St. Clair's Defeat, or the Battle of a Thousand Slain

In 1791, a confederation of Native American tribes destroyed about half of the American army. The catalyst for that conflict was a lengthy period in which unfair treaties, biased against native peoples, were all too common.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Come, I'm Holly fry So. It's
been a while since we have talked about Native American history,

(00:21):
which means the day we're going to talk about that
time that a confederation of Native American tribes destroyed about
half of the American army. Strangely enough, this battle does
not have an official name. Really, It's not called the
Battle of so and So. It just gets referred to
as St. Clair's defeat for the most part, Holly, have

(00:42):
you ever heard this story before? I haven't accept in
what you have told me as you have been researching it.
I get the occasional I am of Oh my goodness, Yeah,
I have never heard about it either. So that is
why we are talking about it today. And the background
on this one actually starts with the Revolutionary War, in which,
of course Great Britain and its American colonies fought over

(01:04):
whether those colonies could govern themselves as an independent nation.
The colonies won their independence in case that was a spoiler,
I'm sorry, and the terms for the end of the
war were set down in the Treaty of Paris in
seventeen eighty three. As we mentioned in our recent episode
on the Battle of Guildford Courthouse, many but not all,

(01:25):
Native American tribes had sided with Britain during the Revolutionary War,
and a big reason for this was that native people's
hopes that Britain's influence would slow down the colony's westward
westward expansion, which was encroaching farther and farther into territory
that had been occupied by just enormous numbers of indigenous

(01:47):
nations for centuries. Great Britain didn't discuss the Treaty of
Paris with its native allies before entering into negotiations, and
it made no provisions for them instead. At the end
of the Revolutionary War, Britain handed a massive stretch of
territory spanning south from the Great Lakes, bordered on the
west by the Mississippi River and on the south and

(02:07):
east by the Ohio River, over to its former colonies.
Florida and most of the land west of the Mississippi
were controlled by Spain at this point. Britain did continue
to occupy some forts and outposts that were in and
along this area. It had handed over, and it did
so for thirteen years after the signing of the Treaty

(02:27):
of Paris. Britain argued that the United States nonpayment of
war debts totally justified their doing this. From these outposts,
Britain encouraged native tribes to resist American expansion, sometimes providing
them with weapons and supplies. But beyond that, this territory,
which would eventually become known as Northwest Territory, was now

(02:48):
in American hands, and the people who were indigenous to
that territory were basically on their own. Once it was
controlled by the fledgling United States, westward expansion into the territory,
of course, increased dramatically. The plan was to methodically survey
all of this land, divided up, and then sell it
in such a way that people purchasing it could establish

(03:10):
settlements that would attract people to the West's fertile farmland.
This whole process was riddled with problems. Though people advertised
land that they didn't actually have to sell, They distributed
parcels with borders that overlapped one another, people double sold
the same land, and even so people kept on moving west.

(03:33):
And to be clear, it wasn't like the West was empty,
there were already a lot of people living there. Some
of them were squatters, which the government dealt with by
evicting them and burning down their cabins, but many of
them were native people, either indigenous to the area or
forced to move there after being displaced from land that
they had been living in farther to the east. Finally,

(03:55):
the Second Continental Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance on July
thirteenth see. The Northwest Ordinance set up how the Northwest
Territory should be governed. It gave this territory a bill
of rights and a process for states that were established
in the territory to then be admitted into the Union.
The Northwest Ordinance also specified that there would be no

(04:17):
slavery or in involuntary servitude in the territory, and in
Article three, quote the utmost good faith shall always be
observed towards the Indians. Their lands and property shall never
be taken from them without their consent, and in their
property rights and liberty, they shall never be invaded or

(04:37):
disturbed unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress.
But laws founded in justice and humanity shall from time
to time be made for preventing wrongs being done to them,
and for preserving peace and friendship with them. So, in
what should not come as a surprise, this turned out

(04:58):
not to be true at all, and we will t
talk about more about how after a brief word from
a sponsor to return to our story. When it came
to treating with the Native American peoples of the Northwest Territory,
in spite of the language in the Northwest Ordinance, the
United States government did not really approach this process particularly fairly.

(05:18):
Those quote just and lawful wars authorized by Congress were
not an idle threat. They were basically the way the
United States was going to resolve disputes with Native American
people's over land. Wars would be fought over land, and
the condition of peace would be handing that land over
to the United States. In some cases, tribes had actually

(05:39):
ceded territory to the government already sometimes too Great Britain
prior to the Revolutionary War, and sometimes this was done
under duress. Tribes also ceded territory that actually belonged to
their adversaries or spoke for their allies without discussing it
with them first, so it was kind of a tangle
and complicating all of this was the fact that many

(06:01):
different tribes hunted, fished, gathered, and even grew crops in
the same places. Since many migrated between summer and winter
dwellings where they had hunting villages that were used only
in the winter, a vast amount of land was actually
used by many different tribes. Even if the government's negotiators
did come to the table with good intentions, which we've

(06:21):
made pretty clear was not always the case. Uh they
were generally trying to make treaties with tribes one at
a time over land that was often used by many.
This all means that following the Revolutionary War, a series
of treaties, sometimes not even signed with the right native leaders,
basically boiled down to this tribe will seed its land
to the United States. In exchange, the United States will

(06:43):
stop fighting this tribe. That was really the heart of
the matter. These included the Treaty of Fort Stanwix at
eighty four, the Treaty of Fort McIntosh in seventeen eighty five,
and the Treaty of Fort Finney in seventeen eighty six,
among others. And of course all of these treaties also
had their own names from the points of view of
the native tribes that they were with. As it became

(07:06):
increasingly clear to the Native peoples of the Northwest Territory
that they could not individually reach a fair agreement with
the United States government or defend themselves from a nation
that was clearly willing to go to war over land,
they began to form a confederacy. And so, just in
case people are confused about all of these dates, all

(07:26):
of these treaties were happening at the same time that
Northwest Territory was being established. In the Northwest Ordinance was
being drafted. So it was all this giant soup of negotiations.
So forming a confederacy was not a new idea to
the North American Native people's at all. At various points,
native tribes and bands had formed both temporary and long

(07:48):
lasting confederacies for a variety of reasons. These included survival
during times of poor weather, resisting the incursions of other
native and non native settlers, and other reading other reasons.
The Hoddana Shawnee, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy, was
one of these existing confederacies, and it actually became part
of the new confederacy that was formed in the Northwest Territory.

(08:12):
Other tribes that became part of this confederacy included the
Council of Three Fires, which is the Chippewa, Ottawa and
Pottawa Tomy, the Shawnee Nation, the Kickapoo, and the Miami,
among many others. These allied tribes eventually became known as
the Northwest Confederacy, the Wabash Confederacy, or the Miami Confederacy,

(08:32):
and it was formed after delegates from all of these
different tribes and existing confederacies met near Detroit in seventeen
eighties six. In seventy Arthur Saint Clair, who sometimes you'll
hear it pronounced more like Sinclair, and there's some debate
about the correctness of which one, but we're going with
Saint Clair for this episode. It was also Scottish and

(08:54):
in Scotland apparently sometimes it's Sinkler. Yeah, so there are
some options. We're picking Saint Clair. That's what we got.
So in seventeen eighty eight, Arthur Saint Clair was appointed
the Governor of the Northwest Territory. So he was born
in Scotland in seventeen thirty four seventeen thirty six. The
records aren't entirely clear, and he was also educated in

(09:15):
Scotland and eventually he joined the Royal American Regiment. He
had combat experience in the colonies during the French and
Indian War, and after marrying the niece of the Governor
of Massachusetts, st Clair settled in Pennsylvania, where he took
on a number of administrative duties, including being the register
of deeds, as a surveyor, and as a judge in

(09:35):
probate court. He fought on the patriots side during the
Revolutionary War, and he had been President of the Continental Congress,
so St Clair had a combined set of both military
and government experiences that made him a logical choice for
this post. One of the things he was supposed to do,
and this role, was to draft a new treaty with

(09:55):
all of the applicable Native American tribes in the area.
And this treaty was, as Lee, meant to cement the
earlier treaties that had already been signed with individual tribes
make them cover everything. So he was tasked to some
degree with sorting out a big mess, and at the
same time, unbeknownst to the native people he was treating with,

(10:17):
Saint Clair was also tasked with pitting tribes against one
another so they would no longer present a united front
against westward expansion. Goes back to that whole thing about
whether we were treating with people fairly and evenly. After
a series of negotiations, St. Clair and native representatives signed

(10:38):
two different treaties in January nine. They were both known
as the Treaty of Fort Harmar also looked at pronunciations
for that and did not find one. One was a
treaty with the Six Nations, which were the Hodeanashani. The
other was called the Treaty with the Wyandot et cetera,
and that one included quote Stims and warriors of the

(10:59):
Wyandot dell A where Ottawa, Chippewa, Patawanama and Sack nations
on the other part. These two treaties established peace and
set boundary lines, and St. Claire's view the two treaties,
also because they were signed with two different sets of
native tribes, would make a wedge between those tribes and

(11:19):
sort of break up their united front. However, many tribes
living farther west in the Northwest Territory actually refused to
sign or even acknowledge these treaties. One was the Miami,
who held that this land was theirs and they had
never agreed to give it up, and that the tribes
that had spoken for them did not actually have the
authority to do so. And the Miami people's influence was significant.

(11:42):
Many refugees from other tribes had wound up settling in
and around the Miami Nation's capital of Kekionga. In the
spring of sevente a trader and Indian agent familiar with
the tribes and the region was sent in to try
to negotiate with the Miami and the other tribes who
were living farther west and closer to the Great Lakes. However,

(12:04):
drawing on the ties of their confederacy, the Miami and
various other members that he talked to, refused to negotiate
with him without consulting with one another, and in some
cases with a British representative he was stationed nearby in Detroit.
This put the treaty process at an impass, which meant
that the United States started to prepare for war. And

(12:26):
we're going to talk more about all of that after
we pause once again for a break to talk about
one of the great sponsors that keeps this show on
the air. So to get back to our story, the
Continental Army, which had been formed to fight on the
patriots side and the Revolutionary War, was dissolved in se four,
the year after the signing of the Treaty of Paris.

(12:46):
To a lot of people in the newly formed United States,
a standing army was antithetical to what their republic was
supposed to be about. Taking the Continental Army's place was
the First American Regiment. This was a volunteer force that
was mainly focused on defending the frontier for the first
several years after the First American Regiment was created, it
was really quite small and it was supplemented with members

(13:08):
of state militia as needed. In June of sevente so,
after all of these events that we talked about before
the break, a First Regiment patrol found a body in
the Northwest Territory, and this body had been shot with
both bullets and arrows. People obviously found us to be
very threatening and started to call for a war to
deal with the quote Indian problem. Two months later, General

(13:31):
Josiah Harmer set out from Fort Washington, near what is
now Cincinnati with about three d and twenty regulars and
about militia to destroy Miami villages along the Maumi River.
Smaller forces moved in at the same time from different
directions on similar missions. St Clair, wanting to preserve the
diplomatic ties that were already in place, sent messages to

(13:55):
British outposts and the tribes that had already signed treaties
with the government that this act was not against them,
but only against the quote Benditti Indians. Harmer's force found
several villages which had mostly been abandoned, and he put
them to the torch. He also burned large storehouses of food.
At these villages. His men killed what little resistance they encountered. However,

(14:20):
on the way back to Fort Washington, his force split up,
and in the process they were goaded into chasing a
Native fighting force into what was basically an ambush. So
even though Harmer successfully burned some things down, the American
force experienced really heavy casualties, and the whole campaign was
put down as a failure. Native raids on American settlements

(14:43):
increased through the following summer and winter. Finally, Henry Knox,
the Secretary of War, requested more troops to increase the
size of the army available to fight against the Northwest
Territories native tribes, and in March of sev George Washington
put Arthur Saint Air in command of it. As before,
this new fighting force still added to its numbers by

(15:05):
relying on troops from state militia's. With this larger army,
st Clair plan a new campaign. The first phase was
to be led by Captain Merritt Scott, whose son had
actually been killed in Harmer's previous failed campaign. Scott led
a force of eight hundred mounted militia along the Wabash
River in May of sev They stormed a series of settlements,

(15:29):
killing thirty two people who had who were later described
as warriors. They took more than fifty captives, and they
experienced very few casualties of their own. The plan was
for st Clair to lead a larger campaign immediately after
Scott's campaign concluded. However, st Clair, who had gout, was
actually ill and didn't actually get to their base of

(15:50):
operations at Fort Washington until the middle of May, at
which point he found it woefully undermanned, and so they
pushed their start date until August first. The next phased
against the Native people in the Northwest territory was led
by Lieutenant Colonel James Wilkinson, who destroyed a series of
Native Native settlements, including several that Scott had previously destroyed

(16:12):
that had been rebuilt in the interim. Then, finally st
Clair and his troops left Fort Washington in September, of
months behind schedule. At this point he had an army
of about two thousand men, along with about twenty Native
American allies that he had intended to use a scouts. However,
st clair scouts weren't actually local to the area, and

(16:35):
consequently they weren't particularly effective. St Clair started an extremely
slow trek towards kek Yanga, clearing a path through really
difficult to rain and stopping to build forts along the way.
The first one they built was Fort Hamilton's, which is
about thirty five miles outside of Fort Washington. About forty
five miles from there, he then built Fort Jefferson. They

(16:57):
had trouble with cold, wet weather and impenetrable mud. They
had to build bridges to move cannons and other heavy
equipment over rivers and ravines, and as the season grew later,
frost and ice ruined the foraging available for the horses
and the other pack animals. Another big problem was dwindling manpower.
Desertions were a big issue, especially as the journey dragged

(17:20):
on and the season got colder. And then there were
the volunteers who had signed up for a six month
enlistment there six months legitimately ended along the way, and
then they were all discharged and sent back to Fort Washington.
On top of that, they were constantly critically low on supplies,
in part because the newly created process for supplying the

(17:41):
newly created army was corrupt, thanks to everything from nepotism
to paying for supplies in advance only for them to
never be delivered. A number of camp followers, including women
and children, also added to the number of mouths to feed,
and eventually St. Clair had to send his infantry regulars
to look for a supply convoy that had been delayed

(18:01):
and then protected once they found it. This meant the
loss of some of his most experienced soldiers. This also
meant that they were a large, loud, slow moving force,
which was, unbeknownst to St. Clair, constantly being observed, monitored,
and reported on by the Western Confederacy's own spies who
were local to the area and therefore a lot more

(18:24):
effective than St. Clair spies. So basically St. Clair knew
nothing about the movements of the Native American force in
the area, but they knew everything about his. This was
definitely a case of him underestimating the abilities of his adversary.
By the night of November three, St. Clair was down
to four hundred soldiers, and that night they set up

(18:47):
a camp next to the Wabash River, with the Kentucky
militia on one side and the regulars and volunteers on
the other. Neither part of this camp was fortified. That evening,
a party of Miami men was spotted not far away,
and soldiers were sent out to intercept them. When they
came back, they told the second in command, Major General
Richard Butler, that they expected a larger attack would be

(19:10):
coming in the morning. However, Saint Clair himself had already
gone to bed, and Butler did not pass this message
onto him. He also took no further steps to secure
the camp after getting this advanced heads up that they
might see some action in the morning. On November fourth,
a fighting force from the Western Confederacy attacked from both

(19:31):
sides of the river. The Kentucky militia, isolated from the
rest of the American force by being alone on the
other side of the river, could offer very little support,
and the main body of the American camp had arranged
itself into two lines. As the Native American fighting force
approached from both flanks, the front line fell back through
the back one, which caused nothing but chaos. The Western

(19:54):
Confederacies men, who were led by a Little Turtle of
the Miami, Blue Jacket of the Shawnee and others, fall
nimbly from within tree cover, and they surrounded the American
force really quickly and started picking people off. The men
who were manning the army's artillery were left undefended and
were mostly killed before they could use their weapons that
even the ones that were able to fire had them

(20:15):
aimed too high to do much good. Over the course
of a four hour battle, the American army was basically
slaughtered along with most of the camp followers. Those who
survived did so after mounted troops plowed an escape route
through part of the Western Confederacy's fighting force, and in
the retreat, the Americans had to abandon an enormous amount

(20:35):
of gear, including two forges, multiple teams of oxen fully
loaded pack animals, tents, muskets, and bayonets, all of the
tools that they had been using to clear the trail
and build bridges, and just on and on and on.
They basically left behind everything they needed. The supplies lost
were worth about thirty two thousand dollars, and that's in

(20:57):
that day's calculations, so that would be more than eight
hundred thousand dollars in today's currency as a rough equivalent.
Among the American force, nine and eighteen were killed, including
Major General Butler, and two hundred seventy six were wounded. St.
Clair's force was using a whole lot of the army's
available total manpower, and so this one action wiped out

(21:20):
almost half of the United States Army. This uh St
Clair absolutely had not anticipated that the Native Americans living
in the Northwest Territory were capable of forming a confederacy
like this and fighting together. And to be clear, sometimes
this was even in spite of not speaking the same
languages as one another. This event had a huge, far

(21:44):
reaching series of consequences. One was that the army for
the US got a lot bigger. The tremendous loss of
Saint Clair's army led to the first congressional investigation, Saint
Clair was ultimately found not to be at fault, although
he was forced to resign his man It was ultimately
blamed on inadequate forces, mismanagement, and inexperienced and undisciplined troops.

(22:08):
The part that gets left out of that is the
fact that the Native force did an extremely good job
of combining their resources and then fighting in a way
that their enemy did not expect, which was just surround
them and fight from the trees and God's chaos. This
congressional investigation also looked at the government's executive branch and
the corruption and inefficiency within the military contractor system that

(22:31):
had caused Saint Clair to have so many problems getting supplies.
That aspect of the investigation started to cement the idea
of executive privilege as President George Washington figured out how
to handle information that would have implicated the Secretary of
War Knox and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton's and
all of these issues of fraud and nepotism that we're

(22:53):
plaguing the army's supply chain because the United States was
not willing to give up the Northwest Territory it mounted
yet another campaign in seventeen ninety four. This one, however,
went the opposite way. Major General Anthony mad Anthony Wayne,
the new commander in chief of the recently expanded Army,

(23:13):
defeated the Western Confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers
on August See. The Treaty of Greenville was signed the
following year, and this was called a quote treaty of
peace between the United States of America and the tribes
of Indians called the Wyandots, Delawares, Shawnees, Ottawa's, Chippawa's, Patawatama's, Miami's,

(23:33):
eel Rivers, weigh As, Kickapoos, Pianshaws, and Kakaskias. So once again,
this was a treaty that ended hostilities against the native
population for the price of seating their land to the
United States. This was not the last time, of course,
that this would happen. That is an ongoing theme of

(23:56):
relations between the United States government and Native tribes going
on long beyond that. Do you have a listener mail
that is maybe not quite so dire? No, my listener
mail is not dire. Uh. It is from Rachel and
Rachel says Hi, Tracy and Holly and then she talks
about where she works, so I'm skipping that part for privacy.

(24:18):
This is about our moonshine episode, and Rachel says the
government taxation of high proof spirits is still a very
real issue even today, with most small skip distilleries getting
only about forty of which each bottle costs after all
the taxes and fees. Federal and state governments are slowly
but surely starting to make changes that will benefit these

(24:39):
small distilleries so that they can grow and serve their
local economies. The distillery that she works at, which I
am remaining nameless, has been in business since when they
started with one sixty gallon copper still. We now have
a six hundred and sixty gallons still and have ordered
a second still that we'll have some time next year.
We work hard to stay within the law, but it's

(24:59):
these see to see why someone would want to make moonshine.
You stand to make a lot more money that way. Uh.
And then she talks about a moonshine festival that's nearby
every Memorial Day weekend and says, I'm not sure of
the history, but I believe it's been going on before
moonshine was made legal in Ohio a few years ago.
That's moonshine in quotes, because like most spirits enthusiasts, it's

(25:23):
not really moonshine if it's legal, but Ohio thinks it is.
And then she says, if we ever stopped by forever
in her part of the world, we can stop by
and have a tour of the distillery, which I'd be
up for. That sounds great to me. Yes, thank you, Rachel.
Thank you Rachel. With that that update about how all
of the extremely high taxes on spirit that we talked

(25:44):
about in that Moonshine episode still exists and affect things today.
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(26:06):
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(26:26):
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