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The Treaty of Greenville was signed at Fort Greenville (now Greenville, Ohio), on August 2, 1795, between a coalition of Native Americans & Frontiers men known as the Western Confederacy and the United States following the Native American loss at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. It put an end to the Northwest Indian War. The United States was represented by General "Mad Anthony" Wayne, who led the victory at Fallen Timbers. In exchange for goods to the value of $20,000 (such as blankets, utensils, and domestic animals), the Native Americans turned over to the United States large parts of modern-day Ohio, the future site of downtown Chicago, the Fort Detroit area, Maumee Ohio Area, and the Lower Sandusky Ohio Area.

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00:00:11	This is Howard Chandler Christy's "The Signing of the Treaty of
00:00:15	Greenville," which dates from, actually the painting dates from 1945.
00:00:21	Even if you're watching this on television or seeing a clip of it on
00:00:25	the internet, you're going to notice the scale of these paintings.
00:00:29	That's something that is notable about historic paintings.
00:00:33	Generally, you want these paintings to be on a heroic scale.
00:00:36	These are large-scale pictures.
00:00:38	These are not something you're going to be putting in your living room.
00:00:41	These are large-scale pictures.
00:00:44	Howard Chandler Christy, and now, we've kind of jumped into,
00:00:47	now the painting again, remember the painting we just left Perry,
00:00:50	ok, the battle is in 1812 and the painting was commissioned
00:00:53	in the years prior to the Civil War and it was hung in 1865.
00:00:58	Now you're looking at a painting that was completed in 1945.
00:01:03	Howard Chandler Christy was a well-known painter, again, he's got Ohio
00:01:06	roots, which I think is great.
00:01:09	This isn't probably - if you've ever heard this guy's name,
00:01:12	this is not what you're thinking of.
00:01:14	Howard Chandler Christy is really well-known
00:01:16	for inventing the Gibson Girl.
00:01:19	Because when he was really young, he was a magazine illustrator, for
00:01:24	Colliers, and Harpers, Scribners, and all the magazines in the early
00:01:28	20th century.
00:01:29	And he invented this thing called the Gibson Girl which was sort of a
00:01:34	variant on the American girl, kind of, the idea of what a young,
00:01:38	vibrant American girl looked like in the early 20th century.
00:01:42	So he spent his early career doing that,
00:01:44	and then he moved to, onto portraiture.
00:01:47	So very few artists who do illustration work want to make that the
00:01:51	limit of what they do.
00:01:52	They all often want to bridge to other work.
00:01:55	And what he bridged to was to, he bridged to portraiture.
00:02:01	And he had a very formal training.
00:02:03	Artists like Powell, the artist we spoke of before, a lot of 19th
00:02:07	century American artists, particularly early 19th century American
00:02:10	artists from the mid-century had a difficulty getting training, and
00:02:15	many of them had to either make do with very little training or had to
00:02:20	go to Europe to get training.
00:02:21	By the time you get to Howard Chandler Christy you can get a really
00:02:29	good arts education in the United States, and he studied in New York
00:02:33	with probably the lead painter of the day, William Merit Chase, who was
00:02:38	not only a great painter, but a great teacher.
00:02:41	So he comes at this from a mid-20th century perspective.
00:02:45	But you can see that really, the same thing is going on.
00:02:48	You want to imagine, Christy has got to imagine for us this moment.
00:02:52	Now what this is again for those of us who are a little not up to speed
00:02:58	on our Ohio history, this is an event that took place in 1795.
00:03:04	The Greenville Treaty is the treaty in which a, not a consortium, but a
00:03:14	group of Native American tribes that had lands within the area that
00:03:19	would become Ohio, make a treaty so that the lands, essentially the
00:03:24	land can become the state of Ohio.
00:03:26	That's what you're seeing; you're seeing the Treaty of Greenville.
00:03:28	And it's after the Americans have won the Battle of Fallen Timbers.
00:03:35	Now, again, a lot of historic research goes into this, and you can
00:03:38	identify almost all of the main figures in the painting.
00:03:42	So you've got, well when I was a kid we called him "Mad" Anthony Wayne,
00:03:47	but we're just going to be nice to him today and call him Anthony
00:03:48	Wayne, who is over here in the blue and white.
00:03:52	This is the officer who is accepting the surrender of the Native
00:03:56	American tribes.
00:03:58	The Native American chief who is standing to the left, when you look at
00:04:03	the painting to the left, is Little Turtle, who was one of the chiefs
00:04:07	of the Miami.
00:04:10	Way down here in the left corner is one of my favorite figures, from
00:04:14	the period as he watches this scene.
00:04:17	This is Leatherlips who was a member of the Wyandot.
00:04:21	And then I think the other one is hard to see, but they've got sort of
00:04:25	a tree trunk and they're signing something there, and there's another
00:04:30	well-known figure, Native American figure, known as The Sun, standing
00:04:36	there, looking over the treaty.
00:04:39	So you've got this incredibly important moment in the history of Ohio,
00:04:44	because, of course, if this, if the Americans had not won this battle,
00:04:48	you would not have had the land to make it into the state of Ohio.
00:04:51	So this is 1795, and we become a state eight years later.
00:04:57	But again, we, you'll never quite think about this event in the same
00:05:02	way after seeing the painting.
00:05:05	The painting will always be sort of a lens through which you think
00:05:08	about this event, and again, always, art works always have a point of
00:05:13	view, so this is a point of view that is sort of
00:05:17	pro-early-frontier-Ohio, and it is, Anthony Wayne is really the hero
00:05:25	here, though there is a bit of balancing, because I think there is a
00:05:29	real respect for the Native American tribes in this painting, and
00:05:34	actual interest in identifying all the different tribes, and I think
00:05:38	it's very important and shows a more of a mid-20th century view point
00:05:42	than a, what would have been a, 19th century
00:05:44	view point of that experience.

Note : Transcripts are compiled from uncorrected captions