by John Hoyt Williams
Major General Arthur St. Clair, ranking officer of the United States Army, had left Fort Washington as the head of that infant organization’s infantry and some 1,400 militia and volunteer levies, and with grim purpose in mind. From the future site of Cincinnati, he was marching northeast to chastise hostile Miami, Shawnee and Delaware Indians who were camped some hundred miles away. Old for active duty in the field at 57, and ridden by severe gout, St. Clair was acting on orders from two of his closest personal friends: President George Washington and Secretary of War Henry Knox. Arthur St. Clair was neither a fool nor unqualified for the command thrust upon him. Born in Scotland, he had distinguished himself as a British officer in the French and Indian War. He resigned his commission in 1762 to marry a Bostonian and become a large landholder in Western Pennsylvania. An ardent patriot in his adopted land, he served with conspicuous success through the American Revolution, rising to become his state’s only major general and a confidant of both Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette, who was impressed by the erudition of the Edinburgh University graduate. In 1787, St. Clair became the President of the Continental Congress, and it was he who handed over power to Washington upon the latter’s 1789 inauguration. St. Clair was soon named the first (and only) governor of the immense Northwest Territory (comprising Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin and much of Minnesota).
That post was a high-stress one, because while St. Clair was expected to maintain peaceful relations with a score of Indian tribes and nations, increasing numbers of Anglo-American settlers were flooding west, making tension and friction inevitable. Valiantly he strove to calm the Indians- who could together field some 15,000 warriors without due strain- signing treaties of peace, trade, and boundary-setting with most of the Iroquois nation, the Sacs, Ottawas, Wyandots, Chippewas and other major tribes in 1789 and 1790. Remaining implacably hostile, however, were the Mohawks, Miamis, Delawares, Shawnees, and many tribes of the upper Wabash, jointly capable of putting perhaps 5-6,000 warriors on any given warpath. These were spurred on by the British in Canada, who desired a permanent Indian buffer state to halt American westward expansion, and they were aided by bitter ex-Tories, renegades of all description, and the fiendish frontier psychopath, Simon Girty. These Indians and their unsavory friends sought to halt the settlers at the Ohio River, a line they swore to hold. Leader of the resistance was Little Turtle of the Miami, whose braves were in a perpetual state of motion, raiding settlements, forts and river barges both within and without the Northwest Territory. Little Turtle’s attempts to band all the region’s tribes together indicated a strong grasp of Indian geopolitics, but an ignorance of his enemy’s and of the white man’s numbers, strength and determination.
After an extended tour of much of his territory during the winter of 1789-1790, a dispirited Governor St. Clair suggested to Secretary Knox that a show of force against the disaffected Indians (whom he underestimated and termed "banditti") might be useful. It is worth noting that the entire authorized strength of the United States Army in 1790 was 718 officers and men, most of whom were scattered among a chain of forts in and along St. Clair’s Territory: Forts Washington, Vincennes, Falls of the Ohio, Knox and Steuben. These small garrisons were notoriously beset by problems of desertion and drunkenness. Knox, who was always willing to spend money to "peacefully attach" the Indians to the United States, was loath to use force against them, for, he explained, this might "stain the character of the nation." Congress was likewise hesitant. Aside from reluctance to increase the size (and expense) of the regular army, some members expressed other qualms: Representative Fitzsimmons of Virginia, with little prescience, exclaimed that "We already possess land sufficient- more, in fact, than we will be able to cultivate for a century to come." Still, after the massacre of a government river convoy in May 1790, Knox and Congress authorized military action in August by a plan drawn up by St. Clair.
In late September the two forces moved out, the Vincennes expedition having to content itself with burning a few villages, for the Wabash tribes refused to either negotiate or fight and instead melted away into the forests. Harmar, whose militia "included many boys and infirm men who had been sent as substitutes," also confronted only shadows as he moved north and west. In October, however, when he unwisely split his forces, the shadows assumed a grim substance. One wing of Harmar’s force, about 300 strong and led by Colonel John Hardin, was ambushed and severely mauled by Little Turtle’s Miamis and Shawnee warriors under Blue Jacket, just south of today’s Fort Wayne. A few days later, Harmar’s men destroyed a number of Miami villages gleefully, and immediately began the march back to Fort Washington. As if in afterthought, the General sent Major P. Wyllys back to the embers of the razed villages with 200 regulars and 200 militia, to surprise the Miamis when they returned. Instead, it was Wyllys who was surprised- he found himself surrounded by Little Turtle’s painted braves, Indians whose musketry was appallingly accurate. Toe to toe with Wyllys’ men, the Indians accepted open battle with their firearms. The militia soon panicked and ran, and the Major, with 182 of his men, fell dead among the whooping Miamis.
With not a second lost, Harmar and his shrinking command retreated to the dubious protection of Fort Washington, and Little Turtle, his fame and exploits sung around the campfires, soon formed a formidable confederacy with Blue Jacket’s Shawnee and the Delaware under Buckongehelas. Into their camps drifted cutthroats Girty, Alex McKee, Matt Elliot and a number of French-Canadian traders, purveying cheap whiskey and expensive firearms, while buying fresh scalps for the insatiable London trade. A new, wide-ranging cycle of depredations spread out from their campfires, and hundreds more settlers were killed or taken captive. A member of an earlier expedition into the area characterized the Miami: "Like beasts of prey, they are patient, deceitful, and rendered by habit almost insensible to the common feelings of humanity." War and torture, it seemed, were their sports. It was clear to St. Clair, Knox, Washington and Congress that the problem was no longer one of wandering "Indian "banditti," but that of a powerful confederation standing in the path of westward migration. If not chastised, Little Turtle’s alliance might well attract other disaffected tribes. Hence, in January 1791, the parsimonious Congress authorized expansion of the United States Army to 3,000 officers and men (a figure it never reached in this era) and set aside a fund of $300,000 for pacification of the Territory.
St. Clair was to command a new expedition and was empowered to call up the militia units as well as three-month levies from Pennsylvania and Virginia. Last-minute peace missions were sent into Miami country, but to no avail. St. Clair’s instructions were to negotiate, if and when possible, rather than fight. If he did have to fight, he was to crush the Miamis and their allies and force them to cede what is now Ohio, and a large portion of Indiana, as well. A permanent fort was to be established in the heart of Miami country to guarantee the peace. Slowly, the expedition began to take shape around Fort Washington. Two small regular army regiments, the veteran First and newly-created Second, were collected there, along with a regular artillery company and two genuinely motley regiments of levies, whose common soldiers were paid a miserly $3 per month. One observer noted that the undisciplined levies were filled with "weak, diseased and unfit men from the streets and jails of Philadelphia," while St. Clair’s Adjutant General, the astute Colonel Winthrop Sargent, wrote in his diary that they were recruited from the offscourings of large towns and cities; enervated by idleness, debaucheries and every species of vice." This main force was to be joined on the march by some 350 boisterous Kentucky militia, most of whom were motivated by revenge or hope of profits from Indian scalps.
Experienced backwoodsmen were few, and even those knew not a thing about the country to be invaded. Quartermaster services were a shambles, and the expedition was long postponed while, explained St. Clair, "a great number of axes, camp-kettles, knapsacks, kegs for musket cartridges and spare cannon balls, and boxes of ammunition had to be made." The impatient Governor was also less than enthused when he met his Congress-appointed second-in-command, (brevet) Maj. Gen. Richard Butler, a moody, taciturn, egotistical martinet with little frontier experience. Sparks flew between the two generals from the start.
These were bad days; atrocious weather (rain and hail), deteriorating food in short supply (Colonel Sargent laconically noted in his diary on October 17, a real crisis: "Liquor there is sufficient for tomorrow’s issue.") In addition, there was hard work, endemic illness, collapsing discipline and the visible presence of Delaware and Miami scouts. Some of the levies, their enlistment terms expiring, marched home, a volunteer was hung for murder, two regulars were executed for desertion "to the enemy," and another given 500 lashes for contemplating the same. Morale had evaporated. On the nineteenth, Adjutant Sargent recorded nonchalantly that six men had "disappeared…whether by desertion, or to the enemy is uncertain." St. Clair, marveling that morale had sunk so low that some of his men preferred service with the hostiles, was by this time all but immobilized by illness. In one dispatch to Knox, he wrote with obvious pleasure of his afflictions, noting that ‘a bilious cholic, and sometimes a rheumatic asthma, to my great satisfaction changed to a gout in the left arm and hand." He was hardly an inspiration to his disheartened host! General Butler, something less than confidant of the Governor and frustrated by the continual delays, proposed (some say demanded) that he take 1,000 select men, make a forced march to the Miami heartland and finish the business. St. Clair, enraged, harshly rebuffed Butler, and the subordinate retreated into himself, sulking in stony silence. On October 24, the march was resumed, a hundred sick left behind as garrison for the new fort, but in the afternoon of the following day a five-day halt was ordered for rest and pasturage for the horses. On the twenty-eighth, Colonel Sergent wrote blandly in his diary: "We had a soldier killed and scalped this morning three miles from camp. He was hunting."
The presence of hostiles did not, however, stop desertion or exit of the levies, and a worried St. Clair admitted that "the Virginia battalion is melting down very fast." In fact with the garrisons of Forts Hamilton and Jefferson, desertions, enlistment expirations and large-scale illness, the entire army was fast dissolving. A record seven miles was covered on October 30, for the army was now marching along an old and broad Indian "road," but camp was made that night in a spongy bog in the midst of violent, chilling thunderstorms. Unable to move out the next day because the soggy morass would not support the wagons, St. Clair saw discontent in the ranks boil over. In addition to much brawling and general insubordination, 60 Kentucky militia marched angrily out of camp for home, bitterly promising to loot the supply train they expected to meet en route from Fort Washington. Unsure of himself as usual, but anxious to maintain some semblance of discipline lest his entire expedition come apart, St. Clair bestirred himself and ordered the whole of the First Regiment (300 men of that unit were then with him) to pursue the deserters, capture them, and escort the supply wagons back to the main force. These men, described as ‘the flower of the army," soon lost their way. They would fulfill neither of their assignments and would be absent from the coming battle: a battle in which they alone might have made a crucial difference.
St. Clair, in ignorance of the whereabouts of his First Regiment, moved out of the bog on November 2, his army now reduced to less than 1,400 sniffling, coughing malcontents. Watched, but not attacked by increasing numbers of Indians of assorted tribes, he pitched camp that evening on the bank of the Mississinewa Creek, well within Miami Country. Next day, the expedition moved out. St. Clair neglected to send scouts more than a few hundred yards from his main column despite the fact that Sargent recorded seeing "an immense number of old and new Indian camps" along the well-worn track they were following. In the afternoon of November 3, the Governor bivouacked his men on elevated terrain on a branch of the East Fork of the Wabash, only a few miles from a large cluster of Miami villages. Unfortunately for his men, he thought he was still several days’ march from the Miami heartland, a notion that a few scouts could have promptly dispelled.
Within an hour or so, all eight cannon were silent: All artillery officers and most of the crews were dead or wounded. The levies in the rear, themselves under savage attack, soon moved to join the main body, but found that there was little room to maneuver in the exposed camp, where the ground was almost covered by the fallen. General Butler, shot in the chest and stomach (probably mortally) had himself propped up in the middle of the camp and continued to issue somewhat incoherent orders, while St. Clair, a prominent and enticing target, avoided the hail of bullets as if by magic. Though he had three horses killed under him and had his uniform pierced by eight musket balls, he remained untouched, calmly directing the battle as best he could, in full view of the enemy. Sargent, though painfully wounded, did the same. The din was hellish: the gunshots, the tortured screaming of gut-shot horses, the pitiful cries of the badly wounded, the shrieking of the now confident Indians, the angry, piercing whine of musket balls, the harshly, hoarsely-screamed orders. Three times, Colonel Darke of the Second Regiment met bounding Indian charges of his own. Close enough to the howling enemy to ply his sabre, Darke (Darke County, Ohio) three times threw the Indians back with his dwindling regulars. Each time they were repulsed, however, the Indians renewed their accurate fire, and as more men fell, confusion, approaching panic spread. According to a witness, many men- levies and regulars alike- "appeared stupefied and bewildered with the danger," some even sitting down and tranquilly eating their interrupted breakfast as their comrades thudded to the earth nearby in death throes.
About 9:30 a.m., after some three hours and more of savage fighting, Colonel Darke’s ravaged regulars drove back the Indians in the rear far enough to uncover the approach road, and, with his decimated command holding the "door" open, the remaining terrified troops "hurried like a drove of bullocks" toward the south. The retreat was a blind rout. Everything, including many personal weapons, was left behind or thrown away. Luckily for St. Clair (now mounted on a scrawny, almost crippled pack horse) and his fleet-footed men, the Indians pursued only a few miles, picking off relatively few stragglers. The lure of what to them was princely booty took them back to camp for serious looting, "and to mutilate, torture and kill" the many wounded, among whom was the recumbent General Butler. Captain Thomas Morris, who had fought the Miami in the 1760’s, had reported with accuracy that "torture is continued often for two or three days, if they can contrive to keep the prisoner alive." The retreat was far more swift than the approach had been: Most of the survivors made Fort Jefferson (30 miles away) by sunset, finding there the "missing" men of the First Regiment. As they straggled in, almost half of them wounded, they were a sorry sight, "one being described as scalped and having a tomahawk sticking in his head." If that description is a true one, that tomahawk might be the only weapon lost by the Indians in the Battle Without a Name! Many of the wounded were destined to die over the coming days and weeks.
Leaving the severely wounded at Fort Jefferson, St. Clair and the remnants of his army made a forced march to Fort Hamilton in a day and a half, arriving there exhausted on November 6, and reaching Fort Washington just two days later. It was only there that the general learned of Captain Slough’s neglected report to General Butler. On November 9, with shaky hand, he penned official reports of the action to Secretary Knox and President Washington. Behind him, on the field, he had left his dead and badly wounded, some 316 horses, eight cannon and about $30,000 in assorted government property. Strange to say, he did not leave his reputation among the corpses. A seven-man committee of the House of Representatives investigated the tragedy of St. Clair’s alleged culpability in early 1792, but the general was a very influential man. He was exonerated, and with honor, because of the obstacles he had had to overcome, because of his unquestionable bravery under fire, and because everyone (except, ironically, St. Clair himself) grossly overestimated the numbers of Indians involved. The committee’s official report ended with the words: "The failure of the late expedition can in no respect be imputed to his conduct." The general nonetheless resigned his army commission later in the year, content to remain for a decade or more the Governor of the Northwest Territory.
In a battle never given a name (Actually the Battle of the Wabash or St. Clair’s Defeat, Ed.) , the three hostile tribes had crushed St. Clair’s army with an estimated 1,200 braves and a handful of interested Canadians. It was (and is) rumored that the legendary Joseph Brant was present with a select band of his Mohawk warriors, but there is no actual proof of this. For years, in any case, American scalps were hawked throughout Eastern Canada. Eighty-five years later, George Armstrong Custer would fall amidst his 270 or so men in an America replete with newspapers that vied with one another to shock the nation with tales of his grisly finale. Few Americans in 1791 would read the appendix of the Congressional Record. The screams of St. Clair’s men dying near future Fort Wayne, Ind., were considerably muted by the forest, the distance, and a curious indifference. Their battle had been but one of a string of bloody encounters that soaked the entire Northwest in blood for a half-century. Reading General St. Clair’s action report in New York, the normally imperturbable first President blurted out to his secretary: "O God, he’s worse than a murderer," and ordered the congressional investigation. The General had written rather blandly that he had been surprised in hostile territory, and his army had lost an appalling 39 officers, 621 men killed and 21 officers, 271 men wounded. Further, scores of men were "unaccounted for," and 30 of 33 female camp followers had perished. His army, in fact, had been butchered.
By winter, 1791, the U.S. Army was eviscerated and demoralized, and the young United States as a nation found itself on the defensive. St. Clair’s unnamed defeat had cost more American lives than had any battle of the Revolutionary war and would rank as the worst defeat at the hands of Indians in American History. The victorious tribes, their spirits soaring, promptly put the torch to the Northwest frontier, raiding as far as Pennsylvania and Kentucky and attempting to mold a giant confederation embracing the Iroquois nation, the Wabash tribes, the Wyandots, Ottawas, and the congeries of Illinois tribes. Clearly, the nation was at risk.