All cities · 18th century
1790s
20 dated events in 1790s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
18th century 20 dated mentions
1790s
- 1790Harmar's Defeat
Harmar marched from Fort Washington (Cincinnati) on 7 October 1790 with 320 regulars of the First American Regiment and 1,133 militia — the largest army the young United States had yet fielded.
Fort Wayne
- 1790Harmar's Defeat
Gen. Josiah Harmar's expedition is mauled in detachments by Little Turtle's forces, the disaster that opens the American record here.
Fort Wayne
- 1790Harmar's Defeat · the first army sent against Kekionga
Kekionga, the Miami capital at the head of the Maumee, was the town the young United States had to break before it could hold the Old Northwest, and in the autumn of 1790 President Washington sent the first of three armies to do it.
Fort Wayne
- 1790The floods, as one river record
The city's Floods marker, standing at the confluence, reaches back to a significant flood in 1790 and states the system's first law: before dikes, the average flood level was about fourteen feet; as engineers diked the riverside neighborhoods, the same water, denied its floodplain, rose higher…
Fort Wayne
- 1791St. Clair's Defeat · not here
St. Clair's force wasted from about 2,000 men at its peak to some 920 officers and men present on the morning of 4 November 1791, camped unfortified on the upper Wabash.
Fort Wayne
- 1791St. Clair's Defeat · the road to Kekionga
Harmar's failure brought a bigger army with the same destination.
Fort Wayne
- 1791St. Clair's Defeat · the worst defeat
Marching north from Fort Washington in the autumn of 1791 with roughly 1,400 people — soldiers and a train of camp followers — St. Clair was under orders to build a post at Kekionga itself and hold it.
Fort Wayne
- 1793–1866The law it ran against · fugitive-slave machinery and Indiana's Black Laws
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and, far more harshly, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (18 September 1850) put rendition in the hands of federal commissioners: a claimant's sworn affidavit sufficed, the accused could not testify, there was no jury, and aiding a fugitive exposed the helper to a $1,000 fine, six months'…
Fort Wayne
- 1793–1866The law over their heads, whole: fugitive machinery, the Black Laws, Article XIII, and the register that does not survive for this county
The federal machinery came first, and the Norris charge states it: the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 let a master or agent seize an absconding person and take him before a judge to prove the claim, and laid a $500 penalty, recoverable by the claimant, on anyone who obstructed the arrest, rescued the fugitive, or…
Granger
- 1794Fallen Timbers
His chief of scouts was the man who knew Kekionga best — William Wells , called Apekonit (“Wild Carrot”) for his red hair, a Kentucky captive adopted into the Miami, Little Turtle's son-in-law, who had fought against the United States at St. Clair's defeat before changing sides in 1794 and bringing Wayne the…
Fort Wayne
- 1794Fort Wayne is dedicated
On 22 October 1794 Col. Jean François Hamtramck dedicates and names Fort Wayne , fifteen cannon rounds for fifteen states, on the fourth anniversary of Harmar's Defeat.
Fort Wayne
- 1794Fallen Timbers, and a fort named Wayne
The Legion of the United States trained at Legionville and Pittsburgh, moved north behind a chain of new forts in 1793 — recovering, on the way, the very ground of St. Clair's defeat, where it built Fort Recovery — and advanced down the Maumee in the summer of 1794.
Fort Wayne
- 1794The forts as posts · three stockades, one garrison, 1794–1819
General Anthony Wayne's Legion reached Kekionga on 17 September 1794, and Wayne personally selected the site near the present intersection of Berry and Clay streets.
Fort Wayne
- 1794The first names · Black residents of the fort era
The presence precedes the town: Dodie Marie Miller's African Americans in Fort Wayne: The First 200 Years , the community's own published history, begins its story in 1794, the year of the American fort, on evidence pointing to a Black inhabitant from the start.
Fort Wayne
- 1794Anthony Wayne: the namesake, who never lived here
What he did here: After the United States Army's two defeats at the hands of the Miami Confederacy, President Washington gave Wayne the Legion of the United States, and on 20 August 1794 Wayne won the Battle of Fallen Timbers, near the Maumee Rapids in Ohio, the victory that broke the Confederacy's war.
Fort Wayne
- 1795Greenville from the council side
The Treaty of Greenville, signed 3 August 1795 after Wayne's victory at Fallen Timbers, is usually told as an American instrument; from the council side it was the confederacy's reckoning with a war it could no longer feed.
Fort Wayne
- 1795Treaty of Greenville
Visit Fort Wayne's history page dates the treaty “August 10, 1795.” The treaty text says 3 August , a small, checkable error in a secondary source, and exactly the kind this record exists to catch.
Fort Wayne
- 1795Greenville, 1795: the six miles square at the confluence
Richardville, a young chief in 1795, signed for the Miami. The six miles square was not sold by metes and bounds again for a generation; it sat in the record as "the reserve at Fort Wayne," and the 1818 treaty boundary would be drawn around its lines.
Fort Wayne
- 1795The treaties that did not touch this ground
Proximity is not cession, and the instruments that passed this ground by are named so that none is ever inflated into a taking: The Treaty of Greenville (1795) ceded the Ohio country and a schedule of reserved tracts about the lakes and the Wabash posts; none of its ground lies in the St. Joseph valley.
Granger
- 1797–1814The portrait that burned: what Little Turtle looked like
On his visit to President Washington at Philadelphia in 1797, Little Turtle sat, at Washington's arrangement, to Gilbert Stuart, the painter of Washington's own portraits.
Fort Wayne