George Washington's War on Native America

Barbara Alice Mann

• Publisher: Praeger
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9780275981778
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780313057809
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Revolutionary War is ordinarily presented as a conflict exclusively between colonists and the British, fought along the northern Atlantic seacoast. This important work recounts the tragic events on the forgotten Western front of the American Revolution—a war fought against and ultimately won by Native America. The Natives, primarily the Iroquois League and the Ohio Union, are erroneously presented in history texts as allies (or lackeys) of the British, but Native America was working from its own internally generated agenda: to prevent settlers from invading the Old Northwest. Native America won the war in the West, holding the land west and north of the Allegheny-Ohio River systems. While the British may have awarded these lands to the colonists in the Treaty of Paris, the Native Americans did not concur.

Throughout the war, the unwavering goal of the Revolutionary Army, under George Washington, and their associated settler militias was to break the power of the Iroquois League, which had successfully held off invasion for the preceding two centuries, and the newly formed Ohio Union. To destroy the Natives in the way of land seizure, Washington authorized a series of rampages intended to destroy the League and the Union by starvation. Food, livestock, homes, and trees were destroyed, first in the New York breadbaskets, then in the Ohio granaries—spreading famine across Native lands. Uncounted thousands of Natives perished from New York to Pennsylvania to Ohio. This book tells how, in the wake of the massive assaults, the Natives held back the American onslaught.

Table of contents

• Series Foreword Bruce E. Johansen
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction ‘‘Niggur-in-Law to Old Sattan’’: How the West Was Really Won
• 1 ‘‘The Vile Hands of the Savages’’: Countdown to Total War, 1775–1778
• 2 ‘‘Shooting Pigeons’’: The Goose Van Schaick Sweep through Onondaga, April 1779
• 3 ‘‘The Wolves of the Forest’’: The Brodhead March up the Allegheny, August–September 1779
• 4 ‘‘Extirpate Those Hell-Hounds from off the Face of the Earth’’: The Sullivan-Clinton Campaign, 9 August–30 September 1779
• 5 ‘‘Keep That Nest of Hornets Quiet’’: The Ohio Campaigns of 1779–1781
• 6 ‘‘Two Mighty Gods with Their Mouth Wide Open’’: Settler Assaults on Ohio, 1782
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index