Wretched Condition of St. Clair’s Army.

St. Clair himself was broken in health; he was a sick, weak, elderly man, high minded, and zealous to do his duty, but totally unfit for the terrible responsibilities of such an expedition against such foes.  The troops were of wretched stuff.  There were two small regiments of regular infantry, the rest of the army being composed of six months’ levies and of militia ordered out for this particular campaign.  The pay was contemptible.  Each private was given three dollars a month, from which ninety cents was deducted, leaving a net payment of two dollars and ten cents a month. [Footnote:  American State Papers, iv., 118, Report of Secy. of War, January 22, 1791.] Sergeants netted three dollars and sixty cents; while the lieutenants received twenty-two, the captains thirty, and the colonels sixty dollars.  The mean parsimony of the nation in paying such low wages to men about to be sent on duties at once very arduous and very dangerous met its fit and natural reward.  Men of good bodily powers, and in the prime of life, and especially men able to do the rough work of frontier farmers, could not be hired to fight Indians in unknown forests for two dollars a month.  Most of the recruits were from the streets and prisons of the seaboard cities.  They were hurried into a campaign against peculiarly formidable foes before they had acquired the rudiments of a soldier’s training, and, of course, they never even understood what woodcraft meant. [Footnote:  Denny’s Journal, 374.] The officers were men of courage, as in the end most of them showed by dying bravely on the field of battle; but they were utterly untrained themselves, and had no time in which to train their men.  Under such conditions it did not need keen vision to foretell disaster.  Harmar had learned a bitter lesson the preceding year; he knew well what Indians could do, and what raw troops could not; and he insisted with emphasis that the only possible outcome to St. Clair’s expedition was defeat.

    The Troops Gather at Fort Washington.

As the raw troops straggled to Pittsburgh they were shipped down the Ohio to Fort Washington; and St. Clair made the headquarters of his army at a new fort some twenty-five miles northward, which he christened Fort Hamilton.  During September the army slowly assembled; two small regiments of regulars, two of six months’ levies, a number of Kentucky militia, a few cavalry, and a couple of small batteries of light guns.  After wearisome delays, due mainly to the utter inefficiency of the quartermaster and contractor, the start for the Indian towns was made on October the 4th.

    The Army Begins its March.