Epilogue

Abstract

The Indians’ hope that the United States might forgo expansion in return for peace and agree to the Ohio as a permanent boundary was not to be realized. The 1793 meeting broke up, the Americans split the Indian confederacy by playing on different tribal interests, and a year later General Anthony Wayne defeated the Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in northwestern Ohio. At the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, tribal leaders ceded most of Ohio to the United States. Indian resistance shifted westward. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the Shawnee war chief Tecumseh and his brother the Shawnee Prophet revived Indian resistance in the North and preached a message of pan-Indian unity throughout the eastern woodlands; from 1813 to 1814 the Creeks fought a bloody war against American expansion in the South. But it was too little and too late. The Indians’ war for independence was lost. They now had to find ways to continue being Indians in the midst of a society that insisted that Indians were a “vanishing race.”