On November 5, 1780, a force of Miami warriors led by the chief Little Turtle ambushed and annihilated a French-American raiding expedition under Augustin Mottin de La Balme near the confluence of the Maumee and Eel Rivers in present-day Indiana. La Balme, a French cavalry officer serving with the Continental Army, had gathered a force of French Canadian volunteers and marched from Vincennes to attack the British post at Detroit. He had already raided the Miami trading center at Kekionga (present-day Fort Wayne) when Little Turtle's warriors struck his camp on Aboite Creek. La Balme and most of his force were killed. The battle was an early demonstration of Little Turtle's military skill, which he would later employ to devastating effect against the United States Army in the 1790s.
The American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) grew from colonial resistance to British taxation without parliamentary representation — a dispute that radicalized through the Stamp Act (1765), the Townshend Acts (1767), and the Boston Massacre (1770). Fighting began at Lexington and Concord in April 1775; the Continental Congress declared independence on July 4, 1776. The Continental Army under George Washington faced severe shortages of supplies and troops, enduring the brutal winter at Valley Forge (1777–1778) before French alliance and French financing turned the military balance. Major engagements included Bunker Hill (1775), Trenton (1776), Saratoga (1777) — which secured French intervention — and Yorktown (1781), where British General Cornwallis surrendered to Washington. An estimated 25,000 American soldiers died in service, from combat, disease, and captivity. The Treaty of Paris (1783) recognized American independence and ceded British territory east of the Mississippi, though it left unresolved questions about Indigenous land rights and the status of Loyalists.
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.