Raid on Pickawillany

Along the Great Miami River in the Ohio Valley, not far from where Piqua, Ohio stands today, once stood the Miami settlement of Pickawillany, sometimes rendered as Pickawillamy, Pickawillani, or Picqualinni. An English trading post appeared beside the Miami village in 1749, offering goods to tribes in the surrounding area. A year later, in 1750, colonists raised a stockade known as Fort Pickawillany to safeguard that post. Behind this activity lay a broader rivalry, as French and English colonists vied for command of the Ohio Country fur trade, part of their larger contest for supremacy across North America. Remarkably, within less than five years the settlement had swelled into one of the largest Native American communities anywhere in eastern North America.

French authorities grew determined to make an example of Memeskia, the Miami chief also called La Demoiselle or Old Briton, who had spurned alliance with them in favor of trading with the English, undercutting what had once been an exclusive French hold on regional commerce. Retribution came on 21 June 1752, when Indians allied with the French descended on the village in what became known as the raid on Pickawillany, or the Battle of Pickawillany. The assault left Memeskia dead along with at least one English trader, and the attackers set fire to both the stockade and the trading post, leveling the community. Afterward, the surviving inhabitants reestablished Pickawillany roughly a mile to the southeast, near the spot where Piqua, Ohio would later be founded.

The razing of Pickawillany pushed the British toward strengthening fortifications and expanding their military footprint at other posts throughout the Ohio Valley, and historians regard the episode as an early spark leading toward the broader French and Indian War.

Etymology

The word Pickawillany traces back to pkiiwileni, a Shawnee term meaning "foreigner" that was used to refer to the Miami people. Among the Miami themselves, the village carried the name Pinkwaawileniaki, which rendered directly into English the Shawnee expression pekowiiθa, meaning "ash people."

Establishment and early history

For roughly twenty years before the French and Indian War began, France found itself unable to fully secure its hold, both military and economic, over the Ohio Country, a region vital to the supply and communication routes linking Canada with Louisiana. The strength of French control rested heavily on maintaining good relations between the New France government and the Native peoples living there, chiefly the Miamis (also called Twightwees), the Wyandots (or Hurons), and the Shawnees.