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Historical Background

The War in the West

While British armies were attacking the Colonials from the seaward side, the long inland frontier from Maine to Georgia was exposed to assault by savage tribes. Most of the Indians sided with the English and, led by British officers, struck time and again at the frontier settlements. Happily for the Americans, the settlements stood firm. Otherwise, the coastal armies might have faced attack from two sides at once. On the southwestern frontier, the Indian threat was negated early. A series of joint campaigns by Georgia, Carolina, and Virginia militiamen in the summer and fall of 1776 reduced the Cherokees to virtual impotence, and a second drive 3 years later completed the job. In the north, the frontier was fairly quiet until 1778, when Tory-led Iroquois bands perpetrated fearful massacres in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania and the Cherry Valley of New York. A punitive expedition under Gen. John Sullivan invaded the Iroquois country in the summer of 1779 to devastate the Indian villages. Another force under Col. Daniel Brodhead marched north from Fort Pitt about the same time to destroy crops and villages around the west end of Lake Erie.

In Kentucky, where settlement began simultaneously with the outbreak of war (see Fort Boonesborough and Fort Harrod, pp. 198-199), the situation was touch and go for 4 years. Boone's Wilderness Road became a tenuous supply line for the few Kentucky stations, which stood off numerous Indian assaults. The frontiersmen had learned well the lessons of Indian war, and knew that passive defense would never halt the raids on the settlements. But it remained for a young Virginian, George Rogers Clark, to prove to the embattled American Congress that offense was the best defense.

Clark's plans required more than his resources could provide, but Virginia, with an eye to cementing her western claims, agreed to subsidize his operations. In the summer of 1778 Clark swooped down on the old French Illinois base of Kaskaskia and a short time later induced the inhabitants of Vincennes, on the Wabash to the east, to switch their allegiance. The British at Detroit struck back and reoccupied Vincennes without a fight. Clark responded by taking the initiative. After a remarkable winter march across the flooded Illinois prairie, he captured Vincennes (Fort Sackville, see pp. 197-198) on February 24, 1779. Clark's daring subdued the Northwest for a time, but he lacked the men and supplies to seize Detroit, center of British power in the Northwest. Although the British were equally unable to win final victory in the Northwest, they were able to strike into Pennsylvania and Kentucky in hit-and-run raids in the closing years of the war. In the Battle of Blue Licks, on Kentucky's Licking River, August 18, 1782, an American frontier force was ambushed and suffered a disastrous defeat (see p. 198) that was only partially avenged by Clark's successful campaign into Ohio the following autumn. This punitive expedition was the last major action of the war in the West. [6]