The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army by Colin G. Calloway (review)

The Wabash Battle is neither unnamed nor unknown in American historical scholarship. The essential details of the event reveal that in the fall of 1791 a United States expeditionary force composed of fourteen hundred men crossed into the Ohio Valley determined to pacify native populations and seize lands ceded by the Treaty of Paris. Commanded by General Arthur St. Clair, the United States army clashed along the banks of the Wabash River with Chief Little Turtle’s Miami Confederation soldiers. After four hours of grueling combat, fully half of the new republic’s armed forces had been killed or immobilized by an American Indian army. Despised by American authorities and anathema to the new nation’s expansionist narrative, the Miami Confederation victory would be conveniently obscured in the annuals of American history.

Here Colin Calloway departs from previous historical treatments to remind us that The Victory with No Name was a quintessentially Indigenous triumph that reasserted longstanding property rights and the sovereign authority of Indigenous peoples. Pushing back against the anti-local and anti-regional tide of contemporary transnational histories, Calloway argues that the Wabash Battle constituted a geographically specific catharsis that reshaped early republic political and military structures. The United States’ effort to enforce sovereignty rights conceded by the British in 1783 would make the Midwest into the new republic’s imperial laboratory. However, the lives and property of Midwest Indians were not the British Empire’s to give and Indigenous resistance to American colonialism also distinguished the region as a testing ground for new American Indian political and military strategies.

The Victory with No Name is structured to demonstrate how these two conflicting views of sovereignty, one imperialistic and the other nationalistic, came to armed conflict in the old Midwest and gave birth to a powerful new North American empire. In chapter one Calloway argues that the Midwest Indian tribes that coalesced as the Miami Confederation and the fledgling former British colonies each took definitive steps to secure their particular sovereign goals through political combinations and formal allegiances. Calloway contrasts two diametrically opposed views of property, describing “Indian land” as “shared space, extensive hunting territories” and “American” land as “property . . . individually owned.” Noting the League of the Iroquois, the Creek Confederacy, the Pueblo Alliance, and the Great Lakes region Three Fires Alliance, Calloway challenges the widespread expansionist myth that American Indian peoples lacked both a definite sense of land ownership and the political will to protect it. For its part, the Confederation Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 establishing the legal framework for American expansion into the 1783 Treaty of Paris cessions—while promising “fair treatment” of Indian peoples.

Chapters two and three follow well-worn contours in early Republic history, tying land speculation, real-estate deals, and political intrigue to the revolutionary impetus for, “a new kind of empire.” Some distinction is given to the “orderly” Jeffersonian “empire of liberty” to be built by a valorized common man, as opposed to the disorderly empire of greed driven by squatters, settlers, and land speculators, however it is not clear how tidy and untidy empires achieve different results? As Calloway rightly notes, under terms of the 1785 Land Ordinance, the minimum 640-acre purchase was set “at $1 an acre,” a prerequisite that made the 1783 cessions unobtainable for most commoners. Herein the seeds of war that sprouted on November 4, 1791, were planted. Driven by the opportunism of “gentleman speculators,” the machinery of government was fine-tuned for rapid expansion. Expansion lead to war.

In chapter four Calloway explores Midwest American Indian political combinations deployed against the rising tide of American expansion. Special attention is given to alliances the Miami Confederacy formed with the British after 1783. Such alliances would come to define American Indian resistance in the Midwest until the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the subsequent 1795 Treaty of Greenville. The latter...