Original subtitles

What do we see when we think of the West?

A gunfight between some smalltown sheriff and a gang of outlaws?

Maybe a cowboy playing his banjo under the stars,

or a wild herd of buffalo hunted by a party of Comanche or Lakota?

For me, it's an image...

from a movie I saw at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood

when I was just seven years old.

A birch bark canoe skimming across a mirrored lake

guided by a man who knows he's free,

living by his wits, answering to no one.

Whatever we see, the West has a power like nowhere else

to fire the imagination and stir the soul.

But if we choose to look a little closer,

we can see beyond these images to another kind of story...

...of people who come to make a home no matter who's already there...

...of a nation that claims an entire continent...

no matter what the cost...

and of a land that shows us bounty,

yet all too often gives us blood.

These stories will captivate us, inspire us and shock us.

And that's why we have to tell them.

Because though the United States was founded in the East...

the country we know today was forged in the West.

People live on myths,

and the myths that really stick in the American experience

are the myths of the West.

The mountains were taller. The deserts were harsher.

The snows were deeper.

American West conjures wonder, possibility, opportunity.

The figure of the mountain man.

Notorious outlaws.

The cowboy.

The discovery of gold in California.

This train of wagons trailing across the prairie.

Everybody has a reason for wanting this land.

But most of that land was already occupied.

We have been residents for more than 10,000 years.

But this is a clash of two different ways

of seeing life itself...

fighting for the future of your homeland on the one side...

...and fighting for the destiny of the new republic on the other side.

The history of the West is a creation story.

It's the creation of what we think of as modern America.

The West is a place where anything is possible.

It is the essence of the American dream.

The core of this is what are we to be as a nation?

The reckoning is coming.

The West is this canvas on which American dreams

become larger than life.

The final shots of the Revolutionary War

mark a new era for Britain's former colonies.

The United States wins not only independence...

...but a vast tract of new land...

...a place they call the West.

The United States, of course, when it is founded,

is on the East Coast

and really no farther than the Appalachian Mountains.

And then in the Treaty of Paris

that settles the Revolutionary War in 1783,

the British cede all their holdings from the East Coast

all the way to the Mississippi River.

The Americans are euphoric

because they've not only defeated the British,

but the British have ceded this enormous sweep of land

in the bargain.

Most of that land is not the United States, in reality.

It was already occupied by scores of Indian nations

and by millions of Indian people.

The suggestion that this was somehow a wilderness

or an uninhabited virgin land,

is one of the most enduring and troubling fallacies

in American history.

There were already relatively stable trade relationships

between the various Indigenous Nations with the British,

but settlers didn't just want to trade and leave.

They wanted to stay.

To live on a piece of land

has been a dream of people all over the world forever.

These Anglo-Americans who've been hemmed in

on the Atlantic side of the Appalachians,

suddenly the war has been won; this immense territory

is being granted to the United States,

and there's a deep desire to go out into this fertile land.

But where so many settlers see opportunity,

some of the founding fathers see risk.

Benjamin Franklin calculated that the American population

was doubling roughly once per generation.

If this is the case, and if most of 'em are farmers,

you gotta double the size of the United States

about every generation.

It was the question for Washington, "Where are we gonna expand into?"

Washington has two major concerns

with regard to this new land.

The first is about security.

The British were still on the border.

But the greater risk is the enthusiasm

of the American settlers themselves.

They see this as free land. They don't want to pay for it.

There's no playbook for George Washington.

No one had done this before.

He knows that he is setting a precedent for the future,

and that's an enormous pressure on him.

I mean, the country's population is expanding continually,

and the West is so important.

What he fears is that settlers are just going to put down their claims

wherever they want, and in a willy-nilly, anarchic fashion,

trampling on the interests of Native Peoples who are out there,

and creating conflict with those Native Peoples.

By the mid 1780s,

armed settlers have already blazed a trail west

from Virginia into Kentucky,

forcing the Shawnee and the Delaware off their homeland.

Before they can push any further,

Congress lays down new laws

to govern the land above the Ohio River,

and gives this region a name:

The Northwest Territory.

The year that the Constitution was written, 1787,

the Northwest Ordinance is passed by the Congress

and the Northwest Ordinance has emphatically

that the Americans have a duty

to show the utmost good faith to the Indigenous People,

and not to take their lands without due compensation

and without actual negotiation.

And so, the idea is for the US to buy lands from the Indians

and then sell it in very large chunks

to these, essentially... aristocrats and land speculators.

And the theory is this is gonna work really easily.

George Washington is thinking once the Indian tribes see

the superior ways of white civilisation and agriculture,

they'll immediately take it up.

And so they'll be happy to just sell those lands to us

and, you know, become white farmers essentially.

Early American capitalists, politicians, people of means,

hope to petition the government,

get tens of thousands of acres

in order to sell it to small-time landholders,

understanding that they don't yet control that land.

By contrast, many settlers have a mind of their own.

They want land and they want it now,

and they want it as cheaply as possible.

In fact, they want it for free.

Despite all of Washington's plans,

some settlers see this new land as the spoils of war,

and they're not afraid to take it.

Many of the people who come out here are squatters.

They're ahead of the law, they're ahead of legal right.

They're not to be blamed necessarily

because they're fulfilling their own dream of happiness...

...but they go out and they find a little clearing

or cut down the trees to build a farm.

When people saw the American West as opportunity,

the Indians were nowhere in that picture,

except as something to overcome.

What we have to keep reminding ourselves is this was their land.

The Northwest Territory is already home

to at least 50,000 Native Americans from more than a dozen tribes...

...including the Delaware, the Shawnee,

the Wyandot, and the Miami.

So, from the settlement of the French and Indian War,

all the way through the American Revolution and into the 1780s,

this region is embroiled in an ongoing conflict.

Native Peoples across the Ohio River Valley

are increasingly incensed

that the American settlers are flooding into their homelands.

For the Indigenous People, it's an ancestral claim.

For the settlers, it's free land,

the opportunity to strike out on one's own.

Both are willing to fight and to die for it.

As the late 1780s bring an onslaught of settlers,

these Native Nations will not only make a stand...

...Miami leader, Little Turtle, will lead them into war.

Once the skirmish starts, it's going to build

until somebody suffers enough to stop.

For centuries, the thousand-mile Ohio River

has been an artery of trade and transport

connecting Native Peoples of the Great Lakes region

to the Mississippi and beyond.

But after the Revolutionary War,

it becomes a path to a new future for Americans seeking land.

Every year, there are boats upon boats upon boats

filled with family, livestock, floating down the Ohio River.

On the south is the American side, Kentucky,

where people expect to squat - find land, and live there.

By the late 1780s,

the Bluegrass lands of Kentucky are filling up,

and settlers are pushing north

across the Ohio River and into Miami territory.

Miami War Chief, Little Turtle,

sees the growing United States as a dire threat to his people.

When you're encroached upon by others,

you have no choice but to try to defend that space.

I think any nation understands that.

And so, at the very core,

this was about defending our right to be in our homelands.

Miami people have been living

in what would become the Northwest Territory

for several centuries before the 1780s.

The nucleus of Miami life

is a string of villages that are on the Wabash River,

the Upper Maumee, going up towards modern-day Ohio.

The Miamis are growing vast corn fields for as far as you can see,

and harvesting actively from the wetland areas of that region.

There are bison even in some of the woodland areas at that time.

Like other Native Americans across the continent,

the Miami used controlled burning to manage game and enrich the soil.

Their abundant resources now attract land-hungry settlers

determined to move here, whether they're welcome or not.

George Washington is not someone

who wants to wage war against Native Americans.

He understands that if you take the continent by force,

that doesn't comport with the ideals of the American Republic.

"Scum" is a term he uses to describe these squatters

who are turning to the federal government saying,

"You need to clear these Natives off these lands."

Land speculators and congressmen also demand action.

Washington hands the problem off to General Arthur St Clair.

Arthur St Clair is the governor of the Northwest Territory.

He's a military leader.

He's also a speculator, a perfect symbol of this conflict of interest.

He stands to gain by conquering Native American territory.

The US has this idea that it's going to protect its settlers

over the mountains.

But there's no army to send.

Once the revolution is over, the continental army

essentially disbands

and defence is gonna be left to state militias.

There's 300 or so soldiers in the US Army.

Now, they have to have control over a territory

stretching from the Great Lakes down to the Gulf of Mexico.

That's not gonna work.

So, they cobble together these various militias

without a whole lot of formal training

and send them over the mountains.

And trouble begins.

In the fall of 1790,

St Clair orders an attack on the Miami capital of Kekionga,

hoping to quell the raids

and force the Miami into a treaty that gives up their land.

Little Turtle and allies from the Shawnee and Delaware

fend off the attack, routing the militia.

But St Clair strikes back,

sending Kentucky cavalry to attack the Miami

and burn down their homes.

The American military campaigns had a direct objective

of going into the village and destroying these stored crops,

the goal being to wipe out their food source

so that they didn't have any means of surviving the winter.

Far from weakening the Miami,

these raids fuel their defiance...

and in the aftermath, Little Turtle gains a valuable ally...

...an American settler captured eight years earlier by the Miami

and raised as one of them.

William Wells.

William Wells is captured as a young boy

in Kentucky during a raid,

brought into what we call Myaamionki, or the Miami country.

This is a common occurrence in Kentucky in this time period.

There are a lot of reasons why a Myaamia family

would want to take a captive.

One might be to replace someone who's died through violence

or through disease, perhaps, to fill a gap in the community.

The story of frontier is also one of what we might call

cross fertilisation of these colliding people,

and they're are also being brought together.

And the captivity and the adoption of Americans

could be seen as a rather dramatic and a very poignant example

of that kind of cultural exchange between these peoples.

William Wells' mother had died,

then his father had been killed in an Indian ambush.

So he just embraces it in a way that a 13-year-old could.

Eight years after being taken captive himself,

a 21-year-old William Wells sees his Miami wife and son

kidnapped by Kentucky raiders in 1791.

Wells marries Little Turtle's daughter,

known in English as Sweet Breeze,

and ends up having four children,

one of which is a grandmother of mine.

Little Turtle brings Wells into a growing army

of Native resistance to US expansion,

and begins to unite the Miami

with allies across the Ohio River Valley and beyond.

Forging an alliance to resist settlement among so many tribes

will be a test of Little Turtle's leadership and diplomacy.

Just as the American Republic is bringing together

what had formerly been separate colonies,

so too, in the Great Lakes area, emerges a confederation

among previously diverse and disparate Indian peoples.

Seven nations from Canada,

six nations from modern-day New York,

all the nations from the immediate region,

create an effective military force

that's larger than any one of the nations could provide on its own.

Indigenous Peoples understand that their futures are imperilled,

and they begin connecting with one another,

forming the Northwest Indian Confederacy

to protect their homelands and sovereignty.

The Native Americans are in a confederacy

unprecedented in their history.

They're well organised, they're determined to resist.

It is pretty remarkable, the ways in which peoples

from across the Ohio country and the Great Lakes region

are coming together to put forth

a united front against American expansionism.

Little Turtle rises to become one of the leading war chiefs

of the Northwest Confederacy.

The British also lend their support,

to protect their North American trade with Native Nations

and to halt US expansion.

Washington now sees a threat to national security

and orders St Clair to crush the Confederacy.

St Clair pulls together what you might call

the prototype to the US Army.

And there's some trained regulars, but not many.

It's this cobbled-together force - frontiersmen, Kentucky militia,

and others who have served in the revolution.

St Clair wants to reassure settlers that the region is safe

by conquering the Native alliance.

He again targets the Miami capital,

but this time he leads the invasion himself.

Little Turtle has his scouts tracking St Clair the whole time,

and waits for St Clair to get to a really vulnerable spot.

On November 3rd, 1791, St Clair makes camp,

still 50 miles from Kekionga.

But the long march and low pay have taken their toll on his men.

A quarter of his 2,000 recruits have succumbed to disease or deserted.

Meanwhile, Little Turtle and other Native leaders

have brought together 1,000 warriors.

Under cover of darkness, they close in.

Little Turtle and his warriors,

he has this entire camp surrounded...

...and as these soldiers are just awakening...

...all of a sudden there are several hundred warriors running at them,

full-on tomahawks, muskets, knives, war clubs.

So, it's a surprise attack.

St Clair's completely unprepared for it.

On the morning of November 4th, 1791,

Miami War Chief, Little Turtle,

leads a confederacy of Native forces

in a surprise attack on General Arthur St Clair's army.

American military commanders underestimate

the sophistication and organisation of Little Turtle

and the Native Confederacy.

They believe that the Native Americans

are really a chaotic fighting force -

they are incapable of modern warfare.

Little Turtle is gonna prove them deadly wrong.

Little Turtle routs the Kentucky militia,

throwing St Clair's camp into chaos.

But the American artillery springs into action.

St Clair's whole scheme is kind of based around

the superiority of this cannon fire.

But Little Turtle brings in sharp shooters

and they effectively take out the artillery crew.

And now, St Clair and the rest of them are cooked.

Over three long hours, St Clair tries to fend off

a carefully planned sequence of Indian attacks.

He has three horses shot from under him, then flees for his life.

Two thirds of his soldiers never make it out.

A survivor describes their freshly scalped heads

as a "field of pumpkins".

St Clair loses almost 700 men,

the largest loss of American troops to Native Americans in our history.

US soldiers, they are going into territories

with this false notion that,

"Oh, if there are a few Indians there, we'll take care of it."

And there's a certain arrogance to that.

The Indian warriors go around stuffing dirt

in the mouths of dead American soldiers.

And I think that's such a telling moment

because in a sense what they're saying is,

"You really wanted this land so badly?

Here, taste it, eat it."

And it seems to suggest that this Indian Confederacy,

as long as it remains united,

is going to be the lasting entity north of the Ohio River,

and that the American Confederation

is the one that's on the verge of collapse.

For Little Turtle and his allies, it's a triumph.

Not only have they wiped out America's only army,

they've blocked westward expansion.

And the nation that claimed its independence

only eight years earlier now looks vulnerable to a British takeover.

The British believe that the American Republic

is destined to fail,

and they're ready to swoop in and reclaim

parts of their former imperial domain.

The British have promised to vacate the area,

to remove their troops, and to remove their forts,

but they have not done so.

And they have this sort of handshake alliance with the Native Americans,

encouraging Native tribes to attack white settlers

who have pushed out onto the frontier.

We have to remember

the United States feels threatened all the time

by these imperial forces circling around them like sharks.

So it's very important for Washington to defeat the tribes

to show the strength of the United States.

Every time there's a setback for the United States,

our reaction is not to rethink Western policy.

Our reaction is to get more serious with lethality.

Finally, George Washington says,

"We've got to take enough force to get this done."

And so he sends Mad Anthony Wayne out.

Anthony Wayne is known widely as "Mad" Anthony Wayne

because of his famously fiery temper.

But actually, he is mad for discipline.

He is mad for training and preparedness.

Washington instructs Wayne

to build a training base near Pittsburgh in 1792

and ready the Republic's first professional army,

a 2,000-strong force named the Legion of the United States.

Mad Anthony really puts together a force

that's aimed directly at reining in this Northwest Confederacy.

So he trains them at bayonet use extensively.

Bayonets are incredibly effective in close quarter fighting

and in bayonet charges.

But you have to have troops that are disciplined.

He tells them, "You might think you're gonna fight the Indians

the way you might fight the British or whomever.

No, it's not gonna go that way. It's gonna be hand-to-hand combat.

However we start, that's where it's gonna end up."

And so, the US backtracks on many of its revolutionary principles.

To raise an army requires raising taxes.

This is the creation of an American fiscal military state,

and it's in response to Native American power.

Before ordering troops into the Northwest Territory,

Washington sends peace envoys

out to meet with leaders of the Confederacy.

Meanwhile, Little Turtle sends William Wells

and other Miami leaders on their own peace mission,

down the Wabash River

to the frontier trading town of Vincennes,

to negotiate the release of Miami captives.

William Wells goes to orchestrate the freedom

of his first wife and child.

He comes to the attention of American officials

who want Anglo-American interpreters.

The US military commander at Vincennes

agrees to help Wells get his family back,

but it will take three months.

In the meantime, Wells ventures across the Ohio River into Kentucky.

What he sees is a world transformed.

When his family had moved to Kentucky, it was just frontier.

And now, by this time in the early 1790s,

it seemed a real town.

By the early 1790s, the US population is four million.

The 74,000 Americans in Kentucky

have eclipsed the 50,000 or so Native Americans

living in the southern Great Lakes.

And to Wells' surprise, the settlers are thriving.

William Wells observes the growth of established communities

in that part of the country.

He sees the changes that are coming.

The more time Wells spends in that white world,

the more he sees... one, how permanent it is,

and two, how numerous are the American settlers.

And he starts thinking,

"We can keep fighting all our lives and they can just keep coming at us.

This is not a happy end."

For William Wells, this is a shock.

He has to be thinking to himself, "What does this mean for the Miami?

What does this mean for Little Turtle?

What does this mean for me and my family?"

Wells is finally reunited

with his captured Miami wife and son.

To secure their freedom, he agrees to work as an interpreter

for the United States,

but first, Wells reports back on what he's seen.

It's clear to Little Turtle at this point

that the Americans are not gonna stop.

They can't halt this onslaught of settlers into their territory.

Little Turtle is trying to figure out

how to preserve the Miami nation.

He wants to keep fighting, protecting the homeland.

By late 1792,

President Washington has made little progress

in his effort to subdue the Northwest Confederacy.

His new army is still in training.

In the meantime, he makes a final effort

to secure Native lands without a fight.

So while George Washington is trying to resolve

the great security crisis on the western border,

there's another huge crisis unfolding in the United States,

which we know as the Whiskey Rebellion.

Basically, thousands of farmers in Western Pennsylvania are up in arms

about a tax that's been imposed on distilled liquors.

It really looks like, to George Washington and his administration,

that they have a civil war brewing.

This is the first major test of this new presidency.

He has to somehow put down law and order.

He has to have the taxes

because the debt from the Revolutionary War

has now reached unprecedented heights.

He sends the troops.

They put down the rebellion, and had he not done otherwise,

then there would really have not been a sense of whether or not

the government could control its own people.

Washington is looking at these wars

against the Ohio Indian Confederacy

and saying, "Wait a second.

There's a vast expensive manpower here and a vast loss in blood.

We've gotta find a different path."

So, they send a team of negotiators out

to meet with leaders of the Indian Confederacy...

...and they basically sort of say,

"Well, what if we pay you to sort of cede some lands to us?"

In spring 1793,

Confederacy leaders from across the Great Lakes region

hold a grand council and debate whether to accept the offer.

In the wake of their victory over St Clair's army,

they take a hard line.

Native Americans have defeated the American army

and successfully defended their homes,

their people, their crops.

So Little Turtle is thinking about creating a lasting peace

while Native Americans have the upper hand.

The Indigenous People in that area

had managed to stave off

American interest for a long time,

and their partnership with the British

also kept Americans out of there.

The Indian leaders - Little Turtle among them -

say, "Money, to us, is of no value.

Rather than you giving us money,

you should pay your poor settlers.

You should use the money to pay them to retreat."

The Confederacy makes a bold proposal,

demanding a permanent boundary at the Ohio River

with Native Nations on the north and the United States on the south.

But the idea is soundly rejected.

Meanwhile, British agents offer weapons and money

to the Indian Confederacy if they'll keep up the fight.

When the peace talks finally collapse,

Anthony Wayne gets orders from a frustrated President Washington:

"Prepare to attack."

From Pittsburgh, Wayne's army moves down the Ohio River

through the invasion of Miami country...

...and they begin cutting, pulling, and burning corn...

...the most immense fields that Anthony Wayne

has ever seen in his life, he says.

Through the summer of 1794,

Wayne pushes the Legion deeper into Miami territory,

supplying his troops through a series of forts.

Meanwhile, Little Turtle and other Confederacy leaders

struggle to agree on their next move.

The timeline is a problem

because Mad Anthony is moving

very slowly and deliberately,

which is part of his strength.

And the gathered warriors have come from far away.

I mean, even hundreds of miles away and they've left their families,

and the warriors are getting really impatient.

Against Little Turtle's advice,

the Shawnee lead an attack on Fort Recovery,

built by Wayne on the site of St Clair's defeat.

First, they take out the supply lines with help from British troops,

then they strike the fort itself.

The idea of attacking a fort was antithetical to Indian ways of war.

The casualties that you would suffer were unthinkable...

...but they're certain they can win.

Part of the Northwest Confederacy decides

it's time to go ahead and attack directly on Fort Recovery.

And it just blows them away.

Both sides lose around 30 men,

but while the US quickly regroups,

Native morale is shattered.

The failure to take Fort Recovery is the first loss

that some of these Native Americans have had in several years.

That ends up being very demoralising

for the Northwest Indian Confederacy.

The warriors start dispersing, and meanwhile,

Mad Anthony Wayne has this crushing force marching towards them.

After a failed attack on Fort Recovery in 1794,

the Indian Confederacy begins to splinter.

Some tribes return to their homelands,

but the Miami and others keep fighting.

Little Turtle asks the British for troops and cannons.

The British are up in Canada and they have this idea

to create what they call an Indian barrier state,

a big, huge strip of land held by Indian tribes

as a way, essentially,

of keeping the United States sort of bottled up on the East Coast.

But to create this zone,

the Confederacy needs military support.

And while the British agree to supply gunpowder and food,

they won't commit the soldiers or artillery

that Little Turtle asks for.

Meanwhile, Mad Anthony Wayne pushes north from Fort Recovery.

The Native American army believes it can slow the Americans down

while their families

are continuing to evacuate the region

as it's being burned.

Little Turtle and his fellow war chiefs

have just 1,500 men left to fight Wayne's 2,000-strong army

and 1,600 Kentucky militia.

They take up position a mile from their British allies at Fort Miami,

choosing terrain that's scattered with fallen trees,

a natural barrier against bayonet charges and cavalry attacks.

Wayne has the benefit of a lot of intelligence coming

about the Confederacy side and what they're up to.

He hears a report that the Indians are ready, preparing for battle.

And part of it is fasting.

Warriors engage with no food or water during that time.

And this prepares the warrior

spiritually, mentally, and physically

to engage in a battle and have success.

Wayne plays a waiting game

as the Native allies fast for three days.

But just after a storm hits, he strikes.

This is a clash of two different ways of seeing life itself,

fighting for the destiny of the new Republic on the one side...

and fighting for the future of your homeland on the other side.

This is very difficult terrain,

but Mad Anthony's trained his foot soldiers so well

in bayonet warfare and hand-to-hand combat.

And that pushes the Indians out of the fallen timbers.

At that point, then his cavalry can much more easily

push the Indians back.

The Native allies are not willing to accept

mass casualties in pitched battles

and would rather easily retreat off the battlefield

rather than allow many of their men to be killed.

They're in this open field, with cavalry coming down on them

with thousands of soldiers.

And so, it ends up being basically a rout.

As their battle lines collapse,

the Native forces retreat.

Saving themselves from annihilation,

they run to their British allies at Fort Miami for help.

So at this time, a treaty is actually under negotiations.

It's eventually gonna be called the Jay Treaty,

between the new United States

and the very powerful and threatening Great Britain,

principally to get the British to remove their troops

and to remove their forts from US territory.

And also to allow a little more trade.

The Indians get to Fort Miami and the gates are locked.

The British commander gets up on top of the stockade

and shouts over the gate,

"You are painted too much, my children.

I cannot let you in."

That's the metaphorical way of saying,

"You are too much into war right now.

You're stirring things up too much."

Because if the British commander opens the gates,

Mad Anthony is likely to attack the fort.

The British commander is under strict orders

not to provoke and to engage in a way that will trigger a war.

And that's the moment when this whole Northwest Confederacy,

I mean, it's literally like the gates close on it.

And so now their ally has left them swinging in the wind,

left them hanging, and that completes the defeat.

Five years after destroying the US army,

the Northwest Confederacy is now soundly beaten at Fallen Timbers

and broken up once and for all.

But a victorious Anthony Wayne

is not finished with his conquest,

and Little Turtle is now powerless to stop him.

Wayne's army burn the corn fields

and leave Ohio Indians without a food supply

and starve them into submission.

This is an apocalyptic type of scene.

The river valley is in flames. There's no food.

People are struggling with, not the defeat at Fallen Timbers,

but the disintegration

of their lives.

So Anthony Wayne takes another hammer to Miami morale

when he builds a fort

smack dab in the centre

of their capital, Kekionga.

And to add salt to the wound,

Wayne names the fort after himself, Fort Wayne.

We called Anthony Wayne "eelaamhsenwa",

which literally means "the wind,"

because of the way

he just kind of blew in

and blew over everyone that was there.

For many Indigenous leaders, this is enough to convince them

that violent resistance is no longer a viable path

to the survival of their people.

As Wayne scorches the earth, Native leaders push for peace talks.

They convene at Fort Greenville in June 1795.

Little Turtle brings in William Wells as his interpreter.

They come to surrender

and want to sign a treaty

that surrenders as little as possible.

And that's Little Turtle's main objective,

surrendering but in a way that keeps Myaamia integrity,

keeps Myaamia sovereignty, keeps Myaamia independence,

with this new, powerful neighbour

that is willing to go to great lengths

to inflict violence on his people.

But they are in a very weak position,

and so they end up surrendering huge swaths of territory,

pushing the line of settlement for the Americans

many many hundreds of miles into the interior.

Little Turtle is the last Native leader

to agree to the Greenville Treaty.

As he signs, he declares he'll also be the last to break it.

It's completed just six weeks after Congress approves the Jay Treaty,

which expels British forts and troops.

George Washington's goal of securing the Northwest Territory

is now complete.

But for Native Americans, it's just the beginning.

The Treaty of Greenville

opens most of the Ohio Valley to white settlement,

but it sets a kind of pattern, a module, a template,

for what's going to follow -

land cessions, by purchase if possible,

by coercion if necessary,

by war, including genocidal war, if absolutely necessary.

The Treaty of Greenville really set in motion

what was a cascade of 13 treaties

which caused the complete dispossession of homelands

for the Miami people.

And within just a very short period of time,

thousands, tens of thousands,

and eventually hundreds of thousands of people

will pour into this territory,

expanding the United States quite significantly.

Miami leaders such as Little Turtle,

they'd lived through the Revolutionary War

and found themselves contemplating a future

in which they might coexist, essentially,

with the American Republic.

So, it must have been incredibly devastating

to see American state power grow so quickly

and project violence into this region.

Little Turtle dies in 1812.

That same year, the British back a new Native uprising

to wrest control of the Great Lakes region back from the US.

Britain and America take up arms in the war of 1812.

And once again in the Northwest Territory,

the United States confronts an Indian alliance and destroys it.

Anglo-American civilisation knows from the beginning,

no matter how much it wants the West,

that getting it is going to involve

some ruthlessness.

But the fact is, we did it.

We did it as peacefully as possible and as ruthlessly as necessary.

We, today, have to recognise

how green and raw and new this nation was.

At that moment, the United States was not a done deal.

It was just barely an idea.

And it figured some things out really well,

and some things, it did not.

And it, by brute force,

pushed its way west.

The Battle of Fallen Timbers and the Treaty of Greenville

marked the final defeat of Little Turtle

and the Northwest Confederacy,

setting what will become a familiar pattern

of Native resistance and American conquest.

Nine years later, President Thomas Jefferson

will double the size of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase.

And just as they first crossed the Appalachian Mountains,

explorers, settlers, and soldiers

will push the nation beyond the Mississippi,

seeking their fortunes in a foreign land

and marching west with bloody footsteps.

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