Fort Laurens was erected on the banks of the Tuscarawas River in Ohio in the fall of 1778 as the planned first step to secure the Western Frontier in the Revolutionary War. This book is the first complete account of the fort's history, drawing on all the documentary evidence available and placing it in the context of the larger struggle for independence.

Told from the viewpoint of the Indians, this account of Indian-white relations during the second half of the eighteenth century is an exciting addition to the historical literature of Pennsylvania.From the beginning, when the white traders followed the first Shawnee hunters into Pennsylvania, until the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, the region's history was the history of the relationship between the Indians and the whites. For nearly half a century the Indian maintained a precarious hold upon Western Pennsylvania by playing one white faction off against the anther, first the French against the British, then the British against the Americans.

David Zeisberger: A life among the Indians offers the unique perspective of a Moravian missionary who lived and worked for sixty-three years among the Iroquois and Delaware nations in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Upper Canada. Earl P. Olmstead's narrative draws on thousands of pages of Zeisberger's own diaries, some of which are translated here for the first time. The diaries offer insights into the role of wampum in tribal government, problems resulting from the mass Euro-American western migration, and incidents of duplicity on the parts of both the American government and Native American nations. Of particular interest are Zeisberger's descriptions of Native American life in the years surrounding the French and Indian War and the American Revolution and the effects of these conflicts on the nations that lived in Ohio Country.

As the Revolutionary War raged on fields near the Atlantic, Native Americans and British rangers fought American settlers on the Ohio River frontier in warfare of unsurpassed ferocity. When their attacks threatened to drive the Americans from their settlements in Kentucky, Daniel Boone, Simon Kenton and other frontiersmen guided an army of 970 Kentuckians into what is now Ohio to attack the principal Native American bases from which the raids emanated. This superbly illustrated book traces Colonel George Rogers Clark's lightning expedition to destroy Chalawgatha and Peckuwe, and describes how on 8 August 1780 his Kentuckians clashed with an army of 450 Native Americans, under Black Hoof, Buckongahelas and Girty, at the battle of Peckuwe. It would be the largest Revolutionary War battle on the Ohio River frontier.