Battle that turned the tide of early Indian wars
While the general cursed from the pain of gout, aides hoisted
him onto his horse and he galloped off with saber swinging. Even
with its comic opera start, it was a crucial battle for the new
nation.
Following the Revolution, a flood of migration westward raised
Indian resentment at the incursions into their ancestral lands and
resisted.
p
Battle that turned the tide of early Indian wars
While the general cursed from the pain of gout, aides hoisted him onto his horse and he galloped off with saber swinging. Even with its comic opera start, it was a crucial battle for the new nation.
Following the Revolution, a flood of migration westward raised Indian resentment at the incursions into their ancestral lands and resisted.
Fighting was particularly bloody in the Ohio country, what was then the Northwest, and British agents who had established forts for the fur trade encouraged Indians.
When two expeditionary forces were soundly defeated, President George Washington called upon one of his most trusted generals from the American Revolution. Anthony Wayne, tagged “Mad Anthony” because of his propensity to attack larger units, was a brilliant strategist as well as a brave officer. He established the Legion of the United States, a force of 2,000 soldiers, and trained them through the winter of 1792-93.
In the summer of 1794 he took the army, supplemented by two brigades of Kentucky riflemen, north through the Ohio country. The Indians, armed by the British at Fort Miamis near present-day Toledo, waited in ambush at Fallen Timbers, a forest that had been uprooted by a tornado.
On Aug. 20, 1794, lines of Indians charged the first wave of soldiers but were forced to retreat when another larger force charged them. Wayne was everywhere, directing soldiers in flanking movements, and yelling, “The bayonet! Use the bayonet!”
Soldiers charged with the bayonet, then fired as the Indians fled. It was over in three hours, and many Indians ran to Fort Miamis for refuge, but the British denied them haven.
The victory secured a vast territory for settlement, and Americans soon poured into Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and what later became Wisconsin. It also provided many young officers with combat experience.
Among them was Lt. William Henry Harrison, later a general in the war of 1812, and the nation’s ninth president. Captain William Clark fought there a decade before he and Meriwether Lewis led their epic expedition to the Pacific. Leonard Covington, later a general killed in the War of 1812, and for whom Covington, Ky., was named, saw action at Fallen Timbers. So did Robert Todd who became the grandfather of a girl who later married Abraham Lincoln.
On the other side was the brilliant scout and coordinator of Indian affairs, Alexander McKee. When defeat seemed imminent, he fled with the American renegade, Simon Girty, called the “white savage” for his atrocities against his countrymen.
The victory hastened the English agreement to abandon their forts on American soil. When the Treaty of Greeneville was signed in 1795, most Indians withdrew from their ancestral lands.
A notable exception was Tecumseh, a Shawnee chieftain. He fought against Harrison at Fallen Timbers, and met him later at treaty conferences. The English made him a brigadier general in the War of 1812 and he was killed at the Battle of The Thames in 1813 where General Harrison won a resounding victory.
