Sometime around the year 1000 A.D., Leif Eiriksson and thirty-five Vikings established a settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows on the tip of the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland (Vinland). Leif’s brother Thorvald would be killed by the native people they called “Skraelings.” It is not known for sure just what the name meant, it was likely descriptive but not necessarily complimentary.

It would be five centuries later, in 1492, that Christopher Columbus and Martin Alonso Pinzon sighted the Bahamas. It is possible that Columbus heard stories about those early Norse explorations and had some idea of the approximate distance of the continents to the west. He mistakenly assumed however that they would have to be Asia so when his expedition landed on San Salvador he called the native Lucayan people “Indians”, because he was sure this was Indonesia.

It may have been a “New World” for these Europeans but for the millions of people already living there it was a world their ancestors had inhabited for thousands of years. Like the Europeans, these people had not unified into one nation, they had formed hundreds of nations and many of those nations had histories of long standing hatred for each other.  

At first, some native people thought the strange “white” men might be gods. With care, they would welcome them as trading partners and potential allies against old enemies. European greed and warfare soon began to mingle with Native American blood feuds resulting in both races committing acts of revengeful and savage brutality that would last for hundreds of years.

The Europeans brought many new weapons but more destructive than any of those, they brought disease and alcohol. The natives had no immunity to European diseases that caused devastating epidemics; some nations would lose twenty-five to fifty percent of their population. Alcoholic beverages, such as rum and whiskey, were also unknown, and once introduced to them a large number of Indians became highly addicted.

For the French, exploration of the new world began with fishing in the Grand Banks. When Jacques Cartier landed on the Gaspe Peninsula in 1534, he had a thirty foot tall cross erected and claimed the territory for France.

One hundred and forty three years after Columbus, explorers were still hoping to find a route to the Far East. In 1635, Champlain sent Jean Nicolet to explore the great interior lakes. When the French discovered “Lac Superieur” (Upper Lake) that the Ojibwa called “Gitche Gume” (Shining Big Sea Water), they were amazed but disappointed to find that it was not salt. Superior is the largest of the five Great Lakes that hold twenty percent of the world’s fresh surface water. Its’ western end is 3,500 miles from the Gaspe Peninsula, but still about 1,600 miles and a bunch of mountains short of the Pacific. 

By the mid-1600s, the fur trade had become big business in North America. The Five Nation Iroquois who lived in what is now the State of New York had been trading beaver pelts to the Dutch Colony of New Netherland for European goods that included guns. The trade was so good that beaver were now almost extinct in their homeland. In order to maintain the trade the Iroquois looked west to the lands of other nations. From 1630 to about 1700 they would conquer and assimilate most of their fellow Iroquoian speaking rivals in what the Europeans called the “Beaver Wars.” In 1649, the Five Nations invaded “Huronia”, home of the Wendat people who lived along Georgian Bay in what is today the Province of Ontario in Canada.

Largely the French were peaceful trading partners of the Algonquin and the Wendat who they called “Hurons” (savages) but unlike the Dutch, they had been more careful about trading guns. With few guns, the Hurons were at a major disadvantage. The Iroquois destroyed the Huron villages and the French Jesuit Mission of Sainte Marie, brutally torturing and killing six of North America’s martyr saints who had ministered and converted many of the Huron to Christianity.

 Nineteen years after the destruction of Sainte Marie among the Hurons, Jesuit Pere, Jacques Marquette founded, in 1668, a new mission called Sault Sainte Marie at the rapids between lakes Superior and Huron and it became the new headquarters of the western Jesuit missions in New France. After trouble with the Sioux tribe, he moved in 1671, to Pointe St. Ignace where lakes Michigan and Huron join and established another mission, Missilimackinac. 

The year before, La Salle had discovered the Ohio River. In 1679, he set sail on Lake Erie to trade for furs in the first ship ever built on the Great Lakes, the “Griffin.” More Jesuit missions were established including Cahokia in 1699 and Kaskaskia in 1703 both along the Mississippi River. In 1701, Cadillac had built Fort Pontchartrain at “de troit” (the strait) between Lakes Huron and Erie.

From about, 1660-1730, because of the Beaver Wars, the Ohio Valley was mostly uninhabited. During the first half of the 18^th century the Iroquois, French and British would all make conflicting claims for the region. In 1749, Celeron de Bienville proclaimed that all land drained by the “Oyo” (Ohio River) belonged to France and he buried seven lead markers at the mouths of strategic tributaries to prove his claim. The French called the territory “The Province of Missilimackinac”.

For one hundred and fifty-five years, France was the most powerful European presence on the North American continent. Now in the mid-1700s she would again engage England in yet another struggle in their “great war for empire”, this time in the Ohio River Valley. In 1750, the English had established ties with the Miami Indians at a large trading community within the Province of Missilimackinac called “Pickawillany” near the present day city of Piqua, Ohio. Two years later the French sent Charles Langlade with a war party of Ottawa and Ojibwa allies to destroy Pickawillany.

In 1754, the French captured the future site of “Fort Duquesne” (Pittsburgh) and when on July 4 of that year they forced George Washington to surrender Fort Necessity, the “French and Indian War” had begun.

 William Pitt became Britain’s Secretary of State in 1757 and he was determined to commit the resources needed to win the war.  England prevailed and took control of Quebec and the Province of Michilimackinac (Eng. sp.). Today all that France retains of her once vast North American Territory are the two small rocky islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon off the tip of Newfoundland’s Burin Peninsula.

The French had not taken the Native Peoples land, instead they settled, often by invitation, on unoccupied land; they traded, lived, and married with the Indians. Unlike the French, too many British and Americans treated the Indians with little respect. Chief Pontiac, of the Ottawa, declared “Englishmen! Although you have conquered the French, you have not yet conquered us! We are not your slaves! These lakes, these woods, these mountains, were left to us by our ancestors. They are our inheritance, and we will part with them to none.”

In 1763, under Pontiac’s leadership, the Indians captured and killed most of the British troops stationed at nine of the eleven forts west of the Alleghenies. During “Pontiac’s Rebellion” the British commander of Fort Pitt, Simeon Ecuyer, instigated a plan of germ warfare by presenting gifts of small pox infected blankets to the Indians. The tactic resulted in the death of thousands and the rebellion ended when Colonel Henry Bouquet, a Swiss professional solider, won the “Battle of Bushy Run” twenty-five miles south of Fort Pitt.

The Colonials had needed British protection on the high seas and from attack by the French, but after the “French and Indian War” ended they no longer feared France. Great Britain on the other hand had seen her national debt soar from 75 million pounds to 133 million during the war and the newly acquired Canadian Territory only added to the cost of governing America.

Not wanting more trouble with the Indians, English Prime Minister Grenville decided it was best to stop settlement in the Western Territories. Britain passed the “Quebec Act” which expanded the old French holdings into the seaboard colonies and bared settlement of the Ohio River Valley. This action angered many wealthy Colonial land speculators including George Washington and started the colonies toward revolution. 

During the French and Indian war, American merchants had continued to trade illegally with France prolonging the conflict. Furthermore, the colonists had often been unwilling to undertake their own defense refusing to send their militiamen on expeditions to Canada. Grenville thought it was only fair that the Colonies pay part of the costs of the benefits they were receiving. He levied taxes and intended that they be collected. The Colonists, who had become almost self-governing and paid little attention to British trade laws or taxes, suddenly found that England now wanted to rule in fact as well as law.

After one hundred and fifty years of settlement, animosity had grown between the American Colonies and Mother England to the point where Englishmen now began to prepare for war with each other.

Among the eastern woodland Indian nations, individuals did not own real estate. Land was common property, with hunting privileges given to groups and each nation defending its own hunting grounds against intruders. The region south of the Ohio River was such a prime hunting ground that the various tribes came to an agreement to share its bounty. The Shawnee who had now returned to the Ohio Valley would prove to be the most aggressive in attempting to repel any white settlers.

The law of “primo geniture” dictated that the full inheritance of an estate should go to the eldest son. The main lure to come to America in the first place was the dual attractions of land and freedom. In American colonial times, virtually everyone was a farmer. Colonial "freeholders", eager to obtain new land, began moving into the Indians sacred “Kah-ten-tah-the” hunting grounds. This Wyandotte word meant “the land of tomorrow”, what we now call Kentucky.

Most of the whites who explored Kentucky in the early days were “long-hunters” who would spend years hunting and collecting furs in the wilderness. One such long-hunter was James Harrod who guided the first settlers down the rivers in dugout canoes made from large yellow popular logs hollowed out to about a quarter-inch in thickness. These canoes could hold six men and their gear. The men carried seed corn, scythes, spading forks, rifles, casks of gunpowder, and sheets of lead from which to make bullets. They established the first permanent white settlement at “Harrod’s Town” in 1774. Another long-hunter, Daniel Boone cut the first land route into Kentucky. This route was known as the “Wilderness Road”.

In 1777, Lord George Germain, England’s Secretary of State for the American Colonies, ordered British commanders to arm the Indians and encourage raids on the colonists and frontier settlements of the West. Many of the same Indians who had helped the French fight the British, twenty years earlier, would now help the British in an attempt to drive the invading American’s from the “Can-tuc-kee” and Ohio Valley. Raids back and forth over the Ohio River were mostly about personal hatred and revenge. By the middle of the year only three settlements, Harrodsburg, Boonesborough and St. Asaph’s (Logan’s Fort), remained in Kentucky.

Defense of America’s western frontier fell to young George Rogers Clark who planned and carried out one of the most daring and brilliant campaigns of the Revolution. On February 25, 1779, Colonel Henry Hamilton, in command of a far larger army, surrendered Fort Sackville at Vincennes (Indiana). The hated “Hair Buyer” was taken prisoner and sent east. Word of Clark’s victory led to an amazing inflow of immigrants into Kentucky. The following year hundreds of boatloads of settlers landed at Clark’s headquarters at the “Falls of the Ohio” (Louisville, KY).

In 1780, Captain Henry Bird led a force of 150 Redcoats and Canadian Rangers together with hundreds of allied Indians from Detroit. They captured Martin and Ruddle’s stations in Kentucky. Three hundred prisoners were marched back to Detroit. Those who could not keep up were killed. Some of the survivors were sold as slaves. In August of 1781, Tories and Canadian Iroquois led by Chief Joseph Brant ambushed a group of Pennsylvania militia near the mouth of the Miami River who were on their way to join Clark’s forces for an expedition to capture Detroit. Clark who seldom took Indians prisoner or granted mercy marched up the Little Miami River to the Shawnee village of Chilicothie and burned it. Then he moved on to the Mad River. In November of 1782, Clark began his last campaign of the Revolution, during that campaign Colonel Benjamin Logan was sent to burn the Indian village of New Piqua, also known as “Standing Stone” (Piqua, Ohio) and “Lorimer’s Post” (Peter Loramie’s store).

At the time, Great Britain’s military was one of the most powerful on Earth, and even though one of every three Colonists remained loyal to England, the United States somehow miraculously won its independence. Not solely by the skills of its own military leaders but due in large part to the almost unbelievable ineptitude of a number of British commanders, and the fact that England’s attention was divided by conflicts elsewhere in the World.

Due to the victories of George Rogers Clark, the British, by the terms of the Treaty of Paris, conceded the lands on the southern side of the Great Lakes to the Americans and no longer openly fought with western settlers. However, the new nation was so strapped for cash that it could not afford to maintain troops at forts such as Detroit and Mackinac (Eng. sp. var.). So the British stayed and through agents such as Alexander McKee, Matthew Elliot and the renegade Simon Girty, continued to encourage Indian raids on frontier settlements by supplying guns and ammunition in exchange for frontiersmen’s scalps.

Regardless, the number of whites south of the Ohio River was dramatically increasing, while the number of Indians north of the river was dramatically decreasing.  About two-thirds of the Shawnee with the aid of French-Canadian trader “Pierre Lorimer” (Peter Loramie) had already secured a grant of land from the Spanish and moved to the Missouri country.

Congress adopted the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, and established the Northwest Territory in 1789. From this territory the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and that part of Minnesota east of the Mississippi River would be carved. The Ordinance provided that within the territory there would be support for public education, freedom of religion, and most significantly, slavery would be forbidden. Revolutionary War General, Arthur St. Clair, a Scotsman with a brogue so thick that those under his command often had difficulty understanding his speech, was appointed Governor.

 The new government wanted to sell land in the Ohio region to pay off debts from the Revolution. The Indians defense of their homeland was the only impediment to settlement of the Territory. A frontier boundary agreement needed to be secured with the Native People in order to sell that land.

During and after the Revolution, raids by the Indians from the Miami and Shawnee villages of what would become the states of Ohio and Indiana, and frontiersman from Kentucky, back and forth over the Ohio River were so continuous that the region became known as the “Miami Slaughter-House”. The policy of the Congress and of the Virginia General Assembly was to arbitrate with the Indians and seek peace.

In 1785, the Treaty of Fort McIntosh, signed with the Delaware, Ojibwa, Ottawa, and Wyandotte established a frontier at the Cuyahoga, Tuscarawas and Muskingum rivers. This allowed Congress to sell land rights to the Ohio Company. By that same year, forty-two thousand settlers had already moved into Kentucky.

Intelligence reports claimed that the Indians were again preparing for all-out war when in fact they were not. There are those who believe these reports were part of a plan by James Wilkinson to organize the Kentuckians into military units without the consent or aid of Virginia. These militia forces would give the settlers the self-confidence to demand independence while at the same time convince the Eastern Virginians that the Kentuckians themselves were creating the problem and thus make them glad to be rid of them.

Between the years, 1783 and 1790, 1,500 settlers were killed in Kentucky. The federal government decided that its treaty policy had failed and that the only way the conflicts in the Ohio Valley could be stopped would be a military campaign against the confederated tribes.

In September of 1790, General Josiah Harmar with an army of 1,453 men, of which 320 were regulars, the rest being composed of militia from Pennsylvania and Kentucky, was sent to subdue the Indians.

Much of what remained of the confederated tribes were now living in the regions of the “Glaize” (Auglaize) river, the “Miami-of-the-Lake” (Maumee River) and the junction of the St. Mary’s and St. Joseph which formed the Maumee (Fort Wayne, IN). The Army was to destroy these latter villages and subdue their inhabitants. Harmar proved unsuitable for command of an army made up mostly of militia. Disorder became so bad that at one point he threatened to turn his own artillery fire on them. When the Indians killed 183 of his men and wounded another 31 he retreated.

Another army was assembled; the Territorial Governor, Arthur St. Clair, would lead this one. His task was to cut a road through dense wilderness for a distance of one hundred and fifty miles, build numerous fortified posts along the way and subdue the Indian towns at the forks of the Miami-of-the-Lake. Further adding to his problems, St. Clair had  become so ill with the gout, a disease that causes painful inflammation of the joints, that at times he had to be carried in a litter. Like Harmar, St. Clair had to rely on militia to supplement his Army regulars.

Militiamen enlisted for six months, no time for proper training, but Congress thought it adequate for men who would be paid $2.10 per month. To earn that grand sum they would have to hack their way through the wilderness. On foot, for hundreds of miles, they fell trees, built fortifications, lived on a limited and often poor supply of food, sleep in tents during freezing weather, endured wild animals, insects, potential disease, and the very real chance of being killed or worse, captured and tortured by the Indians. The better frontier fighters, who had little faith in St. Clair to begin with, passed on the opportunity. Most of the men who made up the militia were either very young, very old or recruited from the floors of local grog shops. They tended to be a bit unruly.