Travel Miami

Meanwhile, the Miami lands in Indiana were being lost to treaties, debts, and taxes. Treaties signed in 1826, 1828, and 1838 took portions of their reserves until the final treaty signed at the Forks of the Wabash in 1840 ceded the last 177,000 acres of the big reserve for $550,000 – $325,000 of which was used to pay debts. Except for Meshingomesia’s band – whose chief owned the land in fee simple – the Miami agreed to remove to Kansas within five years. On October 7, 1846, 555 Miami left Indiana by canal boat and were settled at the approach of winter along the Marais des Cygnes River in eastern Kansas on land adjoining the Piankashaw, Wea, and Peoria. The 500 to 1,500 Miami who remained in Indiana were heavily intermarried with whites so estimates of their number are difficult. The lands of Meshingomesia’s band were divided among the 300 survivors in 1872 and soon lost to land speculators and tax sales. In 1897 the assistant U.S. attorney general terminated the tribal status of the Indian Miami. No explanation for this action was ever given.

Throughout the 1840s, approximately 1,000 Miami lived in eastern Kansas. By 1854 the Wea and Piankashaw had decided to form a single tribe with the 300 Kaskaskia and Peoria which were all that remained of the once-numerous Illinois Confederation. The United States, however, was anxious to open Kansas for settlement to facilitate construction of a transcontinental railroad and wanted to purchase native lands. In June 1854 at Washington, D.C., the Miami and combined Peoria-Miami tribe ceded more than 500,000 acres in exchange for 200 acre individual allotments plus ten sections to be held in common, but no offer of citizenship was made in return for the acceptance of allotment. White settlers flooded into Kansas to determine the question of black slavery with violence, and native lands were fair game for the heavily-armed squatters. The outbreak of the Civil War brought thousands of native refugees to Kansas fleeing the violence in Oklahoma. In the midst of this, Kansas became a state in 1862, and the following year, its legislature asked the federal government to remove Native Americans.

Action on this request had to await the end of the war, but in an omnibus treaty signed in 1867, the Miami and the United Peoria and Miami Tribe (merged group of Peoria, Wea, and Piankashaw), together with the Ottawa, Quapaw, Seneca, Seneca, Wyandot, Delaware and Shawnee, ceded their last Kansas lands and agreed to remove to Oklahoma. They purchased 6,000 acres in the northeast corner of the state in what is now Ottawa County. No sooner had the Miami left Kansas, than white squatters moved into their old lands before they could be auctioned. Army troops had to be used in 1870 to remove them. The Peoria and Miami lands in Oklahoma were allotted in 1893, and the excess given to Ottawa County in 1907. By the 1930s both the Oklahoma and Indiana Miami were completely landless, although the Oklahoma tribe has since acquired 160 acres which are held in trust. The United Peoria were terminated in 1950 but restored to federal status in 1972. The Miami Tribe of Oklahoma never lost its federal recognition, something the Indiana Miami have never been able to regain.

For the most part, native resistance ended with the death of Tecumseh. At the Second Treaty of Greenville (July, 1814), Harrison and the loyal chiefs of the Delaware, Seneca, Shawnee, and Wyandot officially ended hostilities with the Kickapoo, Miami, Ottawa and Potawatomi who had fought for Tecumseh and the British. A separate treaty was signed with the Piankashaw at Portage des Sioux just north of St. Louis a year later. Some of Tecumseh’s followers remained in Ontario after the war but, after making peace at Spring Wells (September, 1815), returned to the United States. The War of 1812 ended in a draw between Britain and the United States, but the tribes of the Old Northwest had been decisively defeated. The Americans knew this and were quick to take advantage. After Indiana entered the union as the 19th state in 1816, pressure increased to extinguish the remaining native claims.

The first step was a treaty signed at Fort Harrison in 1816 with the Wea and Kickapoo confirming earlier cessions, but the major losses came two years later. In January, 1818 the Piankashaw confirmed previous treaties and ceded all of their land except for a two square mile (1280 acre) reservation on the Wabash. In October a series of treaties were concluded at St. Marys with the Indiana tribes, with the Delaware ceding all their land in Indiana and agreeing to move to Missouri. In their treaty, the Miami and Wea relinquished almost six million acres to the United States but kept seven reserves totalling almost a million acres in the northern part of the state. At the same time, nineteen Miami chiefs acquired separate sections of land in fee simple. By 1820 the Wea had signed a treaty at Vincennes ceding their Indiana land from the 1818 St. Marys Treaty and agreed to remove to Missouri. The actual move took several years with the last groups of Piankashaw not leaving Illinois until 1828, and some Wea remaining in Indiana until 1832. Ultimately, 150 Piankashaw and 330 Wea were settled on 160,000 acres in southwest Missouri near the Delaware and Kickapoo.

In general, these peoples had usually gotten along, but unfortunately, there was a serious dispute about the murder of six Delaware by Miami warriors in a separate incidents stretching back to 1809. The Delaware demanded payment, but the Miami reminded the Delaware they had allowed them to settle in Indiana after the Fort Greenville Treaty in 1795 (and even sell some of it in 1803) and offered only $500 to “cover the dead.” The Delaware took this as an insult, and war between these old friends was averted only when the government intervened in 1827. The matter remained a sore spot between them, but in 1829 the Delaware sold their Missouri lands and moved to a new reserve in eastern Kansas north of the Shawnee. The Wea and Piankashaw followed suit in a treaty signed at Castor Hill (St. Louis) in 1832, but their new lands were south of the Shawnee, and over the years the dispute and near-war was slowly forgotten.

During his absence, the Potawatomi attacked American settlements in southern Illinois bringing the frontier to the point of war. Harrison raised an army at Vincennes and, after building Fort Harrison on the treaty line near Terre Haute, marched on Prophetstown in November. Disregarding Tecumseh’s instructions to avoid a fight with the Americans while he was gone, Tenskwatawa ordered an attack on Harrison’s camp. The Battle of Tippecanoe followed. The Prophet’s warriors were finally forced to withdraw, the Americans burned Prophetstown. The defeat was significant, not so much in military terms, but for destroying Tenskwatawa’s reputation as a prophet. When Tecumseh returned in January, his hard-won alliance of 3,000 warriors to stop American expansion had fallen apart. By the time war was declared between the United States and Great Britain in June, 1812, Tecumseh had only managed to regain one-third of his original following.

In May Tecumseh met with the alliance chiefs on the Mississinewa River near present-day Peru, Indiana. Little Turtle had grown sick and old by this time, but because of his opposition to Tecumseh, few Miami warriors joined the British. His attitude was shared by Black Hoof’s Shawnee, Tahre’s Wyandot, and Captain William Anderson’s Delaware. Despite this, Tecumseh still had enough followers to raise havoc at the onset of the war. Michilimackinac was captured in July, and the American garrison abandoned Fort Dearborn (Chicago) but was massacred enroute to Detroit. Detroit surrendered in August after the Wyandot at Brownstown joined Tecumseh who was helping with the British siege of the fort. More forts fell or were abandoned, and raids struck American settlements the entire frontier west to Missouri. During a visit to Fort Wayne in July, Little Turtle died at age 70. Without his influence, most of the Miami promptly went over to Tecumseh and sent a war belt to the Delaware asking them to join them. The Delaware, however, chose to remain neutral.

The only bright note for the Americans was in September when the Prophet and his warriors failed to take Fort Harrison defended by Zachary Taylor and 50 regulars. Otherwise, disaster followed disaster. William Henry Harrison was given command of American forces in the Northwest and began to turn the tide. One his first actions was to attack the Miami villages on the Mississinewa to keep them from giving aid to Tecumseh. The Prophet was forced to abandon Prophetstown for a second time and retreated into Canada. In January, 1813 Harrison relocated the Delaware from Indiana to the Shawnee villages at Piqua, Ohio for their “safety.” Then he moved his army to the upper Sandusky River in northwest Ohio and built Fort Meigs to protect the American settlements farther south. Two attempts by Tecumseh and the British to take Fort Meigs failed that summer, and after Oliver Perry’s naval victory on Lake Erie, Harrison began his advance on Detroit. British resistance crumbled. Detroit fell without a struggle, and Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames in October while covering the British retreat across southern Ontario.

Utilizing the traditional authority accorded to Miami chiefs, Little Turtle squashed most of the dissent, and the matter was finally resolved by treaties which compensated the Miami for their loss. The land sales added to an already volatile atmosphere of social disintegration fueled by defeat and alcoholism in which peace chiefs were often murdered by their own people. After receiving a religious vision in 1805, Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet, began preaching a return to the traditional native values and a rejection of the white man’s trade goods, especially whiskey. This in itself would have been good, but Tenskwatawa’s brother Tecumshe added a political element of no additional sales of tribal lands placing the religious movement in direct opposition to the peace chiefs and the Americans.

In the spring of 1806, the Prophet’s movement got an uneasy start when a series of witch-hunts by his followers in the Delaware and Wyandot villages turned most of these important members of the old alliance against him. However, his reputation grew after he predicted a solar eclipse that summer. Thousands of new followers visited his village, defiantly located on the grounds of deserted Fort Greenville, but with the active opposition of the older peace chiefs (especially Little Turtle), the strongest support for Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh came from the western tribes of the Ohio Valley. The Miami were interested, but Little Turtle’s influence over his people kept them away. Tecumseh decided to ignore the peace chiefs and build his own alliance. In May, 1808 Tenskwatawa abandoned Greenville and relocated his capital, with the permission of the Kickapoo and Potawatomi, to Prophetstown on Tippecanoe Creek in western Indiana. The new location was no accident and was intended as a challenge to Little Turtle who lived nearby. In June Tecumseh visited Canada and secured promises of British aid in case of war with the Americans.

Ignoring Tecumseh’s demand to stop all land cessions, the Miami, Delaware, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Shawnee, and Kaskaskia peace chiefs in September, 1809 sold 3,000,000 acres of southern Indiana and Illinois to the United States at Fort Wayne. Tecumseh was furious, refused to accept the treaty, and threatened the chiefs who signed it with death. In June his Wyandot followers executed the Wyandot chief Leatherlips and brought the calumet and wampum of the old alliance to Prophetstown. The reaction of Little Turtle and the peace chiefs meeting at Brownstown was to condemn the Prophet as a witch. In August Tecumseh met Harrison at Vincennes to protest the Fort Wayne treaty, but the exchange of harsh words almost resulted in a battle. Tecumseh and Harrison met the following summer but accomplished nothing. Afterwards, Tecumseh went south in the fall of 1811 to recruit the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Cherokee to his cause.

Little Turtle and the Miami had symbolically been the last to sign at the treaty at Greenville and afterwards settled on the upper Wabash southwest of Fort Wayne. Little Turtle established his village on the Eel River, and, as was often the case when dangerous enemies had been defeated, the Americans lionized him. He was given a large house and invited to visit the president. Washington presented him with a sword, and Little Turtle so valued this he was buried with it. Little Turtle reciprocated to all of this adulation by becoming the Miami “peace chief,” and as the most prominent former enemy, he became the most prominent peace chief and a strong force supporting the Greenville Treaty and accommodation with the Americans. His opposition, or rather lack of support, was an important reason for the failure of Bluejacket’s attempt to bring back the alliance in 1801.

Little Turtle introduced smallpox vaccination among the Miami by allowing his family and himself to be vaccinated first, but his efforts to stop the spread of alcoholism among the Miami failed. The extent of the problem is apparent from Indian Bureau records in which the agent reported in 1847 that, of 286 Miami in Kansas, 165 were “inebriates.” Alcohol was a major problem on the frontier for both red and white because it was so widely available. Rather than a conscious plan to destroy Native Americans, “moonshine” was a traditional product of a frontier economy short on cash and lacking the roads needed to move crops to eastern markets. Excess grain was converted into whiskey which was easier to transport, and when the new federal government tried to limit production with taxes, the result was the Whiskey Rebellion during which President George Washington was forced to personally lead troops in 1794 to restore order in western Pennsylvania.

After 1795 the Delaware and some Shawnee left Ohio and settled with Miami permission along the White River in east-central Indiana. While American squatters continued to encroach on native lands beyond the Greenville Treaty line, William Henry Harrison, governor of the Northwest Territory, pressed the peace chiefs to cede more land for settlement. His work was made all the easier by the debts (often for whiskey) which the tribes accumulated with American traders. Needing money to pay these, they sold land, and in a vicious cycle, some of the money received was used to buy more whiskey leading to more debts. After the Kaskaskia (Illinois) ceded most of southern Illinois in 1803, the Piankashaw and Wea also ceded their claims to the area in a treaty signed at Vincennes the following year. Beyond the original 11.8 million acres of Ohio ceded in 1795 at Greenville, within ten years Harrison and other American negotiators had added more than 21 million acres. Especially annoying to the Miami was the selling by the Delaware of some of the Miami’s land in southern Indiana.

Little Turtle ambushed one of Wayne’s supply columns near Ludlow Spring, Ohio, but Wayne was still able to establish himself for the winter at Fort Greenville 80 miles north of Cincinnati. In the spring, the British responded to Wayne’s move north by building Fort Miami at the falls of the Maumee River. Many of the alliance tribes took this as a sign of support, but it was a bluff. The British had already decided to reach an accommodation with the Americans rather than risk war. Wayne ignored the new British fort and resumed his advance in July supporting it with a chain of forts extending north from Fort Greenville. Alliance warriors attacked Fort Recovery but failed to capture it. On August 13th, a war council was held on banks of the Maumee. Only the Shawnee, Miami, and Wyandot favored continuing the war. Lacking a consensus, the council asked Joseph Brant to negotiate a truce with the Americans, but he refused and sided with the militants. With reluctance, the alliance decided to fight.

Little Turtle, however, had been among those urging caution and negotiation. Called a coward in the course of the debate, the man who had given the alliance its greatest victories was replaced on the eve of battle. His replacement was the Shawnee war chief, Bluejacket, not the mythical Ottawa Turkey Foot of some accounts. Little Turtle accepted his demotion with grace and continued to support the alliance as the Miami war chief. Estimates of how many warriors Bluejacket actually had when he faced Wayne a week later at Fallen Timbers varies from 700 to 2,000. The hard-fought battle was not really significant from the standpoint of casualties, or the tribes involved, as by what happened afterwards. Driven from the field, the retreating warriors saw the British at Fort Miami close their gates to them rather than risk a fight with the Americans.

Wayne spent the next three days destroying crops and villages in the area and, after marching his Legion to the gates of the British fort, turned around and returned to Fort Defiance on the Auglaize. A month later, he moved into northeastern Indiana, destroyed the Miami villages on the upper Maumee, and built Fort Wayne. Having insured a hungry winter for the alliance, the “Blacksnake” returned to Fort Greenville and waited. In November the Jay Treaty was signed between Great Britain and the United States in which the British, among other things, agreed to finally leave their forts on American territory. Defeated and abandoned by their British allies, the alliance had no choice but to come to terms with the Americans and make peace. In August, 1795 the alliance chiefs signed the Treaty of Fort Greenville ceding all of Ohio except the northwestern part and some of southeastern Indiana. The last battle of the American Revolution was over, and settlers poured into the new lands. Kentucky became a state in 1792; Tennessee in 1796; and Ohio in 1803.

When the news reached Washington, he went into a rage. St. Clair resigned from the Army but remained as governor of the Northwest Territory. The Americans could not afford to lose, and when Washington calmed down, he sent “Mad Anthony” Wayne to Ohio. Wayne was neither mad nor rash, but a deliberate and methodical man who soon proved to the alliance that he was going to a more serious threat than his predecessors. Wayne spent almost two years training his “Legion,” a large group of disciplined regulars to back the skittish militia. Meanwhile, he began building an extensive supply system of roads and forts aimed directly at the Maumee River villages (Toledo, Ohio) which were the heart of the alliance. The Miami watched his careful preparations and began to call him “Blacksnake,” because like the blacksnake (who they considered the wisest of all snakes), Wayne sat quietly and waited for the right moment to strike.

While Wayne prepared, the Americans (worried a military confrontation could lead to war with the British) continued efforts to negotiate a settlement. The Iroquois attempted to mediate the dispute in 1792, but after Little Turtle’s easy victories the previous two years, the alliance was in no mood for compromise. Calling the Iroquois “coward red men,” they threw the American proposal in the fire, and the representatives of the once powerful Iroquois League were fortunate to leave the meeting with their lives. Two other American peace commissioners, John Hardin and Alexander Trueman, were not so lucky and were murdered by the Shawnee enroute to a conference. The Americans kept trying and in the fall, the council met at Auglaize (Defiance, Ohio) to consider its position for another meeting with the Americans that coming summer. Joseph Brant and the British continued to encourage resistance, but Little Turtle was beginning to have doubts about facing Wayne.

Following the alliance’s victories in 1790 and 1791, raids had continued against the settlements, but the “Black Snake” had kept his army intact and refused to scatter it across the frontier in small garrisons. Meanwhile, the alliance was coming undone. An American attack on the Wabash tribes in 1791 had captured a large number of women and children, and the following year the Wea, Piankashaw, and Kickapoo had made peace to get them back. With the Wabash tribes neutral, the Fox and Sauk left the alliance in 1792 because there was not enough food to feed them. Unlike the year before, the American delegation for the peace conference in 1793 arrived safely, mainly because it included Hendrick Aupamut, a Stockbridge Indian with many relatives among the Delaware. The meeting reached an impasse in July and ended without any resolution. In October Wayne received orders to begin his advance into Ohio.

So the stage was set for Little Turtle’s War (1790-94), with both sides facing a situation from which they could neither retreat nor compromise. Meanwhile, the British were gleefully sitting in their forts and supporting the western alliance to keep the Americans out of Ohio. Their aid to the Ohio tribes was entirely self-serving and had nothing to do with defending Native American claims to their land, since the British had never admitted there was such a thing. Despite their protests of needing a native buffer to protect Upper Canada from American expansion or the American failure to pay the Loyalist claims, the British were perfectly aware of the American dilemma, and there is little doubt they fully intended to recover through an economic collapse what they had lost through force of arms during the Revolutionary War.

However, to take Ohio, the Americans first had to create an army, since they had not had one since 1783. All that was immediately available were state militia of questionable leadership and reliability. The new president was too impatient to allow the time needed for this, or perhaps he underestimated his enemy. The alliance was well-armed by the British and could muster 2,000 warriors when required. This made them formidable enough, but they were led by the Miami war chief Little Turtle, the son of a Miami father and Mahican mother, who turned out to be something of a military genius adept in the tactics of allowing an enemy to advance until exposed and vulnerable. The initial American efforts to take Ohio were disasters. Washington ordered Josiah Harmar – a revolutionary soldier known better for his hard-drinking than his skills as an Indian fighter – to destroy the Miami villages on the upper Wabash. On October 22nd, Little Turtle caught Harmar’s 300 regulars and 1,200 militia fording the Wabash near present-day Fort Wayne, Indiana and sent them back to Fort Washington at Cincinnati with over 200 casualties.

In November Major John Hamtramck attacked the Wabash villages, but this was small compensation for Harmar’s debacle. Washington was accustomed to adversity, and after Harmar resigned in March, 1791, he commissioned Arthur St. Clair a major general and commander of the American forces in Ohio with specific instructions to be careful of “surprise.” St. Clair, however, was disliked in Kentucky and had trouble recruiting an army. He eventually assembled 2,000 militia at Fort Hamilton (just north of Cincinnati) and moved north in the fall. Despite Washington’s warnings, St. Clair was surprised on November 4th near the future site of Fort Recovery, Ohio and almost overrun by Little Turtle’s early morning assault of 1,200 warriors. The confused retreat degenerated into a complete rout with the soldiers abandoning their weapons and wounded. The alliance lost 56 warriors in the greatest Native American victory over an American army, while St. Clair lost over 600 killed and 400 wounded from a total force of 2,000. The mouths of the American dead were found later filled with dirt, the only piece of Ohio they would ever get.

At the beginning of 1786, there were 400 American settlers scattered among the French population on the lower Wabash River at Vincennes. In keeping with a long-standing tradition of the frontier economy, they raised corn and converted much of it into whiskey which was sold to anyone willing to pay – including the Piankashaw, Wea, and Kickapoo in the vicinity. After several confrontations over this trade, a war party of 400 to 700 Miami (Wea) arrived in Vincennes and told the French they had come to kill the Americans. The French stalled, and the Americans moved into their forts and sent to Kentucky for help. This was the perfect opportunity for George Rogers Clark, who had been petitioning Congress since 1783 for a war against the Ohio tribes and had volunteered to lead it. Clark arrived at Vincennes in the fall with some hastily recruited Kentucky militia, half of whom immediately deserted when there was no fighting, but Clark kept the others together and sent an expedition to Kaskaskia (Illinois) to arrest a British trader and three Frenchmen as a Spanish agents. Cooler heads prevailed, however, and just as Clark was about to start a major war, Colonel Harmar ordered him to disband and go home.

Many members of the alliance chose to fight American encroachment in 1786 by attacking the settlements north of the Ohio River. At their council that fall, Joseph Brant made a speech which convinced the alliance to demand the Ohio as a boundary. Moderates, however, were able to gain agreement for a temporary truce to allow time for its demands to reach Congress. If there was no reply, raids would resume in the spring. Their timing could not have been worse. The Americans were in the process of recreating their government under a new Constitution, so there was not time for a “minor matter” like peace in Ohio. Congress did not receive the message until July, and the raids had already resumed. During the summer, Benjamin Logan’s Kentucky militia retaliated by attacking and burning the Shawnee villages in western Ohio.

The American governor, Arthur St. Clair, made a final attempt to resolve the dispute and in December, 1787 asked the alliance for a conference at Fort Harmar on the falls of Muskingum. The council agreed to meet and decided to settle for the Muskingum as the border, but there was serious disagreement to this decision. Joseph Brant demanded the repudiation of all treaties ceding any part of Ohio and left the meeting in disgust to return to Ontario. The Miami, Kickapoo, and Shawnee were also opposed, but the Wyandot convinced the Delaware and Detroit tribes to attend. With half of the alliance determined to ignore any agreement, the period preceding the peace conference was anything but peaceful. In July Fort Harmar soldiers building the council house for the meeting were attacked by an Ottawa-Ojibwe war party. The Kickapoo ambushed an army convoy bringing supplies to Vincennes at the mouth of the Wabash, and the Miami killed land speculator, John Symmes, while he was exploring the upper Miami River.

The Mohawk of Joseph Brant were conspicuous by their absence at the Fort Stanwix, and remaining in Canada, they were still hostile to the United States. The previous year, De Peyster had brought Brant west for a meeting of the Ohio tribes at Sandusky, and his influence was instrumental in the creation of the formal alliance the British had wanted. Its first council fire was at the Shawnee village of Wakatomica but was moved to Brownstown (south of Detroit) after Wakatomica was burned by the Americans in 1787. Officially, the British told their former allies to cease attacks on American settlements, but they made it quite clear they would be willing to support th with trade and arms against the Americans. Meanwhile, the British used the American failure to pay the claims of British loyalists (Tories) as an excuse to continue to occupy forts on American territory in defiance of the Treaty of Paris.

Despite the ominous signs, there was a lull in the fighting after 1783 during which 12,000 frontiersmen poured across the Ohio River to squat on native lands. Short of civil war, there was little the American military commander, Colonel Josiah Harmar, could do to prevent this. To pay Revolutionary War debts, Congress had already sold land rights to the Ohio Company and John Symmes representing a New Jersey syndicate. The squatters were paying nothing for the lands they were taking, but they hated Native Americans and could very easily start a war. Since it was obvious the Ohio tribes no longer recognized the authority of the Iroquois, the United States needed to reach an agreement with them over its claim to Ohio. Unfortunately, Americans viewed the western alliance as a British plot (true in many ways), and decided they would only negotiate with the individual tribes.

The Treaty of Fort McIntosh (1785) signed with the Wyandot, Delaware, and the Detroit Ottawa, and Ojibwe agreed to the Muskingum River as the frontier between settlement and native lands. A similar agreement was signed the following year with the Shawnee at Fort Finney (Greater Miami Treaty) (1786). The chiefs who signed these treaties, however, did not represent the alliance or sometimes the majority of their own tribes, many of whom were willing to fight for the Ohio River, not the Muskingum, as the boundary. On the other side, the American negotiators signed for a weak government in Philadelphia which could not control the frontiersmen who would not be satisfied until they had the entire Ohio Valley. Treaties and diplomacy soon gave way to violence. The Miami village of Ouiatenon became a important staging point for raids into Kentucky forcing its French inhabitants to evacuate.