[257] McLaughlin, op. cit., 435.
[258] Ibid., 436; Roosevelt, Winning of the West, Vol. IV, passim.
We may now turn to a consideration of the relations between the Americans and the Indians on the northwestern frontier in the period which falls between the close of the Revolution and the Treaty of Greenville of 1795. By the close of the Revolution two important steps had been taken in the direction of opening the Northwest to settlement. The claims of the various states to a portion or all of this region had been ceded to the national government, and by the Treaty of Paris the sovereignty of the United States as against foreign nations had been recognized. It remained to quiet the Indian title to the lands in question, and, in this connection, to overcome their opposition to their settlement by the whites.
Encouraged by the British officials, the Indians at first strenuously resisted the American claim to sovereignty north and west of the Ohio River. In the course of a few years, however, various treaties were entered into between the United States and the different tribes providing for the cession to the former of lands beyond the Ohio.[259] Such treaties were made at Fort Mcintosh, January 21, 1785, and at Fort Finney, January 31, 1786. But only a portion of the tribes concerned participated in these treaties; those who opposed the cessions saw in them only an incitement to hostilities. In the summer of 1786 the disaffected ones gathered in council at Niagara, and an ineffectual effort was made to unite them in a war upon the Americans. Meanwhile raiding went on along the border, and Congress was impotent to protect it by waging war upon the hostile tribes.[260] Thereupon the Kentuckians to the number of twelve hundred gathered under the leadership of George Rogers Clark to chastise the tribes on their own account. But the force was poorly organized. Clark had lost the qualities of dauntless leadership for which he had been distinguished a few years before, and the expedition accomplished little or nothing.[261]
[259] For an account of these treaties see Winsor, Westward Movement, 267 ff. The treaties themselves are printed in American State Papers, Indian Affairs, Vol. I, and in the various collections of treaties between the United States and the Indian tribes.
[260] Winsor, Westward Movement, 274.
[261] Ibid., 275.
Meanwhile the rush of settlers into the lands west of the Alleghenies went on apace. Owing to the Indian menace north of the Ohio, for the first few years following the close of the Revolution this settlement was practically confined to the region south of that river. It was only a question of time, however, when the Indian barrier would be broken down. The famous ordinance of 1787 made provision for civil government and for the ultimate formation of states in the Northwest. In the same year Congress sold to the Ohio Company five million acres of land, and provision was made for a territorial government, of which General St. Clair was to become the first chief executive. In 1788 the Ohio Company formally inaugurated its enterprise by founding Marietta at the mouth of the Muskingum, and the tide of immigration into the Northwest may be said to have fairly begun.[262] The opposition of the Indians was, naturally, not conciliated by these developments. In 1789 St. Clair negotiated a treaty with certain of the tribes at Fort Harmar, which, in effect, confirmed the grants to the United States north of the Ohio which had been made by the treaties of Fort Mcintosh and Fort Finney.[263] But a large portion of the tribes affected held aloof and took no part in the treaty.
[262] For a description of this movement see ibid., chap. xiv.
[263] Winsor, op. cit., 308-10.