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Lochry's Defeat, also known as the Lochry massacre, was a battle fought on August 24, 1781, near present-day Aurora, Indiana, in the United States. The battle was part of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), which began as a conflict between Great Britain and the Thirteen Colonies before spreading to the western frontier, where American Indians entered the war as British allies. The battle was short and decisive: about one hundred Indians of local tribes led by Joseph Brant, a Mohawk military leader who was temporarily in the west, ambushed a similar number of Pennsylvania militiamen led by Archibald Lochry. Brant and his men killed or captured all of the Pennsylvanians without suffering any casualties. Lochry's force was part of an army being raised by George Rogers Clark for a campaign against Detroit, the British regional headquarters. Clark, the preeminent American military leader on the northwestern frontier, worked with Governor Thomas Jefferson of Virginia in planning an expedition to capture Detroit, by which they hoped to bring an end to British support of the Indian war effort. In early August 1781, Clark and about 400 men left Fort Pitt in Pennsylvania by boat, floating down the Ohio River a few days ahead of Lochry and his men, who were trying to catch up. Joseph Brant's force was part of a combined British and Indian army being raised to counter Clark's offensive. Brant had too few men to challenge Clark, but when he intercepted messengers traveling between Clark and Lochry, he learned about Lochry's smaller group bringing up the rear. When Lochry landed to feed his men and horses, Brant launched his overwhelmingly successful ambush. Because Clark had been able to recruit only a fraction of the men he needed for his campaign, the loss of Lochry's men resulted in the cancellation of Clark's expedition. ==Background== In the Ohio River valley, the American Revolutionary War was fought primarily between American colonists south and west of the Ohio River (in present-day Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky) and American Indians with their British allies north of the river (now the Midwestern United States). From Detroit, the British recruited and supplied Indian war parties to attack American forts and settlements, hoping to divert American military resources from the primary theater of war in the East as well as keeping the Indians—and the lucrative fur trade—firmly attached to the British Empire. Indians of the Ohio Country, primarily the Shawnee, Mingo, Delaware, and Wyandot, hoped to drive American settlers out of Kentucky and reclaim their hunting grounds, which they had lost in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768) and Lord Dunmore's War (1774).〔For more background on the war in the West, see Western theater of the American Revolutionary War. A standard academic history of the Ohio River border war is Downes, ''Council Fires''.〕 The Americans sought to hold on to Kentucky and to secure territorial claims to the region by launching sporadic expeditions against hostile Indian settlements north of the Ohio River. George Rogers Clark, a Virginia militia officer in Kentucky, believed that the Americans could ultimately win the border war by capturing Detroit. He laid the groundwork for this objective in 1779 by seizing the British outpost of Vincennes and capturing the British commander of Detroit, lieutenant governor Henry Hamilton.〔James, ''George Rogers Clark'', 147–8.〕 "This stroke", said Clark, "will nearly put an end to the Indian War."〔James, ''George Rogers Clark'', 151.〕 Clark prepared for a Detroit campaign in 1779 and again in 1780, but each time called off the expedition because of insufficient men and supplies. "Detroit lost for want of a few Men", he lamented.〔James, ''George Rogers Clark'', 171–2; Downes, ''Council Fires'', 247.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Lochry's Defeat」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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