still at times taunting their foes and calling out to them that they had eleven hundred men as well as the whites, and that to-morrow they were going to be two thousand strong[37] This was only bravado, however; they had suffered too heavily to renew the attack, and under cover of darkness they slipped away, and made a most skilful retreat, carrying all their wounded in safety across the Ohio.  The exhausted Americans, having taken a number of scalps, as well as forty guns, and many tomahawks[38] and some other plunder,[39] returned to their camp.

The battle had been bloody as well as stubborn.  The whites, though the victors, had suffered more than their foes, and indeed had won only because it was against the entire policy of Indian warfare to suffer a severe loss, even if a victory could be gained thereby.  Of the whites, some seventy-five men had been killed or mortally wounded, and one hundred and forty severely or slightly wounded,[40] so that they lost a fifth of their whole number.  The Indians had not lost much more than half as many; about forty warriors were killed outright or died of their wounds.[41] Among the Indians no chief of importance was slain; whereas the Americans had seventeen officers killed or wounded, and lost in succession their second, third, and fourth in command.  The victors buried their own dead and left the bodies of the vanquished to the wolves and ravens.  At midnight, after the battle, Col.  Christian and his Fincastle men reached the ground.  The battle of the Great Kanawha was a purely American victory, for it was fought solely by the backwoodsmen themselves.  Their immense superiority over regular troops in such contests can be readily seen when their triumph on this occasion is compared with the defeats previously suffered by Braddock’s grenadiers and Grant’s highlanders, at the hands of the same foes.  It was purely a soldiers’ battle, won by hard individual fighting; there was no display of generalship, except on Cornstalk’s part.[42] It was the most closely contested of any battle ever fought with the northwestern Indians; and it was the only victory gained over a large body of them by a force but slightly superior in numbers.[43] Both because of the character of the fight itself, and because of the results that flowed from it, it is worthy of being held in especial remembrance.

Lewis left his sick and wounded in the camp at the Point, protected by a rude breastwork, and with an adequate guard.  With the remainder of his forces, over a thousand strong, he crossed the Ohio, and pushed on to the Pickaway plains.  When but a few miles from the earl’s encampment he was met by a messenger informing him that a treaty of peace was being negotiated with the Indians.[44] The backwoodsmen, flushed with success, and angry at their losses, were eager for more bloodshed; and it was only with difficulty that they were restrained, and were finally induced to march homewards, the earl riding down to them and giving his orders in person.  They grumbled angrily against the earl for sending them back, and in later days accused him of treachery for having done so; but his course was undoubtedly proper, for it would have been very difficult to conclude peace in the presence of such fierce and unruly auxiliaries.