The summer passed slowly, and each day’s tidings from the north was awaited with such patience as could be mustered. Faithful drilling, interrupted by fevers and influenza, was the order of the day, according to General Posey’s record. The number of challenges and duels suggests something of the social order. On one occasion an officer challenged one of his superiors who, in reply, had him arrested to obviate an encounter. In June a premature report came that the peace commissioners had failed in their mission. “We now have but one alternative left,” wrote Posey, “and this is We must meet the Savage foe, The Emortal Washington at the Head of our Government, and the Old hero Genl Wayne and His well disciplined Legion, we have little to fear accept our god and fear him in love.” The summer wore on with little or no definite tidings from the north. The troops were exercised daily and the necessities of the possible campaign were pushed on up the line of forts from the Ohio River to Fort Jefferson. Contractors and quartermasters were kept busy supplying the comparatively large army. The army and the nation waited for word from the rapids of the Maumee. What would that word be?

As the leaves began to open, the emissaries of a hundred Indian nations were threading the forests of the Old Northwest and Canada upon trails converging on the western shore of Lake Erie. Roche de Bout,[138] as the locality of the “Rapids of the Miami of the Lakes” was known, was on the present site of Maumee City, Ohio. Great fields of Indian corn spread up and down both sides of the broad valley; a score of vegetable plants thrived amid the corn. In the same area probably no such amount of ground was under cultivation by Indian squaws as in the Maumee Valley. The spreading fields supported many villages and it was from these important centers of Indian life that so many marauding parties descended upon Kentucky, calling forth retaliating armies such as those of Clark, Harmar, and St. Clair. And Harmar, only, had actually reached this populous and fertile lair. Here the convention was to be held. The United States commissioners had proceeded to Niagara where they were entertained generously by Governor Simcoe at Navy Hall, a mile distant from Fort Niagara, being advised that the delegates from the various nations would undoubtedly be late arriving on the ground. On July 5, Colonel Brant and fifty Indians arrived at Fort Erie from the Maumee to meet and interview the American commissioners. This delegation alleged that the warlike actions of General Wayne had prevented the meeting at the rapids and inquired specifically whether or not the commissioners were properly authorized to run a new boundary line. Before this advanced deputation returned it was clear that the Indians would refuse to recognize any treaty made since the famous Stanwix treaty of 1768.[139] By their instructions the commissioners[140] were ordered to insist upon the boundaries established at the Treaty of Fort Harmar.[141] From the beginning, despite the liberality of the offers of the United States—trading-posts north of the Ludlow Line to be evacuated and fifty thousand dollars to be paid to settle any miscellaneous claims by Indians not benefited in previous treaties—there was no hope of reconciliation. In fact there was no agreement even among the “hostile” and the “peaceful” nations at Roche de Bout. The delegates from the Six Nations did not agree with the ill-disposed councils of the embittered Shawanese and Miami warriors and were not advised of the final decision of the council. The American commissioners were ever held off at arm’s length. On the twenty-first of July they reached the mouth of the Detroit River, and took quarters with Captain Matthew Elliott. From this point communications passed to and fro between the real convention at Roche de Bout and the Americans fifty miles away. The last message from the Indians was sent August 13. Its important paragraph read: “At our general council, held at the Glaize last fall, we agreed to meet commissioners from the United States, for the purpose of restoring peace, provided they consented to acknowledge and confirm our boundary line to be the Ohio: and we determined not to meet you, until you gave us satisfaction on that point: that is the reason we have never met.”[142] On the sixteenth day of August the commissioners replied that the above message was a virtual declaration of war, and declared that “impartial judges will not attribute the continuance of the war to them.”[143]

A glimpse into the council of Indians at the rapids is afforded us in the deposition made by an unknown Pennsylvanian youth, who was captured by Wea Indians in 1783 and who had lived among the Indians throughout the ten years since that time. He attended the treaty. On the tenth of July there were fourteen hundred Indians present; on the twentieth, twenty-four hundred. Of these, eighteen hundred were warriors. It was unanimously agreed that the Ohio should be made the boundary line and that the Indians be paid for Kentucky. Simon Girty, Governor Simcoe’s aide-de-camp, a Lieutenant Silvy of the Fifth (British) Regiment, and another British officer remained at Colonel McKee’s house, which was fifty yards distant from the council fire.

In the evenings the head chiefs, especially those of the Shawanese and Delaware nations, met with Colonel McKee and his guests. “McKee always promised that the King, their Father, would protect them & afford them every thing they wanted in case they went to war.... Advise that they ought not to make Peace upon any other terms than to make the Ohio the boundary line. After the final decision, McKee furnished the savages with arms, ammunition, scalping knives and Tomahawks even more than they could use this winter.” On the twenty-eighth of July the Indians separated to reassemble “at au-Glaize twenty-four days from that time” to watch Wayne and attack him if opportunity offered.[144]

Instantly a score of Indian runners were hurrying south and east to Knox and Wayne with the secret code message to prepare for war.[145] The exact date of Wayne’s receipt of this message (sent from Niagara, August 23) is not recorded. It was two hours after midnight, September 24, when the express thundered into Petersburg, Kentucky, with an order to General Scott “to take the field with the Mounted Volunteers & to be at Fort Jefferson By the first of October.”[146] Hobson’s Choice was the scene of intense activity as September drew to a close, and by October 5 all was in readiness for the northward movement. Excluding invalids, and garrisons to be left at the four forts on the line of march, Wayne estimated his available force at twenty-six hundred regulars and three hundred and sixty mounted volunteers. “... you may rest assured,” Wayne wrote Knox upon leaving Fort Washington, “that I will not commit the legion [risk an engagement] unnecessarily; and unless more powerfully supported ... I will content myself by taking a strong position advanced of [Fort] Jefferson, and by exerting every power, endeavor to protect the frontiers, and to secure the posts and army during the winter.”[147]

Already the far-sighted Wayne had anticipated the matter of road-building, an important department of a pioneer general’s duty in which he particularly excelled. As early as July 10, the American commissioners to the hostile tribes wrote Secretary Knox that the Indian scouts reported that Wayne “has cut and cleared a road, straight from fort Washington, into the Indian country, in a direction that would have missed fort Jefferson; but that, meeting with a large swamp, it was, of necessity, turned to that fort, and then continued six miles beyond it.”[148] The very fact that when Wayne left Fort Washington, October 7, he covered the seventy-five odd miles to the site of Fort Greenville (Greenville, Ohio) in six days is proof enough that the Indians’ spies were well within the mark in saying that a road had been built; more than that, packhorses had been wearing it deep into the ground with heavy loads of food for mouths and guns, and large droves of cattle had already rough-stamped Wayne’s Trace from the Ohio to the Stillwater. Faithful James O’Hara was quartermaster and Elliott and Williams the contractors. Colonel Robert Elliott, a native of Hagerstown, Pennsylvania, met his death at the hands of the savages at the “bigg hill” near Fort Jefferson while engaged in hurrying on provisions to the northern posts. “Mr Elliott had on a wig,” records General Posey in a strain of gloomy defiance, “the indians will not get his skulp.”

Mad Anthony Street, in Cincinnati, is the beginning of Wayne’s Road northward up Mill Creek Valley, thence running northwest to Fort Hamilton on the watershed south of the head branches of the West Fork. The route through Hamilton is given by Everts as across the sites of Snider’s paper-mill, Niles tool works, and Cape and Maxwell’s plant.[149] The old track crossed the Miami a few rods south of the eastern end of the High Street bridge and from there circled around the west end of what is locally known as the “Devil’s Backbone” on what was L. D. Campbell’s peninsula but which is now an island. Wayne’s first camp was at Five Mile Spring, southeast of the village of Five Mile. The old route passed over the present site of that village and kept on the eastern side of Seven Mile Creek all the way to Fort St. Clair (Eaton, Preble County). Two Mile, Four Mile, Seven Mile, and Nine Mile Creeks were all so named from Wayne’s crossing-places. Following up the valley of Seven Mile about two miles, the old track leaves it near Nine Mile Creek and turns due north, leaving Butler County in Wayne Township, section 6. In Preble County the “south end” of Wayne’s Trace has always been used as a highway and known as “Wayne’s Trace Road.” The trace passes through Washington Township east of Eaton, crossing the Greenville Road on a bluff near a sycamore-tree on the east side of the road. It crossed Banta’s Fork at or near the “Forty-foot Pitch” and ascended the high bank at a point on the east side of the present road. The swamp which the Indian spies said had turned Wayne’s route nearer Fort Jefferson than was originally intended evidently lay in the vicinity of Ithaca, Twin Township, Darke County. The first settler in Brown Township, John Woodington, made his clearing beside Wayne’s Trace on the farm owned by William Herdman in section 28 on the Greenville Pike. Through these parts the explorer will find the famous old track partially marked out by the growths of young sycamores which sprang up here when the forests were cut down. Many of the first settlers “saw on the uncovered roots of trees, along the trace, the indisputable marks of wagon wheels or of the heavy ordinance trains.”[150]

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