Bayonets in the Wilderness: Anthony Wayne's Legion in the Old Northwest (review)

Alan D. Gaff opens his account of General Anthony Wayne's campaign against the Native Americans of the Ohio Valley with an impressive narrative reconstruction of the November 1791 Battle of Kekionga, in which a confederated Indian force under the Miami leader Little Turtle annihilated American forces under General Arthur St. Clair. This defeat motivated the United States War Department to revise its approach to frontier defense and to call upon Wayne to create a new military force capable of overcoming Native American resistance to settler expansion in the Ohio Valley. Gaff relies on a comprehensive analysis of primary evidence to offer an alternative to the "confusing, ill-constructed, and often just plain false" (xiii) scholarship produced to date on Wayne. In many ways, Gaff's monograph mirrors aspects of his protagonist's character; it is methodical, possessed of an eye for symbolism, and ultimately unable to view Native Americans as anything other than savage obstacles to the advancing tide of American civilization.

Gaff aims to retrieve the story of Wayne's campaign from the shadows of Americans' historical consciousness and to make its case as "one of the most stupendous undertakings in U.S. history" (xiv). To accomplish this goal, he provides a meticulously researched account of the rise of the Legion of the United States between 1792 and 1794. Wayne's efforts to recruit, train, supply, and discipline his charges are recounted in comprehensive detail. Gaff spares no effort to provide information at what might be considered a genealogical level for many of the officers and enlisted men who served with Wayne, as well as for Wayne himself. We learn, for example, that on Christmas Day, 1792, Wayne "threw up a Green seated jelley from [his] Stummach" (80).

Gaff's work represents an important contribution to the early history of the United States military. Yet as a history of Wayne's campaign, Gaff's study is situated entirely on the American side of the hill. The author makes very little effort to comprehend the strategy and objectives of Wayne's Native American and British opponents. Eschewing any substantial analytical complexity in his narrative, the author asserts that the 1783 Treaty of Paris transformed the Ohio Valley into American soil. Gaff thus undermines the rationale for both Native American and British resistance to American expansion and normalizes the attitudes of frontier settlers, who sought to deal with Indians only through "fear and terror" (133) and who objected to British retention of posts in the Great Lakes region after 1783. In fact, as Gaff partially acknowledges (235), the British continued to occupy Niagara, Michilimackinac, and Detroit after the Revolutionary War in hopes of securing American compliance with articles in the 1783 Treaty of Paris pertaining to prewar debts and to Loyalist claims for damages in the Revolutionary War. Native Americans, who had no seat at the diplomatic bargaining table in Paris, not only objected to being held to terms negotiated by others; they also knew that the United States had no other claim than ink on paper to lands northwest of the Ohio River after 1783. Thus, when Native Americans spent the next decade raiding frontier towns, destroying livestock, taking captives, and defeating American militiamen and regulars in both pitched and guerrilla-style battles, they were fighting to defend their homelands and their way of life, not engaging in illegitimate acts of senseless, brutal savagery.

In his preface, Gaff laments the supposed "inability" of Native Americans "to permanently record events" as an "immeasurable loss to history" (xiv). Yet employing the excuse of an ostensible lack of written sources to justify omitting Native Americans from the narrative of Wayne's campaign, an event vitally significant to their own history, is ultimately unsatisfying, and, when considered in light of the scholarship produced in the last two decades by historians such as Colin Calloway, Drew Cayton, Gregory Dowd, Leroy Eid, Eric Hinderaker, Larry Nelson, and Richard...