On 4 November 1791, half an hour before sunrise, warriors of the Miami, Shawnee, Delaware and their allies under Little Turtle and Blue Jacket fell on the camp of Major General Arthur St. Clair's army on the upper Wabash, near today's Fort Recovery, Ohio. In about three hours an army that held nearly all of the nation's regular combat troops was broken. Its survivors fled down the road they had cut, throwing away their muskets. Around 900 soldiers were killed or wounded, and many of the women and children who followed the army were lost with them. The disaster led to the first investigation ever held by Congress and to a new American army.
A road to Kekionga
After the Revolution, American settlers pushed north of the Ohio River into lands that the Miami, Shawnee, Delaware and their neighbors refused to give up, and British posts around the Great Lakes kept them supplied with arms. In 1790 a first American expedition under Brigadier General Josiah Harmar, made up mostly of militia, was beaten near the Miami town of Kekionga, today's Fort Wayne, Indiana, by a confederation led by the Miami war chief Little Turtle.1
In 1791 Congress added a second infantry regiment to the army and allowed six-month levies to be raised, and President George Washington gave the command to Arthur St. Clair, governor of the Northwest Territory and a general of the Revolution. His orders were to cut a road deep into the wilderness and build a strong post at Kekionga, with smaller forts along the way.2
Five miles a day
The army left Fort Washington, today's Cincinnati, on 6 September 1791. According to the U.S. Army's account it set out with about 2,000 soldiers, half the 4,000 planned. Women and their children followed the column, and James F. Byrne Jr. puts the camp followers at about 400 by the time of the battle.3
The troops had to cut a road through the forest and bridge streams for the guns, and managed little more than five miles a day. Rain and frost ruined the forage, the six-month men went home as their enlistments ran out, and others deserted. When about sixty militiamen deserted on 31 October, St. Clair sent his one veteran regiment, the 1st Infantry, about 300 men, after them, and it missed the battle. St. Clair himself was ill with gout, which at times left him bedridden.4
The column was watched all the way. Among the warriors shadowing it was a young Shawnee named Tecumseh.5
Camp on the Wabash, 3 November
By 3 November discharges, desertions and the absent regiment had cut the army to about 1,400 effective men. That afternoon it reached a creek that St. Clair took for the St. Marys River. It was in fact the eastern branch of the upper Wabash, 98 miles from Fort Washington.6
The regulars and levies camped on high ground in two lines 60 to 70 yards apart, with the creek in front, and the militia were sent across the creek to camp a few hundred yards ahead. It was late and the men were worn out, so no defenses were dug: St. Clair meant to begin a light earthwork the next morning. Through the night sentries fired at warriors prowling around the camp. A scouting party reported to Major General Richard Butler, St. Clair's second in command, but St. Clair later complained that Butler never passed the scouts' warning on to him.7
Half an hour before sunrise
On 4 November, about half an hour before sunrise and just after the men had been dismissed from morning parade, the warriors struck the militia camp. Their numbers are uncertain. The Army's account says over 1,000, and the editors of Washington's papers say possibly as many as 1,500, drawn from the Miami, Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, Ottawa, Potawatomi and other nations under Little Turtle, Blue Jacket of the Shawnee and Buckongahelas of the Delaware.8
The militia broke almost at once and ran back into the main camp, throwing the front line into disorder. The warriors closed around the camp and fired from behind trees and logs. The heaviest fire fell on the artillery in the center of each line, and the gunners were cut down until every artillery officer but one was dead. Lieutenant Colonel William Darke led a bayonet charge that drove the attackers back three or four hundred yards, but there were too few riflemen to follow it up, the troops had to fall back, and warriors broke into the camp on the left.9
Ebenezer Denny, St. Clair's aide, wrote that the warriors could skip out of reach of the bayonet and return as they pleased, and that "the ground was literally covered with the dead." It seemed to him "as if the officers had been singled out". Butler fell, one of dozens of officers killed that morning.10
Darke, wounded in the thigh early in the action, wrote to Washington five days later about two men he wanted remembered. Captain Hannah got hold of a sailor from Captain Darke's company and, when the cannon was retaken with its gunners lying dead in heaps around the pieces, stood to it himself until the retreat, then spiked it with his bayonet a few yards from the enemy. John Hamelton, a packhorse master, picked up dead men's muskets and fired them, and when the warriors entered the camp he went at them with an ax.11
"It was in fact a flight"
By about half past nine, with the artillery silenced and more than half the army down, St. Clair ordered a charge toward the road to open a way out. A bayonet attack, which the Army's account and Darke's own letter credit to Darke, broke through, and the survivors poured down the road.12
St. Clair wrote that the retreat "was in fact a flight." The warriors pursued for about four miles and then turned back to the camp, but the men threw away muskets and cartridge boxes for miles along the road. The column reached Fort Jefferson, 29 miles away, a little after sunset.13
St. Clair's report to Secretary of War Henry Knox closed: "I have now Sir, finished my melancholy tale".14
The cost
The returns printed in Denny's journal count 37 officers and 593 privates killed and missing, and 31 officers and 252 privates wounded. The editors of Washington's papers give about 900 of the 1,400 officers and men killed or wounded, the U.S. Army's account over 900 soldiers, women and children, and the Ohio History Connection's marker nearly three quarters of the force. The guns, the baggage and the wounded who could not walk were left behind with the camp followers, and the Levin Center counts at least 70 casualties among the camp followers.15
Native losses were light: EBSCO's summary gives about 21 killed and 40 wounded, and the Levin Center about 100 casualties. In EBSCO's words, never before or since has such a high proportion of the total United States military establishment been defeated.16
Washington's anger and Congress's first inquiry
Unofficial reports reached Philadelphia on 8 December, and on 12 December Washington told Congress of the misfortune that had befallen St. Clair's troops. According to a story that Washington's secretary Tobias Lear later told Richard Rush, the president had warned St. Clair to beware of a surprise, and when the official report reached him during a reception he held in his anger until the guests had gone, then exploded. The editors of his papers, citing Douglas Southall Freeman, point out that the news was already circulating in the city and cannot have come as a shock.17
On 27 March 1792 William Branch Giles moved to ask the president to investigate, and when that failed the House voted to appoint a committee of its own: the first congressional investigation of the executive branch. According to the Levin Center, the committee blamed "the gross and various mismanagements and neglects in the quartermaster's and contractor's departments" and found that St. Clair had done his duty "with ability, activity, and zeal".18
From Fort Recovery to Greenville
Washington gave the command to Major General Anthony Wayne, and in 1792 the army was rebuilt as the Legion of the United States, a force trained and drilled to defeat the confederation. In December 1793 Wayne's men built Fort Recovery on the field of St. Clair's defeat. On 20 August 1794 the Legion won the Battle of Fallen Timbers, near today's Maumee, Ohio.19
At Greenville on 3 August 1795 the confederation nations, Little Turtle among their leaders, signed a treaty that gave up most of present-day Ohio and parts of Indiana, Illinois and Michigan. The young Shawnee Tecumseh condemned the chiefs who had signed, and two decades later his own confederation fought on, as told in our article on the Battle of Tippecanoe.20
Also on 4 November
In 1918 the poet Wilfred Owen, who had won the Military Cross in the breaking of the Hindenburg Line in October, was killed in the battle to cross the Sambre-Oise canal at Ors, one week before the Armistice.21
In 1956 Soviet troops attacked Budapest in Operation Whirlwind and crushed the Hungarian Revolution. The story is told on our 23 October page and in our article on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.22
