Taking the Land It Claimed

1929 U.S. postage stamp
marking the 135th anniversary
of the Battle of Fallen Timbers

After winning its War for Independence, the new United States of America claimed all of the land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River.[1] But claiming land is not the same thing as controlling it. So, how did the nation take charge of the territories west of the Appalachians, then inhabited by tens of thousands of Indians?

According to archivist and author Carl Waldman, American citizens and the U.S. government tended to follow a pattern that ultimately achieved the displacement of many indigenous peoples. Typically, the cycle began with trade and the making of treaties. These often provided for Indian land cessions in exchange for money or goods, or the promise of such. Sometime after the new boundaries were established, white settlers, new to an area, would appropriate land on the native side of the line. When one or more tribes retaliated, Americans issued dire warnings about "savages" along the frontier. Not accidentally, the Declaration of Independence had complained that King George III of Great Britain had "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."[2] Fear, resentment, and the prospect of acquiring land generated military action against Indians. These campaigns often led to the establishment of wilderness forts whose presence offered security for prospective settlers. Overwhelmed, native peoples would sue for peace, negotiate a new treaty--which routinely included a new land cession--and move.[3]

The American conquest of the Ohio Valley region matches the pattern Waldman describes. In 1785, U.S. negotiators demanded and won treaty concessions from several tribal leaders gathered at Fort McIntosh on the western edge of Pennsylvania. The westward push by American settlers, encouraged by their government, inevitably led to clashes. In 1787, Delawares, Mingos, Miamis, Wyandots, and Shawnees sometimes fought pioneers in present-day West Virginia and Kentucky. As the 1790s unfolded, the United States, under the leadership of President George Washington, increased the size and strength of its army. In August 1794, at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in far northern Ohio near the western end of Lake Erie, federal troops proved they were able to defeat the Indians of the Old Northwest. The next year, representatives of several tribal groups signed the Treaty of Greenville by which they ceded much of present-day Ohio as well as parts of Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan.[4]

Monument to the Battle of Fallen Timbers in Ohio

As white pioneers entered the Old Southwest, news of the Battle of Fallen Timbers signaled to Indian leaders that the United States was both determined and able to defeat native resistance. This led to a number of new treaties like the one signed by thirty-nine Cherokee leaders at Tellico, Tennessee, in 1798. Due to anxieties about warfare, and by means of tough deliberations, the U.S. and southern Indians were able to avoid major battles like those fought in the Ohio Valley.[5]

Finally, during the decade that followed the War of 1812, as white settlers continued to pour into the western frontier, some Indians simply moved further west. Others, assuming that they were or would be accepted by the United States, continued to acculturate.[6] By that point, the United States had come to truly dominate the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi.[7] It was also around this time that Americans began to adopt the view that Indians were both unchanged and unchangeable. In the eyes of many U.S. citizens, the first Americans had not sufficiently conformed, and it was not likely they ever would.

Notes

[1] Roger L. Nichols, American Indians in U.S. History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 81.

[2] "Declaration of Independence: A Transcription," National Archives, accessed May 9, 2020, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.

[3] Carl Waldman, Atlas of the North American Indian, 3rd ed. (New York: Facts on File, 2009), 213. Waldman's assertion that relations between U.S. citizens and American Indians began with trade finds corroboration in Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier 1846-1890, Rev. ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 15-18. Utley indicates that in the mid-nineteenth century, the first white person an Indian ever saw was likely a trader. For a good discussion of Indian "voluntary removal," see Nichols, American Indians in U.S. History, 102-104.

[4] Nichols, American Indians in U.S. History, 82-86.

[5] Ibid., 86-88. For the treaty between the United States and the Cherokee Indians signed at Tellico, Tennessee, in 1798, see Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America, ed. Richard Peters, vol 7, Treaties between the United States and the Indian Tribes (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1846), 62-65.

[6] Nichols, American Indians in U.S. History, 102-104.

[7] Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 7.