American Revolutionary War: US Colonel William Crawford began a failed expedition to destroy British-allied American Indian towns along the Sandusky River in the Ohio Country.

The American Revolutionary War, also known as the Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, was the armed conflict that comprised the final eight years of the broader American Revolution, in which American Patriot forces organized as the Continental Army and commanded by George Washington defeated the British Army. The conflict was fought in North America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic Ocean. The war's outcome seemed uncertain for most of the war. But Washington and the Continental Army's decisive victory in the Siege of Yorktown in 1781 led King George III and the Kingdom of Great Britain to negotiate an end to the war in the Treaty of Paris two years later, in 1783, in which the British monarchy acknowledged the independence of the Thirteen Colonies, leading to the establishment of the United States as an independent and sovereign nation.

William Crawford was an American military officer and surveyor who worked as a land agent alongside George Washington while Washington was a teenager. Crawford fought in the French and Indian War, Lord Dunmore's War and the American Revolutionary War, rising to the rank of Colonel. In 1782, his unit was attacked, and while he and his surgeon escaped for less than one day, Crawford was eventually captured, tortured and burned at the stake by Crawford's former soldier-turned-British-agent, Simon Girty, and Captain Pipe, a Chief of the Delaware Nation.

The Crawford expedition, also known as the Battle of Sandusky, the Sandusky expedition and Crawford's Defeat, was a 1782 campaign on the western front of the American Revolutionary War, and one of the final operations of the conflict. The campaign was led by Colonel William Crawford, an experienced officer who had served in the Continental Army and a childhood friend of George Washington. Crawford's goal was to destroy enemy Native American towns along the Sandusky River in the Ohio Country, with the hope of ending Native attacks on American settlers. The expedition was one in a series of raids against enemy settlements that both sides had conducted throughout the war.