Upon Hofer's return with his companions from Vienna his Inn became the resort--more or less secretly--of all who were truly desirous of joining the popular movement and of freeing the country. Many, we are told, blamed him for trusting so implicitly all who came. But to objectors he made the same answer: "There are no traitors amongst my countrymen." That his confidence was not misplaced was abundantly shown by the fact that the secret of a conspiracy so vast that it may be said to have extended north, south, east, and west almost throughout Tyrol was unrevealed until the ever-memorable night of April 10, 1809, when the time fixed for the uprising arrived.
On the evening of that day the peasants of the Passeyer and other valleys were called to arms by means of great fires which blazed out in the darkness of the clear April sky in long, ruddy banners of flame. Every hill crest in the vicinity of the Passeyer Valley had its signal fire, and these were answered by others on the mountains overshadowing the distant valleys. On the morrow Andreas Hofer found himself at daybreak at the head of nearly 5000 men who had one and all "confessed" and received the Sacrament ere taking up arms in their sacred cause of liberty.
The Bavarians were at once hotly attacked and routed; and on the 12th, soon after dawn, upwards of 15,000 peasants had rallied to Hofer's standard and appeared before Innsbruck. With indomitable bravery they captured the bridge over the Inn, carried the heights by assault, and entering the town engaged in a fierce hand-to-hand conflict with the troops of General Bisson (who was in command of the joint French and Bavarian forces) and compelled him to surrender.
In the deadly conflict of the streets, which ran red with blood, and into whose mire peasants, French and Bavarian soldiers and officers alike were trampled by the on-press of the Tyrolese, the ruder weapons of the latter, consisting of heavily butted fire-locks, broad knives used in husbandry, scythe blades attached to staves, and bludgeons cut from the thickets of the mountain side, were as deadly and even perhaps more so than the weapons of their enemies.
Down the ancient streets, overshadowed by the everlasting snow-clad mountains; into the narrow byways and courtyards of the ancient town; along under the arcades of the old-time Herzog Freidrich Strasse, swept the Tyrolese, slaying as they went, until the invaders, driven from cranny to cranny, struck down in the open, compelled many of them to retreat along the Inn banks till they fell back into the swiftly flowing river, cried for quarter and surrendered.