Fallen Timbers - Maumee - Ohio
FALLEN TIMBERS
Extract from EMPIRES APART: AMERICA AND RUSSIA FROM THE VIKINGS TO IRAQ by Brian Landers to be published by Picnic in April 2009:
During their war against the British, the colonial rebels had been desperate for native allies. In 1775 the new Congress concluded its first treaty with natives living in southern Ohio and Indiana, a treaty that suggested the creation of a fourteenth native state with representatives in the Congress. Once the War was over however the victors turned on what the Declaration of Independence had described as “the merciless Indian Savages.”
Fifteen years after that first treaty was signed, it was ripped up. In 1790 and again in 1791 the American army invaded what was called the Northwest Territory, a vast swathe of land between the Ohio and Mississippi stretching from Pennsylvania as far west as the modern states of Michigan and Wisconsin. On both occasions it was soundly defeated by native forces led by the Miami general Michikinikwa or Little Turtle. In 1794 a reorganized army made one final attempt at conquest. British troops moved south from Canada in support of the natives but in the event failed to intervene, although a hundred British volunteers stiffened the resistance in the Battle of Fallen Timbers that eventually took place south of Detroit.
An enormous force of Shawnee, Ottawa, Chippewa, Miami, Delaware, Pottawatomi and other tribes under Little Turtle and the Shawnee general Blue Jacket faced the American troops of General Anthony Wayne. The American advance guard of Kentucky militia were ambushed and when they turned and ran the Shawnees made the crucial mistake of leaving their heavily defended positions to set off in hot pursuit, running into the path of the main American force and into range of their artillery. The Americans successfully counter-attacked and by the end of the day native troops were streaming north seeking British protection; those left on the battlefield were scalped and mutilated by the American soldiers. Losses on both sides were heavy with the casualty rate highest among the British volunteers who had fought to the end. The American army then advanced along the Maumee River destroying native villages and crops in an orgy of ethnic cleansing.
In the subsequent Treaty of Greenville the natives were forced to give up most of modern Ohio and Indiana and the site of today’s city of Chicago. The treaty in fact was a total travesty: the federal government solemnly guaranteed territory to the natives which it had already sold to speculators or promised to Revolutionary War soldiers. Any idea of the natives having a state of their own had evaporated. America would expand through further white (or black and white) colonisation not through the incorporation of native states. And it would expand by force. In 1797 American settlers in Natchez rebelled against the Spanish authorities; US troops marched in and the future state of Mississippi was born. It was a demonstration of what would happen repeatedly in years to come from Florida to Hawaii.
Today there is a monument to the Battle of Fallen Timbers set in a park that provides an ideal picnic site outside Maumee, Ohio, where routes 24 and 23 intersect.
The monument was erected in the 1930s and commemorates the dead on both sides. There is also a small memorial with the names of some of the dead buried in an unmarked grave nearby and a rock said to be the spot where the natives rallied before the battle.
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