Ball State and Tribal Leaders Bring Fresh Perspective to Ohio Battle
You have to wonder if the bodies were still warm when the scapegoating began. After a three-hour battle, more than 800 U.S. officers, soldiers, and civilians were killed, their bodies piled along the banks of the Wabash River on land that belonged to American Indians. Hundreds more were wounded.
It happened on November 4, 1791, at what is now Fort Recovery, Ohio, as part of the roughly 10-year Northwest Indian War.
The battlefield is just an hour’s drive east of the Ball State campus. There, an intertribal alliance of approximately 1,400 warriors led by Miami chief Mihšihkinaahkwa, also called Little Turtle, and Shawnee chief Weyapiersenwah, also known as Blue Jacket, annihilated an equally numbered force led by Maj. Gen. Arthur St. Clair.
Known variously as St. Clair’s Defeat or the Battle of the Wabash, it was considered a devastating loss to the Army.
As the blood dried, a narrative formed to explain away the rout. One report blamed a corrupt quartermaster for providing subpar supplies. Others blamed St. Clair for incompetence. Eventually, President George Washington forced the general to resign.
To better understand the battle, Christine Thompson, MA ’09, and others in Ball State’s Applied Anthropology Laboratories (AAL), conducted multiple on-site archaeological surveys and extensively reviewed contemporary journals, diaries, and maps.
Though accounts of American troops’ incompetence and corruption are valid, Thompson sees a more important factor in the outcome of the battle: the strategic, methodical fighting of the American Indians, who executed a cunning plan.
Nine tribes joined forces in the battle of St. Clair’s Defeat. The descendant tribes now number 39, and their headquarters are spread throughout nine Great Lakes and Great Plains states, from New York to Oklahoma.
St. Clair’s Defeat should be a source of immense pride for these tribal communities, said Diane Hunter, MLS ’82, a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, which numbers about 5,500 citizens.
“It shows we were a strong people,” Hunter said. “We knew how to fight. We knew how to defend our land. And it mattered to us.”
Hunter, who lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, is the tribe’s historic preservation officer. She said that most Miami citizens are probably unaware of the battle.
Thompson, whose research interests include prehistoric archaeology as well as historic battlefields, quickly turned her focus to Fort Recovery when she joined AAL after earning her master’s in archaeology at Ball State.
Curious about how landscape features and American Indian strategy affected St. Clair’s Defeat, she and her students conducted field work that included metal detector surveys and physical excavations.
The project was a partnership with the Fort Recovery Historical Society and the community of Fort Recovery, with National Endowment for the Humanities funding.
But it has evolved into much more than discovering artifacts and fine-tuning history. AAL’s research won’t just live inside the walls of academia and on the pages of peer-reviewed journals.
“The end product will be a traveling exhibit and presentations created with tribal communities for tribal communities,” Thompson said.
A multidisciplinary team of Ball State students, staff, and faculty from the anthropology and architecture programs, with American Indian humanities scholars and consultants, are designing the exhibit. It will be called, “St. Clair’s Defeat Revisited: A New View of the Conflict.”