f refuge.
Overtaken on the Thames River, they were given no choice. It was fight
or surrender. Ahead of the American infantry brigades moved Johnson's
mounted Kentuckians, armed with muskets, rifles, knives, and tomahawks,
and led by a resourceful and enterprising soldier. Procter was compelled
to form his lines of battle across the road on the north bank of the
Thames or permit this formidable American cavalry to trample his
straggling ranks under hoof. Tecumseh's Indians, stationed in a swamp,
covered his right flank and the river covered his left. Harrison came
upon the enemy early in the afternoon of the 5th of October and formed
his line of battle. The action was carried on in a manner "not
sanctioned by anything that I had seen or heard of," said Harrison
afterwards. This first American victory of the war on land was, indeed,
quite irregular and unconventional. It was won by Johnson's mounted
riflemen, who divided and charged both the redcoats in front and the
Indians in the swamp. One detachment galloped through the first and
second lines of the British infantry while the other drove the Indians
into the American left wing and smashed them utterly. Tecumseh was among
the slain. It was all over in one hour and twenty minutes. Harrison's
foot soldiers had no chance to close with the enemy. The Americans lost
only fifteen killed and thirty wounded, and they took about five hundred
prisoners and all Procter's artillery, muskets, baggage, and stores.

Not only was the Northwest Territory thus regained for the United States
but the power of the Indian alliance was broken. Most of the hostile
tribes now abandoned the British cause. Tecumseh's confederacy of Indian
nations fell to pieces with the death of its leader. The British army
of Upper Canada, shattered and unable to receive reinforcements from
overseas, no longer menaced Michigan and the western front of the
American line. General Harrison returned to Detroit at his leisure, and
the volunteers and militia marched homeward, for no more than two
regular brigades were needed to protect all this vast area. The struggle
for its possession was a closed episode. In this quarter, however, the
war cry "On to Canada!" was no longer heard. The United States was
satisfied to recover what it had lost with Hull's surrender and to rid
itself of the peril of invasion and the horrors of Indian massacres
along its wilderness frontiers. Of the men prominent in the struggle,
Procter