Indiana give up: they captured Fort Ouiatenon and Fort Miami during Pontiac's Rebellion. The British royal proclamation of 1763 designated the land west of the Appalachians for Native American use, and excluded British colonists from the area, which the Crown called "Indian Territory". In 1775, the American Revolutionary War began as the colonists sought self-government and independence from the British. The majority of the fighting took place near the East Coast, but the Patriot military officer George Rogers Clark called for an army to help fight the British in the west. Clark's army won significant battles and took over Vincennes and
Coshocton, Ohio moved further west to the Sandusky River area, closer to the British Fort Detroit. From there the British and Lenape raided colonial frontier settlements. The Lenape sympathetic to the new United States stayed near Coshocton. Chief Newcomer signed the Fort Pitt Treaty of 1778, by which the Lenape hoped to secure their safety during the War, and he promised scouts and support to the rebel colonists. They also hoped to lay the base for a Native American state in the new nation. In retaliation for frontier raids by hostile Lenape and British, Colonel Daniel Brodhead of the American militia ignored