Bigger than Little Bighorn: Nomenclature, Memory, and the Greatest Native American Victory over the United States

SUMMER 2012 3 Bigger than Little Bighorn Nomenclature, Memory, and the Greatest Native American Victory over the United States Michael F. Conlin and Robert M. Owens T wo important Native American victories over the United States Army, includingthegreatestinhistory,havebeenundulyignored.Thecommon names given to the two battles won by the Northwestern Confederation over the United States—“Harmar’s Defeat” (October 21-22, 1790) with over two hundred American casualties, including 183 killed, and “St. Clair’s Defeat” (November 4, 1791) with over nine hundred American casualties, including six hundred thirty killed—completely ignore the victors. Indeed, this nomenclature is every bit as one-sided as calling the Battle of the Little Bighorn (June 25, 1876) “Custer’s Last Stand.” Academic historians, schoolteachers, and the general public have largely overlooked these two battles due to their ethnocentric names and the triumphalism of American public memory, especially in regard to the Indian Wars. More neutral names for the battles promise to rescue them from the dustbin of history and restore them to their rightful place in the textbooks, classrooms, and collective consciousness of the people of the United States. In the interest of accuracy and fairness, these confrontations deserve appropriate names. Rather than name the battles after the defeated (or the victors), historians should employ objective geographic labels in the spirit of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Accordingly, “Harmar’s Defeat” should be called the “Battle of Kekionga,” and “St. Clair’s Defeat” the “Battle of the Wabash Forks.” I To some extent, these two battles were part of the unresolved frontier phase of the Revolutionary War. While the Patriots’ conflict with the British ended in 1783, armed conflict with Native Americans in the Northwest Territory continued intermittently until 1815. Historian Colin Calloway has accurately described the Treaty of Paris as the “peace that brought no peace.” The driving force behind the conflict was white encroachment on Indian lands, which provoked Native American attacks and Euro-American reprisals. The British encouraged and supported American Indian resistance to white American expansion into the Northwest Territory. Instability in that region was one of the most pressing issues facing the newly independent nation.To remedy its weaknesses there and in many other areas, the new American republic adopted the federal Constitution in 1788, BIGGER THAN LITTLE BIGHORN 4 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY establishing a powerful central government. In the 1790s, the federal government in Philadelphia could levy taxes and raise an army. As the Constitution’s Preamble notes, the federal government could now “provide for the common defense” and thus project military power hundreds of miles into the North American interior.1 These two battles were both part of the messy end of the Revolutionary War and of the imperial project of the United States, a nation of nearly four million people, to conquer and dispossess the First Peoples of the eastern woodlands, who numbered about one hundred and fifty thousand, with perhaps a third of them living north of the Ohio River. Even after the Treaty of Paris secured American independence and ended direct Anglo-American conflict, the United States government rightly regarded the Northwestern Native Americans as a strategic threat. They had fought with the British in the Revolutionary War, continued to accept aid from British agents in the 1780s and 1790s, and many would take the British side in the War of 1812. More important, the United States government viewed the Northwestern Native Americans as an obstacle to white colonization and exploitation of the Northwestern frontier. To counter the threat and clear the barrier, President George Washington charged the War Department with negotiating Indian treaties in the Northwest Territory to secure title to their land and enable white settlement . Many of the First Peoples refused to acquiesce to the presidential diktat. A loose alliance of Native Americans, including the Shawnee, Miami, Delaware, Wyandot, Ottawa, and Potawatomi nations, repudiated the Treaty of Fort Harmar (1789), which would have removed them from much of what would become southern Ohio. To resist the invasion of their land north of the Ohio River, they formed the Northwestern Confederation; many, though certainly not all, the American Indians living in the region joined this confederacy . Secretary of War Henry...