Fort Miami
Near Toledo, Ohio
In the spring of seventeen ninety-four, British soldiers built a stockade on the west bank of the Maumee River, inside territory the United States claimed as its own. Fort Miami was blunt provocation: a show of British force meant to hold the Maumee Valley, support the Native confederacy fighting American expansion, and block General Anthony Wayne's march toward Detroit.
On August twentieth of that year, Wayne smashed that confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, just a few miles south. The defeated warriors fled north to Fort Miami expecting shelter. The British commander shut the gates. That betrayal broke the back of the resistance. The Treaty of Greenville the following year opened most of Ohio to American settlement, and the British eventually gave up the fort. The site near present-day Maumee, Ohio, is now part of a national historic site.
