On November 4, 1791, an American force under Major General Arthur St. Clair was destroyed near the headwaters of the Wabash River, in what is now western Ohio, by a confederation of Native nations led by Little Turtle of the Miami and Blue Jacket of the Shawnee. About 630 soldiers were killed, along with a number of camp followers, and the wounded were many, and the loss was the worst that an army of the United States ever took from Native forces. The survivors fled.
The expedition had been sent to bring the Northwest Territory under control and to punish the nations that had refused to give up their lands, and it had set out late in the season with supplies that were short, and it built a post as a depot and then moved north into the country where the confederate villages stood. The discipline was poor. The camp was not fortified and the men were caught at dawn, and the attack came from three sides at once, and the militia broke early and the regular troops were overrun.
The result forced a change of policy. President George Washington asked for St. Clair's resignation and put General Anthony Wayne in command, and Wayne spent more than a year training a new force and then moved north with care and won at Fallen Timbers in 1794, and the confederation was broken. The lesson was hard. The treaty that followed took much of what is now Ohio, and the site of the battle became a small park where the bones of the dead were buried in 1794 on the orders of Wayne.
The battle is less known than its size deserves. It was the largest single loss of life in a battle between the army of the United States and Native forces, larger than the defeat at the Little Bighorn eighty-five years later, and the land was taken. A monument stands on the site, and the names of the officers who died are cut into it, and the country that was opened by the defeat is now farmland and small towns.