St. Clair's Defeat

In November 1791 Arthur St. Clair marched a badly supplied army into the Ohio country to break the confederacy that had already beaten one American expedition the year before, and camped without entrenching. At dawn on the 4th, Little Turtle and Blue Jacket attacked from every side at once, killed the artillerymen at their guns first, and turned the camp into a killing ground in about three hours. Roughly a quarter of the entire United States Army died that morning, along with most of the women and children travelling with it. Measured against the size of the force engaged, no defeat inflicted on the US Army by Native forces has ever been worse. Three years later a rebuilt army under Anthony Wayne won at Fallen Timbers, and the Treaty of Greenville took most of Ohio.

The scale of the defeat sits oddly against its near-total absence from popular memory, especially next to Little Bighorn, which killed fewer than half as many soldiers and is known to everyone; historians generally attribute the gap to the absence of a charismatic loser and to the awkwardness of a story in which a confederacy of Native nations decisively out-generalled the United States. Little Turtle and Blue Jacket ran a genuine coalition with shared command and a coherent strategy, which nineteenth century accounts consistently declined to credit. The congressional inquiry that followed set constitutional precedent twice over, establishing both the investigative power and the executive's claim to withhold, and is still cited in privilege litigation. The Fort Recovery site has been excavated repeatedly since the 1990s, and the 1794 reburial of the dead found there gives the battlefield an unusually firm archaeological footing.