The Battle of Fallen Timbers (20 August 1794) was the final battle of the Northwest Indian War, a struggle between the Northwestern Confederacy and United States for control of the Northwest Territory. The battle took place amid trees toppled by a tornado near the Maumee River in northwestern Ohio at the site of the present-day city of Maumee, Ohio.
Major General Anthony Wayne's Legion of the United States, supported by General Charles Scott's Kentucky militia, were victorious against a combined Native American force of Shawnee under Blue Jacket, Ottawas under Egushawa, and many others. The battle was brief, lasting little more than one hour, but it scattered the confederated Native American forces.
The U.S. victory ended major hostilities in the region. The following Treaty of Greenville and Jay Treaty forced Native American displacement from most of modern-day Ohio, opening it to White American settlement, along with withdrawal of the British presence from the southern Great Lakes region of the United States.
In the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolutionary War, Great Britain ceded rights to the region northwest of the Ohio River and south of the Great Lakes. Despite the treaty, which ceded the Northwest Territory to the United States, the British maintained a military presence in their forts there and continued policies that supported the Native Americans to slow American expansion. With the encroachment of European-American settlers west of the Appalachians after the War, a Huron-led confederacy formed in 1785 to resist the usurpation of Indian lands, declaring that lands north and west of the Ohio River were Indian territory. The young United States formally organized the region in the Land Ordinance of 1785 and negotiated treaties allowing settlement, but the Western Confederacy of Native American nations were not party to these treaties and refused to acknowledge them. Violence erupted in the area between Native Americans and U.S. settlers in the region and in Kentucky.
In George Washington's first term as President of the United States, the U.S. launched two major campaigns to subdue the Western Confederacy and protect American colonizers from Indian attacks. The Harmar campaign in 1790 resulted in a significant victory for the confederacy and a U.S. retreat to Fort Washington. In May 1791, Lieutenant Colonel James Wilkinson launched what he thought was a clever raid at the Battle of Kenapacomaqua, Wilkinson killed nine Wea and Miami, and captured 34 Miami as prisoners, including a daughter of Miami war chief Little Turtle. Many of the confederation leaders were considering terms of peace to present to the United States, but when they received news of Wilkinson's raid, they readied for war. Wilkinson's raid thus had the opposite effect, uniting the tribes against St. Clair. In 1791, a follow-up campaign was led by territorial governor Arthur St. Clair, which was decimated by combined native forces.
The early republic period saw the United States move from the weak Articles of Confederation to the federal Constitution ratified in 1788, with the Bill of Rights added in 1791. George Washington served two terms as president (1789–1797), establishing precedents for executive authority, and the federal capital moved permanently to Washington D.C. in 1800. The Louisiana Purchase (1803) doubled the nation's territory for roughly $15 million, opening vast trans-Mississippi lands to American expansion. The War of 1812 against Britain ended inconclusively but produced a surge of American national identity and eliminated most British support for Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi. The Northwest Indian Wars (1785–1795) and the Creek War (1813–1814) broke Indigenous confederacies that had resisted US expansion. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 temporarily balanced slave and free states as the nation expanded westward, but embedded the contradiction of slavery in every subsequent territorial debate.
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