, and early
in April was apprehensive on that account for the safety of the
place.[273] Brown and Chauncey, however, agreed that less than four
thousand men was insufficient for the undertaking. Singularly enough,
this number was precisely that fixed upon by Yeo and Drummond, in
consultation, as necessary for the reduction of Sackett's Harbor;
which they concurred with Prevost in considering the quickest and
surest solution of the difficulty attending their situation about
Niagara, owing to the exhaustion of local resources upon the
peninsula.[274] The scarcity thus experienced was aggravated by the
number of dependent Indian warriors, who with their families had
followed the British retreat from Malden and Detroit, and now hung
like lead upon the movements and supplies of the army. "Nearly twelve
hundred barrels of flour monthly to Indians alone," complained the
commanding officer, who had long since learned that for this
expenditure there was no return in military usefulness. In the felt
necessity to retain the good-will of the savages, no escape from the
dilemma was open, except in the maintenance of a stream of supplies
from Lower Canada by keeping command of the Lake;[275] to secure which
nothing was so certain as to capture Sackett's and destroy the
shipping and plant.

Having decided that the enterprise against Kingston was not feasible,
Brown fell into the not unnatural mistake of construing the
Secretary's other letter to present not merely a ruse, but an
alternative line of action, more consonant to his active martial
temper than remaining idle in garrison. Accordingly, he left
Sackett's with his two thousand, an event duly chronicled in a letter
of Drummond's, that on Sunday, March 13, three thousand five hundred
left Sackett's for Niagara; a statement sufficiently characteristic of
the common tendency of an enemy's force to swell, as it passes from
mouth to mouth. The division had progressed as far as the present city
of Syracuse, sixty miles from Sackett's, and Brown himself was some
forty miles in advance of it, at Geneva, when one of his principal
subordinates persuaded him that he had misconstrued the Department's
purpose. In considerable distress he turned about, passing through
Auburn on the 23d at the rate of thirty miles a day, so said a
contemporary newspaper,[276] and hurried back to Sackett's. There
further consultation with Chauncey convinced him again that he was
intended to go to Niagara, and