A No-Name Battle with Native Americans

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Fergus M Bordewich, The Revenge of the Natives. The US Soldiers planned to kill anyone who resisted and compel the Indian tribes to sue for peace. They met disastrous defeat instead. Wall Street Journal, Dec 29, 2014
www.wsj.com/articles/book-review ... calloway-1419807052
(book review on Colin G Calloway, The Victory With No Name. The Native American defeat of the first American army. University of Oxford Press, 2014)

Note:
(a) Both the book author and the reviewer are white.

(b) “In 1791 the United States was a fragile, newly minted assemblage of states that was dangerously weak at its periphery. Americans felt surrounded by hostile forces: British to the north, Spanish to the south and, to the west, hostile Indian tribes that presented a formidable barrier to settlement.”
(i) “British to the north” in Canada. See Canada
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada
(section 1 Etymology)
(ii) “Spanish to the south”
(A) Florida
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida
(section 1.1 European arrival (1513); section 1.2 Spain cedes Florida to the United States (1819))
(B) Spanish English dictionary
* Pascua (noun feminine; etymology)
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pascua
* florido (adjective masculine; feminine florida): "flowery"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/florido
     flor (noun feminine; from Latin): "1: a flower  2: a bloom"
     en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flor
(iii) “Spanish * * * to the west”
(A) Louisiana Purchase
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Purchase
(1803; "France controlled this vast area [called new France] from 1699 until 1762, the year it ceded the territory to Spain. Under Napoleon Bonaparte, France took back the territory in 1800 in the hope of re-establishing an empire in North America. A slave revolt in Haiti and an impending war with Britain, however, led French officials to abandon these plans and sell the entire territory to the United States, which had originally sought only the purchase of New Orleans and its adjacent lands")

Take notice the first map, whose green shade indicates Louisiana Purchase--for land west of Mississippi. In 1791 (the year this particular book is concerned about) this parcel of land belonged to Spain. See (iii)(C). There is no need to read the rest of this Wiki page.
(B) Louisiana (New France)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_(New_France)

Pay attention: In 1763  (the end of Seven Years' War), New France strode Mississippi River. See map 1 in this Wiki page, where New France is blue).
(C) Seven Years' War
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Years%27_War
(took place between 1754 and 1763 with the main conflict being in the seven-year period 1756–1763; table--Belligerents: Great Britain on the winning side, France and Spanish Empire on the losing side; The war was a success for Great Britain)

Quote: "Spain lost control of Florida to Great Britain, but received part of New Orleans and the Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi River from the French. The exchanges suited the British as well, as their own Caribbean islands already supplied ample sugar [so sugar cane producing Florida is dispensable to the British], and with the acquisition of New France [east of Mississippi River] and Florida, they now controlled all of North America east of the Mississippi.

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(c) “American plans to populate the Northwest Territory—the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and parts of Minnesota—paid scant regard to the wishes of the native peoples who lived there. While President George Washington preferred to purchase the Indians’ land rather than seize it outright—’that is the cheapest, as well as the least distressing way of dealing with them,’ he wrote—virtually no Americans questioned the right of white settlers to replace the tribes or the duty of Indians to make way.”
(i) Northwest Territory. The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed (updated in 2014)
www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Northwest_Territory.aspx
("The Old Northwest became U.S. territory in 1783 by the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolution")

View the map. There is no need to read the rest.
(A) Treaty of Paris (1783). The Our Documents initiative, undated
www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=6

Click "document transcript" in the middle column: "Article 2d [Boundaries:] Mississippi River; Article 7th: "his Britanic [sic; should be “Britannic”] Majesty shall with all convenient speed, and without causing any Destruction, or carrying away any Negroes or other Property of the American inhabitants, withdraw all his Armies, Garrisons & Fleets from the said United States, and from every Post, Place and Harbour within the same."
(B) Jay Treaty
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Treaty
(ii) Northwest Territory
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Territory
("Previously, it [the territory] was part of the British Province of Quebec [1763 (when France also ceded present-day Canada, not just US east of Mississippi River, to UK)–1791 (when the province was divided into Upper Canada and Lower Canada)], and a territory under British rule set aside in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 for use by Native Americans, which was assigned to the United States in the Treaty of Paris (1783)")

There is no need to read the rest.

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(d) Although the drive to pacify the territories north of the Ohio River reflected popular sentiment, it was also a matter of money. The financially strapped federal government had little income apart from land—that is, Indian land—that could profitably be sold to emigrants. As one land speculator put it: If the government could ‘take the effectual measu[res] to bring the natives to Submission, . . . She [US] may fairly calculate on a rapid sale of her lands, by which She may Sink many millions of her National Debt.’”

(e) “But with no standing army [of United States; in 1791], the few American soldiers north of the Ohio were spread far too thin to deter Indian attacks. Washington finally directed Gen Arthur St Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory, to raise a force to chastise the tribes that had rejected the lopsided treaties that the United States proposed. * * * Meanwhile, Mr Calloway says, ‘St Clair’s ponderous, noisy, tree-felling army, with its camp followers, bellowing oxen, and lumbering wagons, would have been hard to miss.’ The target of the campaign was a cluster of Indian towns known as Kekionga * * * The Americans planned to ravage the towns * * * The climactic battle—on Nov 4, 1791—was a debacle.”
(i) ponderous (adj):
"1:  of very great weight
2:  unwieldy or clumsy because of weight and size"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ponderous
(ii) Kekionga
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kekionga
(capital of the Miami tribe)

Compare Miami
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami
(in Florida; It was named for the nearby Miami River, derived from Mayaimi [different spelling from that for Miami tribe, in separate Native American languages--but same in English], the historic name of Lake Okeechobee)

(f) “The Indians’ triumph was short-lived. In May 1792, Congress gave the president the power to raise troops and send them into combat without a formal declaration of war. The next year, a new and better-trained army under Gen. “Mad Anthony” Wayne delivered a decisive defeat to the weakened Native American confederacy. On the ruins of Kekionga, they built a military base that would eventually become the city of Fort Wayne, Ind.”

Fort Wayne, Indiana
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Wayne,_Indiana
("Under the direction of American Revolutionary War statesman Anthony Wayne, the United States Army built Fort Wayne last in a series of forts near the Miami tribe village of Kekionga in 1794.[15] Named in Wayne's honor")