At the conclusion of the French and Indian War (1754–1763), Great Britain won uncontested influence over the region between its Atlantic Coast colonies and the Mississippi River.

[1]: 201  But in 1772, Great Britain redeployed many of its western forces to the East Coast due to the increasing tensions with the colonists, removing a deterrent to illegal squatters.

[1]: 208  Still other Shawnee fled the Scioto River valley, avoiding the anticipated war with the white settlers who suddenly surrounded them.

At Fort Pitt in October 1775, American and Indian leaders reaffirmed the boundary established by Dunmore's War the previous year.

Without British support, Indian leaders such as Chief Blackfish (Shawnee) and Pluggy (Mingo) raided into Kentucky, hoping to drive the settlers out.

By late spring of 1776, fewer than 200 colonists remained in Kentucky, primarily at the fortified settlements of Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and Logan's Station.

It pitted the American Patriot militia and a small force of regulars, against the British-allied Cherokee warriors, who launched a three-pronged attack against the frontier inhabitants in the Overmountain region of the Washington District.

In order to provide a strategic diversion for operations in the Northeast, officials in Detroit began recruiting and arming Indian war parties to raid American settlements.

The intensity of the conflict increased after enraged American militiamen murdered Cornstalk, the leading advocate of Shawnee neutrality, in November.

In September 1778, the United States negotiated the Treaty of Fort Pitt and secured Lenape support for an attack on Detroit the following month.

In February 1778, General Edward Hand led 500 Pennsylvania militiamen from Fort Pitt on a surprise winter march towards Mingo towns on the Cuyahoga River, where the British stored military supplies which they distributed to Indian raiding parties.

They were Simon Girty, an interpreter who had guided the "squaw campaign", Matthew Elliot, a local trader, and Alexander McKee, an agent for the British Indian Department.

Two years earlier in 1777, Colonel Van Swearingen led a dozen soldiers by longboat down the Ohio to help rescue the inhabitants of Fort Henry in Wheeling in a siege by the British and Indian tribes.

That mission was memorialized in a WPA-era mural painted on the wall of the Cove Post Office by Charles Shepard Chapman (1879–1962).

His rival, Captain Pipe, eventually abandoned the American alliance and moved west to the Sandusky River, where he began receiving support from the British in Detroit.

[16] Furthermore, because of intense warfare in eastern Pennsylvania and upstate New York, Congress was unable to provide the manpower for operations against Detroit.

In late 1778, George Rogers Clark, a young Virginia militia officer, launched a campaign to seize the sparsely garrisoned Illinois Country from the British.

With a company of volunteers, Clark captured Kaskaskia, the chief post in the Illinois Country, on July 4, and later secured the submission of Vincennes.

Furthermore, Colonel Daniel Brodhead refused to detach the men because he was staging his own expedition against the Lenape, who had recently entered the war against the Americans.

On August 24, a detachment of one hundred of his men was ambushed near the Ohio River by Indians led by Joseph Brant (also Thayendanegea), a Mohawk leader temporarily in the west.

Enraged by the gruesome murder by Indians of a white woman and her baby,[30] Williamson's men detained about 100 Lenape now known as the "Christian Munsee" at the village of Gnadenhütten.

The Indians and their British allies from Detroit had learned about the expedition in advance, however, and brought about 440 men to the Sandusky to oppose the Americans.

[34] On July 13, 1782, the Mingo leader Guyasuta led about 100 Indians and several British volunteers into Pennsylvania, destroying Hannastown and killing nine and capturing twelve settlers.

In July 1782, more than 1,000 Indians gathered at Wapatomica, but the expedition was called off after scouts reported that George Rogers Clark was preparing to invade the Ohio Country from Kentucky.

The reports turned out to be false, but Caldwell still managed to lead 300 Indians into Kentucky and deliver a devastating blow at the Battle of Blue Licks in August.

With peace negotiations between the United States and Great Britain making progress, Caldwell was ordered to cease further operations.

In November, George Rogers Clark delivered the final blow in the Ohio Country, destroying several Shawnee towns, but inflicting little damage on the inhabitants.

For the Shawnees, the war was a loss: the Americans had successfully defended Kentucky and increased settlement there, so that prime hunting ground was now lost.

[42] The western theater had a markedly different tone than the European style battles in the east, which left a generational impact on US settlers and Native Nations.

[43] For the Native Nations resisting the encroachment of their lands, the struggle would soon continue as the Northwest Indian War, though this time without the explicit support of the British.