Egushawa

As a leader in two wars against the United States, Egushawa was one of the most influential Native Americans of the Great Lakes region in the late eighteenth century.

When the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) began, Egushawa was living in a village at the mouth of the Maumee River, the location of the present-day Toledo, Ohio.

[1] Egushawa supported the efforts of the British in Fort Detroit to recruit American Indians allies in order to attack U.S. settlements in Kentucky.

In 1780, his war band accompanied Captain Henry Bird's invasion of Kentucky, in which two American "stations" (fortified settlements) were captured.

After the Revolutionary War, Shawnee of the Ohio Country began to forge a confederacy to oppose U.S. occupation of the land ceded by the British in what became called the Northwest Territory (now Midwest of the United States).

Egushawa was initially reluctant to take part in the Northwest Indian War, but he joined the native Western Confederacy after the defeat in October 1790 of an American army led by Josiah Harmar .

He belonged to the pro-war faction of the confederacy, arguing that the only path to peace was through war, since "the enemy confide in their superior numbers and strength and not on God, who made them and us, nor on the justice of their cause.

In 1794, Egushawa was seriously wounded in the American Indian defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in the future Ohio, north of the Maumee River.