(c. 1747-1812)
Miami war chief and political leader
Regarded as perhaps the greatest Algonquian war leader of his time, Little Turtle grew to adulthood during the American Revolution and led Native American armed resistance to the American invasion of the Old Northwest in the late eighteenth century. A great strategist and military tactician, he was noted for his exceptional intelligence—and for his ability to debate General Anthony Wayne as an equal at the Greenville Treaty council in 1795. Little Turtle became a staunch supporter of peace in the first decade of the nineteenth century, and as a consequence he lost the support of the Miami tribe and became identified as an American chief.
Little Turtle was born in about 1747. He received the Miami name of his father, Mishikinakwa, who had signed the Lancaster Treaty with colonial Pennsylvania authorities in 1748. It is believed his mother was a Mahican woman who had moved with remnants of her tribe into the Ohio country. Little Turtle achieved war-chief status when he destroyed a small military force led by an obscure Frenchman named Augustin Mottin de La Balme west of today's Fort Wayne, Indiana, on November 5, 1780. La Balme had destroyed the Miami villages at Kekionga, the major Miami settlement, near modern-day Fort Wayne, Indiana, while attempting to aid the American cause in the Revolutionary War.
After the Treaty of Paris in 1783, American officials dictated four treaties to the tribes of the Old Northwest, each based on the premise that Indian tribes had surrendered their rights to the land with the defeat of the British. Native American resistance to these pretensions quickly escalated into border warfare as Kentucky filled with settlers who led attacks deep into Indian country in the late 1780s. Little Turtle was responsible for the security of Kekionga, which had attracted several villages of Delaware and Shawnee Indians.
Although American officials wanted to avoid war with the Ohio tribes (mainly because of the expense involved), President Washington approved an attack on Kekionga in 1790. Little Turtle led the villagers away previous to an attack by General Josiah Harmar on October 20 that destroyed all of the villages. Little Turtle then led an ambush of Harmar's forces, killing 183 Americans. The following year, General Arthur St. Clair led another American army to Kekionga. Little Turtle led the forces of the Miami Confederacy, as the allied tribes were then called, in a devastating defeat of nearly the entire American army. Some 630 officers and men, as well as many civilian camp followers, were killed in the worst defeat of an American army ever by Indian defenders.
After nearly three years of organization and planning, General Anthony Wayne led a third army against the Miami Confederacy in 1794. Little Turtle, ever the great tactician, carefully probed Wayne's forces on their advance and concluded that they could not be defeated. He called for a negotiated peace and, unable to convince his allies, left overall leadership to Blue Jacket of the Shawnees. The well-prepared Wayne, himself a master tactician, defeated the allied tribes without much loss of life on either side at Fallen Timbers, near today's Toledo, Ohio, on August 20, 1794.
Little Turtle was the principal spokesman for the eleven tribes and approximately eleven hundred Indians who gathered at Greenville the following July to conclude peace with the Americans. Little Turtle's son-in-law, William Wells, a white captive, had been a scout for Wayne's invading army, and Little Turtle was fully aware of American intentions at Greenville. At the treaty grounds he eloquently defended Native American sovereignty in the Old Northwest. He also defined Miami ownership of all of present-day Indiana, the western third of Ohio, and part of Illinois and southern Michigan. Though the Miamis had long shared this land with other tribes, "Little Turtle's Claim" was helpful to the Miamis when they filed compensation claims against the federal government in the 1950s.
At the conclusion of the Greenville Treaty, Little Turtle pledged support of peace with American authorities. That promise was sorely tested within a few years when William Henry Harrison was appointed governor of Indiana Territory. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson encouraged Harrison to press for huge Indian land sales in the Old Northwest. Little Turtle signed four treaties—in 1803, 1804, 1805, and 1809—that were disadvantageous to the Miamis, and alienated himself from the tribal leadership. He also accepted personal annuities that were thinly disguised bribes, and allowed Winimac and Topinbee, two pro-American Potawatomi chiefs, to participate in negotiations over Miami land.
American pressure for Indian land brought a new wave of Native American resistance. Tecumseh and his brother the Shawnee Prophet (Tenskwatawa) encouraged tribespeople to resist the American hunger for land and to join together to eject Americans from Indian country. Little Turtle's authority among the Miamis derived from war leadership. As he bent to American desires, hereditary leaders such as Pacanne, the Owl, and Jean Baptiste Richardville (Peshewa) rejected Little Turtle's leadership and in 1809 forced Harrison to admit that they, not Little Turtle, were the real leaders of the Miami tribe.
Little Turtle lived out the last three years of his life at his village west of Fort Wayne on the Eel River, near today's Columbia City, Indiana. He died peacefully at William Wells's house at Fort Wayne on July 14, 1812. Wells was killed a month later while leading the evacuation of Fort Dearborn, the site of modern-day Chicago. Little Turtle's pro-American stance and the neutrality of the Miami tribe did not protect his tribespeople from American attacks. Within three months of his death, Little Turtle's village and two other Miami villages were destroyed.
Little Turtle's fame rests on his brilliance as a war leader and on his defense of Indian sovereignty at the Greenville Treaty negotiations. American strategic needs and land hunger after the Louisiana Purchase eliminated the middle ground upon which Little Turtle's success depended. He ended the last decade of his life as a pliable American chief who had lost touch with the needs of his people. Among the Miamis today he is revered as a great chief despite the tragic ending of his career.
See also
Miami;
Richardville, Jean Baptiste (Peshewa);
Shawnee Prophet (Tenskwatawa);
Tecumseh.
Harvey Lewis Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Calvin M. Young, Little Turtle (1917; reprint, Mt. Vernon, Ind.: Windmill Publications, 1990).
Stewart Rafert
University of Delaware
