From “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
The first Washington administration was consumed by the crisis engendered by its inability to quickly conquer and colonize the Ohio Country over which it claimed sovereignty. During the Confederacy period, before the US Constitution was written and ratified, the Indigenous nations in that region had access to a constant supply of British arms and formed effective political and military alliances, the first of them forged by Mohawk leader Joseph Brant during the 1780s. Washington’s administration determined that only war, not diplomacy, would break up the Indigenous alliances. Secretary of War Henry Knox told the army commander of Fort Washington (where Cincinnati is today) that “to extend a defensive and efficient protection to so extensive a frontier, against solitary, or small parties of enterprising savages, seems altogether impossible. No other remedy remains, but to extirpate, utterly, if possible, the said Banditti.” These orders could not be implemented with a conventional army engaged in regular warfare. Although federal officers commanded the army, the fighters were nearly all drawn from militias made up primarily of squatter settlers from Kentucky. They were unaccustomed to army discipline but fearless and willing to kill to get a piece of land to grab or some scalps for bounty.