Formation of The Confederacy
Co-operation among the Indian nations forming the Western Confederacy had gone back to the French colonial era. It was renewed during the American Revolutionary War. The Confederacy first came together in the autumn of 1785 at Fort Detroit, proclaiming that the parties to the Confederacy would deal jointly with the United States, rather than individually. This determination was renewed in 1786 at the Wyandot (Huron) village of Upper Sandusky. The Confederacy declared the Ohio River as the boundary between their lands and those of American settlers. The Wyandot were the nominal "fathers," or senior guaranteeing nation of the Confederacy, but the Shawnee and Miami provided the greatest share of the fighting forces.
The Confederacy included warriors from a wide variety of peoples:
- Wyandot (Huron)
- Shawnee
- Council of the Three Fires
- Ojibwe
- Odawa
- Potawatomi
- Lenape
- Miami
- Kickapoo
- Kaskaskia
- Wabash Confederacy (Wea, Piankashaw, and others)
- Chickamauga-Cherokee
In most cases, an entire "tribe" or "nation" was not involved in the war; the Indian societies were generally not centralized. Villages and individual warriors and chiefs decided on participation in the war.
Nearly 200 Cherokee warriors from two bands of the Upper Towns group known as Chickamauga lived and fought alongside the Shawnee from the time of the Revolution through the years of the Indian Confederacy. In addition, the Cherokee leader Dragging Canoe sent a contingent of warriors for a specific action.
Some warriors of the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes, which had been traditional enemies of the northwest Indians, served as scouts for the United States during these years.
Read more about this topic: Northwest Indian War
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