Episode Details

The Treaty of Paris handed the United States a wilderness empire running to the Mississippi and the Great Lakes — and the bankrupt Confederation needed to sell it, fast, because western land was very nearly the only asset it had. There was one problem: the nations who lived there had never been conquered, had signed nothing, and were not leaving. This is the story of how the United States tried to take the Ohio country on the cheap — the dictated treaties that told the Shawnee and the Delaware they were a defeated people, the great confederacy that rose to reject them and offered a negotiated peace instead, and a Congress so broke and so empty it could neither accept that peace nor fight the war that followed. General Washington had warned in 1783 that buying the land would cost less than taking it. Nobody could afford to listen. It is the story of a committee of Congress formally concluding that the government could not protect its own citizens — and of Governor Patrick Henry's warning that a frontier left undefended would drive the whole West into separation from the union.