ANTHONY WAYNE
Drawn by Herbert Krofft, Zanesville, Ohio
After two years of preparation in drilling his troops and building several forts to protect supply trains, he led an army of 2,000 regulars and 1,500 militia to the confluence of the Auglaize and Maumee Rivers. Enroute from Fort Greenville he had performed a notable strategy, which led the Indians on the westward to believe he would attack near present Fort Wayne, Indiana, and those to the east to conclude that he would attack them near present Toledo, Ohio. In reality he drove straight north to the mouth of the Auglaize where he built Fort Defiance, and thus, because of their absolute dependence upon the Maumee River for transportation, split the Indian forces in half. Taking ample time and with his now well-disciplined army, he attacked the Indians at Fallen Timbers, west of present Toledo. Here, behind trees blown down by a tornado, an army of 2,000 Indians waited for an attack. On the morning of August 20, 1794, Wayne’s army finally crushed the strength and spirit of the Indian hostility.
The British troops at Fort Miami, which was on American soil, four miles away from the battlefield, did not go to the assistance of the Indians, although a number of Canadian soldiers and officers were captured or killed in the battle. This failure of support and the smashing defeat which had been administered to them made possible the Treaty of Greenville, made by Wayne with the Indians on August 5, 1795.
The boundary lines established by this treaty extended somewhat beyond those of the Fort McIntosh Treaty of ten years before. What Wayne and the Greenville Treaty did accomplish was to convince the Indians and their British backers that America meant to hold the Northwest. They remained convinced until the War of 1812, when the matter was settled for all time.
With the advent of peace, settlement of Ohio and the Northwest proceeded rapidly. Virginians swarmed into the Military Tract reserved by her deed of cession for bounty lands. Manchester, on the Ohio River, was settled in 1791 by Colonel (later General) Nathaniel Massie, who also settled Chillicothe in 1796. Chillicothe was to become later the first territorial capital, then the first capital of Ohio.
When Connecticut ceded her claims to the Northwest Territory lands to the United States, reservation had been made in the northeast corner of the present state of Ohio—known as the “Western Reserve.”
A half million acres of this area were set off for the benefit of Connecticut citizens who had suffered loss by fire at the hands of the British in the Revolutionary War. These still bear the name of “Firelands.” In 1795 Connecticut sold the portion of her reserved lands east of the Cuyahoga River to a land company, and here in 1796 Moses Cleaveland established the present city which bears his name.
In the central part of the state Franklinton, present Columbus, was laid out in August, 1797. By 1800 the towns of Marietta, Cincinnati, North Bend, Gallipolis, Manchester, Hamilton, Dayton, Franklin, Chillicothe, Cleveland, Franklinton, Steubenville, Williamsburg and Zanesville and many smaller settlements were in existence.
In the territory to the west settlers were now finding new homes. Settlements around the old French trading posts and forts had grown materially and new centers were springing up in an ever westward march.