The land which the Indians held was so beautiful and fertile that settlers ventured into it, despite the deadly peril, and in 1787, the Northwest Territory was formed by Congress, and General Arthur St. Clair appointed its governor.  A Scotchman, brave but impulsive, with a good military training, St. Clair had made an unfortunate record in the Revolution.  Put in command of the defenses of Ticonderoga in the summer of 1777, to hold it against the advancing British army under Burgoyne, he had permitted the enemy to secure possession of a position which commanded the fort, and he was forced to abandon it.  The British started in hot pursuit, and several actions took place in which the Americans lost their baggage and a number of men.  St. Clair had really been placed in an impossible position, but his forced abandonment of the fort impressed the public very unfavorably.  He still had the confidence of Washington, who assigned him to the important task of governing the new Northwest Territory, and subduing the Indians who overran it.  With Braddock’s bitter experience still vividly before him, Washington warned St. Clair to beware of a surprise in any expedition he might lead against the Indians, and the events which followed showed how badly that warning was needed.

In the fall of 1791, St. Clair collected a large force at Fort Washington, on the site of the present city of Cincinnati, and prepared to advance against the Miami Indians.  He had fourteen hundred men, but he himself was suffering with gout and had to be conveyed most of the way in a hammock.  By the beginning of November, the army had reached the neighborhood of the Miami villages, and there, on the morning of the fourth, was surprised, routed and cut to pieces.  Less than five hundred escaped from the field, the Indians spreading along the road and shooting down the crazed fugitives at leisure.  St. Clair’s military reputation had received its death blow, but Washington, with wonderful forbearance, permitted him to retain the governorship of the Territory, from which he was removed by Jefferson in 1802.  He lived sixteen years longer, poor and destitute, having used his own fortune to defray the expenses of his troops in the Revolution—­a debt which, to the lasting disgrace of the government, it neglected to cancel.  He grew old and feeble, and was thrown from a wagon, one day, and killed.  Upon the little stone which marks his grave is this inscription:  “The earthly remains of Major-General Arthur St. Clair are deposited beneath this humble monument, which is erected to supply the place of a nobler one due from his country.”

The task which proved St. Clair’s ruin was to be accomplished by another survivor of the Revolution—­“Mad” Anthony Wayne; “Mad” because of his fury in battle, the fierceness of his charge, and his recklessness of danger—­attributes which he shared with Benedict Arnold.  He was thirty years of age at the opening of the Revolution, handsome, full of fire, and hungering for glory.  He was to win his full share of it, and to prove himself, next to Washington and Greene, the best general in the army.