Northwest Indian War: Encyclopedia II - Northwest Indian War - Background

Northwest Indian War - Background

The Treaty of Paris (1783) had given the United States government control, on paper, of all the land east of the Mississippi River and south of the Great Lakes; but the Native American nations actually living in this region were not party to the talks. And while the British Crown had suffered a major defeat at the Battle of Yorktown (1781), there had been no decisive defeat for their Native American allies in the west. The British remained in possession of the Great Lakes forts through which they continued to supply their Native American allies with trade items (including weapons).

Congress sought to stabilize the dollar and pay down its war debt through the sale of western lands under Native American occupation. The Land Ordinance of 1785 gave encouragement to land speculators, surveyors, and so on, who sought to gain Native American land - sometimes through bribery or deceit - for resale to European settlers.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 gave Native Americans title, under US law, to enjoy whatever lands had not been taken from them, but it continued to encourage the influx of US settlers beyond the Ohio. Localized engagements between those settlers and Native Americans continued to rage. The failure of the 1789 Treaty of Fort Harmar to address underlying grievances between the two sides exacerbated the problems and made widespread conflict inevitable.

Congress had negotiated the Treaty of Fort McIntosh in 1785 to acquire most of the eastern portion of the Ohio Country. However Connecticut settlers were already streaming into the Western Reserve which extended into the reservation set aside for the tribes. Conflict soon broke out between the two sides.

Northwest Indian War - Formation of the confederacy

Co-operation among the nations forming the Confederacy had gone back to the French colonial era and was renewed during the American Revolutionary War. The Confederacy first came together in the autumn of 1785 at the British fortress at Detroit, proclaiming that the parties to the Confederacy would deal jointly with the United States, rather than individually. This determination was renewed in 1786 at the village of the Hurons, where the Confederacy further insisted on the Ohio River as the boundary between their lands and those of the American settlers. The Hurons were the nominal "fathers" or senior guaranteeing nation of the Confederacy, but Shawnees and Miamis provided the greatest share of the fighting force.

Note: in most cases, an entire "tribe" or "nation" was not involved in the war; Native American societies were not centralized, and involvement in warfare was decided on a village or even individual basis.

• Huron/Wyandot
• Shawnee
• Council of the Three Fires
  • Potawatomi
  • Ottawa
  • Ojibwe
• Delaware
• Miami
• Six Nations of the Grand River
  • Mohawk
  • Cayuga
  • Onondaga
  • Seneca
  • Tuscarora
  • Oneida
• Kickapoo
• Kaskaskia
• Wabash Confederacy (Weas, Piankashaws, and others)

Some bands of Choctaws and Chickasaws, southern tribes traditionally unfriendly with the Indians of the Northwest, served as scouts for the Americans in the war.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Background", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki