Treaty: Fort Harmar, 1789

Treaties between Natives and the federal government often caused more confusion and havoc than they stopped.  Treaty terms were misinterpreted, misrepresented and misunderstood.  Boundary lines were indistinct, and moved time and again.  Tribes who claimed the same hunting range were often overlooked.  The result was more war, leading to further treaties, and yet more war.

The two Treaties of Fort Harmer in 1789 were a case in point.  Both were negotiated at Fort Harmar, in what is now Marietta, Ohio.  Lt.Col. (Bvt. Brig. Gen.) Josiah Harmar, the namesake of the Fort, was the chief negotiator of the two agreements, along with ill-fated General Arthur St. Clair.  A separate treaty was signed with the Iroquois Six Nations concerning their hunting range in the Ohio Valley.  Another agreement covered the rights of the Wyandot, Delaware, Sauk, Ottawa, Chippewa and Potawatomi.  As usual, the Shawnee were left out of the talks, as were the Miami.  The two treaties were supposed to address boundary line discrepancies in Fort Stanwix II of 1784, and the Treaty of Fort McIntosh of 1785.  In reality, the Treaties of Fort Harmar simply reiterated the muddled boundary lines of those two prior agreements and did nothing to address current grievance.

The biggest grievance of the tribes was the increasing influx of settlers into an area known as the Western Reserve.  The Western Reserve was a portion of land in Northeastern Ohio claimed by the colony and later state of Connecticut.  It had ceded its claims to the federal government, which had some vague plans of creating a long-illusive Native buffer state to house the local tribes.  The plans never came to fruition and New England settlers claimed this territory much like settlers from Pennsylvania, Virgnia and the Carolinas claimed Kentucky and Tennessee.  Secretary of War Henry Knox had authorized St. Clair to give a portion of the Western Reserve known as the Firelands back to the Natives but St. Clair, on scene and far away from Washington, wasn't about to cede an inch to the Natives.  Threatening, bribing and deceiving Native leaders about what they were ceding, he kept the Firelands firmly under Native control. 

Fed up with the lack of follow-through on keeping settlers off land supposedly meant for them, the Natives soon returned to fighting.  The Shawnee and Miami, as the tribes most aggrieved by the new treaties, were particularly active under leaders such as Little Turtle and Blue Jacket.  St. Clair and Harmar would receive stinging defeats at the hands of Native commanders in 1791, and it would take Mad Anthony Wayne's victory at Fallen Timbers in 1794, and the Treaty of Greenville before the United States took possession of thousands of acres of Native land in Ohio Territory for good.