Western Theater of The American Revolutionary War - Background

Background

When the American Revolutionary War began in 1775, the Ohio River marked a tenuous border between the American colonies and the American Indians of the Ohio Country. This border had its origins in the Proclamation of 1763, which forbade British colonists from settling west of the Appalachian Mountains. The British Crown had issued the Proclamation after the French and Indian War (1754–1763) in order to prevent conflict between Indians and colonists in the vast territory newly acquired from France. Settlers and land speculators in Britain and America objected to this restriction, however, and so British officials negotiated two treaties with American Indians in 1768—the Treaty of Fort Stanwix and the Treaty of Hard Labour—which opened up land for settlement south of the Ohio River. Thereafter, tensions between British officials and colonists over western land policy diminished.

Most of the Indians who actually lived and hunted in the Ohio Valley—Shawnees, Mingos, Delawares, and Wyandots—had not been consulted in the 1768 treaties. Angry with the Iroquois for selling their lands to the British, Shawnees began to organize a confederacy of western Indians with the intention of preventing the loss of their lands. British and Iroquois officials worked to diplomatically isolate the Shawnees from other Indian nations, however, and so when Dunmore's War broke out in 1774, Shawnees faced the Virginia militia with few allies. After Virginia's victory in the war, the Shawnees were compelled to accept the Ohio River boundary. Shawnee and Mingo leaders who did not agree with these terms renewed the struggle soon after the American Revolutionary War began in 1775.