without their consent." Legislation and frontier war- 

 fare were separate matters. 



As the fighting strength of the western Pennsyl- 

 vania and Kentucky militia grew, the three thousand or 

 so Shawnees, Senecas, Delawares, and Wyandots 

 (British term for Hurons) nearest the frontier were 

 driven northwest across Ohio by stages. From 1790 to 

 1794 they made their final stand along the Maumee 

 and upper Wabash rivers, there joined by Indian allies 

 and supported by the British Indian Department in De- 

 troit. Although the Great Lakes confederacies defeated 

 the first expeditions sent from Cincinnati, the well- 

 trained army under General Anthony Wayne along 

 with the Kentucky militia gained a victory at the Battle 

 of Fallen Timbers, near Toledo Ohio, in 1794. The 

 same year, the British agreed to vacate Detroit and the 

 Straits of Mackinac. In 1795, several thousand Indians 

 assembled at Greenville, to sign the treaty ceding the 

 southern two-thirds of Ohio and in effect giving up the 

 Ohio River boundary line. The end of the warfare 

 opened the Ohio country to a flood of white settlers. By 



1810, the state of Ohio had a population of 230,000. 

 Indiana and Illinois soon became the next focus of 



conflict between Great Lakes Indians and Americans. 

 Indian antipathy toward white settlers intensified after 

 Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee prophet, began preaching 

 in 1805 in the Delaware towns on the White River of 

 Indiana, where they relocated after their homes in 

 Ohio were destroyed. The prophet's message urging 

 rejection of white society, spread through the Great 

 Lakes and beyond. In 1807, when war between Great 

 Britain and the new American republic was already 

 predicted, the prophet's followers held an intertribal 

 council at the Grand Kickapoo village near the head of 

 the Sangamon River in central Illinois. Headquarters 

 for the new militant coalition was established among 

 the Potawatomis, at the juncture of the Tippicanoe 

 and Wabash Rivers in Indiana. Prophetstown was soon 

 surrounded by encampments of Kickapoos, Winneba- 

 gos, Miamis, and a faction of Wyandots. The Shawnee 

 prophet's charisma diminished after the governor of In- 

 diana Territory, William Henry Harrison, made a suc- 

 cessful surprise attack on Prophetstown in November 



1811. Already the prophet's brother, Tecumseh, was 

 rising to prominence as a military leader and orator, 

 denouncing further land cession treaties. Settlers from 

 Ohio to Missouri hastily began erecting forts in anti- 

 cipation of Indian warfare. 



At the beginning of War in 1812, both Tecumseh 

 and Tenskwatawa crossed to the Canadian side of the 

 Detroit River to join the British army. The British re- 



gained a dominant role among the Indians in the 

 northern sector of the western Great Lakes during the 

 War of 1812. Key figure in organizing Indian military 

 support was Robert Dickson, British trader whose base 

 was among the Dakotas on the headwaters of the Min- 

 nesota River, where he had a Dakota wife and family. 

 Upper Great Lakes Indians contributed the principal 

 troop strength when the British regained the strategic 

 Mackinac Island location in July 1812. (Site for the 

 fort had been moved from the mainland to the island in 

 1781.) From Mackinac Island, Dickson transported In- 

 dian contingents to military camps on both sides of the 

 Detroit River and the Niagara River war zone. Many 

 Indian veterans returned to the upper Great Lakes with 

 tales of the "burning of Buffalo. " 



Chicago became an important, but tragic, site at 

 the outset of active warfare. Fort Dearborn on the Chi- 

 cago River had been established in 1803 on one of the 

 strategic sites reserved for military fortification by the 

 Treaty of Greenville in 1795. It was situated in the 

 midst of country occupied by intermixed Potawatomi, 

 Ojibwa, and Ottawa who had moved into northern 

 Illinois lands formerly inhabited by Illinois and Sauk. 

 Soldiers at isolated Fort Dearborn carried out orders for 

 evacuation in August 1812, but almost all lost their 

 lives when they were ambushed by hostile Potawatomis 

 during their attempt to gain safety at Fort Wayne. This 

 tragedy occurred within a day of the American sur- 

 render of Detroit, leaving Fort Wayne as the American 

 outpost nearest the Great Lakes Indian country. 



Following the American evacuation of Fort Dear- 

 born, Chicago and the entrance to the St. Joseph River 

 across Lake Michigan became British bases for oper- 

 ations during the balance of the war era. Dickson set up 

 a blacksmith shop at a hidden village south of Kalama- 

 zoo to serve the Indian troops. His lieutenant in north- 

 ern Illinois was the Sauk leader. Black Hawk, who col- 

 lected Dakota and upper Great Lakes warriors to 

 oppose American forces in northwestern Ohio. 



In southern Illinois, hostile incidents occurred as 

 early as 1811. Territorial government had been in exist- 

 ence only since 1809 at Edwardsville, established in 

 1805 at the northern margin of white settlement. In 

 1812, Governor Ninian Edwards launched attacks on 

 the Kickapoo and Potawatomi towns along the middle 

 course of the Illinois River, and succeeded in establish- 

 ing Fort Clark at Peoria in 1813. In Indiana, Amer- 

 icans carried out systematic campaigns to destroy Dela- 

 ware towns on the White River, where the Delaware 

 moved after losing their homes in Ohio, but had less 

 success in attacks on Miami towns on branches of the 13 



