Pickawillany: The Village That Triggered a World War

Near the confluence of Loramie Creek and the Great Miami River, on the outskirts of what is now Piqua, Ohio, there once stood a Miami Indian village called Pickawillany. In the late seventeen forties it was among the largest Native communities in eastern North America. It was also a powder keg at the center of a colonial rivalry that would eventually ignite the Seven Years War, the first truly global conflict in human history.

The Miami had long traded with both France and Britain, but in seventeen forty-eight a chief known to the English as Old Briton made a decisive choice. He pulled his people away from the French alliance, welcomed British traders to the village, and allowed a fortified trading post to be built at Pickawillany. Within a few years the post attracted dozens of English merchants from Pennsylvania and Virginia, pouring cheap, high-quality goods into the Ohio Country that the French, with their more expensive trade system, could not match. Pickawillany became a demonstration that Native nations could do business with Britain on their own terms.

France could not allow the example to stand. In June of seventeen fifty-two, a war leader named Charles Langlade led roughly two hundred fifty Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi warriors, accompanied by a small number of French traders, out of the Great Lakes and struck Pickawillany on a summer morning when most of the Miami men were away hunting. The defenders, outnumbered and caught by surprise, were overwhelmed quickly. Several English traders were killed or captured. Old Briton was taken prisoner and, in a deliberate display of political theater meant to warn other Native peoples against siding with Britain, was killed and ceremonially consumed by the Ottawa warriors.

The raid accomplished its immediate goal. Pickawillany was abandoned. The Miami retreated from their British alliance. But the British did not withdraw from the Ohio Country, and within two years the contest over this exact region had drawn France and Britain into the French and Indian War, which spread across Europe, the Caribbean, and India.

The hill where Pickawillany stood is near the roadside today, unmarked by most travelers.