his fellow settlers
and the protection of the women and children.

The surgeon of the column was Dr. John Knight--a small but gritty
little man. Among the Rangers was James Paull, of West Virginia, a
young Buckskin of twenty-two who had left his widowed mother in order
to march to Sandusky.

The column met with such a defeat as had been known but once since the
day of Braddock's Field. For the Indians were ready. Their spies had
reported upon the secret gathering at the old Mingo town of Mingo
Bottom. To all the villages of the north and even to Detroit the word
traveled that the Long Knives were coming.

Captain Pipe, the old war-chief of the Delawares, and his aide, Chief
Wingenund, arrayed two hundred warriors and marched from the eastward
to join the four hundred Wyandots of Chief Half King and Chief
Shaus-sho-to, and defend the Sandusky. In the south the Shawnees of
Black Hoof and Black Beard and all, prepared. The Miamis rallied from
the west. The white captains, Alexander McKee and the Girty brothers,
urged the warriors on. A messenger to the British father at Detroit
brought back promise of reinforcements from there. The British father
was sending his Butler's Mounted Rangers and three cannon, and the
great white captain Matthew Elliott to command the whole army.

All the long, long way up from the Ohio River the Colonel William
Crawford column had seen only two Indians. On June 4 they sighted
their goal, the old Wyandot town of Upper Sandusky. It showed not a
sign of life. They marched upon it. The buildings had been leveled
and grass was growing in the crooked streets. Some months before,
Chief Half King had moved his people eight miles northward, down the
Sandusky.

Guide John Slover had led in vain. He, also, was mystified. The
volunteers were disappointed; they wished to turn back. The council of
officers decided upon one more day's march; then if nothing happened,
back they would go and glad to get out of the land alive.

it was a wide, grassy, forest-dotted country strange to the Long
Knives. Few of them, not even the Zanes and the Wetzels and their
like, had ever been here except as prisoners. They did not know, John
Slover did not know, that only eleven miles to the east was the eager
village of Chief Pipe and his Delawares; that only eighteen miles north
was the principal village of Chief Half King and his painted Hurons:
and that six hundred warriors of the two nations had co