Battle of Fallen Timbers: Fasting Warriors and Fort Miami's Locked Gates

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In August 1794, near modern Toledo, Ohio, the Shawnee leader Blue Jacket set roughly 1,500 warriors from the Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, Wyandot and Ojibwe nations, plus Canadian militiamen dressed as Native fighters, inside a stretch of forest a tornado had flattened into a natural abatis. The episode sets up the stakes: Britain kept its forts in the Northwest Territory after the 1783 Treaty of Paris, and the Western Confederacy had crushed Josiah Harmar in 1790 and Arthur St. Clair in 1791, killing over 600 of about 1,000 soldiers. Major General Anthony Wayne rebuilt the army as the Legion of the United States, drilled it hard, and advanced by building Fort Greenville and Fort Recovery. Little Turtle urged peace, calling Wayne the chief who never sleeps, but Blue Jacket took command and chose to fight.

Wayne stopped to build Fort Deposit for his baggage, so by August 20 the warriors were on the third day of a ritual fast, and when rain fell many left for food at the British post, Fort Miami. The Legion's Kentucky mounted militia broke under the first volley, but Wayne, lifted onto his horse because of gout, rallied the line, used grapeshot and sent William Henry Harrison with orders for a bayonet charge. The fight lasted about 70 minutes. Retreating warriors found Fort Miami's gates barred by Major William Campbell, who feared starting a war with the United States while Britain fought France. The defeat led to the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, and a young Tecumseh, who lost a brother in the retreat, refused to sign it.

• Turkey Foot was shot and killed while standing on a boulder trying to rally retreating warriors.
• Wayne rode alone around Fort Miami's walls, then burned nearby villages, crops and the storehouses of British agent Alexander McKee.
• Second in command James Wilkinson wrote anonymous attacks on Wayne while being paid by Spain as Agent 13, with gold smuggled in sugar and coffee barrels.
• Wayne died in 1796 before he could court-martial Wilkinson, who then succeeded him as commanding general.
• Anthropologist G. Michael Pratt used soldiers' journals and 1995 and 2001 metal detector surveys to place the true battlefield on a bluff a quarter mile from the old monument.