Border warfare marked the American Revolution on the northwest frontier. Between August 26 and September 15, 1781, sixty-four survivors of Lochry's Expedition were held captive in a camp near this site by Butler's Rangers, British-allied Indians led by George Girty. Colonel Archibald Lochry's battalion of Pennsylvania militia, part of a larger punitive expedition under General George Rogers Clark and traveling down the Ohio River behind the main force, was attacked by Girty's men ten miles downstream from the mouth of the Great Miami River near present-day Aurora, Indiana. Thirty-seven militiamen, including Lochry, were killed in the August 24 battle, and the rest were captured. Rogers then abandoned his objective of capturing British-held Detroit. The captives were taken to Detroit and eventually to Montreal. Tradition holds that fewer than twenty of Lochry's battalion ever returned to their homes.