Military Roads of the Mississippi Basin

by Archer Butler Hulbert

MIAMI VALLEY CAMPAIGNS

The various campaigns directed from Kentucky and western Pennsylvania had, by 1779, comparatively freed what is now eastern and central Ohio of red-men. Little by little they had been pushed in a northwesterly direction until the headwaters of the Great and Little Miami and Scioto were reached. Here on the backbone of Ohio, near the headwaters of the St. Mary and Auglaize Rivers—a pleasant country which the Indians always loved—the most heroic stand was yet to be made against the encroaching white men.

The point of vantage was well chosen, as the bloody years of 1780-1795 proved. The forests were divided by large stretches of open land, which were easily cultivated and exceedingly rich. To the northward flowed the Auglaize River affording a highway to the great Maumee Valley and Lake Erie. The St. Mary offered a roundabout water route to the same goal—a goal fortified by the line of British forts on the Lakes. Here encouragement of every description was to be had at all times—at the price of steadily resisting and ravaging the advancing American frontier line.

The three rivers, the Scioto and the two Miamis, offered thoroughfare from this vantage ground southward toward the Kentucky stations. The important Indian towns were located on the upper waters of the Little Miami, the Auglaize, and Maumee, with other villages on the portages between these streams and in the lower valleys of the Auglaize and Maumee. The largest Indian villages were the settlements at the junctions of the Maumee and Auglaize and the St. Mary and St. Joseph. The key of the region was the junction of the St. Mary with the St. Joseph—four water avenues, leading east (Maumee), west (Wabash), south (St. Mary), and north (St. Joseph), and each filled with Indian clearings and villages.

The land was covered with a network of Indian trails running in every direction, of which surprisingly little can be definitely stated. Considering how numerous are the old-time maps which show the roads of the red-men in eastern and central Ohio and in Kentucky, it is remarkable that almost none give the routes in western Ohio and eastern Indiana. By comparison of contemporaneous authorities it is certain there were three important landward thoroughfares leading northward from the Ohio River into the region here under view. In general terms, the most easterly of these ascended the valley of the Little Miami; another passed northward on the watershed between the two Miamis; the third ran north from the present site of Cincinnati on the watershed to the west of the Great Miami, with branches running into and up the river valley itself. All of these routes led to the strategic portages which connected the two Miamis and the Scioto with the St. Mary and Auglaize tributaries of the Maumee.[63]

The unfortunate Bowman expedition of 1779[64] went up the Little Miami to the Shawanese villages along that river. In the year following George Rogers Clark waged his campaign against the celebrated Shawanese town of Piqua on the Mad River tributary of the Little Miami, cutting a road for his packhorses and mounted six-pounder on the east side of the Little Miami.[65] Two years later Clark executed one of the most successful campaigns yet made into the region north of the Ohio. Moving from near the mouth of the Licking (the usual place of rendezvous of all the Kentucky expeditions into Ohio) it is believed the expedition took the central track between the Miamis, reaching the Great Miami near the site of Dayton. From thence the route was up that river to the portage. “The British trading-post,” wrote Clark to the governor of Virginia,[66] “at the head of the Miami and carrying-place to the waters of the lake shared the same fate [as the towns Clark attacked in person] at the hands of a party of one hundred and fifty horse, commanded by Colonel Benjamin Logan.” This post was, undoubtedly, historic Loramie’s Store, the trading-post on Loramie’s Creek, Shelby County, Ohio, at the southern end of the portage to the St. Mary River.

Thus after a number of years of fighting, the Kentuckians had at last struck at the vital spot. This blow ended the Revolutionary warfare in the West. The British having lost, some time ago, the war in the East, had until now assisted the Indians in an attempt to retrieve the situation by ousting the brave pioneers from the West. The presence of the hero of Vincennes so far north as the portage to the St. Mary and Auglaize was proof enough that their hope of conquest in the West was idle.

But hope would not down, and much of the hard story to which these pages are to be devoted would never have had a part in American history had the British now, once for all, given up the design of countenancing the Indians in an attempt to hem in and push back the frontiers of expanding America. The contest until now, 1783, had been one solely of retaliation on the part of the Kentuckians; by treaties, oft confirmed, the Indians had given up all title and claim to the lands south of the Ohio River. From 1785, when the treaty of Fort McIntosh was made with the Wyandot, Delaware, Chippewa, and Ottawa nations, and 1786, when the treaty of Fort Finney was made with the Shawanese, the United States ceded to these Indians all the lands lying between the Muskingum and Wabash Rivers north of a line drawn from Fort Laurens to the Miami-St. Mary portage and thence to the mouth of River de la Panse on the Wabash.

The northern valley of the Ohio River, for a long distance into the interior, now coming into the possession of the United States, the inevitable struggle to hold it drew on apace. The tribes of the Miamis nation, Twightwees or Miamis proper, Weas or Ouiatenons, Piankeshaws, and Shockeys, on the upper Wabash, being troublesome, George Rogers Clark moved northward from Vincennes with nearly a thousand troops in the fall of 1786; but Clark’s deportment was demoralizing and his campaign was a practical failure. However, before starting on the Wabash campaign, Clark had ordered Colonel Logan to strike again at the towns at the head of the Great Miami. With four or five hundred mounted riflemen Logan accomplished the task of destroying eight Indian villages and taking several score of prisoners.

The foregoing details form a necessary introduction to the new era in the West, heralded by the passage of the Ordinance of 1787 and the forming of the government of the Territory Northwest of the Ohio River at Marietta July 16, 1788. Until this time the question of western defense had been a problem for Pennsylvania and Virginia to solve by means of their frontier militia. Now the United States Government took up the tangled problem, by empowering President Washington, on September 29, 1789, to call out the militia of the frontier states to repel the incursions of the savages.