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{{short description|United States territory (1787–1803)}}{{About|the former U.S. territory|the former Canadian territory|North-Western Territory|similar terms|Northwest (disambiguation)|the current-day Canadian territory|Northwest Territories}}{{use American English|date = April 2019}}{{use mdy dates|date=December 2013}}

factoids

|native_name = |demonym = |today = |image_flag = US flag 13 stars.svg4186region:US_type:adm1st|display=title,inline}}}}The Northwest Territory, also known as the Old Northwest{{efn|This term was a later and somewhat broader American term for the area to distinguish it from the Midwestern United States and/or the Pacific Northwest.}} and formally known as the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio, was formed from unorganized western territory of the United States after the American Revolution. Established in 1787 by the Congress of the Confederation through the Northwest Ordinance, it was the nation’s first post-colonial organized incorporated territory.At the time of its creation, the territory included all the land west of Pennsylvania, northwest of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River below the Great Lakes, and what later became known as the Boundary Waters. The region was ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Paris of 1783. Throughout the Revolutionary War, the region was part of the British Province of Quebec and the western theater of the war. It spanned all or large parts of six eventual U.S. states (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and the northeastern part of Minnesota). Reduced to present-day Ohio, eastern Michigan and a sliver of southeastern Indiana with the formation of Indiana Territory July 4, 1800, it ceased to exist March 1, 1803, when the southeastern portion of the territory was admitted to the Union as the state of Ohio, and the remainder attached to Indiana Territory. Initially, the territory was governed by martial law under a governor and three judges. As population increased, a legislature was formed as were a succession of counties, eventually totaling thirteen. At the time of its creation, the land within the territory was largely undisturbed by urban development. It was also home to several Native American cultures, including the Delaware, Miami, Potawatomi, Shawnee, and others. There were a handful of French colonial settlements remaining, plus Clarksville at the Falls of the Ohio. By the time of the territory’s dissolution, there were dozens of towns and settlements, a few with thousands of settlers, chiefly along the Ohio and Miami Rivers and the south shore of Lake Erie in Ohio. Conflicts between settlers and Native American inhabitants of the Territory resulted in the Northwest Indian War culminating in General “Mad” Anthony Wayne’s victory at Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. The subsequent Treaty of Greenville in 1795 opened the way for settlement particularly in southern and western Ohio.

Area

The Northwest Territory included all the then-owned land of the United States west of Pennsylvania, east of the Mississippi River, and northwest of the Ohio River. It incorporated most of the former Ohio Country except a portion in western Pennsylvania, and eastern Illinois Country. It covered all of the modern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, as well as the northeastern part of Minnesota. Lands west of the Mississippi River were the Louisiana Province of New Spain, formerly New France, acquired by the United States in 1803 by the Louisiana Purchase. Lands north of the Great Lakes were part of the British Province of Upper Canada. Lands south of the Ohio River constituted Kentucky County, Virginia, admitted to the union as the state of Kentucky in 1792. The area included more than {{convert|300000|mi2|km2}} and comprised about 1/3 of the land area of the United States at the time of its creation. It was inhabited by about 45,000 Native Americans and 4,000 non-native traders, mostly of French Canadian, British or Irish descent. Among the tribes inhabiting the region were the Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, Wyandot, Ottawa and Potawatomi. Notably, the Miami capital along with British trading posts was at Kekionga at the site of present-day Fort Wayne, Indiana. Neutralizing Kekionga became the focus of the Northwest Indian War, the driving events in the early evolution of the territory.

History

Integration of the Northwest Territory into a political unit, and settlement, depended on three factors: relinquishment by the British, extinguishment of states’ claims west of the Appalachians, and usurpation or purchase of lands from the Native Americans. These objectives were accomplished correspondingly by the American Revolutionary War, provisions in the Articles of Confederation, and various treaties preceding the Northwest Indian War including Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1784) and Treaty of Fort McIntosh (1785). The treaty process extended well beyond the War and existence of the Territory as a political entity.

New France

{{Further|Beaver Wars}}European exploration of the region began with French-Canadian voyageurs in the 17th century, followed by French missionaries and French fur traders. French-Canadian explorer Jean Nicolet was the first recorded European entrant into the region, landing in 1634 at the current site of Green Bay, Wisconsin (although Étienne Brûlé is stated by some sources as having explored Lake Superior and possibly inland Wisconsin in 1622). The French exercised control from widely separate posts in the region, which they claimed as New France; among these was the post at Fort Detroit, founded in 1701. France ceded the territory to the Kingdom of Great Britain as part of the Indian Reserve in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, after being defeated in the French and Indian War.

British control

{{See also|Illinois campaign|Western theater of the American Revolutionary War}}From the 1750s to the peace treaty that ended the War of 1812, the British had a long-standing goal of creating an Indian barrier state, a large Native American state that would cover most of the Old Northwest. It would be independent of the United States and allied with the British, who would use it to block American westward expansion and to build up their control of the North American fur trade headquartered in Montreal.Dwight L. Smith, “A North American Neutral Indian Zone: Persistence of a British Idea,” Northwest Ohio Quarterly 61#2–4 (1989): 46–63.A new colony, named Charlotina, was proposed for establishment in the southern Great Lakes region before the events of Pontiac’s War, after which the Crown issued the Proclamation of 1763, which prohibited white colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. This action angered American colonists interested in expansion, as well as those who had already settled in the area. In 1774, via the Quebec Act, Britain annexed the region to the Province of Quebec in order to provide a civil government and to centralize British administration of the Montreal-based fur trade. The prohibition of settlement west of the Appalachians remained, contributing to the American Revolution.In February 1779, George Rogers Clark, leading a force of Virginia militia, captured Kaskaskia and Vincennes from British commander Henry Hamilton. Virginia capitalized on Clark’s success by laying claim to the whole of the Old Northwest, calling it Illinois County, Virginia,Palmer, pp. 400–421.{{full citation needed|date= December 2013}} until 1784, when it ceded its land claims to the federal government. Britain officially ceded the area north of the Ohio River and west of the Appalachians to the United States at the end of the American Revolutionary War with the Treaty of Paris (1783), but the British continued to maintain a presence in the region as late as 1815, the end of the War of 1812.

Cessions by the states

File:United States land claims and cessions 1782-1802.png|thumb|upright=1.3|The state cessions that eventually allowed for the creation of the territories north and southwest of the River OhioRiver OhioSeveral states (Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut) had competing claims on the territory: Virginia claimed all of the portion that was formerly Illinois Country and Ohio Country; Massachusetts claimed the portion that is now southern Michigan and Wisconsin; Connecticut claimed a narrow strip across the territory just south of the Great Lakes; New York claimed an elastic portion of Iroquois lands between Lake Erie and the Ohio River. The western boundary of Pennsylvania was also ill-defined. Virginia’s jurisdiction was limited to a few French settlements at the extreme western edge of the territory. Massachusetts’s and Connecticut’s claims were effectively lines on paper. New York had no colonial settlements or territorial government in the claimed lands.The western border of Pennsylvania, previously assumed to run in a north by northeast zigzag, was resolved in 1780 by the Continental Congress. The Mason–Dixon line was extended westward to a point five degrees of longitude (about 260 miles) from the Delaware River and the western boundary extended to run due north from the westernmost extent of the Mason–Dixon line to the 43rd parallel. This incorporated the eastern part of Ohio Country as western Pennsylvania, and set the eastern boundary of federal lands.“Unlanded” states, such as Maryland, refused to ratify the Articles of Confederation so long as these states were allowed to keep their western territory, fearing that those states could continue to grow and tip the balance of power in their favor under the proposed system of federal government. As a concession to obtain ratification, these states ceded their claims on the territory to the federal government: New York in 1780, Virginia in 1784, and Massachusetts and Connecticut in 1785. So the majority of the territory became public land owned by the U.S. government. Virginia and Connecticut reserved two areas to use as compensation to military veterans: the Virginia Military DistrictVirginia ceded to the United States its claim to undeeded land in the VMC on Dec. 8, 1852. In 1871, Congress ceded this land to the state. and the Connecticut Western ReserveIn 1800, Connecticut ceded its Western Reserve claims to the Northwest Territory, and it came under the sovereignty of Ohio in 1803.Thomas Jefferson’s Land Ordinance of 1784 was the first organization of the territory by the United States; it provided a process for dividing the territory into individual states. The Land Ordinance of 1785 established a standardized system for surveying the land into saleable lots, although Ohio was partially surveyed several times using different methods, resulting in a patchwork of land surveys in Ohio. Some older French communities’ property claims based on earlier systems of long, narrow lots also were retained. The rest of the Northwest Territory was divided into roughly uniform square townships and sections, which facilitated land sales and development. The ordinance also stipulated that the territory would eventually form three to five new states.BOOK, Calloway, Colin G., 2015, The Victory with No Name. The Native American Defeat of the First American Army, Oxford University Press, 50,

Founding

File:ST.CLAIR, Arthur (signed check).jpg|thumb|Check signed by Arthur St. ClairArthur St. ClairUnder the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which created the Northwest Territory, General St. Clair was appointed governor. When the territory was divided in 1800, he briefly served as governor of the Northwest Territory remnant that included Ohio, the eastern half of Michigan, and a sliver of southeastern Indiana called “The Gore”.St. Clair formally established the government on July 15, 1788, at Marietta. In 1790, he renamed the settlement of Losantiville Cincinnati, after the Society of the Cincinnati, and moved the administrative and military center to Fort Washington.As Governor, he formulated the Maxwell’s Code (named after its printer, William Maxwell), the first written criminal and civil laws of the territory. Maxwell’s Code consisted of thirty-seven different laws with the stipulation that the laws had to have been passed previously in one of the original thirteen states. The laws restructured the court system then in effect in the Northwest Territory. They also protected residents against excessive taxes and declared that English common law would be the basis of legal decisions and laws in the Northwest Territory.

Northwest Indian War

{{Further|Western Confederacy|Harmar Campaign|Big Bottom massacre|St. Clair’s Defeat|Legion of the United States|Siege of Fort Recovery|Battle of Fallen Timbers|Treaty of Greenville}}(File:NW Native Tribes, 1792.png|thumb|upright=1.25|A map showing the general distribution of Native American tribes in the Northwest Territory in the early 1790s.)The young United States government, deeply in debt following the Revolutionary War and lacking authority to tax under the Articles of Confederation, planned to raise revenue from the methodical sale of land in the Northwest Territory. This plan necessarily called for the removal of both Native American villages and squatters from lands west of Appalachia, loosely, the territory called “Ohio Country” and beyond.BOOK, Calloway, Colin G., 2015, The Victory with No Name. The Native American Defeat of the First American Army, Oxford University Press, 38, Resistance from indigenous tribes, who were supported by the continued British presence in the Northwest Territory, presented a continuing obstacle for American expansion.The area making up the Ohio Country had been contested for over a century, beginning with the 17th-century Beaver Wars. The Western Confederacy, or Western Indian Confederacy, was a loose confederacy of Native Americans in the Great Lakes region of the United States created following the American Revolutionary War. Congress passed the Proclamation of 1783, which recognized Native American rights to the land. A council held in 1785 at Fort Detroit declared that the confederacy would deal jointly with the United States, forbade individual tribes from dealing directly with the United States, and declared the Ohio River as the boundary between their lands and those of the American settlers.BOOK,books.google.com/books?id=kgGMIKQTt7oC, Land of the Indians – Indiana, Keiper, Karl A., 2010, 12, 53, Karl Keiper, 26 July 2019, 9780982470312, The Northwest Territory’s first governor, Arthur St. Clair, sought to end Native American claims to Ohio land and thus clear the way for white settlement. In 1789, he succeeded in getting certain Native Americans to sign the Treaty of Fort Harmar, but many native leaders had not been invited to participate in the negotiations or had refused to do so. Rather than settling the Native Americans’ claims, the treaty provoked an escalation of the “Northwest Indian War” (or “Little Turtle’s War“). Mutual hostilities led to a campaign by General Josiah Harmar, whose 1,500 militiamen were defeated by the Native Americans in October 1790.Michael S. Warner, “General Josiah Harmar’s Campaign Reconsidered: How the Americans Lost the Battle of Kekionga”. Indiana Magazine of History (1987): 43–64. onlineA group of squatters had moved up to the area near present-day Stockport now in Morgan County, Ohio and settled along flood plain, or “bottom” land, of the Muskingum River, some 30 miles north of an Ohio Company of Associates settlement at Marietta, Ohio. The Big Bottom massacre occurred on January 2, 1791. Lenape and Wyandot warriors stormed the incomplete blockhouse and killed eleven men, one woman, and two children. (Accounts vary as to the number of casualties.) Rufus Putnam wrote to President Washington that “we shall be so reduced and discouraged as to give up the settlement [Marietta following the Big Bottom disaster].“BOOK, Winkler, John F., Wabash 1791: St. Clair’s Defeat; Osprey Campaign Series #240,archive.org/details/wabashstclairsde00wink, limited, 2011, Osprey Publishing, Oxford, 978-1-84908-676-9, 15, In March 1791, St. Clair succeeded Harmar as commander of the United States Army and was commissioned as a major general. He led a punitive expedition involving two Regular Army regiments and some militia. In October 1791 as an advance post for his campaign, Fort Jefferson (Ohio), was built under his direction. Located in present-day Darke County in far western Ohio, the fort was built of wood and intended primarily as a supply depot; accordingly, it was originally named Fort Deposit. One month later, near modern-day Fort Recovery, his force advanced to the location of Native American settlements near the headwaters of the Wabash River.Leroy V. Eid, “American Indian Military Leadership: St. Clair’s 1791 Defeat”. Journal of Military History 57.1 (1993): 71–88.William O. Odo, “Destined for Defeat: an Analysis of the St. Clair Expedition of 1791”. Northwest Ohio Quarterly (1993) 65#2 pp: 68–93.John F. Winkler, Wabash 1791: St Clair’s Defeat (Osprey Publishing, 2011)On November 4 they were routed in battle by a tribal confederation led by Miami Chief Little Turtle and Shawnee chief Blue Jacket. More than 600 soldiers and scores of women and children were killed in the battle, known as “St. Clair’s Defeat” and many other names. It remains the greatest defeat of a US army by Native Americans in history. About 623 American soldiers were killed in action, and about 50 Native Americans were killed. Although an investigation exonerated him, St. Clair resigned his army commission in March 1792 at the request of President Washington, but continued to serve as Governor of the Northwest Territory.Leroy V. Eid, “American Indian Military Leadership: St. Clair’s 1791 Defeat”. Journal of Military History 57.1 (1993): 71–88.William O. Odo, “Destined for Defeat: an Analysis of the St. Clair Expedition of 1791”. Northwest Ohio Quarterly (1993) 65#2 pp: 68–93.John F. Winkler, Wabash 1791: St Clair’s Defeat (Osprey Publishing, 2011){{missing information|section|failed peace negotiations at Councils on the Auglaize fall 1792 & spring 1793|date=January 2019}}After St. Clair’s defeat, In June 1792, President Washington tapped revolutionary war hero Major General “Mad” Anthony Wayne to avenge St. Clair and assert sovereignty over the western frontier. Wayne was commissioned to form a new army of 5120 professional soldiers, dubbed the “Legion of the United States”. Wayne recruited and trained his army in Pennsylvania, and moved them to southwestern Ohio in fall of 1793. There they were joined by the Kentucky Militia under Major General Charles Scott. Over the next ten months, the armies marched north up the Great Miami and Maumee River valleys toward the Miami capital of Kekionga. Along the way Wayne’s legion built a series of outpost forts including Fort Greene Ville, Fort Recovery and Fort Defiance. Fierce battles occurred around some of these but none of Wayne’s forts were ever taken by the Native Americans.{{missing information|section|siege of Fort Recovery summer 1794|date=January 2019}}In mid 1794, the British constructed Fort Miamis near what is today Toledo, Ohio, to forestall Wayne’s putative advance on the British stronghold at Detroit. The final battle of Wayne’s campaign occurred within the scope of this fort. The military campaign of Gen. Wayne against the Western Confederacy, who were supported by a company of troops from Lower Canada, culminated with victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. Following the battle, in fall 1794, Wayne’s army marched unopposed to Kekionga where they constructed Fort Wayne, a defiant symbol of U.S. sovereignty in the heart of Native American Country.Jay’s Treaty, in 1794, temporarily helped to smooth relations with British traders in the region, where British subjects outnumbered Americans throughout the 1790s. The following year, the Treaty of Greenville secured peace on the western frontier and opened most of southern and eastern Ohio for American settlement.

Settlement

{{Further|Vincennes Tract|Clark’s Grant|Symmes Purchase|Ohio Company|Connecticut Land Company|Purchase on the Muskingum|Seven Ranges}}{{Historical populations|type= USA792045365EDITOR-LAST=BALKINTITLE=REVOLUTIONARY AMERICA 1763 TO 1800PLACE=NEW YORKINFOBASE PUBLISHING>FACTS ON FILE178>ISBN=978-0816025282Ohio and Wayne County, Michigan)FORSTALLTITLE=POPULATION OF THE STATES AND COUNTIES OF THE UNITED STATES: 1790–1990PUBLISHER=UNITED STATES CENSUS BUREAUACCESS-DATE=MAY 18, 2020, FORSTALL>EDITOR-FIRST=RICHARD L.PAGES=51–53UNITED STATES CENSUS BUREAU>URL=HTTPS://WWW2.CENSUS.GOV/LIBRARY/PUBLICATIONS/DECENNIAL/1990/POPULATION-OF-STATES-AND-COUNTIES-US-1790-1990/POPULATION-OF-STATES-AND-COUNTIES-OF-THE-UNITED-STATES-1790-1990.PDFTITLE=POPULATION OF THE STATES AND COUNTIES OF THE UNITED STATES: 1790–1990PUBLISHER=UNITED STATES CENSUS BUREAUACCESS-DATE=MAY 18, 2020, FORSTALL>EDITOR-FIRST=RICHARD L.PAGES=125–127UNITED STATES CENSUS BUREAU>URL=HTTPS://WWW2.CENSUS.GOV/LIBRARY/PUBLICATIONS/DECENNIAL/1990/POPULATION-OF-STATES-AND-COUNTIES-US-1790-1990/POPULATION-OF-STATES-AND-COUNTIES-OF-THE-UNITED-STATES-1790-1990.PDF, May 18, 2020, }}Sporadic westward emigrant settlements had already resumed late in the war{{which|date=December 2018}} after the Iroquois Confederacy’s power was broken and the tribes scattered by the 1779 Sullivan Expedition. Soon after the Revolution ended, land-hungry migrants started moving west. A gateway trading post developed as the town of Brownsville, Pennsylvania, which was a key outfitting center west of the mountains. Other wagon roads, such as the Kittanning Path surmounting the gaps of the Allegheny in central Pennsylvania, or trails along the Mohawk River in New York, enabled a steady stream of settlers to reach the near west and the lands bordering the Mississippi.{{efn|Before the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the western border of U.S. territory ended on the Mississippi; the lands beyond still being a possession of Napoleonic France or the Kingdom of Spain.}} This activity stimulated the development of the eastern parts of the eventual National Road by private investors. The Cumberland–Brownsville toll road linked the water routes of the Potomac River with the Monongahela River of the Ohio/Mississippi riverine systems in the days when water travel was the only good alternative to walking and riding. Most of the territory and its successors was settled by emigrants passing through the Cumberland Narrows, or along the Mohawk Valley in New York State.The Continental Congress’ title to the lands north of the Ohio River was derived from the Treaty of Paris (1783), the Treaty of Fort McIntosh, and the cessions of four states. Settlement was through several means: squatters, direct U.S. government land sales to settlers, sales of tracts of land to land companies, and state sales of land to veterans in the Virginia Military District and Connecticut Western Reserve. The first area to be surveyed was the Seven Ranges along the eastern border of Ohio in 1786–1789. Direct sales of federal lands to individual homesteaders started here. In some cases, the government granted or donated land for special purposes.Settlement followed the forts, whether garrisoned or not. Lack of a garrison meant that threat of Native American attack had become negligible. This was true everywhere in Ohio before 1800 except the northwest sector above the Greenville Treaty line. It became true in Indiana after the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811; by 1813 Battle of the Thames where Tecumseh was defeated and killed, the frontier had essentially moved to west of the Mississippi. The first U.S. military garrisons in the territory were Fort Patrick Henry, Vincennes, Indiana (1779), Fort Clark at Falls of the Ohio, Indiana (1783), and Fort Harmar in Ohio (1785). The first settlements were at these locations.The first land grant was to George Rogers Clark in 1781 at Falls of the Ohio on the Indiana side; he went on to found the settlement of Clarksville. The first two land purchases were large tracts of land sold to John Symmes (Symmes Purchase) in 1788 and two tracts sold to Ohio Company in 1787 and 1792 (Purchase on the Muskingum). Settlement of these areas was spearheaded by Losantiville and Marietta, respectively. In 1792, Congress donated 100,000 acres to Ohio Company as a buffer zone against Native American incursion around the settled area. The vexing land claims by inhabitants of the old French Vincennes Tract were resolved by what was dubbed the ‘Vincennes donation lands’ embodied in a federal land act of 1791. Federal land sales in Indiana (then a part of Indiana Territory starting in 1800) began in 1801, through the Cincinnati land office.After the Revolutionary War ended, Rufus Putnam (the “Father of Ohio“) and Manasseh Cutler were instrumental in creating the Northwest Ordinance,BOOK, The Pioneers, McCullough, David, Simon & Schuster, 2019, 978-1501168680, which opened up the Northwest Territory for settlement. This land was used to serve as compensation for what was owed to Revolutionary War veterans. It was at Putnam’s recommendation that the land was surveyed and laid out in townships of six miles square. He organized and led the first group of veterans to the territory. They settled at Marietta, Ohio, where they built a large fort called Campus Martius.Hubbard, Robert Ernest. General Rufus Putnam: George Washington’s Chief Military Engineer and the “Father of Ohio,” pp. 2–4, 45–8,105–18, McFarland & Company, Inc., Jefferson, North Carolina. {{ISBN|978-1-4766-7862-7}}.Hildreth, Samuel Prescott. Biographical and Historical Memoirs of the Early Pioneer Settlers of Ohio, pp. 34–7, 63–4, Badgley Publishing Company, 2011. {{ISBN|978-0615501895}}.McCullough, David. The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, pp. 46–7, Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York, New York, 2019. {{ISBN|978-1-5011-6870-3}}.File:PUTNAM exb.jpg|thumb|upright|Rufus Putnam. This portrait by James Sharples Jr. is in the collection of Independence National Historical ParkIndependence National Historical Park Putnam and Cutler insisted the Northwest Territory be a free territory, with no slavery. They were both from Puritan New England, and the Puritans strongly believed that slavery was morally wrong. The Northwest Territory doubled the size of the United States, and establishing it as free of slavery proved to be of tremendous importance in the following decades. It encompassed what became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota.Putnam, in the Puritan tradition, was influential in establishing education in the Northwest Territory. Substantial amounts of land were set aside for schools. Putnam had been one of the primary benefactors in the founding of Leicester Academy in Massachusetts, and similarly, in 1798, he created the plan for the construction of the Muskingum Academy (now Marietta College) in Ohio. In 1780, the directors of the Ohio Company appointed him superintendent of all its affairs relating to settlement north of the Ohio River. In 1796, he was commissioned by President George Washington as Surveyor-General of United States Lands. In 1788, he served as a judge in the Northwest Territory’s first court. In 1802, he served in the convention to form a constitution for the State of Ohio.Hubbard, Robert Ernest. General Rufus Putnam: George Washington’s Chief Military Engineer and the “Father of Ohio,” pp. 127–50, McFarland & Company, Inc., Jefferson, North Carolina. {{ISBN|978-1-4766-7862-7}}.Hildreth, Samuel Prescott. Biographical and Historical Memoirs of the Early Pioneer Settlers of Ohio, pp. 69, 71, 81, 82, Badgley Publishing Company, 2011. {{ISBN|978-0615501895}}.McCullough, David. The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, pp. 143–7, Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York, New York, 2019. {{ISBN|978-1-5011-6870-3}}.In the 1800 United States census, following the passage of an organic act by the 6th U.S. Congress creating the Indiana Territory in 1800, seven counties in the Northwest Territory reported the following population counts:{| class=wikitable! Rank! County! Population|1Hamilton County, Ohio>Hamilton|14,692|2Jefferson County, Ohio>Jefferson|8,766|3Ross County, Ohio>Ross|8,540|4Washington County, Ohio>Washington|5,427|5Adams County, Ohio>Adams|3,432|6Wayne County, Michigan>Wayne|3,206|7Trumbull County, Ohio>Trumbull|1,302||Northwest Territory|45,365According to the 1800 Census of the United States, the Northwest Territory (i.e. the pending state of Ohio) had a population, excluding Native Americans, of over 45,000, and Indiana Territory, a population of about 5,600. By the time of Ohio statehood, there were as many as 50 named towns in Northwest and Indiana Territories, a few, like Vincennes, with thousands of settlers, and dozens of unnamed settlements below the Treaty Line in Ohio.File:Campus Martius - Lossing.jpg|thumb|right|Campus Martius (“Field of Mars” in Latin) was named after the part of Rome of the same name. This site, including the Rufus Putnam House, is now part of the Campus Martius MuseumCampus Martius MuseumFollowing settlement of the frontier, the great wave of colonial immigration flowed westward, founding the great cities of the eventual 6 states of the Territory which is now the midwestern United States early in the 19th century: Detroit (