THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR WAS A LONG ONE. THE FIGHTING WITH the British began in April 1775, more than a year before the Declaration of Independence. The peace treaty was not signed until September 1783, though fighting in the coastal colonies substantially ended with the defeat of Gen. Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown in October 1781. The fighting in distant Kentucky lasted even longer, however, and, in proportion to the population of settlers, was far bloodier. Between 1775 and 1782 some 860 Kentuckians in the central bluegrass region alone died war-related deaths.1 Relative to the population during those years, that loss was seven times as great as the comparable number of war-related deaths in the thirteen coastal colonies. George Rogers Clark, an American military leader on the frontier, estimated that “upward of two thousand souls have perished on our side, in a moderate calculation,” during the Indian wars in Kentucky.2
The Kentuckians kept close track of the progress of the Revolution unfolding in the east and honored revolutionary turning points in the names they gave to Kentucky towns (Lexington, for the early clash in Massachusetts; Washington and Georgetown, for the commander of the rebel army; Louisville, Paris, and Versailles, for America’s French ally) and counties (Bourbon and Fayette, again for the alliance with France).3 The fighting and the issues in Kentucky, however, were largely different from the fighting in the coastal colonies. Knowing about those differences helps in understanding the engagements in which Boone was involved, including the attacks on Boonesborough in 1776, the capture and rescue in 1776 of Boone’s daughter and the Callaway daughters, the Indians’ capture of Boone and the salt-boilers from Boonesborough in 1778, the siege of Boonesborough in 1778, the Indians’ crushing defeat of the Kentucky militia at the Battle of the Blue Licks in 1782,the subsequent American retaliation against the Shawnees north of the Ohio River, and the campaigns against the western tribes that led to the opening up of the Northwest Territories to American settlement.
The fighting in Kentucky during the Revolutionary War, unlike that in the coastal colonies, was not, for the most part, directly with the British, but with Indians funded and armed and incited by the British and sometimes accompanied by British or Canadian soldiers. Kentucky’s struggling was frontier warfare, marked more by raids and hand-to-hand combat—and by destruction of crops and homes—than by pitched battles or prolonged sieges. There was much less fighting in Kentucky between American settlers (pro-independence Whigs vs. pro-British Tories) than there was in the Carolinas, although there were white renegades who led Indian attacks on the settlers, and there were also acute tensions between settlers in Kentucky (Harrodsburg vs. the Transylvania proprietors, for example; squatters vs. claimants under officers’ warrants; Virginians vs. settlers from North Carolina vs. Pennsylvanians). The killing in Kentucky also lasted much longer. Indeed, it went on more than ten years after Cornwallis’s surrender at York-town in 1781.
Just as the battling in the Ohio Valley during the French and Indian War had been three-cornered—French and French colonists versus British and British colonists, with each assisted by Indians seeking to preserve their lands—so the fighting in the Ohio Valley during the Revolution involved three forces: Americans, Indians, and British. None of the three was a monolith; rather, each was a congeries of disparate groups, often with conflicting aims.4
Several of the American colonies (notably Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and North Carolina but also Connecticut) had conflicting claims to land in the Ohio Valley. Americans from different colonies, in the years since 1763, had staked claims to lands in Kentucky and elsewhere in the Ohio Valley (including lands north of the Ohio River that the British Parliament in October 1774, in the Quebec Act, had proclaimed were part of Quebec).5 These settlers and absentee claimants alike sought to preserve their land interests during the Revolution. Americans of widely different backgrounds—former officers in the French and Indian War such as George Washington; grantees of the Transylvania Company; settlers with claims under Virginia land law based on preemption or improvements—had claims that involved much of the best land in Kentucky. They shared a strong common interest inkeeping the land they had claimed. With few exceptions victory by the British in the Revolutionary War would have hurt that interest.6
In the case of officers and claimants under officers’ warrants, the British had officially interpreted the 1763 proclamation to permit trans-Appalachian land grants only to British regular officers, not to colonial militia officers such as Washington. Land claimants under Virginia officers’ warrants had to be concerned about whether the Crown would honor warrants that had been issued in contravention of the 1763 proclamation and by a colony that had rebelled against Britain. Similar issues threatened the land claims of settlers such as those at Harrodsburg who based their land claims on preemption or on improvements to claimed lands, under provisions of Virginia’s land acts.
Virginia’s governor Lord Dunmore had not won the hearts of Kentucky settlers by issuing a proclamation in March 1775, under directions from the British Ministry of Trade, that all land in Kentucky was to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, rather than being sold at set low prices. As John Floyd wrote to William Preston in April 1775: “The people in general seem not to approve the Governor’s instructions with regard to settling the lands” because the settlers had little money and did not want to pay top dollar but preferred to exercise settlement rights and preemption privileges and to pay a fixed low price intended to encourage settlement. After hearing from Lord Dunmore of the 1775 proclamation, Preston, knowing how unpopular it was, sought guidance from the increasingly anti-British Virginia Convention, which advised the surveyors “to pay no regard to the Proclamation.”7 Through Boone, Preston directed Floyd and the other Fincastle surveyors not to stretch a chain to survey any land under Dunmore’s proclamation.8
Even the Transylvania Company, for all its ambivalence about the Revolution (coupling professed loyalty to the British sovereign with praise of the patriots’ pursuit of liberty), came to have economic reasons to back the rebels. By the end of 1776 the company’s proprietors had seen their grand hopes of becoming “lords of the soil” ended by Virginia’s formation of Kentucky as a county of Virginia. Thereafter, the proprietors’ only hope was to gain substantial compensatory acreage from Virginia and North Carolina. That hope was more likely to be realized if the Revolution succeeded.
The Ohio Valley Indians were fighting a last-ditch effort to keep their lands. Boone recognized this fact dispassionately and without demonizing the Indians. Boone told his first biographer, John Filson, that in 1778 “the Indians… were greatly alarmed with our increase in number and fortifications.… They evidently saw the approaching hour when the Long Knife would dispossess them of their desirable habitations; and anxiously concerned for futurity, determined utterly to extirpate the whites out of Kentucke.”9 And while Lord Dunmore’s War had ended with some Shawnee chiefs agreeing to yield rights to lands east and south of the Ohio River, that agreement recognized the Indians’ rights to lands on the other side of the Ohio. The Shawnees and other Ohio Valley Indians wanted to preserve those rights and remembered that in 1764, after two years of bitter fighting in Pontiac’s War, the British had agreed to respect the Ohio as the boundary between British settlers and the Indians.10 Many Ohio Valley Indians may have thought that once again they could fight the whites to a standstill—though much had changed between 1764 and 1775, including tremendous growth in the number of white settlers west of the Alleghenies. Perhaps, with British support, the Indians could also drive American settlers out of Kentucky.
Not all of the Indians favored war with the whites. Even before the beginning of the Revolution, some of the Indians of the Ohio Valley saw the futility of opposing white expansion. One of the leading Shawnees, Cornstalk, the principal chief of the Maquachake division of the Shawnees, who had been one of the signers of the Camp Charlotte agreement, generally urged accommodation with the whites—although when the Americans in 1776 sought a promise of neutrality from Ohio Valley Indians, Cornstalk pointed out that the whites’ taking of Shawnee lands south of the Ohio “sits heavy upon our Hearts” and “is the cause of our discontent.”11 Cornstalk, whose division of the Shawnees was the most inclined to seek peace with the Americans, was killed in 1777 by whites while he was being held hostage in an American fort. Although his murder enraged all Shawnees and united most of the Ohio Indians against the Americans, many Shawnees, as the fighting with the whites continued and as whites destroyed Shawnee villages north of the Ohio River, moved away from the Ohio Valley to get farther away from the Americans. Many went to Missouri.12 Most of the Shawnees who remained in Ohio, however, were determined to fight against any further encroachments by American settlers and allied themselves with other tribes in that struggle.13
The British, in supporting Indian attacks on Americans in Kentucky and elsewhere in the Ohio Valley during the Revolution, sought to further three objectives: to reassert control over the Ohio Valley; to hold onto Canada; and to divert American military forces from the coastal colonies. WhileBritain after the French and Indian War had taken control of the string of forts the French had built between Detroit and the forks of the Ohio, by 1773 Britain had abandoned several of the forts, ordered Fort Pitt to be razed, and maintained garrisons only at Detroit, Kaskaskia, and Michilimackinac. In effect, the British pullback from the Ohio Valley had left most of the valley to the Indians and the American frontiersmen crossing the Alleghenies, despite the proclamation’s ban against western settlement.14 The American capture of Montreal in November 1775 and the American attack on Quebec the following month showed how serious was the risk that Britain might lose Canada. Although most of the British military strength in Canada was near Montreal, well to the east of Kentucky, the British undertook, from headquarters in their fort at Detroit, to recruit and support Indian allies to attack the American settlements in the Ohio Valley.
Detroit in the mid-1770s may have had as many as two thousand residents—French, Indians, and a few British—making it far larger than any of the settlements in Kentucky.15 Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton, who had taken command of the Detroit garrison in November 1775, in June 1777 was directed by London to employ Indians “in making a Diversion and exciting an alarm upon the frontiers of Virginia and Pennsylvania.”16 Hamilton carried this out by arranging Indian attacks in Kentucky and campaigns against Wheeling on the Ohio River that kept American forces at Fort Pitt on the defensive. Not infrequently, British or Canadian officers accompanied the Indian attackers—according to Hamilton, with “the strictest injunctions to discourage and restrain them from their usual barbarities.”17 British or French-Canadian soldiers accompanied Indians at several of the most important engagements in Kentucky during the Revolution, including the siege of Boonesborough and the Battle of the Blue Licks. Much of the fighting in Kentucky, however, particularly the smaller-scale raids, was between American settlers and Indians, without any British or Canadian participation.
The British enlisted help from the Indians in part by diplomacy, assisted by whites who lived with Indians, dressed like Indians, were fluent in Indian languages, and could orate Indian style—such men as Simon Girty and his brothers, who went over from the American side to the British side in 1778. The British also furnished the Indians with guns, tomahawks, ammunition, and other war necessities, including (this being Indian warfare) war paint. In September 1778, for example, the month the Indians besieged Boonesborough, Governor Hamilton included in a report listing goods on hand in thefort at Detroit for the Indian department “eighty pounds of rose pink and five hundred pounds of vermilion.”18
The British paid Indians for American militia captives. Reputedly—certainly the Americans believed it to be so—Governor Hamilton also offered Indian five pounds for each American scalp. That was the same price that the Transylvania Company had agreed in 1776 to pay its rangers for each Indian scalp they brought in.19 A Virginian woman in Detroit, married to one of Hamilton’s interpreters, told an American trader in 1778 “that Governor Hamilton did all in his Power to induce all Nations of Indians to massacre the Frontier Inhabitants of Pennsylvania and Virginia and paid very high prices in Goods for the Scalps the Indians brought in.”20 This scalp-buying allegation, which Hamilton always denied, prompted George Rogers Clark and many other Americans to refer to the governor as “Hair-Buyer” Hamilton. The name had a catchy alliterative ring to it, and the charge made the settlers in the Kentucky forts more immune than they might otherwise have been to Hamilton’s attempts to win them over to the British side by promising them free land. The evidence is inconclusive about specific payments having been made for American scalps, but Hamilton undoubtedly received American scalps from Indian raiding parties that had been armed and equipped by the British at Detroit. In September 1778, for example, Hamilton reported to his presiding general, Sir Frederick Haldimand, “Since last May the Indians in this district have taken thirty-four prisoners, seventeen of which they delivered up and eighty-one scalps, several prisoners taken and adopted not reckoned in this number.”21
Hamilton was a well-born Anglo-Irishman—grandson of a viscount, son of a member of the Irish Parliament who served as collector for the ports of Dublin and Cork. He himself wrote well and drew skillful portraits of Indians.22 Yet for all his breeding and culture, as governor at Detroit Hamilton was, as his letter to General Haldimand demonstrates, at the very least willing to accept large numbers of American scalps from his Indian allies. He also used American scalps to encourage the Indians to help the British. In his notes on a council with Indians at Detroit on June 2, 1778, he wrote, “Some Delawares are this day arrived who are desirous of showing their intention of joining their brethren & have presented me two pieces of dryed meat (scalps) one of which I have given to the Chippoweys, another to the Miamis, that they may show in their villages the disposition of the Delawares.”23 The reference to American scalps as “dryed meat” is unpleasantly flip.
In drafting the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson listed among the “repeated Injuries” that King George had inflicted upon the Americans the king’s endeavors “to bring upon the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.” Jefferson doubtless had in mind the efforts of British leaders such as Henry Hamilton. Indeed, he was to use very similar words to justify the Americans’ “strict confinement” of Hamilton after he was taken prisoner.24
The frontier warfare in Kentucky was much smaller in scale than the fighting in the coastal colonies. On the American side there were only about two hundred American settlers in Kentucky at the beginning of the war, not all of them capable of soldiering with a heavy rifle. The Shawnees had many more warriors in their villages north of the Ohio, but their traditional style of fighting was in small raids, like the dawn attacks in which James Boone and Captain Twitty had been killed. The Shawnees and other Ohio Valley Indians, however, were rapidly learning how to fight in larger-scale operations—in large part by having warriors of different tribes act together. The shared threat of increasing American settlement in the Ohio Valley, coupled with British supplies to different Indian groups, led to combined operations against the Americans.25 At the Battle of Point Pleasant in October 1774 between five hundred and one thousand Shawnees and allies fought a sustained battle against the Virginia militia. Perhaps four hundred Indians and forty Canadians besieged Boonesborough in September 1778.
As the fighting went on, there were more large-scale engagements, with Indian tribes acting jointly and the number of American settlers in Kentucky and elsewhere in the Ohio Valley continuing to rise. In June 1782 the Indians in Ohio were strong enough to beat a force of some 500 Virginia and Pennsylvania militiamen on the Sandusky River in Ohio. That same year several hundred Indians from Great Lakes tribes, along with Shawnees, crossed the Ohio into Kentucky for raids and the decisive defeat of perhaps 180 members of the Kentucky militia at the Battle of the Blue Licks. Even greater numbers were involved in some of the battles between Americans and Indians in the 1790s, leading up to the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794.
Most of the combat in Kentucky during the Revolution, however, involved smaller numbers of participants. It was also a far more personal kind of fighting than the battles in the coastal colonies. Artillery, which played a key role in many of the eastern battles, was not a factor in any of the fightsin Kentucky that Boone was involved in, though the presence of two small British field guns led to the surrender of two forts there in 1780—the only forts that were surrendered by the Americans in Kentucky during the Revolution. There were rumors that the British at Detroit were sending swivel guns to their Indian allies for the attack on Boonesborough in 1778. Even light artillery would have destroyed that fort’s flimsy palisades. But the guns never appeared there, probably because of the difficulty of hauling them from Michigan. The weapon with the longest range in Boone’s fights during the Revolution was the Kentucky rifle, capable of killing at little over a hundred yards.
Much of the fighting was at much closer range. The time needed to reload the single-shot rifle was often sufficient for a combatant, after an enemy had fired, to run up close enough to throw a tomahawk at the shooter or to strike him with a tomahawk, knife, clubbed rifle, or club. How personal was the fighting? Very, as Boone would discover outside of Boonesborough in April 1777, when he was shot and nearly tomahawked by Shawnees. And on September 11, 1777, while Squire Boone and other white settlers were shelling corn near Harrodsburg, Indians attacked. Squire Boone took a shot at the Indians and squatted behind a tree to reload. An Indian shot dead another white, who fell next to Squire Boone. The Indian ran up with his tomahawk to scalp the fallen man, just as Squire Boone was drawing a short three-edged sword. A glancing blow from the Indian’s tomahawk cut a three-inch gash in Squire Boone’s forehead, while he stabbed the Indian in the belly with one hand. With his other hand, Squire Boone grabbed the Indian’s sash and pulled him closer as he pushed his sword in, until the sword stuck out a foot behind the Indian’s back. The Indian reached for the hunting knife that hung from Squire Boone’s shot pouch, but the blood from Boone’s forehead and from the Indian’s wound made the knife handle so slippery that the Indian could not draw the knife. Squire Boone pushed the Indian back over a low wall. The fall pushed the sword up inside the Indian and broke off its point, and the Indian died. Squire Boone would later say it was “the best little Indian fight he was ever in.”26
The Indian attacks in Kentucky and the retaliatory white expeditions into Indian country in Ohio also differed from fighting in the coastal states in terms of the amount of food that was destroyed. Shawnees attacking Boonesborough and other Kentucky forts, for example, frequently burned all of the settlers’ corn and killed all their livestock.27 The whites, in theirmany expeditions into Ohio between 1779 and 1794, regularly torched Indian villages, cornfields, and stored corn. The warfare was total warfare. Destroying food was a key component of the Americans’ eventual defeat of the Ohio Valley Indians.28
In the Carolinas much of the bloodiest fighting during the Revolution was between Tories, those who favored the British, and Whigs, as American Revolutionaries were called. Part of it was class warfare. The hostility between the haves and the have-nots, manifest in the 1768 storming of Richard Henderson’s courthouse in North Carolina and in the burning of his house and barn, burst out during the Revolution into all-out warfare—although in topsy-turvy fashion, with the highland Scots and other western North Carolinians often fighting for the Crown against the richer lowlanders, whom they hated for actual and perceived land sales abuses. The richer lowlanders in North Carolina tended to favor the Revolutionary cause, no doubt in part because of their interest in western lands.
In Kentucky there were no major fights between Tory and Whig settlers, though there were British sympathizers, including many of Rebecca Boone’s family, the Bryans. Some who settled in Kentucky during the Revolution, particularly emigrants from North Carolina, were clearly British sympathizers—“all grand tories, pretty nigh,” who “Had been treated so bad [in Carolina], they had to run off.”29 Others came to Kentucky not just because of the lure of cheap land but also to avoid having to choose between fighting for the British side or the rebel side. There were also whites, including the notorious Simon Girty, who joined the British cause and fought with the Indians against the Americans in Kentucky. Boone himself had British ties. In addition to the Tory sympathies of his Bryan in-laws, Boone’s captain’s commission had been signed by Lord Dunmore. If Boone fought the British, it was not so much from ideological commitment to American independence as it was part of his efforts to defend the settlements in Kentucky against Indian attacks (and the British who aided them).
There were also social strains among the Kentucky settlers, linked both to class differences and to land claims. We have seen how settlers at Harrodsburg wrote to the Virginia Convention describing Henderson and the other Transylvania proprietors as “men from North Carolina stiling ’emselves Proprietors” and saying—ominously, if vaguely—that if the self-styled proprietors “have leave to continue to act in their arbitrary manner out of the controul of this Colony [Virginia] the end must be evident to every well wisherto American Liberty.”30 In addition, there was tension between settlers from different colonies—Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. The Continental Congress was brand new and the concept of an American national government was still nascent. Different groups of settlers based their right to land in Kentucky on conflicting claims of different colonies under their royal charters. Many settlers from Pennsylvania and North Carolina, seeing little chance that Virginia would recognize their land claims, petitioned to have Kentucky governed by Congress, not by Virginia—on the theory that Kentucky had been part of the royal domain that had fallen to Congress when the colonies declared their independence.31
There were other economic bases for disagreements between settlers from different colonies. Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina had long vied with each other for control of the Ohio Valley fur trade. In the French and Indian War, for example, George Washington, who had his own interest in land claims in the Ohio Valley through his membership in the Ohio Company, had urged Virginia’s lieutenant governor “immediately” to open a new road from Virginia to the Ohio so that Virginia could stake claims to land and trade ahead of “a set of rascally Fellows divested of all faith and honor”—that is, traders from Pennsylvania.32 In December 1774 Virginia’s governor Lord Dunmore wrote to Lord Dartmouth, the secretary of state for the colonies: “The trade carried on with the Ohio Indians has been almost engrossed by the Province of Pennsylvania, which they have draw[n] to themselves, artfully enough, but with what degree of propriety or right I must leave to your Lordships Judgment, by repeated treaties held of their own Authority, and at such times and for such purposes as they think fit.… [The Pennsylvania traders] have made it their constant business to discredit the Virginians (who lye much more convenient for carrying on a Trade with these Indians than the Pennsylvanians) and make the Indians consider them in the most odious light.”33
Other differences between the settlers in Kentucky were based on competing land claims—not just those of the Transylvania Company versus those based on grants by Virginia, but also claims of squatters and improvers versus claims based on officers’ warrants and those made at different times. One fruitful cause of discord was the 1779 ruling of the Virginia legislature that land would be given to settlers who came to Kentucky before 1778—that is, before the great bulk of the settlers had come to Kentucky.34 That ruling gave the more recent settlers an economic incentive to back the Crown: ifthe Revolutionary Virginia government had already decreed that they were not entitled to free land, the Crown could hardly do worse to them. One anonymous discontented settler wrote that the land mess in Kentucky was “entirely oweing to a Set of Nabobs in Virginia, taking all the land there by Officer Warrants and Pre-emption Rights.” He predicted that if the English were to go to Kentucky and offer the settlers “protection from the Indians, the greatest Part will join” the British side.35 In May 1776 John Floyd wrote to William Preston that there was “the D—l to pay here about land—pray try to get something done by the Convention with regard to selling those lands, or there’ll be bloodshed soon.… Hundreds of wretches come down the Ohio & build pens or cabins, return & sell them; the people come down & settle on the land they purchase; these same places are claimed by some one else, & then quarrels ensue. In short they now begin to pay no kind of regard to the officers land more than any other. Many have come down here & not stayed more than 3 weeks, & have returned home with 20 cabins a piece, & so on. They make very free with my character, swearing I am engrossing the country [with surveys] & have no warrants for the land, & if I have, they will drive me & the officers, too, to hell.”36
Conflicting claims to land in Kentucky gave rise to fifty years of litigation. Neither those conflicting claims nor the other tensions among settlers in Kentucky, however, gave rise to outright fighting between different groups of settlers in Kentucky during the Revolutionary War—unlike the bitter warfare between Whigs and Tories in the Carolinas. The settlers in Kentucky were few in number, and their immediate need was not to kill each other but to act together in mutual defense against Indian attack.
A final distinguishing characteristic of the bloodshed in Kentucky in the Revolutionary period was its length. Well before gunshots were exchanged between British soldiers and American minutemen at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, Indians and whites were killing each other in Kentucky—in the Indian attacks on Boone’s parties in October 1773 and in March 1775, for example, and in the Battle of Point Pleasant in 1774. Combat in Kentucky continued well after the surrender by General Cornwallis at Yorktown in October 1781, which substantially ended fighting in the coastal colonies. The biggest clash in Kentucky during the Revolution, the Battle of the Blue Licks, took place in August 1782, almost a year after the Yorktown surrender, and raids in Kentucky continued well after the British and the Americans signed their peace treaty in February 1783.
The post-treaty fighting in Kentucky was primarily between Americans and Indians, but with strong British encouragement of the Indians, who were unified as never before by the westward flood of American settlement and by the American government’s relentless pressure for Indian land cessions.37 The Indians at first were remarkably successful in this fighting, even against large American forces. In October 1790 Wabash and Miami Indians defeated over three hundred regular American troops and over a thousand Kentucky and Pennsylvania militiamen under Gen. Josiah Harmar in western Ohio. In November 1791 over six hundred Americans were killed near what is now Fort Recovery, Ohio, when Indians led by the Miami war chief Little Turtle crushed an American army led by Gen. Arthur St. Clair.38 St. Clair’s defeat—the worst ever inflicted on Americans by Indians—breathed new life in the Indian resistance to the whites because, as an American general put it, “the Indians began to believe Themselves invinsible, and they truly had great cause of triumph.”39 The Indians in the Ohio Valley were not finally beaten until troops under Gen. “Mad Anthony” Wayne defeated an Indian confederation at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, fought in August 1794 just south of what is now Toledo, Ohio, and then methodically destroyed the Indians’ villages and cornfields.
Much of the larger post-Yorktown encounters in the Ohio Valley took place in Ohio, but Indian raids continued in Kentucky until 1793—fully ten years after the treaty that purported to end the War of Independence. In the last Indian attack in Kentucky, at Morgan’s Station, east of Lexington in what is now Montgomery County, a band of Cherokees and Shawnees killed two, took over twenty hostages, and tomahawked twelve captives to death on their retreat to the north.40
The British did not themselves fight the Americans in the Ohio Valley after the Revolution, though seventy Canadians fought alongside the Indian confederacy against General Wayne’s troops at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Yet the British encouraged the Indians’ resistance to the Americans by Britain’s continued occupation of Detroit and six other posts on American territory, by Canadian trade with the Indians from those posts, and by supplying ammunition and provisions. The 1783 peace treaty required all British garrisons on American soil to be withdrawn “with all convenient speed,” but Britain’s home minister instructed the governor of Canada not to evacuate the forts—presumably to enable Canadians and British to continue to benefit from the fur trade in the hunting grounds between the Great Lakes andthe Ohio River. The British justified their delay, however, by claiming that America was in breach of its treaty obligations to assist in British collection of prewar debts and in Loyalists’ reclamation of confiscated properties. The British even suggested the creation of a neutral Indian state between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River, which would have allowed indefinite Canadian control of the fur trade in the region.
Yet the Battle of Fallen Timbers and its aftermath made bitterly clear to the Indians that they could expect no further significant help from the British. When Indians retreating after the battle sought refuge at the nearby British post Fort Miami, the British shut the fort’s gates in their faces. The British garrison did nothing to prevent Wayne’s men from destroying Indian houses and cornfields (Wayne said he had never seen “such immense fields of corn,” which he described as “the grand emporium of the hostile Indians of the West”) on the Maumee, in the Auglaize Valley, and, in Wayne’s words, “for about fifty miles on each side of the Miami.”41 Within months Britain, by signing Jay’s Treaty in November 1794, confirmed America’s rights to the lands between the Great Lakes and the Ohio and agreed to evacuate its garrisons there. Even though the British did not finally evacuate Detroit and the garrisons south of the Great Lakes until 1796, Wayne was able to point to Jay’s treaty and Britain’s promise to abandon the garrisons when he negotiated with the Indians the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, by which all but the northwestern corner of Ohio was ceded to the Americans and the balance of the Northwest Territory was opened up to American settlement and the Indians acknowledged the United States “to be our father” and that they “must call them brothers no more.”42
For all of the ways in which fighting in Kentucky during the Revolution differed from the war fought in the colonies to the east, there was one basic similarity. In Kentucky, as in the coastal colonies, the American settlers and the British (in the case of Kentucky, acting primarily through their Indian allies) were contending for control of land. Through prolonged and determined efforts the American settlers won the struggle in both arenas. Boone played a key role in the fighting in Kentucky and thereby in the Americans’ lasting hold on that valuable land.