Fort Miamis: The Gate the British Slammed Shut
Near Toledo, Ohio
In the spring of seventeen ninety-four, the British built Fort Miamis on the Maumee River to hold back General Anthony Wayne's American army and support the Northwest Indian Confederation. The fort had four bastions, a twenty-five-foot trench lined with stakes, and fourteen cannons.
On August twentieth, Wayne defeated the Confederation forces at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, just miles upstream. The fleeing warriors ran for the British fort expecting shelter. The gates stayed closed. The British commander refused to let them in, unwilling to risk open war with the United States. The abandoned warriors had to scatter to Swan Creek. That single act of betrayal shattered the Confederation's trust in their British allies and broke the resistance to American expansion into the Northwest Territory. The Treaty of Greenville in seventeen ninety-five followed, opening Ohio and Indiana to settlement, and Britain did not give up the fort until seventeen ninety-six, under the Jay Treaty. A reconstructed earthwork now marks the site near present-day Maumee, Ohio.
