Fighting It Out Along the Wabash--Part Two

by Harry Tunnell

Two decades after St. Clair’s Defeat, General William Henry Harrison, the Governor of the Indiana Territory, led an expedition against a Shawnee-led Indian Confederacy. Tecumseh was the political and military leader of the confederacy and his brother Tenskwatawa, known as the Shawnee Prophet, the spiritual leader.  Prophet’s Town was the headquarters of the Indian Confederacy.  It was located near the confluence of the Wabash and Tippecanoe rivers.  The town sat on a bluff overlooking the Wabash River about 130 miles, as the crow flies, NE of the territorial capital at Vincennes, IN.  One of the main factors that precipitated the battle was the 1809 Treaty of Fort Wayne that Harrison negotiated with the Delaware, Potawatomie, Miami, and Eel River Miami.  In the treaty, the Indians ceded 3,000,000 acres to the United States.  Tecumseh disputed the legitimacy of the treaty, setting the stage for conflict between the confederacy and United States.  Without any resolution in sight, Harrison decided to organize a military expedition of regulars and militia.  Harrison’s expedition would ultimately engage the Indian Confederacy in battle 1 ½ miles NW of the Wabash River (near present-day Battle Ground, IN) and Prophet’s Town.  Harrison and the expedition departed Fort Knox (present-day Vincennes, IN) on September 26, 1811 enroute to a battlefield legacy of hardship, endurance, and close combat.

Harrison and the army arrived at the outskirts of Prophet’s Town on November 6, 1811.  Surprised by the army’s advance on their headquarters, the Indians asked for a conference the next day in an attempt to buy time.  Harrison agreed and the expedition established camp and posted a strong guard force on a small bit of high ground not far from Prophet’s Town.  Having learned the lessons of Indian warfare well enough, and fearing a surprise attack, soldiers and militiamen, slept “on their arms,” meaning fully dressed, weapons loaded, and bayonets fixed—ready to fight at a moment’s notice.  The Indians did not disappoint.  During the early morning hours of November 7, 1811, with the crack of rifle fire and “an awful Indian yell” emanating from every corner of the encampment, the fight was on.  In a hard-fought battle, the Americans persevered, repulsing the attack after several hours of close combat, sometimes hand-to-hand.  The Americans advanced on the abandoned Indian headquarters the next day and destroyed Prophet’s Town.  The army returned to Vincennes on November 18, 1811 and disbanded, having reduced the threat of Tecumseh’s Indian Confederacy in the Indiana Territory.  The battle, known as the Battle of Tippecanoe, takes its name from the lesser river near Prophet’s Town.

Tecumseh was not at the battle or Prophet’s Town.  His brother—far less skilled as a military leader—was the one to commit Indian forces to combat with the American force.  Tecumseh had gone south (to present-day Alabama) to recruit more allies for his confederacy.  Harrison, through his spy network, learned that Tecumseh was planning something more sinister than political networking even though he could not determine precisely what was planned.  In an act of pure military brilliance, Harrison decided to seize the initiative and take an expedition north while the confederacy’s most celebrated and effective military leader was absent.  Tecumseh returned to Prophet’s Town in February or March 1812 to find the confederacy in shambles.  He was subsequently forced to seek an alliance with the British during the War of 1812.  Forces commanded by Harrison and Tecumseh would meet on several battlefields during the war.  Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames (present-day Chatham-Kent, Ontario), by members of Harrison’s command.  Harrison survived the war and by its end was a national hero.  However, he remained most famous for his combat leadership near Prophet’s Town.  After his military career ended, he used the sobriquet “Old Tippecanoe,” to great effect on the political battlefield—eventually becoming the ninth President of the United States, dying in office on April 4, 1841.

The Ewings and the Indian Trade on the Midwestern Frontier

by Tom Castaldi 

  Once the Indian Wars were over and the U.S. Army had moved on from Fort Wayne, the American traders come into the Indian territories to carry out a lively and profitable business with the native populations. They also sought to create their fortunes in the lucrative business of land speculation as former Indian lands became available for sale. In Fort Wayne, especially, where an Indian Agency had been one of the most active in the Midwest after the turn of the nineteenth century, government business with the area tribes also created opportunities for gain.

The Ewing family was among the first to settle in primitive Fort Wayne to take advantage of the Indian trade and the demise of Indian culture. Alexander Ewing, the patriarch of the clan, had emigrated with his family from Ireland to Pennsylvania long before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. Born in 1763, Alexander joined the Continental Army in 1779 at age sixteen and was in Washington’s command until the British surrender at Yorktown in 1783.

 After the war, he joined a trading company and built the first settler’s cabin on the site of what became Buffalo, New York. In 1802, Ewing, then married to Charlotte Griffith, settled in the trading community at the River Raisin near Detroit where twelve years later, in 1814, John Allen, the namesake of Allen County, Indiana, was killed.

Alexander first visited Fort Wayne in 1812 when he was in the command of General William Henry Harrison that broke the Indian siege of the fort.  Having settled for a time in Troy, Ohio, Alexander and Charlotte Ewing came to Fort Wayne to raise their family of four sons and three daughters in 1822. Described as proud and commanding, he was six feet tall, had auburn hair and blue eyes. Most importantly, however, he passed on to his children an extraordinary talent for business.

Well aware of the value of being a town founder, Alexander knew that position often went hand-in-hand with being a tavern owner. As such, Ewing built Fort Wayne’s first tavern, known as Washington House, at the corner of Barr and Columbia streets. It was here that Allen County was organized. The first acts of the newly elected county commissioners were carried out in this house, and it was here that Ewing himself was elected to the Board of Justices of the Peace and was appointed to serve on the first grand jury. 

Alexander's oldest son, Charles, was the first lawyer to come to Allen County and he was named the first county prosecutor. He also helped to establish the town’s first newspaper, the Sentinel, and by 1837 was chosen to be president of the circuit court.

It was land, however, that was at the root of the family fortune.  Alexander bought many of the first lots put up for sale in Fort Wayne by the U.S. Land Office in 1823. His most important purchase was the eighty acres of swamp and thicket west of the original town plot. Known then as Ewington, or Ewing’s Addition, this area was bounded by Fulton and Webster streets, north of Lewis Street, with Berry and Wayne streets cutting through the middle.  Ewing Park marks the southernmost part of this first westward expansion of Fort Wayne.

When Alexander died in 1826, his sons decided to sell most of the land of Ewington to gain capital for their fur-trading ventures and their other land speculations.  In these endeavors the two younger brothers, George Washington and William G. Ewing, had few equals. They formed the W.G & G.W. Ewing Company, which dealt in furs and the tools, blankets, cloths that were a part of the Indian trading business. So powerful did the company become in the region east of the Mississippi, that it was the equal of John Jacob Astor’s great American Fur Company.

Successful at every turn, the brothers were aggressive businessmen. Hugh McCulloch, their contemporary once said that he had “rarely met their equals in business capacity or general intelligence,” but, he continued, “very few have I known who had less real enjoyment of life.  Enterprising, laborious, adventurous men they were, but so devoted to business, so persistent in the pursuit of gain, that they have had no time to enjoy the fruits of their labors.”

So powerful had the Ewings become in the fur trade, which in the 1830s was largely stirred by the great popularity of raccoon pelts in the fashion world, that they engaged in a veritable trade war with the powerful American Fur Company. In 1838, the Ewing brothers, in fact, vowed to carry on the conflict as a “war of extermination” of their competitors. The stakes were high. Even as late as 1840 just a few months’ catch of furs in the Ewings’ Fort Wayne store alone was worth $40,000, a princely sum at that time. By 1843 the war persisted and in the end the Astor company lost the struggle in the Midwest.

As fur-trading declined, the Ewings turned to land and to the unpleasant business of Indian removal.  Their land speculations in Chicago and in Saint Louis earned them millions. In the 1840s the U.S. government put into effect a policy of “removing” the Indians from the five states of the Old Northwest Territory – Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin – to lands in the underdeveloped west, to Kansas and Oklahoma.  Because the government had no agency to carry out this removal on its own, it contracted with private interests to do the work.  A rate of $55.00 was paid per Indian delivered to western reservations.  All expenses for travel, food, clothing, and care had to be paid out of this allowance.  Contractor profits came from the savings on these costs.  The Ewings played a large role, especially in the deportation of the Potawatomi in what came to be called the “Trail of Death.”

Nevertheless, the Ewings did much to make possible the successful growth of Fort Wayne.  In the years after the closing of the fort in 1819, the sole attraction at the Three Rivers was the government annuity payments to the Indians of the region.  There was little agriculture and no industry.  Fur traders like Samuel Hanna, Francis Comparet, and the Ewing brothers made it possible for the community to survive through the difficult years of the 1820s, 30s and 40s to become a city. 

Originally published in Fort Wayne Magazine “Along the Heritage Trail with Tom Castaldi” 

Sept 2006 No. 26

Allen County Historian Tom Castaldi is author of the Wabash & Erie Canal Notebook series; hosts “On the Heritage Trail,” which is broadcast at 6:35 a.m., 8:35 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. Mondays on WBOI, 89.1 FM; and “Historia Nostra” heard on WLYV-1450 AM and WRRO 89.9 FM. Enjoy his previously published columns on the History Center’s blog, “Our Stories,” at history centerfw.blogspot.com.