Treaty of Fort McIntosh, 1785

In January 1785 American commissioners met Native leaders at Fort McIntosh (opens in a new tab), a log fort built in 1778 where the Beaver River meets the Ohio, at present Beaver, Pennsylvania. The meeting followed the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (opens in a new tab) of October 1784, where the Six Nations gave up their claims to the eastern Ohio Country. Congress now wanted a treaty with the nations who lived west of the Ohio River.

The commissioners were George Rogers Clark, the war leader of Kentucky’s frontier, along with Richard Butler (opens in a new tab) and Arthur Lee (opens in a new tab). On January 21, 1785, they signed a treaty of ten articles with sachems and warriors of the Wyandot, Delaware, Ojibwe and Odawa nations. Most of the Native men who signed had not been given authority by their nations to give up land, which is why later chiefs questioned whether the treaty was legal or fair.

The treaty text (opens in a new tab) set a line from the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, up to the Tuscarawas and Fort Laurens, west to the old Pickawillany post on the Great Miami, and down the Maumee to Lake Erie. Inside it, about the northwestern third of present Ohio, the United States allotted land to the Wyandot and Delaware “to live and to hunt on,” and any American who tried to settle there would lose the government’s protection. The signers in turn acknowledged that the lands east, south and west of the line belonged to the United States.

The treaty also made the nations hand over three chiefs, one Wyandot and two Delaware, as hostages until all prisoners, “white and black,” were returned. Posts at Detroit and Michilimackinac were reserved to the United States. Its opening words, in which the commissioners “give peace” to the four nations “on the following conditions,” show that the United States treated them as defeated allies of Britain rather than as equals.

The Shawnee, whose towns in southwestern Ohio lay just across the river from Kentucky, were not party to the treaty, yet it put their homeland on the American side of the line. To them and to many other towns, men without their nations’ consent could not sign away land that was never theirs. Later in 1785 the nations began forming the Northwestern Confederacy (opens in a new tab) so they could deal with the United States as one body.

In January 1786 American commissioners pressed some Shawnee leaders into a separate treaty at Fort Finney (opens in a new tab), and that October Kentucky militia burned Shawnee towns on Logan’s Raid, killing the Mekoche leader Moluntha. Settlers and Native warriors both crossed the disputed line, and the fighting grew into the Northwest Indian War. Kentuckians marched in Harmar’s 1790 campaign, and the war ended with the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, which drew a boundary almost the same as the one drawn at Fort McIntosh.

Kentucky today

No Kentucky ground changed hands at Fort McIntosh, but the line drawn there set the terms of a decade of war along Kentucky’s whole Ohio River border. Families floating down the Ohio in those years, like William Hubbell’s flatboat party in 1791, traveled through the war zone it helped create, and river towns such as Washington in Mason County grew up behind it. The fort site itself is a small park in Beaver, Pennsylvania, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.