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In August 1795, a day after Chief Little Turtle of the Miami signed the Treaty of Greenville, his wife died in camp, and U.S. soldiers carried her body and fired a three-gun salute. This episode explains how that treaty came to be. General Anthony Wayne had defeated the Western Confederacy at Fallen Timbers in August 1794, then burned villages, cornfields and winter food stores before arriving at Fort Greenville with food, seeds and promises of steady supplies. Leaders of the Wyandot, Delaware, Shawnee, Ottawa, Chippewa, Potawatomi and Miami attended, while a young William Henry Harrison, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark watched from the American side.

The Shawnee war chief Blue Jacket urged acceptance and the Wyandot chief Tarhe said the Great Spirit favored the Americans, but Little Turtle argued that the treaties of Fort McIntosh and Fort Harmar were invalid because the signers never owned the land. Wayne broke the deadlock by announcing the Jay Treaty, under which Britain would stop aiding the tribes, and pressed Little Turtle in a private council on August 12. The Greenville Treaty Line ran from the Cuyahoga River at Lake Erie to Fort Laurens, west to Fort Recovery and south to the Ohio River, opening about two thirds of Ohio. Wayne died in December 1796 amid suspicion of his second in command, James Wilkinson, later revealed as a paid Spanish spy, and the young Shawnee leader Tecumseh rejected the treaty outright.

• The tribes received $20,000 in goods such as blankets, domestic animals and utensils, plus yearly annuities of money and supplies.
• The United States kept land for forts inside Native territory, including the mouth of the Chicago River, Detroit and Fort Wayne.
• The treaty gave legal cover to settlers already squatting in the Western Reserve and the Symmes Purchase.
• Federal agents could withhold annuity wagons, turning the supplies into a tool of control.
• Harrison later led the attack on Tecumseh’s coalition at Tippecanoe in 1811, and Tecumseh joined Britain in the War of 1812.