Treaty of Fort McIntosh Boundary Line

In seventeen eighty-five, just two years after the Revolution ended, American diplomats met tribal leaders of the Chippewa, Delaware, Ottawa, and Wyandot nations at Fort McIntosh in present-day Pennsylvania. The treaty they signed drew one of the first boundary lines between the new United States and Native territory in the Northwest Territory, covering what would become Ohio.

It was deeply controversial from the start. Many tribal members rejected the agreement, arguing the leaders who signed it had no authority to cede millions of acres. The boundary was almost immediately ignored by settlers pushing west, and within a decade the United States would fight the Northwest Indian War over the same lands. The Treaty of Fort McIntosh stands as an early and troubled chapter in the long conflict over who owned the Ohio frontier.