He, also, had served in the Revolution, as a sharpshooter. Now he felt badly at having been asked to guide the Long Knife column against his old-time Indian friends, and the town that had sheltered him; it seemed to him not an honorable thing to do. Still, he was an American soldier and citizen; there was war between the white and the red, and dreadful deeds had been done by hatchet and knife, upon his very neighbors. His duty was plain. He could not stay behind or refuse to aid. Therefore he consented to guide and fight, in the cause of 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.