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The Ohio Country (Ohio Territory, [lower-alpha 1] Ohio Valley [lower-alpha 2] ) was a name used for a loosely defined region of colonial North America west of the Appalachian Mountains and south of Lake Erie.
Control of the territory and the region's fur trade was disputed in the 17th century by the Iroquois, Huron, Algonquin, other Native American tribes, and France. New France claimed this area as part of the administrative district of La Louisiane. France and Britain fought the French and Indian War over this area in the mid-18th century as the North American front of their Seven Years' War (1756–1763). Following the British victory, France ceded its territory east of the Mississippi River to the British Empire in the 1763 Treaty of Paris.
During the following decades, several minor frontier wars, including Pontiac's Rebellion and Lord Dunmore's War, were fought in the territory. In 1783, the Ohio Country became unorganized U.S. territory under the Treaty of Paris that officially ended the American Revolutionary War and became one of the first American frontier regions of the United States. Several of the original U.S. states had overlapping claims to portions of it, based on historical royal and colonial charters. The states' claims were largely extinguished after negotiations with the federal government by 1787, and it became part of the larger, organized Territory Northwest of the River Ohio. Most of the former areas north-west of the Ohio River were eventually organized as the state of Ohio, admitted to the Union in 1803.
In the 17th century, the area north of the Ohio River was occupied by the Algonquian-speaking Shawnee and some Siouan language-speaking tribes, such as the Omaha and Ponca. Around 1660, during a conflict known as the Beaver Wars, the Iroquois and allied tribes seized control of the Ohio Country, driving out the Shawnee and Siouan peoples. Those tribes mostly moved further northwest and west, with several eventually settling west of the Mississippi River. [lower-alpha 3] In the east, the Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee) conquered and absorbed the Erie (who also spoke an Iroquoian language) during this time. The Ohio Country, however, remained largely uninhabited for decades, used primarily as a hunting ground by the Iroquois peoples.
In the 1720s, a number of Native American groups began to migrate into the Ohio Country from the east, driven by pressure from encroaching European colonists. By 1724, Delaware Indians had established the village of Kittanning on the Allegheny River in present-day western Pennsylvania. With them came those Shawnee who had historically expanded further to the east. Other eastern bands of the scattered Shawnee tribe began to return to the Ohio Country in the decades that followed. A number of Seneca and other Iroquois peoples also migrated to the Ohio Country, moving away from the Anglo-French rivalries and warfare south of Lake Ontario. The Seneca were the westernmost of the original Five Nations of the Iroquois centered in western New York. In 1722, the Tuscarora, an Iroquoian-speaking tribe from the Carolinas, completed a migration to the area and were allowed to settle near the lands of the Oneida. They were considered cousins to the Iroquois and became the sixth nation in the confederacy.
In the late 1740s and the second half of the 18th century, the British and French angled for control of the territory. [1] The English intended to gain control of the area by sheer number of settlers on the ground. In 1749, The Crown through the government of the Colony of Virginia granted the Ohio Company a beneficial deal on this territory on the condition that it be settled by colonists from the Thirteen Colonies. [2]
With the arrival of Europeans to America, both Great Britain and France had claimed the territory and sent fur traders into the area to do business with the Ohio Country Indians. The Iroquois League also claimed the region by right of conquest. The rivalry among the two European nations, the Iroquois nations, and the Ohio valley Indian tribes for control of the region played an important part in the French and Indian War that lasted from 1754 through 1760. Having initially remained neutral, eventually the Ohio Country Indians largely sided with the French who were more interested in hunting in the region and were not actively settling the area as was their British colonial rivals. Armed with supplies and guns from the French, the Indians launched raids against their enemies via the Kittanning Path east of the Alleghenies. After they destroyed Fort Granville in the summer of 1756, Pennsylvania's Proprietary Governor John Penn ordered Captain John Armstrong to destroy the Shawnee villages west of the Alleghenies, hoping to put an end to their raiding activities. Meanwhile, other British and colonial forces drove the French from Fort Duquesne. They built Fort Pitt at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers that form the Ohio River. [lower-alpha 4] After being defeated by Britain, France ceded their claims to the entire Ohio Country in the 1763 Treaty of Paris. They had done so, however, without consulting their Native American allies who—in many cases—continued the fight against the colonial frontiersmen.
Colonies such as Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, and Connecticut claimed some of the westward lands as had been granted by their original charters. The area, however, was officially closed to European settlement by the Royal Proclamation of 1763, an attempt to preserve the western lands as territory exclusively set aside for use by Native American peoples. By enacting the treaty, the British Crown no longer recognized prior claims that the colonies made on this territory. On June 22, 1774, Parliament in England passed the Quebec Act, which annexed the region to the Province of Quebec. Colonists in the Thirteen Colonies considered this one of the Intolerable Acts that contributed to the call for American Revolution the following year, which began in earnest the following year, in 1775.
Despite the Crown's actions limiting westward expansion, frontiersmen from the Virginia and Pennsylvania colonies had migrated across the Allegheny Mountains for over a decade since the Proclamation. This eventually led them into conflict with the Shawnee tribes that claimed the area as their hunting grounds. The Shawnee, who referred to the settlers as the 'long knives', viewed the colonists as competitors to their resources and a threat to their way of life. Because of this, the Shawnee and other Indian tribes of the Ohio Country, chose to side with the British against the American colonists during the American Revolutionary War. They hoped to expel the colonists permanently from their lands.
In 1778, after several Patriot military victories in the region by an expeditionary force led by General George Rogers Clark, the Virginia legislature organized a nominal civil government over the area. They called this first official territory Illinois County, Virginia. It encompassed all of the lands lying west and north of the Ohio River to which Virginia had previously laid claim.
The high water mark of the Native American struggle to retain control of the region was in 1782, when the Ohio Valley Indian Nations met with the British in a war council at Chalawgatha, a Shawnee village located along the Little Miami River, where they planned what was to become a successful rout of the Americans two weeks later at the Battle of Blue Licks. In 1783, following the Treaty of Paris in which America had gained its independence, Britain ceded its claims over the area to the new United States. The new federal government immediately opened this area to settlement by American pioneers, considering it unorganized territory. The Ohio Country quickly became one of the most desirable locations for Trans-Appalachian settlements, in particular among veterans of the Revolutionary War, who were often granted land in lieu of pay for their military service during the war.
In the treaties of Fort Stanwix (late 1784) and Fort McIntosh (early 1785), the United States fixed boundaries between territory open to settlement and the native tribal lands. The Shawnee and other tribes, however, continued to resist American encroachment into their historic hunting grounds. This resistance eventually led to the Northwest Indian War.
Considered highly desirable, the area was subject to the overlapping and conflicting territorial ambitions of several eastern states:
After negotiation with the federal government, these states ceded their claims to the United States between 1780 and 1786. In July 1787, most of Ohio Country, the southern peninsula of what is today the state of Michigan, and eastern Illinois Country were incorporated as the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio. In 1803, most of what was formerly Ohio Country north and west of the Ohio River was admitted to the union as the state of Ohio.
The French and Indian War (1754–1763) was a theater of the Seven Years' War, which pitted the North American colonies of the British Empire against those of the French, each side being supported by various Native American tribes. At the start of the war, the French colonies had a population of roughly 60,000 settlers, compared with 2 million in the British colonies. The outnumbered French particularly depended on their native allies.
The Transylvania Colony, also referred to as the Transylvania Purchase or the Henderson Purchase, was a short-lived, extra-legal colony founded in early 1775 by North Carolina land speculator Richard Henderson, who formed and controlled the Transylvania Company. Henderson and his investors had reached an agreement to purchase a vast tract of Cherokee lands west of the southern and central Appalachian Mountains through the acceptance of the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals with most leading Cherokee chieftains then controlling these lands. In exchange for the land the tribes received goods worth, according to the estimates of some scholars, about 10,000 British pounds. To further complicate matters, this frontier land was also claimed by the Virginia Colony and a southern portion by Province of North Carolina.
The Beaver Wars, also known as the Iroquois Wars or the French and Iroquois Wars, were a series of conflicts fought intermittently during the 17th century in North America throughout the Saint Lawrence River valley in Canada and the Great Lakes region which pitted the Iroquois against the Hurons, northern Algonquians and their French allies. As a result of this conflict, the Iroquois destroyed several confederacies and tribes through warfare: the Hurons or Wendat, Erie, Neutral, Wenro, Petun, Susquehannock, Mohican and northern Algonquins whom they defeated and dispersed, some fleeing to neighbouring peoples and others assimilated, routed, or killed.
The Shawnee are a Native American people of the Northeastern Woodlands. Their language, Shawnee, is an Algonquian language.
Lord Dunmore's War, also known as Dunmore's War, was a brief conflict in fall 1774 between the British Colony of Virginia and the Shawnee and Mingo in the trans-Appalachian region of the colony south of the Ohio River. Broadly, the war included events between May and October 1774. The governor of Virginia during the conflict was John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, who in May 1774, asked the House of Burgesses to declare a state of war with the Indians and call out the Virginia militia.
The Ohio Company, formally known as the Ohio Company of Virginia, was a land speculation company organized for the settlement by Virginians of the Ohio Country and to trade with the Native Americans. The company had a land grant from Britain and a treaty with Indians, but France also claimed the area, and the conflict helped provoke the outbreak of the French and Indian War.
The Treaty of Easton was a colonial agreement in North America signed in October 1758 during the French and Indian War between British colonials and the chiefs of 13 Native American nations, representing tribes of the Iroquois, Lenape (Delaware), and Shawnee. Negotiations over more than a week were concluded on October 26, 1758, at a ceremony held in Easton, Pennsylvania between the British colonial governors of the provinces of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and representatives of 13 Indian nations, including the Iroquois, who sent chiefs of three of their nations to ensure their continued domination of their Ohio Country region; the eastern and western Lenape (Delaware), represented by two chiefs and headmen; Shawnee and others. More than 500 Native Americans attended the outdoor ceremony, after lengthy negotiations to bring peace to the regions of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and the Ohio Country.
The Treaty of Fort Stanwix was a treaty signed between representatives from the Iroquois and Great Britain in 1768 at Fort Stanwix. It was negotiated between Sir William Johnson, his deputy George Croghan, and representatives of the Iroquois.
George Croghan was an Irish-born fur trader in the Ohio Country of North America who became a key early figure in the region. In 1746 he was appointed to the Onondaga Council, the governing body of the Iroquois, and remained so until he was banished from the frontier in 1777 during the American Revolutionary War. Emigrating from Ireland to Pennsylvania in 1741, he had become an important trader by going to the villages of Indigenous Peoples, learning their languages and customs, and working on the frontier where previously mostly French had been trading. During and after King George's War of the 1740s, he helped negotiate new treaties and alliances for the British with Native Americans.
Fort Pitt was a fort built by British forces between 1759 and 1761 during the French and Indian War at the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, where the Ohio River is formed in western Pennsylvania. It was near the site of Fort Duquesne, a French colonial fort built in 1754 as tensions increased between Great Britain and France in both Europe and North America. The French destroyed Fort Duquesne in 1758 when they retreated under British attack.
The Sixty Years' War was a military struggle for control of the North American Great Lakes region, including Lake Champlain and Lake George, encompassing a number of wars over multiple generations. The conflicts involved the British Empire, the French colonial empire, the United States, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The term Sixty Years' War is used by academic historians to provide a framework for viewing this era as a whole, rather than as isolated events.
The riverside village of Logstown also known as Logg's Town, French: Chiningue near modern-day Baden, Pennsylvania, was a significant Native American settlement in Western Pennsylvania and the site of the 1752 signing of the Treaty of Logstown between the Ohio Company, the Colony of Virginia, and the Six Nations, which occupied the region. Being an unusually large settlement, and because of its strategic location in the Ohio Country, an area contested by France and England, Logstown was an important community for all parties living along the Ohio and tributary rivers. Logstown was a prominent trade and council site for the contending British and French colonial governments, both of which made abortive plans to construct forts near the town. Logstown was burned in 1754 and although it was rebuilt, in the years following the French and Indian War it became depopulated and was eventually abandoned.
The Mitchell Map is a map made by John Mitchell (1711–1768), which was reprinted several times during the second half of the 18th century. The map, formally titled A map of the British and French dominions in North America &c., was used as a primary map source during the Treaty of Paris for defining the boundaries of the newly independent United States. The map remained important for resolving border disputes between the United States and Canada as recently as the 1980s dispute over the Gulf of Maine fisheries. The Mitchell Map is the most comprehensive map of eastern North America made during the colonial era. Its size is about 6.5 feet (2.0 m) wide by 4.5 feet (1.4 m) high.
"Indian Reserve" is a historical term for the largely uncolonized land in North America that was claimed by France, ceded to Great Britain through the Treaty of Paris (1763) at the end of the Seven Years' War—also known as the French and Indian War—and set aside for the First Nations in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. The British government had contemplated establishing an Indian barrier state in a portion of the reserve west of the Appalachian Mountains, bounded by the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and the Great Lakes. British officials aspired to establish such a state even after the region was assigned to the United States in the Treaty of Paris (1783) ending the American Revolutionary War, but abandoned their efforts in 1814 after losing military control of the region during the War of 1812.
Conrad Weiser, born Johann Conrad Weiser, Jr., was a Pennsylvania Dutch (German) pioneer who served as an interpreter and diplomat between the Pennsylvania Colony and Native American nations. Primarily a farmer, he also worked as a tanner, and later served as a soldier and judge. He lived part of the time for six years at Ephrata Cloister, a Protestant monastic community in Lancaster County.
The Treaty of Fort Stanwix was a treaty finalized on October 22, 1784, between the United States and Native Americans from the six nations of the Iroquois League. It was signed at Fort Stanwix, in present-day Rome, New York, and was the first of several treaties between Native Americans and the United States after the American victory in the Revolutionary War.
Belleville is an unincorporated community in Wood County, West Virginia, United States.
The Six Nations land cessions were a series of land cessions by the Haudenosaunee and Lenape which ceded large amounts of land, including both recently conquered territories acquired from other indigenous peoples in the Beaver Wars, and ancestral lands to the Thirteen Colonies and the United States. The land ceded covered, partially or in the entire, the U.S. states of New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee and North Carolina. They were bordered to the west by the Algonquian lands in the Ohio Country, Cherokee lands to the south, and Muscogee and Choctaw lands to the southeast.
The Forbes Expedition was a British military campaign to capture Fort Duquesne, led by Brigadier-General John Forbes in 1758, during the French and Indian War. While advancing to the fort, the expedition built the Forbes Road. The Treaty of Easton served to cause a loss of Native American support for the French, resulting in the French destroying the fort before the expedition could arrive on November 24.
Teedyuscung was known as "King of the Delawares". He worked to establish a permanent Lenape (Delaware) home in eastern Pennsylvania in the Lehigh, Susquehanna, and Delaware River valleys. Teedyuscung participated in the Treaty of Easton, which resulted in the surrender of Lenape claims to all lands in Pennsylvania. Following the treaty, the Lenape were forced to live under the control of the Iroquois in the Wyoming Valley near modern-day Wilkes-Barre. Teedyuscung was murdered by arsonists in the night of April 19, 1763. This marked the beginning of the end of the Lenape presence in Pennsylvania. Teedyuscung's son Chief Bull conducted a raid on the Wyoming Valley that was part of a greater Indian uprising. As a result, the Lenape were forced to move west of the Appalachian Mountains by the Royal Proclamation of 1763.