In June, a two day battle against the villages on the Sandusky of both Lenape and Wyandot, in northern Ohio, an American force was defeated. Colonel William Crawford, the American commander, captured by the Wyandot, was turned over to the Lenape to deal with as they pleased. While being taunted by Simon Girty, the Lenape burned Crawford at the stake. Crawford had been George Washington‘s personal friend.

   Girty led another raid against Kentucky in August. Bryan's Station was the target this time. When pursued by Kentucky militia after the raid, Girty set up an ambush at Blue Licks on the Licking River. Daniel Boone's son, Israel, was one of 60 killed.

   Hannastown, Pennsylvania was burned by the Mingo.  In October, for a second time, a war party of 300 men attacked Fort Henry.  November saw Clark with a force of 1,100 mounted riflemen, defeat the Shawnee, burning New Chillicothe and five other villages. 

   With the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the Revolutionary War ended. Once again, “THE INDIAN PROBLEM” went unaddressed and the war between the Ohio tribes and Long Knives continued. There was a tremendous amount of hypocrisy in the British request that their allies stop their attacks on the Americans. In the manner of the French before them, the British continued resolving intertribal disputes while encouraging an intra-tribal alliance to hold the Americans out of the Northwest Territories. On the sly, the British provided arms to the Ohio tribes from forts they continued to hold in violation of the peace treaty.

   The tribes and the Americans had old scores to settle. Great Britain and the United States had signed a peace treaty. The Americans felt this changed nothing between them and the Shawnee. While each party sized up the other, the fighting stopped, but only temporarily.

   In 1783, at Sandusky, the Northwest alliance was formed. While the British did not actually attend, they sent the Thayendanaga from Canada which was even better still. Alliance members visited Detroit and were given assurances support from the British. The Shawnee hosted the alliances first council fire at Wakatomica. Burned by the Americans in 1787, the council fire was moved to Sindathon's village (Brownstown), a Wyandot village just south of Detroit. The treaty ending the Revolution gave the Ohio Valley to the United States. It said nothing about Indians living there.

   In 1784, needing land to settle Revolutionary War debts by the sale there of, the government of the newly formed nation prevailed upon the defeated Iroquois to sign a reiteration of the Ft Stanwix Treaty of 1768. In the first treaty, the Iroquois had given up all claims to the Ohio Valley, to which there claim was rather dubious to begin with.

   In this, both the original owners and the government were losers. There were already over 12,ooo “squatters” living north of the Ohio who had not paid anyone for the land. Like the British after the Proclamation of 1763 establishing a line over which settlers could not cross, the American army could not stop the flow of “illegal immigrants.”

   In the spring of 1786, there was still a large French population on the Wabash River at Vincennes. Among them, some 400 Americans had settled against the wishes of their government. The Kickapoo and Miami had already had several run ins with the Americans. A large contingent of Ohio Indians showed up in Vincennes. They announced to the French that they were there to kill every single American living at Vincennes. The French, tired of British deceit in dealing with both themselves and the Americans, protected the Americans by going through the motions of negotiating, giving the Americans time to fort up. The Americans also sent out a messenger to Kentucky to get the militia to come to their relief. In the fall, George Rogers Clark and the Kentucky militia arrived.

Interesting Fact - You ever noticed how all the ‘bad guys’ always have 3 names; John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, George Rogers Clark. (That’s a really, really biased, Shawnee point of view.)

   True to form, almost immediately, half of the militia quit and went home. Clark, unflappable as always, sent a small force, to Kaskaskia to arrest someone he thought to be a Spanish agent posing as a British trader. Clark, on the verge of starting a war with Great Britain for arresting one of their citizens, with Spain for accusing them of spying and the Indians just because, was reigned in by Josiah Harmer, the American military commander of the region. Harmer order him to disband his army and return to Kentucky.

   The Overhill Cherokee, come to be known as the Chickamauga, had been expelled from the lowlands of western Tennessee to the Ohio by southern Americans. (Irony abounds. Indians are being chased out of the south to northern lands only to have to fight battles to keep from being driven west.) The Chickamauga joined the alliance now consisting of the Canadian Mohawk (those that had been driven out of New York by the Revolution, having backed the British), the Wyandot, Kickapoo, Odawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Fox, Sauk, (the last two coming to be known as one tribe and always referred to as the “Fox & Sauk”), Mascouten, Lenni Lenape, and, of course, the Shawnee.

   Theyendanaga (Joseph Brant), who had held rank as a British officer during the Revolution, was able to get everyone to coalesce around the idea of the Ohio River and its eastern origins as the boundary between the Americans and themselves. The council also decided on a truce until spring to see if these demands would be accepted by the American Congress. If they received a negative response or no response by spring, they would begin raiding again. This message did not even reach Congress until sometime in July and, of course, the raids had already begun again. The terror campaign began with several attacks on Kentucky settlements by the Chickamauga, Mingo and our trusty Shawnee.

   In retaliation, Colonel Benjamin Logan, unleashed the wrath of the Kentuckians on two villages of Shawnee that had not joined the alliance. Mequachke and Wakatomica, the home of Molunthy (the only Shawnee chief to have signed the Ft. Finney treaty.) In fact, Logan killed Molunthy while he was still clutching that same treaty in his hand. The Shawnee, once again, moved their villages to the northern head waters of the Miami River.

   Arthur St. Clair , the American governor, requested a meeting with representatives of the alliance at Ft. Harmar to set a new boundary for American encroachment into Ohio.

   The alliance almost completely fell apart. It was deeply divided over whether or not to accept the new terms establishing the Muskingum River as the new boundary. The war faction included the Wabash, Miami. Shawnee, and Theyendanaga of the Mohawk. He demanded complete repudiation of all treaties that had given up any of the Ohio lands. Brant left in a huff when the Wyandot decided to attend the council with St. Clair.

   The alliance continued to be divided all through 1788. In July, while building the council house at Ft. Harmer, American soldiers were attacked by a war party of Odawa and Ojibwe. An army convoy was ambushed by the Kickapoo near the mouth of the Wabash. The Americans were furious, but the Lenape, Potawatomi, and Detroit tribes were finally convinced by the Wyandot to join them at the conference.

   This new agreement, signed at Fort Harmar in January of 1789, was a last ditch attempt by both parties to settle the dispute peaceably. The Muskingum was established as the boundary. The Shawnee were not at the conference. The Wyandot promised to drive the Shawnee out of Ohio if they broke the peace. The Wyandot could not have expected to do this. Half the alliance was ignoring this new treaty. They knew the Americans were planning to take all of Ohio anyway.

   Many large groups of Shawnee had left Ohio to settle in southeast Missouri in 1773 and 1779. The Spanish welcomed them as a means of providing a defensive barrier against the Americans on the east and Osage to the south. Representatives of New Spain had gone to Ohio in 1788 to see if they could entice other Shawnee and Lenape to emigrate. They had been somewhat successful . The Spanish governor of Louisiana, Baron de Carondelet, gave the Missouri Shawnee a 25 mile square land grant near Cape Girardeau in 1793. Unwilling to accept the Greenville treaty, others of the Ohio Shawnee joined them. In 1795, later, the Hathawekela that had been living with the Creek in Alabama, made the trek to New Spain.

   Many of the Kispokotha, and virtually all of the Hathawekela, and Piqua were in Missouri by 1800. Only the remaining Kispokotha, Chillicothe and Mequachake were left in Ohio. By the end of 1795 the Shawnee in Missouri outnumbered their brothers in Ohio.

   Hostilities in the Ohio had ended until the rise Tecumseh, the Battle of Tippecanoe and the war of 1812.