THE NATIVE AMERICAN DEFEAT OF THE FIRST AMERICAN ARMY

Native American armies thrashed the victorious Revolutionary Army, but the story didn’t end there

“The Victory With No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army’’ by Colin G. Calloway is the true story of a Native American army that thrashed an American army and scared a young nation to its bones.

It happened in 1791, less than a decade past the American Revolution, when the States seemed no more united than the Indian confederacy that stood in the way of the white man’s expansion.

The Northwest Territory was a vast expanse west of Pennsylvania and north of the Ohio River, stretching to the Mississippi River. President George Washington worried that the various tribes might unite with the Spanish to the south or British to the north, but the natives didn’t need much help to defeat the woefully unprepared force that came after them.

Arthur St. Clair led the doomed army. The 54-year-old Revolutionary War veteran had signed peace treaties with two confederations of tribes in 1789 hoping to divide them, but not all bought in. The Indian nations in Ohio hadn’t agreed to the Peace of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War, and believed that the earlier Treaty of Fort Stanwix required Americans that far west to stay south of the Ohio River.

Mr. Calloway is a detailed and accessible storyteller, and his book exhibits great respect for the diplomatic and military prowess of the Native American confederacy, however brief its success. Before St. Clair, an expedition the previous year led by Josiah Harmar “that was supposed to quash Indian resistance only intensified it.’’

A motley, intermittently drunken force floated down the Ohio from Pittsburgh to meet St. Clair’s army in Fort Washington (Cincinnati) in the summer of 1791. The ill-equipped forces that marched north that September made slow progress through rain-drenched woods.

There were desertions and losses of horses and lives to Indians along the way, and on the night of Nov. 3, roughly 1,100 Americans ended a nine-mile march by making camp at the Wabash River.

There were no defensive fortifications. St. Clair didn’t believe the Indians had the capacity for organized resistance. His own scouts’ reports that night of a large force ahead never got through lower officers to him.

At first light, the Shawnee, Delaware and Miami led a crescent-shaped assault with Ottawa, Ojibwa, Potawatomi, Wyandot and Iroquois on the flanks. Indians surrounded the camp and took special care to kill American officers. St. Clair led a bayonet charge but American lines crumbled and he finally ordered “a desperate retreat.”

“The Indians stuffed dirt into the mouths of some of the dead, a gesture of contempt for land-hungry Americans.”

The Americans lost 630 men. The First Congress would investigate under the new Constitution, and the enduring principle of executive privilege was established when the Cabinet advised Washington to release to Congress only those papers “that the public good would permit” and keep the rest.

The congressional committee absolved St. Clair and blamed the defeat on contractor fraud.

Western Pennsylvanians feared the federal government was incapable of bringing order, but Congress greatly increased the size of the Army and gave the president the power to draft state militias into a federal force (something Washington would use to quash the Whiskey Rebellion in the fall of 1794).

In August 1794, with troops that had moved down the Ohio from Pittsburgh more than a year before, General Anthony Wayne burned native villages and crops in Ohio. In August, Wayne’s army defeated an Indian force at the battle of Fallen Timbers, about 100 miles northeast of St. Clair’s defeat.

“At the Treaty of Greenville in the summer of 1795, chiefs from the confederacy that had twice defeated American invasions of Ohio signed away the southern and eastern two-thirds of Ohio” and lands farther west.

Little Turtle, a Miami chief, in a later visit to Philadelphia, said of the booming population of whites there, “They spread like oil upon a blanket; we dissolve like the snow before the vernal Sun.’’

It is with no small irony that Mr. Calloway writes on the final page, “In proportion to their population, more Native Americans serve in the U.S. Army than any other group.”