Northwest Indian War - Legacy

Legacy

The war has no widely accepted name; other names include the "Old Northwest Indian War", the "Ohio War", the "Ohio Indian War", and the "War for the Ohio River Boundary". In U.S. Army records, it is known as the "Miami Campaign". One historian has recently suggested naming it the "Miami Confederacy War", but other scholars have resisted naming the war after the Miamis (or Little Turtle, as was once common), arguing that this overlooks the centrality of Blue Jacket and the Ohio Country Indians in the war. Many books avoid the problem of what to call the war by describing it without putting a name to it, or ignoring it. Similarly, the battles and expeditions of the war do not have "standard" names in U.S. history books, except for the Battle of Fallen Timbers.

Although this war was the first major military endeavor of the post-Revolutionary United States, and a major crisis of President George Washington's Administration, historians have sometimes overlooked it. Although 19th-century Indian Wars became more famous in American popular culture (in part because of being more recent), the Northwest Indian War resulted in more casualties of the United States military and noncombatants than the combined battles of Geronimo, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Cochise, and Red Cloud. In the Battle of the Wabash (St. Clair's Defeat) American Indians achieved their highest rate of casualties against the US Army.

The Northwest Indian War was part of a long frontier struggle in the Ohio Country, which included the French and Indian War (1754–1763), Pontiac's Rebellion (1763–1764), Lord Dunmore's War (1774) and the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). Many Indian communities perceived the wars as a kind of endemic warfare with European and American settlers that spanned several generations. For example, historian Francis Jennings suggested that the Northwest Indian War was, for the Lenape people, the end of a "Forty Years' War" that began soon after the Braddock Expedition in 1755. For some American Indians, the conflict resumed a generation later with Tecumseh's War (1811) and the War of 1812 (hence their term Sixty Years' War). Conflict with the US continued to the 1830s era of Indian removals from east of the Mississippi.