Battle of Fallen Timbers

On 20 August 1794, near the Maumee River in what is now Maumee, Ohio, the last engagement of the Northwest Indian War unfolded among trees knocked down by a tornado, giving the clash its name. This conflict pitted the Northwestern Confederacy against the United States in a contest for dominance over the Northwest Territory.

Fighting for the American side, Major General Anthony Wayne's Legion, backed by Kentucky militia under General Charles Scott, faced down an alliance of Native fighters that included Shawnee led by Blue Jacket, Ottawas commanded by Egushawa, and numerous other groups. Though the confrontation lasted barely over an hour, it proved enough to break apart the allied Native forces entirely.

With this triumph, large-scale conflict in the region came to a close. Afterward, the Treaty of Greenville and the Jay Treaty pushed Native peoples out of most of present-day Ohio, clearing the way for White American settlers to move in, while also compelling the British to pull back from their holdings near the southern Great Lakes.

Battle

On the night of August 11, Captain William Wells, son-in-law to Little Turtle and head of Wayne's intelligence company, took a bullet along with several of his spies once Native scouts spotted them prowling near a camp. The Choctaw and Chickasaw scouts had already abandoned the Legion at Fort Defiance, unsettled by how ill Wayne had grown during the campaign, which pushed Wayne to put Captain George Shrim, commander of the Legion's rangers, in charge of a mounted scouting party. William May, one of these scouts, fell into Native hands on August 18, and under questioning revealed that Wayne planned to strike on the 19th, or the 20th if he paused first to build a supply depot. Knowing the timing of the assault, Alexander McKee pressed the confederacy to pick ground favorable for battle. Blue Jacket, guessing Wayne would follow the Maumee River, settled his warriors into a defensive line close to modern Toledo, Ohio, at a spot where a windstorm had toppled a swath of trees. This wreckage of fallen timber ran nearly a mile and its thick brush formed a natural barrier shielding the confederate fighters. Roughly 1,500 warriors made up this force: Blue Jacket's Shawnees, Buckongahelas's Delawares, Little Turtle's Miamis, Wyandots under Tarhe and Roundhead, Ojibwas, Egushawa's Odawa, Little Otter's Potawatomi, Mingos, a handful of Mohawks, and Canadian militia disguised as Native warriors under Lieutenant-colonel William Caldwell. Having taken up their posts by August 17 or 18, the warriors fasted as they readied themselves for combat.

Brigadier General Wilkinson pushed for an immediate strike before the confederacy could fully gather, but Wayne chose instead to strengthen Fort Deposit. On the 19th he sent Major William Price with a mounted battalion to scout the terrain; they spotted several confederate positions but no fighting broke out. That evening, confederate leaders met in council and concluded that since Wayne might delay for days, the warriors could break their fast the following morning.

At dawn on August 20, with the Native forces now in their third day without food, the Legion began its advance. Rain that morning convinced many warriors no attack was coming, so they withdrew toward Fort Miami to eat. Anticipating an encounter, Wayne kept the Legion in tight columns, placing dragoons and artillery at the center so they could respond in any direction. Kentucky militia on horseback led the way, struggling against difficult terrain. The scouts at the front had gone barely a hundred yards into the chosen battleground when Little Otter and Egushawa's Odawa and Potawatomi fighters loosed their opening volley, scattering the militia. Behind them stood two infantry companies of the 4th Sub-Legion under Captain John Cook, who, mistaking the Kentuckians' retreat for cowardice, ordered his men to fire on them. His detachment soon broke as well once warriors closed in for hand-to-hand combat.

The fleeing Americans surged toward the column's left wing, held by Lieutenant-colonel Jean François Hamtramck commanding the 2nd and 4th sub-legions. They shattered Captain Howell Lewis' company, which pulled back without discharging a shot. Hamtramck nonetheless arranged his wing into two lines to check the pursuing warriors, many armed only with tomahawks and knives, while General Wilkinson stretched the 1st and 3rd sub-legions into a single 800-yard line on the right. Wayne himself rushed toward the gunfire and sent two light infantry companies forward from the center to hold off the confederates until proper lines could form. Cannon brought up to the front tore into the Native line with grapeshot. Blue Jacket's carefully laid ambush now fell into confusion, since the center had surged ahead while the wings held their ground. Asked for orders, Wayne told his aide, Lieutenant William Henry Harrison, to charge the rascals with the bayonet.

Captain Robert Campbell led the first charge, his dragoons crossing sixty to a hundred yards with sabers drawn. Nearly a dozen dragoons fell wounded and Campbell himself died in the assault. Wilkinson's foot soldiers advanced slowly behind them, and the

Aftermath

During the campaign itself, General James Wilkinson, serving as Wayne's second in command, worked quietly to sabotage him. He fired off anonymous letters attacking Wayne to local papers and spent years sending similar complaints to officials in the capital, all while behaving with exaggerated courtesy toward Wayne face to face, leaving him none the wiser. At the same time, Wilkinson was secretly drawing pay as a Spanish spy, having actually been hired on as one. Even though American casualties had been considerable, he dismissed the fight at Fallen Timbers as barely worth the name, remarking that it had been too brief to truly count as a battle. Long afterward, a Native warrior recalled Little Turtle's warning that the Great Spirit would conceal himself behind clouds if peace with Wayne was not made, and pointed to that morning's rain as an omen of coming defeat.

By December, groups on the other side began seeking peace terms. On 17 December, Antoine Lasselle came to Fort Wayne accompanied by a party of Native Americans and Canadiens. Within a month most of the Miami had drifted back to Kekionga, while representatives from the Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Odawa, and Wyandotte approached the Legion wanting to "bury the hatchet." The following summer, in 1795, the confederated tribes sat down with an American delegation headed by Wayne to hammer out the Treaty of Greenville, finalized on 3 August. Under its terms much of present day Ohio was opened for settlers, with the boundary line drawn near the modern Ohio-Indiana border using the location of St. Clair's defeat as its anchor point. Together with Jay's Treaty and Pinckney's Treaty, this agreement established the framework for peace and shaped relations between the United States, Britain, and Spain going forward.

Eventually Henry Knox informed Wayne of what Wilkinson had been writing, prompting an inquiry. Suspicion turned to confirmation once Spanish messengers carrying payments to Wilkinson were caught. Wayne sought to have him court-martialed for the betrayal, but before that could happen Wayne succumbed to a stomach ulcer and gout-related complications, dying on 15 December 1796 at Fort Presque Isle, and the court-martial never occurred. Wilkinson instead stepped into his first term as the Army's senior officer, a position he held for roughly eighteen months, all while continuing to feed information to Spain in exchange for substantial gold payments.

For years afterward, Odawa people returned to the battlefield to leave tributes at Turkey Foot Rock.

Peace largely held across the Northwest until the War of 1812 broke out. Wayne's aide, William Henry Harrison, went on to serve as territorial secretary and later as a congressman before being named governor of the Indiana Territory in 1801, where he carried out Jefferson's approach of buying Native land gradually over time. Tecumseh, a Shawnee who had fought at Fallen Timbers as a young man and refused to put his name to the Greenville Treaty, pushed back against this incremental dispossession by forming a new alliance across tribal lines. Harrison struck at this coalition in 1811 at the Battle of Tippecanoe.

Several men who fought at Fallen Timbers went on to notable careers, among them William Clark, later co-leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and Harrison himself, who became the ninth President of the United States. Tecumseh, who had watched his elder brother Sauwauseekau fall in the fighting, would go on to build a fresh confederacy aimed at resisting the removal of American Indian peoples.