r
own defense. The task would not be easy; for General Brock, commanding
in upper Canada, had at least two thousand regulars and, as soon as
hostilities began, was joined by Tecumseh and many hundred redskins.

While the question of the war was still under debate in Congress,
President Madison made a requisition on Ohio for twelve hundred militia,
and in early summer the Governors of Indiana and Illinois called
hundreds of volunteers into service. Leaving their families as far as
possible under the protection of stockades or of the towns, the patriots
flocked to the mustering-grounds; many, like Cincinnatus of old,
deserted the plough in midfield. Guns and ammunition in sufficient
quantity were lacking; even tents and blankets were often wanting. But
enthusiasm ran high, and only capable leadership was needed to make of
these frontier forces, once they were properly equipped, a formidable
foe.

The story of the leaders and battles of the war in the West has been
told in an earlier volume of this series. * It will be necessary here
merely to call to mind the stages through which this contest passed,
as a preliminary to a glimpse of the conditions under which Westerners
fought and of the new position into which their section of the country
was brought when peace was restored. So far as the regions north of the
Ohio were concerned, the war developed two phases. The first began with
General William Hull's expedition from Ohio against Fort Malden for the
relief of Detroit, and it ended with the humiliating surrender of that
important post, together with the forced abandonment of Forts Dearborn
and Mackinac, so that the Wabash and Maumee became, for all practical
purposes, the country's northern boundary. This was a story of complete
and bitter defeat. The second phase began likewise with a disaster--the
needless loss of a thousand men on the Raisin River, near Detroit. Yet
it succeeded in bringing William Henry Harrison into chief command, and
it ended in Commodore Perry's signal victory on Lake Erie and Harrison's
equally important defeat of the disheartened British land forces on
the banks of the Thames River, north of the Lake. At this Battle of the
Thames perished Tecumseh, who in point of fact was the real force behind
the British campaigns in the West. Tradition describes him on the eve
of the battle telling his comrades that his last day had come, solemnly
stripping off his British uniform before going into battle, a