the
Indians had deliberately deceived him and were playing
for time while they continued their attacks on the border
settlers. Here he received a letter from Gage ordering
him to disregard the treaty he had made with the Delawares
and to join Bouquet at Fort Pitt, an order which Bradstreet
did not obey, making the excuse that the low state of
the water in the rivers made impossible an advance to
Fort Pitt. On October 18 he left Sandusky for Niagara,
having accomplished nothing except occupation of the
forts. Having already blundered hopelessly in dealing
with the Indians, he was to blunder still further. On
his way down Lake Erie he encamped one night, when storm
threatened, on an exposed shore, and a gale from the
north-east broke upon his camp and destroyed half his
boats. Two hundred and eighty of his soldiers had to
march overland to Niagara. Many of them perished; others,
starved, exhausted, frost-bitten, came staggering in by
twos and threes till near the end of December. The
expedition was a fiasco. It blasted Bradstreet's reputation,
and made the British name for a time contemptible among
the Indians.

The other expedition from Fort Pitt has a different
history. All through the summer Bouquet had been recruiting
troops for the invasion of the Delaware country. The
soldiers were slow in arriving, and it was not until the
end of September that all was ready. Early in October
Bouquet marched out of Fort Pitt with one thousand
provincials and five hundred regulars. Crossing the
Alleghany, he made his way in a north-westerly direction
until Beaver Creek was reached, and then turned westward
into the unbroken forest. The Indians of the Muskingum
valley felt secure in their wilderness fastness. No white
soldiers had ever penetrated to their country. To reach
their villages dense woods had to be penetrated, treacherous
marshes crossed, and numerous streams bridged or forded.
But by the middle of October Bouquet had led his army,
without the loss of a man, into the heart of the Muskingum
valley, and pitched his camp near an Indian village named
Tuscarawa, from which the inhabitants had fled at his
approach. The Delawares and Shawnees were terrified: the
victor of Edge Hill was among them with an army strong
enough to crush to atoms any war-party they could muster.
They sent deputies to Bouquet. These at first assumed a
haughty mien; but Bouquet sternly rebuked them and ordered
them to meet him at the forks of t