral code that was readily defined by his mentor Thomas Jefferson 

who, as Governor of Virginia was also his Commander-in-Chief. In discussing a planned 

invasion of Detroit in the winter of 1779-1780, Jefferson reminded Clark that

the Shawanese, Mingoes, Munsies, and the nearer Wiandots are 

troublesome thorns in our sides. However we must leave it to yourself to 

decide on the object of the campaign. If against these Indians, the end 

 51 Bernard W. Sheehan, “‘The Famous Hair Buyer General’: Henry Hamilton, George Rogers Clark, and 

the American Indian,” Indiana Magazine of History 79, no. 1 (1983): 1-28. 52 Ibid., quotation from p. 12. Also see James Axtell and William C. Sturtevant, “The Unkindest Cut, or 

Who Invented Scalping,” The William and Mary Quarterly 37:4 (July 1980): 451-72; John Grenier, The 

First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607-1814 (Cambridge: Cambridge University 

Press, 2005), 61-65, 125, 167; and Oliver Zeltner, “Crossing the River: Attitudes of Invasion in the 

Revolutionary Ohio Country,” Indigenous Nations Studies Journal 5:1 (Spring 2004), 51-72.
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proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes 

or Illinois river. The same world will scarcely do for them and us.”53

In prosecuting such a war, Clark believed it necessary to show “Indians the Horid 

fate of those that would dare make war on the big Knife[; to] excell them in barbarity ... 

was and is the only way to make war and gain a name among the Indians.” On one count, 

at least, the Shawnee and their allies shared a basic conviction with Jefferson and Clark; 

the same land could not be home to Long Knives and Native communities, and the war in 

the Ohio Valley reflected this persistent truth. With the tenor of the war intensifying in 

the summer of 1777, a thousand Shawnee from different villages left the Scioto Plains to 

live among the Myaamia to the west. Almost all of the Mekoche under Colesquo 

(Cornstalk) remained, still hoping to avoid conflict with the Virginians whose “intentions

were to deprive us [the Shawnee] of our whole Country.” With the murder of Colesquo, 

his son, and two fellow Mekoche, however, most Shawnee communities chose to 

strengthen their alliances with the British and other Native groups and enlarge the war 

against the Long Knives. Through 1778, they inflicted a series of punishing raids south 

and east of the Ohio River. The following year colonial militia retaliated with a push as 

far north as the town of Chalahgawtha (present-day Chillicothe, Ohio), where the 

renowned Shawnee war leader Mkateeweθi-maqua (Black Fish) received a mortal 

wound.54

In 1780 the war intensified, as more than 700 Shawnee, Haudenosaunee, Ojibwe, 

Odawa, Bodéwadmi, and Wyandot—joined by British Rangers and more than eighty

mostly Canadien militiamen under the command of Captains Louis de Joncaire de 

Chabert and Isidore Chene supporters—attacked settlements and fortified sites 

throughout the Blue Grass region. The force was smaller than originally planned, 

however, since a good portion was held back after word that Clark’s forces had departed 

the Falls of the Ohio (present-day Clarksville, Indiana) and were marching toward 

Detroit. Nevertheless, the toll on civilian communities was significant—with dozens of 

settlers killed in the presence of their families and hundreds taken prisoner. The campaign 

ended by late June, but fear reigned among the civilian population for most of the 

summer as tales of violence and death were shared across the Blue Grass region. As the 

stories grew, the perils of some became the trials of all—and fueled an abiding 

resentment against the “infernal rage and fury of those Execrable Hell Hounds” and their 

British allies.55

 53 This and the following paragraph are informed by Sheehan, “‘The Famous Hair Buyer General’: 1-28; 

Grenier, The First Way of War, 155-59; Zeltner, “Crossing the River,” 51-72; and Calloway, The Shawnees 

and the War for America (New York: Viking, 2007), 57-61. Quotation from“Thomas Jefferson to George 

Rogers Clark, 1 January 17[80],” The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 3, 18 June 1779–30 September 

1780, ed. Julian Boyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 258–59. 54 Quotations from James Alton James, ed., George Rogers Cark Papers, 1771-1781 (Springfield: Illinois 

State Historical Library, 1912), 298; and Robert L. Scribner et al., eds., Revolutionary Virginia, the Road to 

Independence: A Documentary Record, 7 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973—1983), 

7: 770—cited in Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America (New York: Viking, 2007), 31. 55 Quotation from “John Floyd to Thomas Jefferson, April 16, 1781,” in George Rogers Clark Papers, 

1771-1781: Volume III, Virginia Series, ed. James Alton James (Springfield: Illinois Historical Library, 

1912), 530. Also see J. Winston Coleman, The British invasion of Kentucky (Lexington: Winburn Press, 
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110

Clark was not at the Falls, as originally feared, but he did assemble a punitive 

force of more than 1,000 militia to attack the town of Chalahgawtha and Pekwoi (Piqua, 

Ohio) in early August. The Shawnee burned Chalahgawtha before it could be taken and 

looted by the Virginians, but a brief battle occurred at Pekwoi. Clark’s force suffered 

approximately thirty killed and forty wounded while Shawnee battle losses may have 

been similar, but an unknown number of Shawnee were killed and wounded when 

artillery fire was directed on the large council house where they had taken refuge. After 

capturing the town, Clark’s militiamen spent two days destroying fields and food stores, 

burning homes, and plundering graves for “curiosities” and scalps.56 Like the stories that 

spread around Kentucky after the early summer raids, these desecrations would horrify 

the Shawnee and deepen their rage against the Long Knives.57

The war between the Shawnee and the Long Knives was especially persistent, but 

other Native-British alliances were also active in the Ohio Valley and the western Great 

Lakes. Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk) and Mamaceqtaw (Menominee) from Green Bay came to 

Detroit in 1779 to participate in campaigns in the southern Ohio Valley, while Odawa, 

Ojibwe, and Bodéwadmi from the northern Great Lakes also participated in the war 

alliances centered on Detroit. The Myaami along the Wabash were inclined to join 

alliances against the Long Knives, particularly in concert with their Shawnee neighbors 

to the east, but also had to maintain their associations to the west among the Kiikaapoi, 

Mascouten, Bodéwadmi who traded with the (anti-British) Spanish to the south. When 

Clark marshaled a large force to attack Canadien settlements along the lower Illinois 

River in 1778, and at Vincennes in 1779, the Myaamia avoided conflict with the Long 

Knives. Such caution ended the following year, however, after France officially joined 

the Americans in their war against the British and a small force led by Captain Augustine 

Mottin de La Balme recruited some Canadiens and Native warriors from around 

Kaskaskia to undertake an invasion of Detroit. After attacking a British post and 

plundering the Myaamia village of Kiihkayonki (aka Kekionga, present-day Fort Wayne, 

Indiana), La Balme and his forces were met and badly routed by a returning war party led 

by Mihšihkinaahkwa (Little Turtle). This series of events ultimately turned most 

Myaamia leaders toward the British alliance and active support of the Shawnee as well as 

the Ökwe'öwé (Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”) and Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) on 

the Muskingum River.58

No Place for Neutrality

Further east on the Tuscarawas River, some Lunaapeew communities remained 

among growing settler populations and worked to avoid conflict with Euro-Americans. 

 

1951); and Le Roy Barnett and Roger Rosentreter, Michigan’s Early Military Forces: A Roster and History 

of Troops Activated Prior to the American Civil War (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 32. 56 Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 96-110; Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, 61-65; 

Aron, How the West was Lost, 35-47. 57 Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 113-14; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 59-60; Cave, Prophets of the 

Great Spirit, 53-55. 58 George Ironstrack, “The Mihši-maalhsa Wars – Part I,” Aacimotaatiiyankwi: A Myaamia Community 

Blog < https://myaamiahistory.wordpress.com/2014/01/10/the-mihsi-maalhsa-wars-part-1/> (accessed 13 

November 2015); Matthew R. Garrett, “Kickapoo Foreign Policy, 1650-1830” (Masters thesis: University 

of Nebraska, 2006), 72-75; White, Middle Ground, 370-373; Robert Allen, His Majesty's Indian Allies: 

British Indian Policy in the Defence of Canada 1774-1815 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1996), 52-55.
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Often led by strong civil leaders, they sought to become the center of a neutral alliance 

and reached out to Lunaapeew, Shawnee, Wyandot and other communities further west. 

In 1778 the commitment to building this alliance faltered after a series of complex and 

deadly challenges. In February the neutral Lunaapeew village of Coshcoton was attacked 

by Pennsylvania militia under the command of Colonel William Crawford, and some of 

Konieschquanoheel’s (aka, Hopocon, or Captain Pipe) family was killed. That summer 

military officials pressed other neutral Lunaapeew leaders to become active allies of the 

patriot cause, which complicated the positions of neutral leaders within their increasingly 

divided villages and among their Euro-American neighbors. Perhaps the most energetic 

supporter of the patriots was the Lunaapeew leader Koquethagechton (White Eyes), who 

served as a guide for an assault on Detroit, but he was killed by a militia officer (or died 

of mysterious causes) somewhere around the western end of Lake Erie. These 

developments weakened the position of the neutral leaders, and a number of families left 

their villages to live among their British-allied kin on the Scioto and Sandusky Rivers. 

These developments ultimately created a schism among the eastern Lunaapeew, and by 

1781 Konieschquanoheel openly favored close relations with the British alliance while 

Gelelemend (Killbuck), who became principal leader of the eastern Lunaapeew after the 

death of Koquethagechton, lost his authority and moved to Fort Pitt where he served as a 

Captain in the Continental Army. It was in that position that he joined an expedition in 

April 1781 that destroyed Coshocton.59

After the burning of Coshocton, the former residents sought refuge at Upper 

Sandusky and Detroit. In September they returned east to escort the populations of three 

mission communities of Christianized Lunaapeew that were upriver from the site of 

Choshocton. The Christianized Lunaapeew, who had been threatened during the 

Continental’s campaign on Coshocton, were a distinct and mostly independent part of the 

Lunaapeew nation that embraced the pacifism of Moravian missionaries and remained 

strictly neutral during the Revolution. Nevertheless, Konieschquanoheel feared they 

might be drawn to the Patriot cause and relocated them against their will. After four-anda-half difficult and hungry months at Upper Sandusky, about 100 of the Christianized 

Lunaapeew were allowed to return to the main mission of Gnadenhütten where they had 

ample stores of food and supplies. In early March, after learning that a sizeable group of 

Lunaapeew had returned to the Tusacarawas, about 160 Pennsylvania militia appeared at 

Gnadenhütten and accused the recent returnees of having raided settlements in areas 

where a number of the militiamen had family. The accusations were denied, but the 

militia, under the leadership of Colonel David Williamson, held a council and voted to 

kill all of the Lunaapeew and destroy the village. After granting the condemned a night to 

prepare for death, they held them prisoner in two separate buildings—one for men, and 

the other for women and children. The next morning, the militiamen began a methodical 

slaughter in the two “killing houses” that involved striking each individual in the head 

with a mallet, then using a scalping knife to kill them with deep cuts to the skull. In all, 

twenty-eight men, twenty-nine women, and thirty-nine children were slaughtered and 

 59 Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys, 168-75.
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their corpses burned within the buildings. Before leaving the militiamen plundered the 

town then burned it to the ground.60

The Gnadenhütten Massacre was not kept a secret. Some militiamen boasted of 

the action, while others who refused to participate also told the tale. Many civilians 

condemned the action, as did General William Irvine, the commandant at Fort Pitt. Yet a 

general hatred of all American Indians, and the widespread resentment of military 

command that bordered on mutiny, effectively silenced these voices.61 Though little 

known in the colonies, word of the massacre electrified the Lunaapeew and their allies in 

the west—and would be long remembered as a dark symbol of the Long Knives’ way of 

war. The first chance for revenge came in June 1782 at the Battle of Sandusky, when 

Colonel Crawford and a force of 500 Pennsylvania militia were defeated by a combined 

force of Lunaapeew, Shawnee, Wyandot, Ökwe'öwé (Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”) 

warriors and British rangers. Though actual battle losses are unknown, most of the 

militia’s casualties occurred while in captivity and a number were tortured to death. The 

most notable was Crawford, who Konieschquanoheel singled out as the leader of the 

deadly attacks on neutral villages, including his own, and the current leader of the men 

who previously committed the Gnadenhütten Massacre. Before a large crowd, and at the 

hands of different men and women, Crawford was burned, beaten, dismembered, and 

variously tortured for hours until he finally perished. A similar fate awaited others who 

were taken to the Shawnee town of Wapatomica, including Crawford’s son-in-law and 

nephew.62

Treaty of Paris Redux

The victory at the Battle of Sandusky helped rebalance the Lunaapeew world after 

the Gnadenhütten massacre, and marked a deepened commitment of all parties to the 

British-Native Alliance against the Americans. It also preceded two other decisive 

victories by a few weeks: the Battle of Blue Licks (August 19, 1782), when nearly half of 

a Virginia militia unit was killed or taken captive by a force of fifty Loyalist Rangers and 

300 warriors from across the Ohio Valley, and the destruction of Hannastown, 

Pennsylvania, by a combined force of Ökwe'öwé and British rangers under the leadership 

of Guyasuta.63 With a broader and more unified coalition, and three significant victories 

in the span of one month, the war seemed to be turning in favor of the Native-British 

 60 Rob Harper, “Looking the Other Way: The Gnadenhutten Massacre and the Contextual Interpretation of 

Violence,” William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2007): 621-44. 61 Ibid. Also, Leonard Sadosky, “Rethinking the Gnadenhutten Massacre: Authority, Class and Power in the 

Communities of the Revolutionary Pennsylvania-Ohio Frontier,” in Sixty Years War for the Great Lakes, 

1754-1814, eds. David Curtis Skaggs and Larry L. Nelson (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 

2010), 373-90. 62 Barbara Alice Mann, George Washington's War on Native America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 170-

75; Parker B. Brown, "The Fate of Crawford Volunteers Captured by Indians Following the Battle of 

Sandusky in 1782." Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 65, no. 4 (1982): 323-40; Schutt, Peoples 

of the River Valleys, 172-74; John Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who 

Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States (Philadelphia Historical Society, 1881), 284-87. 63 John Sugden, Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 63-

64; Larry L. Nelson, A Man of Distinction among Them: Alexander Mckee and British-Indian Affairs along 

the Ohio Country Frontier, 1754-1799 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1999), 126-28; Mann, 

George Washington’s War, 174-77.
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alliance in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley. By fall, however, British officers and agents 

began urging their allies to refrain from further conflict. Rumors of a peace treaty to end 

the war between Great Britain and the Thirteen Colonies were proving true, and the 

military was ordered to scale back all offensive operations.64 When Native leaders around 

Detroit were informed of this decision, and that the British expected to withdraw from the 

war with the colonies while the latter became an independent nation, they were stunned, 

angered, and deeply worried. As Frederick Haldimand, the Governor of Quebec, reported 

to Home Secretary Thomas Townsend,

the Indians are thunderstruck at the appearance of an Accommodation so 

far short of their expectations from the language that had been held out to 

them, and Dread the idea of being Forsaken by us and becoming a 

Sacrifice to the Vengeance which has already in many instances been 

raked upon them. Foreseeing the possibility of the Americans becoming 

an independent, powerful people and retaliating severely upon them, they 

reproach us with their ruin.65

Haldimand received official notice of the treaty’s final terms in the spring of 

1783, and he had good reason to fear Native reactions. Early in the treaty negotiations, 

the British proposed recognition of an independent United States as well as the creation 

of three large American Indian Territories: one in the areas covered by the Quebec Act, 

and the other two encompassing regions to the south of Kentucky that would be 

administered by the United States and Spain. However, in an effort to settle matters in 

North America and pivot to negotiating an end to its wars with France, Spain and the 

Netherlands, British ministers assented to U.S. demands to recognize the entire area 

between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River as U.S. Territory. In the Great Lakes 

and the Ohio Valley, large councils confronted the British with demands for explanations 

and requests for supplies. At Niagara, Brigadier General Allan Maclean reported,

the Indians from the surmises they have heard of the Boundaries, look 

upon our conduct to them as treacherous and cruel; they told me they 

never could believe that our King could pretend to cede to America what 

was not his own to give .... That they were faithful Allies of the King of 

England but not his subjects.66

Great Britain may have surrendered to the United States and signed the Peace of Paris, 

but the King’s erstwhile allies angrily reminded Maclean that they had defended all of 

their lands. Indeed, not a single soldier or settler resided north or west of the Ohio River.

Recalling Pontiac’s Rebellion from twenty years earlier, British officers and 

agents were left with a frightening dilemma. They were compelled to demonstrate that 

the king “still considers you his faithful allies,” and to make promises of continued 

 64 Jonathan R. Dull, “Diplomacy of the Revolution” and “Foreign Relations, after 1783,” in A Companion 

to the American Revolution, eds. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 352-61 

and 398-401. 65 Haldimand to Townshend, October 23, 1782, in Michigan Historical Commission, Historical 

Collections: Collections and Researches Made by the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society, Vol. 20 

(Lansing: Robert Smith & Co., 1892),67. For a fuller synthesis of these issues and their consequences, see 

Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 52-56. 66 Quotation from Allan Maclean to Haldimand, May 18, 1783, in Collections and Researches, 20: 119.
Chapter Four

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relations that were somehow congruent with the development of a new American 

regime.67 At a council in Big Rock (Brownstown) in June 1783, anger at the British 

received a full airing. A Wea spokesman gave a blunt assessment that captured the mood 

of many: “We are informed that instead of prosecuting the war we are to give up our 

lands to the enemy which gives us great uneasiness. In endeavouring to assist you, it 

seems we have wrought our ruin.” Such sentiments were tempered by the formality and 

respect with which the British conducted the meeting, as well as a generous distribution 

of gifts to affirm continued relations. Promises to increase the activities of agents and 

traders now that peace had returned also gained a favorable reception.68

By the time the council ended, British officials managed to create a general sense 

that they would help protect the lands north of the Ohio River from U.S. encroachment. 

This was more than anyone at Fort Lernoult (Detroit) could legitimately offer in June of 

1783, but the sentiment was likely fostered through personal and unrecorded 

conversations. Government officials, military officers, traders, and British Indian agents 

in the west were also upset with the final terms of the Peace of Paris, and many would 

spend the rest of their careers seeking to ameliorate or rectify the Crown’s abandonment 

of the region and its peoples. These ideas and feelings, while still very fresh in the late 

spring of 1783, may have inflated the actualities of British policy while capturing the 

aspirations of those charged with carrying them forward.69

The most concrete expression of British support for its Native allies came through 

the retention of Fort Lernoult, Fort Miami (near present-day Toledo) and Fort Mackinac 

within the region the United States would later term the Northwest Territory.70 The 

Crown, without consulting officials in North America, decided to retain these forts the 

day before officially accepting the Treaty of Paris (September 3, 1783). In doing so, King 

George III responded to the concerns of fur trade merchants who requested at least two 

years to reorganize the trading operations that were centered on these three sites. The 

retention of these forts temporarily assuaged the fears of officials in the British Indian 

Department, who feared that a sudden British withdrawal would no doubt represent a 

dramatic betrayal of the Native Alliance that invited retribution. More significantly, the 

King’s order also presented an opportunity for an active British policy in the Great Lakes 

region. 71

 67 Johnson to Council of Six Nations and Allies, July 23, 1783, in ibid., 177. 68 Maclean to Haldimand, May 18, 1783, in ibid., 121 69 Orpha E. Leavitt, “British Policy on the Canadian Frontier, 1782-92: Mediation and an Indian Barrier 

State,” in Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Vol. 63 (Madison: State Historical 

Society of Wisconsin, 1916), 151-185; Dwight L. Smith, “A North American Neutral Indian Zone: 

Persistence of a British Idea.” Northwest Ohio Quarterly 61:2-4 (1989): 46-63. 70 While the regional and territorial designation was commonly used after the Peace of Paris, the Territory 

Northwest of the River Ohio (aka Northwest Territory), was officially defined in the Northwest Ordinance 

of 1787 and encompassed the lands that would become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, 

Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The three British forts that remained in this region were Fort Miamis (near 

present-day Toledo), Fort Mackinac, and Fort Lernoult (Detroit). Three other forts (Fort Niagara, Fort 

Ontario, and Fort Oswegatchie), and a blockhouse at the north end of Lake Champlain were also retained in 

upstate New York.

71 Smith, “A North American Neutral Indian Zone,” 51-54.
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Figure 4.4: American Indian towns and U.S. settlements after the 1783 Peace 

of Paris. After years of war, the population of Kentucky was much reduced and more 

distant from the Ohio River. The Shawnee and Lunaapeew also migrated away from the 

Ohio River, but these movements also fostered a strengthening of their alliances with other 

groups. A similar process of clustered residence patterns and stronger alliances also 

occurred among the various groups identified in the map key.72

 72 Further congregation and alliance occurred among the Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk, aka Winnebago) and 

Mamaceqtaw (Menominee) to the west of Lake Michigan, and the Anishinaabeg on the northern lakes. All 

of these alliances in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region had either formed or strengthened over the 

past two decades—and were broader and more integrated than they had been at any time since the Great 

Peace of Montréal.
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In a letter to Home Secretary Lord North, Governor Haldimand proposed 

retaining the forts indefinitely to maintain a formal British presence among their Native 

allies.

Your Lordship will observe that the object of their general Confederacy is 

to defend their country against All invaders .... In case things should 

proceed to [war], the event no doubt will be the destruction of the Indians, 

but during the contest not only the Americans but perhaps many of His 

Majesty's subjects will be exposed to great distresses. To prevent such a 

disastrous event as an Indian war ... cannot be prevented so effectually as 

by allowing the posts in the upper country to remain as they are for some 

time.73

In this way, forts and trading posts would support Native communities, dissuade 

Americans from risking war, and—as entertained in the initial negotiations of the Peace 

of Paris—create a Native “buffer zone” between British Canada and U.S. populations. In 

regard to the terms of the 1783 treaty, the British indicated that they would retain the 

forts until the United States fulfilled certain obligations of the Peace of Paris. These 

included the return of confiscated properties to Loyalists who fled the colonies and the 

payment of outstanding debts to Great Britain. The irresolution of these issues allowed 

the forts to remain instruments of British Indian policy, which pleased officials, traders, 

and agents in the region as well as ministers in Whitehall who intended to be ready in the 

likelihood that the American Republic faltered.74

The Revolution dislocated thousands of American Indians. Villages were 

destroyed, individuals and families were killed, and refugees were forced to rebuild 

communities in a new location or find a home among distant kin or like-minded allies. In 

this crucible of war, the sinews of a broad regional alliance grew stronger and proved 

able to keep the people of the United States at bay. While war was not the primary cause 

or source of this alliance, which was more rooted in historical and ancient associations 

than recent circumstances, it had been a chronic condition of life throughout the Ohio 

Valley and lower Great Lakes for three decades. The brief cessation of violence in 1783, 

and the slim hope that—with British support—some kind of peace might be achieved 

with the government of the United States, offered a new environment for the alliance to 

function.

 73 Haldimand to North, November 27, 1783; quoted in Leavitt, “British Policy on the Canadian Frontier,” 

155.

74 Smith, “A North American Neutral Indian Zone,” 46-52.
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Chapter Five

“Engagements respecting Lands”:

Native Confederacies and the Early Republic, 1783-1795

This chapter continues the themes and topics of Chapter Four, with an emphasis on the fears, 

expectations and critical needs that motivated U.S. and American Indian actions in the Ohio 

Valley and Great Lakes region. Likewise, the chapter details Native concerns and actions –as 

responses to the new United States and as efforts to determine the course of events in 

accordance in the region. Though it covers a brief period of time, the chapter illustrates the 

persistence and adaptation of social, cultural and political developments from the 1760s and 

1770s, and establishes the terms by which they would continue into the 19th century.

Despite its revolutionary implications, the War for Independence affirmed more 

than it altered the dynamics that had shaped the Ohio Valley for a generation. The 1783 

Treaty of Paris and its initial consequences is a good case in point. Like the treaty that 

formally ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763, the second treaty changed the geopolitical 

map of North America and involved the surrender of imperial claims to lands west of the 

Allegheny Mountains. In the latter instance, the treaty also implied the dissolution of the 

Royal Proclamation Line of 1763—a stated goal of the American Revolution. Yet the 

Continental Congress found itself in the same position as King George III just twenty 

years earlier: needing to prevent the violence and disorder that a rush of land companies 

and squatters would bring to themselves and American Indian communities.

Just six months after the formal end of the war, the Continental Congress 

resurrected the idea of a proclaimed dividing line in the Ordinance of 1784—with the 

“property of the United States” on the west side of the line and the territories of what 

would become the first states of the new nation on the east. While the Ordinance did not 

explicitly restrict the movement of U.S. citizens into what had formerly been the 

Province of Quebec, it essentially reaffirmed the King’s earlier nullification of colonial 

charters beyond the Alleghenies. In doing so, Congress established the primacy of a 

nascent federal authority in matters relating to territorial claims, formal relations with 

American Indians, land policy, and the framework of national expansion. These matters, 

and the role of the federal government, would be further clarified and strengthened over 

the next few years through subsequent modifications of the Ordinance and in the drafting 

and ratification of the Constitution.1

 

1 Quotation is from By the United States in Congress assembled; April 23, 1784 [New York: s.n., 1785]; 

broadside in the Library of Congress <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/bdsdcc.13301> (accessed 7 May 2016).

See John R. Van Atta, Securing the West: Politics, Public Lands, and the Fate of the Old Republic, 1785-

1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 17-44; Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., “Americans 

versus Indians: The Northwest Ordinance, Territory Making, and Native Americans,” Indiana Magazine of 

History 84:1 (March 1988): 90-108; Robert S. Hill, “Federalism, Republicanism, and the Northwest 

Ordinance,” Publius 18:4, No. 4 (Autumn, 1988): 41-52.
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The end of the war also presented American Indians in the Ohio Valley and Great 

Lakes region with a familiar challenge: maintaining the alliances that had opposed the 

Long Knives since before the Seven Years’ War. This was complicated by the British 

withdrawal to the north and reduced access to trade items that were essential for effective 

village leadership, alliance building, and warfare. Yet the concentration of diverse 

villages that had resulted from shared retreats and migrations, as well as the combinations 

of warriors from different groups that had joined in common battle with the Long Knives, 

had created a basis for continued association and mutual support. The exhaustion and 

destruction of war had taken a toll, however, and calls for strengthening alliances were 

mitigated by slim but appealing hopes for peace. Much as had occurred in the 1760s, 

when the British displaced the French, these hopes empowered some reluctant members 

of wartime alliances to explore a separate peace with the United States. In short, an ageold dynamic of autonomous villages forming or withdrawing from alliances played out in 

a mixed response to the cessation of conflict. 2

Even as older patterns and aspirations shaped parallel developments on both sides 

of the Alleghenies, the abiding concerns of Indigenous leaders and U.S. officials became 

more emphatic and took on more concrete forms. Village and alliance leaders in the Ohio 

Valley and Great Lakes, and political representatives in the new United States, soon 

embarked on concerted efforts to organize diverse groupings under the authority of a 

single representative council. Within a few years these would result in the Confederated 

Council Fire at the Wyandot town of Big Rock (Brownstown) in 1786, and the 

Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia in 1787. Though each was grounded in very 

different traditions, and resulted in different forums of representation and governance, 

both would define and exercise their authorities in opposition to the other. For the United 

States in the mid 1780s, land acquisition, diplomacy, war, and a regulated boundary with 

British North America were paramount concerns of national governance. The 

Confederated Council Fire was defined by a similar set of fundamental concerns: namely, 

defining and defending boundaries with the United States, diplomacy, warfare, and 

preventing land sales to the U.S. by individual communities or groups. The inherent 

opposition between these two national authorities derived from—and further contributed 

to—a sense within each representative system that its validity was dependent on 

achieving all its goals.

A Bordered Land

Over the next decade these opposing visions would be exercised in the expanse of 

territory between the southern shore of Lake Erie and the Ohio River —the geographic 

heart of the “Middle Ground” since before the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701. For the 

better part of a century the region had been variously coveted and invaded by imperial 

rivals, land speculators, squatters, and patriot armies, yet remained a collective homeland 

for an array of American Indian communities. A few years after the Revolutionary War, 

however, large stretches of the area had come to resemble the depopulated landscapes of 

the 16th and 17th centuries. Instead of a “middle ground” or borderland where different 

peoples mixed and came together (in commerce, conflict, and comity), this part of the 

 2 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-

1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991): 408-15.
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Ohio Valley was now a bordered land: with American Indian, British, and French 

Canadien populations mostly concentrated along the north and northwest perimeter, and 

a few U.S. settlements and forts to the south and southeast along the arc of the Ohio 

River. The northern border roughly corresponded to the international boundary line that 

was defined in the 1783 Peace of Paris, but remained a nebulous concept. The British 

maintained forts and posts to the south of the line, British subjects lived and traded on 

both sides, as did American Indian communities—and the latter maintained connections 

to Native communities and use areas that extended throughout the Great Lakes and Ohio 

River basins. Moreover, small groups from towns and villages around the Detroit, 

Maumee, Sandusky, and upper Wabash river basins continued to travel and live 

seasonally in areas further south, and often visited Shawnee, Lunaapeew (Lenape, or 

Delaware) and Ökwe'öwé (Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”) who lived about half-way 

between Lake Erie and the Ohio River. (See Figure 4.4 in the previous chapter.)3

These movements, and associations with the southernmost Shawnee, Lunaapeew, 

and Ökwe'öwé were often associated with raids on U.S. settlements and riverboat traffic 

along the Ohio River. The attacks had the same material and martial objectives of similar 

ventures before and during the Revolutionary War—including the taking of horses and 

property as well as gaining honors by vanquishing an enemy—and continued the patterns 

of violence and vengeance that had long plagued both sides of the Ohio River. Yet 

through the mid-1780s they were a mostly one-sided affair, since Kentuckians were 

unable and unwilling to risk a retaliatory strike at any great distance to the north. With 

American Indians moving through and utilizing the region between Lake Erie and the 

Ohio, and Kentuckians holding close to their homes and settlements, these raids also had 

a broader strategic dimension; enforcement of a territorial boundary along the Ohio River 

that corresponded to Native understandings of where matters stood when the United 

States and Great Britain confirmed the Treaty of Paris in 1783.4

In the mid 1780s, the Ohio River represented the only functional geographic 

boundary between the United States and the people who lived to the west of the 

Alleghenies. Over the next decade, however, the region would be defined by a contest to 

maintain or erase this southern border. Small militia campaigns from Kentucky and 

 3 Chalagawtha was so-named because it was the principal town of the Chalagawtha Shawnee sept or 

division. Like other Shawnee towns, it included people from different Shawnee septs, as well as from other 

American Indian communities. For instance, two historically significant residents of Chalagawtha at this 

time included the war leader Waweyapiersenwah (Whirlpool, aka Blue Jacket) from the Peckuwe (Piqua) 

sept and the young warrior Tecumseh, who was Kispoko Shawnee. lived in the 1780s. Pressure from 

Kentucky raiders forced a move in 1787. Besides Chalagawtha, Peckuwe, and Kispoko, the other Shawnee 

septs are Thawegila and Mekoches. See Charles Callender, “Shawnee,” in Handbook of North American 

Indians, Volume 15: Northeast, eds. William C. Sturtevant and Bruce G. Trigger (Washington, D.C.: 

Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 623-24; Sami Lakomäki, Gathering Together: The Shawnee People 

through Diaspora and Nationhood, 1600–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 84-86, 112-

115; John Sugden, Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 

73-76; and Stephen Aron, How the West was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to 

Henry Clay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 49. 4 Sugden, Blue Jacket, 95-97; Aron, How the West was Lost, 67-68; Robert S. Allen, His Majesty's Indian 

Allies: British Indian Policy in the Defence of Canada 1774-1815 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1996), 65-67; 

R. David Edmunds, Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 

1984), 27-28; Larry L. Nelson, A Man of Distinction among Them: Alexander McKee and British-Indian 

Affairs along the Ohio Country Frontier, 1754-1799 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1999), 154-155.
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contentious meetings between U.S. officials and small groups of American Indian leaders 

in the late 1780s led to threatening responses from the Confederated Council. This in turn 

gave way to a new round of war that was fueled by powerful but differing conceptions of 

sovereignty, territory, culture, and natural or divine rights. These were existential matters 

for a growing Western Confederacy and its constituent members as well as for the 

Congress and U.S. citizens with direct interests in the region. Consequently, there was 

little to no possibility of compromise—particularly when one party or the other felt on the 

brink of achieving and validating its goals through military victory.5

Figure 5.1: Boundaries and Populations, mid 1780s. While it does not

reference the Wyandot, Odawa (Ottawa) and Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi) towns 

around western Lake Erie and southern Lake Michigan, this map shows approximate 

locations of Native population distributions to the north and west of the Ohio River. 

Source: Detail from Thomas Kitchin, North America drawn from the latest and best 

authorities (London: John Harrison, 1787). Source: Library of Congress.

United and Divided

In the United States, views on American Indians and their lands reflected a broad 

consensus: the former should move further west or north, and the latter incorporated into 

the commercial and political systems of the new nation. Within this broadly shared 

vision, however, lay important differences that reflected key political, regional, and 

economic divides. Through the 1780s, congressional leaders from the eastern seaboard 

and the Virginia Piedmont wanted to avoid costly wars and hoped to orchestrate an 

 5 R. Douglas Hurt, The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720-1830 (Bloomington and 

Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 94-104.
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orderly transfer of American Indian lands to the federal government—which would then 

be surveyed and put up for sale to private consortiums or companies. In the western 

districts of New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, such plans ran afoul of a widelyshared resentment against land companies and a general sense that members of Congress 

looked to benefit directly from the policies they enacted. Similar attitudes prevailed in 

Kentucky, but were tinged with a fierce loathing of American Indians and a conviction 

that federal authority should be limited to protecting commerce on the Ohio River and 

using military force to help Kentuckians drive Native peoples out of the region.6

In some respects, these divisions reflected the ongoing debates between 

Federalists and Anti-Federalists on the nature and course of the new nation; yet the tone 

of constitutional disagreements paled in comparison to the mutual contempt that infused 

rival opinions about western land policy, property rights, American Indians, and equality. 

Indeed, these matters threatened to divide the new republic before it even had a 

constitution. Between 1784 and 1788, a number of leading figures in Tennessee and 

Kentucky became increasingly “determined to free themselves from a dependence on 

Congress, as that body could not or would not protect their persons and property nor 

encourage their commerce.” Their complaints revolved around taxes, a lack of equal 

political representation, no federal assistance with defending against American Indian 

attacks, and the Congress’ inability to secure commercial access to the Mississippi River. 

By 1787, Revolutionary War General James Wilkinson became a leading advocate for 

establishing a separate western confederation and worked with the Spanish in Louisiana 

“for our admission to her protection as subjects.”7

Leading political figures in the East sought to avoid all of these outcomes. As 

George Washington complained in 1784, “the rage for speculating in, and forestalling of 

Lands” caused men to “roam over the Country on the Indian side of the Ohio—mark out 

Lands—Survey—and even settle them. This gives great discontent to the Indians, and 

will unless measures are taken in time to prevent it, inevitably produce a war with the 

western Tribes.” To avoid such a war, Washington believed that Congress should work to 

purchase lands in what is now northeastern Ohio and develop a clear plan for their survey 

and disposition. Yet he fully expected a “disappointment” in this matter since “the 

Indians, [as he had] been told, will not yield to the proposal.” Consequently, Washington 

determined that the best way to avoid a costly war and establish strong relations with 

Native leaders (with an eye toward future land acquisition) required a strong exercise of 

federal authority against “ignorant” westerners. Congress, he believed, should declare 

 6 For an overview of these matters, see Kevin Patrick Kopper, “Arthur St. Clair and the Struggle for Power 

in the Old Northwest” (PhD diss., Kent State University, 2005), 82-93; and Bethel Saler, The Settlers' 

Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America's Old Northwest. Philadelphia: University of 

Pennsylvania Press, 2015) 13-22. 7 Kathleen DuVal, “Independence for Whom?: Expansion and Conflict in the South and Southwest,” in The 

World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent, ed. Andrew 

Shankman (New York: Routledge, 2014), 97-115; William R. Shepherd, “Wilkinson and the beginnings of 

the Spanish Conspiracy,” American Historical Review 9 (April 1904): 490-506; and “The Attempts Made 

to separate the West From the American Union,” in The American Nation: Its Executive, Legislative, 

Political, financial, Judicial and Industrial History, vol. 4, ed. James Harrison Kennedy (Cleveland: The 

N.G. Hamilton Publishing Company, 1895), 542-585. Quotations from Alexander McGillivray to Governor 

Arturo O’Neil, April 25, 1788, in McGillivray of the Creeks, ed. John Walton Caughey (Columbia: 

University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 178; and Wilkinson, “Memorial,” in “Wilkinson and the 

beginnings,” 501 –italics in the original.
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that anyone “who shall presume to mark—Survey—or settle Lands beyond the limits of 

the New States, & purchased Lands, shall not only be considered as outlaws, but fit 

subjects for Indian vengeance.”8

Many American Indian leaders certainly agreed with Washington on part of his 

assessment: they did not wish to sell land, they despised land-jobbers and squatters for 

bringing violence, and they feared a renewal of the conflicts that accompanied the 

Revolution. On the other hand, other Native leaders and their communities shared some 

of Wilkinson’s predilections. At about the same time that Washington was arguing for 

more deference to federal authority and Wilkinson was hoping to establish political and 

commercial ties with Spanish Louisiana, a large delegation of Haudenosaunee, Shawnee, 

Chahta (Choctaw), Chikashsha (Chickasaw), and Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) met 

with Lieutenant Governor Francisco Cruzat in St. Louis. As Cruzat reported on the 

meeting, they complained that during the Revolutionary War

[T]he Americans, a great deal more ambitious and numerous than the 

English, put us out of our lands, forming therein great settlements, 

extending themselves like a plague of locusts in the territories of the Ohio 

River which we inhabit. They treat us as their cruelest enemies are treated, 

so that today hunger and the impetuous torrent of war which they impose 

upon us with other terrible calamities, have brought our villages to a 

struggle with death.9

This particular delegation, which numbered 260 individuals, came from 

communities between the eastern reaches of the Ohio to the Tennessee River Basin that 

had formed a wartime alliance in the late 1770s. With the Peace of Paris and the 

geopolitical shift that ensued, they had come to Cruzat to explore the possibility of 

opening a formal relationship with a different imperial power. This was not an act of 

diplomatic desperation or a sign of dependency. Rather, it was a strategic effort to 

establish a necessary alliance with an imperial power that was also wary of the British 

and the new republic to the east. Cruzat welcomed the delegation, as he had many others 

from south of the Ohio River over the past few years, but he could do little more than 

offer token gifts. Spain worried a great deal about the changed landscape of North 

America, and desired allies against the expected encroachments of U.S. citizens and 

British traders, but the Spanish colony of Luisiana did not have enough resources or 

personnel to sustain such an alliance. 10

Seeking Order on Native Ground

The visit to St. Louis offers a window on three distinct ways that Indigenous 

communities would respond to a fragile new regime that was committed to the 

acquisition of Native lands. The one objective they all shared was to strengthen, or at 

 8 “George Washington to Jacob Read, November 3,1784,” in The Papers of George Washington: 18 July 

1784–18 May 1785, ed. W. W. Abbot (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 119–20. 9 Francisco Cruzat to Esteban Miró, 23 August 1784, in Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 1765-1794, ed. and 

trans. Lawrence Kinnaird (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946-1949), 3: 117. 10 Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 101-02; Martha Royce Blaine, The Ioway Indians (Norman: University 

of Oklahoma Press, 1979) 68-70; and DuVal, “Independence for Whom?,” 104-06. Under the Spanish, the 

former French colony of Louisiana was administered as Luisiana.
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least maintain, the ability to shape their futures in accordance with present needs and 

inherited traditions. For many this meant staying in their villages and on their lands, 

sustaining alliances that had developed over generations, and keeping the Long Knives at 

bay. For others, geographic distance provided the best opportunity for peace and 

autonomy, as was the case for the 1784 delegation to St. Louis and several other groups 

that had chosen to rebuild their lives and communities in the area over the previous 

decade. The third variation would reflect a commitment to working out a peaceful 

accommodation with the United States. This approach was favored by a relatively small 

number of civil leaders who held traditional roles as mediators, and whose communities 

had endeavored to remain independent of exclusive alliances with ether the British or the 

patriot cause. Mediation would necessarily involve difficult (and perhaps impossible) 

compromise, but if successful these leaders hoped to establish lasting terms for peace and 

find a favored place for themselves within the post-revolutionary landscape.11

All of these positions, whether they implied conflict, migration, or 

accommodation, would be complicated by two external factors: the sometimes 

conflicting interests of U.S. citizens and political leaders, and the vacillating policies of 

the British in the years immediately following the Peace of Paris. In the case of the 

former, the latent hostility that existed between squatters, regional leaders, and eastern 

political elites resulted in disunited policies that failed to take American Indian concerns 

seriously and managed to offend at least one domestic interest group at every turn. British 

policies had less potential volatility, but they still complicated the strategies of Native 

leaders. In British North America, Provincial Governor Haldimand and members of the 

British Indian Department viewed the Peace of Paris as a betrayal of their Indigenous 

allies and an abrogation of the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix. Officials in London 

dispassionately concurred, but declined to resurrect a military alliance that might protect 

Indigenous rights in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region. The result was a variable 

middle course in which the British Indian Department supported erstwhile allies just 

enough to dampen charges of wholesale abandonment (and the feared retaliations against 

British subjects that might engender), but not so much as to encourage more conflict with 

the United States. The general effect was a diminished alliance with new elements of 

distrust and unpredictability.12

Independencies

Following the shocking news of the Peace of Paris, these various fault lines may 

have been predictable—but they were not yet fully formed. In either case, a growing 

number of American Indian leaders realized that the strongest way forward had to start 

from a unified position that spoke with a single voice. In expectation of formal 

negotiations with the new United States in the coming year, delegates from thirty-five 

Native communities gathered at Upper Sandusky in the summer and fall of 1783. In 

 11 Stephen Warren, The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795-1870 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 

2005), 17-18; Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 105-06; Lisa Brooks, “Two Paths to Peace: Competing 

Visions of Native Space in the Old Northwest,” in The Boundaries Between Us: Natives and Newcomers 

along the Frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750-1850, ed. Danel P. Barr (Kent: Kent State 

University Press, 2006), 87-117; Helen Hornbeck Tanner, Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (Norman: 

Published for the Newberry Library by the University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 92-95. 12 Jon K. Lauck, The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History (Iowa City: University of Iowa 

Press, 2013), 16-18; DuVal, “Independence for Whom?” 123-24; Allen, His Majesty's Indian Allies, 55-59.
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consultation with officers of the British Indian Department they assessed the common 

dangers that all Native communities faced, and worked to formalize a broad confederacy 

that accommodated new conditions and sought peace while affirming the basic goals of 

the alliances that had opposed the Long Knives in the recently ended war. Given the 

diversity of interests and cultures, this was a complex task –yet it was rooted in two 

simple convictions. First, that the territorial claims described in the Peace of Paris did not 

apply to the Indigenous peoples of the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes; and second, that 

formal relations with the United States must be channeled through a broad representative 

council that spoke for all. As the historian Robert Allen notes, the first action of this new 

council was to voice a fundamental diplomatic position: “a satisfactory peace settlement 

could only be realized by a general agreement between Congress, represented by all the 

American states, and the Indian confederation, represented by all the tribes.”13

Such a declaration of independence did not square with the expectations of the 

Confederation Congress any more than the terms of the 1783 treaty between Great 

Britain and the United States made sense to the leaders who gathered at Sandusky. Yet

for all concerned, the possibility of compromise or overlapping sovereignties was 

inconceivable. Having clear territorial boundaries in the Ohio Valley was as central to the 

development and exercise of federal authority in the United States as it was for the 

legitimacy of what would become known as the Confederated Council Fire. Given this 

fundamental impasse, each failure to exercise sovereignty or to nullify the other’s claim 

would bring the specter of war nearer—which would in turn present a riddle on how best 

to prevent, avoid, or win such a war. Disagreement on these matters would exacerbate the 

fault lines described above and hampered unified action on each side of the impasse. 

When conflict ensued, however, these fractures subsided almost completely in the case of 

victory—but opened wide after defeat.

Defining U.S. Sovereignty

While the Sandusky councils were underway, U.S. political leaders worked to 

develop a unified policy regarding western lands and peoples. A first order of business 

was to forestall the chaos that would ensue if land companies or states (wielding colonial 

charters with overlapping claims in the “Ohio Country”) made direct land purchases from 

American Indians. Toward these ends, the Congress of the Confederation issued a 

Proclamation in September 1783 that restricted all land acquisition authority to the 

“United States in Congress assembled,” and prohibited “making settlements on lands 

inhabited or claimed by Indians, [beyond] the limits or jurisdiction of any particular 

State.”14 While this proclamation echoed the Royal Proclamation of 1763, and reserved 

broad sovereign powers to the precursor of the federal government, it resurrected General 

Amherst’s conceit that government officials dictated to, rather than negotiated with, 

American Indians. The first congressionally authorized councils with specific Native 

groups in the Ohio Valley were intended to function as pro forma surrender ceremonies 

followed by large forfeitures of land. Nothing of the sort was imagined by the British in 

 13 Allen, His Majesty's Indian Allies, 59-64; quotation on p. 64. While most delegations came from areas to 

the south, southwest, and west of Lake Erie, the Council included groups from the Illinois River Valley, the 

Tennessee River Valley, the Ottawa River Valley, and throughout the Great Lakes.

14 Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, vol. 25, ed. Worthington C. Ford et al (Washington, 

DC, 1904–37), 25: 602.
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1763, nor even attempted by Amherst, but the Revolution inspired a new kind of 

American Indian policy that was predicated on a very novel conception of treaties and 

international law.

The authority that Congress claimed over the Ohio Valley and other areas covered 

by the Peace of Paris was based upon the Continental Army’s victory over the British in 

North America. The territorial and jurisdictional authority that Great Britain transferred 

to the United States was itself acquired by the conquest of New France. However, what 

Great Britain and France understood as their sovereignty in North America, in regard to 

Native peoples, was limited to what might be described as preemptive rights of 

negotiation. The former Province of Quebec, for instance, was the region where all 

European powers recognized Great Britain’s exclusive right to negotiate with American 

Indian groups for establishing commercial relations or the acquisition of territory.15

Native peoples might interact or cooperate with another European power, but Great 

Britain had a recognized right to initiate relations within its territorial claims. By the 

standards of late 18th-century international law, these were the primary rights that the 

United States received in the Peace of Paris. Since none of the Native peoples north and 

west of the Ohio River had ever been conquered by any European power, let alone the 

new United States, this region was possessed, rather than “inhabited or claimed by,” 

American Indians. In short, the “right of conquest” that Congress claimed did not extend 

any further than the exclusive right to treat directly with American Indians.16

Though peculiar by international standards, the initial efforts to acquire lands in 

the Ohio Valley reflected the confidence that came with defeating Great Britain and 

embarking on the establishment of a new kind of nation. Perhaps more significantly, it 

also grew out of desperate concerns over the fiscal crisis that years of war had imposed 

on the new nation. Veterans of the war, both regulars and militia, were still owed for 

months of unpaid service. The threat of mutiny over lack of pay was a common and 

serious threat during the war, but by 1782 veterans were on the verge of revolt in 

Vermont and elsewhere. A shortage of funds was compounded by the massive warrelated debts the new nation owed for loans received from France, Spain, and the 

Netherlands, as well as the condition in the Peace of Paris that obligated the United States 

to assume the outstanding debts of the thirteen former colonies of Great Britain.17

The only substantial asset the Congress claimed, by virtue of the Proclamation of 

1783, was the land in what Americans referred to as “the Ohio Country.” The sooner it 

could be acquired, the sooner it could be used as collateral for more borrowing; and once 

it was converted into real estate and sold, the sooner Congress could start paying off its 

considerable debts. Moreover, the urgent concern about rebellious veterans would be 

 15 At the time of the American Revolution, the Province of Quebec encompassed an area that extended 

northeastward from the Ohio River to include most of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence river basins as 

well part of the Labrador Peninsula. 16 Robert A. Williams, Jr. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought (New York: Oxford University 

Press, 2000), 33-61; Robert J. Miller, “The Discovery Doctrine in American Indian Law,” Idaho Law 

Review 42 (2005): 1-51. 17 Ben Baack, “Forging a Nation State: The Continental Congress and the Financing of the War of 

American Independence,” Economic History Review 54 (November 2001): 639-56; Max M. Edling and 

Mark D. Kaplanoff, “Alexander Hamilton's Fiscal Reform: Transforming the Structure of Taxation in the 

Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 61 (October 2004): 713-744.
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addressed with scrip that could be formally exchanged for land to the west of the 

Alleghennies or informally used as a kind of currency. Lastly, the transformation of 

American Indian land into U.S. farms would allow the depressed postwar economy to 

recover and give rise to a thriving agrarian nation. In short, land was viewed as a kind of 

specie that could rescue a cash-strapped economy and ensure the survival of a small 

republic in a world of powerful empires.18

“pen and ink witch-craft”19

U.S. and American Indian conceptions of sovereignty, war, negotiation, and 

representation all collided in confounding ways during the first treaty council of the postRevolutionary era. Held at Fort Stanwix in October 1784, the council included three 

Commissioners appointed by Congress and thirteen Haudenosaunee representatives.20

After listening to the Commissioners’ pre-written treaty terms, the Haudenosaunee 

speakers responded with statements that they were only authorized to establish terms of 

peace and could make no decisions regarding the disposition of lands. The 

Commissioners responded with an impatient denunciation, and sought to disabuse the 

Haudenosaunee of any sense that they were “a free and independent nation, and may 

make what terms you please. It is not so.” Backed by militias from New Jersey and 

Pennsylvania, the Commissioners told the Haudenosaunee,

You are a subdued people; you have been overcome in a war which you 

entered into with us without provocation, but in violation of most sacred 

obligations. The great spirit who is at the same time the judge and avenger 

of perfidy, has given us victory over all our enemies. We are at peace with 

all but you. You now stand out alone against our whole force.21

The meeting at Fort Stanwix was not a treaty council so much as a shake down, in 

which the Haudenosaunee were told to forfeit their “claims” to a large swath of western 

New York, the northwestern third of Pennsylvania (including all lands west of the Ohio 

River), and much of what later became northeastern Ohio. Only a portion of this area was 

recognized by other Native groups as Haudenosaunee Territory, but the Commissioners 

defined the treaty boundaries through a decades-old notion that all peoples in the Upper 

Ohio Valley were subjects of—or represented by—the Six Nations. Even as the 

 18 The idea of using land policy to foster an agrarian-based national economy is most closely associated 

with the geopolitical vision of Thomas Jefferson. Among many works on the subject, see Peter S. Onuf, 

Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia 

Press), 53-79. 19 Phrase comes from a statement by the Odawa war leader Agwazhe'aa (Egushawa) in 1791, referencing 

the treaties of Fort Stanwix (1784), Fort Harmar (1786), and Fort Finney (1786)—which are discussed in 

the following pages. See Alexander McKee, Minutes of Debates in Council on the Banks of the Ottawa, 

(Commonly called the Miamia of the Lake) November 1791 (Philadelphia: William Young, 1792), 11. 

Punctuation and spelling follows the original text. The reference to “Ottawa [River]” in the document title 

is a direct translation of several Indigenous names for what has come to be known as the Maumee River. 20 Each of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee were represented by two delegates. The thirteenth 

delegate was the renowned Onöndowága (Onondaga, or Seneca) war leader Gaiänt'wakê (Cornplanter), 

who became an advocate for good relations with the United States after the Revolutionary War. 21 The most thorough account of the 1784 Fort Stanwix Treaty and its associated documents is Henry 

Sackett Manley, The Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 1784 (Rome, NY: Rome Sentinel Company, 1932); quotations 

are from pp. 91-92.
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Haudenosaunee representatives tried to explain they were only authorized to discuss 

matters related to establishing peaceful relations, the Commissioners insisted on a 

wholesale capitulation to their stated terms. Greatly outnumbered by the assembled 

militia, the Haudenosaunee representatives placed their marks on the document and 

delivered six hostages to the commissioners –an act that was originally intended as a 

guarantee of their desire for peace. In return, they were given a promise that the 

Commissioners would “order goods to be delivered to the [Haudenosaunee] for their use 

and comfort.”22

When the Haudenosaunee returned to the Six Nations Council near Niagara, they 

were severely chastised. The Council quickly sent a message to the U.S. Commissioners, 

reminding them that the Haudenosaunee delegates were sent to begin negotiating a peace 

treaty. None were authorized to cede any lands, especially those not even claimed by the 

Haudenosaunee, and the Council could not accept the terms of the document the 

commissioners had drawn up. Western groups that utilized the ceded areas were furious 

with the Haudenosaunee and promptly disavowed the treaty. Upon hearing of these 

denunciations and disavowals, the Commissioners and Congress remained unswayed; the 

treaties, as they understood them, represented an honorable gesture by the conquerors to 

the conquered. From their perspective, the United States did not need permission to 

possess the land—but still wanted to establish peace through the courtesy of a formal 

meeting and the subsequent delivery of presents.23

The pattern established at Fort Stanwix was repeated a few months later when a 

delegation of thirteen Wyandot, Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), Odawa (Ottawa), and 

Ojibwe (Ojibway, or Chippewa) met with U.S. commissioners at Fort McIntosh on the 

upper Ohio River. The Wyandot, Lunaapeew, and Odawa who led the delegation came 

from communities around Upper and Lower Sandusky that had endeavored to remain 

neutral during the Revolutionary War, and now hoped to initiate a peaceful reconciliation 

with the United States. The U.S. commission, led by George Rogers Clark and backed by 

Pennsylvania militia, had already drawn up a draft document that described a vast cession 

of land and a statement that all signatories pledged “themselves and all their tribes to be 

under the protection of the United States and of no other sovereign whatsoever.” As was 

the case with the Haudenosaunee before, the delegation from Upper and Lower Sandusky 

came to negotiate a peace agreement, they were neither prepared nor authorized to affirm 

a pre-written document, let alone cede land. In the context of discussions regarding the 

residential and use areas of their various communities, however, they likely concurred 

with language in the treaty document that broadly described an area between the 

Cuyahoga River on the east and the lower Maumee River to the west as the expanse of 

land they shared with other Indigenous groups.24

 22 Op. cit., 92. 23 Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800 (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 1999), 232-235. 24 Quotations of the treaty text are from “Treaty with the Wyandot, etc., 1785” in Charles J. Kappler, ed., 

Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 2: 6-8. 

Also see Barbara Alice Mann, “The Greenville Treaty of 1795: Pen-and-ink Witchcraft in the Struggle for

the Old Northwest,” in Enduring Legacies: Native American Treaties and Contemporary Controversies, ed.

Bruce E. Johansen (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 154-58. Fort Macintosh was located at the confluence of 

the Ohio River and the Beaver River in present-day Beaver, Pennsylvania.
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For the U.S. commissioners, a general agreement on the common territory of 

these three allied Native groups became something quite different in the final treaty 

document. Lines were sharply delineated on a map, and “the United States allot[ed] all 

the lands contained within the said lines” to the “Indians who sign this treaty ... and all 

their tribes.” More significantly, the treaty used these boundaries to define a vast cession 

of all “the lands East, South and West of the lines ... to the United States.” To the north, 

a six-mile wide stretch of territory from the River Raisin to Lake St. Clair (approximately 

190,00 acres), along with 120 acres around Fort Mackinac, was also “reserved to the sole 

use of the United States.”25 None of the signatories would have ever proposed such 

language; the area between the River Raisin and Detroit encompassed the villages of their 

close kin, for whom they did not speak, and the indeterminate stretch of territory “to the 

East, South and West” encompassed the territories of Shawnee, Myaamia (Miami), and 

Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi), as well as other Lunaapeew and Odawa, for whom they did 

not speak. The request, and then demand, that the American Indian delegation put its 

marks on the document was immediately resisted. Plied with liquor and repeated threats, 

the signatories “were influenced to the act [of putting down their marks], in order to save 

their lives: and that [the U.S. commissioners] told them, that every nation should be 

destroyed, who would not enter into the like agreement.”26

 25 Quotation is from “Treaty with the Wyandot, etc., 1785,” 2: 8. 26 McKee, Minutes of Debates in Council, 9. In a letter to George Washington, Governor St. Clair described 

the “negotiation as both tedious and troublesome, and for a long time had an unpromising aspect, but it 
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The purpose of the Fort Stanwix and Fort McIntosh treaties was not to gain assent 

from—let alone negotiate with—the representatives named in a treaty. Rather, the goal 

was to create a document that described specific territorial boundaries and possessed the 

signatures of duly authorized U.S. commissioners as well marks of identified American 

Indian leaders. Once accepted by the Congress these documents effectively authorized 

the survey and disposition of lands in accordance with the Land Ordinances of 1784 and 

1785. Much as had occurred with the British in 1763, however, the Commissioners and 

Congress overplayed their hands at each step. The treaties did not keep U.S. citizens from 

crossing the Ohio in the vicinity of the lower Muskingum or other points along the upper 

Ohio River. Rather, “a parcel of banditti who bid defiance to all authority”—as George 

Washington put it—viewed the recent agreements as a license to squat on lands before 

they were surveyed and sold.27 Nor did the councils result in an even temporary peace. In 

response to the recent treaty councils, and in retaliation for the new encroachments across 

the Ohio, groups of Shawnee, Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), and Ökwe'öwé 

(Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”) warriors raided both sides of the river, and Kentuckians 

retaliated. Worse still, from the perspective of the Congress, the strategy of dealing with 

discrete groups and communities did not undermine the Western Confederacy. On the 

contrary, it would only become more unified through its rejection of the treaties.28

Talking Past Each Other

In May 1785, less than four months after the Fort McIntosh treaty, a small party 

of U.S. representatives came to meet with a gathering of Shawnee, Ökwe'öwé, 

Lunaapeew, and Tsalagihi (Cherokee) at the Shawnee town of Wakatomika. The 

renowned war leader Kekewpelethy (Great Hawk, aka, Captain Johnny) gave the 

principal speech, and sharply denounced the manner in which the United States 

conducted treaties. “You know ... Virginians, you kindled a Council Fire at Fort Stanwix 

.... Afterwards you kindled another at Beaver Creek .... [Both times] You told us that all 

the Country was yours–[then] Seiz’d and detained [our Brethren as] Prisoners” to make 

them agree. Knowing that the group before him wanted to “kindle another Council Fire,” 

Kekewpelethy made it clear that “we see your Intention—... your design is to take our 

Country from us[.]” “We remind you,” he continued,” that you will find all the people of 

our Colour in this Island strong[,] unanimous, and determined to act as one man in 

Defence of it, therefore be strong and keep your people ... to your side of the Ohio.29

 

came at last to as favorable an issue as could have been expected ... with consequences friendly to the 

frontier parts of the United States.” St. Clair to Washington, May 2, 1788, in American State Papers: 

Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, Vol. 4, Indian Affairs, no. 1 

(Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1832), 10; hereafter cited as ASP, vol. number, subtitle, and volume 

number (i.e., ASP, Indian Affairs, vol. 4). Also see Mann. “The Greenville Treaty of 1795,” 154-55. 27 Washington quoted in Andrew R. L. Cayton, Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio 

Country, 1780-1825 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1998), 7. 28 T.J. Shannon, “The Ohio Company and the Meaning of Opportunity in the American West, 1786–1795,”

New England Quarterly 64 (September 1991): 393-395; Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American 

Indian Policy, 1783-1812 (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967), 16-27. 29 “At a Council held at Wakitumekie [Wakatomika], May 18, 1785,” in Historical Collections 25, 692. 

Punctuation and spelling follows the original text. The name and translation of Peteasuva comes from this 

document, but the word “peteasuva” does not match or approximate the etymology of Shawnee words for 

snake, serpent, or various types of specific snakes.
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Another U.S. delegation came back to Wakatomika and other nearby Shawnee 

towns in November—asking to hold a general council at the Mouth of the Great Miami 

River in two months. This time they were addressed by the war leader and orator 

Peteasuva (Snake, aka Captain Snake). Addressing the “Brethren (of the thirteen fires),” 

he began by noting that a delegation of Wyandot and Lunaapeew from Upper Sandusky 

had recently brought “us the Sentiments of the Ten Great Nations who speak different 

languages, and live along the Great Lakes & their Confederates.” “Brethren,” he 

continued,

we are unanimous, and it is not right that you kindle fires among [small 

and discrete groups]. Therefore we inform you that at [Big Rock, aka 

Brownstown] is the Antient [sic] Council Fire of our forefathers, there is 

the proper place, and when we see you there we will take you by the 

Hand, which cannot be sooner than next Spring, as we must have time to 

hear from the other Nations to the Westward, nothing can be done by us, 

but by General consent, we act and speak like one man.

At the close of this brief but forceful message, Peteasuva sent the U.S. messengers away 

with a string of white wampum and a pipe as tokens of peace.30

Like Peteasuva, most all the leaders of the Shawnee towns on the Mad and upper 

Great Miami rivers rejected U.S. entreaties to meet in council at the mouth of the Great 

Miami. Yet a substantial delegation of Mekoche Shawnee from Wakatomika sent 

messages to U.S. officials that they would attend the council in mid-January. As Sami 

Lakömaki notes, the Mekoche were motivated by traditional and historically specific 

concerns. Within the five Shawnee divisions or septs, the Mekoche had long represented 

the Shawnee as a whole in matters relating to peace—and their civil leaders had 

frequently advocated neutrality over the past two decades of conflict. However, in the 

wake of the Fort Stanwix and Fort McIntosh treaties, which claimed all Shawnee 

territories north of the Ohio River, there was almost no room for neutrality and little hope 

for peace. Yet this situation also made it “extremely important for Mekoche leaders to 

[validate their waning] authority by negotiating a peace with the United States.”31 The 

Mekoche war leader Kekewepelethe was chosen to lead the delegation, and to make 

certain that U.S. commissioners clearly understood the council was about “amicable 

matters” and would not touch on “any Engagements respecting Lands.”32

The first day of the council, which also included representatives from the 

Sandusky Wyandot and Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), showed promise. Initial 

statements by the U.S. commissioners and the Mekoche delegation seemed to confirm 

 30 Quotations from the translated and transcribed speech of Peteasuva are from “Copy of Speech delivered 

at Wakitumekie to Amn Messengers Novr 8th 1785,” in Historical Collections and Researches Made by the 

Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society 24 (Lansing: Robert Smith & Co., 1895), 24-25; hereafter cited as 

Historical Collections and volume number. Punctuation and spelling follows the original text. The “Ten 

Great Nations ... & their Confederates” refers to various communities and alliances of Wyandot, 

Anishinaabeg (Odawa, Ojibwe, Bodéwadmi, and Mississauga), Six Nations and Seven Nations 

Haudenosaunee, and Myaamia. Wakatomika was situated on the Mad River, near present-day Zanesville, 

Ohio. Also see Sami Lakomäki, Gathering Together: The Shawnee People Through Diaspora and 

Nationhood, 1600-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 117-19. 31 Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 119; Mann, “The Greenville Treaty of 1795,” 154-58; Captain McKee to 

Sir John Johnson, February 25, 1786, Historical Collections, vol. 11 (1908): 482-83. 32 Quotation from Mckee to Johnson, 482.
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that “everything past would be forgotten; that [Shawnee] proposals for collecting [and 

returning] prisoners [from the Revolutionary War] were satisfactory, and that we would 

be placed on the same footing as before the war.”33 On the second day, however, the U.S. 

commissioners presented a treaty document with the same bold terms that had been 

delivered at Fort Stanwix and Fort McIntosh. As an officer at the council noted in his 

journal, the Shawnee representatives

were told that as they had joined the English and taken up the hatchet 

against the United States, and ... that the English ... had ceded the whole 

of the country on this side of the lakes to the Americans; that they, the 

Indians, must now look up to the Americans, and ought to be thankful if 

allowed to occupy any part of the country.34

Kekewepelethe immediately protested that the Shawnee and their allies had never been 

conquered, and denounced the entire council. “God gave us this country, we do not 

understand measuring out lands, it is all ours.”35

After a brief conference amongst themselves, the commissioners chastised 

Kekewepelethe for being “unwise and ungrateful,” and warned that failure to affirm the 

treaty would result in a state of war within ten days that would involve “the destruction of 

your women and children.” The Shawnee were given another day to reconsider or depart 

with no agreement, and no presents. How many left with Kekewepelethe is unrecorded, 

but in their absence the elder Mekoche leader Moluntha became the primary Shawnee 

spokesperson at Fort Finney. As a hokima (a male civil, or peace chief), Moluntha was 

predisposed to peaceful resolutions and had long worked to avoid conflict with 

Kentuckians. The following day, under threat of an imminent war and surrounded by 

soldiers, Moluntha expressed regret about the previous day’s talk of war, apologized for 

the speech of Kekewepelethe, and asked for “pity on women and children.” Then 

Moluntha and other Mekoche leaders put their marks on the Treaty of Fort Finney, which 

stated that the Shawnee forfeited most of southwestern Ohio and southern Indiana to the 

United States, and agreed to reside within the boundaries defined at Fort McIntosh.36

The Opposite of Peace

Instead of producing a hoped-for peace that validated the diplomatic leadership of 

the Mekoche, the Treaty of Fort Finney brought violence and discord to Shawnee 

 33 Kekewepelethe quoted in “Gen. Butler’s Journal, Continued,” in The Olden Time, ed. Neville B. Craig 

(Pittsburgh: Wright & Charlton, 1848): Robert Clark & Co.), 522.

34 Quotations from Ebeneezer Denny, Military journal of Major Ebenezer Denny, and Officer in the 

Revolutionary and Indian Wars (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1859), 73. Punctuation 

and spelling follows the original text.

35 Quotation from “Butler’s Journal,” 522. Also see Denny, “Military journal,” and McKee, Minutes of 

Debates in Council, 9-11. Punctuation and spelling follows the original text. 36 Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 118-20. Quotations from Ebeneezer Denny, Military journal of Major 

Ebenezer Denny, and Officer in the Revolutionary and Indian Wars (Philadelphia: Historical Society of 

Pennsylvania, 1859), 73. Also see “Butler’s Journal,” 524-25, 529-31; and Mann, “The Greenville Treaty

of 1795,” 157-58. While Kekewepethe’s mark appears on the final treaty document, most—but not all—

sources indicate that he was not present. Mann suggests that the mark is a forgery. Other prominent 

Mekoche Shawnee who put their marks on the document included Oweeconnee (Shade), Cawechile (Peace 

Woman) and Musquaconocah (Red Pole).
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country. Upon its return from Fort Finney, the Mekoche delegation was roundly criticized 

for acting against its original charge to not entertain any requests about land, and for 

violating the principle that no land could be ceded without the agreement of all affected 

nations. The other Shawnee septs (Chalahgawtha, Thawikila, Kispoka, and Pekowi), and 

most Mekoche, immediately disavowed the treaty. In the coming months Kekewepelethe 

would be praised for adhering to the principles expressed during the November council at 

Wakatomika, while Moluntha lost prestige. The latter still worked for peace, however, 

and maintained communication with the British at Detroit and U.S. officials at Fort 

Finney. In early spring of 1786 he told the British “We never have been in more need of 

your friendship and good offices. We have been cheated by the Americans, who are still 

striving to work our destruction, and without your assistance they may be able to 

accomplish their ends.” Then a few months later he requested that the “chiefs” at Fort 

Finney “have patience” as he continued to do “all he [could] to fulfill the promises made 

... at the council fire.” These were not the actions of a turn-coat or a double-agent, so 

much as the efforts of a weakened hokima still trying to fulfill his role as a peacemaker. 

Yet his diminished circumstances, and his hope that peace might be won through separate 

appeals to the greatest adversaries on the continent, were clear signs that war was 

imminent and his goals unattainable.37

In the wake of the Fort Stanwix and Fort McIntosh treaties, increasing numbers of 

U.S. citizens had begun moving westward across the Allegheny and Cumberland 

mountains, or by flat boat down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh. The latter made easy 

targets for raids by Ökwe'öwé (Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”) and Tsalagihi (Cherokee) 

warriors—who had maintained a pattern of low-level violence against settler incursions 

since the end of the Revolutionary War. After the Fort Finney Treaty, and as flotillas of 

flatboats made their way down the Ohio River during the spring freshet, Shawnee and 

Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) warriors from the upper Mad River also began attacks 

along the Ohio and into Kentucky. These actions quickly led to a general call for 

resistance against the Long Knives, and messengers were sent to the north and the west. 

By summer, large numbers of Bodéwadmi, Ojibwe, and Odawa had answered the call 

and were enroute to the Shawnee towns. At about the same time, forty-seven war canoes 

from villages and towns on the upper Wabash River poured into Vincennes after a nearby 

Piankeshaw village was attacked by Kentucky militia. The French Canadiens of 

Vincennes warned their U.S. neighbors, who found refuge inside Fort Patrick Henry, and 

then mediated a truce before a full-scale assault could begin. The episode ended with the 

destruction of some U.S crops as the warriors departed for home.38

In response to the near attack on Vincennes, General George Rogers Clark led a 

force of 1,200 Kentucky militia toward the Piankeshaw and Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) towns 

around the confluence of the Vermillion and Wabash rivers. However, the ultimate target 

of the campaign was a planned attack on the Myaamia towns at the headwaters of the 

Wabash and Maumee rivers. As Clark led his force up the Wabash, General Benjamin 

Logan led a contingent of militia and U.S. Regulars toward the Shawnee towns on the 

Mad River. While Clark’s campaign was forced to turn back due to insufficient supplies 

and desertion, Logan’s force reached its mark in early October. Known as “Logan’s 

 37 Sugden, Blue Jacket, 71-72; quotations are from p. 72 38 Arthur J. Leighton, “‘Eyes on the Wabash’: A History of Indiana’s Indian People from Pre-Contact 

through Removal,” (PhD diss., Purdue University, 2007), 154-58.
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Raid,” this second action proved more damaging since the Shawnee towns had been left 

undefended when their warriors went to support their allies against Clark. Logan’s forces 

destroyed food stores, burned thirteen towns and villages, took at least thirty captives, 

and killed ten—including the elderly Moluntha.39

Figure 5.3: Population Centers in the Ohio River Valley, late 1780s. Map 

illustrates the main population centers of the Western Confederacy and concentrations of 

U.S. settlements from 1787 to the early 1790s. Following the destruction of the Shawnee 

towns on the upper Great Miami and Mad rivers, most of the refugees rebuilt their 

communities among the polyglot population centers along the upper Maumee River. 

Others moved to the lower Wabash River for about two years before moving to the upper 

Maumee or points further west. The main French Canadien populations at this time were 

near Detroit and along the River Raisin, though a small number were also living and 

trading with groups on the Maumee, upper Wabash and upper Sandusky rivers.

 39 Robert S. Allen, His Majesty's Indian Allies: British Indian Policy in the Defence of Canada 1774-1815

(Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1996), 65. Colin G. Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America (New 

York: Viking, 2007), 83-84; Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 119-121; William R. Nester, George Rogers 

Clark: "I Glory in War" (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 275-79. The Shawnee, 

Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), and Ökwe'öwé (Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”) who raided Ohio River 

settlements in 1785 came from the cluster of mostly Shawnee towns on the upper Mad River 

(Hathennithiipi), and were most likely led by the Shawnee war leader Waweyapiersenwah (Whirlpool, aka 

Blue Jacket), and the Lunaapeew (Delaware) war leader Buckongahelas.
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Dueling Sovereignties

In December 1786, just a few months after the attacks on the Shawnee towns, 

representatives from most all of the groups in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region 

came together in council at Big Rock (Brownstown) to discuss a united response to U.S. 

treaties and military campaigns. The result was a document sent to Congress in early 

January in which the “United Indian Nations at the Confederated Council” noted their 

astonishment at not having been included in the Peace of Paris, and denounced the 

“partial treaties” of 1784, 1785, and 1786 “as void and having no effect.” They then 

informed the Congress that legitimate treaties with the United States would have to be 

“carried on ... with the general voice of the whole confederacy, and carried on in the 

most open manner, without any restraint on either side.” After expressing their regret 

over recent violence along the Ohio River, the Grand Council proposed a council in the 

spring to negotiate a formal treaty of friendship and understanding with the United States. 

In order to establish trust and restore peace between their peoples, the Council also 

requested that Congress “order your Surveyors and others that mark out lands, to cease 

from crossing the Ohio, until we shall have spoken to you because the mischief that has 

recently happened has originated in that quarter. [W]e shall likewise prevent our people 

from going over until that time.”40

As Native leaders worked to ensure that the Western Confederacy as a whole 

(rather than individual groups or leaders) dealt with the United States, Congress 

endeavored to complete a comprehensive plan for the administration of what was known 

as the Northwest Territory. In a series of three land ordinances in 1784, 1785, and 1787, 

the Confederated Congress reaffirmed the basic tenets of the Proclamation of 1783: 

namely, that the entire region between the Mississippi and Ohio rivers was under the 

authority of Congress, and that only agents of the national government could acquire 

lands from Native groups and subsequently survey them for sale or disposal. To ensure 

that this process did not give rise to unnecessary conflict, the 1787 “Ordinance for the 

Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the River Ohio” further 

declared that

The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands 

and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and, in their 

property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in 

just and lawful wars authorized by Congress; but laws founded in justice and 

humanity, shall from time to time be made for preventing wrongs being done to 

them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them.41

 40 “Speech of the United Indian Nations at the Confederated Council held near the Mouth of the Detroit 

River, to the Congress of the United States, Detroit, 18 December 1786,” Papers of the War Department, 

1784-1800 <http://wardepartmentpapers.org/document.php?id=3569> (accessed 9 November 2015). Also 

see Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 57-58. 41 “An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the River Ohio, 

July 13, 1787,” Library of Congress: Primary Documents in American History

<https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/northwest.html> (accessed 15 November 2015).
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Figure 5.4 Organizing the “Northwest Territory”: Map illustrates three key 

features of the Land Ordinances of 1784, 1785, and 1787. The light green area corresponds 

to the geographic bounds of the 1784 Plan for the Temporary Government of the Western 

Territory, while the sectional grid survey corresponds to Thomas Jefferson’s original 

proposal for how the region would be divided into 10 new states. The inset illustrates the 

first area surveyed in accordance with An ordinance for ascertaining the mode of disposing 

of lands in the Western Territory (1785). All lands were organized into 36 squar- mile

Townships that were further divided into one-square mile (640-acre) Sections. Sections 

were often sold or granted in smaller divisions of 320, 160, 80, and 40 acres. This process 

established the cadastral survey system that was later applied to most of what is now the 

western United States. Current state boundaries are visible in light gray lines.

While this language reflected some discomfort in the Congress over recent 

conflicts, the primary focus of all three ordinances was on the process that would 

commence once “the Indian titles shall have been extinguished.”42 The 1785 Ordinance 

had already sought to regularize American settlement patterns through orderly grid 

surveys that prevented squatting, promoted town development, and ensured sufficient 

acreage for any agricultural enterprise. The 1787 Ordinance, which subsumed the 

previous two, also established the methods for creating new states and the process of their 

admission into the Union “on an equal footing with the original States in all respects 

whatever.” By assuring western settlers that their territorial or colonial status was 

temporary, and that they would become equal members of the Republic, the Northwest 

Ordinances of 1785 and 1787 redefined imperial expansion as a process of nation 

 42 Ibid.
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building, and westward migration as an exercise of full citizenship through property 

ownership. In effect, this process was intended to erase the vestiges of the 1763 

Proclamation Line.43

Even as the formal pronouncements of the Western Confederacy and the 

Confederation Congress sought to address some of the same issues, they both struggled to 

project a unified policy or voice. This was confirmed at the Treaty of Fort Harmar in 

January of 1789 which, due to a series of communication errors, occurred some eight 

months later than the Grand Council had initially proposed. Prior to the treaty council, a 

significant number of leaders from the Western Confederacy assembled at Upper 

Sandusky to confer and prepare for the journey to the treaty council site at the mouth of 

the Muskingum River. However, a proposal by some to compromise with the Americans 

and cede lands to the east of the Muskingum created a division and caused a brief delay. 

During this interim a forceful message came from Governor Arthur St. Clair (the head of 

the commission representing the United States), making clear his expectation that the 

forthcoming treaty council would essentially reconfirm the terms of the Fort Macintosh 

Treaty. For many of the members of the Western Confederacy, agreeing to or finding 

ways to compromise on the terms of a rejected treaty was out of the question. 

Consequently, representatives of the Myaamia (Miami), Bodéwadmi, and Shawnee, 

along with most of the Odawa and Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), and as many as 

half of the Wyandot, departed for their homes along the Detroit, Miami, Maumee and 

Wabash rivers, as did the Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) leader Thayendanegea (aka, Joseph 

Brant)—who returned to his village near the Niagara Peninsula.44

At the Fort Harmar council, which was almost exclusively attended by members 

of the Western Confederacy who were inclined toward compromise with the United 

States, the proposal for a boundary at the Muskingum River was rejected outright by St. 

Clair. Contrary to directions from the War Department, which placed an emphasis on 

preventing further cause for conflict or resentment against the United States, St. Clair 

insisted on full recognition of the four-year old Fort McIntosh land cession. Generous 

gifts seemed to tamp down the discord among the Confederacy delegates, but several still 

declined to put their marks on a formal document. St. Clair, for his part, forgot to bring a 

white belt of wampum that would have confirmed U.S. agreement to the terms and the 

conditions of peace they implied. Reports on such missteps and heavy-handedness on the 

part of St. Clair were soon brought to the Confederated Council by the delegates who left 

the Fort Harmar council early or did not put their marks on the treaty document. Not 

surprisingly, St. Clair’s actions and demands were alarming, and they only strengthened 

 43 Malcolm J . Rohrbough, “‘A Freehold Estate Therein’: The Ordinance of 1787 and the Public Domain,” 

Indiana Magazine of History 84 (1988): 46-59; Hinderacker, Elusive Empires, 231. 44 At the time of the council at Fort Harmar, Arthur St. Clair was the Governor of the Northwest Territory. 

He had previously served as President of the Congress. This and the following paragraph are based on the 

following sources: Governor St Clair to the Secretary of War, January 18, 1789;and Governor St. Clair to 

the President, May 2, 1789” in The St. Clair Papers: The Life and Public Services of Arthur St. Clair, ed. 

William Henry Smith (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co, 1882), 2: 108-113; James McIntyre, “Fort Harmar, 

Ohio,” in Treaties with American Indians: An Encyclopedia of Rights, Conflicts, and Sovereignty, ed. 

Donald L. Fixico (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2008), 420; Celia Barnes, Native American Power in the 

United States, 1783-1795 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003). 128-132; Colin G. 

Calloway, The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army (New 

York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 58-59; White, Middle Ground, 443-446.
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the majority position within the Confederacy. Yet the document that St. Clair brought 

back to Congress was received as a sufficient basis for U.S. claims to much of the Ohio 

Valley, and news of the council soon brought surveyors and a number of squatters. In 

sum, the Fort Harmar council exacerbated the very conditions that the Western 

Confederacy and the Congress had sought to alleviate—and ensured that more violence 

would ensue.

Free Consent and Just War

Shortly after President Washington’s inauguration in the spring of 1789, Secretary 

of War Henry Knox provided a grim assessment of conditions in the Northwest Territory. 

“[T]he deep rooted prejudices, and malignity of heart, and conduct reciprocally 

entertained and practiced on all occasions by the Whites and [American Indians] will 

ever prevent their being good neighbours.” This historical dynamic, as Knox saw it, had 

all the markings of a perpetual and indiscriminate cycle of violence. “With minds 

previously inflamed,” he noted, “the slightest offense occasions death, revenge follows 

which knows no bound. The flames of a merciless war are thus lighted up which involve 

innocent and helpless with the guilty.” Because Knox placed a great deal of faith in the 

primacy of the new federal government and the authority of the presidency, he expected 

that peaceful resolution would likely require the force of “Government [to] keep them 

both in awe by a strong hand, and compel them to be moderate and just.”45

Like Washington, Knox had almost equal disdain for backwoods Euro-Americans 

and American Indians, but exercising a “strong hand” on the former was likely more 

difficult and certainly more politically fraught than war on the latter. The right approach, 

he reasoned, was to renegotiate all previous treaties, as well as directly negotiate a treaty 

with the Myaamia (Miami), Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) and Shawnee along the 

Wabash and upper Maumee rivers. While he did not acknowledge the Confederacy as a 

legitimate counterpart in these proposed treaties, Knox believed that a more generous 

compensation for land with specific groups—coupled with firm promises to protect 

retained lands —would establish enough distance between them and encroaching settlers 

to foster peace. In an echo of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and with a clearer sense 

of international law, he suggested and dismissed a counter argument that war was the 

only answer. “The Indians being the prior occupants, possess the right of the soil. It 

cannot be taken from them unless by their free consent, or by the right of conquest in case 

of a just war. To dispossess them on any other principle, would be a gross violation of the 

fundamental laws of nature, and of that distributive justice which is the glory of a 

nation.”46

In the spring of 1789, as Myaamia, Shawnee, and Lunaapeew warriors began 

another season of deadly raids on both sides of the Ohio River, Secretary Knox and other 

officials in the War Department became increasingly alarmed. From their perspective, the 

Treaty of Fort Harmar may have caused consternation within the Western Confederacy—

but that could be alleviated with a new council and a wider distribution of presents. 

 45 “Report to the President, Indian Department Number I: The Wabash Tribes, 1789”; Quoted in Michael 

D. Carter, “Fighting the Flames of a Merciless War: Secretary of War Henry Knox and the Indian War in 

the Old Northwest, 1790-1795,” Journal of the Indian Wars 1:2 (1999), 94-95. 46 “Report of Henry Knox on the Northwestern Indians: June 15, 1789,” in Francis Paul Prucha, ed., 

Documents of United States Indian Policy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 12-13.
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Instead, all of the terms ratified by the U.S. Senate were being violently flaunted by 

groups that were receiving material support from the British at Detroit—which itself was 

located within the territorial boundaries of the United States. For Knox, these conditions 

certainly met the criteria in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance for initiating “just and lawful 

wars.” As he noted in a letter to Governor St. Clair, Knox wanted the United States “to 

exhibit to the Wabash [and other] Indians our power to punish them for their hostile 

depredations, for their conniving at the depredations of others, and for their refusing to 

treat with the United States when invited thereto.”47

Toward these ends, Knox appointed General Josiah Harmar to lead a mixed force 

of 320 regulars along with 1,100 Pennsylvania and Kentucky militia, and deliver a 

“sudden stroke by which their towns and crops may be destroyed” along with all who 

stood in the way. High expectations of an easy triumph, however, soon gave way to a 

terrifying defeat. Under the leadership of the Myaamia war leader Mihšihkinaahkwa 

(Little Turtle) and the Shawnee war leader Waweyapiersenwah (Whirlpool, aka Blue 

Jacket), Harmar’s forces were routed in three separate engagements and forced to retreat 

back to Fort Washington (present-day Cincinnati). It was a stunning and embarrassing 

defeat that cost American treasure and resulted in more than 230 killed and wounded.48

The following year President Washington commissioned St. Clair to lead another 

campaign to the upper Wabash River. After assembling approximately 600 regulars and 

another 1,400 volunteers and militia, he set out from Fort Washington in October for the 

Myaamia town of Kiihkayonki (aka Kekionga, near present-day Fort Wayne, Indiana). 

By the time they reached the headwaters of the Wabash on November 2, however, St. 

Clair’s total force had declined to just under 1,500—largely from illness and desertion. 

As they established their camp on the bluffs above the river, a force of 1,100 mostly 

Myaamia, Shawnee, and Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) warriors prepared for an 

assault the next morning. Led by Mihšihkinaahkwa, Waweyapiersenwah, and the 

Lunapeew war leader Buckongahelas, they attacked at dawn and completely surprised the 

U.S. encampment. As the militia fled in terror, the regular troops formed battle lines but 

were quickly encircled. The artillery was captured and spiked, and only a few battalions 

managed to hold off attacks by making repeated bayonet charges. After just a few hours, 

almost the entire force was destroyed—with 632 killed, 264 wounded, and 37 civilian 

laborers killed or wounded. Still more were captured and taken away from the field of 

battle, as were many of the camp followers. In all, St. Clair lost 97% of his entire force in 

 47 Wiley Sword, President Washington’s Indian War: The Struggle for the Old Northwest, 1790-1795, 

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 134-37. Quotations are from Secretary of War to Governor 

St. Clair, September 12, 1790, in ASP, Indian Affairs, vol. 1 (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1832), 100. 48 Harvey Lewis Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle: First Sagamore of the Wabash (Urbana: 

University of Illinois Press, 1987), 92-94; Calloway, The Victory with No Name, 63-68; Sword, President 

Washington’s Indian War, 139-142, 156; and George Ironstrack, “Mihši-maalhsa Wars Part II – The Battle 

of the Kiihkayonki,” Aacimotaatiiyankwi: A Myaamia Community Blog

<https://myaamiahistory.wordpress.com /2014/03/31/the-mihsi-maalhsa-wars-part-ii/ > (accessed January 

8, 2016). While the British provided material and occasional strategic support, they made it clear that they 

would not countenance the idea of a military alliance; see Nelson, A Man of Distinction among Them, 157-

58. As a younger man, Waweyapiersenwah was known as Sepettekenathé.
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a single engagement. Estimated Native casualties were the inverse of the U.S. losses, and 

amounted to approximately 3% —with perhaps 25-30 wounded and 3-5 killed.49

Exercising Sovereignty

The back-to-back victories over Harmar and St. Clair instilled confidence 

throughout the Western Confederacy, and bolstered the position of those who had refused 

to participate in or recognize the Fort Harmar and Fort McIntosh treaties. Looking south 

to the Ohio River and east toward the Alleghenies they could envision a vast landscape 

free of U.S. troops and citizens, and open to Native resettlement. Brief but damaging 

raids by mounted Kentucky militia in the coming months put a check on such dreams, but 

did little to diminish the resilience of the broader Confederacy. The defeat of St. Clair 

also impressed the British, who had sent advisors to the Myaamia villages prior to the 

battle, and opened a more generous supply of trade goods and gifts. In the early 1790s the 

British also helped organize a number of large councils at different population centers on 

the Maumee River. These gatherings provided the space for leaders within the 

Confederacy to consult with each other and the British regarding a range of issues related 

to accommodating and assisting the communities hardest hit by militia raids to preparing 

for the next U.S. invasion.50

On this last score the British were of two minds—or rather two voices. Officers in 

the British Indian Department like Matthew Elliott, Alexander McKee, and William 

Caldwell who had extensive ties among the Native communities of the Great Lakes and 

Ohio Valley, spoke positively of a British-Confederacy military alliance. So too did 

Detroit-based Lt. Governor John Graves Simcoe, who continued to advocate for 

establishing the “Indian Buffer State” that was initially proposed during the Peace of 

Paris. Yet British officials in London and the Governor General in Montreal were not 

willing to directly engage with U.S. forces, and occasionally disavowed their support for 

a Confederacy-led war—especially when imperial concerns over French threats in 

Europe or Spanish activities west of the Mississippi River made conciliating the United 

States an appealing if temporary strategy.51

Washington, Knox, and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton counseled 

among themselves in the wake of St. Clair’s debacle, and proposed that Congress should 

fund a larger and better-prepared force against the Western Confederacy. Eschewing an 

over reliance on “disgruntled” and “unruly” militiamen “of poor quality and low morale,” 

Congress approved the creation of the Legion of the United States—with a core of 5,000 

regular troops that would be specifically trained and equipped for “Indian Warfare.” 

Major General Anthony Wayne was appointed commander of this new army, and by the 

winter of 1792-93 the entire force had assembled for basic training at Legionville 

(present-day Baden, Pennsylvania), very near the site where George Washington had met 

with Guyasuta almost forty years before. Drawing on his Revolutionary War experiences,

and using the errors of Harmar and St. Clair as counter-examples, Wayne prepared his 

troops to operate as a large mobile force. Emphasizing careful planning and supply, as 

 49 Calloway, The Victory with No Name, 115-29. 50 Calloway, Victory with No Name, 146-50; Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North 

American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 118-

21; White, Middle Ground, 455-56. 51 Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 85-86; Larry L. Nelson, A Man of Distinction among Them, 149-59.
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well as combinations of artillery, cavalry, infantry, and small raiding parties, Wayne 

sought to create an army that was “suitable to the Country and Service for which they 

were intended.” In preparation for an invasion of the Wabash and Maumee River 

communities, Wayne moved the Legion to Fort Washington in early May.52

As Wayne began assembling and training the Legion in western Pennsylvania, a 

Grand Council of the Western Confederacy was convened amidst the cluster of towns 

and villages in an area that French traders had dubbed “the Glaize.” Situated at the 

confluence of the Auglaize and Maumee rivers, and about half-way between the 

Myaamia population center at the headwaters of the Maumee and the mostly Odawa 

villages near the Maumee Rapids, the Glaize was a “composite community” that had 

become what Helen Hornbeck Tanner called “the headquarters for the militant Indian 

confederacy protesting American advance northwest of the Ohio River.” While the 

populations of the main towns were primarily Shawnee, Lunaapew, and Myaamia, the 

whole array of villages and towns in the area included people from various Indigenous 

communities, British traders, and French Canadien settlers, as well as Euro-American 

and African American captives and adoptees. In its composition, then, the Glaize neatly 

captured the diversity of the Western Confederacy and of the region. The Glaize was also 

blessed with silt-rich soils that supported hundreds of acres of gardens, cornfields, and 

pasture areas that stretched for miles along the river banks. This bounty made the Glaize 

a crucial resource for the Confederacy, since extra stores of food could support warriors 

on their way to and from battle, help sustain communities that had been attacked by the 

Long Knives, and feed large gatherings of the Confederacy.53

The assemblage of representatives that came to the Glaize was even more diverse 

than the host community, and included Shawnee, Wyandot, Lunaapeew (Lenape, or 

Delaware), Myaamia, Odawa, Bodéwadmi (Potowatomi), Ojibwe (Ojibway, or 

Chippewa), Waayaahtanwa (Ouiatenon, or Wea), Thâkîwa (Sauk, or Sac), Meskwaki 

(Fox), Haudenosaunee, Mvskoke (Muscogee or Creek), and Tsalagihi (Cherokee)—with 

some coming from as far away as present-day Quebec, Ontario, Tennessee, Missouri, and 

the upper Great Lakes. As the Shawnee leader Musquaconoca (Red Pole, or Painted Pole) 

described it, this “Council fire” drew together a vast web of communities—at the 

physical and metaphorical “center of our Country, [in which] is placed the Heart of the 

Indian Confederacy.” “It was here within the Grand Council,” the Lunaapeew leader 

Buckongahelas noted, that “the sentiments of all the Nations” were clarified. Where “All 

of us are animated by one Mind, one Head and one Heart and we are resolved to stick 

close by each other & defend ourselves to the last.” Energized by the defeats of Harmar 

 52 Alan D. Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness: Anthony Wayne’s Legion in the Old Northwest (Norman: 

University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 22-56; Quotations on militia from John R. Maass, Defending a New 

Nation, 1783-1811 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, United States Army, 2013), 17, 19, and 

21; Wayne quoted in Jay C. Ruston, “Anthony Wayne and the Indian Campaign, 1792-1794,” Indiana 

Military History Journal, 7 (May 1982), 21. 53 Quotation from Tanner, “The Glaize in 1792: A Composite Indian Community,” Ethnohisory 25:1 

(Winter 1978), 15-39; quotation is from p. 15. There were six main towns at the Glaize: three Shawnee, 

two Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), and one mostly Myaamia. The rest of the towns and villages, 

including the British trader’s, were generally more diverse.
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and St. Clair, the Western Confederacy had reached a level of unity and strength that 

made it an independent power in North America.54

While the formidable potential of the Confederacy was certainly felt by its most 

ardent participants, British and U.S. officials recognized its strength as well. To the 

British, who were formally represented at the Grand Council (as a key member rather 

than a guiding partner), the Western Confederacy was an essential ally that could help 

reshape the post-1783 geopolitical landscape of North America. Assisting and supporting 

the aims of the Confederacy could serve two aims: undermining U.S. commercial 

interests in the Great Lakes and its lucrative fur trade, and confining the political 

boundaries of the new Republic to the Ohio River. In the United States, the growing 

independence and strength of the Confederacy presented a grave threat to the young 

nation’s future. An inability to prevent American Indian attacks along the Ohio River, or 

to convert U.S. claims on the Northwest territory into surveyed parcels of land, created 

resentment within western settler communities that only made the secessionist schemes 

of Wilkinson and others all the more plausible. News of St. Clair’s defeat also 

exacerbated political divisions in the East, where Anti-Federalists complained of the 

expense and seeming purposelessness of a war against people with “as much right to their 

hunting-grounds as we have to our cities or our farms.” In short, all parties agreed that the 

future prospects of the region—and even the continent—hinged on how fully the 

Confederacy was able to exercise political and territorial sovereignty.55

As the Grand Council drew to a close, one key disagreement needed resolution 

before the body as a whole could reach consensus and come “to one Mind.” 

Haudenosaunee representatives believed that the Muskingum—rather than the Ohio—

was a more viable eastern boundary between the Western Confederacy and the United 

States. Depopulated of its Indigenous residents, and beginning to fill with land surveyors 

and squatters, it was not a region the Confederacy could recapture or securely control. 

The outnumbered Haudenosaunee soon withdrew their public concerns and the Grand 

Council ultimately reached consensus on an Ohio River boundary, then formally resolved 

to invite U.S. representatives to a conference the following summer. Secretary Knox 

agreed to send a Commission, which met with the representatives of the Grand Council in 

August 1793 on the lower Sandusky River. After several speeches and much discussion, 

the Grand Council proposed the conditions for peace they had formalized the previous 

October: recognition of the Ohio River boundary, and the application of all unspent funds 

from the treaties of 1784-1786 to assist in relocating U.S. citizens to their side of the 

 54 Quotations are from “Indian Council at the Glaize, 1792,” in The Correspondence of Lieut. Governor 

John Graves Simcoe, 5 vols., ed. E. A. Cruikshank (Toronto: The Ontario Historical Society, 1931), 1:220 

and 229; Also see Timothy D. Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship: British Policy and the Indians of 

the Great Lakes, 1783-1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 37-40. 55 William Patrick Walsh, “The Defeat of Major General Arthur St. Clair, November 4, 1791: A Study of 

the Nation's Response, 1791-1793” (PhD diss., Loyola University, 1977), 37-67, 159-173; Kristopher 

Maulden, “The Federalist Frontier: Early American Political development in the Old Northwest” (PhD 

diss., University of Missouri, 2012), 54-70; Kopper, “Arthur St. Clair and the Struggle for Power in the Old 

Northwest,” 163-171; William H. Bergman, “Commerce in Arms: The Federal Government, Native 

Americans, and the Economy of the Old Northwest, 1783-1807” (PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 

2005), 43-52; Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship, 48-50; Nelson, A Man of Distinction among 

Them, 163-67. Quotation from Independent Chronicle (Boston), December 29, 1791; in John C. McMaster, 

The History of the United States: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Appleton, 1883), 67.
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Ohio. The Commissioners balked, but did offer to consider a compromise boundary

somewhere between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. This notion was rejected 

outright and, because the representatives from the Grand Council did not believe the 

Commissioners even had the authority to make such a proposal, the council promptly 

dissolved into acrimonious irresolution.56

Alaamhsenwa: A Shifting Wind57

A few months before the Commissioners departed for Lower Sandusky, General 

Wayne received a triad of directives from Secretary Knox: refrain from offensive 

operations, prevent incursions from U.S. citizens into areas contested by American 

Indians, and prepare for a prolonged campaign in the likelihood that negotiations with the 

Grand Council failed. Wayne had little faith in the Grand Council or the U.S. 

Commission, and suspected the meeting was a ploy by the former to delay war until late 

summer when conditions would be more favorable to the Confederacy. Given his 

expectations, and the order from Knox, Wayne intended to use the early summer months 

to lay the groundwork for a general invasion. Outbreaks of small pox and influenza 

among his troops slowed these preparations, however, and the campaign into the heart of 

the Confederacy did not commence until October 7—when the scourges of the summer 

had passed and official news of the failed council reached Fort Washington.58

Despite the delay, the Legion moved at a slow and methodical pace that followed 

a carefully scripted plan. In order to prevent any part of his force from becoming over 

extended, or encamped without protective fieldworks, Wayne ordered each day’s march 

to end by midday. This schedule allowed for the construction of a defensive perimeter 

well before dark, provided opportunities for scouting the vicinity and the route ahead, and 

ensured that soldiers would be rested and in good order by “Revellee.” The first weeks of 

the campaign were also intended to strengthen order and discipline in the field, and 

provided ample opportunities for troops to become more proficient in creating the basic 

infrastructure of depots, guarded camps, forts, and stream crossings for what would 

become a 200-mile supply train to the lower Maumee River.59 Such preparations failed 

their first test, however, when a combined force of Shawnee, Myaamia, and Odawa 

attacked and routed a convoy near Fort St. Clair (present-day Eaton, Ohio) on October 

 56 “Message from the Western Indians to the Commissioners of the United States, August 13th, 1793” and 

“Message from the Commissioners of the United States to the Chiefs & Warriors of the Indian Nations 

Assembled at the Foot of the Miamis Rapids, August 16th, 1793,” in E. A. Cruikshank, ed., The 

Correspondence of Lieut. Governor John Graves Simcoe, 2 vols. (Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 

1923-1924), II: 17-24. Also see Andrew J. Birtle, “The Origins of the Legion of the United States,” The 

Journal of Military History, Volume 67 (October 2003): 1249-61. 57 Alaamhsenwa (aka “the Wind”) is the Myaamia name applied to General Anthony Wayne—in large part 

because Wayne seemed to move his various forces wherever he chose. The Anishinaabeg (Odawa, Ojibwe, 

and Bodéwadmi) called him Noodin or Chi-noodin, which also means “the Wind.” 58 Henry Knox to Anthony Wayne, April 20, 1793; Knox to Wayne, April 27, 1793, and Wayne to Knox, 

April 29, 1793, in Richard C Knopf, ed., Anthony Wayne, A Name in Arms: Soldier, Diplomat, Defender of 

Expansion Westward of a Nation; The Wayne-Knox-Pickering-McHenry Correspondence, and the

Executive Journal of the Northwest Territory (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1960), 221-25, 

227-33. Also see Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 122-28, 144-55. 59 Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 157-159. The spelling of “Revellee” comes from David A. Simmons,

“An Orderly Book from Fort Washington and Fort Hamilton, 1792-1793,” Cincinnati Historical Society 

Bulletin, 36:2 (Summer 1978): 127.
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17, 1793. Along with the loss of vital stores and pack animals, the Legion suffered 13

killed, 11 captured, and a similar number of wounded out of a company of 90 men.

60

In response to the attack, Wayne ordered the formation of “super convoys,” large 

pack trains escorted by 500 troops. This proved a time-consuming enterprise, and 

effectively stalled the campaign at Fort Greene Ville (present-day Greenville, Ohio)—

some eighty miles north of Fort Washington. After two months the Legion was ready to 

move again, and Wayne sent a detachment twenty-five miles north to establish Fort 

Recovery at the headwaters of the Wabash River and the site of St. Clair’s Defeat. While 

this marked the terminus of the Legion’s campaigning for 1793, the fort was lightly 

garrisoned and remained vulnerable to attack through most of the following spring. By 

late May, however, Fort Recovery had grown in size and importance. With supply lines 

from the Ohio River more secure, and attacks by small groups of Confederacy warriors 

less frequent, vast amounts of stores arrived at Fort Greene Ville—which came to 

resemble a walled village covering fifty-five acres. From these well-stocked and 

protected confines, “super convoys” were assembled and sent north under heavy guard. 

In early June Fort Recovery was ready to become the forward operating base for Wayne’s 

campaign, and clearly presented an imminent threat to the Confederacy.61

As the Legion strengthened its forward position, the Western Confederacy held a 

council of war in mid-June at the Glaize. Though not as large as the Grand Council from 

a year before, the gathering was energized by demonstrations of active support from the 

British. A few months earlier, Governor General Lord Dorchester told a gathering of 

Confederacy representatives that conflict over the Great Lakes region was imminent. The 

cause for war, as Dorchester explained, stemmed from the United States’ refusal to treat 

with Indigenous nations according to international norms and a failure to establish a clear 

boundary line between the United States and British North America. Given “the manner 

in which the people of the United States rush on, and act, and talk ..., I shall not be 

surprised if we are at war with them in the course of the present year; and if so, a line 

must then be drawn by the warriors.” Dorchester’s speech—and Wayne’s establishment 

of winter quarters at Fort Recovery—coincided with an increase in the distribution of 

supplies and weapons at Detroit and the Glaize, as well as a flurry of new messages and 

meetings between officials in the British Indian Department and Confederacy leaders. Lt. 

Governor Simcoe also agreed with a recommendation from the Indian Department to 

construct modest fortifications at strategic sites to the south of Detroit, which soon 

resulted in the construction of Fort Miamis at the foot of the Maumee Rapids as well as a 

blockhouse on Maumee Bay and another near Frenchtown on the River Raisin.62

 60 Carter, Little Turtle, 126; Sword, President Washington’s Indian War, 250; Gaff, Bayonets in the 

Wilderness, 162-66. 61 Painted Tobacco and A. M, McKee to Chiefs of the Huron, June 9, 1794, in Historical Collections, 20 

(Lansing: Wynkoop, Hallenbeck, Crawford, Co., 1912), 358; Nelson, A Man of Distinction among Them, 

167-69; President Washington’s Indian War, 255-256. Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 184-186. Fort 

Greene Ville was named after the Revolutionary War hero Major General Nathanael Greene. At the time of 

its establishment, the fort and the community that grew up around it were known as Greene Ville; see 

Simmons, “An Orderly Book from Fort Washington and Fort Hamilton, 1792-1793,” 125-44. By the spring 

of 1795, however, the facility was referred to as Fort Greenville in Wayne’s correspondence. 62 Lord Dorchester quoted in “Reply of his Excellency Lord Dorchester to the Indians of the seven Villages 

of Lower Canada, as Deputies from all the Nations who were at the general Council held at the Miami, in 

the Year 1793; except the Chawauous, Miamis, and Loups,” 278-79, in Treaty of amity, commerce, and 
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144

All of these actions inspired a renewed faith in the British-Confederacy alliance, 

and assuaged the concerns of the Anishinaabeg (Odawa, Ojibwe, and Bodéwadmi) from 

the northern Great Lakes. During the Sandusky council the previous summer, they 

disagreed with an insistence on the Ohio River as the only acceptable boundary with the 

United States. The idea seemed indefensible, especially given the languishing support of 

the British over the previous decade. Following that council, the northerners largely 

excused themselves from the concerns of the Western Confederacy. Given their distance 

from the Ohio Valley, and relative independence from the various alliances that had 

formed in the Detroit region and Ohio Valley over the previous century, this 

disagreement and subsequent withdrawal is hardly surprising. Yet, by the same token, 

their return to the council grounds at the Glaize clearly reflects the galvanizing effects of 

Wayne’s campaign and British demonstrations of support. Perhaps the most telling and 

immediate consequence of these changes is measured by the number of warriors who 

came from the northern Great Lakes to fight the Long Knives: out of a Confederacy army 

that totaled 1,500, the northern Anishinaabeg alone accounted for at least half that 

number.63

Bolstered by supplies, weapons and provisions from the British, as well as a small 

number of troops, the emboldened Confederacy determined to strike Wayne’s army 

before it could advance from Fort Recovery. Since a direct assault was not possible, war 

leaders devised a plan to attack super convoys in order to gain supplies and isolate the 

garrison. A siege would follow, in which the Western Confederacy would use the eight 

U.S. cannons that had been hidden after the defeat of St. Clair, and then attack Wayne’s 

forces as they retreated south. On the morning of June 30, a supply convoy that had 

encamped outside Fort Recovery the night before was attacked and quickly routed. As 

many as seventy soldiers and contractors were killed, wounded, or captured, while the 

large pack train was taken along with the entire herd of cattle then grazing outside the 

fort. This initial success proved fleeting, however. The search for the hidden cannons was 

fruitless, since all but one had been recovered and refurbished by Wayne’s forces over 

the preceding months. Consequently, the fort had far more artillery than expected and the 

Confederacy had none. This critical fact was not yet clear as the siege perimeter was 

taking shape, but it became apparent when several clusters of northern Odawa and 

Ojibwe warriors decided to rush the fort. Their disorganized charges were effectively 

repulsed by substantial artillery and musket fire, which resulted in a number of casualties 

as well as an ignominious retreat. Though hardly catastrophic, this loss made it clear that 

the initial strategy was no longer viable and that a prolonged engagement would only 

 

navigation, between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America, conditionally ratified by the 

Senate of the United States, at Philadelphia, June 24, 1795; to which is annexed, a copious appendix

(Philadelphia: Henry Tuckniss, 1795), 278-79. For fuller context, see Timothy D. Willig, Restoring the 

Chain of Friendship: British Policy and the Indians of the Great Lakes, 1783-1815 (Lincoln: University of 

Nebraska Press, 2008), 52-54. 63 Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship, 54-56; Sword, President Washington’s Indian War, 270-75; 

Carter, Little Turtle, 129-30; White, Middle Ground, 465-66; Michael A. McDonnell, Masters of Empire: 

Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015), 314-15. Along with 

the Anishinaabeg from the northern Great Lakes, Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) from west of the 

Mississippi sent messages that they would join in the battle—with support from the Spanish—and the 

Waayaahtanwa (Ouiatenon, or Wea) on the Wabash River repudiated their separate agreements with the 

United States and sought readmission to the Confederacy. None, however, arrived at the Glaize by midJune.
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weaken the Confederacy. By dawn the next day, the assemblage of American Indian and 

British forces withdrew and most all of the northern groups soon departed for their home 

villages.64

In terms of losses and gains, the battle at Fort Recovery may have been a draw, 

but it proved a strategic defeat that revealed unacknowledged weaknesses within the 

Western Confederacy and its alliance with the British. While members of the British 

Indian Department offered frequent advice and assistance, and some joined forces with 

the Confederacy at Fort Recovery, the recent pronouncements of civil and military 

officials proved mostly hollow. Many, and perhaps all, in the Confederacy had made the 

decision to attack Fort Recovery with the understanding that 1,500 militia and regulars 

would be joining them in the coming days. That understanding proved false, and may 

have resulted from a miscommunication, but in either case the British did not fully match 

 64 Cruikshank, ed., “The Diary of an Officer in the Indian Country in 1794,” Magazine of Western History, 

11:4 (February 1890): 383-89; Carter, Little Turtle, 131-32; Sugden, Blue Jacket, 161-168; Sword, 

President Washington’s Indian War, 275-76; Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 233-253; Nelson, “Never 

Have They Done So Little”: The Battle of Fort Recovery and the Collapse of the Miami Confederacy,” 

Northwest Ohio Quarterly, 64:2 (Spring 1992): 46.
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their words with deeds. In the aftermath of the battle, such reluctance on the part of the 

British was interpreted as a decisive—and disheartening—reason for the failure to 

dislodge Wayne’s forces.65

Withdrawal rather than victory, and the casting of blame that ensued, also 

exposed key divisions within the broader Great Lakes alliance. The northern 

Anishinaabeg were allies, but not integral members of the Western Confederacy, and they 

were more likely to operate independently of the strategies developed by Myaamia, 

Shawnee, and Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) war leaders. The actions of the northern 

Odawa and Ojibwe who rushed the fort is understandable in that light—as is the chagrin 

of those who watched the debacle unfold. Yet it is likely that a more significant divide 

occurred between these allies in the week before the battle. A member of the British 

Indian Department who fought at Fort Recovery reported that, during their southward 

trek to Fort Recovery, some Odawa and Ojibwe had “committed depredations and

ravished the women in the [Shawnee and Lunaapeew] villages” on the lower Maumee 

River. If this report is true, then it likely explains a subsequent charge by the northern 

Anishinaabeg that some Shawnee and Lunaapeew took revenge by firing into their 

erstwhile allies who charged Fort Recovery.66

Mikaalitioni Taawaawa Siipionki (Battle of the Maumee River/Fallen Timbers)67

Four weeks after the attack on Fort Recovery, Wayne launched the final stage of 

the long-planned campaign against the Western Confederacy. Departing Fort Greene 

Ville on July 28, the Legion headed north to Fort Recovery then pushed on to the Glaize. 

Over the course of this eighty-mile march into the heart of the Confederacy, small 

detachments were sent out to terrorize small villages. These actions, along with the

methodical approach of the Legion, quickly depopulated the Auglaize River basin and 

sent refugees fleeing toward to the north and west.68 The final stretch of Wayne’s march 

proved so rapid, however, that the residents of the Glaize were entirely caught off guard 

and fled just a few hours before the first troops arrived. Consequently, Wayne’s forces 

entered the hastily abandoned population center without incident, and readily helped 

 65 Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship, 52-53; Cruikshank, ed., “The Diary of an Officer in the Indian 

Country in 1794,” 384; Nelson, A Man of Distinction among Them, 169-71. 66 Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship, 52-53; Cruikshank, ed., “The Diary of an Officer in the Indian 

Country in 1794,” 384; Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early 

North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 314-315, 325-36. 67 Terminology comes from George Ironstrack, “Mihši-maalhsa Wars Part IV – The Battle of the 

Taawaawa Siipiiwi,” Aacimotaatiiyankwi: A Myaamia Community Blog

<https://myaamiahistory.wordpress.com/2016/01/01/mihsi-maalhsa-wars-part-iv-the-battle-of-thetaawaawa-siipiiwi/#_ednref21> (accessed January 16, 2016). Taawaawa Siipiiwi directly translates as 

“Odawa River.” Though often referred to as “Miami [River] of the Lakes” or “Maumee River” in U.S. and 

British sources, all Indigenous groups associated the river with the Odawa communities along its lower 

reaches and referred to accordingly in their own languages.

68 Calloway, Victory with No Name, 112-13; Dwight L. Smith, ed., From Greene Ville To Fallen Timbers: 

A Journal of the Wayne Campaign July 18-September 14, 1794 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 

1952), 249-66. Also see Robert M. Owens, Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the 

Origins of American Indian Policy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011), 21-23; Wayne’s 

deliberate and methodical style of campaigning would greatly influence William Henry Harrison’s military 

strategies in the same area during the War of 1812.
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themselves to the bounty that had been left behind.69 A junior officer was particularly 

struck by the “rich low lands in high cultivation ... [for] about six miles on each side [of 

the Auglaize and Maumee Rivers, ... [with an] abundant quantity of vegetables [that] will 

extend the subsistence of the army and if we move rapidly will save us from danger on 

the score of provision.”70

Now situated in the very heart of the Western Confederacy, Wayne and his 

officers congratulated themselves on their success. To ensure this strategic victory, the 

Legion spent eight days (August 9-17) transforming the council grounds of the 

Confederacy into Fort Defiance: a “strong stockade fort, with four good block houses, by 

way of bastions” to serve as Wayne’s forward base of operations. As this work was 

underway, Wayne learned from spies and recent captives that Confederacy forces were 

regrouping on the lower Maumee River at the Odawa villages near Roche de Boeuf 

(“Buffalo Rock;” present-day Waterville, Ohio)—a large limestone formation at the head 

of the Maumee River Rapids—which was just a few miles upriver from the 250-man 

British garrison at the recently constructed Fort Miamis. These various matters were 

summarized in a letter to Secretary of War Henry Knox on August 14, in which Wayne 

also announced that the Legion would make “a forward move to-morrow morning” 

toward the Roche de Bouef—“in the vicinity of which the fate of the campaign will 

probably be decided.” Though Wayne expressed concern that “the best and most recent 

intelligence” made it clear that “the enemy ... possessed ... ground very unfavorable for 

[our] cavalry to act in ..., I do not despair of success.”71

Because Wayne believed it “proper to offer the enemy a last overture of peace,” 

in the hope that it might “spare the effusion of much human blood,” he sent a message on 

August 13 to the “Delawares, Shawanees, Miamis, Wyandots ... and to all other nations 

of Indians, northwest of the Ohio” requesting a peace council. Wayne promised that his 

 69 Calloway, Victory with No Name, 114-15; Smith, ed., From Greene Ville To Fallen Timbers, 265-74. 

Owens, Mr. Jefferson's Hammer, 25-26. 70 Wiley Sword, President Washington’s Indian War: The Struggle for the Old Northwest, 1790-1795, 273-

83; Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle, 124-35; Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 241-53. 

Quotations are from Smith, ed., From Greene Ville to Fallen Timbers, 272 and 274. Wayne used even more 

effusive language in a letter to Secretary of War Henry Knox: “The very extensive and highly cultivated 

fields and gardens show the work of many hands. The margin of those beautiful rivers—the Miamis of the 

Lake (or Maumee) and Auglaize—appear like one continued village for a number of miles both above and 

below this place; nor have I ever before beheld such fields of corn in any part of America from Canada to 

Florida;” Wayne to Knox, August 14, 1794, in Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio in Two 

Volumes, an Encyclopedia of the State (Cincinnati: State of Ohio, 1907), 1:545. 71 Sword, President Washington’s Indian War, 298-300; Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 302-04; Nelson, 

A Man of Distinction among Them, 158-63; Paul David Nelson, “General Charles Scott, the Kentucky 

Mounted Volunteers, and the Northwest Indian Wars,1784-1794,” Journal of the Early Republic 6 

(Autumn 1986): 241. The term Roche de Boeuf (Buffalo Rock), which describes a large rock in the 

Maumee River near the head of the Maumee Rapids, was also rendered “Roche de Bout” which means 

“End Rock.” Though both terms are applicable, the former is more common in primary sources and is used 

here. Quotations are from copy of a message enclosed in Major General Wayne to the Secretary of War, 

August 14, 1794, in ASP, Indian Affairs, vol. 4, 490. The British had stationed 160 regulars at Fort Miamis, 

plus a hundred militiamen from Detroit and the River Raisin. Lt. Colonel William Caldwell commanded a 

mixed company of 53 Detroit militiamen, while Captain Charles Reaume led a company of 37 habitants

from the River Raisin; see Le Roy Barnett and Roger Rosentreter, Michigan’s Early Military Forces: A 

Roster and History of Troops Activated Prior to the American Civil War (Detroit: Wayne State University 

Press, 2003), 44.
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forces would leave the villages and fields around The Glaize unmolested if his message 

received a positive response and—upon the settlement of an acceptable accord—return 

the villages to all who were “lately settled at this place.” The message’s clear implication 

that this was an all-or-nothing offer, along with a boast that the Legion could easily rout 

the Confederacy and destroy all of its towns and villages, created both worry and 

resentment among Confederacy leaders.72

Shortly after this message was sent and received, a council was held near Roche 

de Bouef on August 14. The aged Mihšihkinaahkwa (Little Turtle) spoke first, advocating 

for a direct peace settlement with General Wayne. Though he was greatly respected as a 

war leader, Mihšihkinaahkwa feared the consequences of the coming battle. 

Alaamhsenwa (the Wind), as the Myaamia referred to Wayne, could not be dislodged or 

defeated by the Western Confederacy in its present circumstances. Moreover, recent 

visits to Detroit convinced him that the British would not directly engage the Mihšimaalhsa (Long Knives; i.e., Americans or Kentuckians) or provide sufficient material 

support to Confederacy warriors. With considerable foreboding, he stated that Keešihiwia 

(Creator) “does not want to see the bloody tomahawk among his children. He will hide 

his face in a cloud, if they refuse to talk to the white chief.”73

Though his status allowed Mihšihkinaahkwa to be the first to speak in council, 

and some number certainly shared his doubts about the British, his words were met with 

complete silence. The next speaker was the Odawa leader Mizise-zide (Turkey Foot), 

who spoke for the Bodéwadmi, Odawa, and Shawnee members of the Western 

Confederacy. As the Odawa leader Kinjoino later recalled, Mizise-zide replied to 

Mihšihkinaahkwa with a call to take

the war path of the Long Knives .... Chenosa (Chenoten) [General 

Wayne], the great war chief, will walk in a bloody path toward the sunrise 

... [a]nd the great chief will not come again. The Manitou gave us this 

country and he bids us bloody the trail of our enemies. The Manitou is 

great. He is good. Will the braves of his red children fight? Will they 

defend the council fires and the graves of their fathers?”

Mizise-zide received a positive response to these closing questions, and all subsequent 

speakers fully echoed his call for war. Near consensus became unanimous when 

Mihšihkinaahkwa, as well as Kinjoino and others who preferred to council for peace, 

affirmed their support for the greater will of the Confederacy.74

 72 Copy of message enclosed in Major General Wayne to the Secretary of War, August 14, 1794: “To the 

Delawares, Shawanese, Miamies, and Wyandots, and to each and every of them, and to all other Indians, 

northwest of the Ohio it may concern,” document enclosed in Ibid.

73 Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle, 124-35; George Ironstrack, “Mihši-maalhsa Wars Part IV –

The Battle of the Taawaawa Siipiiwi,” Aacimotaatiiyankwi: A Myaamia Community Blog

<https://myaamiahistory.wordpress.com/2016/01/01/mihsi-maalhsa-wars-part-iv-the-battle-of-thetaawaawa-siipiiwi/#_ednref21> (accessed January 16, 2016). Ironstrack provides the correct rendering of 

the Myaamia name for Wayne, and offers particular insights into the growing doubts that Mihšihkinaahkwa 

held regarding the British. Quotations are from Dresden W. H. Howard, “The Battle of Fallen Timbers as 

Told by Chief Kin-Jo-I-No,” Northwest Ohio Quarterly 20:1 (1948): 39. Howard’s text is a translation of 

an Odawa recollection of the council, and retains the term Manitou (a common rendering of GizheManidoo that is often translated as “Great Spirit” or “Creator,” and has the same meaning as the Myaamia 

term Keešihiwia.

74 Quotations are from Howard, “The Battle of Fallen Timbers as Told by Chief Kin-Jo-I-No,” 39-40. 
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On the morning of August 15, with Fort Defiance nearly complete, General 

Wayne moved a large part of his army toward the Maumee River Rapids. By midday on 

the 18th, the 3,500-strong force of U.S. regulars and Kentucky cavalry reached the 

vicinity of Roche de Boeuf and began construction of Fort Deposit on the western bluffs 

overlooking the upper Rapids. Now within striking distance of the Confederacy, Wayne 

held back for another two days to complete basic fortifications, stow equipment that 

would not be needed on the field of battle, and give his men rest. The delay also had 

another tactical purpose. Wayne knew that many of the Confederacy’s warriors would 

fast and purify themselves before engaging in combat, and thus a respite at Fort Deposit 

would unduly prolong the fasting period and consequently weaken his adversaries.75

By the close of their council at Roche de Bouef, Western Confederacy leaders 

were already aware that the Legion had commenced its march toward the lower Maumee 

River. Runners were immediately sent north to request support from the Anishinaabeg 

(Ojibwe, Odawa, and Bodéwadmi) who had departed after the engagements at Fort 

Recovery. Many were too far away to make it back in time to join their southern kin and 

allies, and some who were still relatively near may have declined the request. 

Consequently, the number of warriors the Confederacy was able to call on amounted to 

1,400—rather than the 1,800 who were at Fort Recovery in early July. Besides a smaller 

force, the Confederacy also had to contend with a shortage of supplies and food. The 

failure to capture the stores at Fort Recovery, and the Legion’s subsequent occupation of 

the Glaize, had created a dire situation. Many of those who fled the Glaize were already 

refugees, having lost their crops and stores to U.S. raiding parties during the summer. 

Now they, along with their recent hosts, were crowded among the villages and towns near 

the Maumee River Rapids—where their presence sorely taxed the resources of the 

surrounding area. Consequently, the energies of Confederacy warriors and their families 

were divided by preparations for a consequential battle and the basic needs of shelter, 

food, and hygiene.76

 

Howard was the government interpreter among the Odawa who lived in Aabitanagaajiwan (aka Halfway 

Village, or Kinjoino’s Village) at the head of the Maumee Rapids in the 1820s. Though an old man at that 

time, Kinjoino had long been an Ogimaa (leader, chief) who continued to use—and readily recalled—the 

same formal diction and metaphors that characterized the speeches at the council of August 14, 1794. It is 

likely that Howard’s use of the word “Chenoten” derives from chi-noodin, which means the Wind or Big 

Wind (see note 56 above). For other accounts of this council, and preparations for the coming battle, see 

Sugden, Blue Jacket, Warrior of the Shawnees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 173-175, 

191-192; Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle, 61, 125, 131, 132, 134; Sword, President 

Washington’s Indian War, 215-218, 287, 297-298, 319, 330; and Bryce Blair, “The Battle of Fallen 

Timbers and the Treaty of Fort Greeneville: Why did Anthony Wayne Win Both and Could he have Lost?” 

(Master’s thesis, University of Toledo, 2005), 68-69. For more on Kinjoino, see Robert F. Bauman, ed., 

“The Last Ottawa: A Selection form the Dresden W. H. Howard Papers,” Northwest Ohio Quarterly 24:1 

(1952): 3-9. 75 The reference to Citadel comes from Smith, ed., From Greene Ville To Fallen Timbers, 286. On the 

march to Roche de Boeuf and the two-day waiting period before the battle, see Blair, "The Battle of Fallen 

Timbers,” 50-51, and Sugden, Blue Jacket, 173-74. 76 Sword, President Washington’s Indian War, 302-05; Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 302-04; Sugden, 

Blue Jacket, 161-168; Sword, President Washington’s Indian War, 275-76; Owens, Mr. Jefferson's 

Hammer, 27-28. The combined forces that composed the Confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers 

included Shawnee led by Waweyapiersenwah (Whirlpool, aka Blue Jacket), Lunaapeew (Delaware) led by 

Buckongahelas, Myaamia led by Mihšihkinaahkwa (Little Turtle), Odawa led by Agwazhe'aa (Egushawa) 

and Ngig (Little Otter), and Wyandot led by Stayegtha (Roundhead), as well as northern Anishinaabeg 
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Badly outnumbered and short on resources, the Western Confederacy still had a 

strategy for victory. Given the terrain along the west bank of the Maumee, which limited 

the travel to a narrow corridor along high wooded bluffs, the Army’s approach route was 

essentially predetermined. Recently arrived captives and deserters further provided 

information on the composition and distribution of Wayne’s forces, which confirmed the 

decision of Confederacy leaders to focus on a specific site for the primary engagement: 

namely, an area about halfway between Roche de Boeuf and Fort Miamis where a 

tornado had created a jumble of downed timber. The site provided excellent cover and 

concealment, and nullified the effectiveness of cavalry and massed charges by much 

larger forces. The relative proximity of Fort Miamis was another important factor since it 

could prove a source of additional supplies and protection, if necessary. All of these 

factors, if fully exploited, supported the Confederacy’s basic battle plan—which was to 

ambush the Legion’s forward units, then quickly force them back on the main body of the 

army. As occurred previously with St. Clair and Harmar, this action was expected to 

cause a disorderly retreat and force Wayne to remove further south. In such a scenario, 

there was every expectation that victory on the battlefield would inspire more 

communities to join the Confederacy in the coming months.77

Initially, the battle seemed to go according to plan. Under the direction of Odawa 

war leaders Agwazhe'aa (Egushawa) and Ngig (Little Otter), multiple small groups of 

Confederacy warriors were hidden amongst the downed timber and arranged in a long 

arch that roughly followed the bluff line. When enough soldiers had come within the 

broad sweep of the Confederacy warriors, the latter intended to pour out from cover and 

sweep around the forward elements of Wayne’s army. Before this trap could be sprung, 

however, a group of warriors made a premature attack on the advanced guard of 150 

Kentucky mounted militia. Others quickly joined in and the Kentuckians fled in panic. As 

Confederacy war leaders had expected, the mounted militiamen crashed through the first 

line of trailing infantry, who briefly held their ground, then all rushed back toward the 

main force. What seemed like the beginnings of a rout quickly stabilized when the 

pursuing warriors encountered the right wing of Wayne’s army, where massed infantry 

had formed to receive the attack. After a few exchanges, the Western Confederacy forces 

withdrew toward the rest of their compatriots, but the scattered and thin lines of the 

Confederacy’s left wing could not long maintain a defensive position.78

A different scenario unfolded on the Confederacy’s right wing, which was mostly 

composed of Wyandot and Odawa from Detroit and Sandusky, as well as Canadian 

militia under the command of Captain William Caldwell.79 Having not taken part in the 

 

(Odawa, Ojibwe, Bodéwadmi), Ökwe'öwé (Seneca and Cayuga; aka Mingo), a Canadian militia led by 

Captain Alexander McKillop, and members of the British Indian Department led by Captain William 

Caldwell. At the time the battle commenced on August 20, a substantial number of Confederacy fighters 

remained far in the rear searching for food; see, Carter, Life and Times of Little Turtle, 135. 77 Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 218-20; Blair, "The Battle of Fallen Timbers,” 52-53. 78 Sugden, President Washington’s Indian War, 295-299; Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 301-07. 79 In 1791 the Province of Quebec was partitioned into Upper Canada and Lower Canada, with the former 

encompassing what is now the Province of Quebec and the Labrador region of what is now the Province of 

Newfoundland and Labrador. Upper Canada covered the southern tier of present-day Ontario –from the 

mouth of the Ottawa River to the border with Minnesota. Due to an influx of Loyalists from the United 

States and emigrants from the British Isles, by the early 1790s the population of Upper Canada included a 

growing number of people of British origin. Given this political and demographic shift, the term 
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initial pursuit of the Kentuckians, they held their ground amidst the downed timber as 

several companies of Legionnaires pushed toward their position. The regular infantry that 

opposed them was ordered to fix bayonets and charge directly into Confederacy 

positions. Wayne had long favored this tactic, and regularly trained his troops in how to 

make repeated bayonet charges into clusters of enemy fighters. With the addition of 

artillery and a fresh group of cavalry that gained the flanks of the Wyandot and Odawa 

warriors, the infantry pressed harder with their bayonet charges and concentrated fire. 

The Confederacy forces were soon routed, and forced into a general retreat.80 As 

Kinjoino recalled, the bayonet charges were decisive in the battle and sealed the demise 

of the Western Confederacy.

We were driven by the sharp end of the guns of the Long Knives, ... 

through the woods and swamps to the end of the hill .... We could not 

stand against the sharp end of their guns, and we ran to the river, swamp, 

thickets, and to the islands in the river covered with corn. Our moccasins 

trickled blood in the sand, and the water was red in the river. Many of our 

braves were killed in the river by rifles from the other side, but some got 

away and escaped to Fort Miami[s]. Many could not get in there but fled 

to the River Raisin, and many more to ... [Detroit].81

Confederacy warriors from all sides of the battlefield retreated toward Fort 

Miamis, where they hoped to obtain shelter and support from the garrison. Yet to their 

alarm, the gates were closed and no relief was offered. Major William Campbell, who 

commanded the garrison, did not dare provide open support for the Confederacy with 

such a large American force in the vicinity. “[A]t last it became so serious,” he later 

reported, “that I thought it was high time to stand to our Arms, fill up the gaps in our 

Abatis and shut out all communication from the Fort, by fixing our Chevaux de Frise.”82

With damning suddenness, Campbell’s actions confirmed all the doubts that 

Mihšihkinaahkwa (Little Turtle) had expressed about British support—and that many in 

the Western Confederacy shared but hoped were not true. Even more than the battle 

itself, the confoundment that Confederacy warriors experienced at the closed gates 

became the most salient memory of defeat. The Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) fur trader 

Teyoninhokarawen (aka John Norton) learned that the

conduct of the British Fort dispirited the Confederates much more than the 

issue of the battle, which they had fought with very inferior number, and 

in a disadvantageous position, without considerable loss; this they 

considered as a misfortune that might be repaired with glory, –another 

time; but the former, they did not know how to remedy.”83

In terms of casualties, the Battle of Fallen Timbers was close to a draw, with U.S. 

losses recorded at forty-four killed and about ninety wounded, and Confederacy losses 

 

“Canadian,” rather than “Canadien,” will be used to reference militias and general populations. “Canadien” 

will only refer to specific francophone populations.

80 Calloway, Victory with No Name, 116-22; Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness: Anthony Wayne’s Legion in 

the Old Northwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 306-12. 81 Howard, “The Battle of Fallen Timbers,” 46-47. Punctuation and spelling follows the original text. 82 Quoted in Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 52. 83 Sugden, Blue Jacket, 179-80, Barnes, Native American Power, 202-03; Calloway, The Victory with No 

Name, 149-50; and Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 323-26; quotation on p. 325.
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about the same. In strategic and material terms, however, it was a complete victory for 

the United States. Not only did the Legion of the United States win the field, it occupied 

the heart of the Confederacy. After the battle, Wayne’s forces followed retreating 

Confederacy warriors then encamped near Fort Miamis. General Wayne subsequently 

paraded before the fort and harangued Major Campbell, but nothing came of the affair. 

Neither man had orders to engage the other’s forces, nor were they inclined to risk their 

honor to start an unauthorized war between their nations. Instead, U.S. forces destroyed 

some crops and a few structures in the immediate vicinity of the fort, then returned 

toward Roche de Boeuf and Fort Defiance. At the first locale they destroyed crops, 

pillaged and burned the abandoned villages, and then desecrated cemeteries. Much the 

same occurred with the towns, villages and crops around the Glaize (except in the general 

vicinity of Fort Defiance), and thus Wayne both destroyed and “gained possession of the 

grand Emporium of the hostile Indians of the West without [much] loss of blood.”84

Reckoning

The full measure of the U.S. victory and the Western Confederacy’s defeat would 

take place over the coming months and year. As the garrison at Fort Defiance wrought 

destruction throughout the Glaize, most of the Legion moved on to the forks of the 

Maumee River and began constructing Fort Wayne in the heart of the Myaamia 

population center of Kiihkayonki (Kekionga). Completed within six weeks, the fort was 

garrisoned with 100 soldiers and the remainder of Wayne’s force moved to his 

headquarters at Fort Greene Ville. With their main population centers having been 

destroyed or occupied by U.S. forces, as many as 3,000 refugees remained at Swan Creek 

through the fall where they received rations and material support from the British Indian 

Department. Others moved north to live with Anishinaabeg kin and allies, or travelled 

west to join those who had already distanced themselves from the United States and the 

decades-long war with the Long Knives. The vast majority of the communities that 

belonged to the Confederacy remained in the region, however. Through the fall and early 

winter their leaders struggled over a collective response to their displacement and the 

Legion’s entrenched positions on their former council grounds.85

In the weeks after the defeat at Fallen Timbers, a peace faction began to develop 

among village leaders who supported the Western Confederacy but were not part of its 

core leadership. While some must have held the same doubts that Mihšihkinaahkwa 

(Little Turtle), Kinjoino, and others had previously felt about the British, they formally 

supported the decision to fight against General Wayne. Yet concerns about the immediate 

and short-term welfare of their communities became more pressing in the weeks 

 84 Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 314-27. Also see, Nelson, A Man of Distinction, 172; Sugden, Blue 

Jacket, 179-180; Barnes, Native American Power, 204-205; Sword, President Washington’s Indian War, 

283. Quotation is from Wayne to Knox, August 14, 1794. 85 James A. Clifton, The Prairie People: Continuity and Change in Potawatomi Indian Culture, 1665-1965 

(Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), 169-80; Warren, The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 72-

80; John P. Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (New York: 

Cambridge University Press, 2007), 72-80; Witgen, An Infinity of Nations, 219-20; Bergman, “Commerce 

in Arms,” 99-100; Amy C. Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 180-81. These western migrations concentrated in 

three different areas: the White River Valley of present-day Indiana, the upper Illinois River Valley, and 

the Mississippi-Missouri Confluence area.
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following the battle. With the loss of crops, homes, food stores, tools, materials and more, 

the prospect of continuing the war into the winter months seemed pure folly. Yet 

renowned war leaders such as Waweyapiersenwah (Whirlpool, aka Blue Jacket), 

Buckongahelas, Agwazhe'aa (Egushawa), Nagohquangogh (from a Myaamia village on 

the St. Joseph River), and P'Koum-Kwa (aka Pacanne, from the Myaamia village at the 

Maumee-Wabash portage) all considered extending the war. 86

To foster these latter sentiments, Governor Simcoe called for a council at Big 

Rock (Brownstown) in mid-October to restate British support for the Western 

Confederacy. On the first day of the council he urged the gathered leaders to negotiate a 

truce with Wayne—rather than a formal peace—and then resume the war alongside 

British troops in the spring. Simcoe’s proposal was championed by Thayendanegea (aka, 

Joseph Brant), who led a sizable Haudenosaunee delegation, but the last word of the day 

belonged to the Wyandot leader Tarhe who—as the chief representative for the keepers 

of the ancient Council Fire—spoke on “behalf of all Nations here.” “We have long 

expected your assistance,” Tarhe told Simcoe, and reminded him that “You have always 

told us Father, you expected orders from the Great Father over the Great Lake.” “[W]e 

now request of you,” he continued, “to tell us whether it is in your power to assist us 

now. We have long been fighting for our Country and we will be ready immediately as 

soon as you let us know that your Warriors are ready to join us.”87

As much a diplomatic rebuff as a hopeful test of Simcoe’s pledge, these words 

also conveyed a sad weariness. In a brief speech that closed the four-day council, Tarhe 

reminded Governor Simcoe that we “have been now eleven years fighting; you always 

gave us reason to hope for your assistance. We are now low spirited by waiting so long, 

and we are nearly at the end of our expectations.” In truth, the Sandusky Wyandot were 

already at the end of their expectations. They suffered heavy losses at Fallen Timbers, 

where three of their four principal leaders were killed—leaving Tarhe as the only, though 

badly wounded, survivor. And like most of the Anishinaabeg, including the Bodéwadmi 

(Potawatomi) and Odawa (Ottawa) to the south and west of Lake Erie, the Sandusky 

Wyandot lived beyond the treaty claims of the United States. A failure to treat directly 

with Wayne could very well lead to the razing of their towns and further loss of land.88

Such calculations were not universal, however. Through the fall months, small 

groups of mostly Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) and Shawnee warriors attacked 

Wayne’s supply convoys to the south, as well as patrols outside the Legion’s forts. In 

early March a group of Shawnee warriors that likely included the young Tecumseh began 

harassing forts and settlements around the mouth of the Scioto River, and became 

 86 William Heath, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma 

Press, 2015), 219-221; Sugden, Blue Jacket, 179-80; Peter Bottiger, The Borderland of Fear: Vincennes, 

Prophetstown, and the Invasion of the Miami Homeland (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 29-

32; Barnes, Native American Power, 208-211; Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys, 180-81. 87 “Proceedings of a Council at Brown’s Town, October 11th 1794,”in Historical Collections, 25 (1896), 

40-46; quotation on p. 44. Also see “A sketch of a speech from the Wyandot chiefs, in the behalf of all their 

confederates, some time ago; about the 10th October, 1794,” in ASP, Indian Affairs, vol. 1, 548; Witgen, 

Restoring the Chain of Friendship, 55-57; and Heath, William Wells, 221-223. 88 Michael Leonard Cox, “The Ohio Wyandots: Religion and Society on the Sandusky River, 1795-1843” 

(PhD diss., University of California at Riverside, 2016), 3-5; Barnes, Native American Power, 206-07; 

Nelson, A Man of Distinction among Them, 173-75; White, The Middle Ground, 469-70. Quotation from 

“Proceedings of a Council,” 46.
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embroiled with Kentuckians who were making retaliatory strikes to the north of the 

Ohio.89 While these activities reflected what had been the will of the most adamant 

defenders of Confederacy lands and communities, they were not condoned by other 

members of the alliance. More than anything, the attacks by the Shawnee—particularly 

around the mouth of the Scioto River—grew out of a continuing commitment to retaining 

an Ohio River boundary with the United States as well as a deep identification with the 

area that dated back at least 2,000 years. For the militant Lunaapeew, who moved into the 

Ohio Valley from the east and had received permission from the Sandusky Wyandot to 

live in the region, their actions reflected a multigenerational effort to make their rightful 

place among the Shawnee, Wyandot, and others. To accede to any of the treaties of the 

previous decade, or affirm them in a new treaty with General Wayne, was to forfeit their 

new homeland for an uncertain future in an unknown place.90

Even as these small-scale attacks were ongoing, a broader movement for peace 

developed within various elements of the Western Confederacy. More than a decade of 

wrangling over decisions about treaties and war had tested the limits of the Confederacy, 

and the overwhelming success of Wayne’s campaign caused renowned war leaders to 

lose patience with increasingly evasive officials in the British Indian Department and 

regret their own advocacy for engaging the Legion at Fallen Timbers.

Waweyapiersenwah (Whirlpool, aka Blue Jacket), Buckongahelas, Agwazhe'aa

(Egushawa), and others now saw wisdom in the words of Mihšihkinaahkwa (Little 

Turtle) when he spoke of Keešihiwia (Creator) hiding “his face in a cloud, if [his 

children] refuse to talk to the white chief [Wayne].” The concerns of these war leaders—

like those of the young Tecumseh—were specific to their situations and goals, and not 

their positions within the larger Confederacy. All of these men were in their fifties and 

sixties, a stage in life when successful war leaders had transitioned to civil concerns, and 

all wanted to ensure that their people could rebuild their homes and replant their crops in 

peace. Even though such a path would come with U.S. demands to accept a land cession 

along the lines of the Fort Stanwix treaty, that prospect offered more possibilities than an 

unwinnable war fueled by British rations. By January 1795, all of these men had either 

made, or were preparing to make, individual queries to Wayne about initiating a peace 

council. 91

Other shifts were already underway that made the likelihood of a peace council 

more certain. Though unknown to Confederacy leaders, the reticence of British officials 

was largely the result of an early December notification that representatives of Great 

Britain and the United States had negotiated “The Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and 

Navigation, Between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America.” More 

commonly known as the Jay Treaty, it resolved several issues dating back to the 

Revolutionary War—including the abandonment (by July 1796) of British forts in the 

 89 Anthony Wayne to Timothy Pickering, March 8, 1795, and Wayne to Pickering, June 17, 1795, in 

Campaign into the Wilderness: The Wayne-Knox-Pickering-McHenry Correspondence, v. 4, ed. Richard 

Knopf (Columbus: Ohio State Museum, 1955), 4: 12, 60; also see Edmunds, Tecumseh, 42-43. 90 Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys, 180-82; Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 129-133. 91 Barnes, Native American Power, 206-07; Sugden, Blue Jacket, 181-82; Nelson, A Man of Distinction 

among Them, 173-75. Lewis, The Life and Times of Little Turtle, 134-35; White, The Middle Ground, 470-

73; Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship, 57-58.
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Northwest Territory.92 While news of the treaty caused British officials at Detroit to 

further limit their support of the Confederacy, it also made Wayne more eager to engage 

Native leaders. Though still not formally ratified, the negotiated treaty ensures that the 

U.S. would not initiate any military actions that could offend or even provoke Great 

Britain. This key limitation was compounded by a few other challenges. Enlistment terms 

were ending for some of Wayne’s troops, as well as for volunteers and militia, which 

weakened his force and made it more difficult to supply and man the string of forts from 

the Ohio to the Maumee. Moreover, the destruction of Native crops and stores eliminated 

the possibility of a lengthy occupation by a wartime army.93

These constraints were not as dire as those faced by Confederacy leaders, but they 

brought some urgency to Wayne’s effort to complete the second purpose of his 

campaign: a general treaty of land cession with all the members of the Confederacy that 

carried forward the basic terms first presented at Fort Harmar. Wayne was greatly 

assisted in this latter charge by Antoine Lasselle and François Navarre, two traders from 

the Canadien settlement on the River Raisin who were well known among the Native 

communities around western Lake Erie. Lasselle had fought with the Confederacy and 

been captured by Wayne’s forces, while Navarre hoped U.S. offficials would certify his 

land claims on the River Raisin. Though each man had acquired different allegiances, 

they knew each other well and were similarly ensconced in many of the same Native 

communities. They were also very opportunistic, and began carrying supplies to the U.S. 

forts as well as trading with soldiers and officers through the winter. These activities 

increased as the fur-trading season began in early March, and eventually resulted in a 

common market of sorts that supplied diverse needs and provided important channels of 

communication between Native leaders and General Wayne and often served as 

translators.94

Within this arena of commerce and potential diplomacy, Mihšihkinaahkwa (Little 

Turtle) and Waweyapiersenwah (Whirlpool, aka Blue Jacket) opened direct 

 92 On Jay’s Treaty, see Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American 

Republic, 1788-1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 406-430; Barnes, Native American 

Power, 200-02, 205; and Nelson, A Man of Distinction among Them, 171-72, and 178. The negotiations 

that resulted in Jay’s Treaty had no bearing on Wayne’s campaign, or the General’s decision not to engage 

Major Campbell at Fort Miamis. However, they did shape British policy in the region in two ways. On the 

one hand, Henry Dudas, the Secretary of State for War, urged Governor Simcoe and the Indian Department 

to increase support for the Western Confederacy in hopes that a defeat of Wayne’s army would give Britain 

more leverage in its treaty negotiations with the United States. Yet Great Britain would not contribute any 

troops to the effort—since to do so would end the treaty negotiations altogether. With the French 

Revolutionary Wars then cleaving Europe, Whitehall was more concerned with keeping the United States 

out of the fray than it was in correcting the shortcomings of the 1783 Peace of Paris. 93 Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 364-65; Sugden, Blue Jacket, 173-75; Lakomaki, Gathering Together, 

127-28. 94 Bergman, “Commerce in Arms,” 110-14; F. Clever Bald, How Michigan Men Helped Make the Treaty of 

Greenville (Ypsilanti: University Lithoprinters, 1945), 211-16; Guillame Teasdale. "Old Friends and New 

Foes: French Settlers and Indians in the Detroit River Border Region," The Michigan Historical Review 38 

(Fall 2012), 44-47; Dennis Au, “The River Raisin: A Comparative Portrait,” Le Journal 27 (Summer 2011), 

3-4. Antoine Lasselle, his brother Hyacinthe, and nephews Jacques and François formed an unofficial 

Canadien “Indian Department” for General Wayne, along with François Navarre, Joseph Porlier dit Benac, 

François Pepin, Jean-Baptiste Romaine dit Sanscraionte, Pierre Menard, François La Fountaine, Chevalier 

Chabert, Joseph Bourdeau, and François Navarre’s cousin, George McDougall. See Barnett and 

Rosentreter, Michigan’s Early Military Forces, 47.
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communications with General Wayne and began to successfully lobby other Western 

Confederacy leaders to consider peace negotiations. By early spring a majority had 

consented to treat with General Wayne, and sent messages that they would attend a grand 

council at the newly designated Fort Greenville in early summer. While the decisions to 

meet in council with General Wayne were determined by the members of specific 

communities and not a group of delegates, as had occurred in previous meetings of the 

Grand Council, those who did gather at Greenville broadly reflected the leadership of the 

Confederacy. There were dissenters, however, including a large number of Shawnee and 

some Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) who had chosen to move further west or north to 

Upper Canada, but from Wayne’s perspective the assembly was a more than “full 

meeting and representation ... of the different tribes ... [around] the council fire of the 

United States.” Unlike previous treaty councils, in which U.S. commissioners dictated to 

a few representatives from discrete communities, the validity of the Treaty of Greenville 

required a broad (but not necessarily universal) application of its terms to the members of 

the Confederacy.95

In a further break from previous U.S. treaty councils, Wayne took great pains to 

follow Indigenous protocols of gift giving and the use of kinship terms that demonstrated 

a commitment to peaceful relations. At times speaking as an “elder brother” to his 

“younger brothers,” Wayne emphasized that all were children of a common “father” –

President George Washington. As the historian Andrew Cayton has noted, General 

Wayne was not practicing artful subterfuge. Rather, he was engaging in the “performance 

of consent.” “Wayne wanted much more than land and peace, he wanted genuine consent 

to the establishment of American sovereignty north of the Ohio River.” Such consent, 

gained through the ritual formalities of a treaty council, legitimized U.S. governance and 

“was as critical to winning a complete victory as any sword, musket, or cannon.”96

The council at Fort Greenville was about more than peace, however, since 

“complete victory” was also tied to an affirmation of the Fort Harmar Treaty. On this 

point the treaty council became a true negotiation, in which Mihšihkinaahkwa (Little 

Turtle) took the lead. After pointing out to Wayne that the Fort Harmar treaty did not 

involve most of the groups then gathered at Fort Greenville, and encompassed the 

homelands of the Myaamia, the Bodewadmi along the southern tier of present-day 

Michigan, and numerous groups in the Wabash and White River basins, 

Mihšihkinaahkwa made it clear that U.S. insistence on the full terms of the Fort Harmar 

Treaty would effectively destroy all the diplomatic successes of the Greenville council. 

 95 Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys, 184-86; Lakomäki, “‘Our Line:’ The Shawnees, the United States, 

and Competing Borders on the Great Lakes ‘Borderlands,’ 1795–1832,” Journal of the Early Republic, 34 

(Winter 2014), 609. Quotation from “Minutes of a Treaty with the tribes of Indians called the Wyandots, 

Delawares, Shawanese, Ottawas, Chippewas, Patawatamies, Miamies, Eel River, Kickapoos, Piankeshaws, 

and Kaskaskias, begun at Greenville, on the 16th day of June, and ended on the 10th day of August, 1795,” 

in American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, 

Vol. 4, Indian Affairs (ASPIA), no. 1 (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1832), 564. On the change from Fort 

Greene Ville to Fort Greenville, see note 61 above.

96 Andrew R.L. Cayton, “‘Noble Actors’ upon ‘the Theatre of Honour’: Power and Civility in the Treaty of 

Greenville,’ in Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830, 

eds. Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1998), 

235-69; quotations from pp. 259 and 239.
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Wayne ultimately concurred, and the various Confederacy leaders compromised on the 

cession of some areas in what soon became the southwestern quadrant of Ohio.97

Figure 5.6: Treaty of Greenville Land Cessions, 1795. Aside from the large expanse 

of land in present-day Ohio and part of Indiana, the Treaty of Greenville included a number 

of non-contiguous land cessions. These generally encompassed lands around military forts, 

portage sites, or trading posts. The six-mile wide stretch of land from the River Raisin to 

Lake St. Clair was an informal military district rather than an area slated for prompt survey 

and sale. It was a hold-over from the Fort McIntosh Treaty (1785), and served as a barrier 

to British interests in the area. With the exception of lands in the immediate vicinity of 

military forts, all of the non-contiguous land cessions were included in subsequent treaties 

and effectively remained unceded and unsurveyed until after the War of 1812.

Consent and the Seeds of Discontent

The twelve years between the 1783 Peace of Paris and the Treaty of Greenville 

was tumultuous and transformative. Through costly wars, a treaty with Great Britain and 

another with the Confederacy, the United States achieved much of the territorial 

sovereignty it had claimed at the close of the Revolution. The exercise of that sovereignty 

would soon encroach on the “general boundary line” of the Greenville Treaty, as land 

speculators, squatters and settlers extended the grid of property ownership to the north

and west. In the process, hard pressed Native communities became more reliant on treaty 

annuities—the annual payments of cash and goods that served as compensation for 

ceding lands to the United States. While annuities, rather than lump sum payments, put 

less strain on a deeply indebted U.S. Treasury, regular annual payments were also 

intended, as Secretary of War Timothy Pickering noted to Wayne, “to secure the good 

 97 “Minutes of a Treaty,” 567-78; Heath, William Wells, 218-221, and 233-38.
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will of the Indian Tribes by making it their interest to be our friends, by their dependence 

on our yearly bounty, ... [and thus] create an obligation of which they would feel the 

force.”98

None of these developments were the intended goals of Mihšihkinaahkwa, 

Waweyapiersenwah (Whirlpool, aka Blue Jacket), Buckongahelas, Agwazhe'aa

(Egushawa), and other Confederacy leaders who placed their marks on the treaty 

document. They wanted an end to decades of conflict, a formally recognized separation 

between their lands and expanding U.S. populations, and a measure of autonomy to shape 

their own futures in a challenging new context. On this last score, some even believed 

that—in the wake of the British withdrawal—a new order might be established in which 

the United States assumed the old role of Onontio. All of these hopes and expectations, in 

one form or another, carried forward the concerns of past generations and fit within the 

oscillating dynamics of what Richard White called “republics” and “alliances.” In the 

immediate wake of the Greenville Treaty, the “republican” condition prevailed, with a 

village or associated villages pursuing an independent course to find opportunity in 

challenging circumstances. In time, however, alliances would develop much as they had 

in previous generations—when the needs and concerns of specific communities were 

most threatened.99

These dynamics would unfold in new ways over the next two decades, but they 

would enlarge on a key aspect of the Treaty of Greenville. In the wake of its defeat at the 

Battle of Fallen Timbers, the Confederacy could not avoid a large cession of land. Yet the 

treaty did establish the precedent in the United States of negotiating directly with the 

multiple groups regarding their collective lands. This was not a small matter, and it had 

been a key principle of the Confederacy since the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix. The 

condition would be eroded over the next decade and a half, however, as specific groups 

sought a separate peace with the United States and federal officials aggressively pushed 

them to cede large tracts of lands. Yet the principle of common lands within a broad 

alliance would become increasingly central to Indigenous relations with the United States 

and Great Britain in the coming years, and proved central to a new period of 

revitalization and resistance prior to and during the War of 1812.

 98 Pickering quoted in Cayton, “Power and Civility,” 258. Also see Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian 

Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 85-98. 99 “Treaty with the Wyandot, etc.,” Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, 2 vols. (Washington, 

DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 2: 39-45; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 115-123; Warren, The 

Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 14-24; and White, Middle Ground, 509-11.
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Chapter Six

“I want to live in peace on our land”1: Crisis and Renewal in the Borderlands

of Nation and Empire, 1795-1810

Though set within a common and relatively brief chronology, the subjects of this chapter are 

mostly presented as overlapping episodes rather than sequential stages of historical 

development. The consequences of the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the 1795 Treaty of 

Greenville affected all communities in the Ohio Valley, but their varied responses grew out of 

different experiences and histories. For Native peoples, the old dynamics of discrete 

communities, common alliances, and cultural revitalization continued to shape responses to 

British and U.S. interests—but occurred in the midst of acute crises brought on by land 

cessions, growing U.S. populations, and resource depletion. British imperial and U.S. 

national agendas were recalculated in ways that both followed and diverged from patterns 

established during the Revolutionary War. By the early 19th century, irresolution of old issues 

and changing conditions in the region made the prospect of a new war in the western Ohio 

Valley seem increasingly imminent. These circumstances also gave rise to a borderland 

community of mostly French Canadiens who drew on century-old relations and experiences 

to gain more autonomy in a changing Indigenous and geopolitical landscape. To better follow 

the complex array of interests and experiences of the period, as well as the transformative 

contexts in which they occurred, different sections focus on specific populations and 

developments. By the end of the chapter, however, the combination of these various 

developments become centered on the Detroit River area and lower River Raisin.

Regardless of their location or level of participation in the recent war with the 

United States, all Indigenous communities in what is now northwestern Ohio, 

southeastern Michigan, and northern Indiana suffered in the aftermath of Fallen Timbers. 

South and east of what became the Greenville Treaty line, hastily abandoned villages had 

been destroyed by U.S. troops. North and west of the line, in the Maumee River basin and 

along the headwaters of the Wabash, most villages remained inhabitable—but some had 

been looted and their crops burned. All of this damage, of course, had come during and 

after several weeks of holding large councils and preparing for war. Both activities 

overtaxed local resources, even as the British increased supplies to the Glaize and Roche 

de Boeuf. Consequently, the Confederacy was already dependent on British assistance by 

the time Wayne had won the battle at Fallen Timbers. In defeat their needs became more 

acute through the fall and winter of 1794-95, when as many as 3,500 people survived 

mostly on British rations in temporary villages along Swan Creek and Maumee Bay. 

Most of these refugees were Shawnee, Lunaapeew, and Odawa from the Glaize and 

Roche de Bouef, but they included families and groups from throughout the Confederacy. 

Some remained at Swan Creek until early 1796, including a number of Shawnee led by 

 1 Quotation from Masseno (Bodéwadmi), at a Council in Cahokia in 1812; Ninian W. Edwards, History of 

Illinois, from 1778 to 1833: and Life and Times of Ninian Edwards (Springfield: The Illinois State Journal 

Company, 1870), 61.
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Kekewepelethy (Great Hawk, aka Captain Johnny)—who subsequently moved across 

Lake Erie to Upper Canada.2

Most of the people who sought refuge on the lower Maumee River returned to the 

vicinity of their former village sites in the spring of 1795, choosing to continue their lives 

where agriculture was more reliable and connections with other returnees more readily 

sustained. Given the destruction of the recent war and the relative proximity of the 

Greenville Treaty line, however, this decision would lead to a host of challenges. These 

became increasingly apparent over the next five years as U.S. citizens pushed into the 

vast expanse of ceded lands. The newcomers rapidly killed off game populations in longused hunting areas and closed off regular travel routes to the south and the east. As an 

editor of Harrison’s memoir would later observe, these changes soon led to a “general 

discontent among the Indians, caused by the scarcity of game, the rapidly-advancing 

skirmish line of white settlements—the sure forerunner of a denser population—upon 

their hunting-grounds.” The increasing proximity of Euro-American settlements and trade 

houses also brought an increased traffic in liquor, which deeply troubled most village 

leaders as it became the scourge of their dispirited communities.3

Living with the Treaty of Greenville

The Greenville Treaty annuities (annual payments of various trade goods, tools, 

agricultural implements, and seed) affected the political and social dynamics of these 

resettled Native communities in significant ways. Although the treaty was signed by a 

broad array of leaders from the Confederacy, the annuities were not directed through a 

Grand Council or any other collective body. Rather, they were given to specific 

signatories who then distributed them within their communities. In this way, at least, the 

United States became an Onontio or “father” of sorts to groups that ceded land and 

professed allegiance. Leaders who did not sign the treaty were thus less able to meet the 

physical needs of their people, or provide access to goods that fostered the reciprocal 

exchanges that held a community together. In this regard, as in many others, the period 

after the Treaty of Greenville variously undermined or altered social cohesion within 

villages, and caused deep fractures throughout the formerly “United Indian Nations.”4

The Shawnee provide a clear illustration of this process, and the difficulties 

associated with any effort to unify increasingly fragmented communities. M’katiwe-kašee 

(aka Catahecassa, Black Hoof), the Mekoche war leader-turned-diplomat, was a signatory 

 2 Robert Allen, His Majesty's Indian Allies: British Indian Policy in the Defence of Canada 1774-1815

(Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2008), 90-91; Timothy D. Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship: British 

Policy and the Indians of the Great Lakes, 1783-1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 57-

58; Larry L. Nelson, A Man of Distinction among Them: Alexander McKee and British-Indian Affairs 

along the Ohio Country Frontier, 1754-1799 (Kent, OH.: Kent University Press, 1999), 178-80. 3 Bert Anson, Miami Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), 149-52, 161; Harvey Lewis 

Carter, The Life and Times of Chief Little Turtle: First Sagamore of the Wabash (Champagne: University of 

Illinois Press, 1986), 146-49; R. Douglas Hurt, The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest 

(Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1996), 261-62; Richard White, The Middle 

Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 1991), 486-96. Quotation from “Introductory Chapter,” in William Henry Harrison, A 

Discourse on the Aborigines of the Ohio Valley (Chicago: Fergus Printing Company, 1883), 58. 4 Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity 1745-1815 

(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 112-115; White, Middle Ground, 494-497.
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of the Greenville Treaty and recognized by the United States as the primary 

representative of all the Shawnee. Along with the Mekoche civil leader Biaseka (Wolf), 

he hoped to use his formal relations with U.S. officials to gain support for developing the 

town of Wapakoneta at the head of the Auglaize River into a place where all five 

Shawnee divisions could “gather together” again as one nation. With access to annuities 

and a history of Mekoche rapprochement with the Americans, M’katiwe-kašee and 

Biaseka seemed to possess sufficient resources to accomplish their vision.5

Yet a general sense of Shawnee national identity did not translate into an 

allegiance to Mekoche leaders. Moreover, the emphasis that U.S. policy placed on the 

adoption of Euro-American agricultural practices—and its acceptance by these Mekoche 

leaders, caused a great deal of consternation. U.S. officials and Christian missionaries 

insisted that men should plow, plant, harvest, and own their crops. Yet this fundamentally 

undermined basic social relations within treaty groups, and bolstered the resistance of 

groups that refused to treat with the United States. The inversion of Indigenous gender 

roles, in which women managed agricultural production in accordance with age-old 

practices, threatened the social position of women and challenged men to forego their 

traditional measures of community worth; namely, hunting and war. These were not 

small matters, and they often found expression in subsequent challenges to U.S. authority 

and treaty signatories.6

Most Shawnee had stayed away from the Greenville council, and chose to pursue 

a degree of self-sufficiency and autonomy. As noted above, some moved to Upper 

Canada while others departed for present-day Missouri where the Spanish had previously 

granted lands to their Hathawekela, Kispoko, and Pekowi relatives. Others preferred to 

remain within the territories they had defended, and established villages between the 

Maumee and the Wabash River. Among the latter was the mostly Kispoko community 

led by Tecumseh (Shooting Star), who vehemently opposed the Greenville treaty and 

frequently denounced the plans of M’katiwe-kašee and Biaseka. After spending the better 

part of three years within Shawnee territories that had been ceded in the 1795 Treaty, 

Tecumseh accepted an invitation to build a town among Lunaapeew (Lenape, or 

Delaware) allies on the west fork of the White River in 1798.7

 5 Sami Lakomäki, Gathering Together: The Shawnee People through Diaspora and Nationhood, 1600–

1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 132-35. The name and translation of “Biaseka” used here 

comes from treaty documents and U.S. reports on councils with Shawnee representatives. The meaning and 

pronunciation of “Biaseka” remains unclear, however, since the word “wolf” in the Shawnee language is 

rendered as m’wewa and roughly pronounced as m’way-wah). 6 Gunlög Fur, A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters Among the Delaware Indians

(Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 199-210; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 116-18, 

124, 134, 154; Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 134-37, 146-51. 7 Bil Gilbert, God Gave Us This Country: Tekamthi and the First American Civil War (New York: 

Atheneum, 1989), 191-93; John Sugden, Tecumseh: A Life (New York: Holt, 1997), 97-98; Amy C. Schutt, 

Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians (Philadelphia: University of 

Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 180-81. Tecumseh (roughly pronounced te-KUM-the, or te-KUM-se) is often 

translated as “Shooting Star” or “Panther Across the Sky.” He was a born into the Kispoko (Panther Clan) –

whose members derived their collective identity from a spirit being that could be seen making great leaps 

across the night sky in the tracings of a falling star or meteor. Consequently, both of the translations equally 

correspond to the Shawnee name. See Sugden, Tecumseh, 13-14.
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Figure 6.1: Indigenous Population Centers after the Treaty of Greenville, ca. 

1795-1800. Superimposed circles and ovals encompass primary residential and use areas 

of former Confederacy groups relative to the northwestern extent of the Greenville Treaty 

Line (identified on the map as “Indian Boundary Line” in the lower right-hand corner of 

the image). Village and town areas concentrated along the Wabash and White rivers are 

contained in the large circle in the lower left. The small oval to the right encompasses the 

Mekoche Shawnee town of Wapakoneta, while the oval in the center surrounds the 

Myaamia (Miami) town of Kiihkayonki (Kekionga) and associated villages. Around the 

western end of Lake Erie (top right-hand corner of image) are the mostly Odawa, 

Wyandot, and Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) villages of Lower Sandusky, the mostly 

Odawa towns and villages on the Lower Maumee River and Maumee Bay, and the 

mostly Wyandot, Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi), and Shawnee communities around the 

Detroit River. The broad oval in the upper center corresponds to Bodéwadmi populations 

on the St. Joseph River and the southern end of Lake Michigan. The small circle in the 

lower right encompasses the mostly Wyandot towns around Upper Sandusky. Source: 

detail from John Cary, “A new map of part of the United States of North America: 

exhibiting the Western Territory, Ken-tucky, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia &c” 

(1805). Courtesy of New York Public Library.

The Detroit River Boundary

As former elements of the Confederacy adjusted to the new U.S. regime of forts, 

annuities, and treaty boundaries, parallel shifts were occurring among Indigenous, 

Canadien, British, and Euro-American populations in the Detroit River area. In 

compliance with the Jay Treaty, the British abandoned Detroit in 1796 and built Fort 
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Amherstburg at the mouth of the Detroit River’s main channel. Located beside the small 

township of Malden (which included Loyalists who fled north after the Revolution, 

employees and retirees of the British Indian Department, several traders formerly based 

at Detroit, and a number of Shawnee associated with Kekewpelethy), the fort replaced 

Detroit as a military and administrative center for Upper Canada and the upper Great 

Lakes.8 From Amherstburg, British officials also kept tabs on U.S. activities and 

maintained relations (through trade and informal councils) with Native communities on 

the other side of the international boundary. These included the Wyandot across the river 

at Big Rock (Brownstown) and Maguaga, Odawa around Maumee Bay, Ojibwe along 

Lake St. Clair and the southern shore of Lake Huron, and Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi) to 

the west of Lake Erie and around southern Lake Michigan, as well as other members of 

the former Confederacy who lived to the north, west, and southwest.9

Individuals, families and small delegations from these communities also 

continued to frequent Detroit, which the Irish travel writer Isaac Weld described in 

October 1796 as “crowded with Indians of one tribe or other” who came to trade, work, 

or visit during the day, but were “turned out of the town [each night], and the gates shut 

upon them.” Whether or not this nightly escort was viewed as an affront, according to 

Weld it seemed of a piece with a general lack of U.S. hospitality. “The American officers 

here,” he wrote, “have endeavored to their utmost to impress upon the minds of the 

Indians, an idea of their own superiority over the British; but as they are very tardy in 

giving these people any presents, [the Native visitors] do not pay much attention to their 

words.” By “presents,” Weld meant annuities, which always seemed to arrive later than 

promised at U.S. posts throughout the region. This chronic tardiness largely stemmed 

from the lack of U.S. naval and commercial vessels on Lake Erie until 1796, and the 

continuing British dominance of lower and upper Great Lakes transportation and trade. 

At the time of Weld’s visit, Fort Lernoult (aka Fort Detroit) was still mostly supplied by 

the overland routes that moved north from the Ohio River and through the posts on the 

Maumee River. Regardless of the reasons, the results did not redound well for the United 

States. Even the once-feared General Wayne was mocked with a new name by the groups 

that received their annuities at Detroit. Instead of Noodin or Chi-noodin (the Wind), 

 8 Historians in the United States and Canada frequently refer to Fort Amherstburg as “Fort Malden,” but 

this is an anachronism. Fort Amherstburg was destroyed by the British in September 1813 prior to their 

retreat from the 2nd Army of the Northwest. The ruins were subsequently occupied by U.S. forces and a 

smaller scale fort was reconstructed on the site and named Fort Malden. Following the Treaty of Ghent in 

1814, which formally ended the war, the British reoccupied the fort—which continued to be known as Fort 

Malden. In the present study, “Fort Amherstburg” is used in reference to the facility prior to September 

1813—and the town of Malden is identified as a distinct community. 9 Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship, 61-63; Allan K. McDougall and Lisa P. Valentine, “Treaty 29: 

Why More Became Less,” in: Papers of the Thirty-Fourth Algonquian Conference, ed. H.C. Wolfart 

(Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2003), 244-247. The Shawnee in Malden would subsequently 

move to Chenail Encarté, a substantial tract of land that encompassed Walpole Island along the 

northeastern shore of Lake St. Clair. Known as the Shawnee Reserve in later years, it had been acquired by 

the Crown in a 1796 treaty from Ojibwe and Odawa communities for Great Britain’s Indigenous allies 

during the recent wars.
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Wayne was derisively referred to as “General Wabang [Waaban], that is General Tomorrow.”10

Such missteps gave further incentive to the British for providing gifts and food to 

Native visitors, who invariably brought information about their communities, U.S. 

officials and policies, and the development of new settlements in the Ohio Valley. 

Stopping in Detroit and Amherstburg also had particular benefits for these visitors, since 

it provided an opportunity to receive both annuities and gifts, do some trading, and glean 

information about the disposition of U.S. military officials and the British Indian 

Department. Yet there was another, more long-standing reason for Native peoples to 

come to the Detroit River area: namely, to trade and socialize with the Canadien

communities that had been in the area for the better part of a century. Weld estimated that 

“two thirds of the [500] inhabitants of Detroit are of French extraction, and the greater 

part of the [1,500] inhabitants of the settlements on the river, both above and below the 

town, are of the same description.” Because Detroit was an entrepôt for the entire Great 

Lakes region, a large number of the French who resided in the town were “engaged in 

trade” that included furs from the north, dry goods from Lower Canada, and 

manufactures from across the Atlantic. However, most exchanges occurred on a local or 

regional scale, and moved through a network of mostly Canadien, Métis, Indigenous, and 

(to a lesser extent) British connections.11

Such relationships were never merely transactional, and many of the traders with 

ties to the Detroit River area lived among or had married into various communities within 

the Confederacy. Several also played important roles in assisting the British and the 

Confederacy prepare for the northward march of Wayne’s army while some, like Antoine 

Lasselle, fought at Fallen Timbers. In the aftermath of the battle, Canadien, Métis, and 

bicultural British traders like George Ironside (Scottish-Shawnee) advised individual 

Confederacy leaders prior to the treaty council at Greenville. Not surprisingly, these men 

also served as interpreters during the month-long council, and a fair number were listed 

as official witnesses on the final treaty document. It was such men, their families, and 

their kin that Indigenous visitors from communities around the Great Lakes—and even as 

 10 Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship, 63; Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 88-90; Guillaume 

Teasdale, “Old Friends and New Foes: French Settlers and Indians in the Detroit River Border Region,” 

Michigan Historical Review, 38 (Fall 2012): 37-38. Quotations are from Isaac Weld, Travels through the 

States of North America and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, during the Years 1795,1796, and 

1797, vol. 2 (London: John Stockdale, 1807; reprint, Carlisle, Mass.: Applewood Books, 2007), 187. On 

U.S. and British shipping around Lake Erie in the late 18th century, see J. B. Mansfield, ed., History of the 

Great Lakes, vol. 1 (Chicago: J. H. Beers & Co., 1899), 127-128, 584. 11 Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship, 63; Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 90-91; Teasdale, “Old 

Friends and New Foes,” 38-39; Weld, Travels, 187; Lisa Philips Valentine and Allan K. McDougall, 

“Imposing the Border: The Detroit River from 1786 to 1807,” Journal of Borderlands Studies, 19 (Spring 

2004), 13-15; Susan Sleeper Smith, “The Social and Political Significance of Exchange, in Rethinking the 

Fur Trade: Cultures of Exchange in an Atlantic World, ed. Sleeper Smith (Lincoln: University of Nebraska 

Press, 2009), 83-88; Catherine Cangany, Frontier Seaport: Detroit’s Transformation into an Atlantic 

Entrepôt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 43-44; Dennis M. Au, “The River Raisin: A 

Comparative Portrait,” Le Journal 27 (Summer 2011), 3. Population figure for Detroit comes from Peter 

Gavrilovich and Bill McGraw, The Detroit Almanac: 300 Years of Life in the Motor City (Detroit: Detroit 

Free Press, 2000), 289.
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far west as the Mississippi River—came to visit, trade, and exchange gifts before or after 

making their way to Detroit and Amherstburg.12

Canadien Continuity

Many of these connections stretched back across several generations, and 

persisted through five decades of war. This was particularly true around western Lake 

Erie and the major river valleys to the southwest and west—i.e., the heart of the former 

Pays d’en Haut. During Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763-65), Obwandiyag (Pontiac) and other 

Indigenous leaders from the Detroit River area received advice and assistance from these 

Canadien communities. By the end of that brief war, British officials ultimately realized 

that peace required emulation of the diplomatic and material exchanges that had long 

nurtured Indigenous-French relations in the region. These efforts proved successful when 

they followed or augmented the commercial and social relationships of Canadien traders, 

and when they approximated Native conceptions of Onontio. In the latter regard, the 

British succeeded best during the American Revolution when the Crown’s fight with the 

rebellious colonies coincided (much like France’s war with the British and Long Knives a 

generation earlier) with the territorial and marshal concerns of American Indians in the 

Ohio River Valley.13

During the subsequent conflicts of the late 1780s and early 1790s, the northward 

displacements of Indigenous communities from the vicinity of the Ohio River pushed the 

center of a renewed Native-British alliance toward the population centers around the 

Detroit River, western Lake Erie, the Maumee River, and the upper Wabash River. These 

locales formed a tight constellation of allied interests that developed common strategies, 

provisioned war parties, and maintained healthy exchange networks in a time of 

intermittent war. Fort Lernoult and the town at Detroit, as well as the immediate 

surroundings, were important in all three regards.14 British officials requisitioned firearms 

for Native warriors and helped plan campaigns that included soldiers and rangers from 

the Indian Department. European trade goods also came to the Great Lakes in the form of 

British supplies and gifts, as well as through Canadien or Métis traders with close 

relations in the region. While military support and trade were central to the BritishConfederacy alliance, these activities were largely sustained by the labors of the 2,000 

habitants (settlers, or residents) whose ribbon farms fronted both sides of the Detroit 

River and the River Rouge. Along with a smaller number of British farmers, they 

 12 F. Clever Bald, How Michigan Men Helped Make the Treaty of Greenville (Ypsilanti: University 

Lithoprinters, 1945), 213-221; Teasdale, “Old Friends and New Foes,” 46-47; Carter, The Life and Times of 

Little Turtle, 140-44; Sugden, Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska 

Press, 2000), 185-90; Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship, 35-38. Though numbers and attributions 

are not precise, at least eight men from the River Raisin and Detroit signed the Treaty of Greenville as 

witnesses, and three more were listed as official interpreters. Many others were present at the negotiations, 

but were not noted by name in official records or did not sign the treaty document; see Le Roy Barnett and 

Roger Rosentreter, Michigan’s Early Military Forces: A Roster and History of Troops Activated Prior to 

the American Civil War (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 47. 13 Nelson, A Man of Distinction, 105-132; Dowd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, & the 

British Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 62-68; White, Middle Ground, 353-68, 

396-408; Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New 

York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 66-68. 14 The British built Fort Lernoult in 1778-79 to replace the aging facilities of Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit.
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produced more than enough grain, produce, and meat for themselves, the denizens of 

Detroit, and military personnel. Their surpluses also filled the larders of traders and—

through British purchasing agents—supplied large conferences of the Confederacy as 

well as Indigenous communities displaced by war.15

While Canadien farmers, traders, and merchants were important to the BritishConfederacy alliance, their actions were not wholly partisan. This was particularly true of 

the Canadien and Métis traders who were instrumental in bringing General Wayne and 

Indigenous leaders together in the months after the Battle of Fallen Timbers and during 

the Greenville treaty council. For the dozen or so traders who were present at the 

Greenville council, facilitating the treaty process helped ensure the continuation of their 

livelihoods and social relations. After Fallen Timbers it was clear that trading in the Ohio 

Valley and the lower Great Lakes would require licenses from the United States—and it 

was rightly assumed that assisting General Wayne’s efforts to hold a successful treaty 

council would bring certain advantages. Moreover, helping Myaamia, Lunaapeew, 

Bodéwadmi, Odawa, and Shawnee leaders navigate the beginnings of the new regime 

would sustain continued relations among the communities in which these Canadiens had 

long resided and traded. As Dennis Au notes, these traders knew that if they “played their 

cards right with the Americans there was a considerable profit to be made.”16

La Rivière aux Raisins and the Detroit River Borderland

It would be wrong to see these men and their families as merely two-faced 

profiteers, working both sides of a transaction to their own benefit. To function well in 

the fur trade over a long period of time required close attention to the fundamental virtues 

of reciprocity and kinship. To cheat or dupe the people with whom one traded, and who 

were often relatives, was a recipe for personal and financial disaster. Likewise, playing 

General Wayne and other U.S. officials for fools was not a game with long-term 

prospects for success. Rather than two-faced, men like Antoine Lasselle maintained a 

singular perspective that looked in two directions: southward toward the United States 

and eastward to British North America, but always focused on maintaining or 

augmenting connections in the fur trade. In truth, they were privateers; people who 

sought a degree of success and independence in the land they inhabited without directly 

offending those who might claim their loyalties. Competition between leading trade 

families like the Navarres and the Lasselles, as well as the different political and personal 

relations that shaped their livelihoods, might cause one or the other to improve relations 

at different times with the United States, Great Britain, or particular Indigenous 

communities and their alliances. Yet such proclivities, even when they pointed in 

opposite directions, came from people who shared a primary identification with—and 

loyalty to—the same French-speaking, Catholic community.17

 15 Karen Marrero, “On the Edge of the West: The Roots and Routes of Detroit’s Urban Eighteenth 

Century,” in Frontier Cities: Encounters at the Crossroads of Empire, eds. Jay Gitlin, Barbara Berglund, 

and Adam Arenson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 80-86; Gitlin, The Bourgeois 

Frontier: French Traders, French Towns, and American Expansion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 

2010), 30-32, 42-44; Teasdale, “Old Friends and New Foes,” 44-45; Cangany, Frontier Seaport, 41-45. 16 Au, “The River Raisin,” 3. Also see Bald, How Michigan Men, 215-17. 17 At the time of the Legion’s advance toward the Maumee River, and in the aftermath of Fallen Timbers, 

fear of Wayne’s army and resentment of British governance over habitant communities around western 
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All of these circumstances and conditions, and the fealty to a historically and 

culturally distinct community, represent the fundamental hallmarks of a borderland 

community. Occupying an indeterminate zone between British North America and an 

expanding United States, Canadiens along the Detroit River and around western Lake 

Erie were separate from and connected to these two rival powers. Variously distrusted 

and solicited by U.S. and British officials, the French-speaking population of the region 

endeavored to maintain its independence by exploiting, soliciting, and protesting the 

attentions of both powers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This strategy was 

compounded by a third, and even more complex dynamic: maintaining relationships with 

Indigenous communities in the former Pays d’en Haut. The Wyandot, Odawa, and 

Bodéwadmi who relocated to the Detroit River area at the same time as the French (after 

the Great Peace of Montréal in 1701), are a good case in point. Unlike their Canadien

neighbors, these were not borderland people per se. Rather, they continued to occupy a 

revered central position within an array of Indigenous communities across much of what 

is now the Upper Midwest. As such, they embodied the fears, resignations, and ambitions 

of the former Confederacy as different groups struggled to adjust to the new U.S. regime. 

Like the French-speaking population, the Wyandot, Odawa, and Bodéwadmi leaders 

alternately engaged U.S. and British officials. Yet their concerns were far more regional 

than local, and did not readily align with the specific concerns of their Canadien

neighbors.18

Fraught with so much complexity, maintaining this Canadien borderland 

presented a host of challenges in the decade and a half after the Treaty of Greenville. 

Nowhere was this truer than among the community of habitants and traders who lived 

along the River Raisin, which in 1795 was the largest Canadien settlement outside of 

 Lake Erie reached a peak—with the Navarres and McDougalls (a Scottish-French family) pushing for an 

alliance with the United States. The sources on the disagreements within the River Raisin community over 

this matter all come from the correspondence of British and U.S. officials, who generally disparaged 

Canadiens and identified them as passionate advocates or enemies of the letter writer’s cause. In sum, the 

correspondence suggests two things: in the midst of a possible war there were pronounced divisions within 

the River Raisin community; the fears of government and military officials caused them to exaggerate—

and misidentify—the intensity of the individuals who were pro-British or pro-American. See Michael 

Power, “Father Edmund Burke: Along the Detroit Frontier, 1794-1797,” Historical Studies: The Canadian 

Catholic Historical Association (1984), 29-46; Patrick Tucker, “From Fallen Timbers to the British 

Evacuation of Detroit, 1794-1796: The Roman Catholic Priest Who Was a British Agent,” The Michigan 

Historical Review, 37 (Spring 2011): 41-76; and Bald, How Michigan Men, 212, 218. On primary loyalty to 

kin and community, also see Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier, 62. 18 This discussion of borderlands is informed by the following works: Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, 

“From Borderlands to Borders: Empire, Nation States, and the Peoples in Between in North American 

History,” American Historical Review 104 (June 1999): 814-41; Michel Hogue, Metis and the Medicine 

Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 

2015; Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American 

Revolution (New York: Knopf, 2006); and John J. Bucowczyk, “Trade, War, Migration and Empire in the 

Great Lakes Basin, 1650-1815,” in Permeable Border: The Great Lakes Basin as Transnational Region, 

1650-1990, ed. Bukowczyk (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press; and Calgary: University of Calgary 

Press, 2005), 10-28. On the Detroit River borderland in particular, see three essays from a special issue on 

emerging borderlands in the Michigan Historical Review 34:1 (Spring 2008): Nora Faires, “Introduction: 

Emerging Borderlands,” vii-xii; Robert Englebert, “Merchant Representatives and the French River World, 

1763-1803,” 63-82; and Lawrence B. A. Hatter, “The Transformation of the Detroit Land Market and the 

Formation of the Anglo-American Border, 1783-1796,” 83-99.
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Detroit –and certainly the most independent population center in the region. Because of 

its position on the main route between Detroit and the lower Maumee River, along with 

connections to the west, the River Raisin settlement was a place of great strategic interest. 

At the time of General Wayne’s campaign, the lower Raisin was considered a way-station 

and a causeway for a possible U.S. invasion of Detroit, a bulwark and supply area for the 

British defense of Detroit, and a rendezvous area for Confederacy warriors and refugees. 

Interest in all these strategic factors would return and intensify in the first decade of the 

19th century, as would a spate of appeals from Indigenous, U.S., and British interests for 

support and assistance from the habitants sur la Rivière aux Raisins (inhabitants on the 

River Raisin.19

At the Border of Historical Change/ À la frontière du changement historique

The origins of the Canadien community on the River Raisin, and its subsequent 

development, reflect the larger historical processes that shaped the old Pays d’en Haut

from the Seven Years’ War to the War of 1812. Prior to the French surrender of Detroit 

in September 1760 and the subsequent Peace of Paris in 1763, habitants acquired rotures

(a kind of inheritable or transferable land lease) through the semi-feudal seigneurial

system of New France. Through petitions to the commandant of Fort Pontchartrain, 

individuals received a roture for a long lot or ribbon farm that fronted the Detroit River—

for which they paid rent to the King in the form of taxes collected by the royal notary. By 

the early 1760s these relatively narrow parcels (between 380 ft. and 950 ft. wide, and 

7,600 ft. deep) had taken up twenty miles of Detroit River frontage and were beginning to 

spread up the River Rouge and the Ecorse River. This process of land distribution and use 

was formally ended with the Treaty of Paris (1763) which, among other things, 

dismantled the seigneurial system and transformed land grants to land titles. Any 

expectations that these changes might lead to a new market for land were largely dashed 

by the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which forbade “any Purchases or Settlements 

whatever, or taking Possession of any of the Lands” west of the Appalachians or within 

the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin, without “especial leave and License” from the 

King.20

 19 Nelson, A Man of Distinction among Them, 162, 167; Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship, 224; 

Wiley Sword, President Washington’s Indian War: The Struggle for the Old Northwest, 1790-1795, 322-

24; Bryce Blair, “The Battle of Fallen Timbers and the Treaty of Fort Greeneville: Why did Anthony 

Wayne Win Both and Could He Have Lost?” (University of Toledo, MA thesis, 2005), 62-63, 122; 

Reginald Horsman, “The British Indian Department and the Resistance to General Anthony Wayne, 1793-

1795,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49 (September 1962): 269-90; and William H. Bergmann, 

The American National State and the Early West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 98-100, 

220-22. For a visual sense of the lower River Raisin as a strategic hub around western Lake Erie, see Figure 

1.5 on page 33.

20 On the rotures and the seigneurial system of New France, see Richard Colebrook Harris, The Seigneurial 

System in Early Canada: A Geographical Study, with a New Preface (Kingston and Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1966), 117-38. On the Detroit River region, see Suzanne Boivin Sommerville, 

“Concessions in Early French Détroit: 1730s and 1740s,” paper delivered before a meeting of the FrenchCanadian Heritage Society of Michigan on the subject of Land Records in Détroit during the French 

Régime, April 12, 2014 at the Mount Clemens Public Library. The end of the Seigneurial system is 

discussed in Donald W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of 

History, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 278-80; and Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a 
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169

While some previously undeveloped parcels in the Detroit area were put up for 

sale, and existing long lots were divided or changed hands, a pent-up desire for more land 

grew as a new generation came of age. This was partly alleviated in the late 1760s when 

most of the Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi), Odawa, and Ojibwe communities moved away to 

locales on the Huron, Rouge, Saline, and Thames rivers, as well as the shores of Lake St. 

Clair and Maumee Bay. Before leaving the Detroit area, however, their leaders made land 

transactions with several Canadien and some Anglo-British buyers for the former village 

sites in the Detroit area. These transactions generally followed established practices from 

the French era, but they violated the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and thus failed to garner 

a formal authorization from the commandant of Fort Detroit (which had been an essential 

requirement in New France).21

British officials in Detroit were neither able nor willing to restrict these 

transactions, since they were loath to foster any cause for resentment among the 

established Canadien and increasing British communities. Instead, a legal technicality 

was used as workaround: the commandant issued a formal statement that acknowledged a 

transaction had occurred, but also noted that he did not have the authority to certify a 

legal deed for the land. This process functioned well enough, and by the late 1770s the 

holders of informal titles within the former Native village sites had marked out long lots 

and either “sold” the land or put it under cultivation. At the close of the American 

Revolution, a new inflationary market developed as British merchants began acquiring 

uncertified “deeds” on both sides of the Detroit River, with the expectation that they 

could later sell these lands under a revamped British system or—if necessary—within a 

future U.S. market. During this inflationary period, François and Jacques Navarre 

decided to move to the lower River Raisin where they could establish themselves in a 

more affordable situation and bring their trade closer to the Ohio Valley. Between 1783 

and 1785 these two landless grandsons of a royal notary began acquiring tracts of land 

from a Bodéwadmi community that had previously moved from Detroit (where they very 

likely had known the Navarre family for several generations) to the upper River Raisin 

basin. Other Canadiens would follow, acquiring land from the Navarres or the 

Bodéwadmi, and a community of habitants along with a handful of traders began to form 

on both sides of the river by 1785.22

Dating from the end of the Revolutionary War and the first post-war conflicts in 

the Ohio Valley, the initial development of the River Raisin community was not a simple 

matter of historical coincidence. Located thirty miles south of Detroit, the River Raisin 

provided more ready access to the growing concentration of Indigenous communities in 

the upper Ohio Valley as well other groups to the west and southwest. The terms of the 

 

Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763-1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 56-

80. Quotation of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 from Jensen, p. 58.

21 Fort Detroit, in the British era, refers to the same French facility known as Fort Ponchartrain du Détroit. 

On the distinction between Fort Detroit and Fort Lernoult during the British era, see note 14 above. 22 Teasdale, “Old Friends and New Foes,” 41-45; Wallace Genser, “‘Habitants”, ‘Half-Breeds’, and 

Homeless Children: Transformations in Métis and Yankee-Yorker Relations in Early Michigan,” The 

Michigan Historical Review 24 (Spring 1998): 28-29; Bucowczyk, “Trade, War, Migration and Empire in 

the Great Lakes Basin,” 21-26; Lawrence B. A. Hatter, “The Transformation of the Detroit Land Market 

and the Formation of the Anglo-American Border, 1783-1796,” Michigan Historical Review, 34 (Spring, 

2008): 86-91.
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1783 Peace of Paris also promised a new degree of independence for this mostly 

Canadien population, since the River Raisin flowed through the territorial claims that 

Great Britain had ceded to the United States. While the Crown retained de facto 

jurisdiction over the area until ratification of the Jay Treaty in 1796, British restrictions 

on land acquisition to the west and north of the Detroit River no longer had any legal 

basis in a Provincial Court. By the same token, the Congress’ restriction against all 

private land purchases from American Indians—as spelled out in the Land Ordinances of 

1784, 1785, and 1787—had little to no bearing in a region where Native residents did not 

recognize (let alone acknowledge) the sovereignty claims of the United States.

Between international treaties and the paper claims of Great Britain and the 

United States, the habitants along the River Raisin had found a fair degree of 

independence by the late 1780s. Over the next few years, British merchants also began 

acquiring parcels from Indigenous groups and Canadiens on the Huron, Raisin, and 

Maumee rivers, which created a “local market in illicit [land] deeds” that enjoyed the 

tacit approval of the notary public’s office in Detroit.23 This development brought a 

degree of certainty to land holders and purchasers on the lower River Raisin, which was 

further augmented in the early 1790s after the disastrous campaigns of generals Harmar 

(1790) and St. Clair (1791). These twin defeats at the hands of the Confederacy 

convinced Lieutenant Governor Simcoe and officials in the British Indian Department 

that the terms of the 1783 Peace of Paris would soon be revisited, and the boundary with 

the United States pushed southward. Such an expectation fostered growing confidence in 

Upper Canada about the future security of land values around western Lake Erie, as did 

an increasing demand for agricultural staples from the North West Company’s rapidly 

expanding network of fur trade posts between Lake Superior and Lake Manitoba.24

Though not insignificant, the independence that habitants gained on the River 

Raisin was based on fragile contingencies. Namely, the weak exercise of British 

sovereignty, a relatively stable market in which land retained or increased its value, the 

willingness of some Indigenous communities to engage in small-scale land transactions, 

and a general feeling that all parties continued to receive what they considered a fair deal. 

These conditions proved short lived, however, and began to unravel completely in 1794. 

Having commenced negotiations with the United States on what became the Jay Treaty, 

British officials wavered in their support of the Western Confederacy and gave up their 

hopes for a southern extension of British sovereignty around Lake Erie. The following 

summer, as the Treaty of Greenville councils were underway, British syndicates worked 

feverishly to obtain large tracts of land to the south and west of the Detroit River with an 

eye toward profiting from the coming U.S. land market. Plying Native leaders with 

liquor, presents and false promises, these would-be land barons sewed resentment among 

Indigenous alliances, Canadiens at River Raisin, and other small land-holders who 

viewed their property in terms of agricultural production and family patrimony rather 

than parcels of real estate. In another regard, however, the large treaty councils and the 

 23 Quotation from Hatter, “The Transformation of the Detroit Land Market,” 87. 24 “Land Claims in Michigan,” American State Papers, Public Lands, 5, 192-218; Huron Potawatomi, Inc., 

“Summary under the Criteria and Evidence or Proposed Finding” (United States Department of the Interior, 

Office of Federal Acknowledgement, 1995), 17-19; Au, “The River Raisin,” 2-3; and Hatter, “The 

Transformation of the Detroit Land Market,” 84-89.
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established presence of Wayne’s army proved a boon of sorts to the traders and habitants

on the River Raisin—who could now access a new market at the various forts as well as a 

substantial customer base of soldiers, camp followers, and sutlers.25

A Canadien home in the Territory of Michigan

Wayne’s victory at Fallen Timbers, followed by the Treaty of Greenville and the 

Jay Treaty, effectively destroyed the informal land market that had developed under the 

British, but created a unique opportunity for the community along the River Raisin. Even 

before the Jay Treaty had been signed in London, and months before Fallen Timbers, 

François Navarre saw the United States as the best guarantor of his and other Canadiens’

property rights. In May of 1794 he travelled to Fort Greene Ville to request that General 

Wayne petition Congress to recognize Navarre’s land deeds—which he presented to 

Wayne—and those of his family and neighbors. Wayne was not in a position to act on 

such a request, and did not address the matter during the treaty council the following 

year. Undaunted, Navarre and other Canadien landholders sent three petitions of their 

own to Congress between 1796 and 1800 that variously sought legal title to their current 

lands (as formerly construed by French and British property systems), inquired about the 

availability of more lands for purchase by their increasing populations, requested that 

Congress distinguish between the small holdings of Canadiens from the large tracts 

claimed by British syndicates, and made clear that the petitioners had rejected British 

offers of land in Upper Canada to instead pursue the “opportunity of gaining the rights of 

citizenship, under a free Government.”26

By 1802 these would-be patriots received a positive response, and a promise that 

a special commission would work directly with the habitants on the River Raisin and 

other nearby waterways. The process was delayed at the outset, however, since the 

District of Detroit (which at the time encompassed the six-mile wide Treaty of Greenville 

land cession that extended from the River Raisin to the shores of Lake St. Clair) still 

lacked a formal administrative center. Aside from the small garrison at Fort Lernoult, 

Detroit was little more than a fortified village surrounded by cultivated lands. The mostly 

French-speaking population retained its close ties with communities on the other side of 

the Detroit River (as did their English-speaking neighbors and nearby Indigenous 

groups), where Amherstburg had quickly become the commercial center of the region. 

Matters were further compounded by the structure and organization of territorial 

 25 Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship, 56-58; Bergmann, The American National State, 105-08; 

Hatter, “The Transformation of the Detroit Land Market,” 93-94; David M. Delo, Post Traders: The Army 

Sutler on the Frontier (Helena, Mont.: Kingfisher Books, 1998), 19-22; For specific references to the 

frenzy in land speculation, see Edmund Burke to E. B. Littlehales, August 14, 1795, in The 

Correspondence of Lieut. Gov. John Graves Simcoe with Allied Documents Relating to His Administration 

of the Government of Upper Canada, ed. E. A. Cruikshank (Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1926), 4: 

63; R. G. England to John Simcoe, July 13, 1795, in ibid, 4: 44; and “Antoine Laselle [sic] to John 

McGregor, Jr., January 31, 1795, in ibid, 3:282.

26Teasdale, “Old Friends and New Foes,” 48-49. Quotation from “Petition to Congress of Inhabitants of 

Wayne Country, September 2, 1800,” in Clarence E. Carter, comp., Territorial Papers of the United States, 

3, Territory Northwest of the River Ohio, 1783-1803 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 

1934), 103-05. Also see David M. Stothers and Patrick M. Tucker, The Fry Site: Archaeological and 

Ethnohistorical Perspectives on the Maumee River Ottawa of Northwest Ohio (Morrisville, NC: LuLu 

Press, 2010), 36-38.
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governance. Until 1805, present-day Michigan was part of the vast Indiana Territory, 

which also encompassed the present states of Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and part of 

Minnesota. With the territorial capital at Vincennes, some 400 miles and several days 

travel to the south, the Detroit area was only marginally connected to the federal 

government.27

These demographic and economic patterns remained in place after Michigan 

became a separate territory in 1805, but elevation of Detroit to a territorial capital 

promised to bind the town’s and the district’s fortunes to the United States. As the 

Democratic-Republicans of the County of Wayne noted in a petition read before 

Congress in early December 1804, territorial status for Michigan was essential in a 

polyglot community that bordered Upper Canada, had few ties to the United States, and 

almost no experience with republican government. As they put it,

the frequent transfer of their allegiance from the French to the English, and 

from the latter to the U.S., has left them destitute of all patriotic 

Attachment to either. The regular & moderate exertion of authority blended 

with justice, would perhaps fix their wavering attachments ..., strengthen 

ties of dependence on the gen[eral] government ... [and enable] our 

Citizens ... better to estimate the admirable administration of its laws.28

Similar arguments had been made in previous petitions over the past four years, and had 

also noted the importance of establishing secure land titles and clear legal codes, but this 

last plea put matters in a more nationalistic light. The argument proved effective, and 

within a month resulted in an “Act to divide the Indiana Territory into two Separate 

governments” –which created the Territory of Michigan and set its formal establishment 

date of June 30, 1805.29

To administer the new territory, Jefferson appointed William Hull as Governor, 

Augustus Woodward as Chief Justice, and Stanley Griswold as Secretary. Together, Hull, 

Woodward, and two other federal judges would also constitute the Detroit Land Board—

to work in tandem with the already established Detroit Land Office. Toward these ends, 

the Land Board designated a Land Office Commission to examine and rule on the 

property claims of habitants within Detroit and in the vicinity of the River Raisin. Just 

weeks before Governor Hull, Justice Woodward, and Secretary Griswold took office, 

however, much of Detroit was destroyed in a fire. Given the complex nature of property 

titles and land claims in and around the town, and the desire of the new territorial officers 

 27 Cangany, Frontier Seaport, 107-108, 125-130; Silas Farmer, History of Detroit and Wayne County and 

Early Michigan: A Chronological Cyclopedia of the Past and Present, 3rd ed. (New York: Munsell & Co., 

1890), 87-89; “The First Towns—Sandwich and Amherstburg,” Documents H 37-H 44, in Enest J. 

Lajeunesse, The Windsor Border Region: Canada’s Southernmost Frontier, A Collection of Documents

(Toronto: The Champlain Society and the University of Toronto Press, 1960), 221-228; and Ray De Bruler, 

Jr., “Land Use and Settlement Patterns in Michigan, 1763-1837” (PhD diss., Western Michigan University, 

2007), 116-118. 28 “To the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States in Congress Assembled [December 6, 

1804],” in Documents Relating to the Erection of Wayne County and Michigan Territory (Detroit: Burton 

Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, 1922-1923), 35. 29 R. Gilpin, The Territory of Michigan, 1805-1837 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1970), 

3-7; Jeffrey Robert Pollock, “Bumpkins and Bostonnais: Detroit, 1805-1812” (MA thesis, University of 

Toledo, 2013), 57-58. 
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to enlarge and reconfigure Detroit, the Commission’s early work was focused almost 

entirely on making a “definitive and judicious adjustment” of pre-existing property 

boundaries and their ownerships in order to accommodate a completely new layout of the 

territorial capital. Yet despite this additional work, the promised review of property 

claims on the River Raisin began by the fall of 1805.30

The Commission was led by Frederick Bates, who was the receiver of public 

monies at the Detroit Land Office when President Jefferson named him one of 

Michigan’s three territorial judges. Most of the habitants were represented by Detroit 

attorney George McDougall, who spoke fluent French and English, was related through 

his mother to the Navarres, and had recently been appointed Notary Public for the newly 

established District of Erie (a jurisdiction that roughly corresponded to the current 

boundaries of Monroe County).31 Bates and McDougall knew each other well from 

previous work and residence in the Detroit area, and the latter seems to have operated as 

an adjunct of the commission. Through late 1805 and much of 1806, the Commissioners 

and McDougall interviewed landholders, examined land deeds, and visited habitants to 

verify claims. The process was complex, and involved sorting through past verbal 

agreements, tangled genealogies, and rough descriptions of boundaries. Yet there was a 

good deal of comity in the process, and everyone involved seemed to be working toward 

a broadly acceptable resolution.32

The tenor and desired outcome of the commission’s work was affirmed by Justice 

Woodward in a March 1806 report to Congress. “There are cases in the history of 

nations,” he wrote, “in which a wise Government will cover with the shroud of oblivion 

that which is past, and place the hand of rigor only on that which is to come; and [the 

work of the commission] is one of those cases.” Instead of seeking ways to deny the land 

claims of people who had been in the region for generations, Woodward championed an 

approach that confirmed the property rights of new citizens—much as had recently 

occurred in what had previously been French New Orleans. Woodward’s sentiments were 

subsequently affirmed by Secretary Griswold who, in almost all other matters, was a 

bitter political rival of the Chief Justice. After replacing Bates on the commission in early 

1807, he wrote President Jefferson about the nature of property claims on the River 

Raisin and elsewhere in Michigan Territory. “[I]t should be recollected, ... That The 

farms are cultivated, that the occupants are natives, born on the soil which they now 

 30 “Report of the Governor and Judges of Michigan Territory to Congress,” October 10, 1805, in Michigan 

Historical Collections, vol. 36 (Lansing: Wyncoop, Hallenbeck, Crawford Company, 1908), 103-111; 

quotation on p. 106—hereafter cited as MHC. Also see Cangany, Frontier Seaport, 154-158; Gilpin, 

Territory of Michigan, 33-38; and M. Agnes Burton, Governor and Judges Journal: Proceedings of the 

Land Board of Detroit (Detroit: Michigan Commission on Land Titles, 1915), 1-10, 148-151. 31 McDougall’s appointment as Notary Public can be found in MHC, vol. 36, 30 32 A fair sense of the breadth and character of the Land Board’s work along the River Raisin can be gleaned 

from the multiple reports and testimonials in the proceedings of the Land Board for the years 1805, 1806, 

and 1807 that are collected in American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the 

Congress of the United States; Public Lands (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1832), 295-301, 322-327, 

334-337, and 342-345.
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claim, feeling That soil to be their home, as it is indeed the only home they have on earth, 

and the only source of their subsistence.”33

Figure 6.2: “Plan of Private Claims in Michigan Territory, As Surveyed by 

Aaron Greeley, d. Surveyor, in 1810” This map depicts adjudicated property claims on 

the River Raisin and adjoining areas. (Courtesy of the Archives of Michigan)

The commission’s final report resulted in a new piece of legislation that made a 

specific exception to the Northwest Ordinance’s bans against preemption and the making 

of private contracts with American Indians for land acquisition. In “An Act Regulating 

the Grant of Lands in the Territory of Michigan” (1807), Congress stipulated that all 

properties in “actual possession, occupancy, and improvement” before 1796, and within 

territory “to which the Indian title has been extinguished,” could be claimed by their 

owners through preemption rights.34 The clause about extinguished “Indian title” did 

fulfill an essential condition of the Northwest Ordinance, but in this case it technically 

 33 A. B. Woodward to John G. Jackson, n.d., enclosed in a March 18 report to Congress entitled “Land 

Titles in Michigan Territory,” 1807, American State Papers: Public Lands, 82; Stanley Griswold to 

Thomas Jefferson, January 30, 1807, in The Territorial Papers of the United States, vol. 10, ed. Clarence 

Edwin Carter (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1942), 81-82—capitalization and italics in the 

original. Also see Cangany, Frontier Seaport, 154-155; Bruler, Jr., “Land Use and Settlement Patterns” 

129-133; and Gilpin, Territory of Michigan, 33-38. 33 R. Gilpin, The Territory of Michigan, 1805-1837 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1970), 

3-7; Jeffrey Robert Pollock, “Bumpkins and Bostonnais: Detroit, 1805-1812” (MA thesis, University of 

Toledo, 2013), 57-58. 34 “An Act Regulating the Grant of Lands in the Territory of Michigan,” in U.S. Statutes at Large 2 (1845), 

438.
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applied to the six-mile wide cession of land between the River Raisin and Lake St. Clair

that was part of the Greenville Treaty. Perhaps in expectation of new land cession 

treaties, recognized property boundaries on the south side of the River Raisin were also 

included in the Act. The saga of the petitioners continued, however, as they sought

recognition of lands they had acquired for the future use of their children—but had not 

occupied or improved before 1796. Eventually, the habitant communities received near 

complete satisfaction when most of these claims were recognized by Congress between 

1807 and 1811. Moreover, their land patents retained the original survey methods of the 

French long lot or ribbon farm system –despite the stipulation in the 1785 Land 

Ordinance that a cadastral survey system would be applied to the lands within the original 

bounds of the Northwest Territory.35

The general tendency toward accommodation allowed the commission to 

complete its work in a timely manner, even as their efforts were shaped by larger 

concerns. First among these was a sense that a drawn-out and overly complicated process 

could present the British with an advantage in the Detroit River region. As the 

Commissioners of the Land Board noted in a report dated September 1, 1807, failure to 

accommodate the land claims of habitants within U.S. territory would leave “those 

people ... completely ruined, and [they] would be compelled to the leave the country and 

cross over to the British side, where each of them may receive, gratis, from that 

Government, two hundred acres of land in fee simple.”36 While the loss of the French 

population would hurt the territorial economy and prove a boon for Upper Canada, it 

could also present a strategic threat to the United States. As Secretary Griswold noted in 

his letter to President Jefferson in January 1807, failure to confirm the habitants’ “Just 

claims” would cause people who would otherwise become “the most satisfied and quiet 

citizens in the Union” to despise the United States.

Griswold viewed this as a particularly urgent matter, since U.S. officials were

planning for a new land cession treaty council that would involve a large swath of 

southeastern Michigan Territory. Officials in Detroit, Vincennes, and Chillicothe (then 

the capital of Ohio) were also growing increasingly concerned about a growing alliance 

of American Indians that opposed further treaties and Griswold feared they might seek to 

forcefully derail the council. Lastly, he expected the British at Amherstburg would 

encourage Native leaders (through gifts and suggestions of a future alliance) to stay away 

from the treaty council. In short, the elements that had given rise to conflict in the past 

seemed to be coming together again. In this context, contented French-speaking citizens 

would “form an invaluable barrier for the united States [sic] on this northwest frontier 

against [American Indians], with whom they are on the most intimate and friendly terms, 

and whom they can influence more than any other people or nation on earth.” Moreover, 

as he pointedly reminded the President, “[t]heir friendship is to be highly valued on this 

 35 Teasdale, “Old Friends and New Foes,” 49-53; Hatter, “The Transformation of the Detroit Land Market,” 

98-99; Also see Paul W. Gates, History of Public Land Law Development. (Washington: Public Land Law 

Review Commission, 1968), 219-23; and Robert E. Mitchell, “Towards a History of Privatizing Public 

Lands in Michigan, 1785-1860,” Michigan Academician, 38 (2008), 124-26. On this particular application 

of preemption rights, see Roy M. Robbins, The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 18 (December 1931): 

337-339 36 Commissioners of the Land Board to the Secretary of the Treasury, September 1, 1807, in “Land Claims 

in Michigan,” American State Papers, Public Lands, 593.
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account, and their chagrin and enmity are to be as greatly dreaded. I should consider 

every Canadian, truly attached to the United States, better than a regular Soldier 

supported at the public expence, to protect this frontier.”37

Figure 6.3: Cadastral Survey and Long Lots on River Raisin. While this map postdates the actions of Congress between 1807 and 1811, it neatly represents how U.S. land 

systems accommodated Canadien long lots along the River Raisin. The map also indicates 

the locations of three reservations: Wyandot to the north, upriver from their former village of 

Big Rock (Brownstown); Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi) at the forks of the River Raisin, and 

Odawa (Ottawa) on Maumee Bay. With the exception of the Wyandot lands, which were 

previously centered around the site of Brownstown on this map, these lands were reserved as 

part of a larger land cession in 1807. Source: detail from Orange Risdon, Map of the surveyed 

part of the territory of Michigan (1825). Courtesy of Michigan State University Map Library.

Griswold’s theories were never fully tested, since the habitants’ seventeen-year 

effort to be recognized and to function as a distinct community proved successful within 

 37 Griswold to Jefferson, January 30, 1807, in Territorial Papers, 83; spelling and punctuation as in the 

original.
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a few months. Nevertheless, the dyamics that concerned him and the other 

Commissioners only intensified over the next few months. By May of 1807 it became 

clear to U.S. officials that the Ojibwe and Odawa around Saginaw, and some Bodéwadmi 

communities nearer to Detroit, were growing closer to the anti-treaty alliance. The 

following month brought news of the Chesapeake—Leopard Affair, in which the crew of 

the HMS Leopard attacked and boarded the USS Chesapeake near Norfolk, Virginia, 

British sailors boarded the Chesapeake, and seized four alleged deserters from the Royal 

Navy. The event raised cries for a new war with Great Britain and—especially in the 

Great Lakes and western Ohio Valley—the budding American Indian alliance.38

If nothing else, the developments of 1807 highlighted the broad arena of 

competing interests in which the habitants on the River Raisin were situated—and would 

have to contend. Most U.S. military installations, trading posts, and settlements were 

concentrated to the south, in the Maumee River basin and adjoining drainages. Nearby 

Indigenous groups were located to the northeast and southeast, between Maumee Bay and 

Detroit, to the west and northwest on eastward flowing streams and rivers including the 

River Raisin, while more distant groups regularly came to the Detroit River area from the 

west and southwest. The other significant nodal point in the habitants’ world was 

occupied by the British at Fort Amherstburg, who retained a significant military, 

political, and commercial presence.

Because the River Raisin was situated at a midpoint between the nearest elements 

of these various groups, the habitants necessarily remained engaged with all three—but 

this proved increasingly difficult as the Canadiens became more secure within a U.S. 

context. For the British, the doubts they held about the River Raisin community in the 

1790s gave way to resentment as Canadien traders increasingly brought Indigenous furs 

and even British trade goods to U.S. markets. A growing number of Indigenous leaders 

who maintained ties with the British, and refused to acknowledge the rights of a single 

group to sell lands, knew that the River Raisin community benefitted from close relations 

with the United States and would clearly benefit from the 1807 Treaty of Detroit. And 

lastly, U.S. officials and traders doubted the loyalty of some Canadiens who seemed to 

move too easily between Native communities, U.S. settlements and posts, and the mixed 

French and British populations on the Canadian side of the Detroit River. Such 

connections had defined the habitants’ world for the better part of a century, but they 

were becoming increasingly difficult to maintain as tensions grew between the British, 

the United States, and a resurgent Native confederacy. Their best future, as far as most 

residents of the River Raisin could tell, lay with the United States—but they could ill 

afford to offend any party.39

Treading an Uncertain Path

As the habitants endeavored to gain legal title to their lands from the United 

States in the decade and a half after Fallen Timbers, most of the Indigenous groups with 

whom they traded had embarked on a halting and more uncertain path. Small groups and 

 38 All of these matters are discussed more fully in the subsequent section of this chapter. 39 Teasdale, “Old Friends and New Foes,” 53-56; Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship, 55-56; Gitlin, 

The Bourgeois Frontier, 62; Robert M. Owens, Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the 

Origins of American Indian Policy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011), 78.
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individuals from the former Confederacy, as well as communities further west and 

southwest, retained their connections with the British along the Detroit River borderland. 

While the destitute came for gifts to sustain them, most came to trade furs, dressed hides, 

honey, beeswax, fish, venison, maple sugar and wild rice for cured meats, rum, cloth, 

decorative items, an array of European wares, or the services of a blacksmith. In this way 

gifts and exchanges sustained communities and their longstanding relations with the 

British. By the late 1790s and early 1800s, however, trade and trust had diminished 

considerably from just a decade before. This partly stemmed from the pressures that new 

U.S. settlers brought on the resource bases that sustained Native communities and their 

abilities to trade, but it reflected other changes as well. Former members of the 

Confederacy who lived near the Greenville Treaty line, and sought to cultivate better 

relations with U.S. officials, increasingly preferred to trade at U.S. posts. At the same 

time, changing policies made the British less forthcoming and generous in their trading. 

Most of this was caused by debts accrued in ongoing European wars as well as the 

relative peace that followed ratification of the Jay Treaty, both of which brought a 

general policy of economy to Fort Amherstburg and sharp reductions in military and 

Indian Department personnel in Upper Canada.40

As material and diplomatic exchanges between American Indians and the British 

were declining, the United States made a concerted effort to increase trade in the lower 

Great Lakes. This movement was partly triggered by Napoleon’s acquisition of Spanish 

Louisiana in 1800 and the possibility that the French might block U.S. access to the 

Mississippi River as well as renew their old position within the former Pays d’en Haut. 

To thwart a possible resurgence of the French imperial designs in North America, 

President Jefferson sought to strengthen commercial and diplomatic relations with Native 

leaders through the implementation of the “factory system”—which involved a series of 

trading forts with a federally authorized trader, or “factor,” who would manage trade with 

American Indian communities and serve as a representative of the U.S. government. The 

factory system, much like the trade licensing that occurred under the French and British 

regimes, was intended to ensure that quality materials would be sold at set prices. While 

the factories displaced and intentionally undersold private traders, Jefferson wanted to 

avoid giving cause for resentments among American Indian communities. This in turn 

would help cultivate commercial and diplomatic relations by cutting into the declining 

British trade and preempting any expected French inroads into the Ohio Valley.41

There is some irony in Jefferson’s advocacy of a quasi-imperial policy that 

undermined private traders, but the factory system represented a key instrument for 

realizing his vision of an “empire for liberty;” a nation of agrarian free holders expanding 

“without blot or mixture” across the continent. As he noted in a letter to Indiana 

Territorial Governor William Henry Harrison in February 1803, the factory system was a 

valuable tool for acquiring land. “To promote this disposition to exchange lands,” he 

 40 Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 92-93; White, Middle Ground, 484, 501-02; Dowd, A Spirited 

Resistance, 116-122. Established in 1791, the Province of Upper Canada encompassed southern Ontario 

from northern Lake Superior to the border with present-day Quebec (then known as Lower Canada). 41 On the factory system, see Ora Brook Peake, A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 

1795-1822 (Denver: Sage Books, 1954), 6-14; Bergmann, The American National State, 185, 189-92; and 

Stephen J. Rockwell, Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 2010), 124-29.
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wrote, “we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see [American Indians] run in 

debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, 

they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.” To acquire lands through this 

process was dependent upon taking trade away from the British, and thus the first 

factories in the Northwest Territory were established at Fort Wayne and Fort Detroit in 

1802. When the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory negated the French threat in 1803, 

cutting into British trade became a central policy concern and new factories were 

established at Sandusky, Chicago, Mackinac, and Green Bay to make inroads against 

traders and engagés from the Hudson’s Bay Company and North West Company.42

William Henry Harrison: “In pursuance of the President’s directions”43

Jefferson’s expectations for the factory system were not met, except around Fort 

Wayne and, to a lesser extent, Fort Detroit. For the most part Native peoples continued to 

trade with people they knew, which included the British at Fort St. Joseph, Canadiens in 

the Detroit River area and around western Lake Erie, the fur company posts to the west of 

Lake Michigan, and some unlicensed U.S. traders.44 Acquiring land still remained the 

main concern, regardless of the success or failure of the factory system, and Jefferson’s 

primary instrument would be his young protégé Harrison. Just months after receiving 

Jefferson’s letter on trade, debt, and land cessions, Governor Harrison sought to expedite 

the land acquisition process by calling for a treaty council at Fort Wayne. At issue was a 

1.2 million-acre swath of land known as the Vincennes Tract in southeastern Indiana 

Territory where Harrison had located his home and the territorial seat of government. The 

United States believed the area was included in the Treaty of Greenville cessions, but this 

interpretation was openly rejected by the Myaamia leader Mihšihkinaahkwa (Little 

Turtle), the Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) leader Buckongahelas, and others who 

initially refused to attend the council at Fort Wayne. Angered by what he considered 

stubborn insolence, Harrison threatened to withhold all annuities from any who remained 

absent.45

This strong-arm approach ultimately convinced a small representation of 

Myaamia, Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi), and Shawnee 

to come from villages and towns in what is now northeastern Indiana and southwestern 

Michigan. Tensions remained high, however, and on several occasions the council 

threatened to fall apart. The Shawnee delegation argued that the council was a simple 

pretense to take land, and stormed off after Harrison issued a strong threat against them. 

The Lunaapeew leader Buckongahelas accused part of the Myaamia and Bodéwadmi 

delegations of making claims on territories where they had no direct interests. The 

 42 Quotations from Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, November 24, 1801; Jefferson to William Henry 

Harrison, February 27, 1803; both in in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York, 

1984), 1117 and 1118. Also see Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood 

(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 49, 85-87; Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the 

Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 173-75, 

285; and Bergmann, The American National State, 186-87. 43 Quotation from William Henry Harrison to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, August 26, 1805, in The 

Papers of William Henry Harrison, 1800-1815 (microfilm), ed. Douglas E. Clanin (Indianapolis: Indiana 

Historical Society, 1999); quoted in Owens, Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer, 100. 44 Bergmann, The American National State, 186-94. 45 Owens, Mr. Jefferson's Hammer, 62-66.
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Shawnee from Wapakoneta returned with a proposal to delay the council and meet with 

the President in Washington, but Harrison dismissed the idea while the Bodéwadmi 

pushed to finish the current council. In the end, Harrison garnered the assent of twelve 

representatives (two Myaamia, two Kiikaapoi [Kickapoo], four Lunaapeew, three 

Shawnee, and four Bodéwadmi). Once the treaty was ratified by the Senate in December, 

there was no mention of annuities and payments since the U.S. government still 

considered the Vincennes Tract a part of the Greenville Treaty and thus already paid for. 

The only compensation that Harrison agreed to involved the cession of a large salt spring 

on the Saline River in present-day southeastern Illinois, for which the signatory groups 

collectively received an annual allotment of up to 150 bushels of salt.46

When news of this final detail became widely known, the resentments shared by 

some of the representatives at the Fort Wayne council became even more wide-spread 

and threatened to diminish the authority of the signatories within their villages and towns. 

To stanch the fallout from the 1803 Treaty, Harrison took a slightly different tack in 1804 

when dealing with Buckongahelas and other Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) for

another land cession below the confluence of the Wabash and Ohio rivers in southern 

Indiana Territory. To partly address the complaints of Buckongahelas at the 1803 council 

and thus patch what might become a troubling breech between the Lunaapeew and the 

United States, the 1804 treaty provided for the distribution of $3,000 worth of supplies, 

tools, and instruction in “agricultural and domestic arts” to the Lunaapeew. Harrison also 

crafted the final treaty language to suggest that the Lunaapeew representatives were the 

sole owners of the land—even though he knew their previous residence in the area had 

come with the permission of the Myaamia (Miami).47

Harrison also knew that the small number of Piankeshaw who lived within the 

ceded lands were preparing to move west of the Mississippi River—as were some of the 

Lunaapeew in the area who, as Harrison told Jefferson, “had not deep attachments to the 

land in question.” The Piankeshaw, on the other hand, “Set a higher value on [the lands,] 

from their ancestors having resided on them for Many generations.” While these were not 

matters that Harrison would have shared with the Piankeshaw or the Lunaapeew, he did 

want to forestall any complaints the Piankeshaw might have about the Lunaapeew 

receiving compensation for lands in southern Indiana Territory. Consequently, he 

convened a brief meeting with the Piankeshaw about a week before his council with the 

Lunaapeew. In return for a forfeiture of all land claims in the Indiana Territory, Harrison 

promised to send $700 in goods to the departing Piankeshaw once they arrived in their 

 46 Robert M. Owens, “Jeffersonian Benevolence on the Ground: The Indian Land Cession Treaties of 

William Henry Harrison,” Journal of the Early Republic, 22 (Autumn, 2002), 419-420; White, Middle 

Ground, 496-97; Michael Galbraith and Angela M. Quinn, Akima Pinsiwa Awiiki (Chief Jean-Baptiste de 

Richardville House) National Historic Landmark Nomination (2012), 21-22; “Treaty with the Delawares, 

etc., 1803,” in Kappler, ed., Treaties, 64-65. All of the Myaamia and two of the Bodéwadmi leaders were 

also designated as representatives of the Waayaahtanwa (Ouiatenon, or Wea), Piankeshaw, and Kaskaskia 

from the lower Wabash River and areas to the west.

47 Owens, “Jeffersonian Benevolence on the Ground,” 420-421; “Treaty with the Delawares, 1804,” in 

Kappler, ed., Treaties, 170-72. Quotation from Harrison to Jefferson, May 12, 1804, in The Papers of 

William Henry Harrison, 1800-1815; quoted in Owens, “Jeffersonian Benevolence,” 421.
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new homes, plus $2,000 worth of provisions, livestock, tools, money, and merchandise to 

be paid over ten years.48

Harrison’s mixture of angry denunciations and attention to the concerns of 

particular Native groups or leaders, as evidenced in the 1803 and 1804 councils and 

meetings, made him a superb agent of Jefferson’s desire for American Indian lands. By 

1805 he had concluded six treaties that involved the cession of 6.5 million acres. The 

duplicitous and presumptuous manner in which he conducted these transactions was 

widely condemned by groups that had been excluded from or refused to abide by the 

treaties, by the members of the communities that signed on to the treaties, and even by 

the signatories themselves. In regard to the latter, Richard White notes that such 

condemnations had limits. “[C]hiefs could ill oppose such cessions in principle since 

their own generosity—their ability to act as chiefs—depended on the annuities the 

treaties yielded. And as Harrison pushed his treaties, chiefs signed from fear that if they 

refused, chiefs of other villages would gladly make the cessions in their stead.” 49

Some leaders from diasporic groups like the Shawnee and Lunaapeew, who had 

moved into the western Ohio Valley and did not have ancient or longstanding 

associations with the region, also viewed treaties as an instrument to acquire a secure 

land base that was independent of the permissions they had received from the Myaamia, 

Wyandot, and others. By the same token, some Myaamia and Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi) 

leaders participated in treaties to ensure that they could retain authority within specific 

areas of deep meaning and usefulness for their people. Even when such goals were 

achieved, however, their reserved lands were eventually surrounded and invaded by a 

flood of squatters, surveyors and settlers who undermined Native communities in myriad 

ways.50

As ceded lands became honeycombed by U.S. newcomers, Native leaders made 

“heavy complaints of ill treatment” to Harrison. This first became apparent to the new 

governor as early as 1801 in the then still unceded portions of southernmost Indiana 

Territory. In an early report to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, Harrison wrote “their 

people have been killed—their lands settled on—their game wantonly destroyed—& their 

young men made drunk & cheated of the peltries which formerly procured them 

necessary articles of Cloathing [sic], arms and ammunition to hunt with.” Harrison 

expected these sorrowful conditions would become more common with subsequent land

cessions, but he most feared what these developments might portend for the United 

States. “All these Injuries the Indians have hitherto borne with astonishing patience,” he 

informed Dearborn, “but although they discover no disposition to make war upon the

United States at present—I am confident that most of the tribes would eagerly seize any 

 48 Owens, “Jeffersonian Benevolence on the Ground,” 421-422; “Treaty with the Piankeshaw, 1804,” in 

Kappler, ed., Treaties, 172-73. Quotation from Harrison to Jefferson, May 12, 1804, in op. cit. 49 Owens, “Jeffersonian Benevolence on the Ground,” 422-25. Quotation from White, Middle Ground, 496. 50 Lakomäki, “‘Our Line,’” 601-605; Galbraith and Quinn, Akima Pinsiwa Awiiki, 21-22; James A. Clifton, 

The Prairie People: Continuity and Change in Potawatomi Indian Culture, 1665-1965 (Lawrence: The 

Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), 186-190.
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favorable opportunity for that purpose—[especially] should the United States be at war 

with any of the European nations who are known to the Indians.”51

Figure 6.4: Land Cessions, Territorial and State Boundaries, ca. 

1809. Except for some lands included in the Treaty of Greenville, all cessions 

to the west of the Ohio state line were obtained by Governor William Henry 

Harrison between 1803-1809. The 1805 Fort Industry Treaty, which ceded 

much of northern Ohio, was effected by Commissioner Charles Jouett who—

like Harrison—was a confidant and protégé of Thomas Jefferson. The Treaty 

of Detroit, in which Governor William Hull represented the United States, 

retained a number of small reserves around village sites, but the broader land 

cession would be contested through the end of the War of 1812.52

 51 Harrison to Dearborn, July 15, 1801, in Esarey, ed., Messages and Letters, 1:27-28. Between 1803, when 

Ohio became a state, and 1810 the population of non-Indigenous people in Ohio increased from 

approximately 50,000 to 230,760. U.S. Census Bureau, Resident Population and Apportionment of the U.S. 

House of Representatives <https://www.census.gov/dmd/www/resapport/states/ohio.pdf> (accessed 3 

December 2015).

52 See “Treaty with the Wyandot, etc., 1805,” and “Treaty with the Ottawa, etc., 1807,” both in Kappler, 

ed., Treaties, 2: 77-78, and 92-95. Hull detailed his efforts and offered oblique observations on Native 

councils with British officials at Amherstburg, in nineteen letters to Secretary of War Dearborn during the 

months of November and December 1897. These are compiled in MHC, vol. 40 (Lansing: Michigan 

Historical Commission, 1915), 212-242. Also see Jouett and Hull to Dearborn, Decemer 24, 1808, in ibid., 

237-238. On Charles Jouett, see Ann Durkin Keating, Rising Up from Indian Country: The Battle of Fort 

Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 61-65; and Henry 
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Tecumseh and Lalawethika

Out of the fragmented and demoralizing conditions of the early 1800s, the latent 

vision of a Native Confederacy with a common homeland began to grow among the 

communities within the upper Wabash and White River basins. Two of the most 

persistent and passionate champions of this vision would be the Kispoko Shawnee 

brothers Tecumseh and Lalawethika (Rattler, or Noise Maker), whose lives deeply 

mirrored the experiences of many Native communities in the former Pays d’en Haut over 

the previous three decades. They were born in the years before the American Revolution, 

when the Shawnee defended their ancient homeland along the Ohio River against the 

Shěmaněse (Long Knives). Their father Puckeshinwau was killed in the Battle of Point 

Pleasant in 1774, and over the next decade their family lived amidst the violence and 

displacement that plagued what is now southern Ohio. Between 1779 and 1783 they were 

forced to move three times after their villages had been destroyed, and eventually 

relocated northward to the upper reaches of the Mad and Scioto river drainages among 

Wyandot and Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) communities. By the time of this third 

move, when Tecumseh was fifteen and Lalawethika just eight years old, they had 

experienced the full effects of conflict and dislocation, as well as frequent association 

with other displaced communities. They were Shawnee, but they were also the children 

of the polyglot world of refugees and alliances in the Ohio Valley—with bitter enmities 

toward the Shěmaněse

.

53

As Tecumseh and Lalawethika became young men their lives continued to reflect 

the tumult that shaped their communities and the region, but they took different if 

complementary paths. Tecumseh became a warrior in 1783, when he joined a small band 

of Shawnee raiders who attacked flatboats and small stations on the Ohio River. Six years 

later he went south with his older brother Cheeseekau and another ten Shawnee to live 

and fight with the Chickamauga (Lower Cherokee) against U.S. settlers along the western 

foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. After Cheeseekau was killed in battle, Tecumseh 

became the leader of this small band of Shawnee warriors. They returned north in 1790, 

and Tecumseh participated in the campaigns that resulted in the defeats of St. Clair and 

Harmar. He was also present during the Battle of Fallen Timbers, where his older brother 

Sauwauseekau was killed. In the following months Tecumseh likely joined fellow 

Shawnee in relocating to Swan Creek, and may have briefly moved to Upper Canada. 

Like the majority of his fellow Shawnee, he also refused to attend the Greenville Treaty 

council. By the late 1790s Tecumseh had achieved some renown among the Shawnee and 

former members of the Confederacy as an honored warrior, a village leader, and a 

steadfast opponent of any treaties and land cessions conducted by specific communities 

or village leaders.54

 

Higgins Hurlbut, Chicago Antiquities: Comprising Original Items and Relations, Letters, Extracts, and 

Notes Pertaining to Early Chicago (Chicago: Printed for the Author, 1881), 97-98, 102-108. 53 Sugden, Tecumseh, 20-36; Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 111-121; Calloway, Shawnees and the War 

for America, 71-76; R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 

1983), 28-37. The linguistic rendering of the Shawnee term for “Long Knives” comes from Frederick 

Webb Hodge, ed., Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, Part 2 (Washington: Government 

Printing Office, 1912), 350.

54 Sugden, Tecumseh, 33-38, 91-95; and Sugden, Blue Jacket, 115, 176, 179, 198-99.
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Over the same period, Lalawethika’s life was less eventful but equally 

representative of conditions in the Ohio Valley. Hampered by a self-inflicted wound that 

left him blinded in one eye as a youth, he never seemed destined to achieve the status or 

recognition that his brothers gained. R. David Edmunds speculates that Lalawethika, who 

was one of the youngest children in a large family, was particularly affected when his 

mother Meethoataaskee and youngest sister moved with other Shawnee and Mvskoke 

(Muscogee or Creek) to Missouri in 1779.55 Cheeseekau, who was fifteen years older 

than Lalawethika, provided for his family members but showered most of his attention on 

Tecumseh. Their older sister, Tecumapease, served as a surrogate mother for her younger 

brothers—but was already beginning a family of her own. What effect these 

circumstances had on Lalawethika is unknowable, but in his late teens he began to abuse 

alcohol and developed a penchant for empty braggadocio. He did join other Shawnee at 

the Battle of Fallen Timbers, but in the years that followed he was primarily known as a 

poor husband, a shaman of little repute, and a chronic drunkard. In many respects, his 

personal life had come to embody the social pathologies that developed in a world shaped 

by dispossession, violence, uncertain harvests and hunts, and increasing dependence on 

treaty annuities. Yet his personal trials would ultimately result in a vision that inspired 

others to resist the conditions that were undermining lives and families, and causing 

many to leave their homelands for areas far to the west. 56

Tenskwatawa: A Vision and a Purpose:

In the early spring of 1805, in his brother’s village near the White River, 

Lalawethika fell into a profound stupor. Whether the result of drunkenness, an 

unidentified sickness that was plaguing the community, or both, he remained comatose 

for several days and was given up for dead. While funeral preparations were underway, 

he suddenly awoke—to the amazement of all who were tending to his body. Once he 

gained full composure, he explained that the Master of Life had presented him with a 

powerful vision of two possible paths or futures: one that would restore the bounties of 

past ages and promised a heavenly afterlife for the deceased, and another that presented a 

magnified reflection of current conditions that ultimately led to destruction and a hellish 

afterlife. Lalawethika also acquired a new name, Tenskwatawa (the Open Door), and had 

been instructed by the Master of Life to teach all Indigenous communities to live as one 

united people, to renounce social evils such as drunkenness and spousal abuse as well as 

the growing dependency on annuities and U.S. trade goods. His recovery from what 

looked like death gave credence to his vision, and his teachings resonated within 

communities that were on the verge of existential crisis. His vision and teachings, which 

also included the performance of specific dances, rituals, and prayers, spread rapidly 

 55 The reason why Meethoataaskee left her children in 1779 is unknown. Her departure followed the 

destruction of the Shawnee town of Chalahgawtha (Chillicothe) where her family lived. She was 

accompanied by her youngest daughter, and they were part of a large group of Shawnee, Mvskoke, and 

other refugee/migrants that headed west. Since the Shawnee were a patrilineal society, her former 

husband’s closest kin were already helping to raise her family—and thus her departure was not an 

abandonment. See Edmunds, Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership (Boston: Little, Brown and 

Company, 1984), 21-22. 56 R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 29-37; 

Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 118-126; Calloway, Shawnees and the War for America, 77-79.
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across many communities through the rest of the year and into the next.57

The man and his vision achieved a new level of excitement and renown in the 

spring of 1806, when Tenskwatawa announced that the Master of Life would cause a 

total solar eclipse just a few days before the summer solstice. Presaging a time of 

significant change, the sun would darken, the birds would fall silent, and the stars would 

appear. This announcement came after Governor Harrison chastised a group of 

Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) for their growing adherence to Tenskwatawa’s 

teachings. “If he is really a prophet,” Harrison chided, “then ask of him to cause the sun 

to stand still,” or make some other miracles, to prove “that he has been sent from God.” 

Whether or not Harrison was aware that a solar eclipse was predicted for June 16, it is 

likely that Tenskwatawa had learned of the event from the owner of an almanac in a 

nearby Shaker community or from a scientist scouting areas to best view the 

phenomenon. In either case, Harrison’s words could not have been more poorly chosen –

or more miraculous.58

While covering the sun greatly enhanced Tenskwatawa’s reputation, his visions 

and the teachings they inspired had already become the cornerstones of a rapidly growing 

movement. Shortly after his first vision, he and his brother Tecumseh moved their village 

to a site near the abandoned ruins of Fort Greenville. Within a year the village had 

become a town that could accommodate the large crowd that came to witness the 

prophesied eclipse. The great gathering at Greenville clearly centered on the solar 

phenomenon, and the opportunity to test or affirm the word of a prophet. Yet the crowd 

mostly reflected the widening appeal of Tenskwatawa’s teachings and the deep chord 

they struck among struggling peoples in need of a promising path toward a hopeful 

future. There were other visionaries in the region at this time, particularly among the 

Lunaapeew and the Shawnee, and all were drawing from a tradition of cultural 

revitalization that stretched back since time out of memory. Yet the teachings of 

Tenskwatawa were more fully steeped in concerns about the material and cultural 

independence of Indigenous communities as well as the unity of all American Indians 

within a broadly shared land base. In short, he preached a salvation that brought 

collective empowerment across a wide region and among diverse groups.59

Tenskwatawa shared his teachings with many visitors, including a group of 

Shaker missionaries who proclaimed “that God, in very deed, was mightily at work 

 57 Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet, 32-38; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 126-29; Alfred A. Cave, Prophets 

of the Great Spirit: Native American Revitalization Movements in Eastern North America (Lincoln: 

University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 63-66, 85-87. In a subsequent representation of this vision, the Master 

of Life is identified as the First Person—who was created by the Great Spirit; see Captain J. Dunham to 

Governor Hull, May 20, 1807, in Maria Campbell Hull and James Freeman Clarke, Revolutionary Services 

and Civil Life of General William Hull (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1848), 314. 58 Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet, 48-49; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 127-30; Duncan Steel and Paul 

Davies, Eclipse: The Celestial Phenomenon That Changed the Course of History (Washington, D.C.: 

National Academies Press, 2001), 191-94. 59 Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet, 49-54; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 142-47; Alfred A. Cave, Prophets 

of the Great Spirit, 81-85.
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among the Indians.”60 Yet only brief parts of his teachings were recorded. One of the 

fullest and earliest expressions comes from the Odawa warrior and visionary Nmegos 

(Trout, aka “Le Maigouis”), an early and close adherent of Tenskwatawa whose words

were surreptitiously transcribed by a British officer in early May 1807. Nmegos brought 

the lessons he absorbed at Greenville to the Odawa town of Waganakising (aka L’Arbe 

Croche; present-day Harbor Springs, Michigan), a few miles south of the Straits of 

Mackinac. He preached of apocalyptic doom for Native peoples if they did not return to 

traditional lifeways and holdfast to the gifts of Gichii Manidoo (the Great Spirit, Creator). 

To guide right behavior, Namegos conveyed a series of restrictions that included 

abstinence from alcohol (specifically whiskey from the United States), a rejection of 

marriage with non-Indigenous people, and a marked decrease in the use of non-essential 

trade goods. Native peoples were also encouraged to renew a respectful relationship with 

the animal spirits and to clothe themselves in animal skins. Unity and alliance were also 

essential, since Tenskwatawa’s vision was directed to all Native peoples, and thus Gichii 

Manidoo insisted that none “were to go to War against each other. But to cultivate peace 

between your different Tribes, that they may become one great people.”61

Channeling the voice of the Master of Life, Namegos clearly identified the 

primary source of the challenges facing Native peoples around the Great Lakes. Noting 

the various peoples who had come to North America, he told his listeners that the Master 

of Life had made the British and French, as well as the Spanish to the west—and they 

were all to be regarded as friends.

But the Americans, I did not make. They are not my children, but the 

children of the Evil Spirit. They grew from the scum of the great water 

[ocean], when it was troubled by the Evil Spirit, and the froth was driven 

into the woods, by a strong east wind. They are numerous, but I hate them. 

They are unjust. They have taken away your lands, which were not made 

for them.

Though Americans carried the germ of evil, the Master of Life made it clear that Native 

peoples were still responsible for separating themselves from “Traders or other white 

men” as much as possible. Moreover, they needed to contend with the workings of “Evil 

Spirits” among themselves, especially as manifested in the form of witches or selfish 

leaders who were too friendly with the Americans. The teachings given to Tenskwatawa, 

“whom I [the Master of Life] have ... awakened from his long sleep,” would provide the 

means for seeing the world as it should be, and the pathway toward reforming their lives 

in accordance with the world as it was first given to them.62

These teachings and the movement they inspired represented a direct challenge to 

established “annuity chiefs” (i.e., leaders that signed treaties with the United States and 

 60 Richard McNemar, The Kentucky revival, or a short history of the extraordinary out-pouring of the Spirit 

of God, in the Western States of America (Albany, NY: E. and E. Hosford, 1808), 119; quoted in Edmunds, 

The Shawnee Prophet, 55. 61 Dunham to Hull, May 20, 1807, in Hull and Clarke, Revolutionary Services, 313-20; quotation from p. 

318. The use of the term Gichii Manidoo in this paragraph follows Odawa usage. Also see Dowd, Spirited 

Resistance, 216-219; Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 128-131; Edmunds, Shawnee Prophet, 37-40. 62 Dunham to Hull, May 20, 1807, in Hull and Clarke, Revolutionary Services, 313-320; quotations, with 

original italics, from pp. 313-14.
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then distributed annuities to their communities), who deeply resented Tenskwatawa and 

sought to undermine his appeal. He explicitly identified them as agents of “Evil Spirits,” 

and called them out for undermining all Native communities—including their own, 

whom they professed to lead with trade goods and agricultural implements they received 

from the United States. Within the context of Tenskwatawa’s vision, treaty signatories 

were guilty of two essential sins: helping measure out land that was given to all Native 

peoples by the Creator, then selling it to people for whom it was “not made;” and for 

adopting “the different manners, customs, animals, vegetables, &c.” that were made for 

the “whites on the other side of the [ocean].”63

Though profound, the disagreement between Tenskwata and the annuity chiefs 

was grounded in a common understanding that land and culture were inseparable—and 

that changes in one necessarily involved changes in both. Tenskwatawa advocated a 

process of revitalization that corrected the problems of the present by cultivating 

behaviors and beliefs that comported with, and restored, inherited traditions and 

conditions. The Mekoche Shawnee leader M’katiwe-kašee (aka Catahecassa, Black 

Hoof), on the other hand, viewed the “farming Business” and “raising Cattle & hogs” as a 

way to compensate for the scarcity of game animals and to thrive in new circumstances. 

The ultimate goal was not to assimilate to U.S. norms and beliefs, but to become a strong 

and increasing population and thus “an independent people.”64

“[T]he obtaining lands”

A simple rejoinder to M’katiwe-kašee (aka Catahecassa, Black Hoof) would 

surely be that such a changed people and landscape would no longer be Shawnee. In 

fact, this was the stated goal of U.S. policy: to simultaneously acquire Indigenous lands 

and “civilize” American Indians through the efforts of missionaries and agricultural 

instructors—and thus save them from their own superstitions and likely extinction. As 

Thomas Jefferson noted in 1803, a civilization program “will enable them to live on 

much smaller portions of land..., and thus a coincidence of interests will be produced 

between those who have lands to spare, and want other necessaries, and those who have 

such necessaries to spare, and want lands.” To acquire land peacefully, however, he 

stated that the government must “promote among the Indians a sense of the superior 

value of a little land, well cultivated, over a great deal, unimproved, and to encourage 

them to make this estimate truly.” Over time, Jefferson expected that “our settlements 

and theirs [would] meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people. 

Incorporating themselves with us as citizens of the U.S., this is what the natural progress 

of things will of course bring on.”65

In a letter to Senator James Jackson in February 1803, President Jefferson stated 

that he was “alive to the obtaining lands from the Indians by all honest & peaceable 

 63 White, Middle Ground, 489-505; Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 147-150; Dowd, A Spirited 

Reisistance, 132-35. Quotations from Dunham to Hull, May 20, 1807, in Hull and Clarke, Revolutionary 

Services, 315. 64 Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 132. Quotations in op. cit. 65 Jefferson to Benjamin Hawkins, February 18, 1803, in Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, 

eds., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 20 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial 

Association of the United States, 1903-04), 9: 363-364; Also see Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 220-

26.
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means ... as fast as the expansion of our settlements.” Yet he concurred with Jackson’s 

impatience on the pace of land cessions up to that point and expressed that he was 

willing to authorize “strong pressure ... to obtain lands.”66 The spate of treaties that 

Harrison completed over the next few years suggests that “pressure” quickly outpaced 

“honest and peaceable means” as the driver of U.S. American Indian policy. One reason 

for the change stemmed from the ratification of the Louisiana Purchase, which made 

removal rather than civilization a viable component for obtaining lands. As Jefferson 

noted later that year in a letter to Andrew Jackson, “acquisition of Louisiana ... [would] 

open an asylum for these unhappy people, in a country which may suit their habits of 

life better than what they now occupy, which perhaps they will be willing to exchange 

with us.”67 Instead of civilization, the government could offer money to departing 

groups or land swaps for areas that would soon be acquired from Native nations to the 

west of the Mississippi River.

The eight land cession treaties that Governor Harrison completed between 1803-

1805, and the one in 1805 by Commissioner Charles Jouett (another confidant and 

protégé of Jefferson’s), created divisions and deep consternation among Native groups to 

the northwest and west of the Greenville Treaty line. This was increasingly apparent, and 

worrisome, to the British stationed at Fort Amherstburg between 1805-1807. As 

individuals and bands from the former Confederacy became more frequent visitors, 

British military officials and Indian Department agents recognized the dangerous signs of 

prolonged hardship and discontent. When visitors expressed frustrations with the 

Americans and U.S. claims to their lands, British officials and traders knew that these 

complaints also implied a criticism of their own cautious neutrality. Agents encouraged 

their erstwhile allies to count on more gifts and rations at the King’s Posts, and to 

continue their relations with the clandestine trade of British traders operating in U.S. 

territory. Indian Department agents also promised they would soon have more to give 

their friends, and spoke of the benefits of maintaining mutual goodwill and the 

advantages of a British-Native alliance if called for in the future. Most who heard these 

words remained skeptical of such an alliance, and often reminded the British of the 

closed gates at Fort Miamis. They nevertheless welcomed the expectation of more trade 

and supplies, if only to support their efforts to maintain some distance from the U.S.68

These interactions at Fort Amherstburg corresponded with the rising influence of 

Tenskwatawa and the large numbers of people who came from as far away as the 

 66 Thomas Jefferson to James Jackson, February 16, 1803, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 39, 13 

November 1802–3 March 1803, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 541; 

italics in the original. 67 Jefferson to Andrew Jackson, September 19, 1803, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 41, 11 July–

15 November 1803, 395. 68 Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 94-98. Jouett led the U.S. delegation at the Treaty of Fort Industry 

(present-day Toledo, Ohio) in late June and early July of 1805. The treaty included Odawa, Ojibwe, 

Bodéwadmi, Wyandot, Lunaapeew, and Shawnee –mostly from Upper and Lower Sandusky, and the 

Detroit River area. The land cession involved an expanse of land known as the “Western Reserve,” which 

extended north of the Greenville Treaty line to Lake Erie between the Cuyahoga and Tascarawas rivers in 

the east and a line of longitude running through the middle of Sandusky Bay on the west. The treaty 

effectively transferred these lands to the Connecticut Land Company. See R. Douglas Hurt, The Ohio 

Frontier Republic: Crucible of the Old Northwest Country, 1720-1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University 

Press, 1986), 150-166.
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Mississippi River and the north shore of Lake Superior to gather at Greenville. By the 

spring of 1807 his vision had taken form within a movement that insisted on an end to 

land cession treaties, and implied the abrogation of those that had already been 

completed. In the midst of these developments, Tecumseh began to take a more forceful 

approach toward U.S. authorities—and pushed closer toward an outright dismissal of all 

treaties. The clearest expression came when Captain William Wells, the commander of 

Fort Wayne, became exasperated with the thousands of pilgrims who were moving in and 

out of Greenville. In an effort to assert his authority, he sent a message in President 

Jefferson’s name telling Tecumseh to vacate his village at Greenville and leave “the land 

of the United States immediately.” In response, Tecumseh sent a message back stating 

that “The Great Spirit above has appointed this place for us to light our fires and here we 

shall remain... The Great Spirit above knows no boundary, nor will his red people 

acknowledge any.” While Tecumseh’s reply made no reference to a particular treaty, the 

fact that he spoke from the site of the Greenville Treaty council and within the bounds of 

its primary land cession, added dramatic clarity to his statement.69

By mid-September Tecumseh had grown weary of the tensions surrounding his 

community at Greenville, and led a small delegation to speak with Ohio Governor 

Thomas Kirker at the state capitol in Chillicothe (the former site of Chalahgawtha). 

Accompanied by Waweyapiersenwah (Whirlpool, aka Blue Jacket), who both advised 

and supported Tecumseh, he explained and defended the nature of the movement inspired 

by his brother’s vision. In a compelling and often dramatic speech before a large crowd, 

Tecumseh stated his opposition to further land cessions but insisted that the Greenville 

community was not a threat to U.S. citizens or their government. Its only purpose was to 

live according to the will of Müyaataalemeelarkwua (the Great Spirit, or the Finisher).70

Allegations to the contrary were the work of the Mekoche leaders at Wapakoneta who 

spread distrust and hatred, and men like William Wells. “When we want to talk friendly 

with him,” Tecumseh complained, “[Wells] will not listen to us—and from the beginning 

to end his talk is blackguard. He treats us like dogs.”71 Such opposition had taken a toll, 

however, and Tecumseh announced that the community of Greenville would soon be 

moving west to the confluence of the Tippecanoe and Wabash rivers. Governor Kirker 

was duly impressed with the delegation, and restated the basic elements of Tecumseh’s 

oration in a letter to President Jefferson. He also noted that the delegation “gave me every 

satisfaction I could ask and ... their lives are peacable and the doctrines the[y] profess to 

Practice are such as will do them honor if the[y] continue to be sincere and so far they 

have given me no cause to doubt it.”72

Kirker’s assessment of Tecumseh likely reflected a mutual desire to avoid the 

 69 William Heath, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma 

Press, 2105), 313-15; quotations from pp. 313 and 314. 70 The term “Müyaataalemeelarkwua” and its translation comes from C. C. Trowbridge, Shawnese 

Traditions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1939), 40. Trowbridge’s work was based on 

interviews with Tenskwatawa in 1824.

71 Sugden, Tecumseh, 5-7; quotation from p. 7. Also see Heath, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old 

Northwest, 317-19. 72 Governor Kirker quoted in “To Thomas Jefferson from Thomas Kirker, 8 October 1807,” Founders 

Online, National Archives <http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-6528> (accessed 

October 5, 2016).
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kind of tension that surrounded the community at Greenville, and the planned move to 

the Tippecanoe River must have eased both men’s concerns about the near future. Yet 

Kirker’s view stood in sharp contrast to the growing concerns of political and military 

observers in Fort Amherstburg, Detroit, Vincennes, and Washington, D.C. Indiana 

Territorial Governor Harrison, who had once admired the “Indians ... astonishing 

patience” with U.S. settlers, was now preoccupied with his earlier prediction that they 

would someday “make war upon the United States ... should [we] be at war with any of 

the European nations who are known to the Indians.”73 Officers of the British Indian 

Department had come to a similar conclusion. As officers learned more about the 

excitement around Tenskwatawa, and hosted growing numbers of visitors who came for 

presents and trade, they developed a cautiously optimistic sense of Native support for the 

British in the likelihood of a war with the United States.74

Looming Crises

The trigger for both of these assessments occurred in June 1807 when the British 

commander of the warship HMS Leopard fired on the frigate USS Chesapeake off of 

Norfolk, Virginia. The U.S. vessel was subsequently boarded, four British-born sailors 

were taken away and charged with desertion, and then impressed into duty on the 

Leopard. While the event occurred within the coastal waters of the United States, its 

origins lay in the Napoleonic wars of Europe. The Royal Navy was plagued with 

desertions, which often occurred when sailors jumped ship in a U.S. port and signed on 

with the merchant marine. From the U.S. perspective, the boarding of the Chesapeake

also coincided with a recent Order in Council that barred neutral countries from trading 

with France and its allies. This action came in response to a similar edict from France, 

and was intended to bolster the British blockade of French-controlled ports on the 

Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. Since the United States was a neutral nation with an 

extensive carrying trade, the Order in Council was focused on keeping U.S. registered 

ships from trading with France and its allies. President Jefferson insisted that U.S. 

neutrality in the conflict guaranteed the right to trade freely with belligerent and neutral 

parties alike, and denounced impressment of U.S. sailors as an abrogation of this right.75

 73 Harrison to Dearborn, July 15, 1801, in Messages and Letters, 1:27-28. Between 1803, when Ohio 

became a state, and 1810 the population of non-Indigenous people in Ohio increased from approximately 

50,000 to 230,760. U.S. Census Bureau, Resident Population and Apportionment of the U.S. House of 

Representatives <https://www.census.gov/dmd/www/resapport/states/ohio.pdf> (accessed 3 December 

2015).

74 Dowd, Spirited Resistance, 219-223; Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 130-132; Edmunds, Shawnee 

Prophet, 39-42; Sugden, Tecumseh, 33-34. Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 130-131; Jefferson to 

Secretary of War [Henry Dearborn], 28 August 1807, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. IX: 1807-

1815, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1898), 132-33. 75 This and the following paragraph are informed by Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812 (New York: 

A.S. Barnes, 1962), 83-100; John P. Deeben, “The Flipside of Impressment: British Seamen Taken by the 

U.S. Navy Prior to the War of 1812,” The Journal of the War of 1812 10 (Spring 2006): 10–16; Deeben, 

“Taken on the High Seas: American Seamen Impressment Records at the National Archives, 1789–1815,” 

New England Ancestors 7:4 (Fall 2006): 17–22; and Donald Hickey. “The Monroe-Pinkney Treaty of 1806: 

A Reappraisal,” William and Mary Quarterly, 44 (1987) 65-88. Given the broad scope of the MonroePinkney Treaty, it shared the same formal title as the Jay Treaty that was ratified in 1796: “Treaty of 

Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, Between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America.”
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The issues related to the Order in Council had already become part of the recently 

negotiated Monroe-Pinkney Treaty, which had been drafted to replace the expiring terms

of the Jay Treaty and address commercial relations. Consequently, the potential for some 

resolution already seemed to be at hand. Among other things, the Monroe-Pinkney Treaty 

defined the rights of neutrals in times of war and clarified the terms of trade between 

Great Britain and the United States, but British negotiators refused to abandon 

impressment—which was recognized as a basic right by the Admiralty Courts and clearly 

applied to British-born sailors who, regardless of their status in the U.S. merchant marine, 

were life-long subjects of the Crown by virtue of their birth. For Jefferson, who received 

the signed treaty document in early 1807, ending impressment was an essential condition 

and he declined to put the treaty up for ratification by the Senate. In the absence of any 

treaty, the boarding of the Chesapeake was not a direct violation of international law—

particularly during a time of war. Yet in the United States it was received as a violation of 

national sovereignty as well as the principle of free trade, and thus amounted to an 

indirect abrogation of the Jay Treaty. On all counts, then, it was deemed an act of war 

that had been long expected.

The Chesapeake Affair capped a year of growing tensions between Great Britain 

and the United States, and led to cries for war in Congress. No such declaration came, but 

the ire that was felt in the East found sharp expression in the Ohio Valley. In a formal 

address to the territorial General Assembly on August 17, Governor Harrison took up the 

Chesapeake Affair directly –which he furiously denounced as a clear example of British 

tyranny and violence. However, he soon pivoted to the more immediate concerns of his 

audience and “our situation ... in the contest which is likely to ensue; for who does not 

know that the tomahawk and scalping knife ... are always employed as instruments of 

British vengeance [which is] ... organizing a combination amongst the Indians within our 

limits, for the purpose of assassination and murder.”76

Two weeks after this address, President Jefferson sent a long message to 

Secretary of War Dearborn that honed more closely to the views of Harrison and his 

fellow westerners than it did the concerns of eastern politicians. Free trade and commerce 

with Europe were urgent concerns, as was the threat of a war with Great Britain, but 

Jefferson always saw the future of the United States in terms of territorial expansion and 

land acquisitions. And it was toward these matters that Jefferson addressed his letter to 

Secretary Dearborn, and effectively spelled out U.S. policy in the West for the next 

several years. Jefferson admitted to Dearborn that he initially viewed “the workings 

among the Indians of [the Northwest as having] proceeded from their prophet chiefly, and 

... [were] a transient enthusiasm, which, if let alone, would evaporate innocently; 

although visibly tinctured with a partiality against the United States.” However, in light 

of the Chesapeake Affair and recent messages from agent Charles Jouett and Michigan 

Territorial Governor William Hull about meetings between British officials and growing 

 76 Harrison, “Message to the Legislature, August 17, 1807,” in Messages and Letters of William Henry 

Harrison, vol. 1, ed. Logan Esarey (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Commission, 1922), 236.
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numbers of Native visitors at Malden, Jefferson had a complete change of mind and 

directed the Secretary to “immediately prepare for war in that quarter.”77

The president also instructed Dearborn to have governors Hull and Harrison 

inform the various

chiefs of the several tribes in that quarter; to recall to their minds the 

paternal policy pursued [by us] ... towards improving their condition, & 

enabling them to support themselves & their families: that a 

misunderstanding having arisen between the US and the English, war may 

possibly ensue: that in this war it is our wish the Indians should be quiet 

spectators, not wasting their blood in quarrels which do not concern them: 

that we are strong enough to fight our own battles, & therefore ask no 

help; and if the English should ask theirs, it should convince them that it 

proceeds from a sense of their own weakness which would not augur 

success in the end.

Jefferson then noted that, despite the folly of such a position, “some tribes are already 

expressing intentions hostile to the United States [and] we think it proper to apprise them 

of the ground on which they now stand; for which purpose we make to them this solemn 

declaration of our un-alterable determination.” In chilling language, he threatened

if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will 

never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the 

Mississippi. Adjuring them, therefore, if they wish to remain on the land 

which covers the bones of their fathers, to keep the peace with a people 

who ask their friendship without needing it, who wish to avoid war 

without fearing it.78

The U.S. reaction to the Chesapeake Affair also convinced the Governor General 

of Canada, Sir James Craig, that war could be imminent. This in turn led to increased 

outreach to American Indian leaders, which resulted in the councils that Jouett and Hull 

had reported. Yet these visitors recalled the betrayal at Fort Miamis, and doubted whether 

the British were prepared for another war with the United States. By the end of the year, 

however, Craig had transferred more personnel and funding to the Indian Department in 

Upper Canada, where agents gave presents and held several councils with Native leaders. 

As Craig put it, the goal of this new attentiveness was two-fold: to restore “a confidence” 

in the British; and to communicate the Governor’s desire to actively work with Native 

communities to thwart “the Americans ... obvious intention of ultimately possessing” all 

their lands. From Craig’s perspective, such an alliance was an absolute necessity. Failure 

 77 Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies

(New York: Vintage, 2011), 110-112. Jefferson to Secretary of War [Henry Dearborn], 28 August 1807, in 

Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 132. 78 Jefferson to Secretary of War [Henry Dearborn], in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 132-133. Jefferson 

would subsequently author a specific address “To the Chiefs of the Ottawas, Chippewas, Powtewattamies, 

Wyandots, and Senecas of Sandusky” (April 22, 1808) that reiterated the essential points of his letter to 

Dearborn; Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, 

Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private, Vol. VIII 

(Washington, D.C.: Taylor & Maury, 1853), 210-213.
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in these matters would leave all of Upper Canada open to invasion from the United 

States, and might even result in former Native allies being “employed against us.”79

In the midst of warnings from the United States and solicitations from the British, 

Odawa, Ojibwe, Wyandot, and Bodéwadmi (Pottawatomi) representatives from around 

western Lake Erie met in a treaty council with Governor Hull at Detroit in November 

1807. In accordance with instructions from Secretary Dearborn, Hull only invited “Chiefs 

of such Indian Tribes or Nations, as are actually interested” in meeting with him to ensure 

that the council did not have undue complications.80 Hull commenced the proceedings 

with language from Jefferson’s August letter to Dearborn, and made it clear that a key 

purpose of the treaty was to “confirm and perpetuate the friendship, which happily 

subsists between the United States and the nations aforesaid,” and for the “Indians [to] 

acknowledge themselves to be under the protection of the United States, and no other 

power, and will prove by their conduct that they are worthy of so great a blessing.”81

U.S. officials certainly hoped to prevent a new British-Native alliance in the 

Detroit River area, but the primary focus of the treaty was a vast cession of 

approximately six million acres that encompassed most of the southeastern portion of 

Michigan Territory. While the scale was significant, so too was the location—since the 

ceded lands bordered Upper Canada as far north to Lake Huron. Incorporating such a 

large area into the federal domain was intended to present a bulwark against future 

British encroachment in two ways; by acquiring large swaths of land from groups that 

had a long history of close relations with the British, and by establishing the framework 

for converting these lands into private property. There were other concerns that followed 

from these two goals, and Hull complained of “great difficulties” in arranging the council 

and refining the terms of the treaty. Among these were the “influence of the Prophet 

[Tenskwatawa], of our neighbours [the British Indian Department and garrison] on the 

other shore, of the [British land syndicates that had acquired] large Tracts ... within the 

boundaries described in the Treaty, of the French people and others, who have made 

Settlements on these Lands, and of ... Vile and despicable” critics and political rivals in 

Detroit who sought “to prevent a measure which in my opinion will greatly promote the 

Interest of the United States, and the comfort and happiness of the Indians.”82

Because the Treaty of Detroit encompassed the entire area between the River 

Raisin and Lake St. Clair that had been included in the Treaty of Greenville (1795), Hull 

also tried to accommodate an older agreement the Wyandot had with General Anthony 

Wayne about retaining the lands that encompassed their village sites and adjacent use 

 79 Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 110-113. Quotations from Sir James Craig to Lt. Governor Francis 

Gore, December 28, 1807, in Historical Collections and Researches Made by the Michigan Pioneer and 

Historical Society 25 (Lansing: Robert Smith & Co., 1895), 232-33. 80 H. Dearborn to Gov. Hull, January 27, 1807, American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and 

Executive, of the Congress of the United States, Vol. 4, Indian Affairs, no. 1 (Washington: Gales and 

Seaton, 1832), 748. 81 Quotation from “Treaty with the Ottawa, Etc., 1807,” in Kappler, ed., Treaties, 91-92. On specific 

concerns about a British-Native alliance in the Detroit River area, see Hull to Dearborn, August 4, 1807, 

and Woodward, “Reports of Indian Alarms,” August 14, 1807; both in MHC, vol. 40, 169-171, 174-177. 82 For the concerns of U.S. officials and Governor Hull’s thoughts about the treaty council, see Hull’s 

correspondence as collected in Hull and Clarke, Revolutionary Services, 306-11. Quotation is from Hull to 

Dearborn, November 4, 1807, in MHC, vol. 40, 212-213; spelling and capitalization follows the original.
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areas. Toward these ends, the treaty council discussions excluded Big Rock 

(Brownstown) and Maguaga from the larger land cession. This specific element of the 

treaty also comported with the terms for the other signatories, who all retained small 

reserves around their primary villages and the “privilege of hunting and fishing on the 

lands ceded” until they became private property. However, the boundaries of the retained 

areas, as well as the usufruct “privilege[s],” were subject to one final condition: “in all 

cases they [were] to be located in such manner, and in such situations, as not to interfere 

with any improvements of the French or other white people.” For the six million acres of 

ceded lands, the signatory groups received a proportionate share of the combined total of 

$10,000 of “money, goods, implements of husbandry, or domestic animals,” and a $2,400 

annuity of the same “forever.”83

The treaty was a remarkable coup for Hull and the United States, but it soon 

became a liability that was first manifested among the Wyandot. Unlike their kin at 

Sandusky, who largely ignored the teachings of Tenskwatawa and shunned the British, 

the Wyandot at Big Rock (Brownstown) and Maguaga were situated directly across from 

Fort Amherstburg and remained the traditional keepers of the Council Fire for significant 

regional alliances or confederacies. For reasons of disposition and location, they proved 

amenable to various and sometimes conflicting interests—including U.S. officials, the 

British Indian Department, habitants, the other Indigenous groups that participated in the 

Treaty of Detroit, and different communities in the movement associated with 

Tenskwatawa. However, their earlier willingness to work with Governor Hull faltered 

when the Wyandot learned that the treaty document ratified by the U.S. Senate in late 

January 1808 made no mention of the reserved lands around Big Rock and Maguaga. It 

took a year of persistent communication with Hull and other U.S. officials, as well as 

sending a delegation to Washington, D.C., until they finally received some temporary 

satisfaction from President Jefferson in a letter dated January 31, 1809. Jefferson 

explicitly acknowledged the Wyandot understanding of the agreement with General 

Wayne, as well as the reasons it had not been committed to writing before his death in 

1796, and promised to have “the agreement ... committed to writing ... respecting the 

reserves for the [I]ndians, and you shall have a copy of these writings which shall be firm 

and good to you forever.”84

 83 “Treaty with the Ottawa, Etc., 1807,” in Kappler, ed., Treaties, 93-94. Also, Hull and Clarke, 

Revolutionary Services, 306-11. Both Governor Hull and Judge Woodward had previously written 

President Jefferson that “the case of the Wyandot Indians deserves the consideration of the Government,” 

and advocated for reserving lands around village sites within the Greenville Treaty cession area; Hull and 

Woodward to Jefferson, October 10, 1805, in American State Papers, Public Lands, vol. 1, 231. For the 

location of the lands eventually retained by the Wyandot, Bodéwadmi, and Odawa in the general vicinity of 

the River Raisin, see Figure 6.2 above. The Ojibwe constituted the majority of the representatives at the 

council, but most of their village areas were to the north of the ceded area. Consequently, the terms of the 

treaty that dealt with unceded village sites did not involve them to the same degree as the other groups. 84 The divisions among the Sandusky and Detroit River Wyandot dated back to the first half of the 18th

century, and were often manifested in opposing responses to the development of particular alliances. In the 

late 18th and early 19th century, the Sandusky Wyandot were more receptive to working with the United 

States than the Detroit River Wyandot. See White, Middle Ground, 147, 194-95, 198-99, 201. The 

Wyandot understanding of the 1807 treaty council is reviewed in “Speech of Indian Chiefs to Governor 

Hull, September 30, 1809,” Historical Collections, vol. 40, 304-07. Jefferson would later affirm this 

understanding in January 1809; see “Speech of Thomas Jefferson to the Indians,” MHC, vol. 40, 274-76.
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Though rooted in their specific circumstances, the distress and alarm the Wyandot 

felt after the treaty was widely shared. Odawa and Bodéwadmi leaders who were not 

present at the council were deeply upset with the treaty, and criticized their 

representatives over the scale of the land cessions. Beyond the Detroit River area, the

treaty was widely viewed as an audacious violation of Indigenous sovereignty; an opinion 

that attracted even more people to align themselves with Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh, 

and brought a growing number of visitors to Malden. By March 1808, Wyandot, Odawa 

and Bodéwadmi leaders met to discuss whether to formally disavow the treaty—and 

whether some of the signatories should be punished or killed.85

No immediate actions resulted from this meeting, aside from Wyandot efforts to 

retain their villages and surrounding lands, and all were again represented at another 

treaty council in November 1808 with Governor Hull at Big Rock (Brownstown), along 

with two Shawnee representatives from Wapakoneta. Instead of vast cessions of land, 

however, this council was a more straightforward affair that involved U.S. acquisition of 

the rights-of-way for constructing two federal roads across unceded lands in northwestern 

Ohio. While construction of new roads would address important administrative, 

economic, and military concerns of the United States, the routes would also ease travel 

for Native users and would not require a substantial land cession. Consequently, this 

treaty council neither undermined nor inflamed the anti-treaty alliance in the Detroit 

River area that had grown over the previous summer.86

The 1808 treaty council at Brownstown presented no difficult challenges to the 

signatories, but it was soon followed by disturbing news from Washington. On February 

28, 1809, just a month after President Jefferson affirmed the Wyandot effort to retain 

their village sites and adjoining use areas, Congress passed An Act for the relief of 

certain Alibama and Wyandott Indians. The Act reduced the boundaries that 

encompassed Big Rock (Brownstown) and Maguaga, and converted the agreement for 

retaining lands in perpetuity to a 50-year lease from the United States. The Wyandot were 

understandably distraught, and appealed directly to Governor Hull and President James 

Madison for some remedy. “Father we were astonished when you told us there was a 

small tract of land at Browns Town and Maguawgo, for our use for fifty years. And a 

vacancy in the middle between the villages.” They explained to Hull that these changes 

had taken areas where “[we] have made valuable Improvements thereon, which have cost 

[us] both labor and expenses; And what is more ... the land that covers the bones of our 

fathers ... [and] are our sole dependence for cultivation and Hunting.” Along with 

restoring the boundaries they had previously discussed in conversation and 

correspondence with General Wayne, Governor Hull, and President Jefferson, the 

Wyandot made it clear that they expected to “enjoy and have our land forever.” To make 

 85 Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship, 223-26; Bergmann, The American National State, 233-35; 

William Claus to Francis Gore, February 27, 1808, in MHC, vol. 15 (Lansing: Darius Thorp, 1889), 44-45. 86 While the Treaty of Brownstown is often referenced as an authorization for the construction of Hull’s 

Road within Michigan Territory, this is not the case. By the ratified terms of the 1807 Treaty of Detroit, the 

route from the Maumee River to Detroit followed an ancient and still used “trace” only traversed ceded 

lands. In their efforts to retain their village of Big Rock (Brownstown) and Maguaga, which lay on the 

route used by Hull, the Wyandot apparently offered to give the right-of way within and near their villages 

to the United States. This matter of a “gift” is touched on in “Speech of Thomas Jefferson to the Indians,” 

which also notes a reciprocated “token of [U.S.] good will the sum of a thousand dollars.”
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their concerns more amenable, however, they did offer one possible concession: a 

willingness to accept a term of 100 years, with the understanding that their descendants 

and the United States would revisit the issue after that time.87

As much as this sudden turn was a direct assault on the Wyandot, it also violated 

the fundamental tenets of the universe. “It surprises us,” they informed Hull, “that Our 

Great Father the President ... [s]hould take as much upon himself as the Great Spirit 

above; as he wants all the land on this Island [North America]—... we think he takes the 

word out of the mouth of the Great Spirit above [as if] he is omnipotent and master of us 

all; and every thing in this world[.]”88 These latter statements expressed a fundamental 

sentiment about the indivisibility of place, identity, community, and the continual 

workings of Creation that had been (and remains) a defining ethos of Indigenous world 

views since time out of memory. As land cession treaties became more common with the 

United States, such references to the will and manifestations of the Creator or Great Spirit 

were frequently employed to explain the concerns and hesitations of Native leaders. Such 

language was also fundamental to the broader vision and appeal of Tenskwatawa, as well 

as to the shared concerns of the Bodéwadmi, Odawa, Ojibwe, and Wyandot who were 

contemplating their own alliance against further land cessions after the 1807 treaty. 

Though some leaders within all of these groups remained hesitant about Tenskwatawa 

and Tecumseh, their basic affinities with that growing movement only increased.89

Prophetstown

To create distance from the turmoil of the summer and fall, and move closer to 

western groups that more fully embraced Tenskwatawa’s visions, Tecumseh, his brother, 

and Main Poc—a war leader and shaman among the Mshkodésik Bodéwadmi (Prairie 

Potawatomi)—began the process of organizing and building a new town near the mouth 

of the Tippecanoe River. Initially just 100 people were on hand during the winter of 

1807-1808 to help with the process. That number increased in spring, however, as more 

people moved away from Greenville or came from communities to the west and north. 

Most of the early arrivals were ardent followers of Tenskwatawa, or were part of 

extended families that either opposed their annuity chiefs or came from groups that 

eschewed treaties. Many younger people who had come of age since the Treaty of 

Greenville were especially attracted to Tenskwatawa’s vision, and embraced the 

opportunity to make the world anew. Young warriors who had no battles or triumphs to 

speak of also embraced prescribed purification rituals as a preparation for battling against 

 87 “An Act for the relief of certain Alibama and Wyandott Indians, February 28, 1809,” in Richard Peters, 

ed., The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America from the Organization of the Government 

in 1789, to March 3,1845 by Authority of Congress, vol. 2 (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 

1845), 527. Quotations from “Speech of Indian Chiefs to Governor Hull,” 305-306. All punctuation, 

capitalization, and spelling follows the original document. These concerns would be reiterated in a letter to 

President James Madison in February 1812; see “From the Chiefs and Sachems of the Wyandot Nation,” 

February 5, 1812, The Papers of James Madison, Presidential Series, vol. 4, 5 November 1811–9 July 1812, 

eds. J. C. A. Stagg et al (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 163–167. 88 Quotations from “Speech of Indian Chiefs to Governor Hull,” 305-306. The Detroit River Wyandot did 

not concede these issues until an 1818 treaty with the United States.

89 Sugden, Tecumseh, 222-223; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 143-44; Cave, Cave, Prophets of the Great 

Spirit, 112; Lakomäki, Gathering Together, 147-148.
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“evil forces”—a term that many associated with the Americans.90

As the town grew, so too did the interest of British officials at Fort Amherstburg 

and U.S. officials in Washington and Vincennes. Tenskwatawa’s teachings started as a 

movement to revitalize Native communities and prevent further treaties, but always 

implied more. To the British, this movement suggested a core around which to develop 

another alliance against the northward expansion of U.S. settlements and a likely invasion 

of Upper Canada. To the U.S., any movement to end treaty making was a threat, 

particularly if it was organized around a broad alliance with growing numbers of 

warriors. These notions crystalized between 1807-1808, as U.S. and British officials 

interacted with or received reports on Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh. Agents of the British 

Indian Department learned more about the excitement that was developing around 

Tenskwatawa from the growing numbers of people who came for presents and to trade, 

while Tecumseh’s militant tone became better known to U.S. officials through his 

exchanges with Captain Wells at Fort Wayne. This information was then filtered through 

the context of the Chesapeake Affair, as well as the past two generations of contest and 

conflict in the Ohio Valley.91

The tone of Jefferson’s letter to Secretary Dearborn certainly reflected all of these 

influences, as did the renewal of British expectations that the alliance of the early 1790s 

might return. Yet the response to Jefferson’s letter, which was communicated by Hull and 

Harrison to various councils with Native leaders, was received by many as a goad to 

resist further U.S. encroachments rather than a fearsome threat. Perhaps the best measure 

of this defiance occurred through the fall of 1808, when some 5,000 Native people came 

through Malden to receive gifts from the King’s bounty and to trade. Their leaders held 

private conversations with officers in the Indian Department on the subject of a pending 

war with the U.S., a renewal of the Confederacy, and a restored alliance with the British. 

A number of leaders agreed to travel to their neighboring communities with messages 

regarding the need to prepare for war and to strengthen relations with each other.92

Tecumseh, who served as the primary war leader of the multi-ethnic community 

at Prophetstown, also made his first formal visit to the British at Fort Amhersbug in June 

1808. In his meeting with British officers, he spoke of his planned journeys over the next 

few years to visit with forty distinct nations about his brother’s teachings and the need to 

resist U.S. expansion. He welcomed the positive interest of the Indian Department and 

agreed to promote an alliance with the British as well as a renewed Confederacy during 

his various travels. The Wyandot at Big Rock (Brownstown), in recognition of the esteem 

the British had shown Tecumseh, presented him with a magnificent belt composed of 

11,550 grains of wampum that they had recently received from the British. This potent 

instrument of alliance would travel with him through the next few years as he made trips 

 90 Edmunds, Shawnee Prophet, 67-72; Dowd, Spirited Resistance, 138, 142-44; 219-223; Clifton, The 

Prairie People, 195-97; Adam Jortner, The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battel of Tippecanoe and the Holy 

War for the American Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 143-48. 91 Jortner, Gods of Prophetstown, 142-45; Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship, 210-213; Owens, Mr. 

Jefferson's Hammer, 204-215; Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 112-15; Patrick Bottiger, “Prophetstown 

for Their Own Purposes: The French, Miamis, and Cultural Identities in the Wabash–Maumee Valley,”

Journal of the Early Republic (Fall 2013), 30-35. 92 Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 132-138; Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, Edmunds, 

Tecumseh, 137-153; Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 117-20.
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as far east as the Haudenosaunee, as far west as the Osage on the other side of the 

Mississippi, to the northern Great Lakes, and as far south as the Mvskoke (Muscogee or 

Creek). While his diplomatic ventures would not always bear fruit, he was generally well 

received by groups that had participated in the previous Anglo-Native alliance as well as 

the French alliance before.93

A Treaty without Peace

In the midst of rising tensions over the possibility of another war with Great 

Britain and a Native alliance, the United States proposed a new treaty council at Fort 

Wayne for a large cession of lands in eastern and south-central Indiana Territory. 

Councils were held at Fort Wayne in September 1809 with many of the same Myaamia, 

Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi), Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), and Waayaahtanwa 

(Ouiatenon, or Wea) leaders who attended the 1803 treaty council. Governor Harrison 

again represented the United States, in what was his first treaty council since 1805. Aside 

from Mihšihkinaahkwa (Little Turtle), who had signed multiple land-cession treaties 

since 1795, none of the other representatives objected to the treaty. However, all the 

Myaamia leaders from other towns opposed the treaty and with one voice they reminded 

Harrison that when signing the 1795 treaty they vowed never to sell any more lands in the 

Wabash River Valley. Moreover, they insisted that none of the other groups at the council 

had a right to sell the lands in question. At several junctures over the next few days, other 

delegations also expressed strong opposition to more land cessions, and at times their 

number represented a sizeable majority. Yet Harrison persisted, and fell back on a basic 

strategy of focusing on one group at a time—beginning with those who had the weakest 

historical connection to the proposed cessions.94

As Robert Owens suggests, this 1809 Fort Wayne Treaty council saw Harrison at 

“the zenith of [his] negotiating style,” in which he utilized “all his most effective tactics.” 

As he had done with the same groups in 1803, Harrison coerced attendance at the council 

by threatening to withhold annuities from the 1795 treaty. Once the council had begun, he 

took “bribery and exploiting divisions ... to new heights. Both at the intertribal and 

intratribal levels, he masterfully and ruthlessly divided and conquered his opponents.” 

When he had struck deals with all of the groups except the Myaamia, he then played on 

the small and large resentments that individual Myaamia leaders had toward their peers, 

and used these to fracture their unity with the promise that those who promoted the treaty 

would be designated as the primary recipients of annuities. In the end Harrison managed 

to cobble together an agreement in four separate treaty documents that, if combined into 

one, would not have received the support of most delegates—and would have been 

completely rejected by the Myaamia. Instead, the Fort Wayne treaties of 1809 ceded 2.9 

million acres to the United States.95 (See Figure 6.3)

 93 Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship, 217-224; Sugden, Tecumseh, 203-07. 94 This and the following paragraph draw from Owens, “Jeffersonian Benevolence on the Ground,” 405-

435. This treaty also included a delegation of Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) –who were represented by Myaamia at 

the 1803 Fort Wayne treaty council.

95 Ibid., quotations from pp. 431-432. Also see the following from Kappler, ed., Treaties: “Treaty with the 

Delawares, etc., 1809,” 101-02; “Supplementary Treaty with the Miami, etc.,” 103; “Treaty with the Wea,” 

103-04; “Treaty with the Kickapoo,” 104-05. Patrick Bottiger notes that “the Miami factions signed the 

treaty because they realized that they could not allow Little Turtle to use the treaty to define himself as the 
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Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa had tied their efforts at forming a new Confederacy 

to the prevention of any more treaties. Pressed by people from some of the groups 

involved with the 1809 treaties, as well as others from around the region, they were 

obliged to intervene or their movement would seem powerless. Yet they needed to be 

cautious. Aggressive action could lead to unnecessary loss of life, since the nascent 

confederacy was not militarily prepared. Moreover, a premature or ill-advised effort to 

forcefully implement the wider goals of the confederacy could give the British pause. 

With these concerns in mind Tecumseh convened a council at Prophetstown that 

developed a limited, two-pronged strategy. Their direct response to the United States 

would be limited to preventing surveyors from entering and marking off ceded lands. 

Treaty signatories were engaged more directly, however, and threatened with death if 

they did not disavow the treaty and seek to reclaim the ceded lands. These actions and 

threats alarmed Harrison, and compelled him to call for a meeting with Tecumseh at 

Vincennes in August 1810.96

The Turn Toward War

Tecumseh agreed to come, but the meeting was filled with tension and did little 

more than demonstrate how differently the two men viewed matters. In a much-quoted 

speech, Tecumseh told Harrison that

The being within, communing with past ages, tells me that once, nor until 

lately, there was no white man on this continent; that it then all belonged 

to red men, children of the same parents, placed on it by the Great Spirit 

that made them, to keep it, to traverse it, to enjoy its productions, and to 

fill it with the same race, once a happy race, since made miserable by the 

white people, who are never contented but always encroaching.

He further clarified that “Indians ... may sell [land], but all must join. Any sale not made 

by all is not valid. The late sale is bad. It was made by a part only. Part do not know how 

to sell. All red men have equal rights to the unoccupied land.” Harrison disagreed, stating 

that the Myaamia did own the land and could sell all, and that Native peoples were not a 

single people. Subsequent exchanges went untranslated, and were poorly understood by 

both men, but Tecumseh did make it clear that if the treaty was not cancelled then he 

would head to the Wyandot Council Fire in Big Rock (Brownstown) to formally call for a 

broad alliance of Native communities and the British.97

 

Miamis’ sole representative. Similarly, Pacanne signed the treaty in order to affirm his identity as a 

prominent leader.” See Bottiger, “Prophetstown for their Own Purposes,” 49; and Arthur J. Leighton, 

“‘Eyes on the Wabash’: A History of Indiana’s Indian People from Pre-Contact Through Removal” (PhD 

diss., Purdue University, 2007), 227-231. Myaamia leader P'Koum-Kwa (aka Pacanne) was an adversary of 

Mihšihkinaahkwa (Little Turtle) from the Myaamia village at the Maumee-Waubash portage. 96 Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, 137-39; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 138-39; Alfred 

A. Cave, Prophets of the Great Spirit, 106-108; Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet, 80-81, 84; and Sugden, 

Tecumseh, 178-80, 184-86. 97 Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, 139-141; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 138-140; 

Alfred A. Cave, Prophets of the Great Spirit, 107-110. While this version of Tecumseh’s formal statement 

is not reproduced in Harrison’s correspondence, it was in wide circulation by the 1830s. See Samuel Drake, 

The Book of the Indians of North America (Boston: Josiah Drake, 1833), 100-101; and Harrison to 

Dearborn, August 22, 1810, in Esarey, ed., Messages and Letters, 1:463-469.
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Tecumseh did travel to Big Rock and then Fort Amherstburg in November 1810, 

along with close to 2,000 Odawa, Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi), Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk or 

Winnebago), Thâkîwa (Sauk, or Sac) and Shawnee. After the customary distribution of 

supplies, Captain Matthew Elliott, who had been with the Indian Department since the 

Revolutionary War, arranged a formal council with Tecumseh and the other Native 

spokesmen. Tecumseh declared that he and the warriors had received from the Wyandot 

the wampum belt that had been given to them by the British after the defeat of the French 

in the 1760s. To Elliott’s surprise, Tecumseh then stated that he was ready to go to war 

against the United States. On behalf of the tribes represented at the council, he 

announced: “We are now determined to defend it [our country] ourselves, and after 

raising you on your feet leave you behind but expecting you will push forwards towards 

us what may be necessary to supply our wants.”98

Elliott later noted that he was fully convinced “that Our Neighbours are on the eve 

of an Indian War, and I have no doubt that the Confederacy is almost general, particularly 

towards the Quarter in which the Prophet resides.” Yet official British policy was 

adamant that hostilities should be prevented until diplomatic conditions, and British 

preparations, were sufficient. Some of this was communicated to Tecumseh and the other 

leaders, but it did not deter them from continuing on the course they had set. During the 

spring and summer of 1811, American settlements along the lower Wabash were plagued 

by sporadic raids, and in July about 300 people allied with Tecumseh came in to 

Vincennes as a show of force. Harrison ordered three companies of militia to stand by, 

and tensions eventually subsided without incident. In an effort to dissuade Tecumseh 

from aggressive action and present a demonstration of military strength, Harrison invited 

Tecumseh to return in a few weeks for a formal meeting and to witness a special review 

of a much larger militia force. Tecumseh thanked the governor for the offer of hospitality, 

and stated he would return in a few weeks as he embarked on a long journey to the south. 

In doing so he issued a veiled threat of his own, telling Harrison the purpose of the 

southern journey was to invite Mvskoke (Muscogee or Creek), Chickamauga (Lower 

Cherokee), Chahta (Choctaw), and Chikashsha (Chickasaw) into his growing alliance.99

The militia that Tecumseh returned to see was substantial, but was not a threat

Prophetstown and allied communities. Harrison knew this better than Tecumseh, and he 

had been cajoling officials in Washington with a barrage of letters to allow him to draw 

on more troops. At about the same time that Tecumseh had come for this latest visit to 

Vincennes, Harrison finally received authorization from Secretary of War William Eustis 

for the use of troops to enforce the Treaty of Fort Wayne. Eustis cautioned, however, that 

Harrison should only move on Prophetstown “if the prophet should commence, or 

seriously threaten hostilities[, only then] he ought to be attacked; provided the force 

under your command is sufficient to ensure success.” Harrison replied that he wished his 

“instructions were such as to march ... immediately to the Prophets Town,” but readily 

concurred that he still needed more troops.100

 98 Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 115-117. 99 Ibid., 117-118; Jortner, Gods of Prophetstown, 183-185; and Sugden, Tecumseh, 220-267. 100 Eustis to Harrison, July 17, 1811, 537-38; Harrison to Eustis, July 24, 1811, 657; and Harrison to Eustis, 

August 6, 1811, 671; all in Esarey, Messages and Letters, vol. 4; Jortner, Gods of Prophetstown, 181-84.
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Figure 6.5: Harrison’s Campaign, and the Battle of Tippecanoe, 1811

Through early summer Harrison was able to call up militia from the territories of 

Indiana and Illinois, who assembled and trained at Vincennes. A sizeable contingent of 

regular infantry, volunteers, and rangers also came up from Kentucky. In late August 

Harrison finally received formal confirmation from President James Madison to proceed 

with an attack on Prophetstown, even though Madison held “a strong presumption that 

hostilities will not be commenced by the Indians.”101 Harrison likely agreed with 

Madison’s statement, but did not feel constrained by any sense of honor it might have 

implied. Instead, he hurried his plans and by late September his force had grown to 1,300 

U.S. infantry under Colonel John Boyd, and about 700 volunteers from Indiana and 

Kentucky that included cavalry, riflemen, and rangers.102

 101 James Madison to Eustis, August 24, 1811, in Papers of James Madison, vol. 3, November 1810–4 

November 1811, 426-27. 102 Jortner, Gods of Prophetstown, 187-89; John R. Maass, Defending a New Nation, 1783-1811 

(Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 2013), 51-53.
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After nearly six weeks of traveling up the Wabash, with a long stop to build Fort 

Harrison near present-day Terre Haute, Harrison’s forces finally arrived within a mile of 

Prophetstown on November 6 and encamped for the night. Throughout the long march, 

Harrison and Tenskwatawa had sent emissaries to each other and both were well apprised

of the other’s actions and preparations. Tenskwatawa repeatedly asked to negotiate with 

Harrison rather than fight, and focused on fortifying Prophetstown against the U.S. forces 

rather than attacking them in a vulnerable locale along the march. A final council was 

held at Harrison’s camp that evening, but mutual distrust prevented any resolution. That 

night, as the historian Alfred Cave suggests, two Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk or Winnebago) 

men who were spying on the U.S. camp were apparently shot by a sentry. 103

When word of the shootings reached Prophetstown, a contingent of Hoocąągra 

warriors initiated a dawn attack that penetrated the U.S. encampment, then became a 

general but disorderly assault as more warriors from various groups arrived. With 

ammunition running out, and under attack by cavalry, they retreated back to 

Prophetstown where Tenskwatawa ordered a general evacuation. The U.S. regulars and 

Kentucky militia sustained heavy casualties, with more than sixty killed and at least 125 

wounded, and the camp was in disarray. Harrison feared that another attack might be 

imminent, perhaps from the Myaamia and Bodéwadmi who had warned Harrison not to 

bring war into their country, or from Tecumseh himself. Consequently, he prepared for an 

orderly withdrawal and retreat. After scouts discovered that Prophetstown had been 

abandoned, Harrison sent a detachment of cavalry to destroy the buildings, crops and 

property, and then join the retreat back to Fort Harrison and then Vincennes.

The Battle of Tippecanoe, as it came to be known in the United States, had no real 

strategic consequence and was essentially a draw: U.S. casualties were likely higher than 

Native losses, but Prophetstown was destroyed. Harrison would later boast of the battle, 

but his actions and their ineffectual results received heavy criticism in Kentucky and 

southern Indiana. Tenskwatawa must have lost face as well, since the inconclusive battle 

and the destruction of Prophetstown called his prophetic leadership into question. Yet the 

battle strengthened his position, as Prophetstown was rebuilt and the arrival of more 

supporters caused the town to grow. Moreover, the U.S. invasion greatly disturbed all of 

the communities in the Wabash River Valley, including those who most resented 

Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh, and former opponents found common ground with a 

growing Native Confederacy. Before Harrison set out for Prophetstown, in what he 

expected would be a decisive first strike in a short war, Illinois Territorial Governor

Ninian Edwards wrote approvingly that “If we are to have a british war ... then the more 

severely we now punish the Indians when we can fight them single handed the more they 

will be deterred—and the more difficult of course will it be to rally them against us.” The 

opposite proved the case. The Native-British alliance was greatly augmented by the news 

from Prophetstown, and the war that Edwards hoped to avoid had effectively 

commenced.

104

 103 This and the following paragraph are informed by Cave, “The Shawnee Prophet, Tecumseh, and 

Tippecanoe: A Case Study of Historical Myth-Making,” Journal of the Early Republic, 22:4 (Winter, 

2002), 652-657; and Maass, Defending a New Nation, 54-57. 104 Cave, “The Shawnee Prophet, Tecumseh, and Tippecanoe,” 657-673; Jortner, Gods of Prophetstown, 

194-198; quote on p. 189.
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Chapter Seven

The Coming of War and the Battles of Frenchtown

Following the military engagement at Tippecanoe, it was clear to all concerned that a larger 

war was imminent. This expectation necessarily involved hard choices about whether such a 

fate should be engaged or avoided. If the former, then actions to organize and bolster 

alliances became paramount. If the latter, then commitments to remain neutral needed to be 

clarified and defended against the entreaties of belligerent parties. In either case, these 

decisions involved frequent reevaluation as the dynamics of war shifted. This proved 

especially true in the fall of 1812 when the Detroit River region became the center of the war 

in the region, and the first theater of the much larger War of 1812.

The Pull of War

The Battle of Tippecanoe and the abandonment of Prophetstown may have been a 

military draw, but these events coincided with a marked shift in Tenskwatawa’s 

movement. The failure of his professed ability to protect warriors from U.S. bullets, 

along with his prediction of a complete victory over Harrison’s forces, demonstrated that 

Tenskwatawa was fallible—even disastrously so. Yet the movement he inspired had 

come to depend less on allegiance to him than the common experiences that defined the 

alliance of communities his vision inspired. These foundations remained after the events 

of November 1811, and were certainly present in the rebuilding of Prophetstown over the 

following year, but they had been tilting more decisively toward war since Tecumseh’s 

visit to Fort Amherstburg a year before. In the weeks after the destruction of 

Prophetstown, a number of war leaders took more prominent roles within the various 

groups that had recently been gathered at Prophetstown. These included Main Poc, who 

had strong ties with communities from southern Lake Michigan to the Mississippi, the 

Kiikaapooi (Kickapoo) war leader Pakoisheecan from the Illinois River Valley, and 

others from Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk or Winnebago), Thâkîwa (Sauk, or Sac), and 

Meskwaki (Fox) towns to the west and southwest of Lake Michigan. Tecumseh’s return 

from the south in January 1812, as the rebuilding of Prophetstown was underway, only 

bolstered this increasingly martial orientation.1

Through the late winter and early spring of 1812, small bands of Bodéwadmi, 

Kickapooi, and Hoocąągra warriors who had fought against Harrison’s troops on the 

Tippecanoe River began a series of small-scale revenge attacks. Usually operating 

separately from each other, these groups destroyed buildings, took stores, and killed a 

total of forty-six individuals. Much of their ire was focused on newer settlements or 

clusters of homes in the western Ohio Valley, but their reach also extended to Chicago 

 1 R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), 112-18; Alfred A. 

Cave, Prophets of the Great Spirit: Native American Revitalization Movements in Eastern North America

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 119-128; Colin Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for 

America (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 147-52; Patrick Bottiger, The Borderland of Fear: Vincennes, 

Prophetstown, and the Invasion of the Miami Homeland (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 

149-53.
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and Kaskaskia in the Illinois Territory and eastward into the state of Ohio. In late January 

Tecumseh met with Harrison to distance himself from these attacks and state that he 

wished to establish peaceful relations among all Indigenous groups and with the United 

States. A group of Hoocąągra leaders who were not associated with the attacks also 

visited Harrison a few weeks later. This meeting, along with the previous statements from 

Tecumseh, had a particularly strong effect on the Governor—who reported to Secretary 

Dearborn that he fully expected peace to return to the Indiana Territory. 2

Through the early spring all parties sought to tamp down the potential for more 

conflict, and a “grand council” was called for at the main Myaamia (Miami) town on the 

Mississinewa River. It proved a large and diverse gathering that included Wyandot, 

Ojibwe, Odawa, Bodéwadmi, Lunaapeew, Myaamia, Waayaahtanwa (Ouiatenon, or 

Wea), and Piankeshaw representatives, as well as Shawnee, Kiikapooi, and Hoocąągra 

leaders associated with Prophetstown. The meeting also included a small contingent of 

U.S. and British observers. Most of the representatives came from specific communities 

that had either maintained connections with U.S. officials since 1795, had kept their 

distance form Tenskwatawa’s movement, or both. The council itself played out as a 

series of accusatory speeches to which Tecumseh replied individually. While the 

Wyandot delegation, led by Shetoon (Isadore Chaine)—a leader among the Sandusky 

Wyandot—also chastised Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa for the trouble they caused, he 

spoke with the forgiving tone of an elder brother.3

Tecumseh responded that he too preferred peace, and condemned the recent 

scourge of attacks on remote settlements. On this score, he shifted responsibility away 

from himself and to the Bodéwadmi representatives. Even though they had blamed the 

“pretended prophet” for leading “foolish young men of our tribe” to such “mischief,” 

Tecumseh reminded the Bodéwadmi that they held more sway over their relatives than 

anyone else at the council. These mutual attributions of blame clouded the purpose of the 

council which, as Little Turtle stated, was to demonstrate “that we all appear of one mind, 

that we all appear to be inclined for peace; that we all see that it would be our immediate 

ruin to go to war with the white people.” Tecumseh concurred with this basic sentiment, 

but added two conditions: his growing community would not adopt “the habit of selling 

land to the white people that did not belong to them,” nor would they suffer “an 

unprovoked attack on us” without vowing to “die like men.”4

Tecumseh might have assuaged the concerns of some at the council, and his 

desire for peace on the terms he noted was entirely consistent with previous statements. 

Yet his concerns were more strategic than hopeful. In May of 1812 a war between the 

United States and Great Britain was more than likely, but all parties—including those 

 2 Bottiger, Borderland of Fear, 157-58; Ann Durkin Keeting, Rising Up from Indian Country: The Battle of 

Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 98-100, 103-05; 

William Franz, “‘To Live by Depredations’: Main Poc's Strategic Use of Violence,” Journal of the Illinois 

State Historical Society 102 (Fall/Winter 2009): 241-243; Edmunds, Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian 

Leadership (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984), 162-63. 3 Cave, Prophets of the Great Spirit, 130-32. 4 Cave, op. cit.; Ross F. Lockridge, “History on the Mississinewa,” Indiana Magazine of History, 30 

(1934): 29-56. Quotations are from “Speeches of the Indians at Massassinaway, May 15, 1812” in 

Messages and Letters of William Henry Harrison, vol. 2, ed. Logan Esaray (Indianapolis: Indiana 

Historical Commission, 1922), 50-53.
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who met beside the Mississinewa—were still assessing their best options in a narrowing 

future while peace and war remained in the balance. The tension and uncertainty that led 

to this council placed all Native leaders in a similar position, and Tecumseh likely hoped 

to gain tacit support from a revered leader like Pacanne—who hosted the council. 

Knowing well that the older Myaamia leader was a frequent adversary to 

Mihšihkinaahkwa (Little Turtle), resented Harrison and U.S. treaties, and remained 

committed to protecting Myaamia lands and communities, Tecumsheh likely hoped that 

Pacanne might consider an alliance with the British. The council also provided an 

opportunity for a secret meeting with Shetoon, who was working within his own 

community to displace the pro-American Tarhe as the rightful leader of the Sandusky 

Wyandot. Shetoon also saw in Tecumseh an important ally in his efforts to strengthen 

relations with the Detroit River Wyandot and the British. He had previously assisted 

Tecumseh with acquiring supplies, food stores, and weapons from the British in 

February, and was now carrying a message from the British that the time had come to 

consolidate their forces and plans at Malden.5

“a mere matter of marching”:

When Tecumseh departed the council grounds along the Mississenewa, Michigan 

Territorial Governor William Hull, who had recently accepted a commission as Brigadier 

General of the recently established Army of the Northwest, was enroute to Dayton, Ohio. 

Hull’s was tasked with organizing 1,200 recently called up militia from Ohio, 275 U.S. 

Infantry from Vincennes, a volunteer troop of light cavalry, two companies of rangers 

from Cincinnati. As President Madison noted in his orders to Hull, the purpose of this 

new army was four-fold: construct an overland supply and transportation route from 

southern Ohio to western Lake Erie, establish a strong military presence at Detroit and 

bolster defenses at Mackinac, prepare to invade Upper Canada in expectation of an 

imminent war declaration, and maintain control of Lake Erie once British and American 

Indian forces had been defeated or dispersed.6

Though complex, these objectives were part of an even larger military strategy 

developed by Secretary of War Dearborn over the winter of 1811-1812. Along with the 

Army of the Northwest, Dearborn’s plan called for two more armies that would comprise 

part of a three-pronged invasion of Canada. As Hull secured Michigan, subdued a NativeBritish alliance, and severed British access to the upper Great Lakes, his position would 

be bolstered by two nearly simultaneous invasions. In this scenario, the Army of the 

Center was would cross the Niagara River, destroy a smaller British-Haudenosaunee 

alliance, take control of the entire Niagara Peninsula, and thus isolate all of Upper 

Canada from Lower Canada. The Grand Army of Canada, under the command of General 

 5 Bottiger, Borderland of Fear, 99-101; Edmunds, Tecumseh, 165-68; John Sugden, Tecumseh: A Life

(New York: Henry Holt and Company), 267-70. 6 Robert S. Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812: An Operational and Command Study, vol. 1 (East 

Lansing: Michigan State University Press. 1997), 16-27; and James T. Brenner, “Notes on the Ohio Militia 

during the War of 1812,” 3-5, available at Ohio War of 1812 Bicentennial Commission: Papers 

<http://www.warof1812.ohio.gov/Papers.aspx> (accessed October 16, 2015).
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Dearborn, would take a longer invasion route up the Champlain Valley into Lower 

Canada, then take Montréal—and thus defeat the British in North America.7

Dearborn’s strategy presented a compelling script for victory, but it did not come 

together as scheduled or planned. The reasons were manifold, but largely stemmed from 

a general lack of military preparedness, and political factionalism. Under President 

Jefferson a policy of neutrality and parsimony had caused the military and navy to 

deteriorate—a process that continued through most of President Madison’s first term. 

With a small officer corps and few troops, the United States relied heavily on volunteers 

and militias. This in turn required time for recruitment and—in some instances—a slow 

and confused mobilization under the direction of inexperienced officers. Delays and 

complications were inevitable in these circumstances, but they were compounded by 

regional political interests. In the Northeast, where Dearborn was to lead the invasion of 

Lower Canada, Federalists represented a strong political majority. This early political 

party not only opposed the Jeffersonian Republicans (aka Democratic-Republican Party), 

but vehemently denounced a war with Great Britain that would damage the nation’s 

maritime economy. Moreover, they saw in the planned invasion of Canada a dangerous 

manifestation of Jefferson’s well-known expansionist tendencies. This regional resistance 

caused Dearborn to scuttle his original war plan, which called for massing all U.S. forces 

in the Champlain Valley and besieging Montréal, severing connections to the Atlantic 

and the interior, and waiting for the collapse of British Canada. Recruiting, marshalling 

and staging such a large army in an openly defiant region was not possible, and forced 

Dearborn to favor the three-pronged approach. Yet even then he was hard pressed to find 

sufficient volunteers and militias to join his smaller army in the Northeastern theater.8

Jingoism and overconfidence masked some of these challenges in the build-up to 

war, and fueled the arguments of Jeffersonian Republicans during congressional debates 

over a war resolution. When Speaker of the House Henry Clay convened the debate over 

President Madison’s war message in early June, he was already on record for advocating 

an invasive war. Two years earlier, as a U.S. Senator from Kentucky, he stated that “it is 

absurd to suppose we shall not succeed in our enterprize [sic] against the enemy’s 

provinces, ... the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper 

Canada at our feet.” Madison’s new Secretary of War William Eustis echoed these 

sentiments at the beginning of debates in 1812 when he reportedly said, “We can take the 

Canadas without soldiers, we have only to send officers into the province[s] and the 

people, disaffected towards their own government will rally round our standard.” A few 

months later, Thomas Jefferson neatly summarized the sentiments and expectations of the 

“War Congress” in a letter to Pennsylvania legislator William Dunne. We “should expect 

disasters” in war, he wrote,

if we had an enemy on land capable of inflicting them. [B]ut the weakness 

of our enemy there will make the acquisition of Canada this year, as far as 

the neighborhood of Quebec, ... a mere matter of marching; & will give us 

 7 Dearborn’s strategy and its implementation is well summarized in Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A 

Forgotten Conflict (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 80-88. 8 Steven J. Rauch, The Campaign of 1812 (Washington, D.C.: United States Army Center of Military 

History, 2013), 13-14, 55-56; Hickey, War of 1812, 80; Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American 

Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York: Vintage, 2011), 180-82.
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experience for ... the final expulsion of England from the American 

continent.9

Such confidence certainly harmonized with the drums of war, but it could also 

foment domestic discord. This proved the case in Baltimore just days after Congress 

authorized the formal declaration of war, when a mob destroyed the offices of a 

Federalist newspaper that condemned what would be a “highly impolitic and destructive 

war.” When the paper reopened another mob formed and rushed to the publisher’s office, 

which was defended by a group of supporters. In the midst of the stand-off, shots were 

fired into the crowd and two men were killed. One of the paper’s defenders was 

subsequently beaten to death and another left crippled for life.10

Though a dramatic illustration of the kind of public violence that occurred during 

the Early Republic, the “Baltimore Riots” also demonstrate that the U.S. declaration of 

war exposed passionate disagreements over the purpose and wisdom of the war. Much 

like the divisions among Indigenous communities in the western Great Lakes and the 

river valleys to the south, the United States was clearly marked by differences that were 

expressed through regional concerns, political and material calculations, exuberant pride, 

and sharp disagreements. These distinctions were even present among various advocates 

for war as well as in the different theaters where conflict occurred.11

All supporters of the war resolution, and even most critics, could agree that the 

actions of the British Navy were flaunting free-trade principles and deliberately harming 

U.S. shipping and agricultural exports. How that corresponded to an invasion of Canada 

was a different matter. A compelling argument was made that invading Canada would 

force British concessions on the sea, but Federalists countered that such a war would 

further jeopardize trade and likely bring punishing retributions from Great Britain. In the 

South, maritime commerce was also important, particularly in relation to agricultural 

exports, but the war took on a different strain. Gaining control of navigable rivers flowing 

to the Gulf and “opening” new lands west of the Appalachians neatly dovetailed with 

ongoing conflicts with the Mvskoke (Muscogee or Creek) and other Indigenous groups. 

As in the Northeast, this theater of the war also had an anti-imperial dimension. In this 

case, however, it was directed against Spanish Florida—which was viewed as a weak 

interloper in the region, a shelter for the Mvskoke, and a tacit British ally.12

 9 On the debates of the War Congress see Hickey, War of 1812, 29-35. Eustis quotation from Hugh Murray, 

An Historical and Descriptive Account of British America, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1839), 185; 

Clay quotation from Annals of Congress, 11th Cong., 2nd sess., 579; Jefferson quotation from “Thomas 

Jefferson to William Duane, 4 August 1812,” The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 5, ed. J. Jefferson 

Looney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 293–294. 10 Paul A. Gilje, Rioting in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 60-63. Quotation is 

from Thomas O’Connor, An Impartial and Correct History of the War Between the United States of 

America and Great Britain (New York: John Low, 1816), 25; facsimile reprint, Bedford, Mass.: 

Applewood Books, n.d. 11 The divisions that both informed and were created by the War of 1812 are fully explored in Taylor, The 

Civil War of 1812. 12 For an overview of various theaters of the war and the motives that shaped specific campaigns, see 

Hickey, War of 1812, 126-58; David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, The War of 1812 (Westport, Conn.: 

Greenwood Press, 2007), 73-86; and Taylor, The Civil War of 1812, 6-12. Also see Tom Kanon, “Before 

Horseshoe: Andrew Jackson’s Campaigns in the Creek War Prior to Horseshoe Bend,” in Tohopeka: 
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A Western War

Maritime issues like British impressment of American sailors and restrictions on 

U.S. trade with Europe and European colonies also carried weight in the Ohio Valley, but 

the push for war in Ohio, Kentucky, and adjoining territories was rooted in far more 

regional concerns that extended back to the Seven Years’ War. More than “Free Trade 

and Sailors’ Rights,” westerners railed about an ongoing “ANGLO-[NATIVE] WAR” 

and, like Representative Felix Grundy of Kentucky, wanted to “drive the British from our 

Continent” to finally stop their “intriguing with our Indian neighbors” and to bring more 

territory—as well as the proceeds of the Canadian fur trade—into the United States. 

Grundy was just one of the many so-called western War Hawks, who proved the most 

passionate supporters of the war resolution. A number of these War Hawks were 

appointed military officers during the war, and their constituencies provided a large 

number of the U.S. regulars, volunteers, and militias that served in 1812 and 1813. This 

commitment was unmatched by any other region, and it was fully manifested in the 

geographic focus of the Army of the Northwest—which would be the first and, until 

October, the only U.S. army to engage hostile forces.13

The British regulars and Canadian militias that would oppose Hull also had 

distinct concerns in this theater of the War. Unlike the defensive forces along the Niagara 

Peninsula and around Montreal, who were primarily concerned with preventing an 

invasion from the United States, officers in the British Army and in the Indian 

Department still advocated for a semi-independent American Indian “buffer state”—as 

proposed at the end of the Revolutionary War. For the confederacy of American Indians 

that allied with the British, conflict with the United States related to more existential 

questions of territory, culture, and autonomy. In every case, and for every participant, the 

War of 1812 in the Great Lakes region was about ending (and winning) what David 

Curtis Skaggs and Larry L. Nelson have termed the “Sixty Years’ War for the Great 

Lakes.”14

Hull’s Road to War

General Hull’s army set out from Dayton on June 1, the same day Madison sent 

his War Message to Congress. As it proceeded north, the army cut a crude road over 

prairies, across streams, and through dense stretches of forest. Though it followed wellknown paths that had been used for countless generations, the road had to support the 

passage of an army, its artillery and vast assortment of impedimenta, as well as hundreds 

of cattle and horse teams. A daily pace of creating nine or ten miles of passable road, 

 

Rethinking the Creek War and the War of 1812, ed. Kathryn E. Holland Braund (Auburn: University of 

Alabama Press, 2012), 105-121. 13 Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights in the War of 1812 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 

2013); Hickey, War of 1812, 26; Gundy quotation in Annals of the Congress of the United States, 12th 

Congress, First Session (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1853), 426. 14 Dwight L. Smith, “A North American Neutral Indian Zone: Persistence of a British Idea,” Northwest 

Ohio Quarterly 61 (1989): 57-63; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 129-147; Sandy Antal, A Wampum Denied: 

Procter's War of 1812, 2nd ed. (Kingston [Ont.]: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011), 13-25; and 

David Curtis Skaggs, “The Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 1754–1814: An Overview,” in The Sixty 

Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754–1814, eds. Skaggs and Larry L. Nelson (East Lansing: Michigan 

State University Press, 2001) 21-42.
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often in midst of heavy summer rains and mud, took a heavy toll on the militiamen who 

did most of the work. They were also assisted by U.S. regulars, but the latter were mostly 

responsible for building a string of blockhouses and supply depots to support the 

subsequent use of the road. As the army continued northward, however, these became 

temporary posts that were garrisoned by the sick, exhausted, and injured. Pushing 

through the heavily wooded and muddy tangle of the vast Black Swamp that 

encompassed the southeastern half of the Maumee River basin proved the most 

challenging stretch. By the time the Army of the Northwest had crossed the Maumee 

Rapids at the end of June, a significant number of draft animals had been worked to 

death, much of the equipage was in some state of disrepair, and the able-bodied force had 

been reduced by a few hundred.15

Given these circumstances, Hull was greatly cheered to discover that the packet 

boat Cuyahoga was at the mouth of the Maumee River. To speed the march to Detroit 

and bring relief to his army, the small schooner was hired on July 1 to transport supplies 

and baggage along with approximately forty infirmed officers and soldiers as well as a 

few officers’ wives. The remainder of the army continued north and encamped a few 

miles south of the River Raisin. Before dawn on July 2, General Hull received a dispatch 

from Secretary of War Eustis that the United States had declared war on June 18.16 An 

officer was immediately sent to hail the Cuyahoga from the shore and prevent it from 

sailing past the Royal Navy Dockyard on the main channel of the Detroit River, but the 

small schooner had already passed. A few hours later, as Hull’s army was approaching 

the River Raisin, the Cuyahoga was intercepted by the Provincial Marine. The 

commander of the garrison at Fort Amherstburg had received notice of the U.S. war 

declaration five days earlier, and sent a bateau with half a dozen sailors and an equal 

number of Shawnee warriors to take what became the first prize of the war. Besides 

valuable equipment, stores, and prisoners, the boat was also carrying Hull’s official 

papers—which included regimental returns, correspondence with Secretary Eustis, and 

other materials that detailed the strategy of the Northwestern Army and its imminent 

invasion of Upper Canada.17

 15 Maria Campbell and James Freeman Clarke, Revolutionary Services and Civil Life of General William 

Hull (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1848), 225-236; Robert Lucas, The Robert Lucas Journal of the War 

of 1812 During the Campaign under General William Hull (Iowa City, IA: State Historical Society of 

Iowa, 1906), 16-17; Larry Lee Nelson, Men of Patriotism, Courage & Enterprise: Fort Meigs in the War of 

1812 (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 1985), 9-10; Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 24-28. 16 Secretary Eustis had frequently been in contact with Hull during the course of the northward march. 

These messages were usually sent by courier, and Hull had already received messages on June 24 that 

Eustis had sent on June 18. However, Eustis sent word of the war declaration by the U.S. postal service—

which explains the additional delay in this instance.

17 Historians and sources vary on the details regarding the capture of the Cuyahoga. Military historian 

Steven Rauch identifies the small Provincial Marine vessel as a gunboat, while others refer to it as a 

longboat or a bateau. The number of British sailors is usually identified as six, though the total crew is 

often referenced as twelve—with some sources noting that the other six were American Indians (and 

probably Shawnee). See Lucas, Journal, 17-18; “Return of Prizes by HM Vessels on Lake Erie,” in 

Cruikshank, ed., Documents Relating to the Invasion of Canada and the Surrender of Detroit, 1812

(Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1912), 232; William K. Beall, “Journal of William K. Beall, JulyAugust, 1812,” American Historical Review, 17 (July 1912): 787-789; Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War 

of 1812, 28; Rauch, The Campaign of 1812, 19; and Antal, A Wampum Denied, 36-37.
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The Frenchtown to Detroit Corridor

That evening Hull’s army encamped near the center of Frenchtown on the south 

bank of the River Raisin. Though wary of possible ambushes near the Huron River, and 

no doubt concerned about the fate of the Cuyahoga, General Hull and his army felt 

welcome in the first sizeable community they had seen since early June. Given the 

habitants’ general success in gaining U.S. recognition of their land titles, and the prospect 

that final surveys would soon be completed and recorded, they firmly supported the aims 

of Hull’s army. In a strange twist of fate, however, the maps of their land claims were in 

the possession of the surveyor Aaron Greeley—who had been captured earlier that day 

while aboard the Cuyahoga. When the habitants eventually learned that Greeley and his 

maps were in British custody, they were forced to put their expectations on hold for the 

duration of the newly declared war. While news of this event likely deepened their hopes 

that—as Hull boasted—the war would be brief and the victory complete, it also brought 

additional clarity to the very personal motives behind their support for the war.18

The habitants of the River Raisin, and their Bostonnois neighbors (newer Englishspeaking arrivals from the United States), had already begun preparing for war while 

Hull’s army was still assembling in Ohio. Since mid-May, when eighty volunteers from 

the Frenchtown area were organized into a militia company, they had trained and drilled 

on a fairly regular basis. To defend Frenchtown as well as support any U.S. military 

needs in the area, a stockade near the center of the community had been fortified with a 

blockhouse and two more stockades were built in outlying areas. However, the most 

direct support for Hull’s army came through the efforts of several small details that were 

assigned the task of improving sections of the route between Maumee Bay and the Huron 

River. Lastly, another twenty men from the Frenchtown area assisted a cavalry unit from 

the Detroit militia in patrolling outlying settlements and guarding the mail. It is likely that 

these men, as well as others who interacted with nearby Native communities or 

conducted business on both sides of the Detroit River, were the source of the newest 

intelligence Hull received about movements and preparations of the forces that would 

oppose him.19

More than a place of brief respite, Frenchtown was a strategic locale. From a 

military standpoint, the “trace” or beaten path from the Maumee Rapids to Detroit—

which was initially surveyed and mapped by James McCloskey shortly after the 1808 

treaty council at Big Rock (Brownstown)—was the most critical section of the entire 

 18 Dennis M. Au, “‘Best Troops in the World’: The Michigan Territorial Militia in the Detroit River 

Theater during the War of 1812,” in Selected Papers from the 1991 and 1992 George Rogers Clark TransAppalachian Frontier History Conferences, ed. Robert B. Holden (Vincennes: Vincennes University Press, 

1994), 109-111; Ralph Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides: The Story of Michigan's Greatest Battlefield Scene 

of the Engagements at Frenchtown and the River Raisin in the War of 1812 (Marceline, MO: Walsworth 

Publishing Co., 2008), 17-18. 19 Au, “‘Best Troops in the World,’” 109-110, 112; Brian Leigh Dunnigan, “To Make a Military 

Appearance: Uniforming Michigan's Militia and Fencibles,” Michigan Historical Review, 15 (Spring, 

1989), 32-33. Also see Au, War on the Raisin: A Narrative Account of the War of 1812 in the River Raisin 

Settlement, Michigan Territory (Monroe, Mich.: Monroe County Historical Commission, 1981), 10-11. The 

main stockade, which was known as the Wayne Stockade, blockhouse, and new stockades were destroyed 

by the British in August 1812 to prevent any subsequent use by U.S. forces.
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route.20 The decision to invade Canada by land, and thus develop the trace into a crude 

road along the western shore of Lake Erie, was largely determined by the strong positions 

of Fort Amherstburg and the Royal Naval Dockyard at the mouth of the Detroit River—

which commanded the navigable channel to Detroit and would allow British vessels to 

easily sweep any U.S. maritime force from western Lake Erie. Consequently, the 

settlement at Frenchtown was one of the most strategically important locales in Hull’s 

invasion plan. As one of the few populated areas along the entire route, Frenchtown and 

the farms that fronted the lower River Raisin helped provision the Army of the 

Northwest—and they were expected to keep supplying Detroit in the coming invasion of 

Canada. The local militia force also helped with the routing and construction of the road, 

offered some additional protection along the sections to the north and south of 

Frenchtown, and provided information about nearby American Indian communities as 

well as developments at Fort Amherstburg. All of these qualities, as well as the 

information provided by the habitants, were integral to Hull’s plan. Yet the strategic 

importance of the small settlement could also be exploited by allied British and Native 

Confederacy forces, who soon made it the Achilles heel of the Army of the Northwest.21

By the time Hull’s army arrived in Detroit on July 5, he had already learned of the 

Cuyahoga’s fate. Yet he remained confident that his army would still be able to conquer 

the western districts of Upper Canada. From the reports of scouts and spies, and 

conversations in Detroit among people he knew well from his time as the territorial 

governor, Hull learned the general composition of British forces on the other side of the 

river. These included an artillery detachment, 300 infantry, an unknown number of 

Canadian Militia, and as many as 400 warriors allied with Tecumseh. The vessels and 

crews of the Provincial Marine represented the one advantage the British possessed, but it 

was not enough to offset Hull’s much larger army which, combined with the infantry and 

artillery garrisoned at Fort Detroit, numbered approximately 2,000.22

 20 James McCloskey was an obvious choice for this task since he was personally and politically connected 

to both Governor Hull and Chief Justice Woodward, had conducted surveys of Detroit after the town 

burned in 1805, and maintained close relations with leading residents of Frenchtown. As a Captain in the 

U.S. Army, McCloskey participated in the invasion of Canada. He was not present during the surrender of 

Detroit, however, since General Hull had sent him to request troops from the governors of Ohio and 

Kentucky. He returned to Detroit at the end of war to serve as Deputy Quartermaster of Fort Shelby prior to 

and during the Treaty of Springwells (1815). In 1825 he was convicted of embezzlement during his tenure 

at the Bank of Michigan and subsequently moved to Indiana. See Cecil K. Byrd et al, eds., An Exhibit to 

Commemorate the One Hundred Fiftieth Anniversary of the Beginning of the War of 1812 (Bloomington: 

Lilly Library, Indiana University, 1962), 37; Catherine Cangany, Frontier Seaport: Detroit’s 

Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepôt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 159; James 

McCloskey to Augustus B. Woodward, June 10, 1808, MHC, vol. 37, 419-420 and note. 89; “Appointment 

of James McRosky [sic] as Surveyor,” December 26, 1808, MHC, vol. 37, 419; Peter Godfroy and John 

Smith, “Certificate,” September 21, 1821, MHC, vol. 12, 578-79. 21 For an overview of Hull’s invasion plan, see Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, 

British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York: Vintage, 2011), 158-163. On the construction of 

what became known as Hull’s Trace, see Daniel F. Harrison, Hull's Trace North Huron River Corduroy 

Segment, National Register of Historic Places Nomination (2010), 6-7. The strategic significance of 

Frenchtown and the assistance its residents provided to the Army of the Northwest is well presented in 

Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 18-19, 21. 22 Dennis Carter-Edwards, “The War of 1812 along the Detroit Frontier: A Canadian Perspective,” 

Michigan Historical Review, 13 (Fall, 1987), 30-33; Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 28.
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Figure 7.1: Hull’s Trace and the First Theater of the War of 1812. Map

depicts the route of Hull’s Trace, populated areas, military facilities, and initial 

routes of the invasion and defense of Upper Canada. General locations of American 

Indian villages follow “The War of 1812: Indian Involvement, 1811-1816,” in 

Tanner, ed. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, 106-107.

Shortly after arriving in Detroit, or perhaps while enroute from Frenchtown, Hull 

briefly attended a council at Big Rock with representatives from several Indigenous 

nations. The gist of the meeting involved a reiteration of Hull’s earlier statements about

the importance of Native “neutrality” in the war, with a warning that siding with the 

British would only “involve them in the calamities of war.” The United States, on the 

other hand, was “sufficiently strong” to fight its own wars “and did not wish to disturb 

their tranquility by asking their assistance.” The council included Myeerah, some of the 

Bodéwadmi, Ojibwe, and Shawnee leaders from the 1807 and 1808 councils, Tarhe from 

the Sandusky Wyandot, and representatives from a few neutral groups in the broader 

region. Though some at the council had previously expressed an interest in the movement 

centered on Prophetstown, most were vehemently opposed to Tenskwatawa and all 

preferred to abstain from any conflict involving the United States. Hull’s visit was brief 

and the council continued for several more days, but he left with a sense that he had 

undermined the British-Native alliance and secured the cooperation of Myeerah, Tarhe, 
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and Jim Blue Jacket—the elder son of Waweyapiersenwah (Whirlpool, aka Blue 

Jacket)—along the all-important route between Detroit and the Maumee Rapids.23

Invasion, Retreat, and the Road to Frenchtown

Three days after arriving in Detroit, Hull received a letter from Secretary Eustis 

dated June 24 authorizing an invasion of Upper Canada. “Should the force under your 

Command be equal to the enterprize [sic],” Eustis wrote, then “consistent with the safety 

of your own posts, you will take possession of Malden, and extend your conquests as 

circumstances justify.” The Secretary also cautioned Hull to manage his forces with the 

understanding that no reinforcements would be forthcoming in the foreseeable future. 

The ordered invasion began on July 12 and, once he had landed, Hull issued a formal 

proclamation stating that he came not to conquer but to offer “the invaluable blessings of 

Civil, Political, & Religious Liberty and their necessary result, individual, and general, 

prosperity.” The size of the invading army, and misgivings about a war that would divide 

the deeply connected communities along the Detroit River, apparently caused most of the 

local militiamen to return to their homes and hunker down with the rest of the civilian 

population. Rather than press this advantage, however, Hull chose to remain near the 

landing area and the town of Sandwich. Since his primary objective was Fort 

Amherstburg, rather than the towns, hamlets and farms of Essex County, he did not want 

to move until all his artillery arrived from Detroit and was made ready for transport 

across the fifteen miles of uneven ground between Sandwich and Fort Amherstburg.24

Delayed but still unopposed, and concerned that many of the U.S. regulars and 

most of the militia were not sufficiently prepared to carry off a concerted campaign and 

siege, Hull drilled his troops at what became an informal training base near Sandwich. A 

preliminary foray was made toward Fort Amherstburg on July 16 when a large advance 

guard led by Colonel Lewis Cass was sent forward to assess British strength. It was 

turned back after a fierce fight near the bridge over the River Canard by a combination of 

British regulars, Canadian militia, and Native warriors. The subsequent movement of 

British gunboats to the vicinity of the river mouth further bolstered the British position, 

and the planned route of Hull’s army was effectively blocked about five miles north of 

 23 While setting out from Urbana, Ohio, Hull had sent a message to various Native leaders from Maumee 

Bay to Lake St. Clair requesting a council around the beginning of July. However, it is not clear from his 

correspondence if he briefly attended the council while enroute to Detroit, or some days after his arrival. 

Hull to Eustis, July 21, 1812, in MHC, vol. 40 (Lansing: Michigan Historical Commission, 1915), 419-420. 

Also see Antal, A Wampum Denied, 44; Sugden, Tecumseh, 281-283; and Sugden, Blue Jacket: Warrior of 

the Shawnees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 218-220, 257-260. Waweyapiersenwah, who 

died in 1810, lived in a village that he established in the late 1790s just north of Big Rock on the Detroit 

River. In the waning years of his life he became a close counsellor of Tecumseh. John Steckely has 

suggested that more appropriate renderings and translations of “Myeerah” [amęˀyeh ire –on water, he 

walks], “Tarhe” [orhé—swan; which is also a cognate with the Guyohkohnyo (Cayuga) word for crane and 

may reflect the Guyohkohnyo population that lived among the Wyandot at Upper Sandusky], and 

“Stayeghtha” [Hostayehtak – “He carries bark”]. In order to maintain some consistency with the frequent 

references to these men in the historical record, the narrative will use the more common—if inaccurate—

renderings of their names. John Steckley, communication with the author, October 7, 2017.

24 Carter-Edwards, “The War of 1812 along the Detroit Frontier,” 33-34; Quimby, The U.S. Army in the 

War of 1812, 33-35, 37; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 40-45. Quotations from Eustis to Hull, June 24, 1812,” 

and Hull, “A Proclamation,” both in MHC, vol. 40, 595 and 409. Preparing artillery for transport took much 

longer than expected since many of the gun carriages needed more repairs or modifications than expected.
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Fort Amherstburg. Stymied at the River Canard, with his army still entrenched at 

Sandwich and the carriages for the artillery needing more repairs and modifications than 

expected, Hull’s invasion soon became little more than a large occupation of a small 

community.25

 25 Carter-Edwards, “The War of 1812 along the Detroit Frontier,” 34; Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 

1812, 37-38; Sugden, Tecumseh, 283-85; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 50-51.
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The tenor of the campaign took a dramatic turn for the worse in early August, 

when Hull received news that Fort Mackinac had been taken more than three weeks 

earlier by a combined force of approximately fifty British regulars, 150 Métis traders, 

engages, and voyageurs, 300 Anihshinaabeg (Odawa and Ojibwe) who were trading at 

nearby Fort St. Joseph, and another 100 or so Dakhóta (Dakota), Mamaceqtaw 

(Menominee), and Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk or Winnebago) who had come from the 

western Great Lakes to fight with the British-Native alliance. This news drastically 

changed the invading army’s situation in Upper Canada, as well as Fort Lernoult and the 

town of Detroit, since all were now vulnerable to an attack from the north. As Hull later 

described his feelings at the time, “the surrender of Michillimackinac opened the northern 

hive of Indians, and they were swarming down in every direction.” Moreover, the 

“desertion of the [Canadian] militia had ceased” and reinforcements of British regulars 

were pouring into Fort Amherstburg from the east. On August 7, he ordered a complete 

retreat to Detroit—less than three weeks after the invasion had begun.26

In the period between receiving word about the surrender of Fort Mackinac and 

the decision to retreat across the river, General Hull sent urgent messages to Secretary 

Eustis, Governor Return Meigs, and Kentucky Governor Charles Scott requesting more 

troops and supplies. He soon learned that a large shipment had already been sent by boat 

along the southern shore of Lake Erie and would soon arrive at Maumee Bay. From there 

it would be off-loaded and hauled north along the route Hull’s army had taken just six 

weeks earlier. Independent of the shipment by boat, or any of Hull’s recent dispatches, 

Governor Meigs had also sent a supply train guarded by 100 Ohio militia and U.S. 

regulars.27 Even as these two pieces of welcome news arrived, however, Hull also learned 

of a significant setback that could directly threaten both relief efforts: the Wyandot at Big 

Rock (Brownstown) had abandoned their stated position of neutrality. Though 

worrisome, the news could not have been a complete surprise. Myeerah had frequently 

expressed his exasperation with U.S. intransigence regarding the 1807 Treaty of Detroit 

and, at the recent council in Big Rock, protested the routing of Hull’s road so near the 

Wyandot villages for fear that it could invite attack as well as complicate important 

relationships with relatives and traders on the other side of the river. From Hull’s 

perspective the reasons mattered far less than the timing of the news, since Big Rock was 

situated at the crossing of the Huron River on the route from Maumee Bay to Detroit, and 

it was the main access to and from Malden.28

Centering the Native Alliance

The Wyandot of Big Rock and Maguaga had long-standing reasons to be reticent 

about any perceived, let alone actual, connections to the United States in the period 

between the Battle of Tippecanoe and Hull’s invasion of Canada. Yet they did not easily 

abandon the neutrality they had repeatedly professed for several years. This was also true 

of the Sandusky Wyandot affiliated with Stayeghtha (Bark Carrier, aka Roundhead) and 

 26 Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 38; Sugdent, Tecumseh, 285-87. Quotation from Hull to 

Eustis, August 26, 1812, in Memoirs of the Campaign, 14. 27 Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 38; Rauch, Campaign of 1812, 22 28 Trevor T. Johnson, “The Wyandot Village of Maguaga: Vital Ground in the Michigan Territory during 

the War of 1812” (Prepared for the National Park Service, River Raisin National Battlefield Park, June 

2016), 18-19, 21-23.
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Teotrontore (more commonly Sou-neh-hoo-way, or Splitlog), who had been closely 

associated with Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh for several years. Another group of 

Wyandot who were led by Warrow (a younger brother of Stayegtha and Teotrontore), and 

lived on the south side of the Detroit River between Fort Amherstburg and Sandwich, 

were also reticent to take sides in the war. Only Tarhe (Crane), the leader of the Wyandot 

still at Sandusky and the titular leader of the various Wyandot communities, had 

expressed clear opposition to the British and support for the United States.29

With the long-expected war now under way, and a growing number of American 

Indians coming in to Malden from the west, north, and east, remaining neutral was 

becoming less tenable by the day. For the Wyandot, any collective decision they made 

regarding war, peace, or neutrality carried additional weight. As the traditional Keepers 

of the Council Fire, as well as caretakers of the Great Calumet (ceremonial, or peace, 

pipe) that opened important councils, and holders of the great wampum belts from past 

alliances, their decisions held particular significance for other Native communities as 

well as British and U.S. interests. Division among the Wyandot might weaken some of 

the bonds within the Native Confederacy, while a unified declaration would—at the very 

least—effect on the early course of the war. Within this indeterminate calculus, two other 

factors were at play. First, the Wyandot along the Detroit River were conflicted over 

whether to maintain neutrality or support the British (and thus did not include Tarhe in 

their deliberations). Second, their communities were all based in the central theater of the 

war and collectively numbered at least 1,700—which was roughly the same number as 

the population of Detroit.30

At a large council in Malden that included Stayeghtha (Bark Carrier, aka 

Roundhead), Teotrontore (more commonly Sou-neh-hoo-way, or Splitlog), Warrow, and 

Myeerah, Tecumseh made forceful and compelling arguments that an alliance with the 

British offered the only means for protecting Native lands, communities and futures. 

These were followed by strong appeals from Colonel Henry Procter, the new officer in 

command of Fort Amherstburg, who expressed a firm commitment to Tecumseh’s 

alliance, referenced the increasing support and provisions that were coming to bolster his 

Majesty’s allies, and made note of the recent news from Mackinac as well as the growing 

numbers of warriors and their families that had answered Tecumseh’s call and were 

coming to Malden. These arguments ultimately convinced all to join the alliance, except 

Myeerah—who recalled the British abandonment of the Native Confederacy in the 1790s, 

reiterated his stance on absolute neutrality, and promptly made his returned to Big Rock. 

The British, Tecumseh, other leaders of the growing Native alliance, and the Wyandot 

who remained, all expected that Myeerah would be coerced to support the U.S. or, if he 

refused, that his community would be attacked. With these concerns in mind, and still 

hoping for the Wyandot to present a unified front, they determined to force an evacuation 

of Big Rock and brought all the remaining Wyandot back across the Detroit River. In 

short, Myeerah forfeited the neutrality he professed to Hull because he was kidnapped by 

his own people. Yet he would also accept his changed circumstances, and willingly 

 29 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 44-45; Johnson, “The Wyandot Village of Maguaga,” 28. 30 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 58-59; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics 

in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 514-515; Sugden, 

Tecumseh, 209, 284-285, 437; Johnson, “The Wyandot Village of Maguaga,” 9-10.
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performed the duties of a Wyandot war leader in the coming months—including at the 

River Raisin.31

The Road to Frenchtown

Cut off from the north and forced back to Detroit by an emboldened enemy, the 

Army of the Northwest could only look to the overland route from Maumee Bay for 

supplies and reinforcements. While Hull was still in Sandwich, British and Native leaders 

crossed the river to Big Rock, both to bring Myeerah and his community over to Malden 

as well as to guard against any movements along the southern access route to Detroit. In 

the first days of August, Hull received notices from the River Raisin that the supplies and 

escort sent by Governor Meigs had arrived in Frenchtown, and that a sizable contingent 

of warriors led by Tecumseh and the Wyandot war leader Stayeghtha (Bark Carrier, aka 

Roundhead) had crossed over to Big Rock from Malden. In response to this news, Hull 

ordered 150 Ohio Volunteers and 50 Michigan Militia to depart Sandwich on August 4 

and march to Frenchtown, where they would combine with the soldiers already there to 

escort the supplies to Detroit. While crossing Brownstown Creek about three miles north 

of Big Rock, the Americans were surprised and attacked by two dozen or so warriors 

under the leadership of Tecumsheh. In a brief engagement followed by a disorderly 

retreat, the would-be escort suffered eighteen killed and twelve wounded to just one 

killed among the attacking warriors. Another seventy Americans were listed as missing—

including most of the militia forces—but were ultimately accounted for in the following 

days.32

News of the defeat at Big Rock likely factored into Hull’s decision to withdraw 

from Sandwich to Detroit on August 7, but the matter of opening a line of transport to 

Frenchtown remained a distinct and vital concern. On August 8, with the entire army in 

Detroit, Hull sent a detachment under the command of Lt. Colonel James Miller that was 

composed of 280 U.S. Infantry and an assortment of 310 cavalry, artillery and infantry 

from the Ohio Volunteers and Michigan Militia. The British-Native alliance had also 

bolstered its position along the western side of the Detroit River, and included a 

combination of 200 Shawnee, Wyandot, Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi), Odawa, and probably 

most of the Dakota, Mamaceqtaw (Menominee), and Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk or 

Winnebago) who had come down from Mackinac. These were joined by units from the 

41st Regiment of Foot and the Essex Militia, who together numbered about 150 men. 

Initially situated at different locales along the route to Frenchtown, the various elements 

of the combined Native and British force came together near the Wyandot village of 

 31 Sugden, Tecumseh, 290-91; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 71-74, General John E. Hunt, “Memoirs of 

General Elliot Hunt, 1798-1877,” in The John Hunt Memoirs: Early Years of the Maumee Basin, 1812-

1835, ed. Richard J. Wright (Maumee, Ohio: Maumee Valley Historical Society, 1979), 13; “Colonel 

Proctor to Major -General Brock, August 11, 1812,” in Documents Relating to the Invasion of Canada and 

the Surrender of Detroit, 1812, ed., E.A. Cruikshank (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1912), 135. 32 James Dalliba, A narrative of the battle of Brownstown: which was fought on the 9th of August, 1812, 

during the campaign of the north western army under the command of Brigadier General Hull (New York: 

D. Longworth, 1816), 7-9; “Brig-General Hull to The Secretary of War, August 4, 1812,” in Documents 

Relating to the Invasion of Canada and the Surrender of Detroit, 1812 (Ottawa: Government Printing 

Bureau, 1912) 115-17; E. A. Cruikshank, General Hull’s Invasion of Canada in 1812 (Ottawa: Royal 

Society of Canada, 1908), 254-58; Johnson, “The Wyandot Village of Maguaga,” 25-26.
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Maguaga on August 9 after receiving intelligence on the position and route of the U.S. 

detachment. 33

The ensuing Battle of Maguaga (aka Battle of Monguagon) would prove costly 

for the United States, with a total of eighty-two casualties (eighteen killed and sixty-four 

wounded) and the loss of supplies that had been stashed prior to the battle. While there 

was no recorded tally of Native casualties, initial estimates from U.S. combatants 

suggested the number may have been as high as forty. The British ultimately counted a 

total of four killed and fifteen wounded among the 41st Regiment and the militia, as well 

as two more who were briefly taken prisoner. Despite these uneven numbers, the battle 

itself was a tactical victory for the U.S. because the British-Native alliance withdrew 

while the Americans held the field. Yet this proved a small and hollow victory, since the 

hurried march and subsequent battle had left Colonel Miller’s force without supplies as 

well as too spent and exposed to risk another engagement—either enroute to the River 

Raisin or on a subsequent return to Detroit.

On August 14 Hull ordered one last attempt to link up with Frenchtown via a 

circuitous western route toward Gabriel Godfroy’s trading post on the Huron River, 

where a detachment from Detroit would rendezvous with an escort from Frenchtown led 

by Captain Henry Brush of the Ohio Volunteers. However, this effort came to naught for 

two reasons: the route proved difficult and slow; the detachment of 400 troops did not 

have provisions for even a brief stay in the field; and the Ohio Volunteers at Frenchtown 

were panicked by rumors of an imminent attack from nearby American Indians and 

suspected that Canadiens within the Michigan Militia would not resist—and perhaps 

welcome—the attackers.34

As the U.S. position continued to unravel along the Detroit River, and Hull waited 

in vain for a definitive message from Godfroy’s or Frenchtown, the British continued to 

receive more reinforcements from the east. The U.S. invasion at Niagara was still 

delayed, in large part because General Dearborn had yet to fully marshal his forces in the 

Champlain Valley.35 These circumstances allowed Major General Isaac Brock to leave 

 33 This and the following paragraph are based on Cruikshank, General Hull’s Invasion of Canada in 1812, 

260-63; Dalliba, A narrative of the battle of Brownstown, 10-37; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 80-82; 

Johnson, “The Wyandot Village of Maguaga,” 27-35. Johnson’s detailed study of the Maguaga campaign 

and battle is by far the most comprehensive work on this subject.

34 Au, War on the Raisin, 15; Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 43. A longtime trader among the 

Bodéwadmi with close relations among the Myaamia and other groups, Gabriel Godfroy was appointed a 

Colonel in the Michigan Militia prior to the outset of the War of 1812. Au also notes that Godfroy likely 

led “a ‘secret service’ of interpreters to be sent among the Native people to report their movements and to 

quell the ‘seret intrigues of the enemy.’” See Au, “‘Best Troops in the World,’” 121.

35 Major-General Dearborn’s preparations for an invasion of Canada were stymied by delays that largely 

stemmed from his passive leadership and initial attentions to shoring up the defenses of New England. 

Consequently, Dearborn readily agreed to Governor General George Prévost’s proposal for a local truce in 

early August. Since Parliament had revoked the Orders in Council that President Madison had cited in his 

“War Message,” the British hoped that further negotiations might bring the war to a quick and relatively 

painless end. While Dearborn would have welcomed such an outcome, he also desired more time to prepare 

his army. Known as the Dearborn-Prevost Armistice, the agreement did not have the formal authorization 

of President Madison and the proposal was soon rejected by the United States. In the interim, however, the 

British managed to send reinforcements to the Detroit River while Dearborn failed to initiate the invasion 
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the eastern theaters to take charge of the growing forces at Fort Amherstburg, which were 

then under the command of Colonel Henry Procter of the 41st Regiment. Arriving at the 

Royal Dockyard on August 13 with a contingent of 50 regulars and 150 volunteers, 

Brock inferred from U.S. dispatches captured at Maguaga and Big Rock that Hull was 

short on supplies, his command was in disarray, he feared an attack by large groups of 

American Indians from the north and the west, and that he pinned all his hopes on 

reinforcements from the south and news of U.S. victories to the east. Armed with this 

information, Brock determined to take immediate advantage of Hull’s growing 

insecurities. A battery was installed at Hull’s recent headquarters in Sandwich, and two 

warships were anchored nearby. On the morning of August 15, Brock sent a message to 

Hull that exaggerated the position of the British-Native alliance in terms that most 

comported with Hull’s fears, and called for a complete surrender by 3:00 o’clock that 

afternoon. Hull refused and British artillery commenced a sustained bombardment of Fort 

Detroit at 4:00 o’clock, which was returned in kind.36

Neither Brock nor Tecumseh and the various elements of the Native alliance had 

enough people to capture Detroit without significant losses, let alone sustain a prolonged 

siege. Through subterfuge, however, they managed to convince Hull that he was facing 

an overwhelming force. By giving the cast-off red coats of the regulars to the militia, 

lighting a multitude of camp fires at night, and moving various groupings of regulars, 

militia and warriors to different locales, the shifting combinations of British and Native 

forces created an illusion that (when viewed from the ramparts of Fort Detroit) looked as 

if a vast army was assembled on opposite side of the Detroit River. Brock also allowed 

the Americans to capture some false correspondence about British concerns regarding the 

imminent arrival of thousands of Native warriors, and what they would do to U.S. 

civilians, soldiers, and officers alike. It also helped that Hull was made aware of Brock’s 

arrival on the Detroit River, since the presence of the Major General in this theater meant 

that the U.S. offensives to the east had either failed or not yet commenced. 37

This psychological warfare was augmented the following morning by another 

round of shelling from the British, which was not returned by the Americans, and a 

subsequent message from Brock that played to Hull’s fears about uncontrollable Native 

warriors attacking the garrison and the civilian population. The successful landing of 

British forces at Springwells, as well as a growing concentration of American Indian 

forces to the west and southwest of Fort Detroit, made it clear to Hull that his position 

was effectively surrounded except for the town immediately to his north. Short the 400 

troops who had yet to return from the aborted effort to reach Frenchtown, and with a 

significant number of his command either too ill to fight or having recently deserted, Hull 

determined that he could not engage an overwhelming force in the field and would not 

subject the civilian population to a long siege. Consequently, he chose to surrender his 

army, Fort Detroit, and the Territory of Michigan out of “a sense of duty, and a full 

conviction of its expediency ... [since] it was impossible for me to sustain my situation.” 

 that was planned to coincide with Hull’s campaign. See Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812 (New York: 

Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 182. 36 Sandy Antal, “Michigan Ceded: Why and Wherefore?,” Michigan Historical Review, 38, (Spring 2012): 

2-7; Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 43-44. 37 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 92-94; Carter-Edwards, “The War of 1812 along the Detroit Frontier,” 35-36.
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“The bands of [American Indians] which had then joined the British force,” he added 

defensively, “were numerous beyond any former example.” 38

Less than five weeks after Hull delivered his proclamation at Sandwich, the Army 

of the Northwest had surrendered to the British and the Union Jack flew over Detroit for 

the first time in sixteen years. Given the minimal loss of life on every side, the magnitude 

of the defeat was extraordinary. The British took nearly 600 prisoners who were 

transferred to Lower Canada for indefinite internment, and acquired artillery, weapons, 

supplies and food stores. Some of these prizes were kept in place or moved to Fort 

Amherstburg, but a good deal was transported across Lake Erie to strengthen the defenses 

at Niagara. In addition, the British gained possession of the supplies and food stores 

under guard at the River Raisin and the Maumee Rapids.39

The day after Hull’s surrender, Captain William Elliot of the First Essex Militia 

arrived in Frenchtown with a small detachment to present the terms of surrender at the 

Frenchtown garrison. He also carried a letter from Colonel Duncan McArthur, the 

commanding officer of the Ohio Volunteers, ordering Captain Brush to abide by the 

terms of surrender. Stunned and angered, Brush declared the documents to be forgeries 

and had Elliot locked in the stockade. By that afternoon, however, soldiers who had fled 

Detroit confirmed that news of the surrender was true. Brush convened a meeting of 

officers later that evening, and all agreed to retreat rather than surrender—then departed 

that night for Ohio with as many stores as they could carry. Colonel John Anderson and 

Captain Hubert LaCroix of the 2nd Regiment of Michigan Militia declined to leave their 

properties and homes in Frenchtown and released Captain Elliot from the stockade the 

following morning. Angered by his treatment Elliot arrested both men, then designated 

Captain François Lasselle to oversee the surrender of all remaining arms and supplies.40

In the days after the surrender of Frenchtown, Native groups came from both 

sides of the Detroit River to (in the words of Captain Peter Latouche Chambers of the 41st

Regiment of Foot) “Pillage[,] Ravage and destroy” the properties of civilians and former 

militia who supported the Army of the Northwest. Most of their ire was directed toward 

“Yankee” or Bostonnois (English speaking, non-Catholic arrivals from the United States) 

households like Anderson’s, which caused the owners to flee and seek refuge in Ohio 

through the following year. To help calm this situation, Colonel Matthew Elliott and 

Tecumseh visited the River Raisin to variously speak with Native leaders and habitants. 

While Tecumseh had good relations with a number of people in Frenchtown, the 

concerns of both men were more tactical than personal since there was nothing to gain in 

making strong enemies among any community in the Detroit River region. However, 

some Wyandot had different neighborly concerns since they had long known the 

Canadien families that made up the majority of Frenchtown—and thus keenly resented 

 38 Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 44-7; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 94-98. Quotation from 

“General Hull to the Secretary of War, Aug. 26, 1812,” ed. Cruikshank, Documents Relating to the 

Invasion of Canada and the Surrender of Detroit, 1812 (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1912), 189. 39 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 98-99; Carter-Edwards, “War of 1812 along the Detroit Frontier,” 35-36. 40 Au, War on the Raisin, 15-16; and Au, “Best Troops,” 113-14.
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the benefits the habitants received from the 1807 treaty and their decision to support 

Hull’s invasion.41

While the high concentration of American Indians in the vicinity of the River 

Raisin soon diminished, tensions often lay just beneath the surface through the rest of the 

summer and fall of 1812. During this time Frenchtown served as an important 

procurement center for the British commissariat—as well as an informal and less than 

voluntary supplier to American Indian fighters enroute to and from Ohio and Indiana 

Territory. The River Raisin also served as a fairly regular base of operations for 

Tecumseh and his closest associates. From the Frenchtown area they moved to and from 

battle sites to the south and west while maintaining regular contact with the British at 

Fort Amherstburg and American Indian villages to the west and north.42 The lower River 

Raisin was also a destination and a throughway for more distant groups within the new 

Confederacy as they came to or from Detroit and Malden. Consequently, habitants

frequently had to contend with strangers (i.e., people with whom they had no relations 

either through distant kinship or trade) who felt no particular obligations to this Canadien

community. It did not help that most of these people came as groups of warriors, at times 

with prisoners in tow who may well have been known to some of the habitants.

43

“expecting you will push forwards towards us”44

With the British now focused on establishing some level of administration in 

Michigan and preparing for another American campaign, various parts of the new 

Confederacy were carrying out an offensive war against the United States. The first major 

attack had already occurred on August 15, when Fort Dearborn (present-day Chicago) 

was evacuated in accordance with orders from General Hull. Years of difficult relations 

between the garrison and nearby Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi) communities on the 

Kankakee River, along with the recent U.S. declaration of war, had created an explosive 

situation. As the evacuating column was moving through the dunes near the shore of 

Lake Michigan, it was attacked by a much larger force of Bodéwadmi. Within half an 

hour most of the sixty-six U.S. regulars and militia, along with most of the twenty-seven 

associated family members who evacuated with them, were dead and the rest made 

captive. Less than three weeks later a small war party of Shawnee, Lunaapeew (Lenape, 

or Delaware), and Bodéwadmi from the Prophetstown area attacked Pigeon Roost in 

Indiana Territory, killing twenty-three people. A day later a larger force of Bodéwadmi, 

Waayaahtanwa (Ouiatenon or Wea), Shawnee, Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), and Hoocąągra 

 41 Au, War on the Raisin, 17-18; Patrick M. Tucker and Laurel E. Heyman, “Welcome to Hard Times: Two 

French Merchants and Militiamen in the Detroit River Region During the War of 1812,” The Michigan 

Historical Review 38 (Spring 2012): 63-65; and Bela Hubbard, "The Early Colonization of Detroit," in 

Pioneer Collections (Lansing: Robert Smith Printing Co., 1900), 362; Russell E. Bidlack, The Yankee 

Meets the Frenchman: River Raisin, 1817-1830 (Ann Arbor: Historical Society of Michigan, 1965), 2-3. 

Quotation from Peter Latouche Chambers to Procter, August 24, 1812, in Select Documents of the 

Canadian War of 1812, ed. William Wood (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1920), 490. 42 Charles Askin, “Journal,” in Select Documents of the Canadian War of 1812, 540-41; Antal, “Michigan 

Ceded: Why and Wherefore?” The Michigan Historical Review 38 (Spring 2012): 14-15. 43 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 113-16, 23; Guillaume Teasdale, “Old Friends and New Foes: French Settlers 

and Indians in the Detroit River Border Region,” Michigan Historical Review, 38 (Fall 2012): 57-59; Au, 

War on the Raisin, 19-20; Hubbard, “The Early Colonization of Detroit,” 362. 44 Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 115-117.
Chapter Seven

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(Ho-Chunk or Winnebago) warriors laid siege to Fort Harrison (present-day Terre Haute, 

Indiana). They were ultimately repelled, but soldiers were killed and two supply wagons 

taken. On September 5, Fort Madison on the western shore of the Mississippi River (in 

present-day Iowa), was attacked and placed under temporary siege by Thâkîwa (Sauk), 

Meskwaki (Fox) and Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk or Winnebago).45

Figure 7.3: Confederacy Attacks and Conflicts with U.S. Citizens and 

Military. Map shows location of events and sites noted in previous paragraphs. General 

locations of American Indian villages are drawn from “The War of 1812: Indian 

Involvement, 1811-1816,” in Tanner, ed. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, 106-107.

These various assaults stemmed from a common desire to reclaim and defend 

 45 Ann Durkin Keating, Rising Up From Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of 

Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 133-150; Alec R. Gilpin, The War of 1812 in the 

Old Northwest (East Lansing: The Michigan State University Press, 1958), 137-38; Gregory Evans Dowd, 

A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity 1745-1815 (Baltimore: The Johns 

Hopkins University Press, 1999), 183-84; R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (Lincoln: University 

of Nebraska Press, 1983), 13, 128-30; Gillum Ferguson, Illinois in the War of 1812 (Champaign: 

University of Illinois Press, 2012), 61, 74-75.
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Indigenous lands, and most were tied in one way or another to groups that had been 

associated with Tenskwatawa’s movement since before the move to Prophetstown. Yet 

there was no collective strategy, nor did they involve the British or the diverse array of 

warriors in the Detroit River area. However, this changed after Bodéwadmi from the 

Elkhart, Tippecanoe, and Illinois rivers began a siege of Fort Wayne in late August. With 

the fall of Detroit, Fort Mackinac and Fort Dearborn, the war leader Winamac (who had 

previously led Bodéwadmi warriors at the Battle of Tippecanoe) recognized the 

importance of removing the last significant fort in the western Ohio Valley. After several 

days of small attacks on targets outside the fort, and a failed ruse to bring armed warriors 

inside the walls, a siege was established on September 4. After a few days, messengers 

were sent to Detroit, Fort Amherstburg, and several Native towns requesting British 

artillery, soldiers, and more warriors. All was agreed to by the British and Native war 

leaders, but the British had to delay until after September 10 when a temporary truce 

between the United States and Great Britain expired.46

The consolidation of British, Canadian, and Indigenous forces on the Detroit 

River with Native groups to the southwest represented a full manifestation of American 

fears about the British-Native alliance. Because the threat was so immediate, military 

leaders were forced to rely on an army of mostly untrained militia and volunteers who 

were promptly ordered to march north from Cincinnati on August 29 –before Winamac 

had sent his appeal to Detroit. Under the command of William Henry Harrison, who had 

recently been appointed a Major General of the Kentucky Militia, the bulk of the army 

reached Piqua, Ohio, within a few days and advanced units arrived in the vicinity of Fort 

Wayne on September 11. With reports that a 2,000-strong army was close behind, the 

siege was lifted the next day before U.S. troops arrived.47

Unaware that the siege had lifted, the promised assistance from the Detroit River 

finally departed on September 14. The assembled force included 150 infantry, an artillery 

unit, 100 Canadian militia, 800 warriors from the Detroit River led by the Wyandot war 

leaders Stayeghtha (Bark Carrier, aka Roundhead) and Splitlog, another 200 Ojibwe and 

Odawa from Michilimackinac, as well as several officers and 47 men from the River 

Raisin who had been hired as drovers. After a long portage around the Maumee Rapids, a 

mixed detachment of British and Native forces nearly stumbled into a large army of U.S. 

regulars, volunteers and militia—part of the 2nd Army of the Northwest that had been 

assembled in response to General Hull’s multiple requests for reinforcements. Under the 

command of Brigadier General James Winchester, the army was now on its way to retake 

Detroit. After a few small engagements between scouts from both sides, the British 

refused to engage such a large force and most of the British-Native alliance returned to 

the Detroit River without incident. The Ojibwe and Odawa departed for home, however, 

 46 Edmunds, The Potawatomis: Keepers of the Fire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 189-

91; Skaggs, William Henry Harrison and the Conquest of the Ohio Country: Frontier Fighting in the War 

of 1812 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2014), 123; and Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 94. 

On the truce, see footnote 35 above.

47 Edmunds, The Potawatomis, 191; Skaggs, William Henry Harrison and the Conquest of the Ohio 

Country: Frontier Fighting in the War of 1812 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2014), 99-100, 123-24; 

and Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 95-99. During Harrison’s northward march, his army had 

been augmented by several units of Ohio Militia and numbered 2600 by the time the siege was lifted.
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224

as did some other members of the Native alliance.48

As autumn arrived the British-Native alliance effectively withdrew from any 

sustained offensive operations. This was a consequence of several strategic concerns: 

namely, diminishing supplies, the retention of military personnel and resources for the 

conflicts on the Niagara Peninsula, the departures of Native warriors to their home 

communities, and the proximity of General Winchester’s army. In contrast, General 

Harrison launched a scorched earth campaign immediately after his arrival at Fort 

Wayne. Divisions of Kentucky militia units composed of cavalry and infantry were 

dispatched to the upper Wabash River, the Elkhart River (in northeastern Indiana 

Territory), and the Eel River.49

Figure 7.4: Routes and Movements of U.S. Military Forces in the Fall 

of 1812. Closely adapted from a map in Steven J. Rauch, The Campaign of 1812

(Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, United States Army, 2013), 25.

 48 Cruikshank, “Harrison and Proctor: The River Raisin,” in Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 

vol. 4 (Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, 1911), 122-27; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 124-26; Larry L. 

Nelson, Men of Patriotism, Courage, & Enterprise! Fort Meigs in the War of 1812 (Canton, Ohio: Daring 

Books, 1985), 16-17. 49 This and the following paragraph are informed by Skaggs, William Henry Harrison and the Conquest of 

the Ohio Country, 125-133; Robert M. Owens, Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the 

Origins of American Indian Policy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011), 223-25; Quimby, The 

U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 113-16; Arthur J. Leighton, “‘Eyes on the Wabash’: A History of Indiana’s 

Indian People from Pre-Contact Through Removal” (PhD diss., Purdue University, 2007), 293-96.
Chapter Seven

225

Despite orders to avoid certain towns that had not supported conflict with the 

United States, the militias either could not discern—or did not discriminate—between 

different communities. Along with Bodéwadmi towns whose warriors participated in the 

siege of Fort Wayne, Myaamia, Lunaapeew, and Bodéwasmi communities that had kept 

their distance from the British-Native alliance also suffered the destruction of their homes 

and crops. A similar round of attacks took place a month later, primarily focused on the 

Bodéwadmi towns around the southern end of Lake Michigan. Finally, a third expedition 

composed of 600 cavalry was sent to attack the Myaamia and Lunaapew towns on the 

Mississinewa River in December. Colonel John Campbell, who led the expedition, 

reported the killing of at least 38 American Indians, and the taking of 118 prisoners. 

Many of the prisoners were rescued in a counterattack, but the loss of homes and food 

stores was devastating for the survivors–who soon moved to the Detroit River and joined 

the British-Native alliance. Among these refugees was P'Koum-Kwa (Pacanne), who 

could no longer hone to a policy of neutrality.

As these raids were underway, Winchester made preparations for a winter 

encampment below the Maumee Rapids while Harrison established his headquarters at 

Upper Sandusky. By this time, the command of the 2nd Army of the Northwest had been 

transferred from General Winchester to Harrison, who President Madison appointed a 

U.S. brigadier general. The appointment followed intense pressure from political leaders 

and militia officers in Kentucky, who greatly preferred the younger Harrison over the 

genteel veteran of the Revolutionary War. Winchester retained his rank, but his new 

command was limited to the left wing of the army—which was composed of the 17th U.S. 

Infantry, a detachment of the 19th U.S. Infantry, and four regiments of Kentucky 

volunteer militia. A smaller center column was placed under the command of General 

Edward Tupper, which consisted mostly of Ohio militia along with some Kentucky 

mounted riflemen. Tupper’s command was primarily responsible for transporting 

materials and fortifying Hull’s route from earlier in the year, but forward units did engage 

with a large foraging party on the lower Maumee River in early November. Along with 

coordinating the supply and movement of the Army of the Northwest, Harrison 

commanded the army’s right wing, which consisted of three separate militia brigades 

from Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, the 2nd Regiment of Light Dragoons.50

The First Battle of Frenchtown

The situation in Frenchtown changed in late fall and early winter, when reports 

came in to Fort Amherstburg that part of the reconstituted Army of the Northwest was 

slowly making its way along the lower Maumee River. While the news was hardly 

unexpected, the encounter with Tupper’s scouts triggered an immediate concern about the 

material and strategic importance of Frenchtown. If the U.S. forces became entrenched at 

the River Raisin, it could lead to the loss of Michigan and jeopardize the security of 

Upper Canada. With this new threat, the British-Confederacy alliance determined to 

make the settlement a forward line of defense or—if circumstances warranted—to 

 50 Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 104-10; Nelson, Men of Patriotism, Courage, & Enterprise!, 

17-21; Cruikshank, “Harrison and Proctor,” 138-45; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 131-35; Jeff L. Patrick, 

“‘We Lay There Doing Nothing’: John Jackson’s Recollection of the War of 1812,” Indiana Magazine of 

History, 88 (June 1992): 22-28.
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remove or destroy its resources before they fell into U.S. hands. By the second week of 

January, when word came that a large U.S. force was settling in below the Maumee 

Rapids, a contingent of as many as 200 mostly Bodéwadmi and Wyandot warriors headed 

to Frenchtown. They joined up with the two small companies of the Essex militia 

(numbering about fifty men) that were already situated in Frenchtown. Along with an 

artilleryman and a light canon, the augmented force made preparations for an expected 

U.S. attack.

51

Thirty-five miles to the south, Winchester’s army established a defensive winter 

camp near present-day Perrysburg, Ohio, on January 10, 1813. While his command had 

numbered close to 2,000 men in late summer, it was down to fewer than 1,300. Much of 

the decline was attributable to desertion or dismissal—which largely stemmed from a 

widespread and intense dislike of General Winchester and a propensity among Kentucky 

volunteers to eschew the precepts of military discipline. However, many of those who did 

not reach the Rapids had either become incapacitated by injury or illness and left behind 

at a rear post. Winter was especially brutal, and the effort to find and build a suitable 

encampment in the wet and freezing tangle of the Black Swamp took a heavy toll. The 

conditions were compounded by diminished rations and a lack of winter clothing, since 

most of Winchester’s army only had the now tattered garments they were using in the 

heat of July and August. Exposure and disease took a deadly toll through December, 

accounting for a further decline in Winchester’s command. After four-and-a-half months 

of hard travel, repeated setbacks in the Black Swamp, and a few minor engagements with 

allied American Indian and British fighters, the remaining men under Winchester’s 

command were malnourished, poorly clothed and profoundly dispirited.

52

While it was obvious that his forces needed to recuperate, Winchester also knew 

his men required some “progressive operations” or his command would falter altogether. 

After months of wearisome duty, the militiamen had nearly finished the terms of their 

service and showed no inclination to extend their enlistments. Indeed, many had recently 

come close to deserting—and nearly all the militia despised Winchester. For men who 

boasted during their send-off from Kentucky that they would conquer the “ancient enemy 

... of Americans and Kentuckians” (i.e., the alliance of British and American Indian 

interests that pre-dated the Revolutionary War), the prospect of more hunger, fatigue, and 

idleness was unacceptable. In short, incessant hardship and prolonged inaction had 

brought the left wing of the Army of the Northwest to the verge of collapse.53

 51 Squire Robert Reynolds, “Narrative,” in 1812; The War, and its Moral: A Canadian Chronicle, ed. 

William F. Coffin (Montreal: John Levell, 1864), 208; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 160-63. 52 Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 124-25, 130-32; Cruikshank, “Harrison and Proctor,” 149-

50; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 154-56. Elias Darnell, A Journal Containing an Accurate and Interesting 

Account of the Hardships, Suffering, Battles, Defeat and Captivity of Those Heroic Kentucky Volunteers 

and Regulars Commanded by General Winchester, in the Years 1812-13. Also, Two Narratives by Men 

That Were Wounded in the Battles on the River Raisin and Taken Captive by the Indians, 2 ed. 

(Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, and Company, 1854), 31-40. 53 G. Glenn Clift, Remember the Raisin! Kentucky and Kentuckians in the Battles and Massacre at 

Frenchtown, Michigan Territory, in the War of 1812 (or: Kentucky Historical Society, 1961), 46-49; 

Winchester quotation from Winchester to Harrison, 17 January 1813, in Messages and Letters of William 

Henry Harrison, vol. 2, ed. Logan Esaray (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Commission, 1922), 314. 

Quotation on “ancient enemy” is from the speech made by Captain William Lewis just before the battle of 
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227

 

Such a fate was soon averted, however, when a messenger from Frenchtown 

arrived in Winchester’s camp on January 13, 1813. He reported that the British had begun 

rounding up suspected U.S. sympathizers and confiscating stored foodstuffs, livestock 

and portable property for use at Fort Amherstburg. Moreover, the messenger stated that 

all French-speaking habitants were to be taken across the Detroit River to Canada and 

Frenchtown burned to the ground. The following day another resident of Frenchtown 

arrived with much the same story, and Winchester decided to send scouts to assess the 

situation. Two days later he received a promising report: the military force at Frenchtown 

 

January 18, 1813, in which he referenced the send-off speech of Kentucky Representative Henry Clay in 

Georgetown the previous August; in “Recollections of the Late War, the River Raisin Battle,” Kentucky 

Yeoman (Frankfort), May 7, 1833; reprinted in Federal Writers’ Project. Military History of Kentucky, 

Chronologically Arranged (Frankfort, KY: State Journal, 1939), 82. Also see James A. Ramage and 

Andrea S. Watkins, Kentucky Rising: Democracy, Slavery and Culture form the Early Republic to the Civil 

War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 101-02.
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was hardly formidable, none of the reported confiscation and rounding up had actually 

occurred, and the settlement on the River Raisin still held an abundance of resources and 

supplies that could help support the U.S. forces through the winter. That same evening, 

January 16, the decision was made to send a force to take Frenchtown. The following 

morning 550 men from the 1st and 5th Kentucky Volunteer Militia Regiments were 

assembled and sent north under the command of Lt. Colonel William Lewis of the 5th

Kentucky Volunteers. Soon afterwards, Winchester dispatched another 110 militiamen 

from the 1st Kentucky Volunteer Rifle Regiment, and the two forces joined up that 

evening at the north end of Maumee Bay (near present-day downtown Toledo, Ohio).54

The combined force set off in the early morning hours of January 18, using the 

frozen and snow-dusted shoreline of Lake Erie as a road to the north. A few miles south 

of Frenchtown the Kentuckians were joined by as many as 100 habitants—many of 

whom served in the Michigan militia the previous summer—and the entire force came 

together just south of the frozen River Raisin around three o’clock in the afternoon. 

Facing them, on the north side of the river, the Essex Militia was positioned behind the 

cover of houses, structures, and fences within the village of Frenchtown. On the west and 

east ends of the village, Bodéwadmi and Wyandot warriors took up similar but less 

protected positions. The Essex militia opened fire with its lone artillery piece, which was 

answered with shouts and a three-pronged rush of Kentuckians and habitants across the 

river. They soon took control of the north bank and forced the defenders to retreat from 

the central core of Frenchtown. The Essex militia briefly held its ground at the north edge 

of Frenchtown where, as Kentucky rifleman William Atherton recalled, “they made a 

stand with their howitzer and small arms, covered by a chain of enclosed lots and a group 

of houses, having in their rear a thick brushy wood filled with fallen timber.”55

Efforts to outflank the allied Canadian militiamen and Confederacy warriors 

proved unsuccessful, and the fighting devolved into a series of fierce skirmishes through 

the denser woods to the north. Fallen timber offered protection for a fighting retreat, 

which was now aimed toward making a successful escape to the Wyandot village of Big 

Rock (Brownstown) while forcing the Kentuckians to pay as dearly as possible for their 

ensuing victory. In “the woods the fighting became general and most obstinate,” as one 

Kentuckian described this part of the battle, “the enemy resisting every inch of ground as 

they were compelled to fall back.” Over the course of two miles the slow-moving battle 

continued until darkness fell, with the retreating forces taking cover to fire on the 

pursuing Kentuckians, then dashing to another protective area before the pursuers could 

regroup or return accurate fire. It was this part of the battle that brought the most 

casualties to the U.S. side, which all told lost thirteen killed and fifty-four wounded. 

 54 Winchester, “General Orders,” Camp Miami Rapids, 16 and 17 January 1813, James Winchester Papers, 

Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library; Darnell, A Journal Containing an Accurate and 

Interesting Account, 45-48; Robert B. McAfee, History of the Late War in the Western Country (Bowling 

Green, OH: Historical Publications Company, 1919), 223-26; Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 103-112; Au, 

War on the Raisin: A Narrative Account of the War of 1812 in the River Raisin Settlement, Michigan 

Territory (Monroe, MI: Monroe County Historical Commission, 1981), 25-27. 55 Quotation is from William Atherton, Narrative of the Suffering & Defeat of the Northwestern Army, 

under General Winchester: Massacre of the Prisoners, Sixteen Months Imprisonment of the Writer and 

Others with the Indians and British (Frankfort, KY: A.G. Hodges, 1842), 36. For a detailed summary of the 

early part of the battle, see Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 112-120.
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Records for the Essex Militia are spotty, and no written accounting was made for Native 

losses, but the Canadians suffered at least one casualty (whether killed or wounded is 

uncertain). American Indian casualties were greater, but the numbers are not clear. Some 

were certainly killed since Kentucky militiamen boasted of mutilating and scalping at 

least a few corpses. Traces of blood were also found along the paths taken by retreating 

American Indians, either from wounded individuals or the bodies of dead fighters who 

were taken away by their comrades.56

Figure 7.6: First Battle of Frenchtown: Battle Actions on January 18, 1813.

Image is closely based on a painting by Tim Kurtz on display outside the Visitor Center at 

River Raisin National Battlefield Park.

Word of the victory soon reached General Winchester, who rejoiced at the initial 

news and immediately concurred with a request from Colonel Lewis for more troops. 

Four companies of U.S. Regulars (17th and 19th U.S. Infantry) were assembled, along 

with some militiamen, and the force of about 300 headed off to Frenchtown—which they 

reached before dawn on January 20. The decision to attack Frenchtown, as well as 

 56 One member of the Essex Militia, and two American Indians were also taken prisoner by the Kentucky 

forces. Atherton, Narrative of the Suffering, 37; Darnell, Journal, 42-43; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 163-

64; Au, War on the Raisin, 28-29. Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 53-55; Benson J. Losing, The Pictorial 

Field-Book of the War of 1812 (New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1869), 313-315; Naveaux, 

Invaded on All Sides, 120-21.
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assemble the bulk of his command so close to Fort Amherstburg, came with considerable 

risk. Yet for Winchester the die was cast. The victory at Frenchtown seemed to confirm 

his initial decision to send troops to the River Raisin, while the number of casualties 

(which numbered roughly ten percent of the original force sent to Frenchtown) precluded 

any chance of a quick withdrawal back to the Maumee Rapids. As Winchester wrote to 

Harrison, he both feared a counter attack from Fort Amherstburg; admitting that his 

position “was not very favourable for defence.” Yet he also welcomed such an action, 

boasting that if the enemy tried “to retake this place ... he will pay dearly for it.” Though 

Winchester’s decision “alarmed” Harrison (and contravened his standing orders), he 

averred that it was right of Winchester to bolster Lewis’ forces at Frenchtown. 

Consequently, Harrison accelerated the plans for a winter invasion of Upper Canada and 

quickly mobilized 360 of his own troops to aid Winchester at Frenchtown.57

The Second Battle of Frenchtown

Hopeful expectation trumped anxiety as Winchester’s forces settled into 

Frenchtown, but across the Detroit River another sentiment prevailed: decisive urgency. 

Sometime after midnight on January 19 news about the loss of Frenchtown first reached

Colonel Henry Procter, the commander of Fort Amherstburg,. Aware of Harrison’s buildup at Upper and Lower Sandusky, and Winchester’s movements along the lower Maumee 

River, Procter regarded the force that attacked Frenchtown as the opening act in a 

planned invasion of Detroit and Canada. To counter such a strategy, he “deemed it 

requisite, that, [the Enemy] should be attacked without Delay, and with all, and every 

Description of Force, within my Reach.”58 The goal was to destroy or at least dislodge 

Winchester’s forces before they could be joined by the right wing of the Army of the 

North West, and to reestablish a forward position against U.S forces.59

Procter quickly dispatched a company of regulars, some artillerymen, and the 

twenty-eight members of the Provincial Marine to Big Rock, where they met up with 

some of the retreating American Indian fighters from the previous day’s battle. By the 

20th, more regulars from the 41st Regiment of Foot and Royal Newfoundland Fencibles, 

as well as Canadian militiamen and members of the British Indian Department, came in 

from Detroit and Fort Amherstburg. All told, this British and Canadian force amounted to 

595 men and included six pieces of artillery. At Big Rock they were joined by a 

confederated force of American Indians that were then wintering on both sides of the 

Detroit River, and included Wyandot, Shawnee, Bodéwadmi, Odawa (Ottawa), Ojibwe, 

(Chippewa), Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), Myaamiaki (Miami), Hoocąągra (Ho-

 57 Au, War on the Raisin, 30-33; Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 56-62; Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 131-

39. Quotations are from Winchester to Harrison, French Town River Raison [sic], January 21, 1813, in 

Messages and Letters of William Henry Harrison, vol. 2, 325-26. Harrison expressed his alarm in Harrison 

to James Monroe, January 26, 1813, The Papers of James Madison, Presidential Series, vol. 5, 10 July 

1812–7 February 1813, ed. J. C. A. Stagg et al, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 624–

28. On Harrison’s plans and actions, see Skaggs, William Henry Harrison and the Conquest of the Ohio 

Country, 143-46. 58 Procter to Sheafe, 25 January 1813, in Select British Documents of the Canadian War of 1812, vol. 2, ed. 

William Wood (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1920-28), 7; Cruikshank, “Harrison and Proctor,” 157. 59 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 166-67. Various primary and secondary sources refer to the army under 

Harrison’s command as the “Army of the North-West,” the “army of the north west,” “Army of the North 

West,” “Army of the Northwest.” For the sake of simplicity, “Army of the Northwest” is used in this study.
Chapter Seven

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Chunk or Winnebago), Mvskoke (Muscogee or Creek), Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) Thâkîwa 

(Sauk, or Sac), and Meskwaki (Fox) fighters. Though each group had formidable war 

leaders, they formally deferred to the Wyandot as the “elder brothers” in the Confederacy 

and keepers of the ancient Council Fire, and their most renowned war leaders: Stayeghtha 

(Bark Carrier, aka Roundhead), Teotrontore (more commonly Sou-neh-hoo-way, or 

Splitlog), and Myeerah (Walk-in-the-Water). Numbering at least 600, and perhaps as 

many as 800, this was one of the largest and most diverse assemblages of American 

Indian warriors in the entire war. On the 21st the British, Canadians and American Indians 

moved en masse to Swan Creek, where they spent part of a restless night before heading 

toward Frenchtown about five miles to the southwest.60

Figure 7.7: Second Battle of Frenchtown: Early Actions on January 22, 1813.

Image is closely based on a painting by Tim Kurtz on display outside the Visitor Center at 

River Raisin National Battlefield Park.

Arriving before dawn on the 22nd and unnoticed by the American sentries, the 

allied forces gathered into their battle positions about 250-350 yards to the north of 

Frenchtown. Arrayed in an arc along the wooded stretch of Mason Run, the allied forces 

were organized into three large groupings: British regulars and artillery were positioned 

across the center; about 200 yards to their right (west) was a somewhat dispersed 

clustering of mostly Anishinaabeg (Odawa, Ojibwe, and Bodéwadmi), Myaamia, and 

some Canadian militia; and another 250 yards to the left (east) of the center position a 

large number of mostly Wyandot and Shawnee fighters held the forward position, with 

Canadian militia and artillery to their rear. The American forces, which at this time 

numbered 934 able-bodied men, were primarily situated in two locales. Approximately 

 60 Herbert C. W. Goltz, “The Indian Revival Religion and the Western District, 1805-1813,” in The 

Western District: Papers from the Western District Conference, eds. K. G. Pryke and L. L. Kulisek 

(Windsor, Ont: Essex County Historical Society and the Western District Councils, 1983), 29-32; 

Cruikshank, “Harrison and Proctor,” 158; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 167-68; Naveaux, Invaded on All 

Sides, 139-145.
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700 soldiers from the Kentucky militia regiments were encamped within the center of 

Frenchtown, with defensive positions staked out behind the puncheon fences along the 

north side of the village as well as the garden fence lines to the east and west. In the open 

field to the east, about 160 regulars from the U.S. 17th Regiment slept behind a hastily 

constructed series of breastworks. The remainder of the U.S. forces were scattered 

throughout the Frenchtown community, in barns or homes, while General Winchester 

slept at his temporary headquarters in the home of François Navarre on the south side of 

the River Raisin—less than a mile to the west of Frenchtown proper. A small number of 

habitants from Frenchtown and nearby settlements were also prepared to defend the 

village, and added to the U.S. forces.61

Just as the British forces in the center readied their attack, reveille sounded on the 

U.S. side and soon after a sentry spotted the Red Coats in the dim pre-dawn light. He 

fired a shot into the forward line that killed the lead grenadier, and the report of his 

musket sent the just-awakened U.S. forces scrambling for their battle positions. Almost 

immediately, the British opened up with their artillery and the infantry pushed forward 

from their center position. As they drew within range of Frenchtown, they fired a 

powerful volley at what, in the still dark distance, had seemed to be a line of soldiers on 

the opposite end of the field of battle. Assuming they had the advantage, the British then 

made a fierce charge toward Frenchtown, but the target of their fusillade proved to be the 

puncheon fence behind which the protected Kentuckians could fire at will. With the 

British artillery still overshooting the mark, and the puncheon fence providing ample 

protection, the Kentuckians were unscathed and unrelenting. After twenty minutes the 

British were forced to retreat, leaving a number of fallen comrades behind who were shot 

by Kentucky marksmen as they struggled to crawl through two feet of crusted snow.62

Matters went quite differently on the American’s right flank. There the Canadian 

militia quickly adjusted the aim of their artillery, and soon wreaked havoc on the more 

exposed position of the U.S. 17th Infantry. As canon fire tore through the encampment 

and shattered breastworks, the exposed U.S. regulars also had to contend with militiamen 

and Wyandot fighters that had taken possession of some nearby buildings from which 

they fired at will into the American encampment. The U.S. regulars struggled to hold 

their ground, but eventually faltered when mounted warriors came around their right 

flank. An attempt was made to send a few companies of Kentucky militiamen to the aid 

of the 17th Infantry, but the effort ultimately proved disastrous. General Winchester, who 

had just arrived from his headquarters, ordered the infantrymen to fall back to the north 

bank of the river where they could rendezvous with the Kentuckians. Together they made 

a brief stand, but were soon overwhelmed by the pursuing Canadian, Wyandot and 

Shawnee fighters. After a frantic retreat to the south side of the frozen river, where some 

made another weak stand, the American position disintegrated entirely. All who were

gathered near the south bank were swept up in the ensuing chaos, including Winchester 

and several officers. Fleeing pell-mell toward the south, and hampered by the poor 

 61 Shadrach Byfield, “A Common Soldier’s Account,” in Recollections of the War of 1812: Three 

Eyewtnesses’ Accounts, ed. John Gellner (Toronto: Baxter, 1964), 16-18; Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 62-

64; Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 145-55; Au, War on the Raisin, 30-35. 62 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 171; Robert S. Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812: An Operational 

and Command Study (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997), 134-36; Au, War on the 

Raisin, 39-40. On the snow depth, see Naveaux, Invaded on all Sides, 113.
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footing on the ice-crusted snow, many were run down and killed in fairly short order. 

Others managed to continue for a mile or two along Hull’s Road, but few escaped their 

pursuers—who now included a large contingent of American Indian forces that had swept 

around the west and south side of Frenchtown. Of the approximately 400 U.S. forces who 

were caught up in the rout, about 220 were killed and another 147 were captured. Only 

thirty-three managed to escape and return back to the Maumee River.63

Figure 7.8: Second Battle of Frenchtown: Closing Battle Actions on January 

22, 1813. Image is closely based on a painting by Tim Kurtz on display outside the 

Visitor Center at River Raisin National Battlefield Park.

 63 Atherton, Narrative of the Suffering, 44-45; Darnell, 52-53; Cruikshank, “Harrison and Proctor,” 158-59; 

Antal, A Wampum Denied, 169-74; Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 65-66; Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 

160-71, 174-87; Au, War on the Raisin, 37-39; Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 136-37.
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The actions to the east and south of Frenchtown were barely perceived by the 

British regulars and the Kentuckians still entrenched behind the fence lines. Instead they 

remained locked in what, for them, seemed to be the main battle area. Over the course of 

two hours, the British regrouped and made two more frontal attacks, but the Kentuckian 

position was too strong. The third and last attack proved the most costly, and brought 

total British casualties among the 41st Regiment of Foot and Provincial Marine to 182 (24 

killed and 158 wounded), a number that was perhaps four times greater than the total 

losses suffered by the entrenched Kentuckians. As the British pulled back and evaluated 

their weakening situation, many of the Kentuckians took a simple breakfast in the midst 

of a relative lull in the fighting. While waiting for news from the warriors that had routed 

the 17th and 19th U.S. Infantry, as well as those who had apparently positioned themselves 

on the south side of Frenchtown, Colonel Procter suddenly found himself face-to-face 

with General Winchester, Winchester’s young son Marcus who served as his aide-decamp, and Colonel Lewis—all in the custody of Stayeghtha.64

Procter soon pressed his opposite for outright capitulation, but Winchester 

averred—since he was now a prisoner and could not give orders to those still engaged in 

battle. When told that his men would otherwise be burned out of their position, and 

attacked by a much larger force of American Indians, General Winchester agreed to send 

a message encouraging the Kentuckians still within the pickets of Frenchtown to 

surrender. When they received the message, the Kentuckians balked. Feeling themselves 

on the verge of victory, they still believed the battle could be won. As Private Elias 

Darnell later recalled, “Some plead[ed] with the officers not to surrender, saying they 

would rather die on the field!”65 These were brave words, and Major George Madison of 

the Kentucky 1st Regiment was committed to holding out long enough to influence the 

terms of surrender. After some back-and-forth with the British over the disposition of 

prisoners, protection from Confederacy warriors, and care of the wounded, Madison 

formally surrendered. While Colonel Procter viewed Winchester’s surrender as 

unconditional on all forces under his command, Madison’s terms were unremarkable and 

entirely in accord with Procter’s expectations. In either case, the Kentuckians’ position 

was untenable. Their ammunition was low, they were completely hemmed in on the 

south, British artillery was in position to fire enfilade through their defensive lines, and 

Confederacy warriors were firing into the heart of Frenchtown while preparing to set it on 

fire. In short, Madison had two choices: to surrender to the British or, as he put it, “be 

massacred in cold blood.”66

 64 Casualties among the 41st Regiment of Foot were particularly high, and amounted to nearly half of those 

who took the field on the morning of the January 22, 1813. See Antal, A Wampum Denied, 174, and Au, 

War on the Raisin, 42. 65 Quotation from Darnell, Journal, 48. 66 Robert B. McAfee, History of the Late War in the Western Country, (Bowling Green, Ohio: Historical 

Publications Company, 1919), 235-36; Darnell, Journal, 54-55; Atherton, Narrative of the Suffering, 53; 

Cruikshank, “Harrison and Proctor,” 160-61; Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 69; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 

169-74; Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 189-202; Au, War on the Raisin, 40-44. Also “Augustus B. 

Woodward to Colonel Henry Procter, Detroit, February 2, 1813,” and “Affidavit of Medard Labadie, 

February 13, 1813,” both in American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the 

Congress of the United States, Vol. 4, Indian Affairs, no. 1 (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1832), 367 and 

371—hereafter cited as ASP.
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The battle was costly for the British regulars and Canadian militia, whose 

combined losses of 24 killed and 161 wounded amounted to nearly a third of all the 

forces under Procter’s command at Frenchtown. For the U.S. forces, however, their loss 

was an unmitigated disaster. Of the 934 who heard the morning’s reveille, all but the 

thirty-three who managed to escape to the Maumee Rapids were either dead, wounded, or 

prisoners of war. A preliminary count on the evening of the 22nd put the number of 

American dead at 218, while the number of ambulatory prisoners who were marched off 

to Fort Amherstburg was tallied at 495. Approximately sixty wounded prisoners were 

unable to make the journey, and they were attended by thirty of their fellows who stayed 

behind. Aside from the thirty-three who evaded capture during the desperate retreat from 

the River Raisin, approximately sixty-six were reported missing. Some were likely dead 

but their bodies remained undiscovered, while the rest had become captives within 

various American Indian encampments. Based on later counts of prisoners that passed 

through Fort Amherstburg, it seems that most all of these captives were eventually turned 

over to the British.67

A Confederacy Victory

The undisputed victor at the River Raisin was the Native Confederacy. While 

their casualty numbers remain unknown, American Indian fighters fared much better than 

their British and Canadian allies in every respect. The Wyandot and Shawnee war leaders 

who directed the attack against U.S. regulars on the east side of Frenchtown quickly 

turned the fight into the sort of running battle they preferred. Moving “in scattered order,” 

groups of warriors took advantage of small areas of cover and harassed the edges of the 

U.S. position. As the soldiers gave ground they were driven toward the river, then all 

were nearly surrounded. Brief efforts by some U.S. regulars and Kentucky militiamen to 

make a joint stand were short-lived, and their retreats were channeled southward along 

Hull’s Trace to a series of awaiting ambushes. All of this went in accordance with a basic 

strategy that eschewed the massing of forces, emphasized the actions of small groups 

working in concert with others, and sought to disorient the enemy with small random 

strikes from several directions. Once the attack was joined by many of the Bodéwadmi, 

Myaamia, Odawa, and Ojibwe fighters that had swept around the west side of 

Frenchtown, the fate of the “Long Knives” was more than sealed.68

The small clusters of regulars and Kentucky militia that managed to get as far as 

the prairie and woods to the south of the River Raisin were exhausted, low on 

 67 While the accounting of wounded and killed is imprecise, the general variance between American and 

British sources is minimal. See Cruikshank, “Harrison and Proctor,” 162-64; Au, War on the Raisin, 44-45; 

Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 73-74; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 173-74; and Antal, “Remember the Raisin! 

Anatomy of a Demon Myth,” The War of 1812 Magazine, no. 10 (2008) <http://www.napoleonseries.org/military/Warof1812/2008/Issue10/c_Raisin.html#_edn14> (accessed 25 January 2015)

68 The reference to “scattered order” comes from Armstrong Starkey, European and Native American 

Warfare, 1675-1815 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 22. Also see “Extract of the Minutes 

of a Council held at Michilimackinac the 28th October 1814, between Waindawgay & Mishpawkissh[,] 

Potewatemys on behalf of their chiefs and Lieut. Col. Macdonald,” in Collections and Researches Made by 

the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society, vol. 23 (Lansing: Robert Smith & Co., 1895), 453-55; and 

Charles Callender, “Great Lakes-Riverine Sociopolitical Organization,” in Handbook of North American 

Indians, Volume 15: Northeast, eds. William C. Sturtevant and Bruce G. Trigger (Washington, D.C.: 

Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 617-19.
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ammunition, or had abandoned their cumbersome muskets to improve their chances of 

flight. Their efforts to make a final stand, flee, or bargain for their lives usually ended 

with the same fatal result. Native warriors were not in a position to safely hold many 

prisoners, nor were they disposed to spare the lives of men who would kill them at the 

first chance. Moreover, they were expected to atone for the deaths and destruction their 

communities had suffered over the past few months and years at the hands of people with 

whom many had been in conflict for generations. This sentiment was particularly acute 

among the Bodéwadmi and Myaamia whose villages had been attacked just a month 

before—perhaps by some of the very same men that were now running, fighting, and 

begging for their lives. In short, the Kentuckians and the U.S. regulars (who hailed 

mostly from Kentucky and southern Ohio) were in the hands of the “ancient enemy” they 

sought to destroy—and wished to destroy them. Most were killed outright, which 

accounts for the high death toll and relatively low number of wounded and captured from 

this part of the battle.69

The Native Confederacy was also responsible for ending the battle and bringing 

about the surrender of the Kentuckians still entrenched within Frenchtown. While the 

presentation of General Winchester to Colonel Procter shifted the British focus from 

assessing their losses to demanding U.S. surrender, the decisive victory on the south side 

of the River Raisin allowed for a new concentration of American Indian fighters around 

Frenchtown. As Winchester later recalled, this development convinced the Kentuckians 

to give up their arms and take “the opportunity of surrendering themselves as prisoners of 

war” to the British—or lose the battle to “the [American Indian warriors], who were then 

assembled in great numbers.” At this point the Kentuckians were already receiving sniper 

fire from the rear and soon realized the impossibility of their situation. The longer they 

tried to hold out, the more certain “the buildings adjacent would be immediately set on 

fire”—and they would be cut down while trying to escape the flames.70

Leaving the Field

For Procter, the U.S. agreement to surrender to his forces was an important 

triumph—but returning to Fort Amherstburg became a matter of great urgency. He knew 

that U.S. forces under General Harrison were already enroute to the River Raisin, and 

there was some expectation that they might arrive within a few hours. Given the 

condition of his own troops, Procter had no spirit for another engagement at Frenchtown. 

With his able-bodied forces outnumbered by the large contingent of U.S. prisoners, 

Procter could hardly defend his position while guarding hundreds of men who would turn 

on their captors at the first opportunity. Moreover, the large number of grievously 

 69 On the recent American attacks against Bodéwadmi and Myaamia villages in southwestern Michigan and 

northern Indiana, see Edmunds, The Potawatomis, 189-95; and Skaggs, William Henry Harrison, 123, 134-

35; and Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 94. While the men from the 19th and 17th U.S. Infantry 

who fought at the River Raisin came from the same regiments as those who attacked the Myaamia and 

Bodéwadmi, they served under Winchester and did not participate in Harrison’s December campaigns. 70 Quotations are from Winchester to Harrison, January 23, 1813, in John Brannan, ed., Official Letters of 

Military and Naval Officers of the United States During the War with Great Britain in the Years 1812, 13, 

14, & 15, with Some Additional Letters and Documents Elucidating the History of That Period

(Washington: Way & Gideon, 1823), 133.
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wounded British regulars and militia needed care. In short, Procter’s victory over 

Winchester necessarily became a hurried retreat.71

Once the Kentuckians within Frenchtown had grounded their arms and 

surrendered, the decision to return to Fort Amherstburg was set in motion. British 

wounded were placed on sleighs and rushed back to the fort while all of the American 

prisoners who could walk were assembled and counted—then ordered to march to 

Canada. The sixty or so who were too badly wounded to make the eighteen-mile march to 

Fort Amherstburg, along with the thirty who stayed behind to care for them, were 

sheltered in a few homes. A guard of two militia officers and three interpreters from the 

Indian Department remained behind. Along with the assistance of some habitants, they 

were nominally charged with preventing escapes as well as intervening with any 

American Indians that might come into the settlement. Procter had agreed to send back 

any available sleighs the next day to transport the wounded prisoners to Amherstbug, but 

the Americans and the British fully expected that U.S. troops would arrive from the south 

before that became necessary.

Colonel Procter’s information on the location and movement of Harrison’s forces 

was vague, but it proved remarkably accurate. While the 2nd Battle of Frenchtown was 

still underway, Procter received word that a large U.S. force was marching along the 

frozen surface of Lake Erie—just eight miles south of Frenchtown. This report was later 

deemed erroneous, but a battalion of U.S. regulars that Harrison had sent north from the 

Maumee on the 21st was on the ice at that time, though perhaps not so close. By the time 

the Kentuckians were about to surrender, however, the relief battalion was within two 

hours of the River Raisin. Harrison was several hours behind with two more battalions of 

Ohio and Kentucky militia, and it is possible that a substantial force of 900 could have 

arrived at Frenchtown by nightfall. However, after encountering several escapees from 

the rout of the U.S. 17th Infantry and Kentucky militia, Harrison and his officers halted 

their marches. After convening together, they “unanimously determined that as there 

could be no doubt of the total defeat of Genl. Winchester there was no motive that could 

authorize an immediate advance but that of attacking the enemy who were reported to be 

greatly superior in numbers and were certainly well provided with artillery.” Though 

Harrison’s reasoning is understandable in light of circumstances and incomplete 

information, the decision to hold back proved fateful. 72

 71 This and the following paragraph are informed by The John Hunt Memoirs: Early Years of the Maumee 

Basin, 1812-1835, ed. Richard J. Wright (Maumee Ohio: Maumee Valley Historical Society, 1979), 42-44; 

Byfield, “A Common Soldier’s Account,” 17-18; Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 142; Au, War on the 

Raisin, 45-46; Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 74-76; and Antal, A Wampum Denied, 174-77. 72 Procter’s information came from a Canadian militia scout who reported seeing a large military force on 

the ice. This sighting was later deemed a Fata Morgana—a kind of mirage across an expanse of ice or water 

that enlarges and alters the shape of a distant object—of a few Wyandot drovers moving livestock north 

from the Sandusky area. Given the nature of a Fata Morgama, which presents enlarged reflections of 

objects beyond the horizon, this may well have been a sighting of the more distant American forces. The 

report to Procter is described in John Norton, The Journal of Major John Norton, 1816 (Toronto: 

Champlain Society, 1970), 316-17. On the movements and decisions of Harrison’s troops on January 21-

22, see Harrison to Secretary of War, January 24, 1813, in Messages and Letters of William Henry 

Harrison, 331-34; quotation is from p. 332. Also see Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812, 

363-64; and Au, War on the Raisin, 46-48.
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Reckoning

Like the prisoners and their five-man guard, the habitants who remained in 

Frenchtown as well as the group of American Indians encamped a few miles north at 

Stony Creek also expected that some part of Harrison’s force would arrive by nightfall. 

Accordingly, the members of the Indian Department planned to slip away to Fort 

Amherstburg before U.S. troops arrived. The wounded prisoners would then become the 

responsibility of their countrymen (as they certainly preferred) rather than the overtaxed 

British, and the habitants of Frenchtown could start the process of cleaning up and 

sorting through their losses. In short, the last piece of what might be called Procter’s 

“victorious retreat” would be finished. This likely scenario would also have been 

expected by the group of Confederacy fighters who had withdrawn a few miles to the 

north. The following morning they would have kept an eye on the U.S. forces arriving 

from the south, but prudence and a desire to fight another day would prevent any from 

directly engaging Harrison’s forces.73

By first light there was no sign or news of a U.S. relief force, and so the ablebodied prisoners began readying their wounded comrades for the trip to Fort 

Amherstburg. By this time, however, the Canadian and Indian Department guards already 

knew that no such journey would take place. In the absence of U.S. troops from the south, 

a pre-dawn council at Stony Creek had determined to complete the victory that had been 

cut short by the U.S surrender to the British. Soon after the guards learned of this 

decision, most departed Frenchtown. Since they had no real authority over the actions of 

their Native allies, there was nothing they could do without endangering themselves. The 

last remaining interpreter from the Indian Department conveyed the news to Captain 

Nathaniel Hart, one of the U.S. wounded. In answer to Hart’s concerned question about 

what “the Indians intend[ed] to do,” the interpreter replied “They intend to kill you.” 

When Hart then asked the man to intervene in some way, the interpreter replied that 

doing so would effectively make him an ally of the U.S. and thus “they will as soon kill 

[me] as you.” The promised sleighs had not arrived and any that may have been en route 

would certainly have been warned off—either by the departed guards who were 

themselves heading along the road or across the ice back to Fort Amherstburg, or the 

American Indians still at Stony Creek.74

The event that became known as the “River Raisin Massacre” was not a sudden 

burst of collective violence. Rather, it began as a somewhat incredulous confirmation that 

no U.S. forces had arrived. It then progressed to a fairly deliberate taking of valuables 

and able-bodied captives, that was later punctuated by the killing of the most severely 

wounded survivors of the previous days’ battles. According to witness accounts from 

habitants and prisoners, in the first hour or so after daybreak the number of American 

 73 Darnell, Journal, 57-60; Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 28-29. 74 Quotation from Thomas P. Dudley, Battle and Massacre at Frenchtown, Michigan, January 1813 (Ann 

Arbor: Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan Library, 2004), 3. Also see Au, War on the 

Raisin, 44; and Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 85-86. While there are no recorded accounts of why the 

promised sleighs did not arrive from Amherstburg, there are several likely reasons. Two guards, along with 

an officer, had left Frenchtown around dawn and may well have met the sleighs on the road north of town 

or on the ice of the Detroit River. It is also possible that the sleighs may have been turned back at Big Rock 

(Brownstown) or Stony Creek, where they would have learned from the American Indians still gathered 

there about the ensuing events at Frenchtown.
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Indians that had come in to Frenchtown was fairly small—with the few who spoke 

English engaging with some of the men who were taking care of the wounded. As Dr. 

Gustavus Bower later described the morning, “They did not molest any person or thing 

upon their first approach, but kept sauntering about until there were a large number 

collected, (say one or two hundred) at which time they commenced plundering the houses 

of the inhabitants, and the massacre of the wounded prisoners.”75

Even then, the killings followed a method that—however brutal—might be 

described as utilitarian. The wounded who could not travel were the primary victims, and 

they were killed with a suddenness that betrayed little or no emotion. The same could be 

said of the looting, the taking of able-bodied prisoners, and the burning of buildings and 

structures—behaviors that Dr. John Todd, a surgeon with the Kentucky 5th Regiment 

52Volunter Militia later described as a kind of “orderly conduct.” A sense of deliberate 

order did not diminish, and perhaps intensified, the sense of horror that many survivors 

would later describe. Indeed, the most vivid recollections related to the systematic nature 

of the killings and resulting treatment of the remains. Men were killed with just one or 

two blows, their bodies quickly stripped of clothing and often scalped, and the bloody 

corpse left where it had fallen. In places, recalled Elias Darnell, the ground was “strewed 

with the mangled bodies, and all of them were left like those slain in battle, on the 22d, 

for birds and beasts to tear in pieces and devour.”76

By late-morning most of the Confederacy warriors had departed toward Big Rock 

with the spoils and captives, which had been denied them by the terms of surrender 

worked out between the British and U.S. officers. The killing of the badly wounded also 

completed what had been left unfinished the day before, and allowed a number of 

warriors who had not taken a coup to fulfill their vows of revenge on the Long Knives for 

attacks both old and new. All of the structures and buildings that had survived the 

previous days’ battles were also destroyed, leaving the core area of Frenchtown in utter 

ruin. The number of men who were killed in Frenchtown that morning is unknown, nor is 

there any clear accounting of the straggling prisoners who were cut down on the road to 

the north. Plausible estimates range between thirty and eighty killed, with most counts 

putting the number closer to sixty. The number of surviving captives is equally unclear. 

Over the next several days most of the latter were either turned over to the British at 

Amerstburg or ransomed in the streets of Detroit. Several were taken to their captors’ 

villages, with some destinations as near as the River Rouge and others as far as the Straits 

of Mackinac. In accordance with the precepts of a “mourning war,” these men could 

expect two fates: kind treatment and adoption by the kin of an individual who had been 

killed by the Long Knives (and thus fill the place of the deceased); or killed as 

 75 “Statement of Dr. Gustavus M. Bower, 24 April 1813,” in American State Papers: Documents, 

Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, Vol. 1, Military Affairs, no. 1 (Washington: 

Gales and Seaton, 1832), 372; hereafter cited as ASP, vol. number, and subtitle, and volume number. 76 “Statement of John Todd, M.D., 24 April 1813,” in op. cit., 373-74; Darnell, Journal, 62. Accounts of the 

events of January 23, 1813 were compiled in a large document entitled “Spirit and Manner in which the 

War is Waged by the Enemy: Communicated to the House of Representatives, July 31, 1813,” in ASP, 

Military Affairs, vol. 1, 339-382. This document also included other complaints about British actions in 

other theaters of the war, but most of the testimonials related to the events on the River Raisin. For an 

overview of the various accounts, see Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 80-91.
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atonement. In either case the decision about their fate was generally left to the nearest 

female kin of the deceased.77

Remember the Raisin!

The events of January 23, 1813, became known as the “River Raisin Massacre” in 

the United States, and quickly grew into one of the most famous and longest lasting echo 

of the battles of Frenchtown. In March of that year, President James Madison devoted a 

good portion of his Second Inaugural Address to a condemnation of American Indian 

warriors and British forces, drawing on centuries-old tropes about “the hatchet and the 

knife,” “indiscriminate massacre,” “torture and death,” and the “blood of the 

vanquished.” In this and other such accountings, the “massacre” took on a transformative 

significance. In Ohio and especially Kentucky, “Remember the Raisin!” became a 

recruiting slogan for more militia volunteers to join an army that was only recently on the 

verge of collapse because of desertions and a lack of reenlistments. In subsequent battles, 

including the Battle of the Thames where Tecumseh fell, it became a rallying cry that 

would later be celebrated in print alongside other slogans of the war like “Free Trade and 

Sailors’ Rights” and “Don’t Give Up the Ship.”78

Unlike General Hull’s embarrassing defeat and surrender the previous summer, 

the death and capture of so many Americans at Frenchtown did not lead to widespread 

criticism of U.S. military leadership. Instead, as Madison’s Second Inaugural made clear, 

“British commanders”—and particularly Procter—were entirely at fault for having 

“extorted victory over the unconquerable valor of our troops” by the threat and example 

of “massacre.” In other words, Frenchtown was not a fair fight because, as Harrison made 

clear in a letter to Secretary of War James Monroe, “the British have no intention to 

conduct the war (at least in this quarter) upon those principles which have been held 

sacred by all civilized nations.”79

These were not new sentiments and, like the events at Fort William Henry some 

two generations before, they had as much to do with oft repeated tropes about “Indian 

atrocities” as they did the recent events at Frenchtown. Since before the Revolution, the

specter of “[Native peoples] ... exercising their wonted barbarities”—to quote George 

Washington—inspired numerous military campaigns into the Great Lakes region, 

excused most every defeat suffered by U.S. forces, and explained decades of informal 

conflicts west of the Appalachian Mountains between Americans and Native 

communities. In this context the magnitude of U.S. losses on the River Raisin was not a 

 77 The most detailed estimates are from Au, War on the Raisin, 45-46; and Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 87. 

Both authors put the number of killed on January 23 near 60. For descriptions of captivity within American 

Indian communities after the battles of Frenchtown, see Antal, A Wampum Denied, 198-99. On mourning 

wars see Timothy J. Shannon, “The Native American Way of War in the Age of Revolutions, 1754-1814,” 

in War in an Age of Revolution, 1775-1815, eds. Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (New York: Cambridge 

University Press, 2013), 140-42. Also see Thomas S. Abler, “Scalping, Torture, Cannibalism and Rape: An 

Ethnohistorical Analysis of Conflicting Cultural Values in War,” Anthropologica 34:1 (1992): 3-20. 78 “James Madison, March 4, 1813. Speech, Second Inaugural,” The James Madison Papers, American 

Memory (Library of Congress) <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mjm.15_0108_0116> (accessed 30 January 

2015). On the subsequent use of “Remember the Raisin!,” see Paul A. Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ 

Rights in the War of 1812 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 214, 218. 79 Madison, “Second Inaugural;” Harrison to Secretary of War, February 11, 1813, in Messages and 

Letters, 2:359. Also see Owens, Mr. Jefferson's Hammer, 128-87.
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strike against the war effort, but an affirmation of the need to fulfill Thomas Jefferson’s 

vow that “In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.”80

Figure 7.9: Detail from Massacre of the American Prisoners, at 

French-Town, on the River Raisin (1813). This popular representation of 

the events of January 23, 1813 suggests they were a debauched affair that was 

overseen by a substantial British encampment (in the background).

General Hull had expressed all of these sentiments during his short-lived invasion 

of Canada, when he issued a proclamation addressed to the “INHABITANTS OF 

CANADA!” “If, contrary to your own interest, and the just expectations of my country,

you should take part in the approaching contest,” Hull warned, then “you will be 

 80 On “atrocities,” see Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Indian Atrocities: Narratives of the Perils and Sufferings 

of Dr. Knight and John Slover among the Indians During the Revolutionary War (Nashville: W.F. Bang, 

1843); first published in 1783. In a prefatory note to his readers, Brackenridge noted “that the nature of an 

Indian is fierce and cruel, and that an extirpation of them would be useful to the world, and honorable to 

those who can effect it.” Quotation from George Washington to the President of Congress, 5 October 1776, 

in The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources 1745-1799, Vol. 6, ed. John 

C. Fitzpatrick (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932), 159. Jefferson to Secretary of War [Henry 

Dearborn], August 28, 1807, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. IX: 1807-1815, ed. Paul Leicester 

Ford (G.P Putnam's Sons, 1898), 132-33.
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considered & treated as enemies, & the horrors & calamities of war will stalk before 

you.” He further vowed that

If the barbarous & savage policy of Great Britain be pursued, and [Native 

warriors] are let loose to murder our Citizens, & butcher our women and 

children, this war, will be a war of extermination. The first stroke of the 

Tomahawk, the first attempt with the scalping knife, will be the signal for 

one indiscriminate scene of desolation. No white man found fighting by 

the side of an Indian, will be taken prisoner. Instant destruction will be his 

lot.81

Such expressions were almost verbatim repetitions of century-old views on 

American Indians and warfare, but they were colored by the wars of the late 18th century. 

From the period of the American Revolution and through the War of 1812, American 

Indians were also viewed as both the subjects and the agents of British tyranny. When 

American Indians did not abide the norms of European standards of warfare, the British 

were at fault for not exercising sufficient control; conversely, the British were deemed 

weak and dishonorable whenever they relied on the support of American Indian fighters. 

The killings of wounded soldiers at the River Raisin, which U.S. government officials 

and the general public widely but erroneously believed to have occurred while “British 

officers and soldiers silently and exultingly contemplated the scene,” was presented as 

one of the most dramatic examples of British tyranny. The “River Raisin Massacre” was 

a bloody confirmation that Americans were fighting what many called a “Second War of 

Independence,” and to remember the Raisin was to redouble the effort to finally destroy 

the twin menace of “British tyranny” and “Indian perfidy” that had plagued eastern North 

America since before the Declaration of Independence.82

To the Victors

Despite frequent U.S. pronouncements to the contrary, the alliance between the 

British and the Native Confederacy did not have a senior partner. They shared a common 

set of goals (to halt and reverse the northwestward expansion of U.S. settlements, to 

sustain the British fur trade, and affirm a collective American Indian sovereignty in the 

Great Lakes region), but the alliance was also marked by a latent distrust on both sides. 

As the Shawnee war leader Tecumseh reminded Colonel Procter, the British had twice 

abandoned an alliance with American Indians—first at the Peace of Paris that ended the 

American Revolution in 1783, and later at the decisive Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 

that eventually led to a vast cession of lands in Ohio. Understandably, Tecumseh was 

“afraid that [the British] will do so again.” Procter acknowledged as much in his 

correspondence with his superiors, noting that any “aid we may expect from the Indians 

will always be in proportion to their confidence in our strength and which they are too 

 81 Hull, “A Proclamation,” in Official Letters of Military and Naval Officers, 31. 82 Alexander James Dallas, An Exposition of the Causes and Character of the War between the United 

States and Great Britain (Concord, N.H.: Isaac and Walter R. Hill, 1815), 90; Hickey, War of 1812, 1-4; 

Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W.W. 

Norton & Company, 2008), 251-53. Quoted phrases are from James Grahame, The History of the United 

States of North America, from the Plantation of the British Colonies till their Assumption of National 

Independence (Boston: C.C. Little & J. Brown, 1845), 114, 125.
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sensible is but small.” Yet British officers also complained that their allies were “fickle,” 

did not appreciate the larger strategic goals that guided British military actions, and often 

abandoned the field of battle when their own designs were accomplished.83

For the Confederacy warriors at Frenchtown, the hasty departure of British forces 

to Fort Amherstburg was not “fickle,” but completely understandable. However, 

Procter’s desire to take care of his wounded and remove a large number of prisoners 

before Harrison’s troops arrived was a British concern that did not readily align with the 

personal or collective objectives of the American Indians who remained. For them the 

battles on January 18 and 22 were not distinct from the subsequent taking of captives, 

destruction of Frenchtown, and killing of wounded prisoners. When the expected U.S. 

troops failed to arrive, the status of the able-bodied prisoners from the previous day’s 

battle remained unchanged—with one exception. Unlike their fellows in Fort 

Amherstburg, who were subject to British authority, these men belonged entirely to those 

members of the Native Confederacy who claimed them as their own. The same was true 

of the wounded, as well as of the property of the habitants.

As noted above, the able-bodied prisoners had particular value in the form of 

ransom, adoption, or a retribution killing. While the second and third alternatives 

followed age-old practices that sought to rebalance a household, family or community 

that was still mourning a loss, the first alternative was more akin to plunder. Unlike U.S. 

soldiers and Kentucky militiamen, Confederacy fighters did not draw from a ready set of 

stipends, bonuses, or payments for the risks they took. Their communities might receive 

gifts from the British, and any family members who travelled with them to Malden 

obtained some material support, but otherwise a warrior received little more than 

ammunition, some rations, and presents. Consequently, victory in battle came with an 

implicit expectation to plunder. This not only compensated for past dangers or losses, but 

served as a point of honor for warriors who were expected to return to their communities 

with gifts and resources. Strategically, plundering also weakened the enemy’s position 

and often served as direct retribution for the destruction of American Indian towns by 

U.S. troops, militias and vigilantes. While taking prisoners to a captor’s home village

could also achieve these various ends, obtaining ransom for a healthy and valued captive 

was more akin to the compensatory purposes of plunder.84

The burning and looting of Frenchtown was also directly related to the previous 

day’s fighting. Just when the British called for a truce to initiate the process of surrender, 

the core of the village was nearly surrounded by Confederacy fighters and the 

Kentuckians were on the verge of being burned out. In short, what would have been the 

final stage of the 2nd Battle of Frenchtown was thwarted. The surrender denied the 

Confederacy a potent victory they were about to claim, and left intact a community and 

an array of structures that would be of great tactical significance to Harrison’s army. 

Burning and looting the village center thus made good on the purposes and prospects of 

 83 Tecumseh quoted in Edmunds, Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership (Boston: Little, Brown, 

and Company, 1984), 204. Procter quoted in Antal, A Wampum Denied, 150. Also see Antal, A Wampum 

Denied, 149, 261, 383. 84 White, The Middle Ground, 343-351; Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 27, 34, 98; 

Wayne E. Lee, “Peace Chiefs and Blood Revenge: Patterns of Restraint in Native American Warfare, 1500-

1800,” The Journal of Military History 71:3 (2007): 739-41.
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the previous day’s battle, and forced the habitants to flee toward communities around 

Sandusky Bay or to seek refuge with relatives and acquaintances at Detroit.85 Destruction 

of the town also served as punishment to the habitants for making a definitive alliance 

with the U.S. In doing so they rejected an earlier plea for assistance from Stayeghtha 

(Bark Carrier, aka Roundhead) and Myeerah (Walk-in-the-Water), who hoped to draw on 

the history of good relations between nearby American Indian communities and the 

habitants of Frenchtown. The appeal for aid was also couched in a threat, however, and 

once Frenchtown effectively declared itself for the United States, the Wyandot and their 

allies readily determined that “we will not consider you in future as friends, and the 

consequences [will] be very unpleasant.86

The killing of the wounded at Frenchtown was horrific for those who died as well 

as the U.S. soldiers who witnessed the killings, and certainly traumatized many of the 

latter. Yet in both respects it was not unlike the many killings of disarmed combatants 

that had occurred at the hands of Long Knives and American Indians since well before 

the American Revolution. Just a few months earlier General Hull had threatened “instant 

destruction”—with no chance of imprisonment—to any “white man found fighting by the 

side of an Indian;” the fate of the latter was too obvious to state. The Kentuckians who 

were surrounded by the combined forces of American Indians on January 22 expected a 

similar fate at the hands of American Indians—and thus preferred to die fighting. Instead 

of the frenzied mass killing that the Long Knives might have feared, the event known as 

the “River Raisin Massacre” only struck the badly wounded. The methodical nature of 

the killings, coupled with the unexpected suddenness of the deadly blows, appalled the 

survivors—but was nevertheless understood as atonement for recent events. More than 

random acts in a multi-generational “blood feud,” the killings of the U.S. combatants 

were meant to correspond to specific American Indian losses in the previous days’ battles 

as well the death and destruction that accompanied attacks on several Bodéwadmi and 

Myaamia towns a few months earlier. A number of the Bodéwadmi and Myaamia who 

were in Frenchtown on January 23 came from these same villages, and certainly knew 

that the attacks had come from the comrades of the U.S. Regulars they encountered on 

the River Raisin.87

The most gruesome aspects of the killing and destruction that occurred on January 

23, 1813, involved the mutilation of corpses. The taking of scalps was widely noted by 

survivors and later commentators, who accused Procter of paying bounties for each scalp. 

No bounties were offered by Procter, and even his harshest U.S. critic—Michigan 

Territorial Judge Augustus Woodward—attributed the violence on the 23rd to “an ignoble 

revenge on [the] prisoners” that needed no cash incentive. However, scalping had a much 

broader significance than revenge or retaliation for specific wrongs. In many respects a 

scalp taken from an enemy was something like a service medal—a demonstration of 

prowess and a mark of honor to be displayed in a ceremony and dance upon the warrior’s 

return home. While scalps could be kept as a sort of personal trophy, in which the slain 

 85 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 95, 172, 177; Au, War on the Raisin, 20. 86 Barbarities of the Enemy, 132. 87 Peter S. Schmalz, The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 114-16; 

Skaggs, William Henry Harrison and the Conquest of the Ohio Country, 125-29; Au, War on the Raisin, 

50-51; James A. Clifton, The Prairie People: Continuity and Change in Potawatomi Indian Culture, 1665-

1965 (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), 209-210; Edmunds, The Potawatomis, 194-95.
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foe’s power became a possession of the victor, they were also incorporated into a 

community’s ceremonial life. After a series of Victory Dances (aka “Scalp Dances”) 

following a successful conflict, scalps were often left as offerings at grave sites. Among 

the Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk or Winnebago) and other groups, they were also incorporated 

into war bundles, objects that were “the focus of important ceremonies ... [involving] a 

series of supernatural beings associated with war.”88

By far the most galling and intentionally offensive action was the mutilation and 

dismemberment of the dead. Though interpreted as a frightful warning to the inhabitants 

of Frenchtown and subsequent U.S. troops that would soon be coming into the area, this 

was primarily about affecting the afterlives of the vanquished. Habitants were threatened 

against burying the bodies so that the violated corpses remained in the open to be picked 

over and scattered by animals, without the rites of burial and the ceremonies that would 

bring peace to the dead or their communities. As much as any other action, this violation 

of the dead was directly related to the actions of Kentucky militiamen on January 18 as 

well as troops under Harrison’s command the previous summer and autumn.

Mkadebnesi (Blackbird), an Odawa war leader from Waganakising (L’Arbe 

Croche), explained such actions to the British in the summer of 1813. “[L]ast spring we 

fought the Big Knives and we lost some of our people there,” he noted, but when “we 

retired the Big Knives got some of our dead. They were not satisfied with having killed 

them, but cut them into small pieces. This made us very angry.” As long as a conflict is 

underway, Mkadebnesi told his young warriors that it is alright “to kill and scalp,” but the 

Americans often “did mischief.” In describing raids on evacuated towns around southern 

Lake Michigan, Mkadebnesi recalled that “the Big Knives destroyed all our corn. This 

was fair [in war], but ... they did not allow our dead to rest. They dug up their graves, 

and the bones of our ancestors were thrown away and we could never find them to return 

them to the ground.” In response to British suggestions that it would be best if the Odawa 

focused on the “fair” aspects of war, and not offend U.S. sensibilities, Mkadebnesi had a 

ready answer. “I have listened with a good deal of attention ... [but] if the Big Knives, 

after they kill people of our colour, leave them without hacking them to pieces, we will 

follow their example. They have themselves to blame.” “The way they treat our killed,” 

he continued, “and the remains of those that are in their graves in the west, makes our 

people mad when they meet the Big Knives.” While such actions and reasoning could 

only inflame a desire among Americans to “Remember the Raisin!,” for Mkadebnesi and 

other Confederacy fighters they represented an extreme form of victory: one that 

vanquished the enemy and mitigated the effects of recent violations of their own dead.89

A number of prominent war leaders like Tecumseh, Mookmaanish (Odawa), and 

Zhabné (aka Shabbona; Bodéwadmi) had publicly condemned the killing of people who 

had either surrendered or were non-combatants, but these were not blanket statements to 

be applied in all cases. The notable instances where these men counseled against violence 

of this sort occurred in two contexts. The first related to a broader war where killing 

unarmed enemies would complicate wartime strategies by inflaming unnecessary cycles 

 88 Abler, “Scalping, Torture, Cannibalism and Rape:” 7-9; Nancy Oesterieich Lurie, “Winnebago,” in 

Handbook of North American Indians: Northeast, 695-96. 89 Mkadebnesi (Blackbird) quotations from “Speech of Blackbird to Claus, July 15, 1813,” in Cruikshank, 

“Harrison and Procter,” 141-42.
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of revenge. The second applied to potential victims from groups against whom a warrior 

held no particular animosities. To harm or kill such a person was a random and 

anonymous act of violence that brought no honor and simply created enemies where none 

existed. The violence that occurred on January 23 did not really fit these conditions. Both 

dispassionate and intimate, the killing of “Long Knives”—and the desecration of the 

dead—was directly tied to recent violations of Native moral codes. This last matter 

received direct confirmation from the Anglican priest, John Strachan, who noted that 

“American troops under General Winchester killed an Indian in a skirmish near the river 

Au Raisin, on the 18th January 1813, and tore him litera[l]ly into pieces, which so 

exasperated the Indians that they refused burial to the Americans killed on the 22d.”90

Zenith of the Confederacy

The battles of Frenchtown, and the subsequent killings and destruction on January 

23, capped a six-month stretch of military success for the Native Confederacy that 

included the engagements at Big Rock (Brownstown) and Maguaga, participation in the 

siege and capture of Detroit, engagements with small detachments of U.S. troops on the 

lower Maumee, and the gathering of important intelligence for the British at Fort 

Amherstburg as well as for Tecumseh and other Confederacy leaders in the Detroit River 

area. In concert with these earlier actions, Frenchtown proved a smashing victory that 

marked the highpoint of the Confederacy’s strength during the War of 1812. The first 

U.S. Army of the Northwest had been completely defeated just eight weeks after the 

official declaration of war, and the left wing of the reconstituted army was annihilated at 

Frenchtown a little more than 5 months later.

In the ensuing months, groups of Confederacy warriors were able to move at will 

through present-day Michigan and northwestern Ohio, where they kept a close eye on 

Harrison’s stalled army on the lower Maumee as well as on nearby settlements. As spring 

approached and Procter received new reinforcements at Fort Amherstburg, hopes ran 

high within the Confederacy that a joint offensive with the British might drive the 

Americans into southern Ohio. Such a victory would restore much of the territory that 

had been lost since the mid 1790s, and thus achieve the vision that Tecumseh conveyed 

to Harrison in 1810; namely, “to tear up” past treaties, “stop this evil” of coerced land 

cessions, and restore “for the red men ... a common and equal right in the land, as it was 

at first, and should be now—for it was never divided, but belongs to us all.” The dream of 

an independent Native territory had never seemed more real.91

 90 “John Strachan to Thomas Jefferson, 30 January 1815,” The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 8: 1 

October 1814 to 31 August 1815, ed. J. Jefferson Looney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 

221. On the attitudes and actions of Tecumseh, Mookmaanish, and Zhabné (Sabbona), see Eric Hemenway, 

“Turning Point: The War of 1812 from the Native American Perspective,” (Little Traverse Bay Bands of 

Odawa Indians and the Harbor Springs Area Historical Society, 2014), 7. 

<http://www.harborspringshistory.org/images/downloads/HSAHS_Turning_Point_booklet_WEB.pdf> 

(accessed 4 March 2015).

91 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 203-04; Sugden, Tecumseh, 326-27; Cecil King, Balancing Two Worlds: 

Jean-Baptiste Assiginack and the Odawa Nation, 1768-1866 (Saskatoon: Dr. Cecil King, 2013), 133-

34.Tecumseh quoted in Giles B. Gunn, Early American Writing (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 412-

13. Also see Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 139-41; and Edmunds, Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian 

Leadership, 130-35, 189-91.
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Chapter Eight

Consequences of War and Peace

The War of 1812 occurred in multiple theaters and, in so far as the Northwest is concerned, 

involved two distinct wars. This chapter covers the final year of the war in the Northwest, its 

relation to other theaters, the terms of peace that were established between the United States 

and Great Britain, and between the United States and Native communities in the Great Lakes 

and western Ohio River Valley.

While the Confederacy’s prospects seemed to broaden, General Harrison 

concentrated his command at the Maumee Rapids. It was there, a few miles upstream and 

across the river from the site of Fort Miamis, that construction of Fort Meigs had 

commenced just ten days after the battles of Frenchtown. Drawing on the lessons he 

learned while serving under General Anthony Wayne, Harrison concentrated on 

protecting supplies for a planned invasion of Upper Canada, sheltering his diminishing 

command (which shrank to just 700 by winter’s end as enlistment periods for Virginia 

and Pennsylvania militia service expired and volunteers returned home), and providing a 

northern assembly point for new recruits. Given its relative proximity to Fort 

Amherstburg, as well as its prominence as the headquarters of the Army of the 

Northwest, Fort Meigs became the focus of a new offensive by the British-Native 

alliance. After delays caused by a series of storms, a siege was established at Fort Meigs 

on April 28 by a combined force of approximately 530 British regulars and 460 Canadian 

militia under the command of General Procter and 1,250 Confederacy warriors primarily 

led by Tecumseh and Stayeghtha (Bark Carrier, aka Roundhead).1

The weather-caused delays allowed Harrison to assemble and move 300 

additional troops to the nearly finished fort in mid-April, and 1,200 Kentucky militia 

arrived soon after the siege began—which brought the combined U.S. forces to 

approximately 2,300. Weeks of cold rain had also softened the earthen ramparts and 

makeshift embankments that had been thrown up within the fort’s perimeter. These 

absorbed most of the British ordnance and left the rest of the fort complex relatively 

undamaged. Aside from the ineffective bombardments, the siege involved one significant 

battle. On May 5, a detachment of newly arrived Kentucky militia along with some U.S. 

infantry attacked the British batteries and attempted an assault on the main BritishConfederacy encampment near the former site of Fort Miamis. Both efforts failed 

horribly, particularly after the bulk of the Kentuckians pursued clusters of Native 

warriors who easily lured the whole force into the dense woods. As they shouted 

 1 Rex LeRoy Spencer, “The Gibraltar of the Maumee: Fort Meigs in the War of 1812” (PhD diss., Ball 

State University, 1988), 100-103; John R. Elting, Amateurs, to Arms! A Military History of the War of 1812

(Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1991), 104-106; David Curtis Skaggs, William Henry Harrison and 

the Conquest of the Ohio Country, 155-58; Larry N. Nelson, Men of Patriotism, Courage & Enterprise!: 

Fort Meigs in the War of 1812 (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 1985), 53-61.
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“Remember the Raisin!” the disorderly attackers were channeled toward waiting groups 

of warriors and cut down. In total, the U.S. losses (which were mostly suffered by the 

Kentuckians) numbered close to 150 killed and 170 wounded, with more than 500 

wounded and able-bodied taken prisoner. For many of the American Indian warriors, the 

defeat of the Kentuckians fulfilled their expectations of the campaign and large numbers 

departed on May 7—as did the Canadian militia, who needed to tend to their farms. With 

his command greatly reduced and his ordnance nearly gone, Procter was forced to lift the 

siege on May 9 and returned to Fort Amherstburg. Although the Confederacy won its 

battle, and suffered few casualties, the lifting of the siege ultimately proved a strategic 

victory for Harrison and signaled a change of fortune for the British-Confederacy 

alliance.2

The siege of Fort Meigs demonstrated that Procter’s limited artillery was not 

capable of dislodging an entrenched U.S. position, and also confirmed that the Native 

preference for subterfuge and swift strikes was not sufficient for siege warfare. Procter 

and Tecumseh debated the value of attempting another siege, with Procter arguing that it 

would prove ineffective. Because maintaining the British-Confederacy alliance was too 

important, however, he assented to Tecumseh’s desire to try again. A second assault and 

siege was attempted on Fort Meigs in late July, and another on Fort Stephenson (at Lower 

Sandusky) in early August. The siege on Fort Meigs was even less successful than the 

first, while the attack on Fort Stephenson resulted in significant British casualties. These 

failures weakened the alliance, which was already suffering from a lack of supplies for 

British troops, Canadian militia, and the large number of Confederacy warriors and their 

families based near Fort Amherstburg and Malden. Moreover, siege warfare exasperated 

the Native Confederacy since, as Stayeghtha put it, it was like trying to fight a “ground 

hog under the ground” that refused to come out. There was no honor and no gain in such 

an encounter. Dispirited and with British supplies running low, most of the Confederacy 

warriors and their families returned to their villages and prepare for the coming harvest.3

After the failed siege of Fort Stephenson, Procter’s only option was to consolidate 

his forces around Fort Amherstburg. After months of chronic shortfalls in supplies and 

troops, which Governor Prévost was increasingly directing toward the defense of Lower 

Canada, there was little to do but increase foraging patrols on both sides of the Detroit 

 2 Spencer, “The Gibraltar of the Maumee,” 108-129; Skaggs, William Henry Harrison, 158-62; Nelson, 

Men of Patriotism, Courage & Enterprise!, 61-68; Sandy Antal, A Wampum Denied: Procter's War of 

1812, 2nd ed. (Kingston [Ont.]: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011), 221-23; John Sugden, Tecumseh: 

A Life (New York: Holt, 1997), 330-34. Following the battle about a dozen wounded prisoners were killed 

by three or four warriors, but these action were reportedly halted by the interventions of Tecumseh, the 

Thâkîwa (Sauk, or Sac) war leader Mahkate:wi-meši-ke:hke:hkwa (also Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or 

Black Hawk), and Superintendent Matthew Elliott of the British Indian Department; see Sugden, 

Tecumseh, 336-338; Timothy D. Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship: British Policy and the Indians 

of the Great Lakes, 1783-1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 37-40; and Black Hawk, Life 

of Black Hawk, or Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak: Dictated by Himself, ed J. Gerald Kennedy (New York: 

Penguin Classics, 2008), 103-04. 3 Elting, Amateurs, to Arms!, 107-109; Nelson, Men of Patriotism, 111-14; Alec R. Gilpin, The War of 

1812 in the Old Northwest (East Lansing, MI: The Michigan State University Press, 1958), 205-207; Sandy 

Antal, A Wampum Denied: Procter's War of 1812, 2nd ed. (Kingston [Ont.]: McGill-Queen's University 

Press, 2011), 275-280; Sugden, Tecumseh, 336-39, 348-49. Stayeghtha quoted in Edmunds, The Shawnee 

Prophet (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 137.
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River to sustain British, Canadian, and remaining Confederacy forces as best as possible. 

There was no time to languish, however, since the war in the western theater had shifted 

to a critical maritime contest for control of Lake Erie. Consequently, Procter ordered the 

bulk of his forces to assist the Provincial Marine in the preparation and arming of vessels 

at the Royal Naval Dockyard. Since the outbreak of the war the small fleet adjacent to 

Fort Amherstburg had limited the movement and supply of U.S. forces, and did more to 

stymie U.S. offensive operations than anything Procter had attempted since the spring 

thaw. With Harrison having now amassed 5,000 troops in the vicinity of Maumee Bay 

and Lower Sandusky, it was imperative that the British retain control of the lake.4

Battle of Lake Erie

Through the summer of 1813, Commander Robert Heriot Barclay of the Royal 

Navy worked to prepare and refurbish the vessels at the Royal Dockyard, as well as train 

a hodge-podge assortment of seamen, merchant sailors, and British infantry in managing 

the craft and their guns. His task was further hampered by U.S. victories on the Niagara 

Peninsula, which endangered shipments from eastern Lake Erie and caused his superiors 

to retain personnel and resources in the eastern theater of the war. At Presque Isle 

(Pennsylvania), a small U.S. fleet had been under construction through most of the year 

and, with the arrival of a few additional vessels, Master Commandant Oliver Hazard 

Perry had ten ships under his command by late July. Though Barclay’s fleet only 

numbered six vessels, he was still able to move freely around the lake since a sand bar 

had developed across the mouth of the harbor at Presque Isle. This prevented Perry from 

moving his largest vessels, and Barclay from moving in for an attack, but the British 

managed to blockade the U.S. fleet for nine days in late July.5

Barclay ultimately had to withdraw due to a lack of provisions and a threatening 

storm which allowed Perry enough time to move his vessels over the bar using a process 

known as “cameling.” Two pairs of simply-built barges were towed out to Perry’s fleet, 

and each pair was situated on opposite sides of Perry’s two large brigs. These barges or 

“camels” were then flooded almost to the waterline, attached to a brig, and secured 

together by strong lines running beneath the keel. To lift the ships, the “camels” were 

emptied of water and each brig gently skirted the bar as it headed in to open water. The 

U.S. fleet first sailed to Sandusky Bay, where it gained more personnel and supplies, and 

then moved to an anchorage at Put-in-Bay on South Bass Island.6

From this vantage Perry was able to maintain a loose blockade at the mouth of the 

Detroit River and force Barclay to come to him for battle. With his vessels as ready as 

they could be, and after receiving a last-minute addition of sailors and officers, Barclay 

chose a favorable wind and sailed out to meet Perry on the morning of September 10. 

With the wind coming out of the northwest, the U.S. fleet struggled for two hours to form 

 4 Robert S. Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812: An Operational and Command Study (East 

Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997), 198-200; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 275-293. 5 Skaggs and Gerard T. Altoff, A Signal Victory: The Lake Erie Campaign, 1812-1813 (Annapolis: Naval 

Institute Press, 1997), 81-89, 94-117. 6 On cameling and Perry’s movements, see Walter P. Rybka, The Lake Erie Campaign of 1813: I Shall 

Fight Them This Day (Charleston: The History Press, 2012), 47-49. Also, Skaggs and Altoff, A Signal 

Victory, 94-117.
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a line and a frustrated Perry ordered a return to Put-in-Bay. Before the order could be 

executed, however, the wind shifted 180 degrees. Perry quickly reversed his order and 

now—with the wind at his back—proceeded to close on the enemy. The British 

triumphed in the first engagement, and fully expected the U.S. fleet to surrender. Perry 

instead chose to leave his incapacitated flagship and was rowed to his second brig, the 

Niagara, where he hoisted his flag and recommenced the Battle of Lake Erie. Mostly 

unscathed, the Niagara and two small gunboats were able to sail past and fire at will on 

the badly damaged British fleet. Barely able to maneuver, and their remaining guns 

greatly outmatched by the unscathed ships under Perry’s command, the British were cut 

to pieces and eventually surrendered by mid-afternoon.7

Figure 8.1: Routes and Movements of Military and Naval Forces in the Spring 

and Summer of 1813. Closely adapted from a map in Richard V. Barbuto, The Canadian 

Theater, 1813 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, United States Army, 2013), 33.

Denouement

With this victory, the U.S. could move supplies and troops at will on western 

Lake Erie. The British and their Native allies, however, were almost completely cut-off 

 7 Skaggs and Altoff, A Signal Victory, 118-147.
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from the rest of Upper and Lower Canada. The only viable route to the east involved a 

long and difficult land route up the Thames River Valley. With his situation now crystal 

clear, Procter immediately began preparing for a mass overland retreat from Detroit, Fort 

Amherstburg, and Malden to Burlington Heights (present-day Hamilton, Ontario) at the 

western end of Lake Ontario. As the British began organizing and packing military 

stores, baggage, and supplies for transport on small vessels to Sandwich and the mouth of 

the Thames, they were interrupted by Confederacy leaders who had not heard the repot of 

Barclay’s defeat. Seeing these sudden preparations, they chastised Procter for abandoning 

the alliance and accused him of cowardice. Speaking for many, Tecumseh demanded that 

Fort Amherstburg and its artillery be left to the Confederacy to defend themselves against 

the U.S. The rejoinder to this demand came with crushing news; all the fort’s artillery had 

been used by the British squadron that had just fallen to Commodore Perry, and U.S. 

naval control of Lake Erie made any position in the Detroit River area indefensible. With 

their position now untenable, and their British allies focused on a long and difficult 

retreat, many in the Confederacy soon decided to leave for their home villages with the 

hope that they might fight another day at another place. Of the approximately 3,000 

warriors then in the vicinity of Malden, only a third would ultimately choose to join the 

British retreat and make a stand against Harrison’s army somewhere along the Thames 

River. On the coming days a fair number returnd to their homelands in the north, but 

more than half crossed over to Big Rock (Brownstown) before dispersing to their various 

communities or moving to a new locale to await a change in the winds of war.8

When General Harrison received the news of Perry’s victory, a sizeable part of 

the 5,000-strong Army of the Northwest was encamped on the Portage River near 

Sandusky Bay. Knowing that Procter would be making hasty preparations for a retreat, 

Harrison immediately sought to press his new advantage. To speed the process, he chose 

to leave most of his army’s artillery behind—thus simplifying the transport process 

across the lake and ensuring his forces would be as light and mobile as possible in their 

pursuit of Procter. Available boats were sent up the Maumee River to ferry soldiers from 

Fort Meigs, while those encamped on the Portage River made ready for a departure from 

present-day Port Clinton, Ohio. It took ten days to organize, equip, and ready these 

various elements of the Army of the Northwest, along with 250 American Indian allies. 

Among the latter were Wyandot, Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), and Onöndowága: 

(Seneca) from Upper Sandusky, as well as Shawnee from Wapakoneta. Except for a 

regiment of Kentucky mounted volunteers, who travelled around the western shore of 

Lake Erie, all of Harrison’s army arrived at the Bass Islands between September 20 and 

22. After a two-day delay caused by foul weather, the entire force was then moved to 

Middle Sister Island on September 25. The following day, Commodore Perry and 

General Harrison reconnoitered the mouth of the Detroit River and discovered that the 

last elements of Procter’s command were just then evacuating Fort Amherstburg. They 

 8 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 295-311; Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 204-09, 269-274; 

George B. Catlin, The Story of Detroit (Detroit: Detroit News, 1923), 181-182; John Sugden, Tecumseh's 

Last Stand (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 62-71. In a letter to President Madison, Colonel 

Richard M. Johnson estimated that more than half of the Native Confederacy’s entire fighting force was 

then in the vicinity of Big Rock (Brownstown). Johnson to James Madison, [ca. September, 27] 1813, in 

The Papers of James Madison, Presidential Series, vol. 6, 8 February–24 October 1813, ed. Angela 

Kreider et al (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 660–61.
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also located a suitable landing area about three miles south of Malden, and determined to 

bring U.S. forces over to the Canadian shore within the next twenty-four hours.9

On the morning of September 27, with his entire army crowded onto a small, 8.5-

acre island and making ready for the invasion of Canada, Harrison issued a General 

Order that made pointed reference to the events of January 1813 along the River Raisin.

The General entreats his brave troops to remember that they are sons of 

sires whose fame is immortal: that they fight for the rights of their insulted 

country, whilst their opponents combat for the unjust pretensions of a 

master.

Kentuckians! –remember the river Raisin, but remember it only whilst the 

victory is suspended. The revenge of a soldier cannot be gratified of a 

fallen enemy.10

The message served as both an inspiration and a warning for the coming days. 

The first sentence neatly encapsulated the basic tenets of President Madison’s war 

message from the previous year. Namely, that the Army of the Northwest was charged 

with defending the honor and freedom of the United States against the aggressions of the 

same King George III, and the same kind of British-Native alliance, that had inspired 

their fathers to fight in the Revolutionary War. Harrison then turned to the more 

immediate passions that would inspire the pursuit and conflict in the days to come; 

namely, revenge for those who died at Frenchtown. The last line of the order, which 

alluded to mutilation of the dead, likely had several meanings for General Harrison. Like 

most every senior officer, he viewed such behavior as dishonorable. Yet he also knew 

that men under his command had taken these actions in previous engagements, and that 

the practice was not an uncommon expectation among the various Kentucky militia units 

then assembled on Middle Sister Island. Moreover, Harrison also knew that mutilation of 

the dead would elicit fierce retributions from Native warriors—and thus unnecessarily 

prolong the war. Lastly, Harrison expected that the General Order would still be ignored 

by some—and likely wanted to ensure that he was on record as forbidding the practice in 

case there was some future inquiry on the conduct of the war.11

As the Army of the Northwest was making its way across Lake Erie, Colonel 

Richard M. Johnson’s Kentucky Mounted Riflemen travelled around Maumee Bay was 

heading north toward Detroit. Along with former Michigan militiamen from the 

Frenchtown settlement they met along the way, Johnson’s regiment arrived at the River 

Raisin on September 27. On the north side of the river, near the area that had been the

core of Frenchtown, they found the remains of a dozen or so bodies and placed them in a 

 9 Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 269-270, 274; Edmunds, R. David. “Forgotten Allies: The 

Loyal Shawnees and the War of 1812,” in The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754–1814, eds. 

David Curtis Skaggs and Larry L. Nelson (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001), 345–50. 

Antal, A Wampum Denied, 261. 10 “General Order,” in John Brannan, ed., Official Letters of Military and Naval Officers of the United 

States During the War with Great Britain in the Years 1812, 13, 14, & 15, with Some Additional Letters 

and Documents Elucidating the History of That Period (Washington: Way & Gideon, 1823), 224-225. 11 Robert M. Owens, Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American 

Indian Policy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011), 227-230; Skaggs, William Henry Harrison, 

164, 193, 201-202, 212-213.
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mass grave. These were likely the remains of the Kentuckians who had been killed during 

the First Battle of the River Raisin, and were buried together on January 19. Sometime in 

the ensuing weeks or months, as Confederacy warriors moved through or sojourned in 

Frenchtown, these remains were disinterred and scattered as retribution for the previous 

treatment of Native remains at Frenchtown on January 18 and attacks on Native 

communities along the upper Wabash the previous December. It is very likely that these 

were the same set of remains that was reburied in June 1813 by a small detachment 

Johnson had sent to Frenchtown for that purpose. In either case, the burial or reburial of 

these remains must have deeply affected Johnson’s men deeply as they competed their 

task, conducted a brief ceremony, then rode north to avenge the dead and their 

desecration.12

By the time Johnson’s volunteers arrived in Detroit, the troops that had been 

ferried over from Lower Sandusky were establishing garrisons at Detroit, Sandwich 

(present-day Windsor, Ontario), and Fort Amherstburg—and the army’s lead forces were 

already moving up the Thames River. A week later, on October 4, the bulk of the army—

which now included Johnson’s regiment—came within striking distance of the retreating 

British-Native Confederacy near Moraviantown (present-day Chatham, Ontario). The 

following afternoon Harrison arrayed his combined forces, which numbered more than 

3,500, against an allied force of the 450 infantrymen and militia who were well enough to 

bear arms, and another 500-800 Confederacy warriors. Rallying to the cry of “Remember 

the Raisin!” Johnson’s mounted riflemen took the lead and instantly routed the British 

forces who tried to make a stand in the middle of the road. Confederacy warriors, using 

the cover of wooded marshlands, managed to hold off the onslaught for about thirty 

minutes before withdrawing. Because the battle was so brief, casualties were low and 

generally equal on all sides—but the U.S. victory was absolute. Along with the lopsided 

numbers arrayed against each other, the best measure of the outcome is in the accounting 

of British captured. Because these included men who were too ill or weak to bear arms, 

the total number of prisoners taken from the field outnumbered Procter’s actual fighting 

force by more than 100. In a matter of minutes, as British Colonel Robert Young noted in 

one of the earliest reports of the brief battle, “General Procter’s army [was] completely 

annihilated.”13

Procter and some of his staff managed to escape capture, as did a mixed group of 

panicked soldiers, camp followers, and the infirm. Together they numbered 200, and their 

pell-mell retreat eventually gave way to a hasty but disordered march toward Burlington 

Heights at the western end of Lake Ontario (present-day Hamilton, Ontario). American 

 12 Ralph Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides: The Story of Michigan's Greatest Battlefield Scene of the 

Engagements at Frenchtown and the River Raisin in the War of 1812 (Marceline, MO: Walsworth 

Publishing Co., 2008), 288-89; G. Glenn Clift, Remember the Raisin! Kentucky and Kentuckians in the 

Battles and Massacre at Frenchtown, Michigan Territory, in the War of 1812 (Frankfort: Kentucky 

Historical Society, 1961), 101-104; and Dennis Au, “Captain Hart’s Jawbone,” 5—and brief essay attached 

to the end of Au, War on the Raisin: A Narrative Account of the War of 1812 in the River Raisin 

Settlement, Michigan Territory (Monroe, Mich.: Monroe County Historical Commission, 1981). 13 Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies

(New York: Vintage, 2011), 240-246, 420-426; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 331-349; Sugden, Tecumseh's 

Last Stand, 105-135; 234-239. Quotation is from Colonel Robert Young to Major-General John Vincent, 

October 9, 1813, in Cruikshank, ed. The Documentary History of the Campaign Upon the Niagara Frontier 

in the Year 1813, Part III (Welland: Lundy’s Lane Historical Society, 1905), 222.
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Indians generally left the Thames River in two directions, with most heading toward their 

homes to the northwest and west, while perhaps 400 took the road eastward toward Lake 

Ontario. Given the magnitude of the defeat, the fleeing British believed that U.S. forces 

were in pursuit, and might even attack Burlington Heights. However, such fears proved 

unwarranted. General Harrison certainly hoped to capture Procter, and sent a detachment 

on what proved a fruitless endeavor, but his army was not prepared for a long 

campaign—let alone an assault against fortified positions on the Niagara Peninsula. 

Though Harrison’s stores were temporarily filled with pillaged supplies, these would be 

soon depleted while traversing the more barren and less populated areas along the 

eastward route, especially with winter coming soon. An even more pressing concern 

related to the sixty-day enlistment period of most of the Kentucky militias, who were 

anxious to return south for harvest.14

Despite failing to capture Procter and his command, the Battle of the Thames was 

an enormous triumph for Harrison’s forces. Though casualties were low on all sides, the 

U.S. scored a significant tactical victory. Harrison’s army recovered six cannon near 

Moraviantown, and had found two 24-pounder field artillery pieces while traveling up the 

Thames. Along with this artillery, U.S. forces also captured the better part of 5,000 small 

arms—most of which having previously been “taken by the enemy at the surrender of 

Detroit, at the river raisin and Colo. Dudley’s defeat.”15 The capture of nearly all the 

stores of the retreating British provided a welcome boost for Harrison’s command in the 

Detroit River area, while victory on the battlefield promised a less taxing winter in terms 

of further war preparations. Sweeping the British and the Native Confederacy from 

Amherstburg was certainly the most significant result of the battle, and completely 

altered the strategic calculus of the war in the Northwest Theater. The British-Native 

alliance was severed, and two of the most renowned leaders of the Native Confederacy—

Tecumseh and Stayehgtha—were among the dead. While their bodies were reported 

hidden or removed from the battle area, other corpses (believed to be theirs) were 

mutilated, then stripped of flesh, hair, clothing, and accoutrements to become prized 

trophies of war. For all its suddenness and short duration, the victory on the Thames was 

viewed by Kentuckians and the rest of Harrison’s army as the finale of a long, violent 

struggle against their “ancient enemy ... of Americans and Kentuckians.” “To them,” as 

the Canadian historian Sandy Antal states, “Procter and Tecumseh represented the final 

obstacle to occupation of the old Northwest. This immense territory was opened up for 

settlement largely through the blood of the hardy Kentuckians.”16

 14 Harrison’s concerns can be gleaned from several testimonial letters that defended him against charges 

that he was negligent in failing to pursue and capture General Procter. See “Extract from the Deposition of 

Major [John] Chambers, [n.d.],” 566; “Extract from the Deposition of Colonel [C. S.] Todd, [no date],” 

566; “Extract from Lewis Cass to Harrison, August 31, 1817,” 566-67; “Extract from Governor Isaac 

Shelby to Harrison, April 21, 1816,” 567-569; all in Messages and Letters of William Henry Harrison, vol. 

2. Part 2. Harrison’s initial battle report in “Harrison to John Armstrong, October 9, 1813,” op. cit. 558-65. 15 Harrison to Armstrong, 565. 16 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 348-49. Quotation on “ancient enemy” is from the speech made by Captain 

William Lewis just before the battle of January 18, 1813, in which he referenced the send-off speech of 

Kentucky Representative Henry Clay in Georgetown the previous August; in “Recollections of the Late 

War, the River Raisin Battle,” Kentucky Yeoman (Frankfort), May 7, 1833; reprinted in Federal Writers’ 

Project. Military History of Kentucky, Chronologically Arranged (Frankfort, KY: State Journal, 1939), 82.
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Figure 8.2: “A View of Co. Johnson’s Engagement with the [Indians] 

(Commanded by Tecumseth) near the Moravian Town, October 5, 181[3].”

Colored woodcut from Henry Trumbull, History of the Indian Wars (Boston: J.P. Peaslee, 

1828). Rather than presenting one scene, the image depicts different episodes during the brief 

battle. The final episode shows Colonel Johnson, on horseback, striking Tecumseh with a 

sword. This same woodcut was first used in an 1819 edition. Source: Library of Congress.

The Kentuckians who were at the Battle of the Thames knew they would be 

celebrated as heroes when they returned home, and several parlayed their service into 

successful political careers in their home state. They had avenged their fellows who died 

at Frenchtown and Fort Meigs, proven the boasts of Henry Clay, and now the great 

Tecumseh who had so long opposed them was dead. On the return south, however, these 

triumphant sentiments would be tempered by a somber task: giving the rites of sepulture 

to the prisoners who were killed on January 23. For more than seven months their 

remains, along with the bodies of the few who died within the core area of Frenchtown, 

had been left in the open and scattered by hogs. The Native warriors who did the killing 

on the 23rd most certainly warned the habitants against “burying the dead,” and later 

reports from the settlement confirmed “that the Indians would [still] not suffer it.” Some 

corpses were buried or at least covered by the habitants along the river bank or the woods 

on the south side of the Raisin where U.S. casualties were heaviest, but on the north side 

of the river only the bodies of a few officers and the remains of two men who had 

perished in a torched house were surreptitiously buried. Consequently, the burnt out 

remains of Frenchtown’s core area still presented a horrid scene and a haunting warning 

near Hull’s Trace.17

 17 Au, War on the Raisin, Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 288-89; Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 101-103. 

Quotations from report of Ensign Isaac L. Baker to General Winchester, February 26, 1813 in American 

State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, Vol. 1, Military 
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On October 15, five regiments of Kentucky militia, led by Governor of Kentucky 

Isaac Shelby, returned to the River Raisin. As Major William Trigg recalled soon after, 

“over the field of battle at that place a scene was presented that will be long affecting to 

the sensibility of Kentuckians—the unburied bones or our countrymen were every where 

[sic] to be seen.” Governor Shelby then directed a large detail to perform “the 

melancholy duty of interring the remains! By [them] and some others of the army, the 

remains of sixty-five were collected and buried in the best manner our situation would 

permit, with the customary honors of war.” Trigg then closed with an observation that it 

“is some consolation to think that they are buried by the hands that had first, in some 

degree, revenged their death.”18

Fractured Alliance

The Battle of the Thames was not the final death knell of the Native Confederacy, 

but it did lead to a dramatic fracturing of the alliance. A number of communities from 

western Lake Erie to southern Lake Michigan withdrew from the ongoing conflicts, while 

groups from west of Lake Michigan allied with the British to repel U.S. incursions at Fort 

Mackinac and Fort Prairie du Chien on the Upper Mississippi. Northern Anishinaabeg 

(primarily Odawa and Ojibwe) also travelled eastward to fight with the British military 

and Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) against U.S. forces along the Niagara Peninsula. By late 

November 1813, Governor Prévost (with the support of Secretary of War Henry 

Bathurst) pushed forward plans to reconstitute the British-Native alliance in Upper 

Canada and Michigan. The following February, Prévost and other officials hosted lavish 

councils in York (present-day Toronto) and Montreal that included leaders from various 

groups of Odawa, Ojibwe, Shawnee, Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), Hoocąągra (HoChunk or Winnebago), Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) Thâkîwa (Sauk, or Sac), Meskwaki (Fox), 

and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), and honored the memory of Tecumseh with the presence 

of his son Paukeesa as well as his sister Tecumapease.19

At a council in York, Naiwash, the Odawa war leader and fervent ally of 

Tecumseh, presented Prévost with a black belt of wampum that called for a renewal of 

war in the west. Prévost responded in lengthy but positive terms. Noting that “Our Great 

father considers you as his children,” he affirmed that together “we must make great 

exertions ... [to] preserve what we hold and recover from the enemy what belongs to us.” 

With your “undaunted courage” and “the assistance of my chiefs [officers] and warriors 

[soldiers], we shall drive the Big Knives from of all your lands the ensuing summer.” 

Prévost then shared the promising news that, with the collapse of Napoleon’s army in 

Europe, “our Great Father will give us more warriors [soldiers] ... who will join us in 

attacking the enemy and will open the great road to your country.”20 Though Prévost did 

 

Affairs, no. 1 (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1832), 370; hereafter cited as ASP, vol. number, and subtitle, 

(i.e., ASP, vol. 1, Military Affairs,). 18 “Extract of a letter from major William Trigg, to the editors of the Frankfort Argus, dated Chilllicothe, 

Oct. 22, 1813,” The American Weekly Messenger; or, Register of State Papers, History and Politics, for 

1813-14, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: John Conrad, 1814), in 157. Also see Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 102-103. 19 Sugden, Tecumseh’s Last Stand, 195-97; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 384-88. 20 Sugden, Tecumseh's Last Stand, 196-98; quotations on pp. 196-7. Also see Lieut. Gen Drummond to 

Secretary Freer, York Feb. 16th 1814, in Historical Collections: Collections and Researches Made by the 

Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society, vol. 15 (Lansing: Darius D. Thorp, 1889), 491-92.
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not share it at the time, the British already had a plan to recapture Detroit and regain 

control of Lake Erie. Two strike forces with a combined strength of nearly 1,800 would 

move along the shore of Lake Erie and destroy the iced-in fleets of the U.S. Navy, while 

another would race overland by sleighs and capture Malden, Sandwich, and Detroit. The 

goal was to complete both operations by the end of February, but an unusually warm 

winter stymied both plans. Without sufficient lake ice the U.S. fleet could not be 

approached and would be able to set sail if necessary, and a lack of snow made sleighs 

useless as the overland route became a vast stretch of mud.21

Following the abandonment of both winter strikes, Lieutenant Governor George 

Drumond proposed sending a detachment of troops recently transferred from Europe to 

escort “about 200 warriors ... to their brethren in the westward, with an ample supply of 

Powder & Ball.” In expectation of this delivery, about 1,200-1,300 warriors aligned with 

Main Poc came near Detroit “where they waited sometime in expectation that the British 

Troops would return.” However, this expedition also came to naught after the Battle of 

Longwoods, where U.S. troops routed a British and Native force on the upper Thames 

River. With the area around London still contested and the Thames River Valley made 

barren by U.S. foraging parties, Drumond’s plan became untenable. As Matthew Elliott 

explained, Native leaders refused

to proceed with the ammunition on the ground that our regular troops do 

not advance further than the Settlements on the River Thames, and of 

course would be of no use in protecting their friends, in the enemie’s 

country. The Americans might hear of these supplies being sent to the 

Indians & the consequence would be fatal, perhaps to their whole Tribes. –

They would therefore rather suffer for want of ammunition, than endanger 

themselves or their families.22

“I wish to remain at peace; I wish to remain neutral”

In the months after the Battle of the Thames, as elements of the Confederacy and 

British officials sought to combine their strategies and forces in the east, the United 

States resumed its pre-war policies of treaty-making in the west. With General Harrison 

once again at the forefront, a council was held at Greenville in July 1814 with a gathering 

of Wyandot, Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), Shawnee, Odawa, Ökwe'öwé (SenecaCayuga; aka, “Mingo”) from Sandusky, Myaamia (Miami), Bodéwadmi (Potawotami), 

and Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo). All were represented by leaders who had either worked with 

 21 Drummond to Sir George Prévost, February 19th 1814,” Historical Collections, vol. 15, 492-93; Antal, A 

Wampum Denied, 378-79. It is worth noting the profound effect that climate had on the course of the War 

of 1812 in the Great Lakes. Like the brutally cold winter of 1812-13 that so challenged Winchester’s 

forces, the warm winter of 1813-14 undermined British war plans to retake the Detroit River area. An 

extreme shift in the El Niño Southern Oscillation (El Niño/La Niña) resulted in a very strong La Niña in 

1812-1813 that was followed by an equally strong El Niño the next winter. The proximity and intensity of 

these two climate events has few equals over the past three centuries. See Joëlle L. Gergis·and Anthony M. 

Fowler, “A History of ENSO Events Since A.D. 1525: Implications for Future Climate Change,” Climatic 

Change 92 (February 2009): 343-387. 22 Quotations, in order, are from Drumond to Prévost, March 5, 1814; W. Claus, “Report from the Indian 

Department;” and Elliott to Col. Stewart, March 4, 1814—all in Historical Collections, vol. 15, 503-04, 

553-54, and 497-98. Also see Antal, A Wampum Denied, 380. London is near the headwaters of the 

Thames River, about halfway between Toronto and Detroit.
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the United States, disavowed the Confederacy, or struggled to remain neutral during the 

previous three years of conflict. Given these various dispositions, and the absence of any 

particular alliance among these groups, there was some confusion about the purpose of 

the council. Harrison emulated his former commanding officer, General Wayne, and 

sought to cultivate good relations with gifts and an unhurried schedule of meetings that 

allowed each group to counsel among themselves. While accommodating the diplomatic 

norms of Native councils was helpful, and affirmed the peaceful intentions of the council, 

it did little to clarify the purpose of this gathering. Harrison was joined in these efforts by 

Lewis Cass, who had served as Colonel of the 3rd Ohio Volunteers at the outset of the war 

on the Detroit River and later served as Brigadier General in Harrison’s reconsitituted 

Northwest Army. In recognition of these services, and just a few weeks after Harrison 

praised his leadership during the Battle of the Thames, Cass was appointed Governor of 

the Michigan Territory by President Madison.23

Over the course of several days Harrison and Governor Cass made several 

speeches about the justice of past treaties, the generosity of the president, the duplicity of 

the British, and the reasons why the United States had gone to war with Great Britain and 

the Confederacy. When asked to make comments on these matters, Native leaders 

declined to respond since they could not identify any particular issue to negotiate or 

concede. Finally, after more than a week of meetings, P'Koum-Kwa (aka Pacanne)

expressed general exasperation: “you ask the reason why your children will not speak, 

and we know not what you wish us to say; but let us know what you have to propose, and 

then we will answer.” P'Koum-Kwa then offered a brief explanation of his own difficult 

position at the council, since the war had forced his people to “live between two fires” 

after their villages were attacked by Harrison’s troops on the Mississinewa. Over the 

course of the war he variously sought accommodation with the United States and the 

British, while maintaining some distance from the Confederacy, but neither strategy 

proved satisfactory or useful. He then reminded Harrison that “you have frequently told 

us you loved us, we also have loved you, but you have deceived us, as also the [British] 

people on the other side.” “Since we have come together here,” he continued, “you have 

not come to the point with us; you too, seem not to speak plain to us; ... and [know] 

father I have told you the minds of our warriors; the Kickapoos and Pattawatamy 

warriors are of the same mind as the Miamies.”24

This speech broke a log jam in the council proceedings and caused other 

representatives to challenge Harrison directly over the course of the next two days. Citing 

previous incidents where the U.S. wanted their communities to remain neutral in the war 

 23 The council would become formally known in the United States as “A treaty of peace and friendship 

between the United States of America, and the tribes of Indians called the Wyandots, Delawares, 

Shawanoese, Senecas, and Miamies;” see “Treaty with the Wyandot, etc., 1814,” in Charles J. Kappler, ed., 

Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 2: 105-

06. The Ökwe'öwé (Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”) were always identified as “Seneca” in this and 

subsequent treaties. On Cass’s service during the War of 1812, see Willard Carl Klunder, Lewis Cass and 

the Politics of Moderation (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1996), 9-14. 24 “Journal of the proceedings of the commissioners plenipotentiary, appointed on behalf of the United 

States of America, to treat with the Northwestern tribes of Indians,” in American State Papers: Documents, 

Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, Vol. 4, Indian Affairs (ASPIA), no. 1 

(Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1832), 831-32; hereafter cited as ASP, vol. number, and subtitle, (i.e., ASP, 

vol. 4, Indian Affairs).
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with Great Britain, Wyandot, Bodéwadmi, Kiikaapoi, and Myaamia leaders openly 

questioned the implied purpose of the treaty council—which increasingly seemed less 

about establishing peace than forcing the assembled nations to form a military alliance 

with the United States. Ktunga (aka Charley), a Myaamia leader from Eel River, told 

Harrison that he meant to “take fast hold of your whole hand ... to now tell you, I wish to 

remain at peace; I wish to remain neutral alongside you.”25

As he had done in earlier treaty councils, Harrison singled out Ktunga and the 

Myaamia as bent on undermining the council and demanded they be rejected by all the 

other assembled delegations. Governor Cass also spoke sharply to Ktunga, but sought to 

ease tensions and allow all to save face. Toward these ends he alluded to the earlier 

requests that U.S. officials made regarding Native neutrality in 1811. At that time the 

United States “needed no assistance from them” to fight the British, and the same was 

still true. However, Cass stated that he was well aware of their “restless dispositions, that 

they could not remain neutral, that their young men and warriors could not be restrained, 

and if not for us, would be against us.” In other words, an alliance was merely an 

insurance against future conflict between the gathered groups and the United States as 

well as an invitation to channel “restless dispositions” against the Confederacy or the 

British as they saw fit. The council finally came to a close after three weeks, and resulted 

in a fairly straightforward agreement for the assembled Native nations to aid the United 

States through the remainder of the war and to not treat for peace with Great Britain.26

“twilight’s last gleaming”

Aside from a few raids on isolated farmsteads, and the summer engagements at 

Prairie du Chien and Mackinac noted above, conflict in the upper Ohio Valley, Michigan 

Territory, and the western district of Upper Canada (present-day Ontario) had effectively 

ended by the spring of 1814. And with the conclusion of the second Greenville Treaty in 

late July, the chance of reconstituting some version of the fractured Confederacy was 

effectively over. Even the once dim hope of the alliance that Tecumseh pursued with the 

Mvskoke (Muscogee or Creek) became an impossibility in March 1814. At a place called 

Tohopeka, where the Talapoosa River makes a sweeping horseshoe bend, an army of 

Tennessee militia led by General Andrew Jackson destroyed a force of more than 1,000 

Mvskoke warriors—and subsequently forced the Mvskoke to cede twenty-three million 

acres in what is now Alabama and Georgia. With the exception of Jackson’s campaign in 

the South, which was less about the war with Great Britain than it was a campaign 

against Spanish Florida, the Mvskoke, the remainder of the War of 1812 had become 

concentrated in the eastern theater and along the Atlantic seaboard.27

 25 Ibid., 833. 26 Ibid., 833-34. The concluding statements of the treaty council are on pp. 835-36. Also see “Treaty with 

the Wyandot, etc., 1814,” in Laws and Treaties, 105-06; and Robert M. Owens, Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: 

William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy (Norman: University of Oklahoma 

Press, 2011), 237-39. 27 Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 739-40, 746-50; William A. Hunter, “History of the Ohio 

Valley,” in Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15: Northeast, 592-93; Lyle M. Stone and 

Donald Chaput, “History of the Upper Great Lakes Area,” Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 

15: Northeast, 607-609; Ove Jensen, “Horseshoe Bend: A Living Memorial,” in Tohopeka: Rethinking the 
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Figure 8.3: Major Campaigns in the Eastern Theater, 1814. Detail from 

“Principal Campaigns, War of 1812,” United States Military Academy, Department of 

History <http://www.usma.edu/history/SiteAssets/SitePages/War%20of%201812.aspx>.

Some of the largest and deadliest campaigns of the entire war occurred in the 

summer of 1814. These included the Battle of Chippawa, the Siege of Fort Erie, the 

Battle of Lundy’s Lane, and the Battle of Lake Champlain. Though each engagement 

proved a tactical victory for one side or the other, the combined result of these conflicts 

amounted to a deadly and costly strategic draw. On land, and particularly along the 

Niagara Peninsula and the St. Lawrence River, the British and the United States were 

evenly matched.28 However, the British possessed a distinct naval advantage along the 

eastern seaboard—where they blockaded U.S. ports and moved almost unopposed 

through Chesapeake Bay. In late August troops from the British Army and Royal Marines 

overwhelmed U.S. militia forces and took Washington, D.C., where they burned the 

White House, Capitol, Navy Yard, and other federal buildings. These actions were more 

symbolic than strategic, and partly served to avenge the destruction of York (the 

provincial capital of Upper Canada) the previous year. In mid-September, the British 

bombarded Fort McHenry in an effort to take Baltimore Harbor, but were thwarted by 

U.S. defenses. Coming so soon after the burning of Washington, this successful defense 

was celebrated as an important victory that found its most lasting expression in Francis 

Scott Key’s “Star Spangled Banner.”29

 

Creek War and the War of 1812, ed. Kathryn E. Holland Braund (Auburn: University of Alabama Press, 

2012), 146-157. 28 David Heidler and Jeanne Heidler, Old Hickory's War: Andrew Jackson and the Quest for Empire (Baton 

Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2003) 22-37; Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 187-93. 29 Ibid., 196-204.
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Even as these actions were underway, the United States and the United Kingdom 

had begun peace negotiations in the Belgian city of Ghent in August. The appeal of a 

negotiated end to the war was rooted in concerns about Europe and the vicissitudes of 

war in North America. The dramatic increase in the number of resources, troops, and 

ships that Great Britain was able to bring to the North American conflict promised to 

extend a war that might well tear the United States apart. On the other hand, a prolonged 

war could only add to the staggering debt that Great Britain had taken on during the 

Napoleonic Wars. Moreover, the reduction of British forces in Europe might leave the 

continent vulnerable to more conflict—which ultimately proved true when Napoleon 

escaped imprisonment and returned to France in March 1815. Yet both sides still wanted 

to gain a distinct territorial advantage in order to negotiate a treaty that was more 

favorable to their position.30

Figure 8.4: Major Campaigns in the Southern Theater, 1813-14. Detail from 

“Principal Campaigns, War of 1812,” United States Military Academy, Department of 

History <http://www.usma.edu/history/SiteAssets/SitePages/War%20of%201812.aspx>.

Toward these more limited ends, the British developed plans for a two-pronged 

campaign in the South: a large force would land at Savannah then push westward toward 

the lower Mississippi, and another would take New Orleans. The goal was not to 

permanently occupy the Gulf region, but to hold territory and strangle western commerce 

via the Mississippi River in order to gain concessions at Ghent. The planned invasion of 

Savannah was delayed, but the British arrived at the Mississippi River Delta in midDecember. Opposing this offensive was a mixed array of U.S. regulars and southern state 

 30 Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 417-19; Hickey, The War of 1812, 293-96.
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militias under the command of General Andrew Jackson. After a few smaller 

engagements to the south of the city, the British attempt to take New Orleans commenced 

on January 8, 1815. Though greatly outnumbered, U.S. forces were both resourceful and 

bold in their defense of New Orleans. By anticipating and exploiting British lapses, 

Jackson and his officers turned the battle to their advantage and won a smashing victory 

on January 18. It was a stunning defeat of battle tested British soldiers, whose losses were 

more than thirty times greater than the U.S. forces.31

Though spectacular, the U.S. victory at the Battle of New Orleans ultimately had 

no bearing on the war or the treaty negotiations that formally brought it to an end. The 

Treaty of Ghent had already been signed on December 24, 1814, and was subsequently 

ratified by unanimous consent in the U.S. Senate. Its terms reflected the exhausting 

irresolution of the war, which—as the treaty’s preamble stated—had made “His Britannic 

Majesty and the United States of America desirous of terminating the war which has 

unhappily subsisted between the two Countries, and of restoring upon principles of 

perfect reciprocity, Peace, Friendship, and good Understanding between them.” With 

neither party admitting fault, nor addressing the primary issues of impressment and free 

maritime trade in the U.S. declaration of war, the Treaty of Ghent amounted to a return to 

status quo ante bellum (the state existing before war)—with all territories, prisoners, and 

properties taken during the war to be returned in due course. In short, the signatories were 

ready to accept stalemate as the better part of valor. For the British negotiators and their 

government, a treaty of peace provided an escape from a costly and increasingly 

unpopular war that drew their attentions away from Continental Europe, while U.S. 

officials saw the treaty as a face-saving exit from a war that, in the words of Maryland 

Republican Joseph Hopper Nicholson, was no longer “for ‘free trade and sailors’ rights,’ 

not for the conquest of the Canadas, but for our national existence.” 32

In a remarkable coincidence of delayed communications, news of the concluded 

treaty negotiations in Ghent did not reach the Gulf Coast until mid-February—at about 

the same time that the treaty was being ratified by the Senate and not long after news of 

the battle’s outcome reached Washington, DC. As the final notice from an already 

concluded war, however, the Battle of New Orleans became a victorious touchstone for 

subsequent memories of the war. As the historian Matthew Dennis notes, the War of 

1812 amounted to a costly and painful “split decision” that “Americans were generally 

happy to accept” in January 1815. However, the news from New Orleans helped redefine 

the war “as a glorious victory, a heroic defense of the United States.”33 Jackson and his 

army embodied the ingenuity and pluck of the underdog, as well as the character and 

resolve that would shape the nation’s future greatness. These would prove the most 

lasting sentiments of the war, and instantly gave rise to boasts of beating “at every 

 31 Hickey, The War of 1812, 206-214. 32 Quotations from “Treaty of Peace and Amity between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of 

America,” Treaty of Ghent, 1814; National Archives online; Our Documents

<https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=20> (accessed October 22, 2016); and Joseph H. Nicholson 

to William Jones, May 20, 1814, quoted in Hickey, The War of 1812, 182. Also see Taylor, Civil War of 

1812, 411-419; Hickey, The War of 1812, 287-93; and Willard Sterne Randall, “A Clumsy War, a Lasting 

Peace: The Treaty of Ghent,” The Quarterly Journal of Military History, 27 (Spring 2015): 30-41. 33 Matthew Dennis, “Reflections on a Bicentennial: The War of 1812 in American Public Memory,” Early 

American Studies, 12 (Spring 2014): 269-300 –quotation on p. 275.
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opportunity, Wellington’s Veterans!” and having “unqueened the self-stiled [sic] Queen 

of the Ocean.” Similar sentiments would take hold in British North America as well, 

where successful defenses against repeated U.S. actions along the Niagara Penninsula 

and St. Lawrence River would foster a nascent sense of Canadian national identity.34

A Separate War, and a Separate Peace

Alan Taylor has quipped that the “War of 1812 looms small in American 

memory,” but selective national amnesia did not set in for some time. Jackson used his 

exploits at New Orleans to ascend to the presidency in 1828, and contrasted his war 

triumphs against President John Quincy Adams’ former role as a supposedly weak 

negotiator in Ghent. Other presidents and vice presidents successfully campaigned on 

their service in the War of 1812, including Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson, 

President William Henry Harrison, his Vice President and successor John Tyler, and 

President Zachary Taylor—who first made a name for himself during the siege of Fort 

Harrison. Except for Johnson, who was born in Kentucky, all of these men were from the 

Virginia Piedmont region, and all lived and served in the Northwest theater of the War of 

1812. The same was true for several veterans of the Kentucky Militia, who had successful 

political careers as governors, U.S. senators, U.S. representatives, and members of the 

state legislature. Even the dead were written into the political landscape, with nine 

Kentucky counties named after men who died at Frenchtown. Although memories of the 

War of 1812 soon faded in the rest of the United States, the western war still loomed 

large in the state’s collective memory.35

Though not as frequently, nor as long as in Kentucky, the battles of Frenchtown 

and their aftermath were remembered throughout the United States for several years—not 

least because the defeat was so destructive, fatal, and complete. Yet the larger historical 

context of the battles and their aftermath gave them particular meaning in the states that

were formed out of the Northwest Territory. U.S. citizens and political leaders in 

Kentucky, Ohio, and the Indiana Territory were the loudest advocates of a war between 

1809 and 1812—and they clearly understood their motives in a broader historical context. 

Since the onset of the Seven Years’ War (aka French and Indian War), conflict in the 

region invariably conflated imperial and Indigenous opposition to the goals of EuroAmerican land seekers. These goals were pursued, fought for, and often thwarted during 

the American Revolution and through all but the final conflict in what became known as 

the Nothwest Indian Wars (1785-1795). The Confederacy that grew up around 

Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh was a new manifestation of this old dynamic, which U.S. 

citizens west of the Alleghenies characterized in the same terms of “absolute Tyranny” 

 34 Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson: The Course of American Empire, 1767-1821 (Baltimore: Johns 

Hopkins University Press, 1998), 293-96; quotations from Boston Yankee, March 3, 1815, in Remini, 

Andrew Jackson, 295. Also see Hickey, War of 1812, 308-09. On Canadian nationalism and the War of 

1812, see George Sheppard, “‘Deeds speak’: militiamen, medals, and the invented traditions of 1812,” 

Ontario History, 83 (September 1990), 207-232. 35 Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 10; The literature on former presidents is voluminous, but see the entries for 

Harrison, Tyler, and Taylor in John A. Garraty and Eric Foner, eds., The Reader's Companion to American 

History (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 491, 1091-92, and 1060-61. On post-war Kentuckians, see 

Clift, Remember the Raisin!. 107-67, passim. Andrew Jackson was born in southern North Carolina, but the 

other presidents all hailed from Albemarle County, Virginia—where Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, 

and James Monroe had their primary estates and plantations.
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and “merciless savages” that Thomas Jefferson had used in the Declaration of 

Independence. In that regard, especially, this region best fit subsequent characterizations 

of the War of 1812 as a “second war of American independence.”36

While the events along the River Raisin correspond to this idea of a “second war,” 

the same is true of the surrender of Detroit, the Battle of the Thames, the smaller conflicts 

of 1811-1813 in the western Ohio River and upper Mississippi River valleys, and—at 

least tangentially—Perry’s victory on Lake Erie. It is especially worth noting that the 

Battle of the Thames was the only consequential U.S. victory in British North America 

through the entire war, and Perry’s victory (which decisively turned the tide of the war in 

the Detroit River—western Lake Erie region) was the only naval engagement during the 

war that was of immediate and lasting significance. In contrast, the battles on the River 

Raisin and their aftermath mark the zenith of the Native Confederacy and its alliance with 

the British. And if not for the vicissitudes of weather (a sudden change in the wind that 

favored Perry, the heavy rains that soaked Fort Meigs, or the warm winter of 1813-1814), 

the events on the River Raisin may well have shaped a different outcome and altered the 

final terms of the Treaty of Ghent. As it was, however, “Remember the Raisin!” became 

the most potent call for vengeance during the war—and thus had a lasting echo in how 

the war was remembered. Because the memory of the Raisin conflated tragedy with 

triumph—it ennobled a prevailing sense of victory in the years after the war, and allowed 

Americans to forget “how tenuous their ‘victory’ in the West had been.”37

A few years after the Treaty of Ghent took effect, the once uncertain outcome of 

the war almost seemed predestined; if not by divine plan, then through a manifestation of 

a virtuous national character. In 1818 Andrew Griswold Whitney gave the Fourth of July 

Oration in Detroit, and proclaimed to an assembled audience of civic leaders, veterans, 

and other worthies that the “events of the late war have ... not enervated the American 

Character: have not enfeebled the arms nor corrupted the hearts of our soldiers.” Then, in

a direct nod to the "Gentlemen of the Army” in the audience, Whitney gave solemn 

praise: “the events of the late war in which you were engaged has shown that you have 

not studied the deeds of your fathers in vain.... You have repeatedly vanquished the 

veterans of Europe... You have raised the National Character, for valor, to the high 

ground on which it stood at the close of the Revolution. You could not hope to do 

 36 Though common in 20th century texts, one of the earliest uses of the phrase “second war of 

independence” dates to the February 15, 1815 issue of the New York National Advocate: “This second war 

of independence has been illustrated by more splendid achievements than the war of the revolution;” 

quoted in Carol Sue Humphrey, The Press of the Young Republic, 1783-1833 (Westport, Conn.: 

Greenwood Press, 1996), 91. A similar phrase was used some years later in James Fennimore Cooper, 

Notions of the Americans: Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 

1828), 315. One of the clearest echoes of Jefferson’s passage on American Indians in the Declaration of 

Independence came from the Lexington (Kentucky) Reporter on December 10, 1811: “the blood of our 

fellow citizens murdered on the Wabash ... calls aloud for vengeance ... [as] “the SCALPING KNIFE and 

TOMAHAWK of British [Indians], is now, again devastating our frontiers; quoted in Humphrey, The 

Press of the Young Republic, 1783-1833, 87-88. 37 Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 141-143; Dennis, “Reflections on a Bicentennial,” 278-280—quotation on 

p. 278.
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more.”38 While few if any of the veterans would have described their service as a matter 

of repeated vanquishing, most saw their efforts as continuing the work of the 

Revolutionary generation. More specifically, they saw themselves as the men who finally 

destroyed the twin menace of British imperialism and Native independence. For them, to 

remember the Raisin was to know the reason for the war and the meaning of victory.

In this last regard, the crowd that gathered to hear Whitney’s oration was fairly 

unusual. With the exception of similar gatherings that may have occurred in Lexington, 

Vincennes, or Cincinnati, the people in Detroit knew how, why, and what they had won 

in the late war. Indeed, the Northwestern theater was the only area where any of the 

stated objectives of the war had been achieved. Of “the series of acts, hostile to the 

United States as an independent and neutral nation,” that President Madison described in 

his war message to Congress, the only issue the war resolved was “the warfare just 

renewed by the [American Indians] on one of our extensive frontiers; a warfare which 

[has] ... for some time been developing ... among tribes in constant intercourse with 

British traders and garrisons.” Moreover, this complaint was the only one that directly 

shaped the negotiations and final drafting of the Treaty of Ghent.39

Accepting the Unacceptable

During preliminary negotiations through the spring of 1814, British and American 

commissioners expressed their concerns about a host of matters, including fishing rights 

off of Nova Scotia, adjustments to the border between British North America and the 

United States (with President Madison going so far as to suggest the surrender of Upper 

and Lower Canada to the U.S.). All of these issues were non-starters, and served more as 

preliminary tests rather than clear objectives during this informal phase of negotiation. 

Yet the U.S. delegation continued to broach the issue of impressment, even though the 

practice had ceased when Napoleon’s alliance began collapsing on the Continent. It still 

remained a matter of principle for President Madison, however, who wanted to guard 

against further uses of the policy. In response, the British commission made it clear that 

changes to British law, particularly in relation to wartime actions like impressment, were 

out of the question. As growing numbers of British troops began arriving in North 

America from Europe, and peace became more urgent than principle for the U.S. 

commissioners, they privately conceded this point amongst themselves—as did President 

Madison and his cabinet.40

With impressment off the table, and the Orders in Council that barred neutrals 

from trading with France and its allies having been rescinded in June 1812, there was 

only one outstanding issue remaining from Madison’s war message: the “warfare just 

renewed by the ... tribes in constant intercourse with British traders and garrisons.” 

When formal treaty negotiations began in Ghent on August 8, the British commissioners 

addressed this matter directly. A “sine qua non of a treaty of peace,” they told the U.S. 

 38 Andrew Griswold Whitney, “An Oration delivered in Detroit, Michigan, July 4, 1818,” in Trumpets of 

Glory: Fourth of July Orations, 1786-1861, Henry Hawken, ed. (Granby, Conn.: Salmon Brook Historical 

Society, 1976), 329-351. 39 President Madison to Congress, June 1, 1812, in U.S. House Journal, 1790. 12th Cong., 1st sess., 454, 

457.

40 Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 411-412; Hickey, War of 1812, 282-83; 
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commissioners, required that “peace be extended [by the United States] to the Indian 

allies of Great Britain, and that the boundary of their territory be definitively marked out, 

as a permanent boundary between the dominions of Great Britain and the United States.” 

This last element recalled the “Indian-barrier state” that officials in British North 

America had championed in the early 1790s, and restated to their Native allies in the 

build-up to the outbreak of the War of 1812.41

The creation of such a “barrier state” that bordered the United States along the 

Greenville Treaty line, was expected to foster continuing ties between the British and 

their Native allies as well as prevent the likelihood of another invasion from the south. 

Such an arrangement would also guarantee that British fur trade companies would be able 

to operate in the western Great Lakes. Besides these strategic and commercial concerns, 

this matter was a point of honor for past and current governors of the Canadas as well as 

officers in the British Indian Department. The latter had frequently fought with and lived 

among their Native allies, friends, and kin over the previous two decades. Since the end 

of the American Revolution, the British had twice promised—and failed—to support the 

territorial concerns of their Native allies. By addressing these matters, the British were 

seeking to right past failings while advancing their version of what a victory in a “second 

war of independence” would mean in the western Ohio Valley, the Detroit River region, 

and the western Great Lakes.42

The young “War Hawk” Henry Clay, who was one of the U.S. commissioners, 

quickly denounced “the absurdity, to say the least of it, of Great Britain attempting 

without powers, to treat for ... tribes, scattered over our acknowledged territory.” His 

views were seconded by others, including John Adams who wrote that to “condemn vast 

regions of territory ... [so] that a few hundred [American Indians] might find wild beasts 

to hunt upon it, was ... incompatible with the moral as with the physical nature of 

things.” Such an action, he continued, would “preclude forever the people of the United 

States from settling and cultivating those territories.” With a complete impasse on the 

sine qua non of the British position, treaty talks came to a near standstill. President 

Madison’s public release of diplomatic messages, which represented a profound breach 

of diplomatic protocol, exposed the main reason for the breakdown of negotiations in 

Ghent. In the United States, the British push for a separate Indigenous territory created 

more congressional support for continuing the war—but in Parliament the opposition 

denounced the push for a separate Indigenous territory as an insufficient cause for 

prolonging a costly war—particularly after British offensives had faltered on Lake 

Champlain and Baltimore Harbor.43

 41 Orpha E. Leavitt, “British Policy on the Canadian Frontier, 1782-92: Mediation and an Indian Barrier 

State,” in Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Vol. 63 (Madison: State Historical 

Society of Wisconsin, 1916), 151-185; Dwight L. Smith, “A North American Neutral Indian Zone: 

Persistence of a British Idea.” Northwest Ohio Quarterly 61:2-4 (1989): 46-55. Quotation from “Protocol 

of Conference, August 8th, 1814,” in Niles Weekly Register, vol. 7, ed. H[ezekiah] Niles (Baltimore: The 

Franklin Press), 73, 42 Smith, “A North American Neutral Indian Zone,” 56-63; Hickey, The War of 1812, 289-90; Taylor, Civil 

War of 1812, 412-13. 43 Richard Feltoe, The Ashes of the War: The Fight for Upper Canada, August 1814—March 1815

(Toronto: Dundurn, 2014), 185-87; Hickey, The War of 1812, 291-95; Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 413-15. 

Quotations from Henry Clay to James Monroe, August 18, 1814, in James P. Hopkins and Mary W. M. 
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As the British negotiating position weakened, and President Madison learned the 

United States would incur crippling debt if conflict persisted much longer, both sides 

became more interested in ending the war than in winning the terms of peace. On 

November 27 the British offered to end the war on the terms of uti possidetis—by which 

the signatories would retain the territory they currently held as a result of the war. While 

this proposal was not formally accepted, it accelerated negotiations. By mid-December 

both parties agreed to settle on a treaty that essentially amounted to a return to pre-war 

conditions. The final treaty, which was signed the day before Christmas, also contained 

an additional article that obligated the United States to cease “hostilities with all the 

Tribes or Nations of Indians with whom they may be at war at the time of such 

Ratification, and forthwith to restore to such Tribes or Nations respectively all the 

possessions, rights, and privileges which they may have enjoyed or been entitled to in one 

thousand eight hundred and eleven previous to such hostilities.” While the explicit 

reference to Britain’s Native allies distinguished this treaty from earlier agreements with 

the United States, it made no reference to Indigenous territories and did not touch on any 

land cession treaties prior to 1811.44

Springwells and Victory

In the summer of 1815, U.S. and British officials held councils to both convey 

and fulfill the terms of the Treaty of Ghent with Native peoples. At councils on the 

Mississippi River, Louisiana Territorial Governor William Clark hosted representatives 

from the westernmost groups that had fought with the British. Along with formal 

statements of peace and friendship, Clark also explained that the British would no longer 

be able to trade in the western Great Lakes or along the Upper Mississippi. Instead, the 

United States would build forts around Lake Michigan and the Upper Mississippi to keep 

the peace and support the operations of U.S. traders.45 The British also met with 

Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Bodéwadmi) delegations in the northern Great Lakes 

as well as representatives from more westerly groups, to convey the terms of the Treaty 

of Ghent and to state that they would maintain trade relations from new posts in Upper 

Canada.46

 Hargreaves, eds., The Papers of Henry Clay, vol. 1 (Lexington, 1959-63), 965; and diary entry for 

September 1, 1814, in John Quincy Adams, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams: Comprising Portions of his 

Diary from 1795 to 1848, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1874), 28. 44 Hickey, War of 1812, 294-299; Taylor, The Civil War of 1812, 411-419; Willig, Restoring the Chain of 

Friendship, 266-69. Quotation from “Treaty of Peace and Amity between His Britannic Majesty and the 

United States of America,” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy

<http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/Ghent.asp> (accessed November 19, 2016).

45 The groups represented at the councils with Clark included Lakȟóta Oyáte (Lakota, aka Western Sioux) 

and Dakhóta Oyáte (Dakota, aka eastern Sioux) from both sides of the Mississippi, as well as Mshkodésik

Bodéwadmi (Prairie Potawatomi), Piankeshaw, Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), Thâkîwa (Sauk, or Sac), and 

Meskwaki (Fox). Other groups were not represented, including western Ojibwe, Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk or 

Winnebago), and Mamaceqtaw (Menominee), as well as specific leaders from the previously noted groups. 

See “Treaty with the Potawatomi,” 110-11; “Treaty with the Piankeshaw,” 111-12; “Treaty with the 

Teton,” 112-13; “Treaty with the Sioux of the Lakes,” 113-14; “Treaty with the St. Peter’s Sioux,” 114-15; 

“Treaty with the Yankton Sioux,” 115, “Treaty with the Kickapoo,” 116-17; “Treaty with the Sauk,” 120-

21; and “Treaty with the Foxes,” 121-22: all in Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs. 46 Colin G. Calloway, “The End of an Era: British-Indian Relations in the Great Lakes Region after the War 

of1812,” Michigan Historical Review (Fall 1986), 12: 5-6; Robert S. Allen, His Majesty's Indian Allies: 
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The two largest councils were held along the Detroit River in late August, with 

the British at Malden and the United States at Springwells—an ancient burial mound site 

near the mouth of the River Rouge and a strategic locale during the events that led to 

General Hull’s surrender of Detroit in 1812. Unlike the British, who were treating with 

their allies, U.S. Commissioners William Henry Harrison and John Graham “deemed it 

proper to include ... those tribes who had been friendly to us as [well as] those who had 

been hostile.” They hoped the latter could be “restored to their former position before the 

war” and thus aligned with Native communities that were more favorably disposed 

towards the United States. The U.S. approach thus proved more complicated, not least 

because the council at Malden had commenced before the one at Springwells. This 

caused initial attendance to be low and resulted in a series of postponements as Harrison 

and Graham had to await the end of the British council before theirs could begin. The 

situation was further compounded by an informal U.S. policy that sought to prevent 

Native peoples from crossing the Detroit River to Upper Canada, but welcomed any who 

wished to return to Michigan Territory or beyond. Consequently, attendance at the 

Springwells council could make it difficult for anyone who expected to cross back to the 

south side of the Detroit River. Once the Commissioners understood the difficulties 

associated with these restrictions, and rescinded the policy, more Native leaders 

announced they would come to Springwells once the council at Malden had concluded.47

Even though it marked the end of an era in formal British-Native relations and 

alliances, the council at Malden covered weighty subjects that required fulsome 

discussions. The primary purpose of the council was to present the full terms of the 

Treaty of Ghent, identify the borders between the United States and British Canada, 

clarify the nature of British-Native relations within Canada, and offer British support for 

their former allies who remained within U.S. territory. In addition, Native leaders used 

the council proceedings to assess how and where (in terms of international boundaries) to 

best pursue a course that guaranteed the most autonomy for their people. The gathering at 

Malden was also characterized by angry denunciations of Britain’s acceptance of the 

treaty, as well as expressions of sorrow on all sides over the loss of the alliance. On this 

last score it is important to remember that relations between the British and Native 

leaders had always been complicated, and often fraught with tension, but they were never 

merely transactional. Consequently, the council included a good deal of social visiting 

that inflected the formal proceedings and delayed their conclusion. Lastly, the British 

were generous with feasting and presents, which brought a welcome relief from the 

hunger and want that followed the end of the war.48

 

British Indian Policy in the Defence of Canada 1774-1815 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1996), 168-71. 47 Quotations from William Henry Harrison and James Graham to Secretary of War William H. Crawford, 

September 9, 1815, in ASP, vol. 2, Indian Affairs, 16-17. Also see “Treaty with the Wyandot, etc., 1815,” in 

Laws and Treaties, 117-119; Floyd R. Dain, “The Treaty of Springwells,” Detroit Historical Society 

Bulletin 26 (November 1969): 4-8; and Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 428-29. General Duncan McArthur, who 

then commanded the U.S. Army of the Northwest, served as the third treaty commissioner with Harrison 

and Graham. Michigan territorial governor Lewis Cass was also present at the treaty council, as one of 

several formal observers and witnesses. These matters and other details are covered in the correspondence

and reports that are collected in ASP, vol. 2, Indian Affairs, 13-25. 48 “Proceedings of Court of Inquiry, 12 Aug. 1815,” 208-214; “Lieut. Col. James to General Harrison, 29 

Aug. 1815,” 229-230; General Harrison to Lieut Co. James, 3- Aug. 1815,” 230-231; “Lieut. Col. James to 
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For those who did come to the Springwells council grounds, either from Malden

or directly from their villages, the stores of supplies and gifts the U.S. Commissioners 

had brought were important enticements—both as a sign of good will on the part of the 

United States as well the promise of respite after seasons of hardship and want. While 

these provisions were intermittently stopped during extended periods of waiting for the 

council at Malden to end or the delayed arrivals of communities from the north and 

southwest, on the whole the council proved a fairly straightforward affair. All who 

attended espoused a desire for peace, and were relieved that the U.S. Commissioner did 

not raise the issue of new land cessions. Even Tenskwatawa—who made a brief visit with 

a small delegation from Malden—“addressed the council in a speech” that Harrison 

described “in tenor and subject [to be] pacific.”49

The Treaty of Springwells succeeded as a council of peace, and even 

rapprochement, but it ignored the requirements of the Treaty of Ghent in one respect. The 

stipulation that relations between the United States and Native peoples were to return to 

conditions as they were in 1811 seemed clear enough. Yet the U.S. Commissioners 

qualified this particular condition with a requirement that all “agree to renew and confirm 

the [1795] treaty of Greenville ..., and all subsequent treaties to which they were, 

respectively, parties, and the same are hereby again ratified and confirmed in as full a 

manner as if they were inserted in this treaty.” This condition included the 1807 Treaty of 

Detroit, which ceded more than six million acres of southeastern Michigan Territory to 

the United States. While the treaty predated 1811, it had been contested by a number of 

Wyandot, Bodéwadmi, and Odawa leaders who insisted they never agreed to the vast 

cessions that were described in the final written document. Moreover, their refusal to 

accept what they deemed a fraudulent treaty contributed to the conditions of war that 

existed prior to and after 1811—and inspired many of the affected groups to seek alliance 

with the British. In short, the year 1807 fit the conditions of the Treaty of Ghent, but the 

irresolution of the Treaty of Detroit and its consequences did not. While some misgivings 

were expressed during the councils at Springwells about the stipulation to accept all the 

terms of past treaties, those who would have most forcefully contested this point were in 

Malden or far to the west.50

From Harrison’s perspective, the Springwells council extended the basic terms of 

peace and “fidelity to the United States” that he and Governor Cass had stipulated in the 

the 1814 Treaty of Greenville—albeit to a larger and more diverse gathering of Native 

leaders. While this was not insignificant, and was a requirement of the Treaty of Ghent, 

confirmation of the 1807 Treaty of Detroit came with a degree of urgency. The area 

covered by that treaty had been designated as possible Military Bounty Lands by 

 

Maj. Gen. Robinson, 6 Sep. 1815,” 244-245; “Mr. Claus to Maj. Gen. Robinson, 10 Sep. 1815,” 260-261; 

“Indian Council,” 262-266; “Speech to Indians, Amherstburg, 14 Sep 1815,” 269-273; all in in Michigan 

Historical Collections, vol. 16 (Lansing: Robert Smith & Co., 1890), 318—hereafter cited as MHC. Also 

see Calloway, “The End of an Era,” 11-12; Allen, His Majesty's Indian Allies, 168-171. 49 Harrison and Graham to Secretary of War, 16-25; quotation on 23. Also see Dain, “The Treaty of 

Springwells,” 9-10; Owens, Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer, 243-44; and “The Treaty with the Wyandot, etc., 

1815,” 117-119. 50 Harrison and Graham to Secretary of War, 24-25; Dain, “The Treaty of Springwells,” 9-10; “The Treaty 

with the Wyandot, etc.,” in Kappler, Indian Affairs, 117-119; Taylor, The Civil War of 1812, 436-438; 

Calloway, “End of an Era,” 6-10; and Allen, His Majesty's Indian Allies, 171-174.
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Congress in May 1812, to be surveyed and granted as incentives and payments to 

volunteers who enlisted in the soon to be declared war. Because Hull’s invasion of Upper 

Canada failed, and conflict in the region persisted through most of the war, no surveys 

were undertaken until 1815. By then, the vision of a growing U.S. population in the 

Detroit River area had strategic appeal—especially when a large number of the new 

residents would be veterans who could readily serve in new militias in the case of a 

resumption of hostilities. In short, Harrison’s political and military experience made him 

well-attuned to the importance of confirming the 1807 Treaty of Detroit—and heightened 

his instincts for integrating land cessions with other components of a large treaty council. 

Such an approach would serve him and his successors well in the coming years.51

 51 Act of May 6, 1812, ch. 77, 1 Stat. 1, 728-730; and Act of April 29, 1816, ch. 164, 1 Stat. 1, 332. Also 

see Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American 

Public Lands, 1789-1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 71-88; Taylor, The Civil War of 

1812, 428-29.
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Chapter Nine

Removing and Remaining

This chapter covers the immediate and lasting consequences of the War of 1812 for Native 

peoples in what became known as the Old Northwest, with particular emphasis on the policy 

of American Indian Removal and its application to the Native groups and communities that 

were most directly affected by the conflicts and dislocations of the war era.

On July 4, 1818, Michigan Territorial Governor Lewis Cass split his time 

catching up on correspondence as well as participating in the Fourth of July celebrations 

that he hosted on his property in Detroit. In a brief letter he wrote to a friend that 

afternoon or evening, Cass shared some of the sentiments in Andrew Griswold Whitney’s 

oration and noted how “this day ... incite[s] within my bosom emotions sacred and 

powerful.” His most poignant feelings were triggered by the recollection that just a few 

years ago, at the River Raisin, “many of our countrymen lay bleeding beneath the 

tomahawk and scalping knife of [their Native adversaries].” Yet Cass readily exclaimed, 

“How different the scene now!” With “peace ... the fruits of prosperity now enrich our 

land; learning and the arts flourish ...; and the Government [is] strengthened by ... the 

blessings of free and equal laws.”1 Another of Cass’s letters that day touched on more 

mundane matters, including a plan to counteract North West Company efforts to increase 

trade with northern Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe and Odawa) from British Canada. Though he 

was generally “opposed to the introduction of spirituous liquors into the Indian Country,” 

Cass nevertheless directed his agent to allow “spirits to be introduced” by U.S. traders “to 

promote the trade of our Citizens.”2

Though very different in tone and content, these two pieces of correspondence 

fairly capture the scope of issues that defined the governor’s interests and responsibilities: 

from commerce, American Indian affairs, and British activities along territorial borders, 

to the implementation of federal policies and national interests. The holiday provided 

some relief from his many duties, but he no doubt gave some thought to his most pressing 

concern that summer. In less than two months he was slated to host and administer five 

separate treaty councils that would be held on the St. Mary’s River near the Ohio-Indiana 

border. All of these councils were intended to correct and revise the single treaty that 

Cass, his fellow treaty commissioner and old comrade in arms General Duncan McArthur 

 1 Lewis Cass to Unknown [likely Andrew Jackson], July 4, 1818, in Andrew Jackson Papers: Series 1, 

General Correspondence and Related Items, 1775 to 1885; Library Congress, Manuscript Division 

<https://www.loc.gov/item/maj005822/ > (accessed December 16, 2016). While the addressee is unnamed, 

Cass references the recipient’s military heroism in the war –which suggests the letter was to Jackson. On 

the hosting of the Fourth of July celebration on Cass’s property, see George B. Catlin, The Story of Detroit

(Detroit: The Detroit News, 1923), 261.

2 Cass to William H. Puthuff, July 4, 1818, in Clarence Edwin Carter, comp. and ed., The Territorial 

Papers of the United States: The Territory of Michigan, 1805-1820, vol. 10 (Washington, D.C.: 

Government Printing Office, 1952), 778.
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(who had taken charge of the Army of the Northwest following Harrison’s resignation in 

1814), and U.S. Indian Agent John Johnston had conducted with multiple groups the 

previous summer at Fort Meigs. In an effort to craft the first treaty that would have 

involved removal to areas west of the Mississippi River, Cass, McArthur, and Johnston 

took a novel approach to the basic expectations of treaty-making. The three men had 

rightly guessed that they could gain larger cessions of land if they included clauses for 

the retention of unceded parcels that would be retained as individual land grants by each 

village or town leader. As such, these grants would function as individual estates with all 

the benefits of fee-simple title (i.e., they could be bought, sold, inherited, borrowed 

against, or any other such processes).3

While this innovation helped gain begrudging consent to the cession of nearly all 

Native lands remaining in Ohio, it also appealed to the men who put their marks on the 

treaty—since it meant “their” lands, which they would hold for their communities, would 

not be subject to future treaty negotiations. The latter condition did not matter to Cass, 

McArthur or Johnston, since they presumed that impoverished American Indian 

communities would readily sell their lands to all-comers at the earliest opportunity. They

might also have guessed that legal ownership by one person of an entire community’s 

land could enrich a few at the expense of others and cause many to simply move west on 

their own accord. While this tactic led to a collective agreement to cede vast stretches of 

land, it did not result in an agreement on removal nor did it gain formal ratification by the 

U.S. Senate—which viewed the granting of fee-simple land grants as side-stepping the 

federal government’s exclusive authority to acquire Native lands.4

As Cass prepared for the five treaty councils that would replace the single Treaty 

of Fort Meigs, his task was compounded by three key factors: he would need to explain 

the reasons for revisiting the terms of the previous treaty; he would extend the terms of

the former treaty to include more cessions of land in the recently admitted state of 

Indiana (1816), and—as he noted in a letter to Johnston in January—the treaty would 

have to involve removal to “the West Side of the Mississippi.” President James Monroe 

concurred with these objectives, and acknowledged Cass’s depiction of removal as a 

humanitarian policy that would “secure [American Indians] from the exterminating 

pressure of our progressive settlements.” Yet Monroe was most impressed with the 

administrative simplicity that would result from removal. “The great object is to remove 

altogether these tribes beyond the Mississippi. If that is accomplished, every difficulty is 

 3 “Treaty with the Wyandot, etc., 1817,” in Charles J. Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, 2 

vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 2: 145-55. Macarthur and Cass had been 

appointed colonels in command of Ohio Militia prior to the outbreak of war along the Detroit River, and 

both served under General Winchester during the invasion of Canada and subsequent fall of Detroit. Both 

men would later serve as Brigadier Generals in the Army of Northwest, and both commanded a brigade 

during the campaign that resulted in the Battle of the Thames. On McArthur’s career, see John McDonald, 

Biographical Sketches of General Nathaniel Massie, General Duncan McArthur, Captain William Wells, 

and General Simon Kenton” Who Were Early Setlers in the Western Country (Dayton: D. Osborn & Son, 

1852), 98-139, 154-158, 171-172. 4 Lakomäki, “‘Our Line’: The Shawnees, the United States, and Competing Borders on the Great Lakes 

‘Borderlands,’ 1795–1832, Journal of the Early Republic, 34 (Winter 2014): 620-22; Karim M. Tiro, “The 

View from Piqua Agency: The War of 1812, the White River Delawares, and the Origins of Indian 

Removal,” Journal of the Early Republic, 34 (Spring 2015): 47-48.
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removed; there then ceases to be any question about the tenure by which the Indians shall 

hold their lands.”5

Two of the five treaty councils that took place in 1818 involved the same groups 

that were at the 1817 council. These included Wyandot from Upper Sandusky and Big 

Rock (Brownstown), Odawa who lived on the lower Maumee River, the Shawnee from 

Wapakoneta, and Ökwe'öwé (Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”) at Lower Sandusky. With 

the exception of a few additional small reservations for specific Wyandot groups in the 

vicinity of Upper Sandusky, these treaties otherwise converted the lands “granted [in 

1817] by the United States to the chiefs of the respective tribes” into “Indian 

reservations.”6 A third treaty involved Bodéwadmi from northern Indiana and 

southeastern Michigan Territory, who together ceded lands in north-central Indiana. The 

last two treaties involved delegations of Myaamia and Lunaapeew representatives, and 

called for a vast cession of land in central Indiana. While the Myaamia would retain a 

block of land extending southward from the Wabash toward the upper basin of Wildcat 

Creek, the Lunaapeews consented to forfeit “all their claim to land in the state of Indiana” 

for land acquired by the United States “upon the west side of the Misssissippi.” The 

decades-long effort of the Lunaapeew to establish and maintain a home in the western 

Ohio Valley had come to an end, and these diasporic people would soon join their 

western relatives who had been migrating away from the region for the past generation.7

“can never be incorporated into our system”

American Indian removal, as a policy and a program, is closely associated with 

the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and the Cherokee 

Trail of Tears from Georgia to present-day Oklahoma (1838-39). Yet its origins date back 

to the Early Republic and the policy was applied to Indigenous groups both north and 

south of the Ohio River. The idea of removal was first implied in the “civilization 

program” put forward by Secretary of War Henry Knox in the 1790s. Knox believed the 

United States had a moral duty to help American Indians assimilate to U.S. values and 

norms. Toward these ends, he proposed a combination of government agents and 

Christian missionaries that would teach literacy, market agriculture, and U.S. systems of 

community governance. If successful, this assimilation program was expected to prevent 

war, facilitate land acquisition, and absorb Native peoples into American society. Such 

“benevolent ethnocide” was not readily or widely accepted, by American Indians or the 

people with whom they were to assimilate, but it demonstrated a central conceit that was 

tied to a policy of land acquisition. For the “gift of civilization,” as the historian Brian 

 5 Tiro, “The View from Piqua Agency,” 49-51; quotations from Cass to Johnston, January 30, 1818, as well 

as Cristopher Van Deventer to Cass, June 29, 1818 on p. 50 and 51. Van Deventer, who was chief clerk in 

the War Department, served as President Monroe’s emissary in this matter. To ensure that any “question 

about tenure” was resolved, Van Deventer also relayed Monroe’s order to General William Clark to acquire 

lands from Native groups in Missouri that could then be transferred to the new arrivals.

6 Quotation comes from “Treaty with the Wyandot, etc., 1818,” in Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs, 162. 7 While some Lunaapeew were not averse to moving west, many resented the treaty. Johnston would later 

boast that the commissioners had bribed at least two of the leading delegates with separate personal 

annuities. See Tiro, “The View from Piqua Agency,” 50-52; Amy C. Schutt, Peoples of the River Valleys: 

The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 182-83; John 

P. Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 

2016), 104-08.
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Dippie notes, “Indians would gladly exchange land.” Whenever this formula failed to 

materialize, however, Euro-American negotiators rationalized that it was because some 

racial defect prevented Native peoples from realizing the value of the gift.8

If Secretary Knox represented the moral code that would inform removal, then 

Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the future policy. Throughout his life, Jefferson 

always maintained an overriding desire to foster and sustain an expanding agrarian 

empire. This was clearly manifested in his views on Native peoples, which ranged from a 

desire “to ameliorate the condition of the Indian natives, by introducing among them a 

knowledge of agriculture and some of the mechanic arts,” to feeling "oblige[d] ... to 

pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach.”9 In the first 

guise, teaching them “Habits of industry, easy subsistence, [and] attachment to property” 

was the desired goal of American Indian policy when it accompanied land cessions and 

Native peoples appeared open to assimilation.10 When Native leaders refused to cede 

lands, and allied themselves with a European power to defend their lands and values, the 

fundamental threat they posed to U.S. expansion led Jefferson to advocate the destruction 

of whole communities.

In Jefferson’s mind, the ultimate resolution to this dichotomy came with the 

Louisiana Purchase. The acquisition of this vast territory not only settled the problem of 

navigation and U.S. commerce along the Mississippi River, it powerfully affirmed the 

Jeffersonian plan for national development and agrarian expansion. Within a few years 

Jefferson expected the new territory would allow for a policy of removing eastern Native 

nations to lands beyond the Mississippi, and thereby foster a more orderly conversion of 

their former lands into American farms and towns across the continent. “[T]he best use 

we can make of [Louisiana Territory] for some time,” he told John Breckenridge,

will be to give establishments in it to the Indians on the East side of the 

Missipi, in exchange for their present country, and open land offices in 

the last, & thus make this acquisition the means of filling up the Eastern 

side, instead of drawing off it's population. When we shall be full on this 

side, we may lay off a range of States on the Western bank from the head 

to the mouth, & so, range after range, advancing compactly as we 

multiply.11

 8 For an overview of Knox and the “civilization program,” see Reginald Horsman, Expansion and 

American Indian Policy, 1783–1812 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 53-64. The term 

“benevolent ethnocide” comes from Jeffrey David Ehrenreich, “Contact and Conflict: An Ethnographic 

Study of the Impact of Acculturation, Racism and Benevolent Ethnocide on the Egalitarian Coaiquer 

Indians of Ecuador” (Ph.D. diss., New School of Social Research, 1985). Quotation from Brian Dippie, The 

Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 

1982), 6-7. 9 Quotations are from Jefferson to Messers. Thomas, Ellicot, and Others, November 13, 1807, in Andrew 

Adgate Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds., Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Monticello: Thomas 

Jefferson Memorial association, 1903), 16: 289; and Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, December 6, 

1813, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings: Letters, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York, 1984), 1312. 10 Jefferson to James Pemberton, November 16, 1807, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 11: 395. 11 Jefferson to John C. Breckinridge, 12 August 1803, in Writings: Letters, 1138. Also see Christian B. 

Keller, “Philanthropy Betrayed: Thomas Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Origins of Federal 

Indian Removal Policy,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 144 (March 2000): 39-66.
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Figure 9.1: Indiana State Seal. The Seal of the Territory Northwest of the 

Ohio River (image on the left) depicted a landscape with a mature tree standing at 

the edge of a forest. Beneath the tree was a trimmed trunk of a recently cut tree, 

and in the background a flatboat crossed a broad river. The Latin motto for the 

territorial seal was “Meliorem lapsa locavit!”—which roughly translates as “He 

has planted a better world than the one that has fallen.” When Indiana achieved 

statehood in 1816, the first state seal (pictured on the right) added a woodsman, 

crops, a draft horse, a fleeing bison and a rising sun. Though it has been updated 

over the course of two centuries, the basic elements of the seal have not changed.

Images from Pamela J. Bennett and Alan January, “Indiana’s State Seal—An 

Overview,” Indiana Historical Bureau and Indiana State Archives (2005).

While the Louisiana Purchase made removal possible, it also changed the 

connection between civilization and assimilation. As President James Monroe would 

later state, “the extension of our settlements” prevented Native communities from 

becoming like Euro-Americans, and “unless the tribes be civilized they can never be 

incorporated into our system in any form.” Consequently, the “rights of humanity” and 

“the honor of the nation” required the U.S. to “remove them” beyond the Mississippi. In 

other words, assimilation could only occur if Native peoples moved far away from the 

society they were to emulate. Leaving a homeland in order to become one with the 

people who insist that you leave is a strange and disheartening fate. In many cases the 

people who were to be removed had embraced elements of the “civilization” program, 

and had no desire to leave their crops, homes, and livelihoods for a mostly unknown 

place. Others who resisted or very selectively adopted the cultural and commercial 

models of U.S. society were inclined to resist further land cessions and removals, but not 

averse to creating separation between themselves and a growing tide of U.S. citizens in 

their midst. In either case, any confusion or resistance that the rhetoric of removal 

caused among Native leaders was often viewed by U.S. officials as further proof of 

racial deficiency and intransigence. While speaking with Chahta (Choctaw) leaders 

about the merits of removal, Andrew Jackson became exasperated. “Hear and listen 

well,” he commanded. “Decide for the happiness of all your people .... We have labored 

hard to convince you of your real interests. We hope you will see them as we do ... 
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Should you [not], it will be a source of great regret, as it may be a measure fatal to your 

nation.”12

Lewis Cass and the Push for American Indian Removal

Coming a year after Andrew Jackson conducted the Treaty of the Cherokee

Agency (1817), Cass’s council with the Lunaapeew (aka Treaty of St. Mary’s) produced 

the second removal treaty—and the first to involve an exchange for lands on the west 

side of the Mississippi River. This precedent would be followed in 1820 at the Treaty of 

Doak’s Stand, which removed the Chahta from their remaining lands in Mississippi to the 

Arkansas Territory.13 That would prove the last removal treaty until 1830, the same year 

the Indian Removal Act was passed during Jackson’s first presidential term. In the 

interim, however, land cession treaties continued apace—especially north of the Ohio 

River. In 1819 Governor Cass conducted the Treaty of Saginaw with various 

communities of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Bodéwadmi that resulted in the cession of six 

million acres through the mid-section of Michigan’s lower peninsula.14 Over the next 

decade Cass and other treaty commissioners would complete twenty-two more treaties 

within the old Pays d’en Haut. About half of these addressed unresolved claims from past 

treaties with groups of Waayaahtanwa (Ouiatenon, or Wea), Piankeshaw, Kiikaapooi 

(Kickapoo), Shawnee, Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), and others who had moved 

west over the previous two decades. The rest involved substantial land cessions in the 

Lower Peninsula of Michigan Territory, northeastern Indiana, northern Illinois Territory, 

and southwestern Wisconsin Territory. Other treaties were also completed by William 

Clark in present-day Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma to reserve areas for eastern 

Indigenous nations that were expected to swap their lands for parcels in what was then 

formally referred to as Unorganized Territory of the United States.15

The scale and pace of these various land cession treaties stemmed from two 

related dynamics. The first reflected a desire among U.S. officials to resume the treaty 

making process that had stopped in 1809 and thus prevent a new alliance against the 

United States by isolating Native communities on reduced parcels of land. The second 

purpose, of course, was to bring land seekers, town builders, and economic development 

to a region plagued by decades of conflict and distrust. These latter goals were greatly 

fostered by the construction and completion of the Erie Canal in the 1820s. As 

 12 Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 58-66; Dippie, The Vanishing American, 61-70; Robert Remini, 

Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (New York: Viking, 2001), 208-10.Quotations are from James 

Monroe, “Eighth Annual Message (December 7, 1824),” Miller Center

<http://millercenter.org/president/monroe/speeches/speech-3606> (Accessed December 18, 2016); and 

Andrew Jackson, “To Choctaw Indians, October 3, 1820,” The Papers of Andrew Jackson, IV, eds. Harold 

D. Moser, David R. Hoth, and George H. Hoemann (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 392.

13 “Treaty with the Choctaw, 1820” in Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs, 191-95. 14 David Stout, “Ethnohistorical Report on the Saginaw Chippewa,” in David Horr, ed., American Indian 

Ethnohistory: North Central and Northeastern Indians, Chippewa Indians V (New York, Garland 

Publishing, 1974), 113-17; LeRoy Barnett, “Land for Family and Friends: The Saginaw Treaty of 1819,” 

Michigan History Magazine, 87 (2003): 28-34; “Treaty with the Chippewa, 1819” in Kappler, ed., Indian 

Affairs, 185-87. 15 Helen Hornbeck Tanner, ed., Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (Norman: University of Oklahoma 

Press, 1987), 159, 163-65; Bethel Saler, The Settlers' Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in 

America's Old Northwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 109-118; Bowes, Land 

Too Good for Indians, 64-70.
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waterborne commerce began to flow between New York City and Lake Erie—and from 

there to the Upper Great Lakes—population growth far exceeded the expectations of 

early boosters. Between 1820 and 1830 the population of Ohio increased from 

approximately 581,000 to 937,000, with most of that growth occurring in the northwest 

corner of the state. Over the same period Indiana’s non-Indigenous population went from 

148,000 to 476,000, while Michigan Territory more than tripled from just 7,800 to 

28,000. As these newcomers crowded into recently ceded areas, they pressed closer to the 

small reservations of various Native groups. At times a latent hostility toward Native 

peoples contributed to abuses in the form of trespass, the killing of livestock, or physical 

violence against individuals and communities. In a sense, these migrants enacted a kind 

of private removal policy to pressure Native groups away to leave the lands that these 

newcomers deemed “too good for Indians.16

Such developments did not go unnoticed by Governor Cass, but he was less 

concerned about violence against Native communities than possible conflicts between 

different Native groups that were forced to compete for the same diminishing resources. 

As he noted in a letter to Secretary of War John C. Calhoun in April 1821, Cass did not 

understand the “causes or circumstances of [such] contest[s]” between Native groups, but 

he encouraged Secretary Calhoun to instruct “Indian Agents generally to exert their 

influence & authority to prevent and to terminate this kind of petty war fare.” If such 

authority could be converted into a general policy, Cass believed the “Agents could not 

only [pacify] hostilities after they may have commenced, but they also ought to act as 

Mediators ... to wean the Indians altogether from these pursuits, & to prevail upon them 

to abandon the ... Tomahawk and the scapling knife ... to which [these] uncivilized 

nations are so prone.” Cass also believed that preventing conflict between the “wretched 

remnant of our once powerful aboriginal tribes” was also a matter of public safety and 

national concern since allowing their “predatory and barbarous” natures to remain “in a 

continued state of excitement” could result in their seizing “any favourable occasion, 

which may be presented, of entering into [new] combinations against us.”17

Given these fears, Cass argued that the “time has arrived when we should be 

known to the Indians by every humane and benevolent exertion; and certainly on a fair 

retrospect of their former situation and on a correct view of their present and social & 

moral degredation [sic], they have a right to expect much.” In a remarkable conceit that 

would serve as his moral compass through the rest of his career, Cass then offered a blunt 

assessment of the federal government’s obligations. “In fact we must think for them. We 

must frequently promote their interest against their inclination, and no plan for the 

improvement of their condition will ever be practicable or efficacious [if] ... the 

promotion of which their consent must in the first instance be obtained.”18

 16 Tanner, ed. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, 159, 163-65; Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 222-

226. R. Douglas Hurt, The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720-1830 (Bloomington and 

Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 375; Andrew R. L. Cayton, Frontier Indiana (Bloomington 

and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 267-68; Dunbar and May, Michigan: A History of the 

Wolverine State, 158-62. Quotation from Bowes, op. cit., 225. 17 Cass to the Secretary of War, April 6, 1821, in Carter, comp. and ed., Territorial Papers of the United 

States, vol. 11; The Territory of Michigan, 1820-1829, vol. 11 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing 

Office, 1943), 116-117. 18 Ibid. Also see Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 41-42
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While Cass’s policy suggestions had no measurable effect at the time, they 

certainly informed his approach to American Indian policy as both a treaty commissioner 

and the Governor of the Michigan Territory. To address the problems described in his 

letter to Secretary Calhoun, as well as foster levels of population growth and economic 

development that would make a territory like Michigan qualify for statehood, Cass 

became a leading advocate for linking a formal policy of removal with the established 

framework of treaty making. The acquisition of most (or all) of a Native nation’s land 

base, in conjunction with wholesale removal of its members to new lands beyond the 

Mississippi River, would accomplish two key goals. First, it would bring more land into 

the public domain and thus accelerate the process of surveying and selling large tracts to 

town builders and individual families. Secondly, it would create distance between various 

Native communities and newcomers, and thus reduce the potential for conflict. To Cass 

this was a win-win scenario for all involved, and it became the underlying rationale for an 

important treaty council that he conducted with Myaamia and Bodéwadmi leaders on the 

Mississiniwa River in the fall of 1826.19

These objectives and their expected outcomes were explicitly referenced 

in Cass’s opening address of the council. “Your Great Father whose eyes survey 

the whole country,” he opined, “sees that you have a large tract of land here, 

which is of no use to you. You do not cultivate it, and there is but little game upon 

it.” Fortunately, as Cass viewed the matter, “there are a great many of the white 

children of your father who would be glad to live upon this land. They would 

build houses, and raise corn and cattle and hogs.” The Myaamia, Bodéwadmi, and 

many other nations also stood to benefit from these circumstances since the 

“Great Father is not only anxious to purchase the country of you, but he is 

desirous that you should remove far from his white children ... [to] a large 

country west of the Mississippi ... [where] they can hunt and provide for their 

women and children and once more become a happy people.” While this 

opportunity came with an open-ended promise that the land “will be yours, as 

long as the sun shines, and the rain falls,” the offer was presented as a one-time 

deal. “You must go before long,” Cass told them. “You cannot remain here. You 

must remove or perish.”20

Cass expected this council would serve as an early roll-out for a future policy of 

American Indian Removal, but in this case he badly misjudged the situation. After 

meeting for several days with their respective communities, the Myaamia and 

Bodéwadmi leaders returned to the Council House to give their replies to Cass’s 

proposal. The Bodéwadmi leader Aabanaabi (Looks Back) rejected the entire treaty, as 

did the Myaamia leader Meehcikilita (aka “Le Gros”). Subsequent pressure from the 

commissioners managed to exploit divisions within and between the Myaamia and 

Bodéwadmi, and ultimately resulted in an agreement to cede a right of way along the 

Wabash River as well as some large blocks of land in northeastern Indiana and 

southwestern Michigan Territory. The Myaamia and Bodéwadmi also retained substantial 

 19 Willard Carl Klunder, Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation (Kent, OH and London:The Kent State 

University Press, 1996), 47-51. 20 “Mississinawa Treaty,” Niles’ Weekly Register, 31 (December 2, 1826), 218. Also see Bowes, Land Too 

Good for Indians, 156-59, 66-71.
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tracts for their various communities, and adamantly refused to entertain the notion of 

relocating beyond the Mississippi River.21

Removing the “Indian Problem”

Though Governor Cass’s first efforts at combining wholesale land acquisition 

with removal did not meet expectations, he soon became a leading advocate for making 

this sort of two-step program a centerpiece of American Indian policy. In doing so, he 

gave speeches and wrote essays on American Indians and federal policy that often 

referenced his military service during the War of 1812, the many treaty councils he 

participated in, and his years as territorial governor of Michigan. These activities raised 

his national profile and made him a respected champion of “Indian Removal” as the best 

and only solution to what many called the “Indian Problem.” A sense of this public 

persona, and the degree to which it made a lasting impression, can be garnered from an 

early twentieth-century admirer who noted that Cass possessed the “courage that 

conquers, ... an accurate knowledge of Indian traits and of Indian character,” was 

“scrupulously honest in all his ... many important treaties with the Indians,” and always 

desired “to advise and encourage them in all matters relating to their own highest 

welfare.”22

All of these perceived virtues and experiences were on full display in the summer 

of 1829, at an influential conference in New York City regarding the “Emigration, 

Preservation, and Improvement of the Aborigines of America.” In his keynote address 

and a subsequent essay, Cass presented a long exegesis on the moral and legal basis for 

American Indian Removal as a humane, civilized, and politically necessary policy. 

Though rooted in his reading of legal texts and informed by the many treaty councils he 

had conducted, Cass’s arguments were ultimately grounded in his sense that Native 

peoples represented an existential and moral conundrum with only one solution. “It is 

difficult,” he argued,

to conceive that any branch of the human family can be less provident in 

arrangement, less frugal in enjoyment, less industrious in acquiring, more 

implacable in their resentments, more ungovernable in their passions, with 

fewer principles to guide them, with fewer obligations to restrain them, 

and with less knowledge to improve and instruct them.

 21 Quotations and treaty terms are from the Mississinewa Council proceedings are from “Treaty 

Negotiations September 1826” and “Treaty Negotiations October 1826,” in The John Tipton Papers, vol. 1, 

eds. Armstrong Robertson and Dorothy Riker (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1942), 577-592. 

Also see Bowles, Land Too Good for Indians, 66-72; and Juanita Hunter, “The Indians and the Michigan 

Road,” Indiana Magazine of History, 83 (September 1987), 577-592. Eight years after the Missisinewa 

council, state officials pushed for the complete removal of all Native peoples from Indiana. Apparently 

confident that their arguments in 1826 were still convincing, Myaamia leaders directly petitioned then 

Secretary of War Lewis Cass to intervene on their behalf. Cass declined, and instead authorized state 

officials to begin negotiating removal agreements. However, as noted in the following section of this 

chapter, the Myaamia managed to resist removal until 1842 and—along with some of the Bodéwadmi who 

were represented at the 1826 council—managed to remain in their homelands for many years after. 22 Quotations are from an oration by Governor Woodbridge N. Ferris, reprinted in Michigan Historical 

Commission, Bulleting No. 7: Lewis Cass Day on Mackinac Island, August 28, 1915 (Lansing: Wynkoop, 

Hallenbeck, Crawford Company, 1916), 39-40.
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Consequently, they were incapable of recognizing “the benefit of [U.S.] institutions, and 

[thus could not be taught] ... to appreciate their value .... The fulcrum is wanting, upon 

which the lever must be placed. They are contented as they are; not contented merely, but 

clinging with a death-grasp to their own institutions.” The only rational solution, as Cass 

viewed the matter, was for “the civilized power ... [to] exercise a wholesome restraint 

over the conduct, and a general supervision over the concerns, of their barbarous 

neighbors. A jurisdiction of this nature is essential to the safety of both, and its extent 

must be determined by those who are called to exercise it.” In short, the United States 

was obligated to “govern and they obey.”23

To bolster his arguments, Cass returned to the subject of his 1821 letter to John C. 

Calhoun. Namely, what he regarded as the latent violence and duplicity of Native peoples 

that derived from their presumed lack of “self-governance and self-management.” No one 

“can look back upon the history of the Indians, ... without being sensible, that they are ... 

‘of a restless and mischievous disposition,’ and that ‘all [civilized people] have a right to 

join in order to repress, chastise, and put it ever out of [the Indians’] power to injure 

[us].’” Moreover, Cass insisted that “some of the most unprovoked aggressions and 

atrocious barbarities have been committed within a few years; and nothing but the 

absence of foreign aid, and the impression of our strength, prevents the renewal of the 

scenes at Fort Mimms, at the Maumee, and at the River Raisin.”24

All of these sentiments, including memories of the River Raisin in 1813, informed 

Cass’s successful advocacy for a federal removal policy—which Congress soon 

institutionalized in 1830 with the passage of the Indian Removal Act. The following year 

President Jackson appointed Cass as the Secretary of War, with primary authority for the 

development and implementation of the new removal policy. Over the next five years he 

endeavored to, in his words, “satisfy [Native peoples] of our sincerity and the value of the 

aid we offer; to hold out to them motives for exertion; to call into action some powerful 

feeling” to change their “traits of character” and “condition.” Because “almost all of them 

have disappeared, crushed by the onward course of events, or driven before them,” any 

thoughts of remaining in their homelands and “preserving their peculiar institutions” was 

a “vain hope.” As Cass saw matters, Native peoples needed to be removed for their own 

good to a place where “the Government ... [can] determine what arrangements can be 

made for the permanent establishment for the Indians.” To shirk this responsibility and 

allow Native peoples to “remain” among a rapidly growing population of U.S. citizens 

was tantamount to accepting “their fate [as] written in the annals of their race.” Removal 

 23 Cass, “Documents and Proceedings Relating to the Formation and Progress of a Board in the City of 

New York, for the Emigration, Preservation, and Improvement of the Aborigines of America. July 22, 

1829,” The North American Review, 30 (January 1830): 73, 94. For a fuller assessment of Cass’swritings, 

see John T. Fierst, “Rationalizing Removal: Anti-Indianism in Lewis Cass's North American Review

Essays,” Michigan Historical Review, 36 (Fall 2010): 1-35. Also see Bernard Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: 

Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American 

History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 168, 251-260. 24 Cass, “Documents and Proceedings,” 81, 94. The quoted phrasings in Cass’s text can be found in 

Edmund Burke, “Remarks on the Policy of the Allies with Respect to France, Begun in 1793: With an 

Appendix,” in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 4 (London: John C. Nimmo, 1887), 

472.
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offered the only “hope to see them renovated in character and condition by our example 

and instruction, and by their exertions.”25

Figure 9.2: Nineteenth Century Land Cessions. Most of the land 

cessions encompassed by the period of 1811-1830 correspond to treaties 

conducted after the end of the War of 1812. Removal Era treaties generally 

correspond to areas identified with the period 1831-1850. The roughly 

square shape in the center of Indiana encompasses lands retained by the 

Myaamia after the St. Mary’s Treaty of 1818 and until the Treaty of 1840.

Removing and Remaining

The policy of Indian Removal clearly fits the definition of hegemony; namely, 

“having a position of political, economic, or military predominance over others.” Yet this 

very unequal power dynamic does not mean removal was a uniformly imposed policy 

that left little room for Native peoples to respond or shape its enactment. Indeed, 

Americans were greatly divided by the policy. The House of Representatives only passed 

the Removal Act by four votes, and congressmen received numerous petitions from 

women’s groups, abolitionists, and missionaries to vote against the policy. Even Henry 

Clay spoke against removal. Citing language from the Treaty of Ghent, he noted that 

native treaty rights were bound up in “the lands where they inhabit or hunt.” To take 

these lands, and exchange them for others acquired by the United States, was to 

disconnect this sovereignty from the place in which it was situated—and thus removal 

amounted to an abrogation of previous treaties. Moreover, the decision not to “uplift” or 

 25 Lewis Cass, “Report of the Secretary of War,” November 21, 1831, House Document 2/2, 22nd Cong., 

1st sess., Serial 216, pp. 31-32.
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“civilize” American Indians on their own lands was both a failure of moral will and a 

specious cover for taking lands.26

While opposition to removal was often grounded in patronizing rhetoric, it 

nevertheless marked a divide that would create flexibility in how the policy was enacted. 

The commissioners and agents who conducted removal treaties held varying opinions 

that fit along a spectrum between Clay and Jackson, and more often than not they already 

knew the Native leaders with whom they met in council. When treaties became entwined 

with personal relations, removal could sometimes be avoided. This proved the case with 

the Pokégnek Bodéwadmi (Pokagon Potawatomi) from the St. Joseph River in 

northeastern Indiana and southwestern Michigan, who worked with Catholic missionaries 

and welcomed “civilizing” programs that helped them adjust to new conditions in their 

homelands. In 1833, at a large treaty council in Chicago, U.S. Commissioners brought 

together Bodéwadmi leaders from central Michigan Territory to northeastern Illinois 

Territory to conduct a series of removal treaties for all of their communities. As 

commissioners prepared to finalize the terms of each treaty, however, the Bodéwadmi 

ogima (chief) Pokégnek (aka Leopold Pokagon) made a specific case for his people to

stay: his community was mostly Catholic, frequently interacted with their Euro-American 

neighbors, and had already adopted all of the “civilized” qualities they were supposed to 

need. The commissioners were swayed by this reasoning and agreed to put aside the 

removal treaty that had been drawn up for the Pokégnek Bodéwadmi.27

A few other Bodéwadmi communities also managed to stay in southern Michigan, 

including the present-day Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi and the Match-E-BeNash-She-Wish Band of Potawatomi Indians of Michigan. Either by hiding from federal 

authorities sent out to conduct a removal or returning to their homeland after a brief stay 

in present-day Kansas, they re-consolidated along familial lines and old geographic 

associations. The people who would later constitute the Nottawaseppi Huron Band were 

related to Bodéwadmi that lived in the Detroit area during the late 18th century (including 

some of the people who sold land on the lower River Raisin). By the advent of the 

removal period, some were living on reservations along the upper Huron River and at the 

confluence of the River Raisin and the Macon River. However, in the post-removal 

period they re-established themselves to the west on a tributary of the St. Joseph River. A 

slightly different scenario occurred with the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band, who 

lived on the headwaters of the Kalamazoo River during and after post removal period. 

Composed of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Bodéwadmi, the forebears of the Match-E-Be-NashShe-Wish Band avoided removal through the assistance of an Episcopalian Mission and 

the Ojibwe and Odawa communities that were affiliated with the mission. Both the 

Nottawaseppi Huron Ban and the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band persisted in their 

 26 Quotations from Oxford English Dictionary online 

<https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/hegemony> (accessed December 18, 2016); and Henry Clay, 

“Address to the Colonization Society of Kentucky,” National Intelligencer (January 12, 1830), n.p. Also 

see Mary Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal 

in the 1830s,” The Journal of American History, 86 (June 1999): 15–40; Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to 

Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 

16-32; and Jason Edward Black, American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment (Oxford: 

University Press of Mississippi, 2015), 37-52. 27 Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 156-59, 177-81.
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homeland for many generations, and eventually reestablished a treaty relationship with 

the United States and control over defined reservation lands in the 1990s.28

Other variations on removal occurred, with very mixed consequences. In the 

1830s about half of the Odawa on the Maumee River left for Upper Canada. These 

included a good number of stalwarts 

from the Confederacy who left with 

Naiwash to live among other 

Anishinaabeg in the ancient homeland of 

the Giishkaakhang Odawa on Georgian 

Bay. The rest were removed between 

1837 and 1839 in three stages to presentday Kansas, but the journeys proved 

deadly for half of these forced migrants. 

The Odawa in northern Michigan were 

able to avoid removal by negotiating 

land cession treaties that established 

small reservations on the upper and 

lower peninsulas and guaranteed 

usufruct rights on public (i.e., unclaimed 

or unsold) lands. While the U.S. Senate 

abrogated the portions of the treaties that 

established small reservations, the 

northern Odawa remained in their 

homelands, continued to exercise and defend their usufruct rights, and gained federal 

recognition along with restoration of some of their treaty lands in the 1980s and 1990s.29

A very different scenario played out for the Shawnee and Lunaapeew (Lenape, or 

Delaware), regardless of whether they had been part of the Confederacy or had 

cooperated with the United States prior to and during the War of 1812. While some 

Shawnee and Lunaapeew signed removal treaties in the 1830s and were subsequently 

removed to western lands in the 1830s, most had already left Ohio and Indiana in a series 

of migrations that dated back to the 1780s. The greatest number of departures coincided 

with the dramatic growth in the region’s non-Indigenous population during the 1820s. 

One of largest of these less than voluntary removals occurred in 1826, when 

Tenskwatawa left Wapakoneta with a group of 500 Shawnee (approximately a third of 

 28 “Summary Under the Criteria and Evidence for Proposed Finding, Huron Potawatomi, Inc.” (Approved 

May 10, 1995), 2, 26, 29-31, 40-42; “Summary under the Criteria and Evidence for Proposed Finding 

Match-e-be-nash-she-wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians of Michigan” (Approved June 23, 1997), 17-176; 

Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 156-59, 177-81. 29 Patrick M. Tucker, “Opinion on the Removal of the Ottawa of Ohio: Voluntary or Forced?” Expert 

Witness Report to Attorneys for the Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma, Plaintiff vs. Sean Logan, Director, Ohio 

Department of Natural Resources, Defendant, Case No. 3-05cv7272, United States District Court for the 

Northern District of Ohio Western Division—Toledo (March 30, 2007); Matthew L. M. Fletcher, “Ottawa 

Removal,” in Encyclopedia of American Indian Removal, vol. 1, eds. Daniel F. Littlefield and James W. 

Parins (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2011), 163-67.
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the entire Shawnee population in Ohio) and moved to present-day Kansas City where he 

remained until his death 10 years later.30

Wyandot Removal and the Struggle Between “weal or woe”

Through the 1820s the Wyandot lived in four different locales: the Wyandot 

Reserve on the Huron River about seven miles west of Big Rock (Brownstown), the 

Upper Sandusky Reservation in present-day Wyandot County, Ohio, the Big Spring 

Reserve about 15 miles north of Upper Sandusky, and the Anderdon Reserve just to the 

north of Amherstburg. The boundaries of the reserves/reservations in Michigan Territory 

and Ohio were established in two treaties with the Wyandot that were conducted by 

Lewis Cass and Duncan McArthur in 1818. The 5,000-acre Wyandot Reserve coincided 

with the cession of Maguaga and Big Rock, and served as a single reservation for the 

members of those two communities. The Upper Sandusky Reservation had been 

recognized in earlier treaties, but was enlarged in 1818 by more than 55,000 acres. The 

16,000-acre reservation at Big Spring was established for any Wyandot in Canada who 

wanted to return to the United States. The small community that developed at Big Spring 

was mostly comprised of Wyandot who came from Lower Sandusky (which was ceded in 

1817 at the Treaty of Fort Meigs), Big Rock, and Maguaga, and thus tended to have 

closer ties to the Wyandot on the Huron Reserve than they did with the community at 

Upper Sandusky.31

While the Wyandot identified as one people, the location and composition of 

these four reserves/reservations corresponded to persistent differences that predated the 

War of 1812. As had occurred in the decade before the war, U.S. officials sought to 

exacerbate potential divisions within the larger Wyandot nation in order to expedite the 

removal process. The first effort along these lines occurred in the winter of 1831-1832 

and involved a treaty negotiation with the Big Spring Band for the cession of their 

reservation in exchange for lands beyond the Mississippi River. As U.S. Special Agent 

James Gardiner noted to Secretary Cass, he expected “that, notwithstanding the apparent 

determination of the Upper Sandusky Indians to maintain their present position, this 

treaty [would initiate] ... the means of producing a final cession of all the Wyandott [sic] 

lands in Ohio in a year or two more.”32 The majority of the small population at Big 

Spring was willing to sell the reserve, and generally concurred with Gardiner’s 

assessment that “their present situation in the State of Ohio, in the vicinity of a white 

population, which is continually increasing and crowding around them, they cannot 

prosper and be happy, and the morals of many of their people will be daily becoming 

more and more vitiated.” However, the Big Spring Band adamantly refused any 

suggestion that they move to the West; insisting, instead, that the treaty must affirm their 

 30 Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 2007), 19-52. 31 Martin W Walsh, “The ‘Heathen Party’: Methodist Observation of the Ohio Wyandot,” American Indian 

Quarterly, 16 (Spring 1992): 189-211; Cox, “The Ohio Wyandots,” 145-146; Dwight L. Smith, “An 

Unsuccessful Negotiation for Removal of the Wyandot Indians from Ohio, 1834,” Ohio Archaeological 

and Historical Quarterly, 58 (July 1949): 308-309. Also see “Treaty with the Wyandot, etc., 1817” in 

Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs, 145-152. 32 Special Agent James B. Gardiner to Hon. Lewis Cass, Secretary of War, January 28, 1832; quoted in J. 

Orin Oliphant, “Wyandot Exploring Delegation 1831,” Kansas Historical Quarterly, 14 (August 1947): 

262.
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intention to “remove to Canada, or to the river Huron in Michigan, where they own a 

reservation of land, or to any place they may obtain a right or privilege from other 

Indians to go.”33

The treaty with the Big Spring Band was roundly criticized by the leaders of the 

Upper Sandusky Wyandot, who complained that most of the signatories were more 

connected to the Detroit River area than to the Big Spring Reserve—and were thus not 

qualified to represent the Wyandot communities in Ohio. Given this response, and wary 

 33 Quotation is from “Treaty with the Wyandot, 1832,” in Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs, 338. Also see 

Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 132-134.
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of causing more resistance among Wyandot leaders at Upper Sandusky, U.S. officials 

likely shelved any notions they may have had about a treaty with the Wyandot on the 

Huron River reserve in Michigan. In the meantime, disputes among the Wyandot over the 

sale of Big Spring reached an amicable resolution in December 1832 when some 

Wyandot from Big Spring—“being also anxious ... to keep the whole nation together”—

determined to share “an equal distribution of the proceeds of [the Big Spring] reservation 

[with] ... our kinsfolks of Upper Sandusky.” In return, they received a “seat upon the 

grand reservation at Upper Sandusky, and to an equal participation in all privileges and 

immunities arising from the same.”34

These developments were welcomed by U.S. officials, who recognized the newly 

enlarged Council at Upper Sandusky as the preeminent authority among the Wyandot on 

matters regarding land cessions and removal. Their reasoning was based on four basic 

conditions: the people living at Upper Sandusky composed the majority of the Wyandot 

living in the United States, possessed the largest reservation, were situated in the midst of 

a rapidly growing population of U.S. citizens, and were in the State of Ohio (rather than 

the federal Territory of Michigan). This last point would become more significant in 1834 

when Governor Robert Lucas of Ohio threatened to exercise state sovereignty over the 

reservation if the federal government did not remove the Wyandot to the west.35 In an 

effort to stave off pressure from Governor Lucas and would-be squatters, the Wyandot 

agreed to a new land cession treaty in 1836. The terms were unique, but they reflected a 

keen desire on the part of the Wyandot to squelch the demands of the State of Ohio and 

affirm their intentions to stay on their lands. The treaty encompassed the sale of 36,400 

acres that had been added to the eastern side of the Upper Sandusky Reservation in 1818 

(ostensibly for a presumed influx of Wyandot from around Amherstburg), along with a 

640 acre parcel to the northeast of the main reservation known as Cranberry Reserve. 

According to the terms of the treaty, the survey and sale of the lands were to be 

conducted by the State of Ohio—with the proceeds turned over to the Wyandot. These 

funds were then designated for “the rebuilding of mills, repair and improvement of roads, 

establishing schools, and other laudable public objects for the improvement of their 

condition,” with the remainder distributed among Wyandot households as annuities.36

The 1836 treaty brought a sense of respite to the Wyandot at Upper Sandusky, 

while public projects and annuities seemed to promise a degree of permanence. The 

demographic and political dynamics of Ohio did not abate, however, and the push for 

removal continued apace. Throughout the 1830s, the Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware) 

near Lower Sandusky, the Odawa who lived on the lower Maumee River, the Shawnee 

and Onödowá’ga: (Seneca) from Wapakoneta, and the Ökwe'öwé (Seneca-Cayuga; aka, 

“Mingo”) at Lower Sandusky were all pressured into ceding their lands in Ohio and 

 34 Quotation from a documented agreement between 10 signatories to the Big Spring treaty and the 

“Wyandot Chiefs of Upper Sandusky” on December 3, 1832; in Correspondence on the subject of the 

emigration of Indians: between the 30th November, 1831, and 27th December, 1833, vol. 3 (Washington: 

Duff Green, 1835), 543-544. Also see Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 133-134. 35 Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 134-38; Smith, “An Unsuccessful Negotiation for Removal,” 311-

315; Bowes, “Wyandot Removal,” in Encyclopedia of American Indian Removal, 273. 36 Cox, “The Ohio Wyandots,” 215-218, Carl G. Klopfenstein, “The Removal of the Wyandots from Ohio,” 

Ohio History Journal, 66 (April 1957): 123-125; and Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 136-138. 

Quotation from “Treaty with the Wyandot, 1836,” in Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs, 460.
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removing to present-day Kansas. By 1839 the Wyandot were the only tribal nation in 

Ohio, and they became the entire focus of the political and private interests that had long 

championed the removal of all American Indian from the state. As the Wyandot faced 

this growing threat to their communities and lands, the encroachments of an increasingly 

aggressive population of U.S. citizens made it difficult to maintain a united front against 

the rising clamor for their removal. These external pressures also enlivened internal 

divisions among the Wyandot that predated the War of 1812 and corresponded to the 

different experiences of the Detroit River and Upper Sandusky communities in the 

decades after the war.37

A year after the Treaty of Springwells (1815) formally ended conflict in the 

Detroit River border region, the Upper Sandusky Wyandot accepted the entreaties of 

Methodist missionaries to preach and live among them. In the ensuing years a substantial 

number of Wyandot adopted many of the religious and economic precepts of the Second 

Great Awakening—a Protestant religious revival movement that emphasized individual 

salvation and individual effort in a market economy. Such individualism may have run 

counter to the traditional precepts of Wyandot society and leadership, but the families 

who took these ethics to heart would eventually prove to the most adamant opponents of 

removal. Situated at an important crossroads, their reservation already had important 

commercial advantages and, as a Methodist missionary warned, they would be in a less 

prosperous circumstance and soon surrounded by unscrupulous Euro-Americans if they 

agreed to remove to present-day Kansas.

These “Christian” Wyandot were opposed by “Pagan” Wyandot who were so 

named because they did not associate with the Methodist missionaries, had some earlier 

experience with Catholicism, continued to embrace older cultural practices, and preferred 

to remain at some distance from Euro-American communities. Though removal was 

hardly a “Pagan” preference, migration to Canada or some area to the west might allow 

for a level of cultural and political autonomy that could not be sustained in Ohio. These 

different views were largely entrenched by the mid 1830s, when U.S. officials began 

encouraging the Wyandot to send parties to assess the lands they would move to in 

present-day Kansas. The Wyandot obliged, in part to see if some accord might be worked 

out between “Christian” and “Pagan” leaders, but they were disappointed by the 

conditions they found on the western prairies and declined to participate in a treaty. Even 

as U.S. officials began to lose their patience through the late 1830s and Ohio officials 

blustered, the so-called “Christian” and “Pagan” Wyandot failed to reach an accord 

amongst themselves.38

The impasse was finally broken by tragedy in December 1840, when three U.S. 

citizens killed Summundewat (the principal leader of the Upper Sandusky Wyandot) his 

sister, and brother in-law at a winter hunting camp. Though all three assailants were 

arrested, none were ever charged. Following this event and its dispiriting outcome, the 

 37 Mary Stockwell, The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Indians (Yardley, PA: Westholme 

Publishing, 2016), 205-211, 241-249, 2270-281; Charles Garrad, Petun to Wyandot: The Ontario Petun 

from the Sixteenth Century (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of History and the University of Ottawa Press, 

2014), 509-514, 517. 38 Cox, “The Ohio Wyandots,” 40-43, 72-73, 110-126, 217-221; Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 137-

144. Also see Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, ed. Patricia Ingham (New York: 

Penguin Books, 2000), 216-217.
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“Christian” leaders of the Upper Sandusky Wyandot took full measure of their 

vulnerabilities and began to consider leaving Ohio. By this time, the entire Wyandot 

nation had been worn down by more than a half-century of wrestling with federal 

officials over the shifting terms and conditions of treaties, the violence of the War of 

1812, a decade of engaging and countering Ohio politicians, and the ongoing agitations 

that stemmed from the federal policy of Indian Removal and the expectations of land 

speculators. William Walker, an Upper Sandusky Wyandot leader whose family lived 

near Malden during the War of 1812, summed matters up in a letter to his brother: “even 

those who have, heretofore, been opposed to the treaty are truly desirous now that the 

matter might be closed and they relieved from this state of suspense. Let the result be for 

‘weal or woe.’”39

A removal treaty was finally concluded in March 1842, which called for the 

cession of all lands in Ohio and Michigan Territory for a permanent annuity of $17,500 

and 148,000 acres in present-day eastern Kansas. All of the signatories were from the 

Upper Sandusky Reserve, but they apparently acted with the consent of “the Wyandotts 

of the River Huron, in Michigan,” who probably numbered less than sixty men, women, 

and children at the time.40 The following July, as the date of removal approached, the 

Wyandot who had gathered in Ohio had become—in the words of Joel Walker—“very 

dull and desolate;” woe had become a collective reality, “everybody ... appeared to have 

a long face on,” and the “once peaceful barbarian village [wore] rather a gloomy 

appearance.” Now refugees, forced to leave their homes, the Wyandot remained 

committed to managing the process of their removal with the assistance of a few 

missionaries. Numbering 644 people, they first took themselves and their belongings by 

wagon, horse, and foot to Cincinnati, all the while encountering frequent reminders of the 

pressures that had forced them to cede their lands. Travelling south along the same road 

that William Hull had enlarged in 1812, the Wyandot were preyed upon by thieves and 

liquor peddlers—and repeatedly met cold indifference from the communities they passed. 

Once in Cincinnati they traveled by steamboat to St. Louis, and from there up the 

Missouri River to the vicinity of present-day Kansas City.41

 39 Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 135-38. Walker quoted in Cox, “The Ohio Wyandots,” 297. 40 The population of the Huron Reserve had diminished over the years through intermittent migrations to 

Anderdon, Upper Sandusky, the islands and shore of the Detroit River, and other Native and non-Native 

communities with whom they were close. At least a dozen or more Wyandot moved to Anderdon in the 

period between the treaty council and the removal date. Consequently, the people still living on the Huron 

Reserve were in no position to alter the consensus within the larger and more powerful leadership council 

at Upper Sandusky. Given the subsequent decision of all 45 men, women, and children who lived on the 

Huron Reserve to assemble at Upper Sandusky before removal, it is likely that they deferred to the 

authority of the leaders of the Wyandott Nation at Upper Sandusky. See “Treaty with the Wyandot” (1842), 

in Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs, 537; Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 145; and Sallie Cotter Andrews

(Tewatronyahkwa, Deer Clan), “Nicholas Cotter: ‘Ron-nyan-es’ or ‘Striking the Sky,’ Big Turtle Clan,

1822–1887” <https://www.wyandotte-nation.org/culture/history/biographies/nicholas-cotter/> (accessed 12

June 2018). 41 Carl G. Klopfenstein, “The Removal of the Wyandots from Ohio,” Ohio Historical Quarterly, 66 (April 

1957), 119-136; Frederick A. Norwood, “Strangers in a Strange Land: Removal of the Wyandot Indians,” 

Methodist History, 13 (1975), 45-60; Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 138-146. Joel Walker quoted in 

Cox, “The Ohio Wyandots,” 296. Quotation regarding the “Wyandotts of the River Huron” from “Treaty 

with the Wyandot” (1842), in Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs, 537.
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The entire 1,000-mile journey took three weeks, and the days on the river boats 

proved less stressful than the overland portions. After crossing the Missouri River to the 

Kansas shore, however, their travails recommenced. Because the federal government had 

not been able to acquire the lands that were identified in the 1842 treaty, the Wyandot 

were forced to live as squatters in makeshift quarters near the confluence of the Kansas 

and Missouri rivers. Through the fall and winter they suffered from exposure, hunger, 

and disease, with approximately 100 of the 664 people who left Ohio dying in a matter of 

months. In the midst of this woeful period, Wyandot leaders arranged to purchase 25,000 

acres from nearby Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), and finally began to rebuild their 

community the following spring.42

Figure 9.5: Wyandot Removal, 1843. Map illustrates the route of the Wyandot 

from Upper Sandusky to present-day northeastern Kansas.

Potawatomi Trail of Death

A different but equally tragic scenario unfolded in what came to be known as the 

Potawatomi Trail of Death. One of the groups most opposed to removal, missionaries, 

and U.S. officials was the Mshkodésik Bodéwadmi (Prairie Potawatomi) that lived along 

the Yellow River about thirty miles southeast of Lake Michigan. Closely associated with 

Main Poc, who had died in 1816, this community’s principal leader was a prophet known 

as Menominee who blended Tenskwatawa’s teachings with elements of Catholicism. 

Menominee was not present at the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, where various Bodéwadmi 

groups assembled for a series of treaties, and the following year declared that he would 

not meet with U.S. Commissioners. In the summer of 1836 the United States conducted 

 42 Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 144-48; Norwood, “Strangers in a Strange Land,” 48-60; Kim 

Dayton, National Historic Landmark Nomination Form: Wyandotte National Burying Ground—Eliza 

Burton Conley Burial Site (Washington, DC: National Historic Landmarks Survey, National Park Service, 

2016), 16, 20-22. 
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removal treaties with most of the signatories who were at Chicago in 1833, including one 

group residing on the Yellow River. However, a large faction associated with Menominee 

remained aloof. The following year the first Bodéwadmi removals in northern Indiana 

occurred, and included Bodéwadmi along the Tippecanoe River—about a day’s travel to 

the south of the communities on the Yellow River.43

The 1837 removals soon brought a flood of squatters into northern Indiana 

through the spring of 1838, including areas within the Yellow River basin. These 

interlopers were not welcomed by resident Bodéwadmi communities, but matters became 

potentially volatile by mid-summer. The removal treaties of 1836 had set August 5, 1838 

as the final date for all signatory groups to abandon their homes in Indiana. Menominee 

was not a signatory to the treaty, and had no intention of abiding its terms. Alarmed by 

the continued presence of Bodéwadmi in the Yellow River area, a group of newcomers 

wrote to Indiana Governor David Wallace and expressed their fears of an imminent 

uprising. After visiting the area in late August, Wallace was determined to enforce the 

terms of the 1836 treaties on the Yellow River Bodéwadmi before summer’s end. The 

Governor soon met with General John Tipton in Logansport, and directed him to effect a 

forced removal of Menominee and his community. A veteran of the Battle of Tippecanoe 

and a Major in the Indiana Territorial Militia during the War of 1812, and having just 

completed a term as a US Senator, Tipton possessed the connections and experience to 

carry out the order. Within two days he brought together a mounted militia force of 100, 

and set out for the Yellow River some 40 miles to the north. Before leaving, Tipton also 

sent a messenger to arrange for a meeting with Menominee. Tipton arrived at the Yellow 

River on August 30 and met with Menominee in a log chapel near his village. The 

meeting quickly became an incarceration, however, when Tipton informed Menominee 

and his cohort that they were all prisoners. The Bodéwadmi who attended the meeting 

were all locked within the chapel, and Tipton then sent out several militia units to bring 

in as many Yellow River Bodéwadmi as they could find within two days. A few days 

later, more than 800 people had been hastily assembled in the vicinity of the chapel, and 

cursory preparations were underway for an early morning departure on September 4.44

With their leaders caged in a prison wagon, and the smoke of their burning homes 

and fields pouring into the sky, the Yellow River Bodéwadmi began a forced march 

under military escort on the morning of September 4. Over the two months of their nearly 

700-mile ordeal, a prolonged heat wave, followed by periods of cold rain and snow, 

weakened the Bodéwadmi and exacerbated widespread illnesses. At one point, more than 

a third were plagued with fever, diarrhea, tuberculosis, depression, or general fatigue—

and had to crowd on to baggage wagons because they could not walk. Death was a near 

daily experience, particularly for young children, and the pace of the westward march 

forced “their bereft and exhausted families to leave the bodies behind in hastily dug 

graves.” By the time they arrived at their destination on November 4, at least forty-three 

 43 R. David Edmunds, The Potawatomis, Keepers of the Fire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 

1978), 255-66; James A. Clifton, The Prairie People: Continuity and Change in Potawatomi Indian 

Culture, 1665-1965 (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), 244-45, 270-72. 44 Edmunds, The Potawatomis, 266-68; Clifton, The Prairie People, 297-300; Thomas J. Campion, “Indian 

Removal and the Transformation of Northern Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History, 107 (March 2011), 

39-44; [William Polke], “Journal of an Emigrating Party of Pottawattomie Indians, 1838,” Indiana 

Magazine of History 21(1925), 315-20.
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had died and as many as sixty-eight escaped. The trauma of the journey would deeply 

scar the Yellow River Bodéwadmi, and the route they and other Bodéwadmi took to the 

West came to be known as the Potawatomi Trail of Death. Arrival in Kansas, for the 

Bodéwadmi and other Native nations, also brought a new existential challenge. As Kelli 

Jean Mosteller (Citizen Potawatomi Nation) writes, “removal from the places oral 

tradition dictated they were meant to live, dispossession of the lands where their 

ancestors were buried, and the loss of sites where seasonal ceremonies took place,” 

shattered essential conceptions of the relationship between place and people. Those who 

escaped the Potawatomi Trail of Death were generally able to maintain these ancient 

relations, while their tales of the removal experience served as a stark warning to the 

Bodéwadmi with whom they settled in Michigan and Upper Canada.45

Figure 9.6: “Potawatomi leaving Logansport, Indiana, September 10, 1838.”

Detail of a sketch by George Winter. The Wabash River is in the background. Source: 

Tippecanoe County Historical Association, Lafayette, Indiana.

Myaamia Removal and Hiding in Plain Sight

Removal was conceived as a blanket policy, predicated on racialized conceptons 

of civilization and commerce, and applied through blunt applications of military, 

political, economic, and legal force. Yet every Native community experienced the 

process differently, and the applications of force were never uniform. A case in point 

involves the last substantial removal from the western Ohio Valley, which occurred in 

 45 Thomas J. Campion, “Indian Removal and the Transformation of Northern Indiana,” Indiana Magazine 

of History, 107 (March 2011): 39-44; Irving McKee, “The Centennial of ‘The Trail of Death,’” Indiana 

Magazine of History 35 (March 1939), 27-41; [Polke], “Journal of an Emigrating Party of Pottawattomie 

Indians, 1838,” Indiana Magazine of History 21(December 1925), 319-24, and 335-36; Edmunds, The 

Potawatomies, 268-270; Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 169-70; Kelli Mosteller, “An Unsettling 

Legacy: The War of 1812 and the Removal Treaties of the 1830s,” Citizen Potawatomi Nation

<https://www.potawatomi.org/news/top-stories/1072-an-unsettling-legacy-the-war-of-1812-and-theremoval-treaties-of-the-1830s> (accessed June 14, 2017). Quotation from Mosteller, “Place, Politics, and 

Property: Negotiating Allotment and Citizenship for the Citizen Potawatomi, 1861-1891” (PhD diss., 

University of Texas at Austin, 2013), 3-4.
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1846 and involved the Myaamia who were then centered around the confluence of the 

Mississinewa and Wabash rivers. The first treaty with the Myaamia during the Removal 

Era occurred in 1834, but the matter of removal was not formally raised until a 

subsequent treaty council in late November 1840. The delay partly stemmed from the 

personal diplomacy of Pinšiwa (Jean Baptiste Richardville) who, like his uncle P'KoumKwa (aka Pacanne), was a venerated akima (civil leader). His fluency in English and 

French, as well as his connections with traders, missionaries, and state officials, allowed 

him to assuage concerns about the Myaamia. Even when Myaamia removal seemed 

unavoidable, his personal status allowed him to gain exemptions for several families—

including his own—before his death in 1841. Maconaquah, a leading Myaamia woman, 

also managed to gain exemptions for a number of her relatives after the 1840 treaty was 

confirmed. Born Francis Slocum, who as a young child lived in northern Pennsylvania 

when she was captured by Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), Maconaquah’s efforts on 

behalf of her children and other members of her village succeeded in part because of her 

Euro-American origins—and the willingness of U.S. citizens and officials to attribute the 

presumed virtues of the “white race” to Maconaquah, her Myaamia relatives, and other 

members of her village.46

Pinšiwa and Maconaquah were exceptional figures, and well known to EuroAmericans within and beyond Indiana. Yet their experiences were shared by other 

Myaamia. After the 1840 treaty, a series of administrative delays on the part of U.S. 

officials and petitions from Myaamia leaders put the date of removal off until 1846. In 

the interim, several Myaamia families managed to gain relief from removal with nonMyaamia testimonials about their Christian faith and their success as farmers and 

entrepreneurs. Such characteristics were hardly rare, and during the six-year delay a 

substantial number of Myaamia families that farmed their own parcels came to believe 

that they could remain on these various holdings indefinitely. As a final date for removal 

drew near, however, last ditch efforts to persuade U.S. officials proved too little and too 

late. Instead, Governor James Whitcomb—like Governor Wallace before him—sent 

troops to ensure compliance.47

Because the extended relations of Pinšiwa and Maconaquah encompassed so 

many households, the number of people exempted from removal amounted to nearly half 

of the entire Myaamia population. Along with others who gained their own exemptions, 

or fled when the militia troops arrived, the number of Myaamia who remained in Indiana 

amounted to more than half of the Myaamia nation. The nearly 400 who could not claim 

or prove an exemption were ultimately forced to board canal boats at Peru, Indiana, for 

the journey to Kansas Territory. Though not as trying as the Potawatomi removals of 

 46 Michael Galbraith and Angela M. Quinn, National Historic Landmark Nomination Form: Wyandotte 

National Burying Ground (Eliza Burton Conley Burial Site (Washington, DC: National Historic Landmarks 

Survey, National Park Service, 2009), 22-23. Stewart Rafert, The Miami Indians of Indiana: A Persistent 

People (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 1996), 107-114; Melissa A. Rinehart, “Miami 

Removal,” in Encyclopedia of American Indian Removal, 137-39; Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, myaamiaki 

aancihsaaciki:A Cultural Exploration of the Myaamia Removal Route (Miami, OK: Miami Tribe of 

Oklahoma, 2011), 2-3. 47 Kate A. Berry and Rinehart, “A Legacy of Forced Migration: The Removal of the Miami Tribe in 1846,” 

International Journal of Population Geography, 9 (March/April 2003): 93–98; Rafert, The Miami Indians 

of Indiana, 114-19.
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1837-38, the one-month journey on a series of canal and river boats still took a toll—with 

several elderly and very young Myaamia dying en route. The arrival in eastern Kansas 

was traumatic as well, leaving the Myaamia “grief-stricken and disheartened” over the 

loss of their homes and the prospect of life in an unfamiliar land so far from their 

relatives in the Wabash River valley. These feelings would be magnified in the coming 

months, since winter was coming and the people would have to live in canvas tents and 

eat government-supplied rations until they had built houses and harvested crops the 

following year. Those who remained in Indiana were also confounded and depressed in 

the aftermath of Removal, and all were left to contend with a deep and lasting wound 

running through the Myaamia nation.48

Like the Myaamia still in Indiana, a fair number of Shawnee and Lunaapew, as 

well as Wyandot, Odawa, and Ökwe'öwé (Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”), managed to 

remain in the region long after the removal period. This anomaly stemmed from the 1818 

treaties conducted by Cass and McArthur in which some leaders retained their village 

sites as discrete “reservations” that had the legal qualities of an estate that could be 

passed on to their descendants. Most of these retained lands were not included in 

subsequent removal treaties, and thus hundreds of Indigenous and Métis peoples 

remained in Indiana and Ohio. Over the course of a few generations, the ties within these 

Native groups weakened as families and individuals moved to reservations in Oklahoma 

or “married out” of their communities. While some of these groups still persist as loose 

associations of self-identified American Indian communities in Ohio and Indiana, only 

the Miami Nation of Indians of the State of Indiana is formally recognized by a state, and 

none have a nation-to-nation relationship with the federal government.49 In every case, 

however, the histories of the people who hid in plain sight during and after the Removal 

Era present a further manifestation of Native adaptation and persistence—and the deep 

connections between their communities and the places the Creator made for them.50

Coda to 1812: Black Hawk War

Along with the Cherokee Trail of Tears, one of the most famous historical 

episodes associated with the Removal Era is the Black Hawk War in 1832. The origin of 

the conflict did not begin with Removal, but with William Henry Harrison’s 1804 Treaty 

of St. Louis, which ceded a vast expanse of land between the Illinois and Mississippi 

Rivers as well as a large area in what is now eastern Missouri. The treaty involved a party 

of five Thâkîwa (Sauk, or Sac) and Meskwaki (Fox) who were returning north after a 

council with William Clark in St. Louis. While the extent of the cession would not be 

known for several years, Harrison’s treaty was immediately denounced by the Thâkîwa 

and Meskwaki as invalid since it was conducted with men who were not authorized to 

treat for land. It is also likely that the men were badly intoxicated when the treaty was 

 48 Berry and Rinehart, “A Legacy of Forced Migration: The Removal of the Miami Tribe in 1846,” 98–112; 

Miami Tribe, myaamiaki aancihsaaciki, 5-7. Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 69-74. Quotation from 

Rinehart, “Miami Removal,” 140.

49 The Indiana Miami formed and maintained a treaty relationship with the United States between 1854 and 

1897, but subsequent efforts to restore nation-to-nation relatons with the United States have not been 

successful. See Rafert, The Miami Indians of Indiana, 128-30, 276-78, 283-92. 50 Rebecca Kugel, “Planning to Stay: Native Strategies to Remain in the Great Lakes, Post-War of 1812,” 

Middle West Review, 2 (Spring 2016): 1-26. Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 73-78.
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completed. The Thâkîwa who were associated with Mahkate:wi-meši-ke:hke:hkwa (also 

Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk) never accepted the 1804 treaty, and readily 

allied with the British and the larger Native Confederacy during the War of 1812. By the 

1820s, as U.S. citizens pushed into the heart of the Thâkîwa homeland in present-day 

northwestern Illinois, most Thâkîwa and Meskwaki moved across the Mississippi.

However, the community associated with Mahkate:wi-meši-ke:hke:hkwa still seasonally 

inhabited their village of Saukenuk at the mouth of the Rock River (present-day Rock 

Island) on the east side of the Mississippi and, much to the chagrin of U.S. officials, 

maintained active trade relations with the British to the north.51

The survey and sale of lands in Illinois incensed Mahkate:wi-meši-ke:hke:hkwa

and his community, and they refused to acknowledge U.S. sovereignty over the area. In 

the spring of 1831, 1,500 Thâkîwa and Meskwaki returned to Saukenuk to plant crops 

and demonstrate their independence within their homeland. By late June a force of 

Illinois volunteers responded to this action with an attack on Saukenuk, but found that the 

village had been abandoned. The departed Thâkîwa and Meskwaki had already moved 

about forty miles up the Rock River where they received assistance from a prophet 

known as Waapakiishik, who led a village of about 200 disaffected Hoocąągra (HoChunk or Winnebago), Thâkîwa, Meskwaki, Bodéwadmi, and Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo). In a 

relationship that was reminiscent of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, Mahkate:wi-mešike:hke:hkwa and Waapakiishik had become the center of Native opposition to the 

region’s growing population of Euro-American newcomers as well as U.S. policies that 

sought to remove and “civilize” American Indians. By autumn, however, Mahkate:wimeši-ke:hke:hkwa moved across the Mississippi to reside near the winter hunting 

grounds of the Thâkîwa.

52

Mahkate:wi-meši-ke:hke:hkwa once again returned to Saukenuk in the spring of 

1832, perhaps in response to possibile assistance from Native groups to the north as well 

as the British. Neither materialized and, after a mixed force of U.S. Regulars and militia 

were sent to Saukenuk in late April, the Thâkîwa and Meskwaki again fled up the Rock 

River. This time the U.S. force pursued, and a long running conflict took place along the 

Rock River through northwestern Illinois—where Waapakiishik and some of the warriors 

in his village came to the support of the Thâkîwa and Meskwaki. These joined forces 

were then pursued further up the river into southwestern Wisconsin Territory. At this 

point, the events that became known as Black Hawk’s War shifted into a long retreat 

toward the Mississippi and costly rear-guard engagements with much larger militia 

forces. After weeks of moving northwestward across various river drainages, the flight 

and pursuit came to an end in early August amongst the maze of islands and sloughs 

where the Bad Axe River joins the Mississippi. After a few scattered groups attempted to 

surrender, most of the remaining Thâkîwa and Meskwaki were chased across the 

Mississippi and fired upon from a steamboat.53

While the tragic denouement on the Mississippi hardly amounted to a war, it 

marked the end of any sustained armed resistance to the United States in what had once 

 51 Bowes, Black Hawk and the War of 1832: Removal in the North (New York: Chelsea House, 2007), 26-

32.

52 Ibid., 34-46. 53 Ibid. 63-86.
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been part of the much larger Northwest Territory. In this respect, the events of 1832 are 

directly connected to the treaties of William Henry Harrison and—in the person of 

Mahkate:wi-meši-ke:hke:hkwa—the Native Confederacy that formed around 

Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh prior to and during the War of 1812. Yet in the minds of 

most people in the United States, the Black Hawk War became associated with Indian 

Removal in two ways. First, it made western governors more forceful in their advocacy 

and implementation of removal; and second, it turned Mahkate:wi-meši-ke:hke:hkwa into 

a tragic symbol for Eastern critics of President Jackson and the Removal policy. In a 

remarkable accident of political theater, both Jackson and Mahkate:wi-meši-ke:hke:hkwa 

toured several eastern cities at the same time—with the latter drawing great crowds that 

came to see and celebrate a noble champion of Native rights. These sentiments did not 

hold in western cities, especially in Detroit where “the throng resembled more a lynch 

mob than an admiring multitude” and effigies of Mahkate:wi-meši-ke:hke:hkwa and his 

companions were burned.54

The violence associated with the events known as Black Hawk’s War marks a 

distinct episode in the 1830s, but as the event in Detroit suggests, it follows directly from 

the motives and causes that gave rise to the War of 1812. The same is true of the 

Removal Era, which was grounded in the host of treaties that preceded and soon followed 

the War of 1812. Harrison’s treaties before the war clarified the central cause of the 

Native Confederacy, while removal effectively defined the consequences of defeat. The 

examples given in the preceding paragraphs, along with the discussion of Mahkate:wimeši-ke:hke:hkwa and the events of 1832, do not cover the full breadth of experiences 

during the Removal Era. Yet they all offer clear insights into the direct and lasting 

consequences of the War of 1812 for Native peoples as well as the foundational 

conditions that underlay U.S. national growth through the middle of the 19th century and 

beyond. These consequences and conditions would find new expressions in subsequent 

removals of Native communities from Kansas to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) in the 

1860s—a fate that most Thâkîwa and Meskwaki would also endure. Each removal, for 

every community, renewed old traumas, deepened the process of dispossession, and 

created a further separation between homelands and communities. After more than five 

decades, the future that Native peoples who fought along the Detroit River and at 

Frenchtown was both clearer and darker—and still unfolding.

 54 Quotation from Kerry A. Trask, Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America (New York: Henry 

Holt and Company, 2006), 294-307; quotation on 301-02.
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Chapter Ten

297

Chapter Ten

Remaining, Remaking, and Remembering

The final chapter returns to the subject of the Wyandot during between the end of the War of 

1812 and the Wyandot Removal from Ohio to present-day Kansas. The topical emphasis is on 

the people variously referred to as the “Canadian Wyandot,” the Wyandot Indian Band of 

Anderdon, and the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation. Their history in the first half of the 19th

century parallels that of other Native peoples discussed in Chapter Nine, but their persistence 

in the Detroit River region reflects a remarkable continuity that is finding new expression in 

growing concerns about identity, homeland, environmental stewardship, and history. The 

chapter then shifts to a history of the River Raisin Battlefield site, the City of Monroe, and 

various ways the battles have been commemorated since the 19th century. The narrative 

concludes with an overview of the movement to create what is now the River Raisin National 

Battlefield Park.

The Wyandot of Anderdon

Between the aftermath of the War of 1812 and the series of treaties held on the St. 

Mary’s River in 1818, a small number of Wyandot left Lower and Upper Sandusky to 

live with the “Canadian Wyandot” on the Anderdon Reserve near Amherstburg. Centered 

on the lower Canard River, the reserve was established in 1816 for the Wyandot who 

were allied with Teotrontore (more commonly Sou-neh-hoo-way, or Splitlog). Though 

more closely tied to the Wyandot in Michigan Territory, the people who lived on the 

Anderdon Reserve also had close connections to the Wyandot community at Big Spring

in Ohio. Consequently, the 1832 dissolution of the Big Spring reserve caused some 

residents to move (or move back) to Anderdon rather than south to the Grand Reserve at 

Upper Sandusky. Similar ties also extended to families who had previously moved to the 

Grand Reserve from Michigan Territory and Big Spring. As the spectre of removal 

became more imminent, some of these Wyandot from Upper Sandusky and most of those 

still on the Huron Reserve joined their fellow Wyandot on the Anderdon Reserve.

1

The number of people who moved to the Anderdon Reserve in the early 1840s is 

unrecorded, but it is very likely that more would have come if not for a significant

reduction of the reserve from roughly 23,000 acres to 7,700 acres in 1836. Though not a 

direct parallel to U.S. policies in the 1830s, this reduction was partly a response to 

developments across the border. The push for shrinking the Wyandot land base mostly

came from Sir Francis Bond Head, the newly appointed Lieutenant Governor for Upper 

Canada, who took a multi-part approach toward regularizing land policies and 

government administration in what is now southwestern Ontario. One of Bond Head’s 

primary concerns related to a growing political reform movement against Crown rule in 

 1 Charles Garrad, Petun to Wyandot: The Ontario Petun from the Sixteenth Century (Ottawa: Canadian 

Museum of History and the University of Ottawa Press, 2014), 515-516; also see pp. 296-299 above. Note: 

in referencing a specific “reserve” or “Reserve,” this paragraph follows the capitalization that is used in 

government documents.
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Upper Canada. To both address and defuse the conditions that inspired reformists and 

would-be rebels, Bond Head wanted to encourage more commercial and agricultural 

development in the Detroit River border region and thus address a potential cause for 

dissent.2

Along with quelling dissent by liberalizing economic policies and promoting 

more private property ownership, Bond Head also sought to exercise more control over 

First Nations affairs. While this third concern certainly fit with his desire to attract more 

people to migrate from Lower Canada and take up lands in what is now southwestern 

Ontario, Bond Head also wanted to avoid the incessant treaties, relocations, and removals 

that characterized U.S. policies toward American Indians. In this latter role, Bond Head 

also viewed himself as a benevolent arbiter of potential conflicts between Native peoples. 

One of his first forays into this assumed role involved the Huron Reserve at Anderdon

and the concerns of Odawa, Bodéwadmi, and Ojibwe groups that had recently moved to 

the area to avoid U.S. removal policies. Bond Head soon learned that these members of 

the Nswe’mishkote’win (Council of Three Fires) were parties to agreements from the 

1790s and early 1800s that established a collective reserve near Amherstburg for them, 

the Wyandot, and other Native allies of the British. Wyandot leaders were suspicious of 

their erstwhile Anishinaabeg allies, and refused to recognize their interests to any portion 

of the Huron Reserve.3

In an effort to unravel the consequences of multiple agreements for the same 

lands, and attract more British subjects to take up land in the area, Bond Head crafted a 

treaty with the Wyandot that called for ceding the northern and southern thirds of the 

Huron Reserve. Together these amounted to approximately 15,300 acres—which left 

about 7,700 acres for the Wyandot. The full proceeds from the sale of the lands in the 

northern third of the reservation were designated for the Wyandot, but the revenue 

generated from selling the southern third of the reserve was intended for the more 

recently arrived Anishinaabeg. Bond’s initial proposal was poorly received by the 

Wyandot, and vigorously denounced by the Splitlog and Warrow families. Broad Head 

responded with threats to immediately cut off all funding for the “annual presents” the 

Wyandot received from the Crown. Splitlog scoffed at the threat and refused to entertain 

any talk of land cessions.4

 2 Laurie Leclair, “The Huron-Wyandottes of Anderdon Township: A Case Study in Native Adaption, 1701-

1914” (Master’s thesis, University of Windsor, 1988), 42-44; Rhonda Telford, “How the West Was Won: 

Land Transactions Between the Anishinabe, the Huron and the Crown in Southwestern Ontario,” in David 

H. Pentland, ed., Papers of the Twenty-Ninth Algonquian Conference (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba 

Press, 1998) 328-342; Michel Ducharme, “Closing the Last Chapter of the Atlantic Revolution: The 1837-

38 Rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 116 

(October 2006): 413–430; Theodore Binnema and Kevin Hutchings, “The Emigrant and the Noble Savage: 

Sir Francis Bond Head’s Romantic Approach to Aboriginal Policy in Upper Canada, 1836-1838,” Journal 

of Canadian Studies, 39 (Winter 2004): 115-138. 3 Leclair, “The Huron-Wyandottes of Anderdon,” 44-46; Telford, “How the West Was Won,” 342-347. 4 Leclair, “The Huron-Wyandottes of Anderdon,” 46-48; Telford, “How the West Was Won,” 347-351; 

Robert J. Surtees, Treaty Research Report: Manitoulin Island Treaties (Ottawa: Treaties and Historical 

Research Center, Indian and Northern Affairs, 1986), 2-13.
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Figure 10.1: Plan of the Huron Reserve (1836-1837). Map shows areas within the Huron 

Reserve as distributed by Wyandot leaders to specific family lines. Laid out in the manner of 

the French long lot system, the reserve had designated lands in the rear that were set aside for 

future generations. As was the case in French habitant communities, the Huron Reserve also 

included another five tiers of undesignated and unsurveyed areas (not shown in this image)

reserved for hunting, harvesting plant foods, woodland resources, and future long lots. The 

darkened portions of the map encompass the northern and southern thirds of the Huron 

Reserve that were ceded in the 1836 treaty. A series of land cessions between 1848 and 1886 

further reduced the Reserve and the loss of nearby islands. Sources: footnoted below.5

 5 Map sources include an updated version of Peter Carroll’s, “Plan of the Huron Reserve, Western District, 

Crown Lands, April 6, 1836” (produced by the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma); and “Anderdon 

Township, 1837,” in Detroit River Canadian Heritage Background Report (Ottawa: Canadian Heritage 

Rivers Association, 1998), 27.
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The meetings between Bond Head and Wyandot leaders occurred in the midst of 

several councils the Lt. Governor held with other Native groups that had come to 

Amherstburg to receive annuities and meet with the King’s new representative. The 

Odawa, Bodéwadmi, and Ojibwe who had returned to the area were among these groups, 

and Joseph Warrow grew increasingly concerned that Bond Head would simply treat with 

these Anishinaabeg for the land cessions. They Wyandot would thus lose large tracts of 

land and receive nothing in return. Warrow and his party were joined by several leaders 

within the Wyandot community, including Thomas Clarke and others associated with 

Splitlog. Clarke was also able to have the stone quarry in the southern third of the Huron 

Reserve to be withdrawn from any land sales—and instead retained by the Wyandot. 

While the Anishinaabeg were allotted funds from land sales in the southern portion of the 

reserve, they did not stay in the Detroit River area. Instead, they moved to Manitoulin 

Island where Bond Head established a new center for the distribution of annuity goods 

that was closer to more First Nations communities as well as to Ottawa and Toronto. 

More than a center for “presents” and councils, Manitoulin also became something of an 

exclusive First Nations territory mostly inhabited by Anishinaabeg who were generally 

welcomed the migration of other Anishinaabeg to the area.6

This reduction of the Anderdon Reserve effectively precluded a substantial 

movement of Wyandot to Canada in the wake of the 1842 removal treaty. Consequently, 

the Wyandot population at Anderdon never grew much beyond the 200 people who were 

estimated to be living there in 1838. Of these, about two dozen chose to join their close 

kin at Upper Sandusky who had opted to move to present-day Kansas. In subsequent 

years, some Wyandot from Kansas occasionally returned to the Detroit River area. 

Because they were deemed “American” Wyandots, however, they did not receive formal 

recognition from Canadian officials nor, in some instances, the leaders of the Wyandot at 

Anderdon. In 1878, nearly all of the people who constituted what was then referred to as 

the “Wyandot Tribe” applied for citizenship under the auspices of the Indian Act of 1876, 

and most of the reserve was surveyed and patented as the private property of Wyandot 

residents with the remainder sold off to Anglo-Canadians.

7

Twelve years later a small group formally known as the “Wyandots of Anderdon,”

under the leadership of Chief Joseph White, also terminated their Native status and had 

their lands surveyed and patented. While these actions resulted in the loss of a collective 

political status within the Dominion of Canada, they also provided an important degree of 

independence from Crown oversight and –through private property laws– secured their 

long-standing attachments to homes and lands along the eastern side of the Detroit River. 

The rationale behind these latter concerns was still evident in the early 20th century, when 

the number of people who identified as Wyandot and continued to live within the former 

boundaries of the Anderdon Reserve or on Bois Blanc (aka “Bob-Lo”) Island numbered 

about 70 –with most still maintaining a notable fluency in their own language.8

 6 Allyshia West, “Indigenous and Settler Understandings of the Manitoulin Island Treaties of 1836 (Treaty 

45) and 1862,” (Master’s thesis, University of Victoria, 2010), 46-62. 7 Leclair, “The Huron-Wyandottes of Anderdon Township,” 72-81; Garrad, Petun to Wyandot, 118-124. 8 Leclair, “The Huron-Wyandottes of Anderdon Township,” 81-82; Garrad, Petun to Wyandot, 516; 

Horatio Hale, “Huron Folk-Lore. I. Cosmogonic Myths. The Good and Evil Minds,” The Journal of 

American Folklore, 1 (October-December 1888): 177-180; and Hale, “The Fall of Hochelaga: A Study of 

Popular Tradition,” The Journal of American Folklore, 7 (January-March 1894): 4-6. The last few Wyandot 
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“There my lineage would form a group, surrounding me”9

Descendants of the “Wyandot Tribe” and the “Wyandot of Anderdon” remained 

in the Detroit River region through the 20th century, with some moving north to Windsor 

and Detroit or across the river to the communities of Brownstown, Gibraltar, Trenton, 

and Flat Rock where some Wyandot had remained after the Treaty of Upper Sandusky 

(1842). From these various bases, they sustained family ties and enduring associations 

with relatives on both sides of the river. Along with kinship and shared history, many 

also maintained an especially close attachment to the Wyandotte Indian Cemetery and the 

“Indian School Burying Ground”—which are situated within the boundaries of the 

former Anderdon Reserve and still remain unceded Native lands within the Dominion of 

Canada. Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Windsor, Ontario, also continued as

another important touchstone for generations of Detroit River Wyandot. Originally 

established in 1760 as the Mission des Hurons de la Pointe de Montréal du Détroit, the 

Church sits on land donated by the Wyandot to the Jesuits and houses birth, marriage, 

and burial records for many generations of Wyandot.10

In the second half of the 20th century the records at Our Lady of the Assumption 

Church, along with materials in archives and special collections held by public libraries 

and research universities in the region, attracted scholars interested in Wyandot history 

and language. These materials also established a basis for recognizing and reinvigorating 

the historical importance of the Detroit River Wyandot, and became a key resource for 

identifying and reconnecting Wyandot descendants in the Detroit River region. One of 

the main proponents of this latter effort was Charles Oscar Warrow, a direct descendant 

of three Wyandot chiefs who led the Wyandot community at Amherstburg from the end 

of the War of 1812 until 1835. Born in 1906, Warrow (who was generally known as 

“Oscar”) spent all but the last years of his life in communities of central importance to the 

history of the Detroit River Wyandot; namely, Trenton (Maguaga), Grosse Ile, Grosse 

Pointe, Wyandot Township, and Flat Rock –where he was buried in 1980 near the Huron 

River and within the former boundaries of the Huron Reserve. Along with Grace Warrow 

Manning, Yvonne Gibbs, Lil Splitlog, Judith Pidgeon-Kukowski (Kwendae’to’), and 

others, he also conducted research in local historical records, consulted with scholars on 

Wyandot history in the Detroit River area, worked on genealogies, poured over local 

 

to forego their “Indian” (aka First Nations) status and become Canadian citizens did so in 1914. In a 1997 

interview, Ted Warrow noted that the last official reference by Canadian officials to “the Wyandot Indian 

Band of Anderdon” occurred in 1925; see Jaqueline Smrke, “Natives bid to restore band status,” Windsor 

Star,” July 15, 1997, 3. 9 John L. Steckley, De Religione: Telling the Seventeenth-century Jesuit Story in Huron to the Iroquois

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 179. Quotation comes from a translation of a seventeenthcentury Jesuit text on Baptism that was originally rendered in the Wen

dat (i.e.. Wyandot) language. 10 Garrad, Petun to Wyandot, 515-516; Kay Givens-McGowan, “The Wyandot and the River,” in John 

Hartig, ed., Honoring our Detroit River: Caring for Our Home (Bloomfield Hills, MI: Cranbrook Institute 

of Science, 2003), 31; “Wyandotte Indian Cemetery,” in folder labeled “Wyandotte Indian Cemetery, 

Anderdon, Ontario: Lot 19 – Highway 18” (on file at the Windsor Public Library in the Essex County 

Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society Collections); Amherstburg Bicentennial Book Committee, 

Amherstburg, 1796-1996: The New Town on the Garrison Grounds, Book II (Amherstburg: Marsh 

Collection Society, 1997), 26-27; and Ernest J. Lajeunesse, The Windsor Border Region, Canada’s 

Southernmost Frontier: A Collection of Documents (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1960), xli-lii, xc-cii. 

The long-standing significance of these sites has been frequently noted during informal conversations 

between the author and members of the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation.
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historical records, and used extensive personal contacts to identify other Wyandot 

descendants in the Detroit River area. The larger goals of these efforts were to reestablish and revitalize the region’s Wyandot community with an eye toward ensuring its 

future viability on both sides of the Detroit River.11

Oscar Warrow’s son, Ted Warrow, joined with other Wyandot descendants to 

further this cause in the 1990s. One of the earliest fruits of these labors was the 

establishment of an annual Green Corn Feast on Grosse Ile. The Feast was rooted in the 

Green Corn ceremony that was once widespread among agrarian peoples throughout 

eastern North America. While some groups in Canada and the United States have 

maintained the ceremony almost continuously—or resurrected it in the 20th century, some 

version of this annual event was very likely held in the Detroit River area through most of 

the 19th century. While these sacred events varied in their particulars among different 

cultural groups, all functioned as a multi-day combination of harvest festival, New Year’s 

celebration, peace council with public rituals of pardon and absolution, and various 

ablutions of personal and community renewal. The Green Corn Feast is a less extensive, 

one-day affair, but the now annual event helps maintains a deep connection to the past as 

well as strengthen connections among Wyandot descendants in the region.12

In an effort to further galvanize this community and strengthen their ancestral 

identity, Ted Warrow and other Wyandot descendants looked in to the requirements of a 

1985 amendment to the Canadian Indian Act of 1876. Among other things, the 

amendment established a process for an “Indian band” to restore its treaty-based

relationship with the federal government of Canada. The two main criteria for 

reconstituting a band required a clearly defined group composed of direct lineal 

descendants of the original or former band, and retention of a historical land base since 

the time of the band’s dissolution. By the mid 1990s the Wyandot Indian Band of 

Anderdon had formed with 60 members, all of whom could directly trace their descent

from Wyandot who had lived on the Anderdon Reserve prior to its dissolution. In the 

matter of demonstrating a retained land base, the Wyandot Indian Band of Anderdon 

noted the two unceded parcels of the former Anderdon Reserve that still harbored the 

remains of their forebears.13 In May of 1997, however, the Ministry of Indian and 

Northern Affairs rejected the petition on the grounds that the cemetery lands had been 

 11 Scholars who worked with these materials and consulted with Wyandot/Wyandotte in the Detroit River 

region, Kansas, and Oklahoma include Charles Aubrey Buser, Patricia Anderson Buser, John L. Steckley, 

and Charles Garrad. Correspondence between the Buser’s and the people named in this paragraph can be 

found in the Charles and Patricia Buser Collection in the Ohio State University Rare Books and 

Manuscripts Library.

12 Bruce C. Trigger, “The Original Iroquoians: Huron, Petun, and Neutral,” in Edward S. Rogers and 

Donald B. Smith, eds., Aboriginal Ontario: Historical Perspectives on the First Nations (Toronto: Dundurn 

Press Limited, 1994), 60-62; Givens-McGowan, “The Wyandot and the River,” 27-29; C. M. Barbeau, “On 

Iroquoian field-work in 1912,” in Summary Report of the Geological Survey Department of Mines for the 

Calendar Year 1912 (Ottawa: C.H. Parmlee, 1914), 458-459; Wyandot of Anderdon Nation: Green Corn 

Feast , Michigan <http://www.wyandotofanderdon.com/wp/?page_id=121> (accessed 16 September 2018). 13 Although the term “Indian band” (or “band indienne”) remains a legal term in Canadian law, “First 

Nations” (or “bande de la Première Nation”) is more commonly used by the federal government, First 

Nations peoples, and the broader Canadian public. I have chosen to use the words “Band” and “Indian” in 

this paragraph since they correspond to the 19th-century terminology that is embedded in Canadian law, the 

1985 amendments, and the petition for restoration of the Wyandot Indian Band of Anderdon.
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surrendered to the Crown in 1833. Since the Ministry failed to elaborate on the terms and 

timing of the “surrender,” this pathway toward reconstituting an Indian band reached a 

seemingly permanent impasse. 14

Restoring “Indian band” status in Canada would have certainly advanced efforts 

to strengthen the Wyandot community in the Detroit River area. However, recognition 

from Canadian officials was not the only way to build community and establish a land 

base. In regard to the former, the renamed Wyandot Nation of Anderdon received a 

profound affirmation in the summer of 1999 when they joined with the Wyandot Nation 

of Kansas, the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma, and the Huron-Wendat Nation (located in 

Wendake, Quebec) to hold a Feast of Souls ceremony at the site of Ossossané in presentday Midland, Ontario. Ossossané was the site of a well-documented, ten-days-long Feast 

of Souls ceremony in 1636, and was located in the heart of Wendake (the Wyandot, 

Wyandotte, or Wendat homeland) prior to the dispersal of the mid-17th century. The focal 

point of the ceremony was a large ossuary pit where the remains of people from 

Ossossané as well as affiliated towns and villages were interred together—and thus the 

living and the dead, and the peoples with whom they were related, were united in a 

common space and through a collective ceremony.

15

The reinternment followed the recent adoption of a new policy by the Royal 

Ontario Museum (ROM) to

acknowledge that Aboriginal human remains must be treated with great 

care and respect. The ROM is committed to the repatriation of human 

remains in its care, at the request of Canadian Aboriginal groups. In this 

process, the spiritual requirements of the Aboriginal peoples and federal 

and provincial legal requirements must be respected. 16

Over the previous decade the Museum had addressed First Nations concerns about human 

remains and cultural materials on an ad hoc basis, and occasionally partnered with U.S. 

museums in matters relating to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation 

Act of 1990 (NAGPRA). However, the new policy marked a significant shift because it 

 14 See Smrke, “Natives bid to restore band status;” and Bruce G. Trigger, “The Original Iroquoians: Huron, 

Petun, and Neutral,” in Edward S. Rogers and Donald B. Smith, eds., Aboriginal Ontario: Historical 

Perspectives on the First Nations (Toronto: Dundurn Press Limited, 1994), 61. The argument that the 

Huron Reserve was surrendered to the Crown in 1833 is almost certainly specious. Moreover, existing 

documents suggest that the nine efforts to obtain a legal “surrender” of the Reserve between 1831 and 1836 

were duplicitous and founded on efforts to divide Wyandot leaders and misrepresent their stated concerns. 

Even the Bagot Commission (1842-1844), which strongly advocated for de-culturation and assimilation of 

First Nations peoples, concluded that the circumstances surrounding the “surrender” of the Huron Reserve 

were “peculiar,” and “not clearly established.” See Ronda Telford, “How the West Was Won,” 337-353; 

quotations from the Bagot Commission on p. 345. Also see R. J. Surtees, Indian Land Surrenders in 

Ontario, 1763-1867 (Ottawa: Ministry of Indian and Northern Affairs, 1984), 58, 98, 126-127. 15 George Sioui, Huron-Wendat: The Heritage of the Circle (Vancouver: University of British Columbia 

Press, 1999), 142-146; G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660, 2 

vols. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1976), I: 86-90; 93-101; Erik R. Seeman, The HuronWendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in early North America (Baltimore: Johns 

Hopkins University Press, 2011) 59-79; Kathryn Magee, “Dispersed, But Not Destroyed: Leadership, 

Women, and Power within the Wendat Diaspora, 1600-1701” (PhD diss., The Ohio State University, 

2011), 93-101. 16 Quotation in Mima Kapches, “Ossossané Ossuary: The Circle Closes,” Archaeology of Eastern North 

American, 38 (2010): 9. 
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dealt with a large and well-known collection, it was associated with a national historic 

site (i.e., the Ossassané National Historic Site of Canada), and the continued storage of 

human remains in the museum’s basement was increasingly viewed as an egregious 

affront to the Wendat.17

For the Huron-Wendat Nation, the reinternment was a long-desired restoration 

that required the consecration of a Feast of Souls ceremony. Like the ceremony that 

occurred in 1636, this event would also bring together related communities:: the HuronWendat Nation, the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma, the Wyandot Nation of Kansas, and 

the Wyandot Nation of Anderdon. As Kathryn Magee notes, the ceremony was also 

intended “to renew the Wendat Confederacy on twenty-first century terms.” More than 

350 years after their dispersal, and three centuries after the Wyandot came to live in the 

Detroit River region, these “disparate groups across North America continued to ... 

identify themselves as” a common people. The 1999 Feast of Souls joined these diasporic 

peoples “together through the same avenues as their seventeenth-century ancestors, 

drawing upon the power, traditions, and culture of [their] Confederacy before its 

dispersal.”18

The Feast of Souls ceremony and reunion was a profound event for all who joined 

together in the multi-day event. The power of the occasion also resulted in a joint 

statement from the leaders of all four nations, in which they pledged to collectively work

for the welfare of the people of the Confederacy. With endless patience, 

may we fulfill our duty, and may our firmness be tempered with tenderness 

and compassion .... [I]f any nation of the Confederacy should ever need 

help, let it call out the others to come to its aid. We vow to attempt to work 

together in a way that the embers of long ago council fires may be fanned 

into a flame of kinship, culture and love that will warm countless 

generations of Wendat people.19

The statement, and the spirit of the occasion in which it was made, has been

reaffirmed at subsequent events where representatives from some of the four nations were 

present. Perhaps the most significant reunion occurred in September 2015 when leaders 

from all four nations gathered in Gibraltar, MI to hold a dedication ceremony for the 

acquisition of a 15-acre parcel that had been part of Big Rock or Brownstown, where the 

Wyandot lit their Council Fire in the village led by Tohunehowetu (aka Adam Brown). 

The renamed Wyandot of Anderdon Nation have since developed a plan to turn the land 

into a site for the public presentation of Wyandot history, culture, and environmental 

stewardship. Known as the Six Points Property, the site is also intended to be “the future 

home of the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation,” and will include a separate area for 

ceremonial use, gatherings, and tribal offices. For logistical and financial reasons, the 

 17 Mima Kapches, “Ossossané Ossuary: The Circle Closes,” 7-10; and Sioui, Huron-Wendat, 47-49. For 

popular coverage of the site’s excavation in 1947, see J. Herbert Cranston, “The Lost Souls of Ossossane,” 

Maclean’s, October 15, 1947, 24-32. 18 For an excellent overview of the 1999 Feast of Souls ceremony, see Magee, “Dispersed, But Not 

Destroyed,” 358-366; quotations from pp. 358-359. Also see Seeman, The Huron-Wendat Feast of the 

Dead, 140-144. 19 A copy of the signed document can be found at Wyandot of Anderdon Nation: Wendat Confederacy 

Document <http://www.wyandotofanderdon.com/wp/?page_id=101> (accessed 16 September 2018).
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land was purchased by the federally recognized Wyandotte of Oklahoma Nation and then 

leased to the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation—which is recognized by the State of 

Michigan as a State Historic Tribe, but within the context of federal law is simply 

considered a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. While the Wyandotte of Oklahoma 

Nation’s ready access to funds, and a more certain purchase agreement helped seal the 

deal, the arrangement also affirmed the pledge that members of the HuronWendat/Wyandot/Wyandotte Confederacy would aid each other.20

In the years since the Feast of Souls ceremony at Ossossané, the Wyandot of 

Anderdon Nation became the successor to the Wyandot Nation of Anderdon (née

Wyandot Indian Band of Anderdon). Like the group that formed in the 1980s, the 

Wyandot of Anderdon Nation continues to work towards gaining formal recognition as a 

distinct nation that directly engages with the federal government. While the government 

in question is now the United States of America rather than the Dominion of Canada, the 

goal is essentially the same for a community with deep connections on both sides of the 

riverine border. For almost three decades, the long effort to gain federal recognition 

(from Canada or the United States) has been an ongoing process of community 

rebuilding, cultural revitalization, and demonstrating the sovereignty of people with a 

long history of treaty making with the United States, France, Great Britain, Canada, and a 

host of Native nations. Federal recognition would further advance and solidify these 

efforts, and ensure a fuller exercise of sovereignty within a homeland that long predates 

 20 Jim Kasuba, “Wyandot of Anderdon Nation acquires land in Gibraltar,” News-Herald, September 11, 

2015 < http://www.thenewsherald.com/news/wyandot-of-anderdon-nation-acquires-land-ingibraltar/article_f44c9e69-52dc-514c-84cc-583bd5577480.html> (accessed 16 September 2018); also see 

Matt Thompson, “Wyandotte chiefs offer their perspective,” The Blade, June 25, 2015 

<https://www.toledoblade.com/local/2015/06/25/Wyandotte-chiefs-offer-their-perspective.html> (accessed 

16 September 2018). On events that involved partial reunions of the Confederacy, see Charles Garrad, 

“Resarching the Petun,” Ontario Archaeology, 89/90 (2010): 35-36; and Jane Gerster, “Thousands of 

Huron-Wendat remains reburied after decades as archeological artifacts,” The Star, September 14, 2013 

<https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/09/14/thousands_of_huronwendat_remains_reburied_after_decad

es_as_archeological_artifacts.html> (Accessed 16 September 2018). On the State of Michigan’s 

recognition of the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation, see Michigan Indian Directory, 2016-2017 Edition: 

Federally Recognized Tribes, Michigan’s Historic Tribes, State and Federal Contacts, and Indian 

Programs and Services (Lansing: Michigan Department of Civil Rights, 2017), 6.
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the establishment of the United States. In announcing the acquisition of the Six Points 

property and the Master Plan for the its transformation, the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation 

presented a very clear vision of the past, present and the future. “This land was lost to us 

[in the St. Mary’s Treaty of 1818], but our ties to it have never been broken. Our Nation 

has proudly regained this land and is reclaiming our heritage in hopes of educating our 

children and grandchildren, and making our presence known to the world.”21

Along with efforts to revitalize their political and cultural institutions, the 

Wyandot of Anderdon Nation has also taken an active interest in projects related to 

environmental restoration and historical interpretation in the Detroit River region. While 

this includes partnerships with state, county, and municipal agencies, some of the most 

consequential projects have involved collaborations with National Park Service at various 

sites in the River Raisin National Battlefield Park and with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife 

Service in the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge. One of the most significant 

and ongoing partnerships between the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation and the U.S. Fish 

and Wildlife Service dates back to the early 2000s and involves the protection and 

restoration of Humbug Marsh. Located near the former site of Big Rock and the Six 

Points property, the Humbug Marsh Unit harbors the “last [mile] of natural shoreline on 

the U.S. side” of the Detroit River and is a designated “Wetland of International 

Importance.” Because of its proximity to Big Rock and Six Points, the wealth of 

ecological diversity within Humbug Marsh, and the fact that the visual, biological, and 

cultural qualities of the marsh made it the last stretch of the Detroit River that ancestors 

of the Wyandot might still recognize, the Wyandot of Anderdon became actively 

involved in the push to acquire the site from a developer and make it a centerpiece of the 

new wildlife refuge. In subsequent years this relationship with the Refuge and Fish and 

Wildlife staff has become a partnership and a friendship that continues to grow.22

 21 Givens-McGowan, “The Wyandot and the River,” passim; “Six Points Master Plan,” Wyandot of 

Anderdon Nation <http://www.wyandotofanderdon.com/wp/?page_id=385> (accessed 16 September 

2018).

22 Emilia Askari, “Last Refuge on the River,” Land + People, 14 (Spring 2002): 16-20; US Fish & Wildlife 

Service, “News Release: Sacred Land Restoration Ceremony to be Held at Refuge Gateway in Trenton,” 

April 26, 2011 <https://www.fws.gov/uploadedFiles/Wyandot%20May%20%204,%202011.pdf> (accessed 

16 September 2018); John Hartig et al, “Transformation of an Industrial Brownfield into an Ecological 

Buffer for Michigan’s Only Ramsar Wetland of International Importance,” Sustainability, 4 (May 2012): 

1043-1058; National Wildlife Refuge Association, “Partnerships in the Refuge System: International 

Wildlife Refuge Alliance and the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation,” August 26, 2014

<https://www.refugeassociation.org/2014/08/partnerships-in-the-refuge-system-international-wildliferefuge-alliance-and-the-wyandot-of-anderdon-nation/> (accessed 16 September 2018). Such collaboration 

is usually limited to federally recognized tribes, but the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation have been delegated 

by the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma to represent Wyandot/Wyandotte interests in government-togovernment relations with these federal agencies in the Detroit River region.
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Figure 10.3: Six Points Master Plan: A Vision for the Future Home of the Wyandot of 

Anderdon Nation. The Six Points project will involve land conservation, habitat restoration, 

protection of archaeological resources and historically significant spaces, sharing of Wyandot 

values with visitors, and provide a key location for ceremonies, gatherings, and council 

meetings. Though open to the public, the structures and locales identified by the numbers 9-

14 in the right-hand margin will be reserved for members of the Wyandot of Anderdon 

Nation and their guests. The lower portions of the site are mostly wetlands that include a 

turtle pond and views toward the Detroit River. Source: University of Michigan, School of 

Natural Resources and Environment Master’s Practicum, Six Points Property Master Plan: A 

vision for the future home of the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation (2016).

Relations with the National Park Service and staff at the River Raisin National 

Battlefield Park have been even more extensive. Ted Roll, the Grand Chief of the 

Wyandot of Anderdon Nation is an Executive Board Member of the River Raisin 

National Battlefield Park Foundation –which cooperates with and assists the National 

Park Service in management and public outreach programs. Members of the Wyandot of 

Anderdon Nation have also participated in public presentations, educational programs, 

and ceremonies at various park sites. In the summer of 2015, some three months before 

the ceremony at the Six Points property, leaders from each nation of the Wyandot 

Confederacy came together at the River Raisin National Battlefield Park headquarters to 

complete work on a program for educators entitled the “Wyandotte Journey Towards 

Understanding.” The program, which included site visits to multiple units of River Raisin 

National Battlefield Park, as well as to Fallen Timbers Battlefield and Fort Miamis 

National Historic Site in Maumee, Ohio, received glowing reviews from participants—

nearly all of whom noted how their historical understanding of the region had been 
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enlarged and transformed by Native perspectives. The “Wyandotte Journey Towards 

Understanding” also served as the basis of a program and tour in mid-September 2016 for 

attendees of the annual meeting of the American Association of State and Local History

that was held in Detroit. Entitled “War and Peace: Following in the Footsteps of the 

Huron-Wyandot.” The program was also well received by this group of academics and 

professional historians.23

In September 2018, representatives from the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation and 

the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma came together for the bicentennial of the treaty that 

resulted in the cession of Big Rock and Maguaga, and the relocation of the “Michigan 

Wyandot” to the Huron Reserve. To mark the significance of the treaty and celebrate the 

return to Six Points and Big Rock, the two nations jointly hosted a gathering at the Six 

Points property and conducted a ceremony at a nearby park in Gibraltar. Staff from River 

Raisin National Battlefield Park assisted with the second event, which was also attended 

by Susan White, the Refuge Manager for the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge.

The ceremony was centered on the presentation and blessing of three wampum belts. The 

first commemorated the 1818 treaty, the resilience of the Wyandot of Anderdon, and their 

2018 return to Big Rock. The second belt focused on the 1843 removal of the Wyandot 

from the Upper Sandusky and the Huron reserves to Kansas, and the subsequent 

persistence and growth of their descendants across 175 years. The third belt honored the 

Wyandot/Wyandotte/Wendat Confederacy, from the time its members lived in their 

ancient homelands, through the many travails and separations that followed their first 

encounters with Europeans, to the enduring bonds that recently brought them together at 

Ossossané and the commitments they made to work for the benefit of future generations.

The powerful symbolism of these three belts is well captured in the descriptive 

explanation that was given during the presentation of the first belt.

The 200th commemorative wampum belt was woven by over 400 Southeast 

Michigan youth in a purple field emphasizing the horror and tragedies of 

losing the villages of Brownstown and Monguagon after an intense 33-year 

struggle to retain them. On each end of the belt, fragmented pieces of the 

Treaty of Greenville wampum belt are [depicted] to illustrate the broken 

treaties and worthless words that were inscribed in it. The two squares 

represent the two villages and the nearly 1,200 Wyandotte that lived in the 

villages when they were taken from the Wyandot in 1818 by the United States 

under the leadership of Territorial Governor Lewis Cass. The six-sided star 

[near the center of the belt] symbolizes the Six Points development and the 

return of the Wyandot to this site of the Confederated Council Fire at Big 

Rock (or Brownstown) 200 years after the Treaty of St. Mary’s. The six points 

[of the star] represent the traditional Wyandot prayer to the North, South, 

East, West, Heaven, and Mother Earth as a thank you to the Great Creator for 

 23 Thompson, “Wyandotte chiefs offer their perspective,” The Blade, June 25, 2015; “Wyandotte Journey 

Towards Understanding: Project Evaluation,” Self Governance Communication & Education Consortium

<https://www.tribalselfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Wyandotte.pdf> (accessed 16 September 

2018); “Battlefield presentation provokes discussion about war,” The Monroe News, May 29, 2017 

<http://www.monroenews.com/news/20170529/battlefield-presentation-provokes-discussion-about-war> 

(accessed 16 September 2018).
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protecting the Wyandot people and keeping them strong during the 200-year 

journey since leaving their villages.

In the middle of the [white] six points design is one purple bead representing 

the heart and soul of the Wyandot as one people..., protected by the Great 

Creator. [Two broad rows of white beads running across the center portion of 

the belt show] the open lines of understanding and healing [that are required] 

as together we journey to understand and share for the benefit of future 

generations. Between each symbol on the belt there are seven beads 

representing the seven generations who came before us making our journey 

possible and the seven generations to come, reminding us to be good stewards 

of Mother Earth and to remember the lasting impacts of decisions we make 

today on the future generations.24

The place, timing, and tone of this commemorative event powerfully illustrates 

the enduring significance of the Battles of Frenchtown and the broader contexts in which 

they occurred. For the Wyandot, those contexts include their status as the Keeper of the 

Council Fire before and during the Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes (1754-1814). 

The Wyandot were also deeply involved with the battles along the River Raisin, their 

villages of Big Rock and Maguaga were sites of conflict, and Big Rock was central to the 

strategic concerns of the British, the U.S., and the Native Confederacy through most of 

1812 and 1813. In short, the Wyandot were one of the most engaged and most affected 

groups in the Northwest Theater of the War of 1812. The seventh-generation references 

that were made during the wampum belt ceremony at Gibraltar also serve as reminders 

that such concerns long preceded the War of 1812 and continued long after. Native 

peoples in the early 19th century, regardless of how they chose to engage or avoid war, 

invariably considered their deep obligations to past and future generations—as did their 

forebears and descendants. Such concerns also guided their approach to the profound 

challenges that came with subsequent land cession and removal treaties.

25

For the Wyandot and other Native peoples, the War of 1812 was the culmination 

of a sixty-year struggle to ensure the ancient past would carry through to future 

generations. As the events and memories embedded in the 1818—2018 bicentennial 

wampum belt attest, this struggle resulted in horror, profound loss, displacement, and 

dispossession. While these post-war traumas resulted from U.S. policies toward 

American Indians and—to a somewhat lesser degree—British and Canadian policies 

toward First Nations peoples, they were greatly exacerbated by widespread prejudices 

against Native peoples, the duplicity of government officials, and the constant push to 

convert reservation lands into private property. Like other Native groups in North 

 24 Kasuba, “200th anniversary of Wyandot forced migration to be observed in Gibraltar with special 

sctivities,” News-Herald, September 20, 2018 <http://www.thenewsherald.com/news/th-anniversary-ofwyandot-forced-migration-to-be-observed-in/article_46210b50-bd31-11e8-84bc-a7f311195ba0.html> 

(accessed 30 September 2018). Quoted text as read by River Raisin National Battlefield Park 

Superintendent Scott Bentley. Video of the ceremony can be viewed at “Wyandot of Anderdon Nation 

Wampum Belt Ceremony” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nNcA6WfHGk> (accessed 2 October 

2018).

25 Weighing decisions in light of how well they comport with the concerns of seven generations into the 

past and their effects on the next seven generations is common to many Native peoples in North America.
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310

America, the Wyandot in the Detroit River sometimes became invisible to their nonIndigenous neighbors in order to survive these multiple threats. Yet even as they “hid in 

plain sight,” they sustained a persistent and tenacious attachment to their home territory 

and to their former role as Keepers of the Council Fire. 26

The 2018 wampum belt and the recent acquisition of the Six Points property are 

the fruits of this tenacity, and powerful testimony to the multi-generation effort to shape a 

viable future within the Wyandot homeland. This process remains ongoing, and is also 

evident in the Wyandot of Anderon Nation’s collaborations with the U.S. Fish and 

Wildlife Service and the National Park Service: two agencies that are committed to 

restoring and managing the environmental, cultural, and historical legacies that define the 

Detroit River region. Because the Wyandot are so embedded in the landscapes and 

histories of the area, and so connected to past and future generations, they “remember the 

Raisin” like no other people. Through two centuries of horror and healing, they have 

come to embody the significance of the battles and their historical legacies. This is not to 

suggest that the Wyandot represent the past in a way that echoes William Faulkner’s oftquoted observation that the “past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Rather, it is to suggest 

something more significant and more lasting. While Faulkner alluded to the ways the past 

continually haunts the present, a concern for the next seven generations implies that the 

present is a promise to an ever-living future. In other words, the degree to which the 

Wyandot embody the historical significance of the Battles of Frenchtown is roughly the 

same as the effects their decisions will have on their homeland and their descendants over 

the next seven generations.27

 26 Givens-McGowan, “The Wyandot and the River,” 31. 27 It is important to note that the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation’s ongoing process of community 

revitalization also parallels recent historical trends in the Great Lakes region and across the country. Most 

of these developments followed a period of Native activism from the late 1960s through the 1980s, which 

laid the groundwork for several key developments in the 1990s. Among these were a series of efforts by 

American Indian communities to exercise greater self-determination and more directly address longstanding concerns over self-governance, the exercise of traditional practices within their homelands, and 

fuller recognition of their inherent sovereignty as recognized in treaties with the United States. Some of this 

coincided with federal policy developments that included the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act 

(1990), President Clinton’s “Memorandum on Government-to-Government Relations with Native

American Tribal Governments” (1994) and subsequent Executive Order 13175 on Consultation and 

Coordination with Indian Tribal Governments (2000). The 1990s also witnessed the restoration and 

recognition of nation-to-nation relations with a number of American Indian communities through the 

process of federal recognition. Among these were five of the twelve federally recognized tribal nations in 

Michigan. For broader examinations of these matters, see Stephen Cornell, The Return of the Native: 

American Indian Political Resurgence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Joane Nagel, American 

Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture (New York: Oxford 

University Press, 1996); Joanne Barker, Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity 

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Dennis F. Kelley, Tradition, Performance, and Religion in Native 

America: Ancestral Ways, Modern Selves (New York: Routledge, 2014). The five tribal nations in 

Michigan that gained federal recognition in the 1990s are the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, the 

Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, the Match-e-be-nash-she-wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians 

of Michigan, the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi, and the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi 

Indians (Michigan and Indiana). The seven groups with a longer established federal recognition are the Bay 

Mills Indian Community, the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, the Hannahville 

Indian Community, the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior 
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Remaking: Frenchtown becomes Monroe

Much like the Removal Era and the saga of the Detroit River Wyandot, the 

development of Monroe, Michigan, also illustrates the consequences of the War of 1812 

and the U.S. victory in the Northwest theater. By 1816, after concerns about the 

possibility of renewed conflict in Michigan Territory had died down, the habitants of the 

community they referred to as sur la Rivière Aux Raisins were committed to rebuilding

their homes and livelihoods to pre-war conditions. Former Yankee residents like John 

Anderson also returned, and were soon followed by a number of families and single men 

from Ohio and the eastern states. These newcomers viewed southeastern Michigan as a 

place to seek new opportunities, but they moved to the Frenchtown area for a particular 

reason. It was one of the few areas in Michigan Territory where land had been surveyed 

and deeded in the years before the war—and where much of it was available for 

purchase. While the General Land Office also conducted surveys in adjoining areas 

beginning in 1817, these lands would not be ready for patents or deeds for a few more 

years. Consequently, most of the newcomers focused their attention on parcels 

immediately south of the River Raisin and to the west of the old core of the habitant

community.28

The new arrivals, who the habitants often referred to as Bostonnois (“Bostoners”),

soon outnumbered their French-speaking neighbors. In just a few years the growing 

community increasingly reflected the Protestant “Yankee” quality of individualism and 

its association with market-based relationships and pursuits. The mostly informal 

designation of “Frenchtown” also gave way to a new name that seemed to confirm the 

changing social order along the River Raisin. In July 1817, Governor Cass divided

Wayne County to create Monroe County, which he named in honor of former Secretary 

of War and recently inaugurated President James Monroe—who was scheduled to visit 

Michigan the following month.29 Territorial Secretary William Woodbridge subsequently 

designated the general environs of Frenchtown as the county seat, and declared a 12.5 

square mile area centered on the home of François Lassalle to be the “Town of Monroe.” 

Official references to the name “Frenchtown” continued for a few more years with the 

designation of the Frenchtown post office (the second oldest in the Territory), which was 

formally changed to the Monroe of Michigan Territory post office in 1824.30

By this time the Catholic habitants had become a minority in an otherwise 

Protestant town with New England values. This is not to suggest that habitants and 

 

Chippewa Indians, the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan, and the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of 

Chippewa Indians.

28 Margaret Wickens Pearce, “The Holes in the Grid: Reservation Surveys in Lower Michigan,” Michigan 

Historical Review, 30 (Fall, 2004), 135-40; James Z. Schwartz, Conflict on the Michigan Frontier: Yankee 

and Borderland Cultures, 1815-1840 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 14-17. 29 President Monroe was then on a “Goodwill Tour” of the Northeast and the lower Great Lakes, and came 

to Detroit for a few days in mid-August. John McClelland Bulkley, History of Monroe County, Michigan: 

A Narrative Account of its Historical Progress, its People, and its Principal Interests, vol. 1 (Chicago: The 

Lewis Publishing Company, 1913), 416-17. 30 Talcott Enoch Wing, History of Monroe County, Michigan (New York: Munsell & Company, 1890), 42;

Bulkley, History of Monroe County, 246-47, 579; Walter Romig, Michigan Place Names: The History of 

the Founding and Naming of More than Five Thousand Past and Present Michigan Communities (Detroit: 

Wayne State University Press, 1986), 213; Kenneth E. Lewis, “Mapping Antebellum Euro-American 

Settlement Spread in Southern Lower Michigan,” Michigan Historical Review, Vol. 30 (Fall 2004): 124-25. 
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Yankees did not pursue the same commercial goals, or that Bostonnois somehow 

exploited their more established neighbors. The latter had the advantage of relatives and 

close connections on both sides of the Detroit River, and some habitants carried on a 

mostly exclusive trade with Wyandot, Bodéwadmi, and Odawa communities. These 

connections were envied by some Yankee merchants, and likely contributed to the 

suspicions of new arrivals who questioned the national and even racial loyalties of their 

French-speaking neighbors. Nevertheless, the habitants persisted in their home 

community much as their ribbon farms remained embedded in Monroe’s property lines 

and transportation routes.31

Through the early 1820s, most population growth in southeastern Michigan 

occurred in areas to the west and northwest of Monroe where soils were better drained 

and larger parcels could be acquired in areas that followed the cadastral survey. As

Monroe became a regional entrepot for these interior agricultural areas, flour mills went 

in to operation on the lower Raisin and a toll bridge was constructed across the river to 

facilitate transportation to the north and south. In the mid 1820s John Anderson formed a 

company with several others in Monroe to construct a small harbor at the mostly Frenchspeaking community on La Plaisance Bay. Their success was announced in the Michigan 

Sentinel, Monroe’s first newspaper and the second oldest in Michigan, on June 23, 1827.

Our enterprising fellow citizens Miller and Germain, have recently 

shipped from La Plaissance Bay, for the city of New York, two hundred 

barrels of flour, manufactured at their mills .... This is claimed to be the 

first flour shipped from Michigan and speaks loudly of our manufacturing 

and commercial prospects, and is an evidence of the great change that has 

taken place in this section of the country within a few years past.

With the only Michigan port on Lake Erie, Monroe became a regional processing and 

shipping center with direct connections to New York by way of the Erie Canal.

32

These advantages of location were further augmented by a key federal

infrastructure project that put Monroe at the center of a regional economic boom in the 

1830s. In the years immediately after the War of 1812, Hull’s Trace (the first federal road 

in the United States) was improved between Fort Meigs and Monroe, but the stretch 

between Detroit and the River Raisin was in poor shape—with several stretches nearly 

impassable during wet seasons. In response to complaints from Monroe and Detroit, the 

federal government rebuilt the “trace” between 1824-1829. Some of the worst stretches 

were moved inland from the marshes along Lake Erie and the mouth of the Detroit River, 

and the entire route was transformed into a thirty-three-foot wide, well-graded roadway

from the toll bridge on the River Raisin to the north end of Detroit. This greatly eased 

travel and more closely linked Monroe with Detroit’s growing connections to the new

agricultural communities that were forming in the Grand, Kalamazoo, and Joseph river 

basins to the west and northwest.33

 31 Schwartz, Conflict on the Michigan Frontier, 16-20; Brian C. Wilson, Yankees in Michigan (East 

Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008), 23-25. 32 Bulkley, History of Monroe County, 344-46; quotation from op. cit., 538.

33 Daniel F. Harrison, Hull's Trace North Huron River Corduroy Segment, National Register of Historic 

Places Nomination (2010), 7-9.
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Michigan Fever

Completion of the road also helped fuel “Michigan Fever,” a frenzied period of 

plat surveys, land sales, and property speculation that followed the period of removal 

treaties in southern Michigan. Vast tracts of public lands attracted swarms of new comers

looking to acquire property, causing Michigan’s population to grow from approximately 

30,000 in 1830 to more than 170,000 in 1837. This rapid increase was accompanied by an

exponential growth in annual land sales from 147,062 acres in 1830 to a peak of 

4,189,823 acres in 1836. With the bulk of these transactions handled by the federal land 

offices in Detroit and Monroe, the acreage encompassed a broad swath of land from the 

southern end of Lake Huron to the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan. Fueled by 

unsustainable speculation, these markets imploded in early 1837—soon after Michigan 

gained Statehood on January 26 and just as financial crises in Europe and the Americas

tightened credit around the world. In the United States the collapse of the Michigan land 

market helped trigger the “Panic of 1837,” a period financial crisis that resulted in

widespread bank collapses and closures. The “Panic” soon gave way to a deep recession, 

marked by nearly seven years of chronic deflation and high unemployment.34

At the height of the land speculation frenzy and subsequent financial panic, 

Monroe and the Detroit River area were caught up in the so-called “Toledo War” (1835-

1836) and the “Patriot War” (1838). The first related to an unresolved dispute over the 

boundary between Michigan Territory and Ohio that resulted from cartographic errors in 

the late 18th century. While the dispute was real, and even delayed Michigan statehood 

by a year and a half, the “war” had only one (non-fatal) casualty. This occurred in July 

1835 when Monroe County Deputy Sherriff Joseph Wood was stabbed with a pen knife 

 34 Robert E. Mitchell, “Towards a History of Privatizing Public Lands in Michigan 1785-1860,” Michigan 

Academician, 36 (September 2008): 121-148; George Fuller, “Settlement of Michigan Territory,” Journal 

of American History, II (1915), 25-55; Alasdair Roberts, America’s First Great Depression: Economic 

Crisis and Political Disorder After the Panic of 1837 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 13-55.
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314

while trying to make an arrest in Toledo, Ohio. The “Patriot War” was a more serious 

affair that was tangentially related to a broader rebellion against Crown rule in Upper 

Canada. The namesakes of this “war” were the “Hunter Patriots,” self-styled militias 

from the United States who viewed that Canadian rebellion as an opportunity to 

“liberate” Canada from the British. In the Detroit River region, the “war” involved three

conflicts: the Battle of Windsor, where “Hunter Patriots” were defeated by British forces 

near Windsor and by U.S. forces in Michigan, and the Battles of Fighting Island and 

Pelee Island where the “Patriots” were routed and forced to retreat to the United States.35

The conflicts of the 1830s partly reflected the legacies of the Northwest 

Ordinance (1787) in the rendering of poorly understood geographic features, and the War 

of 1812 in the Hunter Patriots’ echoing of General William Hull’s triumphant 

expectations of an easy conquest. Unlike those earlier events, however, they were mere 

tempests in a teapot—and any turmoil associated with the recent “wars” was soon 

forgotten as land markets began to stabilize and credit became more available. By the late 

1830s, the residents of Monroe could already sense a new era of stable economic growth. 

To bolster these hopeful expectations, the City of Monroe invested in a key infrastructure 

project that would more tightly bind the area to national markets—and thus expand and 

diversify the local economy. The initial phase occurred in 1838, when the City issued 

bonds to finance the straightening and dredging of the River Raisin to create a 1,300-foot 

navigable channel from near the site of the 1813 battles downstream to the edge of the 

marshes. From there, the “City Canal,” as it was known, would connect with the 4,000-

foot long United States Canal, a federally financed project then under construction. After 

some delays, both projects were completed in 1843—the year that the national economy 

finally shifted out of its chronic recession. With a direct waterborne connection to the 

commerce of Lake Erie and—via the Erie Canal—the eastern seaboard, Monroe was 

primed to take advantage of a resurgent national economy.

36

The “Floral City”

Throughout the 1840s, Monroe increased in population and developed an 

increasingly diversified economy. Less an adjunct of Detroit and Toledo, the Monroe was 

able to develop local industries that included fisheries, brick factories, pulp and paper 

mills, as well as furniture and other manufactories for the regional market. The city also 

remained an important transshipment area for agricultural produce, including processed 

grains as well as fresh and dried fruits. In all regards, these various enterprises benefited 

from access to steamboats on Lake Erie and newly developing networks of railroad

connections across the Midwest. In the 1850s Monroe became renowned as the “Floral 

City”—both for the abundance of lotus in the lakeshore marshes as well as the number of 

 35 Don Faber, The Toledo War: The First Michigan-Ohio Rivalry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan 

Press, 2008), 98-105; Marc L. Harris, “The Meaning of Patriot: The Canadian Rebellion and American 

Republicanism, 1837-1839,” Michigan Historical Review, 23 (Spring, 1997): 49-53; Shaun J. McLaughlin, 

The Patriot War along the Michigan-Canada Border: Raiders and Rebels (Charleston, SC: The History 

Press, 2013), 118-149. 36 Willis F. Dunbar and George S. May, Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State (Grand Rapids: 

William B. Erdman’s Publishing Co., 1995), 164-68; Kenneth E. Lewis, “Mapping Antebellum EuroAmerican Settlement Spread in Southern Lower Michigan,” Michigan Historical Review, 30, (Fall, 2004): 

120-126; Wing, History of Monroe County, 169-171, 173-176.
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nurseries in the town that shipped ornamental trees and plants across much of the nation 

and into Canada. One of the more famous nurseries in Monroe belonged to Israel 

Ilgenfritz, who owned one of the largest nursery businesses in the United States and grew 

much of his stock on the easternmost part of the Frenchtown battlefield—where the 

prairie met the wooded border of the lake marshes.37

Figure 10.5: Birds-eye View of Monroe, ca. 1860s. Oval shape corresponds to the core 

area of the Battles of Frenchtown and shows the Ilgenfritz Nursery on the right (eastern side) 

of the battleground. Factores are on the south side of the river and downriver from the city 

center—which is not shown in this image. Detail of Monroe: Monroe Co Michigan, 1866

(Drawn and Published by A. Ruger: Chicago Lithographing Co., 1866). Source: Library of 

Congress.

Through the mid 19th century, the population of Monroe more than doubled from 

1,700 in 1840 to about 3,900 in 1860. This increase, coupled with economic 

diversification, was reflected in the demographic profile of the city. Besides AngloAmerican “Yankees” and the descendants of French Canadiens, Monroe also had 

growing numbers of German immigrants and Irish from the Northeast. While most of the 

newcomers were laborers, some were entrepreneurs or professionals who primarily 

worked within their communities. African Americans and Native peoples who usually do 

not make it into the historical record were also in Monroe. American Indians were likely 

seasonal residents and, as occurred in other parts of the United States in the mid 19th

century, may well have worked individually or in small family groups at orchards and 

nurseries. As was the case in Detroit, the African American community in Monroe had 

ties and shared history with families on the Canadian side of the Detroit River. Monroe 

was also one of the penultimate stops on the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves on 

their way to Canada by way of Detroit. The labor of Monroe’s African American 

residents would have followed patterns typical in the region, with men often working in 

construction or performing manual labor, and women taking on the household and family 

chores of white families while maintaining their own gardens and household. For every 

distinct group in Monroe during the mid 19th century, status, ethnicity, and race roughly 

 37 Dunbar and May, Michigan, 164-68; Bulkley, History of Monroe County, 536-597; and Graydon M. 

Meints, Michigan Railroads and Railroad Companies (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 

1993), 2-27.
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corresponded to the types of work and wage scales that depressed or augmented the 

economic opportunities of different groups and individuals.38

Figure 10.6: “Monroe from the Battle-Ground,” ca. 1860s. View presents the 

River Raisin and the battleground area, which was fronted by the two homes along the 

fenceline. The road sweeping through the lower center of the image dates to the early 

19th century. Source: Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812 (New 

York: Harper & Brothers, 1869), 169.

Like most all of Michigan, Monroe sent young soldiers, nurses, and supplies in 

support of the Union cause during the Civil War. The two most famous residents to head 

off to the battlefields were the newlyweds George Armstrong Custer and Elizabeth 

“Libbie” Custer (née Bacon). Unlike most officers’ wives, Elizabeth Custer lived with 

her husband during the war and through the rest of his military career—and contributed 

informally to the running of large encampments behind the battle lines. In all, Monroe 

County sent approximately 2,000 men to the war, and lost approximately 436—in battle 

and as prisoners of war, but most frequently from disease, illness, or accidents.39 In the 

decade following the war, and through the rest of the 19th century, the demographic and 

economic profiles of Monroe remained fairly stable. This contrasts markedly with 

Detroit, which grew six-fold between 1860 and 1900 (45,619-285,704), and Toledo, 

 38 James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among 

Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 237-68; African Americans 

in the United States, Michigan and Metropolitan Detroit (Center for Urban Studies, Wayne State 

University, February 2002); Alexandra Harmon, “Indians in the Marketplace,” in The Oxford Handbook of 

American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 497-502. 39 Elizabeth Bacon Custer, The Civil War Memories of Elizabeth Bacon Custer: Reconstructed from Her 

Diaries and Notes by Arlene Reynolds (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 123-39. Figures derived 

from Jason King and Monroe County Genealogical Society, Civil War Veterans of Monroe County, 

Michigan (Monroe: Friends of the Monroe County Historical Museum, 2015).
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which increased ten-fold (13,768-131,822). While the city and county of Monroe 

continued to prosper, they increasingly fell within the orbit of the growing metropolitan 

centers to the north and south.40

An Industrial City:

Much as habitants remade the former village sites along the Nmézibe (Sturgeon 

River) into the settlement sur la Rivière aux Raisins, and Yankees would layout the town 

of Monroe to the southwest of the battle site, the small city on the River Raisin 

underwent another profound transformation in the early 20th century. With its population 

still hovering around 5,000, Monroe nevertheless became an industrial city—with a 

primary focus on the manufacturing of paper and fiber board products. As the national 

market for paper goods grew exponentially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, 

existing mills expanded as new ones were constructed to supply paper and cardboard for 

magazines, business products, government records, packaging and a host of other 

mundane uses in a rapidly expanding national economy. While most of these were 

located downwind of the city center, toward the canal docks on the south side of the river, 

the largest new paper mill was constructed on the north side of the river on the site of the 

former core area of Frenchtown. The first buildings went up in 1911, but the plant would 

continue to expand until it covered most of the battle site by the mid 20th century. The 

mill remained in use under different ownerships until 1995, when it was largely 

abandoned.41

With excellent transportation networks and almost unlimited access to water for 

cooling and manufacturing, Monroe’s industrial base quickly grew and diversified 

beyond paper. In the 1910s Brisk Blast began producing tire pumps for the burgeoning 

number of automobile owners and repair shops, and subsequently changed its focus and 

name to produce Monroe shock absorbers for automobiles, trucks and trains. Other 

suppliers of parts for Detroit-based auto manufacturers also took root in Monroe, as did a 

steel mill that produced raw material for other industrial manufacturers. As part of a 

larger wave of labor organization during the Great Depression, a strike at the Newton 

Steel Mill in Monroe briefly caught the nation’s attention. The strike ultimately collapsed 

in a melee with the Monroe Police Department, but the corporation—along with the rest 

of the steel industry—was eventually unionized by 1942. Industry and labor remained a 

mainstay of Monroe through much of the second half of the 20th century, but one 

Monroe-based corporation best captured the ideal of suburban leisure and comfort in 

 40 Census figures for Detroit and Toledo from “Demographic history of Detroit,” Wikipedia, The Free 

Encyclopedia

<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Demographic_history_of_Detroit&oldid=754075621> 

(accessed January 22, 2017); and “Toledo, Ohio,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 

<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Toledo,_Ohio&oldid=758170867> (accessed January 22, 

2017).

41 Jeffry L. Green, “Historical and Contextual Significance,” in A Profile of the River Raisin Paper 

Company Site in Monroe, Michigan (Historic Preservation Program at Eastern Michigan University, 

September 1998), 9-11; Joanna V. Brace, “The Power of Porch Talks: The Civic Improvement Society of 

Monroe, Michigan, 1901 to 1914, Michigan Historical Review, Vol. 27 (Fall, 2001): 3-7.
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318

post-World War II America: LA-Z-BOY, Incorporated—which began as one of several 

local furniture companies in the 1920s.42

Figure 10.7: River Raisin Paper Company, ca. 1930s (colorized postcard). The 

paper mill complex was situated on what had been the core area of Frenchtown. The steam 

engine in the lower left corner closely follows Hull’s Trace on a rail line that is now owned 

by the Canadian Northern Railroad. Source: Monroe County History Museum.

By the end of the 20th century, Monroe’s situation as a manufacturing center was 

coming to an end. Like the rest of the so-called “Rust Belt” in the Northeast and the 

Lower Great Lakes, Monroe experienced population decline, unemployment, a 

diminished tax base, and an aging infrastructure in need of repair. The source of these 

changes are manifold, but their origins date back to the mid-20th century when massive 

federal projects like dams, highways, and military bases, and defense plants triggered the 

move of industries and people to western metropolitan centers. Later, the rise of global 

trade in the post-Cold War era, along with increased automation, silenced factories and 

undermined the industrial workforce. Monroe resembled other “Rust Belt” communities 

in another important respect: it inherited a century of industrial by-products that had 

spoiled the River Raisin, polluted soils, and left vacant buildings steeped in toxic 

materials. In response to these conditions, the City of Monroe (which adopted the slogan 

“Resilient Monroe!”) determined to make a virtue of necessity. The long process of 

environmental mitigation and brownfield restoration, along with the removal of 

abandoned factory buildings, could become the basis for an urban renewal program that 

combined outdoor recreation, heritage tourism, urban open spaces, and downtown redevelopment. The portions of the River Raisin Battlefield that lay beneath the old 

facilities of the River Raisin Paper Company, along with associated parklands, was 

 42 Ryan Solomon, “History of the City of Monroe Michigan” <http://www.historicmonroe.org/Solomonhistory/solomon-hist.htm > (accessed January 6, 2017); Ahmed White, The Last Great Strike: Little Steel, 

the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America at pp. 101-02 (University of California 

Press 2016), 147-50.
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identified as a cornerstone of this revitalization. In these efforts, Monroe came to 

epitomize a new movement in the early 21st century that has seen communities across 

much of the United States actively reshape themselves in accordance with their unique 

histories and physical settings.43

Remembering

In 1961, to commemorate its 50th Anniversary, the River Raisin Paper Company 

published a brochure titled “50 Years of Continuous Progress.” Along with calling 

attention to a 1904 monument that had been placed near the battle site, and was very near 

the entrance to the company’s main plant, the brochure debuted an artist’s rendering of 

core area of Frenchtown in 1813 as seen from the south side of the river. Along with a 

brief description of the battles and their aftermath, the brochure also noted how 

“Remember the Raisin!” was a rallying cry at the Battle of the Thames. The author then 

brought history to the present, as manifested in the state-of-the-art paper mill.

The changes from the frontier days of Monroe to the present are symbolic 

of the Nation’s growth. Today, the battlefield of the River Raisin is the 

site of the River Raisin Paper Company. The manufacturing plants of the 

company stand exactly on the spot where the picket fence enclosed the 

American prisoners.

The brochure is not unlike other brief celebratory pieces that are commissioned for a 

corporate milestone. Yet the brochure also illustrates a broader truth about 

commemoration; it very often construes the past to speak directly to the immediate needs 

of the present.44

Aside from the day on which the events occurred, the first commemorations of the 

battles of the River Raisin and their aftermath would have involved celebration and 

boasting, as well as the showing, giving, and trading of prizes taken. In the coming weeks 

and months as warriors returned home, they would present a trophy, either a scalp or a 

possession from the vanquished, or perhaps a prisoner. Feasting, stories, and dances 

would celebrate valiance and victory. For the habitants on the River Raisin, the battles 

and their aftermath were an unmitigated disaster. For nearly a week their lives had been a 

recurring cycle of fear, hopeful expectation, violence, death, and destruction. The 

memories persisted as a collective trauma that was further deepened over the next year 

with each new alarm about British or Native foraging parties and the expected abuses that 

would ensue. The Kentuckians taken prisoner on January 22 may have been inclined to 

forget the defeat and focus more on thoughts of home. Those who survived the rout and 

slaughter on the south side of the river were likely in shock during their first nights at 

Fort Amherstburg, but some took to their journals to recall lost comrades and friends. 

Lastly, the men who witnessed and survived the killings on January 23 probably had no 

 43 Steven C. High, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America's Rust Belt, 1969–1984 (Toronto: 

University of Toronto Press, 2003), 92-121; oel Kotkin, Mark Schill, and Ryan Streeter, Clues From The 

Past: The Midwest as an Aspirational Region (Sagamore Institute, February 2012), 4-13; Green, 

“Historical and Contextual Significance,” 1-14; Resilient! Monroe: Resource Atlas (October 15, 2003; City 

of Monroe, Monroe Charter Township and Frenchtown Charter Township); City of Monroe Parks and 

Recreation Master Plan (Prepared by Beckett & Raeder, 2014). 44 50 Years of Progress (River Raisin Paper Company, Monroe, Michigan), n.p.
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desire to “remember the Raisin” for some time. These were part of the mix of feelings, 

then, that would inform the earliest formal commemorations.

Re-covering the Dead

Over the next fifty years, the most poignant commemorations of the battles and 

their aftermath involved the interment of human remains. The habitants who 

surreptitiously buried the dead likely performed some ceremony, which solemnified the 

act as well as the memories of January 1813. To give some kind of final rites brought 

peace to the living and retrieved the latter from the horrors of their demise. Similar 

sentiments were at play when Colonel Johnson brought a detachment to rebury exposed 

remains in June 1813, but the process of gathering disturbed bones and placing them in a 

mass grave was perhaps more galling than depressing. The act of remembering the Raisin 

on that day involved digging into the ground and holding the bones of fellow 

Kentuckians. This experience was both personal and collective, and made any desire for 

vengeance more visceral. When Governor Shelby’s forces came to the River Raisin in 

early October, the same rituals and sentiments from June were repeated. This time, 

however, the event involved hundreds who were enroute to a battle that would avenge the 

fallen. In a matter of days they would shout “Remember the Raisin!” and rush British 

troops trying to make a stand on the road near Moraviantown.45

While all of the various U.S. regulars and militia who were present for the Battle 

of the Thames rallied to the cry, it had more meaning for those fighting with Shelby, 

Johnson, and other units from Kentucky. The defeat on the River Raisin and the 

subsequent killing of prisoners involved their fellows, and it was Kentucky militiamen 

who suffered so many casualties at Fort Meigs. The Battle on the Thames would have 

great strategic importance, but it was also a personal battle for many of the young men 

from Kentucky. Many of their families had been fighting the Shawnee and other Native 

groups for generations, and so these young men were now living the tales they had 

learned as children about honor, violence, and Native warfare. Killing Tecumseh would 

avenge the River Raisin, but it would also balance the ledger of past conflicts in the 

Kentuckians favor.46

In coming years, memories of the battles and their aftermath would find their way 

into publication—but commemorations as such continued to focus on finding remains 

and giving them a proper burial. On July 4, 1818, a group of men went with John 

Anderson from the Fourth of July celebration at Governor Cass’s to Monroe where they 

joined a group of residents to unearth the bones that Johnson’s troops had buried and 

 45 Ralph Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 288-289; G. Glenn Clift, Remember the Raisin! Kentucky and 

Kentuckians in the Battles and Massacre at Frenchtown, Michigan Territory, in the War of 1812

(Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1961), 101-104; and Dennis Au, “Captain Hart’s Jawbone,” 5 —a 

brief essay attached to the end of Au, War on the Raisin: A Narrative Account of the War of 1812 in the 

River Raisin Settlement, Michigan Territory (Monroe, MI.: Monroe County Historical Commission, 1981). 46 Darren R. Reid, “Anti-Indian Radicalism during the Era of the American Revolution: Comments and 

Reflections upon a Different Type of Revolution in the Early American West, 1774-1795,” The Berlin 

Historical Review, 2 (February 2016): 11-28; Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and 

Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), 262-67; James A. Ramage and Andrea S. 

Watkins. Kentucky Rising: Democracy, Slavery, and Culture from the Early Republic to the Civil War 

(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 97-128.
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removed them to the cemetery. A month later they were disinterred and taken to the 

Protestant cemetery in Detroit; and then again in 1834 they were exhumed and sent to the 

Kentucky State Cemetery in Frankfort. In 1848, the bodies of eighteen Kentucky soldiers 

who died during the battle on January 18, 1813, were found in a common grave during 

roadwork. They were identified by one of the veterans who was on the burial detail, and 

sent to Frankfort. As Monroe continued to develop, similar reminders of the battles were 

periodically uncovered, including a common grave in February 1871 and the remains of 

two bodies found in 1910 during the construction of the River Raisin Paper Mill.47

A Spirit of Celebration

While every recovery of human remains awakened memories of a war that most 

Americans rarely considered anymore, the 1871 discovery of the multiple remains

marked a shift to more public ceremonies that took on the characteristics of a community 

celebration. The first such event was championed by Joseph Guyor, who was present 

during the battles of Frenchtown and was one of the young men who fled to Ohio on 

January 22, 1813. Following the 1871 discovery of remains from the Battles of 

Frenchtown, Guyor determined to arrange a reunion of veterans. Guyor posted a notice in 

the Monroe Monitor newspaper, inviting veterans of the battles to come stay on Guyor’s 

Island—where he kept a restaurant and lodge used by sportsmen on the canal near Lake 

Erie. As one attendee later recalled, the site was well-chosen for its facilities, for the 

beauty of the scenery, and for its historical relevance as “the scene of large gatherings of 

the Pottawattomie and Shawnee ..., [as well as] the ancient site of a village” that had 

been uncovered during the construction of a railroad. The multi-day affair attracted 

twenty mostly French Canadien veterans, and another 50 or so residents of Monroe. Lt. 

Colonel George Armstrong Custer, who was then on home-leave from his service as 

Commander of the Seventh Cavalry, was a guest of honor. A hero of Gettysburg and 

celebrated in the national press for the Battle of Washita on the southern Great Plains, 

Custer was received by “the men of past generations ... with warmest demonstrations of 

respect and admiration.”48

The success of the 1871 reunion was followed by a much grander affair on July 4, 

1872 in the center of Monroe, which brought in 150 veterans of the War of 1812, with 

most having been “in the ranks of that gallant column of Kentuckians, who responded to 

the cries of distress and alarm that went up from the little French settlements scattered 

along the River Raisin.” The event also attracted another 15,000 to 20,000 attendees who 

witnessed fireworks, viewed relics from the war, watched a brief sham battle, and, with 

Colonel Custer serving as Master of Ceremonies, listened to speakers like Michigan 

Supreme Court Justice James Campbell celebrate the “Soldiers of the war of 1812, 

worthy followers of the men of ’76, ... whose valor and sacrifices secured this pleasant 

land under the protecting care of the Union [and] ... remind our children how Freedom is 

gained, and how she is guarded.” Campbell then shifted to a solemn recognition of the 

specific locale and unique circumstances of the event.

[You have] again brought Kentucky to Michigan ... [and] this spot, which 

will ever be sacred to you and us. It’s [sic] memories recall to you friends 

 47 Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 287-88. 48 Bulkley, History of Monroe County, 126-27.
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and kinsmen, whose loss made sorrow through all your households. To us 

they are the glorified memories of martyrs, who died in our behalf .... 

May their spirit still live where their bodies perished.”49

This remarkable event, which was three times larger than the population of 

Monroe, helped shape memories of January 1813 in two significant ways. The broad 

historical themes that explained the events of 1776 and the War of 1812 certainly fit the 

oratorical themes of 54 years before: a tragic massacre of heroic martyrs who sought to 

defend the American Revolution. Yet the 1872 reunion localized these sentiments, and 

made the events of 1813 a foundational memory of the community that all shared—

whether of Canadien, Yankee, or some other descent. To remember the Raisin was to 

embody the “spirit” in the place where the [martyrs] “bodies perished.” The presence of 

Custer added another dimension to the commemoration and its particular relevance to the 

community of Monroe. Custer was a glamorous hero of the Union cause during the Civil 

War and represented the national virtues that Justice Campbell praised. Moreover, he was 

widely celebrated for his actions in the “western Indian wars” that had been making 

headline news for the past few years. As Commander of the Seventh Cavalry in the 

Dakotas, Custer embodied the purpose of former U.S. wars in the Old Northwest and 

served as a reminder that the ancient war continued. His death in 1876 also made him a 

martyr, and provided a haunting echo of 1813 for the residents of Monroe.50

Image 10.8: Gathering at Guyor’s Island, 1871. George A. Custer is pictured in the 

middle of the top row with his right hand on John Clapper and his left hand on Francis 

Navarre. Joseph Guyor is seated in the middle row near the right edge of the photograph. 

Source: Monroe County Historical Museum, Monroe, Michigan.

 49 Campbell quoted in ibid. 129; event described on pp. 128-34. 50 Oliver Knight, Following the Indian Wars: The Story of the Newspaper Correspondents Among the 

Indian Campaigners (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 69-83; Shirley A. Leckie, Elizabeth 

Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 206-09, 223-226.
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The next significant spate of memorializing the battles of Frenchtown occurred in 

the early 20th century, when the placement of stately memorials was a key feature of the 

City Beautiful Movement—which sought to clean up urban public areas, create welllandscaped parks, and build inspiring public architecture. In 1904, a promise made in 

1872 was finally fulfilled with the unveiling of the Kentucky Memorial in downtown 

Monroe at Memorial Place park. Later that same year a stone cairn was placed along the 

River Raisin near what had been the southwest corner of Frenchtown’s core. While the 

monuments, and the dedication ceremonies, sustained memories of 1813, no significant 

commemorations would occur for more than a half-century.51

Making a Park

Though barely noticed nationally, the sesquicentennial of the War of 1812 

inspired renewed interest among the residents of Monroe. In 1962, the Monroe County 

Historical Society began exploring the possibility of a battlefield park, and established 

the River Raisin Memorial Park Committee. The most likely site was an undeveloped 

ten-acre parcel immediately east of the River Raisin Paper Company facilities (which, by 

this time had become part of the Union Camp Corporation). With low funds and relying 

on volunteer hours, the Committee—which joined forces with the Society’s Historical 

Trails Committee—necessarily made slow progress. By 1973, however, they were ready 

to pursue two possibilities. The first involved placement of an observation deck on a 

knoll in Rauch Park on the south side of the River Raisin between Dixie Highway and the 

CSX Railroad bridge, and purchase of the 10-acre parcel.52

In order to confirm the historical relevance of the parcel, which was near the 

presumed site of the 17th Infantry encampment on the night of January 21, 1813, the 

Monroe County Historical Commission agreed to sponsor archeological surveys in 1976 

and 1977. These studies, along with historical research, resulted in the identification and 

partial excavation of three house sites—two of which were dated to the time of the battles 

of Frenchtown, and uncovered material evidence associated with U.S. troop locations and 

movements.53 Further excavations in 1980 and 1981 of two areas within the former core 

area of Frenchtown generally turned up materials that post-dated the 1812-1813 period, 

though subterranean evidence of some structural elements may have corresponded to the 

period of the battles of Frenchtown.54 Also in 1981, the Monroe County Historical 

Commission and the Michigan Department of State History Division presented a 

compelling vision of a future park in a lengthy feasibility study that presented various 

acquisition plans, cost analyses, and interpretive approaches for sites related to the events 

of January 1813. Though it did not lead to immediate results, the study clarified possible 

 51 Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 290; “Monument, Shaft to Mark River Raisin Battlefield Presented to 

City of Monroe;” supplement to the Monroe Democrat, October 21, 1904, 37; Custer was memorialized in 

an even grander fashion in 1910 when President William Howard Taft and Elizabeth Bacon Custer 

unveiled a monumental equestrian statue in downtown Monroe.

52 Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 292-93. 53 James E. Fitting, C. Stephan Demeter, Donald J. Weir, “An Archeological Survey of the River Raisin 

Battlefield Site Prepared for the Monroe County Historical Commission by Commonwealth Associates Inc. 

(1977), copy on file in the Office of the Michigan State Archeologist, East Lansing, MI; hereafter cited as 

MSHDA.

54 Demeter, “Report on Archaeological Testing: 1980 Season, River Raisin Battlefield Site” (1981), copy 

on file in MSHDA.
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approaches and served as a basis for the pursuit of future opportunities. The trigger for 

the study was the closing of the corrugated plant, which covered a large expanse of the 

mill complex and was slated for demolition. The following year a nine-year effort to gain 

federal recognition of the battle’s significance finally resulted in the listing of an eightyacre River Raisin Battlefield Site on the National Register of Historic Places.55

As initial plans for interpretation and preservation of the battlefield area were 

underway, Richard Allen Sieb—a local businessman and longtime resident of Monroe—

purchased an early 20th-century bungalow and an adjoining 20-foot easement near the 

southeast corner of the mill complex in 1985. This action provided an additional year for 

the park movement to put together a funding package to acquire and refurbish the 

property for use as an interpretive center. These efforts soon garnered $122,000 from the 

County of Monroe, the State of Michigan, and La-Z-Boy Corporation to transform the 

bungalow into the River Raisin Battlefield Visitor Center in 1990—which presently 

serves as the Visitor Center for the River Raisin National Battlefield Park. During the 

Center’s initial year, the first annual commemoration of the 1813 battles was organized 

by the newly established Friends of the River Raisin Battlefield and held on January 20, 

1991. A year later, the Monroe County Historical Society initiated a plan called “Project 

2013” that would integrate existing municipal parks along the river with an expanded 

battlefield park facility. The goal was to have the complex ready for “a bicentennial 

observance [of] the Siege of Frenchtown” in 2013. This growing interest in the battlefield 

coincided with the changing fortunes of Jefferson Smurfit—who purchased the plant 

from Union Camp a few years earlier. A declining market for paper products and 

fiberboard, compounded by the aging facilities in Monroe, made the plant a costly asset 

for a struggling corporation. A proposal to convert part of the facility into a massive 

waste-to-energy incineration energy plant met strong public opposition, and the facility 

was shut down altogether in 1995.56

Even before 1995, the mill complex was already shrinking. Two abandoned mill 

structures on the west side of North Dixie Highway were undergoing demolition in the 

area that is now the Monroe Multi-Sports Complex and the Riviere Aux Raisins Park. 

Archeological monitoring and shovel testing that occurred during the demolition revealed 

structural evidence of prehistoric occupation and the remains of a limestone rubble 

foundation likely associated with Frenchtown.57 As more potential acreage for an 

expanded River Raisin Battlefield Park became available, a movement developed for a 

regional master plan that would link a larger battlefield park with a Downriver Linked 

 55 “River Raisin Battlefield and Massacre Site, Monroe County, Michigan: A Feasibility Study of 

Alternatives for Acquisition, Development, Management, and Interpretation,” prepared for the Monroe 

County Historical Commission by David A. Clary (Architecture Preservation Consultants, June 1981), 

copy on file in MSHDA; Invaded on All Sides, 293; River Raisin Battlefield Site (20MR227); National 

Register ID: 82000542 (December 10, 1982).

56 Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 293; “Project 2013” (Monroe Historical Society, 1992), copy on file at 

MSHDA; “Smurfit plans merger with Stone Container,” The Independent May 12, 1998 

<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/smurfit-plans-merger-with-stone-container-1159672.html> 

(accessed January 6, 2017). Also see Gary J. Davis, Environmental Site Assessment (Physical WalkThrough) of Monroe Paper Company, July 10, 1991, copy on file at MSHDA. The mortgage for Sieb’s 

purchase of the bungalow at 1403 East Elm Avenue, along with a plaque honoring the initial contributors to 

the Vistor Center project, is in the collections of River Raisin National Battlefield Park.

57 Demeter, “Monroe Paper Mills 1 and 2: An Archeological Evaluation” (1991), copy on file at MSHDA.
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Greenways Initiative that called for recreational trails connecting Sterling State Park with 

the River Raisin. This coincided with a successful effort to obtain a Clean Michigan 

Initiative Grant from the State of Michigan and use the funds to convert the brownfields 

of the old paper mill site into park lands rather than new industrial development.58

As more buildings on the Monroe Paper Company property were demolished, 

archeological surveys were commissioned by the City of Monroe and jointly funded by 

the National Park Service between 1999 and 2003. The primary goal was to determine 

the condition of subsurface materials and corroborate the findings of recent historical 

studies on the possible location of key archeological features. The 1999 survey uncovered 

a historic fenceline associated with Frenchtown. The following year, further investigation 

of two areas associated with the battlefield site revealed 1,450 artifacts. Most were 

prehistoric ceramics, lithics, and faunal remains associated with an American Indian 

village site ca. 1450-1650. Nearly all of the historical artifacts post-dated the War of 

1812, but backhoe trenching did reveal evidence of the puncheon fence used by Kentucky 

militia set in a wide, shallow wall trench. In 2003 further excavation revealed more fence 

lines associated with Frenchtown, while metal surveys in the open field where the U.S. 

17th Infantry was encamped and initially attacked revealed numerous items related to the 

Second Battle of Frenchtown.59

With archeologists confirming the integrity of subsurface materials and artifacts, 

the ongoing efforts to develop a battlefield park began to accelerate. In August of 2003, a 

land swap involving multiple government agencies brought thirty acres to the battlefield 

park and 215 acres of adjacent marshlands to Sterling State Park. A year later the 

Michigan Department of Environmental Quality provided a combined loan and grant that 

totaled $1.8 million for land acquisition. As pieces of a larger park came into place, plans 

for interpretation, management, further demolition, and environmental mitigation 

continued as well. How or when they might be implemented was still unclear, until U.S. 

Representative John Dingell brought his legislative skills to the cause. Having already 

worked on passage of the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge Act (Public Law 

107-91) in 2001, he was well versed in the complexities of environmental restoration, 

recreation, and community development in the post-industrial landscapes of Downriver 

communities.60

Representative Dingell had also closely followed the developments in Monroe 

and took a keen interest in plans for a battlefield park. Given the complexities of local 

and state land acquisition, demolition, and environmental mitigation, he determined to 

elevate the issue to the federal level. In early 2006 Dingell introduced two bills before 

 58 The result of this project is the River Raisin Heritage Trail. See Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 294; the 

recreation trails plan was part of a larger project supported by the Community Foundation for Southeast 

Michigan <http://www.michigan.org/property/downriver-linked-greenways> (Accessed January 6, 2017). 59 G. Michael Pratt, “A Phase II Archaeological Investigation of the River Raisin Battlefield and Massacre 

Site, City of Monroe, Monroe County” (1999); Pratt and William E. Rutter, “Phase II Archaeological 

Reconnaissance of the River Raisn Battlefield, Monroe, Michigan” (2002); Pratt and Rutter, “Draft Report: 

Archeological Assessment of the Selected Areas of the River Raisin Battlefield, Monroe, Michigan” 

(2004). These studies were partially funded with matching grants from the American Battlefield Protection 

Program of the National Park Service. All reports on file at MSHDA.

60 Phase I Environmental Site Assessment: Pumphouse and Box Factory Parcels, E. Elm Street at N. Dixie 

Highway, Monroe Michigan (Legacy Environmental, Inc); on file at Monroe County Historical Museum.
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Congress: the River Raisin National Battlefield Study Act (H.R. 5132) and the River 

Raisin Battlefield Acquisition Act (H.R. 5133). Working the halls of Congress through 

the spring, Dingell managed to obtain a hearing for H.R. 5132 in the middle of July. After 

guaging support in Michigan over the summer, Dingell’s bill came to the floor on 

September 26 and passed. With support from both Michigan senators, and Kentucky 

Senator James “Jim” Bunning, the bill passed the Senate in December and was signed 

into law by President George W. Bush on December 20, 2006.61

The River Raisin National Battlefield Study Act did not authorize the creation of 

a federal park site, but it established a process through which the feasibility of a park 

(federal or otherwise) could be studied. The Act also formalized a process by which lands 

could be donated and held, with assistance from the National Park Service (NPS), for a 

future park, in accordance with the American Battlefield Protection Act of 1996 (PL 104-

333, 16 U.S.C. 469k). In 2007, the process for gaining formal National Park Service 

recognition of a park and any lands that might be donated to it began with the 

commissioning of a National Historic Landmark nomination that was contracted out by 

the Monroe County Historical Society. While the study was ongoing, subsequent steps 

involved a Special Resource Study that involved four components; confirmation that the 

area possesses nationally significant resources; a suitability assessment to determine the 

distinctiveness of the resource and the history it conveys; a feasibility assessment to 

ensure the park would be large enough to protect its key resources and support visitor 

use; and consideration of different ways to protect and interpret the resource (by the NPS 

or some other entity). Determinations on these four factors would come through study 

and consultations by the Special Resource Study Team and from public input through 

correspondence and public meetings.62

On July 10, 2008, Representative Dingell and Michigan Senator Carl Levin 

submitted legislation to establish a River Raisin National Battlefield Park. Since the 

Special Resource Study process was still underway, and a draft National Historic 

Landmark study had yet to be submitted, NPS Deputy Director Daniel Wenk 

recommended that legislation be tabled until the process was complete. At the time he 

made his statement, July 30, 2008, he expected “the study process [and the NHL] should 

be ... completed in 2-3 years from now.” Through the following year, a nearly complete 

draft NHL nomination was produced and the Special Resource Study Team had 

completed much of its work. However, Dingell and Levin would choose to submit their 

legislation before the process had run its course. Confident in the support of their 

constituents, they joined their bills with an Omnibus Public Lands Management Act. 

Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico had first proposed a bill to this effect on June 26, 

2008, just two weeks before the River Raisin National Battlefield Park legislation had 

 61 Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 295-98. Legislative history is from Solomon, “History of the City of 

Monroe Michigan;” John H. Hartig et al, “Habitat management lessons from the environs of the Detroit 

River International Wildlife Refuge,” Journal of Great Lakes Research, 40:2 (2014): 31-36; National Park 

Service Midwest Regional Office, “River Raisin National Battlefield Park: Study and Boundary 

Assessment,” National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior River Raisin National Battlefield / 

Michigan, November 2009.

62 G. Michael Pratt, William E. Rutter, Theodore J. Ligibel, and Jeffrey L. Green, “Rier Raisin Battlefield 

National Historic Nomination, March 2, 2009 [DRAFT], on file at MSHDA; River Raisin Battlefield: 

Special Resource Study, Newsletter 1 (September 2008).
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been drawn up. Bingaman’s bill was delayed, however, which allowed more pieces of 

legislation to become part of the omnibus package in its second iteration.63

Though best known as the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009, 

Bingaman’s second piece of legislation was formally titled “An act to designate certain 

land as components of the National Wilderness Preservation System, to authorize certain 

programs and activities in the Department of the Interior and the Department of 

Agriculture, and for other purposes.” The bill was introduced during the first week of the 

new 111th Congress on January 9, 2009, was voted out of the Senate on March 25, and 

signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 30. The suddenness with which a 

brand-new national park proposal resulted in a unit of the National Park Service was 

breathtaking, especially since the main feature of the park was mostly comprised of 

vacant industrial buildings in various stages of demolition. The results far exceeded what 

anyone expected just a few years before—and what the new national battlefield park

augured for the upcoming bicentennial would have been unthinkable to the original 

authors of the “Project 2013.”64

 63 “Statement of Daniel N. Wenk, Deputy Director, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 

Before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources Concerning S. 3247, To Provide for the 

Designation of the River Raisin National Battlefield Park in the State of Michigan” (July 30, 2008), River 

Raisin National Battlefield Park files.

64 S.22 - Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, 111th Congress (2009-2010), CONGRESS.GOV 

< https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/senate-bill/22> (Accessed January 18, 2017); “Newest 

U.S. park honoring War of 1812 dedicated,” Toledo Blade, October 23, 2010.
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To Remember the Raisin

The establishment of the River Raisin National Battlefield Park was not so much 

the product of legislative skill as it was the affirmation of local talents. The idea of the 

national battlefield park, and its ongoing development, is rooted in decades of planning 

and volunteering to recover a place of national significance. By the same token, the 

national park unit is part of a small, post-industrial city’s vision of its present and future. 

Like the battles of Frenchtown, the River Raisin National Battlefield Park is situated 

within a community. This is still a fairly unusual circumstance within the National Park 

System, as is the stipulation that the park can only acquire acreage through donation. 

Among other things, this ensures that the National Park Service manages what others 

desire or are willing to give. Yet park management is situated within a context that 

extends beyond the local area and involves collaboration with other federal public land 

units and agencies, collaboration and consultation with federally recognized American 

Indian nations, interpretive programs that convey the national and longstanding 

significance of the site and the events that occurred in 1813, and an obligation to protect, 

manage and restore environmental features and conditions that correspond to the 

historical setting. It is a slightly different approach to remembering the Raisin than might 

occur without the National Park Service, but it complements—and is complemented by—

the efforts of a community that has a long and active interest in the park site.

The purpose of this study fits somewhere between the obligations and interests 

noted above, and seeks to extend them to a broad array of peoples and historical 

processes that both shaped and became embedded in the actions, memories, and 

consequences of the battles and their aftermath. Put another way, this study endeavors to 

remember the Raisin from multiple perspectives. This is not an easy task, nor is it always 

pleasant. At the core of any effort to remember the Raisin, there is violence, death and 

destruction. The fact of the brutality begs difficult questions, which in turn remind us that 

to remember often requires an effort to fully understand rather than dismiss or overlook 

the unpleasant parts we would rather avoid. The violence that occurred at the River 

Raisin, as well as the conflicts that preceded and followed, was intimate and purposeful. 

In a world where alliances, friendships and kinship were grounded in rituals of generosity 

and reciprocal kindnesses, threatening enemies were treated with equally intimate and 

brutal measures. This rubric was generally true for Long Knives and Indigenous peoples, 

especially in a world made deadlier by gunpowder and metal weapons. Kindness and 

violence were also key to social cohesion in a world where incarceration or confinement 

were not viable options for punishing important transgressions. In short, the violence that 

occurred along the River Raisin more than 200 years ago was of another world—and to 

remember requires an effort to understand that world on its terms.

The location of Frenchtown and the battles also beg deceptively simple questions 

of the sort one learns in journalism class: who, what, why, when, and where. All of these 

terms can force new ways of understanding. The question “why here?” for instance, 

requires attention to geology, water tables, the migrations of animals, fish, and birds, the 

persistence of human communities, climate, the endurance of past associations with 

place, the consequences of violence and imperialism, and a host of other issues that 

predate human habitation and still define our lives today. Questions of who and why are 

often at the center of how we ascribe blame or virtue. The answers to questions about 
Chapter Ten

329

“who belongs?” and “why are they here?” were immediate and simple for Indigenous 

peoples and Kentuckians in the early 19th century. They are more complicated for us 

today, in part because we inherit a wider set of possible answers. This in turn means the 

question of “who?” can be very difficult with just the slightest shift in perspective. Who, 

for instance, had a right to be on the lower River Raisin in the late 18th and early 19th

centuries? Wyandot, whose ongoing connection to the Big Rock (Brownstown) area is as 

long as the historical arc of this study; Kentuckians enroute to the Battle of the Thames; 

Canadien militia from Upper Canada; Generals from Tennessee; Irish immigrants in the 

Detroit area? When the question is extended to subsequent generations and later 

commemorations, the list becomes endless and every succinct response offers a different 

declaration about legitimacy or merit.
Chapter Ten

330
Cultural Resource Base Maps

331

Cultural Resource Base Maps

The following Cultural Resource Base Maps provide a geographical overview of the ten 

Administrative Units that constitute the River Raisin National Battlefield Park. Since 

very little acreage is held in fee simple title by the National Park Service, the 

administration of these various units involves cooperative agreements with other public 

agencies that operate at the federal, state, county, township, and municipal level.

A. River Raisin National Battlefield Park Administrative Units 333

B. Springwells and Fort Detroit Units 335

C. Maguaga Unit 337

D. Wyandot Reserve (historical) Unit 339

E. Big Rock/Brownstown Unit 341

F. Hull’s Trace Unit 343

G. Macon Reserve (historical) Unit 345

H. Frenchtown Unit 347

I. Plum Creek Unit 349

J. Ottawa Reserve (historical) Unit 351
Cultural Resource Base Maps

332


Cultural Resource Base maps 336

Cultural Resource Base maps 338

Cultural Resource Base maps 340

Cultural Resource Base maps 342

Cultural Resource Base maps 344

Cultural Resource Base Maps 346

Cultural Resource Base Maps 348

Cultural Resource Base Maps 350

Cultural Resource Base Maps 352
Index 351

Index

17th U.S. Infantry, 225, 230, 232-33, 235, 238, 

305, 327, 261, 314, 326, 328

19th U.S. Infantry, 225, 230, 235

41st Regiment of Foot (British), 217-18, 220, 

231, 235

Agwazhe'aa (Odawa), 150, 152, 153, 157

Algonkin: see Omàmiwinini

American Indians: see specific groups, nations, 

confederacies, and alliances

Amherst, Jeffrey, 88, 91-92, 94, 96-97, 101, 105, 

124-25

Amherstburg (town, community), 163n.8, 164, 

171, 176, 256, 286, 288, 299, 300, 02, 303

Anderdon Reserve, 286, 290n.41, 299, 302-03, 

304

Anderson, John, 220, 313, 314, 322

Anishinaabeg, 40n.21, 53, 54, 57, 57n.61, 59,

61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 79, 113n.70, 130n.30, 

141n.57, 143, 148, 149n.76, 151, 153, 

232, 258, 269, 273, 285, 300, 302; 

alliances and associations with other 

groups, 41-43, 44, 47, 50, 62, 65, 69, 145, 

148, 152, 153, 258

Army of the Northwest (U.S.): First, 163n.8, 

205, 208, 209, 211, 217, 220, 248; 

Second, 211n.21, 224, 226, 227, 230n.59, 

251, 255, 256, 257, 269n.47

Atherton, William, 229

Auglaize River, 139, 146, 161

Baltimore: Battle of, 262, 268; Riots, 207

Barclay, Robert Heriot, 251, 253

Battles of Frenchtown and Aftermath, 1, 3, 6, 9, 

10, 12, 18, 31; First Battle, 226-30; 

Second Battle, 230-37; Aftermath, 237-40; 

Commemorations of, 8n.16, 320-24

Bawaating (Sault Sainte Marie), 54

“Beaver Wars” (aka “Iroquois Wars”), 40-52

Biaseka (aka Wolf; Shawnee), 161, 161n.5

Big Rock (aka Brownstown), 5, 18n.40, 114, 

118, 130, 133, 141, 161, 171, 194n.38, 

202, 203, 206, 213n.23, 221, 223, 225-26, 

229, 238n.74, 240, 242, 251, 252n.8, 265, 

287, 318; Battle of, 217, 246; Council Fire

at, 123, 132, 198

Black Hawk: see Mahkate:wi-meši-ke:hke:hkwa

Black Hoof (aka Catahecassa): see M’katiwekašee, 

Black Swamp, 17, 18, 227

Blackbird (Odawa): see Mkadebnesi

Blue Jacket: see Waweyapiersenwah (aka 

Whirlpool)

Bodéwadmi, 5, 11, 26, 40n.21, 48, 49, 52, 55, 

56-57, 62-63, 78, 79, 85, 128, 130n.30, 

141n.57, 159n.1, 163, 169, 176, 179, 181, 

188n.70, 197, 201, 203, 204, 212, 218n.54, 

222, 224, 225, 228, 232, 236, 244, 268n.45, 

270, 274; in Detroit area, 6, 8, 63-66, 167,

230; within Native alliances, 43, 54, 61, 80, 

88, 90, 92, 94, 95, 108, 109, 132, 136, 140, 

143, 148-49, 153, 166, 192, 194, 195, 199, 

217, 221, 231, 258-59, 277, 279; removals 

and persistence, 277, 283-84, 290-92, 295, 

299, 301, 312

Bower, Gustavus, 239

Brant, Joseph: see Thayendanegea

Brock, Isaac, 218-19

Brownstown: see Big Rock

Brush, Henry, 218, 220

Buckongahelas (Lunaapeew), 133n.39, 138, 140, 

149n.70, 152, 153, 157, 179-80

Burlington Heights, 252, 254

Cadillac, Antoine de la Mothe, 63

Caldwell, William, 139, 150

Campbell, William, 150-51

Campbell, John, 224

Canadien(s), 18, 81, 108-09, 132, 140, 154, 162, 

164-71, 177, 179, 218, 220, 316, 322, 323

Canard River, 213, 298

Captain Johnny (Shawnee): see Kekewepelethy

caribou, 22-23, 24

Cass, Lewis, 8, 213, 259-60, 269n.47, 270, 272-

73, 277-82, 285, 294, 309, 312, 321

Cayuga: see Guyohkohnyo

Chahta (Choctaw)122, 129, 276, 277

Chalahgawtha (Shawnee town and sept, aka 

Chillicothe), 104, 108, 109, 131, 183n.57, 

188

Champlain, Samuel, 36-37, 43-44, 45, 81
Index 352

Chesapeake-Leopard Affair, 176, 189, 190-91, 

194, 261

Chequamegon Bay, 53-55, 57, 63, 64, 78

Cherokee: see Tsalagihi, 

Chicago, 178, 203, 221, 283; Treaty of (1833), 

290-91

Chickasaw: see Chikashsha,

Chikashsha, 122, 199

Chillicothe, OH, 176, 188

Chillicothe: see Chalahgawtha

Chippawa, Battle of, 261

Chippewa: see Ojibwe

Choctaw: see Chahta

Cincinnati, OH 205, 223, 266; also see Fort 

Washington

Clark, George Rogers, 106-07, 109, 127, 132

Clark, William, 268, 274n.5, 277, 294

Clay, Henry, 206, 256, 267, 283

Colesquo (Shawnee), 104, 105, 107, 108

Continental Congress, 105, 117

Cornstalk: see Colesquo

Coshocton, 110

Council of Three Fires: see Nswe’mishkote’win

(The) Crane: see Tarhe, 

Crawford, William, 101, 110, 111

Creek: see Mvskoke 

Croghan, George, 88-89

Custer, George A., 317, 322-323

Cuyahoga Packet, 209-10, 211

Cuyahoga River, 73, 127

Dakhóta, 215, 268n.45

Dakota (aka Eastern Sioux): see Dakhóta

Darnell, Elias, 234, 239

Dearborn, Henry, 182, 190-91, 1966, 204, 205-

06, 206n.7, 218, 218n.35

Delaware Prophet: see Neolin

Delaware: see Lunaapeew

Democratic-Republicans (aka Jeffersonian 

Republicans), 172, 206

Dingell, John (U.S. Representative), 327, 327

Downriver Linked Greenways Initiative, 325

Dudley, Thomas, 255

Early Holocene epoch, 14, 20-21, 22, 23

Eel River (IN), 224, 260

Egushawa (Odawa): see Agwazhe'aa, 

Elkhart River, 223

Elliott, Mathew, 139, 199, 220, 258

Erie Canal, 277, 315

Eustis, William, 199, 206, 209, 209n.16, 213, 

215

Expansionism (U.S.), 5, 7, 8; post-Revolutionary 

War Period, 119, 123-24, 126, 137, 158, 

178; Jeffersonian geopolitics, 100-01, 174, 

178-81; and settler colonialism, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 

74, 76, 92, 100-01, 102, 103; and land 

speculation, 68-69, 71, 89, 92, 106; and land 

cession treaties, 129, 138, 143, 155, 157-59, 

174-75, 178-80, 188, 191-95, 197, 277-79, 

281-83

Fallen Timbers, Battle of, 149-51, 166n.17

Federalists, 121, 141, 206, 207

Fort Amherstburg, 163n.8, 171, 185, 186, 198, 

205, 209, 215, 219, 225, 230-31, 237; 

British Indian Department at, 186-87, 247; 

diplomacy and councils with American 

Indians/First Nations, 199, 217-18, 246, 

270-71; falls to U.S., 255-56

Fort Dearborn, 221, 222

Fort Detroit (aka Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit), 

187; under French administration, 92, 169; 

during British administration, 94; Pontiac’s 

War and, 95-96; during American 

Revolution, 106; becomes U.S. facility in 

1796, 163, 178, 179; During War of 1812, 

211, 219-20

Fort Duquesne, 73, 85, 87, 90, 92

Fort Greenville (aka Fort Greene Ville), 142, 

143n.61, 146,151, 155, 156, 171, 185

Fort Harmar, 126n.19, 135-36, 137, 138, 156-57

Fort Harrison, 201, 221, 264

Fort Lernoult (aka Fort Detroit), 114, 163, 165, 

169n.21, 171, 215

Fort Mackinac, 114, 128, 214-15, 222, 257

Fort McHenry, 261

Fort Meigs, 248-49, 252, 256, 265, 273, 285, 

313, 321

Fort Miamis, 114n.74, 143, 146, 147n.71, 149-

50, 154n.92, 188, 192, 248, 308

Fort Niagara, 85, 92, 114n.74

Fort Pitt, 85, 88, 90, 91-92, 94, 96-97, 102, 110, 

111

Fort Recovery, 142-43, 146147, 149

Fort St. Joseph (Niles, MI), 62, 179, 215

Fort Stephenson, 249

Fort Washington, 138-39, 142
Index 353

Fort Wayne, (IN): 1794-1798, 151; 1800-1819, 

178-179, 196; 1803 Treaty of, 180; 1809 

Treaty of, 196-98, 199; 1812 siege of, 222, 

224, 225; present-day city, 16, 109, 138. 

Also see Kiihkayonki

Fort Wayne (MI), 27

Fort William Henry, 81-83, 84, 86, 88, 91, 240

Fox: see Meskwaki

Frankfort, KY, 321

“Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights,” 208, 240

French (in New France): as Onontio, 57-59, 61-

62; as traders and coureurs des bois, 56, 66-

68; as habitants, 34, 37, 85, 95

French and Indian War: see Seven Years’ War,

French Canadians: see Canadiens

Frenchtown (Mich.), 1-3, 4, 6-7, 61; 

environmental context, 12, 18, 20, 31; 

establishment of, 169-70; and effort to 

secure U.S. land titles, 171, 173-78; during 

War of 1812, 210-13, 217-26, 228-43, 254-

55; becomes Monroe, MI, 311-13. Also see

Battles of Frenchtown and Aftermath

Friends of the River Raisin Battlefield, 325

Fur trade: see Peltry trade, 

Gelelemend (aka Killbuck; Lunaapeew), 110

Georgian Bay, 34, 39, 40, 42, 48, 49, 50, 285

Gibbs, Yvonne, 302

Giishkaakhang (aka Kiskakon) Odawa, 40-41, 

41n.25, 48, 50, 52, 53, 284

Gnadenhütten, 110-111

Godfroy, Gabriel, 218n.34, -229

Godfroy, Peter, 211n.20

Godfroy’s Trading Post, 28

Grand Council (of the Western Confederacy), 

134, 136, 139-143, 155, 160; also “grand 

council,” 204

Great Miami River, 73, 129-130, 133

Great Peace of Montréal (1701), 62-64, 65, 

114n.70, 118

Green Bay, 50, 52-54, 56n.60, 61, 63, 66, 76, 

79, 94, 109, 178

Greenville, OH, 142, 155, 185, 188-89, 195, 258

Griswold, Stanley, 172, 174, 176, 256

Guyohkohnyo (aka Cayuga), 39, 44n.29, 49, 

104, 213n.23

Guyor, Joseph, 322

Harmar, Josiah, 138-39, 140, 149, 170

Harrison, William Henry, 153, 182, 188-89, 190,

204; service in the Legion of the United 

States, 249; land cession treaties, 179-182, 

185, 196-201; Battle of Tippecanoe, 200-02; 

as Commander of the Army of the 

Northwest, 224, 226, 227, 230, 236, 238, 

242, 245, 246, 249, 250, 251, 253-54, 256, 

260; post War of 1812 treaties, 269-70.

Hart, Nathaniel, 9n.16, 238

Ho-Chunk: see Hoocąągra

Battle of Horseshoe Bend (aka Battle of 

Tohopeka), 260

Hull, William: as Governor of Michigan 

Territory, 172; and treaty negotiations, 181, 

191-95, 196, 212; as Commander of 

Northwest Army, 205; Detroit Campaign 

and invasion of Canada, 208-11, 213-16; 

sends detachments to Frenchtown, 217-18; 

surrenders Detroit and Michigan, 219-21

Hull’s Trace, 19, 211, 212, 235, 256, 269, 296, 

313

Huron River (MI), 18, 210, 215, 218, 283, 285, 

287, 302

Hoocąągra, 52, 82, 245, 257; and late 17th

century refugee communities from east of 

Lake Michigan, 52-53, 56, 66, 79; alliance 

with British during Revolution, 109; early 

involvement with Native Confederacy, 199, 

201, 203-04, 215; during War of 1812, 217, 

221, 230 244, 257; and resistance to U.S. in 

1820s-1830s, 295

Illiniwek, 53, 57, 65

Illinois Confederacy: see Illiniwek.

Impressment, 6, 190, 208, 262, 266

“Indian Buffer State,” 115, 139, 208

Indian Department, British, 94, 119, 128-29, 

149, 151, 158, 160, 171, 172, 173, 178, 186, 

197, 199, 201, 202, 206, 208, 242, 248-49

Indian Removal, 7, 8, 101, 109, 186-87; and 

U.S. policy prior to 1830, 101, 112, 187; and 

U.S. policy after 1830, 272-91

Indian Removal Act (1830), 8, 274, 277, 281

Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), 41, 

296

Indiana: Territory of, 172, 178, 179, 180, 182, 

197, 200, 201, 204, 221, 264, 276

Iroquois: see Haudenosaunee

Jackson, Andrew, 197, 272, 274, 276, 287, 289-

90, 294, 296, 307
Index 354

Jay Treaty, 154, 162, 169, 170, 171, 177, 190

Jefferson Smurfit, 325

Jefferson, Thomas, 100, 105, 173-74, 176, 190, 

192, 193, 194, 240; views on American 

Indians, 103, 107; Declaration of 

Independence and American Indians, 107,

264; on agrarian expansion and national 

development, 178-79, 206, 275; War 

preparations, as President, 190-91; land 

cession treaties, 180, 186-188, 196;

expectations of removal policy, 275

Johnson, Richard Mentor, 253-54, 256, 264, 

320, 321

Johnson, Sir William, 91, 97, 98, 101

Jouett, Charles, 181, 187, 191-92

Kanien’kehaka (aka Mohawk), 43-44, 45, 50, 

54, 57n.62, 59; within Haudenosaunee 

Confederacy, 39, 49, 46-48, 57, 76n.37, 109; 

in association with other Indigenous nations, 

83, 136, in alliance with British, 76, 83, 104, 

257

Kansas (Territory), 41, 277, 283, 284, 288, 289-

90,292, 293-294, 296, 298, 301, 304, 309

Kekewepelethy (Shawnee), 160

Kekionga: see Kiihkayonki

Kentucky and Kentuckians, 4, 5, 71, 105, 106, 

201, 242, 322, 324; during Colonial Era 

wars and conflicts, 80, 103, 104; during 

wars and conflicts of 1770s-1790s (in militia 

and volunteer units), 105, 108, 110, 121-21; 

and settler colonialism, 4, 71, 120; during 

War of 1812 (in Militia and Volunteer 

units), 139, 149, 151, 199, 215, 223, 225, 

250, 251, 254-55, 256, 257-58, 272, 315; at 

Battles of Frenchtown and aftermath, 226, 

228-29, 230, 231-34, 235-38, 239, 241, 245; 

veterans of War of 1812, 265, 266;

advocacy for invasion of Canada, 206-08.

Also see George Rogers Clark, Henry Clay, 

Richard Mentor Johnson, settler colonialism, 

and Isaac Shelby.

Kentucky Memorial, 329

Kickapoo: see Kiikaapoi

Kiihkayonki (aka Kekionga), 109, 138, 151

Kiikaapoi (aka Kickapoo), 29, 139; and ancient 

associations with western Lake Erie, 29, 49; 

and connections to alliances and

confederacies, 53-53, 63-65, 66, 73, 78, 88, 

95, 109, 132, 179, 221, 230, 257-59, 295

Kinjoino (Odawa), 148, 149n.74, 150, 152 

Kiskakon Odawa: see Giishkaakhang

Knox, Henry: policy of expansion with honor, 

274-75; and Northwest Indian Wars, 136-38, 

139, 141-42, 146

Koquethagechton (aka White Eyes; Lunaapeew), 

104, 110

L’Arbe Croche: see Waganakising

La Plaisance Bay, 313

LA-Z-BOY, 319, 325

La Croix, Hubert, 220

Lake Champlain, 45, 81; Battle of (War of 

1812), 261, 267

Lake Erie: Battle of, 7, 250-52

Lasselle family, 155n.94, 166

Lasselle, Antoine, 154, 164, 166

Lasselle, Françcois, 220

Legion of the United States, 139, 142-43, 146-

48, 166n.171

Lenape (aka Delaware): see Lunaapeew

Lewis, William, 226n.53, 227, 255n.162

Long Knives (aka Big Knives; Indigenous term 

for Virginians, Kentuckians, and 

Americans), 71, 78, 80, 105-07, 108, 109, 

111, 118, 123-24, 132, 140, 143, 147-48, 

150, 152, 165, 182, 183n.55, 235, 239

Litter Otter: see Ngig, 158

Little Turtle: see Mihšihkinaahkwa

London (ON), 258

Louisiana Territory, 121, 122, 178, 187, 268, 

275

Lower Canada, 74, 150n.78, 164, 205-06, 220, 

249, 251, 266, 2997, 172, 216, 230, 263, 

265, 280

Lower Sandusky, 127, 141, 162, 230, 249-50, 

254, 274, 285, 288

Loyalists, 115, 163

Lunaapeew, 67, 68, 69-70, 71, 73, 76, 77-78, 80, 

85, 87-88, 90, 91, 92, 93-94, 95, 96, 97, 102, 

104, 110-111, 119, 127, 128, 129-30, 136, 

137-38, 140, 145, 153, 155, 159, 161-62, 

166, 177-80, 182, 184, 185, 197, 204, 221, 

224, 230, 252, 257, 258, 274, 277, 284, 287, 

290, 293

Lundy’s Lane, Battle of, 261

M’katiwe-kašee (aka Catahecassa; Shawnee), 

160-61, 186
Index 355

Maconaquah (aka Francis Slocum; Myaamia), 

293

Madison, George, 234

Madison, James, 6, 100, 194, 200-01, 205, 206, 

208, 225, 240, 253, 259, 266-67, 279-280

Maguaga (town), 163, 193, 194, 215, 217-18, 

243, 285, 302, 309, 310

Mahkate:wi-meši-ke:hke:hkwa (aka Black 

Hawk), 294-296

Main Poc (Bodéwadmi), 195, 203, 258, 290, 

213, 271

Mamaceqtaw (aka Menominee), 52, 53, 57, 109, 

215, 217

Manning, Grace Warrow, 302

Mascouten, 48-49, 51, 52, 53, 63-65, 66, 78, 95, 

109

Maumee Bay, 143, 159, 162, 163, 168, 175, 176, 

210, 215, 217, 227, 250, 253

McArthur, Duncan, 220, 272-73, 285, 294

McDougall, George, 173

McKee, Alexander, 139

Meigs, Return (Governor of Ohio), 215, 217

Mekoche (Shawnee sept), 105, 124-26; as civil 

leaders within larger Shawnee federation, 

106, 108-09, 130-31; and town of 

Wapakoneta, 160-61, 188-89

Menominee: see Mamaceqtaw

Meskwaki, 29, 48, 49, 52, 63, 64-66, 140, 203, 

221, 230, 257, 294-96

Métis, 4, 4n.7, 86, 164, 165, 166, 215, 294

Miami (American Indian Nation): see Myaamia, 

Michigan (Terr.), 4, 7, 11, 13, 14, 17, 63-64, 

185; U.S. establishment of, 172-74, 272; 

early governance and land claims, 176, 205, 

285, 287, 290; occupied by British, 219, 

220-21, 225; reoccupied by U.S., 259, 260; 

and “Michigan Fever,” 313-14

“Middle Ground,” 68-63, 79, 119-20. Also see 

Pays d’en Haut.

Mihšihkinaahkwa (aka Little Turtle; Myaamia):

as renowned war leader, 115, 138, 147-48; 

and Grand Council, 151-53, 155; and Treaty 

of Greenville, 156-57; and civil leadership

after 1795, 179, 297, 205

Militia(s): Kentucky, 1, 127, 132, 138, 139, 150, 

199-200, 206, 208, 223-24, 225, 226, 227, 

229, 231, 232, 237, 243, 253, 255, 257, 264; 

Ohio, 205, 209, 215, 218, 225, 228, 229; 

Michigan, 210-11, 213, 217-18, 228; Essex 

(Canadian), 211, 215, 218, 219-20, 225, 

228, 230, 231, 232, 234-35, 237, 248, 249, 

254

Mingo: see Ökwe'öwé

Missionaries, 71, 187, 274, 283, 290, 293; 

Jesuit/Catholic, 37, 47, 86, 283; Protestant 

(Moravian, Methodist, Shaker), 74, 110, 

161, 185, 288, 289

Mississinewa River, 293; and large Native 

council in August 1812, 204-205; and U.S.

raids in December 1812, 224, 259

Mizise-zide (aka Turkey Foot; Odawa), 148

Mkadebnesi (aka Blackbird; Odawa), 245

Mohawk: see Kanien’kehaka

Monguagon: see Maguaga

Monroe County Historical Commission, 324

Monroe County Historical Society, 324, 325, 

327

Monroe Paper Company, 325

Monroe, James: Secretary of War, 240; 

President, 273, 276, 312

Monroe, MI: establishment and early 

development, 311-314

Mookmaanish (Odawa), 245

Moraviantown, ON, 7, 254, 255

Mourning War, 47-49, 50, 65, 79, 239

Muskingum River, 73, 77, 88, 110, 136

Muscogee: see Mvskoke, 

Mvskoke, 103, 140, 183, 183n.59, 197, 199, 

207, 230, 260

Myaamia, 53, 57, 78-79, 81, 88, 107, 109, 147, 

162, 201; and Pays d’en Haut, 59, 63-64, 

66, 73, 77; and Pontiac’s Rebellion, 92, 95; 

and Native-British alliances during 

Revolutionary War and in 1790s, 110, 128, 

132, 136, 137-38, 139-40, 142, 145; 

regarding land cessions and resistance to 

U.S. policies, 151-152, 156, 166, 179, 197-

98; during War of 1812, 204-205, 224, 231, 

236, 244, 259-60, 279, 282; Removal and 

persistence of, 292-294

Myeerah (aka Walk-in-the-Water; Wyandot), 

212, 215-16, 217, 230, 243

Naiwash (Odawa), 257, 284

Native Confederacy, 1, 5, 6, 7, 10, 179-80, 282; 

in association with Tenskwatawa and 

Tecumseh, 200, 201, 203, 258-59, 268; 

alliance with British, 199, 210, 212, 228, 

244-245, 262-263, 266-267; resistance from 
Index 356

non-Confederacy leaders, 206-207, 217, 

218; and the course of the War of 1812, 218-

22, 223, 248-49, 251, 259-260, 300. Also see 

Battles of Frenchtown and Aftermath, 

Tecumseh, Tenskwatawa

Navarre family, 166, 169, 173

Navarre, Francis, 322

Navarre, François, 154, 169, 171, 231

Navarre, Jacque, 169

Neolin (Lunaapeew), 95-96, 97

New Orleans, Battle of, 262-263, 264

Ngig (Odawa), 149

Niagara River, 16, 40, 205

Nmegos (Odawa), 185

Northwest Ordinance, 134, 137, 174, 315-145

Northwest Territory (formally, Territory 

Northwest of the River Ohio), 114, 134, 

135, 136, 140, 154, 174, 178, 264, 276, 295

Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi, 

283

Nswe’mishkote’win (Council of Three Fires), 

40n.21, 57, 299

Obwandiyag (aka Pontiac; Odawa), 93n.16, 94-

95, 97, 165

Ojibway (aka Chippewa): see Ojibwe

Ojibwe, 40, 53, 54-55, 57, 61, 63, 66, 78, 80, 83, 

85, 88, 90, 93, 94, 95, 108, 109, 127, 132, 

140, 143, 145, 163, 168, 176, 192, 195, 204, 

212, 215, 223, 230, 231, 235, 257, 268, 272, 

277, 284, 299, 301. Also see Anishinaabeg, 

and Nswe’mishkote’win (Council of Three 

Fires)

Ökwe'öwé (Seneca-Cayuga; aka “Mingo”), 51, 

68, 70, 71, 73, 76, 80, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 

95, 102, 104, 110, 111, 112, 119, 129, 132, 

158, 274, 288, 294

Omàmiwinini (Algonkin), 40, 44, 47, 49, 54

Oneida: see Onyota’ake

Onoda'gega, 44, 49, 59, 104

Onondaga: see Onoda'gega

Onöndowága (Seneca), 49, 50-51, 59, 66, 70, 

76, 91, 92, 95, 97, 104, 252

Onyota’ake (Oneida), 39, 44, 49, 54, 104

P'Koum-Kwa (Myaamia), 152, 225, 259, 293

Pacanne: see P'Koum-Kwa

Paukeesa (Shawnee), 257

Pays d’en Haut, 5, 43, 69, 74, 79, 94, 167, 168, 

178, 182, 277; and exercise of French 

imperial interests, 56-59, 64-66; as arena of 

exchange, conflict, and mutual 

accommodation, 55-56, 59, 61-63, 68, 73. 

Also see “Middle Ground.”

Pekowi (aka Piqua): 

Peltry trade, 33-35, 37-38, 46, 46, 53, 54, 55, 56, 

62, 64, 66, 67, 72, 74, 115, 140, 166, 170, 

182, 210, 244, 270

Peoria (Indigenous nation), 78

Perry, Oliver Hazard, 7, 225, 250-52, 265

Peteasuva (Shawnee), 129-30

Piankeshaw, 132, 180, 204, 277

Pidgeon-Kukowski, Judith (Kwendae’to’),

Pinšiwa (aka Jean Baptiste Richardville; 

Myaamia), 293

Piqua: see Pekowi

Pokagon: see Pokégnek

Pokégnek; and Pokégnek Bodéwadmi, 293

Pontiac: see Obwandiyag

Pontiac’s Rebellion, 5, 94-96, 101, 165

Potawatomie Trail of Death, 290-292

Proclamation Line of 1763, 98-101, 117

Procter, Henry (aka Henry Proctor), 216, 218, 

230, 234-35, 236-38, 240, 242-43, 244, 246, 

248-50, 251-52, 254-55

Prophetstown, 196, 198, 199, 200-02, 203-04, 

212, 221-222. Also see Tippecanoe, Battle 

of.

Provincial Marine, 209, 211, 230, 234, 250

Put-in Bay, 250

“Remember the Raisin!” (as rallying cry), 2,

240, 245, 248, 265-66, 311, 320-21, 323, 

328

Ribbon farms (aka “long lots”), 1, 165, 168, 169, 

174, 175, 300, 313

Richardville, Jean Baptiste: see Pinšiwa, 

River Raisin “Massacre:” U.S. interpretations of, 

1-2, 241-42, 244, 320-21. Also see Battles of 

Frenchtown: Aftermath

River Raisin Paper Company, 31, 318-319, 320, 

324, 325

River Rouge, 28, 165, 168, 239, 268

Roche de Boeuf (aka Buffalo Rock), 146, 147 

n.71, 148, 149, 151

Roll, Ted, 307

Roture, 168. Also see Ribbon farms.

Roundhead (aka Bark Carrier): see Stayeghtha

Saline River, 179
Index 357

Sandusky Bay, 18, 26, 29, 72, 73, 243, 250, 252

Sandusky River, 66, 105, 110, 133, 141

Sandwich (ON), 213-14, 216, 217, 219, 252, 

254, 258

Sauk (or Sac): see Thâkîwa

Saukenuk, 295

Sault Sainte Marie 54. Also see Bawaating

Scioto River, 102, 104, 153, 182

Scott, Charles (Governor of Kentucky), 215

Seneca-Cayuga: see Ökwe'öwé

Seneca: see Onöndowága)

Settler colonialism, 3; and cycles of violence, 

131-32, 136-37, 155

Seven Years’ War, 69, 74-76, 78-84, 100-01; in 

context of Sixty Years’ War for the Great 

Lakes, 170, 210, 268; and reshaping of Pays 

d’en Haut, 74, 88, 120-21; Native alliances 

and motivations, 72, 78-79, 85, 119-20; in 

relation to American Revolution, 98-99, 

100-01

Shabbona: see Zhabné

Shawnee, 67-68, 68-69, 77-78, 79, 88, 94, 97, 

103-04, 129-30, 133, 136, 165, 181, 183, 

195-96, 201, 235, 260, 309, 321; return to 

ancient homeland, 75-76, 77; and War of 

1812, 219, 210-11, 223, 230, 233, 235, 254; 

as diasporic peoples, 72-73, 124-25, 157-58, 

163, 181, 182-83; septs and towns, 132-33, 

188; conflict with “Long Knives” 

(Virginians and Kentuckians), 77-78, 105-

07, 108-09, 110-12, 113, 121-22, 132, 136, 

142; councils with U.S., 130-132, 215-16, 

219, 277; Removal, 284-285; Native 

alliances, 69-70, 88-89, 91, 93, 97-98, 111-

12, 145, 206; prophetic traditions, 94, 183; 

during Seven Years’ War, 76-78, 81-82, 86; 

and Western Confederacy, 129-30, 136, 

137-38, 145-46, 148, 148n.76, 151, 153, 

154. Also see Tecumseh, Tenskwatawa, 

Waweyapiersenwah, Tecumapease, 

Shelby, Isaac (Governor of Kentucky), 257, 321

Simcoe, John (Lt. Governor of Upper Canada), 

139, 143, 152, 170

Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 5, 61, 

208, 310

Snake (aka Captain Snake): see Peteasuva

Sou-neh-hoo-way (aka Splitlog): see

Teotrontore

Sovereignty, 71, 124, 128, 163, 286; Indigenous 

contexts of, 120, 124, 126, 138, 140-41, 169, 

194, 242, 282, 294, 305; in U.S. legal, 

territorial, and economic terms, 105, 124-26, 

155, 157, 190, 286, 294, 305; imperial 

conceptions of, 35-36, 74-76, 99, 103, 170

Splitlog (aka Sou-neh-hoo-way; Wyandot): see

Teotrontore

Splitlog, Lil, 302

St. Clair River, 64

St. Joseph River (IN), 152

St. Joseph River (MI and IN), 63, 85, 162, 283

St. Lawrence River, 16, 29, 34, 35, 41, 44, 55, 

81, 98, 168, 261, 264

St. Louis (Missouri), 122-23, 289, 294

St. Mary’s River (IN), 272

Stayeghtha (aka Bark Carrier, or Roundhead; 

Wyandot), 215, 216, 217, 223, 230, 243, 

248, 249

Stony Creek, 26, 237, 238

Swan Creek, 151, 159, 183, 231

Tarhe (Wyandot), 152-53, 205, 212, 213n.23, 

216

Taylor, Zachary, 264

Tecumapease (Shawnee), 183, 257

Tecumseh (Shawnee), 2, 185, 220, 259, 263, 

294; early life of, 153, 183-5; and William 

Henry Harrison, 199-201, 202, 205; Native 

Confederacy, 5, 188-189, 195-98, 205, 218, 

247-248, 263, 294; alliance with British, 

198-99, 245; resistance from nonConfederacy groups, 203-05; as war leader, 

215-16, 219, 246, 251, 254; death of, 2, 242, 

254-255, 320. Also see Tenskwatawa.

Tenskwatawa (Shawnee), 5, 197, 204, 278, 283, 

296, 301; early life (as Lalawethika), 182-

184; and visions of, 184-87, 188; Native 

Confederacy, 187-88 196-97, 198, 199, 202, 

208, 216, 221, 294; garners Native 

opposition, 186, 197, 205; departs for the 

West, 283. Also see Prophetstown, 

Tecumseh, and Battle of Tippecanoe

Teotrontore (aka Splitlog, Sou-neh-hoo-way; 

Wyandot), 215, 216, 230

Thâkîwa (Sauk, or Sac), ancient residence 

around western Lake Erie, 29, 48-49; 

alliances, 52, 63, 140, 257; relations with 

French, 63, 64, 66; Native Confederacy, 
Index 358

199, 203, 221, 230; Black Hawk War, 294-

96. Also see Meskwaki

Thames River (ON), 29, 95, 168, 251, 252, 254, 

258

Thames, Battle of, 2, 7, 8, 240, 252-54, 255-57, 

265, 319, 328

Thayendanegea (aka Joseph Brant; 

Kanien’kehaka), 136, 152

The Glaize: Grand Council of Western 

Confederacy, 139-40, 159, 167; polyglot 

community of the “Middle Ground,” 143, 

146, 147; destruction of, 149, 151. Also see

Battle of Fallen Timbers, 

Tippecanoe, Battle of, 6, 189, 195, 200-01, 203, 

215, 222, 291

Todd, John, 239

Treaties (between Great Britain and Native 

representatives; listed by formal title): 

Treaty of Camp Charlotte (1774), 102-104

Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1763), 101, 102, 

105, 123

Treaties (between the U.S. and Native

representatives, listed by formal title):

Treaty of Brownstown (1808), 194-95; 

Treaty of Chicago (1833), 283-84, 290;

Treaty of Detroit (1807), 177, 181, 193, 

194n.88, 215, 270-71; Treaty of Fort Finney 

(1786), 131-132; Treaty of Fort Harmar 

(1789), 135-138, 154, 156-57; Treaty of Fort 

Industry (1805), 181, 188n.70; Treaty of 

Fort McIntosh (1785), 130-31, 32, 36, 38, 

56; Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1784), 101, 102, 

105, 123, 126-27, 130, 131, 132, 154, 157;

Treaty of Fort Wayne (1803), 179-80, 

197n.96; Treaty of Fort Wayne (1809), 197-

98, 199; Treaty of Greenville (1795), 6, 155-

57, 159, 160-61; Treaty of Greenville 

(1814), 258, 260, 270; Treaty of Grouseland 

(1805), 180, 187; Treaty of Portage des 

Sioux (1815), 268; Treaty of Saginaw 

(1819), 277; Treaty of Springwells (1815), 

268-270, 288; Treaty of St. Louis (1804), 

300; Treaty of St. Mary’s (1818), 290, 294;

Treaty of Vincennes (1803), 178; Treaty of 

Vincennes (1804), 180; Treaty with the 

Kickapoo (1809), 179; Treaty with the 

Miami (1834), 293; Treaty with the 

Wyandots (1842), 289

Treaty of Ghent (1814), 7, 261, 264-265, 268

Treaty of Paris (1763), 94, 168

Treaty of Paris (1783), 114, 117

Trout (aka “Le Maigouis;” Odawa): see Nmegos

Tsalagihi (aka Cherokee), 76, 103, 129, 132, 

140, 281

Turkey Foot (Odawa): see Mizise-zide, 

Upper Sandusky, 110, 124, 129, 136, 162, 225, 

251, 273, 284, 286, 287-88, 289, 297, 300, 

308

Vincennes, IN, 107, 109, 132, 171, 176, 189, 

196, 198, 199-200, 201, 205, 265

Waayaahtanwa, (also Ouiatenon, or Wea), 73, 

95, 140, 197, 204, 221, 276

Wabash River, 16, 18, 66, 73, 77, 78, 81, 88, 94, 

109, 119, 132, 133, 136, 137-38, 139, 142, 

156, 159, 161, 162, 165, 180, 182, 189, 197, 

199, 201, 223, 253, 273, 278, 291, 292, 293

Waganakising (aka L’Arbe Croche), 85, 185, 

245

Wakatomika (Shawnee town), 129-30, 131

Walk-in-the-Water: see Myeerah

Wapakoneta (Shawnee town), 161, 179, 188, 

194, 251, 273, 284, 287

War Hawks, 7, 208

Warrow (Wyandot), 215, 216, 298

Warrow, Joseph, 300

Warrow, Charles “Oscar,” 301; also see Grace 

Warrow Manning

Warrow, Ted, 302

Washington, George, 78, 92, 136, 137, 39, 155; 

as land speculator and surveyor, 73, 105-

106; during Seven Years’ War, 68-69, 70-

71, 72-73; views on squatters and settlers, 

100-01, 121, 129, 133-34, 142; attacks on 

Haudenosaunee towns in 1779, 104; on 

federal authority and American Indian 

territories, 122, 125-26

Waweyapiersenwah (Whirlpool, aka Blue 

Jacket; Shawnee), 213; leadership in Grand 

Council, 153, 155; as war leader, 138, 152; 

as mentor to Tecumseh, 188

Wayne Stockade, 210n.19, 

Wayne, Anthony (General), 146, 157, 166, 168; 

and Legion of the United States, 141-43, 

145, 146; Northwest Campaign, 146, 147, 

148-150, 153-55; and Treaty of Greenville 

(1795), 155-57. Also see Fallen Timbers, 

Battle of

Weld, Isaac, 163-64

Wells, William, 188, 189, 196
Index 359

Wendat (aka Huron-Wendat Nation), 29, 39-40, 

41, 44, 46, 49, 50, 52, 303, 304

Western Confederacy, 115, 136, 142, 145, 147, 

152-53, 160, 162-64, 167, 177; as response 

to Haudenosaunee territorial pretensions, 

126-127, 141; in political and military 

opposition to the United States, 137, 138-39, 

140, 144, 148-49; in alliance with British, 

143-44, 159, 165-66; and battles with U.S. 

forces, 142, 146, 149-51, 153; and Treaty of 

Greenville (1795), 154-157

White Eyes: see Koquethagechton

Winchester, James, 223, 225-27, 229-30, 231, 

232, 234, 236, 237, 246

Winnebago: see Hoocąągra

Wolf (Shawnee): see Biaseka

Woodward, Augustus, 172, 173-74, 244

Wyandot (aka Tionontaté), 4, 11, 59, 61, 64, 

189, 318; antecedent populations (prior to 

1640s), 29, 40-41, 44, 48, 49, 50; 

dispossession by Haudenosaunee in late 

17th century, 50-52; and central position in 

French-Indigenous commerce and 

diplomacy in Great Lakes Region, 52, 53-

55; as keepers of the ancient Council Fire, 

5, 94, 118, 124, 130, 152, 193, 199, 216, 

230, 308, 309; relocate to Detroit River 

area, 63-64; associations, alliances and 

confederacies in western Pays d’en Haut, 

57, 59, 64, 66; associations, alliances and 

confederacies through Sixty Years’ War 

for the Great Lakes, 90, 92, 94-95, 108, 

110, 111, 118, 129, 130, 136, 140, 147, 

150, 152, 153, 163, 192-93, 194-95, 197, 

199, 204, 212, 215-17, 223, 225, 232, 235, 

244, 251, 257, 258, 269; Detroit River 

division in late-18th century and after; 108-

09, 163, 167, 176, 193, 194-97, 205, 215, 

216, 217, 223, 230, 273, 284, 297-300; 

Sandusky division in late 18th century and 

after, 111, 130, 53, 162, 182, 193, 204, 

205, 212, 215, 216, 125, 257, 258, 273, 

284, 287, 388, 389; at Fallen Timbers, 

156, 158, 159, 163; treaties with the 

United States, 134, 137, 201-205, 273, 

284, 287; during War of 1812, 221, 223, 

257, 258; relations with habitants of 

Frenchtown, 220, 244, 256, 303; at Battles 

of Frenchtown, 236, 239, 240, 242, 245, 

247; post War of 1812 land cessions, 284-

288, 298-300; Removal to Kansas, 288-

289; Anderdon Reserve, 300-301; 20th 

and 21st century revitalization, 301-309. 

Also see Giishkaakhang (aka Kiskakon) 

Odawa, Myeerah, Stayeghtha, Tarhe, 

Teotrontore, Warrow, Wendat

Zhabné (aka Shabbona; Bodéwadmi), 245
Index 360
Appendices and Addendum

361

Appendices and Addendum

Appendices

A. River Raisin National Battlefield Park and its significance 363

relative to other NPS sites that correspond to the War of 1812 

a. Horseshoe Bend National Military Park

b. Chalmette Battlefield, Jean Lafitte NHP & Preserve

c. Boston National Historical Park: USS Constitution

d. Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine

e. Fort Mackinac National Historic Landmark

f. Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial

g. President’s Park (White House)

h. Castle Clinton National Monument (New York City)

i. National Mall and Memorial Parks: U.S. Capitol

j. Cumberland Island National Seashore

B. Consultations 369 

C. Recommendations for Additional Studies 371

D. Acknowledgements 375

E. Bibliography of Battlefield-related Source Material Literature 377

Addendum 417

A. River Raisin Battlefield Site: National Register

of Historic Places Documentation
Appendices and Addendum

362
Appendix A Significance relative to other NPS sites associated with the War of 1812

363

A. River Raisin National Battlefield Park and its significance relative to 

other NPS sites that correspond to the War of 1812

Compared to the number of Revolutionary and Civil War sites within in the 

National Park System, War of 1812 sites are quite rare. Along with the River Raisin 

National Battlefield Park, there are six sites that are primarily associated with the War of 

1812: Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine; Horseshoe Bend National 

Military Park; Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial; the Chalmette 

Battlefield unit within Jean Lafitte National Historical Park & Preserve; Fort Mackinac 

National Historic Landmark, and the USS Constitution—which is part of the Boston 

National Historical Park. Other sites within the National Park System with associations to 

the War of 1812 include President’s Park (The White House), Castle Clinton National 

Monument (New York City), the U.S. Capitol (as part of the National Mall and Memorial 

Parks), and Cumberland Island National Seashore. As a collective, these park units do not 

form a comprehensive representation of the war’s breadth or significance, yet each site 

conveys the importance of a distinct locale within the larger conflict.

Cumberland Island National Seashore, Georgia:

Though Cumberland Island National Seashore did not become associated with the 

War of 1812 until after the Treaty of Ghent was signed, it represents two key elements of 

the broader war. Namely, the increased strength of the Royal Navy along the U.S. 

coastline following Napoleon’s surrender in the spring of 1814, and the opportunities the 

war could present to enslaved African Americans. While enroute to support the invasion 

of New Orleans, Admiral George Cockburn sailed his small fleet to Cumberland Island to 

await further information about the coordination of ships and troops. He also 

commandeered property on the island, attacked the small fortifications that guarded St. 

Mary’s, and occupied the port—all of which placed the coastal island and the nearby sea 

lanes under the control of Great Britain. Cockburn also recruited enslaved residents for 

service in the Royal Marines with guarantees of pay and emancipation, but this effort was 

cut short when word of the Treaty of Ghent arrived. Cockburn’s presence on Cumberland 

Island also connects the National Seashore to other War of 1812-related NPS sites. These 

include the bombardment of Fort McHenry, the burning of Washington, DC (President’s 

Park and the U.S. Capitol), and—through Cockburn’s mission to support of the invasion 

of New Orleans—Chalmette Battlefield.

Castle Clinton National Monument, New York

Though located in one of the most densely populated areas on earth, Castle 

Clinton is one of the least known NPS sites with a connection to the War of 1812. In the 

wake of the Chesapeake-Leopard Affair (1807), New York and other major coastal cities 

began to fortify their harbors. Located on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, Castle 

Clinton (then known as Southwest Battery) was one of four installations around New 

York Harbor. The original namesake for Battery Park, Castle Clinton would become 

better known in the mid 19th century as the Castle Garden restaurant, theater, and opera. 

Between 1855 and 1890 it served as an immigration processing center for the State of 

New York, then later housed the New York City Aquarium. As a deterrent, the Southwest 

Battery and the other fortifications served their purpose, since the Royal Navy never 

attempted to sail into New York.
Appendix A Significance relative to other NPS sites associated with the War of 1812

364

U.S. Capitol and President’s Park, Washington, D.C.

During the Chesapeake Campaign in the summer of 1814, Royal Marines wrought 

destruction through much of the Chesapeake Bay region, and ultimately invaded 

Washington, DC. In retaliation for the burning of the Canadian capital of York by U.S. 

troops in April 1813, the British set fire to the White House, the U.S. Capitol building, 

several warships, and the navy yard where they were anchored. The damage to the 

Capitol was considerable—but not irreparable. The British then moved on to the now 

abandoned White House, and set it afire. While the effects of the attack on Washington 

would not be fully repaired for several years, the burning of Washington was more a 

national embarrassment—and a boastful trophy for the British—than a strategic defeat. It 

also serves as a measure of the lopsided nature of the war at that time, as well as a victory 

that an indebted and weary Britain was too exhausted to exploit.

Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine, Maryland

Built in the late 18th century, Fort McHenry anchored the defenses of Baltimore 

Harbor against a maritime attack. In mid-September 1814, Admiral Cockburn’s forces 

arrived at the mouth of the harbor with the intention of taking the port and thus 

controlling a large swath of the Mid-Atlantic coast. The fort withstood a 25-hour 

bombardment and maintained control of the channel into Baltimore Harbor—thus forcing 

the British to withdraw. Though nothing was gained in the engagement, and little damage 

occurred to either side, the resilience of Fort McHenry prevented losses that would likely 

have exceeded those suffered by Washington, DC. The bombardment of Fort McHenry 

also inspired Francis Scott Key’s “The Star Spangled Banner” –which conflated survival 

with victory and neatly captured how the war would be remembered in subsequent years.

USS Constitution, Massachusetts

Like the survival of Fort McHenry and the burning of Washington, the USS 

Constitution is one of the best-known symbols of the War of 1812—and of the three it is 

the only one that was involved in an outright victory. Over the course of the war, the 

Constitution defeated four British warships in three-separate engagements and captured 

several British merchant ships. While the victories did not alter the calculus of the war, 

they had great symbolic importance by demonstrating that U.S. sailors and ships could 

defeat the ruler “of the waves.” These defeats also caused great consternation among the 

British public who—even though the Royal Navy retained its dominance in the western 

Atlantic—fretted about the course of the war and its purpose.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Taken together, the six NPS sites noted above do not present a coherent or 

comprehensive representation of the war. The President’s Park, the U.S. Capitol, Fort 

McHenry, and the USS Constitution possess symbolic importance, but only Fort 

McHenry and the USS Constitution are primarily associated with the War of 1812. Few 

visitors to Cumberland Island take the time to see the small War of 1812 display in the 

NPS Visitor Center, and Castle Clinton rarely—if ever—factors into historical studies of 

the war.1 However, the same is not true of two NPS sites associated with the campaigns 

 1 Neither Southwest Battery nor Castle Clinton are noted in Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A 

Forgotten Conflict. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989, nor in David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. 

Heidler, eds., Encyclopedia of the War of 1812 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2004).
Appendix A Significance relative to other NPS sites associated with the War of 1812

365

of Andrew Jackson: the Chalmette Battlefield unit within Jean Lafitte National Historical 

Park & Preserve, and Horseshoe Bend National Military Park.

Chalmette Battlefield, Louisiana

Like Fort McHenry, Chalmette Battlefield is as much a shrine as it is a site for 

historical interpretation of the events associated with the Battle of New Orleans. And like 

Admiral Cockburn’s activities around Cumberland Island, the Battle of New Orleans and 

General Jackson’s smashing victory over the British at Chalmette Plantation occurred 

after the ratification of the Treaty of Ghent. Nevertheless, it served to chasten the British, 

made Jackson a national hero, and gave the United States a celebrated victory at the close 

of a brutal truce. The date of the victory, January 8, 1815, became a national holiday and 

Jackson’s heroics ultimately propelled him to the White House.

Horseshoe Bend National Military Park, Alabama

One of the most decisive and consequential battles during the War of 1812 

occurred in March 1814 at a place known as Tohopeka, or Horseshoe Bend. It was there 

that General Jackson led an army of 2,000 Tennessee militia and U.S. Infantry, along 

with several hundred Chahta (Choctaw) and Tsalagihi (Cherokee) warriors, against 

approximately 1,000 Mvskoke (Muscogee or Creek) warriors. More than 800 Mvskoke

were killed, and almost all the rest were wounded. Five months later, at the Treaty of Fort 

Jackson, the Mvskoke were compelled to cede twenty-three million acres in what is now 

Alabama and Georgia. While the context of the battle shares some similarities with the 

Battles of the River Raisin, it had almost nothing to do with the British or the War of 

1812. Rather, it stemmed from many of the same impulses that led to the wars of the 

1790s in the Ohio Valley—but in a decidedly Southern context. Jackson’s imperial foe in 

the Southeast was Spanish Florida, with whom the United States was not at war but 

Southern filibusters sought to annex to the United States, and his wrath was directed 

toward the Mvskoke and the enslaved African Americans who found refuge in West 

Florida.

Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial, Ohio

In terms of strategic significance, one of the most consequential battles during the 

War of 1812 occurred on Lake Erie in September 1813. Though it hinged on a sudden 

change in wind direction and the unconventional tactics of Commandant Oliver Hazard 

Perry, the U.S. victory over the British fleet was total—and it completely changed the 

balance of power around western Lake Erie. Since before the outbreak of the war, the 

Royal Navy (operating out of the Amherstburg Royal Naval Dockyard) controlled 

shipping and communication on Lake Erie. This gave the British and the Native 

Confederacy a distinct advantage over U.S. forces, which were entirely dependent upon 

burdensome overland routes for supplies, communications, and reinforcements. Perry’s 

victory completely reversed that equation, and the British were ultimately forced to flee 

overland while U.S. troops ferried across western Lake Erie. The magnitude of Perry’s 

victory can also be measured with a brief exercise in counterfactual history. If Perry had 

lost the engagement with Commander Robert Heriot Barclay, the British and the Native 

Confederacy alliance would have retained control of Michigan Territory and—armed 

 
Appendix A Significance relative to other NPS sites associated with the War of 1812

366

with U.S. vessels and cannons—possibly driven the U.S. Army of the Northwest away 

from Lake Erie and back toward Fort Wayne. Moreover, British negotiators at Ghent may 

well have been able to gain some of the territorial cessions they proposed for the creation 

of an American Indian buffer state. Put another way, the fates of the British-Native 

alliance and the U.S. Army of the Northwest greatly depended on the outcome of the 

Battle of Lake Erie.

River Raisin National Battlefield Park, Michigan

Within this grouping of NPS sites, the River Raisin National Battlefield Park 

(RRNBP) stands out for several reasons. First, it is directly associated with Perry’s 

Victory and International Peace Memorial, as well as Fallen Timbers Battlefield and Fort 

Miamis National Historic Site (which was utilized by British and Native Confederacy 

forces during the siege of Fort Meigs). This constellation of historically significant sites, 

along with the proximity of Fort Meigs National Historic Landmark (Ohio) and Parks 

Canada’s Fort Malden National Historic Site in Amherstburg, Ontario, provides a fair 

sense of the area’s significance during the War of 1812.2

RRNBP also shares a number of key characteristics with two of the more 

significant War of 1812-related park units, especially in regards to interpretation. At 

Horseshoe Bend, for instance, the park presents information on the landscape as well as 

the people involved in the battle, and interprets the cultural relationships and conflicts 

that led to the Creek War. Along with materials and information on the broader course of 

the War of 1812, the park also describes the war's impact on the Mvskoke people, its 

relation to the growth of slavery as well as the western expansion of the United States, 

and the role war played in the career of Andrew Jackson. The still relatively new 

interpretive center at Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial focuses on the 

naval battle for Lake Erie, as well as the details and structures of specific vessels. 

However, a good deal of attention is also given to the Northwest theater of the War of 

1812, and some of the key Indigenous, British, and U.S. personalities.

Such commonalities are not redundancies, but connections that provide 

opportunities within the NPS for a more comprehensive approach to the commemoration 

and interpretation of the War of 1812. On this last score, however, RRNBP is unique. 

Unlike other NPS units related to the War of 1812, RRNBP directly connects the war of 

1812 with earlier conflicts and historical developments (namely, the “Sixty Years’ War”). 

General Hull’s invasion of Canada, which passed through and launched from units within 

RRNBP, was a continuation of conflicts and military agendas that stemmed back to the 

Seven Years’ War and ran through the American Revolution and the Northwest Indian 

Wars. The invasion plan also reflected the fundamental goal of the so-called War 

Hawks—the most passionate advocates for war—who dreamed of destroying the Native 

Confederacy and removing the British from North America.

Hull’s dramatic failures, along with the Battles of Frenchtown and their aftermath, 

illustrated the deadly folly of the War Hawks. Subsequent events, and the defeat of the 

British-Native Confederacy alliance at the Battle of the Thames, also broke the dreams of 

Tecumseh and his British allies. Unlike the broader course of the war, and the terms of 

 2 The Fallen Timbers Battlefield and Fort Miamis National Historic Site are affiliated units of the National 

Park System that are managed by Metroparks of the Toledo Area
Appendix A Significance relative to other NPS sites associated with the War of 1812

367

the Treaty of Ghent that stipulated a return to status quo ante bellum, the Northwestern 

theater of the War of 1812 did not end in a “tie.” Although the British remained in 

Canada, the conflicts that centered on the Detroit River and western Lake Erie broke the 

Native Confederacy and allowed U.S. political, economic, and demographic expansion 

into the region. In short, the Northwest theater is the one area where the United States 

clearly won what many described as the “Second War for Independence.” In the case of 

the Northwest theater, victory in this second revolution finally achieved an essential goal 

of the first: dispossession of American Indians and the incorporation of their lands.

The changes wrought by the War of 1812 would long reverberate in the western 

Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region –in terms of economic and environmental 

transformations, demographic shifts, and in the implementation of the policy of Indian 

Removal. The events along the River Raisin and the Detroit River are as intimately 

connected to this subsequent history as they are to historical developments of the 

preceding century. Consequently, the units within RRNBP provide a unique opportunity 

to illustrate how the region and the War of 1812 can articulate deep-seated and ongoing 

historical trends in North America.
Appendix A Significance relative to other NPS sites associated with the War of 1812

368
Appendix B Consultations

369

B. Consultations

Stephen Aron

Professor of History: University of 

California, Los Angeles

Chair: Institute for the Study of the 

American West at the Autry National 

Center

Dean L. Anderson, Ph.D.

State Archaeologist

Michigan State Historic Preservation 

Office

Andrew R. L. Cayton

Distinguished Professor of History

Miami University/Ohio State University

Sheri Clemons

Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma

Tribal Historic Preservation Officer

Robin Dushane

Eastern Shawnee Tribe

Tribal Historic Preservation Officer

Donald Fixico (Shawnee, Sac and Fox, 

Muscogee Creek, and Seminole)

Distinguished Foundation Professor

Arizona State University

Rhonda Hayworth

Tribal Historic Preservation Officer

Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma

George Ironstrack (Miami Tribe of 

Oklahoma) 

Myaamia Center at Miami University 

(Ohio)

Robert J. Miller (Eastern Shawnee 

Tribe)

Professor of Law

Lewis & Clark College

Mollie Olinyk

Cultural Resource Management 

Specialist

Michigan State Historic Preservation 

Office

Grand Chief Ted Roll

Wyandot of Anderdon Nation

William B. “Ben” Secunda

NAGPRA Project Manager

University of Michigan 

George Strack

Former Tribal Historic Preservation 

Officer

Miami Tribe of Oklahoma

Erin Thompson

Tribal Historic Preservation Officer

Absentee Shawnee

Richard White

Margaret Byrne Professor of American 

History

Stanford University

Marcus Winchester

Director, Language and Culture

Programs

Pokagon Band of Potawatomi: Pokégnek 

Bodéwadmi
Appendix B Consultations

370
Appendix C Recommendations

371

C. Recommendations for Additional Studies

For all its significance, the small scale of River Raisin National Battlefield Park and the 

geographic distribution of discrete park units, does not by itself convey a sense of 

historical gravitas. However, the array of units and their various historical associations do 

invite deeper inquiry—which is rewarded with fuller understandings of the past and the 

present, and of the connections between peoples and landscapes. While the present study 

seeks to deepen these connections and understandings in the context of a lengthy 

monograph, historical synthesis does not readily lend itself to full explorations of distinct 

places, personalities, or historical episodes. The following recommendations are intended 

to facilitate such explorations in the service of public presentations and park 

interpretation.

A. Cultural Landscape Report

A significant amount of research work has been done on the ancient and historical 

landscapes of the lower River Raisin and the Detroit River area, and some of it has 

been utilized in the crafting of this Historic Resource Study (HRS). However, further 

studies on the various units that compose the River Raisin National Battlefield Park 

(RRNBP) would deepen understandings of cultural and historical contexts as well as 

inform recreational activities throughout the park. Because land and culture were at 

the heart of the conflicts that occurred in the region, neither the battles, the peoples, 

nor the landscapes can be understood independent from the other. Consequently, a 

Cultural Landscape Report would be a valuable tool for interpretive activities as well 

as future management programs.

B. Special History Studies

The number of people associated with the Battles of Frenchtown and their immediate 

aftermath is uncountable. However, there are certain individuals whose biographies 

provide a through-line that connects and expands on many of the subjects covered in 

the Historic Resource Study (HRS). The following biographical subjects are noted 

below: Mahkate:wi-meši-ke:hke:hkwa (aka Black Hawk), Lewis Cass, Richard 

Mentor Johnson, William Henry Harrison, Duncan McArthur, and George Armstrong 

Custer

• Mahkate:wi-meši-ke:hke:hkwa (also Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk):

Mahkate:wi-meši-ke:hke:hkwa who fought at Frenchtown and in several other 

consequential battles during the War of 1812. As a Thâkîwa (Sauk, or Sac), he is 

also the descendant of people who were around western Lake Erie immediately 

prior to the disease epidemics and wars of the early 17th century. The Thâkîwa 

(Sauk, or Sac) subsequently developed an uneasy but important relationship with 

the French around Detroit, and later became strong allies of the British—through 

and beyond the War of 1812. Their experiences with the treaty-making of 

William Henry Harrison also fostered a deep resentment toward the United States, 

particularly among Mahkate:wi-meši-ke:hke:hkwa, his allies, and his community, 

that would erupt in the events that became known as the Black Hawk War (1832). 
Appendix C Recommendations

372

After that event, Mahkate:wi-meši-ke:hke:hkwa came to represent a new version 

of Tecumseh to the U.S. public: a noble warrior whose defeat served as a poignant 

measure of the stern efforts that were required to build a continental nation.

• Lewis Cass: While much has been written about Lewis Cass, there are no studies

that directly relate his life and career to the lasting impacts of the Battles of the 

River Raisin and their Aftermath. Lewis Cass played an integral role in the public 

debate over removal policy leading up to the passage of the Indian Removal Act.

During this debate, he frequently alluded to the events on the River Raisin and 

other conflicts in Michigan Territory as examples of what could occur if Native 

peoples were not forced to move beyond the Mississippi River. From his military 

service at the outbreak of the War of 1812 to his long tenure as Governor of 

Michigan, Cass had a hand in a series of significant historical developments. 

These include his service and conduct under General Hull and the fall of 

Michigan Territory, his various military promotions, his central role in Hull’s 

Court Marshal, his administration of Michigan Territory, treaty making in the 

Aftermath of the Battles, vigorous advocacy for the forceful removal American 

Indians to what is now present-day Nebraska and Kansas. During his service as 

the Secretary of War under President Andrew Jackson, Cass vigorously applied 

the policies associated with the Indian Removal Act (1832) and became directly 

involved in the military response to the uprising led by Mahkate:wi-mešike:hke:hkwa. In sum, Cass’s life deserves a detailed examination that directly 

relates to the experiences of Indigenous peoples.

• Richard Mentor Johnson, William Henry Harrison, Duncan McArthur: The

political careers of specific individuals associated with the River Raisin should be 

further explored concerning their influence into and roles associated with U.S. 

Indian Policy. Foremost among these are Richard Mentor Johnson, William 

Henry Harrison, Duncan McArthur. Collectively and individually, their careers 

demonstrate the significance that the River Raisin played in the development and 

implementation of American Indian Removal.

• George Armstrong Custer: Because of his personal fame and ongoing cultural

resonance, George Armstrong Custer’s youthful years in Monroe, Michigan, and 

his familiarity with survivors of the Battles of the River Raisin deserve further 

examination in light of his later career on the Great Plains.

C. Ethnographic Studies

• Ancient, Pre-Contact, and Historical Associations: Since at least the middle of the 

19th century, activities related to construction, road-building, demolition, and 

development have unearthed material and human remains associated with 

Indigenous communities that date back to the Pre-Contact era. A host of research 

that is cited in the HRS suggests that at least some of these ancient communities are 

antecedent to groups that were in the area during the historical era. Moreover, this 

research indicates that many of the material and social developments that occurred 

among earlier populations continued among their descendants as well as later 
Appendix C Recommendations

373

arrivals to the region that adopted the established lifeways of the region. 

Consultations with associated tribal nations, along with input from scholars working 

on pre-contact societies in the western Lake Erie basin, can provide the basis for a 

study that conveys the antiquity of Native residence in the region—and the 

relevance of those older communities to historical and present-day identifications to 

the area.

• Odawa, Bodéwadmi, and Wyandot: River Raisin National Battlefield Park includes

sites that were historically associated with the Odawa (Ottawa), Bodéwadmi 

(Potawatomi), and Wyandot that moved to the Detroit River area at the turn of the 

17th and 18th centuries. All of these sites (former Reserves or villages) were taken 

through treaties and the policy of Indian Removal, and all remain touchstones for 

Odawa, Bodéwadmi, and Wyandot peoples who live in the area and beyond. The 

research for this HRS suggests that the former Wyandot and Odawa 

Reserves/villages likely correspond to communities that have been closely 

associated since the pre-contact era (i.e., Tionontaté and Giishkaakhang Odawa). It 

is also likely that the Bodéwadmi who moved to the Detroit River area around 1700 

were descended from people who previously lived further to the west of Lake Erie, 

had previously lived near the Tionontaté and Giishkaakhang Odawa when many 

groups sought refuge on the west side of Lake Michigan. While these suppositions 

are well grounded, they require further proof. In either case, the historic sites 

directly associated with these communities can provide further depth to 

interpretations of the Native Confederacy during the War of 1812. Namely, by 

establishing the antiquity of ongoing associations and past alliances, the longstanding deference to the Grand Council Fire of the Wyandot, and the central 

location of the Battles of Frenchtown within this larger cultural and historical 

landscape. And finally, these sites can more fully be presented as parts of a shared 

Native homeland rather than isolated detention areas.

D. Additional Special History Studies (non-biographical)

• African American (slave and free) Perspectives and Experiences: The history of the

Detroit River region in the late 18th and early 19th centuries deserves a fuller 

assessment of the African American (slave and free) experience on both sides of the 

international border. Beginning in the early 18th century, when Indigenous captives 

from the Central Plains were sold as slaves in Detroit, to the participation of 

enslaved and free African Americans in both Canadian and U.S. militias during the 

War of 1812, the colonial and early national histories of the region were tied to 

broader ideas about race, labor, freedom, and slavery. At the outbreak of the War of 

1812, these ideas were construed differently by francophone Canadiens, white 

Americans from the Great Lakes region and the South, Native peoples, African 

Americans, Black Canadians, and Indigenous peoples.

After the American Revolution, the Detroit River became an easily crossed 

international boundary where—depending on the side of the river-- different legal 

systems complicated notions of property in people and variously held out the threat 

of enslavement or emancipation. Knowing when and where to cross the river, and 
Appendix C Recommendations

374

having kin on one side or the other, were thus matters of great import for enslaved 

peoples as well as free people who might become vulnerable to enslavement on the 

other side.

In the decades following the war, the Detroit River area became a critical 

destination on the Underground Railroad. Nearly every escaped slave headed for 

the Canadian side of the river passed through or stopped in the vicinity of Monroe, 

Michigan. From there, they either crossed the river directly or moved on to Detroit 

and then crossed directly to Windsor, Canada. Recent studies on how race and 

status have been shaped by the borderland context of the Detroit River, along with a 

growing number of studies on African American and Black Canadian communities 

in Detroit, Windsor –and how they have shaped the shared histories of these studies, 

would serve as an excellent basis for this Special History Study.

• Motivations for War and Military Service: While there is substantial information

about the actions and experiences of U.S. regulars and militiamen during the War of 

1812, very little has been written on the ideas and understandings that motivated 

communities to support the war and inspired individuals to fight. Because of the 

large number of memoirs, reports, and civic statements about the Battles of the 

River Raisin, the subject is ripe for a focused study. Consequently, a brief analysis 

of the cultural, social, and economic factors that shaped westward migrations and 

aspirations (as well as the fears and hatred that colored relations with Native 

peoples) should be considered for a topical study in coming years. With sufficient 

secondary literature, such a study could further deepen understandings of the 

antagonists who met and killed each other along the River Raisin.
Appendix D Acknowledgements

375

D. Acknowledgements

In the Introduction to The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the 

Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, Richard White alludes to the 18th-century novel 

Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. Like the narrative structure of Sterne’s fiction, 

White viewed the research and writing for the Middle Ground as a never-ending task of 

digging backwards through a multiplying list of sources to make sense of later events. I 

have often reflected on White’s metaphor while working on the present study, and we 

shared a pained but humorous conversation about the subject at a mutual friend’s 

engagement party. Yet the experience of working on this project is different from White’s 

in two respects. First, his narrative ended in 1815, while this work continues to the 

present-day. Second, I was able to benefit from White’s masterful study as well as a new 

generation of scholars who have revisited White’s thesis and—in many cases—carried it 

into the 20th and early 21st centuries. The point here is not to establish an equivalency 

between this work and the scholarship of others, but to acknowledge how deeply I have 

relied on the cumulative efforts of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, as well as 

archivists, antiquarians, compilers, and historical societies. In many respects, then, the 

bibliography and consultations noted in this appendix serve as the principle 

acknowledgements for this work.

The complexity of this study, and the patience it required of others as each 

deadline was extended, have also given me a host of reasons to offer more personal 

expressions of gratitude. First and foremost, I am especially grateful for the support, 

enthusiasm, and knowledge that Scott Bentley (Superintendent of the River Raisin 

National Battlefield Park) has brought to this project. I told him once in a conference call 

that he was my favorite Superintendent in the entire National Park System—and I’d like 

to take this opportunity to reiterate that earnest statement. The same sentiments apply to 

Daniel Downing, Chief of Interpretation, Education & Operations—a true “Jack” and 

“Master” of all trades at River Raisin. The thoughtful patience of Ron Cockrell, who has 

managed this project from the NPS Midwest Regional Office in Omaha, is also much 

appreciated—and at moments has served as a life-line. In the same vein, I am indebted to 

the insightful and deeply informed commentary that I have received from anonymous 

readers during the drafting of this work. My hope is that all will recognize their 

contributions in the final narrative.

The efforts of archivists and librarians at facilities noted in the Bibliography have 

also been invaluable to this project. However, I would like to single out Chris Kull from 

the Archives and Library at the Monroe County Historical Museum—who directed me to 

a wealth of information about the history of Monroe, the effort to establish a

commemorative park on the former site of the River Raisin Paper Company, and offered 

good-natured observations on a host of town matters. Others in Monroe who were helpful 

with their time include volunteers at the NPS Visitor Center and, especially, Ralph

Naveaux, whose book Invaded on All Sides provided valuable insights on the Battles of 

Frenchtown as well as the movement that led to the establishment of the national 

battlefield park. Chief Ted Roll, of the Wyandot of Anderdon, also proved especially 

helpful. Besides providing a font of information and insight, and in the process becoming 
Appendix D Acknowledgements

376

a friend while I was on the road, he organized a meeting and exchange of information 

with a number of tribal members in Brownstown, MI. Another Archivists and librarians

at the Detroit Public Library, the Bentley Library at the University of Michigan, and the 

Library of Michigan were all especially kind and helpful, as was Dean Anderson, State 

Archeologist for Michigan. Lastly, I would like to especially acknowledge the patience of 

my friends and family as I frequently disappeared into places and times that were far 

from our home.

Chi-Miigwech,
Appendix E Bibliography of Battlefield-related Source Material Literature

377

Bibliography of Battlefield-Related Source Material Literature

Archives and Special Collections

Library of Congress: Rare Book & Special Collections Division

Wayne State University: Rare Books and Special Collections

Detroit Public Library: Burton Historical Collection

University of Michigan: Bentley Historical Library

Library of Michigan: Rare Materials Collection

Purdue University: Special Collections

Notre Dame University: Rare Books and Special Collections

Digital Collections

• American Memory from the Library of Congress:

o Manuscript Division < http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/mcchtml/corhome.html>

o U.S. Congress < http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html>

• Library of Congress: Geography and Map Division

o <https://www.loc.gov/collections/?fa=partof%3Ageography+and+map+division>

• Internet Archive: American Libraries Collection

o <https://archive.org/details/americana>

• Internet Archive: Canadian Libraries Collection

o <https://archive.org/details/toronto>

• HathiTrust Digital Library

o < https://www.hathitrust.org/>

• David Rumsey Historical Map Collections

o < http://www.davidrumsey.com/>

• Michigan State University Libraries. Michigan History: Primary Sources

o < http://libguides.lib.msu.edu/PrimarySources>

• University of Michigan Digital Collections: Bentley Image Bank

o < http://quod.lib.umich.edu/b/bhl>

• The Bancroft Library Digital Collections

o < http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/libraries/bancroft-library/digital-collections>

• University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, Digital Collections: The History Collection

o <http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/History>

Selected Primary Texts*

Bauman, ed., Robert F. “The Last Ottawa: A Selection from the Dresden W. H. Howard Papers.” 

Northwest Ohio Quarterly 24 (1952): 3-9.

Beall, William K. “Journal of William K. Beall, July-August, 1812,” American Historical Review, 

17 (July 1912): 787-789

Black Hawk. Black Hawk, an Autobiography Donald Jackson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 

 * List does not include digital materials cited in the text.
Appendix E Bibliography of Battlefield-related Source Material Literature

378

1964.

Blackbird, Andrew J. History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan: A Grammar of 

Their Language, and Personal and Family History of the Author. Ypsilanti: Ypsilantian Job 

Printing House, 1887.

Books and Magazine Articles on Battle of Tippecanoe, Battle of the River Raisin, Battle of the 

Thames. Louisville, KY: Louisville Free Public Library, 1913.

Bouquet, Henry. The Papers of Col. Henry Bouquet. Vol. 2. Edited by Donald H. Kent and 

Sylvester Kirby Stevens. Harrisburg: Department of Public Instruction, Pennsylvania 

Historical Commission, 1942.

Bourgeois, Arthur P., ed. Ojibwa Narratives of Charles and Charlotte Kawbawgam and Jacques 

Lepique, 1893-1895: Recorded with Notes by Homer H. Kidder. Detroit: Wayne State 

University Press, 1994.

Brackenridge, Hugh Henry. Indian Atrocities: Narratives of the Perils and Sufferings of Dr. Knight 

and John Slover among the Indians During the Revolutionary War. Nashville: W.F. Bang, 

1843. Reprint Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010.

Brannan, John, comp. Official Letters of Military and Naval Officers of the United States, during 

the War with Great Britain in the years 1812, 13, 14, and 15. Washington City: Way & 

Gideon, 1823. Reprint New York: Arno Press, 1971.

Burton, M. Agnes, ed. Journal of Pontiac’s Conspiracy, 1763. Translated by R. Clyde Ford. 

Detroit: Michigan Society of the Colonial Wars, 1912.

Byfield, Shadrach. “A Common Soldier’s Account.” In Recollections of the War of 1812: Three 

Eyewitnesses’ Accounts. Edited by John Gellner. Toronto: Baxter, 1964.

Campbell, Maria and James Freeman Clarke. Revolutionary Services and Civil Life of General 

William Hull. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1848. Reprint Bedford, MA: Applewood 

Books, 2009.

Carter, Clarence E., comp. Territorial Papers of the United States, 3, Territory Northwest of the 

River Ohio, 1783-1803. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1934.

Carter, Clarence E., ed. The Territorial Papers of the United States: The Territory of Michigan, 

1805-1820. Vol. 10. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942.

Carter, Clarence Edwin. The Territorial Papers of the United States: The Territory of Michigan, 

1805-1820. Vol. 10. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1952.

Copeland, David A., ed. The Greenwood Library of American War Reporting: The French and 

Indian War & the Revolutionary War. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005.

Craig, Gerald M., ed. Early Travellers in the Canadas, 1791-1867. Toronto: Macmillan, 1955.

Cruikshank, E. A., ed. The Correspondence of Lieut. Governor John Graves Simcoe, 5 vols. 

Toronto: The Ontario Historical Society, 1926-1931.

Cruikshank, Ernest A. ed. Documents Relating to the Invasion of Canada and the Surrender of 

Detroit, 1812. Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1912.

de Bouganville, Louis Antoine. Adventure in the Wilderness: The American Journals of Louis 

Antoine De Bougainville, 1756-1760. Translated and edited by Edward P. Hamilton.

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964.

de Champlain, Samuel. Voyages of Samuel De Champlain, trans. Charles Pomeroy Otis. Vol. 2. 

Boston: The Prince Society, 1878.

Documents Relating to the Erection of Wayne County and Michigan Territory. Detroit: Burton 

Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, 1922.
Appendix E Bibliography of Battlefield-related Source Material Literature

379

Dudley, Thomas P. Battle and Massacre at Frenchtown, Michigan, January 1813. Ann Arbor: 

Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan Library, 2004.

Dunlop, William. Recollections of the War of 1812. 2 ed. Toronto: Historical Publishing Co., 1908.

Esaray, Logan, ed. Messages and Letters of William Henry Harrison. Vol. 2. Indianapolis: Indiana 

Historical Commission, 1922.

Fitzpatrick, John C., ed. The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources 

1745-1799. Vol. 6. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932.

Fitzpatrick, John C., ed. The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript 

Sources, 1745-1799. Vol. 6, September 1776-January 1777. Washington: Government

Printing Office, 1932.

Fixico, Donald L. Treaties with American Indians: An Encyclopedia of Rights, Conflicts, and 

Sovereignty. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2008.

Ford, Paul Leicester, ed. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Vol. 9: 1807-1815. New York: G.P 

Putnam’s Sons, 1898.

Ford, Paul Leicester, ed. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Vol. IX: 1807-1815. New York: G. P. 

Putnam's Sons, 1898.

Foster, Emily. The Ohio Frontier: An Anthology of Early Writings. Lexington: University Press of 

Kentucky, 2000.

Fredriksen, John C., ed. The War of 1812 in Person: Fifteen Accounts by United States Army 

Regulars, Volunteers and Militiamen. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2010.

Gellner, John, ed. Recollections of the War of 1812: Three Eyewitness Accounts. Toronto: Baxter

Publishing Company, 1964.

Gunn, Giles B. Early American Writing. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.

Hickey, Donald R. ed. The War of 1812: Writings from America’s Second War of Independence. 

New York: Library of America, 2013.

Historical Collections: Collections and Researches Made by the Michigan Pioneer and Historical 

Society. Vol. 11. Lansing: Robert Smith & Co., 1889.

Historical Collections: Collections and Researches Made by the Michigan Pioneer and Historical 

Society. Vol. 15. Lansing: Robert Smith & Co., 1889.

Historical Collections: Collections and Researches Made by the Michigan Pioneer and Historical 

Society. Vol. 16. Lansing: Robert Smith & Co., 1890.

Historical Collections: Collections and Researches Made by the Michigan Pioneer and Historical 

Society. Vol. 20. Lansing: Robert Smith & Co., 1892.

Historical Collections: Collections and Researches Made by the Michigan Pioneer and Historical 

Society. Vol. 23. Lansing: Robert Smith & Co., 1895.

Historical Collections: Collections and Researches Made by the Michigan Pioneer and Historical 

Society. Vol. 24. Lansing: Robert Smith & Co., 1895.

Historical Collections: Collections and Researches Made by the Michigan Pioneer and Historical 

Society. Vol. 25. Lansing: Robert Smith & Co., 1896.

Historical Collections: Collections and Researches Made by the Michigan Pioneer and Historical 

Society. Vol. 36. Wyncoop Hallenbeck Crawford Company, 1908.

Hopkins, James P., and Mary W. M. Hargreaves, eds. The Papers of Henry Clay. Vol. 1. 

Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1959.
Appendix E Bibliography of Battlefield-related Source Material Literature

380

Howe, Henry. Historical Collections of Ohio in Two Volumes, an Encyclopedia of the State. 

Cincinnati: State of Ohio, 1907.

Hunt, General John E. The John Hunt Memoirs: Early Years of the Maumee Basin, 1812-1835. 

Edited by Richard J. Wright. Maumee, Ohio: Maumee Valley Historical Society, 1979.

Hurlbut, Henry Higgins. Chicago Antiquities: Comprising Original Items and Relations, Letters, 

Extracts, and Notes Pertaining to Early Chicago. Chicago: Printed for the Author, 1881.

James, William. A Full and Correct Account of the Chief Naval Occurrences of the Late War 

between Great Britain and the United States of America: Preceded by a Cursory 

Examination of the American Accounts of Their Naval Actions Fought Previous to That 

Period. London: T. Egerton, 1817. Reprint London: Conway Maritime Press, 2002.

Kappler, Charles J., ed. Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, 2 vols. Washington, DC: Government 

Printing Office, 1904.

Kawbawgam, Charles, Charlotte Kawbawgam, Jacques LePique, Homer H. Kidder and Arthur P. 

Bourgeois. Ojibwa Narratives of Charles and Charlotte Kawbawgam and Jacques Lepique, 

1893-1895. Detroit: John M. Longyear Research Library; Marquette County Historical 

Society; Wayne State University Press, 1994.

Kellogg, Louise Phelps, ed. Early Narratives of the Northwest, 1634-1699. New York: Charles 

Scribner’s Sons, 1917.

Kent, Donald H., Sylvester Kirby Stevens, and Autumn L. Leanord, eds. The Papers of Henry 

Bouquet. Vol. 2. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1951.

Knopf, Richard, ed. Campaign into the Wilderness: The Wayne-Knox-Pickering-McHenry 

Correspondence. Vol. 4. Columbus: Ohio State Museum, 1955.

Lambert, J. Travels through Canada and the United States of North America in the Years 1806, 

1807 and 1808. London: C. Crandock and M. Joy, 1813. Reprint New York: Antiquarian 

Press Limited, 1960.

Looney, J. Jefferson, ed. Vol. 8. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Lucas, Robert. The Robert Lucas Journal of the War of 1812 During the Campaign under General 

William Hull. Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1906.

Manley, Henry Sackett. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 1784. Rome, NY: Rome Sentinel Company, 

1932.

Marston, Morrill, Report on Indians of the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1820. Madison: Wisconsin 

Historical Society, 2003.

McAfee, Robert B. History of the Late War in the Western Country. Bowling Green, OH: 

Historical Publications Company, 1919.

McDonald, Daniel. Removal of the Pottawattomie Indians from Northern Indiana: Embracing Also 

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Chippewa, and Potawatomi Indians. New York: Garland Publishing, 1974.

Wheeler-Voegelin, Erminie and Stout David B. Indians of Illinois and Northwestern Indiana: 

Anthropological Report on the Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi Indians. New York: 

Garland Publishing, 1974.

Wheeler-Voegelin, Erminie, Emily J. Blasingham and Dorothy R. Libby. An Anthropological 

Report on the Miami, Wea, and Eel-River Indians. New York: Garland Publishing, 1974.

Wheeler-Voegelin, Erminie, Remedios Wycoco-Moore and Baerreis David A. Indians of 

Northeastern Illinois. New York: Garland Publishing, 1974.

Wheeler-Voegelin, Erminie. An Ethnohistorical Report on the Wyandot, Potawatomi, Ottawa, and 

Chippewa of Northwest Ohio. New York: Garland Publishing, 1974.

Wheeler-Voegelin, Erminie. Ethnohistory of Indian Use and Occupancy in Ohio and Indiana Prior 

to 1795. New York: Garland Publishing, 1974.

Wheeler-Voegelin, Erminie. Indians of Northwest Ohio. New York: Garland Publishing, 1974.

White, Bruce M. Grand Portage as a Trading Post: Patterns of Trade at “the Great Carrying 

Place”. Grand Marais, MN: Grand Portage National Monument, National Park Service, 

2005.

White, Phillip M. The Kickapoo Indians, Their History and Culture: An Annotated Bibliography. 

Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Appendix E Bibliography of Battlefield-related Source Material Literature

408

White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 

1650-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 

1650-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Willcockson, Tom Carvey Elizabeth. Twelve Moons: A Year with the Sauk and Meskwaki, 1817-

1818. Rock Island, Ill.: Citizens to Preserve Black Hawk Park Foundation, 2012.

Williams, Jr., Robert A. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought. New York: Oxford 

University Press, 2000.

Willig, Timothy D. “Restoring the Thin Red Line: British Policy and the Indians of the Great 

Lakes, 1783-1812.” 2003.

. Restoring the Chain of Friendship: British Policy and the Indians of the Great Lakes, 

1783-1815. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Wilson, Brian C. Yankees in Michigan. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008.

Wing, Talcott E. History of Monroe County Michigan. New York: Munsell & Company, 1890.

Witgen, Michael J. An Infinity of Nations: How Indians, Empires, and Western Migration Shaped 

National Identity in North America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Wood, Cameron C. ““We Wish to Remain among the Whites”: The Creation of a Shared 

Nottawaseppi Huron Potawatomi and Settler Community in the Mid-19th Century.” 2011.

Yanik, Anthony J. The Fall and Recapture of Detroit in the War of 1812: In Defense of William 

Hull. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011.

Zunz, Olivier. The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and 

Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Lanman, Charles. The Red Book of Michigan: A Civil, Military and Biographical History

Michigan: A Civil, Military and Biographical History. Detroit: E.B. Smith & Co., 1871.

Peterson, Jaqueline and Jennifer S.H. Brown, eds. The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in 

North America. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1991.

Dissertations

Anderson, Dean L. “Documentary and Archaeological Perspectives on European Trade Goods in 

the Western Great Lakes Region.” PhD diss., Michigan State University, 1992.

Anselmi, Lisa Marie. “New Materials, Old Ideas: Native Use of European-Introduced Materials in 

the Northeast.” PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2004.

Bergman, William H. “Commerce in Arms: The Federal Government, Native Americans, and the 

Economy of the Old Northwest, 1783-1807.” PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 2005.

Birzer, Bradley J. “Entangling Empires, Fracturing Frontiers: Jean Baptiste Richardville and the 

Quest for Miami Autonomy, 1760-1841.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 1998.

Bohaker, Heidi Rosemary. “Nindoodemag: Anishinaabe Identities in the Eastern Great Lakes 

Region, 1600 to 1900.” PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2006.

Carr, Dillon H. “Paleoindian Economic Organization in the Lower Great Lakes Region: Evaluating 

the Role of Caribou as a Critical Resource.” PhD diss., Michigan State University, 2012.

Cox, Michael Leonard. “The Ohio Wyandots: Religion and Society on the Sandusky River, 1795-

1843.” PhD diss., University of California at Riverside, 2016.
Appendix E Bibliography of Battlefield-related Source Material Literature

409

Jacobs, Lyn Richard. “Native American Prophetic Movements of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth 

Centuries.” PhD diss., Syracuse University, 1994.

Krakker, James. “Changing Sociocultural Systems During the Late Protohistoric Period in 

Southeast Michigan.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1983.

Kurtz, Royce Delbert. “Economic and Political History of the Sauk and Mesquakie: 1780s-1845.” 

PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1986.

Leighton, Arthur J. “‘Eyes on the Wabash’: A History of Indiana’s Indian People from Pre-Contact 

through Removal,” PhD diss., Purdue University, 2007.

Leighton, Arthur J. “‘Eyes on the Wabash’: A History of Indiana’s Indian People from Pre-Contact 

through Removal.” PhD diss., Purdue University, 2007.

Martin, Susan Rapalje. “Models of Change in the Woodland Settlement of the Northern Great 

Lakes Region.” PhD diss., Michigan State University, 1985.

McClurken, James M. “We Wish to Be Civilized: Ottawa-American Political Contests on the 

Michigan Frontier.” PhD diss., Michigan State University, 1988.

Perrin, Vincent E. “The Holistic Thesis of Native American Military Defeat.” PhD diss., Drew 

University, 2011.

Shoemaker, Scott Michael. “Trickster Skins: Narratives of Landscape, Representation, and the 

Miami Nation.” PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2011.

Sleeper-Smith, Susan. “Silent Tongues, Black Robes: Potawatomi, Europeans, and Settlers in the 

Southern Great Lakes, 1640-1850.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1994.

Smith, Beverley Ann. “Systems of Subsistence and Networks of Exchange in the Terminal 

Woodland and Early Historic Periods in the Upper Great Lakes.” PhD diss., Michigan State 

University, 1996.

Walsh, William Patrick. “The Defeat of Major General Arthur St. Clair, November 4, 1791: A 

Study of the Nation's Response, 1791-1793.” PhD diss., Loyola University, 1977.

White, Bruce M. “Give Us a Little Milk: Economics and Ceremony in the Ojibway Fur Trade.” 

PhD diss., McGill University, 1986.

Theses

Berkson, Alice. “Cultural Resistance of the Prairie Kickapoo at the Grand Village, Mclean County, 

Illinois.” Master’s thesis, Illinois State University, 1992.

Blair, Bryce. “The Battle of Fallen Timbers and the Treaty of Fort Greeneville: Why did Anthony 

Wayne Win Both and Could he have Lost?” Master’s thesis, University of Toledo, 2005.

Cox, Michael Leonard. “The Ohio Wyandots: Religion and Society on the Sandusky River, 1795-

1843.” PhD diss., University of California at Riverside, 2016.

Darch, Heather A. “The Breakdown of the Cultural Imperatives for the Establishment of Alliances 

among the Native Tribes of the Great Lakes.” Master’s thesis, University of Guelph, 1989.

Garrett, Matthew R. “Kickapoo Foreign Policy, 1650-1830.” Master’s thesis, University of 

Nebraska, 2006.

Garrett, Matthew R. “Kickapoo Foreign Policy, 1650-1830.” Master’s thesis, University of 

Nebraska, 2006.

Huitema, Marijke E. “‘Land of Which the Savages Stood in No Particular Need’: Dispossessing the 

Algonquins of South-Eastern Ontario of Their Lands, 1760-1930.” Master’s thesis, Queen’s 

University, 2000.
Appendix E Bibliography of Battlefield-related Source Material Literature

410

Ironstrack, George Michael. “From the Ashes: One Story of the Village of Pinkwi 

Mihtohseeniaki.” Master’s thesis, Miami University, 2006.

Leclair, Laurie. “The Huron-Wyandottes of Anderdon Township a Case Study in Native Adaption, 

1701-1914.” Master’s thesis. University of Windsor, 1988.

McCauley, David C. “The River Raisin Settlement, 1796-1812: A French Culture Area.” Master’s 

thesis, Eastern Michigan University, 1968.

Mosteller, “Place, Politics, and Property: Negotiating Allotment and Citizenship for the Citizen 

Potawatomi, 1861-1891,” PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2013.

Nolan, Raymond Perez Kimberly. “The Kickapoos and the Sac and Fox: Working Together for 

Sovereignty.” Master’s thesis, Fort Hays State University, 2007.

Plummer, Elizabeth L. “White Attitudes and Their Effects on the Wyandot Indian Removal.” 

Master’s thesis, Bowling Green University, 1976.

Roth, Nancy Ellen. “Land Use, Riparian Vegetation, and Stream Ecosystem Integrity in an 

Agricultural Watershed.” Master’s thesis, University of Michigan, 1994.

Wood, Cameron C. ““We Wish to Remain among the Whites”: The Creation of a Shared 

Nottawaseppi Huron Potawatomi and Settler Community in the Mid-19th Century.” Master’s 

thesis, Oakland University, 2011.

Reports

Arnold, Jeanne. “Early Archaic Subsistence and Settlement in the River Raisin Watershed, 

Southeastern Michigan.” In The River Raisin Archaeological Survey Season 2, 1976: A 

Preliminary Report. Edited by Christopher S. Peebles and James K. Krakker, n.p. Lansing: 

Office of the State Archeologist, Michigan Historical Center, 1977.

City of Monroe Parks and Recreation Master Plan. Prepared by Beckett & Raeder, 2014.

Clary, David A. “River Raisin Battlefield and Massacre Site, Monroe County, Michigan: A 

Feasibility Study of Alternatives for Acquisition, Development, Management, and 

Interpretation.” Prepared by David A. Clary. Architecture Preservation Consultants for the 

Monroe County Historical Commission, June 1981.

Cole, Kenneth L., M. B. Davis, F. Stearns, G. Guntenspergen, and K. Walker. “Historical 

Landcover Changes in the Great Lakes Region.” In Perspectives on the Land Use History of 

North America: A Context for Understanding Our Changing Environment—Biological 

Science Report USGS/BRD/BSR-1998-0003. Edited by Thomas D. Sisk. Springfield, VA: 

U.S. Geological Survey, Biological Resources Division, 1998.

Davis, Gary J. “Environmental Site Assessment (Physical Walk-Through) of Monroe Paper 

Company, July 10, 1991.”

Dayton, Kim. National Historic Landmark Nomination Form: Pinšiwa House (Chief Jean-Baptiste 

de Richardville House). Washington, DC: National Historic Landmarks Survey, National 

Park Service, 2016).

Fitting, J.E. “A Metal Detector Survey of a Portion of the River Raisin Battlefield, Monroe, 

Michigan.” 1977.

Fitting, J.E., C. Stephan Demeter and Donald J. Weir. “An Archeological Survey of the River 

Raisin Battlefield Site Prepared for the Monroe County Historical Commission by 

Commonwealth Associates Inc.” 1977.

Foundation Document: River Raisin National Battlefield Park, Michigan. Denver: National Park 

Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 2012.
Appendix E Bibliography of Battlefield-related Source Material Literature

411

Galbraith, Michael and Angela M. Quinn. National Historic Landmark Nomination Form: 

Wyandotte National Burying Ground (Eliza Burton Conley Burial Site. Washington, DC: 

National Historic Landmarks Survey, National Park Service, 2009).

Harrison, Daniel F. “Hull's Trace North Huron River Corduroy Segment.” National Register of 

Historic Places Nomination Form, August 2010.

Johnson, Trevor T. “The Wyandot Village of Maguaga: Vital Ground in the Michigan Territory 

during the War of 1812.” Prepared for the National Park Service, River Raisin National 

Battlefield Park, June 2016.

Monroe County Historical Commission. An Historical and Archaeological Investigation of the 

River Raisin Battle Site of 1813, 1977.

Mozola, Andrew J. “Report of Investigation 13: Geology for Environmental Planning in Monroe 

County, Michigan.” Prepared in cooperation with the Department of Geology, Wayne State 

University, 1970.

Phase I Environmental Site Assessment: Pumphouse and Box Factory Parcels, E. Elm Street at N. 

Dixie Highway, Monroe Michigan. Legacy Environmental, Inc.

Pratt, G. Michael. “A Phase II Archaeological Investigation of the River Raisin Battlefield and 

Massacre Site, City of Monroe, Monroe County.” Copy on file in the Office of the Michigan 

State Archeologist, East Lansing, MI, 1999.

Pratt, G. Michael and William E. Rutter. “Archeological Assessment of Selected Areas of the River 

Raisin Battlefield, Monroe, Michigan.” Prepared for the City of Monroe and the American 

Battlefield Protection Program by Mannik & Smith Group, Inc., Maumee, Ohio, 2004.

. “Phase II Archaeological Reconnaissance of the River Raisin Battlefield, Monroe, 

Michigan.” Copy on file in the Office of the Michigan State Archeologist, East Lansing, MI, 

2002.

Pratt, G. Michael, William E. Rutter, Theodore J. Ligibel, and Jeffrey L. Green. “River Raisin 

Battlefield National Historic Landmark Nomination” [DRAFT]. 2009.

Resilient! Monroe: Resource Atlas. City of Monroe, Monroe Charter Township and Frenchtown 

Charter Township, October 15, 2003.

River Raisin National Battlefield Park: Study and Boundary Assessment. National Park Service, 

U.S. Department of the Interior, River Raisin National Battlefield/Michigan, November 

2009.

River Raisin Watershed Council. River Raisin Watershed Management Plan, 2009.

Rutter, William E. “Archaeological Reconnaissance, River Raisin Paper Company Plant (Mill 3 

and 4/Area #52, Elm Street at Dixie Highway), City of Monroe, Monroe County, Michigan.” 

Prepared for the Monroe County Historical Society, 2006.

Tucker, Patrick M. “Opinion on the Removal of the Ottawa of Ohio: Voluntary or Forced?” Expert 

Witness Report to Attorneys for the Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma, Plaintiff vs. Sean Logan, 

Director, Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Defendant, Case No. 3-05cv7272, United 

States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio Western Division—Toledo. March 30, 

2007.

Watershed Management Planning for the River Raisin: Perspectives on Changing Land Use, 

Dams, Water Quality and Best Management Practices, 2007.

Wing, Talcott Enoch, ed. History of Monroe County, Michigan. New York: Munsell & Company, 

1890.
Appendix E Bibliography of Battlefield-related Source Material Literature

412
United States Department of the Interior 

National Park Service / National Register of Historic Places Registration Form 

NPS Form 10-900 OMB No. 1024-0018 

River Raisin Battlefield Site Monroe MI

Name of Property County and State

United States Department of the Interior

National Park Service

National Register of Historic Places Registration Form

This form is for use in nominating or requesting determinations for individual properties and districts. See instructions in National Register 

Bulletin, How to Complete the National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. If any item does not apply to the property being 

documented, enter "N/A" for "not applicable." For functions, architectural classification, materials, and areas of significance, enter only 

categories and subcategories from the instructions.

1. Name of Property

Historic name: _ Battles of Frenchtown________________

Other names/site number: _State of Michigan Archeological Site 20MR227; River Raisin

National Battlefield Park; River Raisin Battlefield (NRHP site # 82000542)

Name of related multiple property listing:

_________N/A_____________________________________________________

(Enter "N/A" if property is not part of a multiple property listing

____________________________________________________________________________ 

2. Location

Street & number: ____1403 East Elm Avenue____________________________________

City or town: _Monroe_____ State: _MI_________ County: _Monroe_____

Not For Publication: Vicinity: 

____________________________________________________________________________

3. State/Federal Agency Certification

As the designated authority under the National Historic Preservation Act, as amended,

I hereby certify that this ___ nomination ___ request for determination of eligibility meets 

the documentation standards for registering properties in the National Register of Historic 

Places and meets the procedural and professional requirements set forth in 36 CFR Part 60. 

In my opinion, the property ___ meets ___ does not meet the National Register Criteria. I 

recommend that this property be considered significant at the following 

level(s) of significance: 

_X_national ___statewide ___local 

Applicable National Register Criteria: 

_X_A ___B ___C ___D 

Signature of certifying official/Title: Date 

______________________________________________ 

State or Federal agency/bureau or Tribal Government 

X

Addendum National Register Documentation 413
In my opinion, the property '/.._meets_ does not meet the National Register criteria.

Title: ?HfO 

4. National Park Service Certification

I h�by certify that this property is:

_✓_ e erntered in the National Register

_ determined eligible for the National Register

ate 

12 10 le> 

State or Federal agency/bureau 

or Tribal Government 

_ determined not eligible for the National Register

_ removed f

rom the National Register _?other (explain·) f+u, � Add,/.,-,,.,� I Doa""'�,..J.,J,·VV1

5. Classification

Ownership of Property 

(Check as many boxes as apply.)

Private: 0 

Public - Local 0 

Public - State 0 

Public - Federal 0 

Category of Property 

(Check only one box.)

Building(s)

District

Site

□ 

0 

□ 

Date of Action

Section 7 page 2 

Addendum National Register Documentation 414
United States Department of the Interior 

National Park Service / National Register of Historic Places Registration Form 

NPS Form 10-900 OMB No. 1024-0018 

River Raisin Battlefield Site Monroe MI

Name of Property County and State

Addendum National Register Documentation 415

Building(s) 

District 

Site

Structure 

Object 

Number of Resources within Property 

(Do not include previously listed resources in the count) 

Contributing Noncontributing 

_____________ _ 55 ___ buildings 

_____1_______ _ 3__ sites

_____________ _ 3 ___ structures 

_____________ _ 1 ___ objects 

______1______ _ 62 ___ Total 

 Number of contributing resources previously listed in the National Register ___ 0____ 

____________________________________________________________________________ 

6. Function or Use

Historic Functions 

(Enter categories from instructions.) 

_DEFENSE: battle site_ 

_DOMESTIC: multiple dwellings_ 

_TRANSPORTATION: road related_ 

_AGRICULTURE/SUBSISTENCE: agricultural fields 

___________________ 

X
United States Department of the Interior 

National Park Service / National Register of Historic Places Registration Form 

NPS Form 10-900 OMB No. 1024-0018 

River Raisin Battlefield Site Monroe MI

Name of Property County and State

Addendum National Register Documentation 416

Current Functions 

(Enter categories from instructions.) 

_LANDSCAPE: park__ 

_TRANSPORTATION: rail related and road related 

_DOMESTIC: multiple dwellings 

_COMMERCE/TRADE: warehouse, financial institution, restaurant, specialty store _ 

_VACANT____________ 

_UNKNOWN__________ 

_WORK IN PROGRESS: park, conservation area_
United States Department of the Interior 

National Park Service / National Register of Historic Places Registration Form 

NPS Form 10-900 OMB No. 1024-0018 

River Raisin Battlefield Site Monroe MI

Name of Property County and State

Addendum National Register Documentation 417 

_____________________________________________________________________________ 

7. Description

Architectural Classification 

(Enter categories from instructions.) 

___N/A_____________ 

___________________ 

___________________ 

___________________ 

___________________ 

___________________ 

___________________ 

Materials: (enter categories from instructions.) 

Principal exterior materials of the property: ______ N/A_______________ 

Narrative Description 

(Describe the historic and current physical appearance and condition of the property. Describe 

contributing and noncontributing resources if applicable. Begin with a summary paragraph

that briefly describes the general characteristics of the property, such as its location, type, style, 

method of construction, setting, size, and significant features. Indicate whether the property has 

historic integrity.) 

______________________________________________________________________________ 

Summary Paragraph 

The expanded River Raisin Battlefield Site includes lands on the south and north shores of the 

River Raisin and encompasses sites directly associated with the Battles of Frenchtown that 

occurred between January 18-23, 1813. Covering approximately 230 acres, the site includes the 

core area of the historic Frenchtown settlement (which became the primary area of conflict and 

destruction) as well as lines of attack, retreat and surrender. Restoration of industrial 

brownfields and park development has returned much of the core conflict area to the landscape 

of open fields and cleared riparian zones that existed in January 1813. Historic landscape 

features also include the River Raisin shoreline, Mason Run, and a grid of streets, park 

boundaries, and property lines that still trace the roture system of ribbon farms (or long lots) that 

existed in early 19th-century Frenchtown. Another key feature of the Battles of Frenchtown was 

Hull’s Trace, a roadway first laid out in the summer of 1812 that served as the primary route to 
United States Department of the Interior 

National Park Service / National Register of Historic Places Registration Form 

NPS Form 10-900 OMB No. 1024-0018 

River Raisin Battlefield Site Monroe MI

Name of Property County and State

Addendum National Register Documentation 418 

and from the conflicts of January 1813.1 The original trace (i.e., path, or rudimentary road) 

bisects the battlefield area and is now overlain by a railroad right-of-way consisting of two sets 

of tracks owned—from west to east—by Norfolk Southern Railway and Canadian National 

Railway. Aside from these landscape features, physical evidence of Frenchtown, the battles, and 

their aftermath are archeological. No contributing structures exist on the site. North of the River 

Raisin, current conditions include two lightly developed municipal parks, National Park Service 

land and facilities within River Raisin National Battlefield Park (RRNBP), reclaimed 

brownfields, vacant lots, a small marina with a restaurant, and twenty-four private residences on 

both sides of East Elm Avenue. South of the River Raisin the expanded National Register of 

Historic Places (NRHP) site includes a stretch of land along the River Raisin that includes two 

lightly developed municipal parks, vacant lots, thirteen private residences, and a credit union. 

______________________________________________________________________________ 

Narrative Description 

This document expands and amends the existing National Register designation for the River 

Raisin Battlefield (site # 82000542). Since the National Register of Historic Places listing was 

made in 1982, the physical conditions of the battlefield area have changed considerably. The 

abandonment and removal of large facilities associated with the paper industry, and the 

conversion of these sites to open park areas, has created an entirely new landscape. As a result 

of these changes, the historic qualities of setting, association, and feeling have been greatly 

enhanced and enlarged. This is true of the landscape within the boundaries of the original 

National Register site as well as adjoining parcels that compose significant parts of the Battles of 

Frenchtown but were not included in the 1982 NRHP nomination. The process of demolition, 

environmental mitigation, and landscape restoration within the core battle areas also created 

opportunities for archeological investigations which have shed new light on American Indian use 

and residence in the area, the establishment and development of Frenchtown in the late 18th and 

early 19th centuries, the War of 1812 conflicts that occurred there, and the subsequent history of 

the site. The establishment of River Raisin National Battlefield Park in 2009, which has 

administrative and statutory authority within and beyond the original boundaries of the NRHP 

site, represents another significant development. The sum of these many changes provides a new 

and larger context that better reveals historic landscape features and more fully conveys the 

significance and scale of the Battles of Frenchtown. 

GENERAL SETTING

1 Daniel F. Harrison, National Register of Historic Places, Hull's Trace North Huron River Corduroy Segment, 

Brownstown Township, Wayne County, Michigan, National Register #10001022 (2010). This site is managed as a 

unit of River Raisin National Battlefield Park (RRNBP).
United States Department of the Interior 

National Park Service / National Register of Historic Places Registration Form 

NPS Form 10-900 OMB No. 1024-0018 

River Raisin Battlefield Site Monroe MI

Name of Property County and State

Addendum National Register Documentation 419 

The expanded River Raisin Battlefield Site is situated within the City of Monroe in southeastern 

Michigan.2 Set on a level plain and extending across the lower reach of the eastward flowing 

River Raisin, the expanded NRHP site is approximately three miles upstream from Lake Erie. 

The area has supported human use and residence for thousands of years, and served as an 

important crossroads between areas to the south and north as well as between Lake Erie and 

inland areas to the west. Though altered by more than two centuries of agricultural, residential, 

commercial and industrial development, this dynamic continues to define the area. The City of 

Monroe serves as a hub for the mostly rural and inland areas of Monroe County while the Port of 

Monroe, which is the only Michigan port on Lake Erie, connects area industries with the entire 

Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway System. Monroe is also roughly equidistant from the Detroit 

Metropolitan Area to the north and the Toledo Metropolitan Area to the south. The routes to and 

from the Battles of Frenchtown essentially followed all of these pathways –along the shore of 

Lake Erie, inland from the west, up from the Maumee River rapids (present-day Toledo), and 

down from Detroit. These geographic connections and intersections made the settlement of 

Frenchtown a site of dramatic conflict in large part because it occupied a contested crossroads of 

great strategic importance.3

Monroe is a relatively small city with a land area of just over ten square miles and a population 

of approximately 23,000. Served by railroads, state highways, Interstate 75, and the Port of 

Monroe, it is well connected within the region and beyond. For most of the 19th century, Monroe 

was a regional hub for a mostly agricultural economy, but in the early 20th century the city 

became economically linked to rising new industrial centers in Toledo and Detroit. While most 

of the county remained rural, the city became devoted to the production of steel, the manufacture 

of automobile parts and large machinery, furniture manufacturing, and large-scale paper and 

cardboard container production. Toward the end of the 20th century Monroe followed the broad 

economic decline of the so-called Rust Belt, and has since lost much of its manufacturing base. 

In response to these changes, the city has come to epitomize a new movement that is seeing 

communities across much of the United States actively reshape themselves in accordance with 

their unique histories and physical settings. The restoration of the battlefield site and the 

establishment of the national battlefield park are two key examples of this movement. 

2 In the context of this document, the “core area” of the expanded River Raisin Battlefield Site refers to the main 

scenes of action on January 18, 22, and 23. This corresponds to the central environs of Frenchtown on the north side 

of the River Raisin as well as near shore areas on the south bank of the river. The expanded boundaries of the 

NRHP site encompass the areas where battle approaches transitioned into attacks, and where retreats continued as 

running battles or devolved into complete routs. For purposes of interpretation and administration, the NPS situates 

the Battles of Frenchtown within a larger area that extends beyond the City of Monroe to the site of the British and 

American Indian encampment at Swan Creek on January 21, 1813 (about four miles north of the battlefield in Berlin 

Township), and about five miles to the south of the River Raisin where the last U.S. surrenders occurred at Otter 

Creek (in LaSalle Township). These more extensive boundaries also include British, American Indian, and U.S. 

lines of approach and retreat as well as a few skirmish areas. 3 During the War of 1812, southeastern Michigan had a few mostly French-speaking communities. The largest was 

known as Frenchtown and included the battlefield site. Most of the properties connected with Frenchtown were 

located within the present city limits of Monroe, which was established in 1817 and named after then president 

James Monroe. The communities to the north of the River Raisin and beyond the boundaries of Monroe were later 

reorganized as the Frenchtown Charter Township, which includes most of the area within Monroe County that lies 

north of the Monroe city limits.
United States Department of the Interior 

National Park Service / National Register of Historic Places Registration Form 

NPS Form 10-900 OMB No. 1024-0018 

River Raisin Battlefield Site Monroe MI

Name of Property County and State

Addendum National Register Documentation 420 

In the 1982 National Register listing, the River Raisin Battlefield Site took in an area bounded by 

Mason Run on the north, Detroit Avenue on the east, and the north bank of the River Raisin on 

the south. The western boundary followed a line that ran southwesterly from the point where 

Noble Street intersects with Mason Run and through part of an existing paper mill facility to the 

River Raisin.4 The expansion of these boundaries is significant, incorporating more of the key 

locales associated with the Battles of Frenchtown and utilizing the boundaries of adjacent 

parklands that retain—or have recently been restored to—their historic landscape characteristics. 

The new boundaries encompass those of the original listing, with the following additions. On 

the north side of the River Raisin, the west boundary extends all the way to the CSX rail line to 

take in key areas utilized by various combatants during the Second Battle of Frenchtown 

(January 22, 1813). This new boundary includes the entire footprint of a former paper mill 

facility that was partly included in the original listing, and has since become municipal parkland, 

along with two vacant structures and two commercial sites that are slated for for reclamation and 

incorporation into the national park unit. 

The north boundary of the expanded battlefield site extends beyond the Mason Run drainage to 

encompass an additional fifty-four acres of vacated commercial and industrial property that is 

being reclaimed for inclusion into the national park unit. This expanse incorporates areas where 

Kentucky militia pursued Canadian militia and warriors from a confederated alliance of 

American Indian communities (hereafter referred to as the Native Confederacy or Confederacy) 

in a running battle at the close of the First Battle of Frenchtown (January 18, 1813).5 Areas to 

the north of Mason Run also include the approach route and relative positions of British artillery 

and Confederacy warriors during the Second Battle of Frenchtown. This portion of the expanded 

NRHP site includes part of a reclaimed industrial site as well as former commercial properties 

that have been vacated, demolished, and slated for reclamation. The eastern boundary extends 

4 This seemingly arbitrary boundary cut across the property of what was then the Union Camp Corporation, but it 

did follow the survey lines of a historic ribbon farm.

5 The Confederacy comprised individuals, families and communities from several distinct 

cultural groups that included Wyandotte (aka Wyandot or Huron), Shawnee, Bodéwadmi 

(Potawatomi), Odawa (Ottawa), Ojibwe (Chippewa), Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), 

Myaamia (Miami), Waayaahtanwa (Wea), Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk, aka Winnebago), Kiikaapoi 

(Kickapoo), Muscogee (Creek), Ökwe'öwé (Seneca-Cayuga; aka, “Mingo”), Thâkîwa (Sauk, or 

Sac), and Meskwaki (Fox) fighters. Members of these various communities also resided in or 

moved to areas within present-day Canada before, during, and after the War of 1812. Those who 

remained in Canada, and whose descendants continue to reside there, are more appropriately 

referred to as First Nations. The majority remained within the boundaries of the United States 

during and after the War of 1812 and signed treaties with the United States. For consistency, in 

this nomination all are referred to collectively as American Indians—in accordance with the 

standard terminology used by federal and state agencies, American Indian tribes and 

organizations, and academic institutions in the United States. For more on the terms and 

orthographies used for referencing specific groups, see note 38 below. The term Canadian will 

be used in this narrative to identify the local militia forces (both anglophone and francophone) 

from present-day southwestern Ontario that fought with British Regulars and Native 

Confederacy fighters. 
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beyond Detroit Avenue (which served as the eastern boundary of the original NRHP listing) to 

include approximately 35 acres of open field and marshland where Confederacy warriors 

outflanked and attacked U.S. forces during the Second Battle of Frenchtown (January 22, 1813).6

Along the north bank of the River Raisin, between East Elm Avenue and the river’s edge, the 

boundary extends a short distance eastward and westward from the original NRHP listing: 

beginning at a point approximately 700 feet east of the East Elm and Detroit Avenue 

intersection, and extending westward to include a cluster of private residences and a stretch of 

publicly owned riverfront on the west side of North Dixie Highway. 

Expansion of the River Raisin Battlefield Site’s boundaries also includes areas on the south side 

of the River Raisin. Along the river this includes two municipal parks—Rauch Park (2.1 acres), 

which is to the west of the Norfolk Southern tracks, and Hellenberg Park (13 acres), which is to 

the east of the Canadian National tracks—and a small stretch of vacant land that extends 

westward from Rauch Park to the CSX rail line.7

 This area is where U.S. forces and Kentucky 

militia crossed the frozen river to attack Canadian militia and Confederacy forces in Frenchtown 

on January 18, as well as where some re-crossed the river as they retreated from pursuing 

Confederacy fighters on January 22. The Hellenberg Park parcel, which includes Sterling Island, 

was also a key line of attack on January 18 as well as the site of a brief defensive stand by U.S. 

forces on January 22. 

Though relevant to the events of January 1813, areas to the south of this mostly open riverfront 

area are not included in the expanded boundaries for two reasons: first, they encompass nearly 

200 acres of residential and commercial areas that do not possess historic qualities of setting, 

association, and feeling that exist within the former core of Frenchtown and the near shore areas 

along the south riverfront; and second, preliminary archeological surveys have concluded “they 

can't be determined significant under [National Register] Criterion D, potential to provide 

information important in history.”8

 A southern extension of the boundaries of the NRHP site may 

be prudent at a future date, particularly if long-range plans to convert the area into open 

parklands and interpretive recreational corridors come to fruition.9 Toward these possible ends, 

two specific sites are worth noting. Extending south from the current riverfront parks, known 

lines of retreat along the route of Hull’s Trace (i.e., between Kentucky Avenue on the west and 

the Norfolk Southern and Canadian National lines on the east) run approximately one mile to 

Plum Creek Park. This small park is the site is where U.S. troops surrendered to Native 

Confederacy fighters on January 22—and it was in this vicinity that significant numbers were 

6

 This land is part of a larger parcel slated for future acquisition and incorporation into RRNBP. 7 Hellenberg Park was improved in 1985 with a Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) stateside assistance 

grant from the National Park Service. It, therefore, is perpetually encumbered with the LWCF Act for public use 

and enjoyment as park land.” Bob Anderson, Chief, Recreation Grants Division, NPS Midwest Region, to Senior 

Historian Ron Cockrell, NPS Midwest Region, email, March 9, 2015.

8 Pratt, Rutter, and Richard Green, “The River Raisin Battlefield, Outside the Core: Archeological Survey of 

Peripheral Battlefield Areas, American Battlefield Protection Program Grant GA 2255-08-008” (2010), 33-34. 9 On the south side of the river, residential areas within the River Raisin 100-year floodplain, along with a mix of 

vacant commercial land in the vicinity of Hull’s Trace, have been identified in a long-range plan for possible 

acquisition and conversion to park uses and recreational corridors. These plans are detailed in River Raisin History 

Corridor East – Master Plan (2013), which was jointly produced by the City of Monroe, the Monroe County 

Historical Society, the River Raisin National Battlefield Park Foundation, and the National Park Service.
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killed. A short distance to the west and closer to the river is the location where Kentucky militia 

were captured on a knoll that now occupies the center of Woodland Cemetery.10

The areas that are included within the expanded boundaries present significant features of the 

Battles of Frenchtown and their aftermath. Though heavily engineered near its confluence with 

Lake Erie, the section of the River Raisin that runs through the expanded NRHP site follows its 

historic course and is undergoing significant habitat restoration. The same is true of Mason Run, 

a small creek that runs across the northern portion of the core battlefield area before flowing to 

Sterling State Park and the Ford Marsh Unit of the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge 

(DRIWR). Historically, the area between Mason Run and Frenchtown was a lightly wooded area 

composed of a few small orchards as well as cultivated and fallow fields that were laid out in 

long narrow lots. In accordance with French colonial practices, these “ribbon farms” had a 

narrow frontage along the River Raisin that extended back for more than a mile.11 While ribbon 

farms were scattered along both sides of the river for several miles, the area referred to as 

Frenchtown was a cluster of homes and structures adjacent to the point where Hull’s Trace 

reached the north bank of the Raisin. Frenchtown, as such, was contained within a series of 

garden fences that had recently been fortified with a puncheon fence. Resembling an informal 

stockade, this fencing surrounded six extended family homes, outbuildings, and community 

paths. All of these structures were destroyed in the Battles of Frenchtown, as were many of the 

small orchards. Even after two centuries of change, however, streets bordering and crossing the 

battlefield still follow the original ribbon farm layout, and the route of Hull’s Trace (which 

underlies North Dixie Highway) is still used as a major transportation corridor. Along with the 

persistence of features like Mason Run and the River Raisin, these conditions present an accurate 

spatial reference to major events and positions within the historic landscape. 

The current physical appearance of the River Raisin Battlefield Site’s core area also provides a 

strong sense of the historic landscape. On the north side of the River Raisin, where most of the 

conflict and destruction occurred, the battlefield site is composed of two larger parcels divided 

by the railroad right-of-way and North Dixie Highway, and two narrow strips between the River 

Raisin and East Elm Avenue. East of the Canadian National line is a forty-two-acre parcel that is 

currently the main area for interpretation within RRNBP. Bounded on the south by East Elm 

Avenue, on the east by Detroit Avenue, and encompassing the Mason Run drainage on the north, 

most of this parkland is a converted industrial site that had long been used for manufacturing 

paper products and packaging. It now consists of a grassy field, scattered trees and shrubs, and a 

recently replanted stretch of Mason Run. A good deal of the acreage that is closer to the Detroit 

Avenue side of this National Park Service (NPS) land was formerly used for a plant nursery, and 

retains the approximate conditions that were present during the War of 1812. The visitor center 

and administrative offices for RRNBP are located at the southeastern end of this former nursery 

10 It should be noted that preliminary archeological fieldwork occurred at two locations along Plum Creek in 2009. 

Extensive fill materials from the mid-20th century were encountered, and researchers were unable to determine if 

“1813 soil horizons even survive ... beneath the modern fill horizons.” Pratt et al, “The River Raisin Battlefield, 

Outside the Core,” 33. 11 Dennis M. Au and Joanna Brode, "The Lingering Shadow of New France: The French-Canadian Community of 

Monroe County, Michigan," in Michigan Folklife Reader, eds. C. Kurt Dewhurst and Yvonne R. Lockwood 

(Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1987), 323-324.
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area, in a house built during the early 20th century and accessed from East Elm Avenue. A 

densely-wooded area is immediately east of this facility while a short distance to the north is a 

pavilion that provides interpretation of battlefield archeology through exhibits, guides, and 

literature. This area is set within a pedestrian loop that runs through the location of the U.S. 17th

Infantry encampment on the night of January 21, 1813 and through the early minutes of the 

Second Battle of Frenchtown the following morning. Across Detroit Avenue is a stretch of 

mowed grass that was once used as an ash dump that subsequently became overgrown and 

heavily wooded. The landowner has since removed the ash and trees and transformed the area to 

open field and forested wetlands. 

The portion of the expanded NRHP site that lies to the west of North Dixie Highway and north 

of East Elm Avenue is another former industrial site that was demolished and reclaimed in the 

1990s and is now the City of Monroe’s Multi-Sports Park. At the north end of this 15.3-acre 

parcel is the city’s 70,000 square foot Multi-Sports Complex, which has been proposed as a 

future visitor center and administrative facility for RRNBP.12 Aside from the parking lot at the 

Complex, and a nearby skatepark, the rest of the site is mowed grass with a scattering of trees 

and some shrubs. Immediately south of the Multi-Sports Park is Riviere Aux Raisins Park, (1.9 

acres), which extends along the north side of East Elm Avenue from the corner of North Dixie to 

the edge of the original NRHP site boundary. A mostly grassy area with a few trees and a 

flagpole, the primary feature of the park is a concrete and stone obelisk commemorating the 

“River Raisin Massacre.” Erected in 1904 and placed near the riverbank, it was moved across 

East Elm Avenue to its current position in 2002. The area along the river, immediately across 

from Riviere Aux Raisins Park, is a narrow strip of city-managed greenway with a concrete 

sidewalk. 

The only area within the northern part of the expanded River Raisin Battlefield Site that still has 

a number of developed properties is east of the railroad right-of-way, along East Elm Avenue. A 

short distance to the east of the Canadian National Railway Bridge is a row of early and mid20th-century homes fronting the river (some with detached garages and small boat launches), 

with another set of early-20th-century homes on the north side of East Elm Avenue. The 

proximity of these homes to the River Raisin places them in the same vicinity as most of the 

homes and structures that were extant, and destroyed, during the Second Battle of Frenchtown 

and the following day. 

Immediately south of these home sites, on the opposite side of the River Raisin, is Hellenberg 

Park. Situated on Strong Island, which was once separated from the mainland by a shallow 

branch of the River Raisin that was blocked and filled in the early 20th century, the park is 

accessed from East Front Street and includes an open grassy area, a baseball diamond, parking 

lot, boat launch area, basketball court, and a few structures. This park area encompasses the 

lines of attack and retreat of U.S. troops, as well as the site of the defensive stand on January 22, 

1813. Hellenberg Park also has a footbridge to Sterling Island, which is composed of fill taken 

from a small chain of islands that were once situated near the south bank of the River Raisin. 

The vegetation on Sterling Island approximates the riparian conditions that existed along this 

12 River Raisin Heritage Corridor-East Master Plan (Ann Arbor: Beckett & Reader, 2013), 33. 

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stretch of the river in the early 19th century.13 Just west of the Norfolk Southern rail line, and 

across the river from the Riviere Aux Raisins Park and the narrow greenway, is Rauch Park and 

another vacant parcel. Together they provide an open green space of mowed grass and trees that 

is bisected by the approach to the North Dixie Highway Bridge. Most of the remaining area 

within the expanded River Raisin Battlefield Site that lies south of the River Raisin is composed 

of private residences, streets, and vacant lots. 

During and after the battles along the River Raisin, Frenchtown proper was destroyed. The 

buildings were burned, fences were burned or broken apart, and some orchard trees were 

damaged or cut down. Consequently, the absence of historic structures at the current battlefield 

site is consistent with the actions and consequences of the Battles of Frenchtown. For the next 

few years the immediate environs remained unused and uninhabited, but the site subsequently 

began a long process of transformation. In 1817 the town of Monroe was platted as an American 

settlement to the south and west of the ruined core of Frenchtown, along the opposite shore of 

the River Raisin. Over the next few decades, American settlers and land speculators poured into 

southeastern Michigan in a movement that was largely fostered by two developments: the 

dislocation and removal of nearby Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi), Wyandotte and Odawa (Ottawa) 

communities, and the opening of the Great Lakes to East Coast markets with the completion of 

the Erie Canal in 1825. In the process, francophone families became a distinct minority 

population and their lands were subdivided or sold off to become American farms that were 

cleared and drained for more intensive commercial agriculture. The former site of Frenchtown 

was annexed into the growing City of Monroe, but continued as a productive agricultural area 

that served local and regional markets. 

As the region and city industrialized, most of the battlefield area on the north side of the River 

Raisin was developed by the River Raisin Paper Company beginning in 1911, and the company’s 

facilities eventually encompassed 200 acres. Over time the company and its properties were 

acquired by other corporations, and the structures within the expanded NRHP site were variously 

used, replaced, left vacant, or repurposed through most of the twentieth century. A combination 

of aging facilities, economic competition, concerns about toxic pollution, and a growing interest 

in commemorating the Battles of Frenchtown led to the first demolitions of industrial structures 

in the 1970s. That process ultimately came to a close in early 2015 with the removal of a brick 

pump house and office structure (ca. 1918) that stood just east of the Canadian National Railway 

Bridge. After more than 200 years, the battlefield site on the north side of the river—with the 

exception of East Elm Avenue, portions of the railroad right-of-way, and Dixie Highway—has 

steadily returned to conditions that reflect conditions that existed at the close of the conflicts and 

destruction that occurred between January 18 and 23, 1813. 

CONTRIBUTING RESOURCES 

13 C. Stephan Demeter, Donald J. Weir, and Russell B. Henry, Hellenberg Field Archeological Survey: Phase I, 

Part 2; Submitted to City of Monroe, Department of Community Development (Jackson, MI: 

Gilbert/Commonwealth, 1987), passim.
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The River Raisin Battlefield Site is the sole contributing resource in this nomination. Much has 

changed in the past several years, and large portions of the battle site have been restored to 

conditions approximating those of the early 19th century. Subsurface resources also remain 

largely intact. Archeological investigations have revealed that materials related to Frenchtown 

and the events of January 1813 remained in situ and mostly undisturbed through decades of 

agricultural use and a century of industrial development, expansion, and demolition. 

The expanded NRHP site also reflects the process of land acquisition and restoration that 

remains ongoing through partnerships between the City of Monroe, the Port of Monroe, the 

National Park Service, the River Raisin National Battlefield Park Foundation, the Michigan 

Department of Natural Resources, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Even as that 

process moves forward, however, some noncontributing structures and roadways will remain 

within the approximately 230 acres of the expanded NRHP site. None of the noncontributing 

features or planned restoration projects will undermine the significance of this expansion of the 

NRHP site.14

There are three other sites on the National Register that are historically connected to Frenchtown 

and the battles that occurred there, but they are all individual listings and are not included here as 

components of a multiple-property site or district. The most recently listed site is Hull's Trace 

North Huron River Corduroy Segment (NRHP ref. # 10001022), which is a partly exposed 

corduroy road that was laid down in the early-19th-century. This site is an administrative unit of 

the River Raisin National Battlefield Park, and is an intact remnant of the same road—or trace—

that bisected Frenchtown and connected Fort Detroit with the military encampment that became 

Fort Meigs. While this exposed stretch of road has direct relevance to the events of January 

1813, it lies 14 miles north of the battlefield and has important associations with other National 

Register sites—and is thus not part of a multiple-property listing.15 Within the city limits of 

Monroe is another National Register site, the Sawyer House (NRHP ref. # 77000721), which has 

a connection to the Battles of Frenchtown. The Sawyer House occupies the site of a dwelling 

that belonged to Francois Navarre, who initiated the development of Frenchtown in the late 18th

century and served with American forces during the War of 1812. Because of its location, on the 

south side of the river and nearly a mile from the battle site, the Navarre home was peripheral to 

the events of January 1813. U.S. General James Winchester used the house as his headquarters, 

but its distance from Frenchtown caused him to miss, and misread, events as they unfolded 

during the Second Battle of Frenchtown. The site of Navarre’s house was entirely covered over 

14 On partnerships, see River Raisin Heritage Corridor-East Master Plan. 15 Harrison, Hull's Trace North Huron River Corduroy Segment. The stretch of Hull’s Trace that is preserved near 

the mouth of the Huron River was part of the route used by the British and American Indians during their approach 

to Frenchtown on January 21, 1813, as well as in the removal of British wounded and American Prisoners of War on 

January 22, 1813. It is also the site where U.S. forces encamped after reentering Michigan Territory from Upper 

Canada (present-day province of Ontario) in September of 1813 to bury the remains of soldiers killed at the Battles 

of Frenchtown. Primary documents describing the burying of soldier remains were written from this site. The 

distance from the battlefield is measured in road miles along North Dixie Highway, U.S. Turnpike Road, and 

Jefferson Avenue, which together cover Hull’s Trace from present-day Monroe to the mouth of the Huron River. 

Other NRHP sites that have associations with the Hull’s Trace North Huron River Corduroy Segment site include 

Fort Meigs (#69000151), Jefferson Avenue—Huron River and Harbin Drive—Silver Creek Canal Bridges 

(#0000080), and Fort Wayne (#71000425).
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by Dr. Alfred Sawyer’s Italianate home in 1873, and no visible trace remains of the original 

structure. Lastly, the Navarre-Anderson Trading Post (NRHP ref. # 72000645) is a National 

Register site about five miles west-northwest of the battlefield site. A cluster of three buildings, 

one being a reconstruction and the other two dating back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries, 

they were part of a small family compound that was located on the north side of the river and just 

west of the expanded River Raisin Battlefield Site boundaries. The structures were moved a 

short distance in 1894, and then to their current location in 1971. Bullet holes on the historic 

facade of the main building likely date back to the Battles of Frenchtown, but distance from its 

original location preclude the Trading Post’s inclusion with the expanded River Raisin 

Battlefield NRHP listing.16

NONCONTRIBUTING RESOURCES

At present there are 62 noncontributing resources within the proposed boundaries of the River 

Raisin Battlefield site (NRHP site # 82000542), as enumerated in Section 5 above. Under the 

category of buildings, 28 are single-family residences that are located on East Elm Avenue along 

the north side of the River Raisin and, along the south side of the river, on East Front Street. 

There are also 25 commercial buildings located on both sides of the river, four of which have 

been vacant for several years. Most of these properties are located around the northern extension 

of the NRHP boundaries in an area that is zoned by the City of Monroe as a Light Industrial 

District. The commercial buildings located near the north and south banks of the river are related 

to dining, entertainment, banking, and boating. Another two buildings within the proposed 

boundaries are for public use. These include an early twentieth-century bungalow that serves as 

the combined Headquarters and Visitor Center for River Raisin National Battlefield Park, and the 

Monroe Multi-Sports Complex building just north of Riviere Aux Raisins Park. There are also 

three municipal parks that are counted as noncontributing sites within the proposed boundary 

expansion: Hellenberg Park (which includes Sterling Island) on the south shore of the River 

Raisin, Riviere Aux Raisins Park on the north side of the river, and the expanse of open space 

around the Monroe Multi-Sports Complex. There are also three noncontributing structures within 

the proposed boundaries that include one bridge (the Dixie Highway bridge) and two railroad 

trestles (Canadian National and Norfolk Southern railways). Lastly, there is one noncontributing 

object within the boundary expansion area: a fifteen feet tall stone obelisk that was dedicated in 

1904 to memorialize the Americans who died during the Second Battle of Frenchtown. 

Originally placed near the river bank, it is currently located on the southeast corner of Riviere 

Aux Raisins Park.

STATEMENT OF INTEGRITY 

16 Harrison, Sawyer House, Monroe, Monroe County, Michigan, National Register #77000721 (1977); Dennis M. 

Au, "Standing for Two Centuries: The Navarre-Anderson Trading Post," Michigan History, 23:6 

(November/December), 1989: 32-36. 

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In regards to setting, feeling and association, it is important to note that none of the Frenchtown 

village elements that existed at the outset of the Battles of Frenchtown are present above ground. 

Their absence within the core area of conflict and residence, however, is the product of the 

battles on January 18 and 22 as well as the destruction wrought by American Indians on January 

23, 1813. While a few properties near the south bank of the River Raisin survived the conflicts, 

as well as some further west on both sides the river, the general destruction of the core of 

Frenchtown is a particularly significant event. Consequently, the absence of the former 

structures is a persistent and historically accurate result of the conflicts. If the current site 

included representative structures of early 19th century. Frenchtown, their presence might serve 

commemorative and interpretive purposes. However, these would be noncontributing resources 

within the battlefield area since the historical significance of the Battles of Frenchtown derives in 

part from the complete destruction of the core village area. 

The expanded NRHP site maintains historic integrity of setting, feeling, and association in the 

series of fields, river shores, and wooded areas displaying historic landscape features that were 

present during the Battles of Frenchtown. The same is generally true of near-shore areas on both 

sides of the River Raisin, with the exceptions of noncontributing residential structures that front 

along both sides of East Elm Avenue along the north shore of the river and the sparsely 

developed mix of residential, municipal park, and commercial structures near the southern shore 

of the river. On both sides of the River Raisin, streets and property lines that border or run 

through the expanded NRHP site on a north-south axis follow the roture system of ribbon farms 

(or long lots) that radiated back from their narrow frontages and were first laid out by the 

habitants of Frenchtown in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Moreover, East Elm Avenue 

follows the route of the riverfront road that was first laid out in the late 18th century while the 

original course of Hull’s Trace is overlain by North Dixie Highway. These roadways, and the 

old property lines they trace, make it possible to identify specific sites where allied British, 

Canadian militia, American Indian forces were arrayed against, U.S., Kentucky militia, and local 

Michigan militia forces prior to and during the battles. The persistence of the historical grid is 

also being used to identify stretches of land for further acquisition, restoration, and incorporation 

into RRNBP. 

The entire area within the proposed expansion of the River Raisin Battlefield Site possesses 

integrity of location. Specific events and their locations are well documented in contemporary 

reports from British and U.S. military sources, recorded comments from Confederacy fighters, 

and the published recollections of soldiers, Kentucky militia, and Frenchtown habitants. This 

information is further corroborated in a series of prolonged cases that were brought to the U.S. 

Court of Claims by property owners who sought reparations for the damages they sustained in 

the two battles and their aftermath.17 Residents of Monroe, which was founded in 1817, 

remained keenly aware of the battlefield site for many years. Even newcomers in the 1820s 

acquired some passing familiarity with the town’s wartime experience, since the Battles of 

Frenchtown and subsequent killing of surrendered U.S. soldiers received a great deal of press in 

the United States and inspired the War of 1812 battle cry of “Remember the Raisin!” Finding 

17 Patrick Tucker, Donna Nightingale and Dennis Au, Private Land Claims of the Rivière-aux-Raisins Area, 1779 – 

1812 (Monroe: Frenchtown Chapter of the French-Canadian Heritage Society of Michigan, 2001).
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human remains within the battlefield area was not uncommon, even as late as the 1840s, and 

each discovery sharpened memories of the battles. Guided by contemporary accounts, property 

records, the Court of Claims cases, and historical recollections, recent archeological 

investigations have recovered materials related to the battles and the destruction of Frenchtown. 

These investigations have corroborated the historical record and demonstrated that subsurface 

conditions remained largely undisturbed by the construction and expansion of large industrial 

sites through the 20th century. In sum, an expansion of the River Raisin Battlefield Site accords 

with evidence from contemporary records, published accounts, a long-standing community 

awareness, and archeological evidence. 
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_________________________________________________________________ 

8. Statement of Significance

Applicable National Register Criteria 

(Mark "x" in one or more boxes for the criteria qualifying the property for National Register 

listing.)

A. Property is associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the

broad patterns of our history.

B. Property is associated with the lives of persons significant in our past.

C. Property embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of

construction or represents the work of a master, or possesses high artistic values,

or represents a significant and distinguishable entity whose components lack

individual distinction.

D. Property has yielded, or is likely to yield, information important in prehistory or

history.

Criteria Considerations 

(Mark “x” in all the boxes that apply.) 

A. Owned by a religious institution or used for religious purposes

B. Removed from its original location

C. A birthplace or grave

D. A cemetery

E. A reconstructed building, object, or structure

F. A commemorative property

G. Less than 50 years old or achieving significance within the past 50 years

X
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Areas of Significance 

(Enter categories from instructions.) 

_MILITARY ________ 

___________________ 

___________________ 

___________________ 

___________________ 

Period of Significance 

_1811-1814 __ 

___________________ 

___________________ 

Significant Dates 

_January 18-23, 1813__ 

___________________ 

___________________ 

Significant Person 

(Complete only if Criterion B is marked above.) 

_____N/A___________ 

___________________ 

___________________ 

Cultural Affiliation 

_____N/A___________ 

___________________ 

___________________ 

Architect/Builder 

_____N/A___________ 

__________________ _ 

Statement of Significance Summary Paragraph (Provide a summary paragraph that includes 

level of significance, applicable criteria, justification for the period of significance, and any 

applicable criteria considerations.)
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The expanded River Raisin Battlefield Site possesses significance under National Register of 

Historic Places Criterion A. The battles that occurred on January 18 and 20, 1813, and the 

subsequent killing of wounded American prisoners and destruction of Frenchtown that occurred 

on January 23, 1813, were significant historic events that derived from broad patterns of North 

American history and directly contributed to national and regional developments during and after 

the War of 1812. The battle events mark a significant victory for the Native Confederacy that 

came together in 1811 to prevent U.S. expansion into the Great Lakes region and areas to the 

south and west. The battles also represent a key point in the War of 1812, as British forces—in 

alliance with Confederacy warriors—sought to block a U.S. invasion of Upper Canada (presentday Ontario) and help foster the creation of a distinct American Indian territory to the west and 

southwest of Lake Erie and the western Great Lakes. This effort came to a formal end when a 

large gathering of American Indian leaders affirmed a “A Treaty of Peace and Friendship” with 

the United States (aka Treaty of Greenville, 1814), and British negotiators dropped their support 

for such a territory prior to signing of the Treaty of Ghent in December 1814. The Battles of 

Frenchtown collectively remain the largest conflict to ever occur within the present boundaries 

of Michigan and proved the deadliest engagement for the United States during the War of 1812. 

This loss inspired the spirited cry of “Remember Raisin!” for U.S. forces in subsequent battles 

during the War of 1812, including the decisive American victory at the Battle of the Thames in 

Upper Canada (present-day Ontario) where British forces surrendered and the celebrated 

Shawnee leader Tecumseh was killed. The events along the River Raisin also mark the last 

hours of Frenchtown, one of the very few French ribbon farm settlements to be established 

within the United States after the Revolutionary War. 

______________________________________________________________________________ 

Narrative Statement of Significance (Provide at least one paragraph for each area of 

significance.) 

Criterion A—Military 

The historical significance of the River Raisin Battlefield Site is both expansive and singular. 

The larger, or expansive, significance derives from the position of Frenchtown within broader 

geographical and historical contexts that extend back to the 17th century, and involve 

communities and developments throughout the Great Lakes region. As a military event, it 

reflects generations of crisis, conflict, and accommodation for a host of confederated American 

Indian groups, an equally long period of invasion and dispossession of their lands and 

communities by Europeans and Euro-Americans from the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, the 

creation and persistence of French and Métis communities during and after French imperial 

activity in North America, and competition between French, British, and U.S. interests in the 

region that each knew as Pays d’en Haut (Upper Country), the Western Territory, or the Ohio 

Country. In the first decade of the 19th century, Frenchtown was situated along a key travel 

corridor within a historically and culturally complex borderland of competing interests. First 

established in the mid-1780s, the settlement was primarily inhabited by French-speaking 
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Catholic habitants whose French and Métis lineages reached back to the French colonial era in 

the Great Lakes region. Other nearby communities included multi-ethnic American Indian 

villages of mostly Wyandotte to the north, mostly Bodéwadmi (Potowatomi) to the west and 

northwest, and mostly Odawa (Ottawa) to the south. While relations between habitants and 

American Indian communities were generally peaceful and mutually beneficial, they operated 

within a narrow space that was impinged upon by powerful regional, national and global 

forces.18

With the Detroit River and western Lake Erie as an easily crossed boundary between British 

Canada and the United States, unsettled tensions over the disposition of the Great Lakes area 

after the American Revolution remained a live concern for various groups and communities in 

the border area and beyond. To the south, in Ohio and Kentucky, American settlers, land 

speculators and political leaders were committed to finishing a decades-long process of 

destroying and removing American Indian communities from present-day Ohio and areas to the 

west. From the upper Great Lakes to the lower Ohio River, a growing confederacy of American 

Indian communities associated with the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa was 

organizing to defend and strengthen their communities against further territorial loss. All of 

these developments, from the settlement of Frenchtown and the location of the nearby 

Wyandotte villages of Brownstown and Maguaga to the competing agendas of Kentuckians, 

British officials, U.S. policy makers and the Native Confederacy, were rooted in historical 

processes that had been actively shaping the region for more than half a century.19

All of these interests and dynamics were part of what historian David Skaggs has termed the 

“Sixty Years War for the Great Lakes,” a period of prolonged crisis and conflict in the region 

that spanned from the French and Indian War (1754-1763) through Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763-

1765), Lord Dunmore’s War (1774), the Revolutionary War (1775-1783), and the Northwest 

Indian War (1785-1795) to the War of 1812 (1812-1815).20 As the various dates indicate, the 

region was not wracked by six decades of continuous warfare, but repeated conflict touched 

every community and generation. In the decade after 1795, for instance, years of conflict gave 

way to a series of American Indian land cessions and the wholesale displacement of many 

communities from present-day Ohio. As Native resistance to further loss of villages and land 

intensified in the early 1800s, however, U.S. officials, Trans-Appalachian settlers, British 

officials, and American Indian communities prepared for a renewal of old conflicts. War came 

in 1811 with the Battle of Tippecanoe in present-day Indiana, and the older dynamics of the 

18 For an overview of these subjects, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the 

Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), passim; Helen Hornbeck Tanner, 

ed., Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (Norman: Published for the Newberry Library by the University of 

Oklahoma Press, 1987), 39-95; David C. McCauley, "The River Raisin Settlement, 1796-1812: A French Culture 

Area," (MA thesis, Eastern Michigan University, 1968); Au and Brode, "The Lingering Shadow of New France," 

325-28. 19 For an overview of these conditions, see the essays in David Curtis Skaggs and Larry Lee Nelson, eds. The Sixty

Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), and Tanner, ed.,

Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, 48-121. 20 Skaggs, “The Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814: An Overview,” in Skaggs and Nelson, eds. The

Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1-20. The terms used here reflect commonly used designations in the United

States, which can differ from American Indian, Canadian, French, and British conceptions of these conflicts.
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“Sixty Years War” both determined and defined the course of the War of 1812 in the western 

Great Lakes region.21

Though maritime issues like British impressment of American sailors and restrictions on U.S. 

trade with Europe and European colonies topped the list of grievances in President James 

Madison’s “War Message” to Congress on June 1, 1812, the push for war with Britain was 

strongest in the Trans-Appalachian West.22 Led by the so-called War Hawks, a group of 

influential western congressmen, they sought an expansive war and pressed for an invasion of 

Canada. More than “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights,” westerners worried about what they called 

an “ANGLO-SAVAGE WAR” and, like Representative Felix Grundy of Kentucky, wanted to 

“drive the British from our Continent” to stop their “intriguing with our Indian neighbors” and to 

bring more territory—as well as the proceeds of the Canadian fur trade—into the United States.23 

The British, for their part, hoped to foster an independent territory for American Indians in the 

Great Lakes region that would restore pre-Revolutionary War conditions and serve as a buffer 

against further U.S. expansion. For the confederacy of American Indians that allied with the 

British, conflict with the United States related to more existential questions of territory, culture, 

and autonomy.24 In every case, the War of 1812 in the Great Lakes region was about ending 

(and winning) the Sixty Years War. Because Frenchtown was a key location in the strategy of 

all parties, it was variously claimed and occupied by every faction in the months that followed 

the U.S. Declaration of War on June 18, 1812. By January of the following year, the settlement 

became the epicenter of violence and destruction in the Great Lakes region. 

The singular importance of the River Raisin Battlefield Site derives from its strategic position 

during the War of 1812 as well as the scale and significance of the Battles of Frenchtown and 

their aftermath. It is no coincidence that Michigan Territorial Governor William Hull, who also 

served as commanding general of the newly formed U.S. Army of the North West, first learned 

of the official declaration of war against Great Britain while approaching Frenchtown on the 2nd

of July. General Hull received the news while implementing an already planned invasion of 

Canada that involved the construction of a road from southern Ohio to Detroit. Though it 

followed well-known paths that had been used for countless generations, the road had to support 

the passage of an army and its supplies. Construction proved arduous, and involved numerous 

river crossings, the construction of blockhouses and supply depots, and pushing through the wet 

21 Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 131-47; Robert M. Owens, Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William 

Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011), 188-

210; Colin G. Calloway, Crown and Calumet: British-Indian Relations, 1783-1815 (Norman: University of 

Oklahoma Press, 1987), 296-312. 22 Madison’s message from “Senate Journal—Monday, June 1, 1812,” at American Memory (Library of Congress); 

A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875 < 

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?hlaw:1:./temp/~ammem_LjJD::> (accessed 17 December 2014). 23 Paul A. Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors' Rights in the War of 1812 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); 

Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 26; Gundy 

quote in Annals of the Congress of the United States, 12th Congress, First Session (Washington: Government 

Printing Office, 1853), 426.

24 Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 129-147; and Sandy Antal, A Wampum Denied: Procter's War of 1812, 2nd ed. 

(Kingston [Ont.]: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011), 13-25.
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and muddy tangle of the vast Black Swamp that encompassed much of the lower Maumee River 

basin. The crude road, which became known as Hull’s Trace, was mostly completed between 

early May and early July—when Hull and his 1,500-strong force of U.S. Regulars and Ohio 

militiamen arrived in Detroit.25

From a military standpoint, the stretch of road from the Maumee River to Detroit was the most 

critical section of the entire route. The decision to invade Canada by land, and thus develop a 

road along the western shore of Lake Erie, was largely determined by the strong positions of Fort 

Amherstburg and the King’s Navy Yard at the mouth of the Detroit River—which blocked all 

upstream access to Detroit and would allow British vessels to easily sweep any U.S. maritime 

force from Lake Erie. Consequently, the settlement at Frenchtown was one of the most 

important locales in Hull’s invasion plan. As one of the few populated areas along the entire 

route, Frenchtown and the farms that fronted the lower River Raisin helped provision Hull’s 

forces —and they were expected to keep supplying Detroit in the coming invasion of Canada. 

The local militia force also helped with the routing and construction of the road, offered some 

additional protection along the sections to the north and south of Frenchtown, and provided 

information about nearby American Indian communities as well as on developments at Fort 

Amherstburg just eighteen miles to the northeast. All of these qualities were integral to Hull’s 

plan, but the strategic importance of the small settlement could also be exploited by allied British 

and Native Confederacy forces—which soon made it the Achilles heel of Hull’s Army of the 

North West.26

Frenchtown and the First Months of the War of 1812 

The invasion of Canada began on July 12, and U.S. forces were initially unopposed when they 

crossed the Detroit River. After meeting resistance from Canadian Militia, American Indians, 

and British Regulars—and then failing to lay siege to Fort Amherstburg—the invasion began to 

falter by early August. To bolster his position at Detroit and support the stalled invasion on the 

opposite side of the river, Hull sent three separate detachments to protect and retrieve desperately 

needed supplies at the Wayne Stockade and other buildings in Frenchtown. The first detachment 

of 200 Ohio Militia and some U.S. Regulars was routed on August 5 near the Wyandotte village 

of Brownstown, and the second detachment of 610 regulars and militia was turned back near the 

Wyandotte village of Maguagua on August 9. On both occasions they were surprised by large 

numbers of American Indian warriors led by Tecumseh (Shawnee), Stayeghtha (a.k.a. 

Roundhead; Wyandotte), Main Poc (Bodéwadmi), and others that had crossed over from their 

encampments near Amherstburg—as well as a contingent of British troops that participated in the 

engagement of August 9. All told, American casualties numbered upwards of 180 killed, wounded, 

or captured. A third detachment tried to reach Frenchtown by a more circuitous route via Godfroy’s 

Trading Post on the Huron River (present-day Ypsilanti, Michigan) and down the Saline River. 

25 Maria Campbell and James Freeman Clarke, Revolutionary Services and Civil Life of General William Hull (New 

York: D. Appleton & Co., 1848), 225-236. 26 For an overview of Hull’s invasion plan, see Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British 

Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York: Vintage, 2011), 158-163. On the strategic significance of 

Frenchtown and the assistance its residents provided to the Army of the North West, see Ralph Naveaux, Invaded on 

All Sides: The Story of Michigan's Greatest Battlefield Scene of the Engagements at Frenchtown and the River 

Raisin in the War of 1812 (Marceline, MO: Walsworth Publishing Co., 2008), 18-19, 21.
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During the long journey, the detachment ran out of supplies and had to turn back. These failures, 

along with news that Fort Mackinac had fallen to allied British and Native Confederacy a few weeks 

earlier, convinced Hull to withdraw his invading forces back to Detroit. Cut off from any possible 

support from Mackinac, and fearing that a vast number of American Indian fighters would soon 

pour down from the Upper Great Lakes, Hull intended to entrench his command at Detroit. 

Within days, however, Detroit was under siege by a force greatly augmented by newly arrived 

British reinforcements and a growing number of warriors who had come to join the Native 

Confederacy.27

After a brief period of shelling and a number of expert feints by British and Confederacy forces, 

Hull determined that his position in Detroit was untenable. On August 16, less than five weeks 

after his invasion of Canada had begun, Hull surrendered Detroit and Michigan Territory without 

a fight. This dramatic turn of events was so sudden that word did not reach the small detachment 

of Ohio militiamen at Frenchtown until almost two days after the event. They had been stationed 

at the Wayne Stockade, constructed in 1806 about one mile west of Frenchtown, when Captain 

William Elliott from the British Indian Department presented the written terms of the 

surrender.28 The militia officer in charge of the site rejected the documents as forgeries, locked 

Elliott’s party in an adjacent blockhouse for a night, and threatened to hang the captain in the 

morning. New information from Detroit allowed cooler heads to prevail, but instead of honoring 

the terms of surrender the small group of Ohio Militia fled south. In the wake of the Ohioans’ 

departure, groups of Confederacy warriors ransacked some dwellings while the British sought to 

establish preliminary authority in Frenchtown and the surrounding area. Within a few days order 

was restored, most of the Confederacy warriors departed to surrounding villages or Fort 

Amherstburg, and the British burned the stockade and its outbuildings before leaving the town 

under a light guard.29

The defeat of the U.S. Army of the North West and the advent of British administration in 

Michigan altered but did not diminish the strategic importance of Frenchtown. On the contrary, 

the settlement’s significance in the War of 1812 was magnified. For the rest of the summer and 

27 On the Battles of Brownstown and Maguagua (a.k.a. Monguagon), and Hull’s surrender, see Antal, A Wampum 

Denied, 78-84, 97-100; and Anthony J. Yanik, The Fall and Recapture of Detroit in the War of 1812: In Defense of 

William Hull (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 68-105. 28 The British Indian Department, which operated alongside and association with the British Army, deserves some 

explanation. The Department dates back to the mid-eighteenth century and the Seven Years’ War in North America 

(French and Indian War). Established to manage diplomatic relations with American Indian groups as well as foster 

military and commercial alliances, the Indian Department was initially a branch of the British Army. By 1800 

authority had transferred to the Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada (present-day Southern Ontario and parts of 

Northern Ontario within the Great Lakes Basin) and the Governor General of Canada—who was responsible for the 

affairs of the Indian Department in Lower Canada (present-day southern and eastern Quebec). At the time of the 

War of 1812, Sir George Prévost served as the Governor General of Lower Canada and the Commander and Chief 

of British Forces in Canada while civilian leadership in Upper Canada devolved to a series of commanding officers 

who also served as provisional Lieutenant Governors. Consequently, the entire British Indian Department operated 

under military authority throughout the war. At this time the Department had a distinct officer corps totaling around 

100 individuals who served as agents, advisers, and interpreters for British officials and Confederacy groups and 

generally fought alongside their American Indian allies. See Robert Allen, His Majesty's Indian Allies: British 

Indian Policy in the Defence of Canada 1774-1815 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1996), 11-21, 149-166. 29 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 111-112.
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fall of 1812, Frenchtown served as an important procurement center for the British 

commissariat—as well as an informal and less than voluntary supplier to American Indian 

fighters en route to present-day Ohio and Indiana. The River Raisin area also served as a base of 

operations for Tecumseh and his closest associates, who moved to and from battle sites to the 

south while maintaining regular contact with the British at Fort Amherstburg and allied 

American Indian villages to the west and north.30

The situation in Frenchtown changed in late fall and early winter, however, when reports came in 

to Fort Amherstburg that part of the reconstituted Army of the North West was slowly making its 

way along the lower Maumee River. While the news was hardly unexpected, it triggered an 

immediate concern about the material and strategic importance of Frenchtown. If U.S. forces 

became entrenched at the River Raisin, it could result in the loss of Michigan and jeopardize the 

security of Upper Canada. With this new threat, the British and Confederacy alliance quickly 

determined to make the settlement a forward line of defense or—if circumstances warranted—to 

remove or destroy its resources before they fell into American hands. By the second week of 

January, when word came that a large American force was settling in at the Maumee Rapids, the 

two small companies of the Essex militia (who together numbered about 50 men) that were 

already situated in Frenchtown were bolstered by a contingent of as many as 200 mostly 

Bodéwadmi and Wyandotte fighters. Along with an additional artilleryman and a light cannon, 

the augmented force prepared for an expected U.S. attack.31

The Battles of Frenchtown 

Thirty-five miles to the south, the left wing of the reconstituted Army of the North West 

established a defensive winter camp near the Maumee Rapids (present-day Perrysburg, Ohio) on 

January 10, 1813. Formed the previous summer and serving under the command of Brigadier 

General James Winchester, the combined force of Kentucky Militia and U.S. Infantry that once 

numbered close to 2,000 men was down to fewer than 1,300. A good deal of that decline was 

attributable to desertion or dismissal, but many of those who did not reach the Rapids had either 

become incapacitated along the way and left behind at a rear post or died from exposure and 

disease. After four-and-a-half months of hard travel, repeated setbacks, and a few minor 

engagements with allied American Indian and British forces, the remaining men under 

Winchester’s command were malnourished, poorly clothed and profoundly dispirited. While it 

was obvious that his force needed to recuperate, Winchester also knew his men required some 

“progressive operations” or his command would falter altogether.32 After months of wearisome 

duty, the militiamen had nearly finished the terms of their service and showed no inclination to 

extend their enlistments. Indeed, many had already come close to deserting on more than one 

occasion—and most despised Winchester. For men who four months earlier had boasted of 

conquering the “ancient enemy ... of Americans and Kentuckians” (i.e., the alliance of British 

30 Charles Askin, "Journal," in Select Documents of the Canadian War of 1812, ed. William Wood (Toronto: The 

Champlain Society, 1920), 540-41; Antal, "Michigan Ceded: Why and Wherefore?" The Michigan Historical 

Review 38 (Spring 2012): 14-15. 31 Squire Robert Reynolds, "Narrative," in 1812; The War, and its Moral: A Canadian Chronicle, ed. William F. 

Coffin (Montreal: John Levell, 1864). p. 208; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 160-63. 32 Quote from Winchester to Harrison, January 17, 1813, in Messages and Letters of William Henry Harrison, vol. 

2, ed. Logan Esaray (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Commission, 1922), 314.
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and American Indian interests that dated back before the Revolutionary War), the prospect of 

more hunger, fatigue, and biding time was unacceptable.33 In short, incessant hardship and 

prolonged inaction had brought the left wing of the Army of the North West to the verge of 

collapse. 

Such a fate was soon averted, however, when a messenger from Frenchtown arrived in 

Winchester’s camp on January 13. He reported that the British had begun rounding up suspected 

U.S. sympathizers and confiscating stored foodstuffs, livestock and portable property for use at 

Fort Amherstburg. Moreover, the messenger stated that all French-speaking habitants were to be 

taken across the Detroit River to Canada and Frenchtown burned to the ground. The following 

day another habitant of Frenchtown arrived with much the same story, and Winchester decided 

to send scouts to assess the situation. He received a promising report on January 16: the military 

force at Frenchtown was hardly formidable, none of the reported confiscation and rounding up 

had occurred, and the settlement on the River Raisin still held an abundance of resources and 

supplies that could help support his forces through the winter. That same evening the decision 

was made to take Frenchtown, and the following morning approximately 550 men from the 1st, 

2nd and 5th Kentucky Volunteer Militia Regiments, along with a company of the U.S. 17th

Infantry Regiment, were assembled and sent north under the command of Lt. Colonel William 

Lewis. Soon afterwards, Winchester dispatched another 110 militiamen from the 1st Kentucky 

Volunteer Rifle Regiment, and the two forces joined up that evening at the north end of Maumee 

Bay (near present-day downtown Toledo, Ohio).34

The combined force set off in the early morning hours of January 18, using the frozen and snowdusted shoreline of Lake Erie as a road to the north. South of Frenchtown the Kentuckians were 

joined by as many as 100 habitants—some of whom served in the Michigan Militia the previous 

summer—and the entire force came together a short distance to the south of the frozen River 

Raisin around three o’clock in the afternoon. Facing them, on the north side of the river, the 

Essex Militia was positioned behind the cover of houses, structures, and fences within the village 

of Frenchtown. On the west and east ends of the village, Confederacy warriors took up similar 

but less protected positions. The Essex Militia soon opened fire with its lone artillery piece, 

which was answered with shouts and a three-pronged rush of Kentuckians and habitants across 

the frozen river. They soon took control of the north bank and forced the Essex militiamen and 

33 Quote is from the speech made by Captain William Lewis just before the battle of January 18, 1813; in 

“Recollections of the Late War, the River Raisin Battle,” Kentucky Yeoman (Frankfort), May 7, 1833; reprinted in 

Federal Writers' Project. Military History of Kentucky, Chronologically Arranged (Frankfort, KY: State Journal, 

1939), 82. Also see G. Glenn Clift, Remember the Raisin! Kentucky and Kentuckians in the Battles and Massacre 

at Frenchtown, Michigan Territory, in the War of 1812 (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1961), 46-49. 34 Winchester, "General Orders," Camp Miami Rapids, January 16 and 17, 1813, James Winchester Papers, Burton 

Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library; Elias Darnell, A Journal Containing an Accurate and Interesting 

Account of the Hardships, Suffering, Battles, Defeat and Captivity of Those Heroic Kentucky Volunteers and 

Regulars Commanded by General Winchester, in the Years 1812-13. Also, Two Narratives by Men That Were 

Wounded in the Battles on the River Raisin and Taken Captive by the Indians, 2 ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 

Grambo, and Company, 1854), 45-48; Robert B. McAfee, History of the Late War in the Western Country (Bowling 

Green, OH: Historical Publications Company, 1919), 223-26; Au, War on the Raisin: A Narrative Account of the 

War of 1812 in the River Raisin Settlement, Michigan Territory (Monroe, MI: Monroe County Historical 

Commission, 1981), 25-27; Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 103-112.
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American Indians to retreat from the central core of Frenchtown. The Essex militia briefly held 

its ground at the north edge of Frenchtown where, as Kentucky rifleman William Atherton 

recalled, “they made a stand with their howitzer and small arms, covered by a chain of enclosed 

lots and a group of houses, having in their rear a thick brushy wood filled with fallen timber.”35

Efforts to outflank the allied Canadian and Confederacy fighters proved unsuccessful, and the 

fighting devolved into a series of fierce skirmishes through the denser woods to the north. Fallen 

timber offered protection to the slowly retreating allied forces, who were now determined to 

make a successful escape to the Wyandotte village of Brownstown while forcing the 

Kentuckians to pay as dearly as possible for their ensuing victory. In “the woods the fighting 

became general and most obstinate,” as one Kentuckian described this part of the battle, “the 

enemy resisting every inch of ground as they were compelled to fall back.” Over the course of 

two miles the slow-moving battle continued until darkness fell, with the retreating forces taking 

cover to fire on the pursuing Kentuckians, then dashing to another protective area before the 

pursuers could regroup or return accurate fire. It was this part of the battle that brought the most 

casualties to the U.S. side, which all told lost 13 killed and 54 wounded. Records for the Essex 

Militia are spotty, and no accounting was made for Native losses, but the Canadians suffered at 

least one casualty (whether killed or wounded is uncertain). American Indian casualties were 

greater, but the numbers are not clear. Some were certainly killed since Kentucky militiamen 

boasted of mutilating and scalping at least a few corpses. Traces of blood were also found along 

the paths taken by retreating American Indians, either from wounded individuals or the bodies of 

dead fighters who were dragged away by their comrades.36

Word of the victory soon reached General Winchester, who rejoiced at the initial news and 

agreed to Colonel Lewis’ request for more troops. He quickly assembled the four companies of 

U.S. Regulars under his command (17th and 19th U.S. Infantry) and a few militiamen, and then 

led the force of about 300 to Frenchtown—which they reached before dawn on January 22.37 

The decision to attack Frenchtown, as well as assemble the bulk of his command so close to Fort 

Amherstburg, came with considerable risk. It also “alarmed” (and contravened the standing 

orders of) Major General William H. Harrison, who commanded the entire Army of the North 

West and was then encamped with the right wing at Upper Sandusky about fifty-five miles 

southeast of the Maumee Rapids.38 The victory at Frenchtown seemed to confirm Winchester’s 

initial decision to send troops to the River Raisin, while the number of casualties (which 

numbered roughly 10% of the original force sent to Frenchtown) precluded any chance of a 

35 Quote is from William Atherton, Narrative of the Suffering & Defeat of the Northwestern Army, under General 

Winchester: Massacre of the Prisoners, Sixteen Months Imprisonment of the Writer and Others with the Indians and 

British (Frankfort, KY: A.G. Hodges, 1842), 36. For a detailed summary of the early part of the battle, see 

Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 112-120. 36 One member of the Essex Militia, and two American Indians were also taken prisoner by the Kentucky forces. 

Atherton, Narrative of the Suffering & Defeat of the Northwestern Army, 37; Darnell, Journal, 42-43; Antal, A 

Wampum Denied, 163-64; Au, War on the Raisin, 28-29. Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 53-55; Benson J. Losing, 

The Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812 (New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1869), 313-315; 

Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 120-21. 37 Au, War on the Raisin, 30-33; Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 56-62; Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 131-39. 38 “William Henry Harrison to James Monroe, 26 January 1813,” The Papers of James Madison, Presidential Series, 

vol. 5, ed. J. C. A. Stagg et al, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 624–28.
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quick withdrawal back to the Maumee Rapids. As Winchester wrote to Harrison, he both feared 

and welcomed a counter attack from Fort Amherstburg: admitting that his position “was not very 

favourable for defence,” yet boasted that if the enemy tried “to retake this place ... he will pay 

dearly for it.” Comforted by the victorious outcome, Harrison averred that it was right of 

Winchester to bolster Lewis’ forces at Frenchtown. Consequently, he accelerated the plans for a 

winter invasion of Upper Canada and quickly mobilized 360 of his troops to aid Winchester at 

Frenchtown.39

Hopeful expectation trumped anxiety as Winchester’s forces settled into Frenchtown, but across 

the Detroit River at Fort Amherstburg another sentiment prevailed: decisive urgency. Sometime 

in the early hours of January 19 news about the loss of Frenchtown first reached the commander 

of Amherstburg, Colonel Henry Procter. Aware of the U.S. build-up at Upper and Lower 

Sandusky, and Winchester’s movements along the lower Maumee River, Procter regarded the 

force that attacked Frenchtown as the opening act in a planned invasion of Detroit and Canada. 

To counter such a strategy, he “deemed it requisite, that, [the Enemy] should be attacked without 

Delay, and with all, and every Description of Force, within my Reach.”40 The goal was to 

destroy or at least dislodge Winchester’s forces before they could be joined by the right and 

center wings of the Army of the North West, and to reestablish a forward position against the 

U.S. 

Procter quickly dispatched a company of regulars, some artillerymen, and the 28 members of the 

Provincial Marine to Brownstown, where they met up with some of the retreating American 

Indian fighters from the previous day’s battle. By the 20th, more regulars from the 41st Regiment 

of Foot and Royal Newfoundland Fencibles, as well as Canadian militiamen and members of the 

British Indian Department, came in from Detroit and Amherstburg. All told, the British and 

Canadian force amounted to 595 men and included six pieces of artillery. At Brownstown, it 

was joined by a confederated force of American Indians that were then wintering on both sides 

of the Detroit River, and included Wyandotte, Shawnee, Bodéwadmi, Odawa (Ottawa), Ojibwe, 

(Chippewa), Lunaapeew (Lenape, or Delaware), Myaamia (Miami), Waayaahtanwa (Wea), 

Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk, aka Winnebago), Muscogee (Creek), Ökwe'öwé (Seneca-Cayuga; aka, 

“Mingo”), Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo) Thâkîwa (Sauk, or Sac), and Meskwaki (Fox) warriors. 

Though each group had formidable war leaders, they formally deferred to the Wyandotte—the 

longest established group in the Detroit River area—and their most renowned men: Stayeghtha 

(Roundhead), Sou-ne-hoo-way (Splitlog) and Myeerah (Walk-in-the-Water). Numbering at least 

600, and perhaps as many as 800, this was one of the largest and most diverse assemblages of 

American Indians in the entire war. On January 21 the British, Canadians and American Indians 

39 Quotes are from “Winchester to Harrison, French Town River Raison [sic] 21 Jany 1813,” and “Winchester to

Harrison, French Town River Raisin 21 Jany 1813,” in Messages and Letters of William Henry Harrison, vol. 2,

325-26. On Harrison’s plans and actions, see Skaggs, William Henry Harrison and the Conquest of the Ohio

Country: Frontier Fighting in the War of 1812 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 143-46.

40 Procter to Sheafe, January 25, 1813, in Select British Documents of the Canadian War of 1812, vol. 2, ed.

William Wood (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1920-28), 7.

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moved en masse to Swan Creek, and then on to Stony Creek where they spent part of a restless 

night before heading toward Frenchtown a few miles to the southwest.41

Arriving before dawn on January 22 and unnoticed by the American sentries, the allied forces 

gathered into their battle positions between 250-350 yards to the north of Frenchtown. Arrayed 

in an arc along the wooded stretch of Mason Run, they were organized into three large 

groupings: British regulars and the six artillery pieces were positioned across the center; about 

200 yards to their right was a somewhat dispersed clustering of mostly Odawa, Ojibwe, 

Bodéwadmi and some Canadian militia; and another 250 yards to the left of the center position a 

large number of mostly Wyandotte and Shawnee fighters held the forward position, with 

Canadian militia and artillery in the rear. The American forces, which numbered 934 ablebodied men, were primarily situated in two locales. Approximately 700 men (mostly from 

Kentucky militia regiments) were encamped within the center of Frenchtown, with defensive 

positions staked out behind the puncheon fence along the north side of the village as well as the 

garden fence lines to the east and west. In the open field to the east, about 160 regulars from the 

U.S. 17th Regiment slept behind a hastily constructed series of breastworks. The remainder were 

scattered throughout the Frenchtown community, in barns or homes, while General Winchester 

slept at his temporary headquarters in the home of Francois Navarre on the south side of the 

River Raisin—about a mile to the west of Frenchtown proper. A small number of habitants from 

Frenchtown and nearby settlements had also come to help defend the village, and added to the 

total.42

Just as the British forces in the center readied their attack, reveille sounded on the American side 

and soon after a sentry spotted the Red Coats in the dim pre-dawn light. He fired a shot into the 

forward line that killed the lead grenadier, and the report of his musket sent the just awakened 

Infantry and militia scrambling for their battle positions. Almost immediately, the British 

opened with their artillery and the regulars pushed forward from their center position. As they 

drew within range of Frenchtown, they fired a powerful volley at what, in the still dark distance, 

had seemed to be a line of soldiers on the opposite end of the field of battle. Assuming they had 

the advantage, the British then made a fierce charge toward Frenchtown, but the target of their 

fusillade proved to be the puncheon fence behind which the protected Kentuckians could fire at 

41 Herbert C. W. Goltz, "The Indian Revival Religion and the Western District, 1805-1813," in The Western 

District: Papers from the Western District Conference, eds. K. G. Pryke and L. L. Kulisek (Windsor, Ont: Essex 

County Historical Society and the Western District Councils, 1983), 29-32; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 166-67; 

Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 139-145. References to specific American Indian groups follow the orthographies 

or common spellings from official communications or language materials used by federally recognized tribes in the 

United States and by Canadian First Nations that are historically associated with the conflicts in the Detroit River 

region. These include the Wyandotte Tribe of Oklahoma, the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, the 

Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi, the Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma, the Wikwemikong Unceded Indian 

Reserve, the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe, the Walpole Island First Nation/Bkejwanong Territory, the Chippewas of 

Kettle and Stony Point First Nation, the Munsee-Delaware Nation, the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown, the 

Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, the Ho-Chunk Nation, the Muscogee Nation, 

the Seneca-Cayuga Nation, the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas, the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma, the Sac and Fox 

Nation, and the Sac & Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa.

42 Shadrach Byfield, "A Common Soldier's Account," in Recollections of the War of 1812: Three Eyewtnesses' 

Accounts, ed. John Gellner (Toronto: Baxter, 1964), 16-18; Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 62-64; Naveaux, Invaded 

on All Sides, 145-55; Au, War on the Raisin, 30-35.
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will. With the British artillery still overshooting the mark, and the puncheon fence providing 

ample protection, the Kentuckians were unscathed and unrelenting. After 20 minutes the British 

were forced to retreat, leaving their fallen comrades behind—who tried to crawl away while 

taking fire from Kentucky marksmen.43

Matters went quite differently on the right flank of the U.S. position. There the Canadian militia 

quickly adjusted the aim of their artillery, and soon wreaked havoc on the more exposed position 

of the U.S. 17th Infantry. As cannon fire tore through the encampment and shattered 

breastworks, Canadian militiamen and Wyandotte warriors took possession of some nearby 

buildings and fired into the exposed encampment. The U.S. soldiers struggled to hold their 

ground, but eventually faltered when mounted warriors came around their right flank. An 

attempt was made to send a few companies of Kentucky militiamen to the aid of the 17th

Infantry, but the effort ultimately proved disastrous. General Winchester, who had just arrived 

from his headquarters, ordered the infantrymen to fall back to the north bank of the river where 

they could rendezvous with the Kentuckians. Together they made a brief stand, but were soon 

overwhelmed by the pursuing Wyandotte, Shawnee, and Canadian militia. After a frantic retreat 

to the south side of the river where some made a weak stand, the American position disintegrated 

entirely. All were swept up in the ensuing chaos, including Winchester and several officers. 

Fleeing pell-mell toward the south, many were run down and killed. Others managed to continue 

for a mile or two along Hull’s Trace, but few managed to escape their pursuers—who now 

included the array of American Indian forces that had swept around the west and south side of 

Frenchtown. Of the approximately 400 Men who were caught up in the rout, about 220 were 

killed and another 147 captured. Only 33 escaped.44

The actions to the east and south of Frenchtown were barely perceived by the British regulars at 

the edge of the woods and the Kentuckians still entrenched behind the fence lines. They instead 

remained locked in what, for them, seemed to be the main battle area. Over the course of two 

hours, the British regrouped and made two more frontal attacks, but the Kentuckians’ position 

was too strong. The third and last attack proved the most costly, with over 100 British casualties, 

a number that was more than double the total losses suffered by the entrenched Kentuckians in 

all three attacks. As the British pulled back and evaluated their weakening situation, Colonel 

Procter suddenly found himself face-to-face with General Winchester in the custody of 

Stayeghtha. Procter pressed his opposite for outright capitulation, but the Kentuckians still 

within the pickets of Frenchtown balked when they first received word of Winchester’s captivity. 

Feeling themselves on the verge of victory, they still believed the battle could be won. As 

Private Elias Darnell later recalled, “some [men] plead[ed] with the officers not to surrender, 

saying they would rather die on the field!” With their ammunition almost gone, and now 

surrounded on the south, east, and west by American Indian warriors, it became apparent to the 

officer’s still within Frenchtown that victory—let alone escape—was not possible. After some 

43 Robert Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812: An Operational and Command Study (East Lansing: 

Michigan State University Press, 1997), 134-36. 44 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 169-74; Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 65-66; Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 160-71, 

174-87; Au, War on the Raisin, 37-39; Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 136-37.
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more back-and-forth with the British over the disposition of prisoners and wounded, the 

Kentucky militia and remaining U.S. forces surrendered.45

The battle was costly for the British regulars and Canadian militia, whose combined losses of 24 

killed and 161 wounded amounted to nearly one third of the forces under Procter’s command at 

Frenchtown. For the left wing of the Army of the North West, however, the loss was an 

unmitigated disaster. Of the 934 Americans who heard the morning’s reveille, all but the 33 who 

managed to escape to the Maumee Rapids were either dead, wounded, or prisoners of war. A 

preliminary count on the evening of the 22nd put the number of U.S. dead at 218, while the 

number of ambulatory prisoners who were marched off to Amherstburg was tallied at 495. 

Approximately 60 wounded prisoners were unable to make the journey, and they were attended 

by 30 of their fellows who stayed behind. Aside from the 33 who evaded capture during the 

desperate retreat from the River Raisin, approximately 66 were missing. Some number was 

likely dead but their bodies remained undiscovered, while the rest had become captives within 

various American Indian encampments. Based on later counts of prisoners that passed through 

Amherstburg, it seems that most of these captives were eventually turned over to the British.46

The undisputed victor at the River Raisin was the Native Confederacy. While their casualty 

numbers remain unknown, American Indians fared much better than their British and Canadian 

allies in every respect. The Wyandotte and Shawnee war leaders who directed the attack on U.S. 

regulars on the east side of Frenchtown quickly turned the fight into the sort of running battle 

they preferred. Moving “in scattered order,” groups of fighters took advantage of small areas of 

cover and harassed the edges of the U.S. position. As the soldiers gave ground they were driven 

toward the Kentucky reinforcements, then all were nearly surrounded. Brief efforts by some 

U.S. regulars and Kentucky militiamen to make a joint stand were short-lived, and their retreats 

were channeled southward along Hull’s Trace to a series of awaiting ambushes. All of this went 

in accordance with a basic strategy that eschewed the massing of forces, emphasized the actions 

of small groups working in concert with others, and sought to disorient the enemy with quick 

random strikes from several directions. Once the attack was joined by many of the Bodéwadmi, 

Myaamia, Odawa, and Ojibwe fighters that had swept around the west side of Frenchtown, the 

fate of the “Long Knives” (as the Kentuckians were known) was more than sealed.47

45 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 169-74; Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 189-202; Au, War on the Raisin, 40-44. 

Quote from Elias Darnell, Journal, 48. 46 While the accounting of wounded and killed is imprecise, the general variance between American and British 

sources is minimal. See Au, War on the Raisin, 44-45; Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 73-74; Antal, A Wampum 

Denied, 173-74; and Antal, Remember the Raisin! Anatomy of a Demon Myth," The War of 1812 Magazine, no. 10 

(2008) <http://www.napoleon-series.org/military/Warof1812/2008/Issue10/c_Raisin.html#_edn14)> (accessed 27 

January 2015). 47 The reference to “scattered order” comes from Armstrong Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 

1675-1815 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 22. Also see “Extract of the Minutes of a Council held 

at Michilimackinac the 28th October 1814, between Waindawgay & Mishpawkissh[,] Potewatemys on behalf of 

their chiefs and Lieut. Col. Macdonall,” in Michigan Historical Society, Collections and Researches Made by the 

Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society, vol. 23 (Lansing: Robert Smith & Co., 1895), 453-55; and Charles 

Callender, “Great Lakes-Riverine Sociopolitical Organization,” in Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 

15: Northeast, eds. William C. Sturtevant and Bruce G. Trigger (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 

1978), 617-19. The term “Long Knives” was used by American Indian communities in the Great Lakes region as a 
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The small clusters of regulars and Kentucky militia that managed to get as far as the prairie and 

woods on the south side of the River Raisin were exhausted, low on ammunition, or had 

abandoned their cumbersome muskets to improve their chances of flight. Efforts to make a final 

stand, flee, or bargain for their lives often resulted in the same fatal result. Native warriors were 

not in a position to safely hold many prisoners, nor were they disposed to spare the lives of men 

who would kill them at the first chance. Moreover, they were expected to atone for the deaths 

and destruction their communities had suffered over the past few years at the hands of people 

with whom they had been in conflict for generations. This sentiment was particularly acute 

among the Bodéwadmi and Myaamia whose villages had been recently attacked, and their homes 

and crops destroyed, by some of the very same militiamen and soldiers that were now running, 

fighting, and begging for their lives. In short, the Kentuckians and the U.S. regulars (who hailed 

mostly from Kentucky and southern Ohio) were in the hands of the “ancient enemy” they sought 

to destroy—and wished to destroy them. Most were killed outright, which accounts for the high 

death toll and relatively low number of wounded and captured from this part of the battle.48

The Native Confederacy was also responsible for ending the battle and bringing about the 

wholesale surrender of the Kentuckians still entrenched within Frenchtown. While the 

presentation of General Winchester to Colonel Procter shifted the British focus from assessing 

their losses to demanding a U.S. surrender, the decisive victory on the south side of the River 

Raisin allowed for a new concentration of American Indians around Frenchtown. As Winchester 

later recalled, this development convinced the Kentuckians to give up their arms and take “the 

opportunity of surrendering themselves as prisoners of war” to the British—or lose the battle to 

“the [warriors], who were then assembled in great numbers.” At this point the Kentuckians were 

already receiving sniper fire from the rear and soon realized that if they tried to hold out too long 

“the buildings adjacent would be immediately set on fire” and they would be cut down while 

trying to escape the flames.49

For Procter, the U.S. surrender to his command was an important triumph—but returning to 

Amherstburg became a matter of great urgency. U.S. forces under General Harrison were 

already heading from the Maumee to the River Raisin, and the British feared that they might 

arrive within a few hours. With his able-bodied forces outnumbered by the large contingent of 

U.S. prisoners, Procter could hardly defend his position and guard hundreds of men who would 

turn on their captors if given the opportunity. Moreover, the large number of grievously 

wounded British regulars and Canadian militiamen needed care. In short, Procter’s victory over 

Winchester necessarily became a hurried retreat. Once the Kentuckians within Frenchtown had 

reference to Kentuckians and, earlier, Virginians—though it could also be applied to Euro-Americans more 

generally. It likely refers to the swords of military officers or, more specifically, the long daggers that Kentucky 

militiamen wore on their belts.

48 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 169-74; Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 65-66; Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 160-71, 

174-87; Au, War on the Raisin, 37-39; Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812, 136-37. On the recent American

attacks against Bodéwadmi and Myaamia villages in southwestern Michigan and northern Indiana, see R. David

Edmunds, The Potawatomis: Keepers of the Fire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 191-95; and

Skaggs, William Henry Harrison and the Conquest of the Ohio Country, 134-35. 49 Quotes are from Winchester to Harrison, January 23, 1813, in John Brannan, ed., Official Letters of Military and

Naval Officers of the United States During the War with Great Britain in the Years 1812, 13, 14, & 15, with Some

Additional Letters and Documents Elucidating the History of That Period (Washington: Way & Gideon, 1823), 133.
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grounded their arms and surrendered, the decision to return to Amherstburg was immediately set 

in motion. British wounded were placed on sleighs and sent back to the fort while the U.S. 

prisoners who could walk were assembled and counted—then ordered to march north and east 

across the frozen Detroit River. Because there were not enough available sleighs, some of the 

British wounded stayed in Frenchtown until the evening when transport was arranged for their 

removal to a field hospital a few miles north of Frenchtown (at either Stony Creek or Swan 

Creek). The 60 or so U.S. prisoners who were too badly wounded to make the long march to 

Fort Amherstburg, along with the 30 who stayed behind to care for them, remained in 

Frenchtown. They were guarded by two militia officers and three interpreters from the British 

Indian Department, who were nominally charged with preventing escapes as well intervening 

with any American Indians that might come into the settlement. Procter had agreed to send back 

any available sleighs the next day to transport the wounded prisoners over to Amherstbug, but all 

expected that U.S. troops would arrive from the south before that became necessary.50 

Colonel Procter’s information on the location and movement of Harrison’s forces was 

questionable, but it proved remarkably accurate. While the Second Battle of Frenchtown was 

still underway, Procter received word that a large U.S. force was marching along frozen Lake 

Erie—just eight miles south of Frenchtown. This report was later deemed erroneous, but a 

battalion of U.S. regulars that Harrison had sent north from the Maumee was on the ice at that 

time, though perhaps not so close. By the time the Kentuckians were about to surrender, 

however, the relief battalion was within two hours of the River Raisin. Harrison was several 

hours behind with two more battalions of Ohio and Kentucky militia, and it is possible that a 

substantial force of 900 could have arrived at Frenchtown by nightfall. However, after 

encountering several escapees from the rout of the U.S. 17th Infantry and Kentucky militia, 

Harrison and his officers halted their marches. After convening together, they “unanimously 

determined that as there could be no doubt of the total defeat of Genl. Winchester there was no 

motive that could authorize an immediate advance but that of attacking the enemy who were 

reported to be greatly superior in numbers and were certainly well provided with artillery.”51 

Though Harrison’s reasoning is understandable in light of the circumstances and incomplete 

information, the decision to hold back proved fateful. 

Aftermath 

Like the prisoners and their five-man guard, the habitants who remained in Frenchtown as well 

as the group of American Indians encamped a few miles north at Stony Creek also expected that 

some part of Harrison’s force would arrive by nightfall. Accordingly, the members of the Indian 

50 Au, War on the Raisin, 45-46; Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 74-76; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 174-77. 51 Procter’s information came from a Canadien militia scout who reported seeing a large military force on the ice. 

This sighting was later deemed a Fata Morgana—a kind of mirage across an expanse of ice or water that enlarges 

and alters the shape of a distant object—of a few Wyandotte drovers moving livestock north from the Sandusky 

area. Given the nature of a Fata Morgama, which presents enlarged reflections of objects beyond the horizon, this

may well have been a siting of the more distant American forces. The report to Procter is described in John Norton, 

The Journal of Major John Norton, 1816 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1970), 316-17. On the movements and 

decisions of Harrison’s troops on January 21-22, see Harrison to Secretary of War, January 24, 1813, in Messages 

and Letters of William Henry Harrison, 331-34; quote is from p. 332. Also see Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book 

of the War of 1812, 363-64; and Au, War on the Raisin, 46-48.
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Department would slip away to Amherstburg, the wounded prisoners would become the 

responsibility of their countrymen rather than the overtaxed British, and the habitants could start 

the process of cleaning up and sorting through their losses. The group of Confederacy warriors 

gathered a few miles to the north at Stony Creek would have kept an eye on the arriving army, 

but prudence and a desire to fight another day would have likely prevented them from engaging 

Harrison’s forces.52

By first light there was no sign or news of a U.S. relief force, and so the able-bodied prisoners 

began readying their wounded comrades for the trip to Amherstburg. By this time, however, the 

Canadian and Indian Department guards already knew that no such journey would take place. In 

the absence of U.S. troops from the south, a pre-dawn council at Stony Creek had determined to 

complete the victory that had been cut short by the U.S. surrender to the British. Soon after the 

guards learned of this decision, most departed. Since they had no authority over the actions of 

their American Indian allies, there was nothing they could do without endangering themselves. 

The last remaining interpreter from the Indian Department conveyed the news to Captain 

Nathaniel Hart, one of the U.S. wounded. In answer to Hart’s concerned question about what 

“the Indians intend[ed] to do,” the interpreter replied, "They intend to kill you." When Hart then 

asked the man to intervene in some way, the interpreter replied that doing so would effectively 

make him an ally of the U.S. and thus "they will as soon kill [me] as you.”53 The promised 

sleighs had not arrived and any that may have been en route would certainly have been warned 

off—either by the departed guards who were themselves heading back to Amherstburg or the 

American Indians still at Stony Creek.54

The event that became known as the “River Raisin Massacre” was not a sudden burst of 

collective violence. Rather, it started as a fairly deliberate taking of valuables and able-bodied 

captives that was later punctuated by the killing of the most severely wounded survivors of the 

previous days’ battles. According to witness accounts from habitants and prisoners, in the first 

hour or so after daybreak the number of American Indians that had come into Frenchtown was 

fairly small—with the few who spoke English engaging with some of the men who were taking 

care of the wounded. As Dr. Gustavus Bower later described the morning, “They did not molest 

any person or thing upon their first approach, but kept sauntering about until there were a large 

number collected, (say one or two hundred) at which time they commenced plundering the 

houses of the inhabitants, and the massacre of the wounded prisoners.” Even then, the killings 

followed a method that—however brutal—might be described as utilitarian. The wounded who 

could not travel were the primary victims, and they were killed with a suddenness that betrayed 

little or no emotion. The same could be said of the looting, the taking of able-bodied prisoners, 

52 Darnell, Journal, 57-60; Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 28-29. 53 Thomas P. Dudley, Battle and Massacre at Frenchtown, Michigan, January 1813 (Ann Arbor: Scholarly 

Publishing Office, University of Michigan Library, 2004), 3. Also see Au, War on the Raisin, 44; and Clift, 

Remember the Raisin!, 85-86. 54 While there are no recorded accounts of why the promised sleighs did not arrive from Amherstburg, there are 

several likely reasons. Two guards, along with an officer, had left Frenchtown around dawn and may well have met 

the sleighs on the road north of town or on the ice of the Detroit River. It is also possible that the sleighs may have 

been turned back at Brownstown or Stony Creek, where they would have learned from the American Indians still 

gathered there of the ensuing events at Frenchtown.
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and the burning of buildings and structures—behaviors that Dr. John Todd, a surgeon with the 

Kentucky 5th Regiment Volunter Militia later described as a kind of “orderly conduct.” A sense 

of deliberate order did not diminish, and perhaps intensified, the horrors that many would later 

describe. Indeed, the most gruesome recollections stemmed from the systematic nature of the 

killings and resulting treatment of the remains. Men were killed with just one or two blows, their 

bodies quickly stripped of clothing and often scalped, and the bloody corpse left where it had 

fallen. In places, recalled Elias Darnell, the ground was “strewed with the mangled bodies, and 

all of them were left like those slain in battle, on the 22nd, for birds and beasts to tear in pieces 

and devour.”55

By late-morning most of the Bodéwadmi, Wyandotte, Odawa, Ojibwe, Myaamia and others had 

departed toward Brownstown with their spoils and captives. All of the structures and buildings 

that had survived the previous days’ battles were destroyed, leaving the core area of Frenchtown 

in utter ruin. The number of men who were killed in Frenchtown that morning is not known, nor 

is there any clear accounting of the straggling prisoners who were cut down on the road north. 

Plausible estimates range between 30 and 80, with most counts putting the number closer to 60. 

The number of captives is equally unclear. Over the next several days most of the latter were 

either turned over to the British at Amherstburg or ransomed in the streets of Detroit. Several 

were taken to their captor’s villages, with some destinations as near as the River Rouge and 

others as far as the Straits of Mackinac. In accordance with the precepts of a “mourning war,” 

these men could expect two fates: kind treatment and adoption by the kin of an individual who 

had been killed by the Long Knives (and thus fill the place of the deceased); or killed as 

atonement. In either case the decision about their fate was generally left to the nearest female 

kin of the deceased.56

Remember the Raisin! 

The events of January 23, 1813, became known as the “River Raisin Massacre” in the United 

States, and quickly grew into the most famous and longest lasting echo of the Battles of 

Frenchtown. In March, President James Madison devoted a good portion of his Second 

Inaugural Address to a vivid condemnation of “[American Indians] armed with ... the hatchet 

55 "Statement of Dr. Gustavus M. Bower, 24 April 1813" in Barbarities of the Enemy; Exposed in a Report of the 

Committee of the House of Representatives of the United States, Appointed to Enquire into the Spirit and Manner in

Which the War Has Been Waged by the Enemy, and the Documents, Accompanying Said Report (Worcester: Isaac

Sturtevant, for Remark Dunnell, 1814), 139; "Statement of John Todd, M.D., 24 April 1813" in ibid., 145; Darnell, 

Journal, 62. For an overview of various American accounts, see Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 80-91. 

56 The most detailed estimates are from Au, War on the Raisin, 45-46; and Clift, Remember the 

Raisin!, 87. Both authors put the number of killed on January 23 near 60. For descriptions of 

captivity within American Indian communities after the Battles of Frenchtown, see Antal, A 

Wampum Denied, 198-99. On mourning wars see Timothy J. Shannon, "The Native American 

Way of War in the Age of Revolutions, 1754-1814," in War in an Age of Revolution, 1775-1815, 

eds. Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (Washington, D.C.; [New York]: German Historical 

Institute; Cambridge University Press, 2013), 140-42. Also see Thomas Abler, "Scalping, 

Torture, Cannibalism and Rape: An Ethnohistorical Analysis of Conflicting Cultural Values in 

War" Anthropologica 34:1 (1992): 3-20. 
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and the knife ..., devoted to indiscriminate massacre ..., eager to glut their ... thirst with the 

blood of the vanquished and to finish the work of torture and death on maimed and defenseless 

captives.” In this and other such accountings, the “massacre” took on a transformative 

significance. In Ohio and especially Kentucky, “Remember the Raisin!” became a recruiting 

slogan for more militia volunteers to join an Army that was only recently on the verge of 

collapse due to a lack of reenlistments. In subsequent battles, including the Battle of the Thames 

where Tecumseh and Stayeghtha fell, it became a fiery battle cry that would later be celebrated 

in print alongside other famous slogans of the war like “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights” and 

“Don’t Give Up the Ship.”57 

Unlike General Hull’s embarrassing defeat and surrender the previous summer, the death and 

capture of so many soldiers and militiamen at Frenchtown did not lead to widespread criticism of 

U.S. military leadership. Instead, as Madison’s Second Inaugural made clear, “British 

commanders”—and particularly Procter—were entirely at fault for having “extorted victory over 

the unconquerable valor of our troops” by the threat and example of “massacre from their 

[Native] associates.” In other words, Frenchtown was not a fair fight because, as Harrison made 

clear in a letter to Secretary of War James Monroe, “the British have no intention to conduct the 

war (at least in this quarter) upon those principles which have been held sacred by all civilized 

nations.”58

These were not new sentiments, and they had as much to do with oft repeated tropes about 

“Indian atrocities” as they did the recent events at Frenchtown.59 Since before the Revolution, 

the specter of “Savages ... exercising their wanton barbarities”—to quote George Washington—

inspired numerous military campaigns into the Great Lakes region, excused most every defeat 

suffered by U.S. forces, and explained the cause and purpose of informal conflicts west of the 

Appalachian Mountains between Euro-Americans and American Indian communities.60 In this 

context the magnitude of U.S. losses on the River Raisin was not a strike against the war effort, 

but an affirmation for prosecuting “a war of extermination” in the Great Lakes region. In the 

build-up to what became the War of 1812, while “preparations for war [were] openly going on,” 

President Jefferson directed Governors Hull and Harrison in 1807 to convey to the “tribes ... 

already expressing intentions hostile to the United States ... this solemn declaration of our un57 “James Madison, March 4, 1813. Speech, Second Inaugural,” The James Madison Papers, American Memory 

(Library of Congress) <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mjm.15_0108_0116> (accessed 30 January 2015). On the 

subsequent use of “Remember the Raisin!,” see Paul A. Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors' Rights in the War of 1812 

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 214, 218.

58 Madison, “Second Inaugural;” Harrison to Secretary of War, February 11, 1813, in Messages and Letters, 2:359. 

Also see Owens, Mr. Jefferson's Hammer, 128-87. 59 This term comes from Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Indian Atrocities: Narratives of the Perils and Sufferings of Dr. 

Knight and John Slover among the Indians During the Revolutionary War (Nashville: W.F. Bang, 1843); first 

published in 1783. In a prefatory note to his readers, Brackenridge noted “that the nature of an Indian is fierce and 

cruel, and that an extirpation of them would be useful to the world, and honorable to those who can effect it.”

60 Quote from George Washington to the President of Congress, October 5, 1776, in The Writings of George 

Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources 1745-1799, Vol. 6, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick (Washington 

Resources at the University of Virginia [online]) <http://etext.virginia.edu/washington/fitzpatrick/> (accessed 5 

February 2015). For a classic study of these issues, see Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of 

the Indian and the American Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
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alterable determination...; if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will 

never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi.... In war, they 

will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.” Hull repeated these sentiments during his 

short-lived invasion of Canada, when he issued a proclamation addressed to the 

“INHABITANTS OF CANADA!” threatening that if 

you should take part in the approaching contest, you will be considered & treated 

as enemies, & the horrors & calamities of war will stalk before you. If the 

barbarous & savage policy of Great Britain be pursued ..., the war, will be a war 

of extermination. The first stroke of the Tomahawk, the first attempt with the 

scalping knife, will be the signal for one indiscriminate scene of desolation. No 

white man found fighting by the side of an Indian, will be taken prisoner. Instant 

destruction will be his lot.61

Such expressions were almost verbatim repetitions of century-old views on American Indians 

and warfare, but they were colored by two generations of conflict dating back to before the 

French and Indian War (1754-1763). In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson 

made an explicit connection between “absolute [British] Tyranny” and American Indians. While 

the latter were reviled as “merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare, is an 

undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions,” their abilities to wage war were 

presumed to require the sponsorship of an imperial power.62 Through a kind of double-jeopardy, 

American Indians were also viewed as subjects and agents of British tyranny. When American 

Indians did not abide the norms of European standards of warfare, the British were at fault for 

not exercising sufficient control; conversely, the British were deemed weak and dishonorable 

whenever they relied on the support of American Indian fighters. The killings of wounded 

soldiers at the River Raisin, which U.S. government officials and the public widely—but 

erroneously—believed to have occurred while “British officers and soldiers silently and 

exultingly contemplated the scene,” was presented as one of the most dramatic examples of 

British tyranny. The “River Raisin Massacre” was a bloody confirmation that the U.S. was 

fighting what many called a “Second War of Independence,” and to remember the Raisin was to 

redouble the effort to finally destroy the twin menace of British tyranny and American Indian 

“perfidy.”63

To the Victors 

Despite frequent U.S. pronouncements to the contrary, the alliance between the British and the 

Native Confederacy did not have a senior partner. They shared a common set of goals (to halt 

61 Jefferson to Secretary of War [Henry Dearborn], August 28, 1807, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. IX: 

1807-1815, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (G.P Putnam's Sons, 1898), 132-33; Hull, “A Proclamation,” in Official Letters 

of Military and Naval Officers, 31. 62 “Declaration of Independence,” at Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, 

1774-1789 <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/bdsdcc.02101> (accessed 30 January 2015). 63 Alexander James Dallas, An Exposition of the Causes and Character of the War between the United States and 

Great Britain (Concord, N.H.: Isaac and Walter R. Hill, 1815), 90; Hickey, “Introduction,” in The War of 1812: 

Writings from America's Second War of Independence, ed. Hickey (New York: Library of America, 2013), n. pag.; 

Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W.W. Norton & 

Company, 2008), 251-53.
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and reverse the northwestward expansion of U.S. settlements, to sustain the British fur trade, and 

affirm a collective American Indian sovereignty in the Great Lakes region), but the alliance was 

also marked by a latent distrust on both sides. As the Shawnee war leader Tecumseh reminded 

Colonel Procter, the British had twice abandoned an alliance with American Indians—first at the 

Peace of Paris that ended the American Revolution in 1783, and later at the decisive Battle of 

Fallen Timbers in 1794 that eventually led to a vast cession of lands in Ohio. Understandably, 

Tecumseh was “afraid that [the British] will do so again.” Procter acknowledged as much in his 

correspondence with his superiors, noting that any “aid we may expect from the Indians will 

always be in proportion to their confidence in our strength and which they are too sensible is but 

small.” Yet British officers also complained that their allies were “fickle,” did not appreciate the 

larger strategic goals that guided British military actions, and often abandoned the field of battle 

when their own designs were accomplished.64

For the Native Confederacy warriors at Frenchtown, the hasty departure of British forces for 

Amherstburg was not “fickle,” but completely understandable. However, Procter’s desire to take 

care of his wounded and remove a large number of prisoners before Harrison’s troops arrived 

was a British concern that did not readily align with the personal or collective objectives of the 

American Indians who remained. For them the battles on January 18 and 22 were not distinct 

from the subsequent taking of captives, destruction of Frenchtown, and killing of wounded 

prisoners. When the expected U.S. troops failed to arrive, the status of the able-bodied prisoners 

from the previous day’s battle remained unchanged—with one exception. Unlike their fellows in 

Amherstburg, who were subject to British authority, these men belonged entirely to those 

members of the Native Confederacy who claimed them as their own. The same was true of the 

wounded, as well as the property of the habitants. 

As noted above, the able-bodied prisoners had particular value in the form of ransom, adoption, 

or a retribution killing. While the second and third alternatives followed age-old practices that 

sought to rebalance a household, family or community that was still mourning a loss, the first 

alternative was more akin to plunder.65 Unlike U.S. soldiers and Kentucky militiamen, 

Confederacy fighters did not draw from a ready set of stipends, bonuses, or payments for the 

risks they took. Their communities might receive gifts from the British, and any family 

members who travelled with them to Amherstburg obtained some material support, but otherwise 

a warrior received little more than ammunition and some rations. Consequently, victory in battle 

came with an implicit right to plunder. This not only compensated for past dangers or losses, but 

the rewards of plunder served as a point of honor for warriors who were expected to return to 

their communities with gifts and resources. Strategically, plundering also weakened the enemy’s 

position and, certainly through the entire Sixty Years War, often served as direct retribution for 

the destruction of American Indian towns by U.S. troops, militias and vigilantes. While taking 

64 Tecumseh quoted in Edmunds, Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership (Boston: Little, Brown, and 

Company, 1984), 204. Proctor quoted in Antal, A Wampum Denied, 150. Also see Antal, A Wampum Denied, 149, 

261, 383.

65 White, The Middle Ground, 343-351; Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 27, 34.
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prisoners to a captor’s home village could also achieve these various ends, obtaining ransom for 

a healthy and valued captive was more akin to the compensatory purposes of plunder.66

The burning and looting of Frenchtown that occurred on January 23 was also directly related to 

the previous day’s fighting. Just when the British called for a truce to initiate the process of 

surrender, the core of the village was nearly surrounded by Confederacy fighters and the 

Kentuckians were on the verge of being burned out. In short, what would have been the final 

stage of the Second Battle of Frenchtown was thwarted. The surrender denied the Confederacy a 

potent victory they were about to claim, and left intact a community and an array of structures 

that would be of great tactical significance to Harrison’s army. Burning and looting the village 

center thus made good on the purposes and prospects of the previous day’s battle, and forced the 

habitants to flee toward communities around Sandusky Bay.67 Destruction of the town also 

served as punishment to the habitants for making a definitive alliance with the U.S. In doing so 

they rejected an earlier plea for assistance from Stayeghtha (Roundhead) and Myeerah (Walk-inthe-Water), who hoped to draw on the history of good relations between nearby American Indian 

communities and the habitants of Frenchtown. The appeal for aid was also couched in a threat, 

however, and once Frenchtown effectively declared itself for the United States, the Wyandotte 

and their allies readily determined that “we will not consider you in future as friends, and the 

consequences [will] be very unpleasant.”68

The killing of the wounded at Frenchtown was horrific for those who died as well as the 

survivors who witnessed the killings, and certainly traumatized many of the latter. Yet in both 

respects it was not unlike the many killings of disarmed combatants that had occurred at the 

hands of Long Knives and American Indians since well before the American Revolution. Just a 

few months earlier General Hull had threatened “instant destruction”—with no chance of 

imprisonment—to any “white man found fighting by the side of an Indian;” the fate of the latter 

was too obvious to state. The Kentuckians who were surrounded by the combined forces of 

American Indians on January 22 expected a similar fate at the hands of American Indians—and 

thus preferred to die fighting. Instead of the frenzied mass killing that the Long Knives might 

have feared, the event known as the “River Raisin Massacre” only struck the badly wounded. 

The methodical nature of the killings, coupled with the unexpected suddenness of the deadly 

blows, appalled the survivors—but was nevertheless understood as atonement for recent events. 

More than random acts in a multi-generational “blood feud,” the killings were meant to 

correspond to specific American Indian losses in the previous days’ battles as well the death and 

destruction that accompanied attacks on several Bodéwadmi and Myaamia towns a few months 

earlier. A number of the Bodéwadmi and Myaamia who were in Frenchtown on January 23 

66 Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 98; Wayne E. Lee, "Peace Chiefs and 

Blood Revenge: Patterns of Restraint in Native American Warfare, 1500-1800." The Journal of 

Military History 71:3 (2007): 739-41. 67 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 95, 172, 177; Au, War on the Raisin, 20. 68 Barbarities of the Enemy, 132.
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came from these same villages, and certainly knew that the attacks had come from Winchester’s 

forces.69

The most gruesome aspects of the killing and destruction that occurred on January 23 involved 

the mutilation of corpses. The taking of scalps was widely noted by survivors and later 

commentators, who accused Procter of paying bounties for each Euro-American scalp. No 

bounties were offered by Procter, and even his harshest U.S. critic—Michigan Territorial Judge 

Augustus Woodward—attributed the violence on January 23 to “an ignoble revenge on [the] 

prisoners” that needed no cash incentive. However, scalping had a much broader significance 

than revenge or retaliation for specific wrongs. In many respects a scalp taken from an enemy 

was something like a service medal—a demonstration of prowess and a mark of honor to be 

displayed in a ceremony upon the warrior’s return home. While scalps could be kept as a sort of 

personal trophy, in which the slain foe’s power became a possession of the victor, they were also 

incorporated into a community’s ceremonial life. After a series of Victory Dances (or “Scalp 

Dances”) following a successful conflict, scalps were often left as offerings at grave sites. 

Among the Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk, aka Winnebago) and other groups, they were also 

incorporated into war bundles, objects that were “the focus of important ceremonies ... that 

involved a series of supernatural beings associated with war.”70

By far the most galling and intentionally offensive action was the mutilation and dismemberment 

of the dead. Though interpreted as a frightful warning to the inhabitants of Frenchtown and U.S. 

troops that would soon be coming into the area, this was primarily about affecting the afterlives 

of the vanquished and the community where they died. Habitants were threatened against 

burying the bodies so that the violated corpses remained in the open to be picked over and 

scattered by animals, without the rights of burial and the ceremonies that would bring peace to 

the dead or their communities. More than any other action, this violation of the dead was 

directly related to the actions of Kentucky militiamen the previous autumn. The Bodéwadmi 

leader Segnak (Blackbird, the Younger) explained such actions to the British a few months later, 

noting that when the “Big Knives” destroyed villages the previous fall, “they did not allow our 

dead to rest. They dug up their graves, and the bones of our ancestors were thrown away and we 

could never find them to return them to the ground .... The way they treat our killed, and the 

remains of those that are in their graves in the west, makes our people mad when they meet the 

Big Knives.” Segnak made it clear that “We do not disturb their dead,” but their transgressions 

require us “to follow their example.”71 While such actions and reasoning could only inflame a 

desire within the U.S. to “Remember the Raisin!,” for Segnak and other Confederacy fighters 

they represented an extreme form of victory: one that vanquished the enemy and mitigated the 

effects of recent violations of their own dead. 

69 Peter Schmalz, The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 114-16; Skaggs,

William Henry Harrison and the Conquest of the Ohio Country, 125-29; Au, War on the Raisin, 50-51.

70 Abler, "Scalping, Torture, Cannibalism and Rape:” 7-9; Nancy Oesterieich Lurie, "Winnebago," in Handbook of

North American Indians: Northeast, 695-96. 

71 David D. Plain, The Plains of Aamjiwnaang: Our History (Victoria, BC: Trafford Publishing,

2007), 85-86. 
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Denouement 

The Battles of Frenchtown, along with the subsequent killings and destruction on January 23, 

capped a six-month stretch of military success for the Native Confederacy that included the routs 

at Brownstown and Maguaga, participation in the siege and capture of Detroit, engagements with 

small detachments of U.S. troops on the lower Maumee, and the gathering of important 

intelligence for the British at Amherstburg as well as for Tecumseh and other Confederacy 

leaders in the Detroit River area. In concert with these earlier actions, Frenchtown proved a 

smashing victory that marked the highpoint of the Confederacy’s strength during the War of 

1812. The first U.S. Army of the North West had been completely defeated just eight weeks 

after the official declaration of war, and the left wing of the reconstituted Army of the North 

West was annihilated at Frenchtown barely five months later. In the ensuing months, groups of 

Confederacy fighters moved at will through present-day Michigan and northwestern Ohio, where 

they kept a close eye on Harrison’s stalled army on the lower Maumee as well as on nearby 

settlements.72 As spring approached and Procter received new reinforcements at Amherstburg, 

hopes ran high within the Confederacy that a joint offensive with the British might drive the U.S. 

forces into southern Ohio. Such a victory would restore much of the territory that had been lost 

since the mid-1790s, and thus achieve the vision that Tecumseh conveyed to Harrison in 1810; 

namely, “to tear up” past treaties, “stop this evil” of coerced land cessions since the 1780s, and 

restore “for the red men ... a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be 

now—for it was never divided, but belongs to us all.”73

While the Confederacy’s prospects seemed to broaden, General Harrison concentrated his 

command at the Maumee Rapids where the construction of Fort Meigs commenced just ten days 

after the Battles of Frenchtown. Harrison needed to protect supplies and artillery for a still 

planned invasion of Upper Canada, shelter his diminishing command (which shrank to just 700 

by winter’s end as enlistment periods for Virginia and Pennsylvania militia service expired and 

the volunteers returned home), and provide a northern assembly point for expected new recruits. 

Given its significance to the U.S. position in the western Great Lakes, Fort Meigs became the 

focus of the next allied British-Confederacy offensive. After delays caused by a spate of bad 

weather, a combined force of approximately 530 British regulars, 460 Canadian militia, and 

1,250 Confederacy warriors led by Tecumseh and Stayeghtha (Roundhead) assembled in the 

Detroit River area in mid-April then established a siege of Fort Meigs on April 28. The weathercaused delays thwarted their efforts in several ways, however. Harrison had time to move 300 

additional troops to the nearly finished fort in mid-April, and 1,200 Kentucky militia arrived 

soon after the siege began—which brought the combined U.S. forces to approximately 2,300. 

Weeks of cold rain had also softened the earthen ramparts and makeshift embankments that had 

been thrown up within the fort’s perimeter. These absorbed most of the British ordinance and 

left the rest of the fort complex relatively undamaged. The siege lasted a week and involved one 

significant battle on May 5 that resulted in heavy casualties among the newly arrived 

72 Au, War on the Raisin, 60-61; Cecil King, Balancing Two Worlds: Jean-Baptiste Assiginack 

and the Odawa Nation, 1768-1866 (Saskatoon: Dr. Cecil King, 2013), 133-34. 73 Tecumseh quoted in Giles B. Gunn, Early American Writing (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 412-13. Also 

see Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 139-41; and Edmunds, Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership, 130-35, 

189-91.
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Kentuckians. Nevertheless, the lifting of the siege amounted to an important victory for Harrison 

and signaled a change of fortune for the British-Confederacy alliance.74

The siege demonstrated that Procter’s limited artillery was not capable of dislodging an 

entrenched U.S. position, and confirmed that the American Indian preference for making swift 

strikes from cover was not conducive to siege warfare. After some debate and disagreement 

between Procter and Tecumseh about the value of another siege, the alliance returned to Fort 

Miegs in late July and then moved on to Fort Stephenson (near Sandusky) in early August. The 

second siege of Fort Miegs was even less successful than the first, while the attack on Fort 

Stephenson resulted in significant British casualties. These failures weakened the alliance, 

which was already suffering from a lack of supplies for British troops, Canadian militia, and the 

large number of Confederacy warriors and their families based near Amherstburg. Moreover, 

siege warfare exasperated the Native Confederacy since, as Stayeghtha (Roundhead) stated, it 

was like trying to fight a “ground hog under the ground” that refused to come out. There was no 

honor and no gain in such an encounter. Through the rest of August, a number of Confederacy 

fighters and their families departed the Detroit River area and returned to their villages and 

crops.75

After the failed siege of Fort Stephenson, Procter’s only option was to consolidate his forces 

around Amherstburg. After months of chronic shortfalls in supplies and troops, which were 

increasingly channeled toward the defense of Lower Canada (present-day southern Québec), 

there was little to do but sustain British, Canadian, and Confederacy forces as best as possible 

and assist in the preparation and arming of vessels in the Royal Naval Dockyard. By then the 

war in the western theater had shifted to a maritime contest for control of Lake Erie, and both the 

U.S. and the British had to await its outcome before making any strategic decisions. The single 

and decisive engagement came on September 10, when Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry 

defeated and captured the entire British squadron in the vicinity of the Lake Erie Islands—about 

30 miles east by southeast of Frenchtown. With this victory the U.S. could move supplies and 

troops at will on western Lake Erie and—with the exception of a long and difficult land route up 

the Thames River Valley—effectively severed Amherstburg from present-day eastern Ontario 

and Québec.76

General Harrison immediately pressed his new advantage by marshaling the 5,000-strong Army 

of the North West for another invasion of Canada, with about half ferrying up from Sandusky to 

Amherstburg and the rest travelling on land from Fort Meigs by way of Frenchtown and Detroit. 

74 John R. Elting, Amateurs, to Arms! A Military History of the War of 1812 (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 

1991), 104-106; Skaggs, William Henry Harrison and the Conquest of the Ohio Country, 155-62; Nelson, Men of 

Patriotism, Courage & Enterprise: Fort Meigs in the War of 1812 (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 1985), 53-68. 75 Elting, Amateurs, to Arms!, 107-109; Nelson, Men of Patriotism, 111-14; Alec R. Gilpin, The War of 1812 in the 

Old Northwest (East Lansing, MI: The Michigan State University Press, 1958), 205-207; Antal, A Wampum Denied, 

275-280. Stayeghtha (Roundhead) quoted in Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (Lincoln: University of Nebraska

Press, 1983), 137.

76 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 275-293; Skaggs and Gerard T. Altoff, A Signal Victory: The Lake Erie Campaign,

1812-1813 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1997), 118-148.
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454

Procter, for his part, hastily prepared for a mass overland retreat from Detroit and Amherstburg 

to Burlington Heights (present-day Hamilton, Ontario) at the western end of Lake Ontario. 

Seeing these preparations, Confederacy leaders chastised Procter for abandoning the alliance and 

accused him of cowardice. Speaking for many, Tecumseh demanded that Fort Amherstburg and 

its artillery be left to the Confederacy to defend against the U.S. invasion. Upon learning that all 

of the fort’s artillery had been used by the British squadron that fell to Commodore Perry, and 

that U.S. control of Lake Erie made any position in the Detroit River area indefensible, many in 

the Confederacy decided to leave for their home villages or prepare to fight another way in 

another place. Of the approximately 3,000 warriors of the Native Confederacy then in the 

vicinity of Amherstburg, only a third chose to join the British retreat and make a stand against 

Harrison’s army somewhere along the Thames River.77

As Harrison’s forces pushed northward along the western edge of Lake Erie, Colonel Richard M. 

Johnson's Kentucky Mounted Riflemen—along with men from the Frenchtown settlement—

were the first to arrive at the River Raisin on September 27. They were followed a few days later 

by militia under the command of Kentucky Governor Isaac Shelby, and the remains of as many 

as 65 dead from the Battles of Frenchtown were interred in a mass grave.78 By this time U.S. 

forces were already garrisoned at Detroit, Sandwich (present-day Windsor, ON), and 

Amherstburg, and Harrison’s lead forces were in pursuit of Procter and the Confederacy. On 

October 4, Harrison came within striking distance near Moraviantown (present-day Chatham, 

ON). The following afternoon Harrison arrayed his combined forces, which numbered more 

than 3,000, against an allied force of some 450 infantrymen and militia who were well enough to 

bear arms, and another 500-800 Confederacy warriors who were with the main body of the 

retreating army. Rallying to the cry of “Remember the Raisin!,” Johnson’s cavalrymen rushed 

the overwhelmed British forces and the Battle of the Thames had become a rout almost before it 

began. Confederacy warriors, using the cover of wooded marshlands, held off the onslaught for 

about 30 minutes before breaking into a running retreat. While casualty numbers were not 

particularly high, and about equal on all sides, the U.S. victory was total. More than half of the 

British fighting force was taken prisoner, as were nearly all of those who were unable to bear 

arms. Though Procter and most of his command escaped, and Confederacy warriors made a 

successful retreat, both Tecumseh and Stayeghtha (Roundhead) were dead.79

The Battle of the Thames was not the death knell of the Native Confederacy, but it did lead to a 

dramatic fracturing of the alliance. Once the magnitude of the U.S. victory was known, most of 

the groups of Bodéwadmi, Wyandotte, Myaamia (Miami), Waayaahtanwa (Wea), Odawa, and 

Ojibwe that had abandoned their alliances with the British during the retreat from Amherstburg 

chose to refrain from further conflict. This decision, and the new circumstances in which it 

occurred, was formalized just days after the Battle of the Thames through a provisional armistice 

77 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 297-309; John Sugden, Tecumseh's Last Stand (Norman: 

University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 62-71. 

78 Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides, 288-89; Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 101-104.

79 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 331-349; Sugden, Tecumseh's Last Stand, 105-135. 

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agreement with General Harrison.80 The armistice generally applied to American Indian 

communities from the Detroit River area to south of Lake Michigan, and groups of Ojibwe 

(Chippewa), Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk, aka Winnebago), Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), Thâkîwa (Sauk, or 

Sac), and Meskwaki (Fox) from areas further north and west held to their alliance with the 

British stationed at Mackinac and continued to push back against remote U.S. settlements and 

military outposts. Still others moved eastward to fight with the main force of the British military 

against U.S. forces along the Niagara Peninsula. Ohio and Kentucky militiamen carried on in a 

similar manner, but in a different theater of the war, with a number joining the forces led by 

General Andrew Jackson in the South.81

Over the next several months, the British contemplated several plans for retaking the western 

reaches of Upper Canada and Michigan, and the Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi) war leader Main Poc 

assembled as many as 1,200 Confederacy warriors near Detroit in March 1814. The uncertain 

course of the war around Lake Ontario, an early spring thaw, and gnawing doubts about troop 

numbers and equipment all stymied any British movements toward western Lake Erie—and 

ultimately put off a potential rendezvous with Main Poc and his forces. Small incursions by 

British and U.S. forces occasionally occurred in the Thames River Valley, and U.S. settlements 

in Michigan still suffered from intermittent raids by small groups of American Indians. Toward 

the end of spring, however, two years of war and near-constant military requisitioning of crops, 

cattle, and supplies had created a blighted landscape that extended well to the east and southwest 

of the Detroit River area. With the population thinned, crops destroyed, fields unplanted, 

commerce shut down, and nagging fears that war might return, the region was almost as hard for 

the U.S. to manage as it would have been for the British to invade and reestablish themselves. 

For these two antagonists, the result was stalemate and stagnation. However, life for American 

Indian communities around the western Lake Erie Basin became desperate. Some had lost all of 

their crops to U.S. raids the previous summer, and all were now effectively cut off from British 

supplies. The hunger and disease that plagued their communities through the winter of 1813-

1814 continued to haunt them through spring, and former concerns about war, neutrality or 

alliances gave way to elemental concerns about subsistence and survival.82

If nothing else, such desperate straits confirmed that the war in the western Great Lakes region 

was already over and the Native Confederacy had lost. This general defeat found its first official 

expression in a treaty council at Greenville, Ohio, in July 1814. Held at the same location as the 

first Treaty of Greenville of 1795, which ended the series of conflicts known as the Northwest 

Indian War (1785-1795) and included the cession of most of present-day Ohio to the United 

States, the second Treaty of Greenville did not involve any new land or boundary issues. Rather 

it served to “give peace” to groups that assisted U.S. forces or maintained neutrality in the recent 

conflicts, and to “extend this indulgence” of peace to groups that had been allied with the 

80 “Harrison to Secretary of War, October 10, 1813,” “Armistice between Harrison and the Indians, October 14, 

1813,” “Harrison Proclamation to Indians Armistice, October 16, 1813” all in Messages and Letters of William 

Henry Harrison, vol. 2, 573-75, 576-79. 81 Gillum Ferguson, Illinois in the War of 1812 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 110-114. 82 Antal, A Wampum Denied, 378-87; James A. Clifton, The Prairie People: Continuity and Change in Potawatomi 

Indian Culture, 1665-1965 (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), 210-214.
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Confederacy. The treaty, which identified the Myaamia (Miami), Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi), 

Odawa (Ottawa), Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), Wyandotte (Wyandot, a.k.a. Huron), Lunaapeew 

(Lenape, or Delaware), Shawnee, and Onöndowága (Seneca), included signatories from different 

villages in present-day Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan and represented a fair spectrum of the 

groups that had divided over the issue of war against the United States. The treaty also obliged 

the signatories to aid the U.S. in its war efforts against Great Britain and “Indian tribes as still 

continue hostile,” and further specified that none could seek peace with the other tribes without 

the consent of the United States.83

With conflict effectively over in the western Great Lakes, the only active theaters of war in the 

summer and fall of 1814 were on the Niagara Peninsula, along the Eastern Seaboard, and in the 

South. The general momentum of the war shifted toward the British in the summer of 1815 

when the decisive victory over Napoleon at Waterloo allowed the British to direct more forces to 

North America. In the Chesapeake region the Royal Navy terrorized coastal communities and in 

late August a combined force of British Regulars and Royal Marines burned the public buildings 

in Washington, D.C.—including the White House. Though dramatic, these events were not 

significant enough to change the course of the war. Nevertheless, they did help end the basic 

stalemate that had plagued diplomatic negotiations for months. After two years of war, both 

sides concluded that outright victory was mutually impossible and thus, even as the White House 

lay in ruins, the United States and the United Kingdom made a concerted push to negotiate a 

lasting peace. During the initial talks to end the war, the British promoted the possibility of 

creating an independent American Indian territory in the western Great Lakes region. As 

negotiations increasingly focused on ending the war rather than solving any of its original 

causes, however, the idea was pushed aside and eventually dropped. This was true of most every 

concern that preceded the war and inspired its initial prosecution, and by the time the two nations 

completed the Treaty of Ghent on December 24, 1814, they could only agree on two key 

elements: the war between the British and the U.S. was effectively a draw; and both sides saw 

little benefit in furthering the conflict. Consequently, the official ending of the war simply 

amounted to status quo ante bellum (the state existing before war).84

The second Treaty of Greenville, which preceded the Treaty of Ghent by some five months, was 

also predicated on the same concept of status quo ante bellum—as it existed in 1811—but 

recognized a possible continuation of hostilities with groups not covered by the treaty. This 

distinction was addressed in September 1815 at the Treaty of Springwells, which marks the 

official end of the War of 1812 in the area that people in the U.S. generally referred to as the 

Northwest. Taking place within the future boundaries of Fort Wayne in Detroit, Michigan, the 

treaty council included the same principles who signed the Treaty of Greenville in 1814 as well 

as communities and groups that were directly aligned with the Confederacy and had fought 

against the U.S. at Frenchtown and elsewhere. All told the treaty involved Wyandotte, 

Lunaapeew, Shawnee, Bodéwadmi, and Onöndowága from the Detroit River area as well as 

83

“Treaty with the Wyandot, etc., 1814” in Charles Kappler, ed. Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties Vol. II

(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 105-106.

84 Taylor, The Civil War of 1812, 411-419. 

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Myaamia, Bodéwadmi, Hoocąągra (Ho-Chunk, aka Winnebago), Odawa (Ottawa), and Ojibwe 

(Chippewa) from further north and west.85

Though it repeated much of the same language used in the second Treaty of Greenville, the 

Treaty of Springwells was not a simple peace treaty. For the groups associated with the 

Confederacy, accepting conditions as they existed in 1811 amounted to a repudiation of all the 

reasons they had fought against the United States. These included the vast land cession of 1795 

as well as subsequent treaties that ceded large portions of present-day Indiana, Michigan, and 

Ohio. The Confederacy did not consider these treaties valid in 1811, nor did its leaders 

recognize the right of individual village leaders to sign away large tracts of land that other 

American Indian communities used or resided in. As the Shawnee leader Tecumseh stated to 

Harrison at Vincennes in 1810, the members of the Confederacy viewed such dealings as 

“pretended treat[ies]” that resulted from concerted efforts by government officials to “make 

differences between” and then “separate the tribes” to acquire land from each group “one by one, 

and advise them not to come into [the Confederacy].” “No [single] tribe [or individual village 

leader] has the right to sell,” he continued, “even to each other, much less to strangers who 

demand all, and will take no less.”86

Along with a direct acknowledgement of previous treaties, the Treaty of Springwells also 

implied an affirmation of the process by which they were conducted. By identifying specific 

groups and village leaders “associated with Great Britain in the late war between the United 

States and that power,” but making no reference to their collective association with the 

Confederacy, the treaty essentially reinstated the framework that Tecumseh described as 

duplicitous and invalid. Treaty signatories only represented their specific communities, and 

individually acknowledged the suzerainty of the United States over their external affairs. With 

the Confederacy defeated, and its former constituents “under the protection of the United States, 

and of no other power whatsoever,” the Treaty of Springwells effectively reopened the process 

of land cessions that had ended in 1811.87 

The War of 1812 may have resulted in a draw between the United States and Great Britain, but 

in the western Great Lakes the war achieved all that the War Hawks hoped to gain short of 

acquiring portions of Canada. The British had been driven out of the region, the Confederacy 

defeated, and the Jeffersonian program of aggressive land acquisition reinstated. The victory 

was as complete for the U.S. side as the defeat was for American Indian communities—whether 

they sided with the Confederacy or not. Within six years of the Treaty of Springwells council, 

the United States had concluded multiple treaties with various American Indian groups in the 

Great Lakes region and acquired vast tracts of land in Ohio, and the present states of Michigan, 

85 “Treaty with the Wyandot, etc., 1815” in Kappler, ed. Indian Affairs, 117-119. 86 “Tecumseh's Speech to Governor William Henry Harrison, Vincennes,” Indiana Historical Society 

<http://images.indianahistory.org/cdm/ref/collection/dc050/id/560> (accessed 7 April 2015).

87 “Treaty with the Wyandot, etc., 1815”, 118.Very similar terms were incorporated into a series of treaties 

conducted with more westerly groups in 1815-16. See “Treaty with the Potawatomi” (1815), “Treaty with the 

Piankashaw” (1815), “Treaty with the Sioux of the Lakes” (1815), “Treaty with the Sioux of St. Peter’s River” 

(1815), “Treaty with the Yankton Sioux” (1815), “Treaty with the Sauk” (1816), “Treaty with the Winnebago” 

(1816), “Wea and Kickapoo” (1816), “Treaty with the Ottawa, etc.” (1816), and “Treaty with the Sioux” (1816); all 

in Kappler, ed. Indian Affairs, 110-115, 126-133. 
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Indiana, and Illinois. The pace of treaty making slowed through the 1820s, but increased again 

in the late 1820s. With the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1832, the process of land 

cessions accelerated further and became fully associated with relocating American Indian 

communities on lands to the west of the Mississippi River. While some groups managed to 

remain on small reservations in Michigan and Wisconsin, the majority were forced to move west. 

These coerced removals were often disorderly and poorly implemented, with many communities 

suffering exposure, severe hunger and death during the westward treks. In their place, growing 

populations of Euro-Americans, recent European immigrants, and some former African 

American slaves created what has since become known as the Heartland of America. Though 

often referred to in the United States as the “Forgotten War,” the War of 1812—especially in the 

Upper Midwest—was one of the most transformative in the nation’s history. To many American 

Indians with current and historical connections to the Great Lakes region, the losses that 

followed the Battles on the River Raisin are clearly remembered as the beginning of a period that 

is directly linked to the subsequent removal era.88

Battle Setting and Archeology 

The historical significance of the River Raisin Battlefield Site derives from several factors, but the 

site’s physical setting is especially distinct. Unlike other battles and engagements in the western 

Great Lakes region during the War of 1812—or over the previous six decades—the events at 

Frenchtown centered on platted land in an inhabited area along an important travel corridor. 

Consequently, the events and their effects were recorded and recalled by habitants and U.S. civilians 

in the immediate and near vicinity. The scale of the battles, their strategic importance, and the 

amount of destruction, death, and captivity that ensued all resulted in a great deal of subsequent 

attention. Military reports and maps were produced noting physical landmarks and structures as well 

as the movements and positions of various forces. Official assessments by British and U.S. officers, 

as well as formal investigations into the events of January 23, 1813, resulted in numerous recorded 

interviews with witnesses and principal actors who recalled various details of the battles, their 

aftermath, and their setting. These were followed in 1817 by a map and report that delineated 

property lines and the locations of damaged or destroyed structures for a case brought to the U.S. 

Court of Claims by affected property holders.

89

88 The material on these subjects is voluminous. For brief but thorough overviews, see William A. Hunter, “History 

of the Ohio Valley,” in Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15: Northeast, 592-93; Lyle M. Stone and 

Donald Chaput, “History of the Upper Great Lakes Area,” Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15: 

Northeast, 607-609; Tanner, ed., Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, 120-167; Andrew R. L. Cayton, “The 

Meanings of the Wars for the Great Lakes,” in Sixty Years War for the Great Lakes, eds. Skaggs and Nelson, 373-

390.

89 Personal accounts and reports of the battles and their aftermath are referenced in the Narrative Statement of 

Significance. For later recollections in the 19th century, and the historical memory of residents in Monroe, see 

Charles Lanman, The Red Book of Michigan: A Civil, Military and Biographical History Michigan: A Civil, 

Military and Biographical History (Detroit : Washington: E.B. Smith & Co.; Philp & Solomons, 1871), 64-79; 

Benson J. Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1869), 360-362; 

John McClelland Bulkley, History of Monroe County Michigan: A Narrative Account of Its Historical Progress, Its 

People, and Its Principal Interests. Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1913), 57-86, 126-136.. Patrick 
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This wealth of information, corroborated with persistent landscape features like the River Raisin 

shoreline, Mason Run, the route of Hull’s Trace, and the boundaries of ribbon farms (aka long lots) 

along present-day north-south trending streets and property lines, provides a remarkably detailed 

reference for the events and locales associated with the battles and their aftermath. The documentary 

record has also provided an important guide for several archeological investigations which have

confirmed the locations of some destroyed structures and uncovered materials directly related to 

specific battle engagements. While none of these investigations have resulted in significant 

reinterpretations of the events that occurred in January 1813, they do confirm the physical integrity 

of the site in two ways. First, by ground truthing the documentary record and, second, by 

demonstrating that some archeological resources remain intact and in situ. The latter condition was 

confirmed through excavations of historically identified sites as well as the discovery that the 

original paper mill was built atop a two-foot layer of compacted cinder and clay that effectively 

sealed and protected much of the early nineteenth-century soil strata from a century of construction, 

expansion, dumping, and demolition.

Though significant for identifying and confirming the location of an important settlement’s destroyed 

remnants that was destroyed, archeological research has not otherwise “yielded ... information 

important in prehistory or history” —and it is unclear if it “may be likely to yield ... [additional] 

information important to prehistory or history.” 90 Consequently, the expanded site is not being 

considered in terms of National Register Criterion D. Yet this updated nomination fully concurs with 

the conclusion of two archeologists who have conducted research at the River Raisin Battlefield Site: 

namely, that “[archeological] contexts ... add an important dimension to the historical data and 

strongly support the significance of the [expanded] site.” 91

The first archeological studies of the battlefield area began in the late 1970s, but they were long 

preceded (and partly informed) by accidental discoveries of human remains and battle debris. 

Following the destruction of Frenchtown on January 23, 1813, most of the habitants who lived 

within or close to the battle area departed for Detroit or towards the Maumee Bay and Sandusky. 

While the remains of a few individuals were surreptitiously buried or hidden under some brush, it 

was not until eight months later that burial parties gathered the skeletal remains scattered throughout 

the battle area. These were interred in mass graves, but subsequent finds were buried individually. 

Items related to the battle were exposed with some frequency into the middle of the nineteenth 

century, generally as the result of preparing fields or constructing homes as the battlefield area

developed into a mixture of residences and plant nurseries. In 1904, the partial remains of four 

separate bodies were uncovered during the construction of a monument along the north bank of the 

River Raisin, near the identified sites of two homes that were destroyed in the aftermath of the 

Second Battle of Frenchtown. In the first decades of the 20th century, industrial development and 

road building exposed ammunition, cannon balls and other battle-related items as well as skeletal 

Tucker, Donna Nightingale and Dennis Au, Private Land Claims of the Rivière-aux-Raisins Area, 1779 – 1812 

(Monroe: Frenchtown Chapter of the French-Canadian Heritage Society of Michigan, 2001). 90 Quotation of Criterion D is from Barbara Little, et al, National Register Bulletin 36: Guidelines for Evaluating 

and Registering Archeological Properties (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 

2000), 19.

91 G. Michael Pratt, William E. Rutter, Theodore J. Ligibel, and Jeffrey L. Green, “River Raisin Battlefield 

National Historic Nomination, March 2, 2009 [DRAFT], 5 (document on file at Office of the Michigan State 

Archeologist). Pratt and Rutter, whose reports are cited below, jointly and independently conducted archeological 

research at the River Raisin Battlefield Site between 1999 and 2006.
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fragments in areas that would have been within the fenced area of Frenchtown. As the archeologist 

Barbara Mead noted in the original River Raisin Battlefield Site NRHP nomination, “the confused 

conditions of burial and the long history of finds of human bone within the site, [make it] extremely 

probable that both interred and scattered remains yet exist.”92

While many of the materials and artifacts that have been found within the battlefield area are 

associated with the events of January 1813, some of the human remains uncovered in the earlynineteenth century were from earlier American Indian use and residence. During the 1915 

construction of a River Raisin Paper Company mill facility, at least one of the exposed skeletons 

came from an American Indian cemetery that long predated the establishment of Frenchtown. 

Accidental finds and amateur surface collections have also revealed materials associated with 

American Indian populations, but given the circumstances of their discovery they cannot be reliably 

attributed to any specific period or tradition. In 1976, the first professional archeological 

investigation of the battlefield area did reveal lithic and artifact fragments associated with Late 

Archaic (ca. 4,500-3,000 BP) and Late Woodland (ca. 1,400-400 BP) periods. Another 

archeological survey in 1999 uncovered hundreds of artifacts composed mostly of ceramics, lithics, 

and faunal remains associated with an American Indian village site (ca. 1450-1650). These finds 

likely correspond to similar sites throughout the River Raisin watershed and Western Lake Erie 

Basin, but to date the focus of archeological work has been on the soil layer that corresponds to the 

core of Frenchtown and the events of January 1813.93

The archeological studies of the battlefield area that occurred in 1976-1977 were conducted by 

Commonwealth Associates with the support of the Monroe County Historical Commission. Based 

on careful historical research and the reports of a local collector, the first season of work resulted in a 

controlled surface collection of the field that lies northeast of the current RRNBP Visitor Center. 

Along with a significant concentration of lead shot, artifacts included a brass button and brass hat 

ornament associated with U.S. military uniforms during the War of 1812. Together these items 

confirmed the location of the U.S. 17th Infantry encampment when it was attacked on the morning of 

January 22. In 1977 the archeological team examined a telephone cable trench that had been cut 

through the core area of Frenchtown, and were able to identify and partially excavate cellar walls 

from the Hubert LaCroix, Jean Baptiste Jerome, and George McDougal homesites that had been 

destroyed in January 1813. Other artifacts included a door latch, a military button, and a Britishmade pistol flint.94

92 Barbara Mead, National Register of Historic Places, River Raisin Battlefield Site, Monroe County, Michigan, 

National Register #82000542 (1982), 2. For a general overview of these matters see G. Michael Pratt, William E. 

Rutter, Theodore J. Ligibel and Jeffrey L. Green, [Draft] River Raisin Battlefield National Historic Landmark 

Nomination (2009), 5-6. More specific references are in notes 89-93 below. 93 Talcott E. Wing, "History of Monroe County, Michigan," in Pioneer Collections: Report of the Pioneer Society of 

the State of Michigan Together with Reports of County, Town, and District Pioneer Societies, Vol. IV (Lansing: 

Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Company, 1881), 321. John McClelland Bulkley, History of Monroe County 

Michigan: A Narrative Account of Its Historical Progress, Its People, and Its Principal Interests. Chicago: The 

Lewis Publishing Company, 1913), 401; Kenneth E. Dodge, Fisheries Special Report 23: River Raisin Assessment

(Lansing: Michigan Department of Natural Resources, 1998), 19-20; James E. Fitting, C. Stephan Demeter, Donald 

J. Weir, “An Archeological Survey of the River Raisin Battlefield Site, Prepared for the Monroe County Historical

Commission by Commonwealth Associates Inc. (1977), copy on file in the Office of the Michigan State

Archeologist, East Lansing, MI.

94 Fitting et al, “An Archeological Survey of the River Raisin Battlefield Site” (1977).
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A Phase II/III excavation in 1980-81 of two areas to the west of Hull’s Trace (present-day North 

Dixie Highway) attempted to find structural elements that were identified on historical maps of 

Frenchtown. These included the Godfroy barn, which was destroyed during the Second Battle of 

Frenchtown, the puncheon fence that protected Kentuckians from British assaults, and the Godfroy 

home site near the north bank of the River Raisin. While excavations of the site near the river 

revealed subsurface evidence of some structural elements that may have corresponded to a root cellar 

or privy from the 1810s, all the recovered artifacts and materials from the various sites post-dated the 

battles. The excavations did demonstrate that large portions of the battlefield were sealed under a 

layer of early 20th-century ash and cinder fill that was laid down during the construction of the paper 

mill—and thus indicated that subsurface materials remained relatively undisturbed throughout most 

of the paper mill site.95

In 1991 Commonwealth Cultural Resources Group conducted archeological monitoring, shovel 

testing, and trenching during the demolition of two abandoned mill structures owned by the Monroe 

Paper Company. Some trenching beneath the fill and structural debris at a site along East Elm 

Avenue to the east of the Canadian National Railway Bridge did reveal prehistoric debitage, but no 

artifacts were encountered to provide a sufficient basis for determining an identified culture phase. 

Brick and mortar was encountered and attributed to a ca. 1810-1840 setting, but could not be 

identified with any known historical structure. Other portions of the site, where topsoil had been

removed or disturbed during the initial construction of the mill, did not yield any intact archeological 

materials. Another location immediately northwest of the East Elm Avenue and North Dixie 

Highway intersection (near the present site of the 1904 “River Raisin Massacre” monument) 

produced evidence of “an intensive and potentially significant prehistoric site,” but a lack of specific 

artifact types precluded even a tentative association with a particular culture phase. A limestone 

foundation dating to ca. 1890-1910 was also exposed in the same vicinity, as was an assemblage of 

ceramic fragments that likely post-dates the Battles of Frenchtown by at least two decades.96

As more buildings on the Monroe Paper Company property were demolished, archeological surveys 

between 1998 and 2000 revealed several buried features and additional cultural materials. In 1998, a 

Phase II archeological investigation was conducted by Midwest Archeological Associates in what 

would have been the southwest portion of Frenchtown –an area that now lies about one city block 

west of North Dixie Highway and fronts East Elm Avenue. Excavation and metal detection survey 

resulted in the recovery of artifacts from several eras. These included items related to the use of the 

mill building and its demolition, artifacts from mid- to late 19th-century occupation and use, and 

prehistoric lithics and faunal remains. Two sherds of pearlware and some forged nails were found 

that either predate or are coeval with the events of January 1813, and their presence indicates that 

artifacts relating to the era of the battles remain in the topsoil that underlies the 20th-century layer of 

clay and cinder. Only one recovered item could be definitively associated with Frenchtown and/or 

the battles of 1813: a portion of a silver-plated brass shoe buckle that is possibly associated with a 

denizen of Frenchtown, a member of the Essex Militia, or a Kentuckian. The most significant find 

proved to be the buried remains of a historic fence line. Post mold patterns suggested that the fence 

posts could have supported puncheon planks and the fence might have been one of the puncheon or 

95 Demeter, “Report on Archaeological Testing: 1980 Season, River Raisin Battlefield Site” (1981), copy on file in 

the Office of the Michigan State Archeologist, East Lansing, MI.

96 Demeter, “Monroe Paper Mills 1 and 2: An Archeological Evaluation” (1991), copy on file in the Office of the 

Michigan State Archeologist, East Lansing, MI; quotation from p. 5.
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picket fences described in accounts of the Second Battle of Frenchtown. The discovery of the shoe 

buckle immediately within the area enclosed by the fence lent credibility to this possibility. The 

discovery of the fence line also provided a key datum point for subsequent archeological research of 

the battlefield area.97

In 2000, Midwest Archeological Associates extended the 1998 Phase II archeological investigation 

of the previously discovered fence. Trench excavations and test pits led to the recovery of 1,450 

artifacts. Most of these came from a prehistoric midden associated with a late Sandusky Culture 

(1450-1650 CE) village. The midden contained an abundance of “shell tempered ceramics, lithic 

tools and debitage, and quantities of well-preserved faunal remains” that may well be associated with 

the materials recovered nearby in 1991. In either case, the location of this village and the ossuary 

burials at late Sandusky sites would suggest that many if not all of the human remains found during 

the construction of the River Raisin Paper Mill may predate the events of January 1813 by a few 

centuries. The excavations in 2000 also revealed 113 historic artifacts, though most seemed to 

postdate the events of January 1813. Backhoe trenching did reveal the east-west trending fence line 

that ran along the north end of Frenchtown, as well as its intersection with the north-south trending 

fence line (on the western edge of Frenchtown) that had been excavated two years earlier. Charcoal 

evidence at the top of the postholes also indicates that the fence was destroyed by fire. This 

evidence, along with the lack of any prehistoric materials in the vicinity of the fence line, the nearby 

presence of the ca. 1810s shoe-buckle, and the ability to accurately predict the course of the fence 

line based on historical maps and descriptions, indicates that a key feature of the battles had been 

found. Lastly, the excavations in 2000 confirmed the findings of previous surveys and excavations; 

namely, that much of the archeological record associated with historic Frenchtown and older 

American Indian use and residence remained intact beneath the paper mill complex.98

Archeologists returned to the former paper mill site in 2003 to follow up on two previous 

investigations; namely, the excavations of the puncheon fence and the site of the U.S. 17th Infantry 

encampment. Seven trenches were excavated in former parking areas, but no artifacts relating to the 

events of January 1813 were recovered. Two of the trenches did reveal further evidence of the fence 

and its course along the perimeter of Frenchtown, while another two trenches revealed prehistoric 

materials that likely correspond to the same late Sandusky village site that had been encountered 

previously. At the site of the US 17th Infantry encampment the open field was closely mowed, and 

the area underwent a surface metal detection survey. A total of 715 artifacts were recovered, with 

most dating to the late-19th and early-20th centuries. However, eighty-one of the artifacts were 

associated with the battle on January 22, 1813. Nearly half of these were either musket balls or buck 

shot, but other battle-related artifacts included lead waste, gun flints, and gun parts. Further analysis 

determined that the calibers of the recovered musket balls and buckshot matched those used by 

American Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers (1794) and the Battle of Mackinac Island (1814). 

97 G. Michael Pratt, “A Phase II Archaeological Investigation of the River Raisin Battlefield and Massacre Site, 

City of Monroe, Monroe County” (1999).

98 Pratt and William E. Rutter, “Phase II Archaeological Reconnaissance of the River Raisin Battlefield, Monroe, 

Michigan” (2002); quotation is from p. 23. The 2000 field season was supposed to include a metal detector survey 

of the field to the north of the current RRNBP Visitor Center, at the site of the U.S. 17th Infantry encampment, but 

tall grass and weeds thwarted this effort. On ossuary burials at Late Sandusky sites in the region, see Timothy 

James Abel, The Petersen Site: A Prehistoric to Historic Occupation in Northwestern Ohio (St. John's, 

Newfoundland: Copetown Press, 2002), 18-20.
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Four brass buttons were also recovered, and at least two correspond to those used by the US military. 

No other recovered items from this survey could be unequivocally attributed to the battle. The 

locations of these artifacts and the relative lack of shot that would have been used by US Regulars 

“suggests that the survey area lies behind the US position at the start of the attack and, perhaps, that 

the retreating Regulars offered little return fire as they abandoned their position for the shelter of the 

north bank of the River Raisin.”99

Only two other archeological investigations have occurred within the core area of the battlefield 

since 2003, one in 2006 that monitored the demolition of a paper mill building and another in 2013 

that took soil borings during a gas line project. While neither of these resulted in significant finds, 

they did add to the understanding of the soil profile beneath the former industrial site. Consequently, 

they contribute to a substantial catalog of information that augments the historical record and 

provides a fuller understanding of the battlefield area’s significance.

100 As noted by Pratt and Rutter, 

archeologists have recovered material data that includes the location “of the puncheon fence that 

partially enclosed Frenchtown and provided protection to American soldiers during the second battle 

of the River Raisin as well as the cellars of Frenchtown houses referenced and used by American 

soldiers during the battle and as locations of atrocities afterwards.” In short, the cumulative findings 

of archeological research provided “the foundation for accurately defining” the central area of the 

NRHP site.101

Since 2006 much has changed within the core area of the battlefield. The last industrial building 

from the paper mill was demolished in 2008, the River Raisin National Battlefield Park was 

established in 2009, clean up and capping of the industrial brownfield was largely completed in 2010, 

and the transfer of the mill property to the NPS occurred in 2011. At present the national park unit’s 

boundaries remain unfixed and land transfers are ongoing, but they already encompass the expanded 

and updated NRHP site on the north side of the River Raisin. Building on the work that had already 

occurred in the core area of the battlefield, and in response to NPS plans to incorporate areas to the 

north and south of the former core of Frenchtown, the most recent archeological investigation 

associated with the battlefield area occurred beyond the former paper mill site.102 In October 2009, 

with the support of an American Battlefield Protection Program grant from the NPS, a team of 

archeologists led by Pratt, Rutter, and Richard Green conducted a preliminary survey of areas to the 

north and south of the River Raisin.

Based on historical records and recent accidental surface finds, the investigation focused on three 

areas: (1) north of Mason Run, on lands within the national battlefield park and encompassed by the 

NRHP expansion; (2) the south side of the River Raisin just above the flood plain on a parcel 

immediately south of Hellenberg Park (which lies within the floodplain); (3) and at two sites adjacent 

99 Pratt and Rutter, Archeological Assessment of Selected Areas of the River Raisin Battlefield, Monroe, Michigan. 

Prepared for the City of Monroe and the American Battlefield Protection Program by Mannik & Smith Group, Inc., 

Maumee, Ohio, 2004. Quote is from p. 77. 100 Rutter, Archeological Reconnaissance, River Raisin Paper Company Plant “Mill 3 and 4/Area #52,” Elm Street 

at Dixie Highway, City of Monroe, Monroe County, Michigan. Prepared for the Monroe County Historical Society; 

Allen P. Van Dyke, “Michigan Gas Utilities Gas Pipeline in Monroe, Michigan,” AVD Archeological Services, 

Inc., 2013. 101 Pratt et al, [Draft] River Raisin Battlefield National Historic Landmark Nomination; quotations on p. 7. 102 River Raisin National Battlefield Park: Study and Boundary Assessment (November 2009); River Raisin 

Heritage Corridor-East Master Plan, passim.
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464

to Plum Creek, about a mile south the River Raisin. The brief four-day survey did not recover any 

artifacts associated with the events of January 1813, but did provide important information about 

subsurface contexts. While intact 1813 soil horizons were encountered in the study area, a number of 

test units revealed considerable disturbance. Other units had deep layers of fill with various mixtures 

of concrete, metals, and construction debris that thwarted the use of metal detectors and 

magnetometers. Consequently, backhoe trench excavation provided the only means for assessing the 

archeological potential of these areas.

103

Given these conditions, the archeological team determined that a thorough investigation of areas 

outside the core of the battlefield was not a worthwhile endeavor. While scattered evidence of 

running battles, brief defensive stands, and assembly areas might be found to the north and south of 

an expanded River Raisin Battlefield Site, such investigation would require “massive, yet precise, 

mechanical excavation of large areas.” The expense of such an investigation would be hard to justify 

given the limited archeological potential of recovering and contextualizing small, random artifacts 

like munitions, personal items, and pieces of equipment in areas where historical maps and firstperson accounts are less precise than those associated with the actions in the core of Frenchtown.”104

103 Pratt et al, “The River Raisin Battlefield, Outside the Core,” passim. 

104 Ibid. 33-34. 

 Addendum National Register Documentation 
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National Park Service / National Register of Historic Places Registration Form 

NPS Form 10-900 OMB No. 1024-0018 

River Raisin Battlefield Site Monroe MI

Name of Property County and State

Addendum National Register Documentation 465

______________________________________________________________________________ 

9. Major Bibliographical References

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Demeter, C. Stephen. "Report on Archaeological Testing: 1980 Season, River Raisin Battlefield 

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 , Donald J. Weir and Russell B. Henry. Hellenberg Field Archeological Survey: Phase I, Part 

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 . The Potawatomis, Keepers of the Fire Civilization of the American Indian Series.V.145. 

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Algonquin Books, 1991.

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Federal Writers' Project. Military History of Kentucky, Chronologically Arranged. Frankfort, KY: 

State Journal, 1939.

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Lurie, Nancy Oesterieich. "Winnebago." In Handbook of North American Indians, edited by William 

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Publications Company, 1919.

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Historical Society. Vol. 23. Lansing: Robert Smith & Co., 1895.

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Engagements at Frenchtown and the River Raisin in the War of 1812. Marceline, MO: 

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River Raisin Battlefield Site Monroe MI

Name of Property County and State

Addendum National Register Documentation 470

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___________________________________________________________________________ 

Previous documentation on file (NPS): 

____ preliminary determination of individual listing (36 CFR 67) has been requested 

__X_ previously listed in the National Register

____ previously determined eligible by the National Register

____ designated a National Historic Landmark 

____ recorded by Historic American Buildings Survey #____________

____ recorded by Historic American Engineering Record # __________

____ recorded by Historic American Landscape Survey # ___________

Primary location of additional data: 

____ State Historic Preservation Office 

____ Other State agency

____ Federal agency

____ Local government

____ University

____ Other

 Name of repository: _____________________________________

Historic Resources Survey Number (if assigned): ________________
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NPS Form 10-900 OMB No. 1024-0018 

River Raisin Battlefield Site Monroe MI

Name of Property County and State

Addendum National Register Documentation 471

Geographical Data 

 Acreage of Property _Approximately 230_ 

Use either the UTM system or latitude/longitude coordinates 

Latitude/Longitude Coordinates 

Datum if other than WGS84:__________ 

(enter coordinates to 6 decimal places) 

1. Latitude: Longitude: 

2. Latitude: Longitude: 

3. Latitude: Longitude: 

4. Latitude: Longitude: 

Or 

UTM References See continuation sheet

Datum (indicated on USGS map): 

 NAD 1927 or NAD 1983 

1. Zone: 17N Easting: 303234 Northing: 4643747 

2. Zone: 17N Easting: 303026 Northing: 4643427 

3. Zone: 17N Easting: 302756 Northing: 4643554 

4. Zone: 17N Easting : 302196 Northing: 4642730 

5. Zone: 17N Easting : 302891 Northing: 4642131 

6. Zone: 17N Easting : 303345 Northing: 4642894 

7. Zone: 17N Easting : 303297 Northing: 4642996 

8. Zone: 17N Easting : 303349 Northing: 4643281 
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River Raisin Battlefield Site Monroe MI

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Addendum National Register Documentation 472

9. Zone: 17N Easting : 303206 Northing: 4643357 

10. Zone: 17N Easting : 301206 Northing: 4643668 

Verbal Boundary Description (Describe the boundaries of the property.) 

The expanded River Raisin Battlefield Site boundary is defined by streets, railroad lines, 

property lines, and park boundaries in the present city of Monroe and Monroe Charter Township 

in the State of Michigan. The northern boundary begins just west of Harbor Avenue at a point 

approximately 2,400 feet north of Mason Run and extends eastward about 360 feet across a 

former industrial site to a point adjacent to the Canadian National Railway line. From there the 

boundary turns south for approximately 1210 feet along the eastern edge of the Canadian 

National Railway line to a point opposite the intersection of Telb Street and Harbor Avenue. 

From there the boundary extends west across railroad right-of-ways, Dixie Highway, and 

continuing until intersecting with the CSX railroad bed, approximately 950 feet. The western 

boundary follows the railroad bed south across the River Raisin to the intersection with East 

Front Street, approximately 3,000 feet. The boundary turns west for approximately 150 feet until 

the intersection with Blossom Lane. The boundary then turns southwest to follow Blossom 

Lane, where it crosses East 1st Street and continues along Half Street until its terminus at 

Woodland Cemetery, approximately 2, 100 feet. From this point the boundary turns northwest 

for approximately 500 feet to the northwest corner of Woodland Cemetery, then southwest for 

approximately 800 feet to the southwest corner of Woodland Cemetery, and then southeast for 

approximately 800 feet to the southeast corner of Woodland Cemetery. The boundary then 

proceeds southwest to follow Reisig Street before continuing across Plum Creek to its southern 

bank, approximately 1250 feet. The southern boundary follows the southern border of Plum 

Creek Park until the intersection with the Canadian National Railway bed, about 1,400 feet. The 

boundary then turns northwest following the railroad bed until the intersection with East 1st

Street, approximately 3,400 feet. At East 1st Street the boundary turns southeast following East 

1st Street, which becomes Link Street and then East Front Street, approximately 1,300 feet. At 

the eastern tip of Sterling Island and East Front Street the eastern boundary turns northeast across 

the River Raisin for a distance of approximately 900 feet to the southeast corner of parcel # 59-

01900-012 and its frontage on East Elm Street. From East Elm Street the boundary runs north 

along the eastern boundary of parcel # 59-01900-012 for approximately 2,000 feet to Mason 

Run, then turns northwest along the parcel boundary for approximately 700 feet to Detroit 

Avenue. The boundary then follows Detroit Avenue north to the intersection with Telb Avenue, 

approximately 1,300 feet. Turning west on Telb Avenue the boundary crosses Harbor Avenue to 

the edge of a former industrial site, approximately 580 feet. At this point the boundary runs 

north for 1,210 feet to the origin point. 
United States Department of the Interior 

National Park Service / National Register of Historic Places Registration Form 

NPS Form 10-900 OMB No. 1024-0018 

River Raisin Battlefield Site Monroe MI

Name of Property County and State

Addendum National Register Documentation 473

Boundary Justification (Explain why the boundaries were selected.) 

The boundary encompasses significant aspects of battle actions that occurred on January 18 and 22, 

1813, as well as the killing, destruction, and captivity that occurred on January 23, 1813. The natural 

and cultural features within the expanded site are significant to the battle and its location within 

Frenchtown, a Canadien ribbon farm community in Michigan Territory. Archeologically defined 

features of the battle landscape were used to define the boundary in addition to archival 

documentation on Frenchtown and the events along both sides of the River Raisin in January 1813.

Specifically, the northern portions of the expanded NRHP site encompasses the British approach to 

Frenchtown along Hull’s Trace on January 22, 1813, their pre-dawn deployment in the woods to the 

north of Frenchtown, and the establishment of artillery positions just north of Mason’s Run. The 

northeastern portions of the NRHP site also encompass an area of intense fighting during a running 

battle through the woods at the end of the First Battle of Frenchtown. On the north side of the River 

Raisin, extending the boundaries of the NRHP site incorporates key areas of action for Native 

Confederacy fighters during the Second Battle of Frenchtown, who swept around the west side of 

Frenchtown crossed the River Raisin. The western Norfolk Southern Railroad corridor along the 

western boundary of the expanded site encompasses areas of skirmishing and the positions of 

Confederacy fighters to the west of the Frenchtown fences. Extending the boundaries to the east of 

Detroit Avenue takes in the full scope of actions that involved the attack on the U.S. 17th Infantry 

encampment during the Second Battle of Frenchtown. 

The inclusion of areas to the south of the River Raisin incorporates the sites of several key actions 

during the First and Second Battles of Frenchtown. The south shore of the river acted as a 

deployment area for American soldiers attacking British positions at Frenchtown on January 18, 

1813, as well as the sites of retreat and brief defensive stands on January 22. A broad irregular 

corridor centered along Kentucky Avenue and extending southward from East Second Street to just 

beyond Plum Creek encompasses American approach to Frenchtown on January 18, as well as the 

main American retreat route on January 22. Within the corridor is the General Winchester capture 

site, Woodland Cemetery, and the route of Hull’s Trace south out of Frenchtown. The Winchester 

capture site is located at the corner of Kentucky Ave and East Third Street. Woodland Cemetery 

contains the remains of casualties from the Battles at River Raisin. Where Kentucky Avenue crosses 

Plum Creek was the site of the last significant between conflict between American soldiers the 

pursuing Wyandotte, Shawnee, Bodéwadmi, Odawa, and Ojibwe fighters. Wyandotte (Wyandot, 

a.k.a. Huron), Shawnee, Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi), Odawa (Ottawa), Ojibwe (Chippewa) fighters.
United States Department of the Interior 

National Park Service / National Register of Historic Places Registration Form 

NPS Form 10-900 OMB No. 1024-0018 

River Raisin Battlefield Site Monroe MI

Name of Property County and State

Addendum National Register Documentation 474

______________________________________________________________________________ 

11. Form Prepared By

name/title: ____Mark David Spence______________________________________ 

organization: ______N/A_______________________________________________ 

street & number: __707 Broadalbin St. SW_________________________________ 

city or town: _Albany_____________ state: ___OR_______ zip code:_97321_____ 

e-mail__markdavidspence@gmail.com__

telephone:__(541) 223-3536__ ________

date:__May 25, 2017________________
United States Department of the Interior 

National Park Service / National Register of Historic Places Registration Form 

NPS Form 10-900 OMB No. 1024-0018 

River Raisin Battlefield Site Monroe MI

Name of Property County and State

Addendum National Register Documentation 475

___________________________________________________________________________ 

Additional Documentation 

Submit the following items with the completed form: 

• Maps: A USGS map or equivalent (7.5 or 15 minute series) indicating the property's location.

o See Figure O4 on Continuation Sheet

• Sketch map for historic districts and properties having large acreage or numerous resources.

Key all photographs to this map.

o See Figure O5 on Continuation Sheet

• Additional items: (Check with the SHPO, TPO, or FPO for any additional items.)
United States Department of the Interior 

National Park Service / National Register of Historic Places Registration Form 

NPS Form 10-900 OMB No. 1024-0018 

River Raisin Battlefield Site Monroe MI

Name of Property County and State

Addendum National Register Documentation 476

Photographs 

Submit clear and descriptive photographs. The size of each image must be 1600x1200 pixels 

(minimum), 3000x2000 preferred, at 300 ppi (pixels per inch) or larger. Key all photographs to the 

sketch map. Each photograph must be numbered and that number must correspond to the 

photograph number on the photo log. For simplicity, the name of the photographer, photo date, etc. 

may be listed once on the photograph log and doesn’t need to be labeled on every photograph. 

Photo Log 

Name of Property: River Raisin Battlefield 

City or Vicinity: Monroe 

County: Monroe State: MI

Photographers: Zackary Ray and National Park Service staff 

Dates Photographed: August 2, 2011 and March 10, 2014 

Description of Photograph(s) and number, include description of view indicating direction of 

camera: 

1 of 8: View to the south from the former site of Frenchtown and the present River Raisin National 

Battlefield Park across the frozen River Raisin toward Hellenberg Park and Sterling Island 

(to the left of the bridge). View encompasses one of the routes taken by American forces 

when they moved into Frenchtown on January 18, 1813, as well as an American route of 

retreat and the site of a brief defensive stand on January 22, 1813. [NPS Staff: March 10, 

2014] 

2 of 8: View to the south from the vicinity of a British Artillery position on January 22, 1813. The 

NPS visitor center and interpretation pavilion can be seen in the distance. The open field is 

the location of the U.S. 17th Infantry encampment on January 22, 1813, to the east of 

Frenchtown. [Zackary Ray: August 2, 2011] 

3 of 8: View to the north toward a tree line where British, Canadian, and Native Confederacy forces 

established initial battle positions on January 22, 1813. [NPS Staff: March 10, 2014] 

4 of 8: East view of U.S. 17th Infantry encampment toward Detroit Avenue and an open field across 

the road. The field in the distance is where Confederacy fighters came around the 

American’s right flank. [Zackary Ray: August 2, 2011] 

5 of 8: View to the south of railroad bridges and Dixie Highway crossing the River Raisin. This 

transportation corridor follows the route north from Frenchtown that was laid out by General 

William Hull in 1812. [Zackary Ray: August 2, 2011] 
United States Department of the Interior 

National Park Service / National Register of Historic Places Registration Form 

NPS Form 10-900 OMB No. 1024-0018 

River Raisin Battlefield Site Monroe MI

Name of Property County and State

Addendum National Register Documentation 477

6 of 8: View to the north from near the intersection of East Front Street and the Canadian National 

Railway route. This site lies on the approach route used by Kentucky militia at the 

commencement of the First Battle of Frenchtown on January 18, 1813. [Zackary Ray: 

August 2, 2011] 

7 of 8: View to the east from near the intersection of East Elm Avenue and the Canadian National 

Railway route. View encompasses the area that represented the western half of Frenchtown, 

toward the opposite side of treeline that is depicted in photos #2 and #3. The low split rail 

fence is a feature of the River Raisin National Battlefield Park. [NPS Staff: March 10, 2014] 

8 of 8: View to the northeast with State of Michigan historical marker and bench on interpretive trail 

behind River Raisin National Battlefield Park. View encompasses the U.S. 17th Infantry 

encampment, with Detroit Avenue and the lines of Native Confederacy attack in the distance. 

[NPS Staff: March 10, 2014] 

Paperwork Reduction Act Statement: This information is being collected for applications to the National Register of Historic Places to 

nominate properties for listing or determine eligibility for listing, to list properties, and to amend existing listings. Response to this request is 

required to obtain a benefit in accordance with the National Historic Preservation Act, as amended (16 U.S. S.C.460 et seq.).

Estimated Burden Statement: Public reporting burden for this form is estimated to average 100 hours per response including time for 

reviewing instructions, gathering and maintaining data, and completing and reviewing the form. Direct comments regarding this burden 

estimate or any aspect of this form to the Office of Planning and Performance Management. U.S. Dept. of the Interior, 1849 C. Street, NW, 

Washington, DC.
Addendum National Register Documentation 478

Figure 01 of 13: River Raisin Battle actions on January 18, 1813 

First Battle of Frenchtown; Battle Actions on January 18, 1813. Image is closely 

based on a painting by Tim Kurtz on display outside the Visitor Center at River Raisin 

National Battlefield Park.
Addendum National Register Documentation 479

Figure 02 of 13: Position of American forces on the morning of January 22, 1813 
Addendum National Register Documentation 480

Figure 03 of 13: River Raisin battle actions on January 22, 1813 

Second Battle of Frenchtown; Battle Actions on January 22, 1813. Image is closely based 

on a painting by Tim Kurtz on display outside the Visitor Center at River Raisin National 

Battlefield Park.
Addendum National Register Documentation 481

Figure 04 of 13: Universal Transverse Mercator Coordinate Points, River Raisin Battlefield Site 

fudge 

Point Location UTM Coordinates Point Location UTM Coordinates

A 

CN corridor, 794’ NE 

of point B 17N 303234–4643747 G 

Mason Run at a point 700 ft. SE 

of Detroit Ave. 17N 303345–4642894

B 

CN corridor & Telb St. 

extended 17N 303026–4643427 H Mason Run & Detroit Ave. 17N 303297–4642996

C 

CSX corridor & Telb St. 

extended 17N 302756–4643544 I Corner of Detroit Ave & Telb St. 17N 303349–4643281

D E. Front St. & CSX cor. 17N 302196–4642730 J 200 ft. west of Telb St extended 17N 303206–4643357

E 

E. Front St at tip of

Sterling Island 17N 302891–4642131 K 

Mason Run at a point 700 ft. SE 

of Detroit Ave. 17N 303206–4643668

F E. Elm Ave & 17N 303139–4642262
Addendum National Register Documentation 482

Figure 05 of 13: Photo Key for Expanded River Raisin Battlefield Site
Addendum National Register Documentation 483

Figure 6 of 13: Photograph 1 of 8 

Photo 1: View to the south from the former site of Frenchtown and the present River Raisin National 

Battlefield Park across the frozen River Raisin toward Hellenberg Park and Sterling Island (to 

the left of the bridge). View encompasses one of the routes taken by American forces when 

they moved into Frenchtown on 18 January, as well as an American route of retreat and the 

site of a brief defensive stand on 22 January.

 Figure 07 of 13: Photograph 2 of 8 

Photo 2. View to the south from the vicinity of a British Artillery position on 22 January 1813. The 

NPS visitor center and interpretation pavilion can be seen in the distance. The open field is the 

location of the U.S. 17th Infantry encampment on 22 January, to the east of Frenchtown.
Addendum National Register Documentation 484

Figure 08 of 13: Photograph 3 of 8 

Photo 3. View to the north toward a tree line where British, Canadien, and Native Confederacy forces 

established initial battle positions on 22 January 1813. [NPS Staff: March 10, 2014]
Addendum National Register Documentation 485

Figure 09 of 13: Photograph 4 of 8 

Photo 4. East view of U.S. 17th Infantry encampment toward Detroit Avenue and an open field across 

the road. The field in the distance is where Confederacy fighters came around the American’s 

right flank.
Addendum National Register Documentation 486

Figure 10 of 13: Photograph 5 of 8 

Photo 5. View to the south of railroad bridges and Dixie Highway crossing the River Raisin. This 

transportation corridor follows the route north from Frenchtown that was laid out by General 

William Hull in 1812.
Addendum National Register Documentation 487

Figure 11 of 13: Photograph 6 of 8 

Photo 6. View to the north from near the intersection of East Front Street and the Canadian National 

Railway route. This site lies on the approach route used by Kentucky militia at the 

commencement of the First Battle of Frenchtown on 18 January 1813.
Addendum National Register Documentation 488

Figure 12 of 13: Photograph 7 of 8 

Photo 7. View to the east from near the intersection of East Elm Avenue and the Canadian National 

Railway route. View encompasses the area that comprised the western half of Frenchtown, 

toward the opposite side of treeline that is depicted in photos #2 and #3. The low split rail 

fence is a feature of the River Raisin National Battlefield Park.
Addendum National Register Documentation 489

Figure 13 of 13: Photograph 8 of 8 

Photo 8. View to the northeast with State of Michigan historical marker and bench on interpretive trail 

behind River Raisin National Battlefield Park. View encompasses the U.S. 17th Infantry 

encampment, with Detroit Avenue and the lines of Native Confederacy attack in the distance.